the boast of the United States that they have been able to
absorb annually some million of alien immigrants, and that one
generation has usually sufficed to give them not only the name
but the full sense of American nationality. The " psychological "
element, indeed, may be admitted, but it does not explain ths
whole of the phenomena nor the ultimate driving force, so to
speak, of nationality.
The German historian Karl Lamprecht came nearer the truth when he added another element, the economic, as the creative force in the evolution of nationality. Like Bluntschli, he found a general law for this evolution in the development of the Volks- geist, but he explains this development by changes in economic conditions. Nationality, that is to say, is but a manifestation of the instinct of men to group themselves for the defence of their common interests, and it follows that the groups thus formed tend to shift and change with the ebb and flow of the economic struggle for existence. This view, which if it be sound obviously conflicts with the belief that the triumph of the principle of self-determination would bring permanent peace to the world, was elaborated by the Austrian Socialist Otto Bauer, in his Nationalitatenfrage, with special reference to the nationality question in the former Habsburg Monarchy. " It is," he said, " the battles of the economic classes, everywhere active, the changes in the means and the conditions of work which determine the strength and weakness, the death and rebirth of nationalities." The determining factors of nationality in Austria-Hungary which for the purpose of this study might be considered the laboratory of Europe he declared to be not cultural but economic. The mass of men, the peasants and the labourers, are incapable of that consciousness of a widespread, common, inherited culture which is supposed to be the hall- mark of nationality; but they are dissatisfied with their lot, resentful of the dominant powers whom they hold responsible, and ready therefore to group themselves against them.
This revolutionary tendency, which among the lower classes of the dominant races is anti-national and cosmopolitan, is apt among subject races to express itself in nationalism. The process was strikingly exemplified in Bohemia, where the flood of Czech nationality followed the channels opened up by industrial change, and German nationality succumbed not so much to cultural as to* economic pressure. Before the World War the same process was taking place in all the eastern marches of Germany in Silesia, in Posen, and in East and West Prussia, in which for years past the German element had been succumb- ing to the irresistible flood of Polish nationality, of which the unifying force was the economic opposition of the Slav prole- tariat and peasantry to the German capitalist and governing classes. The same phenomenon is apparent in the case of Ireland. The idealists of Sinn Fein never succeeded in inspiring the shrewd peasantry with their own enthusiasm for their " Milesian past "; the use of the renovated Gaelic language remained a conceit of the " intellectuals " of the cities; and the labourers and peas- ants were won to the Republican cause by a frank appeal to their economic interests the promise of small holdings and of freedom from war taxation and the burden of the national debt.
It is then clear that there is an economic basis for nationality, and that, whatever other elements may enter into it, a sense of community of material interests is always present. It may be added that this sense is the strongest and most essential factor, and that without it nothing else will serve to maintain the com- mon sentiment. Common origin, common language and a com- mon tradition of culture and laws will not preserve the unity of a nationality when the material interests of its parts come into violent conflict. This truth received its most momentous illus- tration in the secession of the southern states of the American Union in 1860-1 and the bitter struggle that followed. The principle of state sovereignty and independence on the one side, and that of American national union on the other, did but dis- guise the true causes of the struggle, which were less political than economic; the agricultural south was determined to pre- serve its economic system, based on negro slavery; the indus- trial north was primarily inspired, not by any abstract love of
coloured humanity, but by the economic objection of the labour- ing masses to the slave system.
Relation of Nationality to the Nation or State. In considering the relation between the idea of nationality and that of the state we are apt to be confused by the romantic and idealistic tinge given to the idea of nationality by the poets and philos- ophers of the struggles for freedom. A nationality, conceived as something divinely inspired, is believed to have not only the capacity but the right to become a nation, and its legitimate growth to be necessarily stunted if it be prevented from doing so. Bluntschli, for instance, described a nationality as an incomplete organism which could only become completed as an effective " personality " by political organization as a nation or state, and some such idea underlay the Liberal enthusiasm for that " principle of nationalities " which during the last hundred years has so profoundly changed the map of the world. But when we come to examine this principle, as stated by its most conspicuous champions, we find no clear conception of what it ultimately involves, while the main question of what con- stitutes a nationality is consistently begged. The late M. Emile Ollivier, for instance, defines the principle of nationality (and incidentally of self-determination) as follows:
This principle is that every association of men called a people is an independent individuality; free, sovereign, enjoying the impre- scriptible right of self-determination (de disposer d'elle-meme) both in internal and external affairs. 1
If the word "people" be taken in its usual non-political sense, this statement was, and remains, obviously untrue, or represents at most an aspiratiqn; if it means a nation, then the principle as here defined is merely that of the sovereign inde- pendence of nations, i.e. states, which has always been a fun- damental doctrine of international law; it is, that is to say, a conservative, not a revolutionary principle. But this is not what M. Ollivier meant by it. For him, as the apologist of the Liberal Empire, the principle of nationality was dynamic, not static; it involved a regrouping of the nations, not as Alexander I. of Russia had once proposed by the formation from above of homogeneous populations fenced off by their natural boundaries, but by the free vote of the people con- cerned the Napoleonic plebiscite. This principle of nation- alities, he says in his L' Empire liberal, is to be carefully dis- tinguished from the theory of great agglomerations, the natural limits of the race, for race has nothing to do with it :
In the politics of nationality there are no natural frontiers. The true frontiers are those fixed by the will of the populations. The idea of race is barbarous, exclusive, retrograde, having nothing in com- mon with the large, holy, civilizing idea of country (patrie).
Renan, in his Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? comes to much the same conclusion. A Zolherein, he says, is not a patrie; a nation is a grand aggregation of men with a moral conscience which causes them to sacrifice their individual interests to those of the community; wherever the existence of such a moral conscience is proved a nation exists as of right. " If there is any doubt as to its frontiers, consult the populations in dispute."
This solution of a difficult problem would be admirably easy were the rivalries of nationalities confined to the frontiers of states, which we have the best reason to know they are not, and were these frontiers themselves a mere question of marks on the map. But in any case, as Herr Bauer points out, this " psycho- logical-voluntarist " theory begs the whole question of nation- ality, for it does not explain the factors that determine the will of populations to form a nation or to attach themselves to a nation already formed supposing they are conscious of pos- sessing a choice. It does not, that is to say, give us the real con- necting link between nationality and the state, nor does it explain why in the igth century, for the first time, nationality was erected into a Staatsprinzip.
Historically it seems clear that the explanation is at least largely economic. It may be true that a Zolherein does not constitute a patrie, but the experience of Germany proved that it may be a powerful element in the constitution of one. It was
1 L' Empire liberal, i., p. 164.
