Charles Tilly - States and Nationalism in Europe

States and Nationalism in Europe 1492-1992
Author(s): Charles Tilly

Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 131-146
Published by: Springer
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States and nationalism in Europe 1492-1992

CHARLES TILLY
New Schoolfor Social Research
As an independent state, Romania has not been around much more

than a century. Wallachia and Moldavia only acquired autonomy as
coupled principalities under Ottoman sovereignty in 1861, and only
became an independent kingdom in 1881. The Kingdom of Romania,
furthermore, only annexed Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania more than half of its maximum territory - after astute switching of sides
during World War I. In the absence of a Romanian state, nevertheless,

Romanian chroniclers of the seventeenth century propounded three
theories of their ethnic origins, Latinist, indigenist, and mixed: first, that
a homogeneous people descended from the Roman legions and colonists established in the new province of Dacia after the emperor Trajan
conquered the region in 105-106 AD; second, that a likewise homogeneous people sprang from the highly civilized Dacians already on the
spot whom the Romans integrated into their empire; third, that
Romans and Dacians not only mixed, but selectively assimilated some
later migrants into the region.
All three theories, especially the first two, made Romanians an ancient,
self-contained population, clearly distinct from the Turks who ruled
them, as well as prior to the Germans, Jews, Slavs, and Hungarians who
now shared the territory with them. As a British historian of the region
remarks, drily, of the ninth century A.D.:
The ethnic appurtenance of the then inhabitants of Transylvania is acrimoniously disputed between Roumanian [sic] and Hungarian historians, the
former maintaining that a Roman, or alternatively, Romanised Dacian, population had survived the Dark Ages, the latter pointing to the fact that all the
pre-Magyar place-names of Transylvania are Slav, except four river-names,

which are not Latin; also that the first mentions of "Vlachs" in Hungarian
documents comes in the thirteenth century, when they figure only as roving
shepherds, and not numerous.'
Theory and Society 23: 131-146, 1994.

? 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
132
I need hardly add that Romanians and Hungarians dispute not only the
ancient history, but the present nationality, of Transylvania, which
houses many speakers of Hungarian but since World War I appears on
maps as part of Romania.
In a Balkan region splintered by hundreds of ethnicities and subject to
the incessant competition of Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman

empires, the Roman and Dacian myths voiced claims to autonomy and
coherence. Eighteenth-century Russian rulers who ground away at
Ottoman power reinforced the myths by trying to establish a distinct
Dacian state as a buffer between Ottoman and Russian territories.
Only during the nineteenth century, however, did the Latinist, the
indigenist, or the mixed theory of Romanian origins begin to command
wide popular support. In general, Romanian nationalists then argued

some variant of the proposition that a distinctive Romanian people had
long existed, still maintained a coherent, contiguous, common life, and
therefore deserved its own sovereign state. Hence an irony: the first
elected prince of Wallachia and Moldavia was the bourgeois

Moldavian nationalist Alexander Cuza, who faced severe political
problems precisely because he already had strong connections in the
region; he fell to a coup five years after taking office. The relatively suc-
cessful prince who followed him and eventually became King Karol I
was no Romanian, but a member of the Prussian royal family, Karl of
Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.
E. J. Hobsbawm has already had a lepidopterist's field day pinning up
the butterflies of nationalist fantasy.2 His net moves fast; I will not com-
pete with him on that hunting ground. Instead, let me lay out a simple
theory of the political conditions under which nationalist claims wax
and wane. These thinly-documented but thickly-thought reflections
emerge from two of my recent inquiries: an analysis of change and

variation in the organization of European states over the last millennium and a study of variation in the forms of European revolutions
since the late fifteenth century.3 In this day of apparently resurgent
nationalism in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, let me suggest that

strong forms of nationalism wax and wane with the manifest value and
feasibility of ruling your own state, which depends in turn on two main
factors: 1) the state's capacity to monitor, circumscribe, and control

resources (including cultural forms) within its territory, and 2) the
readiness of other states to support the state's priority in these regards.
My very schematic survey provides few clues as to the reasons why

nationalism took different forms, intensities, and social bases in, say,
133
Norway and Bohemia. Nor does it dare to explain the content of

nationalist ideas or the mechanisms of their diffusion in the style of a
Benedict Anderson or a Liah Greenfeld. Instead it seeks insight into
the remarkable historical timing of nationalist demands. For they have
only become common political currency during the last two hundred
years. Within those two centuries, furthermore, they have bunched in
periods of imperial disintegration.
When and how did ethnic multiplicity become a political problem? For
most of world history, after all, thousands of peoples claiming distinctive identities have coexisted with and within states that managed some
form of indirect rule. More states resembled the Austro-Hungarian
Empire than emulated Sweden. Those states have usually favored some
identities over others, but have neither homogenized their populations
nor faced serious threats that subject peoples would rebel in the name
of their distinctness. Only late in the eighteenth century did nationalism
become a salient force in European politics.
If by nationalism we understand any pursuit of a ruling class selfinterest, to be sure, nationalism has existed as long as states have existed. Two centuries or so ago, however, a narrower, newer, stronger
form of nationalism became prominent in European politics: the claim
that people who spoke for coherent nations - and they alone - had the
right to rule sovereign states. Two different phenomena acquired the
name "nationalism": state-led nationalism on one side, state-seeking
nationalism on the other. What was state-led nationalism? Rulers who
spoke in a nation's name successfully demanded that citizens identify

themselves with that nation and subordinate other interests to those of
the state. What of state-seeking nationalism? Representatives of some

population that currently did not have collective control of a state
claimed an autonomous political status, or even a separate state, on the
ground that the population had a distinct, coherent cultural identity.
The two forms of nationalism shared the principle of national selfdetermination: that states should correspond to homogeneous peoples,
that homogeneous peoples had distinctive political interests, that members of homogeneous peoples owed strong loyalties to the states that
embodied their heritage, that the world should therefore consist of
nation-states having strongly patriotic citizenries. Over the roughly
10,000 years that states have existed somewhere in the world, such
ideas have been rare, their actual realization in states exceptional. With
respect to everyday identities, before 1800 almost all large states re-
134
mained highly composite, ruling indirectly through putative representa-
tives of different peoples and powers, making little effort to homogenize or coopt any but a small imperial elite. I do not deny Spartan
patriotism, Jewish captivity, or ancient hatreds of Armenians and
Turks. I mean to say that only during the last two hundred years have
the two specific forms of nationalism become staples of national and
international politics.
To pinpoint that change, I have prepared chronologies of "revolutionary situations" in the Low Countries, the Iberian peninsula, the Balkans
and Hungary, the British Isles, France, and the European territories
occupied until recently by the Soviet Union; the chronologies run from
1492 to 1991.4 A revolutionary situation includes these elements:
1. the appearance of contenders, or coalitions of contenders,

advancing exclusive competing claims to control of the state, or
some segment of it;
2. commitment to those claims by a significant segment of the citizenry;
3. incapacity or unwillingness of rulers to suppress the alternative

coalition and/or commitment to its claims.
As a rule of thumb, I have included instances in which the previous

rulers' opponents controlled either a substantial region or a major
administrative segment of the state for a month or more. Revolutionary
situations were by no means the only occasions for manifestations of

nationalism, but they provide preliminary indications of the incidence
of nationalist demands that were strong enough to generate open conflict. Without constituting anything like definitive evidence, the chronologies therefore help specify what theories of nationalism must
explain.
Table 1 summarizes for each region and fifty-year period the number
of years in "national" revolutionary situations - where the challenger
was either resisting a demand for cultural assimilation into the state or
demanding political autonomy on behalf of an explicitly stated cultural

distinctness. Despite much retrospective mythmaking to the contrary, I
have not called "national" such momentous events as the Catalan and
Portuguese rebellions of 1640 because in each case aristocratic leaders

appealed explicitly to ancient charters rather than principles of nationality. I have, on the other hand, included instances where substantial
proportions of self-identified religious or ethnic communities seem to
135
Table 1. Years in national revolutionary situations by region and period, 1492-1991
Period Low Iberia Balkans & British France Russia Total
countries Hungary Isles

1492-1541
1542-1591
29
20
22
1592-1641
14
1742-1791
1642-1691
1692-1741
22
32
16
1792-1841
34
49
1842-1891
21
23
1892-1941
14
29
1942-1991
Total
15
83
10
51
23
41
56
35
250
have supported a demand for communal autonomy. Table 2 presents

the years in national revolutions, thus defined, as a percentage of all
years in revolutionary situations of whatever kind.
The number of such years varied dramatically from region to region.
They were rare indeed in the Low Countries, where (despite some
French-inspired nationalist rhetoric during the Batavian Revolution of
1795-1798) only the Belgian revolution of 1830-1833 qualified. They
were, by contrast, commonplace in the Balkans and Russia, where in
83 and 56 years, respectively, of the half-millennium since 1492 a
national revolutionary situation was underway. In those two regions,
furthermore, a majority of all revolutionary years - 52.9 percent in the
Balkans and Hungary, 65.1 percent in Russia - involved a national

component.
National revolutionary situations before 1800 resulted overwhelmingly
from state attempts to subordinate, expel, or eradicate imperial minori-
ties, as when the conquering Spaniards began to persecute the conquered Moors, then to persecute those who had been nominally christianized, the Moriscos. In the Balkans and Hungary, the handful of pre1800 national revolutionary situations consisted of Protestant resistance to the Habsburg Counter-Reformation and one eighteenth-century Greek bid for independence of the Ottoman empire - the latter
only the faintest foretaste of incessant nineteenth-century rebellions
against the Ottomans. In the British Isles, it is true, Scots and Irish
repeatedly fought against English hegemony in the name of ancient
national rights well before 1800; after that date, every full-fledged revo-
Table 2. Years in national revolutionary situations as percentage of all years in revolutionary situ
Period Low Iberia Balkans & British Isles France
Countries
1492-1541
0.0
55.6
Hung
0.0
1542-1591
0.0
66.7
0.0
1592-1641
0.0
33.3
27.2
1642-1691
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
1742-1791
0.0
0.0
33.3
2.8
100.0
50.0
1842-1891
1892-1941
1942-1991
Total
5.6
66.7
11.1
87.5
66.7
52.9
100.0
100.0
100.0
0.0
53.
0.0
100.0
0.0
9.6
100.
15.4
10.0
1692-1741
1792-1841
15.8
17.9
0.0
0.0
0.0
100.0
100.0
42.5
0.0
41.4
Total Revolu-
tionary
Years
88
157
157
-: No revolutionary years in this interval.
120
137
lutionary situation in the British Isles pitted Irish rebels against British
rulers. In France, the wars of religion and their sequels (e.g., the
Camisard rebellions of the Cevennes and Languedoc in 1702-1706)
concentrated national revolutionary situations in the Old Regime. In
Russia and Poland, Cossacks and other frontier populations rebelled
frequently in defense of autonomies they had enjoyed as licensed

marauders when Russian or Polish armies were insufficient to hold off
enemies on their flanks.
Before 1800, in short, strenuous demands for political autonomy in the

name of a culturally distinct population occurred chiefly in two circum-
stances: first, when empires sought to impose official religions on dissenting minorities; second, when empires sought to strengthen central
control over populations that had previously enjoyed substantial autonomies through indirect rule or weak imperial administration. After
1800, the frequency with which subject populations revolted in the
name of their distinct nationalities - and especially the frequency with
which previously acquiescent minorities demanded full independence
- greatly increased. The proportion of all revolutionary situations that
included a clear national component rose correspondingly, from a typical 30 percent before 1800 to a typical 50 percent thereafter. First
state-led, then state-seeking nationalism became prevalent as a motor
of revolution.
Not that homogeneous nation-states suddenly became dominant in

Europe. On the contrary: Even during the last two nationalistic centuries, only a tiny proportion of the world's distinctive religious, linguistic, and cultural groupings have formed their own states, while precious
few of the world's existing states have approximated the homogeneity
and commitment conjured up by the label "nation-state." Within

Europe itself, perhaps twentieth-century Portugal, Albania, Greece,
Austria, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark all approached the
mark at one moment or another - and even in those countries such
regions as Lapland and Macedonia introduce significant heterogeneity.

Despite much mythmaking to the contrary, such large states as France,
the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Spain all hosted visibly,
vigorously heterogeneous peoples.
Should we therefore conclude with Hobsbawm that we are tracking a
chimera? No, because from 1789 onward European rulers did make
larger demands on their citizens in the nation's name while insisting
that citizens themselves give their nation priority over other interests;
138
states did commonly adopt programs of normative indoctrination designed to homogenize their subject populations and to activate their
national commitments, cultural uniformity within states did increase,
the cultural distinctiveness of states likewise increased, and spokesmen
for national minorities did demand distinctive political treatment or
separate states far more often than before 1789. What is more, political
doctrines came to assume that the homogeneous and connected population of a nation-state not only existed but enjoyed rights of citizenship
by the very fact of its existence. "Just as the Greeks," remarks Robert
Dahl,
took for granted that the proper scale of democracy, or for that matter any
decent political system, was necessarily extremely small - a few tens of thou-
sands of people - so since the late eighteenth century advocates of democracy have generally assumed that the natural locus of democracy is the
nation-state or, more generally, the country.5
Large groups of people acted on similar beliefs, demanding rights on

the base of citizenships real or imagined.
Why did those things, the very integument of nationalism, occur? Stateled nationalism grew from the effort of rulers to accomplish two closely
related programs: 1) to extract ever-expanding means of war - money,

men, materiel, and much more - from reluctant subject populations,
2) to substitute direct top-to-bottom government for indirect rule
through tribute-yielding intermediaries who enjoyed considerable
autonomy within their own jurisdiction. The second often began as an
unintended by-product of the first, as intensified demands for resources by means of privileged intermediaries produced resistance and
sharply diminishing returns.
In the process, rulers who had previously held their titles by aristocratic election or dynastic right frequently allied against hereditary
intermediaries, such as great landlords, with bourgeois who shared an
interest in advancing their own version of national identity vis a vis the
many parochial identities that had previously coexisted, and who saw
the diffusion of that national identity as a means of political rationaliza-
tion. Cultural brokers who had previously mediated between parochial

identities and the sovereign faced a choice among losing influence,
struggling to defend the autonomy and power of those parochial identi-
ties, or joining the new nationalizers. Thus increased the discrepancy in

power and prestige between participants in the dominant culture and
adherents to what were becoming ethnic minorities. The creation of
139
large standing armies drawn from the national population stimulated

these campaigns for national identity.
Why did war and standing armies matter? After a few seventeenthcentury experiments, the eighteenth century saw the definitive decline
of mercenary armed forces in favor of large standing armies and navies
recruited or even conscripted almost entirely from national populations and financed chiefly by taxes on those same populations; the
French levee en masse of 1793 marked a major moment in that change.
Except where invasion loomed, ordinary people resisted press gangs
and conscription fiercely. Nevertheless, states beat down that resistance. Once France, Prussia, and a few other powers were fielding massive armies and navies in this way, the market for mercenaries collapsed
in most of Europe, and every state that claimed a military presence fol-
lowed the great-power suit. Countries that had long specialized in the
export of mercenaries, such as Hesse and Switzerland, found themselves turning to cottage industry.6
The formation of such vast military forces in this peculiar way had a
whole series of unintended but fundamental consequences: involving
rulers in extended struggle and bargaining with their subject populations, expanding definitions of citizenship, forwarding ideas and practices of popular sovereignty, generating enforceable claims of subjects
on states in such forms as rights to petition and associate, reinforcing
various kinds of representative institutions, inflating central state
bureaucracies, moving states from indirect toward direct rule, extending state controls over stocks and flows of labor, capital, commodities,
and money within and across increasingly well-defined national

borders, enlarging state obligations to military veterans and their families, constituting military veterans and their families as collective politi-
cal actors, and forwarding shared experience through military service

itself. In Great Britain, for example, the war years from 1792 to 1815
saw not only massive increases in armed forces and taxation, substantial growth and centralization of the national state, and a large increase
in the powers of parliament, but also a great mutation of popular collective action toward associational bases, national issues, and claims on
parliament.
Two linked features of these momentous processes deserve special

attention: circumscription and central control. First, circumscription.
All states exercise priority within relatively well-defined territories; that
is one way we know they are states, not lineages, gangs, churches, cor-
140
porations, or something else. Nevertheless, they vary widely with respect to how contiguous and sharply-bounded those territories are and
in regard to how deeply they exercise control at and within their boun-
daries. In eighteenth-century Europe, larger states generally maintained lax controls over ill-defined and enclave-ridden borders; within
those borders, furthermore, either they did not penetrate very deeply
or they left that penetration to largely autonomous intermediaries.
Migrant workers, merchants, goods, and money confronted many bandits and tollgates, but otherwise moved easily and without state monitoring within and across frontiers. Few states, furthermore, maintained
effective systems of registration for property or persons; witness the

rarity of national tax assessments and the surprise occasioned by the
results of nineteenth-century censuses. Even obligatory military service, where it occurred, depended on local knowledge of the eligible
males and was therefore highly vulnerable to local mystification.
What of central control? With the growth of massive national armed

forces and the attendant growth of state budgets, almost all states erect-
ed wider, deeper, more direct systems of control. Central control extended, obviously, to property, production, and political activity; rulers
stopped relying on highly autonomous magnates and pressed toward

direct rule, toward the creation of administrations extending directly
from the central power down to individual communities and households.
Central control emphatically included cultural control, the singling out

or creation of a single linguistic, historical, artistic, and practical tradition from all those present within the national territory. States began as
never before to create national educational systems, to impose standard national languages, to organize expositions, museums, artistic
subventions, and other means of displaying cultural production or heri-
tage, to construct communications networks, to invent national flags,

symbols, anthems, holidays, rituals, and traditions. As a result, national
populations did finally become less heterogeneous, even though few of

them ever approximated the homogeneity of the ideal nation-state; the
homogenizing effect extended to such profound matters as demographic behavior.7 National bourgeoisies and intelligentsias commonly
collaborated in the effort, which in its early phases often discredited
the exclusiveness and self-interest of the aristocracy, sometimes of the
crown itself. Once begun, the process perpetuated itself, for the advan-
tages of speaking a national language and adopting a national style

rather than continuing to live within a shrinking, stigmatized pool
became more and more manifest.
141
Cultural control benefited from the existence of a well-defined other;

the alien enemy within or without magnified the value of assimilation,
even for members of that alien enemy. Anti-Semitism had this force
through much of Europe, but anti-German sentiment reinforced the
desirability of becoming very French, as anti-French, anti-Polish, or
anti-Russian feeling reinforced the desirability of becoming very German. The same dynamic operated within plural empires; once Austria
and Hungary became well-defined separate spheres within the same
empire after 1866, for example, the many German-speakers of Budapest felt intense pressure either to leave or to Magyarize.
The process of circumscription helps explain a surprising feature of

European nationalism: the relative unimportance of religious identification in the continent's state-led and state-seeking movements. More
so than language or everyday practices, religion served for centuries as
the prime symbolic bond among European peoples in those encounters that transcended strictly local ties. In local social relations, religion
remained a potent marker. Before 1800, we have seen, imperial efforts
to convert, annihilate, or expel members of religious minorities

frequently generated determined rebellions. Outside of eastern
Europe, however, after 1800 religion rarely figured as a basis of nationalist claims from the top or from the bottom.
The relative absence of mobilization based on shared religion after

1800, furthermore, contrasts sharply with the savage salience of religious boundaries during the Reformation and the various wars that fol-
lowed until the settlements of 1648. On the whole, religious identities

became prominent in two circumstances: 1) where the dominant class
belonged to a distinctly different faith from their subjects, as in the
Ottoman Empire, or 2) where (especially in the course of the Reformation) the state had managed to establish its own church, as in England,
Scotland, and Sweden. Outside of these circumstances, religion had the
troublesome consequence of identifying populations within one state
with confessional cousins who inhabited quite different, and even rival,
states.
Not that rulers never tried: Louis XIV's expulsion of Huguenots and
his subsequent scorched-earth wars against Camisards supported his
claim to be Europe's principal defender of the Catholic faith as well as
weakening autonomous bases of power within his kingdom; even there
the crown eventually settled for accepting payoffs from the remaining
Protestants of the Midi. French revolutionaries and their successors
142
tried first to capture the French Catholic church, then to suppress it,
then to establish their own church, then to work out a modus vivendi
with a church recognized to be multinational. From that point onward,
language and presumed common origin constituted much more powerful bases of European nationalist demands than did religion. During
the very period (1780-1830) in which anti-French nationalism was

swelling in England, its rulers were dismantling the religious monopoly
of public office they had erected with the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
This vast top-down process constituted state-led nationalism, making it

seem normal politics in a world that had only recently experienced a
quite different politics of dynastic interest, indirect rule, virtual representation, brokerage among multiple ethnicities, and extensive particularism. But it also increased the incentives and opportunities for state-
seeking nationalism. State-led nationalism activated the formation,

mobilization, and claim-making of ethnic groups. It did so by legitimating the potent principle of correspondence between people and
state, by greatly increasing the advantages to any group of controlling
its own state (not to mention the disadvantages of not controlling its
own state), by more frequently situating cultural minorities within one
state adjacent to cultural majorities in neighboring states, by diminishing state toleration of distinctive cultural enclaves, and by coercing
assimilation of minorities, which in their turn threatened the positions
of regional intelligentsias and bourgeoisies as cultural brokers.

Only after 1790, for example, did any substantial number of Hungarian
nobles start demanding that a standard Magyar, instead of Latin,

become the language of administration and public life in polyglot Hungary; popular mobilization around that demand only occurred many
decades later. But Hungary enjoyed a dual monarchy with Croatia,
where the Hungarian demand stimulated first a defense of Latin and
then a call for Croatian (which was then even less standardized than
Magyar) as the "national" language. In the process, German, which had

served as a major lingua franca throughout the Habsburg domains,
became much more clearly identified with Austria, as the ethnic Germans who had so long served as merchants and middlemen everywhere
in the empire faced sharpened political choices.
The exact modalities of mobilization and resistance varied with the
national population's class composition, urbanity, extent and multiplicity of cultural cleavage, and aggressiveness of attempts at assimilation. Throughout Europe, nevertheless, as those groups that controlled
143
the state apparatus pursued campaigns of homogenization and assimilation they faced not just widespread resistance but newly mobilized
demands for political autonomy, even for independence.
What, then, is happening today in the former Soviet Union and what
was once Yugoslavia? Are we simply witnessing the explosion of

bottled-up state-seeking nationalism? Not exactly. Although Russians
certainly moved into positions of power in the Soviet Union's nonRussian sections and Serbs took advantageous positions within Yugoslavia, both states offered considerable latitude to ethnic minorities and
enclaves. More important, they reinforced certain ethnicities by building them directly into state structure, naming subdivisions such as
Croatia, Slovenia, Uzbekistan, and Georgia, and giving preference in
their administrations to those who could successfully claim to represent the presumably coherent populations within them. State and party
relied heavily on ethnically-identified regional bosses who (in echoes of
old imperial systems of rule) enjoyed considerable autonomy so long as
they delivered goods and compliance to the center.
In both cases, however, the weakening of the central power forwarded a
quasi-revolutionary situation; it introduced uncertainty into each particular compact between a recognized group and the center. As in the
surge of claim-making that occurs early in revolutions when everyone's
rights and privileges become uncertain, both locally-dominant ethnic

groups and their threatened neighbors began jostling each other for
position at the next settlement. But the tearing of the Iron Curtain and
the rapt attention of states outside of Eastern Europe made possible

two outcomes that were unthinkable a few years before 1989: 1) the
formation of firm, independent alliances between segments of the old
composites such as Estonia or Slovenia and states outside the zone of
state socialism; 2) the application of the principle one people: one state
within that zone. The likelihood that western powers would facilitate
those outcomes without fear of attack from the Soviet military opened
up entirely new opportunities.
Given an established principle of national self-determination and the

attractive prospect of recognition and favored treatment by western
powers, every group that commanded some military power, some

geographical concentration, and some claim to constitute a coherent
nation had a strong dual interest: to bid for an independent state and to
prevent ambitious neighbors from making successful bids for independent states. So long as the tie between nationhood (however fic-
144
tional) and statehood persists, the advantages of running your own

state remain substantial, and great powers promote the claims of beleaguered minorities within existing states, state-seeking nationalism will
flourish. Conversely, the loosening of ties between culture and state, the
weakening of state capacities, and the increasing determination of great
powers to maintain existing boundaries would all work to diminish

nationalism, at least in the long run. In another fifty years, the era of
nationalism - both state-led and state-seeking - could be ending.
Three possible futures follow.8 The first gives us continued homogenization of national populations by means of cultural control over education, mass media, employment, public administration, and immigration.
The gloomiest vision of this future includes the consolidation of existing countries into a small number of states, each rigidly conformist
inside and aggressively nationalist outside.
The second possibility features incessant splintering of existing states

into segments controlled by one ostensibly unified people or another. It
is hard to see how this process would ever end, because at each level
there would always be more stateless populations with some claims to
autonomy and because the splitting itself would weaken the capacity of
governments to control political and economic change.
The third future offers separation of the principle of cultural distinct-
ness from the principle of statehood, perhaps along the lines of the
European Community. This future could threaten whatever solidarity
now exists between governments and citizens, but it holds out some
hope of diminishing the readiness of people to slaughter each other for
control of territory.
Hard-nosed political thinking may make the first two scenarios seem
much more likely in different parts of the world - homogenization in
rich countries, splintering in poor ones. But since all three scenarios
rest on fictions, they remain open to creative political redefinition. The
last would provide both a refreshing return to the world's usual condition of cultural multiplicity and a promising advance to the peaceful
confrontation of differences.
Notes
1. C. A. Macartney, Hungary:A Short History (Edinburgh: University Press, 1962), 5.
145
2. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1789: Programme, Myth, Reality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For other recent writing on the
subject, see especially Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991. Revised edition); John
A. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1982); Ernst Bruckmiiller, "Ein 'deutsches' Biirgertum? Zu Fragen

nationaler Differenzierung der biirgerlichen Schichten in der Habsburgermonarchie
vom Vormarz bis um 1860," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990): 343-354; John
Comaroff, "Humanity, ethnicity, nationality: Conceptual and comparative perspec-
tives on the U.S.S.R.," Theory and Society 20 (1991): 661-688; Walker Connor,
"Ethnonationalism" in Myron Weiner and Samuel P. Huntington, editors, Understanding Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987); Otto Dann and John
Dinwiddy, editors, Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution (London:

Hambledon, 1988); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Ernst Haas, "What is nationalism and why
should we study it?" International Organization (1986): 707-744; Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985);
Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative
Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European
Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Michael Kearney, "Borders and boundaries of state and self at the end of empire," Journal of Historical
Sociology 4 (1991): 52-72; David D. Laitin, "The national uprisings in the Soviet
Union," World Politics 44 (1991): 139-177; David D. Laitin, Roger Petersen, and
John W. Slocum, "Language and the state: Russia and the Soviet Union in comparative perspective," in Alexander J. Motyl, editor, Thinking Theoretically About Soviet
Nationalities: History and Comparison in the Study of the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Adam J. Lerner, editor, "Reimagining the nation," Millennium 20 (1991), entire issue; Michel L6wy, "Internationalisme, nationalisme et
anti-imp6rialisme," Critique Communiste 87 (1989): 31-42; Roy E. H. Mellor,

Nation, State, and Territory: A Political Geography (London: Routledge, 1989);
Gerard Noiriel, Le creuset francais: Histoire de l'immigration xixe-xxe siecles (Paris:
Seuil, 1988); G6rard Noiriel, La tyrannie du National: Le droit d'asile en Europe
1793-1993 (Paris: Calmann-Levy); Uffe Ostergard, "Peasants and Danes: The

Danish national identity and political culture," Comparative Studies in Society and
History 34 (1992): 3-27; Daniel A. Segal, "Nationalism, comparatively speaking,"
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Topalov, "Patriotismes et citoyennetes," Geneses 3 (1991): 162-176; Peter Waldmann, Ethnischer Radikalismus: Ursachen und Folgen gewaltsamer Minderheitenkonflikte (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1989); Brackette F. Williams, "A class
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Anthropology 18 (1989): 401-444; Victor Zaslavsky, "Nationalism and democratic
transition in postcommunist societies," Daedalus 121/2 (1992): 97-122.
3. See Charles Tilly, "Ethnic conflict in the Soviet Union," Theory and Society 20
(1991): 569-580; Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992; revised edition); "Futures of European states," Social Research 59
(1992): 705-717; European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

4. The chronologies, but not the tables in this article, appear in European Revolutions.
I have corrected the published chronology for the Balkans and Hungary, into which
146
dark forces somehow introduced three revolutionary situations from Bohemia which recent Czechoslovak history should have reminded me did not, and does not,
belong to the Balkans or Hungary.
5. Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 4.
6. Rudolf Braun, Industrialisierung und Volksleben (Zurich: Rentsch, 1965); John Casparis, "The Swiss mercenary system: Labor emigration from the semi-periphery,"
Review 5 (1982): 593-642; Charles W. Ingrao, The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas,
Institutions, and Reform under Frederick II, 1760-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987).
7. Susan Cotts Watkins, From Provinces into Nations (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990).
8. I have drawn these final paragraphs from "Past, present, and future nationalisms,"
The New School Commentator 4 (November, 1992): 1-4.

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States and Nationalism in Europe 1492-1992

Author(s): Charles Tilly

States and nationalism in Europe 1492-1992

As an independent state, Romania has not been around much more

during World War I. In the absence of a Romanian state, nevertheless,

pre-Magyar place-names of Transylvania are Slav, except four river-names,

Theory and Society 23: 131-146, 1994.

the incessant competition of Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman

wide popular support. In general, Romanian nationalists then argued

elected prince of Wallachia and Moldavia was the bourgeois

emerge from two of my recent inquiries: an analysis of change and

nationalism in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, let me suggest that

factors: 1) the state's capacity to monitor, circumscribe, and control

My very schematic survey provides few clues as to the reasons why

Norway and Bohemia. Nor does it dare to explain the content of

become a salient force in European politics.

spoke in a nation's name successfully demanded that citizens identify

the state. What of state-seeking nationalism? Representatives of some

mained highly composite, ruling indirectly through putative representa-

1. the appearance of contenders, or coalitions of contenders,

2. commitment to those claims by a significant segment of the citizenry;

3. incapacity or unwillingness of rulers to suppress the alternative

As a rule of thumb, I have included instances in which the previous

situations were by no means the only occasions for manifestations of

demanding political autonomy on behalf of an explicitly stated cultural

Portuguese rebellions of 1640 because in each case aristocratic leaders

countries Hungary Isles

have supported a demand for communal autonomy. Table 2 presents

The number of such years varied dramatically from region to region.

Balkans and Hungary, 65.1 percent in Russia - involved a national

Period Low Iberia Balkans & British Isles France

-: No revolutionary years in this interval.

frequently in defense of autonomies they had enjoyed as licensed

Before 1800, in short, strenuous demands for political autonomy in the

Not that homogeneous nation-states suddenly became dominant in

few of the world's existing states have approximated the homogeneity

and commitment conjured up by the label "nation-state." Within

mark at one moment or another - and even in those countries such

regions as Lapland and Macedonia introduce significant heterogeneity.

Large groups of people acted on similar beliefs, demanding rights on

related programs: 1) to extract ever-expanding means of war - money,

tion. Cultural brokers who had previously mediated between parochial

ties, or joining the new nationalizers. Thus increased the discrepancy in

large standing armies drawn from the national population stimulated

and money within and across increasingly well-defined national

cal actors, and forwarding shared experience through military service

Two linked features of these momentous processes deserve special

effective systems of registration for property or persons; witness the

What of central control? With the growth of massive national armed

stopped relying on highly autonomous magnates and pressed toward

Central control emphatically included cultural control, the singling out

tage, to construct communications networks, to invent national flags,

populations did finally become less heterogeneous, even though few of

tages of speaking a national language and adopting a national style

Cultural control benefited from the existence of a well-defined other;

The process of circumscription helps explain a surprising feature of

remained a potent marker. Before 1800, we have seen, imperial efforts

to convert, annihilate, or expel members of religious minorities

The relative absence of mobilization based on shared religion after

lowed until the settlements of 1648. On the whole, religious identities

the very period (1780-1830) in which anti-French nationalism was

This vast top-down process constituted state-led nationalism, making it

seeking nationalism. State-led nationalism activated the formation,

of regional intelligentsias and bourgeoisies as cultural brokers.