Classical Civilisation Confronts Modern Nationalism

In the early nineteenth century, revolutionary and national movements challenged the early modern multinational states and the status quo negotiated in the Congress of Vienna. ¹ In contrast with this phenomenon, there was a simultaneous process highlighting the pre-eminence of wider cultural spheres concretised in concepts like “civilisation” and “culture”. The divergence of these two latter concepts was explained as a result of historical processes that had created different kinds of societies, manners or laws. As a result, François Guizot and other social theorists defined the distinction between European civilisation and the rest of the world as the inevitable outcome of human variability since classical antiquity. Ironically, the arguments of both national particularity and European civilisation were often based on the same example, ancient Greece. ²