Bismarck, Germany, and Machiavelli's warning to nation builders

One of the great delights of reading Machiavelli is how prescient his comments are. For me, he is the epitome of the realistic realist: he is objective about human nature, but not unduly pessimistic, and we find so many "new" theories already expounded in his works: loss aversion theory, for instance, or the resource curse. Reading him gives us a new understand of current and past events, and a capacity to foresee, within reasonable proportions, future ones. Any politician or leader of nowadays can find much to learn from a careful reading of Machiavelli—not just his more famous The Prince, but especially, also, his Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, a masterly analysis of history with an eye to the present.

And this leads me to this post's subject.

Henry Kissinger, in his Diplomacy, tells us that the tragedy of Bismarck's life was that while he managed to unite Germany and make it strong—so much so that it was able to endure two world wars, nazism, communism, foreign occupation and half a century of division—, still he set in the course that led to the First World War:

The constitution which Bismarck had designed for Germany compounded these tendencies. Though baseed on the first universal male suffrage in Europe, the Parliament (the Reichstag) did not control the government, which was appointed by the Emperor and could only be removed by him. The Chancellor was closer to both the Emperor and the Reichstag than each was to the other. Therefore, within limits, Bismarck could play Germany's domestic institutions off against each other, much as he did the other states in his foreign policy. None of Bismarck's successors possessed the skill or the daring to do so. The result was that nationalism unleavened by democracy turned increasingly chauvinistic, while democracy without responsibility grew sterile. 

Bismarck ended the Concert of Europe by refusing to act within the conservative consensus that was the result of the Congress of Vienna. But, and this is the main issue, while creating an Europe where moral consensus was no longer a palliative for great power disputes and Realpolitik reigned supreme, Bismarck also reduced the options for any future balancing acts. This happened because instead of the flexible German Confederation in which differente states could help balance different sides in the European balance of power system, and which was forbidden to wage aggressive wars, a colossal unitary and militarized Germany appeared which could threaten every other European power.

Deprived of the former flexibility, the balance of power tended to become rigid, divided into two  blocks and making arms races and eventual war inevitable.

Where Bismarck failed was in having doomed his society to a style of policy which could only have been carried on had a great man emerged in every generation. This is rarely the case, and the institutions of imperial Germany militated against it. In this sense, Bismarck sowed the seeds not only of his country's achievements, but of its twentieth-century tragedies.

What occurred to me on reading these comments was that, as usual, we find that Machiavelli had something to say about it, and that Bismarck might have profited from an awareness of his comments. This is from Chapter 9 of the Discourses:

Such a person [the founder of a state or creator of new institutions within it] ought however to be so prudent and moderate as to avoid transmitting the absolute authority he acquires, as an inheritance to another; for as men are, by nature, more prone to evil than to good, a successor may turn to amitions ends the power which his predecessor has used to promote worthy ends. Moreover, though it be one man that must give a State its instititutions, once given they are not so likely to last long resting for support on the shoulders of one man only, as when entrusted to the care of many, and when it is the business of many to maintain them. 

Compare this with Kissinger's observations on the role of the chancellor, and we find that Bismarck's fault would be promptly understood by Machiavelli. Perhaps Bismarck was aware of that. Perhaps he knew of the difficulty for another in maintaining his balancing game, and accordingly would have worked to change the institutions of Germany, given a few more years, but since the Kaiser Wilhelm II promptly dismissed him on coming to power, in 1890, we shall never know.

What we do learn from this is how Machiavelli's insights remain useful so many centuries after his death.

Are there any states nowadays that ought to give special heed to this lesson? I can think of  one that is, perhaps, one of the closest nowadays to the republics that form Machiavelli's examples: Singapore.

Singapore is the creation of a single man, and a profoundly Machiavelic one at that—in the correct sense of the word. But this great-little city state and its interesting founder will be the subject of a conversation for another day.