National Review advocates breaking up Germany

[OttoVonBismarck]

I was at leats a little surprised to see NR both bashing Bismarck, and advocating for deliberate German dis-unification (back to its pre-1871 state.) I don't think it's obviously intended as serious per se, the article appears to primarily be guided by a desire to attack Angela Merkel and the modern German progressives, but with some good shade shown on the real OvB as well.

Bismarck's Terrible Idea

By CAMERON HILDITCH

The unification of the German nation-state brought us a world of trouble.

In light of my Corner post defending cancel culture earlier this week, it's interesting to note that the German woke Left has launched a war on Otto von Bismarck, the architect of Germany's unification into a single nation-state and its first chancellor. As Katja Hoyer, writing for Unherd, notes, Bismarck is coming under increasing criticism from public figures in Germany for the imperial, expansionist nature of his statecraft, which is seen by some as culminating in certain colonial atrocities committed by Germany in Africa at the turn of the 20th century.

As a general rule, it's a sorry state of affairs when the people of a given nation turn against their own history on account of its imperfections with indignant and masochistic wrath.

But Germany is different.

If socialism (in all of its national and international permutations) tops the list of bad ideas to have emerged from the last 200 years of human history, the German nation-state is not much farther down. Before its unification in 1871, it had been a militarily, economically, and geopolitically unthreatening patchwork quilt of quaint principalities, loosely confederated by the Treaty of Verdun in the year 843. The peoples of the various principalities retained for many centuries a greater allegiance to their local prince than to the larger Holy Roman Empire of which they were a part. This fierce and obstinate attachment to local autonomy was called, rather delightfully, kleinstaaterei, or "small-statery," a phrase and an idea sure to warm the cockles of anti-authoritarian hearts everywhere.

The Holy Roman Empire collapsed in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars, leading to a mad scramble over disputed territory in central Europe. By the middle of the 19th century, Bismarck, as prime minister of Prussia, had begun to exploit this state of affairs by expanding Prussia's authority over neighboring principalities. This led eventually to the formation of the North German Confederation in 1867 and then to the establishment of the First German Reich in 1871 (the first in a particularly inauspicious trilogy, one might add).

Bismarck's Germany was born in war. Prussian victories in three successive wars of aggression against Denmark, Austria, and France in the 1860s and '70s allowed him to lay the foundation of German nationhood on the corpses of well-established neighboring nation-states, all three of whom were unlikely soon either to collapse or to forget the cost that Bismarck had exacted from them in the course of his state-building. Aggression toward the French in particular was built into German identity from the start. In his memoirs Bismarck wrote that he "had no doubt that a Franco-German war must take place before the construction of a united Germany could be realized." The terms of the eventual peace treaty with France were punitive, as France was forced to cede Alsace and Lorraine and to pay an indemnity to boot. The French would not be able to resist retribution when the shoe was on the other foot at Versailles in 1918.

The antidemocratic bureaucracy of professional rulers that so plagues both the European Union and the U.S. federal government today is often described as "Bonapartist," but in reality it was Bismarck who provided the template for how to bureaucratize a modern nation-state and insulate its rulers from the forces of democracy. The architecture of the German state was arranged in such a way as to ensure that it was technocrats drawn from the landed nobility in Prussia who ran the country, rather than representatives of the people.

We also have Bismarck and his fellow Prussians to thank for America's incurably dirigiste and ineffective progressive government education system, geared as it is more toward social engineering than to the ennobling of the human spirit. Horace Mann, the godfather of American public education, was totally enamored of the Prussian education model. When he presented it to the Massachusetts House of Representatives as a model for the American public school, it was greeted with skepticism. A committee of the state legislature described Mann's favored Prussian model as "more for the purpose of modifying the sentiments and opinions of the rising generation, according to a certain government standard, than as a mere means of diffusing elementary knowledge," which was exactly what enthused early progressives, whose vision for education in this country eventually triumphed. From Bismarck's Prussia flowed the current of modern state technocracy that eventually swelled into the deluge that would consume much of the 20th century.

The momentum of megalomania that drove Bismarck to forge the German nation-state was unabated by 1914. Kaiser Wilhelm and his court were anxious for the young German state to impress itself upon the nations of the earth and to assume a station equal to that of the powers surrounding it. Germany began a huge naval buildup, with the goal of supplanting the Royal Navy as the world's dominant sea power. The French were also aware years before the outbreak of the First World War that the Germans were planning to attack them through Belgium.

The impetus behind all of this was the fever of nationalism that seized Western European states — especially, though not exclusively, Germany — at the turn of the 20th century. Germany's well of achievements was, after all, not as deep as that of its neighbors. The French could trace their nationality back in some form to Charlemagne and the Frankish dominance of the Carolingian Empire. England could plausibly claim to be the oldest nation-state of all, having been unified in the ninth century by Alfred the Great, the mirror and the light of all Christian kings. The Germans had some catching up to do, and by 1914, they were spoiling for a fight.

It's generally thought that the Treaty of Versailles, which brought the First World War to a close, was too harsh on Germany, and that its seizure of German territory guaranteed the aggrieved reaction that catapulted the National Socialists to power during the '30s and thus allowed them to carry out their genocidal program during the '40s. I beg to differ. Versailles did not go far enough. Following the conflagration of 1914–1918, the Allied powers ought to have broken "Germany" back up into the loosely confederated principalities it had been before 1871, perhaps with the League of Nations superintending (to replace the Holy Roman Empire). Maybe then we would have been spared the Second World War, the Cold War, and today's more peaceful project of German expansion, which we call the European Union.

After all, the perfidy of the unified German nation-state is not yet a matter entirely historical. Right now, Angela Merkel appears intent on making room for Vladimir Putin at the head table of European politics. And it hasn't been that long since Merkel's Germany used the European Union to cripple Greece and consign it to an economic vassalage from which it is unlikely ever to escape. The "loans" made by German banks to "bail out" Greece following its financial meltdown a decade ago were, as everyone now recognizes, simply a way of laundering German money through Greek institutions. German banks loaned money to the Greek government so that the Greek government could pay back its debts to German bankers, as the Greek taxpayer bore the crushing burden of it all.

All of this is to say that, as squeamish as their radical impulses make me, I can't help cheering on the would-be cancelers of the Iron Chancellor. The anti-Bismarckians ought not to waver in the execution of their principles. They should go the full nine yards and cancel the German state itself, Bismarck's most lasting legacy. Bring back the principalities, bring down the EU in the process, and make kleinstaaterei great again.

I don't entirely disagree with his premise that the unification of Germany, as it specifically occurred (especially the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine) lead to a world of trouble for humanity. But I think he ignores that a disunited Germany had led to lots of wars and troubles for a thousand years, and that while it'd have been preferable to have not had two World Wars (both of which can be lineally tied to German unification), if it had been done differently a united Germany was and now that it's a fait accompli is, a better result than the old order.

[Habbaku]

#MorgenthauPlanNow!

[Josquius]

If this leads to the revival of low German I am all for it.

[The Minsky Moment]

There is so much bad history in that article I wouldn't know where to start.

[OttoVonBismarck]

There is so much bad history in that article I wouldn't know where to start.

You probably need to watch yourself, that's William F. Buckley Fellow you are criticizing.

[Valmy]

I was not aware Bismarck hadn't been turned against in the past. Was he held up as some kind of hero until recently? I guess I figured the spirit of 1848 was more of the founder of the modern German state not the Kaiserriech.

But maybe I am a radical member of the woke left.

[The Brain]

He claims that the Franco-Prussian war was a war of Prussian aggression. For someone who, I suspect, claims to be interested in history at dinner parties, he sure doesn't seem to be much aware of the Second Empire. An Empire that ev0l Prussia helped topple...

[Valmy]

He claims that the Franco-Prussian war was a war of Prussian aggression. For someone who, I suspect, claims to be interested in history at dinner parties, he sure doesn't seem to be much aware of the Second Empire. An Empire that ev0l Prussia helped topple...

They aggressively insulted la Grande Nation!

[The Brain]

Btw, isn't National Review like downtown Kooksville?

[The Brain]

He claims that the Franco-Prussian war was a war of Prussian aggression. For someone who, I suspect, claims to be interested in history at dinner parties, he sure doesn't seem to be much aware of the Second Empire. An Empire that ev0l Prussia helped topple...

They aggressively insulted la Grande Nation!

Sacre donc!

[Valmy]

Btw, isn't National Review like downtown Kooksville?

I thought it was supposed to be this big right wing intellectual thing.

So...probably headed that way.

[OttoVonBismarck]

NR was historically the educated right. Under Rich Lowry's direction in the era of Trump, they've staked out a position in which they worry a lot about cancel culture, the woke left, attempt to build a philosophical "justification" for American nationalism centered on the English language and Judeo-Christian ideals (even though Lowry himself is not religious), while trying to maintain cred as being the "educated right" by occasionally calling out the very worst and very dumbest of the modern GOP while defending 90% of their bad behaviors.

In short they're still more grounded in reality, and have higher quality writing than Fox News, Breitbart, Daily Wire, Daily Caller, but they're probably about on par with the Wall Street Journal opinion crew (which has moved a lot more towards disrepute in the last 5 years.)

[grumbler]

It's a bad sign for the author' credibility when he claims that Bismarck's united Germany was "the First German Reich in 1871 (the first in a particularly inauspicious trilogy, one might add)."  The term "Reich" was not used in Imperial Germany anyway.

Pan-Germanism existed well before Bismarck, and the idea that, absent Bismarck, there would be no united Germany is absurd.  What Bismarck did was ensure that a united Germany would have a staunchly conservative constitution (which you'd think that the National review would be applauding).  It wasn't about Bismarck's "megalomania" at all.  The megalomania was on the part of the Austrian and French leadership, who thought that they could crush Prussia and so avert German unification.  Both declared war on Prussia, rather than the reverse.

And the idea that Germany could have been permanently divided in 1919 is equally absurd.  It might have delayed WW2, but would also have made the US Congress even more unhappy and unwilling to support Britain and France when the time came for them to pay the piper (remember that the US did not sign the Versailles Treaty because US diplomats were fully aware of the stupidity of it).

Hilditch's claim that "the landed nobility in Prussia who ran the country" were "technocrats" is so absurd that I am surprised the editors of NR allowed him to keep it in the article.  Germany's technocrats were largely middle-class and from the Rhineland.  The Junkers were the very opposite of technocrats.

The National review lost very little credibility by publishing this article, but it did lose all that it had.

[The Minsky Moment]

He claims that the Franco-Prussian war was a war of Prussian aggression. For someone who, I suspect, claims to be interested in history at dinner parties, he sure doesn't seem to be much aware of the Second Empire. An Empire that ev0l Prussia helped topple...

On the other hand, he believes that Frederick II's Prussia was an exemplar of a "militarily, economically, and geopolitically unthreatening" "quaint principalit[y]"

[OttoVonBismarck]

NR also has taken to letting a few of its writers spend inordinate amounts of time vaguely writing about Covid conspiracy theories. Like they aren't out there going full Facebook crazy covid conspiracy, but it's basically the same mentality under a prettied up veneer.

I found his reference to the German Empire as the "First Reich", my understanding is the "numbered Reichs" (which was a retrospective Nazi thing), considered the HRE the First Reich, the German Empire the 2nd Reich, and obviously Hitler's empire the third reich.