Description
Much like nations, the nation-based order and the domestic and international hierarchies it produces are imagined. Benedict Anderson and the scholarship in Historical International Relations have frequently approached nationalism and nations as a horizontal division of the world. By contrast, this contribution delves into the imagined hierarchies within and between nations during the 1848 Springtime of Nations. Through an examination of fraternal images employed in a variety of textual and visual sources, I explore how the European national imaginary of 1848 was translated into the nation-based order and its corresponding domestic and international hierarchies. The collapse of the 1848 Revolutions led to a crisis in the national imaginary. The revolutionary fraternity was appropriated under an alienated version by dynastic regimes and opposed by socialists advocating for the international brotherhood of workers. The Springtime of Nations, with its successes and failures, was a pivotal chapter in creating, shaping, legitimising, and challenging the nascent nation-based order.
