THE NS ESSAY Ein reich über alles: Hans Burgkmair the Elder’s woodcut of 1510 shows a double-headed eagle, symbol of the Holy Roman empire The new German empire European integration was designed to contain Berlin’s power – instead, it has increased it By Brendan Simms n a blistering speech to the Greek par- who died in January, right to say that Chan- liament on 15 July, the former finance cellor Angela Merkel is a calculating “Mer- minister Yanis Varoufakis referred to kiavelli”, whose ambition to “Germanise” the harsh “bailout” conditions impos- Europe has now been validated by events? ed by eurozone leaders, and especially The short answer to these questions is, IBerlin, as a “new Versailles”. This calculated “No.” Germany is not oppressing Greece, allusion to the punitive peace inflicted on or any other eurozone country. Nobody imperial Germany after the First World forced these previously sovereign states War, especially the “reparations” she was into the common currency, at the barrel of a forced to pay, was picked up by media com- gun or in any other way. It was a dance they mentators and politicians across the world. insisted on joining, in some cases rather like Berlin’s approach was widely condemned the ugly stepsisters, doing violence to their as “brutal”. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of economic body shape in order to fit into London, claims that “the man with the gun the shoes of the required convergence cri- is the German finance minister, Wolfgang teria. Besides, none of them wants to leave, Schäuble”, and that “it is the Germans who because they have no desire to resume the are now running the show”. Indeed, one failed national politics they were trying could be forgiven for wondering whether to escape through “Europe”. Polls suggest the “Fourth Reich” that the Irish histo- that, offered a clear choice between return rian, politician and journalist Conor Cruise to the drachma and reclaiming national sov- O’Brien warned about in 1989, shortly be- ereignty, or accepting German leadership of fore the Wall fell, had now come to pass. So the eurozone, most Greeks prefer the latter. has the euro crisis brought about peacefully The same is true, more or less, of the rest of something that the Kaiser and Hitler failed the common currency area. Clearly, there to achieve militarily, namely the German is only one thing worse than being domi- domination of Europe? Less hyperbolically, nated by Germany in the eurozone and that AKG-IMAGES was Ulrich Beck, the eminent sociologist is not being dominated by Germany in t 22 | NEW STATESMAN | 24-30 JULY 2015 24-30 JULY 2015 | NEW STATESMAN | 23 t the eurozone. Whatever else is going on form of power-sharing through impe- In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Ger- here, it is not the re-creation of the Second rial courts and the imperial assembly, the mans played by the rules but nobody else or Third Reich. Reichstag. France and Sweden were guar- did. After a long agony, the Holy Roman That said, the current crisis is very much antor powers from the Peace of Westphalia empire collapsed under the onslaught of a product of “the German problem” and, in 1648, with the right to intervene in Ger- revolutionary France and Napoleon. Later, indeed, of the German imperial legacy. In man affairs to keep the peace or to prevent the German Confederation, which failed order to understand why, we need to go foreign interference, and in the 18th cen- to deter French revanchism, was destroyed back to the origins of a question that has tury Russia was also formally awarded that by Bismarck in his drive to create a united driven the history of our continent for hun- privilege. The German Confederation of Germany in 1871. This turned the Ger- dreds of years and fundamentally shapes 1815, the successor to the empire, was con- mans from objects of the state system into its politics today. structed on very similar lines in order to en- subjects, with a powerful voice in Europe sure that Germany did not lapse into civil and the world. ermany, or the various polities in war and that it remained strong enough to As is well known, however, the estab- which most Germans lived, has repel invaders, but never became so strong lishment of a consolidated power centre been the fulcrum of the entire as to pose a threat to its neighbours. at the heart of the continent eventually European state system since at overturned the whole European and then least the 16th century. Its central Germans repeatedly the global balance of power. It required a Ggeographical location made it the cockpit of coalition of the world’s strongest powers Europe, a territory on which foreign armies refused to be objects of to crush both the Kaiser’s Germany and – Ottoman Turk, Spanish, French, British, Hitler’s Third Reich in the two world wars. Russian, French, Swedish, to name only the the state system After each contest, the German Ques- most prominent – contested for mastery of tion posed itself anew: how to order the the continent. Its sheer populousness, the The result was a German political cul- European centre in such a way that it was industriousness of its inhabitants and the ture preoccupied with precedence, legality, robust enough to master domestic and ex- prowess of its soldiers made Germany the rules and procedure to the point of paraly- ternal challenges without at the same time most valued prize in the state system. sis. Two of the American founding fathers, developing hegemonic tendencies. The For much of the past 500 years, the fear James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, Versailles settlement of 1919 spectacularly was not that Germany itself would disturb diagnosed this condition more than 200 failed to do so, primarily because it was re- the European balance of power but that an years ago. They looked at the “federal sys- sented as an attempt to turn Germans back outside force would use the Germans to do tem” of the “Germanic empire” and found into mere objects of the state system. so. This was because their political com- it to be “a nerveless body, incapable of regu- The solution arrived at after the Second monwealth, the “Holy Roman Empire of lating its own members, insecure against World War was far more successful. Ger- the German Nation”, was bitterly divided, external dangers, and agitated with unceas- many was partitioned territorially into a between the emperor and the leading princ- ing fermentations in its own bowels”. “Mil- communist east and a democratic west, es, and between Catholics and Protestants. itary preparations,” they noted, “must be and underwent a change of heart. It was This created a vacuum at the heart of Europe preceded by so many tedious discussions, widely accepted that what was needed, as which exported instability and attracted the arising from the jealousies, pride, separate the writer Thomas Mann argued, was not predatory attention of its neighbours, most views, and clashing pretensions, of sover- “a German Europe but a European Germa- catastrophically during the Thirty Years eign bodies, that before the diet can settle ny”. The project of European integration War (1618-48), but also during the Turkish the arrangements, the enemy are in the was thus intended to contain Germany by invasions of central Europe and the revolu- field . .” By contrast, the federalists praised rendering her structurally incapable of and tionary and Napoleonic wars. the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, by culturally indisposed towards military ag- For this reason, European statesmen which the two parties, formerly so divid- gression. It was also conceived as a way of tried to refashion Germany in a way that the ed, had come together to “resist all [their] mobilising Europe’s, and especially Ger- Germans were not always at each other’s enemies” by creating a common debt, many’s, huge military and economic po- throats, or at the feet of their neighbours. common parliamentary representation and tential for the western cause against the This required institutions that defused in- common foreign and security policy. This Soviet threat. The reintegration of Germa- ternal tensions, if necessary through out- served as the model for the United States. ny into the western comity of nations, in- side intervention, and mobilised the com- The Germans were well aware of their own cluding the generous forgiveness of many mon energies in defence of the empire’s weaknesses, and tried to overcome them of her debts in the 1953 London agreement, external borders. German politics was through an interminable but ultimately in- was conducted on this basis. therefore characterised by a sophisticated effectual “imperial reform debate”. Yet while pacifying Europe, and contain- ing Germany, required a constitutional ar- rangement and political culture similar to those of the old Holy Roman empire, keep- ing the Russians out demanded a mighty union comparable to that created by the British and the Americans. 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