(a) The rise of nationalism across nations shattered the chains which held together the empires of modern Europe. Discuss. (20…

(a) Nationalism and the break-up of Europe's empires

Before 1914, the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian empires held many nationalities together by dynastic loyalty, administration and force. Nationalism, spread by the French Revolution and Napoleon's conquests, steadily loosened that hold.

Habsburg: Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and South Slavs asked for autonomy from 1848; the Ausgleich of 1867 gave Hungary equality and made the Dual Monarchy, but the Slavs remained dissatisfied, and in 1918 the empire dissolved into Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, with territory to Poland, Romania and Italy.

Ottoman: Greece won independence by 1829, then Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Montenegro emerged, and the Balkan wars of 1912–13 removed most European holdings; in the First World War the Arab revolt and Armenian and other nationalisms undermined the empire, which ended in 1922.

Russian: Poles revolted in 1830 and 1863, and Finns, Balts, Ukrainians and Caucasus peoples asserted themselves, especially in 1917.

Nationalism also built states: Italy (1861) and Germany (1871) were unified. But empires were not undone by nationalism alone. Defeat in the First World War, economic strain, military weakness and the rivalry of great powers drove the final collapse. Thus nationalism shattered the chains with war as the trigger.

(b) Consequences of the Northern victory in the American Civil War

Direct and obvious consequences: the Union was preserved and secession ended; slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave citizenship, equal protection and voting rights to the freedmen; the plantation South was devastated and Reconstruction was begun.

The indirect effects were arguably greater. The wartime Republican Congress passed the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act, the National Banking Acts, protective tariffs and land-grant colleges, and the war created paper currency and an income tax, a larger federal government and national market. Industrial capital, no longer checked by Southern planters, grew rapidly, laying the basis for the Gilded Age and America's rise as a great industrial power. The war settled the supremacy of the nation over the states and strengthened nationalism. But gains for Black Americans were soon rolled back by Reconstruction's end (1877), the Black Codes and Jim Crow, and the sharecropping system, whose consequences lasted into the twentieth century.

(c) Revolutions as a disastrous way of change

The statement is partly valid. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was followed by civil war, war communism and the 1921 famine, and later Stalin's collectivisation and terror cost millions of lives. The Chinese revolution of 1949 brought the Great Leap Forward (1958–61), which caused one of the worst famines in history, and the Cultural Revolution, causing persecution and disruption.

Yet both also achieved much: ending old landlord and imperial orders, spreading literacy, health and industrialisation, and building powerful states. Costs may result from violence and from the leaders' choices, not from revolution itself, and gradual reform in other countries also took long and had costs. The assessment must therefore balance the achievement against the human price.