Nationalism refers to the sentiments, when a country promotes themselves and ranks them above all and its citizens love their country and are patriotic about it. In the 19 century, there was a sudden upswing in the nationalistic feelings in various European countries. Most of the civilians were extremely patriotic about their country and also felt strongly about loosing their mother land. People wanted to fight for their land. The people of each country were really enthusiastic about the war therefore, they didn’t really plan as to how will they tackle the problem when it arrives. Nobody had any idea what kind of situation they will be in? What it would be like and what consequences will this war lead them into?
There were reasons as to why people were so enthusiastic about the war. One, they were indoctrinated by their teachers that they should have a strong trust in their country and their leader and secondly, they thought that the war is going to finish in 4 months thus, the victory wasn’t far away. Plus, they wanted to win because they didn’t want to loose their country (land). On the other hand, many European countries were being ruled by multi-racial empires.
That means empires inhabited by people of different races. E.g. Russian empire contained more non-Russians than Russians. The Austro-Hungarian Empire included Serbs, Croats, Poles, Czechs and many others. All these people didn’t feel patriotic about their country as they were ruled by other empires. The nationalist movement in these empires caused lots of conflicts before 1914. These conflicts lead to the war due to strong sense of nationalism.