Origins and Characteristics of Macro‐Nationalism: A Reflection on Pan‐Latinism's Emergence at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Appearing across Europe in the late nineteenth century, macro-nationalist movements or pan-movements -pan-Latinism among them -participated in the 'first globalisation'. During that period, European powers' new domination of a considerable part of the world gradually homogenised the planet politically and economically. In this context, the panmovements placed nationalism on a larger scale than ever before. Mining various cultural, linguistic and 'racial' criteria, each macro-nationalist movement promoted projects of supra-national integration among all German-speaking, Slavic-speaking or Romancespeaking peoples. Proposing a conceptual framework for analysing this phenomenon, this article situates macro-nationalism within nationalism's broader history, underscoring similarities and differences in relation to the dominant model of nation-state nationalism. I show how the pan-movements drew constitutive elements from different phases in nineteenth-century nationalism and became crystallised in a context marked by intensified armed conflicts and imperial rivalries. Focusing on the case of pan-Latinism, I highlight the major role played by intellectual and political elites in this ideology's development and discuss the extent of its relevance to other social classes.

A macro-nationalist periodical for a new Europe? Franco-Italian exchanges and Latin Renaissance in Cronache della civiltà elleno-latina (1902–1907)

“…Indeed, the escalation of European nationalism was directly tied to the surge in global colonial conquests. These further fuelled rivalries among European powers, as nationalist tensions within Europe spilled over into their overseas ambitions (Giladi, 2020: 259).…”

“…As Amotz Giladi has explained, macro-nationalist movements, or pan-movements, such as Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism, and Pan-Latinism, spread across Europe in the late nineteenth century as part of the first globalization wave elicited by European colonialism. These movements ‘advocated linguistic and cultural homogeneity within vast geographic areas, but also within the borders of the already established nation-states’ (Giladi, 2020: 258). While retaining the bourgeois-liberal idea of human progression from smaller to larger units, macro-nationalism emphasized culture, language and even race as crucial factors in defining human groups, aligning itself with the later ethnic phase of nationalism.…”

Cântecul Gintei Latine: Vasile Alecsandri, ‘race’ connections and the Latinity of the Romanians (1850s–1870s)

“…The first centres on the idea of Latinity and the emergence of macro‐nationalisms in Europe (in this specific case, pan‐Latinism), within which Vasile Alecsandri's cultural and political activity has to be framed. Pan‐Latinism was strictly correlated not only with the exacerbation of nationalism and imperial rivalries in the second half of the 19th century (Giladi, 2020; Poupault, 2017), but also with the development of Romance (or neo‐Latin) studies, and the issue of how racialism developed within the 19th‐century humanities. More generally speaking, European macro‐nationalisms—for example, pan‐Slavism, pan‐Germanism, pan‐Latinism, pan‐Scandinavism and pan‐Celticism—can be counted among the consequences ‘of ideas ultimately derived from linguistics’ (Hutton, 1998: 4; Leerssen, 2006a: 154), namely, of the introduction of comparatism in language studies.…”