Cives Patriae: ‘German’ Burghers in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Abstract

Modern theories of nation-building and nationalism have usually looked to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the starting point for the formation of the nation, without taking into account expressions of pre-modern national identity and nationhood. Hans Kohn’s distinction between a democratic — hence a ‘good Western’ — nation-building process modelled on the French Revolution, on the one hand, and a ‘negative Eastern’, romantic and xenophobic cultural nationalism, on the other hand, is typical for this approach.¹ Research on the myths of origin of early modern nations, such as the Batavian myth of sixteenth-century Dutch historians and the Swedo-Gothic myths in the reign of Gustavus Adolphus in the seventeenth century, however, has demonstrated that a sense of national belonging and political identity existed long before 1789. The extent to which theories of modern nation-building limited the definition of a nation has rightly been criticized by John Elliott:

The apparent uncertainty of modern historians when faced with the question of nationalism in early modern Europe stands in marked contrast to the increasingly confident use in the sixteenth century of the words patria and patrie.²