Nationality
Country and humanity--The marks of nationality: the will of
the people; the sense of national mission--Patriotism--
International solidarity--Ethics of foreign policy:
non-intervention; war; the special missions of each
country--The future of Europe--The Slavs--The United
States of Europe--Italy's international function.
The law of Duty, man's bounden service to humanity, goes on beyond the
individual and the state to be the rule of international relations.
Man's end, so runs Mazzini's argument, is to serve the progress of
humanity. But the individual, in his isolated impotence, would shrink
from the immensity of the burden. And for most men, humanity excites
no effective sense of obligation; they will give for country what they
will not give for the wider and remoter circle of mankind. The
cosmopolitan, who talks of duty to humanity and neglects the nation,
is as one who bids men climb a ladder and takes away the rungs.
Therefore Providence, once again applying the law of association, has
placed the individual among men of like feelings and aspirations, that
serving his country he may serve humanity, that through the nation and
its common strength he may have power to help the progress of the
world. Thus a nation is a God-appointed instrument for the welfare of
the race, and in this alone its moral essence lies. "Nationality is
sacred to me," he says, "because I see in it the instrument of labour
for the good and progress of all men." "Countries are the workshops of
humanity"; "a nation is a living task, her life is not her own, but a
force and a function in the universal Providential scheme." "Humanity
is a great army, marching to the conquest of unknown lands, against
enemies both strong and cunning. The peoples are its corps, each with
its special operation to carry out, and the common victory depends on
the exactness, with which they execute the different operations."
This "division of European labour" is essential to the progress of
Europe, and, through it, of the world. But each group of humanity's
workmen, if it is to be efficient, must be organised, not by coercion,
but by free acceptance of their obligations; they must be impelled by
duty and the sense of a great common work to do. Each nation must be a
living, homogeneous entity, with its own faith and consciousness of
self. Europe, in Mazzini's lifetime, had little of this. He condemned
its existing divisions as answering to no principle, since for the
most part they were agglomerations of territory, made in the interests
of a royal dynasty or in the name of some artificial principle, as the
balance of power; and therefore they were powerless to inspire a
common national effort for an intelligent and useful end. Factitious
and immoral ends filled up the void; unsatisfied national yearnings
burst imperiously through diplomatic schemes of peace; there was
little of the burning love of independence, that alone safeguarded
from designs of aggressive empire, from France in the past, from
Russia in the present. The map of Europe must be drawn afresh, and
states be made conterminous with nationalities.
What, then, are the inherent, essential marks of nationality? Are race
and geographical features, language and literature, customs and
traditions? None of these, Mazzini replied, are more than secondary
elements, race least of all. Wiser and juster than Bismarck and his
school, he saw that race, even if it were discoverable, has small
connection with the facts of to-day. He did not investigate the dark
problem of race characteristics, he did not even ask whether race
affinities are among the physical causes that create a national
feeling. But, none the less, his argument is indestructible against
the theory that makes race the chief base of nationality. He was saved
from ethnological fancies by his sensible conclusion, that races are
too intimately compounded to be a cause of national character. "There
is not a single spot in Europe," he declared, "where an unmixed race
can be detected." "France, the most powerful nationality of the modern
world, is a mixture of Germans, Celts, and Romans." There is one
aspect however of the race question, that he did not sufficiently
recognise. However imaginary the original ethnological basis of a
country may be and generally is, yet some races have been fixed for
several centuries; and this has generated a belief in a common racial
origin, which, however false historically, may none the less, when
supported by a common language, become an important and sometimes a
dominant factor in creating a sense of nationality.
He gave his fancy play in determining the influence of geography. He
loved geographical study, and as usual sought for a spiritual purpose
underlying the physical facts. "By the courses of the great rivers, by
the lines of the high mountains, and other geographical features God
has marked the natural borders of the nations." "Nationalities," he
said, "appear to me to have been traced long ago by the finger of
Providence on the map of Europe"; and Italy, for instance, had her
"sublime, irrefutable boundary marks." He left this transcendentalism
for safer ground, when he came to language and literature, and
recognised what potent factors they had been in the making of nations.
The importance of language was sufficiently obvious. Literature had
sometimes, as in the case of his own Italy, remained the one surviving
sign of nationality, when all else was lost. He knew how great had
been the influence of Dante in forming the national sense of his own
country; how much the Polish poets of the century had done to feed the
Slav national spirit; how intimate is the power of national melodies;
what the common possession of a great poet may do to knit a people. He
realised too, though perhaps insufficiently, how history has helped to
form nations; how a common government draws a people together in
common loyalty or common revolt; how war may be a welding influence;
how men, living for generations under the same law, acquire from it
common habits and customs and traditions.
All these, however, are but the formative elements of nationality;
they are not its essence. Mazzini's clear democratic faith kept him
from confusing the justification of the fact with its causes.
Nationality was independent of any of them. Centuries of divided
government had not destroyed the national sense of Italy; Switzerland
was a nation for all its diversity of languages; difference of tongues
did not prevent Poland and Lithuania from sharing the same national
aspirations; Alsace belonged to France, however German it might be by
race and history. Nationality is a sentiment, a moral phenomenon,
which may be generated by material causes, but exists by virtue of
moral facts. On any theory of freedom or democracy it can have no
positive, meaning basis but the popular will; and it is a parody of
nationality that unites by coercion. "Nationalities can be founded
only for and upon and by the people"; and it follows that when the
inhabitants of a territory desire to be a nation, provided that behind
their desire there lies a moral purpose, they have the right to be
one. This, despite slight and rare inconsistencies, he made the broad
clear principle of modern, democratic nationality, a principle
"invincible as conscience," whose triumph no hostility of kings or
statesmen, no artificial counterfeits can permanently hinder.
Still, he held, the mere fact of the popular will is not enough.
Nationality, like every political phenomenon, must have a moral aim to
justify it. A mere momentary reaction against misgovernment, for
instance, gave no sufficient claim to independence. "In questions of
nationality, as in every other question, the end alone is sovereign";
and a true nation must have its moral intention, its clear and
understood mission to accomplish for itself and for humanity, its
conscious part in realising the divine idea on earth. It is only in
its homage to the moral law, that a nation finds its "baptism and
consecration." "A community of men drawn together by a selfish
principle for a purely material purpose is not thereby a nation. To
constitute a nation, its informing principle and purpose and right
must be grounded on eternal bases. The purpose must be essentially a
moral one, since a material interest by itself is by its nature
finite, and can therefore form no basis of perpetual union." "Country
is not a territory; territory is only its base; country is the idea
that rises on that base, the thought of love that draws together all
the sons of that territory."
This love is patriotism. "O my brothers," he says, "love your country.
Country is our house, the house that God has given us, setting therein
a populous family, to love us and be loved by us, to understand us and
be understood by us better and more readily than others are." It was
by such burning patriotism he saved his country and was first to
practise it himself. But he detested the sentimental and emotional
patriot. His patriotism was a silent, manly thing, that hated display
and braggart talk; it was as a steady spiritual flame, that never
roared to heaven and never sank to ashes. He tested it by its fruit in
the individual life. No ill-living man was true patriot. "Let
country," he said, "be incarnated in each one of you; each one of you
feel and make himself responsible for his brothers; each of you so act
that in yourselves men may respect and love your country." "Where the
citizen does not know that he must give lustre to his country, not
borrow lustre from it, that country may be strong but never happy."
Real patriotism will not fear to speak the truth. "Flattery will never
save a country, nor proud words make us less abject." "The honour of
a country depends much more on removing its faults than on boasting of
its qualities." One can imagine what would have been his scorn for the
degenerate imperialism of latter days. The patriot's supreme desire is
that his country's true honour may be untarnished; he thinks more of
duty than of victory. His own Roman Republic, that glorious and
illuminating example of patriotism, had small hope of success, but its
honour stood entire, and therefore morally it triumphed. Success,
empire, military glory may be a country's lot; so may failure and
defeat and poverty; neither this nor that fate touches its real being.
True national dignity and glory lie in right doing, and humiliation
comes only from public dishonour and a mendacious diplomacy. "You must
keep your country pure of selfishness," was his maxim of patriotism
for Italian working men.
Patriotism, then, is intense regard for a country's moral greatness;
and it expresses itself in that sense of national duty, which he held
to be the only justification of a country's national existence. This
duty has two objects, the community itself and all humanity. We have
seen what he conceived to be a nation's duty to its members; there is
no true country, he said, without a national education, or where men
starve for want of work. Here we are more concerned with that
forwardness to serve humanity, which he made the other mark of the
true nation. "National life and international life should be two
manifestations of the same principle, the love of good." Above the
separate nations stands the European brotherhood, the late-born child
of Christianity. Sir Thomas More, he says, first formulated the new
law of peace; literature and trade and travel are ever drawing the
nations together by "a law of moral gravitation"[43]; the French
Revolution echoed through the democracies of Europe; the struggle with
Napoleon renewed the common understanding of the nations. The cause of
the people is the same the whole world over, and the democracies must
join hands to fight the battle of them all, as he had tried to make
them do, when he founded Young Europe. Humanitarian movements,--the
abolition of the slave trade, the cause of Greece and Italy,--were
European. "There exists then in Europe a harmony of needs and wishes,
a common thought, a universal mind, which directs the nations by
convergent paths to the same goal." No country may be isolated,
economically or intellectually; and it is a poor and counterfeit
patriotism, that despises other countries. That way lies destruction.
"A nation's growth depends on the trust that other peoples place in
it"; a country guided by a moral principle "finds everything open
readily to it from markets to political alliances," but one that
stands for an unjust policy has mistrust and jealousy for its portion.
Hence the country, that does injury to another, sins against itself.
"I hate," he said, "the monopolist, usurping nation, that sees its own
strength and greatness only in the weakness and poverty of others."
That is a poor and stunted people, whose foreign policy is "one of
aggrandisement and selfishness, whether it seeks them basely or buys
glory at other men's expense." Countries, that cherish liberty at
home and outrage it abroad, "are fated to expiate their error through
long years of isolation and oppression and anarchy." So far he
preached familiar doctrine, but he carried it into regions of his own.
International duty does not stop at non-aggression. Every country has
its positive duty to humanity; and while evil is enthroned, and right
can hardly hold its own, and the eternal battle rages round, it may
not stand aside in cowardly forgetfulness. Mazzini abhorred the
doctrine of non-intervention--the principle that no country may
interfere in the domestic matters of another,--a doctrine which the
Americans and Canning introduced for the protection of freedom, but
which less hardy statesmen in France and England had perverted to
excuse their own faint-heartedness. If the principle had been
generally accepted, if it had meant for instance that France could not
intervene at Rome or Russia restore despotism in Hungary, it might
have worked successfully. But practically it meant that "intervention
was all on the wrong side," that only England observed the principle,
and therefore the one Great Power, which in some degree stood for
liberty, tied its own hands, while the Powers that stood for despotism
worked "their unhallowed ends when, where, and how they thought fit"
over three-fourths of Europe. As Mazzini pointed out, the theory took
for granted a system based on nationality; and where nationality was
non-existent, as in Italy and South-Eastern Europe, it had no rightful
application. At the best it was a "poor and incomplete" doctrine. A
country has its "bonds of international duty," obligatory in proportion
to its strength. "The absolute doctrine of non-intervention in
politics corresponds to indifference in religion; it is a masked
atheism, a negation of all belief, of every general principle, of any
mission of a nation in humanity's behalf." "Neutrality in a war of
principles is mere passive existence, forgetfulness of all that makes
a people sacred, the negation of the common law of nations, political
atheism. On one side," he was speaking to Englishmen in 1859, "stands
the flag of liberty and right, of the true and good; on the other the
flag of tyranny and ambition, of the false and evil. And you, a free
nation and strong, you who profess belief in truth and justice, would
you say, 'Between evil and good we will remain neutral, impassive
spectators'? It is the word of Cain. No people, that chooses to teach
that policy, may dare to call itself Christian, for it is practically
a people of atheists or cowards. Sooner or later a tremendous
expiation will visit the cowardly desertion of the duty which God lays
on peoples as on individuals." "Can it be that England," he wrote
twelve years earlier, "the England of the Reformation, the England of
Elizabeth and of Cromwell, self-centred in immoral indifference, gives
up Europe to the dictatorship of force?"
Hence he was no believer in peace at any price. Sternly, indeed, he
condemned war, when it was not fought for a right principle; it was
"fratricide," if not imperative in the interests of the race. But it
was "sacred as peace, when the triumph of good is to be its issue." He
attacked the Manchester School for perverting the sense of human
solidarity. "Peace," he wrote to the Geneva Congress of 1867, "cannot
become a law of human society, except by passing through the
struggle, which will ground life and association on foundations of
justice and liberty, on the wreck of every power which exists not for
a principle but for a dynastic interest." Europe, he held, could not
have lasting peace, till Austria and Turkey made way for the
nationalities, which they held down; it would ever be perturbed by
fears of Russian aggression, till Poland was restored to be its
bulwark; and only war could free the Poles and Southern Slavs. "When
you have substituted justice for tyranny, truth for falsehood, duty
for selfish interests, the republic for monarchy, then you will have
peace, but not till then."
Mazzini, unluckily, was not content with the broad human principle
that a country must use its strength for right and freedom everywhere.
He appended a theory, which has its germ of truth, but defies
definition, and is easily twisted to save a special argument. Each
nation had, he thought, some distinct and specialised service to
render to humanity. "God has written one line of his thought on the
cradle of each people." "Special interests, special aptitudes, and
before all special functions, a special mission to fulfil, a special
work to be done in the cause of the advancement of humanity, seem to
me the true, infallible characteristics of nationalities." The theory
escapes any exact precision; but it offers a rich field for poetry,
and Mazzini's imagination was at home in it. England's function was
"industry and colonies," Russia's was the civilisation of Asia,
Poland's "the Slav initiative." Germany's mark was thought, France's
was action, Italy's thought in unison with action. "While the German
walks earth with his sight lost in the depths of heaven, and the
Frenchman's eye rarely looks aloft but scours earth's surface with its
restless penetrating glance, the Genius, that guards the destinies of
Italy, has been ever wont to pass swiftly from the ideal to the real,
seeking from of old how earth and heaven may be joined together." We
have seen what curious use he made of this theory of special missions
to rebut Irish claims.
Such were the principles of nationality, and nations built on them
would make the Europe of the future. Mazzini believed that democracy
would tend towards large nations. He repudiated any love of
administrative centralisation and urged the widest local government;
but the bigger the nation, the more perfect, he thought, would be the
development of association within it, and the greater therefore its
momentum on the road of progress. And, as the larger nations would be
approximately equal in territory or population, a new and natural
balance of power would arise to safeguard peace. This liking for large
countries sometimes nearly led him into inconsistencies with his own
principles, and made him question the national basis of most small
states. He made a confident forecast of the future European
settlement. (He was writing, of course, prior to 1870.) England and
France (apart from Savoy and Nice) were the only countries, whose
territory marched with their natural borders, and they alone would
remain unchanged. Italy would be united, and include the border
districts and islands that spoke the Italian tongue, except,
apparently, the Canton of the Ticino. Germany, including the
German-speaking provinces of Austria, would also achieve its unity,
but be divided into two or three "great administrative sections."
Spain and Portugal would form a single country. Greece would expand
over all territories with a Greek-speaking population. Switzerland
would be the nucleus of an Alpine Federation, embracing Savoy and the
Tyrol. Holland was, apparently, to keep its independence; Belgium, on
the other hand, had no future as a nation, though he does not indicate
its destiny. In early life he seems to have thought that Denmark would
remain a separate state; afterwards he believed that the three
Scandinavian states were inevitably destined to unity.
The most difficult problem, of course, was that of Eastern Europe.
Mazzini evidently thought that, next to the unity of his own country,
the Slav movement was the most important question in European
politics. Here was a mighty people, awakening to life, proving its
power by its literature,--for it, he believed, had produced the only
living poetry since Goethe and Byron,--claiming its rightful place in
the European commonwealth. Nothing could arrest the self-assertion of
the Slavs, but the future of Europe largely depended on the direction
which it took. If the other nations hailed it and guided it, it would
enrich the life of Europe by the new elements it brought into it; if
it went unfriended and undirected, it would be perverted into
"Czarism," and cost Europe twenty years of bloodshed to check
Muscovite ambitions. Two things Europe would do well to keep in mind.
It was as useless as it was immoral to bolster up Austria and Turkey,
for the Slav movement would be inevitably fatal to them both. And
Europe must see that the Slavs became a barrier and not a help to
Russian designs of domination. This could be done, and done only, by
helping the non-Russian Slavs to organise themselves into powerful and
independent nations. Czarism owed its strength not to Panslavist
aspirations, but to the fact that the Czar was the only hope of the
Christian populations of the Balkans. Mazzini's detailed forecast of
the Slav national settlement varied from time to time; but his
favourite plan was that Russians, Poles, Czechs, and Serbs should form
four separate nationalities. In curious and impossible inconsistency
with his own principles, he seems to have thought that Hungary and
Roumania would be annexed to or federated with one or other of these
states; and he looked to a federal union of Serbs and Greeks, with
Constantinople, as a free city, for the centre of the federation.
Out of the nationalities would grow "the United States of Europe, the
republican alliance of the peoples," "that great European federation,
whose task it is to unite in one association all the political
families of the old world, destroy the partitions that dynastic
rivalries have made, and consolidate and respect nationalities."
Mazzini's ken, strange to say, was almost restricted to Europe. He
scarcely mentions in this connection the American United States,
though sometimes he seems perhaps to imply that they would enter the
European commonwealth. He had no inkling that Eastern races might
claim their own independent development. His forecast of European
colonisation hardly extended beyond Asia and North Africa; he believed
that Asia was destined to be "an appendix of Europe," and that the
great stream of European colonisation would set towards it, chiefly
through the agency of Russia and England. Thus he was concerned with
Europe only; and for the Europe of the future, a federation of
harmonious nationalities, he had a splendid prophecy. When nationality
had triumphed, "all cause of war would disappear, and in its place
arise a spirit of brotherhood and peaceful emulation on the road of
progress." Revolutions would be no more, and "the slow, continuous,
normal unfolding of activities and powers" would lead the nations ever
onwards. We come again to his vision of a European authority, sitting
at Rome to give guidance and harmony to the peoples. When the great
day arrived, that brought the victory of liberty and nationality, the
peoples would assemble their "true General Council." No doubt the
Council was the same as that which would define the new religious
faith. It would formulate the common national duties of the peoples,
and secure their freedom to perform those duties, while the separate
national councils defined the special duty of each country.
It would be Italy's glorious function to lead the nations to this
unity. France had lost the opportunity in 1815; England, when she
isolated herself from the life of Europe by her enslavement to
non-intervention; the Slav countries were disqualified by their
rivalries or obsequiousness to Russia. Italy had her unquestioned
titles to the proud hegemony,--her geographical position, her
character, her traditions, the universal looking for some great thing
to come out of her new life. She was "the land destined by God to the
great mission of giving moral unity to Europe, and through Europe to
Humanity." She would be the armed apostle of nationality, the
protectress of oppressed peoples, the instrument to destroy Austria
and Turkey and give freedom to the Slavs. And when this part of her
mission was fulfilled, and through her nationality was victorious,
then the gratitude of the peoples, and the divine appointment of
Providence, and her own essential fitness for the task, would make
Rome the centre of the cause of peace, the seat of the Diet of the
nations, fulfilling Dante's vision, that saw her "helmsman" of
humanity, to steer it to its peace. It was a noble dream, much of it,
it may be, fantastic and impossible, and yet, perhaps, with its seed
of truth. The European Federation tarries behind Mazzini's eager
prophecy, but its coming cannot be delayed for ever. The triumph of
nationality, despite the evil deed of 1870, has advanced with mighty
strides since his day. And though patriotism has often erred into
ignoble paths, and international fraternity gone backward, yet the
evil creates its own remedy, and disarmament becomes an ever more
importunate desire. When the nations learn that arbitration and
disarmament are necessary for their own self-preservation, when the
European federation gradually evolves itself, Rome will be the natural
seat of the High Court of Europe. Italy, which by her plebiscitary
origin has given a rule to the nationalities,--a country practically
without territorial ambitions or colonial empire, the natural mediator
between the two great European alliances, with her ancient prestige
and service to humanity to give her lustre, has paramount claims to
the high prerogative.[44]
FOOTNOTES:
[43] The first address of the People's International League, from
which these words are quoted, was written by W. J. Linton, but was
based on Mazzini's rough draft.
[44] M. Novicow in his _Missione d'Italia_ has recently expressed the
same belief, almost in Mazzini's words. [But the Tripoli business has
changed all this.--1911.]