Editing The World Wars (section)

===Nationalism===
Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who looked at Britain with barely restrained jealousy and decided that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog of Europe. Enter the idea of Nationalism, a political theory that roughly states that loyalty to the state trumps all other loyalties, and that there is no higher expression of loyalty to the state than making it better than all the other states. Combine this with borderline unrestrained capitalism and social Darwinism, and you have a toxic brew of ideas: that your country "must" be better than other countries, cooperation is purely for the benefit of countering rivals and earning prestige, and diplomacy, global politics, and economics are zero-sum games that you have to win. Nationalism should not be confused with patriotism. Patriotism is a love for one's country, while nationalism is a determination to make one's country better than others even at the expense of those other countries.

Remember how we mentioned that Pax Britannica and the technological innovations will come up again later? These two, combined with nationalism, were a special point of concern for Britain. Ever since the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had become the enforcer of the peace on the world's seas and the guarantor of Britain's world-spanning empire. The United Kingdom invested colossal amounts of time and money into building a world-beating fleet, equipped with the latest naval technology and manned by a highly trained pool of professional officers and sailors. They produced one of the world's first ironclad warships in 1860 and pioneered the use of propeller-driven ships, gun turrets, and torpedoes. By 1889, Britain's determination to hold onto their top-dog status at sea was formally codified as the "two power standard", whereby the Royal Navy was always to be as strong as the number two and three navies in the world. This worked just fine until 1906, when the revolutionary new battleship HMS ''Dreadnought'' was built and launched. With a uniform armament of big guns, turbine engines, and many other technological improvements, ''Dreadnought'' instantly rendered all other battleships in the world obsolete and triggered a worldwide naval arms race as other countries started building their own dreadnoughts.

In this time before the rise of aircraft carriers and submarines, battleships were still the final arbiter of naval power and a potent symbol of national prestige. Any navy that wanted to be taken seriously had to have battleships, but ''Dreadnought'' had set everyone back to square one, including the Royal Navy. Now it was possible for countries that had lacked a battleship navy to catch up with the big players, and it didn't take long for everyone on the planet to get in on the game. Aside from the usual suspects like Britain, Germany, America, Russia, and France, countries like Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Japan, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina were all ordering up dreadnoughts as fast as they could find the money. Wilhelm II was particularly obsessed with having a dreadnought fleet of his own; aside from the boost it would bring to Germany's prestige and military power, he had long been in love with the Royal Navy and dreamed of building a fleet just like it when he became Kaiser. He hadn't even intended to start an arms race, but when Britain saw Germany investing in a fleet that was potentially equal to theirs, they were completely unwilling to risk losing their status as the dominant naval power. Germany wasn't willing to acquiesce either, since they didn't understand why Britain was getting so upset about the whole thing until one British commentator summed up the UK's position as follows: Germany would still be the most powerful country on the continent of Europe with or without a navy, but if the Royal Navy were wiped out, Britain would instantly lose control of its empire and its position as number one superpower in the world.

A further thing to note is that nationalist tensions were starting to weaken the imperial system, as people living in countries that had been subjugated by the great empires started looking around and going "hey, fuck being ruled by a bunch of smelly dickhead foreigners!" While some countries were able to survive these tensions with more or less sensible governments, like England with the House of Commons, more often than not this resulted in outright revolt, which caused the creation of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and a swath of states formerly under the control of an empire that figured they'd be better off ruling themselves. Others were crushed under the Russians, who knew that successful nationalist movements could cause them to face similar issues with Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

The countries that were hardest hit by these successive waves of unrest revolution were none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were creaky, poor, exhausted states in dire need of reform. The solution that was attempted in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep the state from collapsing. The formation of the Dual [[Monarchy]] and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans had the failed Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire and the Young Turks coup following the Tanzimat's abolition establishing what was intended to be a constitutional monarch but was really a military dictatorship under the delusionally idealistic and, as would be proven in a few years, seriously incompetent Enver Pasha and his fellows in high command. Others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror and oppression tactics. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the fractious and ethnically diverse Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.