Perhaps one reason for this delay was the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire. This loose coalition of central European kingdoms arose during the 800s and 900s in an ad hoc fashion to meet a need for defensive coordination.
As the old joke explains, the Holy Roman Empire was not Holy, not Roman, and not an Empire. It was secular, organized for the purpose of defending Europe against various waves of Islamic invaders. It was Germanic, not Roman. It was not an empire, but rather a confederation whose emperor was an emperor in title only. The Holy Roman Emperor had to beg rather than dictate. He was sometimes reduced to shuttling back and forth between various kings and princes in an attempt to get them to unify around some plan.
So it was that in central Europe, in contrast to western Europe and to England, that the smaller local kingdoms and principalities retained more power, and efforts to create a centralized government over a larger territory were not fruitful.
The modern and postmodern reader should not retroject any concept of ‘Germany’ onto Europe prior to 1871. ‘German’ denoted, at most, a language and culture, but not a political or governmental unity. Indeed, the Germans were as likely to fight with each other as to ally with each other.
Even the commonalities of language and culture were tenuous. The regional differences in vocabulary and pronunciation meant that the dialects spoken in northern cities like Hamburg and Bremen were largely unintelligible to the southern cities like Salzburg and Innsbruck.
This is in sharp contrast to the degree of national unity which was reached, e.g., in England, where the residents of Manchester and the residents of London understood themselves to be part of the same nation, as historian William Hagen writes:
In 1789 the German-speaking lands were, with few exceptions, encompassed within a sprawling geopolitical entity antiquatedly named the The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. They were, strange as it may seem, divided into some three hundred and twenty-five separate principalities.
If the Germans lacked political and national unity, then they also lacked leaders to whom they could commonly pledge allegiance. The habits of the Empire meant that dozens of local dynasties had a greater impact on daily life than the one imperial dynasty. These many regional dynasties naturally worked to keep the emperor and his royal family irrelevant.
Comparing Germany with France, England, or Spain, the question arises: why did the medieval and early modern German lands not evolve, as these and many other European countries did, from the condition of a loosely strung together medical feudal kingdom into a stoutly forged centralized “national monarchy,” such as that of France’s mighty Louis XIV, the seventeenth-century “Sun King”? Premodern monarchies on the French or British model created unitary frameworks for subsequent political democratization, such as preliminarily began in England with the Puritan and Glorious revolutions of the seventeenth century and in France with the revolution of 1789.
The lack of centralized power did not seem to harm the Germans: it was during these centuries that they produced the great cultural artifacts which are universally acknowledged and admired.
Decades before there was a territory on the map called ‘Germany,’ Beethoven, whose music was chosen to represent all of Europe as the anthem of the EU, composed his works.
The long list of poets, mathematicians, composers, painters, architects, physicists, chemists, and philosophers who constitute not only Germany’s great achievements, but rather also humanity’s great achievements — many of them, if not most, lived at a time when there was no Germany.
Consider: Wolfgang Mozart, J.S. Bach, Johann Walter, Caspar David Friedrich, G.W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, G.W.F. Hegel, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Lucas Cranach the Younger, Hans Cranach, Augustin Cranach, Hans Holbein the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and many others.
Perhaps the Germans were at their best without Germany. The lack of a nation-state did not harm them, and perhaps even helped them.
But the lack of a German nation-state was a problem for the rest of the world. German culture and German political influence spread slower, and didn’t spread as far as they might otherwise have, because there was no overarching nation-state until 1871.
In Africa, in South America, and in southeast Asia, German colonization was microscopic compared to the geopolitical impact of England, France, Belgium, and other European nations.
Those regions of the world were denied advancements in culture, technology, and natural sciences. The Germans were productive and creative without a nation-state. But because the German nation-state emerged late and then was hobbled for much of the twentieth century, the rest of the world was unable to realize much of its potential.
