Social Studies 20-1 · Background
Where nationalism came from
Nationalism is younger than it looks. Before the late eighteenth century most people were subjects of a ruler rather than members of a nation — and the shift from one to the other is what the related issues assume you know.
- 1. The words, first
- 2. The French Revolution and Napoleon
- 3. Building nation-states
- 4. The First World War
- 5. What costs marks
The words, first
The idea: A short list of terms the sources use without explaining.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Ancien régime | The order before 1789: absolute monarchy, legal privilege for nobility and clergy. |
| Popular sovereignty | The idea that legitimate authority comes from the people rather than from a monarch or God. |
| Levée en masse | Mass conscription of citizens. Revolutionary France's armies were citizens fighting for their own nation, and they were formidable. |
| Reign of Terror | 1793–94, when thousands were executed as enemies of the nation by the revolutionary government. |
| Unification | Building one state out of separate territories. Italy and Germany were both unified by 1871. |
| Imperialism | Extending control over other territories and peoples. |
| Militarism | Glorifying military power and keeping the state ready for war. |
| Alliance system | The pre-1914 network of mutual defence agreements that turned a local crisis into a continental war. |
| Total war | War mobilising an entire society — conscription, war industry, rationing, censorship, propaganda. |
| Self-determination | A people deciding its own political status. Central to the 1919 settlement, and applied very unevenly. |
The French Revolution and Napoleon
The idea: 1789 turned subjects into citizens. Napoleon then carried that idea across Europe — and provoked the nationalisms that would defeat him.
1789. Liberty, equality, fraternity replaced a monarchy that claimed authority from God with one claiming it from the people. Legal privilege was abolished, and the nation became the source of legitimacy.
The levée en masse. A citizen army fighting for its own nation beat professional armies fighting for pay. This is the first clear demonstration of nationalism's military power, and every state took the lesson.
The Terror. The same revolution that produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man executed thousands as enemies of the nation. The pattern — define the nation, then define people out of it — recurs throughout Related Issue 2, which is why the course puts it here.
Napoleon's accidental contribution. He carried revolutionary ideas of citizenship and legal equality across Europe, and being ruled by foreigners gave Germans, Spaniards and Italians a sharp reason to define themselves as nations. Nationalism spread partly as resistance to the man spreading it.
Building nation-states
The idea: Nations that feel ancient were often assembled deliberately, by states that wanted them.
Italy and Germany, both unified by 1871. Neither existed as a state before. Both were built by leaders — Cavour, Bismarck — who used national feeling as a tool of state-building rather than simply responding to it.
How a nation gets made. A standardized national language, taught in state schools. Printing and newspapers, so that strangers read the same words on the same day. Conscription, which mixes regions in one uniform. A national history, chosen and taught. People who never meet come to feel part of one community.
Imperialism as nationalism abroad. Competition for colonies was justified as national greatness, and it hardened the rivalries that produced 1914.
The First World War
The idea: Long-term causes and an immediate trigger are different things, and questions reward separating them.
Long-term: militarism, alliances, imperialism, nationalism · Trigger: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, June 1914
Total war. Whole societies were mobilised — conscription, war industry, rationing, censorship — and it was justified by appeals to the nation. Propaganda became a state function.
Canada. Canada entered automatically when Britain declared war, and signed the Treaty of Versailles in its own right. Vimy Ridge in 1917 is the usual marker for an emerging Canadian national identity. Full formal autonomy came with the Statute of Westminster in 1931.
Versailles and its consequences. Article 231, the war guilt clause, assigned Germany responsibility and justified reparations; it was experienced as national humiliation and gave ultranationalists a ready grievance. Self-determination redrew central and eastern Europe while African and Asian colonies were reassigned as mandates — an inconsistency that later independence movements pointed at directly.
What costs marks
The idea: History questions in this course reward precision about causes.
- Calling the assassination the cause of the First World War. It was the trigger; the causes were long-term.
- Treating nations as ancient. Most modern nations were assembled, and saying how is worth marks.
- Skipping the Canadian angle. Vimy, conscription and the Statute of Westminster all belong here.
- Ignoring the unevenness of self-determination. It was the point of most later decolonization arguments.