Nationalism at first had seemed to pose a threat toEurope'smonarchies. In the 1860s, however, the kingdoms ofPiedmont andPrussia had created newnation states by combining the national principle with their own instincts for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement. The results - thekingdom of Italy and theGerman Reich - were no doubt very far from being perfectnation states. ToSicilians, the Piedmontese were as foreign as if they had beenFrenchmen; the true unification of Italy came after the triumphs ofCavour andGaribaldi, with what were in effect small wars ofcolonization waged against the peoples of the south. ManyGermans, meanwhile, lived outside the borders ofBismarck's new Reich; what historians called his wars of unification had in fact excludedGerman-speakingAustrians from a Prussian-dominatedKleindeutschland. Nevertheless, an imperfect nation state was, in the eyes of most nationalists, preferable to no nation state at all.
Niall Ferguson,The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 75
In our own dayclassics have been dethroned without being replaced. But throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth andnineteenth centuriesour statesmen were so brought up that they thought ofRome as the hearth of theirpolitical civilization, where their predecessorCicero had denouncedCatiline; where the models of their own eloquence and statecraft, as taught them atEton,Harrow andWinchester, had been practised and brought to perfection. And, therefore, the ruins of theForum were as familiar, as sacred, and as moving toRussell and toGladstone as to Mazzini and Garibaldi themselves. This was a prime fact in the history of theRisorgimento.
G. M. Trevelyan, 'Englishmen and Italians: Some Aspects of Their Relations Past and Present', read before the British Academy (June 1919), quoted inClio, A Muse: And other Essays (1913; rev. ed. 1930), p. 107
