Romantic nationalism

Romantic nationalism arose in reaction to dynastic or imperial hegemony, which assessed the legitimacy of the state from the top down, emanating from a monarch or other authority, which justified its existence.

[1][2] Among the key themes of Romanticism, and its most enduring legacy, the cultural assertions of romantic nationalism have also been central in post-Enlightenment art and political philosophy.

[3] Historically in Europe, the watershed year for romantic nationalism was 1848,[citation needed] when a revolutionary wave spread across the continent; numerous nationalistic revolutions occurred in various fragmented regions (such as Italy) or multinational states (such as the Austrian Empire).

It would flower in the Balkans (see for example, the Carinthian Plebiscite, 1920), along the Baltic Sea, and in the interior of Central Europe, where in the eventual outcome, the Habsburgs succumbed to the surge of Romantic nationalism.

[5] Earlier, there was a strong romantic nationalist element mixed with Enlightenment rationalism in the rhetoric used in North America, in the American colonists' declaration of independence from Great Britain and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution of 1787, as well as the rhetoric in the wave of rebellions, inspired by new senses of localized identities, which swept the American colonies of Spain, one after the other, from the May Revolution of Argentina in 1810.

[6] Discussing these views in their third editions, they particularly singled out Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone as the first national collection of fairy tales, and as capturing the Neapolitan voice.

Among those influenced were the Russian Alexander Afanasyev, the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, and the Australian Joseph Jacobs.

The unseen and unheard Song of Roland had become a dim memory, until the antiquary Francisque Michel transcribed a worn copy in the Bodleian Library and put it into print in 1837; it was timely: French interest in the national epic revived among the Romantic generation.

Examples include the Estonian Kalevipoeg, Finnish Kalevala, Polish Pan Tadeusz, Latvian Lāčplēsis, Armenian Sasuntzi Davit by Hovhannes Tumanyan, Georgian The Knight in the Panther's Skin and Greater Iran, Shahnameh.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte's 1808 Addresses to the German Nation, Heinrich von Kleist's fervent patriotic stage dramas before his death, and Ernst Moritz Arndt's war poetry during the anti-Napoleonic struggle of 1813–15 were all instrumental in shaping the character of German nationalism for the next one-and-a-half century in a racialized ethnic rather than civic nationalist direction.

"[11] Joseph Goebbels told theatre directors on 8 May 1933, just two days before the Nazi book burnings in Berlin, that: "German art of the next decade will be heroic, it will be like steel, it will be Romantic, non-sentimental, factual; it will be national with great pathos, and at once obligatory and binding, or it will be nothing.

"[12] Of this phenomenon, the Soviet literary scholar Naum Berkovsky wrote: German fascism extracted Romanticism from the naphthalene of the past, established its ideological kinship with it, included it in its canon of forerunners, and after some cleansing on racial grounds, absorbed it into the system of its ideology and thereby gave this trend, which in its time was not apolitical, a purely political and topical meaning ... Schelling, Adam Müller and others thanks to the fascists again became our contemporaries, though in the specific sense in which every corpse taken out of its century-old coffin for any need becomes a "contemporary".

[14] Heinrich Heine parodied such Romantic modernizations of medieval folkloric myths in the "Barbarossa" chapter of his large 1844 poem Germany.

The Middle Ages I’ll endure, If you bring back the genuine item; Just rescue us from this bastard state, And from its farcical system,

During the periods of foreign occupation, the Catholic Church served as bastion of Poland's national identity and language, and the major promoter of Polish culture.

In Scandinavia and the Slavic parts of Europe especially, "national romanticism" provided a series of answers to the 19th-century search for styles that would be culturally meaningful and evocative, yet not merely historicist.

There were romantic nationalist movements for separation in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the Kingdom of Bavaria held apart from a united Germany, and Czech and Serb nationalism continued to trouble Imperial politics.

Primacy is the claimed inalienable right of a culturally and racially defined people to a geographical terrain, a "heartland" (a vivid expression) or homeland.

[19] The rising nationalistic and imperialistic tensions between the European nations throughout the Fin de siècle period eventually erupted in the First World War.