Nationalism in Germany, 1848

Prussia, which had best been able to defend the ‘national development of Germany against Austria’, had joined forces with the Habsburg monarchy and with Russia, wrote the pro-Prussian liberal Droysen in October 1850, before the meeting at Olmütz on 29 November, at which Otto van Manteuffel was forced to back down by Schwarzenberg in a stand-off over Hesse-Kassel.³ Berlin had been in a position to decide ‘the European question’, preventing the return of the ‘unbearable aspects of the system of 1815’ which had led to ‘the disorder (Unheil) of 1848’, but it had failed to act, leaving reactionaries in Austria and elsewhere to dictate the course of events.⁴ ‘Instead of securing educated Western Europe against the assault of barbarity, in league with the national strengthening of Germany, they have allied themselves precisely with such barbarity in order to hinder the national movement of Germany,’ he went on: ‘As if it is not enough that they have again proclaimed the organised disunity of Germany, the old Bundestag, they have killed off every point of political crystallisation, they push towards the maddest despotism, they will soon also smother German science, and they will, where possible, kill off Protestantism.’⁵ The Prussian government had supported such reactionaries, concluded Droysen, in the belief that the principle on which Tsar Alexander had claimed to ground the European states’ system in 1815 still obtained; ‘that all governments have a common interest in moments of danger’.⁶ ‘Reaction’ in Germany and Europe, of which the government in Berlin had become part, was significant above all because ‘it has tried to work against a powerfully acting European crisis, to remove from Prussia, Germany and, where possible, Europe, those extensive changes of conditions and attitudes which have already established themselves, to dam the breaches in the dykes and to prevent inundation’.⁷ To this end, Prussian reactionaries believed, ‘in respect of Prussia’s foreign policy’, that they should ‘assuage Austria’s envy of Prussia at any price’ and abide by ‘Russia’s arrogant strictness’, so that ‘Prussia, in a sincere league with them, could maintain the declining world order and entrench it for a long time to come’.⁸ As a result, Manteuffel could no longer say, as he once had, that the whole people (Volk) was for him, but he could argue that ‘Austria and Russia, perhaps also Bavaria,’ were for him.⁹ In the opinion of liberals such as Droysen, the German states, including Prussia, had tied their own fortunes to those of an absolutist Austria and a despotic and barbaric Russia at the expense of German unity and unification.

Prussian – or ‘Borussian’ – historians interpreted Manteuffel’s signature of the Olmütz Punctation, by which settlement of the conflicts in Holstein and Hesse-Kassel were entrusted to the Confederation, as a humiliating turning-point, reversing most of the national aspirations and achievements of the German revolutions and assuring the predominance of the Habsburg monarchy and the Bund until the era of Bismarck after 1862.¹³ Many subsequent historians, even those emphasising the successes of Schwarzenberg and his predecessors or of Beust, Pfordten and the other leaders of the third Germany, have been influenced by such an interpretation.¹⁴ It appeared that the secret negotiations of courtiers had thwarted the national-minded projects of liberals, democrats, and moderate conservatives or, in the Borussian reading of events, that the national aims of Prussia had been quashed by Austria and the forces of the Restoration. The national significance of Olmütz, however, was not so clear-cut. The meeting itself, which was held in the Hotel Zur Krone during the evening of 29 November and the morning of the next day, went unnoticed in the press at the time, even in the pro-Austrian Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, according to Leopold von Gerlach.¹⁵ Manteuffel was accompanied only by his secretary, returning to Berlin inconspicuously on the 5 o’clock train on 30 November.¹⁶ Schwarzenberg, who had only decided to go to Olmütz on 26 November at the insistence of Franz Joseph, went with the Russian envoy in Vienna, Peter Freiherr von Meyendorff, but his visit attracted little comment on the part of well-informed insiders such as the Viennese Inspector-General of the Gendarmerie, Johann Freiherr Kempen von Fichtenstamm, even if the Minister-President was subsequently granted the freedom of Vienna and other Austrian cities in recognition of his mission to Moravia.¹⁷ Neither minister had an unambiguous set of instructions, with Schwarzenberg warned by his Emperor against his will to keep the peace and Manteuffel trying to reconcile his King’s last-minute decision to mobilise troops over Hesse-Kassel and his own desire for conciliation. The consequences of their decisions were ambiguous.

Prussia backed down and agreed to the replacement of its troops in Hesse-Kassel by Habsburg forces and to full demobilisation, compared to Austria’s agreement merely to partial disarmament. None of the leaders, including Schwarzenberg, wanted war in November 1850, with the stand-off coming at the end of a complicated series of military crises, interventions, retreats, ceasefires and peace treaties beginning in 1848.¹⁸ ‘War between Prussia and Austria would be like an ancient Japanese duel in which each of the participants ripped open his own bowels’, remarked Manteuffel.¹⁹ What was more, such leaders shared many other aims, not least the need to defeat ‘revolution’ at home and abroad. In these circumstances, Olmütz was unlikely to redefine the terms of the German question.²⁰ The Prussian version of events in the press, wrote Schwarzenberg, tried to conceal the nature of the agreements reached and compromises made. ‘We at least are more candid and tell the world: yes, we have made concessions in order to arrive at an understanding with an old ally and to maintain peace, and because we hope that Germany will be the gainer thereby.’²¹ For Austrian diplomats such as Anton von Prokesch, the Habsburg ambassador in Berlin, it was obvious by 1 December 1850 that Prussia had compromised – ‘what Prussia can and does view as concessions are for us just as many guarantees of a conservative course that she gives us’ – but it was not evident where these compromises would lead.²² As the Austrian ambassador in Paris, Alexander von Hübner, confided to Metternich, Prussia seemed to have committed itself to the Confederation, acting ‘as policeman in the duchies and in Hesse’ and marking ‘a break with the revolution’, but the question remained: ‘have we arranged it so that a necessary consequence of this convention must be a total and basic change of system in Berlin?’²³

Manteuffel denied that the change was necessary, maintaining that the choice ‘between an alliance with the Great Powers of Europe or with the revolution’ was ‘not in doubt’ in Prussia.²⁴ The acting Foreign Minister, who was confirmed in his post and as Minister-President on 4 December 1850, ‘now gained the reputation of a great diplomat’, wrote Leopold von Gerlach on 7 December: ‘the punctations of Olmütz are seen as one of the most successful and honourable negotiations for Prussia’.²⁵ The minister’s own reading of the meeting’s outcome was that Schwarzenberg had ‘conceded a great deal’: the joint handling of Holstein and Hesse, the occupation of Cassel by a Prussian and Austrian battalion, and the hasty convocation of a conference to decide matters, ‘not in Vienna, but in Dresden’.²⁶ To Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in his forthright response to the resignation letter of the Kultusminister Adalbert von Ladenberg, ‘Austria gives us, after 18 months, what we all, including the excellent Radowitz, have not ceased for a single moment since May 1849 to demand of Austria, in the name of Prussia and in its good right, in the name of the good rights of Germany (Teutschland), its princes, its people (Volk), its history, in the name of healthy human reason, of logic, of genuine German national feeling: “The reconstruction of Germany by the entirety of its states under the united auspices of its two Great Powers.’”’²⁷

Despite retrospective accounts of the ‘humiliation’ of Olmütz, many liberals and other members of the political ‘opposition’ in Prussia did not, at the time, disagree publicly with this positive reading of events. In an article in the Constitutionelle Zeitung on 12 December criticising the ‘system of 1815’, Droysen continued to champion the Hohenzollern state as a self-contained power, ‘not like certain others’ which needed ‘“the solidarity of conservative interests” in order to impose themselves on their own constituent parts (Glieder) with suicidal barbarity’.²⁸ Prussia, the liberal historian implied, had not given way to, and connived in, the re-establishment of domestic reaction and a repressive Austrian-led Confederation. Indeed, according to the liberal editor of the Constitutionelle Zeitung Ludwig Karl Aegidi, rather than Prussia having been defeated in Germany by Austria at Olmütz, the Habsburg monarchy had revealed itself, from the point of view of the ‘common man’, to be ‘foreign’ to German affairs.²⁹ Liberal deputies in the Prussian chambers were undecided about the significance of the meeting and the government’s policy towards Holstein and Hesse-Kassel. Duncker, together with Simson, Beseler and the conservative Vincke, wanted to give up their seats in protest against Manteuffel’s ‘reaction’, but Auerswald, Beckerath, Schwerin and Camphausen were strongly opposed to this course of action. For its part, ‘the mass of the party has no conviction or opinion in this regard at all,’ wrote Duncker on 8 January 1851: ‘that is, it never even thought about it on its own’.³⁰ On 10 January, Gagern, the former leader of the National Assembly, predicted a Prussian-led future for Germany, characterised by enduring political struggles and eventual constitutional reform, entailing ‘a gradual progression towards unity and freedom’.³¹

Unholy Alliances

Britain, in particular, had attempted to find a solution which was consonant with the requirements of the states’ system. In contrast to its position during the German revolutions, when it had remained formally neutral, the Foreign Office openly endorsed Prussia’s plan for a reorganisation of Germany’s institutions from July 1849 onwards, since the Erfurt Union promised to be less democratic, centralised and speculative than its revolutionary predecessor. ‘The Central Power at Frankfort, which was to have been the nucleus around which German unity was to have been formed seems to have crumbled to pieces,’ wrote Palmerston on 13 July 1849 in a despatch that was sent to all British embassies on the Continent:

The scheme of German unity which has led to no result at Frankfort has been taken up at Berlin and … has, provisionally at least, been worked into a practical measure … Such an extensive organization of Germany would no doubt be advantageous to the German people, with reference both to their internal interests and to their foreign relations, and it would consequently on that account be advantageous to Europe at large.³⁹

Nevertheless, the government quickly altered its position as the other Great Powers and the German states resisted Prussia’s initiatives. ‘It has long been clear to me that Prussia having to contend against the open hostility of Russia and Austria, the covert hostility of France and the jealousy of the principal German sovereigns … would not succeed’, wrote Russell to Prince Albert on 9 April 1850.⁴⁰ Unlike Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, both of whom were more supportive of Prussia and the duchies, Palmerston and Russell became increasingly critical of Berlin’s designs in Schleswig-Holstein, which appeared to have issued in the frank admission of Alexander von Schleinitz, the Prussian Foreign Minister, in August 1850 that the dismemberment of Denmark was being considered.⁴¹ Despite repeated royal attempts to reverse the proclivity of British policy, Palmerston put forward the London Protocol on 4 July 1850, according to which the Great Powers agreed to preserve the integrity of the Danish monarchy, in the face of vehement Prussian opposition. When Radowitz was sent to London to enquire about the possibility of an Anglo-Prussian alliance, partly to shore up the monarchy in its dispute with Austria over Schleswig-Holstein, he was refused. Britain had effectively reverted to its earlier policy of non-intervention in German affairs, ruling out the idea that Austria or the states of the third Germany, which according to the attaché in Berlin in 1861 had ‘for ten years … used the protectorate of Austria to secure impunity to their own execrable misgovernment and to emasculate the national spirit of Germany’, could proffer a workable alternative to a Prussian-led national union.⁴² ‘I confess I do not see my way as to the future organisation of Germany,’ Russell wrote to Prince Albert in April 1850: ‘If it is declared at Erfurt that Austria cannot by her constitution enter into the confederation, and at Vienna that she must enter with all her states, there appears no room for negotiation.’⁴³ British statesmen would not have intervened to block attempts to reorganise Germany after 1850, but they could not see how this could be done.

The Foreign Office had intervened in an attempt to foil Schwarzenberg’s aim of incorporating the entire Habsburg monarchy in the Bund, with the prospect of forming an anti-British customs union, by insisting on the terms of the Treaty of Vienna: ‘the Germanic Confederation is not a Union formed solely by the voluntary association of the states that compose it, and which therefore can be altered and modified at the absolute will of those States … The German Confederation … is the result and creation of a European Treaty concluded at Vienna in 1815, and it forms part of the general Settlement of Europe which that Treaty established and regulated.’⁴⁴ Neither Britain and the other Great Powers nor the German states belonging to the Erfurt Union had consented to Schwarzenberg’s scheme. Yet Britain’s insistence on the European character of the German settlement in 1850 was largely pragmatic. When the Austrian Minister-President re-formed the Bundesversammlung in September 1850 out of a conference attended by only ten German states, Cowley noted that the procedure was ‘strictly speaking illegal’, but the British government failed to act, partly because it favoured the reconstitution of the German Confederation faute de mieux.⁴⁵

After the instability of 1848, Palmerston desired a ‘closer union of the German states (perhaps with the exception of Austria, Württemberg and Bavaria) under the patronage of Prussia’ as ‘a solid barrier between the great states of the continent’, rather than an Austrian-led German ‘mass’, but his own growing opposition to Berlin’s policy towards Schleswig-Holstein, the principal national question in Germany, worked against such a desire.⁴⁶ In any event, as the Foreign Secretary recognised in November 1850, Britain lacked the means to intervene militarily, even if it had wanted to do so:

To send a land force to cooperate with the Prussians against Austria would be out of the question, and our naval cooperation would be of small assistance. If our alliance is sought for with reference to such a conflict we should probably say that we could not promise it without the consent of Parliament; that Parliament would not be likely to give its consent.⁴⁷

Even more importantly, Britain had little chance of gaining the consistent support of the other Great Powers for any European settlement of the German question, given the disparity of their aims and the virtual collapse of the states’ system in 1848, after Prussia, Austria and France had succumbed to revolution. As a liberal power unscathed by revolution and founded on the frightening and unstable basis of industrial growth on display at the Crystal Palace of the World Exhibition in 1851, Britain itself was a major cause of uncertainty in Europe, unwilling to fit into a reconstituted ‘Holy Alliance’ of conservative powers.⁴⁸ Despite adhering to a rhetoric of ‘balance’ and ‘legality’, the United Kingdom was unable and unwilling to oversee and enforce the old ‘system of 1815’ in Germany after 1849. Partly for this reason, public opinion and the press in the German lands rarely, if ever, saw Britain as a member of a reactionary alliance of oppressive Great Powers.⁴⁹

France, too, was not usually held to be part of a refashioned conservative international order. In the conservative press especially, the Napoleonic regime was seen as the successor of the revolution, ‘an exemplary warning’ which had ‘ended in moral bankruptcy after a series of increasingly humiliating revolutions and reactions’, remarked the moderate conservative Preussisches Wochenblatt in 1853.⁵⁰ Napoleon III was often viewed as a ‘parvenu’ or a ‘French Caesar’, but his ‘imperialist’ regime – an ‘Empire’ or ‘Kaiserreich’, not to be confused with the German tradition of ‘Kaisertum’ – appeared to be more deeply rooted, associated with modernity, the army and ‘French national life (Volksart)’, threatening to reduce Germany to the status of a vassal.⁵¹ In the Crimean and Italian wars of 1854–56 and 1859, the Napoleonic regime had exploited the national question in a revolutionary way in order to pursue its own interests, making it imperative to reform the Bund and establish a ‘dam against the supremacy’ of France.⁵² Even before these wars, the European states’ system seemed to have lost its ‘rallying point’, lamented the Wochenblatt, with a ‘solidarity of conservative interests’ no longer existing on an international stage.⁵³ To the reactionary Neue Preussische Zeitung, Napoleon III had deliberately sought to undermine the entire system, acting ‘not for the freedom and independence of Italy’ in 1859, but ‘to honour each state and each city in Italy with Napoleonic institutions and laws’, ‘to turn dualism in Germany into an open, long-running wound’ and ‘to suffocate the threat of an Anglo-German coalition’.⁵⁴

From differing religious and political points of view, liberal and Catholic publications agreed with such an analysis. Dictatorship appeared likely in France once Napoleon’s presidential mandate had expired, with the prospect that the crisis could spread from France to Germany, as in 1848, forewarned the Grenzboten in 1850.⁵⁵ Such a ‘military’ regime pursued its own interests opportunistically and ruthlessly, manufacturing an ‘Italian question’ in 1859 to suit its own ends.⁵⁶ Although it had fought against the outbreak of war, the Grenzboten had now given up its opposition, fearing a French plan ‘to isolate and weaken Austria in order in its next campaign, backed by Russia and unhindered by Austria, to throw itself on Prussia with all its might’: ‘it is more about the Rhine border for France than about Italy’.⁵⁷ All parts of Germany were anxious about a French attack, even though they had not joined Austria in the conflict against Italy and France: ‘The Bavarians are already picturing the possibility of a French occupation of the Palatinate, the Württemberger are already complaining about the hardships of war, the Hanoverians are reminding themselves that we do not possess a fleet to keep the French army of invasion from the coast.’⁵⁸ German weakness, it was widely assumed, would eventually be exploited by an unscrupulous, dictatorial or revolutionary French neighbour, as had occurred in the era of German humiliation at the hands of Napoleon I after 1806. For this reason, even in the peacetime of 1863, a Bavarian, Catholic periodical such as the Historisch-politische Blätter preferred Prussia to the spectre of another Confederation of the Rhine.⁵⁹ Nothing was more despicable, implied the same publication, than to admit that ‘Germany is disunited’, to ‘wash our hands in innocence’ and to ‘go over to France’, for the German lands would again become vassal states.⁶⁰ The implication throughout such analyses was that Europe existed in a phase of international disorder and self-interest akin to that of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Germany would not be protected from France by international law or the states’ system.

Napoleon III refused to accept the settlement of 1815, helping to prevent the reconstitution of the international order after 1848.⁶¹ France’s revolutionary heritage, its uneven support of nationalities, its desire to expand eastwards, and its inconsistency constituted a direct threat to the German lands at the same time as undermining the states’ system, as the Russian Foreign Minister made plain in 1863. ‘Prince Gortchakov affirms that the Imperial Government of France allied with the revolutionary forces in Europe is a constant source of anxiety and disturbance to the other Powers,’ Napier reported to Russell: ‘The bulwark against French ascendancy in the Monarchies of Austria, Prussia and the German Confederation is profoundly shaken and may at any moment be laid in ruins.’⁶² Gorchakov had already warned the French ambassador Montebello in 1860: ‘If you continue periodically to disturb that peace you will gradually end by inspiring everybody with a certain mistrust. In the end, your best friends will break away from you.’⁶³ Prior to the Crimean War, Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys, the French Foreign Minister, was driven to form an alliance in part to bring about the collapse of the system of Nicholas I, ‘the main object of which’, according to one British diplomat in 1854, had been ‘to keep France in check’.⁶⁴ During the Italian war, France was ready to weaken Austria, a Great Power, in the name of Italian nationalism and in pursuit of the annexation of Nice and Savoy. At the time of the Polish insurrection, pushed by the anti-Russian sentiment of public opinion, ‘The French hint Threats which we are not prepared to make and we appeal to the Treaty of Vienna which the French would wish to tear to Tatters’, asserted Palmerston in 1863.⁶⁵ Finally, after initial quiescence during the Prusso-Danish war over Schleswig-Holstein, Napoleon grew impatient, threatening – in the British Foreign Secretary’s view – to drag ‘us into a war, in which she would claim the Rhine, and possibly revolutionise the whole of Italy’.⁶⁶ Even to British policy-makers, who had been in favour of the Anglo-French alliance that had existed from the Crimean War to the insurrection in Poland, France constituted an unpredictable element, variously menacing Germany, defeating Austria, opposing Russia and hindering the reconstruction of the states’ system.

The system was propped up, it was widely believed, by a tsarist autocracy which had escaped revolution in 1848 and which had intervened to re-establish the power of the Habsburgs through the suppression of the Hungarian insurrection in 1849. Yet St Petersburg enjoyed a precarious relationship with the two other ‘conservative’ powers, Prussia and Austria, disagreeing with Berlin over Schleswig-Holstein and the German question, and with Vienna over the Balkans and the Near East. Schwarzenberg himself, at the height of counter-revolutionary cooperation between Russia and the Habsburg monarchy, was alleged to have warned of Austria’s future ‘ingratitude’ to its eastern neighbour.⁶⁷ As Vienna joined London and Paris in opposing Russia’s occupation of the Ottoman Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in defence of Christians’ rights on 3 July 1853, the Austrian Foreign Minister Karl Ferdinand von Buol-Schauenstein reiterated Schwarzenberg’s argument about the monarchy’s strategic interests: ‘My conduct with regard to the Eastern question is inscribed on the map.’⁶⁸ Austria’s ‘vital interests’, in the words of Franz Joseph, clashed with those of Russia.⁶⁹ Having broken definitively with St Petersburg in the summer of 1854, insisting on the unconditional evacuation of the Principalities and consorting with France and Britain, eventually mobilising troops on the Russian border although formally neutral, Vienna was never to reassume its position as a bulwark of the ‘Holy Alliance’. For this reason, Franz Joseph was anxious that ‘the present war should not end by a mere Treaty of Peace,’ wrote the British Prime Minister in 1855: ‘He thought Russia would long bear ill-will to Austria for the part she had taken, and he wished to be united in a Treaty with the Maritime Powers, with a view to a permanent political system.’⁷⁰ As Nicholas I told the Austrian ambassador coldly in July 1854, ‘the trust which had existed until now between the two sovereigns for the happiness of their empires being destroyed, the same intimate relations could never exist again’.⁷¹

This long-standing sense of betrayal seems to have pervaded the majority of Russia’s elites, whose ‘language not only of exasperation and hatred but even of menace’ could be heard in Europe’s spas: ‘Many of them give it to be understood in an indirect but significant manner that not long will elapse before Austria will be made to pay severely for what in the apparently official language of Russia is termed “her unparalleled treachery”.⁷² In 1860, as Austria searched desperately for allies after defeat in its war against France and Italy, the Russian Foreign Minister Gorchakov, a former ambassador in Vienna, remarked in private that he was not inclined to look for alliances ‘in rotting debris’.⁷³ Russia did not have to ally itself to ‘those in agony’, he went on elsewhere, which would be ‘too blind a policy’ and one which St Petersburg could avoid, ‘thank God’, since it did not have ‘cataracts’.⁷⁴ Although, in 1866, Alexander deplored ‘the extinction of the small German States, several of whose Princes were connected by ties of kindred with the Imperial family of Russia’, and he regretted ‘the total exclusion of Austria from Germany’, he did not consider supporting the Habsburg monarchy militarily – or by threat of force – against Prussia.⁷⁵ During the 1850s and 1860s, the rift between the two main conservative powers proved unbridgeable. By 13 August 1866, Gorchakov saw no alternative, after the failure of his initiatives first to avert war and then to mitigate the effects of Austria’s defeat, ‘but to restrict ourselves to a purely Russian policy’, since ‘we have not been listened to’.⁷⁶

Russia refused to intervene in the German question in the years between Olmütz and Königgrätz. It generally backed Denmark and opposed Prussia over Schleswig-Holstein, most notably between 1848 and 1850 and in 1863–64, but its interest ‘on behalf of Denmark’, although ‘sincere’ in the estimation of one British diplomat, was ‘secondary’.⁷⁷ ‘We have already done and will continue to do morally everything that can be done for the defence of Danish rights,’ wrote the Tsar in February 1864: ‘As for material intervention, that is not to be thought of.’⁷⁸ After the Crimean War, in which it had been opposed by the armies of Austria and offended by the neutrality of Prussia and the other German states, Russia repeatedly refrained from offering more than moral support in Germany, even to the Court in Berlin, to which it remained, as Alexander II assured Bismarck in his first audience as Prussian ambassador in St Petersburg in June 1859, personally and politically most attached.⁷⁹ Such sentiments of attachment ‘are for me an inalienable inheritance that I have received from my father and from my mother’, who was Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s sister, but they were distinct from the official relations of the two states, which could blow hot and cold.⁸⁰ After 1856, Russia faced ‘an almost absolute necessity of dealing with its own internal affairs and developing its moral and material forces’, wrote the former Russian Foreign Minister Nesselrode in his outgoing memorandum of February 1856, having resigned in November of the previous year.⁸¹ This necessity, together with the perceived duplicity of the German states, helped to ensure that ‘for us the German conflict is only of interest if it results in a general conflagration’, noted the Tsar in 1863.⁸²

At most, Russia aimed to unite the other powers in an ad hoc fashion against the revolutionary designs of Napoleon III, ‘a constant source of anxiety and disturbance’, and ‘to lay cautiously and quietly the basis of a common policy the objects of which should be to support the two great German Powers and give them courage to resist the elements of internal dissolution and the menace of foreign aggression’, reported the British ambassador in St Petersburg in December of the same year.⁸³ Over Schleswig-Holstein, Gorchakov ‘merely proposes that the four powers should mutually acknowledge their common interests in this matter and avow to each other the formation of a sort of moral coalition against revolutionary conspiracy, Ultra-Democracy, exaggerated nationalism and Military Bonapartist France’, he continued.⁸⁴ In fact, the Russian Foreign Minister had already confessed privately that the tsarist regime could count on no other power, not even in a moral sense rather than a legally or diplomatically binding one: ‘It is a sad age, the one in which we are destined to live and act! At the present time, there is not a single power of the first rank which can, by its intrinsic value or the invariable character of its convictions, serve as a source of support for a probate and honest government such as our own.’⁸⁵ Russia had neither the means nor the intention of resurrecting a Holy Alliance to preside over discussion of the German question.

The Crimean War demonstrated that the Holy Alliance had been hollowed out by the revolutions of 1848–49, despite Nicholas I’s apparent certainty as late as 1853 that ‘when I speak of Russia, I speak of Austria as well’.⁸⁶ As Karl Friedrich Kübeck von Kübau remarked of the plan of his mentor Metternich to keep to the tenets of the Vienna system of 1815, manoeuvring Russia out of the Principalities through the concerted actions of the other powers while refusing to become entangled in any conflict, supported by an alliance with Prussia and the German Bund, the pursuit of Austria’s traditional foreign policy was no longer feasible: ‘The Prince spoke wisdom – but it will not work!’⁸⁷ Even Buol, who worked hardest in 1854–56 to preserve some of the bases of the international order, seems to have believed that a new system was needed in the changed circumstances of post-revolutionary Europe. In 1813, argued the Foreign Minister in an emergency meeting of the Austrian Ministerrat on 22 March 1854, Austria had acted decisively at the right time ‘to give a definite direction and solid foundation to European politics, on which the general peace and political balance of power had rested in surety for 40 years’.⁸⁸ ‘That the building which was erected at the time threatened to collapse into rubble before our eyes was certainly not Austria’s fault’, he continued.⁸⁹ In occupying the Principalities, Russia had committed ‘a hostile act which contravened all the treaties’ concerning the Eastern question and comprising an essential part of the states’ system.⁹⁰

If the props of the Concert of Europe consisted of its ‘conservative spirit’, opposing revolution and imperialism on the Continent, and its common rules of Great Power behaviour, including abstention from territorial wars in Europe, avoidance of confrontations between the powers and the requirement of states’ consent over questions touching on their vital interests, they were shown by the Crimean War to be inadequate.⁹¹ Britain and France had threatened Austria with the incitement of revolution in Italy, if it failed to confront the tsarist regime, and Russia, the principal conservative power, had deliberately countenanced ‘the collapse of the Turkish Empire’, in Buol’s opinion.⁹² Little other than the internal preoccupations of destabilised states and the coincidental absence of significant flashpoints had maintained the integrity of the Concert of Europe between 1848 and 1854. In particular, the agreement of the powers over effective Austrian hegemony in Italy and Germany, the critical centre of the pentarchy and arguably the pivot of the states’ system, had been challenged by Prussia in the latter and France in the former, and had been virtually ignored by Britain, which had been sympathetic to Italian nationalism and Prussian-led German unification. Ironically, Vienna’s decision to side with the maritime powers against Russia in 1854, juggling a desire to maintain the Concert against Russian aggression and the need to defend Austrian interests in the Balkans, served to undermine its own hold, with support from St Petersburg, over the German core of the European system.

Unlike its Austrian counterpart, the Prussian government managed to uphold an uneasy neutrality during the ‘oriental crisis’. In part, such a stance was dictated by the indecisiveness of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who was caught between criticism of Russia, whose illegal occupation of Moldavia and Wallachia through an act of ‘arrogance and error’ had caused ‘the terrible mess’ in the first place, and support for St Petersburg, since the tsarist regime had come to symbolise conservatism and had occupied the Principalities in the purported defence of Christians’ rights against Islam and the Ottoman Empire.⁹³ ‘The War that is breaking out is an unjust one on both sides,’ declared the King early in 1854: ‘And I will not let Prussia be forced into an unjust war.’⁹⁴ The Tsar was less charitable: ‘My dear brother-in-law goes to bed a Russian every evening and gets up every morning an Englishman.’⁹⁵ In part, Berlin’s position was forced on Manteuffel’s administration by the eventual ascendancy of the camarilla, which wanted ‘nothing more sincerely than the good friendship of Prussia, Austria and Russia’.⁹⁶ Although the Gerlach brothers were not ‘Spree Cossacks’, as moderate conservatives claimed at the time, they were consistently opposed to the western powers, which they associated with revolution: ‘My opinion of the foreign policy of the era’, wrote Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach retrospectively, ‘was not to attack England and France, not to be enthusiastic about Russia, as were almost all conservatives of the age, but still to be decisively against the western alliance, of which liberalism in its entirety was in favour, and to be for friendship with Russia and a brokering neutrality, hand in hand with Austria.’⁹⁷ Yet, despite championing the Holy Alliance, the camarilla began to falter once ‘the disclosure of the immoral, egotistical and Bonapartist … Austrian policy’ of rapprochement with the maritime powers was made in Berlin in October 1854.⁹⁸

The press and public opinion, in Prussia as in the rest of Germany, rarely seem to have assumed that the states’ system, either in the form of a conservative Holy Alliance or a looser Concert of Europe, was sufficiently coherent and powerful to inhibit German unification. Even in the autumn of 1850, as Austria and Russia imposed the London Protocol on Schleswig-Holstein in the face of Prussian opposition and liberal uproar throughout Germany, the National-Zeitung still ridiculed the idea that ‘the Great Powers have spoken’: ‘We can answer that diplomats have only found the courage to interfere because of our impotence and inactivity. Everywhere, they only impose their laws on the weak, whilst they always rush, faced with the strong, to recognise faits accomplis.’¹⁰¹ The ‘old system of a European balance of power’ had lost much of its relevance, commented the Preussisches Wochenblatt in 1852: the Holy Alliance was ‘very nice in theory’, but in reality it had ‘mostly turned into its very unholy opposite’.¹⁰² It is true that there were references to the interference of reactionary powers such as Russia. Thus, when Austria resurrected the Bundestag, openly backed by Alexander II, the National-Zeitung mockingly lamented the fact that ‘the most important decision in the German constitutional question’ had slipped out of ‘the hands of the German National Assembly into those of the Tsar of Russia’.¹⁰³ It is also true that significant sections of the press and public genuinely feared foreign enemies on political and, in the case of Russia, racial grounds.¹⁰⁴ In both the French and Russian ‘characters’ lay a powerful ‘drive towards territorial expansion’ which might lead to the destruction of Prussia in the same manner as Poland, Sweden and Turkey, warned the Wochenblatt.¹⁰⁵ However, foes were usually identified singly and inconsistently.

During the Crimean War, claimed the Kölnische Zeitung, ‘both conflicting parties in Germany look towards “Russia’s dominance”, one hopefully and faithfully, the other fearfully but sceptically’.¹⁰⁶ Liberal publications were usually critical of St Petersburg and reactionary ones approving, though with qualifications.¹⁰⁷ Their attitudes to France and Britain tended to be reversed. Catholic, South German and Austrian newspapers and periodicals tended to follow the movement of the Habsburg monarchy away from the tsarist regime and towards the western powers. The Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung accordingly interpreted the oriental crisis in early 1854 as a struggle against the Ottoman Empire, the ‘hereditary and imperial enemy’ of the West (Abendland), with Russia defending a ‘national and religious idea’ held by ‘all peoples and princes of Christendom’.¹⁰⁸ In contrast, by the end of 1854, the same newspaper could be found discussing a ‘racial conflict’ between ‘Slavs’ and ‘Germans’: ‘Austria not only has a neighbour to fear but also the national character of this Great Power. Between the compact masses of the North and South Slavs, German elements have pushed their way between, in the Austrian duchies on the Danube down to the mouth of the March.’¹⁰⁹ Despite referring to long-lasting stereotypes, Germans’ views of their ‘enemies’ were diverse and unstable. Few contemporaries placed such enemies in a durable international system. Indeed, wrote the Historisch-politische Blätter, Europe had undergone a revolution in the relations between states between 1854 and 1856.¹¹⁰ In these uncertain conditions, the best defence seemed to be greater German unity vis-à-vis the outside world, contended the Catholic periodical, against the charge that it was ‘ultramontane’ and ‘un-German’.¹¹¹ A similar pattern could be observed during the wars of 1859 and 1864, both of which overturned previous inter-state allegiances and assumed affinities, planting further doubts in many contemporaries’ minds about the validity and relevance of a European ‘states’ system’. Rather than perceiving a domestic and international ‘reaction’ which had re-established political fault lines through and beyond the German lands, in the manner of the Metternichian order of 1815, most commentators in the 1850s appear to have viewed foreign affairs in a national way, distinguishing between ‘Germany’, however defined, and a changing array of external allies and enemies.

Austrians and the Vielvölkerreich

The main point of contact between ‘Germany’ and the states’ system appeared to be Austria, which had dominated the German lands until 1848 and which had played a vital part in the Concert of Europe. Thus, a 36-year-old Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen, Prussia’s new envoy to the reconvened Bundestag in Frankfurt, made one of his first tasks a visit to Metternich, who was staying on the family estates at Johannisberg on the Rhine in 1851, after returning from exile in Britain. The two men got on well, discussing the previous half-century of European history and meeting again in Vienna a year later. Twelve days after Bismarck’s first visit, the Austrian elder statesman – ‘the hero of the day’ – was unexpectedly called on by Friedrich Wilhelm IV, on his way down the Rhine from Coblenz to Mainz.¹¹² As in Metternich’s time, much of the Habsburg monarchy’s status and leverage as a Great Power continued to derive from its position as the principal German power and its ability to mobilise other states via the Bund. It was therefore imperative that the governments and, to a varying extent, the presses, parties and publics of the German states accepted that Austria was ‘German’. After 1848–49, such acceptance was by no means straightforward. Moreover, German Austrians themselves seemed during the revolution to have put their loyalty to the monarchy above their cultural affiliations with Germany. The continuing existence of this ‘Austrian question’, at least in southern Germany and in certain political milieux, largely dictated the terms of the debate about German territory and borders.

Austrian leaders certainly wanted to preserve the Habsburg monarchy’s role in Germany after 1848–49. Schwarzenberg was not ready to allow Austria to be forced out of the German sphere: his goal was ‘an externally solid and powerful, internally strong and free, organically integrated and, yes, united Germany,’ he wrote to Schmerling on 4 February 1849:

Confident of the view that there exists no contradiction between the interwoven, if also sometimes apparently diverging, interests of the German and non-German parts of the monarchy, on the one hand, and of these and the rest of Germany, on the other, the government in no way underestimates the difficulty of an inner unification (Vereinigung), but it also has no doubt, if the work is done impartially and without other motives, of the successful resolution of the great task.¹¹⁴

As early as December 1848, the Austrian Minister-President had mooted the possibility of the whole of the Habsburg monarchy entering an historically ‘German’ Confederation, despite the likely objections of the non-German nationalities. He adhered to this position throughout 1849 and 1850, in opposition to Radowitz’s Union plan, first floated in the spring of 1849 and opposed by Schwarzenberg in a fit of rage as a contravention of the 1815 settlement, and in the wake of the stand-off with Berlin over Kurhessen and Schleswig-Holstein in the autumn of 1850.¹¹⁵ After the Prussian government had refused to give up the Union and to discuss a reform of a reconstituted Bund in July 1850, Schwarzenberg again put forward the idea of Germany as a Bund of 70 millions in his ‘six-point programme’ of the same month, which outlined the entry of the Austrian Gesamtstaat and the institution of a common Zollunion.¹¹⁶ When this initiative was also rejected, he went ahead and reconvened the Bundestag independently of Berlin in August, but nevertheless continued to articulate his ‘desire for an agreement with Prussia, without which a definitive and reasonable constitution (Konstituierung) of Germany is not to be achieved’.¹¹⁷

Prussia, of course, was obliged to acknowledge the Confederation at Olmütz in November 1850, agreeing to discuss a reform of the Bund at the Dresden Conferences of January 1851, yet Austria’s ‘German’ rhetoric remained unchanged by the reversal of the two states’ positions of power, as the joint invitation to the other states on behalf of Vienna and Berlin made plain: a revision of the constitution of the Bund was required because ‘otherwise the German lands would be reduced to complete insignificance in the context of the European family of nations’.¹¹⁸ The implication was that Austria was a ‘German’ power, with an inalienable right to remain in Germany. Thus, as the Frankfurt Parliament had begun to discuss offering Friedrich Wilhelm IV the title ‘Kaiser of the Germans’ in January 1849, Schwarzenberg, who believed that the Prussian King might be obliged to accept, had insisted that the Austrian Emperor was ‘the first German prince’: ‘This is a right, made sacred by tradition and the passing of centuries, by the political power of Austria and by the wording of the treaties on which the still-undissolved ties of the Bund are founded.’¹¹⁹ In this sense, Prussia’s acceptance of the Bund seemed to imply recognition of Austria’s continued presence in Germany.

Defeat, however, did not prompt a revision of the administration’s German policy. Although Prussia and the other German states had refused to back Austria in 1859, Rechberg’s answer was to court them more determinedly, not to give in to those calls in Vienna to reduce Prussia, perhaps through an alliance with France, to a second- or third-ranking power: ‘Quite aside from the standpoint of legality, it would be accompanied by the most disastrous consequences,’ wrote the new Foreign Minister: ‘Germany would be weakened and Austria would stand alone against a preponderant France.’¹²⁴ Rechberg’s aim was to ‘act calmly but firmly in the defence of our legitimate rights, and collect the other German governments around us’ so that ‘Prussia will perceive the impossibility of achieving her plans and this will facilitate the victory of the calmer and more sensible party in Berlin’.¹²⁵ Germany could be persuaded to rally around Austria, the principal German power. Rechberg asked of Prussia ‘only that for her part she respect our dignity and the position we have in Germany as a Great Power and as the heir of a glorious past’.¹²⁶ His policy towards Schleswig-Holstein in 1863–64 was likewise marked by a willingness to conciliate Berlin and to maintain Austria’s position in Germany, a position which – he held in 1866 – he would not have lost through a disastrous war with the other German Great Power.¹²⁷ Such claims were consistent with his pedigree, as the son of a Bavarian Foreign Minister, and his reputation as a German specialist, with Metternich asserting as early as 1855, when he became Austrian envoy in Frankfurt, that ‘Rechberg knows German conditions; in that regard he stands almost alone there.’¹²⁸ Both Buol and Rechberg followed a broadly Metternichian policy in support of Austria’s continuing role in Germany, its maintenance of the Confederation and its linkage of the German question and the European states’ system.

Critics, however, claimed that Vienna usually placed its European interests above its German responsibilities and that it proved incapable of adapting to public demands for a German nation-state in and after 1848. To Anton von Schmerling, one of the most well-known representatives of German–Austrian liberals and the Austrian Staatsminister (Prime Minister) from December 1860 to 1865, the Habsburg monarchy had failed to take the initiative in Germany: ‘Alone from the highly insignificant Graf Buol, who led the affairs of state from the death of Minister Schwarzenberg to 1859, and just as little from Graf Rechberg, no decisive act at all was to be expected.’¹²⁹ The appointment of Schmerling, the former head of the Central Power in Frankfurt and champion of constitutional reform in Austria, had appeared to signal a change in Vienna’s German policy, leading to Austrian-led attempts to reform the Bund from within through the deliberations of the Bundesversammlung in 1862 and from without at the Frankfurt Fürstentag in August 1863. Through the machinery of the Bund, Rechberg and Ludwig von Biegeleben, the Hessian-born head of the German section of the Austrian Foreign Ministry, adopted the plan of Reinhard von Dalwigk zu Lichtenfels, the Minister-President of Hesse-Darmstadt, advocating the establishment of a confederal court, a tripartite executive and an assembly of delegates of the state assemblies.¹³⁰ At the Fürstentag, Franz Joseph proposed a 5-person executive, a federal Bundesrat of 17, a federal court, an assembly of 302 delegates of state parliaments, and an assembly of princes and heads of state, all of which were held, in an Austrian memorandum enclosed with the invitation to the conference of princes on 31 July, to constitute ‘a new shaping of the political constitution’ of ‘the German nation (Nation) in its entirety’.¹³¹ The former initiative was defeated by 9 votes to 8 in the Engerer Rat of the Bundesversammlung in January 1863; the latter foundered on Wilhelm I’s refusal to attend the meeting of the princes, with the heads of the individual states subsequently insisting in a signed declaration that their support for the Austrian project was valid only ‘until the members of the Bund not represented [that is, Prussia] either definitively reject the disclosed plan or have shown us their counter-proposals’.¹³²

Berlin, of course, scuppered the plan, putting forward its own scheme, which included a Prussian and Austrian veto over the declaration of wars other than those in defence of confederal territory, full Prussian parity with Austria in the leadership of the Bund, and the institution of a directly elected national parliament. Yet even before the defeating of Austrian proposals, there were justified doubts about Vienna’s commitment and freedom of manoeuvre. In the discussions with Franz Joseph prior to the Fürstentag, Rechberg had been sceptical, in Schmerling’s view:

the honourable gentleman shook his head and said that nothing would come of the affair, that Prussia would never allow itself to be present and to accept such a reform because, as everyone knew, the Prussian government had other plans altogether. But quite apart from this, the idea that an agenda for the reform of the German Bund could even be formulated and that he would be in a position to represent it was anything but agreeable to him.¹³³

For his part, Franz Joseph insisted on taking Rechberg to Frankfurt with him rather than Schmerling, despite the objection of Hungarian ministers that such a step would ‘inflict very significant damage’ and ‘that the impact of Graf Rechberg in this matter would amount to nought’, resulting in a ‘fiasco’.¹³⁴ The dominant view in government, court and army circles in Vienna was that constitutional reform in Germany posed difficulties, thought by many to be insurmountable, for the political and administrative structure of the Habsburg monarchy.

Many Austrian statesmen and officials could not see how a multinational Habsburg state could be integrated into a German polity.¹³⁵ Their objections usually focused on attempts to create a confederal or German assembly. For conservatives, especially during the period of neo-absolutism between 1849 and 1861 when Austria lacked a parliament, the very notion of an assembly was problematic. Even in 1863, two years after the February Patent had re-established a parliamentary Reichsrat with legislative and budgetary powers, Franz Joseph was still averse to the term ‘popular representation’ to describe the German assembly of delegates discussed at the Fürstentag. Correspondingly, the chamber was to be purely consultative, was subject to the veto of an assembly of princes, and was only to meet every three years. In his initial meeting with Schmerling, the Emperor barely attempted to conceal the distasteful fact that, according to the briefing which he had received about Austria’s espousal of ‘a reform of the German Acts of Confederation’, not only a powerful executive had to be created, ‘but also of course a representative assembly (Vertretung) must be contemplated’.¹³⁶

Schmerling himself was much more enthusiastic about representative government, believing that its return in the Habsburg monarchy in 1861 had ended the ‘mistrust of Austria which had been harboured in the whole of Germany, the view that it was only to be seen as a bulwark of absolutism’.¹³⁷ He went on to produce a plan, in conjunction with Biegeleben and the federalist publicist and his close acquaintance Julius Fröbel, which included a shared executive and an assembly of Landtag delegates, since ‘the integrity of the individual states must be preserved, so that a directly elected parliament was not called into being, but as much as possible was allowed to come from the individual representative bodies, whereby the necessary linkage with German popular representative assemblies was made and the possibility was created that laws agreed in this Reich representative assembly would also be introduced without resistance in the individual states.’¹³⁸ The Staatsminister’s hope by the time of the Fürstentag was that state and Reich governments and assemblies would agree over important pieces of legislation and policy. In his first meeting with Franz Joseph, however, Schmerling had conceded that such convergence and cooperation was far from guaranteed, particularly on the part of the multi-national Austrian assembly, by which ‘German’ laws were to be sanctioned or rejected:

Whenever a law comes into being it must be referred to the Austrian Reichsrat for constitutional consideration, and it is to be considered there whether a law agreed in Germany may also be introduced in Austria … Admittedly, there exists the difficulty, which does not exist in other German states, that not only deputies from the so-called German federal lands, but also those from other Austrian territories such as Galicia, Dalmatia, and Venice take up their seats in the Austrian Reichsrat. It is simply to be hoped that laws accepted in Germany will also be accepted here.¹³⁹

Few, if any, other Austrian ministers and officials were so confident that the non-German nationalities of the monarchy would cooperate within such a constitutional framework. As early as December 1848, in response to Schmerling’s demand that Austria should agree to a constitution suited to Germany in the first instance and then add special clauses to make it acceptable to the Habsburg monarchy, Schwarzenberg had warned that such a modus operandi threatened further to undermine the trust of Austria’s other nationalities: Croatia wanted to become Austrian not German, he cautioned.¹⁴⁰ Since the Minister-President was opposed to the idea of a grossdeutsch constitution, sending its proponents from the Frankfurt Parliament back home in the spring of 1849 without even meeting them, it soon became apparent that his conception of the Bund, which required the so-called ‘Gesamteintritt’ of Austria, was not national at all, but rather, as he put it to the ministerial conference of 8 October 1849, a ‘Mitteleuropäischer Staatenbund’ of three blocs – the Habsburg monarchy, Prussia, and the middling and smaller German states within a narrower Bund – united by an indissoluble agreement in international law and by a common customs’ union.¹⁴¹ In response, the Bavarian Minister-President Pfordten devised an alternative scheme, which was accepted by Vienna in January 1850 except for the exclusion of Lombardy and Venice. Once again, Schwarzenberg’s ‘Central European’ concept took precedence over his German loyalties:

The German land of Austria, which supports Germany but which does not want for this reason to give up its whole body (Gesamtkörper), acquired in the course of centuries, steps forth as one of the major factors in the international Bund which is to be formed and fulfils in this way one of the natural and justified desires which have been voiced since 1848; namely, the corresponding position of power of a great Central European body. The incorporation of the Italian provinces of Austria in the common customs’ area can only be an advantage for Germany.¹⁴²

Buol likewise spelled out, after a flurry of press reports about a planned Austrian reform of the Bund in 1855, that he had no intention of introducing ‘the parliamentary principle’ or any other measures ‘in the sense of liberal doctrines’.¹⁴⁵ His successor Rechberg wanted, with Prussia, ‘to nip German democracy in the bud’ and to keep the Confederation in its old form: Austrians could not risk ‘dismantling the existing edifice without assuring ourselves of the construction of another comfortable one’.¹⁴⁶ Even the restored Austrian Reichsrat, much less a German parliament, he remarked in 1861, would be divided along national lines, making Austrian policy in Germany impossible:

The majority of the Reichsrat would by no means belong to the German race. Should the imperial government find itself in the situation of having to defend its German policy in order to fulfil its confederal obligations to the German Bund, then the Hungarians, the south Slavs, the Poles, and the Italians would unite in the dictum that they would reject any policy that required sacrifices of money and blood for Germany. As a result of such a vote the imperial government would be unable to assert its rights and its position in Germany.¹⁴⁷

Austria’s defence of its rights appeared to conflict with the interests of a German nation-state. For a short period, Schwarzenberg had seemed to avoid the dilemma of his successors, hinting that a Central European Confederation could at once retain a German core and make use of an extended periphery, enhancing the power of the whole. By such reasoning, Germany benefited from the inclusion of non-German nationalities within its borders and from the coexistence of Great Powers within a powerful Staatenbund. On 9 March 1849, Schwarzenberg had written to Schmerling privately that Frankfurt had to ‘give up the nonsense that the weakening of Austria was the strengthening of Germany’.¹⁵⁰ If the German lands were to be divided up ‘organically’ in accordance with its ‘tribes’, ‘Austria has advantages to offer such a Germany: in holding open Reich citizenship, in terms of settlement, in respect of tariffs, in conjunction with the Mediterranean and the Black Sea etc. – advantages which will bring about close ties and true unity in a shorter time and for the greater use of Germany than can be achieved in any other way.’¹⁵¹ The incorporation of the whole of the Habsburg monarchy in the Bund remained Schwarzenberg’s aim at the Dresden Conferences in January 1851, after he had forced Prussia to back down militarily in November of the previous year. Yet the Austrian Minister-President failed to achieve Austria’s Gesamteintritt, even though Prussia and Russia had stated in 1850 that they would not oppose it.¹⁵²

From accounts of both Olmütz – at which even Manteuffel’s own private secretary thought the Austrian aristocrat ‘a splendid man, noble through and through,’ whom he would have preferred as Prussia’s own minister – and of Dresden, where the Austrian Minister-President occupied the first floor of the royal palace with silverware and champagne glasses while his Prussian counterpart was allotted the floor above with water glasses, Schwarzenberg dominated proceedings and arguably had the means to enforce his will. That he chose not to was the result of many overlapping considerations: the wish of Franz Joseph to avoid war and court Berlin; Russia’s divided loyalties; fear of public reaction in Germany, especially if Russia were to become involved; the need to gain the support of the western powers in the Near East; scepticism of the steadfastness of Austria’s allies in the third Germany; and uncertainty about Austria’s military superiority over Prussia. Above all, however, the Minister-President seems not to have valued the monarchy’s Gesamteintritt in the Bund highly enough to risk war after Olmütz or to offer Prussia full parity in Dresden. His instructions to Vienna’s representatives at the Dresden Conference were conservative: Austria should portray itself as a defender of legality and should back the old Bund, reassuring the German states and European Great Powers, which ‘may well consider what a guarantee of the peace the German Confederation offers them under its present constitution, and what a danger a militarised state, such as would be established by Prussia, would bring for them’.¹⁵³ The restoration of the Confederation, contemplated here before the conferences had begun, militated against incorporation and the establishment of a ‘Bund of 70 millions’ – a phrase which was avoided by Schwarzenberg and other diplomats, despite its use in the Austrian press. When challenged by Prussia, Vienna proved less interested in setting up a new type of government and territorial settlement for Germany than in shoring up Austria’s position as a Great Power, cultivating its relations with other European powers, and ensuring the continuity and legality of existing German institutions.

The idea of a Central European economic bloc, which surfaced during the Schwarzenberg and Schmerling eras, seemed – like the Mitteleuropäischer Staatenbund – to contradict such conservatism, yet it found few supporters in government and was quickly jettisoned. Between 1849 and 1851, Karl Ludwig von Bruck, the Minister of Trade and founder of the Austrian Lloyd, presented the case for a gradual reduction of tariffs to merge the three trading areas of Germany – Austria, the Zollverein and the North German coastal states – in order, ‘regardless of all obstacles and prejudices, the scale of which we do not hide from ourselves, to fulfil all the needs of the peoples (Völker) and to ground a truly fixed and rewarding order of things with the new political construction of Germany and Austria.’¹⁵⁴ Schwarzenberg initially sponsored Bruck’s proposals only to drop them at Dresden in favour of the overriding foreign-policy goal of restoring the Bund. In his letters to Metternich, Prokesch and Buol during 1850, he tellingly never mentioned a German customs’ union or, indeed, other Mitteleuropa schemes or a Bund of 70 millions.¹⁵⁵ The Minister-President’s instructions to Buol in Dresden suggest that he wanted to put any Zolleinigung to immediate political use as a means of securing the agreement of Prussia more generally. The levels of the tariffs could be decided later.¹⁵⁶ Like Schwarzenberg, Buol appears to have had little interest in the complicated negotiation of a customs’ union, seeing it increasingly as an obstacle to better relations with Berlin. The trade and customs agreement that he signed with Prussia in February 1853 failed to secure the Habsburg monarchy’s eventual entry into the Zollverein, merely noting that negotiations should begin again in 1860.

When talks actually recommenced in 1862, the commission into tariffs advised ministers only to revive the pursuit of a Gesamteintritt into the Zollverein if Prussia did not conclude its free-trade agreement with France. Since Rechberg asserted to the council of ministers on 23 April 1862 that ‘a unification of tariffs (Zolleinigung) with the entire Zollverein is obviously not to be achieved’, the main question was whether Austria could set up an alternative Central European customs’ union to rival that of Prussia, composed of South German states and the Habsburg monarchy, or whether it would be saddled with ‘the political disadvantages connected to isolation’.¹⁵⁷ As in 1849–51, Austria had considerable leverage, with many members of the Zollverein resistant to the removal of tariffs on French goods and with some willing to profit from Bismarck’s lack of popularity in Germany: ‘If we succeed in moving a greater number of these states, and namely those on which the maintenance of the continuity of its customs’ area depends such as Hanover, Braunschweig, Hesse etc., not to accept the Prussian treaty with France, then there is a hope of pushing Prussia towards compromise.’¹⁵⁸ Yet Austrian ministers remained cautious and disorganised. As late as 11 April 1862, Rechberg belatedly asked what policy to pursue: it was necessary to know ‘what the intentions of the imperial government were, which direction he should go in and whether he should attempt to effect the entry of Austria into the Zollverein or not’.¹⁵⁹ Repeatedly, the Foreign, Trade and Finance Ministries complained of a lack of coordination.¹⁶⁰ On 22 July 1863, Biegeleben lamented that Austria had still not managed to settle on a tariff level and was therefore unable to persuade individual states to leave the Zollverein.¹⁶¹ Even at the start of negotiations with other German states, Rechberg had acknowledged the possibility ‘that only Bavaria and Württemberg [would] join Austria’, although he noted the tariff commission’s advice that this would be better than nothing.¹⁶² Throughout, ministers’ expectations were limited. They seemed to be jockeying for position in Germany, usually against Prussia, rather than attempting to construct a new order or system of government there. In 1865, Vienna signed a treaty with the Zollverein which simply left open the question of a general unification of tariffs. Albrecht von Bernstorff reported to the council of ministers that it was ‘the most advantageous that could be arrived at under the prevailing conditions’.¹⁶³ The Austrian government’s plans for a Central European or a new German customs’ union had been largely defensive, designed to cajole or threaten Prussia into moderating its own aims. It is doubtful whether they corresponded in any meaningful way to an alternative Austrian vision of a new German order.

Austrian leaders saw Germany as a sphere of Great Power politics and as one of the sources of the Habsburg monarchy’s Great Power status. Despite paying lip service on occasion to the reform or replacement of the Bund’s political institutions, Vienna preferred to deal directly with Berlin in order to achieve its ends. Even at the height of the conflict between the two powers in 1850, Schwarzenberg was certain that ‘our desire for agreement with Prussia … remains the same’.¹⁶⁴ In August, the Minister-President’s ‘six-point programme’ had called for an executive and Bundesversammlung composed exclusively of Prussian and Austrian representatives. From Dresden, the Minister-President wrote to Franz Joseph on 1 January 1851 that any reform of the organs of the Confederation would require Prussian cooperation: ‘That agreement with Prussia is above all necessary to this end is unmistakable. It is necessary not only because of the indispensable sanction of Prussia, but also because only when we bring in our suggestions together with the Berlin cabinet, and indeed in a decisive fashion, will all the claims, objections and doubts be removed which are to be expected in this matter from the side of almost all our allies in the Bund.’¹⁶⁵ When the small states refused Austrian proposals in Dresden in March, Schwarzenberg blamed Prussia, but he nevertheless went on to sign a defensive alliance with Berlin in April. Buol’s priorities were similar. During the Crimean War, Vienna had to gain the explicit consent of Prussia to the Austrian occupation of the Principalities and, the Foreign Minister assumed, ‘the help of the Bund is assured us’.¹⁶⁶ Buol’s rivals at the ministerial council, most notably Hess, were still more emphatic: ‘the absolute necessity of eventual Prussian help’ had to be ‘completely certain’ before Austria acted.¹⁶⁷ During the war against France and Italy in 1859, the same considerations prevented Austria trying to enlist the support of the Confederation until it was too late, notwithstanding the fact that – in Bruck’s words of 28 May – ‘Austria wins more and more friends in Germany’: Rechberg explained on 28 June 1859 that Austria had not turned ‘to the German Bund simply in order to avoid a misunderstanding with Prussia’.¹⁶⁸

Buol’s replacement believed throughout his period of office that ‘a truly German and conservative policy is only possible through the unity and under the leadership of Austria and Prussia’.¹⁶⁹ The unity of the two powers was the ‘natural course of German affairs’.¹⁷⁰ There were, he assured other ministers at the time of Berlin’s offer of a defensive alliance in April 1861, ‘some elements in Berlin in the highest sphere friendly to Austria, alongside inimical ones’.¹⁷¹ ‘If we act calmly but firmly in the defence of our legitimate rights and collect the other German governments around us,’ he advised the Bavarian Foreign Minister in January 1862 during the struggle with Berlin over the Zollverein and reform of the Bund, ‘Prussia will perceive the impossibility of achieving her plans and this will facilitate the victory of the calmer and more sensible party in Berlin.’¹⁷² Although Rechberg’s long-standing opponent, Bismarck, proved to be ‘hair-raising’, not calm and sensible, the Foreign Minister nonetheless preferred to deal with him directly in the war against Denmark in 1864 rather than attempting to work with the Confederation or rally the German states.¹⁷³ Prussia and Austria, acting as Great Powers, needed to take Schleswig as security against the future actions not only of Denmark, but also those of the Confederation, whose resolutions on the succession in the duchies contravened international law and the London Protocols agreed by the powers in 1852: ‘It is very pressing that Austria and Prussia take steps towards this security because otherwise the Bund could make an incompetent decision and the collision with England could be made unavoidable.’¹⁷⁴ It was much more important ‘not to disturb the political waters’ of the states’ system, remarked Rechberg in February 1864, ‘than to disturb unjustified expectations here and there in Germany’.¹⁷⁵ Although Prussia was Austria’s main rival in Germany, it alone could be expected to act sensibly and effectively.

Habsburg ministers’ dogged pursuit of Prussia was the consequence of scepticism about the third Germany, making it difficult for them to imagine a new German order, even if they had wanted to. In general, the medium-sized German states were viewed in Vienna as a means of tipping the balance of the Confederation in Austria’s favour. Thus, most of Schwarzenberg’s plans for reforming the Bund relied on the pro-Austrian sympathies of the monarchies of Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover and Württemberg: in December 1848, the Minister-President had outlined the reorganisation of Germany into six military ‘duchies’, with the ‘quasi-mediatisation of all the non-monarchical state bodies of Germany’, including the pro-Prussian Grand Duchy of Baden; in May 1849, he put forward the idea of a ‘trias’, or tripartite executive, with Bavaria – although unmentioned – intended for the decisive third seat in the executive; in October 1849, he envisaged that the directory of his Mitteleuropäischer Staatenbund would likewise be composed of the representatives of the Habsburg monarchy, Prussia and the rest of Germany, with Austria acting as chair; in January 1850, he accepted a seven-person directory – the six monarchies and both Hessian states – together with a tripartite Volkshaus of 100 Austrian, 100 Prussian and 100 other German deputies; finally, in January 1851 at Dresden, he first suggested a nine-person executive which was then expanded to eleven with Austria and Prussia having two representatives each, and then, after these suggestions had been stymied, he proposed a trias again. After a decade of inactivity, in which Vienna followed but did not actively support the reform initiatives of Bavaria, Saxony and other states, Franz Joseph, Rechberg and Schmerling took up the idea of a five-person executive – Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, and two places in rotation – together with the ‘Engerer Rat’ of the Bundesversammlung as a federal organ and an assembly of 302 delegates of the states’ parliaments at the Frankfurt Fürstentag in August 1863.

All these plans were designed to give Austria and its allies a majority over Prussia. They were not founded on an attachment to the Bund in itself, which Schwarzenberg had branded an ‘old, thoroughly shaky, and very wobbly boutique, ready to collapse at the next blow from inside or outside’.¹⁷⁶ Buol blamed the Confederation for failing to mobilise during the Crimean and Italian Wars in 1854–56 and 1859, and Rechberg castigated it for flirting with popular nationalism in the war against Denmark in 1864. In response to the claim of Bruck, who was serving as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, that Austria and the German states should unite in 1854 to make them more independent of both Russia and the maritime powers, Buol declared that ‘A great union with Germany in order to decide the issue vis-à-vis both East and West is a beautiful but empty dream. Prussia feels nothing but hatred and envy toward us and the small states can only at best be compelled to do what they feel like doing. To rely on such allies would simply be too naïve.’¹⁷⁷ On returning from Vienna in November 1854, Pfordten described Buol’s mistrust of Prussia, which had ‘until now obstructed Austria step by step’, and his ‘indifference towards the rest of Germany, which he calls many-headed’.¹⁷⁸ In a similar vein, Rechberg, who had served as an envoy to the Bund between 1855 and 1859, thought that it would be ‘very healthy’ in February 1864 to give ‘a good lesson to the middle states’.¹⁷⁹ He had departed for Frankfurt in the 1850s, reported Kempen, ‘with a heavy heart’: ‘he holds the entire German soil to be undermined by democracy’.¹⁸⁰ Any attempt to force the individual states to act against their particular interests, especially Prussia, was likely revive their defeatist, treasonous ‘Rheinbund tendencies’.¹⁸¹ Such comments were redolent of Schwarzenberg’s repeated lament that the German states, whose ‘life cannot be extended by artificial means over the long term’, had proved unable to resist revolution in 1848 and to function independently after that date.¹⁸² As far as Austrian policy-makers were concerned, the structure of the Bund was prone to deadlock and inactivity – a fact that Prussia was able to exploit – and the states of the third Germany were inclined to squabble and contradict each other. Neither circumstance encouraged already sceptical and distant Habsburg ministers to see the third Germany as an amenable basis for a reorganisation along national lines.

In many respects, Anton Prokesch von Osten was not typical of the diplomatic caste. Labelled ‘half Turk’ by Bruck, he had been appointed a professor in maths at the Kadettenschule in Olmütz at the age of 21 and had gone on to become an acclaimed orientalist during his time in the Austrian navy (1824–30) and as a diplomat in Greece and the Ottoman Empire (1834–49, 1855–71).¹⁸⁸ In the words of Schwarzenberg, Prokesch was ‘an unusual person: soldier, academic, seafarer, diplomat. Each of these many-sided ways of life have left behind a rich treasure of experiences, and an inexhaustible pile of living pictures for his fantasy.’¹⁸⁹ ‘A long, interesting stay in the Levant during the remarkable epoch of the Hellenic wars and the Turkish reforms, many sea expeditions and diplomatic missions, personal acquaintanceship with the most influential men, especially with Mehmet Ali and Ibrahim Pasha, have given him a deep, fundamental and complete knowledge of the Orient and its conditions, which even Prince M. thought fit to value,’ Schwarzenberg continued: ‘Rarely in one person are such a wonderful poetic spirit, such a rich treasure of knowledge, such a clear reason, such an outstanding talent for description, and such a sharp-sighted logic combined.’¹⁹⁰ Notwithstanding its uncharacteristic trajectory, Prokesch’s life showed how Austrian diplomats, even those born in ‘old’, German-speaking Austria, were tied to the empire and its southern and eastern spheres of interest. Born in 1795 in Graz into a minor aristocratic family on his maternal side, Prokesch lost his mother at the age of nine, and his father, a distant figure, at sixteen. His life from the earliest years was overseen by a series of official sponsors, from his teacher Julius Franz Schneller at the Lyzeum in Graz, via Karl von Schwarzenberg, whom he had served as an ordnance officer in 1815 and whom he had cared for in illness and death in 1820, and Sigmund Heinrich von Kavanagh, his supporter in the Hofkriegsrat in the 1820s, to Metternich himself, into whose ‘most intimate circles he was drawn’ in the 1830s, as one contemporary put it, and by whom he was sent to Italy in 1831–32 and then to the Near East.¹⁹¹ Prokesch’s invitation from Metternich to the marriage of Melanie, his daughter, was considered more prestigious and important for the young diplomat’s career than his ennoblement in 1830. Although far from Vienna for most of the 1830s and 1840s, Prokesch was closely linked by correspondence and trips home, during which he visited Metternich and the Ballhausplatz.

In spite of being ‘the most intimate friend’ of Alexander von Humboldt and an admirer of Goethe, whom he met in 1820, the diplomat viewed Berlin between 1849 and 1852 as ‘the most disagreeable posting in the world’ and the Bundestag in Frankfurt as ‘juridical pedantry and narrow calculations of interest’.¹⁹² A shared culture seemed to have fostered few shared sympathies. Germany appeared to be little more than a fiction, as could be seen at Frankfurt: ‘What will I be in a position to make out of this fundamentally flawed institution? Prussia full of envy and jealousy, represented by a ruthless, petty man [Bismarck]. Each of the states insisting on their equal rights, separate interests … and single line. Jurists not politicians. In none a German heart, each only a Bavarian, a Württemberger etc., with the jealousy of the states amongst themselves … Seventeen views on each question to take into account, with these dependent on each … Court.’¹⁹³ Set against such fragmentation and division was Prokesch’s straightforward sense of loyalty to and identification with the Habsburg monarchy, despite its obvious political shortcomings. ‘I bore the false and unworthy position into which I was brought by the absurd system of the modern period only out of love for the Kaiser as the cornerstone of the monarchy,’ he wrote retrospectively in 1872: ‘What I had to bear was not nearly as much as was imposed on him, and I thought: as long as I believe that I can be useful to the state, it is my duty not to ask how often and to ask about the sacrifices involved, but to persevere.’¹⁹⁴ Like his colleagues, Prokesch identified with ‘Austria’: as soon as he thought that Austria seemed incompatible with the reorganisation of ‘Germany’, or that Germany was incapable of reorganisation, he had little difficulty leaving the latter to its own devices.¹⁹⁵

Habsburg officials were generally wary of plans to refashion the German order and discouraged or prevented Austrians from taking part in many of the discussions to this end. Thus, when Schmerling received an invitation from the liberal Grand Duke Ernst of Saxe-Coburg in 1862 to discuss reform, Franz Joseph refused to give him permission to visit the ruler. In fact, the Staatsminister went on to meet the Grand Duke privately in Vienna, expressing his opinion ‘that it is certainly desirable to undertake a reform of the German Bundesverfassung and that I could not imagine it other than that a moderate representation came into being in the Bund and that it is inescapably necessary to cater for a stronger executive than the previous Bundestag possessed.’¹⁹⁶ Schmerling’s conviction that a liberal Austria could play a constitutional part in Germany was quite widely shared by German Austrians, many of whom only gave up such a hope in 1866. Yet it was not obvious how this hope could be realised, for it seemed to be contradicted by the support of the German–Austrian liberal majority for centralism in the tradition of Joseph II, which in turn was considered by the other nationalities as a form of German colonisation under the auspices of the Habsburg state. ‘Germanising’ officials despatched to Hungary, for instance, were dismissed as ‘Bach’s hussars’, lowly civil servants dressed up in aristocratic uniforms with swords at the behest of Alexander Bach, the bourgeois liberal Interior Minister who had formerly supported the revolution. ‘Two years of parliamentary activity have sufficed to bring forth a very respectable opposition from the midst of those who belonged to the so-called German liberal party, of which one could have rightly said that they strongly defended my system and supported me in carrying it out,’ wrote Schmerling: ‘They were, on the whole, in agreement with the principles of the February constitution, called themselves Austrians and supporters of a centralised state, and vigorously fought those, like the Czechs and Poles, who wanted to know nothing of the general parliament. On the contrary, it was always their aim to extend the power of the parliament as much as possible and also to draw the lands of the Hungarian crown into the representation of the Reich.’¹⁹⁷ The problem for German–Austrian liberals was that the other nationalities became even more disaffected as a consequence of such ‘Germanising’ policies: eventually all nationalities except the Transylvanian Romanians boycotted the Reichsrat, making Austrian involvement in Germany even more unpopular amongst the non-German majority, which accounted for 78.4 per cent of the population in 1851. Combined with the difficulty of reconciling centralism in the Habsburg monarchy with cooperation between the German-speaking parts of Austria and the German lands, the nationality question was recognised by many liberals as an obstacle to Vienna’s full participation in the reshaping of Germany.

Political opinion in Austria during the 1850s, because of censorship and restrictions on associations and meetings, was difficult to assess and was correspondingly less influential, but the opinions on the German question which surfaced during the 1860s were similar to those of 1848–49 and had probably not changed much in the intervening years.¹⁹⁸ The positions which had been visible in 1848–49 still seemed valid: the idea of a German-dominated Central Europe, popular in Vienna, Niederösterreich and Moravia, and championed by Bruck, Schwarzenberg, Schmerling, Perthaler and Fröbel; the concept of ‘greater Austria’, based on international treaties, the Habsburg dynasty and a Staatenbund, and put forward by Karl von Mühlfeld in the Frankfurt Parliament and by conservatives later on; the notion of Grossdeutschland or ‘union’, which had been supported by republicans and democrats such as Karl Giskra and Johann Berger in 1848–49 and especially by Bohemian Germans after the revolution; and ‘autonomy’ or particularism, limited largely to Steiermark and Oberösterreich.¹⁹⁹ The boundaries between the positions were ill-defined, however: it was possible to be a ‘Grossdeutscher’ and an Austrian ‘autonomist’ and ‘dualist’ in the manner of Karl Rechbauer, noted one observer, just as one could be a ‘Grossdeutscher’ and a strict ‘centralist’ and ‘Grossösterreicher’.²⁰⁰ Moreover, all except republican proponents of Grossdeutschland remained loyal to the Habsburg monarchy and refused to countenance the break-up of Austria, along the lines prescribed by Franz Joseph during a famous appearance at the conference of German jurists in 1862: ‘I am above all an Austrian, but decisively German and desire the most intimate connection of Austria to Germany.’²⁰¹ Such attachment to Austria had dictated the actions of the majority of deputies in the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1849 and arguably became more defensive and more pronounced during the 1850s and 1860s. As the main Viennese newspaper Die Presse put it in a seminal article on ‘Die Deutschen in Österreich’ in 1860, German Austrians had been obliged to look for support from other Germans by the hostility of Hungarians, Czechs and Poles in the Habsburg monarchy, but their advances had been rejected as a result of the popularity of a ‘shimmering liberal political doctrine’ in Germany which taught ‘that Germany could only be united on the debris of Austria’.²⁰² The ‘Kleindeutschen’ in particular were ‘Austrophobic’, sympathising with the Italians and other ‘oppressed’ nationalities in the monarchy while regarding the German Austrians with ‘accents of contempt’.²⁰³

Austrian commentators were not very successful in countering the ‘kleindeutsch’ case. The main problem facing them was how to combine the integrity of the Habsburg monarchy and Austria’s full participation in Germany. Even the prominent theorist of federalism Julius Fröbel, who collaborated with the government in Vienna during the early 1860s, was not certain how it was to be done. Schmerling looked to the former radical and forty-eighter for ‘interesting information about events in Germany’ and asked him, with Biegeleben, to draught a proposal for the reform of the Bund, to be presented to the Fürstentag in 1863.²⁰⁴ The resulting plan, Schmerling hinted, was a compromise, implicitly falling short of the National Assembly’s constitution of 1849: ‘We could not conceal from ourselves that the German Reichsverfassung worked out in Frankfurt, with a Kaiser at its head and a Reich parliament with a two-chamber system, could not be realised under existing conditions, given the integrity of the individual members of the Bund, and that an altered form in every sense would have to be chosen in order to have any prospect of success.’²⁰⁵

Of necessity, the idea of a directly elected parliament had had to be given up because of the need to protect individual states from its overriding authority; similarly, ‘the thought of a unified head was ruled out of house because it could be imagined that neither of the Great Powers would concede primacy to the other, and that not even the middling states would allow themselves to be deprived of the chance of exercising influence in the executive’.²⁰⁶ Such provisions ran against the grain of liberal thought and, as Fröbel had admitted in 1859, militated against the principle of nationality, which would have meant the destruction of the Austrian Gesamtstaat.²⁰⁷ Fröbel’s assurance that ‘democracy is synonymous with the federal system carried out from below to above’ found little resonance in the commentaries of other liberals or democrats.²⁰⁸ Moreover, his insistence that ‘the German Confederation acts like a Great Power’ seemed to be contradicted by his advocacy of a ‘trias’.²⁰⁹ His claim that ‘a single German state can never, even from a patriotic point of view, take over German politics on its own and for itself’ was explicitly framed against the case articulated by the Nationalverein, in which Prussia was designated – in Fröbel’s opinion – precisely this role: ‘should Prussia merge with Germany in name, in fact it would be and would remain a Prussian occupation’.²¹⁰ For its part, Austria might be prevented from acting, not least by its internal divisions and nationality conflicts – an inhibition that the publicist was anxious, but by no means certain, to overcome. ‘The principle that Austria must have ordered its own affairs before it can get involved in German ones is, consciously or unconsciously, the programme of an Austrian Gothaism, which has as its aim the giving up of Germany to Prussia.’²¹¹ Fröbel’s priority was to ensure that a powerful German power emerged, preferably in the form of a colonising empire, which could defend itself as the pentarchy was replaced by a ‘world system of states’.²¹² How that power might be created constitutionally was arguably secondary.

The Habsburg monarchy, although championing ‘national affairs’ in Italy and in the East, was routinely perceived to be separate from the German sphere. Germany had ‘the most decisive and important interest in a powerful, flourishing, enlightened state, in the closest possible alliance with Austria, continuing to exist on the territory currently occupied by Austria’, wrote Fröbel.²¹³ Although closely tied to the German lands, the Habsburg monarchy was needed in its own right. Indeed, it was the aim of Schmerling’s reforms, wrote another of his advisers, the constitutional lawyer Hans von Perthaler, to ‘create Austrians, understood as a political nationality’.²¹⁴ Other commentators were more forthright, with some, such as the historians Ottokar Lorenz, Wilhelm Scherer and Anton Springer, backing the creation of Kleindeutschland and the exclusion of Austria for its own good.²¹⁵ Such exclusion did not alter the fact that Austria was a German power, defending Germans’ interests in Italy and elsewhere, but it did mean that the role of the Habsburg monarchy as a strong, colonising empire derived from its multi-ethnic and centralised character, which ensured that it remained distinct from a reorganised Germany. ‘Austria and Germany’ faced similar threats, but remained discrete.²¹⁶ ‘We ourselves pursue no German policy, we harbour no black, red and gold dream, we do not gaze beyond Austria, because we are convinced that German Austria, if Austria in its entirety is to exist, cannot be integrated and must not let itself be integrated in a newly constructed Germany’, wrote the German–Austrian journalist Heinrich Reschauer.²¹⁷

To the newspaper editor and German ‘autonomist’ Bernhard Friedmann, ‘our political system must become a new, whole and unified one’, restricted to the monarchy alone and external to the German Confederation, which had cut across Germany and Austria, weakening both.²¹⁸ Only in a unified Austrian political system ‘can the totality of interests and the unity of the empire find a firm guarantee for the future’, he went on:

Reform of the previous confederal legal relationship to Germany, and its transformation into a purely international alliance (völkerrechtliches Bündnis), as is only possible between two fully independent, unified, self-contained and complete states – it is this German reform alone that can protect Austria and Germany from internal civil wars and foreign entanglements. The new alliance will unite all the advantages of the former one without bringing back the disadvantages of the latter one … The greater German idea, as far as it has any political worth or practical significance at all, can only come into being in this way and in this form of an international alliance between a German Union and an Austrian Union.²¹⁹

To this end, Prussia should be encouraged to place itself in the middle, although not at the head, of the German movement in order to solve ‘the problem of German unity’ and overcome ‘statist, particularist sentiment in previously sovereign federal states (Bundesstaaten)’.²²⁰ Of necessity, such a development would entail the self-exclusion of Austria, other than through an alliance, from German affairs: ‘The demand of the German nation for unified representation abroad and for a German parliament are impossible to meet without either Austria leaving the Confederation or decreeing its own dissolution’, which was to be avoided at all costs.²²¹

Berger’s fellow radical proponent of Grossdeutschland in 1848, Carl Giskra, was moved by a similar assessment of political conditions towards Austrian centralism, having become an advocate of so-called ‘Grossösterreich’ by the 1860s. There was ‘no longer any question of the dissolution of Austria in Germany’ by 1861; rather, it was necessary ‘for now and for a long time’ ‘to have and to maintain Austria as a great state’, even though ‘German culture’ remained ‘the moral, ennobling element in our union of peoples (Völkerverband)’.²²⁵ ‘My political statement of faith can be summarised in a few words,’ wrote the parliamentary leader of the ‘greater Austrian’ faction of the liberal Verfassungspartei:

I believe in and recognise, I hope for and desire a great, free Austria … I believe in the mission of Austria to bind together in one Gesamtstaat, so that all receive the blessings of a great state at the same time as the cultivation of their national life, the different tribes which live on its territory, of which each is large enough and is entitled to lead its own national life, but none is large enough and strong enough to be able to be independent as a state. Because the first part of the mission is not complete and the second part – now as then – is a necessity, I believe in the maintenance and continuance of Austria.²²⁶

A ‘greater German unitary state’ was unachievable.²²⁷ All that could be hoped for was a common front against the hereditary enemy in the West, similar weights, measures and legal principles, the same arrangements for the institutions of high culture, and improvements in business and personal exchanges between Austria and Germany.

Even an unorthodox and pro-German liberal such as Franz Schuselka, the editor of Reform, argued that the government ‘must completely banish the suspicion that it intends, by the defence of the German position, to subjugate the non-German peoples by a German power. Only when Austria has carried out this duty will it be in a position to acquire its German rights’.²³² Internal reform was needed before external intervention in Germany. Despite favouring ‘a solid organic unity (Einigung) of the whole of Germany’ with a common executive and directly elected parliament, Schuselka also retained his conviction that a restoration of the Austrian constitution of 1849 was required in order to avoid the collapse of the monarchy.²³³ The objective of any Austrian reform was to create ‘autonomous lands, tied together by a strong central power’.²³⁴ Existing conditions in the Habsburg monarchy called for pluralism rather than dualism, and a real union between the different parts of Austria rather than a purely personal, dynastic union.²³⁵ Schuselka’s emphasis throughout was on the survival and consolidation of the Austrian monarchy in the face of significant threats from within. He stayed loyal to a wider German nation, supporting its interests against the Great Power manoeuvring of Vienna and Berlin in Schleswig-Holstein for example, but he also prioritised state-building in Austria, sharing – notwithstanding his own protestations – the ultimate goals of an Austrian centralist majority in the Reichsrat.²³⁶ To both centralists and federalists, Austria came before Germany. Such loyalties, combined with other constitutional, diplomatic and territorial sources of conflict between the Habsburg monarchy and the German lands, made it harder for proponents of Grossdeutschland outside Austria to win over public opinion.

2 The Great Powers and the Austrian Question

Unholy Alliances

Austrians and the Vielvölkerreich