National movement

National movements are movements of a nation with the aim of state sovereignty .

Historical context

They gained weight especially in the European multinational empires of the 19th century ( Austria-Hungary , Russian and Ottoman Empire ) and often took their ideas from the politicizing German Romanticism (beginning with Johann Gottfried Herder's Voices of the Nations in Songs , 1807).

These included the Polish freedom movement , the Bulgarian rebirth , the Bohemian Sokols or the national rebirth of the Slovaks , as well as attempts to unite the peoples split up into many monarchies, such as the Poles, such as the Italian Risorgimento or Young Germany . They emphasized their own language, poetry and music, folk culture and history, they also revived old legends of origin and ideologized them ( invented tradition ). Its most successful phases were the peace treaties of the First World War in 1919 and the low-violence revolutions in 1989 . Political Zionism from 1890 onwards is a special form .

They continued to work in the 20th century, even in the 21st (in China), but alongside this came the anti-colonial national movements , which often comprised many ethnic groups , so that the European “people” concept was not applicable, and they tended to unite them with the Gained opposition to old empires or new great states (for example to Spain, Great Britain, France; later to Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa or Indonesia).

See also

• Nation , nationalism , nation-state
• Folklore
• History of Ireland (1801-1922) , Home Rule (self-determination)
• National movement with Friedrich Ludwig Jahn

literature

• Eric Hobsbawm : Nations and Nationalism. Myth and Reality since 1780. Campus, Frankfurt / New York 1991, ISBN 3-593-34524-2 .
• Siegfried Weichlein : National Movements and Nationalism in Europe. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 978-3-534-15484-5 .
• Heiner Timmermann (Ed.): Nationalism and National Movement in Europe 1914–1945. Duncker and Humblot, 1999, ISBN 978-3-428-08896-6 .

Web links

• Wolfgang Eismann, Peter Deutschmann: National movements in the 19th century. (PDF; 147 kB; work for the University of Graz with a focus on Pan-Slavism and national movements in East and East Central Europe).