The Holy Roman Empire Two Hundred Years After:

Model for European Integration?

 

Joseph F. Patrouch

Florida International University

 

 

In a recent Call for Papers for the 2007 national conference of the German Studies Association to be held in San Diego, UCLA historian David Sabean declared “[t]he Holy Roman Empire is very much an ‘in’ subject” and announced his intention to organize multiple panels on the topic.[1]  2006 was the 200^th anniversary of the last Holy Roman emperor, Franz II’s (r. 1792-1806) public renunciation of his title.  His renunciation was proclaimed on a city square in Vienna on 6 August 1806, in the midst of the wars against Napoleon and his allies. The anniversary became the occasion for heated discussion in various European media outlets, political pronouncements, historical publications, and a row of exhibitions.[2]  What was the legacy of this set of institutions—institutions which by various reckonings lasted somewhere between 844 and a thousand years? Could it be considered a model for European integration?  Does it have lessons to teach the people of the European Union (EU) today?  Such broader consideration of the EU is particularly appropriate at that set of institutions’ 50^th anniversary which was celebrated in March 2007 in Berlin.

This topic is related to a new research project I am beginning which seeks to better understand the Empire through a detailed description and analysis of a trip which members of the Imperial family took from their primary residence city of Vienna to an Imperial Diet (or Assembly, Reichstag) in the Imperial Free City of Speyer on the Rhine River.  The trip began in November 1569 and lasted until December 1570.  A brief discussion of the emperor’s August 1569 journey to the Hungarian capital of Bratislava for a meeting of that kingdom’s parliament will also set the scene, allowing some discussion of the tense international situation, particularly the precarious peace with the Ottoman Empire, which controlled a large section of Hungary at the time.  The trip allows a discussion of many of the Empire’s central institutions in a way which includes the specifics of the lived experience of them instead of a static, institutional analysis.[3]  The Empire’s institutions include the office of the Executive (the indirectly-elected Emperor) and his related staff positions such as his court and the courts of his wife and children.[4]

The important judicial instance of the Imperial Aulic Council (Reichshofrat) based in Vienna can be discussed in this project, as can the officials of the Imperial Vice Chancellery, which similarly occupied offices in the Danubian metropolis.  After the court left Vienna, they traveled to Prague, the capital of one of the Empire’s most important sub-units, the complicated set of jurisdictions known collectively as the Kingdom of Bohemia.  There, negotiations with that kingdom’s parliament ensued, as did festivals and celebrations marking the marriage of the Imperial couple’s eldest daughter, Archduchess Anna (1549-1580), to her uncle King Philip II of Spain (1527-1598; r. 1556-1598).[5] Here, public relations and dynastic considerations all come into play.

The trip from Prague to Speyer took the court through a number of important and not-so-important principalities and city-states in the south-central parts of the Empire.  These included the important city of Nuremberg.  That city held the right to keep and protect the Imperial regalia, the symbols of office which were used at elections and coronations of the executive branch.  The deep significances of these items of clothing, relics such as the Holy Lance, and, of course, the Imperial Crown attributed to Emperor Charlemagne, will all be discussed in this project as incorporating the rich hundreds of years of tradition and history in which the Empire was embedded and which gave it much of its significance.  Some discussion of the various levels of authority in the Empire such as Free Cities, subject cities, duchies, prince-bishoprics, Free Knights, the Electors, and the so-called Circles (as well as federations among these) will also be important components adding to the overall understanding of a set of institutions, the Empire, which has been estimated to have had over 300 separate bits and pieces.

The trip’s destination was Speyer, an Imperial Free City and bishop’s seat on a hill by the Rhine River.  Here, some discussion of the physical characteristics of the Empire will be given.  These include a sketch of its basic transportation infrastructure, particularly the river communication routes.  The role of the Rhine cannot be underestimated.  The role of the Imperial Church (Reichskirche) will also be analyzed in reference to the cathedral in Speyer, site of the graves of a number of emperors and therefore important symbolically to the Empire as a whole.

Finally, the second great Imperial judicial institution, the Imperial Cameral Court (Reichskammergericht), which, at the time, was seated in Speyer will be discussed, as will the Imperial Assemblies themselves. These two branches of Imperial government, the judicial and the legislative, were here in Speyer in Fall 1570.  (Although it must be noted there was no fixed location for the assemblies.  They were held intermittently and in various locations throughout the center of the Empire.)  The legislative agenda of the assembly will be discussed in detail, pointing particularly to the financial aspects of the session such as taxes and monetary policies.  Another wedding, this time between Archduchess Elizabeth and King Charles IX of France (b. 1550, r. 1560, d. 1574), was also held here in Speyer at this time, again underlining the parallel importance of dynasty and international affairs to the Empire.[6]

So how does all this relate to the European Union of today?  Of course, the scale of today’s enterprise is much larger than the old Empire ever was.  With an estimated 480 million people living in 27 different countries, today’s EU dwarfs its predecessor.  All, or parts, of thirteen of today’s EU member countries were within the historical boundaries of the Empire, as were today’s Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and part of Russia.[7]

The EU is also much more ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse than the Empire ever was.  However, the linguistic diversity of the Empire should not be overlooked.  Like today in the EU, German was the most spoken language, but significant numbers of speakers of other languages such as Italian, Czech, French, Dutch, and Polish lived within the Empire’s rather unclear borders.  By 1570, the Empire had two legally-recognized Christian denominations (Catholic and Lutheran) and Jews were tolerated in many regions.  Members of other Christian denominations such as Calvinists or Utraquists lived with varying degrees of legal recognition.

It is in the realm of institutions that many people see marked similarities between the old Empire and the new EU.  Both were or are characterized by a welter of jurisdictions, often with unclear relationships to each other.  Both had or have legislatures limited in their purview and granted significant autonomy to their constituent political parts.  Both had, or have, legal codes of a bewildering variety along with multiple court systems.  Both had, or have, complex monetary systems.  (Right now, fewer than half—thirteen of 27—EU countries share a common currency in the Euro.  The others have national currencies.[8]) Both the Empire and the EU were, or are, decentralized geographically, with the legislative, judicial, executive, and administrative offices located in different places and both had, or have, limited collective military capabilities in addition to those of their individual component political pieces.

In an interview in August, 2006, just weeks after the 200^th anniversary of the end of the Empire, the head of the History Department of the University of Innsbruck in Austria was quoted as saying, “[t]he Holy Roman Empire is the foundation of our common European history … It’s almost as if the EU picks up where things left off in 1806.”[9]  In an article published not long after in one of Germany’s leading newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Hans Riebsamen wrote, “[i]t is no wonder that present-day constitutional and national law specialists who are looking for a model for a supranational European constitutional state are concerning themselves intensively with the Old Empire.”[10]

It is not surprising that the topic of the “Old Empire” has again gained popularity in Germany.  Its leaders have often seen their country as the heir to the Imperial traditions (the German flag, for example, still proudly displays the Imperial black and gold), and Germany held the presidency of the European Union (January-June, 2007) as well as the chair of the G-8 group of industrial nations—two of the most important political groupings in the world.  Austria, another country closely tied to the Empire, held the presidency of the EU in the first half of 2006.  Two of the three EU president states between January, 2006 and June, 2007 were and are states tied closely to the Holy Roman Empire.  One of the primary goals of the German EU presidency is the reinvigoration of the discussion of the EU constitution, a constitution whose final consideration has now been postponed until 2008.  Mazohl-Wallnig of Innsbruck believes that “[o]ne can learn from this [the history of the Holy Roman Empire] that Europe definitely needs a common basic law and a common constitution.”[11]

In public pronouncements various German national politicians have explicitly evoked the Holy Roman Empire as a model for the EU.  One of the most detailed of these pronouncements was a lecture given by the German Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, three months ago as part of a series accompanying the blockbuster exhibition on the early modern Holy Roman Empire which was held at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.[12]  In his historically-oriented discussion, Schäuble explicitly compared the Empire, particularly in its last two centuries of existence, to the European Union, underlining similarities such as the variety of legal foundations, the multiple centers of authority, and the difficulties encountered by legislative and judicial practice.[13]

The exhibition at which Minister Schäuble spoke was part of a double exhibition sponsored by the Council of Europe and centered on the history of the Holy Roman Empire from 962 to its end in 1806.  The Council of Europe was established in 1949, and currently has 46 member states. It started sponsoring national and international art exhibitions in 1954, with an exhibition in Brussels held on Humanism.  One on Mannerism held in Amsterdam followed in 1955.  The 1956 Rome European Council exhibition had as its theme “Realism, Classicism and Baroque.”  In 1958, the theme in Munich was Rococo and the 1959 exhibition was on Romanticism.  The aim of these exhibitions, according to the Council’s website, is “to increase knowledge and appreciation of European Art as one of the highest expressions of Europe’s culture and common values.”[14]

By 1965, more explicitly political themes and values were addressed in Aachen, West Germany with that year’s exhibition on Charlemagne, an eighth-century figure often pointed to as the founder of the Holy Roman Empire.[15]  Another exhibition on a medieval emperor, this one on Otto I (“the Great”), was held in 2001 in the former East German city of Magdeburg.  Its success led to the recasting and reopening of the exhibition as part of last year’s hugely successful exhibition there on the Holy Roman Empire which was held simultaneously with the previously-mentioned Berlin exhibition at which Minister Schäuble held his lecture.[16]

The Magdeburg exhibition was opened by a speech by the German State Secretary for Culture Bernd Neumann where he, too, reportedly chose to highlight the Holy Roman Empire’s possible role as a model for the EU.  This idea, according to an article reporting on the event in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, has found support in the Christian Democrat and Christian Social parties represented in the national government by Chancellor Angela Merkel.  Her government is said to have extended an invitation to Pope Benedict XVI, another German who reportedly has shown sympathy with the concept, to the “EuropaFest” and informal summit meeting which was held in Berlin in March, 2007 celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome which established the predecessor institutions to today’s EU.[17]

The Magdeburg exhibition, an exhibition sponsored not just by the Council of Europe but by the German province of Saxony-Anhalt as its official “provincial exhibition” (Landesausstellung) exceeded expectations concerning the number of visitors.  Expecting perhaps 100,000 people, the conference organizers had to expand opening hours to midnight in the show’s final days to accommodate the crowds which reached over the 200,000 mark.[18]

Other exhibitions in Germany last year relating to the Holy Roman Empire and its demise were similarly well received. In Frankfurt am Main, for example, the historical election and eventual coronation site of the Holy Roman Emperors, four simultaneous exhibitions packed in the visitors with opening-night crowds the likes of which had not been seen for a long time, according to one local newspaper report.[19]  These exhibitions had as one of their themes the importance of the co-called “Golden Bull” of Emperor Charles IV (r. 1346-1378).  Issued in 1356 the “Golden Bull” is often considered the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire in its last 450 years of existence.

Clearly, some people, particularly it seems in Germany and to some extent in Austria, have chosen to find parallels and perhaps models for the present EU in the long history of one of its predecessor institutions, the Holy Roman Empire.  There have been skeptical responses inside Germany and in other countries.  Many in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland, for example, recall the WWII-era uses of the images of previous empires to justify German aggression in that period.[20]  There are also significant differences between the Empire of 800-1800 and the EU of the last fifty years.

To return to my research project on the Holy Roman Empire in 1570, while the institutional and legal parallels between the Empire and the EU seem valid enough to spur discussion and thought, one area that appears significantly different relates to foreign policy and defense.  Unlike the EU of today, the Holy Roman Empire in 1570, and for much of its history, had no standing military force.  This was a problem in 1570 when increasingly-violent revolts in parts of the Habsburg family’s holdings in the Burgundian Circle of the Empire, the so-called Low Countries, were causing waves of refugees to flee into neighboring parts of the Empire and the secularizations of the Teutonic Knights’ lands in the far eastern reaches of the Empire had been followed by chaos and invasions there as the Swedish, Polish-Lithuanian, and Danish-Norwegian rulers moved in, followed closely by the Muscowites.  The various break-away cantons and cities in the western Alps had been all but lost to the Empire, constituting the kernel of what would later be known as the Helvetian Confederation (or Switzerland).  The French crown had annexed rights over the key bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun in the Empire’s southwest which the Empire proved unable to recover peacefully. The fighting on the southern front on the Italian peninsula had died down and relations with the papacy there had improved, but territorial and jurisdiction conflicts continued (over rights over Florence, for example,) and could at any time flare into warfare as they had just a decade before when Habsburg troops again had marched on Rome.

Outside of the Empire, the religious sectarian violence in France was appealing to mercenary captains within the Empire’s borders as a rich employment opportunity for their troops.  This led to internal disruptions in the Empire as bands of ill-paid soldiers wandered in and out of the war zones to the west.  There was also the eastern front in greater Hungary-Croatia, where, even though since the last major campaign four years before in 1566, there was an uneasy truce between the emperors and their counterparts in Constantinople, the Ottoman sultans, the costs of maintaining the massive military frontier with its dozens of fortresses and thousands of garrison troops was staggering.  Some of this cost was born by the Empire, even though the troops were stationed outside of the Empire’s borders.  (Vienna’s new state-of-the-art defenses, for example, were paid for largely through Imperial taxes.)

Today’s world is at one time larger and smaller than the world of 1570.  The early 2007 President of the EU, Germany, also chaired the G-8 group of industrial nations and these states’ environmental ministers met in Potsdam in March of that year.  Potsdam was the old summer residence of the Empire’s Electors of Brandenburg, one of the seven or nine most important local rulers in the Empire.  The Electors of Brandenburg held the right to participate in the election of the emperors.  Representatives of the up-and-coming industrial states Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa were invited to this meeting.  On its agenda was a discussion of issues concerning how countries interact on the level of global standards relating to pollution and other environmental issues.  The G-8 summit was held in June 2007 in the Baltic Sea resort town of Heiligendamm, the old retreat of one of the Empire’s most important princes, the Duke of Mecklenburg.  That summit’s agenda concentrated on, among other issues, debt relief and the troubled economies of Africa—themes far from the minds of politicians in the Holy Roman Empire of 1570.

Germany’s foreign policy is marked by ties to various international alliances and allegiances and the European Union is only one of them. In addition to supporting the EU military formation in the EU proper, Germany also participates, along with troops from five other countries, in the “Salamander” Task Force in the EU’s joint military unit in Bosnia/Herzogovina (EUFOR) trying to stabilize that state, enforce the Dayton Accords and later agreements, and bring war criminals to justice.  As President of the EU, Germany presided over that organization’s spring summit held in March 2007 in Brussels.  That summit’s agenda was dominated by discussion of issues relating to climate change and energy policies, particularly as they relate to the EU’s primary energy supplier, Russia.  These are issues far from the agenda of any Holy Roman Empire meetings.  In March, EU foreign ministers met in the old Imperial Free City of Nuremberg for two days of talks with the foreign ministers of the ten member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), an organization representing 500 million people—a population larger than that of the EU.[21]  These talks reveal the wide expanse of EU diplomatic concerns and connections in this globalizing world.

As part of its obligations to the United Nations (UN), another political organization, like the G-8, separate from the EU, Germany continues to participate in UN peacekeeping activities in Lebanon as Germany and its predecessor state West Germany have for 30 years.  Germany also sends observers to participate in the newer UN missions in Sudan, Georgia, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia.  The UN-sanctioned Kosovo Force (KFOR) consists of a brigade jointly led by Germany and Italy (and with troops from nine other countries) as they try to keep the peace and regulate affairs in that section of Serbia.  Outside of UN-sanctioned activities, as part of the international anti-terrorist campaign “Enduring Freedom,” Germany supports the stationing of its naval units off the Horn of Africa.

Perhaps one of the most significant examples of how different the EU of today is from the Holy Roman Empire of 1570 is the role that the EU president, Germany, plays in yet another international organization, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  This alliance of two North American and 24 European countries (nine of which were at least partially in the Old Empire) includes five countries not in the EU.[22]  NATO has active military forces stationed in Kosovo, Bosnia/Herzogovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Albania, Iraq, Serbia, and Sudan, in addition to its most important and numerically significant military campaign, one in which Germany participates along with troops from 36 other countries, the intervention in Afghanistan.  The German troops are part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and participate in two Provincial Reconstruction Teams in the northern part of that country.

The scale of international engagement represented in this paper by reference to the thousands of German soldiers, sailors, and airmen now on active duty around the world and the multiplicity of allegiances and alliances in which Germany is currently embedded, provide evidence that the politically-supported parallel between the EU and the Holy Roman Empire, which has clear relevance to the internal and constitutional issues facing the EU, runs into problems when the present international contexts of the EU are taken into account.  The example of the current president of the EU, Germany, shows that while the past (say of 1570?) is an appealing place, it is not the place of the EU in the first decade of the 21^st century.