In the summer of 1862, Otto von Bismarck was appointed minister-president of Prussia. His highest previous rank had been ambassador to Russia. He had never held an administrative position. Yet with a few brusque strokes, the novice minister solved the riddle that had stymied European diplomacy for two generations: how to unify Germany and reorganise Central Europe. He had to overcome the obstacle that Germany comprised 39 sovereign states grouped in the so-called German Confederation. All the while, Central European trends were warily observed by the two “flanking” powers, France and Russia, ever uneasy about – and tempted to prevent – the emergence of a state capable of altering the existing European balance of power.
Within nine years, Bismarck untied this knot in what Jonathan Steinberg, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, describes as “the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries”. He overcame the princes of the German states in two wars and rallied them in a third; won over public opinion by granting universal manhood suffrage — making Prussia one of the first states in Europe to do so; paralysed France by holding out the prospect of agreeing to the French acquisition of Luxembourg, and Russia by a benevolent attitude during the Polish revolution of 1863.
It is a measure of Steinberg’s achievement in Bismarck: A Life that the subsequent description of the “political genius of a very unusual kind” becomes far from a panegyric. He describes a highly complex person who incarnated the duality that later tempted Germany into efforts beyond its capacity.
Bismarck dominated because he understood a wider range of factors relevant to international affairs. He came into office in a world beset by the memory of the Napoleonic period. The new order that emerged was based on the belief that the goal of peace could be achieved only by nations with compatible domestic institutions. The Holy Alliance of Prussia, Austria and Russia was created to police the continuation of essentially legitimist conservative states. When Bismarck became Ministerpräsident, all these elements were in flux.
Until Bismarck appeared on the scene, it had generally been assumed that nationalism and liberalism represented opposite poles; he rejected that proposition. Prussia’s cohesion was sufficiently strong, he argued, that it could challenge the authority of monarchs abroad even while conducting a monarchist policy at home.
The result sowed the seeds of Germany’s 20th-century tragedies. Dominated by “the sovereignty of an extraordinary, gigantic self”, the new Germany lacked institutional balance. Still, for the 28 years that he served as chancellor of Germany, Bismarck preserved what he had built by a restrained and wise diplomacy.
But Bismarck: A Life shows as well the nemesis of success. The nightmare of hostile coalitions, designed to compel Germany to divide its forces between East and West, grew into one of the motivating forces of Bismarckian diplomacy. He sought to counter it by involving Germany in a dizzying series of partly overlapping, partly conflicting alliances with the aim of giving the other great powers – except the irreconcilable France – a greater interest to work with Germany than to coalesce against it.
It was not to be. Bismarck’s triumphs of the 1860s restricted the manoeuvring room for his intricate plan of an alliance with Austria; a Three Emperors’ League with Austria and Russia; and a so-called reinsurance treaty with Russia. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 produced a France determined on revenge and, hence, a potential ally of any other adversary of Germany. Bismarck was dismissed by a new emperor in 1890. It was the ultimate paradox that the man who had dominated Europe by exalting stability should conclude his career at the whim of a young, somewhat unstable, sovereign.
I must register two caveats. Steinberg’s hostility toward Bismarck’s personality sometimes causes him to overemphasise personal traits at the expense of his strategic concepts, which were usually quite brilliant. The second caveat concerns the direct line Steinberg draws from Bismarck to Hitler. Bismarck was a rationalist, Hitler a romantic nihilist. The idea of conquering Europe would never have come to Bismarck; it was always part of Hitler’s vision. Hitler could never have pronounced Bismarck’s famous dictum that statesmanship consisted of listening carefully to the footsteps of God through history and walking with him a few steps of the way. Hitler left a vacuum. Bismarck left a state strong enough to overcome two catastrophic defeats as well as a legacy of unassimilable greatness. Nevertheless, Bismarck: A Life is the best study of its subject in the English language.
The New York Times
BISMARCK: A LIFE
Jonathan Steinberg
Oxford University Press
Illustrated. 577 pp; $34.95
