INTRODUCTION: GERMAN DECENTRALIZATION AND SOVEREIGNTY

The next three historical narratives are less obvious applications of the king-and-council model of constitutional reform. Two are cases not usually associated with gradual democratization, Germany and Japan. The other case is often considered a revolutionary state, the United States of America, although as shown in Chapter Eighteen, parliamentary democracy had substantially emerged at the colonial level well before its war of secession. These more problematic cases help to test the generality of the theory of constitutional reform developed in Part I, a theory that is intended to explain more than the successful nineteenth-century democratic transitions of a few European constitutional monarchies.

The first of the difficult cases to be examined is Germany. The history of Germany in the nineteenth century is usually told with an eye on the twentieth century, a century in which German foreign policy led to two continental wars of mass destruction. That such a fate lay ahead was not evident to observers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, nor was it inevitable. Indeed, observers in 1820 would have been surprised by this prediction. Germany had a very weak central government in the decades before, during, and after Napoleon’s invasion of the Holy Roman Empire in the late eighteenth century. The empire was less a government than a loose association of independent city-states and duchies linked by language, religion, and commerce. There was clearly a German culture during this period, but the existence of a German government was debatable.