The Question of German Unification

1806-1996

Imanuel Geiss, University of Leeds Fred Bridgham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136185755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The course of recent German history has been volatile. Events in Eastern Europe, the collapse of European Communism and German Re-Unification has brought issues of Germany's status into the arena of world politics. The Question of German Unification presents an introduction to the last two hundred years of German history and addresses questions raised by the status of Germany as a single or split national state.
Imanuel Geiss:
* argues that Germany has fluctuated all too frequently, and catastrophically, between being the power centre of Europe or a power vacuum
* describes the special features of German history and looks at Germany within a European framework
* analyses the political, economic and social aspects of German Nationalism as well as the impact of the collapse of Communism on Germany, through detailing long-term structures and processes
* includes discussion of recent political events as well as a chronology and further reading.
Imanuel Geiss reflects on the irrationalities of German history, surveys how they have been explained by historians, and provides a succinct and readable account of the complex issues involved.

1 Conceptual and European framework

German history is too important to be left to the Germans alone. They cultivate national introspection, the Right stressing the primacy of foreign policy (Primat der Auβenpolitik), and the Left the primacy of domestic affairs (Primat der Innenpolitik). As yet, no rational definition of the German Question has been given in the broader European context. Germany’s ‘special path’ (Sonderweg), recently conjured up by those on the Left, only makes sense as a German variant of other nations’ ‘special paths’ or ‘national questions’. Since the complementary notions of power vacuum – power centre and quantity – quality are universal ones, their application to the German Question promises a greater degree of objectivity.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: POWER

National questions such as the German Question are invariably connected with the political organization of peoples into states of varying size, and with their status as a power vacuum or a power centre. Thence, a general definition of power is called for.

Quality and quantity

The German word for power, Macht, comes from the Indo-European *maghd. It suggests that one is ‘able to do something’, for instance, to raise one’s standard of living, to ‘lead the good life’ (Aristotle). The word signifies a combination of people with economic potential (= capability) and social organization, leading to centralization and hierarchical military structures – armies, navies – under a strong ruler. Consequently, power only develops world-historical importance with the advent of civilization in city-states and empires, first in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3,000 BC. This is why, for Aristotle, the state only comes into existence as the institutionalized embodiment of power when it replaces random scatterings of individual dwellings and villages. Nomads, too, only developed power by forming concentrated military structures.

‘Quantity’ and ‘quality’ – concepts ideally suited to a nuanced analysis of power and state – are also to be found in Aristotle’s Politics, but appear to have been forgotten by modern historians and political scientists in their analysis of power: ‘We have to remember that quality and quantity both go to the making of every state. By “quality” we mean free birth, wealth, culture and nobility of birth; by “quantity” we mean superiority in numbers.’¹

Nowadays, to size of population one would add to the definition of quality the size of territory, analysed by Aristotle as well: it is either roughly proportional to the size of population or else can itself become a strategic or security factor by virtue of its sheer extent – the size of Russia or China, for instance, as a protection against foreign invasions. Conversely, great territorial size can become a heavy burden and make a country ungovernable – witness the break-up of the Soviet Union and pressures within post-Soviet Russia.²

Naturally, size of population requires further classification: ethnic, linguistic, cultural and/or religious homogeneity or heterogeneity are important factors, as is the distinction between the core population of a state and its subject or dependent peoples, usually more towards the peripheries. For power structures of whatever size, the basic rule of thumb is generally a fifty-fifty relationship.

When determining ‘quality’, Aristotle still provides the key, though with his categories perhaps requiring slight modification: it is no accident that ‘freedom’ comes first – the innate sense of qualitative superiority which the classical citizen of the polis felt towards all ‘barbarians’. ‘Aristocracy’ translates into today’s ‘ruling élite’ or ‘political class’; ‘wealth’ becomes ‘economic strength’, as expressed by the gross national products of modern states. ‘Education’ remains as then, now and for the foreseeable future, a key factor.

Today’s historians have a great deal more illustrative material than Aristotle did over 2,000 years ago: with literally countless examples of the ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’ of states, both past and present, to draw on, we can go beyond Aristotle and correlate ‘quantity’ with ‘quality’ by adapting Einstein’s famous formula E = mc² – though in a symbolical sense, of course, rather than a strictly mathematical one: Power = Quantity × Quality².

The greater weighting of quality over quantity explains the often stupendous world-historical effect of small peoples living in small territories (e.g. Portugal, Holland), of city states (Sumerian, Phoenician, Greek), or of the Jews, but also the combined effect of quantity and quality on a large scale (China). Conversely, the formula explains why quantitative strength may turn to weakness when qualititative factors are underdeveloped or have had a dysfunctional, self-destructive effect, as in Russia.

Power vacuum – power centre

A power vacuum is a region without a central government and army. It arises not through the partial or complete absence of power, but when fragmented groups of varying size and strength neutralize each other through mutual rivalry and are rendered incapable of external action, especially of common defence or aggression. In a power vacuum the tendency is towards anarchy or chaos – from primal chaos on the level of pre-agrarian family groupings (hunters and gatherers) and extensive agrarian producers (farmers, nomads) in tribal structures, up to tribal kingdoms and confederations. Secondary chaos in power vacuums generally appears after the dissolution of an imperial superstructure such as an empire and its successor states.

Power vacuums sooner or later attract intervention and conquest by culturally more advanced or militarily stronger power centres. Secondary power vacuums often become the battleground for surrounding major powers, until one of the participants in the internal power struggle for hegemony is successful and establishes a new power centre. States in internal turmoil – as a result of revolution or civil war – temporarily become power vacuums, until such time as order is re-established.

Examples of power centres of varying size and duration, on the other hand, are regions with a central government and army, which often have some of their forces stationed outside their own borders, which is also where they prefer to wage their wars.

The history of states and of power finds spectacular expression in the cyclical rise and fall of power centres and their subsequent collapse into power vacuums. Economic and social history is closely linked in such processes, since it is a country’s economy and social structures which constitute power in the first place. All power centres sooner or later expand by conquest; in modern times also overseas. Generally, some serious military defeat on the periphery provokes internal crisis – in modern times, revolutions and decline of power or an outright collapse.³

Power in relation to the German Question

Like all peoples or regions, the Germans, too, have fluctuated throughout their history between the status of power vacuum and that of power centre. After a diffuse pre-history, German history began with the political union of the Regnum Teutonicum in 911. Against a background of feudal fragmentation during the centuries of chaos after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the German kingdom suddenly emerged, almost from nowhere at the fringes of Latin Europe, as the first power centre in medieval Europe. In 1198 a battle for the German throne between the Staufen and the Guelphs precipitated a centuries-long decline into a power vacuum which lasted until the founding of the Second Reich in 1871. As a continental superpower, the Second German Reich then pursued the fata Morgana of European hegemony and ascent to world-power status, with catastrophic results: the First World War (whence the Germans failed to draw the lesson that it was impossible to defeat the proverbial ‘world of enemies’), National Socialism, Third Reich, Second World War, the division of Germany as part of the division of the world along ideological and power-political lines. German reunification in 1990 came about only in the wake of the Soviet débâcle.

Strictly speaking, the German Question existed in a formal sense only during two periods when the Germans had no single national state: from 1806 to 1871, and from 1945 to 1990. But uniting the Germans in a single state was a uniquely explosive issue, and its corollary becomes inescapable: how would the Germans use such power as they achieved simply by uniting? Like all other new power centres, they sooner or later embarked collectively on the power-political road to expansion, thus the architecture of the European system must provide an answer to the question of why German expansion destroyed the European system itself, in two world wars.

The explosive nature of German unity can also be attributed to the specific rapport between quantity and quality, whence the power of a united Germany: quantitatively, in terms of population and territory, the Germans were always number two in Europe, behind the French until around 1850 and then behind Russia. In addition, isolated territories inhabited by Germans extended throughout eastern and southeastern Europe, forming far-flung pockets of German minorities. Every claim to unite all Germans in a single Reich – as raised by the Pan-Germans after 1890 – thereby inflated the territory claimed by Germans to the point of becoming self-defeating. Furthermore, some of the major German states contained areas in which, to a greater (Austria) or lesser (Prussia) extent, Germans constituted a minority – at best a dominant political, social, economic or cultural minority. Inevitably, they clashed with non-German majorities during the era of awakening national movements.

Qualitatively, Germany in the Middle Ages occupied a roughly central position in Latin Europe, between the most important economic and cultural centres in the South (Italy) and West (France) which had been civilized in varying degrees by Roman tradition passed down a thousand years before, and the North (Scandinavia), which had remained barbarous for much longer, together with the East. It was precisely this central position which made Germany, right down to modern times, the great link between western influences from Italy (church, local autonomy, culture in the broadest sense of the word) and France (medieval land development and the arts) and the rest of Europe.

As a power vacuum, ‘Germany’ had been little more than a geographical concept. But its cultural rise, followed by its economic recovery after the Thirty Years War, and especially the explosion of classical culture around 1800 while it was still politically fragmented and powerless, gave it such momentum that industrialization after c.1850 progressively pushed it qualitatively into a leading position. Its traditional quantitative strength combined with this modern qualitative strength to facilitate its abrupt emergence as the strongest power on the continent, even without the Austrian Germans. In spite of two defeats, in 1918 and 1945 – the second even worse than the first – the divided Germany of the Cold War remained potentially an important power both quantitatively and qualitatively, though in many respects the two Germanies tended to neutralize each other.

THE EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK

In addition to the German dimension of such universal factors as quantity and quality, there are specifically German aspects of the European system, some of which are examined below.

The architecture of the European system

Europe is a complex system of varying entities – peoples, states, regions. Compared with other subcontinental units of similar size, such as China and India, it is distinguished by a different combination of unity and diversity. China is the centralized, all-assimilating, unitary mega-state par excellence. It was no accident, according to de Tocqueville, that oppositional intellectuals (philosophes) at the end of the ancien régime saw it as their ideal state. India, on the other hand, with its social base of family, caste and village, for much of its history has experienced chronic chaos as states fragmented, their size and character changing continuously, with only a few periods of imperial unity. The British raj was the longest period of subcontinental unity for India. Politically, China and India were held together during the last millenium by their respective imperial capitals in the north, Beijing (Peking) and Delhi.

Europe, by contrast, was never a united empire – certainly not after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. Out of feudal chaos there finally emerged, through prolonged conflict, a pentarchy of European powers between the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Since then, the European system has become fragmented through the advent of new national states, above all after the First World War when there emerged successor states of the four great dynastic empires – Czarist Russia in 1917, Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1918 and the Ottoman Empire in 1920/24 – and again with the post-Communist successor states after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in 1989/91.

Instead of imperial unity on the continent, there was always an anti-hegemonic, even an anti-imperial, impulse behind its pluralistic system: whichever of the European powers has attempted to gain sole dominion over Europe has been put in its place by Grand Alliances: France (twice), Russia in the Crimean War, Germany (twice). Since Europe has never constituted a single empire, it has never had a continental capital such as Beijing or Delhi.

While lacking a continental imperial capital, Europe nevertheless has always had a centre: the Germans. If we think of the architecture of the European system as a complex arched Gothic vault, with further arches branching out since the political earthquake of 1989/91, then the Germans would be the capstone. However, given the Germans’ quantitative and qualitative strength, this capstone is too heavy, it threatens to pull down the whole vault. The German capstone would function best in the European vault (and here the metaphor is no longer apt) if it were itself split to ease inner-European tensions. But the capstone must not crumble too much, or it will no longer function effectively.

The quantitative and the qualitative power of the united Germans is a burden both to Germany itself and to Europe. It demands of the Germans, in the centre of Europe, a dangerous balancing act between foregoing the imperial-cum-hegemonic consequences of their national unity, and accepting a low profile, if wanted.

Europe’s internal structural boundaries

One reason for European plurality is the four great structural boundaries which criss-cross the continent.⁴ These came into being where the various versions of civilization which have shaped Europe either stopped their forward march for, in each case, some three to four centuries (the Roman limes; the eastern and southern boundary of the Carolingian Empire), or else drew a fundamental divide through European civilization (Latin/Orthodox, 395/1054; Reformation/Counter-Reformation, 1517/63)

1 The boundaries of the Roman Empire, secured to the north and east by the limes, divided the civilized South and (since Caesar) West – the Iberian peninsula, Gaul, Roman Britain – from the still barbarous East and North, which were to remain barbarous for many centuries to come. What later became Germany is the only European country to straddle this boundary. This helps account for the later fluctuations and uncertainties which the Germans experienced with regard to their place in Europe. The Roman limes was accordingly the first internal structural boundary in Europe.

2 The final division of the Roman Empire saw civilized Europe disintegrate into a Latin West and a Greek East/South-East. Competing Christian missionary efforts from Rome and Constantinople extended the dividing line of 395 northward as far as Finland; religious confirmation of the division between Latin West and Orthodox East came with the schism of 1054. Each side developed in quite different ways, both outwardly and inwardly: in the West, individual freedom, the rule of law, and parliamentary democracy in modern nation states; in the East and South-East, autocratic power structures under the imperial control of despotic rulers.

3 Chronologically between the key dates 395 and 1054, and geographically between the limes and Latin/Orthodox divide, lies the structural boundary of 800: it is marked by the boundaries of the Carolingian Empire, especially with the then still pagan Slav East, and with southern Italy, conquered by the Muslims. True, the Italian Reconquista of 1030–90 and German colonization of the East beginning in 1137 outwardly removed the boundary of 800. But it continued as an inner-European structural boundary because the inhabitants of the reconquered areas in the south of Italy, and of those western parts of the Slav East conquered for the first time, then Christianized and largely Germanized, became all but second-class citizens on Reconquista or colonial soil. To the east of the Elbe, structural differences were renewed and deepened by the ‘second serfdom’ after 1492/98, when agrarian laws over the following centuries reduced peasants to serfs, and in Russia effectively to agrarian slaves. It is no accident that this boundary with the East of 800 and 1492/98 became the great world-structural divide of 1945, and remained so up to the collapse of communism.

4 The final structural boundary, unlike the others, divided the continent north-south, and in a double sense: At the end of the Reformation (from 1517) and the Counter-Reformation (from 1563), the North became predominantly Protestant, with characteristic variants (Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican) and two exceptions: Ireland in the north-west, and Poland and Lithuania in the north-east, clinging staunchly to Catholicism. The South remained predominantly Catholic. The situation in the middle was mixed: Germany reproduced this pattern on a smaller scale – the North predominantly Protestant, the South predominantly Catholic, the middle mixed – and it is here that two of Europe’s great religious wars were sparked off: the Schmalkaldan War of 1546/47 and the Thirty Years War of 1618–48.

Of these four internal structural boundaries, three run through Germany and consequently contributed to Germany’s instability and fragmentation. The complexities of Europe account also for the bewildering oscillat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to English edition
• 1 Conceptual and European framework
• 2 From power vacuum to power centre: from the First to the Second Reich, 1806–1871
• 3 Germany as a power centre: Second and Third Reichs, 1871–1945
• 4 Germany as a power vacuum: division, 1945–1989/90
• 5 United Germany since 1989/90
• Chronological table
• Notes
• Further reading
• Index