Becoming Something, Unmaking Empires

Between 1789 and 1815, the nation evolved from a political novelty to a constitutional cornerstone.This chapter summarizes the turning points in that process, through the shifting relations among European monarchies and empires and between those empires and their populations and cultural communities. The ‘ground zero’ of emerging nationalism was not one or another specific country but rather the grinding tectonic fault-lines between empires with conflicted populations along their peripheries: importantly that between the Holy Roman Empire and France, owing to their advanced state of institutionalized literacy and communicative technologies and infrastructures. Amidst these crises and transitions, the nation did not so much wrest power from the monarchical state as gain prestige, charisma and influence within it. When the two came to arm-wrestling, the nation almost invariably lost the battle – but it was never quite annulled as a political force. When Europe’s states were unmade in the constitutional and strategic conflicts between 1789 and 1914, the nation influenced and shaped their remakings. The nation, through a steady flow of appealing and inspiring cultural production, positioned itself as the natural, logical platform for democratic civil rights. Nations gained soft power as states and empires lost their hard power.