Otto von Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck 's critical qualities were put to full use in the first years after he became Minister President and Foreign Minister of Prussia in 1862. He inherited a diplomatic service which, although it had been founded by Frederick William I, enjoyed little prestige in the country. This was due partly to the military traditions of the Prussian state, where it was infinitely more glamorous to wear the King's coat than to indite dispatches, and partly, and perhaps more, to the timid and vacillating nature of Prussian foreign policy during the first sixty years of the nineteenth century, which was hardly designed to attract spirited and talented young men. Filled with mediocre minds, and lacking the kind of diplomatic tradition that might at least have made them aware of the importance of systematic procedures and provided them with a few general rules of conduct, the Prussian foreign service was in a sorry state in 1862 - disorganized, undisciplined, and destitute of either uniform method or clear channels of communication.

These conditions were too serious to be corrected overnight; nor were they. A source of immediate concern to Otto von Bismarck when he took office, they continued to demand his attention not only during the years in which he was founding the Reich but also in those that followed, when he had to expand the Prussian foreign service to meet the needs of the empire. If, in the end, he succeeded in transforming the chaos of 1862 into order and efficiency, in improving the personnel and the performance of the Foreign Ministry, and in bringing the diplomatic service to a level of technical excellence that was probably unsurpassed in Europe, it was certainly due in part to the critical capacity that had been brought to bear upon Johanna's style in 1847 and that, later, watched over the education of the candidates for the Bismarckian foreign service.

But it was not only criticism and the other forms of deliberate indoctrination that effected improvement in Prussian diplomacy after 1862. Much was accomplished also by the force of example. Otto von Bismarck 's great personal triumphs in the 1860's gave a new luster to the diplomatic profession; and the young men who were drawn to it by this fact regarded their chief as the embodiment of all the arts of diplomacy and wanted to learn them from him. Some of them were willing to do the most routine tasks for the mere privilege of observing his methods; and we find Ludwig Raschdau writing: "We [Foreign Ministry] counsellors were perhaps really only hacks, but at least daily observation gave us the advantage of following the master's work regularly." Some came to study in order that they might in time surpass their teacher; and sometimes their eagerness to do the latter made their study imperfect and their understanding incomplete. But few who were associated with him for any length of time went away without feeling that they had been privileged to see political genius at work.

What were the specific qualities that made Otto von Bismarck appear, to his own and later generations, to be the very model of diplomacy, and continue to arouse reluctant admiration even in the breasts of those who disapprove of his methods or the results of his labors? Perhaps, if we seek these out, we can gain some understanding of the reasons for Bismarck 's successes in foreign policy and for the failures of his immediate, and some of his more remote, successors. From such an attempt, moreover, we may even come closer to an appreciation of the uses and the limitations of diplomacy itself.