In the eighteenth century there had been a dominant German elite, but even for the Germans there was now an adjacent homeland in the new German Empire to the north. In 1867 the Habsburg Empire had transformed itself into the ‘Dual Monarchy’ by granting the most powerful submerged nation, the Magyars, quasi-independence in the Kingdom of Hungary, which shared with the dominantly German ‘Austrians’ only a monarch (the Emperor Franz-Joseph, who had ruled since 1848), an army, a treasury, and a foreign office. The Magyars, like the Germans (and indeed the British, whom they greatly admired and whose parliament building they imitated in Budapest), considered themselves a master race, and they ruled oppressively over their own Slav minorities—Slovaks, Rumanians, and Croats. In the western half of the Monarchy the German ‘Austrians’ ruled not only Slavs to the north (Czechs), north-east (Poles and Ruthenes), and south (Slovenes and Serbs), but Italian-speaking lands on the southern slopes of the Alps coveted by the new Kingdom of Italy. Unlike the tough Magyar squireens of Budapest, the rational bureaucrats of Vienna tried to treat their subjectnationalities tolerantly and granted them equal rights with the Germans. The result was to paralyse the machinery of government in Vienna and force the Emperor to rule by decree. Its rich mixture of cultures certainly made Vienna a city with a uniquely vibrant intellectual and artistic life, but its intelligentsia looked to the future with apprehension and occasionally despair.
Finally there was Imperial Germany, the most complex and problematic power of them all. The unification of Germany in 1871 had created a nation that combined the most dynamic economy in Europe with a regime that in many respects had hardly emerged from feudalism. The Hohenzollern dynasty had ruled Prussia through a bureaucracy and an army that were both drawn from a ‘service gentry’ (Junkers) rooted primarily in their eastern provinces. They resented the very existence of a Reichstag (parliament) that had been unsuccessfully aspiring to power ever since the middle of the nineteenth century. In the newly united empire the Reichstag represented the whole range of the enlarged German population: agrarian conservatives with their vast estates in the east, industrialists in the north and west, Bavarian Roman Catholic farmers in the south, and, increasingly as the economy developed, the industrial working classes, with their socialist leaders, in the valleys of the Rhine and the Ruhr. The Reichstag voted the budget, but the government was appointed by, and was responsible to, the monarch, the Kaiser. The chief intermediary between Reichstag and Kaiser was the Chancellor. The first holder of that office, Otto von Bismarck, had used the authority he derived from the Kaiser to make the Reichstag do his own bidding. His successors were little more than messengers informing the Reichstag of the Kaiser’s decisions and manipulating them to ensure the passage of the budget. By the Kaiser himself they were seen almost as household servants, of considerably less importance than the Chief of the General Staff.
Under these circumstances the personality of the Kaiser was of overwhelming importance, and it was the misfortune not only of Germany but of the entire world that at this juncture the House of Hohenzollern should have produced, in Wilhelm II, an individual who in his person embodied three qualities that can be said to have characterized the contemporary German ruling elite: archaic militarism, vaulting ambition, and neurotic insecurity. Militarism was institutionalized in the dominant role that the army had played in the culture of the old Prussia it had dominated and had to a large extent created; much as its victories over Austria and France had created the new German Empire. In the new Germany the army was socially dominant, as it had been in the old Prussia—a dominance spread throughout all classes by three-year universal military service. The bourgeoisie won the cherished right to wear uniform by taking up commissions in the reserve, and imitated the habits of the Junker military elite. At a lower level, retired NCOs dominated their local communities. The Kaiser appeared always in uniform as the All Highest War Lord, surrounded by a military entourage. Abroad, this militarism, with its constant parades and uniforms and celebrations of the victories of 1870, was seen as absurd rather than sinister; and so it might have been if it had not been linked with the second quality—ambition.
Britain, France and Russia in Pre-WWI Years
