00:00Have you ever really thought about how the world got its shape?
00:03You know, the borders on our maps, the languages we all speak,
00:06this whole idea of what a country even is?
00:09Well, what if I told you that a huge chunk of it all comes down to a single, powerful idea?
00:14In this explainer, we're going to trace the amazing journey of that idea,
00:18nationalism, and see how it completely redrew the map of Europe
00:21and really changed the entire course of history.
00:24All right, to really get this, let's start with a picture.
00:27This is from 1848 by a French artist named Frédéric Soryu.
00:31And just look at what he's imagining.
00:33It's this incredible dream of the future, a world made up of a parade of free peoples,
00:38all marching past their own Statue of Liberty.
00:40And down on the ground, you see the shattered crowns of kings and emperors, just forgotten.
00:45This was way more than just a cool painting.
00:47It was a vision, a radical vision of a new world,
00:50where nations, groups of people, would be in charge, not these old dusty empires.
00:55So, a dream this big doesn't just pop up out of the blue, right?
01:00No way.
01:01Its roots were planted in something very real.
01:03An event that sent absolute shockwaves across Europe about 60 years earlier,
01:08the French Revolution of 1789.
01:11Seriously, this was the moment that the idea of a nation as we know it really truly came to life.
01:16Okay, so before 1789, you gotta understand, France wasn't really a nation of people.
01:21It was basically the personal property of a king.
01:24But the revolution? It changed everything.
01:26Suddenly, power wasn't in the hands of one guy on a throne.
01:29It was transferred to the citizens.
01:31A whole new flag, the tricolor, replaced the old royal one.
01:34French was pushed as the national language to bring everyone together.
01:37They even got a new national anthem.
01:39The whole idea was to create a sense of shared identity.
01:42For the first time, this idea that a nation is made up of its people and what they want,
01:46that idea really started to take hold.
01:48But, okay, that's France.
01:50How did these crazy new ideas actually spread to the rest of Europe?
01:54Well, here's where the story gets really interesting, and kind of ironic.
01:59The answer lies with one man.
02:01A guy who somehow managed to be both the revolution's greatest champion,
02:06and its biggest betrayer, Napoleon Bonaparte.
02:09You see, as Napoleon's armies marched all across Europe, they didn't just bring guns.
02:14They brought his new set of laws, the Napoleonic Code.
02:17And this thing was revolutionary.
02:19It just swept away centuries of old-school aristocratic privilege,
02:22it got rid of the whole feudal system,
02:24made everyone equal before the law,
02:26and modernized everything from roads to currency.
02:28And at first, people loved it.
02:30They saw him as a liberator, this guy bringing progress.
02:33Yeah, that honeymoon did not last long.
02:35People pretty quickly figured out that all this so-called liberation
02:39came with a very steep price tag.
02:41Napoleon took away their political freedom,
02:43he hit them with heavy taxes,
02:45he censored what they could read,
02:47and the worst part,
02:48he forced their sons into his armies to go fight and die for France.
02:52Suddenly, their hero, their liberator,
02:54he looked a lot more like a conqueror.
02:56So, after Napoleon is finally defeated for good at Waterloo,
03:00you've got all of Europe's old royal families breathing a huge sigh of relief.
03:04And they try their best to stuff that revolutionary genie right back into the bottle.
03:08But it was too late.
03:10This just set the stage for a massive, decades-long conflict
03:13between two totally opposite visions for what Europe should be.
03:17Okay, so in one corner, you've got the conservatives.
03:20These are the kings and princes who beat Napoleon.
03:22They all get together in 1815
03:24and basically try to hit the rewind button on history.
03:27They put the old monarchies back on their thrones,
03:29they give power back to the church and the rich landowners.
03:32For them, it was all about tradition, order,
03:34and making sure nothing like the French Revolution ever happened again.
03:38But there was a new force on the rise,
03:40a group that just wasn't going to accept that.
03:43We're talking about the educated new middle class,
03:46the doctors, lawyers, professors,
03:48all created by the Industrial Revolution.
03:50They had a completely different idea, liberal nationalism.
03:55They wanted constitutions, freedom of the press,
03:58and most importantly, governments that were actually chosen by the people.
04:01And this clash wasn't just some polite debate in a fancy drawing room.
04:05Oh, no.
04:06It was like a fire that just started spreading across the whole continent.
04:09The decades after Napoleon were just one explosion after another.
04:13You've got the Greeks fighting for their independence in the 1820s,
04:16which got everyone excited.
04:17Then in 1830, the French, well, they overthrew their king.
04:21Again.
04:21And it all builds up to 1848,
04:23when this massive wave of revolutions just sweeps across Europe.
04:27It proved one thing for sure.
04:28This idea of the nation state wasn't going away.
04:31You know, and this fight wasn't just happening on the streets or in parliaments.
04:34It was a cultural battle, too.
04:36There was this whole movement called Romanticism,
04:38where artists and writers started saying,
04:40Hey, the real soul of a nation, it's not in the king's palace.
04:43It's in the common people.
04:45It's in their folk songs, their stories, their language.
04:48Culture itself became this huge battleground for what it meant to be, say,
04:52German or Polish or Italian.
04:54So after those big, messy, and mostly failed revolutions of 1848,
04:59something shifted.
05:00The dream of nationalism didn't die,
05:03but the way it was going to happen changed completely.
05:05The new nations of Germany and Italy,
05:08well, they weren't going to be born from liberal protesters waving flags.
05:11They were going to be forged through the cold,
05:13hard calculations of powerful politicians
05:15and the brute force of modern armies.
05:18So how did they pull it off?
05:20Well, in both Germany and Italy, the playbook was pretty similar.
05:23A single, strong state took the lead.
05:25That was the super militaristic Prussia for Germany
05:27and the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont for Italy.
05:30And each one had a brilliant and, let's be honest,
05:32ruthless political mastermind running the show,
05:34Otto von Bismarck in Prussia and Count Cavour in Italy.
05:37These guys were absolute masters of mixing clever politics
05:40with straight-up warfare.
05:41And nobody showed this new reality better than Bismarck in Prussia.
05:46I mean, the man started three separate wars in just seven years,
05:49all to stitch Germany together.
05:51He famously said that the great questions of the day
05:53wouldn't be decided by speeches and votes.
05:55He saw that as the big mistake of 1848.
05:58Nope, they'd be decided by blood and iron.
06:01The message was clear.
06:02The age of romantic dreamers was over.
06:04The age of military power had arrived.
06:07And there you have it.
06:08The creation of powerful, unified nations like Germany and Italy.
06:12It kind of felt like the ultimate triumph of that nationalist dream, right?
06:16But as the 19th century started winding down,
06:19that exact same idea, the one that had inspired so much hope,
06:23began to twist into something a lot darker and a lot more dangerous.
06:26So nationalism, this idea of loving your own country and your own people,
06:32it started to morph into imperialism.
06:35The thinking changed.
06:36It became, to be a truly great nation, we have to have an empire.
06:41Suddenly, just being independent wasn't enough.
06:44The new goal was to dominate other people.
06:47And this kicked off that frantic, ugly scramble for colonies all over Africa and Asia.
06:53And if you're looking for the place where this new, aggressive, competitive nationalism was most explosive,
06:59look no further than southeastern Europe.
07:01There was this one region known as the Balkans that was basically a giant tinderbox,
07:06just waiting for a match.
07:09Okay, so here's what was happening.
07:12The old Ottoman Empire, which had controlled the area for centuries, was getting weaker and weaker.
07:17As it crumbled, all these different groups in the Balkans,
07:20Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, they broke free and formed their own nations.
07:24The problem was, these new countries were super nationalistic and really jealous and suspicious of each other.
07:30Every single one of them wanted more land, and they were willing to fight their neighbors for it.
07:34And then, to top it all off, you had the big European powers.
07:38Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, all meddling, backing different sides to get more influence.
07:43It turned the whole region into an absolute powder keg.
07:46And that powder keg, it finally exploded in 1914.
07:50And the explosion was the First World War,
07:53a conflict that would kill millions of people and completely reshape the globe.
07:57That beautiful dream from 1848, of free nations living together in harmony,
08:01it had curdled into a nightmare of jealousy and competition.
08:06And it leaves us with a really tough question,
08:08one that's just as important today as it was over a hundred years ago.
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