ABSTRACT
The political stability that East Central Europe lost in 1848 (with the fall of the Metternich regime) was not regained until 1948 (with the full imposition of Stalinist control), after a whole century of endemic instability and crisis. After 1848 Habsburg absolutism was always on the defensive. ‘The dynastic idea was challenged and, once challenged, could never recover the unconscious security of the past. The “Austrian idea” became an idea like any other, competing for intellectual backing; and the dynasty survived not on its own strength, but by manoeuvring the forces of rival nations and classes’ (Taylor 1976:56-7). But, in the final analysis, ‘the Habsburg Monarchy and nationalism were incompatible; no real peace was possible between them. Metternich saw this more clearly than many of his successors’ (p. 40). This was at the heart of the subsequent endemic instability and crisis up to 1918 and even beyond, when the problem became one of what would take the Habsburg Empire’s place. The Revolutions of 184849 also first posed and made some Europeans fully aware of the difficulty of accommodating a unified German polity in a Europe mainly made up of much smaller nations and states (or would-be states). Indeed, the Czech leaders of 1848 were the first people to be directly confronted by ‘the German problem’, which has loomed so large in European affairs ever since. For these and other reasons 1848 was an extraordinary ‘defining moment’ in the emergence of modern Europe, especially in the Habsburg domains.
