Uwarunkowania społeczne powstawania narodów w Europie
Social Conditions Surrounding the Emergence of Nations in Europe

Summary/Abstract: Questions about the place and role of national communities in the emerging architecture of our world seem to be very significant and fateful. Contemporary European perspective prompts analysis of the social conditions, broadly understood, of the emergence of nations in the nineteenth century and also encourages the shedding of light on the causes and results of the manifestation of this process in the form of national movements. In the past two centuries, the rising modern nations experienced an explicit dynamism due to the processes which had been occurring in European communities under the influence of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and of the industrial revolution which had originated earlier in England. Those events launched a series of modernization processes, which led to the dynamic transformations of social relations in Europe. The old feudal order was crushed – the order which was based on monarchy in the political sphere – and it gave place to the new order, in which the state of a nation came to the fore. The idea of “nation”, grasped as a postulate of the separate establishment of a nation’s being, obtained the right to existence. The analysis undertaken in the present work aims to answer the question of how this process happened. The structure of this argument organizes references to the typological comprehension of the processes of national emancipation, that is, of the Western European model, which emphasizes the institution of a state, and of the Central and Eastern European model, which underlines the significance of language and culture in the emergence of a nation.

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