Section 596 German-American Conflict (2)

Germany's capital accumulation is not as good as that of the United States, but Germany is a traditional society, lacking space for development, at least in agriculture, the desire for foreign investment is very strong, although German capital is not abundant, but it is good at using the financial market, they always combine the banking industry with other industries to establish joint-stock companies, like a group army to act collectively.

Germany uprooted the tropical jungle in southern Mexico, opened sugar cane plantations, and made rum in addition to sugar, and in the north, contracted a large number of semi-arid areas to operate pastures and raise sheep, these are the strengths of the Juncker Group, although the scale of their plantations, the scale of the ranches is neither as large as the British Dairy Company, nor as large as the American slavery plantations, but it is very intensive, with German characteristics, more like the Juncker estate, taking into account the traditional German intensive cultivation and modern capitalization operations.

The Germans also quickly established a railway company, announcing that they were going to build an entire rail network in Mexico, with great ambitions, or ambitions. Americans don't care about this, because Mexico's railway industry is mainly the domain of the Chinese, and like mining, the Chinese previously monopolized Mexican railways. However, the railway was not a network, but simply a railway with Acapulco as the center, connecting some important mines and cities. It is doubtful that the Germans will be able to build a complete railway network centered on Mexico City, but it will provide a huge market for Germany's financial, railroad and mechanical engineering industries.

In addition, Germans began to emigrate to Mexico, which is something that anyone can imagine. The rapid development of the German economy has created the largest number of unemployed peasants, and in recent years, Germany has immigrated to the Americas in large numbers, and the number of immigrants is even more than that of Britain, and the German population in later generations ranked first in the United States.

A large number of immigrants from the German region were attracted by the large amount of undeveloped land in Mexico and came to Mexico to develop the land. German farmers, some of the best in Europe, came to Mexico with the encouragement of the government. A community of Germans in Mexico was quickly formed, which is why Prince Leopold did not co-opt native-born whites, who believed only Germans.

In addition to the Germans, other ethnic groups in the German-ruled zone, mainly Poles, also began to migrate to Mexico in large numbers. They also enjoy preferential conditions from the government, free access to land, and tax incentives for a certain period of time. But these offers only wanted the eastern part of Prussia, near the Polish provinces for some Germanized Poles.

Encouraging these Poles to emigrate, it was a conscious purge by Bismarck's government. Bismarck was in charge of German politics, and although he unified Germany, it was not worthy of the name, and the states retained a large number of privileges, and various forces acted on their own, and these were all problems that Bismarck needed to solve. The conflict between the Prussian regent and Bismarck was that Bismarck gave these people too many privileges, but Bismarck was not really willing to divide the empire, he just wanted to unify first and then reform. These are the things he has done all these years, weakening the power of the states and strengthening the power of the imperial government. Weaken the power of other forces and strengthen the power of the executive branch.

Among them, the struggle between the imperial government led by Bismarck and religious forces is called the "culture war", mainly against the interference of Catholicism in secular power. Prussia and other Uttar states are Protestant states, and Bavaria and other southern states are Catholic states, which is why the southern secession tendency has always been very strong, always pro-Austrian and anti-Prussian. But the general trend was, driven by nationalism, and the stronger Prussia unified Germany. Bismarck continued to use nationalism, a new identity that transcends religion, to suppress religious identity and limit the power of the church.

In the past, the church ran schools, especially in the South. Now Bismarck is calling for a Prussian-style, government-led system of compulsory education, free from church interference, and without religious content in teaching. This aroused opposition from the Catholic bloc, who formed the Centre Party to confront Bismarck in parliament.

The Southern States themselves were strong, and the Kingdom of Bavaria still retained its status as a kingdom, retaining military and diplomatic power, and Bismarck even bribed the King of Bavaria to build a luxurious castle called Neuschwanstein Castle in order to get the King of Bavaria to agree to join the German Empire. This is the prototype of the later Disney Castle, also known as Sleeping Beauty Castle.

So in the culture wars, Bismarck fought hard against the Catholic forces in the south. But in the north, Poland was an outlier, a Catholic country among the Protestant princes, with the Protestant regions of Germany to the west and Orthodox Russia to the east, and he maintained a stubborn Catholic tradition in the midst of a pagan sect. Unable to suppress Bavaria, it could not suppress Poland, and as a result, in Bismarck's culture war against the Catholic Church in the south, Poland became the most repressed region.

Within the territory of the Kingdom of Poland, Bismarck could not move, and Poland and Prussia formed the United Kingdom, just like the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland, each with its own parliament and government, relatively independent, and unified under the same royal power. But on the side of Prussia, there lived a large number of Poles, who were ostracized by the most forceful.

In the eastern border provinces, the German government formulated a policy of Germanization, under the slogan of resisting the "Polonization" of the eastern part of the German Empire, and against the background of nationalist thinking, there was a so-called threat of Polish "infiltration" in eastern Germany. The policy of enforcing Germanization included the use of German only in administrative bodies, the use of German and German in schools, and the prohibition of speaking languages other than German in any official setting.

Such a policy, not unlike the one pursued by Germany in Alsace and Lorraine, was inevitably met with resistance. The German government took tough repressive measures against the rebels, even expelling their own Poles. Within a few years, 22,000 Poles and more than 10,000 Jews with Russian or Austrian nationality were expelled from the eastern provinces of the German Empire. They

Many of them were deported to the Kingdom of Poland. But here it is difficult for these people to maintain even the most basic livelihoods, because Poland itself is an overpopulated country, and industry is far less developed than in Germany, and the Poles themselves are migrating to the United States in large numbers. Due to the scale of immigration, a complete industrial chain has been formed.

The process of immigrating to the United States for Poles is very simple, as long as there are three conditions, $50, 1 address, and someone to pick them up. Immigrants from the interior of Poland generally spend a week in the port of Danzig, where they are checked for good health before being allowed to board the ship. After that, I went to Germany, changed to a ship to the United States, and if it went well, I drifted at sea for a week or two to reach New York. If you get off the ship, you must undergo a medical examination by the U.S. side, and if you don't have lice, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and other diseases, you can be allowed to enter the United States.

Usually Polish Jews would stay in New York, and Poles would go to Chicago. Chicago has even developed into the largest overseas Pole city, known as Little Poland. In addition to the United States, many Poles chose to stay in Europe and settled in Britain, France and other countries. However, these Poles, who were excluded by German national rule and emigrated to Britain and France, were often the better economic class, they were skilled or businessmen, and did not need to go to the United States to seek a livelihood.

Bismarck's national policy, which cannot be said to be a kind of cruel rule, is actually quite normal in this era. It was not only Germany that excluded the Poles and Jews, but other countries also excluded the Germans. In fact, like the Jews, the Germans are also a very widespread ethnic group in Europe, with ethnic Germans living in the Volga Valley in the east, France in the west, and the Black Sea in the south. Perhaps because of the greater turbulence, or because it was mainly concentrated in Central Europe, which facilitated its migration to all directions, the German nation was more widely distributed in Europe than any other nation.

The Napoleonic Wars fueled nationalism in Europe, and the wars that followed turned traditional dynastic feuds into ethnic hatreds. Exclusion by the people and expulsion by the government are not uncommon. For example, after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, 80,000 Germans were expelled from France. After France ceded Alsace Lorraine to Germany after the war, 130,000 French people who did not want to be ruled by the Germans left the territory that once belonged to France. The Germans living in Russia also fled from Russia, which had a growing sense of national identity, during the war and in peacetime. In recent years, nearly 50,000 Germans living in the Volga region have made up their minds to leave their places of residence. Wherever new nation-states emerge, or where ethnic policies are pursued in ancient multi-ethnic empires, there is a danger of ethnic disintegration.

The conflict of nationalism is one thing, but also the demographic pressure brought about by the rapid development of industrialization. However, the biggest reason is that the changes in the old social order caused by the period of social change have caused many people to lose their traditional livelihoods and lack the ability to sustain their livelihoods in the new era.

For example, the reform of serfdom in Germany, although it did not protect the aristocracy as heavily as in England, and allowed the aristocracy to occupy public land in a frenzy, did not divide the land equally among the peasants as in France. Instead, the method of letting serfs buy land from the lord at a high price, some peasants gritted their teeth and ransomed small pieces of land, and the Junker nobles used these funds to invest in new businesses and transform into new nobles, and in some places, peasants could not afford to buy land, so they could only lose their land and be displaced, either choosing to go to the city as proletarian workers, or they could only migrate to other places to find land for their survival. This allowed Germany to continue to send immigrants to the outside world, and surpassed the industrialized Britain, the slow population growth of France, and the vast land of Russia, to become the largest population exporter in Europe, and in some places, Germans even immigrated to the United States with entire villages.

In the past, Germans could only go to the United States, but the United States is a country with British culture after all, although there are fewer and fewer British immigrants, but the British culture formed by history allows later German immigrants to only integrate into the British cultural background, which is why the German population in later generations is the largest ethnic group in the United States, but the United States is an English-speaking country.

In this context, Mexico, ruled by the German princes, became a new choice, a new area of immigration that maintained German cultural traditions and was financed by the government. Large numbers of German and Germanized Polish immigrants began to pour into Mexico, where a German-speaking community began to form.

If this is the case, the conflict between Germany and the United States will not be very serious, but the problem is that, just like Napoleon's entry into Quebec, the Germans' entry into Mexico also had a strong impact on the United States, and a large number of German residents in the United States, just like the French defected to Napoleon, although not all of them were like this, but there are still a considerable number of Germans who choose to invest in Mexico ruled by the royal family of Daubern. Some of these German-American residents are no longer ordinary laborers, but capitalists who have accumulated wealth, and they have become rich by exploiting the resources of the United States, but they have used their wealth to build Mexico, which Americans do not want to see.

The lack of capital in the United States itself made the United States very reluctant to flow these German capital into Mexico, but there was no appropriate legal means to intervene, but public opinion began to criticize, although only a small number of German ethnic groups migrated from the United States to Mexico, but let the British ethnic group that controlled public opinion portray Germans as an American ethnic group that does not love the United States, leading to conflicts between Germans and British Americans in the United States.

Just as Germany has brought Polish culture into the border area bordering Poland in the east and called it Polish infiltration, the United States has also called the problems brought by Germany's entry into Mexico to American society as a German shock!

These are not what the US government wants to see, they have endured the hardships of Napoleon, and they have long judged the impact of the European powers entering the Americas and the American society, so they have always been very opposed to Germany's control of Mexico.

But now that the wood has been completed, the United States has no way to expel German power, but can only limit German expansion in the Americas. In particular, it excluded Germany's infiltration of other Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, using Mexico as a base. To put it bluntly, the United States feared that Germany, after annexing Mexico, would annex Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and other Spanish Caribbean colonies.

What better way to prevent other powers from annexing this place than the United States, so the United States decided to take it from the Spaniards, and they used a large amount of money to buy it, and the Spaniards agreed. The United States also successfully lobbied Britain not to interfere in the territorial deal, citing the need to prevent China from annexing it.

Whether it is said that the Americans are preparing for a rainy day, or that it is expansionism within the United States that they are taking advantage of the Americans' panic about the infiltration of European and Chinese forces into the Americas to promote American expansion, in short, the Americans have succeeded in buying these three tropical islands with a huge amount of money of 50 million dollars.

These tropical islands, as well as the previously independent Haiti, are large plantation economies, rich in sugar cane, and have high economic value, but swallowing them may not be good medicine for the United States, but may be bitter fruit!

The three tropical islands annexed in the name of German expansion turned out to be the fuse of the conflict between the North and the South of the United States!