National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems

Rodney Bruce Hall (ed.)

Columbia University Press

1999

7. Use and Misuse of the Principle of Nationality: The Demise of the Second Empire and the Birth of the Second Reich

 

The great questions of the time are not decided by speeches and majority decisions—that was the error of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood.

—Otto von Bismarck

Of the moral powers in the world he [Bismarck] has not the slightest notion.

—Heinrich von Treitschke

It is not a rare event in history that treaties are broken. But that a treaty is broken anticipando, [beforehand], that was an innovation reserved to the genius of Bismarck.

—Friedrich Ferdinand von Beust

I stand or fall with my own Sovereign, even if in my opinion he ruins himself stupidly, but for me France will remain France whether it is governed by Napoleon or by St. Louis and Austria is for me a foreign country....I know that you will reply that fact and right can not be separated, that a properly conceived Prussian policy requires chastity in foreign affairs even from the point of view of utility. I am prepared to discuss the point of utility with you; but if you pose antinomies between right and revolution; Christianity and infidelity; God and the devil; I can argue no longer and can merely say, “I am not of your opinion and you judge in me what is not yours to judge.”

—Otto von Bismarck

The timidity of the German bourgeoisie kept the Frankfurt Parliament floundering about with self-doubt. The 1848 revolution had left them with a pan-German parliament that was ostensibly empowered to forge a constitution for a German national entity of some form. This was a move toward what they wanted. Thirty-eight German states had been combined in the Deutscher Bund (German Confederation). But this “was only a Staaten-Bund (a federation of states). What the German Liberals wanted was a Bundes-Staat (a federated state).” ₁ But the Frankfurt parliament delegates were both deeply divided in terms of what they wished to do, and burdened with an abiding ambiguity regarding precisely what they had been empowered to do, by whom, and in whose name they were authorized to speak.

 

Identity vs. Institutions: The Problems of the Frankfurt Parliment

While it was clear to all that “[p]olitical legitimacy [now] required more than the traditional support of the aristocracy or state” ₂ it was just as clear that the Frankfurt delegates “were uncertain if they could or should speak for the Volk.” ₃ This was so precisely because the German monarchs who had sent them to Frankfurt with their ostensible blessings had sent them there with a necessarily ambiguous status. While the Frankfurt delegates were supposed to represent the disparate elements of the German “nation,” the power to administer daily public life remained in the hands of the German states. An immediate question arose in light of this dilemma, of what, precisely, the “sovereignty of the nation” meant in practice. The members of the Frankfurt parliament were not able to resolve this question. A major impediment for them in resolving it is that they lacked any practical institutional capacity that would permit them to act upon and manifest their prospective sovereignty. Any decision taken by the executive of the Frankfurt parliament would have to be effectively ratified by the monarchical administrations of the various states from which it was comprised, because only these state administrations could, in practice, carry out the Frankfurt parliament’s “decisions.” As Sheehan describes it, their dilemma was that: “Had they a state to serve, the Frankfurt executive would have served it well; but while the parliament could claim to represent the German nation, its executive could hardly pretend to be a state.” ₄

It was for this reason that the Frankfurt parliament was dissolved so easily and peacefully when, after having finally settled upon a Kleindeutsche solution to the question of Germany’s borders, its major decision—to offer an Imperial German crown to the King of Prussia—was spurned by the Prussian King. In dismissing the decision of the representatives of the “German nation,” Friedrich Wilhelm effectively denied the existence of the German nation, at least the existence of the German nation as an entity that possessed a sovereignty which either mirrored or rivaled his own. As the Frankfurt parliament had determined that the German nation could become a German national-state only with the agreement of the Prussian state, the decision of the head of the Prussian state to remain precisely that robbed the German nation of an institutional form. For the time being, the German nation would have to live on in the Volksgeist in ethereal, incorporeal, insubstantiality—as an idea, a wish, a feeling. The German nation simply could not exist except under the rule of a German prince who held in his hands the reins of a state which could institutionalize the collective identity that the Frankfurt parliament embodied and expressed. Unfortunately for the devotees of the German nation, in 1849, this German prince regarded it as a contradiction in terms that he had been, or could be, “elected” the Emperor of a united German empire. Ironically, at this time, no man in Prussia had been more pleased at Friedrich Wilhelm’s refusal of the imperial crown than Otto von Bismarck, then a member of the Prussian Second Chamber. His speeches to the chamber in April of 1849 resonated with “bitter and sarcastic criticism of the Frankfurt constitution. Bismarck had stigmatized this constitution as ’organized anarchy’ because it gave universal suffrage to the German people.” ₅

Thus the aspirations of the German-speaking peoples for the revolution of 1848 were, by the close of 1849, fairly well defeated by the combination of bourgeois timidity in the face of the continuing unrest among the laboring classes, and the naive faith of German liberals in the power of novel political institutions like the Frankfurt parliament—a body unable to envision a nonmonarchical form of collective action to manifest pan-German national collective identity. Friedrich Wilhelm was a confirmed territorial sovereign and would not (and likely could not) subsume pan-German national-sovereign identity under the paternal wing of his quasi-dynastic territorial sovereignty. He rejected the aspirations and claims of the advocates of pan-Germanism outright.

Friedrich Wilhelm had effectively taken back nearly all that he had offered when the victims of the 1848 revolution in Prussia had been trundled past him on the streets of Berlin. He had, however, softened the blow of his haughty refusal of an imperial German crown by offering his own constitution to the Prussian people as a grant from the Crown. Friedrich Wilhelm’s constitution eschewed the threatening innovation of universal suffrage that the Frankfurt constitution had sought, replacing it with a very limited Drei-Klassen-Wahlrecht (three class suffrage) in which the weight and effect of the vote was apportioned in accordance with the taxes paid to the state. ₆ This move had the desired effect. It effectively “split the opposition, isolate[d] the radical left, and consolidate[d] monarchical authority.” ₇ Yet the Prussian constitution, and the emancipation of the Austrian peasantry, remained as lasting legacies of the 1848 revolution. While the forces of reaction appeared to have triumphed for the moment, their victory was accompanied by none of the reactionary triumphalism that had followed the defeat of Napoleon.

The conservatives seemed to have won, but most of them believed they would have to fight again. Their victory in 1849 was not...attended by those inflated hopes and bold ambitions that had been so apparent in 1815. After this revolution, there was no “Holy Alliance,” no Gothic posturing or talk of restoration. “The old times are gone and can not return,” declared the Prussian minister Manteuffel in 1849. “To return to the decaying conditions of the past is like scooping water with a sieve.” ₈

 

The Second Republic and the Second Empire: Consequences for Alliance Formation with Territorial Sovereigns

The revolution of 1848 had resulted in a second republic in France, and the great nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte had been elected President of the Second Republic shortly after the French King Louis Philippe was forced to flee Paris. While the German states were watching their princes withdraw many of the gains that they had thought they had won in the 1848 revolution, the French Second Republic was proving itself to be the stillborn child of the Parisian radicalism of 1848. “President” Bonaparte seized power in a bloody coup in 1851 and offered the politically fickle French a new and glorious empire in place of the Second Republic in a plebiscite. Weary of republicanism, Bourbons, and Orleanists (constitutional monarchists) the French people acceded to a Second Empire by a vote of 8,000,000 in favor to a mere 250,000 opposed. Bonaparte was proclaimed the Emperor, Napoleon III, on December 2, 1852. ₉

Napoleon III’s reign was not to be conducted with the carefree, unselfconscious, pseudo-autocratic authority that Friedrich Wilhelm managed to carry off in Prussia, in spite of the parliamentary window-dressing that the latter had been required to give to his government from 1848. Napoleon III wished to reign as had his grand-uncle, but he found it unexpectedly difficult to carry off the trappings of absolutism. The violence with which he had established his empire rankled Great Britain and all republicans. The plebescitory manner in which he had formally acquired his title left serious questions regarding his legitimacy as a monarch in the eyes of his continental peers. In any event his dynasty was distressingly young and quixotically nouveau royale from the perspective of the courts of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Madrid. None of these princes thought that Napoleon’s Second Empire would last. There was nothing attending the history of the government of France between 1789 and Napoleon’s coronation in 1852 to suggest that it would. ₁₀ Consequently they had been very hesitant to grant him the full, official recognition that was due to a brother monarch, and they addressed him in their official correspondence, throughout his reign and to his considerable irritation, as notre très cher ami [our very dear friend] rather than Sire mon frère [Majesty my brother].” ₁₁ Thus, as Kissinger argues, Napoleon III was somewhat obsessed by his lack of legitimate credentials in the eyes of his peers. He “yearned to be accepted by the legitimate kings.” ₁₂ This recognition was to be continuously denied him and Kissinger regards this fact as “one of the psychological roots of Napoleon’s reckless and relentless assault on European diplomacy” ₁₃ during his reign.

Whatever the state of Napoleon’s psychology, I will certainly argue that the absence of a long, historically continuous line of blue-blooded and titled ancestors left the second Emperor Napoleon with the problem of legitimating his rule. It was not possible to legitimate the Second Empire with recourse to the dynastic, divine right that the other monarchies of mid-nineteenth-century Europe still so resolutely relied upon. Whether by design or by default, faced with the absence of traditional legitimacy, but bearing the name of Bonaparte, Napoleon III inherited the nationalist credentials of his uncle. France had chosen the Second Empire in lieu of the Second Republic in her craving for a return to the national glory of the first Empire. ₁₄ A Bonaparte served this purpose. He professed a belief in the power of the development of “completed nation-states” as a progressive, organizing, and modernizing force of history and was soon to play the champion of the principle of nationality in the conduct of his foreign policy. Posturing as a defender of national self-determination, Napoleon “attacked the Vienna system” ₁₅ which defended the order of the traditionally legitimated monarchs of Europe. Kissinger argues that Napoleon “was driven to dependence on public opinion [to maintain his legitimacy], and his policy fluctuated with his assessment of what was needed to sustain his [domestic] popularity.” ₁₆ He was consistently popular only when that policy consistently defended the principle of nationality.

By 1854 Napoleon had entered the Crimean War on the side of England to check Russian expansion into the collapsing Ottoman Empire. This move was quite popular at home precisely because it avenged France against Russia’s role in the defeat of the first empire. Later in the decade he was to bring French troops into the fray of a War of Italian liberation against Austria. These hostilities posed a conflict of state and “national” interests that became a classical pattern for the hybrid international system of the nineteenth century: a mixed system of the competing territorial-sovereign and national-sovereign entities. The Austrian “interest” in engaging the Italian campaign was the maintenance of “social order, political legitimacy and religious faith..[against]...Bonapartism, nationalist passions and secularization.” ₁₇

Having already made an enemy of Russia, Napoleon’s Italian campaigns now earned him the permanent enmity of Hapsburg Austria, at whose expense the Italian unification had come. Significantly it also earned him the mistrust of Francophobe Great Britain, which was by no means pleased to witness new “Napoleonic” military activity such a short time after the Battle of Waterloo was supposed to have ended it once and for all. Nor had his Italian campaigns earned Napoleon the good will of the Pope. The advancing unification of Italy presented an obvious threat to the Papal States, and Napoleon had been forced back in 1848 when still President of the Second Republic to send a substantial French garrison to Rome in order to protect Pius IX from Garibaldi and the Roman Republic. Pius had issued his continued defense of his temporal authority in the forms of the encyclical Quanta cura and the December 1864 Syllabus errorum, thus as Prussian aggression and German unification loomed on Napoleon’s eastern horizon, he could not yet remove the garrison without inflaming devout French Catholic opinion. ₁₈ Unfortunately for Napoleon, French domestic opinion might have adored the principle of nationality, but not at the expense of the papacy. French identity might have been national, but it was also overwhelmingly Catholic. The papacy might be defied, as it had been during the First Empire, for the sake of the expression of French national identity, ₁₉ but not for the sake of Italian national identity.

Worst of all, his actions in Italy had not even earned him the unequivocal gratitude of Italian patriots who were upset that Napoleon had not freed all of northern Italy, as he had promised, and were no more pleased that the French garrison in Rome prevented the eternal city from becoming the capital city of the united Italy that the Risorgimento insisted it must become. ₂₀ This was later to cost him the potential for an alliance even with Italy when Napoleon was to cast about in vain for help against the threat of a war with Prussia. Even though Napoleon had wed his cousin, Prince Jerome Napoleon (who was known in France, quite irreverently, as “Plon-Plon”) to Clotilde, daughter to the Italian King Victor Emanuel II, Italy would not ally with France while French troops still protected the temporal power of the papacy. ₂₁ This was so precisely because the papacy had for so long been so effective in sustaining political fragmentation on the Italian peninsula.

It is worthwhile to pause here and observe the extent to which the insularity of decisionmaking for statesmen, which had been quite complete a century before the reign of Napoleon III, had become so badly eroded by this time that Napoleon could not make the move required to lock up an alliance with an emerging nation that he had helped to create. When the British nation had required continental allies in preparation for squaring off against France in the Seven Years’ War (chapter 5), they could not solidify an alliance with the logical and historical counterbalance to France—Austria—because their “constitutional” monarch, George II, insisted that he held personal sovereignty over Hanover. Thus the continental sovereignty and property interests of a British monarch, who was ostensibly subject to the rule of constitutional law, required that the interests of the British nation had to be subordinated to the his personal “dynastic” interests. Clearly the decision-making freedom of Pitt’s administration had been impaired only by the countervailing interests of the Whig oligarchy in the British parliament.

A century later Napoleon III, ruling France without the constraints of a constitution (until months before the end of his reign), found himself unable to make a decision to abandon a militarily helpless papacy to Italian nationalists in order to maximize his opportunity to gain a military ally that otherwise had been given every reason to support him. He could not do so precisely because such a decision would so badly inflame domestic opinion that his regime likely would not have survived its domestic aftershocks. Napoleon could make no decision regarding foreign or domestic policy that could not be soundly excoriated in the corps légeslatif or in the press. Contrary to the situation of Hanoverian Britain a century before, every decision that Napoleon III took would be subjected to the comment and criticism of a constituency much more socially heterogeneous than the Whig oligarchy and Tory fringe with which George had been required to contend. Each major decision that Napoleon III had taken had resulted in an unofficial plebiscite in France regarding the question of whether his rule and his “dynasty” would continue to be tolerated.

Napoleon would soon further aggravate his strained relations with Russia by playing the champion of the cause of the long-suffering nationalists of partitioned Poland when they revolted against Alexander II in 1863. This policy played well to the appreciative Parisians, but gained the lasting enmity of Alexander. According to Aronson:

Nor had a recent state visit [by Alexander] to Paris done anything to endear the Russian Emperor to Napoleon III’s regime. His [Alexander’s] arrival had been greeted by shouts of “Long live Poland!” and, on driving back one day with Napoleon from Longchamps, he had been shot at by a young Polish patriot. Napoleon’s tactful observation that as the two of them had been under fire together they were now “brothers-in-arms” was frigidly received by the outraged Tsar. He returned to Russia in a very bad humor. ₂₂

Neither had Napoleon’s ill-advised policy that seemed to clearly veer away from the support of national self-determination abroad (in addition to protecting the papacy against Italian nationalists) endeared him to the court in Madrid. Napoleon had acceded to the encouragement of his Empress of Spanish birth, Eugenie, to install Maximilian, the brother of the Hapsburg Austrian Emperor, as a Catholic puppet Emperor in republican Mexico. ₂₃ This feat, and the subordinate relationship of Maximilian’s “Empire” to the French Empire, made France appear glorious in the eyes of domestic French nationalists of all political opinions. The glory this move bestowed on France allowed most Frenchmen to ignore the fact that Maximilian had essentially imposed a Catholic Hapsburg imperial government on a national republican Mexico. The Spanish, who saw Mexico as part of their diminishing Empire in America, did not forget. Yet Spanish resentment was to cost Napoleon little in the end. A new problem of Spanish succession, as we shall see, was to cost him a great deal more.

Thus we may see that Napoleon III was constrained in his choice of alliance partners by his reliance upon a foreign policy designed to appeal to popular nationalist domestic sentiment. In spite of his “imperial” pretense, his decisionmaking was lacking the insularity of his old-regime counterparts. He had to rush about Europe as a champion of national sovereignty to maintain his domestic legitimacy, and completely isolated France in the process. Emperor or no, the national-sovereign agency of the French polity had manifest itself in Louis Napoleon’s foreign policy as an implicit condition of his continued rule.

 

National Identity as a tool of Statesmen: Bismark Engineers the Danish and Austro-Prussian Wars

While French foreign policy had veered off into alternatively nationalist and reactionary adventures throughout Europe and the New World, Prussian energy had been directed toward a developing constitutional struggle at home. Wilhelm, finally turning to Bismarck to guide Prussia through the crisis, appointed him Prussian Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs on September 22, 1862. Bismarck had emerged as the only man who would defy the Prussian parliament and appeared to be the man who was least likely to allow constitutional scruples to frustrate his policy in the service of the Crown.

The events surrounding the emergence of this constitutional crisis in Prussia serve to further undermine the structural realist account of the emergence of Prussian nationalism through military reform. If this account were adequate, we would expect to see the Prussian King and his military advisers enthusiastically advancing the development of the Prussian Landwehr in order to ensure the conscription of tens of thousands of enthusiastic, patriotic Prussian troops in the service of the Crown. But as Eyck relates to us in his history of the development of the German Empire under the leadership of Bismarck, it was the more liberal factions of the Prussian parliament, not the Prussian Crown or the Junker aristocracy, that supported expansion of the Landwehr as a constituent element of the Prussian army. Yet a constitutional crisis between the Prussian parliament and the Crown developed over the issue of the length of service that the Landwehr soldier was to serve. Eyck notes that the Prussian King Wilhelm I wanted the term increased from two to three years, not for reasons of specifically military exigency, “but still more in order to destroy their [the conscripts’] civilian outlook...[h]is reasons were of a political as much as a military nature.’ ₂₄

Wilhelm and his generals seriously mistrusted the Landwehr precisely because it was “a creation of the War of Liberation...the citizens in arms.” ₂₅

[General Leopold von] Gerlach called...[it]...the one really liberal institution in the country. But what endeared the Landwehr to the people made it suspicious to the King and [Albrecht von] Roon. They disliked the Landwehr-Mann as too intimately connected with civilian life. The Landwehr man of today was the voter of yesterday and of tomorrow. When in the year 1849 Prussian troops were sent against the South Germans who had risen to fight for the German constitution of the Frankfurt Assembly, some Landwehr men had clearly shown their discontent. The King wanted to avoid a repetition of similar signs of political independence. His plan of reorganization aimed at a weakening of the Landwehr. ₂₆

Thus far from demonstrating his anxiety to create a mass mobilization army to compete with the army of Napoleon III’s France, for example, Wilhelm had decidedly demonstrated his fear of it. He so mistrusted the liberal, democratic ethos exemplified in the man of the mass army that he set out to reorganize away the offending characteristic quite irrespective of any concern for the subsequent effectiveness of the product as a fighting force. This starkly contradicts the expectations of structural realism, which anticipates that states will internally balance external threats through arms racing and/or force modernization. If the mass mobilization army of the first Napoleon was viewed as a highly effective modern military innovation, the impulse of old regime states to emulate it should, in the structural realist view, have been irresistible. Yet it does not appear that the men responsible for optimizing the army’s fighting effectiveness felt any pressing need for an army full of motivated Landwehr men in any case as Eyck relates that “[t]he King acted on the advice of his military advisers,” ₂₇ von Manteuffel and von Roon. The issue here was, of course, that as much as Wilhelm might appreciate a nationally motivated fighting force to serve as guardian of the Prussian state, it was a Prussian state, not a German superstate, that he wished them to guard. In Wilhelm’s world view the Prussian state was still coterminous with the Prussian Crown. He wanted the Prussian soldiery to be king’s men, or he would not have them in arms at all. The parliament would not vote for the army bill without provision of funds for the Landwehr, so Wilhelm, in essence, insisted upon, at a minimum, a three-year term of service to allow his officers time to beat the last civilian and liberal impulse out of each individual Landwehr conscript, to ensure that they became the king’s men.

For Wilhelm and the Prussian conservatives, the Prussian army was an instrument of both foreign and domestic policy. “To defend the state from its enemies abroad, the army had to be a mass force based on conscription, but to defend the social order from domestic unrest it had to remain a politically reliable servant of the king.” ₂₈

Therefore Wilhelm had opted for a very limited change in the composition of the Prussian army and because “[l]ike many of his brother officers Roon doubted the militia’s [ Landwehr’s] effectiveness and questioned its loyalty” ₂₉ , Wilhelm preferred to staff his soldiery with reliable if uninspired mercenaries. His mercenary, professional soldiers may not have possessed a passion for charging into enemy fire for the fatherland (most were not Prussian), heedless of life and limb, but were clearly beholden specifically to the King of Prussia. The liberals in the Prussian parliament, however, were unhappy about both the expense of a mercenary army, and the fact that it was officered by Prussian noblemen who had “contempt for the rest of the nation.” ₃₀ Thus for Prussian liberals, the militia was part of their dream of “national liberation.”

The aristocratic, territorial-sovereign structure of identities of the Prussian king and his officer corps structured their interests such that they regarded the expansion of a Prussian citizenry in arms as inimical to the interests of their class and those of a monarchical, territorial-sovereign Prussian state. They deemed an army composed of the king’s men, dominated by his loyal nobility, to be constitutive of the territorial-sovereign Prussian state. The increasingly popular, national-sovereign structure of identities of the bourgeois liberal component of the Prussian parliament structured their interests such that they regarded the expansion of a Prussian citizenry in arms to be constitutive of any institutional form of collective action that would be minimally capable of manifesting their emerging national-sovereign identity abroad. In consequence: “The conflict over the army reforms, therefore, was more than a conflict between the military and civilians, or between throne and parliament, it was also a conflict between two visions of Prussia’s identity.” ₃₁

This was the atmosphere in which Bismarck was recalled to Berlin from his post as Ambassador to Paris to lead Wilhelm’s government. It is important to pause and note that 100 years earlier Bismarck’s irridentist claims to be acting on behalf of the welfare and interests of ethnic Germans would have been completely unacceptable as a pretext for intervention in the matter, let alone casus belli. From the inception of his administration Bismarck consistently steered Prussian policy on a unilateral course oriented toward Prussian aggrandizement. Bismarck indeed sought the unification of the German states, but he sought this unification only as he envisioned it—under Prussian rule. He was to masterfully employ popular pan-German nationalist sentiment as a tool toward the attainment of this goal. To that end Prussian policy under Bismarck, from 1863, set out to destroy the “legitimate structure of Europe” that had been codified in the 1815 Vienna treaties. ₃₂ Like Napoleon III, Bismarck’s policy was entirely subversive of the legitimating principles, and the agenda of Metternich’s Vienna system, which had assumed a common Austrian and Prussian interest in the maintenance of conservative institutions as a bulwark against the forces of liberalism and democracy in the domestic opposition of each. ₃₃

Unfortunately for Austria, Bismarck did not feel that he required this bulwark to maintain order and conservative monarchical rule within Prussia. His domestic political policies were consistently designed to exacerbate the split between the Protestant, Prussian liberal opposition of the Bürgertum, and the Catholic and working-class liberals, not to mention the socialists. After the defeat of France in 1870, Bismarck would execute the most elaborate machinations to ensure this split, particularly as he launched his Kulturkampf (cultural struggle) campaign against the Catholic Zentrum (center) who had been emboldened in their opposition by the ultramontane results of the first Vatican Council. ₃₄

Austria, then as always, was much more dynastic than territorial in outlook. Due to its polyglot ethnic and linguistic composition, cemented by a coextensive division of ethnicity with geography, the Austrian state had never been and could never become a “national” state. In deference to their imperial subjects’ traditions, the Hapsburgs had traditionally taken separate coronation oaths for the regions that they ruled. “Hapsburgs swore to defend each province and to respect its traditional customs, laws, privileges, and religion.” ₃₅ In doing so the Austrian Hapsburgs attempted to govern a fairly conventional Empire along the lines of the Roman model of antiquity, as it existed after what Michael Doyle has described as the Augustan revolution of imperial administration. ₃₆ The Austrian Hapsburg Empire was at this time, at the most, what Michael Mann calls a “confederal state” subjected to a dynastic, monarchical, absolutist rule softened only by the mitigating parameters of Hapsburg respect for cultural and linguistic particularism. ₃₇ It became increasingly difficult for confederal Austria to simply maintain what it held in an age when the idea of the nation was making its rounds in Europe, and while Russia was frustrating Austria’s hopes of expansion into the soft areas of southeastern Europe created by the quickening Ottoman collapse. The very last thing that Austria wanted to do at this time was to struggle with Prussia for regional hegemony of the German lands of Central Europe. ₃₈ Equally unfortunate for Austria, Prussia felt it had to struggle with Austria to gather up these lands. Austrian Hapsburg princes had been continuously elected Holy Roman Emperors by the German Electors from 1438 until the last Holy Roman Emperor had resigned and done away with the office in the first decade of the nineteenth century. While the office was gone, the allegiance to Hapsburg Austria among the many remaining German princes had not receded. This was so particularly in the Catholic south of German Central Europe. Bismarck was to eventually determine that he must remove the sparkle from the imperial Hapsburg diadem in order to bring the German states under the rule of Prussia. He was soon to provide such a drubbing of Austrian prestige.

But Austria was not to be the first victim of Prussian aggression in the developing Bismarckian scheme to unite the German lands under Prussian rule. That misfortune was to befall a non-German state, specifically Denmark. Significantly, Denmark attracted Bismarck’s quite negative attention in this regard precisely because it was a non-German power. Even before, and especially after an 1848 insurrection by the German-speaking inhabitants of the Danish-ruled Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, tangled disputes had emerged regarding to whom the titles to the Duchies would revert upon the death of the Danish King Friedrich VII. Schleswig-Holstein was a region of mixed Danish-German ethnicity. Friedrich had held title to both while he lived. The dispute had been an essentially legal, titular dispute of the sort common in the eighteenth century. It had been an issue of contended “dynastic” succession and essentially a question of a nature that was to become very uncommon in the more recent era of national-sovereign identity—which prince would own and rule the territory upon the death of their present sovereign. It was a dispute so complex in the legal reasoning required to resolve it that Britain’s Lord Palmerston had once jested that “Only three men have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.” ₃₉

Upon the death of the Danish sovereign in 1863, Bismarck moved quickly to reduce the issue essentially to a German national irredentist claim to recover separate ethnic Germans. Of course, Bismarck had never viewed the Schleswig-Holstein affair from the perspective of a German nationalist and was unlikely to have given a fig for whether or not the ethnic Germans had been mistreated by their Danish rulers. Yet claims that such mistreatment had occurred had been advanced and German nationalists throughout the German-speaking states of Central Europe had expressed enthusiasm for the separation of the Duchies from Danish rule. Bismarck was interested in annexing the Duchies to Prussia. When the Danish king died without issue, Bismarck became anxious to take advantage of the controversy regarding the right of succession over these Duchies in the name of the German nationalist cause, not because he had any sympathy for it but because “Prussia did not have, either in law or in history, the smallest title to the Duchies.” ₄₀ He had earlier written, to Manteuffel, “I have not the smallest doubt that the whole Danish business can be settled in a way desirable for us only by war. The occasion for such a war can be found at any moment we consider favorable for waging it.” ₄₁ The death of the Danish king provided that moment.

Bismarck was able to take advantage of German nationalist sentiment in this context in large measure because Friedrich VII had, somewhat foolishly and autocratically, attempted to “impose a new constitutional order on Schleswig without the promised consultation” back in March of 1863. ₄₂ Upon Friedrich’s death, rival claims by Prince Christian of Glücksburg (to both Schleswig-Holstein and the Danish Crown) and Prince Augustenburg (a “progressive” candidate supported by most German liberals) were evaluated by the Diet of the German Confederation in late November. The Diet was effectively powerless except as a negotiating forum for delegations of the German princes of the loose Confederation formed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, but among its delegates were many German liberal nationalists. In the event a consensus in support of Augustenburg’s candidacy emerged. ₄₃ This was the combined result of inflamed and nascent German nationalist passion over the alleged mistreatment of the German minority in the Duchies, the attempt by a Danish prince to impose a constitutional order on them without consultation with the estates, and the prospect of the continuation of this alleged state of affairs under a new Danish sovereign.

The specific events leading up to the joint Austro-Prussian military operations that were launched early in 1864 to wrest Schleswig-Holstein from Danish control are complicated. What is essential for our purposes here is the difference in Austrian and Prussian motivation, stemming from variations in their respective structures of identities and interests, in cooperating in the joint conquest of Schleswig-Holstein, and the insights that analysis of this difference provides in understanding the growing cleavage in the Austrian and Prussian notions of their state identities and interests. This rift was critical in nullifying the Vienna system, and ending the prolonged period of peace among conservative dynasts that had for so long characterized the functioning of the Concert of Europe. As Sheehan describes the situation, Bismarck and the Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Johann Bernhard von Rechberg, had very different sets of assumptions regarding the significance of their cooperation in operations against Denmark for the future of Austro-Prussian relations. These differing assumptions stem directly from differing Austrian and Prussian understandings of their respective state interests, which in turn stemmed from differing conceptions of sovereign identities. The difference is hardly surprising given Austria’s reliance upon the continuation of Metternich’s Vienna system to avoid conflict with Prussia, while nationalist and secessionist trouble was appearing in its multiethnic empire. It is less surprising still when we consider the character of Rechberg, who “called himself a Conservative statesman and a pupil of Metternich.” ₄₄

Rechberg saw the Schleswig-Holstein problem as the occasion for creating the constellation of forces that he had always wanted: a Confederation dominated by an Austro-Prussian condominium directed against liberal nationalism and in favor of the status quo. His interest in Schleswig-Holstein per se was minimal; his principal aim was to lay the basis for a broad and lasting set of agreements with Berlin. This was not Bismarck’s intention. Although he did not reveal his goals to anyone for another year, he was attracted to the idea of annexing the Duchies to Prussia. Moreover, his agreement to work with Vienna in support of the treaties of 1852 [with the Confederation, which Denmark had violated] was purely tactical, a way to keep the game going while he waited to see what would develop. ₄₅

In his dedication to conservative principles of government, the leading place of the ancient aristocracy in the leadership of domestic society, and to monarchical rule, Bismarck was every bit Rechberg’s match. Unlike Rechberg, however, and unlike many of his Prussian peers such as Gerlach, Bismarck did not regard adherence to the Vienna system as in any way essential to the maintenance of dynastic rule in Prussia. This led him to reject the premises, advice, and wishes of Prussian conservatives. As Kissinger has recently argued, Bismarck “challenged the conventional wisdom which identified nationalism with liberalism.” ₄₆ Thus Bismarck did not see any inherent liberal threat to the Prussian monarchy or social order in a pan-German policy that excluded Hapsburg Austria. As a consequence, Bismarck rejected the suggestion that an Austrian alliance was essential to the maintenance of conservative monarchical rule in Prussia. Instead he believed “the illusion of the need for an Austrian alliance served above all to inhibit Prussia from pursuing its ultimate goal of unifying Germany” ₄₇ under the Prussian Crown. But in rejecting the necessary identification of nationalism with liberalism, a linkage that was almost axiomatic to the adherents to Metternich’s doctrine when he constructed the Vienna system in 1815, Bismarck also rejected the proposition that liberal institutions were required to achieve the unification of Germany. This was a proposition that had been equally axiomatic among the German liberals who had gathered in Frankfurt after the 1848 revolution to construct an all-German constitution. Bismarck felt that the legitimacy of the Prussian monarchy and the strength of the Prussian state was of an order that rendered it impervious to the threat of this logic. Thus he could flirt with the Prussian left, the liberals, and the Prussian, German nationalists when it suited him; and he could employ what he regarded as their delusional, pan-German, national enthusiasms for his own purposes. As Bismarck had himself written in this context:

The sense of security that the King remains master in his country even if the whole army is abroad is not shared with Prussia by any other continental state and above all by no other German power. It provides the opportunity to accept a development of public affairs much more in conformity with present requirements....The royal authority in Prussia is so firmly based that the government can without risk encourage a much more lively parliamentary activity and thereby exert pressure on conditions in Germany. ₄₈

I shall shortly describe the manner in which Bismarck was able to play to not only the Prussian liberals, but also the liberals and nationalists throughout the German Confederation, to gain sympathy for Prussia in the struggle he planned to stage later with Austria. Meanwhile he had, on the basis of Rechberg’s delusions regarding Bismarck’s intentions, in January 1864 engineered the joint invasion of Schleswig by Austrian and Prussian forces. They crossed the frontier on February 1. ₄₉ With annexation of the Duchies as his aim, Bismarck carefully avoided all overtures for a peaceful settlement throughout the ensuing conflict; Denmark was forced to sue for peace by August, and to cede the Duchies to the joint control of Austria and Prussia. Schleswig-Holstein were to be administered by an Austro-Prussian “condominium” of the very sort Rechberg had favored, even though this arrangement favored Prussia, which was geographically situated to exercise an authority over the area that Austria could not. ₅₀

Bismarck wished, of course, to annex both Duchies directly to Prussia, but could not employ such a demand as a legitimate basis for war with Austria, a war he desired in order to humble Austria in the eyes of the Confederation as well as to complete the Prussian conquest of Schleswig-Holstein. Neither his sovereign, the Crown Prince of Prussia, nor the opinion of the smaller German states he wished to woo under the sovereignty of the Prussian Crown would tolerate such a selfish act of aggression. ₅₁ The Prussian sovereign and his son would not tolerate it as it would have been a blatant breach of faith with a brother-monarch. The smaller German states would not tolerate it as it would have been a blatant breach of faith with a brother-German. Significantly, Bismarck had been required to play by territorial-sovereign and national-sovereign rules simultaneously, which he did quite successfully. He could advance a national-sovereign cause of war—his irridentist claim to defend the rights of ethnic Germans—but yet be required to employ this national-sovereign cause of war to control the region in faithful condominium with territorial-sovereign Hapsburg Austria. The best that Bismarck could therefore manage to advance his design, for a time, was to engineer the Convention of Gastein, which ended the condominium arrangement by dividing the Duchies between them, awarding Schleswig, in the north, to Prussia and Holstein, in the south, to Austria. The convention was completed on August 14, 1865. ₅₂ This division was extremely unpopular throughout the Confederation.

But unfortunately for Austria, the Convention of Gastein was signed in the nature of a provisional, not a permanent settlement. This provided Bismarck with the opportunity to manufacture “grievances” against conduct of the Austrian administration of Holstein, and continuously badger the Austrian Ambassador and court with a series of hostile notes until Austria was provoked to send a very sharp note to Bismarck in response. ₅₃ This note upset the Prussian king and was now allowed to serve as a pretext for the creation of a rift in Prussian relations with Austria, particularly in light of the growing realization in Berlin that a military conflict with Austria might provide a means of suspending the escalating constitutional crisis between the Prussian parliament and the Prussian Crown.

Bismarck had met with Wilhelm on February 21 to consider how to deal with the crisis and had convinced Wilhelm “that only three alternatives were now open to him: a liberal ministry, a coup d’état against the constitution, or war.” ₅₄ The first two options were unacceptable to Wilhelm, as he was repelled by the idea of a liberal ministry and did not wish to renounce the constitution his father had drafted. Thus when Wilhelm called a Crown Council on February 28, 1866 to formulate future Prussian policy he was persuaded without difficulty to grant Bismarck permission to begin negotiations with Italy for a military alliance against Austria. This was concluded by April 8. The following day Bismarck instructed the Prussian Minister in Frankfurt to introduce to the Diet of the German Confederation a proposal to convene a German parliament elected on the basis of universal suffrage! ₅₅ This was precisely the franchise that the Frankfurt Parliament that had convened in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848 had sought, and had been denied them when the Prussian King had refused to accept the imperial German Crown and to vitalize that franchise.

The move was carefully and cynically calculated to gain sympathy for the Prussian government as an administration of progressive design which supported liberal, pan-German national unity in comparison with the creaking, dynastic, particularistic Hapsburg court in Vienna. The move served its purpose admirably. It was a singular success for Bismarck when we realize that the move helped to convince the peoples of the German Confederation that Prussia was demonstrating itself to be not only liberal, but also German nationalist in outlook at the very same time that Prussia had in essence demolished the German Confederation by concluding an alliance with Italy against another German member of the Confederation. Bismarck admitted as much when he confided to Benedetti, the French Foreign Minister:

I have induced a King of Prussia to break off the intimate relations of his House with the House of Hapsburg, to conclude an alliance with revolutionary Italy, possibly to accept arrangements with Imperial France, and to propose in Frankfurt the reform of the Confederation and a popular parliament. That is a success of which I am proud. ₅₆

Bismarck’s reference to “arrangements with Imperial France” refer to the ultimately unsuccessful negotiations that he had been conducting with Napoleon III. Bismarck had hoped to bring Napoleon into the war against Austria, or at the least to ensure Napoleon’s benevolent neutrality, by suggesting to Napoleon that if France wished to incorporate all French-speaking regions of Europe (clearly alluding to Belgium) into the Empire, in accordance with the Emperor’s devotion to the principal of nationality, that Prussia would take no notice. These overtures to Napoleon III had scandalized Gerlach, Bismarck’s mentor and Wilhelm’s military adjutant. Gerlach regarded Napoleon as an illegitimate upstart, as had been his great uncle before him, and counseled rapprochement between Vienna and Berlin to isolate illegitimate and chronically revolutionary France. In the margin of a letter from Gerlach protesting to Bismarck that “Napoleon is our natural enemy” Bismarck had scrawled “What of it?” ₅₇ For most conservatives, even so late in the nineteenth century, the legitimacy of the principles of the Vienna system was ironclad. Men like Gerlach regarded the mechanized hum of Bismarck’s radical, realpolitik move away from Metternich’s creation with incomprehension and incredulity. Yet Bismarck appears to have realized that in order for Prussia to unambiguously wrest leadership of German Central Europe from Hapsburg Austria, Prussia would have to exploit pan-German national sentiment and was qualified to do so in a fashion that Austria was not. As Kissinger has recently argued:

Had Prussia sought [earlier] to exploit German nationalism, it could have challenged Austrian pre-eminence in Germany a generation before Bismarck...[but]...refrained from pursuing their advantage because it ran counter to the dominant principle of maintaining the status quo. Austria, seemingly on its death bed after Napoleon’s [I] onslaught was given a new lease on life by the Metternich system, which enabled it to survive for another hundred years. ₅₈

In a similar sense, Bismarck’s move to bring a motion for universal suffrage before the Diet of the German Confederation was astonishing. Universal suffrage certainly existed nowhere in the German states at that time. In a masterstroke, Bismarck made the severe, autocratic, and parochial Prussian government appear to be simultaneously democratic and pan-German nationalist; actually it was neither. Bismarck had calculated that his motion to grant universal suffrage for confederal elections would take the wind out of the sails of his domestic parliamentary adversaries; especially the liberal, bourgeois, Progressive party, in the upcoming elections. He particularly expected that this would assist him in ending the constitutional crisis by making him appear to be, though quite suddenly, more liberal than the liberals. The move made him appear to support German unification as well—inasmuch as nationalism and liberalism were such cognitively linked concepts in the minds of Prussian and other German liberals—as well as in the minds of their conservative adversaries. Bismarck had no doubts that he would succeed in his aims in these moves, as he had seen this accomplished before, in France. As Eyck argues persuasively:

His [Bismarck’s] practical model was Napoleon III, whose government was sustained by the masses and opposed by a portion of the educated upper middle class; Napoleon had introduced universal suffrage to get rid of the Second Republic [in 1852] and had been successful in that. Bismarck was confident that he would be able to achieve the same success. ₅₉

Bismarck did achieve the same success, and more. War between Austria and Prussia finally came and Prussia prevailed quickly and spectacularly even though the Prussian army had been universally thought to be no match for the Austrian forces. Prussian artillery was still of the light, muzzle-loading variety in 1866— inferior to the Austrian guns—and the Austrian cavalry forces were vastly superior. But the Austrian forces took much longer than Prussia’s to mobilize, and Austrian tactical doctrine had not evolved, in spite of the lessons they might have observed at the sides of the Prussians in the Danish War, to adjust to the Prussian advantage in infantry. Aside from the Prussian capacity to mobilize its infantry more quickly and to move it into strategic position more rapidly with rail transport, the Prussian infantry was equipped with breech-loading weapons with rifled bores. These had decimated the Austrian infantry, which had lined up in disciplined rank and file to provide accommodating targets for the Prussian riflemen. The Austrian infantry was encumbered with muzzle-loading weapons that were both less accurate and capable of a lower rate of fire than the Prussian rifles. ₆₀ As a result, the Austrian forces were defeated decisively at Sadowa a mere three weeks after Prussian troops had crossed the Saxon frontier. ₆₁ The armistice was concluded on July 26 in Nikolsburg.

The terms of the armistice were extraordinarily moderate for Austria. Bismarck had wished to humble the Hapsburgs to turn the eyes of the Confederation squarely to Prussia for future leadership of a united German Empire. He had not wished to make of Austria a permanent and implacable enemy. He had been required to argue at great length, and at significant personal cost, with an obsessively triumphant and momentarily vindictive Wilhelm, that no Austrian lands should be annexed to Prussia as part of the settlement. ₆₂ Prussia was not to be so moderate in its terms for the northern German states who had supported Austria in the war. Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, and the Free City of Frankfurt were annexed to the Prussian Crown, ₆₃ their monarchs were deposed, and they ceased to exist as independent actors in the international arena. Saxony, which had also favored Austria, was spared this fate only by vociferous Austrian opposition, although it was required under the terms of the peace to enter the new confederation that would be formed under the leadership of Prussia.

 

National Identity as a Consrtaint for Statesmen: The Second Empire’s Failure to Balance

Quite contrary to Bismarck’s expectations, his subordinate, Goltz, had induced Napoleon III to accept this annexation of vast tracts of northern Germany, along with its three to four million inhabitants, into the Prussian state. The fact that Napoleon did not oppose this annexation, although it created a much more powerful, and therefore more dangerous, German state on his western border, is also quite contrary to the expectations of realist balance of power theories of international relations, quite irrespective of whether they are of the classical realist or the neorealist variant. ₆₄

The neorealist variant argues that a state can balance internally, by an arms race, as easily as externally, by alliance formation. Waltz has argued that “[b]alance-of-power politics prevail wherever two, and only two, requirements are met: that the order be anarchic and that it be populated by units wishing to survive.” ₆₅ Waltz constructs this argument in order to argue that bipolar superpower competition in the twentieth century was not inconsistent with the classical realist notion of the balance of power as an explanation of state behavior. Certainly the notion should have therefore been just as applicable in the late nineteenth century, in a clearly multipolar European system which featured, at a minimum, Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia as Great Powers. Clearly any variant of balance of power theory would argue that it was explicitly inimical to French state interests to sit idly by and watch large tracts of Central Europe and up to four million people, and their goods and wealth, become annexed to an already powerful Prussian neighbor to the East. Yet this is precisely what Napoleon III did, however much hand-wringing might have accompanied his inactivity. How might this behavior be explained?

The major component of the explanation appears to lie in the manner in which Napoleon III’s regime had been legitimated. Throughout his reign Napoleon had consistently posed as the defender of “national self determination” and had attacked the Vienna system coterie of traditionally legitimated, conservative monarchs on this basis. ₆₆ His nationalist rhetoric and campaigns had been inspired in no small measure by a store of personal conviction that the future belonged to national states and not dynastic states. Kissinger has argued that Napoleon III in fact “dreaded German unification but was sympathetic to German nationalism and dithered about solving that insoluble dilemma.” ₆₇ Moreover, a great deal of his popularity and legitimacy within France derived from his role as a symbol of the progressive future of national states. Irrespective of its acceptance of a Second Empire, France still regarded itself to be one of these. France may have chosen an imperial form of government with the 1852 plebiscite that resulted in Napoleon’s installation as Emperor, but it was a national-imperial state that had enthusiastically supported Napoleon’s nationalist campaigns throughout the continental periphery in the intervening years between the proclamation of the Second Empire in 1852 and the Austrian debacle at Sadowa in 1866. A major difficulty of the Emperor Napoleon III, was that over the years he had been “driven to dependence on public opinion, and his policy fluctuated with his assessment of what was needed to sustain his [domestic] popularity.” ₆₈

Napoleon’s seeming inability to play the balance-of-power game when it would bring his policy into conflict with the principle of nationality—which had served so admirably to legitimate his regime—indicates that his decisionmaking procedures could not be conducted with the insularity of more traditionally legitimated statesmen. Just as he had been unable to abandon the papacy for fear of inflaming domestic Catholic opinion, neither could he oppose the operation of the principle of nationality in Central Europe without inflaming radical domestic nationalist opinion. To oppose the principle of nationality, which had long served to legitimate his foreign policy, and in some sense his domestic rule, would simultaneously risk exposing himself as an aspiring traditional autocrat. A Second Empire which represented and glorified the French nation was popular when successful and at least tolerated when not. A Second Empire which represented the Bonaparte family and dynasty, and nothing else, would be unpopular even when successful and deposed when not. The legitimating principles of the Second Empire were the those of nationality and the belief that the imperial institutional form of collective action was best suited to glorify the French nation and thus manifest the agency of the French nation abroad.

Bismarck was, of course, not immune to the pressure of domestic opinion in the formulation and conduct of his policy, but he had several crucial advantages over Napoleon. First, Bismarck served a Prussian monarch whose legitimacy to rule in that capacity was unquestioned by the broad mass of Prussian society. The only elements of Prussian society that conceivably questioned the legitimacy of Wilhelm’s reign were the radical liberals and socialists. Both of these elements were marginalized fringe groups in the context of the prevailing Prussian political discourse of the 1860s. Second, Wilhelm’s legitimacy was enhanced by his emergence as a rallying point for pan-German nationalist sentiment. Bismarck’s skillful maneuvers in the Diet of the German Confederation had created the illusion of a liberalizing, German-nationalist Prussian monarchy.

The illusion was enhanced by a number of institutional facts. ₆₉ One of these had emerged with the failure of the decisions of the Frankfurt Parliament to be implemented by the Prussian Crown. Pan-German nationalist sentiment could only realize its ambitions to become institutionalized in a German nation by attaching itself to, or becoming adopted by, an existing German prince or state to acquire an institutional form. The Hapsburg Austrian state was both unsuitable for this purpose by virtue of its polyglot demography, and disinclined to serve this role by virtue of the dynastic, Hapsburg conception of Austrian state interests. Thus Bismarck could play the nationality card to his domestic audience, and to a broader Central European audience, as a German nationalist leader. He could annex the defeated German powers, which had sided with Austria in the Austro-Prussian War, into a Norddeutscher Bund, as part and parcel of a legitimate irredentist claim ₇₀ to gather up German-speaking lands of Central Europe into a greater German Reich.

In order to oppose this move, Napoleon would have been required to repudiate the legitimating principle of his own regime and its historical foreign policy in its entirety. As Kissinger has recently argued, Napoleon effectively had two options. First, he could adhere to the tried and true strategy of Richelieu and strive to keep Central Europe fragmented. Adopting this policy would, however, have cost him his credentials as a nationalist with all the attendant potential consequences that I have just outlined above. Otherwise, he could strive for the leadership of Europe by placing himself and his Empire at the head of a nationalist crusade, as had his uncle before him. ₇₁ Instead, “[u]nfortunately for France, Napoleon pursued both strategies simultaneously.” ₇₂

It is also likely the case that Napoleon was badly outmaneuvered by Bismarck, who had earlier pandered to Napoleon’s nationalist and revolutionary penchants, as well as to his avarice, by “encouraging the emperor’s appetite for territorial expansion on the Rhine [at the expense of Luxembourg and Belgium] without committing himself on how this appetite might be satisfied.” ₇₃ It also appears that Napoleon had deluded himself into believing that Austria would defeat Prussia in the conflict without difficulty, but curiously “he [Napoleon] never seemed to have asked himself why Bismarck was so determined on war if Prussia was so likely to be defeated.” ₇₄ Napoleon at this time and from this time on, was seriously ill with a large stone in his bladder, and this infirmity can not have failed to contribute to his irresolution. ₇₅ His health alone provided him with significant impediments to rational decisionmaking. He had refused, in this state, to accede to the pleas of Metternich ₇₆ —and of his Empress, Eugenie—that he mobilize at least a part of his armed forces, as a warning to Prussia. ₇₇ He was convinced that the war would be a long one, and that he could intervene if he chose so. ₇₈ Additionally, “Bismarck threw Napoleon the sop of letting him mediate the peace,” ₇₉ though this attempt at intervention also failed and was ultimately exercised only after Austria had been defeated.

Napoleon believed that he could not ask for anything for France so long as he was in the process of mediating the Austro-Prussian peace, but when this task was completed he sent Benedetti to Bismarck on July 23 to ascertain Bismarck’s attitude to a French proposal of a secret convention between France and Prussia that would award France with its 1814 frontiers, and Luxembourg as well. ₈₀ It would appear, then, that Napoleon was suffering from the illusion—which Bismarck had taken no small pains to encourage—that he had achieved an understanding with Prussia, based on the principle of nationality. Prussia would be allowed to gather up German states in Central Europe, and would in return wink at French annexation of Belgium and Luxembourg. Yet it is a tribute to the growing strength of national sentiment in what was soon to become Germany that Bismarck found it completely impossible to yield Luxembourg to France. ₈₁ Nevertheless, we should not delude ourselves that this was Napoleon’s intent before the Austro-Prussian war began. This does not salvage either classical or neorealist understandings of the balance of power. Napoleon did not intend to balance Prussian gains in Central Europe with acquisitions of the significant French-speaking territories that lay between France’s northeastern frontier and the Rhine. At least he did not intend to do so before the Austrian defeat at Sadowa.

Kissinger argues persuasively that Napoleon had not expected Austria to be defeated, let alone so soundly and quickly defeated. Prior to the onset of the war Napoleon had not seriously entertained Prussian allusions to their support of French acquisitions in Belgium or in Luxembourg, which Britain would have been opposed in any case. But “since he expected Prussia to lose; his moves were designed more to keep Prussia on its course to war than to bargain for benefits...Prussia was expected to offer France compensation in the West for extrication from its defeat.” ₈₂ But this did not occur; rather the converse. In his shock at this outcome, Napoleon attempted to retrieve the situation by calling a European congress. While his call was ignored, Bismarck allowed him to mediate the peace in bilateral negotiations between the belligerent parties. Napoleon faintly hoped to intervene sufficiently with his mediation efforts to avoid the “complete reversal of the European balance of power” ₈₃ that was developing from the results of the war. Bismarck, however, had procrastinated in these “diplomatic efforts” to terminate hostilities, while simultaneously hinting broadly that Napoleon should make an ultimatum to the Belgian King that Belgian integration into the Second Empire would be essential to offset Prussian political and territorial gains as a result of the Austrian war. ₈₄

Austria’s rapid military collapse, coupled with Bismarck’s hints that France could be compensated for its neutrality in a manner consistent with French devotion to the principle of nationality, especially in Belgium, appears to have secured that neutrality. Upon the attainment of a peace, however, Bismarck had lost interest in the question of French irredentist interests in Belgium and Luxembourg. Napoleon pursued this issue in order to obtain compensations subsequent to the Prussian territorial gains and the humiliation of Austria. French balancing was, after all, quite tardy. It was a forlorn hope, ex post facto of the Prussian fait accompli. The French failure to balance Prussian aggrandizement prior to the Prussian victory had effectively and permanently ended the French hegemony in Central and Western Europe that France had enjoyed since the reign of Louis XIV.

Note that the difficulties Louis Napoleon experienced in proceeding diplomatically around the machinations of Bismarck do not simply demonstrate that he was outmaneuvered by superior statesmanship or superior intelligence on the part of Bismarck, irrespective of whether we believe that Bismarck might have had the upper hand in each. These difficulties more nearly reflect the problems that Louis Napoleon, as head of a regime that was a hybrid variant of the territorial-sovereign and national-sovereign institutional forms, experienced in operating within a mixed system of territorial-sovereign and national-sovereign principles, norms, and rules. The mixed system game was difficult to play. Its rules were unclear. Territorial-sovereign norms such as territorial compensations for diplomatic favors co-existed with secessionist challenges and irridentist claims based upon ethnicity, language, or culture. Napoleon III was expected to play the gentlemen’s game, as honest broker to a brother monarch, to gain legitimacy in the eyes of dynasts. Bismarck, playing his own game, was able to ruthlessly exploit Louis Napoleon’s insecurity in this regard, and change the rules at will, marching Napoleon toward ever receding goal posts.

It was, in my own view, precisely the hybrid character of the French regime, the fact that it was simultaneously an imperial, or pseudo-monarchical institutional form of collective action, and legitimated by the principle of nationality, and in full possession of a national collective identity, that rendered it so difficult for Napoleon III to successfully balance Prussian aggrandizement in Central Europe. Napoleon was an emperor so long as he and his Empire served to embody French national aspirations. The Second Empire provided an institutional form of collective action that provided a serviceable vehicle for the expression and agency of French national collective identity so long as Napoleon’s goals were at a unity with the will of French national aspirations. French national aspirations willed the demise of the Vienna system which had been constructed to shackle the French people, and all the peoples of Europe, to a “legitimate” scion of the ancien regime. This system constituted, by design, the uncompromising nullification of the idea of the nation. Napoleon’s Second Empire served, for a time, as an institutional form for the collective action of the French nation because its goals were indeed at a unity with the will of the nation.

Napoleon’s ultimate goal was to abrogate the territorial clauses of the Vienna settlement and to alter the state system on which it had been based. But he never understood that achieving his goal would also result in a unified Germany, which would forever end French aspirations to dominate Central Europe. ₈₅

That Napoleon’s attainment of his goal of demolishing the Vienna system did entail these consequences meant that the French failure to balance the Prussian creation of the Norddeutscher Bund spelled the beginning of the end for the Second Empire. The Prussian aggrandizement resulting from the defeat of Austria created not only an obstacle to the advancement of specifically French national aspirations, but also an aggressive and expansive Prussian power that could muster an army four times the size of that of France. ₈₆ By failing to “balance” this power, the Second Empire had acceded to the forging of the tool of its own destruction, as we shall briefly see.

 

The Franco-Prussian War and Birth of the German Nation

Between the collapse of Napoleon’s hope that he would be compensated by Prussia for its territorial gains in the northern German states, and the impending confrontation with Prussia, it had become clear that the pursuit of glory abroad under the banner of nationalism, or any other banner, would not be adequate to ensure that Napoleon could pass his Empire on to his son, Louis. The Second Empire’s foreign policy had collapsed in disaster, left France friendless throughout Europe, and created an extremely powerful and aggressive neighbor to the east. Napoleon’s domestic opposition included an assortment of Legitimists who sought a restoration of the Bourbons, Orleanists who were bourgeois constitutional monarchists—strong within intellectual and financial cells—and Republicans who found their strength among the teeming industrialized masses. As his opposition grew and strengthened, Napoleon found it impossible to govern as he had when the Second Empire had been declared. Then he had muzzled the press, emasculated the corps légeslatif, and held elections only to gauge public opinion. But the elections of 1869 had witnessed a precipitous decline in the vote for the government candidates and a half million vote rise for the Republicans, which was troubling as the Republican vote clearly constituted a vote against, not just the government, but the Empire as well. ₈₇

Napoleon determined to roll the dice and to venture upon maintaining the Empire by subordinating his power to that of a liberal constitution, which he had determined to grant to the French nation. Thus the “liberal empire” emerged as a rather severe consequence of the noninsularity of elite decisionmaking associated with the national-sovereign era. “Only by lifting the crown above party political strife would the Emperor be able to pass it on to his son.” ₈₈ Napoleon called to his side the liberal parliamentarian, Ollivier, to form a government, which took office on January 2, 1870. Napoleon and Ollivier then sat down to draft the constitution of the “Liberal Empire” and the reforms were put to a plebiscite vote. The reforms provided the desired effect. Seven and a half million votes were cast in favor of the Liberal Empire and only the smallest fraction of that opposed the measure.

The vote might have appeared to all but the most cynical to have assured the continuation of the Bonaparte dynasty. Louis Napoleon himself knew better. The most troubling aspect of the vote for him had been the fact that about 50,000 of his 350,000 man army had voted against the Liberal Empire. ₈₉ It is difficult to reconstruct their motivations for this vote. It might have been simple soldierly self-protection. They might have voted explicitly against a “liberal” empire where the corps légeslatif would control the purse strings, rather than their emperor, with potential negative consequences for their incomes and provisions. Napoleon took is as an indication that the army had little confidence in him personally.

Napoleon had been badly shaken by the events attending the Austrian military collapse at Sadowa. According to Allan Mitchell, he introduced measures to reform the French army as early as September 1866. The reforms would vastly enhance the French state’s power to conscript, and abolish or at least dramatically restrict the leaky lottery system which had in practice permitted mass draft evasion. These proposed reforms found very little domestic support. As Mitchell relates:

Napoleon III may have been greatly stirred by Sadowa, but his people, it would appear, remained exceeding temperate in their enthusiasm for things military. Nor were the propertied classes eager to forgo the convenient procedure of “exoneration,” in force since 1855, which allowed them to purchase an exemption from the draft in case one of their sons unfortunately drew a mauvais numéro. ₉₀

The Prussian system of recruitment and popular conscription appears to have been given much credit for the efficiency of the Prussian forces, in spite of the evidence we have from Eric Eyck, presented earlier, that Wilhelm and Roon had actually taken pains to limit the popularly conscripted Landwehr as a constituent element of the Prussian army. Prussia’s mobilization procedures had provided rapid and orderly transportation of Prussian forces to the front as well, whereas French campaigns in Italy and the Crimea had demonstrated French deficiencies in both discipline and organization. Napoleon had pushed for universal conscription in order to acquire numeric parity with the forces the King of Prussia had at his command, if not for the advantages (which Wilhelm appears to have seen as a threat as much as a tool) of a highly motivated citizen army.

Unfortunately, Napoleon had been required to retain his crown and to extend the life of the Second Empire by transforming it into a Liberal Empire. The constitutional limits on his power that had taken effect with the plebescitory accession of the Liberal Empire now forced him to seek a dramatic increase in the size and capabilities of his armed forces, which were seen by the populace as a fearful tool of the Crown, when he was for the first time required to seek parliamentary approval of the budget for these forces. The French electorate feared that a more powerful French army might be employed in the cause of their oppression, or at best that it would be employed in more of the disastrous campaigns abroad that had done so much during the life of the Second Empire to isolate France so completely on the diplomatic front. ₉₁ As Daniel Deudney has recently observed, fear of a standing army is a major impetus for insisting upon constitutional separations of authority over those forces. ₉₂ In this case, while Napoleon retained command of them as well as the power to commit them, the corps légeslatif retained the power to fund them, or not. This power was soon exercised to disastrous effect for the readiness of French forces to meet their Prussian counterpart.

Napoleon had pleaded for a universal conscription arrangement that would dispense with the “exhonorations” which had ensured that the rank and file were populated with impoverished replacements for the scion of the French bourgeoisie, and even agreed to a reduction in the term of service as an inducement to grant his measure. In this way he hoped to gather into his army an additional 500,000 men to move quickly toward his goal of the 1,000,000 men that he believed would be required to meet the Prussians and their allies in any future hostilities. Even his watered-down proposals were, however, deemed “too drastic” by the increasingly self-confident corps légeslatif. The French parliament feared that the expense would divert too many funds away from its own agenda of domestic social reforms, feared that the formation of such a large force would invite attack, and feared that even if Napoleon would not use it against them in the future, national life would be too severely militarized at the expense of the domestic economy. It can be fairly argued that Napoleon had in the past given the French people sufficient cause to fear the growth of “his” army. As Michael Howard writes of Napoleon’s policy of civil-military relations prior to the transformation of the Second Empire into the Liberal Empire:

it [the army] remained apart from the rest of the nation, and Napoleon III deliberately kept it so, as a Praetorian Guard. “The ideal constitution,” declared General Trochu, the most zealous of all military reformers, “is that which creates an army whose instincts, beliefs and habits make up a corporation distinct from the rest of the population.” ₉₃

Thus the corps légeslatif had voted only 5 million of the 14 million francs that Napoleon had requested to effect the military reform. ₉₄ To make matters worse, it cut the military budget by a further 13 million francs early in 1870, ₉₅ just months before the Second Empire’s fatal confrontation with what amounted to the combined strength of the German-speaking states of Central Europe.

In the arena of weapons modernization Napoleon had similar difficulties. After much effort he had managed to acquired a million breach-loading rifles to compete with the Prussian “needle gun,” but he fell far short of obtaining a million troops to man them. The Prussians had corrected their deficit in the quality of their artillery pieces since their experience with the Austrian guns and had contracted with Krupp for new, steel, breech-loading cannon. Certain that the corps légeslatif would not fund modernization of his artillery, Napoleon had attempted to fund breach-loading artillery for his army from his personal funds, but the war with Prussia broke upon a French army still equipped with the old muzzle-loading artillery. ₉₆ As the North German Confederation already had more than a million men under arms, the sum of French military reform efforts between 1866 and 1870 can be seen to have been “woefully inadequate.” ₉₇

Moreover, at precisely this time, French domestic politics saw a resurgence in republican sentiment. The corps légeslatif had begun a program of long overdue domestic reforms, however modest or inadequate, designed to upgrade the economic condition of the laboring classes, and Napoleon’s repeated demands for funds for military reforms could only have been seen by the working classes as insensitive to and obstructive of this purpose. The bourgeoisie had been enriched during the Second Empire, but the working classes had not. More than half of the population of Paris was living in poverty in 1870. ₉₈ Their brief experience with the political institutions of the Liberal Empire provided them with a renewed interest in political participation, and the hope that activism and radicalism might now bring them tangible gains. The constitution of the Liberal Empire had decidedly extended the franchise of the bourgeoisie, great and small. Now even the lower economic orders had begun to strongly agitate for a stake in the nation. The voice of the corps légeslatif had now, again, developed into a clear voice of the will of the French nation, quite distinct from the voice of the French Emperor. In inducing Napoleon III to grant a liberal constitution in order to maintain his crown, France had again asserted its national-sovereign collective identity, however shabbily it might have been dressed (as Marx had complained) in the ragged cloak of bourgeois commercial interest. ₉₉

Into the glowing embers of this newly heated French domestic political environment Bismarck was to pour the gasoline of a Hohenzollern Candidature for the newly vacant Spanish throne. Eyck argues that it had been clear to Bismarck by the spring of 1870 that the southern German states were much less disposed to join the North German Confederation than they had been immediately after Sadowa, four years earlier. ₁₀₀ He had worked quietly behind the scenes after an 1868 revolution had left the Spanish throne vacant, and spent £50,000, attempting to advance the candidacy of Prince Leopold, a Hohenzollern from the Catholic branch of that royal family, in spite of the strong opposition to the candidature by his sovereign, Wilhelm.

Wilhelm had opposed the candidature precisely because he had known that it would inflame French public opinion. Eyck argues that Bismarck must have known that the candidature would lead to war if pressed, as the French would see it as a provocation. Napoleon III would fear for his dynasty if he did not oppose it, and in any case “the candidature of a prince belonging to a ruling dynasty was in opposition to the principle of international practice [what Kratochwil has called, in this context, a ’tacit rule,’ a ’sphere of abstention,’ of the international system] ₁₀₁ which had evolved clearly in the nineteenth century.” ₁₀₂ But Bismarck, fearing that the Spanish Crown would be offered to one of the southern German princes, and thus demolish his efforts to bring these lands under Prussian rule, convinced Leopold to advance his candidature, and Wilhelm to reluctantly agree. The news of Leopold’s move reached France on July 3, 1870. It was “received as a calculated slap in the face for France by Prussia. It set France aflame.” ₁₀₃

We can see very clearly, in the events that followed, the very pronounced transformation in the notion of state interests that national-sovereign identity produces relative to the territorial-sovereign identity of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century states. We saw in chapter 4 that the territorial-sovereign dynast and absolute monarch, Louis XIV, could not, in a fit of rage, be dissuaded from issuing orders that the port of Genoa be bombarded from a French naval squadron for refusing to offer the French ships the first salute. Now, late in the nineteenth century, we find the French Emperor, Napoleon III, working quietly behind the scenes to induce Leopold to withdraw his candidature while the corps légeslatif, with the enthusiastic assistance of the hot-headed Foreign Minister, Gramont, was issuing shrill and public demands to the Prussian government to back down. Aronson describes Napoleon as a “voice of sanity in a wilderness of passion...[while among the parliament and public]...[y]ears of pent-up resentment against Prussia now burst forth.” ₁₀₄ Napoleon’s efforts bore fruit and Leopold withdrew his candidature, to the great pleasure and relief of both Napoleon and Wilhelm. The news of Leopold’s sacrifice reached Paris on July 12, but as Aronson suggests, rather understating the case, “France, by now, was in no mood for peace.” ₁₀₅

Ollivier, as leader of Napoleon’s government, was sent to speak in the parliament to attempt to calm the deputies but:

The truth was that instead of being relieved at the withdrawal of the candidature, a great many Frenchmen were disappointed. They had been left with a feeling of anticlimax, of having been cheated of their just revenge....The cry now went up that a mere withdrawal of the candidature was not enough: Prussia, who had tried to humiliate France, must herself be humiliated. She must be forced to give a guarantee that the candidature of Prince Leopold would never again be raised. Only then would the “honor of France” be satisfied. The idea of garanties was quickly taken up by the deputies, the Press and the crowd. Public opinion, dangerously inflamed, would be content with nothing less. ₁₀₆

This demand, of course, constituted both the greatest madness and the greatest idiocy. But that did not prevent Gramont from issuing instructions to Benedetti, in Berlin, to approach Wilhelm to secure a guarantee that the candidature of Leopold would never again be raised. Benedetti did not wait for his appointment, but approached Wilhelm during his walk, at Ems. In response to Benedetti’s demand Wilhelm politely but firmly informed Benedetti that he could not commit himself further than he had done in endorsing Leopold’s withdrawal. When Benedetti had persisted, Wilhelm had politely raised his hat in salute and walked on. He sent a telegram to Bismarck that evening describing the exchange. Bismarck edited the telegram, and released the product to the press. ₁₀₇ Aronson provides us with a fascinating passage describing the ruse:

Bismarck was at dinner with Moltke and Roon when the telegram arrived. He at once recognized its potential. By a little sharpening of the already sharp tone, it could be made to seem positively insulting. It would provide him with exactly that “red rag to the Gallic bull” for which he was searching. By some slight but skillful editing, the King’s treatment of Benedetti was made to appear distinctly high-handed. That the French Ambassador had suffered a polite but firm rebuff there could be no doubt whatsoever. The editing completed the telegram...was released to the Press. Copies of it were also sent to all Prussian representatives abroad. ₁₀₈

The doctored contents of the “Ems telegram” hit the French newspapers on July 14, Bastille Day in France. The document had the effect which Bismarck had desired. The French went positively mad. On the following day Gramont and Ollivier asked the Senate and the corps légeslatif, respectively, to vote the necessary war credits, which was done. War was now certain, and Aronson’s descriptions of the reaction in Paris provide a contrast with the indifference of the European masses of previous centuries to the wars of their monarchs:

The certainty of war was greeted with a roar of approval by the Paris crowd. For a week the city was in a state of delirium. To one observer it seemed as if the capital had been transformed into a vast lunatic asylum whose keepers had gone on a holiday....The population could hardly wait for nightfall...to start their illuminations...[and cries of] ...‘A bas la Prusse’...[and]... ‘A Berlin!’ ₁₀₉

They bellowed patriotic songs at the top of their lungs all night long, every night. A hysteria of patriotic unity had gripped the city.

“The really fine thing,” declared one naive witness, “is that there are no longer any party distinctions in Paris: there are neither Republicans nor Bonapartists: at the moment there are only Frenchmen.”...in the Place de la Concorde there were more than three thousand people, who danced around the column crying “ Vive l’Empereur!”...Anyone who mentioned caution was simply shouted down. ₁₁₀

Nor does nationalist fervor appear to have been entirely lacking in particularly the Prussian people. Aronson describes the Prussian Public’s reaction as “less frenzied than the French...[but]...no less enthusiastic.” ₁₁₁ He recounts how huge crowds of people had gathered outside Neues Palais at Potsdam, compelling Wilhelm to show himself time and again on the balcony to acknowledge their approval. The Prussian people felt they were “embarking on a just, indeed, almost a holy war.” ₁₁₂ They felt certain that God was on their side and sang Lutheran hymns and Die Wacht an Rhein in the streets. Michael Howard’s history similarly suggests that:

The Germans greeted the coming of the war less with the excited enthusiasm displayed by the people of Paris than with a deep sense of earnestness and moral purpose. It seemed to them not merely a national but a profoundly just war, and they called with every confidence upon the God of Battles to defend their cause. Lutheran hymns mingled with patriotic songs in the celebrations....Throughout North Germany swept a flame of impassioned patriotism fed by and reflected in the press. In the South enthusiasm was, as one might expect, somewhat less...[but]...the southern States had no excuse for evading their treaty obligations, even if they had wished to do anything of the sort. ₁₁₃

By September 3, when the French had been forced to capitulate at Sedan, and Napoleon had been packed off to Wilhelmshöhe as Wilhelm’s prisoner, the southern German people’s and especially their troops expressed as much enthusiasm for the war as had the Prussians. In spite of the nationalist fervor demonstrated by the French people and troops on July 15, Napoleon had been reduced to asking Wilhelm that he be allowed to go into captivity by way of Belgium to avoid passing through the ranks of his defeated army and potentially suffering their insults. His Empress and heir were on the run the next day and ultimately forced to seek shelter from the angry Parisian mobs in the Paris home of her American dentist. ₁₁₄

Napoleon’s entire very long path to the disaster of Sedan had been lit by his need for the glow of public approval and fear that his new dynasty should not survive without it. Napoleon had stood without a single European ally, as Bismarck’s machination brought him war in 1870, precisely because he had played to nationalist sentiment in France for three decades with the nationalist foreign adventures that had systematically alienated the courts of Europe. He had gone to war with Prussia realizing full well that France was utterly unprepared, because inflamed French nationalist sentiment had demanded it.

Further he had taken personal command of the French forces that had rushed eastward to meet the Prussians a Saarbrücken and Metz “despite the fact that he had only the slightest grasp of military strategy, that he was almost too ill to stand, that he was pessimistic, vacillating and exhausted” because French nationalist opinion demanded that he, as a Bonaparte, would obviously lead the French forces and restore French honor. ₁₁₅ He had squandered the little time that fate had provided him to organize the disorganized military mess that he had found upon his arrival at the front with a strategically meaningless “victory” at Saarbrücken, precisely because he had feared that his apparent inactivity would not play well back in Paris. ₁₁₆ When the Prussian forces had moved to cut off the Army of Châlons from its escape route to the west, Napoleon had felt that he could not retreat toward Paris with his army, which had been his only sound strategic course of action and would have dangerously stressed the German lines of communication as well, precisely because Eugenie, fearing the reaction of the Parisian mobs, had advised him it would have been a domestically disastrous move. ₁₁₇ As a result of his failure to order this strategic retreat, Napoleon found himself and his army cut off and caught in the “mousetrap of Sedan,” surrounded by Prussian artillery which had been ensconced on the high ground above him, and which rained down shells upon his position and troops until he had ordered the white flag of surrender to be raised. ₁₁₈ The war was ineffectively continued for a time after the deposition and exile of “third Napoleon,” but these events are of no consequence whatever to the purpose of the present analytic narrative.

Bismarck had been quite anxious to conclude a peace as quickly as possible after the French defeat at Sedan. Southern and northern German troops had now been blooded together and had together quite quickly, soundly, and gloriously defeated mighty France.

Not only did he [Bismarck] want a harsh peace but he wanted a quick one. He was not in favor of a prolonged war. As far as he was concerned the campaign had achieved what he had planned it should: the bringing together of all the German States [less Austria] to fight against a common enemy. Once peace was concluded, the formal unification of Germany would not be long in following. ₁₁₉

Nor was it long in following. Sensing the popular longing for unification in the wake of Sedan, the monarchs of Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse had all expressed their willingness to sign a treaty of union with the North German Confederation by November 11 of that year. Bismarck had induced Bavaria to consent to the same by making some concessions to “Bavarian particularism” and had effectively bribed Louis II of Bavaria, who was badly in debt, to sign on in exchange for an annual sum of money. ₁₂₀ In return for this sum, Louis had signed a letter prepared by Bismarck inviting Wilhelm as the King of Prussia to become a German Emperor. The Reichstag had done the same. Bismarck had been required to work hard to ensure that the events of 1849 would not be repeated and that Wilhelm would not also haughtily refuse the Crown simply because it had been offered to him by the common German people. Wilhelm accepted the Crown on the basis that it had been offered to him by the unanimous consent of the princes of Europe, and it was bestowed on him in Versailles, in the Hall of Mirrors, the symbolic holy ground of the defeated French adversary, on January 18, 1871. ₁₂₁

German national collective identity had, in Bismarck’s eyes, been fleshed out with the institutional form that most suited it, and this was the imperial form. In my own view, German national collective identity could have never developed into its modern form, something very close to the form that it had developed by 1871, without the events following the Revolution of 1848. Without the experience of participatory politics, however limited that franchise might have been, that had permitted the German people within their various states to feel some stake in the policies of the governments of their monarchs, their “German” collective identity would likely have been forever subordinated to particularistic political identities developed around their particularistic relationships with their princes. Without the maintenance of that franchise and its creeping extension to ensure the participation of the people in the society and state consistent with the requirements of rampant capitalism, the people would likely have never been sufficiently politically aware for their budding self-identification as “Germans” to contain the intersubjective meanings that it did for them by this date. And, of course, certainly without their shared experience of victory ₁₂₂ as Germans over a powerful French foe which had historically oriented its policy toward ensuring their continued political disunity, German national collective identity could never have crystallized (to borrow from the lexicon of Michael Mann) with the potency that it clearly did at this time.

Yet German institutional history had been, for a thousand reasons—many of these dating back to the Reformation period—both particularistic and distinctly feudal. The strength of the feudal residue in German Central Europe by 1871 was such that it would be difficult to envision German national collective identity adopting an different institutional form with which to manifest its agency to the world than that of the long lost German Empire. Germany now had its Second Reich, and Bismarck correctly observed that it suited Germany in 1871 in a fashion that would not at all suit German national collective identity today. Bismarck had written, immediately upon the promulgation of the Second Reich:

For German patriotism to be active and effective, needs as a rule to be dependent upon a dynasty. Independent of a dynasty, it rarely comes to a rising point....The German’s love of the fatherland has need of a prince on whom he can concentrate his attachment. Suppose that all the German dynasties were suddenly deposed, there would then be no likelihood of German national sentiment sufficient to hold all the Germans together amid the friction of European politics. ₁₂₃

Note the manner in which this passage invokes the themes that I advanced in the theoretical development of the causal and constitutive linkages between co-constituted individual and collective identities, the legitimating principles of domestic and global social orders, and the derivative institutional forms of collective action. Durkheim’s emotive identification with the “fatherland,” his “organic solidarity of dissimilar individuals” is depicted here. Similarly the Habermassian, Kratochwillian, Weberian formulations of a theoretical construct oriented toward the individual’s valuation of “duty” to legitimate social authority is illustrated in Bismarck’s assertion of the dependence of German patriotism upon a prince. Bismarck understood intuitively that the institutional form of collective action suitable to manifest pan-German nationalism was a consequence of the particularities of co-constituted individual and pan-German national collective identity.

The historical particularities of German history had, then, ultimately proven to present a series of institutional facts that guided German national collective identity into an institutional form that is entirely consistent with our knowledge of the functioning of such facts. They provided a context in which the new game of German national-state formation took on concrete meaning. ₁₂₄

 

Conclusions and Theoretical Reprise

This chapter has analyzed the consequences of the development of national collective identity for the conduct of national-state security policy in the nineteenth century in the context of three critical areas of state conduct, in which realist and neorealist theory predict state security behavior that is at variance with the observed behavior of nation-states.

Structural realism argues that the condition of international anarchy imposes a requirement on each state to emulate strategically successful behavior or perish at the hands of a more powerful and successful rival. I have critiqued an extension of this structural realist argument that suggests that the rise of the mass-mobilization army was an effect of this socialization mechanism on nineteenth-century European states, and was instituted to replicate successful French strategic behavior. While the author of that argument quite responsibly limits his claims and addresses evidence that conservative European dynasts such as the Prussian King approached this innovation cautiously within their own borders, I have presented significant evidence that the Prussian monarchy and army elites were not merely cautious, but actually consciously and actively opposed efforts to expand the popular and participatory nature of Prussia’s armed forces. They did so out of conviction that such forces were inimical to the legitimating principles of dynastic, territorial-sovereign domestic social order, which they represented. Prussia’s territorial-sovereign collective identity did not easily accommodate the institutional structures legitimated by an emerging German national-sovereign collective identity. The Prussian elites actually resisted, to a remarkable extent, expansion of the mass mobilization army, quite irrespective of their perceptions of its benefits in enhancing the motivation and performance of the soldiery.

Both classical realism and structural neorealism predict that states will balance the attempts of powerful neighbors and adversaries to expand their territory. Yet, as has emerged in my analysis, Napoleon III was unable to take action to frustrate Bismarck’s projects to unify the German states, even though French ascendancy over continental affairs was seriously endangered by the creation of the Norddeutscher Bund at the close of the Austro-Prussian War. Napoleon allowed himself to be goaded by Bismarck, and the French nationalist press, into initiating a war against Prussia for which he clearly believed France to be unprepared. France fought Prussia, in 1870, for no purpose whatever consistent with an instrumentally rational definition of the interests of the French state. I have explored the impact of French domestic nationalist agitation in the origins of the Franco-Prussian War. I have demonstrated how the legitimacy of Napoleon III’s reign was predicated on his policy of upholding the principle of nationality in French policy toward the Italian Peninsula, the German states of central Europe, and the Polish reaction against its partition by Russia and Prussia. I have argued that by the time Bismarck’s policy of unification came to fruition, the policy of the “liberal Empire” of France was wholly at the service of the popular French conception of the principle of nationality.

In light of these observations, I argue that state interests may not be designated by the theorist with an assumption that they are static or exogenously given. The interests of societies, whatever institutional form of collective action they employ to express these interests, is demonstrated to be influenced by the self-perceptions of the society they represent. I argue that interests are a function of historically contingent societal collective identity. The structure of state interests of the Second Empire of Napoleon III, and that of Bismarck’s Prussia emerge as distinctly different conceptions, derived from distinctly different notions of the nature of sovereign identity. The regime of Napoleon III, legitimated as it was by Napoleon’s anti-dynastic support for the principle of nationality, led him to take decisions that were not formally rational or consistent with the rational instrumental logic that Bismarck was able to apply as Chancellor of a traditionally legitimated Prussia. Significantly Bismarck, though a confirmed monarchist, was able to employ French and pan-German national sentiment as a tool to obtain his rational-instrumental objectives. Thus a major consequence of the development of national collective identity is that it could be employed as a tool or alternately suffered as a constraint for statesmen. Variations in the structure of state identities and interests, predicated on the legitimating principles of a given regime, determined whether or not the “principle of nationality” (later followed by national-self-determination) were a constraint or a tool for statesmen who might like to pursue rational instrumental policies. Domestic nationalist ferment sometimes transforms the structure of state interests, impelling statesmen to pursue formally irrational policies. I argue that this is precisely what occurred to induce Louis Napoleon to launch the Franco-Prussian War, which resulted in the demise of his Second Empire and in the birth of the Second German Reich.

It was precisely the hybrid nature of the “liberal Empire”; that it served neither as an appropriate institutional form of collective action to manifest monarchical territorial-sovereignty nor French popular and national sovereignty, which doomed it to extinction at the first transnational difficulty. The symbolism of earlier French national glory, latent within the imperial office and the name of Bonaparte, was cast aside like a tarnished ornament when delegitimated by defeat. Louis Napoleon’s legitimation crisis came into being and passed away in a day, at Sedan. The imperial institutional form of collective action could no longer manifest French national collective identity. But it suited as a wholly appropriate institutional form to manifest the national collective identity of the newly forged Pan-German nation.

 

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Endnotes

Note 1: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 21.  Back.

Note 2: Sheehan, German History, p. 673.  Back.

Note 3: Ibid. p. 680.  Back.

Note 4: Ibid. p. 681.  Back.

Note 5: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 27.  Back.

Note 6: Ibid. p. 28. As Eyck describes the arrangement, “[t]he richest men, who paid a third of the taxes, came in the first class. The second class contained the men of moderate means, who paid the second third. All the rest, the overwhelming majority of the voters, belonged to the third class. Every class had to vote indirectly for Wahlmänner (electors) who had to elect the deputy. In this way the first two classes always outvoted the third class, which was practically without any representation.”  Back.

Note 7: Sheehan, German History, p. 704.  Back.

Note 8: Ibid. p. 710.  Back.

Note 9: Theo Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 15.  Back.

Note 10: Significantly, the inconstancy of the French form of government was utilized by Bismarck, after the French defeat at Sedan that ended the Franco-Prussian War, to justify the imposition of a harsh peace on France. The French general Wimpffen had attempted to convince Bismarck that such a harsh peace would result in “unending strife” between France and Prussia and that Prussian generosity would, conversely, earn the gratitude of France. Bismarck responded scornfully, according to Aronson: “The gratitude of the people, he [Bismarck] said, was nothing more than ‘a myth.’ ‘It is possible to meet with the gratitude of a sovereign, sometimes even from a ruling family,’ he claimed, ‘and it occasionally happens that you may implicitly rely on such gratitude. But you must never count on a nation’s gratitude. Were the French like other peoples; if they honored and respected their institutions; if their sovereigns followed one another regularly on the throne—if all these things were so, why then we might have faith in the gratitude of the Emperor and his son, and estimate its worth. But during the last eighty years governments in France have been so unstable and so numerous; they have changed so rapidly, so curiously, so contrary to all expectation, that one can rely on nothing in your country. Consequently it would be madness, it would be building on sand, for any government to base any hopes on the friendship of a French sovereign.’ How could he be sure, asked Bismarck, that a revolution might not tomorrow topple the Empire?” Ibid. pp. 175&-;76.  Back.

Note 11: Ibid. p. 15.  Back.

Note 12: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 105.  Back.

Note 13: Ibid. p. 106.  Back.

Note 14: Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, p. 15.  Back.

Note 15: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 107  Back.

Note 16: Ibid.  Back.

Note 17: Sheehan, German History, p. 865.  Back.

Note 18: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, pp. 102–3.  Back.

Note 19: See, for example, Woloch’s treatment of the anticlerical nature of French domestic educational policy during the First Republic and much of the First Empire. See Woloch, The New Regime, pp. 173–236.  Back.

Note 20: Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, pp. 20–21.  Back.

Note 21: Ibid. p. 55.  Back.

Note 22: Ibid. p. 56.  Back.

Note 23: Ibid. p. 17.  Back.

Note 24: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 48.  Back.

Note 25: Ibid.  Back.

Note 26: Ibid.  Back.

Note 27: Ibid. p. 49.  Back.

Note 28: Sheehan, German History, p. 877.  Back.

Note 29: Ibid.  Back.

Note 30: Ibid.  Back.

Note 31: Ibid. The emphasis is mine.  Back.

Note 32: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 71.  Back.

Note 33: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 122.  Back.

Note 34: See especially Eyck’s account of Bismarck’s domestic divide and rule tactics in this context in Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, pp. 195–215.  Back.

Note 35: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, pp. 330–31.  Back.

Note 36: Doyle, Empires, pp. 92–97.  Back.

Note 37: Mann, The Sources of Social Power, II, p. 331.  Back.

Note 38: Sheehan, German History, p. 856.  Back.

Note 39: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, pp. 77–78.  Back.

Note 40: Ibid. p. 81.  Back.

Note 41: Ibid.  Back.

Note 42: Sheehan, German History, p. 890.  Back.

Note 43: Ibid.  Back.

Note 44: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 64.  Back.

Note 45: Sheehan, German History, p. 891.  Back.

Note 46: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 128.  Back.

Note 47: Ibid.  Back.

Note 48: Ibid. p. 129. Kissinger is citing Bismarck’s Werke, here. The cited passage was written in March 1858.  Back.

Note 49: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 90.  Back.

Note 50: Ibid. pp. 92–94.  Back.

Note 51: Ibid. p. 100.  Back.

Note 52: Ibid. p. 106.  Back.

Note 53: Ibid. pp. 107–10.  Back.

Note 54: Sheehan, German History, p. 900.  Back.

Note 55: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 115.  Back.

Note 56: Ibid.  Back.

Note 57: Kissinger, Diplomacy, pp. 124–25. Kissinger’s quotations of the exchange between Gerlach and Bismarck are taken from p. 125.  Back.

Note 58: Ibid. p. 85.  Back.

Note 59: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 116.  Back.

Note 60: Sheehan, German History, pp. 902–3.  Back.

Note 61: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 128.  Back.

Note 62: As Eyck’s narrative suggests, Bismarck had likely been hoping to ensure the acquisition of other German lands, and had been concerned about the impression that the Prussian terms for Austria might create among the Great Powers of Europe, and the Confederation. Consider this passage from Ibid. pp. 132–33: “Bismarck wrote to his wife [from Nikolsburg]: ‘If we do not exaggerate our demands and do not believe that we have conquered the world, we shall get a peace worth the efforts we have made. But we—that means, of course, the King—are as easily intoxicated as we are depressed, and I have the thankless task of pouring water into his wine and bringing home the truth that we do not live alone in Europe, but with three neighbors [surely an allusion to France, Austria and Russia].’ These are the thoughts and words of a real statesman. But [t]he King fought for his idea with his accustomed stubbornness. It was at Nikolsburg that this struggle between the King and his Minister was fought out with the utmost bitterness. ‘Bismarck yesterday wept in my presence about the hard things that the King said to him,’ wrote the Crown Prince in his diary.”  Back.

Note 63: Ibid. pp. 132–33.  Back.

Note 64: For the balancing expectations of classical realist scholarship see Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, Chapters 11–14, pp. 161–215; Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, Chapters 4–5, pp. 156–210; Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 102–46; Organski and Kugler, The War Ledger, pp. 13–62. Neorealist expectations of balancing activity among states are best described in Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 102–28 and the “expected utility” model presented in Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).  Back.

Note 65: Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 121.  Back.

Note 66: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 107.  Back.

Note 67: Ibid. p. 114.  Back.

Note 68: Ibid. p. 107.  Back.

Note 69: Kratochwil, “Regimes, Interpretation and the ‘Science’ of Politics: A Reappraisal,” pp. 270–72.  Back.

Note 70: For a discussion of the problem of irredentism to the stability of international order see Mayall, Nationalism and International Society, pp. 57–61.  Back.

Note 71: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 108.  Back.

Note 72: Ibid. p. 109.  Back.

Note 73: Sheehan, German History, p. 893.  Back.

Note 74: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 114.  Back.

Note 75: See Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 129. Aronson also writes of the state of Napoleon’s health in this period that “Never really strong, he had been suffering increasingly from pains in the bladder during the last few years. Although his doctors had once diagnosed a stone, no treatment had been carried out, and the discomfort experienced by the Emperor during subsequent ministrations had made him ever more loath to be examined. His nature, moreover, was of a type that prefers a quick alleviation of the symptoms to a treatment of the cause. As a result his pain became worse. This in turn sapped his energy, clouded his brain and weakened his resolve. His tendency to evade, to procrastinate, to drift with the tide, became more pronounced as the years went by. At council meetings, he was often in a state of drugged and hopeless apathy.” Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, p. 28.  Back.

Note 76: This was Prince Richard von Metternich (1829–1895), the Austrian Ambassador to France and at the time, and son of the famous framer of the Vienna settlement of the Napoleonic wars, Clemens von Metternich (1773–1859).  Back.

Note 77: Paul Schroeder in a recent paper has noted that while Napoleon’s wife and Empress was an ardent admirer of the Hapsburg monarchy, she advocated a policy of pushing defeated Austria into sterner opposition of Prussia between Austria’s defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1866, and France’s defeat at the hands of the same in 1870, quite “heedless of Austria’s needs and limitations.” See Paul Schroeder, “A Pointless and Enduring Rivalry: France and the Habsburg Monarchy, 1715–1918.” Delivered at the 1995 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 2, 1995. p. 15.  Back.

Note 78: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 128.  Back.

Note 79: Ibid. p. 117  Back.

Note 80: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 136.  Back.

Note 81: Ibid. p. 156.  Back.

Note 82: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 115.  Back.

Note 83: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 129.  Back.

Note 84: Ibid. p. 130.  Back.

Note 85: Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 107.  Back.

Note 86: According to Eyck, having cowed the Southern German states by his annexation of most of those in the north, Bismarck had been careful to obtain alliances, stipulated in secret treaties, with nearly all of these states to the effect that they would put their forces at the disposal, and under the command of the King of Prussia in the event of a future Prussian war with, particularly, France. See Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 136. As a consequence, according to Howard, the Prussian army had at its disposal as many as 1,200,000 men compared to 288,000 Frenchmen under arms at the end of 1866. See Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871, (New York: Collier Books, 1969), p. 29.  Back.

Note 87: Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, pp. 42–44.  Back.

Note 88: Ibid. p. 45.  Back.

Note 89: Ibid. p. 49.  Back.

Note 90: Allan Mitchell, Victors and Vanquished: The German Influence on Army and Church in France after 1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 5–6. Note that the attitude of the French bourgeoisie with respect to military service for their sons appears to be one of the most constant features of the French political landscape between the birth of the First Republic and the demise of the Second Empire. Recall, for example, how Isser Woloch’s recent study of post-Revolutionary French society indicates that the urban bourgeoisie obtained bogus medical deferments and hired replacements during the Napoleonic conscription at rates much higher than other segments of society during the campaigns of the first Napoleon. (See Woloch, The New Regime, pp. 383–87.) This is curious, as the bourgeois classes in France had been among the most consistently nationalistic and bellicose during this period. They had acceded to the martial tone of Napoleon III’s regime and its replacement, according to the caustic observation of Karl Marx, of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” with “Cavalry, Infantry, Artillery” (See Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, p. 49.) Yet they did not themselves appear to have much of a taste for the fighting.  Back.

Note 91: Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, p. 51.  Back.

Note 92: Daniel H. Deudney, “The Philadelphia System” International Organization 49 (2) (1995): 203.  Back.

Note 93: Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, p. 15.  Back.

Note 94: Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, p. 52.  Back.

Note 95: Ibid. p. 53.  Back.

Note 96: Ibid.  Back.

Note 97: Ibid. p. 54.  Back.

Note 98: Ibid. p. 60.  Back.

Note 99: For a small sample of Marx’s prolific criticism of the French bourgeoisie during the Second Empire of Napoleon III, see Karl Marx “[Excerpts from] The Civil War in France,” with Introduction by Friedrich Engles, in Lewis S. Feurer (ed.). Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 349–91. For a sample of Marx’s explicit criticisms of Napoleon III and the Second Empire’s coup against the Second Republic in this context see Karl Marx, “[Excerpts from] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” Ibid. pp. 318–48. The reader is cautioned that this second essay’s historical subject matter terminates with the events of the year 1852.  Back.

Note 100: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 162.  Back.

Note 101: Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions, pp. 81–88. Kratochwil argues that over time tacit understandings develop regarding spheres of influence and spheres of abstention in which powers agree not to interfere in the affairs of states bordering, or claimed within the sphere of influence, of a powerful potential antagonist. In the context of the Hohenzollern Candidature, the consequences of the War of Spanish Succession in the early eighteenth century had resulted in a tacit rule that the Hapsburg dynasty would not again advance the candidature of a Hapsburg prince for the Spanish throne while the Hapsburg dynasty ruled the Austrian Empire. The Hohenzollern Candidature violated that tacit rule so long as the Hohenzollern family ruled powerful Prussia and the North German Confederation and potentially compromised France’s security in light of Spain’s geostrategic position to the south and west of France.  Back.

Note 102: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, p. 170.  Back.

Note 103: Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, p. 81. The emphasis is mine.  Back.

Note 104: Ibid.  Back.

Note 105: Ibid. pp. 82–83. The passage quoted is found on p. 83.  Back.

Note 106: Ibid. p. 83.  Back.

Note 107: Ibid. p. 84. Also see Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, pp. 169–71.  Back.

Note 108: Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, p. 84.  Back.

Note 109: Ibid. p. 85.  Back.

Note 110: Ibid. p. 86.  Back.

Note 111: Ibid. p. 100.  Back.

Note 112: Ibid.  Back.

Note 113: Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, pp. 59–60.  Back.

Note 114: Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, p. 178–79.  Back.

Note 115: Ibid. p. 89.  Back.

Note 116: Ibid. p. 105.  Back.

Note 117: Ibid. pp. 138–39.  Back.

Note 118: The classic account of the entrapment of the Army of Châlons and the bombardment and surrender of Sedan is found in Howard, The Franco-Prussian War, pp. 183–223. Also see Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, pp. 227–61.  Back.

Note 119: Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, p. 176.  Back.

Note 120: Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, pp. 178–79.  Back.

Note 121: Ibid. pp. 181–82.  Back.

Note 122: Note that shared victory over a common foe conforms to the essence of the creation what Anderson calls “shared history” in his multivariate definition of nationalism. With a shared experience of battle against the French, the integrated German states of Central Europe now added shared history to their shared language and culture as pillars of their “imagined [pan-German, national] community.” This shared memory allowed them to begin a shared forgetting of their internecine conflictual past. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 187–203.  Back.

Note 123: Ibid. pp. 183–84.  Back.

Note 124: Friedrich Kratochwil, “Regimes, Interpretation and the ‘Science’ of Politics,” p. 271.  Back.