Nation Building in Italy, Germany, and Russia

How did strong leaders and nation building transform Italy, Germany, and Russia?

Louis Napoleon’s triumph in 1848 and his authoritarian rule in the 1850s provided Europe’s victorious forces of order with a new political model. To what extent might the expanding urban middle classes and even portions of the working classes rally to a strong and essentially conservative national state that also promised change? This was one of the great political questions in the 1850s and 1860s. In central Europe a resounding answer came with the national unification of Italy and Germany.

The Russian empire also experienced profound political crises in this period, but they were unlike those in Italy or Germany because Russia was already a vast multinational state built on long traditions of military conquest and absolutist rule by elites from the dominant ethnic group — the Russians. It became clear to Russian leaders that they had to embrace the process of modernization, defined narrowly as the changes that enable a country to compete effectively with the leading countries at a given time.