There were plenty of nationalist, often liberal revolutions (in the sense of having a constitution rather than absolutism, if not necessarily democracy). 1848 was known as “the Springtime of Nations” in part because of its heavy nationalist claims that many of its participants made. Therefore, many of the subsequent nationalist movements can be seen as part of the sameThe Turkish War of Independence is a major one. The Unification of Italy can be seen as one. The Unification of Germany can be seen as another. Even the emergence of states like Poland after WWI were in many ways the culmination of the 1848 moment. Many of the 1848 participants did not necessarily want democracy as we’d understand it, but liberal protections under the law and maybe some representation in government, some sense that authority emanated from the people even if decision-making did not always.

One factor is by the time we get towards the end of the 19th century, most countries already have some trappings of liberals, most notably the constitution limiting the powers of the monarch, generally vesting power not just in the nobles but some sort of representatives of the people. By the end of the “Long 19th Century” (French Revolution to WWI), most of Europe did have liberalism in some sense firmly established, which we can somewhat sloppily but conveniently date to constitutions. Austro-Hungary got a series of ineffective constitutions in 1867. The Ottoman Empire had two brief constitutional periods (1876-1878; 1908-end of the Empire). Russia didn’t get a constitution until 1906. Many of these were done in the wake of uprising or catastrophe. The Second Turkish constitution period came in with a Coup. Russia’s constitution came in the wake of their humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.

Often, once a country had a constitution, politics functioned in a “normal” way: so long as the constitution was in effect, parties and politicians (and often the ruling monarch) would argue what should be enshrined in it. When it was suspended, the agitation came to reinstate the constitution.

As countries split off from these empires, they often immediately embraced some form of liberalism. Greece, the first country to successfully break off from the absolutist Ottoman Empire, for example, had a constitution from 1833. Since the nationalist revolutions were crucial to the success of the fledgling states, the new monarch generally had to enshrine something in the constitution. It was a constitutional monarchy, granted, but almost all states in Europe were either constitutional monarchies or absolutist monarchies—there were relatively few republics, and these tended to be relatively small.

We typically think of the questions as despotism or democracy, in retrospect, but many in Eastern Europe and the Middle East thought of it as a question of absolutism or constitutionalism. The major goal of liberalism was to start a constitutional process, which would start a modernization process, which all could by done through a parliament (whose powers would hopefully grow over time). Nader Sohrabi has a book and a coupe of articles arguing how Ottomans and Iranian liberals saw constitutionalism, not democracy, as their ultimate hope (rememberers many of the liberals came from the educated middle class of elite and also feared “mob rule”). One important point here was the aforementioned Russo-Japanese War: this was the first time a Western state had been soundly defeated by an Eastern one. Why? Well, as the liberals in the Ottoman and Iranian empires saw it, an absolutist backwards Western State was defeated by a constitutional modern Eastern state. They, too, could revive their fortunes with a constitutional and modern reform. It’s no coincidence, he argues, that the Russo-Japanese ends in 1905, and Iran gets its constitution in 1905 and the Ottoman Empire restores its constitution in 1908.

In the Americas, all the wars of independence were liberal (in the sense that they had constitutions, a theoretical rule of law, and thought that authority ultimately emanated from the people), as far as I’m aware. Like the United States, these liberal ideals were often only slowly extended to everyone, but the liberal ideals were there from the beginning and there was generally no need for a revolutionary movement to specifically establish them (though these, too, did happen: the Mexican Revolution is a example of this, which I’ll point out, was not coincidentally fought largely about constitutions—most scholars consider the Constitution fo 1917 to be the end point or at least the beginning of the end of the Mexican Revolution).

Once a liberal order had replaced the absolutist order and established a constitution and likely a (sometimes toothless) parliament, there were only rarely a need for a massive revolution—things could be done within the “normal politics” of the liberal order. Revolutions were only required when one wanted to change the liberal order—in the 20th century, this usually either meant a socialist revolution or a fascist one.