German unification question | AskHistorians Archive Observer

Modified from an earlier answer of mine

First off, although there are some orthographic similarities between Dutch and German, they are two different languages. To ask why the Dutch were not included in unification, one might as well ask why Swedes or the English were excluded as well. Language use was not a natural way to form nation-states in the nineteenth century. Contrast this linguistic map to these maps of Europe in 1871 and 1900. The borders of the various states do not align with the linguistic map. This was not an accident as formation of these national states was not a natural and inevitable process but the byproduct of a complex political evolution.

German unification was a case in point here. There were sizable numbers of German-speaking communities that resided outside the 1871 German Empire, see this map in both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires ( the linked map does not include the Baltic German community or the Volga Germans who were descendants of colonists brought over during the reign of Catherine the Great). Creating a contiguous German state out of such a broad community was a political impossibility. As the answer goes in depth below, incorporating Austria into the new German state would have destroyed the European balance of power, as would extending a unified German rule to the Baltic. By the same token, Luxembourg was not incorporated into the German Empire because of geopolitics. Even though the tiny state was part of the Germanic Confederation and the Zollverein, its independence was the result of diplomatic guarantees crafted in the London Conference of 1867 and the Duchy entered into a personal union with the Dutch crown. Bismarck found that violating this neutrality was more trouble than it was worth in the Franco-Prussian War as he wanted as limited a war as possible and keeping the UK out of the conflict was in his interest.

Nor did the formation of nations create homogeneous entities. Most of the polities that had emerged by 1900 possessed large and discreet ethnic and religious minorities. Part of this was the legacy of the ancien regime states like Piedmont-Savoy or Prussia that led national unification. As a general rule, most governments do not willingly cede territory without cause. In the case of Prussia, the sizable number of Catholic Poles in Silesia, Posen, and the various eastern marches may have been at odds to its leadership of a German state, but this was a region that had historically been one of Prussia's protoindustrial centers. There was an active attempt by both the state and non-state actors to Germanize Prussian Poland throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Polish-speaking minority may have been citizens of the Kaiserreich but the political structures of the Reich frequently were institutionally unable to accept this demographic reality. "Unmixing" Europe's various ethnicities was only accomplished by the events of the World Wars and were often accompanied by a great deal of violence and national trauma.

One anecdote about Bismarck was that when someone asked him about the possibility of Austria joining the newly minted German state, the Chancellor declared he would declare war on Austria to prevent such a union. Not only does this anecdote convey Bismarck's dark and sarcastic wit, it also underscores the complicated nature of German national unity. While Bismarck did certainly assert the unification of Germany was Prussia's destiny, what exactly constituted "Germany" was more plastic in Bismarck's formulations.

It is important to note that Bismarck did not invent German nationalism or debates on national unification, but rather was a player in a complex political process. Broadly speaking, the debate over unification in the first half of the nineteenth century ranged between two poles called Kleindeutschland (lesser Germany) and Großdeutschland (greater Germany) solutions. In general, the Kleindeutsch position stressed that Germany should unify as a political entity consisting of the core German states. These central European states were allegedly ethnically and linguistically homogeneous (on the ground, the various German states were far more diverse, but nationalist activists often overlooked this). The partisans of Großdeutschland argued for a larger expansion of Germany into regions where there were large German minorities like Bohemia. The political conditions in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century tended to favor the Kleindeutsch solution. Incorporating Austria into a future German state would have meant adulterating this new German polity because in addition to Austrian Germans, the Austrian Empire contained many Slavs and other non-Germans. One of the big sticking points of the Paulskirche debates about German unification in 1848 was whether the Austria empire could be incorporated into a new German union given the size of its non-German population in places like Bohemia. The only real practical solution to this impasse would have been a real or de facto dissolution of the Austrian empire, which the Habsburg emperor would not permit. Therefore Großdeutschland or pan-German activists in the nineteenth century often saw the old imperial house as a barrier to their aspirations to unite the whole German cultural sphere.

Bismarck favored the Kleindeutsch parties not only for practical reasons- it was the more manageable position and the one with the greatest political support- but also because it aligned within his own biases. As a staunch Lutheran, Bismarck was leery of incorporating too many Catholics into a Prussian-dominated polity. One of Bismarck's schemes during the Crimean War was a proposal that Austria and Prussia divide up Central Europe along the Main River leaving Prussia with the mostly Protestant northern half of the German Confederation. While this proposal went nowhere, it does speak to Bismarck's initial reluctance to include sizable numbers of Catholic Germans under Prussian control. Even though Luther was very distant history in the nineteenth century, the Protestant German cultural milieu had a strong streak of anti-Catholic prejudices and many Protestant ideologues associated Catholicism with retrograde thinking and ultramontainism. Bismarck's public rhetoric both before and after unification played up on these Protestant stereotypes of Catholics' backwardness and Protestant modernity. One of his more common phrases likened Catholic Austria to "a worm-eaten galleon" compared to the "trim Prussian frigate," which was an image that played on notions of the modernity of German Protestants and a Catholic power trapped in the past. While Bismarck did allow southern Germany to join in the German union, he was incredibly leery of Catholic politicians like Windthorst and the Zentrum, the Catholic party, was one of Bismarck's initial opponents in the Reichstag.

Although the process and experience unification lessened confessional differences over the long-term, these were not minor demographic challenges in the 1860s. The political system in Prussia was already rigged against Catholic political mobilization and the presence of Catholics in the post-1871 political order was a disruption to the political system. Incorporating the Austria, even if just Cisleithania or areas like the Sudetenland would introduce a confessional balance favoring Catholics that neither Bismarck nor many of his contemporaries would have been comfortable dealing with. Bismarck's experience with the Zentrum in the early decades of the Kaiserreich did show him that a Catholic minority was a difficult proposition, so incorporating more Catholics would have been a dead letter. By tacking to a Kleindeutschland position in the 1860s-70s, Bismarck became the champion of a type of German nationalism, even though the imperial structure he created privileged Prussia and the Hohenzollerns. For Bismarck, Prussian nationalism was the nationalism of Kaiserreich; he saw the two as complimentary, not as fundamentally oppositional.

Added to the domestic complexities of confession, pushing for an Austro-German union was also a bridge too far in terms of international Realpolitik. While Bismarck could corral the lesser German princes to accept the authority of the Hohenzollerns, he could not apply the same mixture of veiled threats and inducements to a great imperial house like the Habsburgs. Nor was simply deposing the Hohenzollerns a practical possibility either since that begged the question what to do about the rest of the Austrian empire. Leaving Hungary and the Balkans up to their own devices invited trouble with the Russian empire filling in the vacuum. The Wars of German unification had already disrupted the European balance of power. Removing Austria from this balance for a Großdeutschland would have been a leap into a very dangerous unknown.