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Nationalism is the political doctrine that ethnic, linguistic, or cultural communities have the right to self-governance in the form of a sovereign state. Emerging from the French Revolution's concept of popular sovereignty, nationalism transformed the dynastic empires of Europe in the nineteenth century, driving movements for German and Italian unification, anti-Ottoman independence struggles in Greece and the Balkans, and eventually anti-colonial movements worldwide. Historians distinguish civic nationalism (membership by shared political values) from ethnic nationalism (membership by descent), with profound implications for inclusion and exclusion.
Trace concrete case studies: Greek independence (1821), German unification under Bismarck, Italian Risorgimento. Compare the rhetoric of nationalist leaders with the actual patchwork of ethnic realities on the ground.
From your study of the French Revolution and Enlightenment thought, you know that the late eighteenth century produced a radical new idea: political authority derives from the people, not from God or hereditary right. Nationalism is what happened when that idea collided with the cultural diversity of Europe. If the people are sovereign, then who exactly are "the people"? Nationalist thinkers answered: a people sharing a common language, culture, history, and territory — a nation. Each such nation, they argued, has the right to govern itself in its own state.
This argument was historically transformative because it directly threatened the dynastic empires that dominated Europe. The Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires each ruled over dozens of distinct linguistic and cultural communities without making any claim that those communities shared an identity. Nationalism said that arrangement was illegitimate — that Greeks should govern Greece, Italians should govern Italy, Germans should govern Germany. The nineteenth century became a laboratory for testing that principle, through the Greek War of Independence (1821), the revolutions of 1848, Italian unification under Cavour, and German unification under Bismarck.
Historians distinguish two broad varieties with very different political implications. Civic nationalism defines the nation by shared political values and legal membership — anyone who accepts the constitution and laws can belong, regardless of ethnic origin. This was broadly the French model and made possible multiethnic citizenship. Ethnic nationalism defines the nation by descent, language, and cultural heritage — membership is a matter of who you are, not what you believe. This model, influential in German Romantic thought, draws sharper lines between insiders and outsiders and has historically provided the conceptual resources for exclusion and persecution of minorities.
One of the most important insights from the historical study of nationalism is how frequently the "nations" that nationalists claimed to represent were themselves constructions. Bismarck did not unify a pre-existing German nation; he created one, through war, institutional design, and the deliberate promotion of a common German identity across previously distinct kingdoms. The same is true of Italy, Greece, and virtually every other nation-state. Nationalist movements did not simply find nations waiting to be liberated — they built them, often through processes that were deeply contested and involved significant minorities who did not fit the dominant national narrative.
This is why historians emphasize that the nation-state is not a natural form but a historically specific one, and why its apparent inevitability is itself a product of ideology rather than fact. Nations have been constructed; they can also be reconstructed, dissolved, or contested — as ongoing conflicts over borders, minority rights, and separatist movements continue to demonstrate.
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