FURTHER DIFFERENTIATION IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

FURTHER DIFFERENTIATION IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS

National Differentiation (return to Contents)

The Counter-Reformation societies tended to freeze the process of differentiation because of the relations between their political regimes and a defensive Church. Not only Protestanism but also other modernizing trends were opposed, especially those that might foster the independence of universalistically oriented units from the core structure (government, aristocracy, and church). Universalistic units included the business elements, groups advocating more democratic political participation and intellectual groups, which by the eighteenth century were viewed with suspicion by the authorities. The heartland of the Counter-Reformation, the Italian city-states and the papacy, served a pattern-maintenance function in the general Eurpoean system. Spain became a militant spokesman for the pre-Reformation order of society, often seeming more Catholic than the Pope. In its secular social structure, Spain offered an example of a society frozen at an early modern level. Its intransigent traditionalism effectively isolated it from the rest of Europe.¹

Austria, held together by an aristocratic intermarriage and Roman Catholic allegiance, contrasted with Spain in its handling of ethnic heterogeniety. Although at first committed to the Counter-Reformation'the Austrian Hapsbutgs later accepted a limited religious pluralism established by the settlement of 1648.

¹ Amenico Castro, The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1954)

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They were anachronistic in their lack of concern with political nationality, but they played an integrativerole by maintaining a political structure that became ethnically and then religiously pluralistic.² Although the Empire eventually disintegrated under the centrifugal forces of nationalism, it was important over a longtransitional period. Indeed, as late as the Holy Alliance, Austria was the keystone of conservative integrationism in Europe. Furthermore, Austria played a role in mediating Russia's entry into the European system, a role encouraged by mutual conflict with Napoleonic France.

Germany resembled the Counter-Reformation center despite its religious diversity. Its small states were necessarily on the defensive also, threatened as they were with absorption by their larger neighbors. As in the Italian states, structural innovations were inhibited.³ The Prussian role in the European system, conditioned by the open eastern frontier, crystallized as a variant of the Protestant pattern. The Hohenzollern rulers had converted to Calvinism, whereas the bulk of the population adhered to Lutheranism. What emerged was a form of the Protestant national church that amalgamated the two elements.⁴ Calvinism, within the activist pattern of ascetic Protestantism, postulated the dominance inthe community of a religious elite, the predestined elect, setting it above even the faithful Protestant common people. It was also collectivist; it conceived any Calvinist community to be founded upon its religiously

ordained mission. This orientation - activist, authoritarian, and collectivist - fitted the Prussian monarchy as a boundary unit seeking to expand at the expense of the Slavs. Furthermore, it dovetailed with the Lutheranemphasis on the legitimacy of duly constituted authority in maintaining a given order and in checking disorder. Calvinism was suited to a forcible governing class, Lutheranism to its subjects. Along with the general flux of any frontier community, this religious situation helps to explain Prussian advances in rationalizing military and civil administration. Like most of Continental Europe, Prussia was organized about a land-owning aristocracy, the Junkers. The Junkers did not become a parliamentary opposition to royal absolutism as had the English gentry; instead they were a support of the monarchy, particularly in a military capacity. As in England, they transformed their traditional estates into commercial farming operations oriented toward the export of grain. The changes incorporated the old class structure, which was strengthened when the agricultural workers who migrated to the new industries were replaced by Polish

laborers.⁵

² James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1904).

³ Geoffrey Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (New York: Capricorn, 1963).

⁴ Christine Kayser, "Calvinism and German Political Life," doctoral dissertation, Radcliffe College, 1961.

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Before the nineteenth century, Prussia's advances were in governmental effectiveness; in both military and civic bureaucratic administration it set new standards for Europe.⁶ Prussia's military record made it the Sparta of modern Europe. All classes in its hierarchically organized population accepted a stringent conception of duty like the one formulated by Kant but duty specifically to the state. The state managed to combine an amenable lower group, a traditionally military landed gentry, and a not large but urban-oriented upper Burgertum in an effective operating organization.⁷ Gradually, it took advantage of the liberal-national movements in the German world rather than being threatened by them, a trend culminating in the career of Bismarck. Prussia's effectiveness as a sovereign state facilitated its political domination over other territories; it gained control of practically all northern Germany, foreshadowing the exclusion of Austria from leadership in the unification of Germany. When the German Empire was constituted in 1871, it included a large Roman Catholic minority (nearly one-third of the population), the reverse of the settlement of 1648, which had included a Protestant minority in the old Roman Catholic Empire.⁸ Prussia's expansion into other parts of Germany produced strains in the societal community, the religious diversity of which was not yet integrated in a pluralistic structure.

Coincidentally with Prussia's expansion, the new Germany became the site of the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. The economic buildup that established the political position of imperial Germany did not generally include any advance beyond that of early modern Europe. The change came slowly ⁹ considering how long the British example had been available. It centered not in the areas of Prussian efficiency but in the territories about the Rhineland, which were more Roman Catholic than Protestant.¹⁰ Until the spread of the industrial revolution to the Continent, Britain, Prussia, and France had been in the forefront of change. In the differentiation of the European system as a whole, primacy

⁵ See the account of Weber's early researches in Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1962); see also Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York: Wiley, 1964), chapters 4, 6.

⁶ Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958).

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Barraclough, op. cit.

⁹ See David Landes, The Rise of Capitalism (New York: Macmillan, 1966).

¹⁰ See Rainer Baum, "Values and Uneven Political Development in Imperial Germany," doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1967.

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of goal-attaining functions characterized the Northwest; new institutional developments and structural differentiation were emerging there. These processes increased the adaptive capacity of England, and to a lesser extent the other societies, particularly in economic terms.

For this same period, primacy of the more general adaptive function characterized Prussia. It had become the stabilizer of Europe's open eastern frontier. Furthermore, it had pioneered in the development of instrumentally effective collective organization, a generalized resource that has since been diffused throughout all functional sectors of modern societies.

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