ABSTRACT
The modern nation-state* is one of the most significant and powerful of all human institutions. As the effects of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution spread through the continent, nation-states and nationalism assumed various forms. As the century began, liberal nationalism was on the rise as a political force, and Romantic nationalism sparked the imaginations of many newly patriotic Europeans, who began to identify strongly with a nation. As the nationalism of latter half of the nineteenth century helped form new European nation-states, it also came to be more closely associated with power politics, conservatism, and racism. The process of German unification is a good example of how nationalism became a force of the political right in the second half of the nineteenth century. Extreme nationalism also became infused with anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth century. It emerged from the ideology of nationalism that first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.
