Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

MAKING NATIONS 51
German citizens anytime they wished. Only as the European Community
grew, and traditional nationalism somewhat declined, did ethnocentric identities
begin to weaken in Central and Eastern Europe, as it silently submitted
to the requirements of full democratic citizenship in the new, unified Europe.
It must not be forgotten that ethnicist nationalism meant that democracy—
namely, government representing the entire population equally—was always
imperfect because not all citizens were held to be legitimate members of the
national body.
The historical origin of this difference lies in the unresolved division
between the process that matured into a political nationalism based on citizenship,
which one could call citizenship nationalism, as opposed to a nationalism
based on an allegiance to ethnicity, which one could call ethnic nationalism.
Unfortunately, Hans Kohn's explanations were not entirely satisfactory. For
example, Italy's unification came late, paralleling that of Germany, and, as in
Germany, the weak middle class did not accelerate its nationalization. In both
countries national movements arose some time before actual unification, and
in both it was the monarchies, rather than bourgeois strata with mass support,
that created the states. Yet in Germany it was the ethnic, or ethnobiological,
version of nationalism that triumphed, while in Italy by the end of the nineteenth
century the political citizenship version had won.
The difficulty in understanding this contrast can be further highlighted
by comparing the later movements—German National Socialism and Italian
fascism. Both were strongly nationalistic, and among their various projects
was popular unification, which had not been fully accomplished by the
monarchies. Both movements were authoritarian, both viewed the nation as
a collective greater than the sum of its parts (the individuals of which it was
composed), and both despised Western individualism. But National Socialism
adopted the ethnobiological heritage on which it had been nurtured from
the start, whereas Italian fascism continued to draw, at least until 1938, on the
inclusive political nationalism of Italy's legendary founders, Giuseppe Mazzini
and Giuseppe Garibaldi. German speakers in northern Italy, Jews in the urban
centers, and Croatians annexed by war were all perceived as parts of the Italian
nation, or future members of it.
Even the historian Hobsbawm's interesting chronological classification
is only partially convincing. He noted that the nationalist phenomenon had
two hues: the first appeared during the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, bearing liberal-democratic characteristics;
the latter surged in a new form at the end of the nineteenth, based on reac-