Kleinstaaterei

• 1. Introduction

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  Kleinstaaterei is a pejorative German word coined in the early nineteenth century, and it names one of the strangest political conditions in European history. Picture the summer of 1789. The young Wilhelm von Humboldt and a group of friends set out from Brunswick, the capital of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, eager to witness the revolutionary upheaval unfolding in Paris. Before they even crossed into France, they passed through six duchies, four bishoprics, and one free imperial city, Aachen. All of that was still Germany. Or rather, what many hoped Germany might one day become.

  At that moment, the lands of the German-speaking world were divided into somewhere between 294 and 348 separate states, depending on how you counted. Some were little larger than a monastery and its surrounding grounds. Many did not share borders with their own territories. The result was a patchwork of enclaves and exclaves so tangled that maps looked less like a political document and more like a shattered mosaic.

  What produced this extreme fragmentation? How did centuries of feudal inheritance, religious conflict, dynastic ambition, and imperial weakness create a world of hundreds of miniature sovereignties? And what finally ended it?

• 2. Roots in the Medieval Empire

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  The powerful stem duchies of the German-speaking lands predated the formation of East Francia in the ninth century. When the Carolingian line died out around the year 898, a college of imperial princes took over the task of electing a king from among the territorial dukes. That single structural choice carried enormous consequences. Because local rulers wanted to protect their own interests and autonomy, they frequently rebelled against whoever held the crown. Disputes had to be settled on the battlefield rather than through a central court.

  Interregna, periods with no recognized emperor at all, made matters worse. The gaps between 1245 and 1312, and again between 1378 and 1433, fed political instability and energized communal movements. The Swabian League of Cities, the Hanseatic League, and the Swiss Confederacy all gathered strength during these leaderless stretches. Among the lesser nobility, feuding over fiefs produced conflicts like the Thuringian Counts' War, which ground up territory and left the map even more fractured.

  The free imperial cities added another layer of complexity. Many had been founded by German kings and emperors between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and originally administered by imperial nobles, direct vassals of the emperor. Over time, patrician city magistrates gradually took control of administration and the courts, and the cities became essentially self-governing. By the early modern period, a German emperor held the title of sovereign over an entity he could not effectively command.

• 3. Habsburg Ambition and Its Limits

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  From 1438 onward, the Habsburg dynasty held the imperial throne almost without interruption, with only a brief break between 1742 and 1765. They already controlled the Duchy of Austria, the Kingdom of Bohemia, and the Kingdom of Hungary. Yet the Habsburgs did not use that position to build a centralized German state. Their Grand Strategy focused instead on long-term dynastic survival at the heart of a vast, multi-layered, and multi-ethnic realm, positioned against Bourbon France and the Ottoman Empire. The imperial German lands served primarily as buffer zones, and that purpose was fundamentally at odds with any notion of German patriotism or national identity.

  Emperor Maximilian I tried to force a change in 1495. He established an imperial supreme court, the Reichskammergericht, levied imperial taxes, and expanded the power of the Imperial Diet. The reforms made little headway against the structural pull of fragmentation.

  Emperor Charles V confronted a new threat in the Protestant Reformation. In 1546, Charles stated plainly that if the empire failed to intervene, all the Estates of Germany would be in danger of breaking with the faith. His attempt at resolution, the Augsburg Interim of 1548, instead triggered fresh Protestant defiance. After the Reformation, the empire's small states aligned along religious fault lines. Roman Catholic dynasties faced Protestant dynasties in the Thirty Years' War and in a series of subsequent conflicts, each round of fighting producing further territorial disruption.

• 4. The Economics of Division

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  Trade across this fragmented landscape faced obstacles at every turn. Different states maintained varying systems of weights and measures, issued their own currencies, and imposed numerous tariffs on goods crossing their borders. A merchant moving products across Germany navigated a different set of rules at almost every territorial boundary. The German Customs Union, established in 1834, began to dismantle some of these barriers, but the underlying political structure remained porous and uneven.

  After Otto von Bismarck unified Germany under the Prussian royal House of Hohenzollern in 1871, the country's economic growth proved startlingly rapid. That speed itself was read as evidence of how much the Kleinstaaterei had suppressed economic potential for so long. The decentralized system had made it genuinely difficult for the German economy to function as a whole.

  The picture was not entirely bleak. The numerous small courts, though politically inconsequential, often cultivated reputations through patronage of the arts. That rivalry among minor sovereigns generated a form of cultural diversity across the German lands that centralized states typically could not produce.

• 5. Napoleon's Partial Solution

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  French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte forced the Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, to dissolve the empire in 1806. What followed was the most dramatic restructuring the German lands had ever seen. Napoleon eliminated the territories ruled by prince-bishops through secularisation. He consolidated neighboring principalities, absorbed enclaves and exclaves, and reduced several hundred states into a relative concentration of just over two dozen in the Confederation of the Rhine.

  After Napoleon's military defeat, his confederation did not survive. But neither did the old order fully return. The Congress of Vienna, meeting in 1814-15, decided on widespread dynastic restorations, though some of Napoleon's consolidations were preserved. Prussia and the Austrian Empire, the successor state to the Habsburg Monarchy, helped themselves to formerly independent territories in the process. When the dust settled, the result was roughly 40 states, a compressed but still fragmented version of the pre-Napoleonic map.

  Prussia and the Austrian Empire had both stood outside the Confederation of the Rhine, which left them as the only major German powers and set the stage for their eventual rivalry over the question of German unification.

• 6. Nationalism and the End of Fragmentation

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  The rise of nationalism across Europe brought with it a demand for states organized around entire peoples rather than dynastic inheritance. German nationalists began insisting on a single unified state. Unification was among the central demands of the Revolutions of 1848, but the ruling dynasties of the smaller German states, together with multinational Austria and Prussia, successfully resisted the push.

  Not every prominent German voice favored unification. The writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote that cities like Frankfurt, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck were large and brilliant, and that their impact on Germany's prosperity was incalculable. He openly doubted whether they would remain what they were if they lost their independence and became provincial cities inside one great German Empire.

  Goethe's doubts did not carry the day. Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck built a unified German state step by step, and Kleinstaaterei largely ended in 1871 with the founding of the German Empire. The only surviving petty states, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, sat at the far periphery of the German-speaking world. Some of the fragmented internal boundaries persisted in reduced form until the modern states of Germany were formally established in the Federal Republic after World War II.

• 7. A Word That Outlived Its World

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  The German Empire of 1871 was not a clean solution to the tensions Kleinstaaterei had created. The new state excluded the partly German but multinational Habsburg domains of Austria-Hungary, even as it incorporated a substantial Polish minority living in the eastern lands under Prussian rule, along with other minorities along the northern and western borders.

  The word Kleinstaaterei itself proved durable enough to outlast its original referent. In contemporary Germany, the term still circulates in media and political commentary, now applied figuratively to the federal system. Critics invoke it when the division of responsibilities among sixteen different state administrations seems to produce inefficiency or gridlock. As of 2010, education policy was the arena where the charge appeared most often, particularly around the difficulties faced by children of families moving from one German state to another and encountering different school systems. The pejorative coin struck in the early nineteenth century has found new purchase in a country that, in a very different form, still negotiates the tension between unity and regional autonomy.