The One Minute Showdown: Italy's Unification

Recently in class, we had a bit of a showdown against each other about 19^th century political ideologies. An ideology is a system of ideas and ideals, mostly referring to systems that act as foundations for economic or political policies. The main three ideologies during the time period were liberalism, conservatism, and nationalism, although the terms meant different things than they do today. We split into 6 groups (2 per ideology) and read about our assigned topic. Then each group made a one minute presentation to explain their ideology to the rest of the class, facing off against the other group’s presentation, and the class decided whose was more engaging and helpful.

Our group’s topic was nationalism, and we did a live skit to illustrate our ideology. At the beginning, three different states on the Italian peninsula all fought against each other, but when a foreign ruler came in to take over, they banded together to get rid of him. Seeing their similarities and how well they worked as a group, the states joined together as a single country to progress as a whole.

The separate states, in accordance with nationalist ideas, join together to form the single country of Italy! Background music from youtube.com.

Nationalism is the ideology that people of similar cultures, languages, and traditions should join together to prevent foreign rule and to further their own causes. This mostly affected places like Germany and Italy, where everything was split up into regions, rather than a whole country. After the defeat of Napoleon, Italians and Germans saw that their unification was a strength, and aimed for that, though they did not unify until much later.

The other two ideologies were at odds with each other, though nationalism allied itself with liberalism. Liberalism is a system based on merit that gives more freedom and rights for the middle class, rather than the royalty and aristocracy. Liberalism was a basis for philosophers such as John Locke and Adam Smith, who argued for individual liberties, and eventually gave rise to utilitarianism, which is the idea that laws should be judged on overall usefulness to the most amount of people. On the other hand, conservatism places value on traditional constructs, like the monarchy, aristocracy, and the church. Conservatives often criticized the French Revolution, for the bloodshed that reform caused.

I enjoyed the competitive nature of this activity, and I would’ve liked to try a more technological presentation instead of a live skit if we do this again, especially Chatterpix, which a lot of the other groups used.