As a study of the greatest middle class party of Imperial
Germany, "The Splintered Party" is inevitably, in its broadest
aspect, an inquiry into the weaknesses of liberalism in the Empire
of Bismarck and Wilhelm II. How did the National Liberals, the
dominant force in the Reichstag of the 1870s, become by 1914 a
spent and divided power? Professor White explores this question
from a new perspective, emphasizing regional circumstances as
primary agents of the party's decline. The resulting portrait
underscores the paradox of the National Liberals: a party with
strength in all areas of the Empire, a rarity before 1914, yet a
party whose impact was undermined by divisions among its regional
branches.
In "The Splintered Party" the former Grand Duchy of Hessen
serves as a testing ground where the regional foundations of
National Liberalism can be exposed. As Professor White points out,
the party's reversals on the Imperial plane after 1878--rejection
by Bismarck, electoral defeats, internal splits--not only ended its
early primacy in German affairs but also shifted political
initiative from Berlin and the Reichstag delegation to the National
Liberal branches in the states and provinces, which had maintained
unity, power, and alliances with local government in spite of the
upheaval above them. The consequences of this change become visible
through close examination of the political and social structure in
Hessen. On the regional level a liberalism based on the claim to
majority representation by the notables ("Honoratioren") of
bourgeois society, a creed no longer plausible in national
politics, remained defensible. Through the Heidelberg Declaration
of 1884 the National Liberals of the German Southwest attempted to
buttress this approach with an economic and social platform and,
simultaneously, to make it the impulse of the national party's
revival. But they succeeded only in deferring National Liberalism's
adjustment to democratic politics and in subordinating their
movement to the clash of regional and constituency interests. The
result was a chronically splintered party.
Against the backdrop of this main theme, White delineates
several additional features of the changing political and social
scene in Imperial Germany--the local power of the notables,
Bismarck's skills as a political manager, the character of agrarian
discontent and rural anti-Semitism, the steady advance of
socialism. The uniquely German element in National Liberalism's
failure is assessed in a concluding comparison with the development
of liberal politics in Britain and Italy.
General
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