Making of Germany notes class 10 sst
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The Unification of Germany into the German Empire, a Prussia-dominated state with federal features,[1] was officially proclaimed on 18 January 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in France. The new state replaced the German Confederation, a loose association of sovereign states, and the highly decentralized Holy Roman Empire. Princes of the German states, excluding Austria-Hungary and its House of Habsburg-Lorraine (the dynasty that formerly ruled over the German princes during the German Confederation and Holy Roman Empire), gathered at the ceremony to proclaim William I of Prussia and the House of Hohenzollern as German Emperor, following the French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War.
A confederated realm of German princedoms had been in existence for over a thousand years, dating to the Treaty of Verdun in 843. However, there was no German national identity in development as late as 1800, mainly due to the autonomous nature of the princely states; most inhabitants of Holy Roman Empire territories, outside of those ruled by the emperor directly, identified themselves mainly with their prince, and not with the emperor or the German realm as a whole. In the mountainous terrain of much of the territory, isolated peoples developed cultural, educational, linguistic, and religious differences over such a lengthy time period. This internal division became known as the "practice of kleinstaaterei", or the "practice of small-statery". By the nineteenth century, transportation and communications improvements brought these regions closer together.
This changed drastically after the Holy Roman Empire's defeat and dissolution by France in 1806, and even though a German Confederation was re-established in 1815 after the defeat of France, the beginnings of an unprecedented wave of German nationalism swept through Germany during the first half of the 19th century. By mid-century, Germany had already seen movements supporting centralization, with or without the traditionally ruling Austrian Habsburgs.
The rival German-speaking power, Prussia, a former vassal of the Habsburgs, attempted to weaken the German Confederation from both within (Prussia had representation in the German diet, a tradition carried over from the Holy Roman Empire era, thus could directly interfere into Austrian affairs in parliament) and from the outside (Prussia allied with the German Confederation in the Second Schleswig War for the purpose of creating a casus belli between the two powers over the spoils, which would eventually occur in the Austrian-Prussian War of 1866). Economically, the creation of the Prussian Zollverein customs union in 1818, and its subsequent expansion to include other states of the nominally Austrian-led German Confederation, reduced competition between and within the states.
Despite the legal, administrative, and political disruption associated with the end of the Holy Roman Empire, the people of the German-speaking areas of the old Empire had a common linguistic, cultural, and legal tradition further enhanced by their shared experience in the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. European liberalism offered an intellectual basis for unification by challenging dynastic and absolutist models of social and political organization; its German manifestation emphasized the importance of tradition, education, and linguistic unity of peoples in a geographic region. Unification exposed tensions due to religious, linguistic, social, and cultural differences among the inhabitants of the new nation, suggesting that 1871 only represented one moment in a continuum of the larger cultural unification processes. Emerging modes of transportation facilitated business and recreational travel, leading to contact and sometimes conflict among German speakers from throughout Central Europe.
The model of diplomatic spheres of influence resulting from the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 after the Napoleonic Wars endorsed Austrian dominance in Central Europe through Habsburg leadership of the German Confederation, designed to replace the Holy Roman Empire. The negotiators at Vienna took no account of Prussia's growing strength within and declined to create a second coalition of the German states under Prussia's influence, and so failed to foresee that Prussia would rise to challenge Austria for leadership of the German peoples. This German dualism presented two solutions to the problem of unification: Kleindeutsche Lösung, the small Germany solution (Germany without Austria), or Großdeutsche Lösung, the greater Germany solution (Germany with Austria).
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