We continue on this Sunday morning with the second installment of Professor Quigley's work 'Tragedy and Hope...

...The Rise of the Nation State
The shift from the professional army of mercenaries to the mass army of citizen soldiers, along with other factors acting on other levels of culture, made it necessary to broaden the basis of allegiance once again after 1800. The new basis was nationalism, and gave rise to the national state as the typical political unit of the nineteenth century. This shift was not possible for the larger dynastic states which ruled over many different language and national groups. By the year 1900 three old dynastic monarchies were being threatened with disintegration by the rising tide of nationalistic agitation. These three, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire of the Romanovs, did disintegrate as a consequence of the defeats of the First World War. But the smaller territorial units which replaced them, states like Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Lithuania, organized largely on the basis of language groups, may have reflected adequately enough the nationalistic sentiments of the nineteenth century, but they reflected very inadequately the developments in weapons, in communications, in transportation, and in economics of the twentieth century.

By the middle of this latter century these developments were reaching a point where states which could produce the latest instruments of coercion were in a position to compel obedience over areas much larger than those occupied by peoples speaking the same language or otherwise regarding themselves as sharing a common nationality. Even as early as 1940 it began to appear that some new basis more continental in scope than existing nationality groups must be found for the new super-states which were beginning to be born. It became clear that the basis of allegiance for these new super-states of continental scope must be ideological rather than national. Thus the nineteenth century's national state began to be replaced by the twentieth century's ideological bloc. At the same time, the shift from amateur to specialist weapons made it likely that the new form of organization would be authoritarian rather than democratic as the earlier national state had been. However, the prestige of Britain's power and influence in the nineteenth century was so great in the first third of the twentieth century that the British parliamentary system continued to be copied everywhere that people were called upon to set up a new form of government. This happened in Russia in 1917, in Turkey in 1908, in Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1918-1919 and in most of the states of Asia (such as China in 1911).
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2020/05/part-2-tragedy-hopewestern-civilization.html