AP® World History: Modern · Unit 5 · Topic 5.2
Nationalism and the Unification of Italy and Germany
Nationalism is the belief that people sharing language, culture, or history deserve their own state. In Germany and Italy, this idea plus calculated wars and diplomacy turned scattered states into two unified nations by 1871.
Before 1859, Italy was a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, and papal territory. Before 1871, Germany was thirty-nine separate states loosely tied by language and the old Holy Roman Empire's memory. Nationalism gave people a reason to want those borders erased: the idea that a nation is a group bound by shared culture, history, or language, and that this group deserves its own sovereign state. That idea alone did not build anything. It took leaders willing to use it as a tool. Camillo di Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, allied with France to push Austria out of northern Italy in 1859, then let Giuseppe Garibaldi's volunteer army conquer Sicily and southern Italy in 1860. Piedmont absorbed both. Venetia joined in 1866, Rome in 1870, completing the kingdom. Otto von Bismarck, minister-president of Prussia, took a harder route: three short, deliberately started wars, against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870-71, each one rallying German states around Prussian leadership until they joined Prussia in a new German Empire declared in 1871.
Shared language was never enough on its own. Germans and Italians had spoken their languages across rival courts and cities for centuries without wanting one government. Local rulers, regional loyalty, and religious differences kept people attached to their own city or state. Unification required war, diplomacy, and propaganda to convince people that their state loyalty should transfer to a nation.
This matters beyond 1871. Once nationalism becomes a political weapon, it cuts both ways: it builds nations out of scattered pieces, but it tears apart empires built from many peoples. Austria-Hungary, ruling Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and Slavs under one crown, would feel that second edge into the next century.
Key terms
- Nationalism
- The belief that people sharing language, culture, or history form a nation that deserves its own sovereign state.
- Realpolitik
- Bismarck's practical, power-focused style of politics that used war and alliances rather than ideals to achieve unification.
- Risorgimento
- The nineteenth-century movement to unify Italy's separate states into one kingdom.
- Multi-ethnic empire
- A state ruling many different peoples under one government, which nationalism tends to pull apart.
Watch it explained
- How it worksShow me thirty-nine German states assembling into one empire between 1864 and 1871.
- How it worksWalk me through how Bismarck used three short wars to build a country instead of a treaty.
- Worked exampleTrace Italy unifying piece by piece from Piedmont in 1859 to Rome in 1870.
- Common mistakeWhy wasn't a shared language alone enough to make Germans or Italians see themselves as one nation?
- Going furtherWhat happens to a multi-ethnic empire like Austria-Hungary once nationalism catches on inside it?
Check yourself
End of topic.