Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (68 page)

The intimate tension between Prussian patriotism and German nationalism contained a threat and a promise. The threat was that nationalist
agitation would become a force capable of challenging dynastic authority across the German states, that it would substitute a new horizontal culture of loyalties and affinities for the hierarchical order of the
ancien régime
and thereby sweep away the particularist heritage that had endowed Prussia with a distinctive history and significance. The promise was that Prussia might find a way of harnessing national enthusiasms to its own interests, of riding the nationalist wave without surrendering its particularist identity and institutions. In the short term, the threat overshadowed the promise as Frederick William III joined with other sovereigns in suppressing nationalist ‘demagoguery’ and silencing public memory of the war of volunteers. But in the longer term, as we shall see, Prussian political leaders became adept at discerning and exploiting the synergies between nationalist aspirations and territorial interest. In the process, the divided memory of the post-war years made way for an irenic synthesis in which popular and dynastic elements were juxtaposed and seen as complementary. Purged of its political ambiguities, the Prussian war against Napoleon would ultimately be refashioned – however incongruously – as a mythical war of German national liberation. Gymnastics, the Iron Cross, the cult of Queen Luise, even the battle of Jena would all mutate with time into German national symbols, legitimizing Prussian claims to political leadership within the community of German states.
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The territorial settlements agreed at the Vienna Peace Congress of 1814–15 created a new Europe. A Dutch-Belgian composite state, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, appeared in the north-west. Norway was transferred from Denmark to Sweden. Austria struck deep inroads into Italy with the acquisition of Lombardy-Venetia and the installation of Habsburg dynasts on the thrones of Tuscany, Modena and Parma. The borders of the Russian Empire, redrawn to encompass the bulk of eastern and central Poland, extended further westwards than at any time in European history.

For Prussia, too, this was a new beginning. There was no return to the pre-1806 borders. Much of the Polish territory seized in the 1790s (excepting the Grand Duchy of Posen) was transferred to Russian control, and East Frisia (Prussian since 1744) was ceded to the Kingdom of Hanover. In return, the Prussians acquired the northern half of the Kingdom of Saxony, the Swedish-ruled rump of western Pomerania and a vast tract of Rhenish and Westphalian territory reaching from Hanover in the east to the Netherlands and France in the west.
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This was no triumph of the Prussian will. Berlin failed to get what it wanted and got what it did not want. It wanted the whole of Saxony, but this was blocked by Austria and the western powers and the Prussians were forced to make do with the Saxon partition of 8 February 1815. Under this arrangement, Prussia acquired about two-fifths of the kingdom, including the fortress town of Torgau and the city of Wittenberg, where
Luther had launched the Reformation in 1517 by nailing his theses to the cathedral door. The creation of a large western wedge of Prussian territory along the river Rhine was a British, not a Prussian, idea. British policy-makers had long been concerned at the power-vacuum created by the withdrawal of the Habsburgs from Belgium and they wanted Prussia to replace Austria as the German ‘sentinel’ guarding the north-eastern frontier of France.
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This suited the Austrians; they were happy to be rid of the obstreperous Belgians, who now entered a brief and unhappy period of rule by the Dutch.

The Prussians also failed to get their way in the complex negotiations over the future organization of the German states. What the Prussians (whose delegation was led by Hardenberg and Humboldt) wanted was a Germany with strong central executive organs through which Prussia and Austria could share power over the lesser states – in short, a ‘strong dualist hegemonic solution’.
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The Austrians, by contrast, pleaded for a loose association of independent states with the minimum in central institutions. The German Confederal Treaty signed on 5 June 1815 (revised in the Final Act of the Treaty of 1820) represented a victory for the Austrian over the Prussian conception. The new German Confederation, encompassing thirty-eight (later thirty-nine) states, had only one statutory central body, the Federal Diet (
Bundesversammlung
), which met in Frankfurt and was in effect a permanent congress of diplomatic representatives. These arrangements were a setback for those Prussian policy-makers who had hoped for a more cohesive organization of the German territories.

None of this diminishes the significance of the post-Napoleonic settlement for the future of the Prussian state. The western compensation package created a block of Prussian Rhenish territory as large as Baden and Württemberg combined. Enclosed within the new territory, more by accident than design, were those apples of the Great Elector’s eye, the duchies of Jülich and Berg. The Hohenzollern kingdom was now a colossus that stretched across the north of Germany, broken only by one gap, forty kilometres wide at its narrowest point, where the territories of Hanover, Brunswick and Hesse-Kassel separated the Prussian ‘Province of Saxony’ from the Prussian ‘Province of Westphalia’. The consequences for Prussia’s (and Germany’s) nineteenth-century political and economic development were momentous.

The Rhineland was destined to become one of the powerhouses of European industrialization and economic growth, a development entirely unforeseen by the negotiators at Vienna, who assigned little weight to economic factors when they redrew the map of Germany. The settlement of 1815 also had far-reaching geopolitical implications. In relinquishing its claims to much of the Polish territory acquired in the 1790s and accepting compensation in the centre and west, Prussia reinforced its presence within German Europe. At the same time, Austria relinquished for ever its place in the north-west (Belgium) and accepted substantial new territories in northern Italy. For the first time in its history, Prussia occupied more ‘German’ territory than Austria.

The Confederation did not provide Berlin with the strong executive institutions it would have needed in order to exercise formal dominance over northern Germany, but it was open-ended enough to allow Prussia to pursue an informal and limited hegemony without putting the system as a whole in jeopardy. Precisely because the Confederation failed to establish trans-territorial institutions of its own, the door remained open for Prussia to seize the initiative. Two areas in particular commanded the attention of Prussian administrations after 1815: customs harmonization and federal security policy. These were the domains in which Prussia evolved what we could describe as a ‘German policy’ during the decades before the 1848 revolutions.

The ministers in Berlin were slow to embrace an expansionist customs policy. When the government of Hesse-Darmstadt approached Berlin in June 1825 with a view to negotiating a customs agreement, they were turned down on the grounds that the potential financial advantage was too slight. The danger that the Hessians might opt to join the newly founded Bavarian-Württemberg customs union instead seems to have carried no weight whatsoever with the Prussians. Only from around 1826 did the Berlin administration begin to think in broader strategic terms. This was partly a function of the state’s improving financial health, which did away with the need to prioritize financial over all other considerations. At around the same time, the foreign ministry began to insist that customs negotiations be seen as an arm of Prussian foreign policy. In 1827, when Hesse-Darmstadt appealed once again for a union with Berlin, it was welcomed with open arms.

The Austrians reacted with alarm to news of the new customs agreement. The Prussian-Hessian treaty, Metternich observed in a letter to

the Austrian ambassador in Berlin, ‘engenders the most anguished and certainly justified concern of all the German governments. Henceforth all of Prussia’s efforts will be focused on entangling the remaining states in its net…’
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The Austrian chancellor did what he could to dissuade further German courts from joining the Prussians; he also encouraged the growth of a competing customs association, the Central German Commercial Union, whose members included Saxony, Hanover, Electoral Hesse and Nassau and whose territory ran up between the two separate territorial blocks of the post-Napoleonic Prussian state. But these were temporary triumphs. Berlin proved adept at combining friendly appeals to enlightened self-interest with arm-twisting and naked blackmail. Small adjacent states that refused to enter the Prussian-Hessian union were subjected to hard-hitting counter-measures, including ‘road wars’, in which new transport routes were used to suck the flow of trade away from target territories. Finally, on 27 May 1829, an agreement signed with Bavaria and Württemberg allowed Prussia and its partners to encircle some of the smaller states of the Central German Union. The way was now open to the amalgamation of the two customs zones.

The German Customs Union (
Zollverein
) that came into effect on 1 January 1834 incorporated the majority of Germans outside Austria. Baden, Nassau and Frankfurt joined in the following year, to be followed in 1841 by Brunswick and Lüneburg. Nearly 90 per cent of the German population now lived in member states of the
Zollverein
.
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No one who looks at a map of the
Zollverein
states in 1841 can fail to be impressed by its close resemblance to the Prussian-dominated German state that emerged from the wars of 1864–71. Yet this outcome still lay far beyond the mental horizons of those who made policy in Berlin. They aimed above all to extend Prussian influence within a more cohesive association of German states. Customs harmonization became a new arena for the old competition between Prussia and Austria for influence and prestige among the German territories.

With hindsight, it seems clear that both sides overestimated the significance of Prussia’s success. The Customs Union never became an effective tool for the exercise of Prussian political influence over the lesser states. Indeed it may have had a small contrary effect, since it provided enlarged annual revenues to conservative territorial governments jealous of their autonomy.
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For the lesser states, membership of
the Customs Union was a matter of fiscal expediency; it did not – as the events of 1866 would show – translate into political loyalty to Berlin.
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It does not even appear to have laid the ground for Prussian economic primacy in Germany, as is widely asserted in the older literature on the economic prehistory of German unification.
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There is no evidence to suggest that the Customs Union decisively accelerated Prussian industrial investment, or did much to reverse the overwhelming preponderance of agriculture within the kingdom’s economy.
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The Zollverein’s contribution to the later emergence of a Prussian-dominated German Empire was thus less straightforward than has often been assumed.

Customs policy was important, but for different reasons: it was for a time the pre-eminent domain of Berlin’s ‘German policy’. It was here that ministers and officials learned to think in an authentically German compass and to combine the pursuit of specifically Prussian benefits with the building of consensus and the mediation of interests among the other German states. The long, painstaking work towards a German Customs Union reinforced Berlin’s moral authority; it demonstrated to liberal and progressive opinion in the lesser states that Prussia, for all its flaws, might stand for a more modern and rational order of things. Finance Minister Friedrich von Motz and Foreign Minister Christian Count von Bernstorff, the two statesmen most closely associated with Prussian customs policy in the 1820s and 1830s, understood this and they worked consistently to establish Prussia’s reputation as a progressive force in German affairs.
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