Nationalism: The 19th-Century Ideology That Unified Germany & Italy and Shattered Empires

Nationalism—the belief that the nation (a people sharing culture, language, history) should govern itself in its own sovereign state—was the driving force behind three seismic shifts:

• German Unification (1871) – Prussian-led wars and diplomacy fused dozens of German states into the German Empire.
• Italian Unification (1861–71) – Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emmanuel II welded the peninsula's kingdoms into the Kingdom of Italy.
• Imperial Disintegration – In the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, subject peoples (Hungarians, Czechs, South Slavs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Arabs, Armenians) invoked nationalist self-determination, leading to their eventual breakup after WWI.

Nationalism elevated the "nation" above dynasty, religion, or empire as the legitimate political unit, redrawing the map of Europe and the Middle East.