Changing loyalties.

Before there were nations, there were people. And, it was to people, not nations, that the masses owed allegiance. In medieval Europe, states usually were based on religious or dynastic ties; citizens owed loyalty to their church or ruling family. The cultural life of Europe was based on a common inheritance of ideas and attitudes transmitted in the West through Latin, the language of the educated classes. People were concerned with their clan, tribe, village, or province; they rarely extended their interests nationwide.

All of life's activities functioned within the framework of what was called the feudal system.

Under feudalism, certain families came be regarded as noble. In general, nobility was granted by a king or queen, usually for service in battle. Warfare was pretty much constant, so those who developed slicing and dicing skills on the battlefield had a big advantage. As a result, the biggest and best fighters tended to be the ones who became nobles. The state of nobility was handed down from father to son -- women were usually excluded from official power in this society, although there were some notable exceptions.

At the bottom of the social heap were peasants. These poor souls suffered under a system that ran parallel to feudalism called seignorialism. In England, King Alfred (reigned 871-899) decreed that every man should have a lord, and throughout medieval Western Europe seignorialism was the norm. It was a system that came down from the slavery of the Romans.

The seigneurs (seniors or old men) of the noble class dominated the lives of the peasants. They had varying degrees of wealth and power, and their estates were of different sizes, but they were all rulers and employers. The peasants might be owned by the seigneur or free, but they were all his subjects. When the lord held court all his peasants were required to attend, to bring their complaints before him, and to be judged for the offences that were within the lord's authority. He might have the right to hang thieves, for example.

When the lord needed his lands plowed or his crops harvested, he had the right to his peasants, labour, and from each peasant holding he had the right to so many days' labour each week. He might build gristmills, ovens, or winepresses and command his people to use them in order to increase his income. In general, he had the right to approve or disapprove the marriages of his people, to take a head tax from them annually, to tax their income at will, to take an inheritance tax at their deaths, and to reclaim their lands if they died without heirs.

The peasants got something in return. They had the right to hold their land and pass it on to their children. The peasants not only had certain strips of arable land in the fields of their villages, but they also had grazing rights on the common pastures and rights to fuel and building materials in the common woods and wastelands. The peasants also lived under the lord's protection from attack, this was an important privilege in an age noted for lawlessness and warfare.

However, on balance, under the seignorial and feudal systems the nobility enjoyed a rich feast and everybody else had to be satisfied with the few crumbs that might fall from the table.

Then, in the Middle Ages, the established order began to break down. The feudal and seignorial systems started to fall apart. It was undermined by the rising towns whose merchants formed a growing a middle class. Townspeople turned to monarchs to help them take some power away from the feudal lords. The merchants were ready to pay taxes which the monarchs used to hire civil servants and professional soldiers. Soon, the monarchs were making inroads into the power of the feudal lords. Kings and queens began to build nations; the mortar that held the bricks together was a common language and national symbols.

The lords remained socially dominant and often exerted enormous influence, but the lower orders were legally free to change residence and employment. On the Continent changes came later and more explosively. The seigneury in France was abolished with the French Revolution in 1789, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1848, and in Russia not until 1861.

The beginnings of modern nationalism may be traced back to this disintegration, at the end of the Middle Ages, of the social order in Europe. The breakup of feudalism was accompanied by the development of larger communities, wider social interrelations, and dynasties that fostered feelings of nationality in order to win support for their rule. National feeling was strengthened in various countries during the Reformation, when the adoption of either Catholicism or Protestantism as a national religion became an added force for pulling nations together. So, in many cases in Europe -- Sweden, England, Spain -- nationalism grew after the nation-state was created.

The great turning point in the history of nationalism in Europe was the French Revolution. National feeling in France until then had centred in the king. But, the growing merchant middle class in the towns wanted a share of power. They demanded individual liberty, government under a constitution, the rule of law, democracy, the abolition or reduction of class distinctions, and an end to feudal powers. To achieve their goals the revolutionaries had to build a nation-state. If the people continued to live under the commands of royalty and nobility they would never be free. They had to develop the concept of a nation with a national government that represented them all.

The king and the ruling elites were not willing to share their privileges and seem to have completely misread the mood of the people. As the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville said: "Never was any such event so inevitable, yet so completely unforeseen." When the nobility dug in its heels, the bloodshed started. A little over 2,000 nobles -- men, women, and children -- lost their heads to the guillotine.

As a result of the revolution, loyalty to the king was replaced by loyalty to the patrie (fatherland). Thus, "La Marseillaise" the anthem of the French Revolution that later became the national anthem, begins with the words Allons enfants de la patrie ("March on, children of the fatherland").

Regional divisions, with their separate traditions and rights, were abolished. France became a uniform and united national territory, with common laws and institutions. People began to see themselves as part of a national whole; they were no longer defined solely by class. French armies spread the new spirit of nationalism in other lands.

The rise of nationalism came at the same time as the Industrial Revolution, which promoted national economic development, the growth of a middle class, and popular demand for representative government. New emphasis was given to nationalist symbols of all kinds; for example, new holidays were introduced to commemorate various events in national history.

The Revolution of 1848 in Central Europe was another turning point in the growth of nationalism. In that year, both the Germans and the Italian started movements that would lead to the creation of nation states. Although the attempts at revolution failed in 1848, the movements gathered strength in later years. After much political agitation and several wars, an Italian kingdom was created in 1861 and a German empire in 1871. Other Central European peoples who agitated for national independence in 1848 include the Poles, whose territory was divided among Russia, Germany, and Austria; the Czechs, and the Hungarians, subjects of the Austrian monarchy, and the Christian peoples living in the Balkan Peninsula under the rule of the Turkish sultan. The events in Europe between 1878 and 1918 were shaped largely by the nationalist aspirations of these peoples and their desire to form nation-states independent of the empires of which they were a part.

This process continues today.

Look at Italy. It's had all the elements for being a nation for centuries. Geographically, it's very clearly defined -- sea on three sides and mountains on the fourth. The language and culture are unique to the peninsula. Yet, Italy has only been a unified nation since 1861. Massimo d'Azeglio was Prime Minister of Piedmont at the time. He said: "We've made Italy, now we have to make Italians." They're still at it. In September 1996, 20,000 people gathered in Venice. They were there to cheer on Umberto Bossi as he declared a large chunk of northern Italy the independent state of Padania. Many of the people of northern and southern Italy have still not settled their regional differences and pledged their first allegiance to the single nation.