Unification Of Italy And Italian Unification

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The building of nation state is relatively recent phenomenon. The widespread adoption of the political institution can be traced back to the first half of the 19th century. From economic perspective, ideally, the world could be organized as a single free market area, a world market of free trading individuals. Nation states were viewed as the second best, given the hetero-genetic of individuals with different races, cultures and ideologies. According to liberal philosophy, a nation state had to be of sufficient size to form a viable unit of development but not more. (Spolaore, and Wacziar, 2000)
Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the architects of the Italian unification, thought that the optimal number of notational states in Europe was 12, given the economic considerations and the ethnic composition of Europe (Hobsbawn (1990). The unification of Italy (1861) and Germany (1871) can be viewed in this context as well: among other considerations, this was an attempt at building two economies of reasonable size, eliminating small polities protected by heavy trade barriers. This, to large extent, facilitated by the relative cultural, linguistic and ethnic homogeneity of the groups that come together. In fact, economic arguments were critical in the case of
Germany 's unification: As John Keynes put it, paraphrasing Bismarck, Germany was unified by "coal and iron". The German Nation started in 1834 as a customs union which ensure low barriers to trade among its members. European architects

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