The Philosophical Foundations of Conservatism and Nationalism

Before tracing their historical interplay, it is essential to understand what conservatism and nationalism meant as intellectual and political forces during the modern era. While both ideologies emerged from the upheavals of the late 18th century, they often anchored themselves in very different sources of legitimacy. Their subsequent fusion and friction shaped the 19th and 20th centuries in ways that still resonate.

Conservatism: Tradition, Order, and Gradualism

Conservatism as a conscious political philosophy crystallized in reaction to the French Revolution. Thinkers like Edmund Burke argued that society is a partnership between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born. For Burke and his successors, inherited institutions—monarchy, church, aristocracy, and local custom—embodied the accumulated wisdom of generations. Radical change, in this view, risked destroying the organic social fabric. Conservatism therefore became a defense of prescription, the idea that things long established have a right to continue.

In practice, 19th-century conservatism did not simply mean resisting all change. The statesman Klemens von Metternich, a towering conservative figure, sought to engineer a stable European order after Napoleon by enforcing legitimacy and suppressing revolutionary nationalism. Conservatism often aligned with the interests of landed elites and dynastic rulers, but it also appealed to peasants and artisans who feared the disruptions of industrial capitalism and secular republicanism. The core conservative traits remained: reverence for hierarchy, skepticism toward abstract theories of rights, and a belief that authority should flow from history and religion rather than popular will.

Nationalism: Identity, Culture, and Sovereignty

Nationalism was the revolutionary counterpart. It held that humanity was naturally divided into distinct nations, each with its own language, history, and character. The source of political legitimacy, in this view, was the will of the nation, not divine right or dynastic inheritance. In its early liberal form, championed by Giuseppe Mazzini, nationalism sought the unification of peoples and the creation of independent, democratic nation-states. It promised liberation from foreign domination and the old multinational empires.

Yet nationalism was versatile. It could also become a credo of cultural superiority and territorial expansion. The Romantic movement infused nationalism with myth and emotion: the nation was a spiritual organism, bound by blood and soil. Important scholarly works, like those on the history of nationalism, explain how this ideology shifted from left to right over the century. Initially a progressive force against monarchies, nationalism later provided a powerful tool for conservative state-building and authoritarian regimes.

The 19th Century: Confluence and Conflict

The 19th century witnessed the dramatic collision and occasional convergence of conservatism and nationalism. The map of Europe was redrawn multiple times as each ideology tested the other’s limits.

The Congress of Vienna and the Conservative Order

After the Napoleonic Wars, the victorious powers meeting at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 constructed a conservative international system. The architects—Metternich of Austria, Castlereagh of Britain, and others—sought to restore pre-1789 boundaries and dynasties. They viewed nationalism as a dangerous virus that had fueled Napoleon’s conquests. The German Confederation, a loose association of 39 states, was deliberately kept weak to prevent national unification. Italy was also partitioned.

For decades, the conservative Concert of Europe suppressed liberal and nationalist uprisings, most notably in 1848. That year, revolutions erupted from Paris to Budapest, often driven by nationalist demands. Conservatives eventually reasserted control, but they learned a crucial lesson: nationalism could not be simply crushed; it had to be managed or harnessed.

Romantic Nationalism and Conservative Responses

Intellectual currents of Romanticism reinforced nationalist feeling. Thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder celebrated the unique folk spirit of each people, a concept that resonated with both liberal nationalists and conservative traditionalists who valued cultural continuity. For conservatives, the growing national sentiment among Germans, Italians, and Slavs was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it threatened established empires. On the other, it could be used to legitimize a new kind of authoritarian state built on national unity rather than dynastic loyalty.

Conservative Unifications: Germany and Italy

Nowhere was the synthesis clearer than in the unifications of Germany and Italy. In both cases, conservative monarchies—Prussia in Germany and Piedmont-Sardinia in Italy—exploited nationalist passions to extend their own power.

In Germany, Minister President Otto von Bismarck was a pragmatic conservative, not a romantic nationalist. He sought to preserve Prussian royal authority and the social primacy of the Junker class. Yet his successful wars against Denmark, Austria, and France were presented as the fulfillment of German national destiny. Bismarck’s project for a unified Germany excluded Austria and left the smaller German states with little choice but to accept Prussian dominance. The resulting German Empire, proclaimed in 1871, was a peculiar blend: an authoritarian monarchy that claimed to represent the entire German nation. This strategy of conservative nationalism substituted dynastic rituals with new national symbols, from the Kaiser to the Reichstag.

Italy’s unification, known as the Risorgimento, tells a similar story. The Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, under Count Camillo di Cavour, pursued diplomatic and military campaigns to unify the Italian peninsula. While more liberal than Prussia, Cavour was still a conservative modernizer who wanted to prevent republican or radical forces from hijacking unification. When Giuseppe Garibaldi, a popular republican hero, captured southern Italy, Cavour deftly outmaneuvered him and handed the south to King Victor Emmanuel II. The unified Italy was a constitutional monarchy, but its conservative elite soon tempered its initially progressive ambitions.

Multinational Empires Under Pressure

For the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, nationalism was an existential threat. The Habsburg realm comprised Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Croats, and others. After defeat in 1866, the Austrian Empire was forced to create the Dual Monarchy in 1867, giving Hungary equal status. This was a conservative compromise that attempted to satisfy the strongest nationalist movement while still keeping the empire intact. However, it alienated Slavs and other nationalities, leading to chronic instability.

The Ottoman Empire, often called the “sick man of Europe,” experienced nationalist revolts in the Balkans throughout the century. Serbia, Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria gradually broke away, often supported by conservative powers like Russia, which used pan-Slavic nationalism to expand its own influence. The Eastern Question—how to distribute Ottoman territory without triggering a general war—was fundamentally a question of managing nationalist aspirations within a conservative diplomatic framework rooted in the balance of power.

The 20th Century: Radicalization and Reconfiguration

The 20th century took the interplay of conservatism and nationalism to extremes. Two world wars, the rise of fascism, decolonization, and the Cold War reconfigured the old relationship while revealing its darkest potential.

The Great War and the Shattering of Old Orders

World War I was triggered by nationalist tensions in the Balkans, but it quickly became a clash of empires. Conservative establishments in Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg believed that a short, victorious war would reinforce domestic loyalty and suppress socialism. Instead, the conflict destroyed the old order. The Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires collapsed, and a wave of new nation-states emerged across Eastern Europe based on Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination.

Yet the conservative impulse adapted. In many of these new countries—Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states—new regimes blended national pride with authoritarian governance. Conservative landowners, military officers, and clergy often allied with nationalist parties that promised to protect the nation against both communism and corrupt parliamentarism.

Interwar Fascism: A Synthesis of Ultra-Nationalism and Authoritarian Conservatism

Fascism represented the most radical marriage of conservatism and nationalism. Benito Mussolini in Italy and later Adolf Hitler in Germany did not simply overthrow conservative elites; they co-opted or absorbed them. Fascists advocated for a totalitarian state rooted in national myth, racial superiority, and the cult of the leader.

Mussolini’s regime, after coming to power in 1922, quickly aligned with the monarchy, the Catholic Church, and industrial interests. His nationalism was imperial, promising to restore the glories of ancient Rome. In Germany, Hitler’s National Socialist party drew on the resentments of conservative nationalists who despised the Weimar Republic. While Nazism was revolutionary in its methods, it won crucial support from traditional conservatives like President Paul von Hindenburg, who appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933. The regime’s alliance with big business and the military was a perverse fulfillment of the 19th-century pattern: nationalism used to preserve capitalist hierarchy under a radical veneer.

Spain under Francisco Franco also illustrates the fusion. His victory in the Spanish Civil War established a regime that blended fascist elements with ultra-Catholic conservatism, regionalist suppression, and a corporatist economy. For decades, Franco’s state presented itself as the guardian of Spain’s national and religious essence against “communism” and “separatism.”

Cold War Conservatism and Nationalism

After 1945, the world divided into two blocs. In the West, conservatism often took the form of anti-communism, free-market economics, and a defense of traditional values. Nationalism became a more ambivalent force. Western European conservatives, horrified by the excesses of fascism, initially distanced themselves from extreme nationalism. They favored supranational institutions like the European Coal and Steel Community, which eventually led to the European Union, precisely to tame national rivalries.

However, nationalism remained potent in the developing world. Decolonization struggles in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East were steeped in anti-colonial nationalism, often led by figures who fused Marxist and nationalist rhetoric. Meanwhile, the United States and Soviet Union each mobilized nationalist sentiment for their respective causes. The American conservative movement under Ronald Reagan combined patriotism, robust national defense, and cultural traditionalism, appealing directly to a sense of American exceptionalism.

In the Soviet sphere, nationalism was officially suppressed in favor of proletarian internationalism, but it simmered beneath the surface. When communist regimes collapsed in 1989, long-suppressed nationalist movements, from the Baltic states to the Balkans, reemerged with a vengeance. The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s demonstrated how easily old national hatreds, dormant under authoritarian rule, could be rekindled by politicians who mixed conservative appeals to nation, faith, and land.

Comparative Dynamics: Conservatism Embracing or Resisting Nationalism

Across two centuries, conservatives displayed three broad postures toward nationalism. First, outright resistance: Metternich’s Europe and the Ottoman Empire’s suppression of Balkan nationalism are prime examples. Second, pragmatic co-option: Bismarck’s unification and the Habsburg Compromise of 1867 fall here, where conservative elites used nationalism to reinforce their own position while containing its democratic potential. Third, full embrace: interwar fascism and later nativist movements in Western democracies. These strategies were determined by the strength of the existing state, the ethnic composition of society, and the pressures of international competition.

Where conservative institutions were firmly rooted in a single ethnic group, as in Prussia or Piedmont, they could more easily channel nationalism without losing control. Where states were ethnically fragmented, nationalism became a centrifugal force that conservatives fought but rarely defeated. The 20th-century totalitarian experience taught a sobering lesson: nationalism, when detached from liberal constitutionalism and melded with conservative historicism, could become a vehicle for mass mobilization and genocide.

Legacy and Contemporary Reflections

The interplay of conservatism and nationalism did not end with the 20th century. In recent decades, populist movements in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere have once again merged conservative social values with nationalist economic and immigration policies. This so-called “national conservatism” harkens back to the 19th-century models, invoking sovereignty against supranational bodies like the EU and emphasizing cultural homogeneity as a bulwark against globalization.

Historians of conservatism, such as those found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, note that the tension remains unresolved. Conservatism stands for the permanent things—family, faith, community—while nationalism can be a restless, disruptive force demanding constant renewal of the nation. The 19th-century statesmen who first forged this alliance did so for tactical reasons, but the long-term consequences often escaped their control. Understanding this fraught partnership is not only a key to deciphering modern political conflicts but also a reminder of how the idea of the nation, once a dream of liberation, can become an instrument of exclusion and power when harnessed to a rigid vision of order.

As we look at debates over borders, identity, and sovereignty today, the historical dance between conservatism and nationalism remains one of the most instructive patterns of modern politics. It shows that ideologies are rarely pure; they bleed into each other, adapt to new circumstances, and often produce outcomes their original architects never intended.