to the heretic Czech preacher Jan Hus for the quincentenary of his burning at the stake in 1415.
Berlin is another capital where, beneath a dramatic history, there is a strong streak of continuity between the pre-modern and the modern, between the pre-national and the national. The latter does not constitute a fateful German Sonderweg (special path) in contrast to an enlightened ‘Western’ mainstream. It is a variant of the pathway of London, for example. In contrast to Habsburg Vienna, Hohenzollern Berlin did take on a few national features out of the Napoleonic Wars, which unleashed a Prussian/German nationalism similar only to the Spanish. Post-Napoleonic Berlin got a national monument, an off-stage temple-like structure on a hill topped by an iron cross, the new rank-independent medal for military valour. When the quadriga on top of the Brandenburg Gate was brought back to Berlin (having been looted by Napoleon and taken to Paris), the peace goddess Eirene was replaced by Prussian Victoria with an iron cross on her spear. Non-dynastic military commanders Bülow and Scharnhorst flanked the exquisite Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) in the city centre. Urban hubs were renamed after Prussian victories against Napoleon: Leipziger Platz (after the battle in 1813) and Pariser Platz (after the city it conquered and occupied in 1814).42
Nevertheless, Prussia remained a dynastic state. Nor did German unification in 1871 create an unambiguous nation-state. In fact, its act of creation was almost provocatively dynastic and non-national. The German Reich was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles (after the crushing defeat of the Second French Empire) by assembled German princes. No elected representatives of the nation or of Berlin were invited.
The Wilhelmine capital of the Reich rapidly developed into the national centre of Germany, with fast population growth and economic as well as cultural concentration. Although it never reached the national dominance of London or Paris, it was the main node of Germany’s railway system, its main industrial city, its culturally leading city. But the realm was a federated monarchy with a substantial set of princes, from kings to dukes, under the emperor. Symbolically, the dynastic maintained the upper hand in Berlin. The main city centre (east of the big Tiergarten park) was dominated by the Imperial Palace, outside of which there was a monumental ensemble with an equestrian statue of the first emperor, appropriately carrying the double name of Emperor Wilhelm–National Monument. Off centre stage in the east was the monumental Reichstag, whose dedication the Emperor had finally agreed to after about a decade of wrangling: ‘To the German People’. The square in front of it was still Königsplatz (Kings’ Square, referring to the kings of Prussia). The imperial family pushed the construction of sixty-six Protestant churches in Berlin, including a new neo-Baroque cathedral in the front of the Imperial Palace and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. In the Tiergarten the Emperor had in 1902 ‘donated’ to the city a dynastic Victory Avenue (Siegesallee), with twelve Hohenzollern rulers arranged like medieval pilgrimage stations.*
Scandinavia
The exact dating of the Swedish nation-state may be argued over. It may be seen as a protracted, almost bicentennial process. The starting point was the end of absolutism with the death in battle of Charles XII (in 1718), issuing into a quasi-parliamentary, but Estates-based, ‘Age of Liberty’. Royal autogolpes in 1772 and in 1789 put an end to the former, without quite restoring absolutism. After the catastrophic war of 1808 and 1809, when Finland was conquered by Russia, the army deposed the king, and the Estates ensured that a new constitution was adopted before a new prince was elected. But the Estates remained the base of the polity until 1866, and the country was part of a personal monarchical union with Norway until 1905. Royal power was gradually waning in the course of the nineteenth century, but a new national polity freed from the entrapments of the medieval Estates and of a deferential royal administration was slow in developing.
By 1905 and the Norwegian union crisis, at least it was there, and government by national politicians rather than by court-connected civil servants began. In the 1890s, provoked by Norwegian nationalism, the Swedish flag had become a popular symbol, not just a royal and official ensign. The national character of Stockholm developed with this calendar. The city got its first significant national institution in 1866, a National Muserum (of art), housing the former royal art collection.* In 1905, the Diet at last got its own building, in heavy North German granite, close to and clearly subservient in size to the royal castle. In 1923, Stockholm had its new city hall, this time clearly challenging the royal castle across the water, as an alternative icon of urban glory – it is currently the site of the Nobel Prize banquets.
Denmark was another old monarchy, absolutist until 1848. Constitutional Denmark did not immediately become a nation-state, though. The king of Denmark was also duke of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg, with their distinctive political arrangements, including, in the case of the two latter, membership in the German Confederation. Only after the disastrous war against Prussia in 1864 did Denmark become a nation-state, shed of the king’s German possessions.
Copenhagen was the one royal residence city which celebrated its new status as a national capital, after a belated end to royal absolutism, by recentring itself around a new city hall which overshadowed everything else in the city. It was inspired by the city of hall of medieval Italian Siena and Verona: in front of it a vast City Hall Square was laid out, becoming the new public centre of the city. The burghers of Copenhagen had been a potent force even under (and in support of) royal absolutism, and its representatives played a central role in ending it in 1848. Ironically, the new centring of the city was brought about by a city council exclusively composed of the royalist right, in the wake of the 1864 discredit of the National Liberals.
Norway became a nation-state in 1905, peacefully seceding from the union with the Swedish monarchy. For two decades its capital kept its Danish name, Kristiania (after a Danish king), and its main street is still named after the country’s first Swedish king, Karl Johan.* Finland seceded from Soviet Russia in December 1917. Its national self-determination was recognized by Lenin’s government, but the country plunged into an internal class war, won by the bourgeois Whites, with significant but hardly decisive support of German troops. The fifth Nordic nation-state, Iceland, under British protection, left Denmark, then occupied by Nazi Germany, in 1944.
Latin Europe: Nation-States and Organized Religion
All the main religions of the world are ancient. Their clash with modernity is therefore not very surprising. Astonishing, however, is the rarity of their confrontation with nationalism and the nation-state. Important conflicts between nation-state and organized religion are basically confined to Latin Europe. In the internal struggles of emergent modern national Europe, the high clergy, of all the Christian denominations, tended to side with the forces of conservatism and anti-modernity, laying the ground for the unique twentieth-century secularization of Europe. But nations in their emergence were culturally ambiguous, and the European clergy also sometimes played a significant part in national movements, above all in multi-religious states where the ruling prince adhered to a different religion – be it Islam in the Ottoman Balkans, Orthodoxy in Tsarist Poland and the Baltics, Catholicism in Habsburg Bohemia or Protestantism in British Ireland. Above, I have paid attention to the de-Islamization of the Balkans, and it may be added that after World War I the new Polish state blew up the Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in central Warsaw.
Its (then) militant conservatism apart, the Catholic Church had two major liabilities in the eyes of the builders of new nation-states. First, it was a supra-state power and hierarchy demanding obedience to a supra-state leader, the pope. Second, it was extremely wealthy, the largest feudal landowner and owner of built real estate. Along with theological disputes, opposition to this had gone a long way in accounting for the Reformation in countries from Sweden to England, thereby laying the basis for resourceful Renaissance monarchies enriched by expropriated Church wealth. The French Revolution came ideologically out of the Enlightenment, with its strong rationalist and deist currents. The rupture of the revolution with the Church started with the former’s demand that the French clergy pledge allegiance to the national constitution, which the pope refused to allow.
The historical conflict of nation-state and Church are visible today in two landmark buildings in Paris, the Pantheon and the Sacré-Cœur basilica. The Pantheon, ‘To Great Men: A Grateful Fatherland’, was originally built at the end of the dynastic regime as a votive church to Saint Geneviève and