Bismarck: Making and Unmaking of Germany
The famed German sociologist Max Weber gave political science its canonical definition of the state in his 1918 “Politics as a Vocation” lecture. The state is a community that has a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” in an area. Another definition from that lecture builds off of it. Politics is the “striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power either among states or among groups within a state.” 
The intrinsic notion is that people matter. Individuals grant the state its monopoly on force, and then obey political leaders. The boundaries in which politicians can exercise power are hence established, and should provide some restrictions on political actors.
In his insightful biography Bismarck: A Life, Jonathan Steinberg vivifies Otto von Bismarck, Minister-President of Prussia (1862-1890) and Chancellor of Germany (1871-1890). The father of realpolitik and the welfare state “transformed his world [Europe] more completely” than anyone except Napoleon. He united disparate German kingdoms into a world power through war and then ran the Second Reich for two more decades.
Steinberg finds the source of Bismarck’s success in neither institutions nor political parties, but a “sovereign self.” Despite lacking military credentials or great wealth, “Bismarck commanded those around him by the sheer power of his personality.” His behavior ranged from a use-and-discard attitude toward subordinates to bizarre bouts of hypochondria and threats of resignation when conflict arose with Kaiser William I. Yet, his king and boss never dismissed him.
Steinberg substantiates his claims by digging into diaries and letters belonging to Bismarck and his contemporaries. The man who proclaimed politics “the art of the possible” also “never took full responsibility for his acts.” He practiced realpolitik, “do what works and serves your interests,” yet sought to crush “enemies of the Reich [Catholics, socialists, and Jews].” He could jettison principle and patron alike, even those who helped elevate him to power, but could not forgo childhood wounds. His confession to hating his mother, and how he “successfully deceived her with falsehoods,” replayed itself in his poor relations with Queen Augusta and Crown Princess Victoria. He forever fumed about palace conspiracies to undermine him.
Steinberg’s linkage of Bismarck’s psyche and career yields value in his analysis of German unification. In 1863 “a profound struggle” ensued between Bismarck and William. The Austrian Emperor asked the Prussian King to attend a conference on the voluntary unification of Germany. Fearing prospective unification on Austrian terms, Bismarck “persuaded or forced” William to snub the Austrians and reject the invitation. Despite “intense emotions” and “tears,” Bismarck kept his job. Three years later, Prussia defeated Austria militarily to accelerate unification by “blood and iron.”
The same is true for the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Bismarck engineered a war with France over German involvement in a Spanish succession crisis. The affair was equal parts provocation by Bismarck, despite William’s objections, and absurdity given France’s overreaction. Coups were not unusual in Spain at the time, a point the Kaiser stressed, and an offensive German diplomatic cable is hardly a casus belli. Still, Bismarck’s initial failure to convince William, yet get his war testifies to his skills at manipulating circumstances and his monarch.
However, Steinberg’s thesis has issues. It suffers in the domestic sphere from the structure-agency question. What made Bismarck powerful, his “sovereign self” or government structures?
It was likely the latter. While Germany had a parliament, the Reichstag, Kaiser William I was “an all-powerful sovereign executive” who “chose to be overruled by his Chancellor.” Bismarck held no parliamentary majority, nor did he really require one. As William’s minister, he needed only “a public of one” to approve his policy agenda. Royal assent gave him flexibility to find parliamentary combinations for his legislation.
Liberals learned this the hard way. In 1866, Bismarck “needed liberals in order to complete his plans for a new German state” and then consolidate it. He used the liberals accordingly throughout the 1870s, with two ugly instances displaying his flexibility: persecuting Catholics and socialists.
Prussia absorbed Catholic lands in forming the Second Reich. This problematically manifested itself as the numerically strong Catholic Center Party in Protestant-led Germany. Bismarck, himself an evangelical convert (of what depth is debatable), tried to destroy the party and break Catholic influence through a culture war. Anticlerical Protestant liberals forgot their principles, and approved his crusade against a fifth column loyal to the archconservative Pope Pius IX before Germany. The state imprisoned priests, suppressed monastic orders, and restricted clerical control over education.
Bismarck then repaid the liberals by not wasting crises. As the “first modern globalized financial crisis” of 1873 dragged on, his focus shifted away from Catholicism and towards burgeoning socialism. With support from Kaiser William, a “convinced protectionist,” and conservatives who loathed “free markets, private property … and social mobility” he introduced bills to suppress socialism in 1878. By voting their principles on individual rights and rejecting the legislation in May 1878, liberals walked into a trap.
An attempt on William’s life that month, albeit before the vote, became Bismarck’s pretext to crush the Social Democratic Party. Upon hearing about the failed assassination he remarked: “then we dissolve the Reichstag.” Liberals could vote for rights or security. And invariably, the electorate returned a compliant parliament. Laws censoring socialist literature, banning trade groups, and letting the police stop and search suspected socialists passed. Ironically, the laws expired with Bismarck’s career in 1890.
Meanwhile, the political struggle against socialism bequeathed the welfare state. In the shifting political scene of the 1880s, the Catholic Center Party allied with its old persecutor. Catholic votes helped pass, over socialist objections, compulsory old age pensions and accident insurance among other bills in the 1880s. As with his foreign policy triumphs, Bismarck could unabashedly exclaim, “I have beaten them all!”
Yet, how different was Bismarck from those politicians he defeated? He certainly achieved more. He prevented full-blown liberal democracy in Germany, kept peace in Europe after 1870, and administered a world power with limited help. Yet, his refusal to share power was problematic. Running a modern state without sound government structures and a bureaucracy was a tall, if not impossible, order.
But Bismarck, like any politician, strove to preserve his power and the means of exercising it. “He ruled Germany by making himself indispensible” to Kaiser William I. This meant not just great power, but also tremendous angst. As Steinberg notes, “foreign affairs … never provoked the rage, psychosomatic ailments, and physical exhaustion that domestic affairs increasingly did.” Yet, Bismarck did not relinquish his power.
His “gigantic sense of self” would not allow resignation. And, this egotism survives as the archetype for politicians who claim the ability to legislate away problems. It is politicians’ professional raison d'être to endlessly exercise power, for reasons of continued political employment and self-aggrandizement.
Which leads to Bismarck’s tragic legacy. As the Reich collapsed in 1918, Max Weber derided the Iron Chancellor for leaving Germany “totally bereft of political will, accustomed to expect that the great man at the top would provide their politics for them.” A lack of democratic structures and checks on the chancellor’s power magnified the incompetence of his successors. Moreover, the incentives to exercise such immense power invariably attracted those with little regard for anything but power.
Weber died before Germany descended into totalitarianism. But another keen observer of German politics, the economist Friedrich Hayek, did witness the carnage wrought by fascism. And, he reached a chilling conclusion in The Road to Serfdom:
“By uniting in the hands of a single body, power formerly exercised independently by many, an amount of power is created infinitely greater than any that existed before, so much more far reaching as almost to be different in kind.”
The old saying is still true: absolute power corrupts absolutely.
