German Sovereignty Quotes
He was one of the first democratic politicians of Germany who argued for rapprochement between France and Germany and may have been the first to suggest a European Union. Most of the world was very distrustful of German nationalism, and Stresemann presented one of the positive aspects of it. He died of a stroke in 1929 and the political vacuum was eventually filled by Hitler and the Nazis as the Weimar Republic was short lived. As democratic as Stresemann was, he still was preoccupied with German territorial control. Germany’s aggression in WWI led to a peace treaty that fixed borders that were always contested by Germany. The German position was that if there was an area or France, Poland, or other country where there was a community of German speaking people, then that area should be a part of Germany. This was one of the main reasons for Germany’s aggression on WWII.
Metternich, the Chancellor of Austria under the Emperor was a very gifted and imposing diplomat. However he had little vision of the inevitable progress towards democracy and the liberalization of and limitation of the power of monarchs. His advice was on how to be better autocratic monarchs, not on how to reform and he saw no need for absolute monarchy to reform. He advocated press censorship and saw the press as a major enemy. See {630724}. The result was most of the monarchs who took his advice ended up being forced from power or required to cede much of their powers and “rights”. The English monarchs, after their disastrous civil war and its aftermath, in contrast, often led the reform to a constitutional monarchy where the powers and rights of the monarch was defined and limited by a Constitution. Victoria was one of the greatest of the English reforming monarchs, and saw Metternich’s conservatism as responsible for most of the disasters that befell the crowned heads of Europe while she had no such problems. See {607340} for Metternich’s negative view of Constitution.
