Recently, my family played host to a house guest from Germany. When I attempted to describe the idea of alternate history to him, he imediatly began to talk about the 1848 liberal revolutions in Europe, and how the world would have been much better off if they had succeded.
Of course, this got me thinking - what would the actual implications have been if the liberal forces had triumphed in 1848? While I did study the 1848 Revolutions in school, I am rather ignorant as to what their goals were - what were the ideologies of the revolutionaries, beyond the fact that they were liberal? How would they have executed their ideological goals? What sort of societies would they have established?
The list goes on, of course. But the question remains the same - what sort of impact would a victory on the part of the liberal revolutionaries in 1848 have had on the course of history?
(For the sake of arguement, let it be assumed that their 1848 victories are complete everywhere where serious movements of that nature came anywhere near to victory in OTL.)