Bismarck weaponized nationalism by separating it from its liberal grounding

Evidence

Bismarck… realized that, despite the setback of 1848–1849, German liberalism and nationalism supported by Austria were still a serious threat to Prussian particularism and Prussian aristocratic privilege… . Liberalism was fatal to the social order for which Bismarck stood; but nationalism, carefully handled, could be made to subserve the purposes of Prussia… . He separated German national aspirations from the liberal background which, from 1813 to 1848 and in centuries past, had given them meaning. Nationalism had grown strong as an instrument of liberal reform, as an essential means of breaking the stranglehold of particularist interest over the German people… . [H]e offered the German people unity, but at the expense of the radical reform which alone made unity worth while. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 327

Categorization

• XREF: The decoupling of nationalism from radical reform is a key causal mechanism in the broader rise-and-fall arc of revolutionary movements the reader is tracking; parallels the cooptation dynamics that recur in Black radical history.
• SEED: An article angle: how ruling classes repeatedly sever nationalist energy from its liberatory content and redeploy it — Bismarck, and analogues later.