The causes: imperialism and nationalism

For each major historical event we can identify causes.

These are rarely single and sudden: rather, it is a set of reasons which, intervening in each other and adding to previous facts, make the event happen.

It is, in short, the "drop that makes the vase overflow".

Overall, however, we can say that there are two types of causes for major historical events: ideological and economic.

An example of ideological casua is precisely nationalism.

The First World War was unleashed first of all by the widespread NATIONALISM that characterized the great European powers of the time.

In Europe, in fact, there existed four large multi-ethnic empires, that is, which brought together peoples of different ethnicities in a superstate, that is, an empire.

These were the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Germanic Empire, the Turkish Empire and the Russian Empire.

The coexistence of the different ethnic groups was not simple: in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the Russian Empire and also in the Turkish Empire there had been riots and riots throughout the nineteenth century.

We remember, for example, our Italian wars of independence, unleashed against Austria which, directly or indirectly, dominated us.

Poland, then, by the eighteenth century had disappeared from the geographical maps, divided between Russia and Austria.

Finally, in 1871, the German Empire was born, a set of principalities of which the strongest was the Kingdom of Prussia.

This state of affairs was born with the Congress of Vienna: in fact, at the fall of Napoleon, state realities were established which did not take into account the will of the peoples, their national identity.

It is this nationalism, which will then become exasperated, the basis of all those conflicts, even minor ones, which from 1865-66-67 until 1918 will bloody all of Europe: Bulgarians against Serbs, Serbs against Croats, Romanians against Turks, Turks against Greeks.

In short: all against all In Italy, nationalism was never felt by the "people", that is, by the mass of peasants, workers, small artisans; it was the patrimony of a low nobility and an advanced bourgeoisie.

Even the state of the Church was a nationalist state.

This explains why Italy entered the First World War only in 1915, after the party of the "neutralists", ie those who did not want to go to war, was defeated.

As it is easy to understand, the mass of workers we spoke of earlier did not want war: war harms workers, kills trade, massacres fighters and dissolves families and enriches those who earn money from the war, such as large industrialists, banks, nationalist politics.

This twentieth-century nationalism wanted war, to impose itself on others.

The great empires expand at the expense of the peoples of the continents who were rich in raw materials, earth and space: the era of nationalism is also the era of imperialism.

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the African continent was dominated by the British, the French, and then by the Belgians, the Germans, the Italians.

The British empire had spread to Asia and Queen Victoria, who died in 1901, was the sovereign with the largest empire ever seen in history.

In Europe, a small continent, highly evolved due to the two industrial revolutions, the various powers compete for the territories wanting to impose themselves on the others: through the systematic use of war, each human group organizes itself and moves armed in the struggle for survival.

So even if the fuse of the outbreak of the First World War was the killing of Archduke Francesco Ferdinando in Sarajevo (June 28, 1914), the causes of the Great War were ideological, that is animated by nationalism and imperialism.

None of the belligerent countries agree to go for the oppressor.

Even Germany, the epicenter of Prussian "militarism", does not represent itself in an expansionist key.

Instead, it is the rhetoric of self-defense that takes the field and obscures collective thinking.

All, including Germans, claim to act only out of a state of necessity, to defend themselves from the encirclement of the other powers.

Austria wants to punish Serbian nationalists, Russia takes sides as a protector of the Slavic brothers.

France joins Russia in containing Austria.

Britain wants to limit the expansion of any country that could then threaten it in its colonial empire.

Finally, Germany says it wants to break the siege in which it has been tightened by those who prevent it from growing as a great power.

This is the curtain of propaganda and lies that imperialism brings down across Europe.