A BELATED NATION-STATE

Writing in 1832 on the division and unity of Germany, Leopold von Ranke remarked that in spite of the present tensions there had been for centuries a ‘sentiment of essential unity of Germany’. Ranke's words reflect the pride of the German national movement that Germany was one of the old established nations of Europe, and its frustration that the nation had failed to establish a modern state. The sentiment of unity contrasted with a reality of political fragmentation. Ranke saw Germany ‘between unity and dissociation’, more unified than Italy, but less unified than France. His vision was a unified nation, bent towards the future, furthering its public weal.

Ranke thought of nations as meaningful historical actors. Nations had their own identity, beyond the interests, designs and actions of their individual members. In his Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker, published in 1824, Ranke interpreted European history since the Middle Ages essentially as the interaction of six nations – the three ‘Latin nations’, France, Italy and Spain, and the three ‘Germanic nations’, Germany, England and Scandinavia. Two further actors in the shaping of European history were Turkey, an Asian nation, and Russia, a conglomerate of European and Asian provinces. The definition of a nation was vague. A nation could be a comparatively homogeneous nation-state in the modern understanding, as France, England or Spain, where political power and cultural identity merged. It could be a cultural space fragmented into several political territories, as Germany, Scandinavia and Italy.