Geography, Nationalism, and Empire

As anyone who has been abroad with me can attest, I am an obsessive for churches. Be it small chapel or grand cathedral, the very sight of a spire or the drowsy ringing of the bells will beckon me – and unwittingly, my entire travelling party – to visit and indulge, at least momentarily, in the centuries of Christian tradition that has led to the creation of these human renditions of heaven on earth. (Usually, it serves my companions as a nice respite from the furious heat of southern Europe in the summer.)

In 2019, my travelling followed much the same pattern. Starting in Croatia, I dragged my friends to various churches (including a rogue Serbian Orthodox Church, which had some of the most gorgeous frescos I have seen) and ended up attending a mass in Croatian. Subsequently, during a brief stint in Ljubljana, I spent my entire time roaming around the city in search of yet more Christian heritage (interrupted by a short indulgence in Roman history). Vienna was no different – the remarkable Romanesque structures lined the city, notably St Stephen’s Cathedral (I am eternally devastated to have slept through its mass hours). Following this was Munich, with its array of both Catholic and Protestant institutions (in good German tradition), and likewise was the case with Ulm.

Following this, however, was one church that stood out. It was probably the most beautiful one that I witnessed on this trip, but certainly the most historically interesting. This was La Cathédrale de Notre Dame de Strasbourg. A very French name, no doubt, but its architecture is not typical of France. Although much of its structure is in a very typically French Gothic style, large parts of the original architecture are distinctly of more classically German form. This somewhat betrays the cathedral’s origin; it is not truly French or German, but rather, a conundrum unto itself. This cathedral, much like the city of Strasbourg itself (or Straßburg, as those on the other side of the border would call it), has spent its existence drifting between nations.

One might quite easily dismiss this as a triviality of history, and for the most part, it is. Strasbourg today is definitively French (and moreover, very much a modern European city). There is no extant border dispute. Save some fringe exceptions, even the most hard-line of German nationalists would never claim Alsace-Lorraine as part of their irredenta. Yet Strasbourg is emblematic of one of the fiercest disputes in European (and arguably, world) history: what, where, and who is the nation?

Let’s start to answer these questions. What is a nation? Without abstracting too much, we can describe it as a kind of intergenerational cultural community, usually (and ideally) with a defined territory, but occasionally without. It’s not a question I seek to dwell on for too long. After all, I, a maths student who has barely gotten half-way through Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, am not in the best position to comment on this from any academic level. That said, researching what nation means to people is something I have been quite intent on doing as of late. I’ve spoken to a decent slate of people from a variety of places about what it means to them, and while I’d rather reserve most of that for a future article, one thing really struck me: even if people’s views of their own nation were somewhat confused, more or less all of them could, in some way, identify with a nation.

This surprised me for two reasons. The first was that most of these people were very liberally-minded university students, who – to my mind – would have progressed past the need for nations. Evidently, this was not the case. The second was that, even beyond the world of students, telecommunications would have killed nationalism stone-dead. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Why is this? The simple answer seems to be that they all wanted a sense of belonging; not simply acceptance, but a place to call home and a people to call family. There are more advanced explanations out there, but to my mind, it essentially came back to this very simple idea of wanting to be part of something bigger. This may not seem like a particularly radical idea – and to some extent, it isn‘t – but it is a relatively new one.

Strasbourg itself predates the idea of the nation. It was initially founded as an outpost of the Roman Empire, right on the limes – borders – of the state. It was later overrun by the Franks, who established themselves in much of Western Europe. Neither could truly be considered a nation by any rigorous modern standards; although they certainly exhibited characteristics of nations today, they would never have seen themselves as such. Rome saw itself as a hegemonic power, not necessarily as a single, unified people. Citizenship was a firm concept, based on service to the state rather than cultural attributes. The Franks, on the other hand, were likely too disparate to have ever truly seen themselves as a single people. Although some monarchs claimed all of Francia, they were always reliant on feudal lords to ensure they remained in power.

One such monarch is of interest here. He is known as Charlemagne to the French, Karl der Große to the Germans (and usually referred to by the former in common English parlance). Whatever the iteration, it translates to ‘Charles the Great‘, and, especially by the standards of his time, great he was. Charlemagne established the largest European empire since the Romans. Such was his power and influence that he was given the title of Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in 800 A.D. The intention here was to create a universal Christian state, hopefully one day spanning the entire world, with Pope and Emperor in lockstep. However, such was the reality of gavelkind succession laws that – within two generations of Charlemagne – his fledgling hegemon had been divided among his three grandchildren, into West, Middle, and East Francia. The West broadly resembles modern-day France, the east modern-day Germany, but the Middle section – spanning a long, both geographically and culturally diverse stretch from northern Italy to the Netherlands – is what can only be described as a mess.

In fact, a ‘mess‘ may be one of the kinder descriptions we can apply to this conundrum. Arguably, this division is responsible not only for a hefty portion of medieval conflict over which of the other two Francias exercised control over it, but in time, several grand-scale European conflicts (including the campaigns of Louis XIV and the Napoleonic Wars), and eventually, both world wars.

While this is by no stretch of the imagination the only reason for conflict in western Europe, its status as a convergence of cultures certainly gives the groundwork for it. When these territories were initially devised, common people would not have had a concept of belonging to a single cultural entity; rather, for a people who would, by in large, rarely leave the village they were born in,  the world was somewhat concrete in scope. It was the buildings, the churches, the streets and fields around them; any abstract concept of belonging to something grander would not have been possible to conceive at the time. As a result, the feudal system was a necessity; a monarch of such a grand territory could not possibly communicate with every single one of their subjects, so delegation was needed to make the idea of regal power more tangible. In short, people only belonged to their localities.

However, times change, and technology progresses. Following the invention of the printing press, it was possible to print books such as the Bible in the vernacular on a large scale; people were able to form linguistic and hence cultural communities. No longer did people have to identify with their locality alone, but with a grander national idea.

It’s here I must conjecture slightly, but it seems a reasonable hypothesis to pose; people, throughout history, have wanted to form part of some grander community. In early Europe, this was Christianity. The church would form the basis of any community in the Middle Ages; every member of society, regardless of their station, would be united in the worship of the one true God, in communion with millions of other members of the Catholic Church. However, with the advent of Protestantism and widespread dissatisfaction with the Papacy, this view of the world was challenged. Religion became a lot more of a personal affair, and hence, the idea of community became increasingly lost.

This was especially the case in the new borders of the Holy Roman Empire – which, roughly speaking, is the predecessor to modern-day Germany. The people of this Empire spoke, in general, a language that could be described as one of the various forms of German. Given the huge religious differences seen in the Empire – with the South remaining staunchly Catholic and the North adopting the new Protestant faith – any sense of unity within the Empire could only be found through creating a cultural, rather than religious, community. German-ness took a while to fully come of age, but the idea of unity among the German people started to come of age in the 19th century, eventually leading to its unification in the 1870s.

France, conversely, had always been very unified with a strong state at its helm. However, the sheer lavishness and extravagance of its leaders (among other factors) eventually led to the French Revolution in 1789. Much like in Germany, the decline of a single rallying point that the French had in the monarchy necessitated that the country adopted a firmer idea of itself. The bombastic national anthem later adopted, La Marseillaise, is testament to the feelings espoused by these revolutionaries; that the French state must be reborn as a republic led by the people.

This broadly answers who the nation is. However, there is one last question that we need to return to: where is the nation? This brings us back to Strasbourg, which lies on the left bank of the Rhine. According to one theory of French nationalism, this is just inside the ‘natural borders‘ of France; loosely speaking, a vision of the state bounded by the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, entirely dictated by geographic instead of cultural boundaries. Germany’s love affair with the Rhine in particular puts this position into dispute; long has the Rhine been seen by German nationalists as the great German river, and that Germany should not have total control of its watershed is an outrage.

The issue with applying the doctrine of nation-states has always been that the boundaries are vague. The borders of states may change, but there are never any clear lines where the German cultural region ends and the French ones begin. We would like to think there would be an easy geographic line we could draw; yet, more often than not, rivers tend to be unifiers. Especially with a body such as the Rhine, which has been integral to trade in western Europe since time immemorial, the river could not be viewed as a border, but as the very lifeblood of the region.

However, the state cannot see it that way. Borders must be drawn and henceforth respected. It is this tragic collision of geographic lines not accounting for where communities lie that has been responsible for some of the world’s most devastating conflicts. A few days after visiting Strasbourg, I was in Paris, and I saw the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur; not simply another item on my list of religious centres to visit, but a memorial to France’s humiliation at the loss of Alsace-Lorraine during the Franco-Prussian War.

Was this conflict inevitable? It is not simply the great powers that indulge in these border disputes; many a country has been involved in conflicts with their neighbours over straits of land that they would like to be theirs. After all, the nation must have a homeland – what is a country that one cannot see on a map? Whatever the reasoning, it seems absurd that so much conflict has resulted from a combination of geographic fate being out-of-step with people’s sense of belonging. While we are all, in some sense, nationalistic – in the narrow sense that we want to feel attachment to a state – few would condone the utter waste that assigning boundaries to nations seems to result in. This is likely why we feel so conflicted about our own sense of national identity. Yes, we want to belong, but that doesn’t mean we hate everyone else.

Whether the concept of the nation is ultimately a good or bad thing for states to base themselves upon is a very open dispute. In a continent like Europe – which has been forged, for good or evil, in the shape of nationalism – it’s a question that we need to tackle sooner rather than later. Pulling out of Strasbourg train station, I briefly entertained that discussion. Is the concept of the nation still relevant today? All I could settle on was: I suppose it is. Having travelled the year before during the World Cup, it would be impossible to deny that people felt a strong attachment to the success of their country’s football team, at the very least. Nations still feel like the cultural communities they were intended to be. Projects such as the European Union (which, appropriately, has many of its institutions in Strasbourg) have been superb at essentially retaining borders as administrative units but making where the nation lies far more fluid. An imperfect solution, of course, but one which is fundamentally aimed at ensuring people and states are viewed as different things.

If the nation will continue to be a relevant concept is anyone’s guess. My estimate is that it likely will be. Few shun the concept of the nation completely, even if it is less relevant to their lives than to those a few generations before. While communities formed online – especially political ones – could, some day, surpass people’s attachment to the nation, I think that the cultural aspects are too valuable to be given up with ease. Hence, I imagine that the nation is here to stay, and thus so too are our disputes over where it is. Outside the European Union, debates over national borders – Kashmir, the South China Sea, the Caucasus, etc – are omnipresent. How these borders are to be determined, and where the nation lies, are going to be disputes for the foreseeable future, and that is a reality we are going to have to deal with. There are no easy answers to this dispute, at least in large part because everything about it is so vague.

The train eventually pulls out of Strasbourg, after a slight delay. They don’t have WiFi and my seat has been taken. I speak broken German to the couple next to me, and slightly less broken French to the train staff to get a Twix for around €5. I take one last look at the city – the spires, the gorgeous streams from the Rhine, and gorgeous neo-classical architecture – and think, was it really worth fighting over? Failing to reach an answer, I promise myself to write about it later, and nominally content with this answer – with the train marching through the dying sunlight in the wine-regions of northern France – promptly fall asleep.