Perry Anderson Lecture: Sanford S. Elberg Lecture in International Studies; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

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The origins of modern national sentiment as a secular force go back, of course, to the eighteenth century. It was then that there erupted the two great revolutions that gave birth to the first ideological conception of the nation, as we understand the term today -- the rebellion of the North American colonies against Britain, and the overthrow of absolutism in France. The American and French Revolutions, which effectively invented our idea of the nation as a popular collectivity, were products of societies that were among the most advanced of the time; their ideologies marked a dramatic rupture with the visions of the world that had inspired earlier European revolutions, in the Low Countries in the 16th century and in England in the 17th century, both of them deeply religious uprisings, made in the name of God as much or more than that of the people. The American and French Revolutions occurred, nevertheless, in a world still anterior to the Industrial Revolution, in which capital continued to be basically commercial or agrarian. Just for that reason, the elites of each were typically capable of mobilizing direct producers in town and country -- that is to say, popular masses composed mainly of artesans or cultivators -- behind them. There was not yet, as a general social fact, that social chasm between manufacturers and workers which industrial factories would later open up. A single category could notionally embrace all, ascendant and subordinate classes -- patriotism. Militants in the struggles of the future United States and in France called themselves 'patriots', a term inspired by images and legends of the republics of classical antiquity, Athens, Sparta, Rome. What was the philosophical idiom of this new patriotism? Famously, it was the characteristic rationalism of the Enlightenment, whose most eloquent spokesmen -- Rousseau, Condorcet, Paine, Jefferson -- pitted reason against tradition, a conscious collective will against the inert weight of customs. Hence the ruling definition of the nation in this period was essentially political -- that is to say, it was an ideal of the future, not a legacy of the past. The nation was something that free citizens were going to create: it did not pre-exist their intervention as a perennial fact, but would emerge as a new kind of community based on 'natural' rights rather than 'artificial' privileges or restrictions, in which liberty was to be understood as civic participation in public life in the full sense of the term.

In retrospect, one of the most striking features of this Enlightenment patriotism was its universalism. That is to say, it assumed a basic harmony between the interests of civilized nations (uncivilized peoples were another matter), all potentially united in a common struggle against tyranny and superstition. Emblematic of this optimistic rationalism was the argument of Kant's essay, For a Perpetual Peace, that rivalry between princes was the only important cause of wars -- and that once royal ambitions were a thing of the past, as republican constitutions spread, the peoples of Europe would have no further cause to fight one another. In this era, then, the ideals of patriotism and internationalism marched together -- on the plane of values, there was no contradiction between them. Not only, indeed, on the plane of values -- but also, in good measure, in lives and actions. We need only think, for example, of the roles played by the French general Lafayette in both the North American War of Independence and in the French Revolution itself, or of the English writer Tom Paine in Philadelphia and Paris, as pamphleteer for the Thirteen Colonies and deputy for the Gironde in the Convention. Further south, even more strikingly, in the zone most affected by the North American and French upheavals, where the Liberators of the Wars of Independence in Spanish America -- Bolivar, Sucre, San Martin -- fought not only for their own native provinces but across a continent, to emancipate distant or neighbouring lands, in a spirit of regional fraternity.

The Hispano-American cycle of struggles lasted through to the third decade of the 19th century. By then, in Europe itself, patriotism and cosmopolitanism of an Enlightenment stamp had already been snuffed out by the corruption of their ideals in Napoleon's military expansionism, followed by the victory of the European anciens regimes over Napoleon. After an interval, however, there soon arose a rather different configuration -- what we might call for the first time, with a touch of anachronism, since the term itself does not emerge until mid-century -- 'nationalism', as distinct from patriotism. This came into being as an expression of the aspiration of propertied classes to form their own state in a world now dominated, certainly, by the Industrial Revolution, but in which they found themselves in zones less advanced than the British epicentre. These were classes bent above all on emulating -- that is, on catching up with -- the leading industrial states of the day. Hence the storm-zone of this new type of nationalism was Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary. Its rhetorical idiom came from European romanticism, and among its major spokesmen we typically find poets and novelists -- the Petofis, Mickiewiczs, Manzonis. Typically, these who introduced a cult of the mediaeval or pre-modern past of their own countries, in an intellectual operation that reversed that of the rationalist patriotism that preceded it. For romantic nationalism, the essential definition of the nation was no longer political but cultural, and its touchstone would be language, as the accumulated transcript of the experience of past generations. The prophet of this vindication of the cultural particularity had been Gottfried Herder. But if the romantic nationalism that flowered in Europe between the third and seventh decades of the 19th century inverted many of the signs of an earlier kind of patriotism, it still shared important assumptions with it. In exalting German culture, Herder -- who came from the Baltic -- did not depreciate neighbouring Slavic culture, but on the contrary lauded it as a distinctive legacy of its own. The mental world of romantic nationalism was no longer cosmopolitan, but in valuing cultural diversity as such, it tacitly defended a kind of differentiated universalism. Politically, if its first achievements were the Belgian and Greek Revolutions that broke the peace of the Restoration, its most grandiose expression was, of course, the 'spring-time of the peoples' in 1848. The chain of revolutions which convulsed Europe in that year combined national ferment and international contagion across the continent, with barricades from Paris to Vienna, Berlin to Rome, Milan to Budapest. If in Italy, Germany and Hungary, struggles for national unity or independence dominated, 1848 was also, of course, a year of failed liberal revolutions, and of the beginning of revolutionary struggles for socialism, announced by The Communist Manifesto.

The overlap was not accidental. For the forms of internationalism that corresponded to romantic nationalism were to find their most significant home in the First Workingmen's International. If we ask: what were the social bases of this International -- and of the wave of popular urban insurgency in 1848 -- the answer is pretty clear. They did not lie in any factory proletariat, but overwhelmingly in a pre-industrial artisanate. This was a class in possession of its own means of production -- that is tools and skills; that had a high level of literacy; was typically located close to the centre of capital cities; and -- last but not least -- was geographically mobile: a mobility symbolized by the famous tours of young apprentices within or beyond their own countries. In 1848 there were some 30,000 German craftsmen in Paris -- Heine said you could hear German spoken on every street corner; in London Marx and Engels were writing their Manifesto for German artesans working in England; Berlin had its Polish and Swiss craftsmen, Vienna its Czechs and Italians. In other words, it was characterized by the paradoxical combination of what could be termed social racination (including cultural confidence and sense of high politics) and territorial mobility (including the possibility of a direct experience of living abroad, and sense of solidarity between peoples). It was essentially this configuration that allowed the passage from national to international struggles, and from international to social struggles, on the barricades of 1848-9. Its exemplary figure was Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose father was a small fisherman. Garibaldi began life as a young sailor, where he was converted to internationalist ideals -- his first political conviction -- by a group of Saint-Simonian exiles, deported from France in a ship on which he was serving to the Black Sea. Garibaldi became, of course, the great military and political hero of the Roman Republic of 1848, personifying the most generous side of the Italian nationalism of the Risorgimento. But after the defeat of the Republic, he fought for a decade as a soldier for progressive causes in Latin America, in Brazil and Uruguay, before coming back to lead the expedition that liberated Sicily and Calabria, consummating Italian unification. His career, however, did not stop there. In the 1860's, Lincoln invited him to take up a command in the Northern armies during the American Civil War -- a proposition he rejected, rightly suspecting Lincoln's attitude to slavery. On the other hand he accepted the post of General in France, in the defense of the Third Republic against German arms in 1871, and was elected by three French cities to be a deputy in the National Assembly; and after the Paris Commune, he publicly adhered to the First International, to the scandal of Mazzini. In the historical figure of Garibaldi we can find an embodiment of all the best values of the European artisanate of this period, in which national and international impulses coexisted.

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