11 ms·
Was German unification inevitable?
- GekkePrutser 6y agoWell the unification of the German speaking areas mentioned in the article never really happened as Austria and the Swiss-German areas are still separate countries from Germany (and in the case of Switzerland always have been). So the answer is it's been avoidable and actually been avoided :)
- varispeed 6y agoI think it will kind of happen by proxy as European Union members are slowly turning into administrative regions rather than remaining as proper countries.
- sneak 6y agoSwitzerland is not a member state of the EU. (They are part of the EEA and Schengen agreement zone, so people often forget this.)
- varispeed 6y agoI am aware of that, but my prediction is that they will be slowly less and less sovereign over time and at one point there will be one unified european superstate. Who knows, maybe German will become the main language?
- sneak 6y agoWhat mechanism do you propose causes Switzerland, which is 100% sovereign (and even isn't part of the EU, despite all their neighbors being such), to become "less and less sovereign over time"? Who rules them? How? Why?
- _ph_ 6y agoThere are considerations amongst the Swiss to gain full EU membership. I don't know whether they are a majority though.
- dgellow 6y agoNop, definitely not. We (i.e swiss people, not me specifically) rejected it multiple times and that's clearly not going to change in the near future.
- bellyfullofbac 6y agohttps://www.dw.com/en/switzerland-ignores-eu-deadline-for-treaty/a-46639844 https://www.dw.com/en/switzerland-ignores-eu-deadline-for-tr... The EU is obviously Switzerland's biggest trading partner, and whatever trade is subject to rules and regulations they would negotiate with each other. But guess who has the upper hand in negotiations, if you guess the side with more money and the bigger market, i.e. the bigger economy, correct. I do find it strange that Switzerland allows anyone from the EU to come and live there if they have a job in the country (AFAIK this includes menial jobs like being a waiter). maybe it was something the EU offered as a package that the country had to take as a whole. In return obviously Swiss people are allowed to live and work anywhere in the EU as well. More on that: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54316316 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54316316 So in short, Switzerland is sovereign to do what it wants, but going too much against the will of its big brother would damage itself as well. And I imagine if the big brother decides for something new, Switzerland doesn't have unlimited power to say otherwise.
- devdas 6y agoIt's part of the trade agreement with the EU. https://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/countries/switzerland/ https://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/coun...
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoThis argument about switzerland becoming part of Eu because of trade, is like argying that Mexico or Canada is becoming part of US
- PicassoCTs 6y agoNo, english is the neutral communication language european wide. One of the major players extending their language union wide (France, Italy, Germany) is not possible. It also wouldn't make sense. One romanic language would be easier to learn for the whole romanic language family. And eastern europe would inevitable and rightfully so feel alienated. Such imperialistic nonsense is just eating resources and getting nowhere. That road would certainly lead to resentment and then a fracturing of the EU.
- em-bee 6y agoenglish as a language is not really neutral (but neither are other languages) but then, with great britain leaving the EU, english became a much more neutral option than it was before. however i would interpret the parent comments in the light of popularity. german and french may dominate the EU culturally without intending to do so. so it is reasonable to ask. putting this down as imperialistic nonsense suggests a political motivation that i just can't read from the parent comment
- johnnycerberus 6y agoYour question sounds imperialistic. There are more people speaking a Romance language (French, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Catalan) than a Germanic one. And the cherry on top of the cake... what about the Slavic ones? EU will be a federation like Switzerland is.
- rgblambda 6y agoSwitzerland is not part of the EEA, although they have many treaties with the EU that more or less comprises the relationship the EU has with an EEA country.
- sneak 6y agoAhh, thanks for the correction! I knew I should have consulted that venn diagram[1] to double-check. [1]: https://boingboing.net/2011/03/12/venn-diagram-illustr.html https://boingboing.net/2011/03/12/venn-diagram-illustr.html
- vidarh 6y agoThe question raised is specifically about the inevitability of the unification that actually happened in 1871 and 1990, not about any idea of larger German state. The article does not mention language at all as far as I can see, nor cultural connections. Overall this article not really answering anything, though. The answers are t0o high level and short to treat the subject seriously.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoTrue but I was mainly reacting to the tagline of the article: "The unity of the German-speaking lands goes back a long way" The third paragraph also defines unification as such.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- k__ 6y agoThis. As long as Austria is missing, German unification isn't complete. I mean, Austria has a much lower population than Bavaria. It's basically a autonomous German state.
- Clewza313 6y agoThat's perfectly correct on a rational level, but I presume you're getting downvotes because the last person who tried to "unify" Austria & Germany was Hitler in 1938.
- k__ 6y agoHaha, yes, could be. Also, while I think my statement is correct, I don't think all German speaking states should be unified. It's good that we have city states like Berlin and Hamburg compared to area states like Bavaria and Hessen. It's good we have high and low population density states. It's good that Austria is an autonomous country. It's also good that Switzerland does basically its own thing. That way Germans have many different ways to live. Diversity is the key in the long run.
- anoncake 6y agoFWIW Austrians don't like being called Germans.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoThe problem was more that he didn't stop there :)
- someguydave 6y agothe unification of germany was a disaster, it should revert to city-states like liechtenstein
- Zenst 6y agoHow was it a disaster? When West Germany merged with East the impact upon GDP wasn't dramatic and it was a democratic choice. Indeed it went so well, I dare say it was a motivator towards more integration within the EU and will say the EU went on a pokemon phase not long after in member growth. Which even the EU phrases as "Re-unification of Europe" https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/policy/from-6-to-27-members_en https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/policy/from-6... So the re-unification of Germany had many aspects too it that get overlooked.
- thenaturalist 6y agoDon't feed the trolls, I dare suggest.
- Zenst 6y agoHow can you tell it is a troll and not some perspective without knowing the reasoning and workings out of that perspective?
- rektide 6y agoEast Germany still faces incredible far ranging economic & societal difficulties after the West Germans swept in, strong armed the state, offered little support, & privatized all industry. The economy was having enormous difficulties. Rather than support & help the population, it was GDP & GDP alone that was focused on. My sources for what happened then are mostly the 4-part netflix drama The Perfect Crime, about the assassination of the Trust Agency head who paved over communism with capitalism. Not fancy, so I'm not super well versed. The movie doesn't go far into the aftermath, which, if you look at East Germany, has many of the scariest Trumpist vibes one might imagine to it. People got left the heck behind. It was a conquest not an integration. Edit: People seem to really really hate that I cited my sources and it's not good enough. Perhaps a wikipedia quote to confirm some of my stance might make you modestly less skeptical? My words are radical but the situation itself was too: > Despite these problems, the process of unification moved ahead, albeit slowly. The Treuhand, staffed almost entirely by Germans from the west, became the virtual government of eastern Germany. In the course of privatization, the agency decided which companies would live and which would die, which communities would thrive and which would shrivel, and which eastern Länder would be prosperous and which would not. It also decided who might or might not buy eastern firms or services. I'd like to find a way to hand out more credit, to be fairer, and I lack that expertise. My apologies. This was an incredibly difficult situation. Yet, it feels very much, the German "reunification" was a one way integration, was one country taking over another, with few chances at all for the German Democratic Republic government & people to try to self-determine what path forward they wanted to take towards reunification. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_German_reunification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_Germ...
- Svip 6y agoThe answer is probably no. While Pan-German and Pan-Italian nationalists[0] were successful (well, the German ones partially successful, what with Austria being left out), Pan-Scandinavians were not. I doubt many things in history were inevitable. I do feel like German re-unification were probably more likely following the Second World War than German unification was after the Congress of Vienna, even if it looked bleaker for re-unification from the outset. [0] To be clear, Italian and in particular German unification were not the success of pan-nationalists movement but rather strong political forces (like Bismarck) exploiting a popular movement for political gains. Put another way, German unification was not for the benefit of Germans, but for the benefit of Prussia.
- te_chris 6y agoYeah, under Bismarck it was more “one nation, under Prussia”. It’s also quite well known that there was resistance to unification from the West, due to not wanting that again.
- fakedang 6y ago> It’s also quite well known that there was resistance to unification from the West, due to not wanting that again. If that was so well known, then why was it that the first thing the West did was to unify their pieces of Germany into West Germany? Surely it would have been beneficial to them to keep Germany separate if they shared your assumption.
- cpleppert 6y agoI don't think those cases are really comparable. Scandinavian countries had separate state institutions (even when countries were part of the same empire or composite monarchy) in a way that didn't apply to the former Holy Roman Empire/German Confederation which were nominally part of the same political unit and saw themselves as having much closer ethnic ties. The HRE was seen as an entirely german political entity and had almost no non-german kings in its entire history. The fact that German states jealously guarded their sovereignty does not mean they did not see themselves as fundamentally german. Similar reasons apply to Italy. Because of the geography of the Italian peninsula a unified Italian nation state would be much more successful economically than a patchwork of small entities. Once Italy's maritime commercial decline began states had less incentive to block unification. >> Put another way, German unification was not for the benefit of Germans, but for the benefit of Prussia. The rest of Germany not only strongly benefited economically from german unification but also supported protective tariff policies after unification that had the effect of tying their economies much closer to Prussia (and vice-versa of course). If they didn't believe it was in their interest why in the world would they do that? If anything, the rest of the German states probably engaged in free-riding off of Prussia's military support. This once again benefits both sides.
- ptmcc 6y agoSomething that was beaten into us as history majors was to be highly skeptical of anyone suggesting that an historical event was "inevitable". It's easy to look back on the past and think that you see "obvious" trends and patterns but so much of that is influenced by your modern perspective and how selectively history is preserved and told. Like any humanities or social science, history is not objective. Part of studying and analyzing history necessarily involves studying and analyzing the context and biases of sources, stories, and narratives.
- ForHackernews 6y agoI guess it depends on your perspective: If you believe in hard determinism then you could argue that literally everything that has ever happened and will happen is "inevitable".
- thaumasiotes 6y agohttps://dilbert.com/strip/2008-11-04 https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-11-04 I particularly like the phrasing "I'd have to say" :D
- mercer 6y agoI keep forgetting how awful most Dilbert strips are.
- kelnos 6y agoWhen we talk about "inevitable" in this sense, we more mean "obviously had to happen given the events leading up to it" than "was predetermined to happen". I get what you're saying, though, but please ask yourself: how does this idea contribute to discussion?
- UncleMeat 6y agoSure, but that is largely useless information. At the layer of abstraction we care about (human and societal behavior), those systems are so chaotic that even if they are deterministic it is completely non-actionable to say "well it all derives from physics".
- billfruit 6y agoWhy was the Holy Roman Empire never restablished in the post-Napoleonic era? If I remember the last HRE was still around for many years after the outster of Napoleon.
- k__ 6y agoBecause of the rivaly between Austria and Prussia.
- monoideism 6y ago> Why was the Holy Roman Empire never restablished in the post-Napoleonic era Well, that was one of the ideas behind the "Third Reich" (Roman Empire, HRE, then German Reich). Of course, it was under Hitler, not any hereditary emperor. > If I remember the last HRE was still around for many years after the outster of Napoleon. No, the last recognized HRE (Francis II) was defeated by Napolean. But technically, there still is an heir, although his family has renounced any claim to that or any other title (among other reasons, because Hungary and Austria don't permit the use of such titles): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_von_Habsburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_von_Habsburg
- mr_toad 6y ago> hereditary emperor. Hereditary (and especially primogeniture) wasn’t as big a deal under any of the Roman Empires as it was for European monarchies. Even when an emperor had heirs, they were often adopted.
- monoideism 6y agoThe Holy Roman Empire was an European monarchy from the middle ages to ~1800. That's what I was referring to - perhaps that wasn't as clear as it should have been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire
- billfruit 6y agoFrancis II continued to be Emperor of Austria till 1830, Napoleon was outsted in 1815 or there abouts.
- AlexCoventry 6y agoTim Weiner's new book The Folly and the Glory, on US/Russian political warfare since 1945, makes a compelling case that it was not inevitable at all. Most of Europe was opposed to the idea, and the only enthusiastic supporters were the US and the Germanies. Russia was virulently opposed, and according to the book, West Germany paid Russia $2T to remove all of its soldiers from East German territory. The book makes the case that the reunification of Germany is one of the foundations of Russian resentment towards the US, since the Bush I administration gave them categorical assurances that the borders of NATO would not move "an inch Eastward."
- UweSchmidt 6y agoSource on the $2T?
- rolandm 6y agoNot in the trillions, but more like "25-40 billion euros or $31-50 billion" https://www.dw.com/en/how-kohl-and-gorbachev-sealed-the-deal-on-german-reunification/a-5788998 https://www.dw.com/en/how-kohl-and-gorbachev-sealed-the-deal... Helmut Kohl negotiated a very good deal. Money was not an issue for Germany but speed and total withdrawl of the Russian troops. Germany would have paid much more. A year later and it might be too late for the reunification (Gorbachev was kicked out of the Kremlin).
- kmonsen 6y agoIs not like the Soviet Union has a really long life ahead anyway. They had gotten the mortal wound, the question was mostly how long the bleeding out would take. I guess they could have gone down in flames if they wanted to choose that instead. The rest of the world owes them a huge thanks for accepting defeat gracefully. And for beating Hitler of course.
- markvdb 6y agohttps://archive.is/J6Hkj https://archive.is/J6Hkj The Washington Post mentions 14 * 10^9 DEM, or ~7.210^9 EUR or ~910^9 USD at the time.
- coldtea 6y agoHopefully not. Let's see if it will split again.
- Animats 6y agoWas the collapse of the Soviet Union inevitable? If the Soviet Union had hung on for another 20 years, it would have made it into the Internet era. A classic argument against Soviet-style communism is that central planning doesn't work. It doesn't scale. Only free markets scale. Then came the Internet. Now, companies can scale up to planetary scale. Amazon doesn't seem to be having scaling problems - the bigger it gets, the better it works. Nor does Tencent, or Alibaba, or Citibank, or AT&T, or Disney, or Union Pacific. Competition is on the way out. So today, central planning works at scale. No reason it couldn't work for a communist economy. China's not doing badly.
- scarmig 6y agoThe issue with central planning has never been scaling. Back in the mid-20th century, the Soviet Union often managed to excel in scaling particular metrics that were prioritized by leadership. The issue is price discovery and resource allocation, and the ability of politics to interfere with or undermine the price discovery mechanism. The internet has helped with market-based price discovery by acting as a source of legibility and homogenization, which allows for the mega corporations to extract a lot of the value provided by acting as monopoly providers of the platforms for price discovery. But if you look at their internal corporate economies, all of them have issues with substantial waste, resource misallocation, and politics.
- deafcalculus 6y ago1. Central planning might work today but not in a democracy. Keeping the economy at arms length distance from politics seems essential in a liberal democracy. Pretty sure Amazon wouldn’t be as successful if the leadership was elected by employees / customers / stakeholders. 2. The problem with autocracy + central planning is when things go wrong or the world changes in some important way (or people’s preferences change). No way to correct or replace the administration without revolution. So, I’d still bet on liberal democracy and capitalism over the long term.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoDemocracy and capitalism are not joined at the hip, and while the neoliberals are praising the idol of free market, capitalism is dismembering our democratic institutions, like independant journalism and access to justice.
- chmod775 6y agoConsidering most Germans alive today experienced the (1990) unification and the political climate during that time, it's a bit weird to ask four non-German historians. This question would be better posed to politicians of that time, many of which are retired now, but still alive. I can guarantee the answers would be more interesting for sure.
- _ph_ 6y agoI am not a historian, but I grew up in the western part of a split Germany. Everyone did consider Germany a split nation. All of the older people living had lived in the pre-War Germany which was unified. That meant that many families were spread across both halves of Germany before the war and consequently separated due to the split. In several cases (not only Berlin) the border whould run across cities. If most people considered Germany a split country, how can a reunification not be inevitable? The fact that the border had to be guarded against the East German citizens from leaving is another idicator. Finally, after the border opened, Eastern Germany was on the brink of civil collapse, as a lot of people would just leave for the West, due to the economic imbalance and probably not so much trust to keep their freedom in the future. Reunification was the one way to stop this.
- PeterisP 6y ago"how can a reunification not be inevitable?" - for a contrasting example, look at Koreas; the same arguments you list apply also there, and at least there reunification does not seem inevitable; and with every generation of separation the ties grow weaker.
- _ph_ 6y agoWell, assuming of course, the regime which holds its population hostage, fails. Which happened in eastern Germany. Of course, if the countries had stayed separate for 100 years, anything might happen. With Korea, it depends on how long the north keeps the border closed and if and how the regime fails.
- pndy 6y agoIt's not the same situation and I think it's hard to believe it will ever be - it only on the surface seems to be similar because it involves two countries of different systems that are bonded by same culture, history and language up until the split. The details matter; the German unification was a result, as you may remember, of the Autumn of Nations revolution that lead to fall of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union; the situation was building up for over 10 years if not more - some consider the Chernobyl disaster as being the first domino piece that fell down, some the strikes and emergence of 'Solidarność' movement in Poland or even 1968' Prague Spring. North Korea is alone on the playground and at best is being supported by People's Republic of China, economically and politically (to some degree); it holds power in a good grip, the propaganda machine and control of citizens life works there very well - at least from what we know. There's simply no possibility for opposition movements to exist and even be strong enough to question the Kims power and images as leaders. I'd rather expect that China would eventually incorporate North as another province rather than South deciding for the unification which certainly would have some harsh social and economical outcome. The differences between these countries seems to be too big to just dismantle DMZ and become one happy Korea with population of ~76mln. Still, it's a wild guess and anything might happen.
- fakedang 6y agoWhy is everyone here forgetting the last dictatorship of West Europe here - Liechtenstein? You can only get complete German unification if you unite parts of Switzerland, Austria and Liechtenstein. And Schleswig.
- TMWNN 6y ago"I love Germany so much that I prefer to see two of them" —Giulio Andreotti, PM of Italy
- freeflight 6y agoAs a German, I think the term "unification" is very misleading and burying a lot of issues very relevant to this day in Germany. What happened back then wasn't "partners joining into an equal union", what happened was the annexation and selling out of a whole half of a country to prove an ideological political point about the alleged superiority of one of them. Which was then followed with widespread and systematic demonization of anything related to the GDR. A situation that left millions of Germans not just suddenly without a job or any perspective, but being the target of resentment from West Germans who allegedly have to pay for "lazy East Germans" trough the Soli, while seeing a lot of their own political views suddenly equaled to Nazi Germany. The result of which being that the modern day Federal Republic of Germany is not a product of "unification", but rather a continuation of the very same FRG that came out of Western allied occupation with the added territory of the GDR. But in the many ways a unified Germany could have learned from both sides, none did really manifest. For example unified Germany still took years and decades to decriminalize and rehabilitate homosexuality, an issue that was for the most part already solved in the GDR. That's why to this day there's a pretty massive rift going trough the country that particularly many Western Germans are completely oblivious about.
- pasabagi 6y agoAs a non-german, living in east germany, this is more or less my observation too. The unification was literally just one side taking over the other - high level civil servants were replaced by west-german civil servants, teachers were fired, industries closed down as the regulatory enviroment changed overnight, etc. The essential thought of reunification was that there was nothing worth saving in the East. That wasn't actually something many easteners agreed with.
- MichaelMoser123 6y agointeresting that the article doesnt mention the Zollverein/German customs union of 1833; Wasn't that the role model for EU integration, where they argued that political union would follow an integrated economy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zollverein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zollverein also asking 'was X inevitable?' can be rephrased as 'what are the objective reasons that would make X a likely outcome?', that sounds better to me.
- practicalpants 6y agoSlightly tangential but Germany's neighbor, maybe the most interesting historical counter factual I know of is the United States of Austria [1]. This was an actual plan of the Habsburgs/Franz Ferdinand until he was assassinated. A Central/Eastern European super state and there likely wouldn't have been the world wars as we knew them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Greater_Austria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Greater_Austr...
- Clewza313 6y agoKorean unification seems even more inevitable, and I've been waiting for North Korea to collapse since the 1980s, but here we are close to 80 years since the split and the status quo remains as intractable as ever.
- asdff 6y agoIt's not going to collapse as long as it is supported by other states. At this point, the U.S. political cycle is too short lived to do anything about it and all the players at the table know this.