Q."We have seen that nationalism can unite people as well as divide them, liberate them as well as generate bitterness and conflict". Illustrate your answer with examples.

Nationalism is one of the most powerful political ideas of the modern era — a set of beliefs and loyalties built around the idea of the "nation" as the natural and legitimate basis for political community and statehood. For more than two centuries it has shaped world history in ways that cut in opposite directions at once.

On one hand, nationalism has been a unifying and liberating force. It drove the unification of scattered kingdoms into the modern nation-states of Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century, helped create many of the new states of Latin America, and powered anti-colonial freedom struggles — including India's own — that freed people from foreign, oppressive rule.

On the other hand, nationalism has also been a divisive and destructive force. It contributed to the break-up of large multi-ethnic empires (the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, and later the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonial empires), and it continues today to fuel separatist movements — among the Quebecois in Canada, the Basques in Spain, the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, and some groups in India — that seek to break existing states apart. The same language of "nationalism" can be used both to call for uniting separate peoples into one larger nation (as with pan-Arab nationalism) and to call for dividing an existing state (as with Basque or Kurdish nationalism).

Because it pulls in both directions, nationalism resists any single, tidy definition — but that very difficulty is a reason to study it carefully, not to set it aside, since it continues to shape borders, loyalties, conflicts and everyday cultural identity (visible even in something as ordinary as excitement over a cricket match or a diaspora community's loyalty to Bollywood films) well into the age of globalisation.