Unification of Germany - Founding A Unified State

Founding A Unified State

The need for both iron and blood soon became apparent. By 1862, when Bismarck made his speech, the idea of a German nation-state in the peaceful spirit of Pan-Germanism had shifted from the liberal and democratic character of 1848 to accommodate Bismarck's Realpolitik. Ever the pragmatist, Bismarck understood the possibilities, obstacles, and advantages of a unified state, and the importance of linking that state to the Hohenzollern dynasty, and the latter remains, for some historians, one of Bismarck's primary contributions to the creation of the empire in 1871. The conditions of the treaties binding the various German states to one another prohibited him from unilateral action; the politician and the diplomat in him realized the impracticality of such an action. For the German states to go to war, or, as he suspected would happen, to be forced to declare war together against a single enemy, his diplomatic opponents must declare war on one of the German states first. Historians have long debated Bismarck's role in the events leading up to the Franco-Prussian War. While a traditional view, promulgated in large part by the 19th and early 20th centuries pro-Prussian historians, maintain that Bismarck was the sole mastermind behind this unification, post-1945 historians see more of an opportunism and cynicism in Bismarck's manipulating of the circumstances to create a war. Regardless, Bismarck was neither villain nor saint; in manipulating events of 1866 and 1870, he demonstrated the political and diplomatic skills which had caused Wilhelm to turn to him in 1862.

Three episodes proved fundamental to the administrative and political unification of Germany: the death without male heirs of Frederick VII of Denmark which led to the Second War of Schleswig (1864); the opportunity created by Italian unification in providing an ally against Austria in the Austro-Prussian War (1866); and French fears of Hohenzollern encirclement led it to declare war on Prussia, resulting in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). Through a combination of Bismarck's diplomacy and political leadership, von Roon's military reorganization, and von Moltke's military strategy, Prussia demonstrated that none of the European signatories of the 1815 peace treaty could uphold Austrian power in the central European sphere of influence and thus achieved hegemony in Germany, ending dualism.