East-Central Europe in 1848. The "kingdom of Poland" was a section of Poland ruled by Russia; other Polish-peopled areas appear on this map as parts of Prussia or of the Austrian (Habsburg) empire. The red border is that of the German Confederation, the alliance then of the many German states, all small apart from Prussia and Austria, which both ruled large non-German areas. Lemberg is today's Lviv; Pressburg, today's Bratislava.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx adduced, as part of the "revolutionary" activity of the bourgeoisie which set the groundwork for socialism, that "independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff".
That creation of nation-states made openings for democracy, i.e. for the idea, inconceivable before outside perhaps compact city-states, that government should at least in some way reflect the will of "the people", considered as a collective aware of a collective identity and able to communicate across the whole collective.
That was all relative, and to be surpassed by the motto "workers of all countries, unite", but was an advance on the petty princedoms and ramshackle empires of the past.
In the early years of the 20th century, Marxists including Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Leon Trotsky codified this thinking into a programme of consistent democracy on the national question – the right of all nations to self-determination, autonomy for anomalous minority areas, individual equal rights for different languages – as a necessary element in uniting the working class across borders.
They drew on Marx's and Engels's copious writings backing Polish and Irish national revolt.
But in the early years of the political activity of Marx and Engels, notably 1848-9, the issues were not so straightforward. In fact Marx and Engels got some things wrong in 1848-9, and in fact Lenin and the rest were (rightly) discarding part of the legacy they could have got from Marx and Engels.
What was the background in 1848-9? Except maybe with the Spanish-colonist nations in South America (seen by Benedict Anderson in his classic book Imagined Communities as the pioneer cases of democratic-tending nationalism), until well into the 19th century "nations" often did not exist as clear units on which nation-states could be based.
Most people were peasants with little national identity, or even none. Their identity was defined primarily by their extended family, their village, and their religion.
Often villages spoke languages or dialects different even from nearby villages, and quite different from the city and "official" languages. After 1066, the language of the ruling class of England, and of the royal court and of the law, was French for three hundred years.
Similar patterns continued much later in Eastern Europe. Buda, Pest, Lviv, Brno, Wroclaw, Gdansk, Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Riga, were all German-speaking for centuries. The official administrative language of Hungary until 1844 was Latin. Bratislava, now the capital of Slovakia, had been the capital of Hungary for hundreds of years and was even in 1848 the seat of Hungary's parliament, though it had a largely German-speaking population (and a German name: Pressburg).
Nations in Europe, except perhaps the English, the Irish, and a few others, were formed in the process of welding nation-states, rather than being tidily demarcated in advance.
The great French revolution of 1789-94 created a nation mobilised for the revolutionary wars under the slogan "la patrie en danger" ("our country in danger"). But its France was not quite yet "French". In 1789 only one in eight of the population spoke "Paris-French" as a first language, and about half had not even a few faltering words of French to help them deal with the institutions of the French monarchy.
To win, the revolution had to suppress regional "church and king" risings such as the Breton-speaking Chouannerie in Brittany or the Poitevin-speaking revolt in the Vendée. Those were often organised by local landowners and priests, but also animated by a reluctance to accept what came from "France" and an understandable reaction against the Jacobins' efforts to impose Paris-French everywhere in France as the only language.
In 1848-9 a wave of revolutions called "the Springtime of the Peoples" swept Europe. National unity (e.g. in Germany) or self-determination was a major goal.
Hungary fought for liberation from the huge Habsburg empire ruled from Vienna. But what was "Hungary"? Its leaders' claims covered vast areas where non-Hungarians were the majority.
The anti-imperial insurgencies were often led by the aristocratic classes of their areas. In some areas the nobility was a large class, including many "minor" nobles who were scarcely even well-off farmers, but also the main class with a "national" identity. City merchants and workshop-operators were a smaller class, and anyway often German or Jewish. The modern wage-working class scarcely existed there.
Sometimes peasants sided with the Habsburg imperial power against the insurgents. They saw little "national" affinity with the insurgents, and (probably realistically) thought their chances of escaping feudal remnants better with the Empire than with the local nobility. Notoriously, a (Croatian) imperial general, Josip Jelačić, was able to mobilise a large Croatian army to defeat insurgents in Vienna and Hungary.
Marx and Engels, in 1848, came to respond by siding with the "big" nations (Germany, Hungary, Poland) and dismissing the "smaller" nations (Croats, Czechs, etc.) as Chouan-type reactionaries and susceptible to capture by Habsburg-imperialist or Russian-imperialist ("pan-Slavist") interests.
That heat-of-the-moment response has become a template for a variety of supposedly-Marxist approach on the national question, based on a sort of anti-big-power or national-development "instrumentalisation" of the national question rather than (as with Lenin) on principles that can unite the working class across national divisions.
The approach tells us to look in each national conflict for the "good" nation with capacity to form a strong state which opens paths of historic development, or at least one opposed to the dominant big power. We then back that "good" nation against the "bad" nations which do not have that capacity and which are supposedly fated just to be catspaws for rival big powers.
A variant, from the Italian revolutionary socialist group Lotta Comunista (LC), sees all "historic" nation-state building which opens roads of progress as having been completed in the mid-1970s, with the defeat of the USA in Vietnam and the end of the Portuguese empire in Africa. Effectively LC categorises all national battles now as "non-historic". They do not use the term, but they say the battles of the Ukrainians or the Palestinians, for example, have no capacity to go beyond being catspaws for one big power, or alliance of big powers, against another.
The famous "revisionist" controversy in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) spun out of a dispute in 1896 in which the great revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg and the "revisionist" Eduard Bernstein were on the same side against Wilhelm Liebknecht, editor of the SPD paper. Both Luxemburg and Bernstein (though with different nuances) backed the Armenian nationalists against the Ottoman Empire. Liebknecht thought the Armenians incapable of being more than a catspaw for the Russian Empire avid to eat up the Ottomans' domains.
As late as 1918, Rosa Luxemburg dismissed Ukrainian nationalism as "a mere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty-bourgeois intellectuals" and scorned "Lenin’s hobby of an 'independent Ukraine'." She had not much more time for Irish nationalism. (Though she famously denouncing the idea of restoring an independent and united Polish state as impossible, she had more respect for Polish nationalism).
This classic text, by the Ukrainian Trotskyist Roman Rosdolsky, shows that Marx and Engels were wrong even in 1848-9. The good nations/ bad nations line is even more wrong today, when wage-working classes are numerous almost everywhere, and national identity is a major fact almost everywhere in the world.
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