Liberty and the Search for Identity: Liberal Nationalisms and the Legacy of Empires 9637326448, 9789637326448

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LIBERTY AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY Liberal Nationalisms and the Legacy of Empires Edited by Iván Zoltán Dénes

LIBERTY AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY

LIBERTY AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY Liberal Nationalisms and the Legacy of Empires

Edited by Iván Zoltán Dénes

Central European University Press Budapest New York

©2005 by Iván Zoltán Dénes Published in 2005 by Central European University Press An imprint of the Central European University Share Company Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 Fax: +36-1-327-3183 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com 400 West 59th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Tel: +1-212-547-6932 Fax: +1-646-557-2416 E-mail: [email protected] The publication of the present volume was supported by the Committee of Philosophy of the Section of Philosophy and Historical Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Translation editing was financed by the István Bibó Center for Advanced Studies. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 963 7326 44 8 cloth 978-963-7326-44-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Liberty and the search for identity : liberal nationalisms and the legacy of empires / edited by Iván Z. Dénes. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 9637326448 1. Nationalism—Europe—History—Case studies. 2. Liberalism—Europe— History—Case studies. I. Dénes, Iván Zoltán. II. Title. JC311.L56 2005 320.54'094—dc22 2005021604 Printed in Hungary by Akaprint Nyomda

To the memory of István Bibó, political thinker, democrat, European and Hungarian patriot (Budapest, 1911–1979)

Contents

Michael Freeden: Foreword Editor’s Preface

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Iván Zoltán Dénes: Liberalism and Nationalism: An Ambiguous Relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

I. WESTERN EUROPE 1. David McCrone: Scotland and England: Diverging Political Discourses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Richard J. Finlay: Radical Liberalism and Nationalism in Mid-Victorian Scotland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Henk te Velde: Dutch Liberals and Nineteenth-Century National Traditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Janet Polasky: Liberal Nationalism and Modern Regional Identity: Revolutionary Belgium, 1786–1830 . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21 37 55 75

II. CENTRAL EUROPE 1. Gábor Erdôdy: Unity or Liberty? German Liberalism Founding an Empire, 1850–1879 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Albert Tanner: Switzerland: A European Model of Liberal Nationalism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Vilmos Heiszler: The Identity Problems of the Austro-German Liberals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Iván Zoltán Dénes: Political Vocabularies of the Hungarian Liberals and Conservatives before 1848 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Miklós Szabó: The Liberalism of the Hungarian Nobility, 1825–1910 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Maciej Janowski: Marginal or Central? The Place of the Liberal Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Polish History . . . . 7. Otto Urban: Czech Liberalism, 1848–1918 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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91 109 139 155 197 239 273

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Contents

III. EASTERN EUROPE, THE BALKANS AND SOUTHERN EUROPE 1. Miklós Kun: The Inherent Burden of Russian Liberalism . . . . 2. Alexander Semyonov: Empire and Nation in Russian Liberal Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Imre Ress: The Value System of Serb Liberalism . . . . . . . . . . 4. Daniel Barbu–Cristian Preda: Building the State from the Roof Down: Varieties of Romanian Liberal Nationalism . . . . . 5. Diana Mishkova: The Interesting Anomaly of Balkan Liberalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Eyüp Özveren: In Defiance of History: Liberal and National Attributes of the Ottoman-Turkish Path to Modernity . . . . . .

311 329 345 367 399 457

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503

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Foreword

Boundaries are artificial things, yet we cannot do without them. Nationalism is an ideology of boundaries, while liberalism began as a challenger of social and intellectual constraints. Boundaries hold things constant; they protect; and they also appropriate. For some of the ends of liberalism that, too, is crucial: drafting constitutions that define powers and rights, enabling the expression of a popular will, carving out a common space for individuals who claim mutual affinity. But we are now witnessing an era in which boundaries are increasingly there to be dismantled, reorganized, and made more permeable. Liberalism has been centrally involved in, and profoundly influenced by, that reconstitution of political boundaries. At the same time, the rigidities of analyzing political thinking have altered dramatically, resulting in the reassessment of intellectual boundaries. A view of liberalism as a complex and mutating set of beliefs has emerged, in which universal aspirations jostle against the furtherance of particular preferences and differences, while ideologies—rather than perceived as dogmatic and doctrinaire—are understood to be in a continuous state of flux and reconfiguration. These developments are brought out in the essays in this valuable book, studies through which local liberalisms and local nationalisms are explored in a manner that extensively refines our understanding of their joint encounters, their overlaps and their peculiarities. Nationalism was invented in Europe and Europe was nearly annihilated by its own creation. Nationalism is now experiencing a revival but, in view of past experience, it needs to be civilized through re-injection with liberal substance, and nineteenth century thinking and practices may serve as a partial source for that cross-fertilization. But liberalism itself is now a reconstituted ideology that has moved on since its past heyday. We can speak of a liberalism of personal freedoms, rights and self-government, as distinct from a liberalism of cultural, ethnic and local expression, of identity and uniqueness. All those themes pervade this book. Liberalism has throughout its history sought to balance and articulate issues encapsulated in concepts such as liberty, class and classlessness, free trade, democracy and restricted power, citizenship, internal and external group self-determination, progress,

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reason, individualism, civilization, and civil society. We now appreciate that these principles and ideas have competed internally within the family of liberalisms for priority and for their relative weighting vis-à-vis each other. Nationalism occasionally coalesced with or nested within those host ideas, but it also occasionally resisted them, or some of them. The specific attraction of these essays is in their examination of liberalism from the vantage point of Europe’s geographical centre of gravity. What has been generally assumed to be a West European doctrine has undergone mutations and variations throughout Europe. Not infrequently, nationbuilding, attached to its more common end of political emancipation, gave liberalism a function it rarely had in the West, where independent nation states preceded the emergence of liberal theories. The intricacy of liberalism has permitted many usages. While ethically liberalism has been a civilizing force, economically and politically it could be harnessed as a modernizing force, particularly when the liberal faith in progress was reformulated as modernization. The translation of its universalism into free trade, however, accomplished more dubious results. Free trade’s equalizing and liberating tonic was soured by frequent attempts to reduce liberalism to a narrow economic, capitalist doctrine that oversaw much human misery and dehumanization. In this connection, the link between nation and state played a remarkable counterbalancing role. While liberalism was generally wary of the state as a wielder of excessive power and an intervener in private domains of self-development, moderate types of nationalism suggested that the state could be used as a modernizing engine, as a repository of democratic practices, and as an enhancer of cultural identity, and thus serve liberal ends—though central and east European liberalisms did not follow the Western liberal formation of the welfare state as an antidote to liberalism’s association with crude capitalism. In many parts of Europe, and during much of the lifetime of liberalism, its European experience has not been a happy one. The trial and error experimentalism of European liberalisms has often been conducted from a position of political and ideological weakness and, significantly, the political space available for liberalism has differed notably from country to country: sometimes squeezed out by both left and right, at other times infusing political and philosophical practices that are more recognizable under other names. The collapse of most central and east European liberalisms by the late nineteenth century may be contrasted with its transformation in some Western countries, a transformation that was crucial to its future survival power. One lesson to be learnt from this collection of articles is that the fragmentation of liberal traditions in large parts of Europe needs to be reexamined in order to distil already existing liberalisms from the national cultures themselves. Indeed, the allure of mid-19th century romantic and passionate liberalism, adding an enlightened patriotism to the sensitivity to

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global injustice—in contrast to more recent, dryer and technical versions— suggests that liberalism needs to rediscover the political language through which it spread popular hope and inspiration. This rich volume contributes to that task, while attesting to the new kind of trans-European intellectual cooperation that is open, pluralist and self-critical—in short, that is itself quintessentially liberal. Michael Freeden University of Oxford

Editor’s Preface

In 1986 I was faced with the question of how to contextualize the topic of my research, which was the role and ideology of the Hungarian conservatives and their challengers, the liberals. With whom should they be compared? Obviously, the reference group could not be the English or the French, as the difference was so great as to make comparison nonsensical. The Irish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Italian and Greek liberal nationalists and conservatives—who encountered similar dilemmas to the protagonists of my researches, namely, the complex task of creating a middle-class society, a liberal nation state and national identity—were unknown to me. During my conversations with Isaiah Berlin at All Souls College in Oxford around that time, I broached this question. He encouraged me to compare the Hungarians with the Poles and Czechs, with Central and Eastern Europeans. I realized that this was a pioneering task beyond the capabilities of a single person and it would be necessary to collaborate with many scholars in order to conduct a comparison. I began this collective intellectual undertaking in Budapest where I persuaded several colleagues each to elaborate a theme. Ferenc Huoranszki volunteered to interpret the theoretical sources of German liberalism. Gábor Erdôdy summed up the findings of researchers studying nineteenth-century German liberalism, which was little known in Hungary in the 1970s and 80s. Vilmos Heiszler explained the identity dilemmas of Austrian German liberals; Miklós Szabó described and interpreted the character of the Hungarian nobility’s liberalism; András Keszthelyi reviewed the peculiarities of Romanian liberalism; Miklós Kun summarized the handicaps of Russian liberalism; Imre Ress described the liberalism of the Serbs. I undertook to elaborate the pre-1848 Hungarian liberalism and conservativism. I soon realized that a profound knowledge of Czech and Polish liberalism was indispensable, and local specialists would have to be approached in order to analyze those areas. In Prague, Otto Urban and in Warsaw, Maciej Janowski undertook the task in 1988. As a result, the manuscript was completed in Hungarian in 1990 and the volume was eventually published three years later, under the title: Szabadság és nemzet. Liberalizmus és nacionalizmus Közép- és Kelet-

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Európában [Liberty and Nation. Liberalism and Nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe]. The book contained the above studies plus one completed before publication, that by Imre Szilágyi, a summary of Slovenian liberalism. As work progressed, we realized that what we were doing was not comparison but preparing the ground for such a task. It also became clear that for analogies to Central and Eastern European liberal nationalisms we had to look to Western and Northern Europe, and partly to Southern Europe. I made up my mind to persuade foreign colleagues to map the specifics of local liberal nationalisms. By 1996, the raft of studies had been extended to include Henk te Velde’s paper on Dutch liberalism, Janet Polasky’s writing on Belgian liberalism and a study of Turkish liberalism written by Eyüp Özveren. Now international conferences could be convened at Budapest to thrash out the studies written in or translated into English. We hoped that the studies would soon be published in an English volume. However, the publisher’s editor who had originally been interested in the book changed jobs and the manuscript was left to gather dust. In the second half of the decade I managed to persuade two Scottish colleagues, David McCrone from Edinburgh and Richard Finlay from Glasgow, to interpret the links between Scottish liberalism and nationalism. The Swiss case study by Albert Tanner did not merely extend the line of Central European case studies but also shed light on them from a new perspective, while the paper by Alexander Semyonov from St. Petersburg was a new addition to the East European section. We did not succeed in tackling all the liberal nationalisms in Europe. For one thing, early on, the project lacked institutional, hence financial backing. I failed to induce scholars to contribute serious studies about the Irish, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Portuguese liberal nationalisms. At the same time, I came to realize that what we had written in the late 80’s was partly outdated, and hence the authors would have to reconsider their texts. The manuscript was again submitted to a publisher and fortunately we received valuable suggestions from reviewers which helped us improve our texts. By now it was already 2001. The intellectual trends from which we had started our project had already changed. In scholarly discourse, center vs. periphery, civilized empire vs. tribal nationalism were replaced by other paradigms, which offered more differentiated approaches to the national issue and collective identity, which became predominant. Moreover, the work to be done had become increasingly more complex. The reviewers’ comments made several of us rewrite or modify our studies. Last year I submitted the revised and abbreviated manuscript, which included a Balkan comparative study by Diana Mishkova, to the publisher. On the very day when I am writing this preface yet another study arrived presenting the case of Romanian liberal nationalism written by Daniel Barbu and Cristian Preda. The reader is now holding the version which includes the latest recommendations of a new reviewer. The book is

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only indirectly connected to the philosophical and political science discourses on the same theme identified with the names of Yael Tamir, Will Kymlicka and János Kis, since its main objective is the exploration of the similarities and dissimilarities in Central and Eastern European liberal nationalisms, their reference to Western and Southern Europe and the preparation of the necessary comparison in case studies. I recall the memory of Isaiah Berlin (Riga, 1909–Oxford, 1997) with gratitude. Although he did not bequeath large monographs to posterity, his essays, lectures, ideas, insights and lucidity inspired many of us, including those of us who worked on this path-breaking project. I bow my head on behalf of the co-authors of the volume to the memory of Professor Otto Urban (1938–1996) and remember with deep affection Miklós Szabó (1935–2000), historian and political thinker, whom many of us looked upon as our mentor in political thought and who was an autonomous and courageous person. I am indebted to Professor James J. Sheehan, my Fulbright tutor at Stanford in 1990/91, whose suggestions put to paper in 2001 were highly instructive and contributed largely to the improvement of the volume. I also owe a word of gratitude to the anonymous reader who inspired me to reconsider the theoretical relation between liberalism and nationalism four years ago. I am grateful to Professor Gábor Vermes, the publisher’s reviewer of the present version, for his correct, thorough, detailed recommendations made this spring. I am sure they largely promoted the professional level and readability of the volume. Evidently, a greater part of the texts had to be translated. If they are readable, it is mainly to the credit of translator Judit Pokoly and copy editor David Robert Evans—our thanks go to them. Most of my thanks are, however, due to my co-authors. To those who have been on my side for nearly twenty years or participated in it in some phases; to those who had the patience both to correct their texts and to wait for the co-ordination of the different texts and the publication of the volume. Naturally, I understand those, too, who had no patience to wait so long. Luckily, those were the exceptions. Special thanks are due to my colleague and friend, Balázs Trencsényi for his encouragement and help. Eventually the material had to be reduced by half so that it could literally be held in the hand. I do hope that the book will be of use to teachers and students, historians, political scientists and philosophers, and to experts on Central and Eastern Europe, liberalism and nationalism on all five continents. Last, but not least, I should like to remember my intellectual father, István Bibó (1911– 1979), the most outstanding democratic political thinker in twentieth-century Hungary. I dedicate this book to his memory. Budapest, 31 May 2005

Iván Zoltán Dénes

Liberalism and Nationalism: An Ambiguous Relationship IVÁN ZOLTÁN DÉNES

I. Liberty and the search for identity, especially liberalism and nationalism, had an ambiguous relationship during the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At first, liberalism and nationalism were almost inseparable, then opposed, even locked in an irreconcilable confrontation. Liberalism and nationalism both had and have ambiguous meanings. Liberalism was an ideology and a political party to defend or establish constitutionalism against absolutism during most of the nineteenth century. At the same time it was a program to create a modern, progressive, civilized European middle class society opposing social backwardness and the privilege-system. One of its main goals was to create an independent, strong nation-state in order to form a modern middle class society. These three different meanings were interlinked and had a common function of presenting the future vision of the political community. As a political ideology, movement and party of constitutionalism, middle class society and nation-state, liberals had represented the national party constructing modern national culture and identity. Later on, at the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth centuries and afterward, the meaning of liberalism had been reduced to the party of modernity. Nowadays it has almost the same meaning. Nationalism, as we know, has several different contradictory meanings. First of all, it means patriotism, namely somebody’s feeling for and loyalty to his/her family, village, town, county and country, fatherland, patria. Another meaning is the intellectuals’ program of the nation-making process, forging the nation by ideology, culture, common emotional experiences, inventing and creating a common national identity. At the same time it denotes the process itself. Last, but not least nationalism in the narrow sense of the word designates an ideology of exclusion and implicit aggression. Yael Tamir, János Kis and Will Kymlicka have interpreted the link between liberalism and identity not as a result of divine grace, history, tradition, ethnicity and the state, but a deliberate choice by the individual. In their interpretations the basis for individuals belonging somewhere and having different identities, is voluntary. Liberalism is the precondi-

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tion, whereas identities, including the national one, are the choice of free individuals living in a free society. Liberalism and nationalism had a common enemy during the first part of the nineteenth century: absolutism. Their opponents had changed during the twentieth century and up to this very day. They are often in confrontation, and sometimes became mutually hostile. The anti-liberal discourses in Central and Eastern Europe, both that of the interwar ethno-cultural political language, twentieth-century totalitarian regimes and also the post-communist revival of ethno-cultural anti-liberal discourses, depicted liberalism as the devil, the scapegoat. In turn sometimes the liberals stigmatized nationalism as Satan.

II. In the predominant type of political discourse in the twentieth century in the interwar years, liberalism became stigmatized in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal as anti-national. It was claimed that liberalism opposed national traditions, lacked roots, imitated foreign models, served foreign interests, ran counter to national identity, even totally undermined it. That was not only the creed of the advocates of anti-liberal ideologies and their audiences, but the anti-liberals’ image of their liberal foes also had its impact upon the latter. Especially because at that time they were no longer national liberals (more precisely: liberal nationalists), and the ethno-cultural language in which the discourse took shape was alien to them (at least far more unfamiliar to them than to their antagonists). On the issues of national traumas and the ensuing political hysteria, they were forced on the defense. The ideologues formulated the political questions in the terminology of political romanticism, in ethno-cultural terms. Thus, the liberals increasingly displayed the characteristics of the stigmatized. In the new political language of national collectivism and the mythology of the class struggle of the totalitarian systems, liberalism and the liberals were branded as significant forces in opposition to the nation and progress, respectively. Liberalism became a term of abuse, and— with the exception of a brief episode—we are shocked to realize that it has become a blasphemous term again after 1989–90. True, this strain is not as generally accepted today as during the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. One finds that in political discourse liberty and nation, adoption of European models and national self-centeredness, modernity and tradition, globalization and identity are pitted against each other. Rather like the advocates of progress and nation, the Cosmopolitans and the Patriots

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were opposed during the reigns of Joseph II, Catherine the Great, and Frederick the Great. The new liberals themselves have an ambiguous attitude to their liberal nationalist predecessors. On the one hand, they feel, perhaps with good reason, more closely associated with the legacy of liberalism divorced from nationalism (Oszkár Jászi and the civic radicals in Hungary, Emmanuel Rádl and his followers in Bohemia, the activists of “organic work” in Poland, and the liberals in the interwar period throughout Central and Eastern Europe) than with the liberal nationalist tradition. On the other hand, (after the heady experience of 1989/90) the nation has acquired very negative connotations for them, not quite unrelated to its expropriation by the power technicians of the political right. Moreover, all this remains suppressed and unarticulated in a “favorable international environment” for liberalism.

III. Is it inevitable in Central and Eastern Europe to have to choose between binary forms of political discourses as modernity vs. tradition, “Western, cosmopolitan civilization” vs. “national identity?” Are we bound to the false alternatives of “artificial” vs. “natural” development, imitation vs. uniqueness, “adoption of the European model” vs. “national self-centeredness”? Is there an unavoidable dichotomy of the “original” economic, social, and political backwardness and a mission of some national Sonderweg indirectly offering cures for the “West”? Obviously, these are false alternatives, and their underlying assumptions about “West” and “East,” cosmopolitan civilization and national identity, European and national missions were connected to special situations, processes of socialization, and political discourses. Both were parts of the intellectual and emotional heritage of enlightened absolutism bequeathed to its products, especially the “intelligentsia.” Subsequently, as an outcome of autocratic and totalitarian regimes, these dichotomies were revived as alternative forms of indoctrination. Opposed though similarly unproductive, they mark attempts to create identity in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the catchwords of progress and motherland, like eighteenth century Polish reformers of noble rank, several German, Italian and Hungarian intellectuals first opted for the needs of civilization and progress as contrasted with national affinities, having identified national tradition with backwardness. By contrast, many advocates of loyalty to the national tradition and the motherland rejected the role of the “Cosmopolitans” and the innovations called for by progressivists as safeguards of privileges. Some of them quickly realized that the best protection of constitutionalism against the absolutist peril was the extension

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of personal liberty and political freedom to the unprivileged. These were some of the antecedents of liberal nationalisms representing different percepts, dilemmas, and heritages in Central and Eastern Europe. The liberals’ images of “self ” and “other” were determined by the dichotomies of constitutionalism vs. absolutism, progress vs. backwardness (civilization vs. barbarism, West vs. East, virtue vs. corruption), patriotism vs. (often) loyalty to the empire, opinion vs. prejudice. Liberty and nation— liberalism and a critically interpreted national tradition—constituted a harmonious unity, until they rose to power, or, until it turned out that the nation was segmented in terms of society, nationality and religion. Apparently, the most sensitive area was the nationality issue (and in particular, the program of the homogeneous nation-state), which also determined the attitude to the federal solutions. All things considered, the liberals in this region appear to have been mostly liberal nationalists comparable to the Irish, Scottish, Norwegian, Belgian, Italian and Greek liberal nationalists. It was the legacy of the liberals’ promising attempt to secede from liberal nationalist discourse that could be acknowledged in good faith by the Central and Eastern European, first and foremost by Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Serbian and Romanian liberals in 1989/90. It is true that they still acknowledged the earlier liberal heritage as their own, making repeated attempts to do so ever since. However, the Hungarian liberal democratic philosopher, János Kis’ analysis shows far more similarities to Ronald Dworkin’s value judgments conceived in terms of “affirmative action” than to the ideas of the earlier Hungarian liberals.

IV. Etymologically speaking, political liberalism first cropped up in Napoleon Bonaparte’s brumaire declaration and grew into a political term of elaborate content in the Spanish party political struggles of the 1820s. We know that it designated the opponents of absolutism—the advocates of constitutionalism. The different kinds of enlightened absolutism, in turn, were not only opposed to backwardness but also to the privilege system, and to political representation of the privileged estates (Stände), while the liberals were heirs to the aristocratic constitutionalism. However, they had an ambiguous attitude to enlightened absolutism. Some were inspired by the enlightened and modernizing aspirations, while sooner or later they came into conflict with absolutism. Others drew on the fundamental values of various reformations and enlightenments. Summing up the context of the self-identification of North American, British and Dutch liberals prevalent in the first half of the nineteenth century, one has to list, first of all: constitutionalism vs. absolutism, division of power by checks and balances vs. concentration of

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power, and the order of freedom vs. mob rule. Similarly their self-identification contained the realm of active individuals gathering in societies vs. brute violence, consensus vs. prejudice, individual merit vs. privilege, nonconformism vs. conformism, individuals vs. classes taken for castes, lay public administration vs. bureaucracy, and local autonomy vs. central control. The goal of their endeavor was this free congregation of virtuous citizens—a gathering identified in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe with the nation. In France, the centralized state was decisive in politics and political thinking before, during and after the revolution. The classics of the French liberals, such as Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville, defined their position in opposition to it. By contrast, in Germany the unified and constitutional state was not a reality but a program for the future. Here the liberals’ self-definition also included their ambivalence towards enlightened absolutism. Setting a modernizing state against backwardness, a unified state against dismemberment on the one hand, and defending the autonomous individual against the paternalistic state, on the other. The liberals were committed to liberal constitutionalism, and thus, drawing closer to their American, English and French predecessors, they set about reinterpreting and transforming small circles of aristocratic liberties to modern freedom. In these countries, the foes of absolutism and promoters of constitutionalism did not seek to emancipate an existing middle-class society from the excessive domination of the state, but to build it out of nothing. In order to integrate a rising middle-class to become the core of a modern nation, the state was also necessary. What they needed was not an absolutist state, especially not the absolutist state of a foreign empire, but a state that could be the instrument of social development and national integration—a liberal constitutional nation-state. Their primary interpretation of liberty was personal freedom derived from the freedom of conscience and the habeas corpus—the possibility to act without external interference. First and foremost, it meant that man was not a bound slave but a free individual with unalienable rights to his body, soul and actions. That, in turn, required that he should not be kept under anyone’s thumb, his sovereignty being guaranteed by the maturity of his spirit and his financial independence. A free community is paramount for individual liberties. One that does not tolerate the yoke of a despot, one that refuses to be subjugated by either an external conqueror or the greedy moguls of the domestic arena, or again, by the mob. It is a community that is politically free, meaning that its members decide upon their individual and collective matters themselves. The “glorious past” of regnum and natio are reminiscent of the lost golden age. The desirable future to be created is founded on a precedent pro-

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jected into the past. This norm spells out what the political community should have been and should be like. It was influenced equally by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Benjamin Constant, Madame de Staël, Arthur Young, Friedrich List, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Rotteck-Welcker’s Staatslexikon, as well as the use and reinterpretation of the earlier political language and vocabulary. The vision of the desirable future and its archetype projected back into the past are created and interpreted by the intellectuals like István Bibó and Miroslav Hroch. The ardent work of scholars and intellectuals designates and creates the national themes, the active minority resolutely spreads them via nationwide agitation, as a result of which nationalism becomes a mass movement. The intelligentsia elevates high culture to the rank of canons, and orders about the population as its subject. It formulates and disseminates the program of becoming a nation. It lays claim to statehood on behalf of the nation, while the state, in turn, ensures its existence and rule over other nationalities. In the greater part of the nineteenth century, liberalism and nationalism, constitutionalism and national tradition, progress and identity were inter-referential, inseparable and often interchangeable concepts in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. The subjects of the German and Italian small states were entitled to become German and Italian citizens, and the precondition for their personal and political freedom was the creation of a unified and constitutional Germany and Italy. Accordingly, personal liberty and the freedom of the political community, as well as the construction of a middle class society, a modern liberal nation and nation state were to replace backwardness, privileges by birth, segmentation and autocracy. It was the social, national and staterelated dilemmas that basically differentiated the citizens of the United States of America, Great Britain and the Netherlands from those in these European regions. In the United States of America, Great Britain and the Netherlands, middle-class society, the national identity that served to integrate it, local administration and the state that unites all these did exist or were in the making. Germany and Italy were still to be created from the disunited hyperaristocratic small states often controlled by despots. In many regards the situation was similar in the Hungarian Kingdom, the Czech Kingdom, in partitioned Poland, in Greece, in the Romanian principalities, the Serbian principality and Bulgaria. On the spectrum of European liberalisms and nationalisms, the place of those who represented the free property owners’ middle-class society or the aristocracy within independent, constitutional states were different from those who lived under foreign domination, often subjected to an absolutist empire. Among subjugated peoples the liberal nationalists forged the middle-class society as well as the independent constitution-

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al state. The conservatives, on the other side, had little to conserve in this situation. The ideology of the liberal nationalist program, and the lack of the national conservative role implied similar positions, outlooks and values among the German, Italian, Greek, Norwegian, Finnish, Irish, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Croatian, Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian liberals and conservatives. From the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, especially in 1848, many Central and Eastern European countries showed mutual interaction between liberalism and nationalism. In 1917–18 the three old fashioned empires—the Habsburg, the Ottoman and the Russian— disintegrated. Their different parts had become independent nation states including different nationalities. With the exception of Czechoslovakia, in every Central and Eastern European country the ethno-cultural approach, the anti-liberal discourse imbued with political romanticism and the myths of the national characteristics became prevalent, in which the cause of freedom and liberalism was set antagonistically against the cause of the political community and the nation. That was also the case in Southern Europe. Liberalism as the enemy of the nation—the cosmopolitan, alien, bolshevik, plutocratic and Jewish subversion from within—was the image in the ethno-cultural and anti-liberal discourse in the interwar period. It was conserved on the whole after 1945, with only some of its elements transformed and encoded. That applies to the countries subordinated to the Soviet Union, and—as it has turned out—something similar took place (though more indirectly) in Yugoslavia. In these countries both the personal liberty and the political freedom of the political community were suppressed by the totalitarian regimes, became taboos, relegated into the collective subconscious. Although the antitotalitarian revolutions of 1953, 1956, 1968, 1981 and 1989 represented the demand for freedom and the self determination of the individuals and their political communities, it was impossible to realize them before the weakening and crumbling and eventual dissolution of the last European empire, the Soviet Union. Since then liberalism and nationalism often have been antithetical concepts, enemy images of each other that cancel each other out in the discourse of the newly formed and consolidated liberal democracies.

V. In the 1990s we saw the dissolution of numerous multinational polities in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, and the resumption of nationbuilding in many parts of these regions. These recent historical developments find their closest parallel in the gradual disintegration of the multi-ethnic imperial framework and the concomitant process of the

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emergence of nation-states that began in the 1820s and ended in the early 1920s. In order to render this process intelligible on a historical and a theoretical-conceptual plane, it is worthwhile to focus, amongst others, on the intricate relationship of two fundamental concepts of political modernity: liberty and nation. The main trend is that the liberals’ role had been changed from the representatives of the political community, its political freedom and identity, to that of modernity and defender of the rule of law and human rights. We are able to reconstruct and analyze their political vocabulary from the 1820s up till 1918. Without this critical analysis, it is impossible to describe current liberal terminology. How and why did the liberals move from the nation’s party to that of the “enemy” of the nation, from the most popular political actors to the great bogey? My answer is that independence, democracy, personal liberty and political freedom are not programs anymore, but legal realities. At the same time, all the awful consequences of the authoritarian and totalitarian periods are alive, unprocessed and unarticulated, poisoning the public and the private lives of the people. In this context, liberalism is readily tending towards plutocracy as the search for collective identity perverts itself, often becoming nationalism opposed to liberty and liberalism. Liberty and nation which were intertwined and almost inseparable in the first half of the nineteenth century, became opposed for many people in Central and Eastern Europe in the interwar period and after 1989–90. Defining the roots of this phenomenon is an obvious task, by comparing the history of this problem in this geographical region with Western, Eastern and Southern Europe. A way should be found to avoid the usual schematic models of the original backwardness of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, the different romantic nationalistic Sonderwegs and their various national uniquiness mythologies. In this context it is inevitable, among others, to face up to the damnosa hereditas of the old fashioned empires, their heirs’ unsolved fundamental problems and their peoples’ unprocessed pains, fears and humiliations. They are alive, need processing and acknowledgement, or we might yet again suffer from their consequences. In order to understand them one needs to break with the traditional path of national histories, by digging out the suppressed heritage of the Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman empires, including their dissolutions. By reconstructing and analyzing the concepts of liberty and nation in their different contexts, we provide the opportunity to expose their meanings in different modernity and identity discourses in Central and Eastern Europe. On this basis it is possible to compare them to each other and to the main characteristics of similar discourses in other regions. This task requires an interdisciplinary approach to find the contexts of different speech acts, to understand their functions, to iden-

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tify the actors, to analyze their arguments, to reconstruct their motives, to outline their intellectual sources and to rethink the dynamics of the debates redefining their targets. Rival visions of modernity, alternative strategies for the future of the political communities, opposing inventories and concepts of the national past, and contradictory images of the self and the other are required. It is essential to discover the underlying assumptions of the various discourses in order to interpret them as different speech acts. All these interpretations had specific narratives of the past, definite visions of both internal and external enemies, often connected with conspiracy theories, glorification of either the aristocracy or, more often, the peasantry. They developed programs for forging national identity through collective actions; embracing ambiguous attitudes towards modernization; choosing between imitation and autarchy, European blueprints and national uniqueness, sometimes between plutocracy and mob rule. As far as liberalism is concerned, it would be preferable to have the plural, rather than the singular form using the unreflected English and/or French liberal canons for it. Nationalisms also had different contexts with separate meanings and distinct functions. There are enormous possibilities for their future comparisons. The book provides case studies which are preconditions for working out the comparative history of the European regions before, during and after the dissolution of the old fashioned empires. It concerns the various relationships between liberalisms and nationalisms, national identities and modernity concepts, nations and empires, nation-states and nationalities, traditions and modernities, images of the self and the others, modernization strategies and identity creations. The book divides three geographical parts: Western, Central and East-Southern Europe. Each and all includes case studies on the various links between liberalism and national identity in different countries. David McCrone presents the divergence of English and Scottish nationalism discourses from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Richard J. Finlay examines the link between liberalism and national identity in nineteenth century Scotland juxtaposing the different characteristics of Irish and Scottish politics and identity. Henk te Velde deals with the changing peculiarities both of Dutch liberalism and national identity. Janet Polasky interprets the relationship between bilingualism, different national identities and liberal nationalism in Belgium. Gábor Erdôdy surveys the conclusions of the German historiography of the 70s and 80s on German liberal nationalism in the process of the unification. Albert Tanner examines the connection between Swiss liberal nationalist politics and the process of creating national selfimages in Switzerland. It follows Vilmos Heiszler’s overview of the Austro-German liberals’ identity dilemmas and their background. My

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case study is a historical reconstruction and analysis of the political vocabularies of the pre -1848 Hungarian liberals and conservatives. An exceptional reading is the late Miklós Szabó’s original interpretation of Hungarian liberal nationalism by putting it into international context. Maciej Janowski interprets the various liberal groups’ attitudes toward progress and national unification in partitioned Poland. The last Central European case study is the late Otto Urban’s thematical analysis of the antecedents, the development and the characteristics of Czech liberal nationalism. Miklós Kun shows the problems of the awakening Russian liberalism. Alexander Semyonov reconstructs and interpretates the liberal concepts of empire and nation in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth century. Imre Ress outlines the main characteristics of nineteenth century Serbian liberalism and national identity in the context of nation-building. Daniel Barbu demonstrates the oligarchic peculiarities of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Romanian liberal nationalist establishments, and his colleague, Cristian Preda reviews the post-communist liberalism. Diana Mishkova reconstructs, compares and contrasts the nineteenth century Serbian, Bulgarian and Romanian liberal nationalisms. And lastly, Eyüp Özveren analyses the Turkish modernization process with special reference to the prospects of liberalism, the concepts of modernity, and the construction of a national identity. A follow-up edition would allow for an elaboration of further case studies.

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