When answering the question "did nationalism fuel the revolutions of 1848 or did it undermine them," my first impulse was to think positively, as I always do, that nationalism is purely a good thing and therefore it must have fueled the revolutions of 1848. There is definitely evidence to support this claim in our nice little textbook. For example "the roots of revolution lay in social antagonisms, economic crisis, and political grievances. But these revolutions were also shaped decisively by nationalism" (746). Liberal reformers in the German Confederation resented both the Austrians and the Prussians, and believed that "german nationalism... would break Austrian or Prussian domination and end the sectional fragmentation that made reform so difficult" (747). With this mindset, in both Prussia and the smaller German states, "political clubs of students and other radicals joined with middle-class groups of lawyers, doctors, and businessmen to press new demands for representative government and reform" (747). The Frankfurt Assembly is a good example of how most germans were struggling to form a single nation: Germany. Unfortunately, the problem with creating a nation is deciding which germans would be included in this new nation. Some delegates in the Assembly believed that Germans were all those who, "by language, culture, or geography, felt themselves bound to the enterprise of unification" (748). Basically, one group argued for Small Germany (which excluded all Germans living in the Habsburg Empire) and the other group argued for Great Germany.
After reading this, I decided that maybe nationalism wasn't ALL that good for the revolutions of 1848. Sure, it was definitely part of the mentality that pushed germans, italians, etc... to revolt and gain unity; however, nationalism also seemed to undermine the revolutions because of all the "tangled webs of alliances and antagonisms" that it created (751). In central Europe, there were a lot of different ethnicities living side by side, and in some situations they joined forces to fight for a particular cause (like ending feudalism), but the "paradox... was that no cultural or ethnic majority could declare independence in a given region without prompting rebellion form other minority groups that inhabited the same area" (751). Nationalism- helped unify groups of people that identified themselves as "German" or "Italian," but it also broke apart people from different ethnicities that were living in the same nation and therefore a tangled mess of alliances was created.
Overall, I feel that nationalism both fueled the revolutions of 1848 and undermined the revolutionary gains.
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