The Ealing Labour party clocked itself up a remarkable 4,500 retweets for calling Sir Harold Evans’ claim that World War One was started because of nationalism “the most profound and insightful comment you will hear today.” It wasn’t. It is completely wrong.
Nationalism had been a force for over 60 years by 1914 and involved a desire to unite ethnic groups divided into separate polities into single nation states and to drive out dominant forces. The two most significant instances were in Germany and Italy, where unity co-incided with resistance to Austrian supremacy.
There is no doubt that nationalism can be aggressive and destructive. In seeking to unite ethnic groups it can cause conflicts across existing political boundaries, and nationalist leaders are often chauvinists who desire to demonstrate superiority.
However, these were not powerful factors in 1914. If ethnic unity had been Germany’s priority it would have been invading the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not Belgium. There is no doubt that chauvinist attitudes fuelled the move to conflict. France wished for revenge, practical and spiritual for the defeat of 1870, and Germany wished to match and exceed the prestige of the British Empire. These attitudes had existed for 40 years though. They had not led to war.
War was caused not be the desire to unify within ethnic boundaries, but to dominate across them – war was caused by the conflict between imperialist and nationalist forces. The prominent nationalist movements in 1914 were independence and self-determination movements – Ireland, Poland, and Serbia, opposed to the major empires, and it was one of these conflicts sparked a general war.
Serbia was an independent nation but ethnic Serbs also lived within the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire – one ethnic group living across the two models of polity, with both parties wishing to unite the group on their own terms. Objectively was either project more legitimate than the other?
After Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand the Austrians issued an ultimatum designed to enable them to crush Serbia once and for all, resolving the long-standing conflict of interests.
War spread because Germany had imperial desires against Russia, and to a lesser extent France and Belgium; and Russia had its own ambitions in Eastern Europe. All of these projects were very much designed to crush any nationalisms that got in the way, not unleash them.
The essence of Nazi diplomacy 20 year later was to trick the other powers into appeasement by focusing on the Third Reich’s nationalist, not imperialist, ambitions – Austria, the Sudetenland, Danzig, all German-speaking areas. Contemporary statesman did not think this nationalist agenda was worth a war – only when the Nazis wider ambitions to the rest of Poland and Czechoslovakia was revealed did attitudes to appeasement change.
The real agenda of the Nazis however, was to finally and fully unite the nationalist and imperialist projects, reaching the ghastly but coldly logical conclusion that the most effective way to properly deal with rival, and inferior, nationalist groups was not imperial domination but full extermination.
Nationalists are a charmless, easy bugbear, but there are always people out there who are thinking much bigger.