Germany
The peripheral central-European power whose rise organized the twentieth century
Also known as: Germany, German, Germans, Germany's, West Germany
Germany is, for Quigley, the textbook peripheral state of Western Civilization in its Age of Conflict — the late-industrializing power whose two bids for hegemony in 1914 and 1939, and post-1945 partition, organize a large fraction of Tragedy and Hope (T&H 15).
Quigley's Framing
Quigley reads Germany through the civilizational lens: a peripheral region of Western Civilization that industrialized rapidly after 1871, accumulated grievances against the older core powers, and twice attempted to reorganize Europe by force. The peculiar German political culture — bureaucratic, militarized, and saturated with romantic nationalism — is treated as a product of the long fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire and of Prussia's nineteenth-century state-building. Throughout T&H Germany functions as the principal antagonist of the Anglo-American system, but Quigley is careful to distinguish the Wilhelmine, Weimar, Nazi, and post-war German polities as analytically separate cases.
Strategic Role
The German question — how to integrate a continental industrial colossus into a stable European order — is, on Quigley's reading, the central strategic problem of the first half of the twentieth century. First World War and Second World War are framed as successive failures of that integration; the Treaty of Versailles and the Munich Agreement as two opposite mishandlings of the same underlying issue. After 1945 the problem is resolved, partially and provisionally, by the partition of Germany along the Cold War line and the embedding of West Germany in North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Economic Community. Quigley credits the post-war Anglo-American architects with finally getting the German question approximately right.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 15 Quigley
Germany — the peripheral central-European power whose rise organized the twentieth century.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 268 Quigley
The two German bids for hegemony, in 1914 and 1939, were both essentially attempts to solve the same structural problem of European order.