are important political ideologies that shaped modern understandings of nationness and which continue to inform – and, indeed, circumscribe – present-day thinking about national, international, and universal belonging.
NATIONALISM AND COMSOPOLITANISM are part of a broader complex of ideas about nations and national identity that emerged along with the modern nation in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. In an age that witnessed not only two key revolutions which redefined the nation-state (the American Revolution and the French Revolution) but also ongoing reconfigurations of national identity and national borders both on the Continent (Napoleonic Wars) and within Britain (the Acts of Union bringing Scotland and Ireland into Great Britain), the question of nation was a critical one. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism operated in the period as competing (although not always oppositional) responses to this question. In general, nationalism and cosmopolitanism rest on different notions of what a nation is and what it means to belong to a nation.
Nationalism typically defines the nation in particularist terms such as language, history, blood, and geography. In these models, the nation is considered homogeneous and unified, and it is thus frequently imagined as an organic whole. Such particularist notions of nation lend themselves to understandings of national identity and national character as something essential or non-voluntary. Also, because it conceives the nation as both distinct and discrete, nationalism often justifies political projects of national sovereignty and self-determination and supports economic and political policies such as isolationism and non-intervention.
Cosmopolitanism, in contrast, builds out of Enlightenment notions of the civil contract, and – like liberal or civil nationalisms – typically defines the nation in the rationalist and abstract terms of shared rights and shared constitution. In this formulation, national identity is neither essential nor exclusive, and can therefore co-exist with other national and transnational affiliations. In general, however, cosmopolitanism subordinates national belonging to universal belonging. As a political or economic category, then, cosmopolitanism considers nations in their relation to international or global structures, arguing that nations are dependant upon those broader structures for their integrity or preservation, or arguing for the elimination of nations or national borders altogether. As the above definitions suggest, nationalism and the cosmopolitanism have a close and unstable relationship in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European thought. At their most basic, however, nationalism privileges the national over the universal, and cosmopolitanism privileges the universal over the national.
From 1802 to 1829, the Edinburgh Review was arguably the most influential proponent of cosmopolitanism in Britain. From the start, the early Edinburgh aligned itself with both Scottish and Continental projects of enlightenment, advocating an ‘innocent cosmopolitanism’ of the intellect to counter the prevailing ‘violence of national animosity’ (ER 1:253). Setting itself against the parochial prejudices and insular small-mindedness of its predecessors and rivals, it cultivated a cosmopolitan attitude of disinterestedness and open-mindedness towards subject matter both local and foreign. Indeed, an important part the Edinburgh’s mandate was to inform Britons about political and intellectual developments taking place outside of Britain, especially those taking place of the Continent, and its first volume tellingly included numerous reviews of foreign works, including J. J. Mounier’s De l’Influence attributée aux Philosophes, and Charles Villers’ Philosophie de Kant. Significantly, the periodical’s commitment to reviewing foreign works continued throughout the Napoleonic wars, a time when other periodicals ceased to review foreign literature for fear of being suspected of Jacobinism. Influenced by the socio-political theories and political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment, the early Edinburgh Review took a cosmopolitan approach to the important issues of its day, including the question of nation. More often than not, the periodical advanced a cosmopolitan understanding of the nation as a heterogeneous and non-unified civil entity, an understanding that informed its own self-identification as a British periodical coming out of a post-Union Scotland, as well as its support for various national insurrections taking place on the Continent. Politically, the early Edinburgh considered British affairs to be closely tied to what was happening on the Continent, and it broached a liberal model of Europe as a ‘great federacy’ of nations (ER 1:354). Economically, it drew on the political economy of countryman Adam Smith to argue for a commercially-based internationalism in which commodities circulated freely across national borders. Overall, the cosmopolitanism of the early Edinburgh Review stood out in the nationalistic political climate of early nineteenth-century Britain, especially during the Napoleonic Wars, and it was repeatedly attacked as unpatriotic: ‘the watchword of Government was let loose upon us; and we were accused of wishing to lower the flag of England to her former rebellious colonies; and, in conjunction with our Transatlantic brethren, to aid Bonaparte in his views of universal empire:—and this because we were wanting in that truly British feeling, which is ready to sacrifice every opinion to that of the Minister of the day” (ER 20:234). Renewed interest in the question of nation at the end of the twentieth-century, however, has given new life to many of the cosmopolitan tenets advanced in the early Edinburgh Review.
Esther Wohlgemut, University of Prince Edward Island
