Thoughts on reading 1848

My history book club met tonight to discuss 1848: Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport. The book tells the story of the revolutions that swept through much of Europe that year, only to fall to conservative reaction. Still 1848 saw the end of serfdom in most of Europe, and the introduction of "the social problem" (dealing with poverty) in European politics, as well as some spread of constitutional government, rule of law, and other more liberal policies.

1948 was a year of great shortage of food (bad weather and the potato blight), and governmental economic crises in part due to the cost of food for starving people. The industrial revolution was sweeping the countries most involved in the revolutionary movements and craft workers saw their livelihoods threatened. There had been more than half a century for the revolutions in the United States, France, and Latin America to influence political thought in Europe. I suspect that new economic classes had grown who wanted to compete for power with the landed aristocracy and monarchy. I suspect too that there were more educated people and that automated printing presses had greatly expanded the flow of information to the public. Then too, communications were improved as railroads were driving through Europe, steam ships were speeding ocean and river transportation, and the telegraph was emerging. These factors helped to synchronize revolution in several states, as well as the counter-revolutionary movements that occurred in response to the violence in the streets.

I came to the conclusion that the book would be better suited to a graduate seminar on modern European history, rather than to an informal book club. Most of our members found the book was too detailed, masking the big themes we were most interested in by masses of names of people and places, many of which we did not know well.

It may be trite, but I was struck by how much the map of world has changed in 162 years. Germany and Italy unified, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian Empires gone, and the British and French colonial empires are gone. There are scores of countries formed from the former colonies of these empires. Russia was incorporated into the USSR, then became the Russian Federation. On the other hand most of the countries in Europe have given up some sovereignty to the European Union, and there are many other common markets.

One of the themes of the book was the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, in the sense of groups with a degree of language and cultural homogeneity seeking to establish states with territory coterminous with the geographical distribution of the group. In 1848 the political unrest had roots in such aspirations by Italians, Germans, Magyars, Poles, etc.

The question was asked as to whether we would ever solve the problem of states and nations. It seems to be significant in India, China and Africa, as well as Europe and other parts of Asia. The rate at which states come and go over the centuries suggests we may not have solved the problem yet.

I suppose federalism is a part of the solution, with some functions of government centralized and other delegated to smaller governmental units more responsive to local residents. We seem largely to have accepted constitutional government, and perhaps to a lesser extent representative government.

Still, there seems to be a lot of work left to society to figure out the best institutions to accomplish the functions of "government". Even if we knew now the best form of institution for the world today, I suspect that the needs for governments will change in the future.