Libearlism And Nationism In Poland

6 Pages 1537 Words

During the 19th century, every country throughout Europe embraced the ideology of nationalism. It is not inherent in human kind, and in European life it is hard to discover at any period prior to the French Revolution. Its success was largely due to the fact that it offered something for everyone regardless of social or political status. It had no specific ideas for government or economy, just simply whatever is best for the nation. Nationalism also combined well with all other ideologies of the time. It can only be judged in relation to the particular motives of its particular adherents. However, East and West accepted nationalism for different reasons and at different times. In this, as an Eastern European country, the history of Polish Nationalism is no exception.
But, first, what we mean by nationalism? The modern Nation can only be effectively defined as a social group whose individual members, being convinced rightly or wrongly of their common descent and destiny, share that common sense of identity. National consciousness relates to the degree of people awareness of belonging to their nation. Nationalism, in consequence, is a doctrine shared by all political movements, which seek to create a nation by arousing people awareness of their nationality and to mobilize their feeling into a vehicle for political action.
Nationalism was the most successful political force of the 19th century. It emerged from two main sources: the Romantic exaltation of "feeling" and "identity" and the Liberal requirement that a legitimate state be based on a "people" rather than, for example, a dynasty, God, or imperial domination. There were two main ways of exemplification: the French method of "inclusion" - essentially that anyone who accepted loyalty to the civil French state was a "citizen". The German method, required by political circumstances, was to define the "nation" in ethnic terms. Ethnicity in practice came down to speaking German a...