German Customs Union (Zollverein)
A customs union covering most of Germany came into force on 1 January 1834, and it did more for German unification than any speech. The German Confederation of 1815 was thirty-nine sovereign states, each with its own tariffs, tolls, weights, measures and currencies. Goods moving from Hamburg to Austria crossed dozens of customs frontiers, and a Rhine barge paid tolls at every stretch. Prussia moved first, for fiscal rather than national reasons. Its territory was in two blocks separated by other states, and the tariff law of 1818 abolished internal duties within Prussia and set a single moderate external tariff — which meant the small states in between either joined or were strangled by transit charges. They joined, one after another, and the union of 1834 covered eighteen states and some twenty-three million people. Austria was not in it. Metternich understood the danger and could not answer it, because Austria's own industry was protected by high tariffs it could not abandon and its empire was not a natural member of a German market. The economic consequences were large: a single market, standardised currency arrangements, the railway boom of the 1840s and 1850s, and the industrial base of the Ruhr. The political consequence was larger. It taught Germans to think of Germany as a unit with Prussia at the centre and Austria outside it, thirty years before the wars that arranged the same thing with armies. The economist Friedrich List had argued for exactly that, and died before seeing it. The union also settled a question nobody had voted on: whether Germany would include Austria. By the time the armies decided it in 1866, the customs frontier had been running along that line for a generation, and the commercial map and the political one simply converged.
- Year: 1834 CE
- Category: Political
