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part of human beings: families, clans, tribes, estates, social orders,
classes, religious organisations, political parties, and finally nations
and states, were historical forms of the fulfillment of this basic human
need. No one particular form was, perhaps, as necessary to human
existence as the need for food or shelter or security or procreation, but
some form of it was indispensable, and various theories were offered to
account for the historical progression of these forms, from Plato and
Polybius to Machiavelli, Bossuet, Vico, Turgot, Herder, Saint-Simon,
Hegel, Comte, Marx and their modern succcessors. Common ancestry,
common language, customs, traditions, memories, continuous occu–
pancy of the same territory for a long period of time, were held to
constitute a society. This kind of homogeneity emphasised the differ–
ences between one group and its neighbours, the existence of tribal,
cultural or national solidarity, and with it, a sense of difference from,
often accompanied by active dislike or contempt for, groups with
different customs and different putative origins; and so was accepted as
both accounting for and justifying national statehood. The British,
French, Spanish, Portuguese and Scandinavian peoples had achieved
this well before the nineteenth century; the German, Italian, Polish,
Balkan and Baltic peoples had not. The Swiss had achieved a unique
solution of their own. The coincidence of the territory of the state and
nation was regarded as, on the whole, desirable, save by the supporters
of the dynastic, multinational empires of Russia, Austria, Turkey, or
by imperialists, socialist internationalists, anarchists, and perhaps
some ultramontane Catholics. The majority of political thinkers,
whether they approved of it or not, accepted this as an inevitable phase
of social organisation. Some hoped or feared that it would be succeeded
by other forms of political structure; some seemed to regard it as
"natural" and permanent. Nationalism-the elevation of the interests
of the unity and self-determination of the nation to the status of the
supreme value before which all other considerations must, if need be,
yield at all times, an ideology to which German and Italian thinkers
seemed particularly prone-was looked on by observers of a more
liberal type as a passing phase due to the exacerbation of national
consciousness held down and forcibly repressed by despotic rulers
aided by subservient churches.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the aspirations for
political unity and self-rule of the Germans and Italians seemed well
on the way to realisation. Soon this dominant trend would liberate the
oppressed peoples of the multinational empires too. After this, so it
