Good article! Very important topic. Would love to read more about it.
I do think there's at least one important difference: elites no longer control the narrative/mainstream media, making it harder to manufacture consent.
P.S. could you please write "19th century" and not XIX? I'm very familiar with Latin numerals and even I find my reading flow broken by them. If we want to manufacture Europeans, let's make our writing accessible :)
Absolutely. The narrative available to the common people back then was mostly based on what church preached. And then there was the popular tradition of rebellion. Not sure in which way it affected the unification process. Church in Italy, for example, was strongly opposed unification (Papal states and all that.)
As for XIX. century, that’s how you could still see it written when I was a kid. It’s just nostalgia. Time to let go, I guess.
> By comparison, today’s EU is remarkably homogeneous. Every single member state is a liberal democracy with free elections, independent judiciaries, protection of fundamental rights, and market economies.
I think the most important thing missing from this analysis is that the German and Italian unifications were accomplished through war on the pressure of dominance by foreign powers, particularly France. Whether you were a Neapolitan or Latin peasant who couldn't understand Tuscan or Lombard, it didn't matter much, since an army led by Garibaldi enforced unification on you. And even if you couldn't understand the other proto-Italians, you could relate to them a lot more than with the French, which had just lost her Empire that included large parts of Italy.
The same story can be told with the Establishment of the North German confederation. Unification was seen as necessary after Napoleon, and was actually achieved through Wars where the common population had little to no say.
I think the EU being composed of liberal democracies with free elections works against, not for unification. The consent of the people, in each country with different political movements and trends, would be needed. This would need to be done with the Veto, which would be nearly impossible barring some massive external threat like a serious Russian invasion of NATO, or the Veto would first need to be done away with.
In the article, I was trying to focus narrowly on the argument that "pre-unification countries in XIX. century were more homogeneous than the EU is today." The role of violence in the unifications is an entirely different matter. At the first glance it's a common denominator (Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily, Bismark's wars, Sonderbundkrieg) but looking at the details, it's always different -- volunteer expedition that basically triggered a peasant revolt, Bismark's limited wars of conquest and a civil war between Protestants and Catholics. Also, saying that unification "was forced on you" doesn't ring true. Garibaldi's 1000 would unlikely succeed without a popular support, there were plebiscites whether to join the unified Italy in some places etc. All in all, there was something violence-related going on there, but it's far from obvious what kind of common causation mechanism could have been involved. Also, if analysis was to be extended in this direction, the cases of Austria-Hungary and Ottoman empire which disintegrated rather than unified should also be taken into account.
Good article! Very important topic. Would love to read more about it.
I do think there's at least one important difference: elites no longer control the narrative/mainstream media, making it harder to manufacture consent.
P.S. could you please write "19th century" and not XIX? I'm very familiar with Latin numerals and even I find my reading flow broken by them. If we want to manufacture Europeans, let's make our writing accessible :)
Absolutely. The narrative available to the common people back then was mostly based on what church preached. And then there was the popular tradition of rebellion. Not sure in which way it affected the unification process. Church in Italy, for example, was strongly opposed unification (Papal states and all that.)
As for XIX. century, that’s how you could still see it written when I was a kid. It’s just nostalgia. Time to let go, I guess.
> By comparison, today’s EU is remarkably homogeneous. Every single member state is a liberal democracy with free elections, independent judiciaries, protection of fundamental rights, and market economies.
I think the most important thing missing from this analysis is that the German and Italian unifications were accomplished through war on the pressure of dominance by foreign powers, particularly France. Whether you were a Neapolitan or Latin peasant who couldn't understand Tuscan or Lombard, it didn't matter much, since an army led by Garibaldi enforced unification on you. And even if you couldn't understand the other proto-Italians, you could relate to them a lot more than with the French, which had just lost her Empire that included large parts of Italy.
The same story can be told with the Establishment of the North German confederation. Unification was seen as necessary after Napoleon, and was actually achieved through Wars where the common population had little to no say.
I think the EU being composed of liberal democracies with free elections works against, not for unification. The consent of the people, in each country with different political movements and trends, would be needed. This would need to be done with the Veto, which would be nearly impossible barring some massive external threat like a serious Russian invasion of NATO, or the Veto would first need to be done away with.
In the article, I was trying to focus narrowly on the argument that "pre-unification countries in XIX. century were more homogeneous than the EU is today." The role of violence in the unifications is an entirely different matter. At the first glance it's a common denominator (Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily, Bismark's wars, Sonderbundkrieg) but looking at the details, it's always different -- volunteer expedition that basically triggered a peasant revolt, Bismark's limited wars of conquest and a civil war between Protestants and Catholics. Also, saying that unification "was forced on you" doesn't ring true. Garibaldi's 1000 would unlikely succeed without a popular support, there were plebiscites whether to join the unified Italy in some places etc. All in all, there was something violence-related going on there, but it's far from obvious what kind of common causation mechanism could have been involved. Also, if analysis was to be extended in this direction, the cases of Austria-Hungary and Ottoman empire which disintegrated rather than unified should also be taken into account.