Political Ideologies and Movements in 19th Century Europe
Three competing ideologies shaped 19th-century European politics: nationalism, liberalism, and conservatism. Understanding how they clashed and overlapped explains why revolutions kept erupting across the continent and why the political map of Europe was redrawn by 1871.
Nationalism, Liberalism, Conservatism
Nationalism is the belief that people who share a common language, culture, and history belong together in their own independent state. This idea of national self-determination fueled movements like Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire (achieved in 1830) and the push to unite fragmented Italian and German states. Nationalism could be a unifying force, but it also threatened multi-ethnic empires like Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, where dozens of ethnic groups lived under one ruler.
Liberalism grew out of Enlightenment thinking and focused on protecting individual rights: freedom of speech, due process, private property, and limits on government power. Liberals championed constitutional government, representative democracy, and free-market economics (drawing on Adam Smith's ideas). In practice, this meant pushing for written constitutions and expanding who could vote, though early liberals typically wanted suffrage limited to property-owning men, not universal democracy.
Conservatism defended the existing social order. Conservatives valued traditional institutions like the monarchy, the established church, and the aristocracy. They didn't necessarily oppose all change, but they wanted it to be slow and controlled rather than revolutionary. Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich is the textbook example: he spent decades working to suppress liberal and nationalist movements across Europe.
These ideologies had concrete political effects:
- They inspired the wave of 1848 Revolutions that swept across France, the German states, the Austrian Empire, and Italy
- They drove the formation of political parties, such as the Whigs (liberal-leaning) and Tories (conservative-leaning) in Britain
- They produced new constitutions (Belgium's Constitution of 1831) and expanded voting rights (Britain's Reform Act of 1832, which roughly doubled the electorate)
Italian and German Unification
Both Italy and Germany entered the 19th century as patchworks of small states, kingdoms, and territories. By 1871, both had become unified nation-states, though through very different paths.
Italian Unification (Risorgimento)
The Italian peninsula was divided among Austrian-controlled territories in the north, the Papal States in the center, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. Three key figures drove unification, each playing a distinct role:
- Giuseppe Mazzini provided the ideological spark. He founded Young Italy, a revolutionary organization promoting Italian unity and republican government. His writings inspired a generation of nationalists.
- Camillo Benso di Cavour, Prime Minister of Sardinia-Piedmont, was the strategist. He used diplomacy (the Plombiรจres Agreement with France) and military alliances to expand Sardinia-Piedmont's territory, particularly through war against Austria in 1859.
- Giuseppe Garibaldi was the military hero. He led his volunteer force, the Red Shirts, on the Expedition of the Thousand (1860), conquering the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from the south.
Unification came together through this combination of top-down diplomacy and bottom-up popular action, confirmed by plebiscites (public votes) in the annexed territories. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, though Rome wasn't incorporated until 1870.
German Unification
German unification was driven primarily by Prussia and its Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Economic integration had already begun through the Zollverein, a customs union that lowered trade barriers among German states and tied their economies to Prussia (while excluding Austria).
Bismarck practiced Realpolitik, a pragmatic, results-oriented approach to politics that prioritized Prussian power over ideology or morality. He engineered three wars to achieve unification:
- Schleswig-Holstein conflict (1864): Prussia and Austria jointly defeated Denmark and took control of the disputed duchies.
- Austro-Prussian War (1866): Prussia defeated Austria in just seven weeks, excluding Austria from German affairs and forming the North German Confederation under Prussian leadership.
- Franco-Prussian War (1870โ1871): Prussia defeated France, annexed the territories of Alsace-Lorraine, and used the shared victory to rally the southern German states into the union.
The German Empire was proclaimed in January 1871 at the Palace of Versailles, with Kaiser Wilhelm I as emperor and Bismarck as Imperial Chancellor.
Challenges After Unification
Both new nations faced serious growing pains:
- Integrating regions with very different political traditions (some had been absolute monarchies, others had constitutions), economies (industrialized north vs. agricultural south in Italy), and local identities
- Building national institutions from scratch, including unified currencies (the Italian lira), legal systems, and representative bodies (the German Reichstag)
- Overcoming regional loyalties that didn't disappear just because borders changed on a map
Congress of Vienna
The Congress of Vienna (1814โ1815) was the diplomatic conference that redrew Europe's map after Napoleon's defeat. Its three main goals were to restore the balance of power, prevent the spread of revolutionary ideas, and redistribute territory among the victorious powers.
The Congress operated on several guiding principles:
- Legitimacy: Restoring pre-Napoleonic ruling families to their thrones, such as the Bourbons in France and Spain
- Compensation: Rewarding the nations that fought Napoleon with territorial gains. Prussia received the Rhineland, Russia gained control over most of Poland, and Austria took northern Italy.
- Containment: Creating buffer states around France to prevent future aggression, including the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the German Confederation
Russia, Austria, and Prussia also formed the Holy Alliance, pledging to uphold Christian values and cooperate in suppressing revolutionary movements. This reflected the deeply conservative character of the post-Napoleonic settlement.
The Congress succeeded in maintaining relative peace for several decades through the Concert of Europe, a system of regular diplomatic conferences where the great powers resolved disputes collectively. But by suppressing nationalist and liberal aspirations rather than addressing them, the Congress created pressure that kept building. That pressure eventually exploded in the Revolutions of 1848 and ultimately produced the very nation-states (Italy and Germany) that the conservative order had tried to prevent.