European disunion done right

SUMMITS were more fun in those days. When Ferdinand III, the Habsburg monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, arrived in Regensburg, the Brussels of its time, in late 1652, he brought 60 musicians and three dwarves. There were sleigh rides, fireworks and the first Italian opera ever performed in Germanic lands. Aside from that, the Reichstag (imperial diet) was much like today’s European Council, the gathering for leaders of the member states. The emperor arrived with a retinue of 3,000 people to meet the empire’s princes, bishops, margraves and other assorted VIPs. They negotiated for more than a year. By the time Ferdinand left again for Vienna, with 164 ships floating down the Danube, quite a lot had transpired.

Precisely what that was, however, has been a matter of passionate dispute among historians ever since, with special relevance today. The traditional view is that Central Europe, exhausted by crisis (the Thirty Years War, which had ended in 1648), yet again failed to get its act together and form a proper union—ie, a centralised state. For the next 150 years, the “old empire” thus drifted into fragmentation and geopolitical irrelevance. As the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke described it in the 19th century, it became “a chaotic mess of rotted imperial forms and unfinished territories”, until it expired with a barely audible whimper in 1806.