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I want to problematize the idea that there was a pre-WWII White Unity, that then disappeared all at once post-WWII. To post up off of @RenOS 's excellent response, desegregation doesn't start with Black people, it starts with "trusting people from the next village" and then moves through the French Revolutionary levee en masse to "trusting people from other regions within one nation." For immigrant and mixed nations like the United States, there was a long process to achieve linguistic and religious unity within the category of "White." The ancient Greeks drew such strong distinctions between so many different races and city states within a region that is roughly the size of modern Florida.
We can argue about what the degree of discrimination between groups existed pre-WWII, but it was common for a variety of reasons for white-ethnics to marry purely among their own community. Italians married Italians, Austrians and Germans married each other, Irish Catholics married Irish Catholics, WASPs looked down on intermarrying with Catholics. My Hungarian Great Grandmother had a framed photo of JFK and Jackie in her kitchen, because she had taken so much shit for being a Catholic when she came to America, JFK's election was for her similar to the way Black people felt about Barack Obama.
Post WWII, while I still have some Long Island Eye-Talian friends whose parents want them to marry another Eye-Tie, most people are subsumed under the category white. Theological differences between Papists and Prots have been erased or narrowed, to the point that very few people are sufficiently devout to care one way or the other, often a religious Catholic would sooner their daughter marry a devout protestant than an agnostic nominal Catholic.
Viewed in this way desegregation is part of a longer gradient. The amalgamation of disparate identies, from regions into nations, then of nationalities and religious groups into racial categories on the census, to a further integration between census categories of Race.
Nationalism was more often about fragmentation than unification though. The Austro-Hungarian empire split up at the end of WW1 because nobody wanted to share a country with a different ethnic group, and then Yugoslavia split up into even smaller parts later on. Ireland split from the UK. The Basques tried to split from Spain but didn't have enough guns. I don't think the narrative of a long, overarching process towards unification is accurate since it's a process that goes in both direction.
I think it's more of a top down movement going back to the roots of liberalism, which was an elite movement from the beginning. If you start with the premise that everyone is exactly equal and that all differences are from upbringing and circumstances then of course integration makes sense. People who have to live with the consequences more directly might not agree, but that's what the 101st Airborne Division is for.
Nationalism lead to the fracturing of empires that didn't unify hard enough. France brutally suppressed Gascon, Basque, Norman, Provencal, Breton identities, subsumed them under Paris. They eliminated local variation in languages, forcibly required that everything be written in proper standard French.
If the Austrians had the state capacity and the will to forcibly replace local languages with German, the Habsburgs would still be enthroned in Vienna.
It’s worth noting that Austria thought a ‘many nations, one empire’ plan wherein the various subjects would be United by religion and the monarchy was a better bet than nationalism, and that the proximal cause of this plan failing was losing a major war(which was due to a combination of terrible foreign policy decisions, nepotism, and geographic disadvantages rather than internal instability), not revolts among the subjects, and nationalist sentiment opposed to membership in the empire was mostly an import- Princep was a Serbian(from outside the empire) wanting to incorporate a subject people into being forcibly required to be good Serbians, and not a local activist, after all.
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