Chapter 21: What is a Nation? Territories, States, and Citizens, 1848-1871
Chapter Summary
There is little doubt that 1848 represented a revolutionary year for almost every nation on the European continent. The revolution in France served as the catalyst for these uprisings although the real causes of 1848 lay in European developments that included unreconciled social antagonisms, economic crises, and a general impatience with the conservative order. The Revolutions of 1848 were not, however, monolithic. Nor were developments in one country played out in another. While the middle classes played important roles in developments in western Europe, the same cannot be said of Central and Eastern Europe, where the nobility and large landowners retained the tradition pantheon of privilege and authority.
The revolutions of 1848 also highlight one of the key developments in the formation of 19th century ideologies. For it was during the years following the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) that nationalism -- together with its loose coalition with liberalism and nation-building -- came to exert a profound social, economic and political force. Nationalism came to be understood as a sentiment that bound a people together that shared a common history, geography, language and cultural tradition. And although there were a number of philosophers who were advancing this "nationalist idea," it was 1848 which brought nationalism to the forefront of popular argument for reform.
While historians and others could easily argue the success or failure of the French Revolution of 1789 -- and indeed, they have been doing so for more than a century -- 1848 represents a clear failure on the part of the revolutionaries, no matter which country is under investigation. However, in the wake of the revolutions of 1848, new nations came into being -- specifically Germany and Italy -- and thus changed the map of Europe for the duration of the 19th century. The balance of power, so carefully constructed at Vienna, set the stage for the appearance of what, by the end of the 19th century, would be called, the Great Powers: Germany, Britain, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, France and, a relative newcomer, the United States. And this balance of power, a clever balancing act if ever there was one, would manifest itself in the great imperialist drives at the end of the century and ultimately in the European cataclysm, the Great War of 1914-1918.
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