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Japan ushered in a new age for the Japanese people

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but in the course of their expansion began to transform the geo-political theater of East Asia

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with tremendous consequences for the 20th century

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1894-95: First Sino-Japanese War

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became almost like a template of what would happen in the rest of the world

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Germany, late 19th century

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like Japan, national integration depends on the formation of state power

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often in its assertion over neighbors

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empire is used as a concept and instrument for nation building

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a model of recovering from fragmentation, a collection of feudal statelets,

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the remnants of an empire now being brought together over the course of the 19th century

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particularly in the wake of the French invasions into Germany during the Napoleonic wars

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and in some ways borrowing from Napoleon for examples of legal modernization

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like the Japanese

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Japan borrowed modern ideas from the United States

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Germany borrowed ideas from England and France

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consolidating the state, creating an illusion of a shared German space which in some sense had never existed before

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but arguments were made to the opposite of this

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that Germany was Protestant, while there were actually many Catholics and Jews

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Germany had an identity that was somehow counterpoised to the other dominating national identity of Europe, France

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became a long-standing conflict

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sowed the seeds for the outbreaks in the 20th century

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the Habsburgs looked upon the German empire as a threat to their strategic interests

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Germany faced challenges that were very close to them

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Japan at least had the advantage of being separated by large bodies of water

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Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898)

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a shrewd and calculating politico

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was the strong man of the single regimes of the German confederation of states

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managed to promote the idea of a Kaiser, an imperial ruler who would issue his dominion over all of German-speaking peoples from a capital, a national capital, in Berlin

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Germans like Japanese, to build nation, relied upon

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schools, universities

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language campaigns

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newspapers, magazines

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to transcend the local ideas of Prussia, Bavaria

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promoting new business elites

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looking for a national market

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the birth of emerging industrialists

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many of the firms are still the companies that dominate the economic landscape of economic Germany today

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also needed a way of cajoling these elites into participating in unification

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representation in the national political entities like the national parliament, the Reichstag

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local wars

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Prussian army became the important instrument for creating a new national model of integration

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laid the foundations for a national war with France, 1870-71

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this war was decisive

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Prussia spanked the French

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it was a deeply humiliating war for the French

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put the French national identities into another one of its seismic crises

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emboldened the idea that the Prussian military could pull the German nation together

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a decisive moment of unification for the new German nation

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after 1871, Germany began to consolidate more and more led but Bismarck

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first Chancellor Bismarck

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power radiating out to a unified Germany from Berlin

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the system of Iron and Blood

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iron = exemplified the toughness and resilience of the new nation

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blood = sacrifice

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unification of Germany altered the power balance of Europe

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created a new model of territorial rivalry inside the heart of Europe

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with much more lethal potential

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Germany and Japan almost like echoes of each other

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phenomenal examples of the power of nationalism to construct new state systems that could use its resources at the expense of old systems adjacent to them

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political, military, and economic powerhouses

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not unlike a teenage boy who returns to school from summer vacation grown and all bulked up with muscles, as the French and the Chinese were to discover