Otto von Bismarck
The Prussian who unified Germany through three engineered wars, then kept Europe peaceful for two decades with an alliance system that collapsed after his dismissal.
Otto von Bismarck was the Prussian statesman who forged the German Empire out of a patchwork of rival states and then spent two decades keeping the peace he had won. Minister-president of Prussia from 1862 and imperial chancellor from 1871 to 1890, he was the supreme practitioner of Realpolitik, politics judged by power and results rather than by ideology or sentiment. His notorious formula was that the great questions of the age would be settled 'not by speeches and majority votes, but by iron and blood.' He is the rare figure who mastered both halves of statecraft: winning wars to build a state, then disciplining himself to preserve it.
Three wars, one empire
Bismarck did not so much fight wars as engineer them, each designed to isolate a single opponent and to stop the instant its political purpose was served. In 1864 Prussia and Austria jointly seized Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark. In 1866 he turned on his partner: the Austro-Prussian War, decided in seven weeks, expelled Austria from German affairs and left Prussia master of the north. That victory birthed the North German Confederation of 1867, a Prussian-led union that was the future empire in embryo. The capstone came in 1870, when Bismarck edited the Ems Dispatch to provoke France into declaring war. The Franco-Prussian War shattered the French Second Empire, and on 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the assembled German princes proclaimed King Wilhelm I of Prussia as German emperor. France, stripped of Alsace and part of Lorraine, would nurse that humiliation for two generations.
The satisfied power
Having built the empire, Bismarck reversed course. Germany, he insisted, was now a 'satiated' state that wanted no more land, only stability. His overriding fear was the cauchemar des coalitions, the nightmare of coalitions: a hostile alliance of the other great powers forming against Germany, with a two-front war the consequence he most dreaded. His answer was to keep France permanently without friends. The machinery grew elaborate: the League of the Three Emperors (1873) linking Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia; the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary (1879); the Triple Alliance adding Italy (1882); and, when Balkan rivalry threatened to force him to choose between Vienna and St Petersburg, the secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia (1887) pledging mutual neutrality. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878 he cast himself as the 'honest broker,' refereeing the Balkans to keep the powers off each other's throats. In the Kissingen Dictation of 1877 he had spelled out the aim without illusions: a Europe in which every great power except France would need Germany and be steered away from coalitions against it. At home he blunted the socialists by pioneering the world's first modern welfare state. The alliance system was almost too clever to survive its author: a web of overlapping and half-contradictory commitments that only Bismarck's judgment could hold in balance.
The unraveling
In March 1890 the young and headstrong Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed his seventy-four-year-old chancellor, a scene the London magazine Punch captured as 'Dropping the Pilot.' His successors, craving simpler arrangements, let the Reinsurance Treaty lapse almost at once and traded Bismarck's careful ambiguity for a blunter reliance on Austria-Hungary alone. Cut loose from Berlin, Russia drifted toward the one power Bismarck had labored to keep it away from: republican France. The Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 created exactly the encirclement he had dreaded. Within a generation German war planning had narrowed to a single desperate gamble, the Schlieffen Plan, which assumed Germany must knock France out fast before wheeling east against Russia. Bismarck had built a system to make that war unnecessary; his heirs dismantled it and were then left to plan for the war it had been designed to prevent.
Late in life Bismarck is said to have predicted that the next great European war would be touched off by 'some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.' In the summer of 1914, sixteen years after his death, it was, when a Serbian gunman's shots in Sarajevo pulled the taut alliance chains through to their end.