31 Nationalism in Europe

The 19th century saw great changes in the political map of Europe, of comparable significance to the economic and social transformation wrought by the Industrial Revolution. In the southeast of the continent, a number of new countries emerged as the old empire of the Ottoman Turks began to disintegrate (see The Ottoman empire), while in central and southern Europe two powerful new states were created: Italy and Germany.

These new states were based on ethnicity, and in the 19th century more and more people defined themselves by their ethnic or national identity, principally based on the language they spoke. In order to shore up this identity, many creative artists of the period celebrated an often mythologized past and drew extensively on folk music and folk tales, thus helping to create what were often new national “traditions.”

Although in western Europe, nation-states such as Britain and France had been long established, elsewhere on the continent the picture, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, was very different. Germany was a patchwork of mostly minor principalities, largely dominated by Austria. Austria’s own empire included Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Slovenes, Croats and Italians, as well as German-speakers. Italy, like Germany, had no political unity, being merely—in the words of Prince Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister—“a geographical expression.”

The Revolutions of 1848 The defeat of Napoleon in 1815, and the restoration of the old absolutist monarchies and empires, put a lid on the hopes that had been raised by the French Revolution. The burgeoning middle classes, their wealth deriving from commerce and industry, had hoped for greater political power at the expense of the old landed aristocracy, and thus many espoused the cause of liberalism—whereby the power of the absolute monarchs would be replaced by a constitution and a legislative assembly in which they would be represented. In those parts of Europe where people found themselves under a foreign ruler, calls for constitutional reform often coincided with demands for the right of national self-determination.

After a number of abortive uprisings in the preceding decades, in 1848 revolutions broke out in many parts of Europe. The unrest started in France, where, as elsewhere, there was also a socialist element involved, as the peasantry and the urban working class found themselves not only disenfranchised but suffering from hunger and unemployment. The French king was deposed, and the Second Republic declared.

Uprisings followed in Germany, Czech-speaking Bohemia, Poland, Italy, Hungary, Sicily and even in Vienna itself. In the Austrian-dominated German Confederation, nationalists formed the Frankfurt Parliament, which called for liberal reforms and German unification. In Prussia, King Frederick William IV was obliged to agree to the creation of a constitution and a national assembly, and to support the goal of German unification, while in the Austrian empire, the Bohemians and Hungarians achieved a measure of independence. Constitutions were also granted in a number of the Italian states. It was, many thought, “the springtime of the peoples.”

But many of these gains were short-lived. In France, the Second Republic was overthrown in 1851 in a coup by the nephew of Napoleon I, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who declared himself to be the Emperor Napoleon III.

Frederick William refused the offer of the crown of a united Germany, and Austria’s domination of the German Confederation was restored. Austria also crushed the revolts in Bohemia, Hungary and northern Italy, and absolutist imperial rule was restored.

Bismarck’s wars

Bismarck’s first territorial acquisition for Prussia was Schleswig-Holstein, control of which had long been disputed with Denmark. In 1864 he made a temporary alliance with Austria and then attacked and defeated Denmark. Two years later he provoked the Seven Weeks’ War with Austria, and the defeat of the latter left Prussia as the preeminent power in northern Germany. Bismarck’s final move was to play on the insecurities of the independent southern German states, who were fearful of falling victim to Napoleon III’s military adventurism. To bring them on side, Bismarck goaded France into launching the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, which ended in French defeat and set the seal on German unification.

Italian and German unification After 1848, the two most significant developments in 19th-century European nationalism, the unification of Italy and Germany, were largely engineered by the chief ministers of two kingdoms, Piedmont and Prussia.

Piedmont, a constitutional monarchy in northwest Italy, was more advanced economically and industrially than the other Italian states, and its prime minister from 1852, Camillo di Cavour, set about uniting Italy under its leadership through a mixture of diplomacy and war. In 1859, having promised the cession of Nice and Savoy to France, Cavour secured French military support in expelling the Austrians from Lombardy. In 1860 the radical Italian guerrilla leader Giuseppe Garibaldi launched a campaign in which he and his 1,000 Redshirt volunteers swept aside the Spanish dynasty that ruled Sicily and Naples. Determined to maintain Piedmontese control over the process of national liberation, Cavour sent troops to the Papal States to forestall Garibaldi’s ambitions there. In 1861 the kingdom of Italy was established, and Garibaldi recognized Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont as king of the united country. The last remaining pieces of the jigsaw soon fell into place. After Italy gave support to Prussia in its successful 1866 war against Austria, the latter was obliged to hand over Venetia in the northeast, while Italy’s historic capital, Rome, was finally acquired in 1870.

“We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.”

Massimo d’Azeglio, at the first meeting of the parliament of unified Italy in 1861

Diplomacy, war and realpolitik also marked the route to German unification, which was masterminded by Otto von Bismarck, chief minister of Prussia. Bismarck was—in contrast to the revolutionaries of 1848—a militaristic conservative, espousing a strategy of “blood and iron” and engineering three wars in order to bring all the German states under the domination of Prussia. In 1871 King William of Prussia was duly declared Kaiser of a new German empire—which now included the resource-rich former French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.

Thus the birth of a powerful new German state—the most populous and one of the most industrially advanced in Europe—gave rise to three-quarters of a century of bitter Franco–German enmity, which was to contribute to the outbreak of two devastating world wars. However, the spark that set off the first of these conflagrations flashed a long way from the Franco-German frontier. It came in June 1914 on the other side of Europe, in Sarajevo.

the condensed idea

The growth of nationalism contributed to the outbreak of the First World War