When the North German Confederation was joined by the South German states to form a 'united' Germany in 1871, it transferred to the new Empire its federal constitution as well as the leading role of the largest state, Prussia. At the federal level Germany had striking democratic features: the Reichstag or imperial diet was elected by universal manhood suffrage, and although appointment of the chancellor and his government rested solely with the emperor, German governments in this period increasingly found it convenient to dispose of a working parliamentary majority, since the Reichstag's consent was required for legislation. The individual states retained their own princes, governments, assemblies and real administrative control over their own affairs; the imperial government was responsible for defence and foreign relations.
The problem with regard to national minorities came from this strong position assured the states: some states, including Prussia, retained highly undemocratic constitutions, in Prussia's case a 'three-class suffrage' which ensured the dominance of the Junker landowners. And with Prussia came a substantial minority of Poles: 2.4 million in 1871, or 5 per cent of the total population, their numbers had risen to 3.5 million by 1910. One out of 10 subjects of the King of Prussia was a Catholic Pole.23 The Poles therefore had continuous representation in the federal Reichstag but were entirely unrepresented in the Prussian Landtag or diet.
Bismarck, until 1890 Prussian minister-president as well as imperial chancellor, shared the jaundiced views of most Protestant Germans against Catholics as potential 'enemies of the Reich' , whose allegiances to the new Germany were bound to be divided; Polish Catholics were doubly suspect. The German government's self-defeating Kulturkampf or 'war of civilisations' against Catholicism lasted throughout the 1870s, but was eventually abandoned when it became obvious that persecution had merely strengthened the Zentrum, the party representing the 36 per cent of Germans who were Catholic. The Poles, by contrast, came in for more concentrated fire in the 1880s. Bismarck's personal views on them were virulent: they were primitive, obscurantist, fundamentally untrustworthy and ready to revolt 'on twenty-four hours' notice'.24 On security grounds alone, Bismarck felt, it was imperative to control and if possible reduce the Polish presence in Prussia's eastern provinces and especially 'to rid the country of the trichinosis of the Polish nobility'.25
The Prussian government had already, in the 1870s, sought to strengthen the German character of the state by language ordinances which made German the official language, to be used in the school system, public administration and the courts, and in commercial transactions. It followed this up in 1883—5 with the forcible expulsion of 32,000 illegal Polish migrant workers from Russia and Austria, a third of whom were Polish Jews. In 1886 a Settlement Act was passed and a Royal Prussian Colonisation Commission set up, with the aim of buying out Polish landowners and resettling their estates with German colonists. This 'inner colonisation' campaign was a near-complete failure. Although 150,000 Germans were settled, most of the land had to be purchased from Germans, not Poles. The Poles, moreover, fought back, establishing their own Land Bank in 1889, buying extra land and organising cooperatives. Between 1896 and 1914 more land passed from German hands into Polish than the other way; this was despite the passing in 1908 of an Expropriation Act which provided for compulsory purchase. A higher Polish birth rate helped negate the Prussian government's attempts to reverse the balance, more than compensating for the 400,000 Poles who had migrated to the industrial Rhineland by 1914.26
Polish national consciousness in this period, as in Russia, was undoubtedly strengthened by Prussia's anti-Polish measures, not least because, again as in Russia, it became in the process socially more inclusive. A larger educated and middle class, the formation of peasant cooperatives, the cohesion of the Polish National Democratic Society in the Reichstag, and not least the constant need to mobilise Poles of all classes in self-defence, meant that Polish nationalism was a truly mass phenomenon by 1914. In some corners of Prussian Poland, such as the historically mixed region of Upper Silesia, so-called 'national indifference' persisted, but this was increasingly the exception.27
Conversely, what many Germans, from Bismarck down, clearly saw as an equally defensive struggle against a creeping tide of Slavdom was clearly a factor in the formation of a genuinely German, as opposed to Prussian, nationalism. 'United' Germany was an artificial amalgam of disparate elements, divided by loyalties to individual states, by religion, by class and by political beliefs. In addition to better known bonding agents such as imperialism, and the imperial navy launched in 1898, an animus against Poles in the Prussian east was by the 1890s an important focus for German chauvinists and a variety of nationalist pressure groups, reminding us of what Philipp Ther calls 'the imperial character of German history'.28 The Pan-German League, founded officially in 1891, represented a new type of radical or 'integral' nationalism. It stood by definition for dissatisfaction with the German Empire as incomplete and for its expansion to include all Germans, broadly defined as anyone of 'Germanic' stock and wherever they lived. Pan-Germans also enthusiastically supported 'inner colonisation' at the expense of what they saw as racially inferior Slavs. Even more focused on the Prussian east was the German Eastern Marches Society, founded in 1894 and known as the Hakatisten from the initials (HKT) of its three co-founders. The Hakatisten existed to maintain the pressure on what it saw as a backsliding government, insufficiently active in Germanising Prussian Poland; it was they who floated the idea of not simply buying out but positively expelling the Poles. Organisations like these did much to alienate Germany's Poles still further in the generation before 1914.
A final point should be made about the peculiar contribution that the German Empire made, by the very fact of its existence, to the breakdown of international order. Germany's Weltpolitik or 'world policy', aiming at the acquisition of a colonial empire backed up by a world-class navy, as well as an economic and political influence in Europe and the wider world commensurate with its industrial and military power, was pursued vigorously from the late 1890s. It was both a function of the new German nationalism and helped powerfully to reinforce it. At the same time it expressed an understandable interest on the part of German governments and industry in achieving that 'world power status' enjoyed by powers such as Britain and France. But by the early twentieth century Weltpolitik was beginning to boomerang. It helped consolidate the Triple Entente of France, Russia and Britain around Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary, while encouraging expectations in German nationalists which could ill be met. More importantly, because more dangerous than mere diplomatic encirclement, was the increasing focus of German imperialism closer to home, in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. German investment in these regions, often even at the expense of its Habsburg ally, and Germany's involvement in training the Ottoman army, sounded alarm bells in London, Paris and especially in St Petersburg. Each of the Entente powers, in 1914, was reacting to a perceived threat to its vital strategic interests, posed not by the ostensible instigator of the July crisis, Austria-Hungary, but by imperial Germany.
World History
