Parlament und auswärtige Politik in Preußen 1849–1859

Abstract

SUMMARY Little research has been done to date on the relationship between parliamentary systems and foreign policy. However, the gradual increase of influence exerted by parliaments on foreign policy is of the greatest importance for understanding the evolution of parliamentary systems that took place in Europe mainly in the course of the nineteenth century. During that period, foreign policy in Germany lay for the most part in the hands of the monarchs and their governments, the executive power as a rule denying the parliaments any right to cooperate in decisions concerning international relations. In the 1850s, generally known as the ‘reactionary decade’, the deputies of the Prussian diet, however, held several intensive debates on foreign policy, mostly in connection with political crises such as the German-Danish conflict over Schleswig-Holstein (1849), the Olmütz Convention between Prussia and Austria (1850), the Crimean War (1854), and the Italian War in 1859. Thus, despite unfavourable circumstances, a kind of ‘parliamentary convention’ became established in Prussia, which was to have further effects on the political history of the German Reich founded in 1871.