Rise of nationalism

Nationalism, the belief that people who share a language, history and territory should form their own political community, became a dominant force in the nineteenth century. Its rise was driven by the French Revolution, which proclaimed that sovereignty belonged to the nation, and by the Napoleonic Wars, which provoked resistance in the occupied countries. Thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte stressed the importance of language and culture. Nationalism inspired the Greek war of independence from the 1820s, the revolutions of 1848 and the unification of Italy in 1861 and of Germany in 1871. It also undermined multi-ethnic empires such as the Habsburg and Ottoman states. In the twentieth century it fed anti-colonial movements, but also rivalries and conflicts, including the First World War.

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