Hans-Ulrich Wehler - Champion of The Sonderweg Theory

Champion of The Sonderweg Theory

Wehler's speciality is the Second Reich. He was one of the more famous proponents of the Sonderweg (Special Path) thesis that argues Germany in the 19th century underwent only partial modernization. Wehler has argued that Germany was the only nation to be created in Western Europe through a military "revolution from above", which happened to occur at the same time that the agricultural revolution was fading and the Industrial Revolution was beginning in Central Europe. As a result, the economic sphere was modernized and the social sphere partially modernized. Politically, in Wehler's opinion, the new unified Germany retained values that were aristocratic and feudal, anti-democratic and pre-modern. In Wehler's view, it was the efforts of the reactionary German élite to retain power that led to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the failure of the Weimar Republic and the coming of the Third Reich. Wehler has asserted that the effects of the traditional power elite in maintaining power up to 1945 "and in many respects even beyond that" took the form of:

"a penchant for authoritarian politics; a hostility toward democracy in the educational and party system; the influence of preindustrial leadership groups, values and ideas; the tenacity of German state ideology; the myth of the bureaucracy; the superimposition of caste tendencies and class distinctions; and the manipulation of political antisemitism".

Wehler has been especially critical of what calls Otto von Bismarck's strategy of “negative integration” by which Bismarck sought to create a sense of Deutschtum (Germanism) and consolidate his power by subjecting various minority groups such as Roman Catholics, Alsatians, Poles, and Social Democrats to discriminatory laws. Wehler is one of the foremost advocates of the “Berlin War Party” historical school, which assigns the sole and exclusive responsibility for World War I to the German government.

Wehler has argued that the aggressive foreign policies of the German Empire, especially under Kaiser Wilhelm II, were largely part of an effort on the part of the government to distract the German people from the lack of internal democracy. This Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") argument to explain foreign policy, for which Wehler owes much to the work of Eckart Kehr, places him against the traditional Primat der Außenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") thesis championed by historians such as Gerhard Ritter, Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, and Ludwig Dehio. Wehler is an advocate of the concept of social imperialism, which he has defined as "the diversions outwards of internal tensions and forces of change in order to preserve the social and political status quo", and as a "defensive ideology" to counter the "disruptive effects of industrialization on the social and economic structure of Germany" In Wehler's opinion, social imperialism was a device that allowed the German government to distract public attention from domestic problems to the benefit of preserving the existing social and political order Wehler argued that the dominant elites used social imperialism as the glue to hold together a fractured society and maintain popular support for the social status quo He further argued that German colonial policy in the 1880s was the first example of social imperialism in action, followed by the "Tirpitz plan" to expand the German Navy from 1897 onwards According to this point of view, groups such as the Colonial Society and the Navy League are seen as government instruments for mobilizing public support The demands for annexing most of Europe and Africa in World War I are seen by Wehler as the pinnacle of social imperialism

In the 1970s, Wehler was involved in a somewhat discordant and acrimonious debate with Hildebrand and Hillgruber over the merits of the two approaches to diplomatic history. Hillgruber and Hildebrand argued for the traditional Primat der Aussenpolitik approach with empirical research on the foreign-policy making elite, while Wehler argued for the Primat der Innenpolitik approach, treating diplomatic history as a sub-branch of social history with the focus on theoretical research. The two major intellectual influences Wehler cites are Karl Marx and Max Weber