Alternate History German Confederation With Ecclesiastical States

[Basileus_Komnenos]

Supposing that in order to return some of the old status quo a proposal is made to restore some of the old Ecclesiastical States in Germany that were part of the old HRE. What would be the effects of these states still being a part of Germany? How would social and religious dynamics work?

How would these states react to calls for German Unification?

 

[Nuraghe]

Supposing that in order to return some of the old status quo a proposal is made to restore some of the old Ecclesiastical States in Germany that were part of the old HRE. What would be the effects of these states still being a part of Germany? How would social and religious dynamics work?

How would these states react to calls for German Unification?

if at the congress of Vienna they were to decide to restore some ecclesiastical territory it would certainly be one of the 3 former prince electors ( after all, it was the area where it would have made more sense and at the same time there would have been fewer protests for it ) the most probable would be Mainz ( archbishop and primate of Germany ) I also suspect that he would have been tremendously pro-Habsburg ( therefore Prussia would have had further opposition in the Rhineland ) and I think that with regard to the feeling of unification he could have two options ( the first would support a federal Germany that arises from the development of of the confederation, the other in case of situations similar to Otl would be an equal reaction to the papal state in Italy ) furthermore it also depends on the ability of the ecclesiastical state to make its population faithful and knowing how to dose the policies to be used to appease the aspirations of all the actors ( between neighboring powers and the local population ) but considering that from 1820 onwards, the Rhenish Catholics were more liberals among their co-religionists ( in fact the base of the ultramontanists was more in Bavaria / Austria than along the Rhine ( it was the Prussian policies that brought this thought to the area in the long run ), I find it difficult to get by during the reactionary period without problems of any kind

 

[Grey Wolf]

I think that if they are going to bring back Mainz, they would bring back Trier too. Prussia is not going to like this, so you may end up with a Prussian Netherlands, or even Prussian absorption of all of Saxony.

A Prussian Netherlands (ex-Austrian, future OTL Belgium) is going to upset the Dutch, but the main ones pushing for rewards for the Dutch are the British and the only people who can give territory seized in the last couple of decades back to the Dutch are the British, and they've done that as far as they are willing. They could compensate the Dutch with formal dominion over the presumed Portuguese East Indies (which would not happen in OTL until later in the century), and maybe Portugal gets a rose-coloured strip on a map decades in advance, showing Portugal as sovereign from Angola to Mozambique, though with no reality in the the middle at this juncture.