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In the Old World at the time of the American Revolution, the modern nation was still taking shape. There had been stirrings of nationalism in Western Europe as early as the 14th century, but in the 18th century the characteristic medieval institutions—a feudalism that tied people and their children to a particular plot of land and a Catholicism that made everybody a member of a universal church—were by no means dead. Great Britain was ahead of most of the Continent in talking and acting like a single nation. In France the Bourbon kings were still addressing their subjects not as the "French" people but as the peoples of Languedoc, Gascony, Burgundy, Picardy and other duchies and regions that had been brought under the suzerainty of the House of Bourbon. The word "nation," from the Latin nasci (to be born), with strong overtones of a tribal or racial community, still commonly referred to the people who happened to be born in one particular region and who shared a common ancestry.
Loyalties were gradually transformed. A wholesome love of the locality of your birth (le pays) became a belligerent devotion-to-the-death to a vast "fatherland" (la patrie) and its government. The Protestant Reformation, meanwhile, had bred scores of new sects of Christianity. The once Europe-wide loyalty to a single "catholic" church was fragmented into national churches. At the same time, skepticism and science bred doubts of the sovereignty of a single supernational God. The struggle of nations for power then became the story of modern European history —of its boundary disputes, its wars, its revolutions, its literatures and cultures, its deepest communal loves and its bitterest hatreds.
Not until the 19th and 20th centuries did modern nationalism in Europe produce its ripest fruit and its lethal poisons. Nationalism proved to be the modern tribalism, fencing in thought, focusing passions and blinding men to their common humanity. Chauvinism—the word for unreasoning patriotism—came from Nicolas Chauvin, a soldier serving in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars who made himself notorious for his militant national enthusiasm. "Our country, right or wrong!" became a battle cry of peace-loving people.
The growing pride in national cultures and the rise of language consciousness fed the virus. With the spread of literacy and of the cheap daily press, nationalism in the virulent form of chauvinism swept Europe. By 1885 Nietzsche could define a nation as "a group of men who speak one language and read the same newspapers." The epic of nationalism, enlivened by folklore, poetry, painting and music, became a worldwide tragedy written in blood.