How to evaluate the iron-blooded Prime Minister Bismarck

155 years ago today, in 1862, Bismarck became the Prime Minister of Germany. He expressed his opinions to everyone in his inauguration speech. He believed: "The major contemporary problems cannot be solved through speeches and majority resolutions, but must be solved with iron and blood." So far, Germany's political and military changes The reform began.

At first, many domestic nobles were waiting to see Bismarck's joke. At that time, William I thought that like Bismarck, he would be driven off the political stage by the nobles and reduced to the end of being whipped and beheaded. Bismarck firmly believed that if he was destined to die, it would be better to die on the road to the unification of Germany. He was determined to implement the iron-blood policy. Wilhelm I maintained a united front with Bismarck throughout his life.

Times make heroes. Under the influence of capitalism, it is difficult for Germany to achieve change through people's revolution, so it can only use dynastic wars. Bismarck was originally a conservative, and he hoped that the revolution could be Press down. But in the mid-19th century, he began to discover that Germany could achieve reunification through more forceful means.

It is not enough if we only use the words iron and blood as the labels for Bismarck's life. Bismarck's political and diplomatic abilities were outstanding. Since he took office, he has cleverly implemented a unique foreign policy for neighboring countries. In less than five years, he defeated Austria and achieved large-scale reunification of Germany. It only took three years to defeat France and achieve the German Empire. Complete unification, thus becoming the strongest empire in Europe.

After Bismarck achieved the unification of Germany, he stated that Germany would no longer expand. However, in the next twenty years, he was particularly afraid of an alliance between France and Russia in diplomacy, so he always tried every means to hope. There could be a treaty to ensure that this would not happen, and it was finally successfully achieved in 1887. Through this incident, it can be seen that Bismarck had a particularly strong sense of political responsibility and cared very much about Germany's status in the entire European continent.

Because Bismarck adopted a "top-down" reform approach and implemented an "iron-blood" policy across the country, German liberals were particularly indignant at first. However, when the German unification process was completed, , liberals turned to praise Bismarck one after another, and Germany also lost its pursuit of liberalism and democracy. But Bismarck actually found a way to promote Germany's democratization in the cracks of policy. He introduced universal male suffrage in the empire, a rare attempt in Europe.

Germany’s agricultural development was very difficult, so Bismarck began to set up trade barriers to protect the agricultural market. This policy extended the famous "alliance of steel and rye" and at the same time led to a further breakdown in the relations with Russia that Bismarck had been carefully maintaining diplomatically. Measures of this type became the social basis for German conservatism and world war fascism. The "iron and blood policy" implemented by Bismarck changed the pattern of the entire European continent, and also planted the seeds for Germany to become the source of world war.

We can say that Bismarck was the founder of modern Germany. His manipulation of diplomacy and the implementation of the "iron and blood" policy turned Germany on the edge of division into a German Empire that influenced the pattern and historical process of the entire European continent. . In the nineteenth century, apart from Napoleon, only Bismarck could exert such influence on his country and the European continent.