Unified Germany; More a Great or Regional Power?

[King of Rome]

Was the unified German Empire (post-1870), in your opinion, more of a Regional or Great Power? (A Regional Power having the potential for military or economic hegemony in its' region, while a Great Power has global projection capabilities/ global influence.) For the sake of the question the Great Powers would be like Great Britain, Russia, and the USA while Regional Powers would be more like Mexico in Central America, Egypt in North Africa, or Sweden in the Baltic Area.

You do not have to stick to my parameters of the Great or Regional Powers as long as you explain your logic. I had assumed it was a more of a Regional Power, but after talking to a friend, I want to take a second look and am wondering what the consensus of this thread is.

 

[MSZ]

Compared to Britain, a regional power attempting to reach Great Powerhood. Compared to the USA, a Great Power all the way (though this is due to the USA being a regional power at best).

Problem is, that while Germany certainly had the capacityand potential to be a great power, its geography greatly limited its power projection ability. There was virtually no country in its neighborhood for it to projected as everyone else was a great/regional power by itself. Thus its direct influence on others was limited, while Britain, with its colonial empire could operate anwhere.

 

[King of Rome]

So you're saying it was in between becoming a Great Power?

 

[Blackfox5]

By your definition, Germany is certainly one of the Great Powers and was considered to be so by all contemporaries.

Any power that go the British and French to put aside their differences, and convince the Western liberal democracies to ally with autocratic Russia was definitely one of the great powers.

Germany was far above the class of Mexico, Egypt, or Sweden. Egypt was completely dominated by the British. Mexico was a third rate power. Sweden lacked the population and natural resources that it wasn't even a factor in European politics by 1870.

 

[King of Rome]

But as far as global projection or influence?

I was saying that Mexico, for instance, was the powerhouse in Central America and thereby a Regional Power. The Regional Powers' strength is relative to the region.

 

[Nassirisimo]

Difficult question. Undoubtedly, the Germany of 1914 was more powerful than the Britain of 1914, but while Britain could never hope to fight the Germans in a hypothetical continental war, the less powerful Britain could do more damage. While Germany's overseas forces could only be a irritant to the British Empire (though quite a persistent one, as the Far East fleet and Lettow-Vorbeck proved), Britain could box Germany into the continent. In short, Germany was perhaps the greatest power of her time, but only in regional terms. Globally, while she was impressive, she could not stand up to the big global player, Britain.

It really shows what kind of power Britain was. Its time as the greatest power was very short, and in some areas, never came (Britain never was the strongest power in terms of its land military). However, her global power projection capabilities had made up for her shortfalls and gave her an international position that she alone would not have merited.

 

[Snake Featherston]

The German Empire was able to dominate all of Europe if it put its mind to it. It was not, however, anything approaching a global power, and against the likes of France, the UK, and Russia it was playing entirely out of its league if it sought to match them on a global, multi-oceanic scale. The problem those powers had, however, was that their goals for hegemony ultimately focused around Europe, where Germany was the most powerful single state by the time its industrial revolution kick-started.

Germany illustrates the huge gap between a hegemon and the strongest *single state* in a region.

 

[King of Rome]

So I am getting that Germany's more of a regional power, albeit a very strong one?

 

[Snake Featherston]

So I am getting that Germany's more of a regional power, albeit a very strong one?

More like a continental power, but one with the misfortune to have direct land borders with no less than two World Powers and an inevitable tendency to engage in rivalry with a Third. Germany, if it had chosen to stick solely with Europe, might have actually had a very fair chance at European hegemony. Going from there to world hegemony was outside Germany's means. However in Europe it was an extremely powerful enemy, to a point where even when rather weaker than its enemies it did rather more to them than a similarly-sized power in a reasonable sense should have done.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Difficult question. Undoubtedly, the Germany of 1914 was more powerful than the Britain of 1914, but while Britain could never hope to fight the Germans in a hypothetical continental war, the less powerful Britain could do more damage. While Germany's overseas forces could only be a irritant to the British Empire (though quite a persistent one, as the Far East fleet and Lettow-Vorbeck proved), Britain could box Germany into the continent. In short, Germany was perhaps the greatest power of her time, but only in regional terms. Globally, while she was impressive, she could not stand up to the big global player, Britain.

It really shows what kind of power Britain was. Its time as the greatest power was very short, and in some areas, never came (Britain never was the strongest power in terms of its land military). However, her global power projection capabilities had made up for her shortfalls and gave her an international position that she alone would not have merited.

This was further compounded by Germany having the misfortune of sharing direct land borders with France (Europe's most advanced and generally one of its most militarized society), and Russia (the one European overland state properly considered a global as much as a European state). Germany had the impossible situation of facing no less than three enemies each of whom was an immovable object, but the advantage in being more concentrated in terms of power in Europe than any of its three enemies.

 

[King of Rome]

Then the potential power of Germany could define it as a Great Power, though it never got the chance due to its powerful neighbors? That's along the line of what I was thinking.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Then the potential power of Germany could define it as a Great Power, though it never got the chance due to its powerful neighbors? That's along the line of what I was thinking.

Germany was always a Great Power, but not in the same sense as its neighbors. Germany, like China and the USA was a continental power in that it was near-unstoppable in a particular area. What it did not have that the USA in particular does and China has an increasing potential to do is the ability for global power projection.

 

[King of Rome]

Ahh, I was operating under the assumption that a Great Power had certain characteristics and possessed a certain, set definition. That may sound confusing but I get it now, thank you.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Ahh, I was operating under the assumption that a Great Power had certain characteristics and was a set definition. That may sound confusing but I get it now, thank you.

It really didn't. Italy, for instance, was counted as a Great Power despite clearly not being in the rank of say, Austria or Japan. Great Power simply meant the states with the most concentrated power at any given time, though this power was never equally distributed. The UK is definitely the First Rank, France and Russia were First Rank, though the latter less so in the WWI timeframe in the wake of the 1905 Revolution. Japan and the USA were also both Great Powers, the former more militarily (primarily Naval), the latter economic, certainly NOT military. The Germans, by this standard, were more akin to China at its heyday or the USA in the Americas.

However they were up against powers whose interests were global, not merely European, and thus all at a higher tier than Germany itself.

 

[King of Rome]

I see, I see. Could you go into a bit more depth about the concentrated power?

(I understand if your are talking about the economic or military strength of nation, or how some nations excelled in some fields.)

 

[Snake Featherston]

I see, I see. Could you go into a bit more depth about the concentrated power?

(I understand if your are talking about the economic or military strength of nation, or how some nations excelled in some fields.)

Well, it's a matter of how the Germans worked v. their various rivals. France and the UK both had a strong naval-military tradition that viewed the world in a global sense. The French and English actually arguably fought a precursor of WWI against each other in the 18th Century and their wars were always fought on a global scale, while it's significant that all post-Napoleonic Anglo-French flashpoints were outside Europe. This meant that the French and the UK, while overall far stronger, had to dissipate their strength over a global scale and had thus relatively less room to maneuver in a short term but a nearly irresistible power in a long-term sense.

Russia, by comparison, has somewhat more comparison to Germany in that both were strong land powers without any real strategic ability to have more than a glorified coast defense force. However in contrast to Germany Russia had a huge eastern frontier in Siberia before Germany had completed its experiences with the 30 Years' War. RussGeria, however, had major problems translating the enormous overall potential it wielded into actual power for a number of reasons, some institutional, others geographically determined, others arising from a mixture of both reasons. It was, however, the first European power aside from Spain to truly qualify as Global.

In the WWI timeframe, however, Russia was in a deep crisis from its own successes in industrialization forcing it to start having to face its long-term weakness at that intermediary level between the imperial and the local, while it lost a war with Japan and never managed to fully dig out of the shock of the 1905 Revolution by the time of the outbreak of WWI. Germany exploited this and the mistake made to assume that a Russia that was badly weak at the start was always going to be thus was the truly disastrous mistake on the part of the Germans, and played a major role in what happened to them in WWII.

By comparison to these powers, Germany is weaker, but its weaker strength is geographically concentrated in Central Europe where it has the strategic position of interior lines, and due to the Prussian inheritance an army more of quantity than quality. What Germany chose to do, however, was to direct their goals by being the centerpoint of one European and one global alliance against three powers far stronger than it was in both wars. In this its power is sharply limited, but it is a very relative limit.

 

[King of Rome]

That's a bit to chew on right there. I am gonna go ahead and end this conversation for danger of leaving the pre-1900 realm, but I like what I am hearing here.

So if the global scale mentality can contribute to the Great Power Status, would Portugal in its' colonial heyday be considered one?

 

[Snake Featherston]

That's a bit to chew on right there. I am gonna go ahead and end this conversation for danger of leaving the pre-1900 realm, but I like what I am hearing here.

So if the global scale mentality can contribute to the Great Power Status, would Portugal in its' colonial heyday be considered one?

Most assuredly, yes. I would qualify this by noting prior to 1492 that there are no global powers, only various continental ones, but that in a modern sense the Global Powers were Spain, Portugual, the British, French, Russian, and US Empires, the last one only gradually becoming one in a primarily post-1900 phase more from the follies of its rivals than any native strength of its own. However this is a relative scale, and there were any number of pre-Columbian Exchange powers who had what by our standards is local influence far out of proportion to what they'd be by our standards.

 

[Vingilótë]

To be frank, I think this is a key example of why global projection should not be rated too highly when considering Great Power status. If a state such as Germany can be considered the strongest individual state in Europe, but lacks global reach, it shouldn't, in my opinion, be considered secondary to official Great Powers, particularly when for a state which exerts global reach, superpower might be a more appropriate term.

 

[King of Rome]

If you keep it at 1492 though, there were powers that could project beyond their home Continent before that date, for instance, Rome. Granted it was not global in our sense, for its time it spanned what many thought was the Western World.

This may sound dumb, Zmflavius, but Germany could challenge the Great Britain of Europe, but I doubt it could, in the time-frame of 1870-1900 conquer its' global holdings, or maintain such an empire.