In 1815, neither Italy nor Germany existed. Where we now see two major European powers, there were instead patchworks of kingdoms, duchies, and city-states—over thirty separate entities in the German lands alone, and nearly a dozen across the Italian peninsula.

By 1871, both had become unified nation-states through a combination of war, diplomacy, and something entirely new: the conviction that people who shared a language and culture belonged together. This transformation didn't just redraw the map of Europe. It created a template for nationalist movements worldwide and set the stage for conflicts that would consume the twentieth century.

Before people could fight for nations, they had to believe nations existed. This was less obvious than it sounds. A Bavarian peasant in 1800 felt loyalty to his village, his church, perhaps his local duke. The idea that he shared a fundamental bond with a Prussian merchant hundreds of miles away—simply because both spoke German—was genuinely radical.

Romantic philosophers and poets built this sense of shared identity. Johann Gottfried Herder argued that each people possessed a unique Volksgeist—a national spirit expressed through language, folklore, and tradition. In Italy, writers like Alessandro Manzoni deliberately wrote in a unified Italian rather than regional dialects, creating the linguistic foundation for a nation that didn't yet exist politically. The Brothers Grimm collected German folk tales partly to demonstrate a common cultural heritage.

This was nation-building through imagination. People learned to see themselves as part of communities they would never fully meet, bound by cultural ties they were only now discovering. The crucial shift was emotional: nationalism made the abstract nation feel like an extended family, worthy of sacrifice and love.

Takeaway

Nations are not natural facts waiting to be discovered—they are stories people tell themselves until the stories become real.

Ideas alone couldn't unify nations. That required armies, and two very different leaders understood this perfectly. In Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi led his red-shirted volunteers on audacious campaigns driven by revolutionary enthusiasm. In Prussia, Otto von Bismarck orchestrated three carefully calculated wars with the cold precision of a chess master.

Garibaldi's 1860 expedition to Sicily captured the Romantic imagination—a thousand volunteers sailing to liberate a kingdom. But it was the diplomatic maneuvering of Count Cavour in Piedmont that actually assembled the Italian state, using French military support and strategic timing. Italy emerged unified by 1861, though Venice and Rome would follow later.

Germany's unification was more deliberate. Bismarck engineered wars against Denmark, Austria, and France, each designed to exclude rivals and bind German states to Prussia. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 proved decisive. As Prussian troops besieged Paris, the German princes gathered at Versailles to proclaim a unified German Empire. "Blood and iron," Bismarck had declared, would settle the great questions of the day—not speeches and majority votes.

Takeaway

Nationalism provides the emotional fuel for state-building, but power ultimately flows from military capacity and strategic calculation.

For centuries, European peace had rested on a balance of power among roughly equal states. The sudden emergence of a unified Germany shattered this equilibrium. Overnight, a new industrial giant sat at the heart of Europe, with a population larger than France and an economy growing faster than Britain's.

France, humiliated by defeat and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, nursed grievances that would fester for decades. Austria-Hungary, expelled from German affairs and Italian territory, turned its ambitions toward the Balkans—where they would eventually collide with Russian interests and Serbian nationalism. The system that had prevented major European wars since 1815 began to crack.

Bismarck spent his remaining years in power constructing an elaborate alliance system to keep Germany safe, but his successors lacked his restraint. The unification wars had demonstrated that bold military action could reshape the map. They had also created nations whose very existence depended on stories of past glory and future greatness—stories that demanded ever-larger stages on which to perform.

Takeaway

Creating new powers doesn't just add players to the game—it transforms the rules, often in ways the creators never intended.

The unification of Italy and Germany proved that determined leadership, military power, and nationalist passion could forge new nations from fragmented territories. Within a generation, this template spread worldwide, inspiring movements from the Balkans to the colonial world.

But the very forces that created these nations—the glorification of national destiny, the willingness to use war as policy, the belief that peoples deserved their own states—would soon tear Europe apart. The world wars of the twentieth century were, in many ways, the unfinished business of nineteenth-century nationalism.