Stability, Weighed
The three threads, measured
- European states struggled to maintain international stability in an age of nationalism and revolutions.
- A variety of motives and methods led to the intensification of European global control and increased tensions among the Great Powers.
- European ideas and culture expressed a tension between objectivity and scientific realism on one hand, and subjectivity and individual expression on the other.
The accurate verdict on nationalism is that it...
The same force did both.
Nationalism: both a builder and a solvent
- It built states — Italy, Germany, and a dual monarchy reconfigured around the largest minority.
- It also dissolved them, or threatened to: nationalist tensions in the Balkans drew the Great Powers into a series of crises.
- So the honest verdict is that the same force did both, and which it did depended on whose state it was.
Select both effects of imperialism on stability the CED supports.
The same ventures relieved one pressure and built another.
Imperialism: stability exported, instability imported
- Empire gave the powers markets, prestige and a place to compete that was not Europe.
- But the CED links intensified control directly to increased tensions among the Great Powers, and 7.7 records the resistance it created.
- So the same ventures relieved one pressure and built another.
Stabilising, destabilising, or neither?
Sort each development by its effect on stability.
The cultural thread supplied no shared standard by which the political disputes could be settled.
Positivism's claim collapsed into a loss of confidence in objectivity.
The same force built states and threatened them. Nationalism made Italy and Germany and reconfigured Austria-Hungary, and nationalist tensions in the Balkans drew the Great Powers into a series of crises — which it did depended on whose state was in question, and saying so is the accurate verdict, not a hedge.
The CED's verb, ____, has already told you the direction of the verdict.
It concedes the outcome in advance.
Ideas: no settled ground to argue from
- Positivism claimed science alone gives knowledge; by 1914 confidence in objectivity itself had been lost.
- Darwin's material account was taken up inadvertently as a justification for racial hierarchy.
- So the cultural thread supplied no shared standard by which the political disputes could have been settled.
The strongest answers give each movement...
By 1914, and the CED's verb points the way.
Influence on European and global stability
- The objective is the influence of nationalist and imperialist movements on European and global stability.
- The strongest answers give each movement a positive and a negative effect on stability and then say which dominated by 1914.
- The CED's own verb — struggled — has already told you the direction of that verdict.
A principle that says a people should govern itself is a foundation stone where a people already dominates a territory, and a demolition charge where several peoples share one. Nothing about the principle changes between the two cases.
By 1914 states struggled to maintain international stability in an age of nationalism and revolutions: nationalism built Italy, Germany and the dual monarchy and drew the powers into Balkan crises; imperialism relieved rivalry by exporting it while increasing tensions among the Great Powers and creating resistance abroad; and the cultural thread — positivism, then the loss of confidence in objectivity — supplied no shared standard by which the disputes could be settled.