Why did Bismarck annex Alsace-Lorraine? To strengthen, he said, the German frontier against France. But there was another reason. Fear of France had brought the Southern States into the Empire; fear of France should keep them there. The permanent hostility of France was necessary to assure the continuance of Prussia's position as the supreme military power in Germany. And so the plundered provinces became the very corner-stone of the German imperial system. There is surely something very strange about all this. Why should it be necessary to retain the loyalty of nearly half Germany by what practically amounts to terrorisation? The answer is that Germany is not a single national State but a number of dynastic States, federated together under the control of one predominant partner. In other words, the problem of Alsace-Lorraine has led us to the consideration of the second flaw in the development of the national idea in Germany.
The union of Italy meant a clean sweep of all the old dynastic frontiers and States which had strangled the country for so long; the union of Germany, on the contrary, riveted these obsolete chains still more firmly than ever on the country's limbs. Bismarck claimed that this was necessary, inasmuch as the Germans, unlike all other nations, were more alive to dynastic than to national loyalty; that, in short, Germany was not really ready in 1870 for true unity.[1] The chief reason, however, for the retention of the old frontiers was that they suited the aims of Prussia. The reformers of 1848, as Professor Erich Marcks somewhat naïvely says, "had wanted to place Prussia at the head, but only as the servant of the nation; Prussia was also to cease to be a State by itself, a power on its own account. She was to create the nation's ideal—complete unity—and then to merge herself in the nation. But Prussia would not and could not do this. She was far too great a power herself; she could very well rule Germany, but not serve."[2] Both Germany and Italy at first played with the idea of a Confederation, but each was eventually forced to look to one of its existing States to give it the unity it desired. There was only one possible choice for each: for Germany, Prussia; for Italy, Piedmont; but while Piedmont was content to serve, Prussia was too proud to do anything but rule. The dynastic State frontiers were therefore retained because Prussia refused to sacrifice her own State frontiers. The "unification of Germany," in short, was an episode in the gradual expansion of the Prussian dynastic State, which had begun far away back in the thirteenth century.[3] It assumed the air of a national movement, because Prussia cleverly availed herself of the prevailing nationalistic sentiment for her own ends. The German Empire is therefore something unique in the annals of the world; it is at once a nation-State, like Italy, France, and Great Britain, and also a military Empire, like Rome under Augustus, Europe under Napoleon, Austria under Joseph II., i.e. a State in which the territory that commands the army holds political sway over the rest of the country. It is not mere accident of geographical proximity, or even the kinship between Austrians and Germans, which has led to the long and unshakable alliance of Germany with the Hapsburg dominions. They are associated by common political interests and by similarity of political structure. Each stands for the supremacy of one dynastic State over a number of subordinate States or nationalities.
[Footnote 1: The chapter entitled "Dynasties and Stocks" in the Reflections should be carefully studied on this point. Bismarck was obviously uncomfortable about the old frontiers.]
[Footnote 2: Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century, p. 104.]
[Footnote 3: See Chap. III. p. 95.]
Her common nationality leads us to forget that the German Empire should more rightly be called the Prussian Empire.[1] Nor is there any reason at all why the Empire of Prussia should stop its process of expansion at the national boundaries; it has indeed already stepped beyond them, into Poland in the east, into Denmark in the north, into France in the west. Why should not the process be carried farther still and Germany become in Europe, nay, in the world, what Prussia is in Germany? By preserving her identity as a State, and by establishing her hegemony, Prussia, in the name of the national idea of Germany, has been able to spread her own ideals throughout the Empire, in other words to undertake that Prussianisation of Germany which is the most striking fact in her history since 1870. Piedmont was swallowed up in Italy, Germany has been swallowed up in Prussia; she has become the sharer of her victories and the accomplice of her crimes. And so under the tutelage of the spirit of Bismarck the docile German people have adopted the Prussian faith; and the policy of aggression and conquest once entered upon, there was no drawing back. Bismarck fed the youthful nation upon a diet of blood and iron, and its appetite has grown by what it fed on. The success of 1870 turned the nation's head; the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine gave it the first taste of conquest. Germany began to imagine that German character and German culture possessed some magical and unique quality which would alone account for this success. Dreams of a European Empire, of infinite expansion, of world-power, floated before the national consciousness. The German people were no longer content, to use Mazzini's words, "to elaborate and express their idea, to contribute their stone also to the pyramid of history"; they now craved to impose their idea upon the world at large, and to place their stone on the top of the pyramid. Modern Germany is an example of nationalism "gone wrong," just as Napoleon was an example of democratic individualism "gone wrong." The Man of Destiny has been followed by the Nation of Destiny, the "super-man" by the "super-nation." Both have had to face a world in arms arrayed against them.
[Footnote 1: German writers are fond of calling it "Prussia-Germany" (Preussen-Deutschland), a phrase of Treitschke's.]
Thus the national idea in Germany has been cramped, contorted, and perverted by the Prussian system and the dynastic frontiers. Had the dreams of 1848 been realised, there might have been no Franco-German War, no Alsace-Lorraine question, no war of 1914. And what of our third test of nationhood? Do the people of Germany feel that their government adequately expresses their general will, that it is truly representative, by which is not necessarily meant that it is democratic in form?[1] There is no doubt that in 1848 the educated classes of Germany did actually desire a democratic form of polity. In that year Germany was as liberal as Italy; she also had risings in almost every State, not excluding Prussia itself, which were everywhere answered with promises of a "constitution." But when reaction came in Germany, as in Italy, Prussia did not, like Piedmont, stand out for freedom and make itself the model State of Germany; on the contrary she reverted to her old military absolutism at the first opportunity. And so the dreams of German liberty, like the dreams of complete German unity, disappeared before the stern necessity of accepting the supremacy of a politically reactionary State; and the Prussianisation which followed did much to neutralise altogether the liberalising influences of the south. It is therefore possible to maintain that the political institutions of Germany have come to represent more and more the genius and will of the population. "The Germany of the twentieth century," maintains a recent writer, "is not two but one. The currents have mingled their waters, and the Prussian torrent now has the depth and volume of the whole main-stream of German thought."[2]
[Footnote 1: e.g. Russia has a representative government in this sense, though she is without "representative institutions" in the democratic sense.]
[Footnote 2: Round Table, Sept. 1914, p. 628.]