quite incapable of playing a larger role in international affairs. This seems, perhaps, too harsh a judgement in the light of Prussia’s various strengths: its educational system, from the parish schools to the universities, was second to none in Europe; its administrative system was reasonably efficient; and its army and its formidable general staff were early in studying reforms in both tactics and strategy, especially in the military implications of ‘railways and rifles’.39 But the point was that this potential could not be utilized until the internal-political crisis between liberals and conservatives was overcome, until there was firm leadership at the top, in place of Frederick William IV’s vacillations, and until Prussia’s industrial base had been developed. Only after 1860, therefore, could the Hohenzollern state emerge from its near-second-class status.
Yet, as with many other things in life, strategical weakness is relative; and, compared with the Habsburg Empire to the south, Prussia’s problems were perhaps not so daunting. If the period 1648–1815 had seen the empire ‘rising’ and ‘asserting itself’,40 that expansion had not eliminated the difficulties under which Vienna laboured as it strove to carry out a Great Power role. On the contrary, the settlement of 1815 compounded these difficulties, at least in the longer term. For example, the very fact that the Austrians had fought so frequently against Napoleon and emerged on the winning side meant that they required ‘compensations’ in the general shuffling of boundaries which occurred during the negotiations of 1814–15; and although the Habsburgs wisely agreed to withdraw from the southern Netherlands, southwestern Germany (the Vorlande), and parts of Poland, this was balanced by their large-scale expansion in Italy and by the assertion of their leading role in the newly created German Federation.
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