Читать книгу Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol V - Hal Draper - Страница 18

The second incident that drove the Frankfurt Assembly towards a conflict with Russia is more confusing from our vantage point. The two provinces of Schleswig and Holstein had for some time been a source of dispute between Prussia and the Danish monarchy. Both had a German majority—Holstein’s was larger than Schleswig’s and the latter had a significant Danish population—but the ruler of both was the Danish monarch and the landed aristocracy was pro-Danish. It was typical of the ramshackle German state system of the time that one of these provinces, Holstein, was a member of the German Confederation while the other was not. Not only was the German speaking population represented in the Danish legislative assembly, its delegates were permitted to use their own language. This was not the most outrageous case of national oppression in Europe.

Nevertheless, in 1848, the German population of the two Duchies, swept up in the revolutionary agitation of the day demanded independence from their Danish lords and the liberation of the plucky Schleswig-Holsteiners became a rallying point for the Democracy. Its cause was taken up by the Frankfurt Assembly and meerumschlungen Schleswig-Holstein—“Sea-girt Schleswig-Holstein”—became a part of the national legend. Few seem to have found it silly to apply this high-sounding Homeric epithet to what was, after all, a small piece of territory.

That the Frankfurt Assembly was swept up in the general agitation was understandable. That body was capable of endless debates over trivialities especially if they served to distract its attention, and that of the public, from more pressing issues. But the NRZ also made an issue of the Schleswig-Holstein campaign. Why would what appears in hindsight to have been a relatively insignificant issue have attracted Marx and Engels attention? Indeed, their apparently unwarranted concern has often been used as proof of their latent German nationalism. In World War I, their position on Schleswig-Holstein in 1848 became one more precedent for the pro-war socialists.

From the beginning, Marx and Engels made it clear that they were aware of the relative unimportance of the cause of the Schleswig-Holsteiners taken by itself. In fact, and I have not seen this point made elsewhere, they supported the Danes initially.* Engels had written an article only a month before the outbreak of the revolution in Germany on “Three New Constitutions”¹⁹ in which he ridiculed the claims of the German inhabitants of two Duchies, compared the Danish Constitution favorably to that of Prussia’s, and pointed to the extremely favorable status the German minority in the Danish kingdom enjoyed. He claimed that they had as many delegates in the Danish legislature as the Danes by law even though they were far less numerous.

In short the Danes make every possible concession to the Germans, and the Germans persist in their absurd national obstinacy. The Germans have never been national-minded where the interests of nationality and the interests of progress have coincided; they were always so where nationality has turned against progress.

The “interests of progress” in this case were represented by the relatively liberal Danish constitution. But the bourgeois liberals whose political pressure had won constitutional reform were also champions of Danish nationalism and cultural independence from Germany. It was a typical combination in 1848. Prussia as the stronghold of constitutional conservatism was only too willing to use the cause of the oppressed, and politically backward, German population of the territory as a weapon against the Danish liberals. This political lineup explains Engels’ hostility to the agitation of the Germans of Schleswig-Holstein in 1847. It was consistent with his, and Marx’s, general hostility to national movements that “turned against progress.”

What changed? Well, for one thing, there was a revolution in Germany. And that brought to the fore an aspect of international diplomacy that Engels had previously ignored. This was not simply a contest between tiny Denmark and the might of Prussia. Behind Denmark stood England and Russia. For them, and especially for Russia, a successful revolution against their client in the heated atmosphere of June 1848 could be a disaster. What had been a minor squabble between the powers earlier in the year was now a serious matter. Worse, Russia and England’s formerly trustworthy ally, the King of Prussia, was apparently being taken captive by the revolution. As Count Nesselrode, the Russian Foreign Minister complained in his private correspondence:

. . . my patience is at an end. . . . Yesterday, Saturday, a courier brought me the news of Wrangel’s refusal to sign the armistice straight from Copenhagen. . . . Our forbearance has really been abused. We have often repeated to Prussia that she is allowing things to reach a point where we will not be able to maintain a defensive posture towards her as we would wish because of her blind submission to the whims of the German demagogues.²⁰

Marx and Engels’ appreciation of the situation was similar to that of von Nesselrode. What he saw as a danger they, of course, saw as an opportunity.

It should also be understood, as part of the background, that Prussia in 1848 was not the military power that the German Empire was to become after 1870. The course of the war, in which the Prussians were humiliated, makes that clear.

In the first NRZ article on the crisis—“Defeat of the German Troops at Sundewitt”²¹—Engels ridiculed the Prussian army. The article is full of contempt for the Germans and quite complimentary to the Danes. It also makes explicit what really lay behind the NRZ prowar stand in the affair of meerumschlungen Schleswig-Holstein.

If this [the lackadaisical conduct of the war by the Prussians] is not a case of open treason, then it is a manifestation of such immense incompetence that in any case the management of the whole affair must be placed in other hands. Will the National Assembly in Frankfurt at last feel compelled to do what it should have long since, that is take over foreign policy itself?

Engels expressed some scepticism in this article concerning the Assembly but at this early period both Marx and Engels still expected that the German bourgeoisie would be forced in their own interest to act out the role of their Girondin predecessors of fifty years before. They still believed that the bourgeois leadership of the Assembly would, in its own self-interest, embroil the country in a war with the monarchies that only a revolutionary government could win.

The NRZ addressed its demands and its criticism to the Frankfurt Assembly, not to the German governments, because the Assembly was the first, hesitant, step to a united, republican Germany. Marx and Engels did not invent the issue of war with the Alliance any more than they invented the other issues which agitated the country. What distinguished the NRZ was that the “Marx party” whipped up public opinion where the Frankfurt Assembly, even its left wing, tried to calm the people down.

In the end, when Prussia signed a humiliating peace rather than be forced into a war with England and Russia, the Assembly simply capitulated. It was one of the events that helped persuade Marx and Engels that the German bourgeoisie was not capable of imitating its French predecessors.