The central idea we have of the nation is geographic, encompassing a specific territory which we define by name as part of a given country. At the same time, there is a larger sense of the nation which centers on the people who comprise it, their ideology, their political leanings, and the way they make society-wide decisions.
Security has always been a major component of social relations, with groups of people intent in protecting themselves from encroachments on their territory and prerogatives banding together for greater strength. The idea of national security extends beyond the immediate neighborhood, village, or town to a larger entity known as the nation-state, and people only began to develop a sense of national identity after the feudal era. The trend began in the sixteenth century with the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire (Manchester 159-160).
The trend accelerated in the last century. During the second half of the nineteenth century, and specifically between 1859 and 1871, a change came over Europe as several different nation states unified into larger empires more in keeping with the nations we know in this century. During this period, a new German Empire was formed, as well as a unified kingdom of Italy and a Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. This brought about a major change in the balance of political power in Europe and prepared the way for the tensions between the new nation-states during the last years of the nineteenth century and into the first two decades of the twentieth century. The changes are described by historians as part of even more far-reaching changes taking place in technology, transportation, and communication at the same time:
All these disparate events reflected profound changes brought in by the railroad, steamship, and telegraph, which made the communication of ideas, exchange of goods, and movement of people over wide areas more frequent and easier than ever before. Politica...