THE EMERGENCE OF NATIONAL COMMUNITIES

THE EMERGENCE OF NATIONAL COMMUNITIES

I attribute the beginning of the system of modern societies to seventeenth-century developments in the societal community, especially the bearing of religion on the legitimation of society, rather than to the

eighteenth-century evolution toward democracy and industrialization.

After the Reformation shattered the religious unity of Western Christendom, a division arose, roughly along the north-south axis. All Europe south of the Alps remained Roman Catholic: a Roman Catholic peninsula thrust into northern Europe with France as its main component. Protestantism in Switzerland enjoyed the protection guaranteed by Swiss independence. Although Vienna was predominantly Protestant at the start of the seventeenth century, the Hapsburgs were able to recatholicize Austria, aided by the Turkish occupation of Hungary where Protestanism was strong. As religious struggle intensified, the southern tier of political units consolidated. In the sixteenth century this consolidation involved a union of Austria and Spain under the rule of the Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V. The middle of the Empire was protected by the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily adjacent to the Papal States. The presence of the Papacy in Italy and the extent of Hapsburg power made effective independence of the Italian city-states impossible. The Counter-Reformation enforced an alliance between Church and state, exemplified by the Spanish Inquisition. In comparison to the liberal trends within the late medieval and Renaissance Roman Catholicism, the Counter-Reformation stressed orthodoxy and authoritarianism in its organization. Civil alliance with the Church in enforcing religious conformity fostered the expansion of centralizedgovernment authority. Such enforcement was undertaken in the name of the Holy Roman Empire, with its religious legitimation and divinely ordained Emperor.¹ By that time the political structure of the Empirewas more integrated than it had been in the Middle Ages.

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Nevertheless, the Empire was vulnerable; it centered in the loosely organized German nation - Austria's population was only partly German by that time, and the Hapsburgs had assumed the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia through personal unions. The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War, had made Holland and Switzerland independent of the Empire but had also drawn the religious line through the remaining parts; many of the German princes had chosen Protestantism for their domains under the formula cuius regio, eius religio (the religion of the king determined the religion of his subjects). More than the defection from Rome of Henry VIII, this choice undermined the legitimation of the old secular structure of Christendom because the Empire had been conceived as the secular arm of a unified Roman Catholic system. The settlement was an uneasy compromise, acceptable only as an alternative to the indefinite continuation of a destructive war. Nevertheless, it ended any expectation that a Roman Catholic European system could be restored.² For more than three centuries the heartland of the Counter Reformation remained resistant to modernizing processes, citadels of monarchial legitimism, aristocracy, and semibureaucratic states of the older type.

Although the Protestants dreamed of prevailing throughout Western Christendom, they soon splintered into different branches and never developed a conception of unity like that of medieval Roman Catholicisim.³ This fragmentation furthered the development of independent monarchies based on unstable integration of absolutist political regimes and national churches.⁴ It also contained the seeds of the internal religious pluralism that was to advance rapidly in England and Holland. The outcome of the struggle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation was a double step toward pluralization and differentiation. The English-Dutch wing was more advanced, a harbinger for the future. Yet development within the Empire posed the problem of integration across the Protestant-Roman Catholic line. Many historians of modern Europe have perceived only stalemated conflict. Yet religious toleration was subsequently extended to Roman Catholics in Protestant polities and even to Protestants in Roman Catholic polities, though generally without sacrifice of the establishment principle.

¹ James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, rev. ad. (London: Macmillan, 1904).

² Ibid.

³ Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, vol. II (New York: Harper, 1960).

⁴ G. R. Elton, Reformation Europe, 1517-1559 (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian, 1963).

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