The constitutional strength of the Holy Roman Empire is easy to mistake for weakness because it protected weak polities and even insisted on their weakness; it has regularly confounded analysts because of the close working relation of this kind of strength with the absence of power. It was built not on internally developed force but on a remarkable mechanism for the restraint and limitation of force; its stability came from the perpetual frustration of disruptive energy and aggressive power. The principle perrneated the Empire. It was supported by the great powers of Europe and acted as a check upon them too. It was applied by the emperor himself, and against him; by the component states, and against them; and in that environment the hometown communities assumed a character that seemed perpetual and in the nature of things. In Europe’s hollow center, from the end of the Thirty Years’ War until the events that made the Second Empire, states were able to exist without developing the power and freedom of action that would, among other things, have swallowed up the hometown communities and made their members something different from hometownsmen.

Nobody won the Thirty Years’ War, at least nobody before Bismarck, and there is room for doubt whether Bismarck did. The Treaty of Westphalia, an international agreement that became the main statement of the German constitution, proclaimed not a decision but an impasse among competing powers. It acknowledged and codified a situation that had become apparent over three decades of almost constant, seesaw (but never too seesaw) warfare that always seemed to return to the same place. New initiatives or added force by any one of the participating powers had always been met by countervailing force or new initiatives by the others.¹ German soldiers and princes moved from the camp of one great power to the camp of another in defense of their liberties—making sure nobody could get hold of them. By this process the German principalities had been able to avoid being swallowed up by greater powers or by one another, and so survived in a condition of individual weakness. The Treaty of Westphalia, by providing that the states of the Empire might freely make and change independent alliances in defense of their liberties, and by including the European great powers as guarantors, afforded a mechanism for defending the status quo that had already been tested in a war of stalemate.

The mechanism was not systematically described in the treaty, for the powers did not plan it just that way; nor would there have been much difference if it had: great powers are not bound by contracts. And it was promptly and vigorously challenged in conflicts between Louis XIV of France and the imperial house of Habsburg, with the other European powers putting in their hands to serve their ends. But still it held. By the end of Louis XIV’s reign and the War of the Spanish Succession, that classic exercise in the balance of power, it was clear that the situation codified at Westphalia was not just an agreement, it was a fact of European political life, in which two basic principles bearing on Germany intertwined. First, the emperor could exert power and influence enough to protect the status quo from upset generated within or without, but not enough to achieve full sovereignty within Germany for himself; and second, this apparently delicate balance would be kept in constant adjustment by the working of the principle of the balance of power, on a European scale, with a German fulcrum. Such was the history of the first Confederation of the Rhine in the 1660’s, German client states of France against the Emperor until France came to seem the greater threat; such was the amazingly flexible foreign policy of the Electors of Brandenburg.

The interstate structure of Europe and the internal constitution of Germany interlocked to sustain this arrangement; the powers of Europe and the German principalities shifted political stance with a kind of unconscious precision as threats developed now from one quarter, now from another. The regularity with which the mechanism worked in one circumstance after another made it seem almost a mystically self-governing, perpetual motion of politics. The resiliency of the system lay in its capacity to hold state power below the threshold where the system might be overturned. It brought individual wills into its service, into the service of restraining one another. Its logic was circular.

European and German politics for nearly a century after the Spanish Succession War reaffirmed, over and over, what had become apparent then. Toward mid-century the War of the Austrian Succession was for Germany an action to prevent the uniting of the imperial crown with a permanent territorial Habsburg state contemplated by the Pragmatic Sanction, a conjunction whereby the Habsburg house threatened to exceed the limits traditionally set upon its power in Germany. In response the German principalities led by Prussia and France delivered the imperial crown for a time over to the weaker and thus ostensibly safer house of Wittelsbach. But when it appeared that so weak an emperor could not withstand the threats to the status quo offered by France and now by Prussia, the German princes who had voted to a man for the Wittelsbach emperor shifted their allegiance to Maria Theresa of Habsburg, to an Austria which had the organized political resources to balance off the threats coming from the north and the west, but an Austria whose power was developed outside the Empire and not within—to an Austria, again, that could and would protect the Germanies without seizing and changing them. The mechanism absorbed the rise of Prussian power under Frederick the Great into itself, so that the main effect was to transpose the more fragmentary constitutional balance checking imperial authority to a balance between territorial states: the Austro-Prussian dualism that lasted for a century, until Austria’s defeat at Königgrätz in 1866. French entry into the Seven Years’ War on the side of its old enemy Austria amounted to recognition, shared with the German principalities, that Austria at that time seriously threatened neither. The initiatives Emperor Joseph II undertook in Germany in the last quarter of the century, notably on the Bavarian Succession question, were similarly frustrated; there the German liberties were defended by a coalition of German states led by the sometime robber king of Prussia, supported now by the Russian Empress Catherine. Catherine said that Joseph’s efforts to extend and consolidate the imperial power in Germany were “repugnant…to the Treaty of Westphalia, which is the very basis and bulwark of the constitution of the Empire…a violent shock to all the bordering states, a subversion of order, and the destruction of the balance of all Europe.”²

The outburst of French power under Napoleon Bonaparte, by temporarily upsetting the balance of power in Europe, temporarily upset the German status quo as well—and the crisis this brought to the hometown communities is a reminder that their stability and autonomy relied directly on the balanced European and German status quo. But Napoleon’s France too was thrown back in the end, and the old system was reasserted at the Congress of Vienna, where, said an experienced contemporary observer, the “wisdom of the allied powers” simply confirmed the Treaty of Westphalia by creating a German Bund which acknowledged the necessary close interrelation of European politics with the internaI constitution of Germany—a Germany that would be the “peace state of Europe.”³

Even revolutionary imperialism had been absorbed and contained. The repressions of Metternich’s Europe were themselves an exercise based on the familiar pattern of the German politics of the status quo; and in purely political terms (though by then subversion from other sources was well under way), the system prevailed even when Metternich and repression fell away in 1848: it defeated revolution then. “The Treaty of Westphalia,” said the socialist revolutionary Proudhon, “preeminently identifies justice with the force of things, and will last forever.”⁴ The rules of Central European politics seemed hardly different in 1850 from what they had been in 1648. Adolphe Thiers really addressed critical issues of contemporary politics when he brandished the Treaty of Westphalia before the Corps Législatif, Napoleon III, the German states, and Bismarck on the third of May, 1866: “1 beg the Germans to reflect that the highest principle of European politics is that Germany shall be composed of independent states connected only by a slender federative thread. That was the principle proclaimed by all Europe at the Congress of Westphalia; it was the principle adopted when the great Frederick signed the Peace of Teschen on the Bavarian Succession matter.” Thiers did not mention the Congress of Vienna, which had signalized French defeat half a century before. But he pointed to the conjunction between the constitution of Germany and the European balance: “the constant aim of all the nations in modern times, each with its eye upon the other to see that no one of them reaches proportions threatening to the others…what has taken on the name of equilibrium.”⁵

Thiers made of the European political structure after Westphalia a more deliberately willed and a more peaceable thing than it really had been; and again it is by no means certain how fully it was overcome in ms time, or how. But this much can be said about the timing and nature of these events: that during the ten years before Thiers spoke and before Prussia defeated Austria at Königgrätz and broke the German balance, the German home towns had been stripped of the defenses they had built and relied upon since the seventeenth century.

The “force of things” was the resistance by diversity to power and change in Germany. In 1648 the Emperor was obliged to recognize the political independence and internal supremacy [Landeshoheit] of those principalities and estates that had been strong enough to achieve it in fact and had been able to sustain it through the preceding tumultuous years. But codifying that independence in constitutional and international law had a curious effect: recognition of the independent strength of the states became then a protection of their weakness, and also of the weak elements within their borders. For one thing, the security the Empire provided reduced the stimulus to aggression without and reform within that a more precarious situation, or more inviting opportunities, might have afforded. Thus there were few changes, and internal situations were let alone to jell; society could stabilize because there was no compelling reason to change anything. But a second more active force for stability and the protection of weakness developed out of the constitutional situation. Inasmuch as it was impossible and illegal for the Emperor to seize control of the states, he used the legal and political powers he had to prevent them from mobilizing power within their territories or at the expense of one another; and similarly every German polity and estate found it easier to seek security in weakening its rivals than in dominating them.

The distinctive genius of the Holy Roman Empire was that, in practice as well as in law, to preserve the powerless was to defend one’s interests and to uphold the imperial constitution. Where one’s own appetite for political power was frustrated and smothered, the obvious policy was to help smother and frustrate the aspirations of others; and this applied not only to a rival’s efforts at territorial expansion but also to any effort a ruler or estate might make to impose full control over his individual or corporate subjects. The imperial patriot Johann S. Pütter spoke thus of Germany’s Westphalia constitution: “that when every thing is in its proper order, each territorial Lord has sufficient opportunities for doing good; but that if, on the contrary, he is inclined to injure his country, either the Provincial States may interfere to prevent him, or else his subjects in general, or any individual among them, may seek redress from one of the supreme tribunals of the Empire.”⁶ This was a judicial (and idealized) statement of the political fact that almost anybody could invoke outside help against an energetic and overbearing ruler; and, as a matter of law and politics, those threatened could as readily call upon neighboring states as upon the Empire to defend their rights and privileges. Even imperial judgments and executions against any state were in practice entrusted to other states; and even more commonly, an ambitious prince was checked by his neighbors without any reference to imperial institutions at all. Legal grounds for calling in outside help to restrain a ruler could almost always be found if he posed a serious threat, and if, as was likely to be the case, neighboring potentates shared with the threatened nobles or corporations an interest in restraining him. The muddy complexity of jurisdictions and of political and familial relations rarely confronted any organized element of German society, or any organized community within it, with a clear choice between the violent alternatives of submission or rebellion, either of which would have meant dislocation and exposure to the leveling effects of power. Rather they found a peaceful in-between where little changed, save the firmer development of their distinctiveness.

The cla...