After 1871 Europe’s heartland was organized into strong national states. Only on Europe’s borders — in Ireland and Russia, in Austria-Hungary and the Balkans — did people still strive for national unity and independence. Nationalism served, for better or worse, as a new unifying principle. At the same time, socialist parties grew rapidly. Many prosperous and conservative citizens were troubled by the socialist movement. Governing elites manipulated national feeling to create a sense of unity to divert attention from underlying class conflicts, and increasingly channeled national sentiment in an antiliberal and militaristic direction, tolerating anti-Semitism and waging wars in non-Western lands. This policy helped manage domestic conflicts, but only at the expense of increasing the international tensions that erupted in World War I.