The Rise of Nationalism in Europe

Why This Matters

Look at the cover of your passport, or a coin in your pocket. It says “India”. Think about the national anthem you stand up for at school. Think about the tricolour flag. Think about the simple, powerful feeling that you and a stranger sitting in a train two thousand kilometres away both belong to the same country — even though you have never met.

That feeling has a name. It is called nationalism. And here is the surprising part: this feeling is not very old. For most of human history, ordinary people did not think of themselves as belonging to a “nation”. A farmer obeyed a king or a landlord. He did not feel he owned his country. He had no flag, no anthem, no vote. The country belonged to the ruler, the way a house belongs to its owner.

So where did this new feeling come from? It was born in Europe, a little over two hundred years ago. And once it was born, it changed the whole world. It broke up giant empires. It joined scattered little kingdoms into single countries like Germany and Italy. It later inspired Indians, Africans and people across Asia to fight for their own freedom. The very idea that “we, the people, are a nation and we should rule ourselves” — the idea behind India’s freedom struggle — first took shape in the story you are about to read.

This chapter is the story of how that idea was born, how it spread, how it built new countries, and how, in the end, it turned dangerous and helped push the world into a terrible war. It is one of the most important stories in modern history. Let us begin.

The Big Idea

Nationalism is the feeling that a group of people belong together as one nation — sharing a common identity, history and sense of unity — and that this nation should rule itself. This feeling first appeared clearly in the French Revolution of 1789, which declared that the country belongs to its people (the citizens), not to a king. The French spread this idea across Europe. Two new ways of thinking grew around it: liberalism, which wanted freedom for the individual, a constitution, a parliament and free trade; and conservatism, which wanted to keep the old order of kings, the Church and social ranks. After Napoleon’s defeat, conservatives tried to crush nationalism at the Treaty of Vienna (1815). But the idea would not die. Revolutionaries in secret societies (like Mazzini), Romantic poets and folk-tale collectors, and the hungry, angry crowds of 1848 kept it alive. In the second half of the century nationalism built two great new nations — Germany (joined by Bismarck through “blood and iron”) and Italy (by Mazzini, Cavour and Garibaldi). Artists gave each nation a face, as a woman: Marianne for France, Germania for Germany. But by the end of the century, nationalism changed from a generous, freedom-loving idea into a narrow, aggressive one. Nations grew jealous of each other, raced to grab colonies, and clashed in the Balkans — the “powder keg” that finally exploded into the First World War in 1914.

That is a lot of names and dates. Do not worry — we will walk through every one of them slowly. The timeline in Figure 1.1 below lays out the whole journey on a single page, so keep coming back to it as a map for the chapter:

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Let’s Break It Down

First, what is a “nation”?

Before we go further, we should be clear about three small words that sound similar but mean different things: state, nation, and nation-state. Getting these straight now will save you a lot of confusion later.

A state is a territory with a government and clear borders. A nation is a group of people who feel they belong together — they share a sense of common history, culture, and a wish to live as one. A nation-state is the special case where the two match up: a country where most of the people, and not just the ruler, feel they are one nation.

Here is the key point that the chapter keeps coming back to. This feeling of “we are one people” did not exist from the start of time. Nobody is born feeling part of a nation. The feeling was made — slowly, through struggles, through the work of leaders, through songs and stories and shared sacrifice. A French thinker named Ernst Renan put it beautifully in 1882. He said a nation is not made by one common language or race or religion. A nation is made by a long shared past of effort and sacrifice, and a wish in the present to keep living together. He called it “a daily vote” — meaning, a nation stays alive only as long as its people keep choosing, every day, to belong together.

Keep that idea in your head: a nation is something people build, not something they simply have.

The French Revolution and the birth of the nation

The first clear burst of nationalism came with the French Revolution of 1789.

Before we see what changed, let us be sure we remember what France was like before the revolution. This chapter assumes you know it, so here is a quick refresher:

The revolution declared a brand-new idea: from now on, it is the people who make up the nation and decide its future — not the king. Power moved from the monarchy to a body of French citizens.

But here is the deep question. You cannot just announce that millions of strangers are now “one people”. How do you actually make them feel it? The French revolutionaries understood this, and they did many clever, practical things to build that shared feeling:

• They spread the ideas of la patrie (the fatherland) and le citoyen (the citizen) — the idea of one community where everyone has equal rights under one constitution.

• They chose a new flag, the tricolour, to replace the old royal flag. Now everyone could rally behind one symbol.

• They renamed the old assembly the National Assembly, elected by the citizens.

• They wrote new hymns (patriotic songs), took oaths, and honoured martyrs — all in the name of the nation.

• They set up one central system of government with the same laws for every citizen.

• They removed internal customs duties (taxes you had to pay just to move goods from one part of France to another) and brought in one system of weights and measures for the whole country.

• They discouraged regional dialects and made the French of Paris the common language.

Now pause and ask: why did all these little steps create a nation? Because each one removes a wall between strangers. One flag means one symbol to love together. One language means people can actually talk to each other. One set of laws means everyone is treated the same. One system of weights means a trader in the north and a trader in the south are playing the same game. Step by step, these measures turned a collection of separate regions into people who felt like one. Figure 1.2 below traces exactly how this happened — and how the idea then leaked out across Europe:

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When news of the revolution reached other cities in Europe, excited students and educated middle-class people set up Jacobin clubs (groups inspired by the French revolutionaries). And when the French armies marched into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy in the 1790s, they carried the new idea of nationalism with them.

Napoleon: what his Code gave, and what it took

After the revolution, a general named Napoleon rose to power and took control of a huge stretch of Europe. Strangely, Napoleon went back to one-man rule — he crowned himself emperor and destroyed democracy in France. So in one way he was a step backwards. But in the way he ran his lands, he kept and spread many of the revolution’s best ideas.

His most famous reform was the Civil Code of 1804, usually called the Napoleonic Code. Let us be clear about what it did, because it is a favourite exam point. It gave people some big things:

• It ended all privileges based on birth. Before, a noble was above the law simply because he was born a noble. Now that was gone.

• It established equality before the law — the same law for everyone, rich or poor.

• It secured the right to property — your property was protected by law.

He carried this Code into the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. In those places he also simplified the messy patchwork of tiny states, abolished the feudal system, and freed peasants from serfdom (a system where peasants were almost owned by the landlord) and from manorial dues. In the towns, he removed the old guild restrictions that controlled who could do business. He improved roads and communication. Businessmen and small producers were delighted: with uniform laws, standard weights and measures, and a common currency, it suddenly became much easier to move and sell goods from one region to another.

So far, so good. But Napoleon’s rule had a dark side too — and this is the part students often forget. To pay for his endless wars, he raised heavy taxes. He brought in censorship (controlling what people could say or print). And worst of all, he forced young men into his army by conscription (compulsory military service) to go and conquer the rest of Europe.

So how did people feel about him? At first, in places like Holland, Switzerland, Brussels, Milan and Warsaw, the French were welcomed as bringers of freedom. But the warm welcome soon turned to anger. People realised that the new laws did not come with real political freedom — they could not actually choose their own government. The heavy taxes, the censorship and the forced army service began to feel like too high a price for the better administration. The gift came with chains attached.

To pin down this double nature of Napoleon’s rule, try this:

Europe before nationalism: a patchwork of peoples

To understand why nationalism was such an earthquake, picture Europe in the middle of the 1700s. There were almost no “nation-states” as we know them today.

What we now call Germany and Italy did not exist as single countries. They were broken into dozens of separate kingdoms, duchies and small states, each with its own ruler. And the big empires of central and eastern Europe were the opposite of a nation. Take the Habsburg Empire (which ruled Austria-Hungary). It was a giant patchwork of many different peoples speaking many different languages — Germans, Italians, Hungarians (who spoke Magyar), Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats and more. These people did not feel like one nation at all. They often could not even understand each other. The only thing tying them together was that they all obeyed the same emperor.

So the question of the century was: how could a single nation possibly emerge out of such a mixed-up patchwork?

Who wanted change? The aristocracy and the new middle class

To answer that, we need to know who the players were. Society on the continent was dominated by the landed aristocracy — the rich, noble families who owned huge estates in the countryside and grand houses in town. They spoke French in high society, married into each other’s families, and lived a similar life everywhere. But here is the key fact: they were a tiny group. Most people were peasants who farmed the land, often as poor tenants or as serfs.

Then something new appeared. In western and central Europe, industries and trade grew, towns expanded, and brand-new social groups were born: a working class in the factories, and a middle class of industrialists, businessmen and educated professionals (lawyers, teachers, doctors).

This new, educated middle class is the group to watch. It was among them that the idea of national unity caught fire. Why them, and not the peasants or the nobles? Because the nobles were happy with the old system — they were on top of it. The peasants were mostly illiterate and struggling to survive. But the educated middle class could read the new ideas, they had no special birth-privileges to protect, and they stood to gain the most from a free, united nation with free trade. They became the engine of nationalism.

What did liberal nationalism stand for?

The middle class did not just want a nation — they wanted a free nation. Their set of ideas was called liberalism.

The word “liberalism” comes from the Latin word liber, meaning free. But “free” meant two different things at once — a political meaning and an economic meaning. This split trips up a lot of students, so let us take them one at a time.

Politically, liberalism stood for:

• Freedom for the individual and equality of all before the law.

• Government by consent — the people should agree to how they are ruled.

• An end to the absolute power of kings and to special privileges for the Church.

• A constitution and a representative government through parliament (a body chosen by the people to make laws).

But there is an important catch, and examiners love it. Liberal “equality” did not mean everyone could vote. In revolutionary France, the right to vote was given only to men who owned property. Men without property, and all women, were left out. Napoleon’s Code even pushed women back down to the legal status of a minor, under the control of their fathers and husbands. So throughout the 1800s, women and poorer men kept organising and demanding equal political rights.

Economically, liberalism meant free markets — getting rid of the many government restrictions on the movement of goods and money. This is where one of the most important examples in the chapter comes in, so let us slow right down for it.

Why the Zollverein actually pushed nationalism

Here is one of those facts NCERT states and then races past: that the Zollverein (a customs union) “strengthened nationalism”. But why would a boring tax agreement create a feeling of national belonging? This is worth understanding properly, because it shows that nationalism grows not only from poetry and war, but from everyday money and trade.

First, remember what a customs duty is:

Picture Germany in the early 1800s. Napoleon had bundled the countless tiny German states into a confederation of 39 states. But each one still had its own currency and its own weights and measures. A merchant travelling in 1833 from Hamburg to Nuremberg had to cross 11 customs barriers and pay a tax of about 5% at each one. And because each region measured cloth differently — an “elle” of cloth meant 54.7 cm in one place and 65.6 cm in another — every deal needed slow, confusing calculations. Trade was being strangled.

So in 1834, on the initiative of Prussia (the strongest German state), most of the German states joined to form the Zollverein. It abolished the customs barriers among them and cut the number of currencies from over thirty down to two. Soon a network of railways linked the states together too.

Now here is the “why”. When goods, money and people start moving freely across a whole region, the region begins to feel like one place. A merchant in Hamburg and a merchant in Nuremberg are now part of the same market. They share the same money. They depend on each other. They start to think, “We are not 39 little places — we are one economic body.” And once people feel like one economic body, it is a short step to feeling like one nation that should be one country. As the economist Friedrich List wrote at the time, the Zollverein’s aim was “to bind the Germans economically into a nation”. Figure 1.3 below sets the messy “before” against the united “after” so you can see exactly how trade pulled people together:

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A new conservatism after 1815, and the Treaty of Vienna

So far nationalism and liberalism were on the rise. But not everyone was happy about it. After Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815, the rulers of Europe swung hard the other way, towards conservatism.

What is conservatism? It is the belief that the old, traditional institutions — the monarchy, the Church, social ranks, property and the family — should be preserved. Conservatives feared fast change and preferred slow, gradual change. Most of them were not foolish: they did not want to go all the way back to the past. They had learned from Napoleon that some modern reforms (a modern army, an efficient government, an end to serfdom) could actually make a king’s rule stronger. But the one thing they could not accept was the new idea that power belongs to the people.

In 1815, the powers who had together beaten Napoleon — Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria — met at Vienna. The meeting was hosted by the Austrian Chancellor Duke Metternich, the great enemy of nationalism. They drew up the Treaty of Vienna (1815). Its whole purpose was to undo the changes of the Napoleonic years and restore the old order:

• The Bourbon dynasty (the old French royal family) was put back on the throne of France.

• France lost the territories it had conquered.

• A ring of strong states was set up around France to stop it from expanding again — for example, the kingdom of the Netherlands (including Belgium) in the north.

• The old monarchies that Napoleon had overthrown were restored.

These new conservative governments were autocratic — they would not tolerate any criticism. They brought in censorship laws to control newspapers, books, plays and songs, trying to stamp out the ideas of liberty that the French Revolution had spread.

This sets up the great clash of the chapter: liberals (who wanted change) against conservatives (who wanted to keep the old order). Figure 1.4 below puts the two camps side by side so you can see exactly what each one wanted — and, importantly, why the conservatives were so afraid:

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This figure also answers a question worth asking out loud: why were the conservatives so terrified of nationalism? Think about it from a king’s chair. Nationalism says the country belongs to the people, and the people should rule themselves. But the king’s whole claim to power was that the country belonged to him. So nationalism was not just a new idea to him — it was a direct threat to his throne. That is why conservatives censored the press, banned songs, and hunted down nationalists. They were fighting for their own survival.

The revolutionaries and Mazzini’s secret societies

The conservatives’ crackdown drove the nationalists underground. Across Europe, secret societies sprang up to train revolutionaries and spread their ideas in private, away from the censors and the police. To be a revolutionary then meant two things: to oppose the monarchies set up after Vienna, and to fight for liberty and freedom — usually by trying to build a nation-state.

The most famous of these revolutionaries was the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini. Born in Genoa in 1805, he joined a secret society called the Carbonari as a young man, and was sent into exile at just 26 for trying to start a revolution. He then founded two more underground societies: Young Italy and Young Europe, whose members were like-minded young men from Italy, Poland, France and the German states. Mazzini believed that God had meant nations to be the natural building blocks of mankind. So Italy, he argued, could not stay a patchwork of little states — it had to become one single united republic. His tireless work and his dream of democratic republics so frightened the conservatives that Metternich called him “the most dangerous enemy of our social order”.

The Romantic imagination: why poems and folk tales became weapons

Here is another “given” worth opening up. NCERT tells us that culture — art, poetry, stories, music — helped create the nation. But why would a folk song or a fairy tale matter in a political struggle? This is one of the most beautiful ideas in the chapter, so let us understand it properly.

Nationalism did not grow only through wars and treaties. It also grew through culture, in a movement called Romanticism. Romantic artists and poets turned away from cold reason and science, and focused instead on emotions, feelings and a sense of a shared past. Their goal was to make people feel they had a common heritage — a common cultural soul — that bound them into one nation.

A German thinker named Johann Gottfried Herder argued that the true spirit of a nation — what he called the volksgeist — was to be found not among the rich and educated, but among the common people (das volk): in their folk songs, folk poetry and folk dances. So collecting and writing down this folk culture became an important nation-building task. This is exactly why the famous Grimm Brothers spent six years walking from village to village, collecting old fairy tales. To them, those tales were the pure voice of the German people, and recording them was a way to resist French domination and build a German identity.

Now, why were language and folk culture especially powerful weapons under foreign rule? Think about Poland, which had been wiped off the map and divided up by Russia, Prussia and Austria. After Russia took over, the Russians banned the Polish language in schools and forced Russian on everyone. So what did the Polish people do? They turned their language into a weapon of resistance. Priests insisted on using Polish in church and in religious teaching. Many were jailed or sent to Siberia for refusing to preach in Russian. Using your own language became an act of defiance.

Here is the deep reason this works. When a foreign ruler conquers your land, he takes your government and your army. But he cannot easily take your songs, your stories, and your mother tongue — the things you carry in your heart and pass to your children. So a banned language or a remembered folk tale becomes a secret flag. It says, quietly but powerfully, “we are still a people, and we are still here.” That is why a poem could be as dangerous to an empire as a gun.

The hungry 1840s and the revolutions of 1848

Ideas alone rarely start a revolution. People also need to be angry and desperate — and in the 1840s, they were.

The first half of the 1800s saw a huge rise in population. There were far more people looking for jobs than there were jobs. People crowded from villages into city slums. Small craftsmen, especially weavers, were crushed by cheap machine-made cloth pouring in from industrial England. Where the old nobles still ruled, peasants groaned under feudal dues. Then, when a harvest failed and food prices shot up, ordinary people were pushed into deep poverty. These years of hunger and hardship are often called the “hungry 1840s”.

This misery exploded in 1848. And here is the important thing to grasp: in 1848 two different revolutions happened at the same time, side by side.

First, there was the revolt of the poor — the starving peasants, the unemployed, and the desperate workers. In Paris, food shortages and joblessness drove huge crowds into the streets. They built barricades, and the king, Louis Philippe, was forced to flee. (An earlier warning sign had been the Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1845, when starving weavers attacked the contractor who had slashed their already tiny wages — eleven were shot by the army.)

Second, parallel to the revolt of the poor, there was a revolution led by the educated, liberal middle classes. They were not mainly hungry — they wanted political change: a constitution, freedom of the press, freedom to form associations, and the uniting of their people into a nation-state. In Germany, middle-class men gathered in the city of Frankfurt and elected an all-German National Assembly. On 18 May 1848, 831 elected representatives met in the Church of St Paul and drafted a constitution for a united German nation, to be headed by a king under a parliament.

So why did 1848 fail? When the Assembly offered the crown to Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the King of Prussia, he rejected it and joined the other kings against the elected assembly. Worse, the middle-class members of the parliament resisted the demands of the workers and poorer people — so they lost the support of the very crowds who could have protected them. With the people divided, the army was called in and the assembly was broken up.

There is also a vital point about women here. Women had taken a very active part — they founded political clubs, started newspapers, and joined demonstrations. Yet they were denied the right to vote in the Frankfurt elections. When the parliament met, women were allowed in only as observers, standing in the visitors’ gallery. The fight for women’s political rights was far from won.

But here is the surprising twist. Even though the conservatives crushed the revolutions of 1848, they could not put everything back the way it was. The kings finally understood that endless cycles of revolt and repression were exhausting. So in the years after 1848, the autocratic monarchies of central and eastern Europe began to grant some of the changes themselves — they abolished serfdom and bonded labour, and gave more autonomy to the Hungarians in 1867. The revolution had failed on the surface, but it had moved the world forward.

The making of Germany and Italy

After 1848, nationalism took a sharp turn. In the first half of the century it had been tied to democracy and revolution — the liberals’ dream. But now conservatives themselves started using nationalism, not to free the people, but to build powerful states and gain dominance. This is exactly how Germany and Italy were finally unified — from the top, by force, not from below by the people.

Germany — can the army build a nation? The middle-class liberals had tried and failed in 1848. From then on, the job of uniting Germany was taken over by Prussia, the strongest German state, backed by its monarchy, its army, and its big landowners (called Junkers). The man who drove the whole process was Prussia’s chief minister, Otto von Bismarck. His method was famous and ruthless: he believed in “blood and iron” — meaning war and the army, not speeches and votes. Over seven years, Prussia fought three wars — against Denmark, Austria and France — and won them all. The wars knitted the German states together. In January 1871, the Prussian king, William I, was proclaimed the German Emperor (Kaiser) in a grand ceremony at the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. Germany was one nation at last.

Figure 1.5 below shows this unification as a simple before-and-after sketch — not a real map, just rough boxes — so you can see the scattered states being pulled into a single empire:

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Italy unified. Like Germany, Italy had long been split into many pieces — seven states, with the north under Austria, the centre under the Pope, and the south under Bourbon kings. Even the Italian language had no single common form. Three men, with three very different roles, brought Italy together:

• Giuseppe Mazzini was the dreamer and the spirit. Through his Young Italy society he spread the idea that Italy must become one. His uprisings in 1831 and 1848 failed, but he kept the dream alive.

• Count Camillo de Cavour was the clever planner (the brain). He was the chief minister of Sardinia-Piedmont, the one Italian-ruled state. He was not a revolutionary or a democrat — he worked through smart diplomacy. Through a careful alliance with France, he defeated the Austrians in 1859.

• Giuseppe Garibaldi was the soldier (the sword). He led a band of armed volunteers, famous as the Red Shirts. In 1860 his “Expedition of the Thousand” marched into southern Italy and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, winning the support of local peasants and driving out the foreign rulers.

In 1861, Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia-Piedmont was proclaimed king of a united Italy. (A charming detail: many ordinary Italian peasants were so cut off from these ideas that they had never even heard the word “Italia” — some thought “La Talia” was the name of the king’s wife!)

The strange case of Britain

Britain is the “odd one out” of this chapter, and examiners love to ask why. So let us be clear about how Britain was different.

In every other story so far, the nation was born through a sudden revolution or a war of unification. Britain was the opposite: its nation-state was the result of a long, slow process, with no single dramatic revolution.

Before the 1700s, there was no “British” nation. People thought of themselves by their ethnic group — as English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish, each with its own culture and traditions. So how did “Britain” come about? Not by the peoples joyfully joining as equals, but by the English steadily extending their power over the others:

• The Act of Union (1707) joined England and Scotland into the “United Kingdom of Great Britain” — but in practice this meant England dominating Scotland. The British parliament was controlled by its English members.

• Scotland’s distinct culture was suppressed. The Catholic Highland clans were brutally repressed; the Scottish Highlanders were forbidden to speak their Gaelic language or wear their traditional dress, and many were driven from their homes.

• Ireland suffered the same fate. After a failed revolt in 1798, Ireland was forcibly joined to the United Kingdom in 1801.

So a “British nation” was forged by promoting one dominant English culture — the Union Jack flag, the anthem “God Save Our Noble King”, and the English language — while the older nations survived only as junior partners. Britain became a nation not through the people’s revolution, but through the gradual takeover by its strongest member.

Visualising the nation: Marianne and Germania

Here is a clever puzzle the artists of the time had to solve. It is easy to draw a king — you just paint his portrait. But how do you draw an idea like “the nation”? You cannot photograph a nation. So artists used a trick: they personified the nation. That means they drew the nation as if it were a person — and they chose a female figure.

This female figure did not stand for any real woman. She was an allegory — a person or object used to stand for an abstract idea. (You have seen this before: “Justice” is drawn as a blindfolded woman holding scales.) During the French Revolution, artists had already drawn ideas like Liberty and the Republic as women, with special objects to identify them.

So each nation got its own female allegory:

• In France, she was named Marianne — a common French name, to suggest she belonged to the ordinary people. Her symbols came from Liberty and the Republic: the red cap, the tricolour, and the broken chain. Her statues were placed in public squares, and her image went onto coins and stamps, to remind everyone of the nation.

• In Germany, she was named Germania. She became the symbol of the German nation.

The brilliant thing is that every object Germania carries has a hidden meaning. Once you learn the code, you can “read” the painting like a sentence. Figure 1.6 below labels each of her symbols, so you can decode them yourself:

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Nationalism turns aggressive: imperialism and the Balkans

Now comes the dark turn in the story. By the last quarter of the 1800s, nationalism had changed its character. In the first half of the century it had been idealistic — it dreamed of freedom and democracy for all peoples. But now it became narrow and aggressive. Nationalist groups grew intolerant of each other and were quick to go to war. And the big powers used the nationalism of smaller peoples as a tool to grow their own empires — this mixing of nationalism with empire-building is called imperialism.

Before we go on, make sure these last two terms are clear:

The most dangerous flashpoint of this aggressive new nationalism was a region called the Balkans (in south-eastern Europe — today’s Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Bosnia and their neighbours). Its people were mostly Slavs. NCERT calls the Balkans the “powder keg” of Europe — but why? This is the gap to close, because it leads straight to the First World War. Several causes piled up in one small, tense region, like gunpowder in a barrel:

• The Balkans were broken into many small Slav nations who were jealous of one another — each one wanted more territory at its neighbours’ expense.

• The Ottoman Empire, which had ruled much of the Balkans, was growing weak. As its grip slipped, one people after another broke away and declared independence — which only increased the squabbling over land.

• Each Balkan people used Romantic nationalism and history to argue, “We were once a free and great nation, and we want our old territory back” — and several different peoples claimed the same lands.

• Worst of all, the big powers — Russia, Germany, Britain and Austria-Hungary — all pushed into the region, each desperate to grab influence there and block its rivals. They were already locked in fierce rivalry over trade, colonies, and military strength.

Put all that together — many bitter little nations, a collapsing empire, overlapping land claims, and great powers shoving each other — and you have a region packed with explosive tension. One spark could set it all off. Figure 1.7 below draws the Balkans as exactly that: a barrel of gunpowder, with each cause feeding into it, and the spark of big-power rivalry on top:

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These tensions led to a series of wars in the Balkans and, finally, in 1914, to the First World War. Nationalism, which had begun as a beautiful dream of free peoples, had ended in disaster.

But the story does not end there, and here is the hopeful note. While European nationalism turned aggressive, the same basic idea — that people should organise themselves into nation-states and rule themselves — spread to the colonies of Asia and Africa. The colonised peoples used it to fight against their European masters. Indians, in particular, took the idea and made it their own. So the idea born in France in 1789 would, a century later, help inspire India’s own freedom struggle — which is exactly where the next chapter goes.

Common Mistakes

Before the quizzes, let us clear up four misunderstandings that catch students out every year. Read each one carefully — knowing the wrong version helps you remember the right one.

Quick Check

Try these four questions. Pick an answer, then read the explanation — even if you get it right.

Practice Problems

Now try writing full answers, the way you would in an exam. Attempt each one on paper first, then reveal the model answer and compare.

Easy

Medium

Challenge

Summary

Here are the key things you should now be able to explain in your own words:

• Nationalism is a fairly new idea, born around the French Revolution of 1789, which declared that the nation belongs to its people (citizens), not to a king. A nation is built over time, not something that always existed.

• The French built national feeling through one flag, one language, one set of laws and common weights and measures, and spread the idea across Europe through their armies and the Jacobin clubs.

• Napoleon’s Civil Code (1804) gave equality before the law and ended feudal privileges, but his rule also took away political freedom and brought heavy taxes, censorship and forced army service.

• Liberalism wanted freedom, a constitution, parliament and free trade — though its idea of voting still left out women and poorer men. The Zollverein customs union (1834) strengthened nationalism by making the Germans feel like one economic people.

• Conservatism wanted to keep kings, the Church and the old order. The Treaty of Vienna (1815) tried to turn the clock back, but could not kill nationalism.

• Nationalism was kept alive by revolutionaries in secret societies (Mazzini), by Romantic culture (folk tales, poetry and language — especially under foreign rule), and by the revolutions of 1848, where the liberal middle class and the hungry poor both rose up.

• Germany was unified by Bismarck through “blood and iron” (1871), and Italy by Mazzini, Cavour and Garibaldi (1861). Britain became a nation slowly, through England’s domination over Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

• Nations were given a face through female allegories — Marianne (France) and Germania (Germany) — whose symbols each carried a meaning.

• By the end of the century, nationalism turned aggressive and joined with imperialism. The tense Balkans became the “powder keg” that exploded into the First World War in 1914.

What’s Next

You have seen how the idea of the nation was born in Europe and built powerful new countries there. But the story does not stay in Europe. The very same idea — that a people should be free to rule themselves — travelled to the colonies that Europe had conquered.

In Chapter 2, “Nationalism in India”, you will see what happened when this idea reached India under British rule. You will learn how Mahatma Gandhi turned nationalism into a mass movement, how people from every part of society — peasants, workers, women, tribals and the middle class — joined the freedom struggle, and how India developed its own special kind of nationalism. Watch for the same ideas you met here — a shared identity, common symbols, the role of culture and language — but now used by Indians to fight against an empire, not to build a state from the top. The idea born in France in 1789 is about to change India’s destiny.