Western Civilization

The German nation state, which emerged under the leadership of Bismarck, had been set up with all the guises of a modern Western parliamentary state. The problems of the German democratic movement had been both cultural and state implemented. Bismarck successfully protracted his royalist state during the rise of the German Reich through various means that gave up certain privileges to the middle class, that normally in other Western society's, which had been extensively industrialized, led the fight for parliamentary democracy, and their share of power. The German political culture, since the Nationalist movements of the post Napoleonic Europe, sought unification, a feat almost impossible, unless under a strong leadership, which Bismarck finally provided under the heavy price of indoctrinating his reactionary views first in the constitutions of the North German Confederation of the 1860s, and finally with the revised constitution of the German Reich. This early era of German unification created a lot of the precedents that were to follow, of anti-democratic feeling, and the masses longing for strong leadership to see them through hard times (Orlo, 29).

Bismarck, a staunch conservative and royalist, knew that if not co-operation with the rising middle class was to be undertaken, then at the very least enticement to gain the loyalty of the masses, through such institutions as the Reichstag, and labor reforms was needed. To bring the middle class to his camp, he created them junior partners in government and gave them a unified expansionist Germany that could provide them with a secure atmosphere for their international business ventures alongside a few economic offices in the state. The state established, had been Federalist, and staunchly reactionary in both ideology, and practice. The Kaiser had absolute power, the Reichstag voted on bills, that essentially did not matter in terms of need, rather in terms of appeasement, that the aristocracy let them cast a essentially. Bismarck employed all the tools at his disposal to fulfill his desire of a strong unified royalist German Reich. As he exemplified in his failed “Blood and Iron Speech,” the Reich was to be made through a show of force, and conservative politics (Orlo, 68).

The reign of Bismarck in many ways set a very negative precedent for German political development, and Germany's rise as a Great Power. During the age of Wilhelm II Germany fully realized this downward spiral to a state governed more in the fashion of the ...