The word nationalism is associated with a sense of a common identity among people within geographically defined nation-states. Nationalism simultaneously promotes the nation-state around which that common identity develops. A phenomenon of the past two to three centuries, it became increasingly important to politics from the nineteenth century on. Strongly held feelings of a common national identity grew in the years after 1750, and this sense of national identification increasingly competed in people’s minds with religious, regional, and local loyalties.

In an early version of nationalism, the eighteenth-century British took pride in the fact that as Protestants they had defeated the Catholic French king in the global trade wars in Asia and the New World. At about the same time, the German author Johann Gottfried Herder concluded from his studies that a common language—along with its folktales, history, and laws—also served as the basis for a shared national identity. Herder’s emphasis on past accomplishments and traditions connects this kind of nationalism to themes in the romantic movement. In 1789, French revolutionary politicians set out in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that all men were citizens—not subjects—and that as citizens they had rights. The Declaration thus proclaimed that common identity could be based on the rule of law. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, some of the major components of nationalism had developed: pride in military conquest (militaristic nationalism); pride in a common culture developed over centuries (sometimes called romantic nationalism); and belief in citizenship and the rule of law, with its guarantee of civil rights and other freedoms (civic nationalism).

In the nineteenth century, nationalism became a force in domestic and international politics. From the 1820s on, nationalistic politicians took to the battlefield, as in the fight for Greek independence or in the wars of Italian and German unification. Some Italian nationalists expected that unification would strengthen national identity by providing the kind of common citizenship and freedom that the Americans and French had won through their revolutions.

After 1848, realists like Bismarck and Cavour promoted nationalism as the work of “iron and blood”—national strength backed by military might. Nationalism became a matter of pride in a people’s toughness and realism in a competitive world. After their wars of unification, both Germany and Italy continued to promote the vision of the nation triumphant in battle. This differed from the French revolutionary ideal of being triumphant in battle in order to bring rights and constitutions to oppressed peoples—a civic nationalism. By the end of the nineteenth century, the basis of nationalism had shifted from pride in democratic institutions to pride in a nation’s military power. With growing racism in the nineteenth century, there came to be a form of nationalism based on purity of blood. Today, the word nationalism usually combines a wide array of ingredients, prompting politicians to appeal to common religion, laws, customs, language, ethnicity, race, and history to build national pride.