Compare the uses of nationalism in German and Italy to create political unity in the nineteenth century.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

In Italy, credit goes largely to the writings of Giuseppe Mazzini, who advocated unification from the component states of Italy into one nation in a liberalist government. He tried to unify a brotherhood of liberals in Young Italy, a movement to promote law and duty as a means of achieving one unified nation. This was followed by the cultural outpourings of the Risorgimento, emphasizing the various historical and cultural accomplishments of Italy as a means to find commonality and form a nation. Giuseppe Garabaldi also actively promoted nationalism, albeit presenting a Romantic figure in seeing the unification as a fight and being willing to invoke military means to create this nation in a republican form. In Germany, particularly in the universities, young intellectuals called for the creation of a liberalist government from the thirty-nine states in the Confederation. Germany particularly found the Congress System problematic and called for the Wartburg Festival in 1817 to celebrate German accomplishments in a cultural sense, including Protestantism, the German language, and Germany's defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig. The government tried to suppress the unification movement with the Carlsbad Decrees in 1819, but several years later, the Hambach Festival renewed this unification movement with nationalist symbols like flags and promotion of the idea of Young Germany to resist foreign culture (particularly French), and the conservative policies of Metternich.