Book Review - Bismarck - By Jonathan Steinberg - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...rck-by-jonathan-steinberg.html
bismarck kissinger Germany European foreign policy
shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 11
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with a few brusque strokes, the novice minister solved the riddle that had stymied European diplomacy for two generations: how to unify Germany and reorganize 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.
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a highly complex person who incarnated the duality that later tempted Germany into efforts beyond its capacity
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Bismarck is often cited as the quintessential realist, relying on power at the expense of ideals. He was, in fact, far more complicated. Power, to be useful, must be understood in its components, including its limits. By the same token, ideals must be brought, at some point, into relationship with the circumstances the leader is seeking to affect. Ignoring that balance threatens policy with either veering toward belligerence from the advocates of power or toward crusades by the idealists.
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Bismarck dominated because he understood a wider range of factors relevant to international affairs — some normally identified with power, others generally classified as ideals — than any of his contemporaries.
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Like a physicist, Bismarck analyzed the principal elements of each situation and then used them in an overall design.
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Any serious policy requires a fixed point from which to alter the world. Bismarck’s Archimedean point was the belief in the uniqueness of Prussian institutions.
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Bismarck foreshadowed an age whose equilibrium was an ever-changing interaction of forces, themselves in constant flux,
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Like Disraeli, he believed that a broadly based suffrage would be nationalistic and could be mobilized for conservative causes.
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The result, however, sowed the seeds of Germany’s 20th-century tragedies. Dominated as it was by what Steinberg calls “the sovereignty of an extraordinary, gigantic self,” the new Germany lacked institutional balance.
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for the 28 years that he served as chancellor of Germany, Bismarck preserved what he had built by a restrained and wise diplomacy, which was the single most important element in maintaining the peace of Europe.
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When he acted as a revolutionary as minister-president of Prussia, Bismarck could control the timing of policy. In his years as chancellor of Germany and as protector of what existed, others posed the challenges. Bismarck had to await events. In a sense, he became the prisoner of his own design and of its domestic necessities (to which, for example, he had to sacrifice his reluctance to enter the colonial race).
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Bismarck’s successor, Caprivi, pointed out the essential weakness of the Bismarckian system by saying that while Bismarck had been able to keep five balls in the air simultaneously, he (Caprivi) had difficulty controlling two.
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The second caveat concerns the direct line Steinberg draws from Bismarck to Hitler. Bismarck was a rationalist, Hitler a romantic nihilist. Bismarck’s essence was his sense of limits and equilibrium; Hitler’s was the absence of measure and rejection of restraint. 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.