In this week of the course, you will be studying the emergence of new national states in Europe in the second half the nineteenth century,. More specifically you will be focusing on the creation of first Germany and then Italy, actually vice-versa chronologically, as new nations in the second half of the century, and then also some of the new countries of Eastern Europe. The driving force behind the emergence of Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century was the idea of nationalism. Nationalism was something that had come out of the French Revolution, and it had not really existed before the French revolution. The idea of the nation was that all people were bound together into a larger, organic, political entity known as the nation, and that all citizens of the nation were bound by ties of ethnicity, religion, language or shared historical experiences. Before the French Revolution, you could argue that an individual owed his allegiance primarily to a king or queen whatever the case might have been. In other words you were a subject of the king of England, or you were a subject of the king of France or the tsar of Russia, for example. The exception to this was, of course, the situation in the newly independent American colonies, but let us ignore that for the moment. The French Revolution decisively created the idea that an individual now owed his allegiance and duty to his/her country, not just to the king. That duty usually involved military service. The nation could demand the ultimate sacrifice of the citizen and require that the citizen be drafted into the army and die for the nation (This was something that kings could not quite do.). So you get the idea that Germans were Germans because they were Germans and because they were Germans they should be living together in Germany, or you might say that Italians were Italians because they were Italians and because they were Italians they should be living together in Italy. The problem, from a German or an Italian perspective in the nineteenth century, was that all Germans were not living together in Germany and all Italians were not living together in Italy, not considering whether all Germans really wanted to live together. Both Germany and Italy were phrases that could be used to describe geographical areas of Europe, but they could not be applied to specific political states that existed somewhere in Europe. In fact, in both the "regions" of Germany and Italy there were a multitude of independent political states that existed. The problem was how to forge all of these independent small parties together into one dynamic nation, Germany, or Italy. In Germany the process was most closely associated with the work of Prince Otto von Bismarck and in Italy there were a number of people who participated, including Count Camilio Cavour, but in both cases the process involved war and was inspired by the idea of nationalism.