ABSTRACT

Sammlungspolitik appears as a system of economic and political compensations, a symbiotic reciprocity of social forces, pragmatically determined by a succession of responses to the compulsion of entrenched interests, rather than the careful rationalization or creation of policy-makers. Sammlungspolitik is to be identified with the political position developed by the Prussian Finance Minister, Johannes von Miquel, in the summer of 1897. Sammlungspolitik was a governmental strategy, conceived in the summer of 1897 by the leading elements in the Prussian Ministry of State, pushed through in a series of ministerial discussions in the autumn, and implemented in the elections of 1898. Eckart Kehr polemical use of the formula Primat der Innenpolitik has inspired the development of a concept of ‘social imperialism’ which has been loosely and uncritically applied to Miquel’s Sammlungspolitik. The existence of a social imperialism bound to reformist perspectives must introduce a serious qualification into the way in which the idea has previously been used.