Nationalism and the Nation-State in the 19th–20th Centuries
What this domain tests
This domain examines how nations were imagined, mobilized, and institutionalized, and what nation-states did to minorities and empires. You must define terms precisely and compare civic, ethnic, liberal, and authoritarian nationalism.
Core concepts
- Terms: a nation is a claimed community; a state is an institutional apparatus; a nation-state claims congruence between them. Civic nationalism stresses citizenship; ethnic nationalism stresses descent, language, or culture.
- Modernist approaches: Anderson’s “imagined communities,” Gellner’s link between nationalism and industrial society, and Hobsbawm’s invented traditions.
- Unification: Italy was unified in 1861 through Cavour’s diplomacy and Garibaldi’s mobilization; Germany was unified in 1871 under Bismarck’s Prussia through “blood and iron.”
- Self-determination: Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Versailles order promoted it selectively; mandates and minority treaties limited sovereignty in practice.
- Consequences: population exchange between Greece and Turkey (1923), statelessness, ethnic cleansing, fascist ultranationalism, and nation-building after decolonization.
Worked example
Compare German and Italian unification. Both opposed dynastic fragmentation and invoked national community. Germany was largely top-down, driven by Prussia and Bismarck; Italy combined Piedmontese statecraft with popular volunteers. Both new states excluded or assimilated minorities, so unification did not produce homogeneity. The comparison should explain method and consequence, not just dates.
Traps
Equating nation-state with ethnic homogeneity; treating nationalism as only right-wing; assuming self-determination was applied equally; ignoring how states create nations through schooling, conscription, and language policy.