AP European History

## Learning Outcomes

- Explain why nationalism became a major force in Europe after the French Revolution and Napoleonic era
- Identify different ways nationalists created loyalty, including culture, liberal reform, war, and state-building
- Distinguish between **liberal nationalism** and later, more exclusionary forms of nationalism
- Recall key figures and events such as Herder, Mazzini, the Revolutions of **1848**, Cavour, and Bismarck
- Understand how nationalism challenged multinational empires such as Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire
- Analyse how nationalism could be both unifying and destructive in 19th-century Europe

## AP European History Syllabus

For the AP European History, you are expected to understand how nationalism inspired loyalty in different forms during the 19th century, with a focus on the following syllabus points:

- Know that nationalism tied primary loyalty to the nation rather than to dynasty, region, or local lord
- Identify how nationalists used language, folk culture, symbols, religion, and military service to build loyalty
- Explain **romantic nationalism**, including the role of folklore, language, and the idea of a national spirit
- Understand how nationalism and liberalism often worked together in the early 19th century but later diverged
- Identify examples of nationalism from below, such as Mazzini and the Revolutions of **1848**, and nationalism from above, such as Cavour and Bismarck
- Explain how nationalism contributed to the unification of Italy and Germany
- Understand how late-19th-century nationalism could become racial, anti-Semitic, and chauvinistic
- Recognise how nationalism weakened multinational empires and helped create later tensions leading toward World War I

## Test Your Knowledge

_Attempt these questions before reading this article. If you find some difficult or cannot remember the answers, look more closely at that area during your revision._

1. Why did nationalism become stronger in Europe after the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars?
2. How did romantic writers and artists help create national loyalty?
3. What is the difference between Mazzini’s nationalism and Bismarck’s nationalism?
4. How did nationalism challenge Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire?
5. Why is the Dreyfus Affair useful evidence for the darker side of nationalism?

## Introduction

In AP European History Unit 7, nationalism is not just one idea with one outcome. It could call people to fight for liberty and self-government, but it could also justify exclusion, hatred, and expansion. That is why the syllabus stresses that nationalists inspired loyalty in varied ways.

The key shift was this: more Europeans began to think that their deepest political loyalty should go to a **nation** made up of people with a shared culture, language, history, or identity. This challenged older loyalties to kings, emperors, provinces, and dynasties. It also helps explain why the 19th century saw both national unification and national conflict.

> **Key Term: nationalism**
> The belief that a people sharing a common identity should give primary loyalty to their nation and often should rule themselves in their own state.

### From subjects to citizens: why nationalism became powerful

Nationalism did not suddenly appear in **1815**, but the French Revolution and Napoleonic era made it far more powerful. The Revolution claimed to act in the name of the nation, not just a king. Mass conscription also mattered. When a government calls ordinary men to military service as citizens, it teaches them that they belong to a larger national community.

> **Key Term: national self-determination**
> The principle that a nation should determine its own political status and govern itself.

French expansion spread these ideas across Europe, but often in an indirect way. In Spain, resistance to Napoleon produced intense patriotic feeling. In the German and Italian states, French occupation gave people a common enemy. National feeling often grows when people start asking, "Why are outsiders ruling us?" So French domination spread both revolutionary ideals and anti-French nationalism at the same time.

This is a classic AP causation point: French power did not simply export nationalism from Paris to the rest of Europe. It also provoked local reactions that helped Germans, Italians, and others imagine themselves as one people.

Nationalism also appealed because it offered a new source of legitimacy. Conservatives wanted order through dynasty and tradition. Liberals wanted constitutions and rights. Nationalists argued that government should rest on the people of the nation. Early in the century, these ideas often overlapped.

> **Test Tip:** In an SAQ or LEQ, do not define nationalism only as "love of country." Stronger answers show that nationalism is political: loyalty to the nation as the main source of identity and authority.

### Romantic nationalism: culture, language, and emotion

One major way nationalism inspired loyalty was through culture. This is often called **romantic nationalism**. Instead of building loyalty only through laws or constitutions, romantic nationalists appealed to emotion, memory, song, folklore, and language.

> **Key Term: romantic nationalism**
> A form of nationalism that builds loyalty through shared culture, folklore, language, history, and emotional attachment to the nation.

Thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder argued that each people had its own distinct character expressed through language and culture. His idea of **Volksgeist**, or the spirit of the people, became very influential. The nation was not just a legal arrangement. It was a living cultural community.

> **Key Term: Volksgeist**
> The idea that a people share a unique national spirit expressed in their language, traditions, and culture.

This helps explain why the Grimm brothers matter. They did more than collect fairy tales. By recording German folk stories, they implied that people in many separate German states shared one deeper cultural inheritance. That was politically useful. If Bavarians, Saxons, and Prussians shared stories and language, then perhaps they also belonged in one nation.

Art worked in similar ways. Eugène Delacroix’s _Liberty Leading the People_ from **1830** linked revolutionary action to national symbolism. The tricolor flag, the female figure of Liberty, and the street fighters turned political struggle into an emotional national image. Such works did not create nationalism alone, but they made it vivid and memorable.

Language was especially important because it could turn scattered populations into a political community. Standardised language in schools, administration, and print culture helped people imagine that they belonged to one wider nation. This was crucial in places where local dialects remained strong.

Nationalism therefore moved through poems, songs, stories, and shared memories as much as through armies and diplomats. Students often miss this. They jump straight to Bismarck or Cavour and forget that political unification usually rested on earlier cultural work.

### Liberal nationalism and the revolutions of 1848

Early nationalism was often tied to liberalism. Nationalists and liberals both opposed the old order created by dynastic empires and conservative rulers after **1815**. Both wanted to weaken arbitrary authority. Both often supported constitutions, civil equality, and representative government.

> **Key Term: liberal nationalism**
> Nationalism linked to constitutional government, civil rights, and the idea that the nation should rule itself through representative institutions.

Giuseppe Mazzini is a key example. He believed the nation was a moral community whose people had the duty to unite and govern themselves. His group, **Young Italy**, founded in **1831**, called for a unified, independent Italian republic. This was nationalism from below: activists trying to inspire ordinary people through ideas, sacrifice, and revolution.

Mazzini matters because he shows one face of nationalism: idealistic, republican, and tied to liberty. He did not think nationalism should simply hand more power to kings. He wanted national unity to produce popular sovereignty.

The Revolutions of **1848** are sometimes called the **Springtime of Nations** because nationalism and liberalism burst out together across Europe. In the German states, delegates met at Frankfurt to try to create a united Germany. In the Habsburg Empire, Hungarians, Czechs, and others demanded autonomy or constitutional change. In the Italian states, revolts challenged Austrian influence and local rulers.

These uprisings mostly failed in the short run. Yet they still matter because they revealed the strength of nationalist feeling and the weakness of old dynastic legitimacy. They also revealed tensions inside nationalism itself.

For example, the Frankfurt Parliament wanted a unified Germany, but it struggled over borders and political form. Should Germany include Austrian lands? Should it be a monarchy or republic? Such arguments show that "the nation" was not always obvious. Nationalists had to decide who belonged and what kind of state should represent them.

> **Test Tip:** For **1848**, avoid saying simply "the revolutions failed." A better answer adds that they failed immediately but strengthened later nationalism by showing how powerful demands for self-government had become.

### Nationalism from above: unification, states, and exclusion

After **1848**, nationalism increasingly separated from liberalism. Many leaders realised that nationalist feeling could be used without granting full democracy. This is where Cavour and Bismarck become crucial.

Count Cavour in Piedmont-Sardinia used diplomacy, war, and monarchy to advance Italian unification. He was not Mazzini. He did not rely mainly on popular uprising or republican idealism. Instead, he used French support against Austria and let Piedmont become the core of a larger Italian state. Nationalism here was practical and elite-led.

Giuseppe Garibaldi added a more popular and military element by conquering Sicily and southern Italy in **1860**, but even his success was absorbed into a monarchical state under Victor Emmanuel II. Italy shows that nationalism from below could stir action, but state-building from above often decided the final outcome.

Germany followed a similar but even clearer path under Otto von Bismarck. He used war against Denmark, Austria, and France to create German unity under Prussian leadership, completed in **1871**. His nationalism was conservative, monarchical, and military. He did not build a liberal nation-state through parliament. He built it through "blood and iron."

This is one of the biggest AP distinctions in Unit 7:

- **Mazzini** = revolutionary, republican, idealistic nationalism
- **Cavour** = diplomatic, monarchical nationalism
- **Bismarck** = conservative, militarised nationalism

Nationalism also challenged multinational empires. Austria-Hungary ruled Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Serbs, Romanians, and others. The Ottoman Empire ruled many Balkan peoples. As nationalist feeling spread, loyalty shifted away from emperor and sultan toward ethnic or national communities.

Pan-Slavism intensified this process in the Balkans. Slavic peoples increasingly imagined shared interests that crossed imperial borders. Russia often encouraged this because it expanded Russian influence, but it also increased instability in southeastern Europe.

Late in the century, nationalism could become openly exclusionary. The Dreyfus Affair in France, beginning in **1894**, showed how national loyalty could be turned against minorities. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was falsely convicted of treason. Many anti-Dreyfusards treated him as suspect not because of evidence, but because they viewed Jews as alien to the nation.

> **Key Term: anti-Semitism**
> Hostility toward Jews, which in the late 19th century often took racial as well as religious forms.

This is why the AP curriculum links nationalism to **racialism** and anti-Semitism. Nationalism could unite a majority by defining minorities as outsiders. The same pattern appeared in Russian pogroms and anti-Jewish politics elsewhere in Europe.

Another late form was **chauvinism**, an aggressive nationalism that claimed national superiority and justified rivalry or expansion.

> **Key Term: chauvinism**
> Exaggerated, aggressive nationalism that promotes the superiority of one nation over others.

This helps explain **national aggrandizement** in the age of imperialism. If your nation is superior, then expanding its prestige, territory, or empire can be made to seem justified.

> **Key Term: national aggrandizement**
> The expansion of a nation’s power, prestige, or territory, often justified by aggressive nationalism.

By the late 19th century, nationalism had changed from a movement often linked to liberty into a force that could support empire, militarism, and exclusion.

## Key Point Checklist

_This article has covered the following key knowledge points:_

- Nationalism tied primary loyalty to the nation rather than to dynasty, locality, or lordship
- The French Revolution and Napoleonic era helped spread nationalism through citizenship, conscription, and resistance to French rule
- Romantic nationalism built loyalty through language, folklore, literature, and shared memory
- Herder’s idea of **Volksgeist** treated the nation as a distinct cultural community
- The Grimm brothers helped promote German national consciousness through folk culture
- Early nationalism often overlapped with liberalism and demands for constitutions and civil rights
- Mazzini and Young Italy represent revolutionary and republican nationalism from below
- The Revolutions of **1848** joined nationalism with liberal reform but mostly failed in the short term
- Cavour and Bismarck show how nationalism could also be used from above by monarchies and elites
- Nationalism weakened multinational empires such as Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire
- Late-19th-century nationalism could become exclusionary through anti-Semitism, racialism, and chauvinism
- The Dreyfus Affair is a key example of nationalism defining minorities as outside the nation

## Key Terms and Concepts

- nationalism
- national self-determination
- romantic nationalism
- Volksgeist
- liberal nationalism
- anti-Semitism
- chauvinism
- national aggrandizement


Nationalism - Nationalists inspired loyalty in varied ways