In ordinary language, the word “country” usually describes a nation-state. Examples include Japan, Norway, Poland, and Greece.
In previous millennia, however, nation-states were not the primary ordering structure of the world. Dynasties, i.e. royal families, were often the principle defining factor in geopolitics. The authority over inhabitants was not mainly decided by their ethnicities and cultures, nor by defined geographical boundaries and institutional governments, but rather by an inherited right to rule, passed down from one generation to another in the dynasty. Likewise, a citizen’s allegiance was not principally to his people, to his geographical home, or to the political ideals of his government; it was to the dynasty.
An overarching trend in the history of the world is the transition from dynasty to nation-state. The pace at which this change happened varied from place to place. In many cases, this transition included a consolidation and centralization from smaller territories into a larger unit, as historian William Hagen writes:
In 1789 the German-speaking lands were, with few exceptions, encompassed within a sprawling geopolitical entity aniquatedly named the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. They were, strange as it may seem, divided into some three hundred and twenty-five separate principalities.
At first glance, the independence of the many small German states might seem to place the Germans at a disadvantage. Other European nations moved quicker to form nation-states, William Hagen reports:
Comparing Germany with France, England, or Spain, the question arises: why did the medieval and early modern German lands not evolve, as these and many other European countries did, from the condition of a loosely strung together medieval feudal kingdom into a stoutly forged centralized “national monarchy,” such as that of France’s might Louis XIV, the seventeenth-century “Sun King”? Premodern monarchies on the French or British model created unitary frameworks for subsequent political democratization, such as preliminarily began in England with the Purity and Glorious revolutions of the seventeenth century and in France with the revolution of 1789.
But was the race to form nation-states truly an advantage? Perhaps a more measured pace of construction had benefits. France, England, and Spain did not “evolve” as suggested. Their change of political structure was deliberate and conscious. To say that they “evolved” makes the formation of a nation-state seem the inevitable product of unconscious and random processes.
Likewise, the Germans refrained from the formation of a nation-state knowingly and as the result of reflection. The notion of national identity, often packaged with the Romanticism movement, had appeared prior to 1789 in, e.g., the writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder. That notion, however, was challenged by anti-national sentiments. The Congress of Vienna, organized by Klemens von Metternich, resisted the trend toward nation-states.
Rather than ask why the Germans didn’t “evolve” more quickly into a nation-state, one might ask where, among the English, Spanish, and French, were the reflective voices which might moderate the rush into nationalism?
There were advantages to being a “loosely strung together” entity. Retaining a hint of feudalism emphasized the mutuality between governed and governor. In the Middle Ages, the vassal’s oath to the lord was reciprocated by the lord’s oath to the vassal. Each owed the other. By the late 1700s, feudalism was long gone from German-speaking lands, but the distant echo of feudalism shaped societal thinking and reminded rulers that they had obligations to their subjects. The modern nation-state, on the other hand, could subject the individual to the “General Will,” in Rousseau’s phrase.
It is also debatable whether or not the advent of the nation-state was salutary to the process of democratization. It would be odd to regard the reign of Louis XIV as being somehow a forward movement toward democratization. By contrast, Germany without a nation-state was able to maintain and expand participation by means of elected town councils and regional assemblies.
To be sure, England and France enjoyed some advantages by forming nation-states before Germany did. They had more military might and more diplomatic clout. National policies facilitated industrialization. But the hasty formation of nation-states was not unambiguously salutary. Germany’s more measured progress toward a nation-state allowed it to retain a more flexible and responsive regional structure for a longer time. While Germany’s industrialization lagged, its development of mathematics and science excelled, as did its global reputation for academic excellence and artistic achievement.
