Germany - The Tides of Power

Michael Balfour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134917037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In Germany - The Tides of Power, Michael Balfour sets out to explain the factors which have shaped the German social, political and economic character. Tracing the movement of power from the Middle Ages onwards, he seeks to lead the reader to an understanding of modern Germany - why Germany precipitated, and lost, two major wars this century; how the astonishing growth of wealth over the last half-century was achieved; the meaning behind the recent unification of Germany. As German economic expansion continues into the 1990's, Professor Balfour discusses the power held by this technologically advanced nation - and considers the acceptance of this power by the rest of the world.

1
FROM TRIBE TO NATIONAL STATE: THE FIRST REICH

Two non-events during the Middle Ages combined to have a profound effect on Germany’s later history. The first was that the peoples who spoke varieties of the German language (and who must surely have been descended from a single tribe at some point in prehistory) did not develop drastically idiosyncratic versions of it. The second was that various attempts to consolidate them into a single political unit proved in the long run unsuccessful. Many things might have turned out differently either if the Prussians, Saxons, Bavarians and the rest had ceased to be able to understand one another or if a single central government had proved durable. As it was, the Germans retained the ability to feel as a nation but did not acquire the capacity to act as a state.

The reasons why the Frankish, Saxon and Hohenstaufen empires all in due course disintegrated were many: external distractions, premature deaths, dynastic squabbles, incompetent heirs. But the decisive obstacle to unity from 1076 onwards was the hostility of the Papacy and the help thus given to the subordinate princes in their resistance to close Imperial control. Power was dispersed but rested mainly with the seven Electors to the Imperial Crown. The principle was gradually established that their votes should be given to the head of the House of Habsburg, but thereafter he was treated more as an equal than as an overlord.

The Reformation, which at first seemed to offer a new bond uniting Germans against the outside world, in the end carried the process of disintegration further by allowing each ruler to decide the form of religion to be adopted in his territory. Only a minority sided with the old faith but it included the Habsburgs. Lutherans were almost as hostile to Calvinists as to Catholics. Henceforward the only things which Germans possessed in common were a memory and a language (which, however, was given a new focus in Luther’s translation of the Bible).

In England, by contrast, the Normans, Plantagenets and Tudors established the King’s Justice, the King’s English and the King’s Highway. These constituted the essence of stable and effective government with all that could flow from it in the shape of peace, security, ease of movement and a reliable, undiscriminating and uniform legal system. These, in turn, are the pre-essentials for the accumulation of capital (with means of transferring it from savers to spenders); its use to put into effect technical invention (which presupposes the accumulation of knowledge and is particularly important in its application to communications) and the growth of population (to provide both personnel for the machines and consumers for the products). The accidents (or, if one prefers, the destiny) of history and geography, and in particular the fact of being insulated by the sea, placed Britain in a peculiarly favourable position for pioneering the technological break-through known as the Industrial Revolution.

Socially, the technology involved an early swelling in the numbers of merchants, well-to-do landed gentry, professional people and craftworkers. This in turn meant that the crucial conflict between a monarchy tending to absolutism and the various elements composing the ‘middle classes’, who had within them the seeds of a democratic state, was in Britain fought out at a relatively early date and settled in favour of the popular side. This shift of power intensified the awareness of common interest which had been growing under a relatively benevolent royal government since medieval days; the resulting integration (or, to use a simpler term, patriotism) considerably increased the international effectiveness of the state. True, the power of the king was during the eighteenth century replaced by that of an oligarchy, but that oligarchy was never a closed one. It owed much of its resources to commerce and took care to see that commercial interests got free play. Moreover the doctrines which had been evolved to justify the political revolution continued to dominate innovating thought. The result was that when the social repercussions of the Industrial Revolution began to get under way, there were within the ruling classes enough believers in the principles of liberty to provide a focus for the disaffected and to offer them hope that the necessary adjustments could be made without having the social fabric again torn apart by the spiritual and material destruction of revolution.

There has been much discussion recently as to whether Germany took a special path (Sonderweg) to modernity. My answer is that, if any country took such a path, it was Britain which obviously enjoyed special conditions enabling her to break ahead first. In Germany most of these conditions were lacking. It was not an accident but the consequence of the absence of this central authority which caused the Wars of Religion to last for thirty years (1618–48), reduced the population by some 35 per cent and left the country divided into 234 territorial units. The endemic fighting made lives and property insecure. Justice was hard to acquire; saving, learning and invention languished. Awareness of common interest and the sense of being master of one’s own fate, along with belief in the ability to control one’s own environment, were all weak. The new Atlantic routes, which brought so much stimulus to the western coasts of Europe, turned Germany into an economic backwater. While Britain and France were entering on the most eventful period of their histories and expanding in all directions, Germany was at best stagnating. Later generations were to describe these as ‘the lost centuries’.

Luther’s emphasis on the direct responsibility of the individual to God might have been expected to foster a critical attitude towards the state. But instead his belief in original sin led him to take a pessimistic view of human institutions and a distrust of the masses, which was intensified when in 1525 the excitement of defiance to the existing order spread from the religious to the secular field and burst out in the Peasant’s Revolt. By throwing his authority against the rebels, Luther may have lost a chance of making Protestantism a religion of the masses. But in the long run the support of the princes was more important; without it the Reformation might have petered out as earlier movements had done. Yet by taking their side, he put control in their hands. The Lutheran Church became a branch of the state, teaching that God had ordained princes to rule their peoples as fathers rule their families; the business of pastors was to save souls for a heavenly kingdom rather than influence the policies of earthly ones. As all a ruler’s subjects had to conform with his religious views, it was natural for his officials to collect from them along with other taxes the dues on which the Church depended. Those who disliked the religion of their ruler could usually find near at hand an alternative more to their taste. All of which goes to explain the virtual absence in Germany of the nonconformist dissenting tradition which in Britain and the United States of America has proved so potent a source of politics which were radical without being irreligious. Even in 1914 there were only 15,000 people in the whole country claiming to belong to ‘Free Churches’.

GERMANY’S EASTERN FACE

To say that Germany, being in the centre of Europe, has an eastern as well as a western face may seem a glimpse of the obvious but is all the same a truth of the first importance. For her history has been as much affected by the lands to the one side as by those to the other and, as conditions in the two directions differed, her people have had continually to reconcile dissimilar influences and problems.

When in the second century the Germanic tribes moved west and south, their place on the great northern plain was filled by Slavs. These people remained little affected in religion, society and farming methods by Mediterranean culture. As central Germany developed, the Christian duty of converting the heathen to the east combined with a desire to see the land put to better use.

In Bohemia and Silesia, the operation of conversion and colonization went ahead fairly smoothly but farther north the Prussians, a Slav people akin to the Latvians and Lithuanians, offered the fiercest resistance. A prominent part in subduing them was played by the Teutonic Knights, an order originally formed to free the Holy Land from the infidel which in 1225 moved to north-east Germany and in fifty years of struggle succeeded in imposing on the Prussians German habits even where they could not impose German names. Nor was it only in Prussia that the previous inhabitants became Germanized. A parallel assimilation was achieved widely in the conquered territories, although more among the owners of the lands than among the tillers of them, thus complicating the task of anyone so rash as to try to decide on strictly historical grounds to which state it is that they should now belong.

The process left a lasting mark on the men who conducted it. They came to regard as inferior beings all those—chiefly peasants—who kept any of their original characteristics, until the habitual attitude of the German to the Slav became one of disdain. On numerous occasions in coming centuries German and Slav were to co-operate but this co-operation was never, in German eyes, between equals. Their goal of obtaining and holding the upper hand was almost beyond their resources and they never felt secure against a Slav counter-attack: one in the fifteenth century was not completely reversed for 300 years. In consequence great emphasis was laid on discipline, sacrifice, vigilance and valour. But these are secondary virtues whose value depends on which primary objectives they are invoked to serve.

In the thirteenth century a defence system was established in Brandenburg and peasants from further west were encouraged to settle in swamps surrounding a village called Berlin. Two centuries later the Emperor gave the job of ruling Brandenburg to a friend, Frederick von Hohenzollern, whose family, after originating on a hill top in Swabia, had for generations held an important post in Nuremberg. Early in the seventeenth century the Calvinist Elector of Brandenburg added to his lands by inheritance the Lutheran Dukedom of Prussia. And whereas the German peasants needed to colonize the Slav lands had originally to be allowed exceptional privileges, a variety of forces combined at the end of the Middle Ages to turn them back into serfs bound to the land and dependent on the landlord for justice. The towns decayed in the religious wars, except for a few ports through which the surplus corn, grown by large-scale farming on the noble estates, was shipped to make up for bad harvests farther west. Manufacturing was almost non-existent. From 1400 to 1600 the landowners, or ‘Junkers’, dominated the country.

They began, however, to lose ground under Frederick William, who was known as ‘the Great Elector’ and reigned from 1640 to 1688; in 1701 his son Frederick ventured to start calling himself ‘King of Prussia’. The Hohenzollern family held the view that a medium-sized state such as theirs could prosper only by exploiting the differences between its bigger neighbours. In view of Prussia’s limited resources, the essential minimum of strength which this aim required could be achieved only by the strictest care and control in the use of those resources. But the basic industry to which the fruits of economy were devoted was war, and since mercenaries were expensive, Prussia anticipated revolutionary France by creating a conscript army. On this Frederick II (‘the Great’, 1712–86) spent two-thirds of his revenue and in it one-sixth of the adult male population was required to serve; by his death it was practically as big as the French. The nobility, in return for granting to the king the right, and the money, to maintain such an army, were given pride of place in the officers’ corps. A General Staff was developed to plan and conduct campaigns.

To raise the money and men, however, a civilian service was needed and it was to the bourgeoisie that the kings originally turned for staffing this. In more than one respect it set the pattern for later bureaucracies. As early as 1700 the principle of entry by examination was established and in 1723 it was laid down that applicants for senior grades must have had a university education. By the end of the eighteenth century, officials had acquired security of tenure against arbitrary dismissal. They, like the officers, were expected to serve the king rather than the public and to hold their tongues about work which so often had military implications. Such servants proved their value in enabling the monarchy to assert itself against the aristocracy, but once the struggle was over, nobles too were taken into the service, particularly at the local level. The pillar of Prussian administration became the District Councillor (Landrat), who tended to be at one and the same time a local magnate nominated by his peers and a permanent official appointed by the king.

This absolutism was tempered in three ways. First, the Government was among the most up-to-date in Europe, inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment and tolerating almost any form of religious view; the king encouraged his subjects to reason for themselves, provided only that they obeyed his orders. General education was established in Prussia in 1717, 21 years later than in Scotland but 150 years ahead of England and France. The Prussian Common Law (Allgemeine Preussische Landrecht), promulgated in 1794, provided a comprehensive, clear, uniform and impartial code of justice which was not superseded for over a century. First, it exemplified the concept that all public activities should be regulated by legal rules rather than by the changeable views of individuals; this was to become the core of the German approach to politics. Second, the king accepted the same standards as he imposed and regarded himself as the first servant of his people, even if he took his own decisions as to where their interests lay. Finally, Prussia was successful, growing rapidly in size and international reputation. In 1740 she seized Silesia from the Habsburg Empire. In 1772 and 1793 she acquired large areas of Poland. The human tendency to identify with success would by itself be enough to explain why the most autocratic state in Germany was also the only one to evoke among her subjects an effective loyalty as well as a sense of corporate identity.

GERMANY AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Germany as a whole took over a century to recover from the Thirty Years War. The middle classes grew only slowly and were composed more of officials, lawyers, teachers, clergy and merchants than of manufacturers. They it was who provided the protagonists of a slow cultural revival which was at first largely rationalist in character and regarded enlightened individuals as citizens more of the world as a whole than of the principality in which they happened to live.

Gradually, however, signs of a national revival appeared. Language and history, the two great legacies of the medieval Reich to modern Germany, began to be recognized as the essential links uniting the inhabitants of the many political fragments into which the area had been splintered. Looking round the outside world, those inhabitants of the area who had attained the level of self-consciousness needed for effective reflection could not help noticing that elsewhere links of language and culture had become the keystones of the most successful political societies yet evolved. In France and Britain, and to a lesser extent in Holland, Spain and Sweden, national feeling had grown spontaneously as a loyalty to a homogeneous social structure evolved under a settled central government and enjoying the highest level of prosperity yet known to humankind. From this observation it was but a step for Germans to conclude that, since they too had a common language and history, they ought also to have a common government and that lack of such a government might be a major reason for their relative backwardness. The process of political integration, left unfinished in the Middle Ages, should be carried through to completion.

German national spirit was thus a self-conscious growth, based on a deliberate imitation of what had happened spontaneously elsewhere and drawing its essential drive from a sense of deprivation. In Britain and France, the facts preceded and formed the basis for the theory; in Germany the theory was taken over readymade by the intellectuals in the population and adopted as an ideal to which the facts must be altered to fit.

The execution of this process was notoriously accelerated by the French Revolution. This movement provided the world with an unprecedented demonstration of what could be achieved by a resolute and fanatical government able to fire its people with enthusiasm and thus mobilize the full resources of the nation. In the face of the whirlwind the cosmopolitan rationalism of Goethe’s Weimar and the spartan discipline of Frederick’s Potsdam alike proved inadequate. The Germans were first inspired and then humiliated. One result was a wave of romantic dissatisfaction with rationalism, another a widespread desire to emulate France in exploiting the national idea for political purposes and in securing support for a war to liberate and unify Germany. The Revolution must be fought with its own weapons.

It was a step towards this end that, in the years following their defeat by Napoleon at Jena (1806), the Prussian authorities put in hand an overhaul of their society—principally accomplished by non-Prussians in the royal service such as Hardenberg, Stein, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Outmoded economic restrictions were removed, the towns were given a certain amount of selfgovernment and in the countryside the serfs were emancipated. The professional standing army was reorganized and supplemented by a popular short-service ‘Home Guard’ (Landwehr). The responsibilities of the General Staff were increased. The reformers sought to sacrifice all other values to the re-establishment of Prussia as a major European power. The resulting excitement carried the country into the coalition which overwhelmed Napoleon in 1813 and again two years later.

An atmosphere of this kind favoured the development of that emphasis on the individuality of peoples which distinguished German thought for the following 140 years. Each people was conceived of as a separate entity with distinct characteristics and capacities; the differences were as significant as the similarities. Moreover the state rather than the individual became in the philosophy of Hegel (1770–1831) the embodiment of the national identity and as such the repository of ultimate value. As a result there could be no higher authority than the individual state; the final arbiter in inter-state affairs must therefore be force (although the road to this conclusion was often smoothed by a facile optimism which suggested that, once the national will rather than the ruler’s whim was everywhere sovereign, states would share the same views on all questions of mutual interest and thus live in peace with one another). It may be that, because in Western Europe government was on the whole well established over wide areas, political theorists tended to emphasize freedom and individual rights; in Central and Eastern Europe where the effects of division were easy to see, they gave priority to order and the rights of the state.

Hegel was a Professor at the University of Berlin, founded in 1812 by William von Humboldt as an integral part of the Prussian revival. In a country where nationalism began as an intellectual exercise and all professors were appointed and paid by the state, universities have an obvious political role. Berlin in particular deserved its description as the ‘1st Guards Brigade of Learning’. For this was the intellectual power-house where not only Hegel but also such historians as Ranke and Treitschke generated the distinctive view of the world and of Germany’s place in it which the country was to offer as its gospel, a coherent and comprehensive alternative to the rational individualism stemming from the Graeco-Roman tradition.

Yet paradoxically von Humboldt, far from designing the University as a political weapon, made the freedom of the professor to teach and of the student to learn one of the fundamental principles of his system. He also reinforced the tradition that research, the advancement of learning, is not merely the primary function of a university but also an ideal means of stimulating students to independent thought. A school course based upon the principle that no branch of human activity should be alien to the educated person was followed by narrow specialization, with the doctorate as virtually the only degree. Precision and thoroughness thus gained status in public life, perhaps at some cost to a sense of proportion. This trend was reinforced by the requirement that almost all candidates for administrative posts should pass an examination in law, so as to ensure that they understood the principles of the system which they would be called on to apply.

THE FAILURE OF THE LIBERALS

In 1803 Napoleon rationalized Germany, apart from Prussia, by expelling Austria and reducing the remaining units from 300 to 38. Three years later he prevailed on the Habsburg Emperor to abolish the Holy Roman Empire. The statesmen who met in 1814 at the Congress of Vienna found it difficult to put the clock completely back and accordingly confirmed these changes with minor variations, linking the German states (including Austria) in a loose Confederation with a weak Federal Council. At the last moment Prussia was given considerable areas of the Rhineland and Westphalia which she did not welcome (since they meant that her territories were divided into two large blocks with no geographical connection) and in which she was not welcomed (since her dour methods contrasted unfavourably with twenty years of French rule). As a result of this and earlier transactions her predominantly Protestant population of 6 million was increased to 10 million, of whom 5 million, including 1 million Poles, were Catholic.

The problem for German nationalists prior to 1848 was to find a rallyingpoint. The obvious leader for a united Germany might seem to be the Austrian Emperor, but less than one-third of his dominions was included in the German Confederation and of the 12 million people who were so included almost half were Slav. His predecessors had signally failed to rouse an adequate consolidating loyalty to the central government in the days when this might have been done spontaneously and nobody could rate very highly the chances of holding together a population still retaining cultural badges of membership in so many different groups (such as Czechs, Poles, Magyars, Croats and Italians). An identification of the Habsburg Empire with Germany would be bound to alienate the Emperor’s non-German subjects and the interests of the dynasty were for that reason only partially German. The Habsburg Emperors and Prince Metternich, who was their Chief Secretary from 1809 to 1848, were therefore unwilling to risk the loss of their non-German possessions by taking a lead in unifying Germany. At the same time they realized that for Germany to become united would involve the splitting-up of their domains. They were as a result wedded to the existing order because any change must be to their disadvantage.

The nationalists were thus left with two choices. One was to bring about a revolution which would expel all the reigning families and unite in a single state as many as possible of the l...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• 1 FROM TRIBE TO NATIONAL STATE: THE FIRST REICH
• 2 THE SECOND REICH: 1871–1918
• 3 THE FIRST ATTEMPT AT DEMOCRACY: 1918–1933
• 4 THE THIRD REICH: 1933–1945
• 5 THE POST-WAR SETTLEMENT: 1945
• 6 TOWARDS TWO GERMANIES: 1945–1948
• 7 CRISIS AND MIRACLE: 1948–1949
• 8 THE GERMAN REPUBLICS ARE FOUNDED: 1948–1949
• 9 REARMAMENT AND THE RESTORATION OF SOVEREIGNTY: 1949–1955
• 10 ADENAUER’S HIGH NOON: 1955–1961
• 11 THE ERHARD INTERLUDE: 1961–1966
• 12 THE GREAT COALITION: 1966–1969
• 13 THE BRANDT GOVERNMENT: 1969–1974
• 14 THE SCHMIDT GOVERNMENT: 1974–1982
• 15 THE KOHL GOVERNMENT: 1982–1989
• 16 THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS: 1989–1990
• 17 WHAT NOW?
• ANNEXE: THE CURRENT VOTING SYSTEM FOR FEDERAL ELECTIONS
• STATISTICAL APPENDIX
• FURTHER READING