Tenth Grade Social Studies: Nationalism and State-Building: Unification of Italy and Germany

During the nineteenth century, nationalism emerged as the most potent, transformative ideological force in global politics, redrawing the boundaries of Europe and redefining sovereign legitimacy. Emerging from the shared linguistic, cultural, and historical awakenings of the Romantic era and accelerated by the Napoleonic Wars, nationalism posited that humanity is naturally divided into distinct nations, and that each nation possesses the inherent right to self-determination within its own sovereign nation-state. While nationalism acted as a unifying force that forged modern consolidated states in the Italian peninsula and the German Confederation through military conflict and calculated statecraft (Realpolitik), it simultaneously functioned as a profoundly destabilizing force that fractured multiethnic, dynastic empires such as the Austrian Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire.

The Ideological Architecture of Modern Nationalism

Modern nationalism was born out of the intersection of Enlightenment political theory, Romantic cultural aesthetics, and the geopolitical upheavals of the French Revolution.

               THE GENEALOGY OF 19TH-CENTURY NATIONALISM

    [ French Revolution & Popular Sovereignty ] ---> Sovereignty Belongs to "The Nation"
                         |
    [ Napoleonic Invasions of Europe ]          ---> Unified Resistance to Foreign Rule
                         |
    [ Romanticism & Cultural Awakenings ]       ---> Folk Culture, Language, Shared Myths
                         |
                         +-----------------------+
                         |                       |
                         v                       v
             [ UNIFYING FORCE ]        [ DISRUPTIVE FORCE ]
             - Italian Risorgimento     - Austro-Hungarian Fragility
             - German Unification       - Ottoman "Sick Man of Europe"

From Dynastic Allegiance to National Identity

Prior to the late eighteenth century, political loyalty was primarily dynastic, regional, or religious. Subjects owed allegiance to a royal monarch, a local feudal lord, or a religious confession, regardless of the language spoken in their territory. The Austrian Habsburg Empire, for example, united Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Croats, Serbs, and Italians under the single crown of the Catholic Habsburg dynasty.

The French Revolution revolutionized this concept by shifting sovereign authority from the personal body of the monarch to the abstract collective body of "the Nation" (la Nation). The state was no longer the personal property of a king; it was the political embodiment of the people. When Napoleon's armies conquered the European continent, they inadvertently exported this concept. By subjecting Germans, Spaniards, and Italians to French military occupation, heavy taxation, and conscription, Napoleon galvanized a shared sense of collective national humiliation and resistance, transforming vague cultural affinities into militant national consciousness.

Romanticism and the Search for Cultural Origins

The development of nineteenth-century nationalism was deeply intertwined with Romanticism—the artistic, literary, and philosophical movement that reacted against Enlightenment rationalism by emphasizing emotion, intuition, historical roots, and nature. Romantic intellectuals argued that a nation was an organic, living spiritual entity defined by a shared ancestral heritage.

In the German lands, philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder articulated the concept of the Volksgeist—the unique, immutable "spirit of the people." Herder argued that true culture emerges not from universal cosmopolitan reason, but from the native language, ancient folklore, traditional songs, and historical memories of ordinary people (das Volk). Philologists such as the Brothers Grimm traversed the German countryside collecting traditional peasant fairy tales to preserve the pristine essence of the Germanic linguistic soul. Across Europe, Romantic poets, composers, and painters—from Frédéric Chopin in Russian-occupied Poland to Giuseppe Verdi in Austrian-dominated northern Italy—channeled national folklore and heroic mythology into rallying cries for political liberation.

The Revolutions of 1848: The "Spring of Nations"

The explosive potential of nationalism culminated in the Revolutions of 1848, known historically as the "Spring of Nations" or the "Springtime of the Peoples." Triggered by a bourgeois revolution in Paris in February 1848, a wave of simultaneous urban insurrections swept across Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Venice, Budapest, and Prague.

Middle-class liberals, allied with radical workers and impoverished students, demanded constitutional government, freedom of the press, universal male suffrage, and the creation of unified nation-states based on liberal principles. In the German Confederation, liberal intellectuals convened the Frankfurt Parliament to draft a democratic constitution for a united Germany. However, the movement paralyzed itself over whether to create a Großdeutschland (Greater Germany including the Austrian Empire's German lands) or a Kleindeutschland (Lesser Germany excluding Austria and led by Prussia).

When the Frankfurt Parliament finally offered the imperial crown of a constitutional Germany to King Frederick William IV of Prussia in 1849, the monarch contemptuously rejected it, declaring that he would not pick up a "crown from the gutter" offered by a popular assembly. Throughout central and eastern Europe, conservative monarchies recovered their nerve. Austrian imperial forces, reinforced by 200,000 Russian troops dispatched by Tsar Nicholas I, ruthlessly crushed the Hungarian independence movement led by Lajos Kossuth and restored autocratic control over Italy and Bohemia. The failure of 1848 taught European nationalists a vital lesson: liberal idealism and parliamentary debates alone could not defeat entrenched military monarchies. National unification would be achieved not by idealistic speeches, but through centralized state authority and military force.

Italian Unification: The Risorgimento

For centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire, the Italian peninsula had remained a fragmented mosaic of independent city-states, papal territories, and foreign-dominated principalities. Austrian statesman Prince Klemens von Metternich famously dismissed Italy as nothing more than a "geographical expression."

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                    THE ARCHITECTS OF ITALIAN UNIFICATION              |
+-------------------+--------------------+------------------------------+
| Leader            | Role / Title       | Contribution to Risorgimento |
+-------------------+--------------------+------------------------------+
| Giuseppe Mazzini  | "The Soul" /       | Founded Young Italy (1831);  |
|                   | Carbonari Leader   | moral & idealistic republican|
| Camillo di Cavour | "The Brain" /      | Diplomatic alliances, real-  |
|                   | Prime Minister     | politik, Piedmontese modern  |
| Giuseppe Garibaldi| "The Sword" /      | Commanded Redshirts; conquered|
|                   | Guerrilla Commander| Sicily & Naples in 1860      |
| Victor Emmanuel II| "The Face" /       | King of Sardinia-Piedmont;   |
|                   | Constitutional King| first King of unified Italy  |
+-------------------+--------------------+------------------------------+

Mazzini and the Romantic Dream of Young Italy

The ideological foundation of the Italian unification movement—known as the Risorgimento (the Resurgence)—was constructed by Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872). A passionate, uncompromising republican, Mazzini founded the secret society Young Italy (La Giovine Italia) in 1831. Mazzini believed that Italian unification was a divine moral calling and that a free, unified, and democratic Italian republic would serve as the spiritual catalyst for the liberation of all oppressed European peoples.

Mazzini's fiery pamphlets inspired thousands of youthful patriots to launch ill-fated insurrections throughout the 1830s and 1840s, culminating in his brief tenure as head of the radical Roman Republic of 1849 before it was crushed by French troops. Although Mazzini's romantic rebellions consistently failed militarily, his writings succeeded in keeping the dream of Italian nationhood alive across multiple generations.

Cavour and the Realpolitik of Piedmont-Sardinia

The practical political unification of Italy was achieved not by Mazzini's republican masses, but through the calculating, pragmatic statecraft of Count Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810–1861). Appointed Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont in 1852 by King Victor Emmanuel II, Cavour was a classical liberal nobleman who recognized that Piedmont could only lead Italian unification if it became a modern, industrialized state capable of commanding international respect.

Cavour overhauled Piedmont's economy, constructing textile mills, expanding commercial steam navigation, modernizing agriculture, and laying extensive railway networks that linked northern Italy. More importantly, Cavour was a master of Realpolitik—politics based on practical, pragmatic calculations of national interest, power, and military alliance rather than abstract moral or ideological ideals. Cavour understood that small Piedmont could never expel the massive Austrian military machine from northern Italy on its own; it required the military alliance of a major European power.

In 1855, Cavour cleverly entered the Crimean War alongside Great Britain and France, earning a seat at the 1856 Paris peace conference, where he publicized the "Italian question" to sympathetic European diplomats. In 1858, Cavour met secretly with French Emperor Napoleon III at Plombières. Cavour secured an offensive alliance: France agreed to intervene militarily if Austria attacked Piedmont, and in exchange for French blood, Piedmont promised to cede the francophone provinces of Savoy and Nice to France. Cavour promptly provoked Austria into declaring war in 1859. The combined Franco-Piedmontese armies defeated the Austrians at the bloody battles of Magenta and Solferino, forcing Austria to cede the wealthy province of Lombardy to Piedmont. Concurrently, spontaneous plebiscites erupted in Tuscany, Parma, and Modena, which voted overwhelmingly to unite with Piedmont.

Garibaldi and the Redshirts: The Conquest of the South

While Cavour orchestrated events in the north, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882)—the swashbuckling military hero of the Risorgimento—seized the initiative in the south. An expert in guerrilla warfare who had spent years fighting in South American revolutions, Garibaldi commanded a volunteer force of 1,000 fiercely loyal, red-shirted patriots known as the "Expedition of the Thousand" (I Mille).

In May 1860, Garibaldi's Redshirts landed on the island of Sicily, winning the support of local peasants through promises of land reform and sweeping across the island with astounding speed. Crossing to the mainland, Garibaldi entered Naples in triumph, shattering the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Garibaldi prepared to march north on Rome to crown his conquests. However, Cavour was horrified by this prospect: an attack on Rome, guarded by French troops protecting the Pope, would provoke a catastrophic war with Catholic France and possibly derail the entire unification movement. Cavour dispatched the Piedmontese royal army south through papal territories to intercept Garibaldi.

In October 1860, at the historic meeting of Teano, the romantic republican Garibaldi demonstrated selfless patriotism. Refusing to ignite a fratricidal civil war between Italian factions, Garibaldi surrendered all his southern conquests to King Victor Emmanuel II, saluting him as the "King of Italy." In March 1861, the first all-Italian parliament convened in Turin, officially proclaiming the unified Kingdom of Italy. The remaining territorial pieces fell into place through opportunistic foreign diplomacy: Venetia was annexed in 1866 following Italy's alliance with Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War, and Rome was annexed in 1870 when French troops withdrew during the Franco-Prussian War, making Rome the eternal capital of the unified Italian kingdom.

German Unification: Blood and Iron and the Hegemony of Prussia

While Italian unification combined popular romantic heroism with northern diplomatic statecraft, German unification was entirely orchestrated from above by the authoritarian military elite of Prussia.

               THE PRUSSIAN WARS OF UNIFICATION

  [ Danish War (1864) ]          ---> Prussia & Austria seize Schleswig-Holstein
                 |
                 v
  [ Austro-Prussian War (1866) ] ---> Seven Weeks' War; Battle of Sadowa;
                                      Austria expelled from German affairs;
                                      North German Confederation created
                 |
                 v
  [ Franco-Prussian War (1870) ] ---> Ems Dispatch; Battle of Sedan;
                                      Collapse of Second French Empire;
                                      Coronation of Kaiser Wilhelm I at Versailles

The Rise of Prussia and the Zollverein

Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, thirty-nine independent German-speaking states were organized into a loose, powerless German Confederation (Deutscher Bund), dominated by the Austrian Empire. However, Prussia—the militaristic kingdom in northern Germany—possessed critical structural advantages that enabled it to challenge Austrian supremacy.

Prussia possessed immense coal and iron deposits in the Ruhr Valley and Silesia, allowing it to industrialize rapidly, construct an extensive military railway network, and build giant armaments firms like Krupp. Furthermore, in 1834, Prussia established the Zollverein (Customs Union), which eliminated internal trade tariffs among member German states while establishing uniform external tariffs. By excluding the Austrian Empire, whose protectionist economy could not compete, the Zollverein economically integrated the smaller German states under Prussian leadership decades before political unification occurred.

Otto von Bismarck: The Master of Realpolitik

In 1862, King Wilhelm I of Prussia became locked in a fierce constitutional stalemate with the liberal majority in the Prussian parliament (Landtag), which refused to approve tax increases to fund an expansion of the Prussian army. In desperation, the king appointed Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898)—a conservative, fiercely royalist Prussian nobleman (Junker)—as Minister President.

Bismarck made his political philosophy clear in his historic maiden address to the parliamentary budget committee on September 30, 1862: "Prussia must gather her power and keep it for the opportune moment, which has already been missed several times... Not through speeches and majority decisions are the great questions of the day decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood (Eisen und Blut)."

Bismarck simply ignored the parliament. He collected the unapproved taxes, expanded and modernized the Prussian military through mandatory conscription, and equipped soldiers with the revolutionary breach-loading Dreyse needle gun. Bismarck cared little for abstract German nationalist sentiment; his supreme goal was to aggrandize the power, prestige, and territory of the Prussian Hohenzollern monarchy. He recognized that the only way to establish Prussian dominance was to systematically wage a series of limited, calculated wars to isolate and eliminate rivals.

The Three Wars of German Unification

Bismarck engineered the unification of Germany through three masterfully orchestrated diplomatic and military campaigns:

  1. The Danish War (1864): When King Christian IX of Denmark attempted to annex the culturally German border duchies of Schleswig and Holstein into the Danish state, Bismarck invited Austria to join Prussia in a joint military intervention. The combined German forces swiftly crushed the Danish army. Under the Treaty of Gastein, Prussia took administrative control of Schleswig, while Austria administered Holstein. Bismarck intentionally engineered this awkward joint arrangement to create future pretexts for conflict with Austria.

  2. The Austro-Prussian War (1866): Bismarck isolated Austria diplomatically by securing French neutrality through vague promises of territorial compensation along the Rhine, obtaining Russian friendship by assisting the Tsar in crushing a Polish uprising, and forming an offensive military alliance with the newly formed Kingdom of Italy. Bismarck then deliberately provoked a dispute with Austria over the administration of Holstein. When Austria brought the matter before the German Confederation, Prussian troops marched into Holstein, igniting war.

To the shock of European observers, the Austro-Prussian War lasted a mere Seven Weeks. Utilizing advanced military railways, the electric telegraph for field communications, and superior Dreyse rifles, General Helmuth von Moltke's Prussian army obliterated the Austrian army at the decisive Battle of Sadowa (Königgrätz) in Bohemia in July 1866. Displaying classic Realpolitik, Bismarck resisted demands from his king and military generals to march into Vienna and humiliate Austria. Bismarck knew he would need Austrian neutrality in future European conflicts; he demanded no Austrian territory, only that Austria permanently withdraw from German affairs. Prussia annexed several northern states, including Hanover, and formed the North German Confederation, a Prussian-dominated federal union with King Wilhelm as President and Bismarck as Chancellor.

  1. The Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871): To complete unification, Bismarck needed to integrate the four independent, Catholic southern German states (Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, and Hesse-Darmstadt), which remained deeply suspicious of Protestant, authoritarian Prussia. Bismarck realized that only an existential threat from an external enemy—specifically France—could ignite pan-German nationalist fervor and compel the southern states to voluntarily merge with Prussia.

The opportunity arose in 1870 when Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, a cousin of the Prussian king, was invited to accept the vacant throne of Spain. French Emperor Napoleon III, terrified of being encircled between Prussian and Spanish Hohenzollern monarchs, objected vehemently. King Wilhelm I diplomatically agreed to withdraw Leopold's candidacy. When the French ambassador met Wilhelm at the spa town of Bad Ems to demand an unconditional promise that a Hohenzollern would never again seek the Spanish crown, Wilhelm politely refused.

Wilhelm sent a telegram describing the polite encounter to Bismarck. Bismarck edited the text—deleting words without altering the substance to make it appear that the Prussian king had insulted the French ambassador and that the ambassador had insolently disrespected the Prussian monarch. Bismarck released this famous Ems Dispatch to the international press on July 14, Bastille Day. French national pride exploded in fury; on July 19, 1870, an enraged Napoleon III fell into Bismarck's diplomatic trap and declared war on Prussia.

The southern German states immediately rallied to Prussia's side. Prussian and German armies mobilized with devastating speed, surrounding and capturing Napoleon III along with an entire French army of 100,000 men at the Battle of Sedan in September 1870. Parisian workers declared the Third French Republic and endured a brutal four-month siege before surrendering in January 1871.

The Proclamation of the German Empire and the European Balance of Power

On January 18, 1871, in the ultimate act of triumph and humiliation, Bismarck gathered the German princes in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles outside conquered Paris to proclaim King Wilhelm I of Prussia as Kaiser (Emperor) of the newly unified German Empire (Deutsches Kaiserreich). Under the harsh Treaty of Frankfurt, France was forced to pay a staggering five-billion-franc indemnity and cede the industrial, mineral-rich border territories of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, planting the seeds of bitter Franco-German enmity that would ignite World War I.

The unification of Germany completely overturned the European balance of power established at the Congress of Vienna. An industrial and military titan with a rapidly expanding population, dominant coal and steel industries, and the most formidable army on the globe had been forged in the center of Europe, permanently altering the continent's geopolitical dynamics.

Nationalism as a Fragmenting Force: Multiethnic Empires

While nationalism served as a cohesive glue that forged consolidated nation-states in Italy and Germany, it operated as a catastrophic, centripetal force inside the multinational, dynastic empires of Central and Eastern Europe.

               THE DEPLOYMENT OF DIVERGENT NATIONALISMS

  [ CONSOLIDATION ]                         [ FRAGMENTATION ]
  - Shared language & culture unites        - Multiple linguistic groups rebel
  - Examples: Italy (1861), Germany (1871)  - Examples: Austrian Empire, Ottoman Empire

The Austrian Empire and the Ausgleich of 1867

The Austrian Empire was a multiethnic empire comprising over a dozen distinct nationalities, where German-speakers formed a ruling minority of less than twenty-five percent. The largest and most politically organized minority were the Hungarians (Magyars), whose 1848 rebellion had been brutally crushed by Austrian and Russian arms.

Weakened by humiliating military defeats to France in 1859 and Prussia in 1866, the Habsburg monarchy under Emperor Franz Joseph faced internal collapse. To save his dynasty, Franz Joseph negotiated the historic Ausgleich (Compromise) of 1867, transforming the Austrian Empire into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.

Under the Dual Monarchy, Austria and Hungary became two virtually sovereign states united under a single ruler (who reigned as Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary) with joint ministries for foreign policy, finance, and military defense. While the Ausgleich satisfied the Magyar ruling elite, it completely ignored the empire's vast Slavic populations—including Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Croats, and Serbs—who remained politically disenfranchised second-class citizens, creating an unstable powder keg in Central Europe.

The Ottoman Empire: The "Sick Man of Europe" and the Balkans

The Ottoman Empire, once the terror of Christian Europe, suffered steady territorial and institutional decline throughout the nineteenth century, earning the label the "Sick Man of Europe" from Russian Tsar Nicholas I. As the Ottoman central administration deteriorated, the diverse Christian nationalities of the Balkan Peninsula—inspired by Enlightenment ideals and ethnic nationalism—rose in armed rebellion against Ottoman rule.

Greece won its independence in 1830 following a decade-long bloody war supported by Britain, France, and Russia. Serbia gained autonomy in 1817 and full independence following the Russo-Turkish War and the Congress of Berlin in 1878, which also recognized the independence of Romania and Montenegro and placed the Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzegovina under Austrian administrative occupation.

The Balkans rapidly earned the nickname the "Powder Keg of Europe." Pan-Slavic nationalism, fueled by independent Serbia and covertly financed by the Russian Empire, sought to liberate and unite all South Slavs (Yugoslavs) into a single nation. This ambitious goal directly threatened the territorial integrity of neighboring Austria-Hungary, which feared that a powerful Serbia would tear away its millions of South Slavic subjects. The clash between Pan-Slavic nationalism and Austro-Hungarian imperial preservation in the Balkans would ultimately trigger the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

Chapter Exercises

Exercise 1: Contrast the political philosophies and strategic methods employed by Giuseppe Mazzini, Count Camillo di Cavour, and Giuseppe Garibaldi in the unification of Italy. Explain how their distinct contributions synthesized to produce the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

Exercise 2: Analyze Otto von Bismarck's policy of Realpolitik and his famous declaration that the great questions of the day are decided by "blood and iron." How did Bismarck strategically engineer the Danish War, the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Prussian War to achieve German unification under Prussian hegemony?

Exercise 3: Explain why nationalism acted as a unifying force in Germany and Italy, but functioned as a profoundly destabilizing and fragmenting force within the Austrian Habsburg and Ottoman Empires during the nineteenth century.

Solutions and Explanations

Solution 1: Italian unification (Il Risorgimento) was achieved through the complementary synthesis of three distinct approaches embodied by Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi. Giuseppe Mazzini, known as "the Soul," provided the romantic, moral, and idealistic foundation through his secret society Young Italy, popularizing the visionary concept of a democratic, egalitarian republic that inspired an entire generation of Italian youth to sacrifice their lives for the national cause. In contrast, Count Camillo di Cavour, known as "the Brain," operated through pragmatic, calculating Realpolitik, recognizing that romantic rebellions were insufficient to defeat foreign empires. Serving as Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, Cavour modernized the northern Italian economy, laid strategic railroads, and utilized patient international diplomacy to secure a military alliance with Napoleon III's France, successfully expelling Austria from Lombardy. Finally, Giuseppe Garibaldi, known as "the Sword," provided dynamic guerrilla military leadership, leading his legendary thousand volunteer "Redshirts" to conquer Sicily and southern Italy from the Bourbon monarchy. In an extraordinary act of selfless patriotism at Teano, Garibaldi put aside his republican convictions to avoid a civil war, handing his southern conquests over to King Victor Emmanuel II, thereby allowing Cavour's diplomatic framework to formally establish the unified Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

Solution 2: Otto von Bismarck's Realpolitik rejected moral principles, ideological dogmas, and parliamentary consensus in favor of calculating, pragmatic actions designed strictly to maximize Prussian state power and Hohenzollern royal dominance. His assertion that historical crises are resolved by "blood and iron" reflected his conviction that military strength and diplomatic manipulation, rather than liberal constitutional debates, were the sole arbiters of international politics. Bismarck executed this strategy through three carefully planned wars. First, in the Danish War of 1864, Bismarck partnered with Austria to defeat Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein, creating a shared administration designed to generate future pretexts for conflict. Second, in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Bismarck isolated Austria diplomatically and mobilized superior Prussian military technology to crush Austrian forces in seven weeks, expelling Austria from German affairs and establishing the Prussian-dominated North German Confederation, while deliberately sparing Austria territorial humiliation to ensure its future neutrality. Third, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Bismarck baited French Emperor Napoleon III into declaring war by editing the Ems Dispatch to insult French honor, sparking a wave of pan-German nationalism that compelled the reluctant southern German Catholic states to unite militarily with Protestant Prussia, culminating in the complete defeat of France and the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

Solution 3: Nationalism acted as a unifying force in Germany and Italy because those geographic regions were characterized by cultural, linguistic, and historical homogeneity, where millions of people who shared a common language and cultural heritage lived partitioned across dozens of fragmented princely states. In those contexts, nationalism served as a consolidating ideology, drawing fragmented populations into single, powerful nation-states that pooled economic and military resources. Conversely, in the Austrian Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, nationalism acted as a lethal fragmenting force because these states were multinational, dynastic polyglots ruled by a dominant imperial minority that imposed its will over millions of linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse subject peoples. In the Austrian Empire, German-speakers ruled over Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and South Slavs; when these groups developed national consciousness, they viewed Habsburg rule as foreign oppression, forcing the monarchy to concede the Ausgleich of 1867 to create Austria-Hungary. Similarly, in the Ottoman Empire, Christian Balkan populations such as Greeks, Serbs, and Romanians rose in armed rebellion to tear away Ottoman territories, creating the volatile "Balkan Powder Keg" where ethnic nationalism directly threatened to dissolve the multiethnic imperial state.