CHAPTER 17
During the first half of the nineteenth century, small groups of
German and Italian nationalists agitated for the political unification of
their respective peoples. Liberals and nationalists were often the same peo
ple sharing the same goals. Many revolutionaries in 1848 had demanded
national unification, notably the lawyers and professors of the Frankfurt
Parliament in the German states and the Italian liberals and nationalists
opposing Austrian domination of northern Italy. But the outcome of the
1848 revolutions notwithstanding, Germany and Italy were not unified by
the popular movements that typified the revolutions that in 1848 brought a
republic to France, forced constitutional changes in Prussia and Austria,
and sparked insurrections against Austrian control of northern Italy.
Italian unification came, not because of the utopian nationalism of
Giuseppe Mazzini nor because of the frenzied dashes of Giuseppe Garibaldi
and his followers into the south, but rather largely as a result of the expan
sion of Piedmont-Sardinia, the peninsula’s strongest and most liberal
state. Italy was unified politically under the liberal auspices of the Piedmont
Sardinian monarchy, the House of Savoy.
The case of Germany was very different. German unification was effected
by autocratic Prussian King William I and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
through shrewd manipulation of both diplomacy and warfare. “Most coun
tries have an army,’’ it was said, but “Prussia is an army with a country.” The
German Empire, like the Prussia that forged it in “blood and iron,” was defi
antly reactionary, flying in the face of currents of European liberalism.
Without question, the emergence of Italy in the 1860s and of Germany
in 1871 changed the history of modern Europe. Germany emerged as a
great power, Italy as a would-be great power. And the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy increasingly was confronted by demands from its ethnic minori
ties for their own independence, which remained a factor for instability in
its domestic and international politics. In some ways, the Habsburg monar
chy seemed an anachronism, out of place in the age of nationalism.
649
THE ERA OF NATIONALUNIFICATION