Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

With an individual personality structure such as this, the German was painfully uncomfortable in the totally different, and to him totally unfriendly, world of nineteenth-century individualism, liberalism, competitive atomism, democratic equality, and self-reliant dynamicism. And the German was doubly uncomfortable and embittered by 1860 to see the power, wealth, and national unity which these nineteenth-century traits had brought to Britain and France. The late arrival of these achievements, especially national unity and industrialism, in Germany left the average German with a feeling of inferiority in respect to England. Few Germans were willing to compete as individuals with British businessmen. Accordingly, the newly unified German government was expected to help German industrialists with tariffs, credit, price and production controls, cheaper labor costs, and such. As a consequence Germany never had a clearly competitive, liberal economy like the Western Powers.

The failure to achieve democracy was reflected in public law. The German Parliament was more of an advisory than a legislative body; the judiciary was not under popular control; and the executive (the chancellor and the Cabinet) were responsible to the emperor rather than to Parliament. Moreover, the constitution, because of a peculiar suffrage system, was weighted to give undue importance to Prussia (which was the stronghold of the army, the landlords, the bureaucracy, and the industrialists). Within Prussia the elections were weighted to give undue influence to these same groups. Above all, the army was subject to no democratic or even governmental control, but was dominated by the Prussian Officers’ Corps whose members were recruited by regimental election. This Officers’ Corps thus came to resemble a fraternity rather than an administrative or professional organization.

By 1890, when he retired from office, Bismarck had built up an unstable balance of forces within Germany similar to the unstable balance of powers which he had established in Europe as a whole. His cynical and materialistic view of human motivations had driven all idealistic and humanitarian forces from the German political scene and had remodeled the political parties almost completely into economic and social pressure groups which he played off, one against another. The chief of these forces were the landlords (Conservative Party), the industrialists (National Liberal Party), the Catholics (Center Party), and the workers (Social Democratic Party). In addition, the army and the bureaucracy were expected to be politically neutral, but they did not hesitate to exert pressures on the government without the intermediary of any political party. Thus there existed a precarious and dangerous balance of forces which only a genius could manipulate. Bismarck was followed by no genius. The Kaiser, William II (1888-1918), was an incapable neurotic, and the system of recruitment to government service was such as to exclude any but mediocrities. As a result, the precarious structure left by Bismarck was not managed but was merely hidden from public view by a facade of nationalistic, anti-foreign, anti-Semitic, imperialistic, and chauvinistic propaganda of which the emperor was the center.

The dichotomy in Germany between appearance and reality, between propaganda and structure, between economic prosperity and political and social weakness was put to the test in World War I, and failed completely. The events of 1914-1919 revealed that Germany was not a democracy in which all men were legally equal. Instead, the ruling groups formed some strange animal lording it over a host of lesser animals. In this strange creature the monarchy represented the body, which was supported by four legs: the army, the landlords, the bureaucracy, and the industrialists.

This glimpse of reality was not welcome to any important group in Germany, with the result that it was covered over, almost at once, by another misleading facade: the “revolution” of 1918 was not really a revolution at all, because it did not radically change this situation; it removed the monarchy, but it left the quartet of legs.

This Quartet was not the creation of a moment, rather it was the result of a long process of development whose last stages were reached only in the twentieth century. In these last stages the industrialists were adopted into the ruling clique by conscious acts of agreement. These acts culminated in the years 1898-1905 in a deal by which the Junkers accepted the industrialists’ navy-building program (which they detested) in return for the industrialists’ acceptance of the Junkers’ high tariff on grains. The Junkers were anti-navy because they, with their few numbers and close alliance with the army, were opposed to any venture into the fields of colonialism or overseas imperialism, and were determined not to jeopardize Germany’s continental position by alienating England. In fact, the policy of the Junkers was not only a continental one; on the Continent it was klein-deutsch. This expression meant that they were not eager to include the Germans of Austria within Germany because such an increment of Germans would dilute the power of the small group of Junkers inside Germany. Instead, the Junkers would have preferred to annex the non-German areas to the east in order to obtain additional land and a supply of cheap Slav agricultural labor. The Junkers wanted agricultural tariffs to raise the prices of their crops, especially rye and, later, sugar beets. The industrialists objected to tariffs on food because high food prices made necessary high wages, which they opposed. On the other hand, the industrialists wanted high industrial prices and a market for the products of heavy industry. The former they obtained by the creation of cartels after 1888; the latter they obtained by the naval-building program and armaments expansion after 1898. The Junkers agreed to these only in return for a tariff on food which eventually, through “import certificates,” became a subsidy for growing rye. This alliance, of which Bulow was the creator, was agreed on in May 1900, and consummated in December 1902. The tariff of 1902, which gave Germany one of the most protected agricultures in the world, was the price paid by industry for the Navy bill of 1900, and, symbolically enough, could be passed through the Reichstag only after the rules of procedure were violated to gag the opposition.

The Quartet was not Conservative but, potentially at least, revolutionary reactionaries. This is true at least of the landlords and industrialists, somewhat less true of the bureaucracy, and least true of the army. The landlords were revolutionary because they were driven to desperation by the persistent agricultural crisis which made it difficult for a high-cost area like eastern Germany to compete with a low-cost area like the Ukraine or high-productivity areas like Canada, Argentina, or the United States. Even in isolated Germany they had difficulty in keeping down the wages of German agricultural labor or in obtaining agricultural credit. The former problem rose from the need to compete with the industrial wages of West Germany. The credit problem rose because of the endemic lack of capital in Germany, the need to compete with industry for the available supply of capital, and the impossibility of raising capital by mortgages where estates were entailed. As a result of these influences, the landlords, overburdened with debts, in great jeopardy from any price decline, and importers of unorganized Slav laborers, dreamed of conquests of lands and labor in eastern Europe. The industrialists were in a similar plight, caught between the high wages of unionized German labor and the limited market for industrial products. To increase the supply of both labor and markets, they hoped for an active foreign policy which would bring into one unit a Pan-German bloc, if not a Mittel-europa. The bureaucracy, for ideological, especially nationalist, reasons, shared these dreams of conquest. Only the army hung back under the influence of the Junkers, who saw how easily they, as a limited political and social power, could be overwhelmed in a Mittel-europa or even a Pan-Germania. Accordingly, the Prussian Officers’ Corps had little interest in these Germanic dreams, and looked with favor on the conquest of Slav areas only if this could be accomplished without undue expansion of the army itself.