Social Ideas, Social Reality, Social Practice I

GA 337a — 23 June 1920, Stuttgart

7. On Foreign Policy in the Light of Spiritual Science and Threefolding

At the beginning of the study evening, Ludwig Graf Polzer-Hoditz will give a lecture “On foreign policy in the light of spiritual science and threefolding”. Rudolf Steiner will then take the floor.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I would like to say a few words, perhaps aphoristically, about some of the things that Count Polzer touched on today, since, after all, things that I have touched on here and there over the course of time have been repeatedly alluded to.

One can clearly see from various phenomena how the fact that Count Polzer wanted to point out, this rupture, I would say, which then led to the catastrophe, appears in the more recent political development of the 19th century. He spoke of these years of transition and of the complete bewilderment of the Central European peoples, of the 1870s and 1880s, when the battles over the occupation of Bosnia, the Slav question and so on took place in Austria. This was preceded by the 1860s, when there was still a certain after-effect of those European political moods that originated in 1848. These sentiments can be traced throughout Central Europe, both in the Austrian lands and in what later became the German Empire: it is what one might call the emergence of a certain abstract liberalism, an abstract-theoretical liberalism.

In Austria, at the end of the 1860s, the first so-called People's Ministry, Carlos Auersperg's, emerged from the Schmerling and Belcredi ministries. It had a distinctly liberal character, but a theoretical and abstract one. Then, after a very short interim government, in which the Slav question was brought to a certain height under Taaffe, Potocki, Hohenwart, the so-called second bourgeois ministry, the Adolf Auersperg Ministry, emerged in Austria in the 1870s, and with it a kind of bourgeois-liberal direction. These movements were paralleled by the struggles waged by the liberal parties of Prussia and the individual German states against the emerging imperialism of Bismarck and so forth. These liberal currents that emerged are extremely instructive, and it is actually a shame that today's generation remembers so little of what was said in Germany, in Prussia in the 1870s and 1880s, by men like Lasker and so on, and what was said in Austria by Giskra, mentioned today by Count Polzer, and other similar liberalizing statesmen. One would see how a certain liberal, good will arose, but which was basically abandoned by any kind of positive political insight. That is the characteristic feature: an abstract liberalism is emerging in Central Europe that has many fine liberal principles but that does not know how to reckon with historical facts, that talks of all possible human rights but knows little about history and is particularly unskilled at drawing conclusions from it. And it was perhaps the undoing of the whole of Central Europe – the World War began in Austria, or at least it started from Austria – it was the undoing that this liberalizing tendency in Austria was so terribly unpolitical towards the great problems that arose precisely in Austria and to which Count Polzer has pointed out in the most important parts.

Now we must study a little more closely what this liberalism in Austria actually represents. We can study it by listening to the speeches of the older and younger Plener today. You can study it by listening to the speeches of Herbst, that Herbst who wanted to be a great Austrian statesman of the liberalizing tendency. Bismarck, the realist, called Herbst's followers “die Herbstzeitlosen”, one of those bon mots that are deadly in public life. And this liberalism can be studied in another place, in Hungary, where Koloman Tisza repeatedly appeared in the Hungarian parliament with an extraordinarily strong sense of power, and in his outward demeanor, I would say, the true representative of a liberalism that is turned away from the world, that is unworldly, and which - without the historical facts - only reckons with what emerges from abstract, general principles. Tisza, the elder, the father of the man who played a role in the World War, showed this even in his outward behavior. He could never appear anywhere without a pencil in his hand, as if he were going to expound his principles, which are fixed in pencil notes, to those who represent a believing audience. In a sense, one can study a somewhat inferior edition in the person of Bismarck's opponent Eugen Richter, who, however, belongs to a later period in Prussia-Germany. These people can be used to analyse what has emerged as a thoroughly fruitless policy. In particular, all these people learned politics in the English political school. And the most important fact, the essential thing, was that everything that Plener, Giskra, Hausner, Berger, Lasker and Lasser put forward, everything that the Tisza put forward in Hungary, was something positive, concrete for the English; that it means something to the English because it refers to facts, because what is being pursued there as liberalizing principles, applied, can gradually lead to imperialism in the world. Yes, I would like to say that imperialism is strongly inherent in these things in the English representatives of these principles. When the same principles were advocated by the above-named personalities in their parliaments, they were like squeezed lemons; the same principles referred to nothing; they were abstractions. This is precisely where one can best study the difference between a reality and a phrase. The difference is not in the wording, but in whether one is in reality or not. If you say the same things in the Viennese or Berlin parliament as in the London parliament, it is something completely different. And that is why what came from England as a liberalizing trend and was a positive, concrete policy in England was just empty phrases and empty-phrase politics in Berlin and Vienna.

I cannot develop all these things here today, but just a few aphorisms, perhaps just images. But if one wants to see the contradictions that exist, it is interesting to hear or recall how speakers like Suess, Sturm or Plener spoke in the Austrian parliament of the time, or in the delegations, during the debate that followed on from the planned and then executed occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And then a man appeared who spoke from the perspective of the Slavic nation. I still vividly remember a speech that made a certain great impression at the time. It was the speech that Otto Hausner gave in the Austrian Parliament, which he then published under the title 'Germanness and the German Reich'. Unfortunately, I was unable to get hold of it again. I would very much like to have it again, but I don't know if it is completely out of print. If one reads this speech in connection with another that he gave when the Arlberg tunnel was being built, if one reads what he said there from the point of view of higher politics and what he threw into the Austrian parliament from the political podium when Andrássy set out to work for the occupation of Bosnia, then realities were spoken. Hausner was, on the surface, a kind of fop, a kind of faded, snobbish and masked fop who could constantly be seen with his monocle in the Viennese mansion, whom one always met at a certain hour in Café Central, an old fop, but thoroughly brilliant and speaking out of realities. If you take all these speeches together, then basically [the catastrophe of] 1914 to 1918 was predicted back then, even what we are experiencing now, the soul sleep that is descending on this Central Europe. And there you can see how anyone who looks at reality — and I could give you many more such examples — must indeed come to the second thesis that has been mentioned to you this evening, out of reality.

These things that are connected with the threefold social order are certainly not something that has been thought up theoretically, they are not something professorial, but they are taken entirely from reality. And anyone who experienced how, in Austria, Austrian Germanness – for that was essentially the mainstay of Austrian liberalism – clashed with the then emerging and pretentious Austrian Slavdom, had to crystallize the view that Pan-Slavism is a positive force. Pan-Slavism has truly come into its own as a positive force. And perhaps more important than what came from Czechism – from Palacki to Rieger – is what came from Polishness. The Poles played an exceptionally important role in Austria as a kind of advance element, as a vanguard for Slavdom, and they represented all-embracing political points of view. Hausner, who was of Polish origin, once said in a speech that “Rhaetian-Alemannic blood globules” - a strange chemistry - rolled in his veins; but he felt he was a primeval Pole. But there were other Poles speaking in the Viennese parliament during these important times: Grocholski, Goluchowski and Dzieduszycki and so on, and it must be said that they did come up with some great political points of view, while the liberal German element unfortunately degenerated into empty phrases. It could not hold its own, so that it finally merged into the party that Polzer-Hoditz also mentioned, the Christian Social Party, which among young people in Vienna who were involved in politics at the time, and I was one of them, was called the “Party of the foolish fellows of Vienna”; it then became the Lueger Party.

This contrast between a declining direction and a rising one is very interesting. And in a sense, the Poles were unscrupulous, so that all sorts of things came out, for example the following: In Austria, they wanted to return to the old school law, to the old, clerical school law – I say “Austria”, but, to express its concreteness, they spoke in the Austrian parliament, [the Reichsrat], not of “Austria” or something like that, but of the “Kingdoms and Countries represented in the Reichsrat”; Austria-Hungary had a dualistic form of government; one part was called “the Kingdoms and Countries represented in the Reichsrat”, the other “the representation of the countries of the Holy Crown of Stephen”. So when they wanted to go back to a clerical school law in Austria, a majority could not be formed by the Germans alone, but either the Poles or the Ruthenians had to join forces with them. Whenever the opinion went in a certain direction, a coalition was formed between Germans and Ruthenians, and when it went in a different direction, between Germans and Poles. At that time, the issue was to create a clerical school law. The Poles tipped the scales, but what did they do? They said: Yes, all right, we agree to this school law, but we exclude Galicia. So they excluded their own country. So at that time a school law was created by a majority that had Polish delegates in its bosom, but these Polish delegates excluded their own country and imposed a school law on the other Austrian countries. This ultimately resulted in one area ruling over the other and enacting something that it did not want applied in its own area. That was the situation. How could the huge political tasks that arose be tackled with such a background!

It so happened that after this second bourgeois ministry, the government finally passed to this Taaffe ministry, which itself issued the certificate: In Austria, if you want to govern properly, you can only muddle through – that is, juggle from one difficulty to another, save one thing by another, and so on. The ministry that Taaffe headed as prime minister was then also “wittily” led. Taaffe owed his position less to his intellectual capacities than to the fact that at the time at the Viennese court - the Viennese court was already in a state that sailed into the gruesome drama of Mayerling —, that at that time at the Viennese court there was a great receptivity for the special art of Count Taaffe, which consisted in his being able to make little rabbits and shadow puppets with a handkerchief and fingers. The Viennese courtiers were particularly fond of them at the time, and that is how Taaffe's position was consolidated. He was able to keep this Austrian chaos in a corresponding current for a decade. It was actually quite bleak when you saw it happening. I really talked to quite sensible people at the time. They knew that Taaffe was kept in power by the little men. But people like the poet Rollett, for example, said to me: Yes, but Taaffe is still the most intelligent of them. It was a bleak situation. And we must not forget how, little by little over the course of that half-century to which Count Polzer has referred, the stage was set for the situation in which, during the World War, the very witty but thoroughly frivolous Czernin was able to play a leading role at the most important moment. How could one hope that something like the idea of the threefold social order, which was born out of the inner forces of history and brought to the Central European powers in 1917, would be understood otherwise than through adversity? People just didn't understand it, and that's not surprising, because after all, the threefold order is not understood by making bunnies. Other arts will be needed to penetrate into these things.

Now, you see, I have presented all this as a kind of image. One could show in many similar images how this whole catastrophe has been in preparation for a long time and how [in Central Europe] what was and is a reality in the West has become a cliché. And that was mainly something that I always used as a way of putting things to people [such as Kühlmann] - you needed a way of putting things to Kühlmann -: the fact that English politics is part of the great historical perspective in reality. This English policy has been preparing for centuries what has happened out of historical events. I believe that, of course, to understand the whole thing, it is necessary to delve into what underlies the external development and presentation of history.

But, dear ladies and gentlemen, read the memoirs of people. You will see how, in fact, where people present themselves in a certain way, as they are, we are confronted with what can be called: Central Europe is gradually degenerating in terms of the greatness of ideas, and the ideas that are particularly fruitful for Central Europe are emerging in England. It is interesting to follow, for example, the figure of the predecessor of Andrássy, Count Beust, that remarkable minister who could represent every form of patriotism and serve everyone. I would also like to describe Count Beust to you figuratively – there are various accounts in memoirs of how he related to Western European personalities: he would fold up into his knees, very politely, but he would fold up into his knees. So that is the Central European statesman who is actually unable to keep up. I have to mention all this because I was immediately asked about it by Count Polzer: How does it show itself, what has been working from the West for centuries, namely as a conscious English policy working with the historical powers?

The actual external agent [of this English policy] is King James VI, and I would like to say that the gunpowder conspiracy is something quite different from what is presented in history. It is actually the outward sign, the outward symptom of the importance of what is going through Europe from England as an impulse. This is a policy of the great historical perspective. You can see quite clearly the thesis that Count Polzer mentioned today and which I put forward when I first advocated the threefold order: you cannot take some measures – which are foolishly called the League of Nations today – to eliminate from the world what is factually given and must continue to have a factual effect, namely the Central European-English-American economic struggle. This struggle exists, just as the struggle for existence exists within the animal kingdom. It must be there, it cannot be eliminated from the world, but it must be taken up because it is a fact. The supporters of this Anglo-American policy see through this very well. And there something comes to meet us that can be clearly demonstrated – I am not telling hypotheses, but I am telling you things that you could hear in speeches in England in the second half of the 19th century. It was said quite clearly there: a great world war must break out in Europe – as I said, I am only quoting from speeches from the second half of the 19th century – this world war will lead to Russia becoming the great *testing ground for socialism. There, [in Russia], experiments will be carried out for socialism that we in the Western countries would not dream of wanting to strive for, because the conditions there do not allow it. There you see great aspects, the greatness of which you recognize by the fact that they have largely come true and – you can be sure – will continue to come true. But these aspects are not from yesterday; the “minds” of today's people are from yesterday, but not these aspects – they are centuries old.

And what Count Polzer will show you in a week's time as the actual spirit of Peter the Great's testament was simply what was to be opposed [from the East] to the imperialism of the West. Western imperialism, the Anglo-American essence, wanted to found the Anglo-American empire from the standpoint of the universal producer, so to speak. In the East, it has truly been thought of for a long, long time to tie in with the principles of the testament of Peter the Great – you will hear more about whether the testament is true or a forgery; but these are things that are actually of very little importance. And this, what is there in the West, should have been countered, so to speak, by a universal empire of consumption – the latter has already taken on terrible forms today. But these two realms are confronting each other. One can say that basically the one is as evil as the other in its one-sidedness. And in between, what appears to be a foray by the West into the liberalizing politics of Beust, Andrässy, Tisza, Berger, Lasker, Lasser and so on, is rubbing up against what appears to be an advance of Western liberalism. What appears to be an offshoot of Western liberalism comes up against what comes from the East. In Prussia, this is only a form of undifferentiated Polishness, while in Austria it is the strong characters that are there. For in fact, all types of character are represented in this Slavdom: the short, stocky, broad-shouldered Rieger with the broad, almost square face, with the tremendously powerful gaze – I would say that his gaze was power; in Rieger lived something like an after-effect of Palacky, who in 1848 from Prague had Panslavism; the old fop Hausner, very witty, but with him another nuance of what is active in the East emerges; and then people like Dzieduszycki, who spoke as if he had dumplings in his mouth, but was thoroughly witty and thoroughly in control of the matter. There one could study how Austrian Germanism in particular preserved a great, wonderful character. When I was in Hermannstadt in 1889 and had to give a lecture, I was able to study the declining Germanism in the Transylvanian Saxons – Schröer wrote a grammar of the Zipser Germanism and that of the Gottschee region. I have emphasized some of the greatness of this declining Germanness in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man). There we find these remarkable figures, who still had something of the elemental greatness of Germanness in them, such as Hamerling and Fercher von Steinwand. But Fercher von Steinwand, for example, gave a speech in the 1850s that encapsulates the entire tragedy of Central Europe. He said: What should one actually think of when thinking of the future of Germanness? He describes the gypsies, the homelessness of the gypsies. It is remarkable how some things have prophetically dawned on the best people in Central Europe. And it is true, the best people have actually been oppressed, and those who were at the top were terrible people. And so this adversity has prepared the way, which should actually be the great teacher.

In this state, in Austria, where there were thirteen official languages before the war, it really showed how impossible this old state structure actually is in modern humanity, how impossible it is to call a unified state what one was accustomed to. These thirteen different peoples – there were actually more, but officially there were thirteen – demanded with all their might what then had to be expressed as the idea of threefold social order. And Austria could be a great school for this world-historical policy. Especially if one studied it in Austria in the 1880s – I had to take over the editorship of the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” at that time – in the 1880s, when Taaffe ruled externally, when Lueger was being prepared, one really had the opportunity to see the driving forces. At that time, the whole character of Vienna changed. Vienna changed from a city with a German character to a city with an international, almost cosmopolitan character, due to the influx of Slavs. You could study how things developed. Then you realized that there was something impotent about the outcome of liberalism. It was like the impotence when Herbst spoke. Then it finally came to the point that people thought: This policy is no longer good! But they did not come to this conclusion because they inwardly recognized the empty phrases of a policy like Herbst's, which only produced abstractions, but because the Viennese government was striving for prestige and imperialism and used the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. When someone like Herbst opposed it, people didn't see the emptiness of his words, they just saw that he couldn't identify with imperialist politics. In contrast to this, Plener, who basically spoke the same empty phrases, but who identified with and won over the people who were in favor of the occupation, because he was a bigger sycophant. It was at that time, under the impact of the Bosnian occupation, that Hausner delivered his great speeches, in which he prophetically predicted what basically came to pass. Even in what was said then, where the testament of Peter the Great played a role, there was something of the sheet lightning of what then came to pass in such a terrible way. Particularly in the speeches that Count Polzer mentioned today, in which the testament of Peter the Great and the grand perspectives of the Slavs were so often touched upon, a certain opportunity can be seen to see what one should have done, if one had been sensible, in the face of British policy and its grand historical perspectives.

Politics, ladies and gentlemen, must be studied as a reality and experienced as a reality. And again and again I have to say that it is actually extremely painful for me when the people who get hold of the “key points” do not look at them, that they are written out from a faithful observation of the European and other conditions of civilized modern life and with due consideration of all the relevant details. But, my dear audience, you really can't write all these things in detail in a book that is published as a kind of program book. Today I have only hinted at some things in pictures; but if you wanted to write about it, you would have to write fifty volumes. Of course, these fifty volumes cannot be written, but their content has been incorporated into the “Key Points”. And that is the great – or small – thing: it is the small characteristic of our time that one does not feel that there is a difference between the sentences that are spoken and written out of reality and all the gigantic nonsense that is going around the world today and that is actually treated today as having the same meaning as what is drawn from positive reality and what has been experienced. One should feel that this is included in the “key points” and does not need the proof of the fifty volumes. It is an indictment of humanity, this inability to feel whether a sentence, which may only be two lines long, is alive or just a journalistic phrase.

That is what is necessary and what we must and can arrive at: the ability to distinguish between journalism and empty phrases and content that has been experienced and born of blood. Without this, we will not make any progress. And precisely when an attempt is made to orient ourselves in terms of grand foreign policy, it becomes clear how necessary it is today for humanity to arrive at such a distinction.

That is what I wanted to suggest with a few rather inadequate sentences in response to Count Polzer's remarks.

After Rudolf Steiner's remarks, there will be an opportunity for discussion.