Word: bismarcks
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...Yugoslavia's strife, the E.C. has been haunted by a feeling of deja vu. More than a century ago, Otto von Bismarck gazed on another Balkan crisis -- the collapse of the empire of Ottoman Turkey -- and shrank from getting militarily involved. In the Iron Chancellor's view, Germany had no interests there that "would be worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian musketeer." Though Serbian nationalism went on to ignite the First World War, the E.C. last week seemed to feel much as Bismarck had. At an emergency session in the Hague, the Community's foreign ministers rejected...
...years ago. The trouble is, the French today are no longer in league with West Germany. Their chief partner is now a larger, unified country, raising some worst-case nightmares of an old nemesis reborn. The two times in modern history when Germans ventured to consolidate -- under Bismarck and under Hitler -- France was eclipsed and conquered. Apprehensions today do not envisage anything so dire as a panzer plunge through the Ardennes, but many French wince at the prospect of an expanded Federal Republic overmastering them with its money, industry and technology...
Saddam also fancies himself as an Arab version of Otto von Bismarck. In ! Europe more than 100 years ago, the Iron Chancellor fused German-speaking principalities into one mighty nation. Saddam remembers as well his patron Gamel Abdel Nasser, who organized Arab pride and resentment against Western hegemony. Saddam's ambition has been to use Iraqi muscle and achievement to unite the Arabs and thereby re-create the vast Abbasid Empire, which lasted 500 years. In that sense, the war in the gulf is transpiring in a time warp. It is a retrospective vision...
Saddam has said that his ambition is to become an Arab Bismarck. Like 19th century Germany, the Arab world shares a common language and culture but is splintered politically. Saddam dreams of welding it into a single, powerful unit -- with himself at the head, of course. The Iraqi leader can make tactical retreats, but he will try to solve the Kuwait crisis in whatever way seems to him most likely to promote those goals, or at least deal them the smallest setback...
...forces to prevent Russia from seizing Turkey's European provinces. The result was the Crimean War, which gave the world Florence Nightingale, the charge of the Light Brigade and the first modern war correspondents. Fearing the consequences of such entanglements for his own country, the German leader Otto von Bismarck declared that the Eastern Question was "not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier...