• German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity (1784–1791) described the long evolution of human communities. According to Herder, this process had produced distinct national communities in Europe, each united by a common language and shared traditions. Herder respected these cultural traditions but did not believe they should lead to distinct nation-states. Instead he celebrated the common spirit that existed among Europeans based on their centuries-old history of interaction. By contrast, Giuseppe Mazzini, the leading prophet of Italian nationalism before 1848, believed fervently that nations should exist as sovereign states. He founded a secret society to fight for the unification of the Italian states in a democratic republic. The excerpt below was written in 1858 and addressed to Italian workingmen.

Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity

“This is more or less a picture of the peoples of Europe. What a multicolored and composite picture! . . . Sea voyages and long migrations of people finally produced on the small continent of Europe the conditions for a great league of nations. Unwittingly the Romans had prepared it by their conquests. Such a league of nations was unthinkable outside of Europe. Nowhere else have people intermingled so much, nowhere else have they changed so often and so much their habitats and thereby their customs and ways of life. In many European countries it would be difficult today for the inhabitants, especially for single families and individuals, to say, from which people they descend, whether from Goths, Moors, Jews, Carthaginians or Romans, whether from Gauls, Burgundians, Franks, Normans, Saxons, Slavs, Finns or Illyrians, or how in the long line of their ancestors their blood had been mixed. Hundreds of causes have tempered and changed the old tribal composition of the European nations in the course of the centuries; without such an intermingling the common spirit of Europe could hardly have been awakened.”

Giuseppe Mazzini, “Duties Towards Your Country”

“God gave you the means of multiplying your forces and your powers of action indefinitely when he gave you a Country, when, like a wise overseer of labor, who distributes the different parts of the work according to the capacity of the workmen, he divided Humanity into distinct groups upon the face of our globe, and thus planted the seeds of nations. Evil governments have disfigured the design of God, which you may see clearly marked out, as far, at least, as regards Europe, by the courses of the great rivers, by the lines of the lofty mountains, and by other geographical conditions; they have disfigured it by conquest, by greed, by jealousy of the just sovereignty of others; disfigured it so much that today there is perhaps no nation except England and France whose confines correspond to this design.

[These evil governments] did not, and they do not, recognize any country except their own families and dynasties, the egoism of caste. But the divine design will infallibly be fulfilled. Natural divisions, the innate spontaneous tendencies of the peoples will replace the arbitrary divisions sanctioned by evil governments. The map of Europe will be remade. The Countries of the People will rise, defined by the voice of the free, upon the ruins of the Countries of Kings and privileged castes. . . .

Without Country you have neither name, voice, nor rights, no admissions as brothers into the fellowships of the Peoples. You are the bastards of Humanity. Soldiers without a banner, . . . you will find neither faith nor protection. . . . Do not beguile yourselves with the hope of emancipation from unjust social conditions if you do not first conquer a Country for yourselves; where there is no Country there is no common agreement to which you can appeal; . . . and he who has the upper hand keeps it, since there is no common safeguard for the interests of all.”

Sources: Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Idea and History (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1955), pp. 108–110; G. Mazzini, The Duties of Man and Other Essays (London: M. M. Dent and Sons, 1907), pp. 51–54.

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