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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) Max Weber & Ben Fowkes

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The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address) Max Weber (Inaugural lecture, Freiburg, May 1895)

The title I have chosen promises much more than I can achieve today, or wish to achieve. What I intend is first of all this: to use a single example to make clear the role played by racial differences of a physical and pyschological nature, as between nationalities, in the economic struggle for existence. I should then like to add some reflections on the situation of a state which rests on a national basis — such as our own — within the framework of a con- sideration of economic policy. I am choosing for my example a set of events which although they are occurring a long way from us have repeatedly come to the notice of the public in the last ten years. Allow me, then, to conduct you to the eastern marches of the Reich, to the open country of the Prussian province of West Prussia. This setting combines the character of a national border- land with some unusually sharp variations in the conditions of economic and social existence, and this recommends it for our purpose. Unfortunately I cannot avoid calling on your forbearance initially while I recite a series of dry data.

The rural areas of the province of West Prussia contain three different types of contrast, as follows: First, extraordinary varia- tions in the quality of agricultural land. From the sugar-beet country of the Vistula plain to the sandy uplands of Cassubia the estimates of the gross tax yield vary in a ratio of 10 or 20 to 1. Even the average values at district level fluctuate between 4£ and 33| marks per hectare.

Then there are contrasts in the social stratification of the pop- ulation which cultivates this land. As in general in the East, the official statistics refer alongside the 'rural parish' (Landgemeinde) to a second form of communal unit, unknown to the South: the 'estate district' (Gutsbezirk). And, correspondingly, the estates of the nobility stand out in bold relief in the landscape between the villages of the peasants. These are the places of residence of the class which gives the East its social imprint — the Junkers. Everywhere there are manor-houses, surrounded by the single- storey cottages the lord of the manor (Gutsberr) has allotted to the day-labourers, plus a few strips of arable land and pasture; Economy and Society Volume 9 Number 4 November 1980 © RKP 1980 0308-5147/80/0904 0428 $1.50/1

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these people are obliged to work on the manor the whole year round. The area of the province of West Prussia is divided between these two categories in roughly equal proportions. But in particular districts the share of the manorial estates can vary from a few per cent to two thirds of the whole area.

Finally, within this population which is subject to a twofold social stratification, there exists a third contrast; it is between the nationalities. And the national composition of the population of the individual communities also varies from region to region. It is this kind of variation which is of interest to us today. In the first place, the proportion of Poles is naturally greater as you approach the boundary of the Reich. But this proportion of Poles also increases as the quality of the soil deteriorates. Any language-map will show that. One will at first wish to explain this historically from the form taken by the German occupation of these lands, which initially spread over the fertile plain of the Vistula. And this would not be entirely incorrect. But let us now ask the further question: what social strata are the repositories of Germanism (Deutschtum) and Polonism (Polentum) in the country districts? In answer to this question, the figures of the most recently pub- lished population census (that of 1885)' present us with a curious picture. Admittedly we cannot directly extract the national composition of each parish from these figures, but we can do this indirectly, provided we are content to achieve only approximate accuracy. The intermediate step is the figure for religious affiliation, which, for the nationally mixed district we are concerned with, coincides to within a few per cent with nationality. If we separate the economic categories of the peasant village and the manorial estate in each district, by identifying them with the corresponding administrative units of the rural parish and the estate district,2

we find that their national composition is related inversely to the quality of the soil; in the fertile districts the Catholics, i.e. the Poles, are relatively most numerous on the estates, and the Protestants, i.e. the Germans, are to be found in greater propor- tions in the villages. In districts where the soil is inferior the situation is precisely the opposite of this. For example, if we take the districts with an average net tax yield of under 5 marks per hectare, we find only 35.5 per cent Protestants in the villages and 50.2 per cent Protestants on the estates; if on the other hand we take the group of districts which provide an average of 10 to 15 marks per hectare, we find the proportion of Protestants rising to 60.7 per cent in the villages and falling to 42.1 per cent on the estates. Why is this? Why are the estates the reservoirs of Polonism on the plain, and the villages the reservoirs of Polonism in the hills? One thing is immediately evident: the Poles have a tendency to

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collect together in that stratum of the population which stands lowest both economically and socially. On the good soil, like that of the Vistula plain, the peasant's standard of living has always been higher than that of the day-labourer on an estate; on the bad soil, which could only be rationally exploited on a large scale, the manorial estate (Rittergut) was the repository of tivilization and hence of Germanism; there the miserable small peasants still live below the level of the day-labourers on the estates. If we did not know that anyway, the age-structure of the population would lead us to that presumption. If we look at the villages we find that as one rises from the plain to the hilltops, and as the quality of the soil deteriorates the proportion of children under 14 years old rises from 35—36 per cent to 40—41 per cent. If we compare the estates, we find that the proportion of children is higher on the plain than in the villages, that it increases as the height above sea- level increases, though more slowly than this happens in the villages, and finally that on the hilltops the proportion is lower than the proportion in the hilltop villages. As usual, a large number of children follows hard on the heels of a low standard of living, since this tends to obliterate any calculations of future welfare. Economic advance (wirtschaftliche Kultur), a relatively high stand- ard of living and Germanism are in West Prussia identical.

And yet the two nationalities have competed for centuries on the same soil, and with essentially the same opportunities. What then is the basis of the distinction? One is immediately tempted to believe that the two nationalities differ in their ability to adapt to different economic and social conditions of existence. And this is in fact so — as is proved by the tendency of development revealed by shifts in the population and changes in its national composition. This also allows us to perceive how fateful that difference in the ability to adapt is for the Germanism of the East.

It is true that we only have at our disposal the figures of 1871 and 1885 for a comparative examination of the displacements which have occurred in the individual parishes, and these figures allow us to perceive only the indistinct beginnings of a development which has since then, according to all indications, been extraordi- narily reinforced. Apart from this, the clarity of the numerical picture naturally suffers under the enforced but not entirely correct assumption of an identity between religious affiliation and nationality on one side, and administrative subdivisions and social structure on the other. Despite all this, we can still gain a clear enough view of the relevant changes. The rural population of West Prussia, like that of large parts of the whole of eastern Germany, showed a tendency to fall during the period between 1880 and 1885; this fall amounted to 12,700 people, i.e. there was a decline

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of VA per cent, while the overall population of the German Reich was increasing by about SVt per cent. This phenomenon, like the phenomena we have already discussed, also occurred unevenly: in some districts there was actually an increase in the rural popu- lation. And indeed the manner in which these phenomena were distributed is highly characteristic. If we take first the different soil qualities, one would normally assume that the decline hit the worst land hardest, for there the pressure of falling prices would be first to render the margin of subsistence too narrow. If one looks at the figures, however, one sees that the reverse is the case: precisely the most well-favoured districts, such as Stuhm and Marienwerder, with an average net yield of around 15—17 marks, experienced the greatest population loss, a loss of 7—8 per cent, whereas in the hilly country the district of Konitz and Tuchel, with a net yield of 5—6 marks, experienced the biggest increase, an increase which had been going on since 1871. One looks for an explanation, and one asks first: from which social strata did the population loss originate, and which social strata gained from the increase? Let us look at the districts where the figures demonstrate a great reduction in population: Stuhm, Marienwerder, Rosenberg. These are without exception districts where large-scale landowner- ship predominates particularly strongly, and if we take the estate districts of the whole province together, we find that although in 1880 they exhibited a total population two thirds smaller than the villages (on the same area of land) their share in the fall of the rural population between 1880 and 1885 comes to over 9,000 people, which is almost three quarters of the total reduction over the whole province: the population of the estate districts has fallen by about VA per cent. But this fall in population is also distributed unevenly within the category referred to: in some places the population actually increased, and when one isolates the areas where the population was sharply reduced, one finds that it was precisely the estates on good soil which experienced a particularly severe loss of population.

In contrast to this, the increase of population which took place on the bad soils of the uplands worked chiefly in favour of the villages, and indeed this was most pronounced in the villages on bad soils, as opposed to the villages of the plain. The tendency which emerges from these figures is therefore towards a decrease in the numbers of day-labourers on the estates situated on the best land, and an increase in the numbers of peasants on land ofinferior quality. What is at stake here, and how the phenomenon is to be explained, becomes clear when one finally asks how the nationalities are affected by these shifts in population.

In the first half of the century the Polish element appeared to

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be in retreat, slowly but continuously. However, since the 1860s, as is well known, it has just as continuously, and just as slowly, been advancing. Despite their inadequate basis, the language data for West Prussia make the latter point extremely plain. Now a shift in the boundary between two nationalities can occur in two ways, which are fundamentally distinct. It may on the one hand happen that the language and customs of the majority gradually impose themselves on national minorities in a nationally mixed region, that these minorities get 'soaked up'. This phenomenon can be found as well in eastern Germany: the process is statistically demonstrable in the case of Germans of the Catholic confession. Here the ecclesiastical bond is stronger than the national one, memories of the Kulturkampf also play their part, and the lack of a German-educated clergy means that the German Catholics are lost to the cultural community of the nation. But the second form of nationality-displacement is more important, and more relevant for us: economic extrusion-. And this is how it is in the present case. If one examines the changes in the proportion of adherents of the two faiths in the rural parish units between 1871 and 1885, one sees this: the migration of day-labourers away from the estates is in the lowlands regularly associated with a relative decline of Protestantism, while in the hills the increase of the village population is associated with a relative increase of Catholicism.3 It is chiefly German day-labourers who move out of the districts of progressive cultivation; it is chiefly Polish peasants who multiply in the districts where cultivation is on a low level.

But both processes — here emigration, there increase in numbers — lead back ultimately to one and the same reason: a lower expec- tation of living standards, in part physical, in part mental, which the Slav race either possesses as a gift from nature or has acquired through breeding in the course of its past history. This is what has helped it to victory.

Why do the German day-labourers move out? Not for material reasons: the movement of emigration does not draw its recruits from districts with low levels of pay or from categories of worker who are badly paid. Materially there is hardly a more secure situa- tion than that of agricultural labourer on the East German estates. Nor is it the much-bruited longing for the diversions of the big city. This is a reason for the planless wandering off of the younger generation, but not for the emigration of long-serving families of day-labourers. Moreover, why would such a longing arise precisely among the people on the big estates? Why is it that the emigration of the day-labourers demonstrably falls off in proportion as the peasant village comes to dominate the physiognomy of the land- scape? The reason is as follows: there are only masters and

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servants, and nothing else, on the estates of his homeland for the day-labourer, and the prospect for his family, down to the most distant of his progeny, is to slave away on someone else's land from one chime of the estate-bell to the next. In this deep, half- conscious impulse towards the distant horizon there lies hidden an element of primitive idealism. He who cannot decipher this does not know the magic of freedom. Indeed, the spirit of freedom seldom touches us today in the stillness of the study. The naive youthful ideals of freedom are faded, and some of us have grown prematurely old and all too wise, and believe that one of the most elemental impulses of the human breast has been borne to its grave along with the slogans of a dying conception of politics and economic policy.

We have here an occurrence of a mass-psychological character: the German agricultural labourers can no longer adjust themselves to the social conditions of life in their homeland. We have reports of West Prussian landowners complaining about their labourers' 'self-assertiveness'. The old patriarchal relationship between lord and vassal is disappearing. But this is what attached the day-labourer directly to the interests of the agricultural producers as a small cultivator with a right to a share in the produce. Seasonal labour in the beet-growing districts requires seasonal workers and payment in money. They are faced with a purely proletarian existence, but without the possibility of that energetic advance to economic independence which gives added self-confidence to the industrial proletarians who live cheek by jowl in the cities of the West. Those who replace the Germans on the estates of the East are better able to submit to these conditions of existence: I mean the itinerant Polish workers, troops of nomads recruited by agents in Russia, who cross the frontier in tens of thousands in spring, and leave again in autumn. They first emerge in attendance upon the sugar- beet, a crop which turns agriculture into a seasonal trade, then they are everywhere, because one can save on workers' dwellings, on poor rates, on social obligations by using them, and further because they are in a precarious position as foreigners and therefore in the hands of the landowners. These are accompanying circumstances of the economic death-struggle of Old Prussian Junkerdom. On the sugar-beet estates a stratum of industrial businessmen steps into the shoes of the patriarchally ruling lord of the manor, while in the uplands the lands of the manorial estates crumble away under the pressure of the crisis in the agrarian economy. Tenants of small parcels and colonies of small peasants arise on their outfields. The economic foundations of the power of the old landed nobility vanish, and the nobility itself becomes something other than what it was.

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And why is it the Polish peasants who are gaining the land? Is it their superior economic intelligence, or their greater supply of capital? It is rather the opposite of both these factors. Under a climate, and on a soil, which favour the growing of cereals and potatoes above all, alongside extensive cattle-raising, the person who is least threatened by an unfavourable market is the one who brings his products to the place where they are least devalued by a collapse in prices: his own stomach. This is the person who pro- duces/or his own requirements. And once again, the person who can set his own requirements at the lowest level, the person who makes the smallest physical and mental demands for the main- tenance of his life, is the one with the advantage. The small Polish peasant in East Germany is a type far removed from the bustling peasant owner of a dwarf property, whom one may see here in the well-favoured valley of the Rhine as he forges links with the towns via greenhouse cultivation and market-gardening. The small Polish peasant gains more land, because he as it were eats the very grass from off of it, he gains not despite but on account of the low level of his physical and intellectual habits of life.

We therefore seem to see a process of selection unfolding. Both nationalities have for a long time been embedded in the same conditions of existence. The consequence of this has not been what vulgar materialists might have imagined, that they took on the same physical and psychological qualities, but rather that one yielded the ground to the other, that victory went to the nationality which possessed the greater ability to adapt itself to the given economic and social conditions of existence.

This difference in the ability to adapt seems to be present ready- made, as a fixed magnitude. The nations' respective abilities to adapt might perhaps undergo further shifts in the course of many generations, through the millennial process of breeding which no doubt originally produced the difference, but for any reflections on the present situation it is a factor with which we have to reckon, as given.4

The free play of the forces of selection does not always work out, as the optimists among us think, in favour of the nationality which is more highly developed or more gifted economically. We have just seen this. Human history does not lack examples of the victory of less developed types of humanity and the extinction of fine flowers of intellectual and emotional life, when the human community which was their repository lost its ability to adapt to the conditions of existence, either by reason of its social organiza- tion or its racial characteristics. In our case it is the transformation of the forms of agricultural enterprise and the tremendous crisis in agriculture which is bringing to victory the less economically

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developed nationality. The rise of sugar-beet cultivation and the unprofitability of cereal production for the market are develop- ments running parallel and in the same direction: the first breeds the Polish seasonal worker, the second the small Polish peasant.

On looking back at the facts presented here, I am in no position, as I shall willingly concede, to develop theoretically the signi- ficance of the various general points which may be derived from them. The immensely difficult question, certainly insoluble at present, of where to place the limit of the variability of physical and psychological qualities in a population under the influence of its given conditions of existence is something I shall not even venture to touch on.

Instead of this, everyone will automatically want to ask, above all else: what can and should be done in this situation?

You will however permit me to abstain from an exhaustive discussion of this on the present occasion, and to content myself with briefly indicating the two demands which in my view should be posed from the standpoint of Germanism, and are in fact being posed with growing unanimity. The first is the demand for the closing of the Eastern frontier. This was accomplished under Prince Bismarck, and then reversed after his resignation in 1890: permanent settlement remained forbidden to the aliens, but they were permitted entry as migratory workers. A 'class-conscious' land- owner at the head of the Prussian government excluded them in the interests of the maintenance of our nationality, and the hated opponent of the Agrarians [Caprivi] let them in, in the interests of the big landowners, who are the only people to gain from this influx. This demonstrates that the 'economic class-standpoint' is not always decisive in matters of economic policy — here it was the circumstance that the helm of the ship of state fell from a strong hand into a weaker one. The other demand is for a policy of systematic land purchase on the part of the state, i.e. the exten- sion of crown lands on the one hand, and systematic colonization by German peasants on suitable land, particularly on suitable crown land, on the other hand. Large-scale enterprises which can only be preserved at the expense of Germanism deserve from the point of view of the nation to go down to destruction. To leave them as they are without assistance means to allow unviable Slav hunger colonies to arise by way of gradual fragmentation of the estates into small parcels. And it is not only our interest in stemming the Slav flood which requires the transfer of considerable parts of the land of eastern Germany into the hands of the state, but also the annihilating criticism the big landowners themselves have made of the continued existence of their private property by demanding the removal of the risk they run, their personal respon-

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sibility for their own property, which is its sole justification. I refer to the proposal for the introduction of a corn monopoly [the Kanitz proposal of 1894 for a state monopoly on the import of corn into Germany] and the granting of a state contribution of half a billion marks a year.5

But, as I said earlier, I would prefer not to discuss this practical question of Prussian agrarian policy today. I would rather start from the fact that such a question arises at all, the fact that we all consider the German character of the East to be something that should be protected, and that the economic policy of the state should also enter into the lists in its defence. Our state is a national state, and it is this circumstance which makes us feel we have a right to make t