How Conservatives Built Nations and Broke the Balance of Power

The idea

This unit opened with a paradox and closes on its consequence. The paradox: nationalism, the creed of eighteen forty-eight's defeated revolutionaries, was carried to victory by conservative ministers who did not believe in it. Cavour wanted Piedmont's power and got Italy; Bismarck wanted Prussia's and got Germany. Each needed a great-power war to free his hands, and the Crimean War supplied it by breaking the Austro-Russian alliance that had guarded Vienna's settlement. The results were not the liberal nations of eighteen forty-eight. Italy had a half-million electorate and a resentful south; Germany a Reichstag elected by all men and outranked by an unelected council and a Kaiser. Austria answered defeat with a bargain that satisfied two nations and left the rest waiting. Russia answered it with emancipation that freed serfs into debt, then with reaction, and its radicals with a tsar's murder. France answered Sedan with a republic no one had planned, a commune drowned in blood, and a demand for revenge. The consequence: a German Empire at Europe's center destroyed the balance the Congress had kept. Bismarck's alliances held France alone for two decades; his dismissal let Russia turn to France in eighteen ninety-four, and the ring around Germany began. Inside the states, the same conservatives fought Catholics and socialists, then bought the workers with the first welfare state while the SPD waited for a revolution its practice no longer pursued. Nations built from above, an armed peace without a Concert, and empires of many nations: unit fourteen inherits all three.