For most of 19th-century Europe, as A.J.P. Taylor shows in his classic 1941 history, for example, much of the land between Italy and Russia was governed by the Habsburg dynasty. In these territories, a dizzying array of languages, national cultures, and class interests interpenetrated. Under those circumstances, nation states simply weren’t a thing in the modern sense. With Habsburg rule as a kind of political emulsifier, shared linguistic or class interests sometimes weighed more heavily than geography. The Habsburg territory known as Bohemia, for example, is now part of the Czech Republic but also contained (among others) Poles, Hungarians and a great many German-speakers, a fact that Hitler used to justify its annexation in 1938.
It was industrialisation, and with it the bleeding of power from the ancient aristocracies, that drove the shift from these more porous polities toward nation states as we know them. Wealth bled from farming towards mercantile elites. Tractors replaced peasants, who flocked to the cities and demanded industrial work. And many of the disputes in this turbulent age turned on such contests of power, between the old, landed gentry and newer centres of power.
Critics of last week’s NatCon conference often treat liberalism and nationalism as antonyms — but this would have made no sense two centuries ago, when the liberals were the nationalists. When students took over Budapest in the 1848 revolution, for example, what they demanded was not a million miles from what most Brexiters wanted: a voice, in a defined nation bounded by geography and citizenship rather than elite privilege or nativism. That is, in A.J.P Taylor’s words, “a democratic constitution with universal suffrage […] and equal rights for the nationalities”.
At this point in the story, such political possibilities were just emerging. Writing on Christopher Clark’s new history of 1848, Revolutionary Spring, Daniel Zamora Vargas shows how this period also saw the emergence of the public political sphere— and with it, of the kind of engaged mass polity without which you can’t really have a democracy in the sense Brexiteers sought to preserve. It was, Vargas suggests, the inception-point for “political parties capable of disciplining their members” and of “binding them to commonly agreed positions”. In the wake of this febrile time, he writes, “the emerging working class would progressively work through parties, unions and strikes rather than coups d’états and barricades”.
In his forthcoming book End Times, the political scientist Peter Turchin describes a similar — though less chaotic — process of electorate-formation in 19th-century Britain. As Turchin describes it, the mid-19th century in Britain saw a “messy” negotiation between the old landowning aristocracy, emerging mercantile elites, and working-class people, over what was due to whom. This culminated in the overturning of protectionist measures for British farming, reform to welfare provisions for the poorest, and in 1867 the Second Reform Act which granted all adult male property owners the vote. And it was in the course of that negotiation that the British polity became aware of itself as such: a trajectory that would culminate, in the early 20th century, in the universal franchise.
In other words, the age referenced by National Conservatism — the age of nation states — has its beginning point in the push first by the landless bourgeoisie and then by the industrial working class for a political voice within modernity. But we might also argue that it had its end point in two global conflicts between the resulting nation states accompanied by an orgy of industrial hyper-productivity, via total civilian mobilisation for munitions manufacturing.
Since then, we’ve been living in the ashes of the nation state order. Having read Taylor since 2016, I now understand a little better why the nations of Europe might respond to that catastrophe by seeking to replace the clearly somewhat combustible nation state format with the EU: a new emulsifier, with clear structural echoes of the Habsburg empire. Britain was never part of that empire, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that many in the British Isles should view this as an alien imposition. But it’s not as though we can return to the material conditions of the Habsburg age either, however wishfully the “post-liberals” may imagine doing so.
Our situation now is a troubling one: a Europe that is largely post-industrial and, at least as far as its elites are concerned, functionally post-national. And this means, in the terms that emerged during the industrial era, post-democratic. For if working people gained a voice by dint of being indispensable to manufacturing, events since Brexit demonstrate that they may safely be ignored now high finance has replaced making things, without the wheels coming off the state.
Thus emancipated from any meaningful working-class ability to hold their feet to the fire, it’s all too predictable that those in a position to do so should opt for what Turchin calls the “wealth pump”: that is, abandoning rule for the public good, in favour of pursuing their own narrow class interests. In this case, that means turbo-charging finance and property via mass immigration, while running social solidarity infrastructures into the ground, and looking to others of the same post-national class for political, cultural, and ideological solidarity as they do so.
It’s hard to say for sure what forms of large-scale governance will emerge from this febrile situation. A considerable amount of power is already vested in international governance and NGO networks, for example, while capital has been radically post-national for some time. Meanwhile, the masses who once found a voice in aggregate via electoral politics, in the bounded nation state, are on their way to being as radically disempowered as prior to the franchise.
The fact that one side emits platitudes about “the most vulnerable in society”, and the other invokes the aesthetics of the nation state past, is neither here nor there. The nation is over. But the reaction is just beginning.
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