For precise schedule of offerings see department catalog during pre-enrollment week each semester.

This course traces history's perhaps most unsettling mystery: how a movement of human liberation evolved into advocacy of exclusivism and bigotry, generating ethnic cleansing, and in across much of Europe, genocide. In the 1790s, nationalism entered history as the idea that peoples should rule themselves, in accord with human reason and in harmony with each other, but this democratic impulse soon mutated as it came under attack. Its first enemies were predictable: the kings, princes, and bishops who claimed divine right to rule; in 1792 they mobilized armies against revolutionary France, triggering the first mobilized nation under arms in history. For over two decades French revolutionary troops, embodying the forces of nationalism under threat, occupied much of Europe—Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Italy—spreading ideas of popular self-rule, but also causing deep resentment by their simple presence—as foreigners. And so nationalism crossed borders as a democratic doctrine, but also as an awareness that nations must protect themselves against each other. Nationalism's penchant remained popular and subversive, set against conservative powers, spectacularly visible in the spring of 1848, as crowds from Paris to Bucharest and down to Sicily drove monarchs into retreat in the most concerted challenge old legitimate rule had ever faced. Yet within months the old potentates regrouped and showed that they too could "speak nationalism," and within a few decades achieved results that eluded the democrats. Kings and emperors made modern nation states east of France, often as constitutional monarchies. Nationalism not only adapted to modern politics: it was modern politics. From mid-century conservatives and their opponents competed for votes within increasingly scientistic understandings of human nature and against the dynamic forces of an international movement called socialism. By 1914, the contest seemed one of intolerance and racism (right) against tolerance and cooperation (left), but they struggled under the enduring power of the idea of 1789: that nations should rule themselves. The end of WWI signaled that idea's triumph: the contest had made the world "safe for democracy," and its synonym, proclaimed from Washington to Moscow, "national self-determination." Yet once more, history took unexpected turns, and liberal forms of democracy gave way to totalitarian populism right and left, and fascist and Communist regimes governed most of Europe from the 1930s to the 1990s. How did they embody, how did they transform, how did they ironically rejuvenate ideas that nations should rule themselves? In 1989, as in 1848, and 1919, democracy again seemed to have triumphed. But then we open today's newspapers to find yet other variants of nationalism. We begin our consideration of these and related questions with more theoretical writings, asking why and how nationalism is indeed a modern phenomenon, and what might cause it to undergo its radical transformations, right into the unpredictable future.

Repeat Rules