Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Routledge Revivals) by Richard J. Evans

Author:Richard J. Evans [Evans, Richard J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Germany, Essays
ISBN: 9781138842151
Google: la3YoQEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-01-08T01:25:20+00:00

7

The Problem of Democratisation: German Catholics and the Role of the Centre Party

David Blackbourn

I

Wilhelmine Germany’s economic dynamism contrasted strongly with its inability to develop a mature political and constitutional system.1 This failure at the political level has attracted a wide variety of explanations, ranging at their most general from the peculiar power of the Prussian army to the peculiar flaw in the ‘German Mind’.2 At a more directly political level, explanation has centred on the fateful displacement of reformist political energies: into business, into chauvinism, and into cultural life (the civic quietism of the ‘unpolitical German’). In recent years the effects on German political life of Bismarck’s manipulation from above have been emphasised. Reinforced by a new attention to the economic arrangements of the Kaiserreich, this approach has been responsible for establishing a number of important generalisations about the weakness of the German political system.3 These can be fairly quickly enumerated. First, the forced pace of national unification created a series of overlapping struggles – national, constitutional, religious, economic. The legacy of this was a chronic segmentation of both German society and the political parties.4 Secondly, Bismarck’s manipulation emasculated the parties, rendering them capable only of a negative role. Liberalism, especially, was split into a left wing, purist but impotent, and a right wing (the National Liberals) whose cutting edge had been lost along with its political principles. Thirdly, and related to this, the parties degenerated into vehicles of economic interests, and this too weakened their challenge to the status quo. The Conservatives defended their sectional agrarian interests; the National Liberals, alarmed by the working-class threat, contracted the infamous ‘marriage of iron and rye’ with the estate-owning Conservatives; and the Social Democrats (SPD) were confined in the isolation of their proletarian sub-culture. These features of German political life were palpable impediments to democratisation before 1914.

The party which has usually proved too awkward to fit into this framework is the Centre, the party of German Catholics. While other parties have been examined against a backdrop of economic and social interests, the Centre still appears historiographically as a disembodied political phenomenon. Characteristic is Eckart Kehr’s classic formulation, from which so much recent work has proceeded, of the political dealings which accompanied the passage of the first Navy Law in 1898. According to Kehr, National Liberals and Conservatives were reconciled on the basis of an economic trade-off: the National Liberals received the battle fleet for heavy industry, the Conservatives a promise of higher protective tariffs for agriculture. The Centre, by contrast, was won over solely by the offer of the political hegemony.5 This idea of the Centre as a narrowly political and opportunist party has persisted. So, too, has its corollary – first expressed by contemporaries like Hans Delbrück and Friedrich Naumann – that the political opportunism of the Centre was motivated by sectarian or clerical considerations. This attenuated view of the Centre is all the more unfortunate, given the decisive political position of the party prior to 1914.6 The Centre had originally

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