Summary Post

For me, a big topic this week has been nationalism. The questions that keep floating around in my mind are- what is a nation? Is the USA a nation? What is the role of nationalism? Which is better- bottom up or top down? Nationalism can be embraced by the liberals, the conservatives, and even the socialists (Marx) but what is key is that nationalist movements only seem to succeed if the ruling regime is sensible enough to use a mixture of bottom up and top down nationalism (for example- the Italians and Bismarck). 

Another key point that was made in class was that as you move eastward, there are greater numbers of different kinds of people and ethnicities and therefore nationalism plays a bigger role in the revolutions. I've also learned this week that nationalism both hindered and fueled the revolutions of 1848. Nationalism helped unify groups of people that identified themselves as "German" or "Italian," but as you moved eastward and the ethnicities began to become a tangled web, nationalism actually broke apart people from these different ethnicities that were living in the same nation. 

Another key point from this week made about Marxism was that even though workers and middle class might start off together- when push comes to shove, worker's only friends are other workers. This concept ties into nationalism in the sense that the people make the nation or the workers are the nation themselves. As long as everyone agrees we are a nation- then we are a nation. As long as we have common ideals shared by all- then we are a nation. As long as we have shared legal, educational, and political institutions- then we are a nation. A lot of the process of figuring out if we are a nation is subjective. 

To be perfectly honest, I'm still quite confused on the chronology of the July Revolution, June Days, and overall, the year of 1848.