INCUBATING PLURALIST FEDERALISM
PART 2 OF LESSONS FROM THE GERMAN “HOMETOWNS”
To begin, just a reminder, from the introductory instalment to the series, that in the spirit of avoiding the temptation to “read” Walker’s book overly conveniently as a case study in my theory of the phenotype wars, I’ll be quoting him at length, letting his words speak for themselves, in this series.
In his impressive history on the matter1, Mack Walker argues that the German hometowns, as he’s defined them, between 1648 and 1871, took the particular pluralist federal character which they did due to the specific conditions of the Peace of Westphalia, which resolved the decades long religious wars that had just previously crippled Europe. He distinguishes the hometowns from the imperil towns; the latter were few and more directly under the influence of the empire.
The manifestation of the Holy Roman Empire that emerged from the Westphalian Peace was conceived in such a way as to optimize the autonomy of the German hometowns under its imperial umbrella. The 1648 treaty had imposed conditions of decentralization on the German region and left the Empire in a constrained condition. Consequently, not only was the Empire unlikely to intervene in the self-governing affairs of the hometowns, but where it did so, it was prone to intervene on behalf of defending hometown autonomy. In this way, Walker characterizes the Empire as the incubator of hometown self-rule. Here are several passages that sketch out the situation.
The constitutional strength of the Holy Roman Empire is easy to mistake for weakness because it protected weak polities and even insisted on their weakness; it has regularly confounded analysts because of the close working relation of this kind of strength with the absence of power. It was built not on internally developed force but on a remarkable mechanism for the restraint and limitation of force; its stability came from the perpetual frustration of disruptive energy and aggressive power. The principle permeated the Empire.
German soldiers and princes moved from the camp of one great power to the camp of another in defense of their liberties -- making sure nobody could get hold of them. By this process the German principalities had been able to avoid being swallowed up by greater powers or by one another, and so survived in a condition of individual weakness. The Treaty of Westphalia, by providing that the states of the Empire might freely make and change independent alliances in defense of their liberties, and by including the European great powers as guarantors, afforded a mechanism for defending the status quo that had already been tested in a war of stalemate.
…it was clear that the situation codified at Westphalia was not just an agreement, it was a fact of European political life, in which two basic principles bearing on Germany intertwined. First, the emperor could exert power and influence enough to protect the status quo from upset generated within or without, but not enough to achieve full sovereignty within Germany for himself; and second, this apparently delicate balance would be kept in constant adjustment by the working of the principle of the balance of power, on a European scale, with a German fulcrum.
German principalities shifted political stance with a kind of unconscious precision as threats developed now from one quarter, now from another. The regularity with which the mechanism worked in one circumstance after another made it seem almost a mystically self-governing, perpetual motion of politics. The resiliency of the system lay in its capacity to hold state power below the threshold where the system might be overturned. It brought individual wills into its service, into the service of restraining one another. Its logic was circular.
Adolphe Thiers really addressed critical issues of contemporary politics when he brandished the Treaty of Westphalia before the Corps Législatif, Napoleon III, the German states, and Bismarck on the third of May, 1866: "I beg the Germans to reflect that the highest principle of European politics is that Germany shall be composed of independent states connected only by a slender federative thread. That was the principle proclaimed by all Europe at the Congress of Westphalia; it was the principle adopted when the great Frederick signed the Peace of Teschen on the Bavarian Succession matter."
So, while at least to some extend it was a matter of practicality and diplomacy, nonetheless, over the centuries following the Westphalian Peace, the relation between the Holy Roman Empire and the German hometowns came to be effectively one of a loose federalism. This relationship was aided by what Walker emphasizes as a key uniqueness of these German hometowns. There certainly were aspects that were common across many or most. But more important was the tendency for them to exhibit political and cultural distinctiveness in their structure and practices. Indeed, Walker emphasizes that it was precisely such uniqueness that made them “hometowns,” and which militated against any aspirations toward centralized regulation of or rule over them.
…the German hometown Bürger was not a pale, underdeveloped imitation of the bourgeois who figures so prominently in modern European history; he was something quite different and even antithetical in principle, a distinction badly garbled by the term "petty bourgeois."
The important condition for reading or writing about the home towns collectively is always to remember that they lived individually. When they ceased to do so they stopped being home towns.
…defense of freedom lay in political variety and autonomy based upon German customs and German history.
…the German home towns flourished. They developed their bewildering structural variety precisely because they had so little to do with "alien goods and situations" that would invite the attention of administrators, tax collectors, and Roman lawyers.
…the same static conditions that allowed the dissimilarity of forms filled the forms with very similar patterns of communal life.
Constitutional statutes of the communities usually came out of that kind of irregular intervention ad hoc, and reflected the particular situations that had brought the intervention about; and intervention usually served, as subsequent chapters will show, to reinforce the communities' existing character against those who sought to change or violate it.
Freedom from economic penetration from a larger outside world was as important for the preservation of the home town's autonomy and integrity as freedom from political penetration was, and the two usually went together.
In emphasizing the distinctiveness of the hometowns from each other, another important dimension of the story is illustrated by Walker in the qualities that distinguished the hometowns from both the countryside and the city – the latter two which, he points out, have an interesting number of common qualities.
For the German hometown community of early modem times, the upper limit appears to lie at about ten thousand population, perhaps fifteen. That would mean a maximum of about two thousand Bürger or communal citizens – not a remarkable number for one to come to know in the course of a lifetime living, trading, and worshipping together with the rest, but close to the limit of familiarity – it would be hard to encompass more than that into a single view in which each still kept its own face and individuality.
…the home towns of the individualized country were communities free of outside commerce and distinct from the rural countryside. They were neither city nor village, but a kind of polity quite different from both; and city and countryside, from the communal perspective, had far more in common with each other than either had with the home town.
The home town needed no class of mobile, dismissible, unskilled labor of the kind that found place in city and countryside.
Both rich and poor were attracted to large towns and were less likely to be excluded from them than from the home towns where the communal citizen's standards ruled.
…in the countryside political authority was usually exercised by an officer of the state or of a noble, who was no part of the community he governed but rather an outside professional full-time governor, in that sense comparable to the patrician rulers of the cities, but unlike the civic leadership of the hometown communities.
The hometownsman was more likely than either peasant or city dweller to live in the place where he had been born. Both city and countryside experienced greater mobility of population than the small town; at any rate that was the case when figures permitting this kind of analysis were developed in the mid-nineteenth century, and it fits the social state of affairs for two centuries before that.
…the larger a city became, the more its mobility of population was like that of the village; and the smaller the village, the more like the city, with the middle-sized town showing maximum stability of membership. City and country had lesser stability; and their politics and administration, also in many ways resembling one another more than either resembled the home town, reflected the difference.
The hometownsman was far more intimately involved with the total life of his community than either the city dweller or the peasant because all the spheres of his activities fell within the same boundary walls, and so did the activities of all his neighbors. The peasant lived close to his neighbors, but economically he was on his own and political power he had none; the city dweller lived by exchange, but among people who were not his neighbors and cousins and whose polity he did not actively share; the hometownsman lived by exchange among people he intimately knew and whose polity he fully shared.
Further on the matter of the uniqueness of the hometowns, Walker says:
It will often be necessary to separate out the spheres of community life – political, economic, and social – in order to describe them, just as the states developed a kind of legal cloverleaf when they came to judge and legislate the community. But the hometownsman hardly distinguished the spheres, and the community in turn regarded him as one personality: citizen, workman, and neighbor.
No hometown constitution was quite like any other, but the communities behaved very much alike. One handy theoretical way of saying just this would distinguish between structure and function: hometown institutions were structurally different but functionally similar.
…each community had a real interest in its own formaI uniqueness; the more eccentric its institutions, the greater the advantage of those familiar with it. That was an important factor for the preservation of structural diversity.
So, the uniqueness of the German hometown was not merely a product of organic flourishing under the incubator umbrella of the Empire’s tenuous influence and capacity for homogenization, but that uniqueness became a functional advantage for those of the hometown, and served thereby as a filter for vetting and excluding those strangers who might otherwise be able to infiltrate the town more easily. As noted above, commerce, particularly in the form of the peddler and the foreign merchant, and as we’ll see also the indigent laborer, were all regarded with distrust by the hometowns and not welcomed in them.
This cultural, functional vetting then was valuable as friction-inducing obstacles to such pernicious spatializing influences.2 But this is leading us into our next discussion, of what exactly constituted the autonomy and pluralism of these hometown organic communities. That will be addressed in the next instalment.
So, if you want to keep up on this series, with its case study of a long battle in the phenotype wars, please…
And if you know of anyone else who might be interested in these topics, please…
Meanwhile: be seeing you.
Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 (2015, Cornell University Press).
New readers, unfamiliar with my description of the phenotype wars, between spatials and temporals, might want to read my new book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.