Description

This post is also available in: Nederlands

Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schönhausen (Schönhausen, 1 April 1815 – Friedrichsruh, 30 July 1898), from 1865 count, from 1871 prince von Bismarck, from 1890 duke zu Lauenburg, was a German 19th-century statesman and dominant figure in world history. As Prime Minister of Prussia, from 1862 to 1890, he oversaw German unification. In 1867 he became Chancellor of the North German Union. He was the designer of the German Empire in 1871, became the first Chancellor of it and dominated state affairs until he was set aside in 1890 by the new Emperor, Wilhelm II of Germany. His diplomacy of realpolitik and authoritarian exercise of power earned him the nickname “the iron chancellor”. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, “the man of blood and iron” wrote prose of extraordinary directness and clarity, comparable in power to Churchill’s use of the English language. In particular after his death, hundreds of Bismarck monuments – especially in the form of so-called towers – were erected that glorified him as the designer of the modern and national German single state. Historians praised him as a statesman of moderation and balance, who was primarily responsible for the unification of the German states into one nation-state. To this end, he used war to strengthen Prussia’s position and then power-balanced diplomacy to consolidate them. After the completion of that process in the foundation of the empire in 1870, he focused on domestic “enemies,” particularly Socialists and Roman Catholics, and in the 1870s and 1880s, he created a new nation with a progressive social policy, a result that went beyond his original goals as a practitioner of power politics in Prussia. Bismarck was a devout Lutheran who succeeded in transferring government power to the cabinet appointed by the king / emperor and accountable to him. Parliament had limited authority and could at most reject government proposals and budgets. A strong, well-trained bureaucracy carried out the authority on behalf of the government. Although ultra-conservative around 1850, he became more pragmatic and worked primarily with the National Liberals and moderate conservatives. He considered his main opponents to be the Social Democrats and, during the greater part of the 1970s, the Catholic Party.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck