Bismarck
Crankshaw, Edward
enough, with Mr. Howe's introductory essay, a discussion which fails to summarize even briefly the intriguing and substantial body of existing Kipling criticism (Mr. Howe makes no mention of...
...He believed that a strong king balanced by a consultative assembly and even a press (and mass suffrage) was a workable form of government...
...For all t h a t , Bismarck was not then, nor l a t e r , the reactionary he sometimes seemed to be...
...Howe's five dozen inclusions are good enough...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 37 Yet he also seemed, at times, to act as if he were the last believer in absolute kingship...
...and, after the French had been beaten in the war of 1870-71, he constructed a German "empire" dominated by Prussia and excluding Austria...
...Of course the correspondences to our age (even though some of the problems retain a curious resonance even a f t e r a c e n t u r y ' s time) are limited...
...The doctrine of "indirect responsibility" is tenable only if you take the view--and Mr...
...Crankshaw doesn't--that the disasters of August 1914 and after were somehow implicit, even foreordained, in the events Bismarck did manage: an internal contradiction Mr...
...Not surprisingly, there is no bibliography and only the skimpiest of chronologies...
...Howe's literary priorities than it does about the place of Rudyard Kipling in English literature: "[A] handful of Kipling's late stories rank with the great short fictions of our century, if not quite with those of Joyce and Lawrence, then certainly with those of Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor...
...But the dynastic principle, as noted above, was weakening: already showing those strains that were to destroy it forever within a few decades...
...He blamed her, for instance, for the pressure brought against William I to avoid the use of heavy siege guns against Paris in the war of 1870-71--a compunction that, to his mind, prolonged the war, increased its political risks for everyone, and for that matter was not any more humane than the alternative: starvation...
...Kennan shows ---to lure Russia into a military alliance at Germany's expense...
...But inasmuch as William II reversedthe policies that Bismarck had successfully urged upon his grandfather--settling on the coui-se of hostility to Russia that Bismarck had worked so hard to avoid--it is extravagant to argue, as Mr...
...He wanted a strong German state under a strong, but not autocratic, king...
...Edward Crankshaw's militantly anti-Bismarckian views are not utterly unfounded...
...2]_ INSTEAD OF REGULATION: ALTERNATIVES TO FEDERAL REGULATORY AGENCIES Edited by Robert W. Poole, Jr...
...He was portrayed as a diabolical schemer and cynic, thwarting French destiny and tampering with Russian interests in Bulgaria...
...Any age is fortunate if some masterly, impartial, and clearsighted s t r a t e g i s t understands enough of its points of strain to keep it in repair...
...and his Balkan policy was only directed to the avoidance of great-power rivalries that could become a death trap for all: as ultimately, after Bismarck's day, they did...
...and in the absence of a better and more sympathetic attempt .to anthologize Kipling, Mr...
...In fact, Bismarck had no special animus against France...
...and of this fact Bismarck was well aware...
...Bismarck and his conservative contemporaries sought to preserve stability in an inherently unstable environment...
...and here, I am glad to report, he has not done a half-bad job...
...Russia's pan-Slavic agitators yearned to set up a "greater Bulgaria" and to control access to the Black Sea...
...At least that is what he thought he was doing, at the time...
...BISMARCK Edward Crankshaw / The Viking Press / $19.95 Edwin M. Yoder, Jr...
...But in this Indian summer legitimism was being undercut by industrial development and the middle-class parliamentary liberalism associated with it...
...He was, however, a formidably wise, rational, and skilled diplomatist...
...Crankshaw, usually so judicious, has in this case allowed Gladstonian liberal moralism to run away with the story...
...He first emerged from obscurity when the 1848 uprisings were shaking the thrones of Europe and the Prussian king was on the point of giving in to the Berlin mob...
...Confessing his incurable sympathy for England and t h e English to a friend in 1862, Otto yon Bismarck added, almost plaintively, "but they will not let us love them...
...Bismarck correctly saw it as his task to maintain a civil and stable relationship with both Russia and Austria, all the while r e s t r a i n i n g their Balkan quarrels and refusing to allow Germany to be drawn into them...
...But they were wrong, all wrong, and at last we were going to get government off our backs...
...but today, each season sees one or two imaginative additions to the growing list of Viking Portables--and though The Portable Kipling could certainly have been done better, it still deserves to be greeted with genuine praise...
...Unfortunately, one of these spoilers could not be easily dismissed...
...One could imagine a less perfunctory choice of Kipling's verse, but Mr...
...To this end he drew upon the vestigial dynastic relationship between the German emperor, the emperor of Austria, and the Tsar of Russia to create the "three-emperors' l e a g u e " of 1871...
...Howe's Viking Portable will do quite nicely...
...One could imagine a really worthwhile Portable Raymond Chandler or Flannery O'Connor, for instance...
...Bismarck, remembering one of the recurrent terms of scorn that mark his reminiscences, would doubtless find it an example of that "English sentiment" that seemed to him so inappropriate to rational statecraft...
...Here is why: The continuing decay of the Ottoman (Turkish) empire as the manager of the Balkans and keeper of the Straits under English tutelage left both Russia and Austria with tempting prey...
...His especial target, when muttering about this "English" or "petticoat" influence, was the Princess Augusta, the liberal wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia and one of Queen Victoria's far-flung brood...
...The press had said it couldn't be done...
...Bismarck was its last patron, the last European statesman to use it successfully as a counterweight to nationalism...
...Certainly he had an inkling that the cocky young kaiser, William II, would bring Germany to a bad end...
...Did Bismarck, then, create, or did he merely channel, the force of German national s t a t i s m - - M r . Crankshaw's b&e-noire...
...eight years later...
...Ten years ago, the Viking Portable Library was beginning to look like a thing of the past, and speculation such as this doubtless would have been idle and futile...
...This strategic vision and the political skill to apply it successfully are given to few in the measure Bismarck possessed them...
...Eliot, Randall JarreU, George Orwell, Angus Wilson, and V.S...
...Lexington Books / $25.95 David Asman Hearken back to those halcyon days immediately following the election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States...
...There were no puny microstates, swarming and fulminating at a world assembly...
...Bismarck was no paragon...
...This, Bismarck understood, was m be prevented at all cost...
...a diverse assortment of leftish critical cliche's...
...A f t e r 1871 the German empire under Bismarck was a satisfied entity...
...Crankshaw at times admits...
...For all its faults, The Portable Kipling is a more than welcome reminder that Viking-Penguin is once again looking to breathe some muchneeded life into the Viking Portable series...
...Pritchett, to name the most obvious examples) and which contains only a mere handful of disjunct biographical details...
...He was neither a legitimist, nor a believer in feudal obligation or divine right, but a pragmatic supporter of monarchy...
...The Russian panSlavs were natural allies of the French chauvinists...
...But that was not to his purpose...
...As the principal founder of the greater German empire, as conqueror of Austria (1866) and of France (1870), he created the state that Crankshaw as so many before him views as the incubator of twentieth-century German militarism...
...Crankshaw's intense disapproval of Bismarck's undoubted talents for intrigue and prevarication, such cob orful impressionism diverts the reader ,from the complexities of the European situation and from the symmetries of Bismarck' s diplomacy...
...Crankshaw does, that Bismarck was "indirectly" the source of the calamities that were to overwhelm the old Europe in the twentieth century...
...Crankshaw doesn't bother to resolve...
...Whether a prolongation of this highly civilized arrangement would have made for stability, given the ambitions of the French and the Russians, or merely provided a tempting territorial menu for their consumption, is a question Mr...
...Chesterton...
...But the regulatory hamstrings which had been holding back productivity in this country for well over a decade were at last going to be cut...
...But the main elements are familiar...
...The fabric, for all its outward brilliance, was rotten...
...Barely audible above this din of celebration were the warnings from a few d i s t a n t observers...
...Certainly, reasonable men could still differ about specific tax David Asman, former editor of Manhattan Report on Economic Policy, is a free-lance writer living in New York...
...Great-power diplomacy in this last period of relative European stability before the cataclysmic wars of the twentieth century provides one of the great laboratories of historical study...
...Read alone, Mr...
...It was Bismarck, this tall, outwardly phlegmatic Prussian squire with a weakness for poetry, mild h y s t e r i a , hot baths, and f r u i t trees, who braced the king and saved the Prussian system from constitutionalism and liberalism...
...But in Crankshaw's pages Bismarck is subjected to all the quibbles, qualms, and complaints...
...The legitimist principle was brilliantly applied by Metternich while he survived...
...and by republicanism...
...But when combined with Mr...
...After the final defeat of Napoleon, it became the objective of the Allied powers at the Congress of Vienna (1815) to recork the bottle of nationalism and revolution, to demote Napoleon's upstart monarchs, and to resuscitate the dynastic principle ("legidmism") as the fundamental principle of European order...
...The alternative to Bismarck's architecture, at least on paper and to the extent that history discloses missed alternatives, was a continuation of the multiplicity of vest-pocket German principalities, ruled by various kings, princelings, and dukes, all mildly dominated by Austria...
...As for France its " r e v a n c h i s t " (revisionist or revenge-seeking) elements intrigued tirelessly after 1870 --how tirelessly Mr...
...I n d e e d , this common view of Bismarck happens to be historical nonsense...
...by nationalism...
...Even if Mr.,Crankshaw is right in condemning it as Europe's chief mischief-making force, it is not easy to see how Bismarck h i m s e l f could have suppressed it...
...Howe makes no mention of the important contributions of T.S...
...It was a time of unabashed gloating by conservatives of every stripe...
...Austria, a multi-national empire embracing and aspiring to be the patron of rival Slavic principalities, contended b i t t e r l y with the Russians for gain and advantage as Turkey faded...
...And, finally, diplomatists of the old school worked from shared values and established civilities that one would be h a r d - p r e s s e d to discover in the world's turbulent affairs today...
...This thwarted affinity, which was to end in two great world wars, is not the subject of this biography of the Iron Chancellor...
...and a passage which tells us a great deal more about Mr...
...To call him an "entrenched defender of the status quo [with] . . . the armament of the revolutionary and the temperament of a Jacobin" is more colorful than exact--or meaningful...
...Indeed Mr...
...And when he went, the balance was soon destroyed...
...Wait and see," they cautioned...
...Cousinship among the principal monarchies still had some meaning, however a t t e n u a t e d the dynastic principle...
...He did not live to 'witness the culmination of the strategic problems and trends he managed and manipulated for almost thirty years...
...Howe has chosen 28 short stories and 58 poems as illustrative of Kipling at his best...
...Instability is, of course, l a t e n t in any balance of power (or " c o r r e l a t i o n of f o r c e s , " as Soviet jargon has it...
...Crankshaw's biography is full of interesting subjective judgments about Bismarck's c h a r a c t e r ( " a n a r t i s t above a l l . . , a nihilist of genius . . . philistine master of a parvenu kingdom"), Perhaps they are of value...
...and it was to this objective that he bent his extraordinary talents...
...Instead, we get an elaborate and forced skein of Kipling-Freud parallels...
...In his memoirs he analyzes the younger William's defects of character with a bluntness not far short of lkse-majestd...
...Crankshaw is indignant at Bismarck's failure to t r e a t the Berlin liberals with sympathy, or even common courtesy...
...Between 1862 and 1870, with the measured use of Prussian military prowess, he put together a union of the North German states...
...and naturally they worked full time to discredit him, even at times with forged documents...
...Naturally, Bismarck was enemy number one to these factions...
...is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and former editorial page editor of the Washington Star...
...policies or spending cuts...
...The academicians had said it couldn't be done...
...and the Bismarckian order, brilliantly and sympathetically analyzed by George F. Kennan in his recent The Decline of Bismarck's European Order (Princeton, 1979), required vigilant maintenance...
...Admittedly, he has found room for three insignificant occasional pieces and four children's tales while leaving out such key stories as " 'They,' . . . . Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,' . . . . Wireless,' . . . . An Habitation Enforced," and " 'Loveo'-Women.'" The problematic late stories are adequately represented, though (both "Dayspring Mishandled" and "The Gardener" are here, for instance), and there are eight of the Indian stories as well...
...Crankshaw does not consider...
...Bismarck's world was cozy and manageable by comparison...
...Kennan's far more serious and scrupulous study (which is only partially about Bismarck) is a necessary antidote to Crankshaw...
...And nothing would be more welcome in conservative circles than a Portable devoted to that most anthologizable of great authors, G.K...
...Looking back from a century's perspective, the study of the Bismarckian system seems to this reviewer, as to George F. Kennan, of an importance too obvious to need laboring...
...Chicago economist George S t i g l e r - - w h o knows more about the regulatory apparatus of this country than any man alive--had this to say shortly, a f t e r Reagan was inaugurated: "I don't expect Reagan to be as good as Carter was on 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982...
...In an age of nationalism ("that beer-hall enthusiasm," as Bismarck scornfully called it) German nationalism was probably irrepressible...
...that an enlightened Gladstonian conscience can bring to bear upon a master of Realpoli'tik...
...They gradually wore away the preference of the Tsar himself for the German connection by harping upon Russia's holy mission arid destiny in the Balkans...
...No prize for picking out the planted axiom in that statement...
...Crankshaw's book would tend to give the unwary or uninformed reader the mistaken impression that Bismarck operated in a geopolitical vacuum, so free of constraints and conditions that most of the emergent problems were of his making...
...Nor has the list of possible authors been exhausted by their recent efforts, either...
...There were no revolutionary ideologies of paramount importance, unless pan-Slavism be counted one...
...Bismarck's extraordinary term as chancellor ended in 1890 and he died Edwin M. Yoder, Jr...
...J . F . Powers's best work would fit handily into a single volume, as would Colette's...
...At the microscopic level European diplomacy and statecraft in the Bismarckian period were enormously complicated: more complicated than Mr...
Vol. 15 • October 1982 • No. 10
