Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ergas, Henry

Titel

The global context for Federation: The spread of nationalism and the triumph of the nation-state

Ist Teil von

• Agenda (Canberra, Australia), 2020-01, Vol.27 (1), p.105-124

Ort / Verlag

Canberra: ANU Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Liberal nationalism’s culminating moment, the European revolutions of 1848, ended in utter failure. A movement of intellectuals entirely lacking a popular base, the principle of nationality experienced a far-reaching illiberal turn. By the 1890s the world was awash in deeply illiberal, and often positively repellent, nationalisms. Britain itself, however, seemed an exception. But an almost endless list of new fears had emerged and moved to the centre of her politics. Britain was, in Joseph Chamberlain’s evocative phrase, a ‘weary titan’, staggering ‘under the too vast orb of its fate’. The time predicted by Herman Merivale seemed to have come. As Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office from 1847 to 1860, he had foreseen the day when the Empire would have to prove flexible enough to absorb the ‘great Australian Republic which probably is to be’.