The two hundred and twenty years since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire have been the period during which Germany has tried, and repeatedly failed, to replace it with a satisfactory political successor. The successive attempts — the German Confederation, the North German Confederation, the German Empire of 1871, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the two post-war German states, and the unified Federal Republic — have varied in their territorial coverage (which Germans? Catholic and Protestant? Austrian and Prussian?), their constitutional form (federation? unitary state?), and their international position (defensive bloc? aggressor power?). The current Federal Republic, founded 1949 and unified across the former East-West division in 1990, is the most institutionally successful of these successors. It is also, of all of them, the one whose constitutional structure most resembles the empire it replaced: a federation of sixteen Länder with substantial residual sovereignty, a federal constitutional court that adjudicates territorial-federal disputes, a multi-confessional public space, an explicitly European constitutional orientation, and an emphatic refusal of the unitary-nationalist alternative that produced the catastrophes of 1914 and 1933.
The German Confederation
The German Confederation founded at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was an attempt to reconstitute a viable post-imperial German constitutional space. Its constitutional structure — a confederal Bundesversammlung at Frankfurt, presided over by the Austrian Habsburg representative, voting on inter-state legislation under unanimity for major matters and majority for minor — was deliberately weak. The Confederation had no army of its own (only contingents drawn from the member states), no central executive, no central judicial apparatus, no central tax system, and no foreign-policy capacity. Its principal substantive function was the suppression of liberal-nationalist political activity in the member states, conducted under the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 through coordinated press censorship and university surveillance. The Confederation lasted, with revisions, until its abolition in 1866 after the Austro-Prussian War.
The 1848 revolutions — the Frankfurt Parliament's attempt to draft a unified German constitution at the Paulskirche — were the major mid-century challenge to the Confederation framework. The parliament's draft constitution of 1849 offered the imperial crown of a unified German state (excluding the Habsburg multi-ethnic possessions) to the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who refused it on the grounds that he would not accept a crown "from the gutter". The 1848 project collapsed; the Confederation was restored substantially intact in 1851 (the Olmütz Punctation).
The German Empire of 1871
The unification of Germany under Prussian leadership in 1871 — the consequence of the three wars of unification (Schleswig-Holstein 1864, Austria 1866, France 1870–71) and of Otto von Bismarck's diplomatic engineering — produced the "Kleindeutsche" (small-German) solution: a German Empire excluding Austria, comprising the twenty-five constituent states of the North German Confederation plus the four southern states (Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt), under the Hohenzollern emperor (Wilhelm I of Prussia, proclaimed at Versailles on the 18th of January 1871). The constitution of 1871 was a federal one — the constituent states retained substantial residual sovereignty including, in the southern cases, separate posts, railways, and certain reserved tax bases — but the operational center of gravity was Prussian, and the imperial chancellor (Bismarck until 1890, then a succession of less capable successors) was the principal political figure rather than the federal Bundesrat or the popular Reichstag.
The 1871 Empire's constitutional weakness, in retrospect, was the absence of a working parliamentary-responsible-government convention: the chancellor was answerable to the emperor rather than to the Reichstag majority, and the constitutional position made constructive opposition difficult and constructive policy-coalition formation difficult also. The arrangement worked, after a fashion, under Bismarck's diplomatic skill; it failed catastrophically under Wilhelm II (1888–1918), whose personal direction of foreign policy through ill-judged diplomatic interventions (the Kruger telegram of 1896, the Daily Telegraph affair of 1908, the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911) progressively isolated Germany from its potential partners. The First World War of 1914–18 destroyed the imperial system; the Hohenzollerns abdicated on the 9th of November 1918. The Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the post-war German states are covered in Volume XVI of this library; they are not the subject of this chapter.
The Habsburg parallel
The Habsburg dynastic empire — Francis I of Austria's successor state from 1806 onward, reorganised as the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy after the Compromise of 1867 — survived as a parallel institution to the Hohenzollern German state for the entire 1806–1918 period. Vienna remained the capital of a multi-ethnic empire of roughly 50 million people at its 1914 peak (German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ruthenian, Romanian, Croatian, Slovene, Italian, Serbian, Bosnian Muslim), with elaborate constitutional arrangements for managing the linguistic and confessional diversity and with a substantial cosmopolitan-cultural achievement (Mahler, Klimt, Schoenberg, Freud, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler, Musil, Roth) that the post-1918 successor states inherited unevenly. The dissolution of the Habsburg empire at the end of the First World War — the Treaty of Saint-Germain of September 1919 — produced the modern successor states of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (now Czechia and Slovakia), and substantial territorial gains for Italy, Romania, Poland, and the new South Slav kingdom (Yugoslavia, Volume IV of this library).
The European answer
The European Union — founded in 1957 as the European Economic Community of six members (France, Germany, Italy, the Benelux states), expanded across nine successive enlargements to its current 27 members, with its constitutional foundation in the Treaty on European Union of 1992 — has been described, by post-war German constitutional thinkers from Helmut Kohl through Wolfgang Schäuble to Jürgen Habermas, as the institutional successor that the empire actually deserved. The argument is structural: the EU is a federation of formally sovereign states, with a directly elected parliament, a constitutional court (the Court of Justice of the European Union, at Luxembourg), a multi-lingual administrative apparatus, a single market with substantial mobility provisions, and an emphatic refusal of unitary state-formation in favour of federal-confederal balance. The institutional resemblance to the post-Westphalian empire is not coincidental; the German constitutional traditions that informed the EU's federal design were the same traditions that had informed the empire's federalism.
The EU is, in this sense, the answer to a question that was asked first in 1806 and that has been asked repeatedly in the two centuries since: what political form can a continental Europe of formally sovereign states take, that does not collapse into either a unitary hegemonic state (the Napoleonic, Wilhelmine, and National-Socialist temptations) or a Hobbesian disorder of mutually antagonistic small powers (the post-1648 reality at its worst). The empire's answer was an under-coercive federation that worked, for most of its history, by tradition, by inertia, by the small accumulating compromises of an imperial diet that mistrusted both its emperor and its members. The EU's answer, so far, has been similar: a federation that proceeds by accumulating treaty modifications, by judicial interpretation, by reluctant integration in moments of crisis, and by the conviction — held more firmly in the central-European member states than in the Atlantic or northern ones — that the alternative is worse than the inefficiency.
The empire's eight hundred years are over. The argument over what to do instead is not.
End of Chapter X · End of Volume XVII