on the Origin of Inequality between Men, he already explains the kind of homeland he would prefer if afforded the ability to choose one for himself:
I would have chosen . . . a state where, with all private individuals being known to one another, neither the obscure maneuvers of vice nor the modesty of virtue could be hidden from the notice and the judgment of the public . . . I would therefore have sought for my homeland a happy and tranquil republic, whose antiquity was somehow lost in the dark recesses of time . . . I would have wanted to choose for myself a homeland diverted by a fortunate impotence from the fierce love of conquest . . . I would have searched for a country where the right of legislation was common to all citizens, for who can know better than they the conditions under which it suits them to live together in a single society? . . . And if in addition providence had joined to it a charming location, a temperate climate, a fertile country and the most delightful appearance there is under the heavens, to complete my happiness I would have desired only to enjoy all these goods in the bosom of that happy homeland, living peacefully in sweet society with my fellow citizens.32
His entire life, Rousseau yearned to see the establishment of sovereign egalitarian societies within defined territories that could serve as natural homelands. At the same time, in his Social Contract, this republican son of Geneva, with his many internal contradictions, did not hesitate to ponder: “How could a man or a people seize a vast territory and keep out the rest of the human race except by a criminal usurpation since the action would rob the rest of mankind of the shelter and food that nature has given them all in common?”33
Despite these ethical and “anarchistic” declarations, Rousseau remained a completely political thinker. His egalitarian conception of man and the universalist perspective on which it was based led him to search for freedom, which was always dear to his heart, only in the realm of politics: that is, in the construction of political community. Yet the father of the idea of modern democracy also maintained that the freedom he sought could be realized only in small units, or, more precisely, in the form of direct democracies. For this reason, the ideal homeland, according to Rousseau’s basic theory, must remain small and tangible.34 A prophet waiting for the gates of the nationalist era to open, Rousseau watched keenly from his great height and distance but remained unable to enter.
TERRITORIALIZATION OF THE NATIONAL ENTITY
Patriotic battle cries could be heard during the Low Countries’ revolt against the Spanish kingdom in the late sixteenth century and even more so in the early seventeenth century. During the English revolution of the mid-sixteenth century, the radical wing of the Levellers identified the homeland with the free community, which was fully mobilized against monarchic tyranny. And if at the outset of the American Revolution the rebels regarded Britain as their motherland, their attitude had changed by its conclusion, when a new conception of patriotism began to percolate among them. “The land of the free and the home of the brave”35 was on its way, soon to make its mark on history.
One of the most important milestones in the new and promising career of the homeland in the modern era was undoubtedly the French Revolution, particularly its Republican phase. If until then the concept of homeland had served as a point of reference for the political and intellectual elite—state officials, ambassadors, scholars, poets, philosophers, and the like—it now strode confidently into the alleyways of the people. For example, “La Marseillaise,” composed by a junior officer from Alsace, became a popular refrain sung by the large revolutionary battalion that arrived in Marseille and was quickly learned by many more. “Franche-Comté, children of the fatherland, the day of glory has arrived! Against us stands tyranny,” sang the volunteer fighters as they marched, trembling, to the battle of Valmy in September 1792 to fight the hired armies of the old world. And those who were not wounded by the salvo of cannon fire were even able to finish the words to the song: “Sacred love of the fatherland, support our avenging arms. Liberty, cherished liberty, fight with thy defenders!” For good reason, the song was later adopted as France’s national anthem.36
In the meantime, however, Napoleon’s conquests were arousing a new wave of patriotic demands outside France, in areas such as the future territories of Germany and Italy. One by one, the seeds of patriotism were planted, soon to transform old Europe into a spectacular garden of nations and, thus, of homelands.
From the stormy 1790s in France to the popular uprisings that rocked the Arab world at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, almost all revolutionaries and rebels have pledged their love to liberty and, at the same time, declared their loyalty to homeland. The homeland would reemerge on a large scale in the European Spring of Nations of 1848 and would also unite the rebels of the Paris Commune of 1871. And although the Russian Revolution took pride in its internationalism, when put to the test during its war of survival against the Nazi invasion, the Soviet Union revived patriotism as an effective ideological mechanism for mass mobilization. The two world wars of the twentieth century were brutal conflicts fought in the name of a guiding superideology that regarded the state as the entity responsible for protecting the homeland, or at least attempting to work for its benefit by expanding its borders. As we have seen, the acquisition of territory was regarded as a major aim of the nationalist struggles in the great campaigns for decolonization that swept the world from the 1940s to the 1970s. Both the socialists and the communists of the Third World were first and foremost patriots, and only later focused on distinctions of sociopolitical affiliation.
The major question that still needs to be answered is how deep emotion toward a small and familiar physical place was translated into a conceptual composite, applied to vast territories that humans could never know firsthand in their entirety. Perhaps the answer lies in the slow yet decisive territorialization of politics in the age of nationalism.
Despite their great historical importance, the patriots of the English revolution, the volunteers who sang the “Marseillaise” while marching into battle during the French Revolution, the rebels against Napoleonic occupation, and even the revolutionaries of 1848 in the capital cities of Europe still constituted minorities of the populations in which they conducted their activities—large minorities, but minorities nonetheless. And even if homeland had become a key concept in the restless capital cities, most people remained tillers of the soil, relatively untroubled by the qualities of the political leadership, which was already swaying to the cultural and linguistic tones of modernity.
What beckoned them into the new homeland or, perhaps more accurately, what began to construct the concept of national territory in their consciousness was the legislation emanating from the political centers and applied throughout the territories. These laws exempted significant numbers of farmers from feudal obligations, taxes, and other burdens, and in some cases also provided decisive recognition of their ownership to the land they cultivated. The new land laws and agrarian reforms served as the primary means for the transformation of dynastic monarchies and large principalities into increasingly stable nation-states and, as a result, for the evolution of multidimensional homeland areas.
The great urbanization that was responsible for much social change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for the detachment of the masses from their “small homelands,” constituted another important precondition for enabling many to come to terms, at least conceptually, with a large, unfamiliar national territory. Mobility gave rise to hitherto unknown variations of the need for social belonging, and this need was met by national identity, which offered the enticing promise of facilitating individual and collective adherence and rootedness within a larger geographic area.
These and many other political, legal, and social processes
