ABSTRACT
The rise of nation states has been the dominant political trend in modern world history. Although a patriotic love of homeland reaches back to the ancient world, the sense of nations as communities of people sharing a common culture and history appeared only in the eighteenth century. Nationalism was the ideological belief that the nation, however defined, had a right to selfgovernment as a sovereign state. In practice, nationalist movements emerged not in political vacuums but rather as attempts to seize power from kings or empires ruling over multi-ethnic peoples. In 1789, for example, Louis XVI’s subjects spoke mutually unintelligible dialects, practiced distinct customs, and worshipped different faiths. Nationalist leaders in France, as elsewhere, had to instill a common language, culture, and history – while suppressing regional identities – in order to gain the allegiance of the people they claimed to represent.
