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In spite of the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany, liberalism made great strides in the following few years. As Richard Evans writes, “Far from being a complete return to the old order, the post-revolutionary settlement had sought to appease many of the liberals' demands while stopping short of granting either national unification or parliamentary sovereignty. Trial by jury in open court, equality before the law, freedom of business enterprise, abolition of the most objectionable forms of state censorship of literature and the press, the right of assembly and association, and much more, were in place almost everywhere in Germany by the end of the 1860s. And, crucially, many states had instituted representative assemblies in which elected deputies had freedom of debate and enjoyed at least some rights over legislation and the raising of state revenues.
"It was precisely the last right that the resurgent liberals used in Prussia in 1862 to block the raising of taxes until the army was brought under the control of the legislature, as it had, fatally, not been in 1848. This posed a serious threat to the funding of the Prussian military machine. In order to deal with the crisis, the Prussian King appointed the man who was to become the dominant figure in German politics for the next thirty years - [Count] Otto von Bismarck. By this time, the liberals had correctly decided that there was no chance of Germany uniting, as in 1848, in a nation-state that included German-speaking Austria. That would have meant the break-up of the Habsburg monarchy, which included huge swathes of territory, from Hungary to Northern Italy, that lay outside the boundaries of the German Confederation, and included many millions of people who spoke languages other than German. But the liberals also considered that following the unification of Italy in 1859-60, their time had come. If the Italians had managed to create their own nation-state, then surely the Germans would be able to do so as well.
"Bismarck belonged to a generation of European politicians, like Benjamin Disraeli in Britain, Napoleon III in France or Camillo Cavour in Italy, who were prepared to use radical, even revolutionary means to achieve fundamentally conservative ends. He recognized that the forces of nationalism were not to be gainsaid. But he also saw that after the frustrations of 1848, many liberals would be prepared to sacrifice at least some of their liberal principles on the altar of national unity to get what they wanted. In a series of swift and ruthless moves, Bismarck allied with the Austrians to seize the disputed duchies of Schleswig-Holstein from the Kingdom of Denmark, then engineered a war over their administration between Prussia and Austria which ended in complete victory for the Prussian forces. The German Confederation collapsed, to be followed by the creation of a successor institution without the Austrians or their south German allies, named by Bismarck for want of a more imaginative term the North German Confederation. Immediately, the majority of the Prussian liberals, sensing that the establishment of a nation-state was just around the corner, forgave Bismarck for his policy (pursued with sublime disdain for parliamentary rights over the previous four years) of collecting taxes and funding the army without parliamentary approval."22
Bismarck's "blood and iron" politics had won over the liberals.23 Only the socialists remained obdurate. As the German socialist leader Wilhelm Liebknecht remarked: "The oppressors of yesterday are the saviours of today; right has become wrong and wrong right. Blood appears, indeed, to be a special elixir, for the angel of darkness has become the angel of light before whom the people lie in the dust and adore."24
There were definite pan-German tendencies in Bismarck’s thought which were to have bitter consequences not so long after his death. It was obvious that Prussian leadership in Germany could lead eventually, after Bismarck, to moves to unite the whole German nation, including Austria, under Berlin. Bernard Simms shows that the seeds of this were already in Bismarck’s mind in the 1850s: “’There is nothing more German, Bismarck observed in 1858, ‘than Prussian particularism properly understood.’ Bismarck also believed that Prussia could only survive if it secured ‘safe borders’, either through leading a reformed German Confederation, or through straightforward territorial annexation. In 1859 he described these ‘natural frontiers of Prussia’ as nothing less than the Baltic, the North Sea, the Rhine, the Alps and the Lake of Constance. This was a programme for Prussian dominance which would bring the independence of the Third Germany to an abrupt end. It could only be achieved if Bismarck could secure the acceptance of the other powers to a massive change in the European territorial order, to isolate those who objected; sideline or at least gain parity with Austria; win over Third Germany, or crush those elements who refused to cooperate; co-opt the German national movement; and either persuade or bypass the liberals in the Landtag, in order to secure the funds to pay for the necessary military action. A few months before taking office as Prussian chancellor in late September 1862, Bismarck announced privately that ‘My first care will be to reorganize the army, with or without the help of the Landtag… As soon as the army shall have been brought into such a condition as to inspire respect, I shall seize the first best pretext to declare war against Austria, dissolve the German Diet, subdue the minor states and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership.’ His interlocutor, the future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, afterwards remarked to the Austrian ambassador: ‘Take care of that man; he means what he says.’”25
It was good advice. In 1864 Bismarck provoked war between Prussia and Austria, on the one side, and Denmark, on the other, over Schleswig-Holstein, a territory held by Denmark which both of the German-speaking states claimed as their own. There followed a dispute between the two victors over the administration of Schleswig-Holstein, and in 1866 the Prussians under Bismarck crushed the Austrians at Königgrätz. Bismarck then declared the German Confederation led by Austria to be dead, thereby laying the foundations for the unification of the German state under Prussia’s leadership. (Five years earlier, Napoleon III had done the same favour for the Italians by his defeat of the Austrians at Solferino, driving them out of Italy. From then the unification of Italy proceeded apace under the leadership of Piedmont.)
Nevertheless, Bismarck was no warmonger. In his treatise On War (1832) the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz had famously declared that "war is the continuation of politics by other means". But Bismarck was less belligerent, defining politics as "the art of the possible".26 He certainly used war à la Clausewitz to further his political ends, inciting it first with Austria, and then with France. But he also knew when to stop and what boundaries he should not cross.
Bismarck looked neither for Hitlerian Lebensraum in the East nor for influence in the Balkans - influence there, he said, was "not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier". That meant that he tried hard not to come into conflict with Russia, signing a reinsurance treaty with her. Nor did he join in the general European scramble for colonies overseas. Moreover, even if he dreamed about pan-German unification, he renounced the idea of a "greater Germany" that included Austria, which would really have destroyed the balance of power and created the political revolution Disraeli feared. In any case, not having Austria was no disadvantage in terms of power, because Prussia without Austria was so much more powerful than all the other German princes put together that the new state, in spite of the resentment of its junior members at the preponderance of Prussia, was never in danger of disintegration in the way that Austria-Hungary continued to be. For with her complex mixture of nationalities, Germanic, Hungarian, Slav and Latin, Austria was weak; and it was not in her ally Germany's interests that she should be dissolved into her constituent nationalities, thereby creating conflicts and involving the great powers on different sides of the conflicts. Therefore Bismarck did not encourage Austria's forays into the Balkans, which might have involved Russia on the side of the Slavs and Germany on the side of Austria - which is precisely what happened in 1914... For all these reasons, it was not likely, while Bismarck was at the helm of the German state, that she would engage in rash military enterprises, but only such as were manageable with clear political objectives and exit strategy.
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