Politics

Nationalism and the Rise of Italy, Germany, and Japan - Language and National Identity Before 1871 - Language was usually the crucial element in creating a feeling of national unity, but language and citizenship rarely coincided. The idea of redrawing the boundaries of states to accommodate linguistic, religious, and cultural differences led to the forging of larger states from the many German and Italian principalities, but it threatened to break large multiethnic empires like Austria-Hungary into smaller states. -Until the 1860s nationalism was associated with liberalism, as in the case of the Italian liberal nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini. After 1848 conservative political leaders learned how to preserve the social status quo by using public education, universal military