Nationalism is a strong feeling of pride in and devotion to one's country. It was inspirational at first and brought out the best in everyone. Nationalism was about Europe starting to work togeeeether, with an emphasis on being individual, unique countries, but eventually it turned into rivalry. A whooole bunch of the european countries got national anthems around this time (most of them were utterly and rediculously emotional, violent, and exaggerated as could be :) It started in Germany and Italy waaaay back in the day, mostly by Bismarck, and eventually wound up uniting them, before that they had all been a bunch of little tribes in the same area. Bismarck knew unifying Germany would make it stronger so he used "realpolitik"---power before principal based on the needs of the country---to get Germany together. He has a very famous "Blood and Iron" speech and was very against socialism. Nationalism and all of the tubulance that was goi
ng on in Germany at theee time, spread to Italy. In the end, they both wound up being unified :)Reviewin'---
The story I did for my puppet show was about the Hapsburgs. They were the royal rulers over the Austro-Hungarian empire, which suffered lots of fighting as a result of the rise of nationalism. That was because it was multi-national. The Hapsburgs were Catholics, they gave partial independence to Hungary under something called a Dual Monarchy. This upset the Balkan people of the empire, who felt alienated. The Balkan people included Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukranians, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, and the Slovenes. Every time that fights happened in the empire, the reforms that were made catered only to the Hungarian, so they were actually counter-productive. I could have done a better job illistrating what was going down in the Hapsburg faaaamily but it I did a decent job explaining the story of what was happeneing when I gave my puppet show, I think.
When Bismarck ruled as chancellor over Germany, he got all super paranoid. He thought of alot of different aspects of life in Germany as a threat to unification and to his power. The main one's that he felt threatened by were the Catholic church and Socialism. So, first he made up the Kulturkampf which means "battle for civilization" where he tried to make Catholic people put loyalty to the state aaaabove loyalty to the church, and then he made all sorts of anti-socialism laws. To turn people away from socialism he gave them insurance for old age, health, and accidents, these which are only socailist thiiings and ideas. it backfired though because people stuck with socialism. Under Kaiser William II's rule, social welfare was made to help certain groups of people and all the schools in the Germany taught loyalty to the emperor, theeeen William poured money into military stuff with hopes of expantion. Aaalll of this, plus rapid industrialization, were results of nationalism and German unification. While all of this was going on, the Austro-Hungarian empire was a complete mess. Even though the Balkan countries started getting independence from the Hapsburgs, they were under the rule of the Ottoman empire too. The multinational state of the ottoman empire caused maaaany many wars and eventually lead to the start of WWI. So, nationalism had very different affects on the two countries.
Reflectin' & Reinventin'---
I think that, like so many other ideas in this world, nationalism works in some situations, and makes things worse in others. As stated earlier, it was originally focused on appreciating what made each country unique, which was goooood, 'cause it was bringing europe together kinda, but it shifted the focus to be on what made each country the best. There's no way in heck that this idea of 'pride in one's nation' and unification can work in a culturally diverse place. The way it could be changed noooow would be like stronger belief in humanity, like everyone together in the world as opposed to pride in individual nations. The the world be more peaceful :)
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