On 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles — the palace of French kings — a Prussian king was proclaimed German Emperor. The location was not accidental. Otto von Bismarck, the architect of that moment, understood symbolism as well as he understood artillery. France had just been humiliated in a war Bismarck had provoked, and the new German Empire was being announced in the heart of French power. It was a statement: the map of Europe had been redrawn, and the thing every European statesman had feared for half a century had finally happened. There was a Germany now. A real one. With 41 million people, the continent’s largest army, and a rapidly industrialising economy sitting right in the middle of everything.
The “German Question” — what to do about the vast, populous, economically dynamic space in Central Europe — had haunted European diplomacy since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. For centuries, that space had been fragmented into hundreds of petty states, duchies, and free cities. This suited everyone. A divided Germany was a weak Germany, and a weak Germany meant the balance of power held. Bismarck ended that arrangement in less than a decade. What he built in its place would define — and repeatedly devastate — European geopolitics for the next 150 years.
The German Space¶
Geography made Germany both powerful and vulnerable. The North European Plain stretches from the Pyrenees to the Urals with barely a hill to interrupt an army’s march. Germany sits in the middle of it, bordered by France to the west and Russia to the east, with no natural frontiers worth the name. This is the fundamental problem. A united Germany commands the continent’s most productive territory, its densest river network, and its central position astride every major European trade route. But it also has no defensive depth. It can be attacked from every direction simultaneously.
This geographic reality produced two competing anxieties that would shape German strategy for the next century. Germany’s neighbours feared its strength — a unified German state would be the most powerful country in Europe by virtually every measure. And Germany itself feared encirclement — surrounded by potential enemies on every side, with no ocean to hide behind and no mountains to shelter in. Both fears were entirely rational. Both would prove catastrophic.
Before Bismarck, the German-speaking lands were organised as the German Confederation — a loose association of 39 states dominated by Austria and Prussia, the two German great powers who couldn’t stand each other. The Confederation was designed at Vienna to be weak. Mackinder would later observe that the geographic heartland of Europe was also its most politically fragmented zone. That fragmentation was not an accident but a policy — maintained by Britain, France, and Russia, all of whom understood that a united Germany would upset everything.
Blood and Iron¶
Otto von Bismarck became Minister President of Prussia in 1862, at a moment when the Prussian parliament was blocking the king’s military budget. His response set the tone for everything that followed: “The great questions of the time will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions — that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 — but by iron and blood.” He meant it literally.
Bismarck’s method was warfare — short, decisive, and politically calibrated. He understood, as Clausewitz had taught, that war was the continuation of politics by other means. But where Clausewitz theorised, Bismarck executed. Three wars in seven years remade the map of Europe.
The Danish War (1864)¶
Bismarck’s first move was modest and calculated. The duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, with mixed Danish and German populations, provided a pretext. Prussia and Austria fought Denmark together — a brief, lopsided conflict that gave Bismarck two things: the duchies themselves, and a joint occupation arrangement with Austria that was designed from the start to produce friction. Bismarck was already planning the next war.
The Austro-Prussian War (1866)¶
This was the decisive stroke. Austria was the traditional leader of the German world — the Habsburg Empire had dominated Central Europe for centuries. Bismarck provoked a war over the administration of the conquered duchies, then crushed Austria in seven weeks at the Battle of Königgrätz. The Prussian army, equipped with breech-loading rifles and a railway-based mobilisation system, destroyed the Austrian force so thoroughly that Vienna sued for peace almost immediately.
What happened next revealed Bismarck’s genius. He could have imposed a punishing peace — annexing Austrian territory, demanding reparations, humiliating the Habsburgs. Instead, he offered generous terms. Austria lost no territory to Prussia directly and paid no indemnity. Bismarck’s reasoning was coldly strategic: he didn’t want to destroy Austria, he wanted to exclude it from German affairs. A humiliated Austria would seek revenge. A generously treated Austria might become an ally. It did.
The North German Confederation, dominated by Prussia, was formed immediately. The smaller German states north of the Main River were absorbed. Southern Germany — Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden — remained nominally independent but bound to Prussia by military treaties.
The Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871)¶
The final act required a common enemy, and Bismarck chose France. Napoleon III’s Second Empire had been watching Prussia’s rise with mounting alarm. Bismarck manufactured a diplomatic crisis over the Spanish succession — the infamous Ems Dispatch, in which he edited a telegram from the Prussian king to make it sound deliberately insulting to France — and waited for Paris to take the bait. France declared war on 19 July 1870.
It was over in six months. The Prussian-led German armies encircled and destroyed the main French forces at Sedan, captured Napoleon III himself, and besieged Paris. The southern German states, bound by their treaties and inflamed by French aggression, fought alongside Prussia. National sentiment did the rest. By the time the guns fell silent, the German Empire was a fait accompli — proclaimed in the enemy’s palace, cemented by shared blood.
France lost Alsace and most of Lorraine, paid an indemnity of five billion francs, and endured German occupation until it was paid. Unlike the Austrian settlement, this peace was punitive. It was Bismarck’s one great strategic error — not because the terms were unusually harsh by the standards of the day, but because they guaranteed that France would spend the next four decades preparing for revenge.
The Bismarckian System¶
What Bismarck built after unification was arguably more impressive than the unification itself. He had created the most powerful state in Europe, and now he had to prevent everyone else from combining to destroy it. His solution was a web of alliances so intricate that historians still argue about whether it was genius or madness.
The core problem was simple: Germany was too strong for any single European power to defeat, but not strong enough to defeat a coalition of two or more great powers attacking simultaneously from east and west. Bismarck’s nightmare — the cauchemar des coalitions, as he called it — was an alliance between France and Russia. Geography made this lethal. Germany would face a two-front war it could not win.
His solution had several interlocking parts:
Keep France isolated. France was the implacable enemy — the loss of Alsace-Lorraine guaranteed that. Bismarck’s entire alliance system was built, first and foremost, to ensure that France had no allies willing to fight alongside it against Germany.
Keep Russia close. The Three Emperors’ League (1873, renewed 1881) bound Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia in a conservative alignment. When Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans made this untenable, Bismarck negotiated the Reinsurance Treaty (1887) — a secret bilateral agreement in which Germany and Russia each promised neutrality if the other was attacked by a third power. It was diplomacy at its most cynical and its most effective.
Keep Austria-Hungary allied. The Dual Alliance of 1879 was Bismarck’s most durable creation — a defensive pact that would survive until 1918. Austria was no longer a rival but a partner, bound to Germany against the Russian threat. The generous peace of 1866 paid dividends for half a century.
Keep Britain disinterested. Bismarck deliberately avoided building a large navy, acquiring significant overseas colonies, or doing anything else that might provoke Britain into abandoning its policy of “splendid isolation.” A Britain that stayed out of Continental affairs was a Britain that couldn’t join a coalition against Germany.
Manage the Balkans without getting drawn in. Bismarck famously declared that the Balkans were “not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” He meant it. The entire region was a trap — a place where Austro-Russian rivalry could drag Germany into a war that served no German interest. His job was to mediate, not to participate.
The system worked. For twenty years after unification, there was no major European war. France remained isolated. Russia remained aligned. Britain remained aloof. The balance of power held — not because it was natural, but because one man was constantly adjusting it.
The Stradivarius and the Hammer¶
On 20 March 1890, Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck from office. The old chancellor was 75, the young emperor 31. Wilhelm wanted to conduct his own foreign policy — which he understood about as well as a child understands a loaded weapon.
What followed was a masterclass in how to destroy a strategic position through arrogance, impatience, and the inability to understand what you’ve inherited.
The Reinsurance Treaty was not renewed. Wilhelm’s advisors considered it incompatible with the Austrian alliance. Bismarck had managed the contradiction for years. His successors couldn’t be bothered. Russia, suddenly without a German guarantee, did exactly what Bismarck had spent two decades preventing: it turned to France. The Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 was Bismarck’s nightmare made real. Germany now faced potential enemies on two fronts.
The naval arms race began. Admiral Tirpitz convinced Wilhelm that Germany needed a world-class navy. The programme launched in 1898 did more to destroy German security than any enemy action. Britain, which had tolerated a powerful German army for decades, could not tolerate a powerful German navy. A strong German fleet wasn’t a deterrent — it was a provocation. Britain abandoned splendid isolation, settled its colonial disputes with France (the Entente Cordiale, 1904) and Russia (the Anglo-Russian Convention, 1907), and began coordinating military planning with Paris. The Triple Entente was born — not because Britain wanted to encircle Germany, but because Germany gave it no choice.
Colonial adventures multiplied. The Moroccan Crises of 1905 and 1911, the Baghdad Railway, the Boxer Rebellion intervention — Wilhelm lurched from one imperial adventure to another, each time alarming the other powers and achieving nothing of strategic value. Bismarck had understood that colonies were a distraction for a Continental power. Wilhelm collected them like stamps.
The alliance system rigidified. Where Bismarck had maintained flexibility — overlapping commitments, secret treaties, deliberate ambiguity — his successors locked Germany into a single alliance with Austria-Hungary. When Austria stumbled into a crisis with Serbia in July 1914, Germany had no room to manoeuvre. The famous “blank cheque” — Germany’s unconditional backing of Austrian action against Serbia — was the product of an alliance system that had lost all the subtlety Bismarck had built into it.
The result was World War I: exactly the two-front war against France and Russia that Bismarck had devoted his career to preventing, with Britain added to the coalition for good measure. Everything he’d warned against came to pass within 24 years of his dismissal.
The Question That Won’t Go Away¶
The “German Question” did not end in 1918. It didn’t end in 1945. It hasn’t ended yet.
The problem is structural, not personal. Germany occupies the most strategically significant territory in Europe. A weak Germany creates a power vacuum that invites intervention — as the Thirty Years’ War demonstrated. A strong Germany terrifies its neighbours — as two world wars proved. The challenge is finding a Germany that is strong enough to be stable but constrained enough to be safe.
World War II produced the most drastic solution: Germany was physically divided, occupied by four powers, and eventually split into two states. The Federal Republic was embedded in NATO and the European Community — institutions designed, in Lord Ismay’s famous formulation, to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” The Cold War froze the German Question in place. A divided Germany couldn’t dominate Europe even if it wanted to.
Reunification in 1990 reopened everything. A unified Germany was once again the largest economy in Europe, the most populous EU member, and geographically central to the continent. The anxiety returned immediately — François Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher both harboured deep reservations about reunification. The price of their consent was deeper European integration: the Maastricht Treaty, the euro, the tighter binding of Germany into multilateral structures. If Germany was going to be whole again, it would be whole inside a cage — however gilded.
For thirty years, this worked. Germany pursued what scholars call a “civilian power” identity — leading through trade, diplomacy, and institutional engagement rather than military force. The Bundeswehr was deliberately underfunded. Strategic dependence on the American security guarantee was not a bug but a feature. Germany’s neighbours could tolerate German economic dominance as long as German tanks stayed in their barracks.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and the arrangement cracked. Chancellor Scholz declared a Zeitenwende — a turning point — and committed 100 billion euros to military modernisation. Germany began delivering weapons to a war zone for the first time since 1945. The question Bismarck answered in 1871 is being asked again: what does a powerful Germany mean for Europe?
The Bismarckian Legacy¶
Bismarck left behind more than a unified state. He left a strategic template — and a warning.
The template is Realpolitik: the cold-eyed assessment of interests, the use of force calibrated to political ends, the management of alliances as instruments of restraint rather than aggression. At his best, Bismarck demonstrated that the most dangerous thing a powerful state can do is not to fight wars but to win them carelessly — to create enemies it didn’t need and problems it can’t solve. His Austrian settlement remains a textbook case of strategic magnanimity. His alliance system remains a textbook case of managing structural vulnerability through diplomatic creativity.
The warning is what happens when that discipline disappears. Wilhelm II inherited the most sophisticated diplomatic position in Europe and destroyed it through vanity, impatience, and a failure to understand that power requires restraint as much as it requires strength. The naval arms race, the lapsed Reinsurance Treaty, the blank cheque to Austria — each decision was individually defensible, and collectively they were suicidal.
The German Question persists because it is, at bottom, a geographic question. Germany sits where it sits. Its economy produces what it produces. Its population is what it is. No amount of institutional design can change the fact that a unified, prosperous Germany is the most powerful state on the European continent, and that this power makes everyone — including Germany — nervous. Bismarck understood this. His successors forgot it. Whether the current generation of German leaders can remember it may be the most important question in European geopolitics.
Sources & Further Reading¶
- Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life, Oxford University Press, 2011
- A.J.P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman, Vintage, 1967
- Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947, Penguin, 2007
- Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, Simon & Schuster, 1994 — Chapters 5–8 on Bismarckian diplomacy
- Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace, Profile Books, 2013
- Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present, Allen Lane, 2013