Robert D. Kaplan: 1848 ... History's Shadow Over the Middle East

Robert D. Kaplan is a journalist and current National Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. 

1848 in Europe was the year that wasn't. In the spring and summer of that year, bourgeois intellectuals and working-class radicals staged upheavals from France to the Balkans, shaking ancient regimes and vowing to create new liberal democratic orders. The Arab Spring has periodically been compared to the stirrings of 1848. But with the exception of the toppling of the Orleans monarchy in France, the 1848 revolutions ultimately failed. Dynastic governments reasserted themselves. They did so for a reason that has troubling implications for the Middle East: Conservative regimes in mid-19th century Europe had not only the institutional advantage over their liberal and socialist adversaries but also the moral advantage.

Conservative orders, epitomized by the Habsburg Austrian Chancellor Clemens von Metternich, had provided continent-wide stability following the Napoleonic Wars, which in proportional terms killed as many Europeans as World War I. Metternich's Habsburg Empire, encompassing 11 different nationalities, was the geopolitical key to a stable European system (even as the Habsburgs themselves were weak as a power compared to Great Britain and France). Nevertheless, the 1848 reformists were -- like people everywhere and in every age -- insufficiently grateful. By 1848, the horrors of Napoleon were more than a generation past, and Metternich was consequently viewed as merely a reactionary. But liberal hopes of 1848 would come to naught amid ethnic and national questions that the weakening of the Metternichian system unleashed -- ethnic and national questions comparable to the inter-communal tensions that plague the Arab world today.

Indeed, ethnic interests in Europe soon trumped universalist longings. While ethnic Germans and Hungarians cheered the weakening of Habsburg rule in massive street protests that inspired liberal intelligentsia throughout the Western world, there were Slavs and Romanians who feared the very freedom for which the Germans and Hungarians cried out. Rather than cheer on democracy per se, Slavs and Romanians feared the tyranny of majority rule. Among the Slavs were Slovaks, Serbs and Croats who were soon at the throats of their new Hungarian overlords. The Habsburg regime in Vienna exploited these divisions, as well as those between Ukrainians and Poles to the north.

There are fundamental differences between 1848 in Europe and 2011-2012 in the Middle East. Metternich, unlike Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Bashar al Assad in Syria, did not symbolize the decadent rule of one man and one ruling clique; rather, he governed through laws and institutions. Moreover, his polyglot Habsburg system, lying at the geographical center of Europe, constituted a morality in and of itself, necessary as it was for peace among the ethnic nations. This is why Metternich's system survived, even as he himself was replaced in 1848...