The 1867 Compromise entrenched the Hungarian nation, now in charge of all its internal affairs with its own parliament. However, this parliament, by giving virtual control to the ethnic Hungarians, discriminated against the Croats and Slovakian minority. Thus within every majority there is always a minority that, once its minority status is enshrined formally, will struggle to get out.
Of the twenty states that existed in Europe in 1880 only nine (Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, and the Tsarist and Ottoman Empires) had existed in the eighteenth century and only seven of these survived into the twenty-first century. But continuity had hardly been the norm even in apparently long-lasting states.
Between the Congress of Vienna of 1815 and 1870 the boundaries of France remained stable. Then, in 1870, having lost the war with Prussia, France was forced to cede Alsace and Lorraine to the newly born German Empire. But ceaseless and traumatic political changes made France the least stable country in nineteenth-century western Europe. In the hundred years prior to 1870, it had gone through an astonishing range of permutations: an absolute monarchy up to 1789; an interregnum between the fall of the Ancien Régime and the proclamation of a Constitutional Monarchy in 1791; a radical (Jacobin) republic between 1792 and 1794; a moderate republic between 1794 and 1799; a military dictatorship from 1799 to 1804 under Napoleon; and then the Napoleonic Empire between 1804 and 1815. This was followed by a constitutional monarchy under two successive dynasties, the Bourbon (1814–30) and then the Orléans (1830–48). Then there was the Second Republic (1848–52); the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852–70); a period of civil upheaval (the Paris Commune of 1870–71); and then, finally, the Third Republic (1870), which was consolidated only in 1880.
Spain more than matched France in political strife. Ruled directly or indirectly by Napoleonic France between 1808 and 1814, the country was plagued by a succession of civil wars leading to the Vicálvaro Revolution of 1854 and the ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1868 (La Gloriosa), the moderate monarchy of King Amadeo (1870–73), the brief First Republic of 1873–4, and the restoration of the monarchy in 1874.
Nothing as dramatic as this occurred elsewhere. Portugal remained stable, but lost Brazil in 1822 and declined inexorably though holding on to its African empire until the 1970s – after most British, French, Belgian, and Dutch colonies became independent. Switzerland acquired the Valais, Neuchâtel, and Geneva in 1815 thanks to the Congress of Vienna and became a stable country only in 1848 when it settled its internal conflicts by adopting a federal system.
In northern Europe the situation was less complex but also far from static. Denmark lost Norway in 1814 (to the Swedish Crown) and the provinces of Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia in 1864. Iceland obtained autonomy from Denmark in 1874 but became independent only in 1944. Two new major states were created in the course of the nineteenth century: Italy in 1861 and Germany in 1871. Belgium and Greece had been created in 1830, though Greece in the 1830s was far smaller than it is now and much of its present-day territory still lay in the Ottoman Empire.
There were, of course, plenty of ‘nations’ in nineteenth-century Europe without a sovereign state, and many, such as the Welsh, the Flemish, the Catalonian, the Breton, the Corsican, and the Basque, still exist. And, in the late nineteenth century, though there was an abundance of racialist theories pertaining to ethnicity, many had serious doubts that there was such a thing as an ethnic definition of nation.50
So Great Britain was the European success story of the nineteenth century. It did not lose territory, it gained an empire, it continued to industrialize and to stave off social unrest by extending the franchise significantly, first in 1832 and then in 1867, the mid-point between these two dates being punctuated by the defeat of the Chartist movement, the most serious political unrest in the history of modern Britain. Thus, contrary to the terminology that contrasts the Old World (Europe) to the New (the Americas), many of the states that existed in Europe in 1880 were no older than those of North or Latin America. The paradox is that the regional association we call today the European Union, which has few of the attributes of a state, is the strongest and closest inter-state association in the world, but it is located in the continent with the greatest degree of political fragmentation. This fragmentation is not new. Since time immemorial, no single state or conqueror has been able to unify Europe or even to build a large and stable empire such as China, which survived for at least two thousand years, or the Mughal in India for at least two hundred years.
European fragmentation, already pronounced in the nineteenth century, reached new heights in early twenty-first century Europe. By 2015 (as can seen in Table 3 above) there were, in Europe, forty-two states including Turkey but excluding statelets and all former Russian republics east of Turkey (excluding, for instance, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, which are members of the Council of Europe – adding them would simply strengthen the point about fragmentation). Of these sovereign states twenty-eight were in the European Union. The increase in European states since 1980 – when there were ‘only’ thirty – was entirely due to the end of communism, as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia broke up and the Czech Republic and Slovakia separated. There was only one merger: the DDR was (re-) united with the Federal Republic of Germany. No one expects any new mergers while further secessions or separation (Belgium, Scotland, Catalonia) are possible.
Beyond Europe the formation of states proceeded in a different way, though often brought about by European settlers. In complete contrast to the constant redrawing of states and nations in Europe, the United States exhibited a formidable degree of continuity. Independent since 1776, it adopted in 1787 a Constitution, the oldest in the world, that is still substantially the same today. Its main formal political arrangements (President, Senate, House of Representatives, federal system, relatively autonomous judiciary) have remained unchanged. Yet, throughout the nineteenth century everything else changed including key aspects of what makes a nation: territory and population. Few countries of a respectable size have undergone the extraordinary demographic transformations that have characterized the USA. What was, in 1800, substantially a former colony peopled mainly by settlers from the British Isles (circa 4.3 million), their slaves (893,000 and 108,000 former slaves), and a constantly decimated population of indigenous inhabitants (for which we do not have reliable figures) became, on the eve of the Civil War (1861) a country many times more populous: 27 million whites, 3.9 million slaves, and 488,000 freed slaves.51 It was more multi-ethnic than any European country (except, perhaps, the Austro-Hungarian Empire where ethnicity and territory often coincided), with more than 13 per cent of the population born abroad.
Furthermore, the United States was virtually refounded by the bloodiest war it ever fought, the Civil War of 1861–5, with twice the American casualties suffered in the Second World War (circa 620,000 deaths in both South and North during the Civil War and just over 400,000 in WWII) – proportionately, of course, the difference was even more serious since the US population in 1940 was much greater than in 1860 (132 million in 1940 against 31.4 million in 1860, including almost 4 million slaves).52
The Civil War not only put an end to the plantation system but also to any further secessionist tendencies. Since then there has been not the slightest threat of secession (hardly anyone takes seriously the Alaskan Independence Party or the Texas Nationalist Movement). In any case the American Constitution does not allow for secession.
A further dramatic change was the completion of internal colonization. Strictly speaking, the creation of the United States, even if we stick to the formal recognition of territories as being part of the Union, was an extended process. The formation of the USA was completed between 1850 when California became a state (thus bringing westward expansion to an end) and 1912 when Arizona became the 48th state and the last contiguous territory to be annexed. Wars with Mexico settled the southern border. Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union in 1959 but this entailed minor
demographic change (though, in the case of Alaska, considerable territorial expansion, most of it of frozen lands).
The conquest of the west was described by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in a famous paper he delivered at the American Historical Association in Chicago in 1893 as the event that led to the formation of a unique ‘American’ character, for, as the settlers advanced, killed Indians and buffaloes, built homesteads and railways, they shed, Turner claimed, the germs of Europeanness they carried and emerged, finally, as true Americans:
Little by little [the colonist] transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs … here is a new product that is American … Moving westward the frontier became more and more American … Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.53
The creation of Canada was almost as complex, though it became a de facto state in the 1860s, earlier than the majority of present-day European states. In 1841 the British government joined together two separate colonies: English-speaking Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) and French-speaking Lower Canada (present-day Quebec). British Colombia was added in 1873. Newfoundland was preserved as a colony until 1907 when it acquired dominion status. It joined Canada only in 1949 after a referendum won by pro-Canadians by a relatively small margin (52 per cent to 48 per cent).
Latin America is a continent with exceptionally stable state boundaries (compared to Europe or Africa) but with often exceptionally unstable internal regimes. The direct impetus for independence was the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and Portugal in 1807 and the Peninsular War that followed. This undermined Spanish authority and enabled the Spanish settlers (and, in Brazil, the Portuguese) to declare independence in the subsequent decade. The power of the settlers (like those in North America) was due to the near-impossibility for Spain to control her possessions.54 Eventually the settlers took over and declared independence. The dissolution of the Spanish Empire in Latin America thus brought about the existence of over twenty states.
Dissolutions of empires (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Tsarist/Soviet, British, French, and Spanish) are the fundamental causes behind the existence of the majority of today’s states, but the Latin American case, like the earlier case of the United States, and later of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, offers a variant: states that came into being because settlers (almost always European settlers) obtained independence from the mother country, quite unlike the African and Asian instances where, by and large, it was the indigenous population that wrested independence from the colonial power.
After losing much territory to the USA in the 1830s and 1840s, including Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of California, Mexican boundaries remained relatively stable but, between 1822 and 1872, the country had fifty-two different governments and thirty-six heads of state. Most Latin American countries had at least twenty governments in their first fifty years. The Dominican Republic, independent from 1844, had twenty-five governments, seventeen heads of state, and six constitutions in its first fifty years.55
Even an enormous increase in population did not lead to territorial instability. In 1900, compared to Europe or North America the total population of Latin America was small: 61 million (not much more than the population of Germany at the time, 56 million).56 Today the population of Latin America is greater than that of the European Union.
Although territorially fragmented, Latin America exhibited a remarkable linguistic and religious unity: there were only two dominant languages (Portuguese in Brazil and Castilian everywhere else) and one dominant religion, Catholicism. The exceptions to this are minor and confined to territories that, strictly speaking, cannot be classified as part of ‘Latin’ America: English is the main language in most of the Caribbean islands as well as in Guyana, French prevails in Haiti and in French Guyana, Dutch in Surinam. There are, of course, a large number of subsumed native languages, some endangered or spoken by few people, others, such as Quechua, the main Native American language family, which is spoken by some 10 million people and whose multiplicity of dialects are spread across the Andes.
The borders of Latin American states, like those of Africa, were drawn without any consideration for the indigenous people, decimated by disease and oppression, and who never constituted a serious countervailing force or threat to the settlers (here the situation approximates that of the United States and Australia). Popular insurrections and military coups had as their main objective the governance of each country, not the domination of others, and they did not destabilize Latin American states. Simón Bolívar’s efforts in 1819–31 to create larger states such as Gran Colombia (which would have included Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama) were unsuccessful. As he exclaimed:
In America there is no good faith, not even between nations. Our treaties are scraps of paper, our constitutions empty texts; our elections pitched battles; our freedom, mere anarchy; and life pure torture.57
However, by and large Spanish-imposed borders proved long-lasting. The advantage with borders created mainly for administrative reasons, as was the case with Latin America, is that they occasionally reflected geographical constraints (mountains, deserts, forests). Without indigenous native revolts, these turned out to be more stable than those created by a succession of treaties among Great Powers, or by ethnic, religious conflicts, or by ancient wars of conquest and annexation – as in much of Europe. This may explain the relatively low level of external conflicts once independence had been gained. There were, of course, inter-state disputes in nineteenth-century Latin America.58 The most important of these was the Paraguayan war of 1865–70 fought between the Triple Alliance (Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay) and Paraguay, resulting in extremely high casualties on the Paraguayan side. But this aside, other wars, including the War of the Pacific (1879–83) that pitted Chile against a Peruvian-Bolivian coalition, were relatively small compared to the European carnages of the twentieth century, the Chinese wars of the nineteenth century, or the American Civil War. The Battle of Arica, fought between Chile and Peru (1880) and regarded as the most important battle of the War of the Pacific, resulted in ‘only’ 1,500 casualties.
As in Africa, borders were relatively stable, but, inside them, political instability was virulent and, at times, violent, though the commitment to the republican form of government was never seriously questioned, with some minor exceptions. In Mexico, General Agustín de Iturbide had himself designated as Emperor Agustín I in 1822, and though his ‘empire’ was extensive (it included not just Mexico but the whole of Central America as well as what are today California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah), he lasted only a few months. Brazil had a king (King João I of Portugal, who fled the Napoleonic armies in 1808) who left the Brazilian throne to his son Pedro I. Pedro was in turn succeeded by the long-lasting and ‘enlightened’ Pedro II (1825–89), who abdicated when a relatively peaceful military coup brought about the republic.59
The domestic instability of Latin America states bore little relation to the class struggle as conceived in Europe: there was no sturdy industrial system, and the proletariat was supine or non-existent and concentrated prevalently in the mining or food industries. The most important cleavage was between urban and agrarian interests and this often took the form of a struggle between Church and State or between centralizers and devolutionists. The contrast between liberals and conservatives owed little to ideology, though liberals tended to be anti-clerical Westernizers who favoured free trade.
The dualism of Latin America has been much remarked upon: a society of agricultural workers and peasants with little connection to wider political realities and an elite of landlords and mining barons who fought it out, often peacefully, for political control. Such dualism, of course, also prevailed in much of Europe. The main difference, however, is that in Europe no country, not even those regarded as ‘backward’ such as Tsarist Russia, remai
ned unaffected by industrialization. Latin America did not need to industrialize (though Argentina’s important food industry is an exception), since by exporting its primary products (such as guano from Peru, sugar from Brazil, coffee from Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, and Costa Rica, wheat from Chile) its elites could obtain a lifestyle similar to that of their counterparts in Europe and in North America. There had been frequent attempts to industrialize but to little effect. Thus, in 1823–5, in Peru, shortly after Simón Bolívar had declared independence from Spain, there were timid attempts to purchase British machinery to equip local enterprises, but soon this flow of imports was reduced to the usual luxuries and semi-luxuries such as French and English textiles, books, and assorted Parisian goods.60
In parallel with what occurred later in post-colonial Africa, the military struggle required to break the links with Spain in the nineteenth century brought to the fore a class of military strongmen, or caudillos, who dominated much of the politics of Latin America until the 1870s and beyond. Since industrialization was not a policy any of the elites pursued with any vigour, political conflicts were essentially conflicts within the leading groups in society.
The common traits we noted among Latin American countries (languages, religion, Iberian origins, etc.) do not seem to have produced a political integration of the region comparable to that of the European Union, even though linguistic, religious, and political divisions in Europe have been and still are considerable. This gives some substance to Benedict Anderson’s claim that modern nationalism (in the sense of resistance to any pooling of sovereignty) was born in Latin America. It shows that, however artificial the borders and minor the differences, bureaucratic construction and propaganda do marvels for the establishment of patriotic fervour.61
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