European Nationalism: Historical Cases and Their Unique Characteristics

Nationalism is often discussed as a single force, yet its history in Europe reveals strikingly different origins and meanings from one country to the next. England, France, and Germany each produced a distinct version of national consciousness, shaped by the particular economic, intellectual, and political pressures of their time. Understanding these three cases is essential because they became the templates that later inspired (and sometimes warned) nationalists across the world. They also expose a central tension that still defines debates today: is a nation a community of consenting citizens, or a community bound by shared blood and culture?

Three roads to the nation 🔗

Before examining each country, it helps to know how scholars group them. The historian Hans Kohn proposed an influential framework that divided European nationalism into two broad types. Civic nationalism, which he located in Western societies, treats the nation as a political community of individuals with equal rights and duties, united by shared institutions and values. Ethnic nationalism, which he associated with Germany and Central and Eastern Europe, treats the nation as a community based on common descent, language, and culture.

This “Kohn dichotomy” maps fairly well onto our three cases: England and France lean toward the civic model, while Germany became the classic example of the ethnic or cultural model. It is worth noting, though, that many scholars now criticise this neat East-West split. Critics argue that the supposedly “civic” Western nations also relied heavily on ethnic and cultural factors, and that the distinction was partly a product of mid-twentieth-century anxieties about how German history led to Nazism. Keeping that caution in mind, the three cases still offer a clear picture of how varied nationalism can be.

England: nationalism born with capitalism 🔗

The sociologist Liah Greenfeld makes a bold claim that England was the birthplace of modern nationalism. She traces national consciousness to sixteenth-century England, when the new Tudor monarchy was trying to rebuild and legitimise political order after the aristocracy had been destroyed in earlier dynastic wars. The conflict in question was the Wars of the Roses, a series of civil wars in the second half of the fifteenth century. By the time the fighting ended in 1485, the old feudal aristocracy had been almost entirely wiped out.

This destruction had a remarkable consequence. To fill the gap, the monarchy promoted commoners into the elite, and the old picture of England as a fixed social hierarchy gave way to a new image: the nation as a single English people. In this view, the nation was a community of fundamentally equal members holding sovereignty for themselves.

The individual at the centre 🔗

What makes English nationalism distinctive is its emphasis on the individual. English nationalism stressed the individual and treated society as an association of individuals, deriving the shape of the nation from human nature itself. Each person mattered, and the nation was essentially the sum of these free, equal members who owed allegiance to a shared state rather than to a feudal lord.

This individualism connects to the idea of popular sovereignty. Greenfeld argues that national consciousness was, from the start, inherently democratic and egalitarian. The nation was defined as sovereign, broadly equal in membership, and inclusive in its identity. Belonging was tied to participation in a shared political community rather than to a fixed rank.

Why capitalism followed 🔗

Perhaps the most original part of Greenfeld’s argument is the link she draws between nationalism and economic life. The German sociologist Max Weber had famously claimed that the “spirit of capitalism” grew out of Protestant religious ethics. Greenfeld accepts Weber’s framing that a collective ethic drove the rise of the modern economy, but she replaces his Protestant theology with the spirit of nationalism.

Her reasoning runs like this. Because English nationalism placed the individual at the centre and prized equality and dignity, ordinary economic activity became a way of competing for the nation’s prestige. England chose the economy as an arena for international competition, and this “economic nationalism” produced capitalism – an economy oriented toward sustained growth rather than mere subsistence. In other words, the desire to make the nation great drove ordinary people to pursue economic progress, and that collective drive helped create the modern capitalist economy. English nationalism, then, was bound up with the rise of capitalism, individual sovereignty, and allegiance to a shared state.

France: the nation of equal citizens 🔗

French nationalism emerged from a very different soil. Where England’s version grew slowly out of social upheaval and economic change, France’s burst onto the scene through the Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1789. The key ingredient here was a set of powerful ideas about reason, rights, and self-government.

Enlightenment ideas and the general will 🔗

The philosophers known as the philosophes set the stage. Thinkers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote essays examining the ideal forms of government, religion, and society, and their criticisms of the monarchy and the Catholic Church awakened literate French people to the need for reform. As confidence in the old order of God and king collapsed, the idea of the nation – la patrie – began to fill the emotional void.

Rousseau is especially important here. He is often seen as the father of modern nationalism, particularly its liberal form, even though his own writings did not focus directly on the nation. His central concept was the general will: the idea that legitimate government rests on the collective will of the community, and that a community of citizens has the right to govern itself. For Rousseau, the state is only legitimate when it is based on the active participation of its citizens, which is why he is described as a civic nationalist.

Citizenship and equality in the Revolution 🔗

These ideas became concrete during the Revolution. The Third Estate – the common people who carried the tax burden while the clergy and nobility enjoyed privileges – formed the National Assembly and issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The Declaration proclaimed that law is the expression of the general will, that all citizens have the right to take part in its formation, and that all citizens are equal before it and equally eligible for public office according to their abilities.

This is the heart of French nationalism: the nation as a body of equal citizens who participate in their own governance. Membership was defined politically rather than by birth or bloodline. Anyone willing to embrace the values of the Republic could, in principle, belong. This is why France is treated as the model of civic nationalism.

Spreading the ideals abroad 🔗

French nationalism did not stay within France. Napoleon Bonaparte promoted a nationalism built on the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and used them to justify French expansion and military campaigns as a mission to spread enlightened principles across Europe. Ironically, these invasions carried the very idea of nationalism outside France and provoked national feeling in the lands Napoleon conquered – including, as we will see, in the German states.

Germany: the nation of language and culture 🔗

German nationalism took yet another path. In the early nineteenth century, “Germany” was not a unified state but a patchwork of separate territories divided by religion, politics, and class. There was no single English-style state or French-style republic to rally around. Throughout much of the nineteenth century it was not even universally agreed that a single “German nation” existed. What, then, could bind Germans together? The answer that emerged was culture – above all, a shared language.

Romanticism and the Volk 🔗

This cultural turn was deeply shaped by Romanticism, the intellectual movement that reacted against the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment. The philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder was central to it. Herder argued that true German culture was to be found among the common people, the Volk, and that the genuine spirit of the nation – the Volksgeist – lived in folk songs, folk poetry, and folk dances. For Herder, the nation was not a contract between individuals but an organic community of shared culture, history, and language.

This produced what scholars call the Volksnation. Herder saw the nation as co-extensive with the people or Volk, the totality of a cultural and ethnic community rather than just the privileged nobility, and the Volksnation was effectively the German answer to the civic nation of the French.

Fichte and the centrality of language 🔗

If Herder supplied the cultural foundation, Johann Gottlieb Fichte sharpened it into a national rallying cry. His Addresses to the German Nation were delivered while German lands were under Napoleonic occupation, giving them urgent political force. Fichte claimed that the basis of German uniqueness was language, which was the one thing that united a population otherwise divided by religion, politics, and class.

This emphasis on a common tongue gave German nationalism its characteristic shape. Because language and shared ancestry defined the nation, belonging was something inherited rather than chosen. The German Romantics’ concept of the nation rested on an ethnocultural foundation, with Fichte emphasising people’s ancestral history as the source of national life and what set one nation apart from another. This is precisely why German nationalism is treated as the model of ethnic or cultural nationalism, in contrast to the civic models of England and France.

A double-edged legacy 🔗

It is important to read this case carefully and avoid harsh hindsight. Herder himself was not aggressively political. In his view, a Volk was shaped through its coexistence and exchange with other cultures, though the danger in his formula was that it tied national identity to organically developed values and could weaken the individual’s responsibility in favour of the collective. The cultural idea of the nation that began as a celebration of folk poetry and language would later be pushed in far darker directions. Recognising this tension helps explain why scholars treat the German case as both intellectually rich and historically cautionary.

What the three cases reveal 🔗

Placed side by side, the three cases show that nationalism is not one fixed thing but a flexible idea that takes the colour of its surroundings. England produced an individualistic nationalism tied to popular sovereignty and the rise of capitalism, born from the collapse of its old aristocracy. France produced a civic nationalism of equal, participating citizens, born from Enlightenment philosophy and revolutionary politics. Germany produced a cultural nationalism rooted in language and shared descent, born from Romanticism and the absence of a unifying state.

Each version answered a real question its society was facing. The English needed a new basis for political order after dynastic war. The French needed a new source of legitimacy after rejecting king and church. The Germans needed something to unite scattered territories that shared neither government nor religion. The same word – nationalism – meant individual sovereignty in one place, civic equality in another, and cultural belonging in a third. That is why studying these origins matters: it shows that the meaning of national identity has always depended on the specific historical conditions that gave it birth.

What do you think? If England’s nationalism really was driven by economic competition while Germany’s grew from poetry and language, which of these foundations do you think creates a more inclusive idea of who can belong to a nation? And looking at debates over citizenship and identity today, do you see the civic and ethnic models as genuine opposites, or as two threads woven into every nation?

References

1. https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780190686345/cs/9/
2. https://aeon.co/essays/the-myth-of-civic-vs-ethnic-nationhood-in-europe-east-and-west
3. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2019-08-12/nationalism-short-history
4. https://liahgreenfeld.com/category/globalization-of-nationalism/
5. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/11/the-world-nationalism-made/
6. https://www.acton.org/tracing-matrix-nationalism-and-capitalism
7. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/context/honors/article/1146/viewcontent/Thesis_Nationalism_in_the_French_Revolution.pdf
8. https://sites.google.com/site/thepoliticsteacherorg/jean-jacques-rousseau-1712-1778
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_nationalism
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volk
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottfried_Herder
12. https://assets.cambridge.org/97805214/48734/frontmatter/9780521448734_frontmatter.pdf
13. https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1055&context=jmurj
14. https://www.mhra.org.uk/pdf/wph-2-3.pdf