Commercial state
The Hibernia Affair
The underlying issue of the commercial state was an important one for nineteenth century German government officials who saw themselves as holding the line against encroaching industrialism. This is illustrated, for example, in the Hibernia Affair in which the Prussian nobility and bureaucracy sought to curtail the growing power of the industrial middle class. According to Charles Medalen, "The Hibernia Affair of 1904 was nominally a struggle between Prussian 'state socialism' and private enterprise. Neither position was clearly defined....Nonetheless Prussia's attempt to nationalize the Hibernia Coal Company revived fundamental issues which had once divided the bourgeoise and the traditional rulers of Prussia, issues which many had thought resolved by social empiricalism and Weltpolitic." In blocking the takeover of Hibernia, heavy industry sought to reestablish limits to the government's growing encroachment upon the private sphere. [1]
In this context, the commercial state as it was seen to exist in Britain and the U.S. was contrasted with the majesty of the traditional Prussian state (and the Holy Roman Empire): "The Prussian state was not an autonomous factor in society, as proclaimed by its official myth. But neither was it the simple tool of the bourgeoise as some Marxists would have it. With a heavy ballast of history, a vague and pervasive ideology, and a bureaucracy jealous of its power, the state had a massive momentum of its own. The Hibernia affair was a symbolic struggle over the political destinies of Prussia and Germany. Would 'the state' control the economy, or would the economy overwhelm the state? Did the government, allied to the capitalist bourgeoise and willy-nilly committed to industrial society have the power to alter the direction of German economic development? Or would a belated bourgeois revolution occur, would the traditional 'state' prove powerless to stop capitalist monopolies from imposing their will on society? Would the government become an auxiliary service to business, as it seemed to be in Britain and America? The fate of Hibernia itself was of secondary importance, but it was a harbinger of the future, and the protagonists fought with a bitterness born of that knowledge." [2]