The Spread of Romantic Nationalism across Europe: A Case of Ideational Diffusion
By Andreas Wimmer, Seungwon Lee, and Jack LaViolette (all Department of Sociology, Columbia University)
Romantic nationalism profoundly transformed the intellectual culture of Europe. Similar to other well-studied cases of the global diffusion of culture, such as Protestantism or democracy, romantic nationalism was extraordinarily consequential for the political organization of the world. It prepared the ground for the nationalist political revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, which radically changed the political landscape of Europe and beyond: multi-ethnic empires (such as the Habsburg) and dynastic states (such as the Grand Duchy of Tuscany) were replaced by nation-states self-ruled in the name of a particular nation (such as Hungary and Italy).
Before political movements could “liberate” Hungarians from “foreign rule” or “unite” Italians under one political roof, nations had to be imagined: someone needed to describe the speakers of the various Hungarian and Italian dialects as specific and unique “nations,” held together by shared history and common culture. This is what romantic nationalists achieved. They wrote the history of their nation’s golden age and its contemporary struggle for independence or unity, replacing the dynastic histories of before. They systematized vernacular languages, hitherto overlooked and despised as plebeian tongues, in grammar books and vocabularies and thus made them fit for poetry as well as languages of administration to replace Latin or Ottoman. They inventoried the folk tales, peasant customs, and popular music that expressed the “national culture” in its purest forms, uncontaminated by urbanization, industrialization, and transnational elite cultures.
Famous examples of work from the early days of cultural nationalism include the orchestral piece “The Moldau”, composed by Czech nationalist Smetana. The melody evokes the landscape around the Moldau river as it swells from a small brook in the Bohemian mountains to a mighty river majestically streaming past Prague. It is part of an orchestral suite tellingly named Má Vlast (“My Country”) … composed almost half a century before the country Czechoslovakia arose from the rubble of the Habsburg empire.
A canonical example of a written text is Fichte’s “Address to the German nation” of 1808, a series of lectures held in Berlin while it was occupied by Napoleon’s troops and penned down half a century before Bismarck hammered together a unified German nation-state. Fichte extended the Enlightenment concept of a social contract across generations, thus suggesting that the nation represents a living body beyond the experience of any individual life.
In the visual arts, we can point at paintings from the “national history” genre, such as Johann Peter Krafft’s 1796 portrait of the legendary Swiss marksman William Tell, finished more than half a century before the Swiss city-states unified into a modern nation-state. Tell led the original three Swiss cantons towards independence from their Habsburg overlords in the late 13th century and became one of the linchpins of official Swiss nationalism from the middle of the 19th century onward.
Diffusion Channels and Frame Resonance
How do we explain the spread of romantic nationalism across Europe’s long 19th century? In a recently published paper, we examine the channels through which diffusion occurred and the social contexts where the new cultural frame resonated most strongly. Regarding channels, we go beyond simpler, single-network approaches and extend existing studies of diffusion in multiplex networks exploring a whole range of possible conduits through which romantic nationalism may or may not have percolated, in line with Wimmer’s (2021) theory of diffusion in multiple domains: via cultural institutions such as newspapers and universities, which may have spread the new cultural frame among intellectual and artistic elites; through personal networks, as manifested in the letters that romantic nationalists wrote to artists and writers; through the communicative domains established by contemporary states; within areas of cultural similarity, as they had emerged through centuries of communication and exchange along the Roman road network; and finally, through contemporary infrastructural networks established by stagecoaches and, later in the 19th centuries, by railways.
Introducing theories of frame resonance into the diffusion literature, we explore three distinct reasons for which romantic nationalism may have fallen on more fertile grounds in certain parts of the Continent than in others. Protestantism, with its emphasis on religious commonality as a basis for political legitimacy, may have prepared the soil for the reception of nationalism (a cultural compatibility mechanism). Once early romantic nationalist work emerged that documented the existence of language-based communities, future romantic nationalist work within these communities may have mushroomed (the empirical plausibility mechanisms). And finally, romantic nationalism may have been most attractive in states that were ruled by foreign dynasties, including by Napoleon’s empire during the early 19th century, which contradicted nationalist ideas of political self-determination (the contrasting ideals mechanism).
The Dataset
To realize this twofold project empirically, we assembled a novel dataset from a wide variety of sources. The units of observations in most analyses are the roughly 2300 cities and towns of Europe with more than 10 thousand inhabitants (using the well-known database of Bosker, Buringh and Van Zanden 2013), which we follow from 1770 to 1929 with decadal observations. The dependent variable is the number of romantic nationalist works in the genres of writing, music, and the visual arts produced in a town, as recorded in the online version of the monumental Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe. ERNiE was produced by around 350 humanities scholars specializing in specific writers or artists or particular romantic nationalist movements. The three examples of romantic nationalist works cited above are all taken from ERNiE. Our sample consists of 1454 writings, 1047 pieces of music, and 3499 works of visual art produced between 1770 and 1929. The following graph shows the cities in the dataset as well as those that ever saw the production of nationalist works of art and writings.
A considerable amount of data work was required to code the independent variables that allow us to assess where romantic nationalism resonated and through which channels it diffused. To avoid looking at only those channels through which diffusion actually occurred—a common problem in diffusion research—we explored a wide range of plausible possibilities. The resulting city-level dataset also helps to overcome the “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) of many existing studies that document the “awakening” and eventual political mobilization of a nation in an internalist and often teleological analytical style, mostly using would-be nations as units of observation and analysis.
As an example of some of the information used for the construction of the dataset, the following graph shows the distribution of stagecoach connections in 1848, which allow us to calculate the distance to the nearest nationalist work on that network of connectivities and thus to evaluate if romantic nationalism diffused through this domain.
We find that romantic nationalism flourished in cities ruled by foreign dynasties or that fell under the Napoleonic empire, both of which contradicted the nationalist ideals of self-rule and lent nationalist claims more appeal (the “contradicting ideals” type of resonance). By contrast, we do not find that romantic nationalism took roots where it was “culturally compatible” with already established frames, such as the proto-nationalist communities imagined by Protestantism, or where it was “empirically credible”, such as in areas of shared vernacular language that nationalists often saw as the empirical foundation of nationhood.
Through which channels did early nationalism diffuse? We show that it proliferated simultaneously through multiple pathways. Towns and artists/writers who received letters from prominent romantic nationalists were subsequently more likely to produce nationalist writings—thus confirming the importance of personal networks even for macro-cultural change, as recently highlighted by Becker et al (2020). Romantic nationalism also spread in proximity to universities and newspapers located in towns that already had become “infected” with romantic nationalism. Finally, it expanded within regions of dense communication and cultural similarity that had been established since late antiquity. These domains of connectivity are all specific to the production of intellectual objects. More generic channels that are relevant for the circulation of other types of objects as well, such as those established by shared statehood or networks of stagecoaches and railroads, did not seem to provide conduits for the proliferation of nationalist work.
Overall, the viral spread of romantic nationalism resembles how French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1890) imagined, in the late 19th century, most large-scale cultural change to happen: as the result of the concatenation of multiple chains of imitation that proceed independently through different channels, moderated by how much the new ideas resonate in local cultural contexts. In the concluding section, we discuss more specifically how our findings contribute to the literatures on diffusion, on nationalism, and on transformative cultural change more broadly.
About the Authors
Andreas Wimmer is the Lieber Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Columbia University. His research assumes a long term historical and globally comparative perspective. It asks how states are built and nations formed, how ethno-racial boundaries and hierarchies form or dissolve in the process, and when such inequalities will lead to armed conflict and war. Most recently, he is trying to understand how ideas and institutions travel across the world and with what long term consequences.
Seungwon Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Columbia University. He studies the interplay between networks and culture using computational methods. His research aims to explain how networks of interactions, imbued with cultural meanings, drive various social processes, such as stratification, innovation, cultural movements, and health disparities. Currently he is studying how ideas are produced, evaluated, diffused, and contested within social networks.
Jack LaViolette is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Columbia University. His research lies at the intersection of cultural, historical, and computational sociology, with a particular methodological focus on natural language processing. In his dissertation, he examines the elaboration of social boundaries and identities in the 19th-century American literary field.