In the first place, slavophilism was related to the peculiar historical manifestation known as the Slav renaissance.
The eighteenth century, the century of the humanitarian movement, of the enlightenment, and of the great revolution, induced a political and national awakening, not in the west alone, but likewise in the east and south-east of Europe. Ideas of liberty could not fail to exercise a potent influence among the oppressed and dependent peoples under the absolutist rule of Austria, Turkey, and Russia; and it was inevitable that the national contrasts within these multilingual states should strengthen nationalist sentiment. At the opening of the nineteenth century the universal effect of the Napoleonic wars was to favour the growth of national consciousness. In the ensuing epoch of absolutist restoration and reaction, the liberal and democratic efforts of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 favoured an extension of equal rights to nations and languages hitherto oppressed, while subsequently the socialist movement, its internationalism notwithstanding, promoted the growth of independent nationalist sentiments. Not in multilingual Austria alone, but likewise in Germany, nationally unified though politically disintegrated, the growth of national consciousness was resisted by absolutist governments, for nationalist sentiment was everywhere directed against the absolute state, and adopted everywhere a comparatively democratic and liberal program.
In Austria it was the Czechs and the Magyars above all who underwent a national awakening during the reigns of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, and in the year 1848 the awakening took a political form. The other peoples under Austrian and Turkish rule likewise experienced national and political awakening. In the Balkans one people after another secured freedom—Serbs, Greeks, Rumans, and finally Bulgars. The evolutionary process is not yet completed.
From the outset the national renaissance of the Slav peoples was guided by a more or less openly declared panslavist program. The similarity of the Slav tongues and of Slav manners and customs, ties of proximity and of political community (in Austria and in Turkey), and the example of the analogous movements known as pangermanism, panromanism, and panscandinavianism, furthered the progress of the idea of Slav union. In the lesser Slav states a consciousness of politic and cultural weakness and pettiness made union with the
