Where nationalism in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century had often been a force for liberal reform and peaceful brotherhood, expressed in its most optimistic form by thinkers like Giuseppe Mazzini (see “Evaluating the Evidence 23.1: The Struggle for the Italian Nation.”), it now took on more populist and exclusionary tones. The ideal of national belonging had from the start created an “us-them” outlook (see Chapter 21). After the 1870s the growing popularity of supposedly scientific understandings of racial difference added additional layers of meaning to this dichotomy. Though we now understand that there is no genetic evidence that divides humanity into distinct races, most people in the late nineteenth century believed that race was a product of heredity. Many felt pride in their own national racial characteristics — French, English, German, Jewish, Slavic, and many others — that were supposedly passed down from generation to generation. Unfortunately, pride in one’s own heritage easily led to denigration of someone else’s.

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Modern attempts to use race to categorize distinct groups of people had their roots in Enlightenment thought (see Chapter 16). Now a new group of intellectuals, including race theorists such as Count Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, claimed that their ideas about racial difference were scientific, based on hard biological “facts” about bloodlines and heredity. In his early book On the Inequality of the Human Races (1854), Gobineau divided humanity into the white, black, and yellow races based on geographical location and championed the white “Aryan race” for its supposedly superior qualities. Social Darwinist ideas about the “survival of the fittest,” when applied to the “contest” between nations and races, drew on such ideas to further popularize stereotypes about inferior and superior races.

The close links between nationalism and scientific racism helped justify imperial expansion, as we shall see in the next chapter. Nationalist racism also fostered domestic persecution and exclusion, as witnessed by Bismarck’s Kulturkampf and the Dreyfus affair. According to race theorists, the nation was supposed to be racially pure, and ethnic minorities were viewed as outsiders and targets for reform, repression, and relocation. Thus the ethnic Russian leaders of the Russian Empire targeted minority Poles and Czechs for “Russification,” a process by which they might learn the Russian language and assimilate into Russian society. Germans likewise viewed the large number of ethnic Poles living in East Prussia as a “national threat” that required “Germanization” before they could be seen as equals to the supposedly superior Germans. For many nationalists, driven by ugly currents of race hatred, Jews were the ultimate outsiders, the stereotypical “inferior race” that posed the greatest challenge to national purity.