Anarchism and nationalism: WWI.
The long-term goal of the Western ruling classes in face of the perceived anarchist threat included strengthening the role of the army and of the police forces, further colonial expansion, more control over people’s lives, and, above all, an emphasis on the cultivation of patriotic virtues as a unifying force and as the only acceptable common ideology. The overall strategy increasingly focused on the option of war as a way to save the Western powers from the threat emanating from the lower classes mobilized by revolutionary ideologies. World War I may thus be viewed as part of this wider diversionary strategy to subjugate internal opposition, which included the ideological challenges of anarchism and socialism. With the benefit of hindsight, Italian anarchists later identified World War I as the “tombstone of anarchism.” Through war, many of the state’s ideological opponents were removed from the political scene. The drive to eliminate opponents, however, extended well beyond anarchists, targeting socialists, pacifists, Catholics, democrats and other “internal foes.”
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10848770.2016.1180864