Nation States

The Magna Carta is often referenced as the beginning of British, and therefore American, democracy. It created a Great Council of Lords and Barons with whom the King had to consult before making any significant decisions. This is clearly hardly democracy— it's more like an oligarchy—but this council would one day evolve into the British Parliament, from which true democracy would eventually flow. The signing of the Magna Carta is also significant in that it may be seen as the very beginning of the English nation-state. It is a foundational legend upon which the British government and people can trace their shared history and legitimacy back eight hundred years.

Italian and German unification were both protracted processes that involved the unification of disparate kingdoms, principalities, and republics united only by a shared language and a somewhat-common history. The process began, in both countries, earlier in the nineteenth century, and culminated in 1871.

The Prince was written in the sixteenth century by the Italian writer and political thinker Niccolo Machiavelli. The book was written as a sort of guiding manual for current and would-be princes. It deals, primarily, with how to acquire and keep power and is famous for the pragmatic and amoral approach that it advocates.

Throughout most of Europe, from the fall of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance period, only a tiny fraction of people had access to education or any time to devote to scholarly pursuits. Those who did usually wrote in Latin, the language of classical writing, rather than in their local language. In the Renaissance period, the use of Latin was slowly phased out and replaced with the local language, or the “vernacular.” This was very significant because it allowed a great many more people than ever before to read, write, and understand works of literature and nonfiction.

All of these nations were notable nation-states for at least several decades (in some cases several centuries) before the German nation finally achieved unification in 1871. Interestingly, 1871 is also the year many historians point to for Italian unification.

Maximilian I was Holy Roman Emperor from 1508 to 1519. He is one of the most prominent Holy Roman Emperors from this time period and is notable for his attempts to unify the German-speaking people under one ruler. He failed in this attempt because the German speaking people were divided into too many different princedoms and small political entities. German unification would not be completed until 1871.

Theodor Herzl is most famous for his advocation of a Jewish homeland in an essay called Der Judenstaat. In it, he argued that the only way to end European persecution of Jews was to give the Jewish people their own homeland. This was the beginning of the Zionist movement that was given greater emphasis by the Balfour Proclamation in 1917 and that resulted in the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Many European nation-states coalesced around ethnic identity and shared cultural heritage. The Spanish nation-state coalesced around both of these, but also around the religion of Catholicism. Protestantism was almost non-existent in Spain and those who adhered to either Islam or Judaism were either banished or forcefully converted to Catholicism during the formation of the Spanish nation-state.

The commercial revolution began in Amsterdam, but it would never have been able to do so without the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia, which ended that war. The Netherlands, previously under Spanish dominion, became independent; the country was then free to follow its own path of Protestantism and vigorous free market capitalism.

The battles of Tours and Lepanto were not fought by English forces, so we can rule these two answer choices out immediately. The battles of the Somme and Trafalgar were fought during World War One and the Napoleonic Wars, respectively, and so came too late to be part of the rise of English nationalism. The Battle of Agincourt, which took place during the Hundred Years’ War with the French, happened in the fifteenth century and so came at the perfect time to be incorporated into the rise of nationalism in England. It helped solidify what it meant to be English, as opposed to French, and led to the rise of self-identifying nationalist ethnicity among the English people.