The German Colonial Empire by Woodruff D. Smith

Author:Woodruff D. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1978-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

10

Issues of Colonial Politics

Colonial politics in imperial Germany cannot be understood apart from the general context of domestic political issues. In the previous chapter we have observed a strong institutional relation between domestic and colonial politics. In the present chapter we shall see that the relation holds for the dynamic aspects of politics as well.

The Tariff Question

By the 1890s the marriage of convenience between Prussian Junker agriculture and big business that underlay Germany’s regime of economic protection had begun to collapse. Improving economic conditions and the breakup of the conservative-National Liberal political cartel caused the leaders of business to agitate for a lowering of German tariffs, since German industry had achieved a position from which it could compete successfully in the international market and from which tariffs appeared to be only an impediment to economic expansion, especially in Eastern Europe.1 Agrarian interests did not take the same view, since German agriculture possessed no comparable advantage over its potential rivals in Russia and the United States. The resulting conflict over tariff policy became the major issue of German politics in the 1890s. It evolved into a general debate on the direction of German society and absorbed other issues, including colonial ones.

In 1891 and 1892 Chancellor Caprivi introduced a policy of reducing tariff levels as existing economic treaties came up for renewal. Over the next few years new tariff arrangements were made with many of Germany’s trading partners, and especially with Russia and Rumania, both potential competitors of the East Elbian grain growers. The new economic policy soon proved itself a boon to industry, but agrarian interests attacked it immediately and violently. Caprivi was vilified by his own class, and a powerful agrarian interest group, the Bund der Landwirte, was formed to influence the Reichstag. The proagrarian conservative parties desperately played on every weapon of ideology and influence they could muster in order to reestablish tariff protection. Eventually, in 1902, they got their way when Chancellor Bülow passed a revision of the tariff schedules through the Reichstag.

The questions at issue were of course far more significant than the level of tariffs or their effects on German agriculture. The Caprivi tariffs did not actually hurt East Elbian grain sales very much, and German agriculture responded to competitive stimulus in a basically healthy way.2 The questions really were whether or not a narrow status group such as the Junkers could continue to determine policy for all of Germany and whether Germany should vigorously encourage industrial development or attempt to balance industrialization with the protection of other economic forms. These deeper issues were immensely complicated and not susceptible to immediate resolution. Although the proindustrialists pointed to the material benefits of development, the agrarian conservatives persuasively pointed out the social dangers of unrestrained industrialization, which they claimed that the government’s economic policy was intended to promote.

The transformation of the tariff issue into a more general dispute led each side to appeal to widely known sets of ideological conceptions in order to justify its position in terms of the national good.

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