Note (return) — Chapter IV

Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck or by Mazzini, played a great and invaluable part in the development of the political consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth century. But it is becoming less and less possible to accept it as a solution for the problems of the twentieth century. We cannot now assert with Mazzini, that the 'indisputable tendency of our epoch' is towards a reconstitution of Europe into a certain number of homogeneous national States 'as nearly as possible equal in population and extent'[109] Mazziui, indeed, unconsciously but enormously exaggerated the simplicity of the question even in his own time. National types throughout the greater part of south-eastern Europe were not even then divided into homogeneous units by 'the course of the great rivers and the direction of the high mountains,' but were intermingled from village to village; and events have since forced us to admit that fact. We no longer, for instance, can believe, as Mr. Swinburne and the other English disciples of Mazzini and of Kossuth seem to have believed in the eighteen sixties, that Hungary is inhabited only by a homogeneous population of patriotic Magyars. We can see that Mazzini was already straining his principle to the breaking point when he said in 1852: 'It is in the power of Greece ... to become, by extending itself to Constantinople, a powerful barrier against the European encroachments of Russia.'[110] In Macedonia to-day bands of Bulgarian and Greek patriots, both educated in the pure tradition of Mazzinism, are attempting to exterminate the rival populations in order to establish their own claim to represent the purposes of God as indicated by the position of the Balkan mountains. Mazzini himself would, perhaps, were he living now, admit that, if the Bismarckian policy of artificial assimilation is to be rejected, there must continue to be some States in Europe which contain inhabitants belonging to widely different national types.