The Italian Risorgimento and the Polish intelligentsia's visions of the nation and national liberation (1848-1871)

Abstract

This thesis presents an opportunity to look at an important aspect of the genesis of national identity-making in the specific stateless and multicultural context from which Polish nationalism emerged. It sheds additional light on the nation-building practices of Eastern Europe, which on the level of theory have remained understudied, or still fall prey to simplification, with the Kohnian dichotomy on Western civic and Eastern ethnic nationalism being the most persistent. These prevailing perspectives strongly essentialized East European nationalisms and gave them a solely Herderian birth certificate, interpreted as the source of their negative aberration. According to these theoretical apriorisms, it is the history of the Eastern peoples which has predestined them toward ethnic, illiberal, exclusive, organic, and in a word ‘Eastern’, nationalism. The Western type, on the other hand, has always navigated towards civil, voluntaristic, liberal, inclusive and proper nationalism. These premises became the starting point for the research on typologies of nationalisms since Hans Kohn and later John Plamenatz codified them in their influential works.