Looking at a list of EU metropolitan areas by GDP, I see that 5 out of the top 10 cities are in Germany. This is despite the fact that Germany only makes up about 10% of the EU population and about 20% of EU GDP.
Cities such as London and Paris have a much larger economic footprint than any individual German city, but the UK and French economies are both very centered around the primary city, where as Germany seems to have been able to avoid this.
Living in the UK you constantly hear about the often conflictuous relationship between London and the rest of the country, which makes me interested as to how Germany has managed to build such a geographically well-balanced economy.
Is there an interesting historical process by which these differences have emerged? And to what degree has deliberate German economic policy played a role?
Even looking beyong Europe, I struggle to think of another comparible example of a country which has been able to develop in this way. Of course the United States also has many great cities, but I think when the large population difference is taken in to account, US regions tend to be centeralised around single cities in much the same way as most European countries.
England, as a modern entity, existed since the 17th century and as a union with Scotland since 1707. For hundreds of years, therefore, they've controlled in one way or another the flow of trade through the English Channel and the North Sea and, thus, London was the hub of trade.
"Randstad", really just the Netherlands four biggest cities/ports, was the center of trade before London. Before the Anglo-Dutch Wars and William of Orange ascending to the British throne in 1689, the Dutch were the leading naval power in the world. They were the 'rulers of the sea' before Britain was Britain, and they had the empire to show for it. So, naturally, that natural area where trade flowed (the English Channel/North Sea) went into their ports -- at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, all parts of 'Randstad' today.
Paris, is, well, Paris. It was the capital of the French state for hundreds of years. France has been unified and a centralized state ever since Louis XIV in the late 1600's, coalescing at a similar time as Great Britain, but was a center of culture and trade and economics ever since Charlemagne conquered half of Europe in the 800's.
You're seeing a persisting theme here: These cities, which have this enormous economic clout, were the major ports or cities of long lasting empires. Milan, again, was the hub of North Italian trade which itself was bustling in the Middle Ages. And even though it was constantly shuffled between Austrian, French, and Spanish control in the Early Modern period up to their independence and unification of Italy as a whole, they were fought over for a reason. Milan would become the economic trade center of Italy after its unification for this reason. Also partially because most of the rest of Italy, notably the South, were incredibly agrarian and relatively poor.
So now we get to Germany, the country with all these cities in the list. Germany, at its conception, was not a centralized state. To this day, it is not even a Unitarian state. That is, it isn't a state with the highest authority overall being the central government and all subdivisions being, well, lower. Germany, like the United States and Canada, is a Federation. Now in the United States this is because of a bunch of political philosophy mumbo jumbo but in Germany this has a real distinct reason. Because up until their unification in 1870, they were distinct, sovereign states that had existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years in some manner. There are two posts I have made prior that I would recommend for reading on this matter,
In short: Even after Prussia annxed or quasi-annexed all the Northern Germanic states, they still had a centuries spanning history as being their own independent centers of trade, commerce, and politics. We have Frankfurt. Frankfurt was itself an independent entity, being declared a 'free city' of the Holy Roman Empire and thus a center of trade and commerce. It was also in the resource rich Western Europe, where the most industrious regions on Earth were home to.
The Ruhr-Rhine is also a spectacularly special case. It was home to many of Medieval Europes richest duchies and cities, many part of the Hanseatic League which brought an insane amount of trade. In the 1800's it was discovered to be a gold mine (heh, puns) of coal and rapidly urbanized and industrialized. By WWII it was the heartland of all German industry for this reason, as it was basically the first place and the fastest place industrialization grew in all of the German free states in the 19th century.
Munich is the capital and home of German Bavaria, the largest state which joined in the German unification besides Prussia. Bavaria owes much of its wealth and success to Napoleon; it existed long before and was rather wealthy too as it was kind of sort of an elector for the Holy Roman Empire (the family who ruled their lands also ruled the Palatinate which was an elector) but it was Napoleon which over doubled their size and gave them much of that really wealthy West German industrial land I was talking about earlier. In fact they were so powerful (as you can read in my second post above!) that Prussia was considering subduing them with a significant portion of their military but ended up accepting them into the German state but as autonomous as they could possibly get (their own standing military, control over their own railroads in peacetime, etc.).
Hamburg was an incredibly wealthy port city located in the Northern Holy Roman Empire. It was also a leading member of the Hanseatic League, was a free imperial city, and was located in a crucial region of trade that led into the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. When Germany unified, Hamburg and Bremen would be its largest ports and thus would grow over its history as a major trade town accepting goods to feed one of the largest industrial nations on the planet.
And lastly, Berlin. The capital of Prussia, the state who unified all of Germany. Germany's Paris, if you would. Here's a brief introduction to how they came to be. but most of the relevant bits are from my posts above.
And that's it. So in short, the reason Germany has so many strong economic cities is because Germany was not a some centralized state that threw all its economic weight into its 'capital'. It was a conglomeration of literally hundreds of states and dozens of economic heavyweights all coming together in 1871 to form one super state. There's a reason Germany formed in 1871 and by the late 1880's it was the #2 industrial power in the world, these states were some of the richest pound for pound in the world and they all got together.
Some good source material on this:
Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 by Christopher Clark
The Origins of the Wars of German Unification by William Carr
The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806 by Jonathan Israel
The Origins of Modern Europe 1660-1789 by James White
The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany by David Blackbourn
The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 by David Blackbourn
