The Indelible Bonobo Experience

With religious diversity came the cultural sort. The Catholic areas had very visual and sensual aesthetics. Hence the flamboyant baroque and rococo churches, chapels, and palaces that still dot the southern landscapes today. The Protestant territories frowned on pictures and icons so they gave rise to literary cultures (Goethe, Schiller, Lessing) and to music (Bach). In its ways, the empire was as varied as the EU, where fun ranges from bull fighting at one end to naked saunas at the other. (via ec)

• Originating in Germany in recent decades but increasingly accepted in academia elsewhere, it also regards the institutional structure of the empire as it emerged from the 1653 Reichstag as a proto-type for the EU today. However, its proponents mean that in a good way. Peter Claus Hartmann, a historian at the University of Mainz, says that the old empire, though not powerful politically or militarily, was extraordinarily diverse and free by the standards of Europe at the time. As one of its subjects, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, wrote, it was a place “in which, in peacetime, everybody can prosper.”
• Depending on how one dates it, the old empire lasted a thousand years. Its patriarch was Charlemagne, a Frankish king who united a geographic area eerily similar to that of the 1952 precursor to the EU, the European Coal and Steel Community of West Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy. Crowned emperor in Rome by the pope in 800, Charlemagne and his heirs represented the continuation in western Europe of the ancient Caesars, whence the German word Kaiser (emperor).
• The empire faced the same problem as today’s EU, only worse. The EU currently has 27 member states. During its final 150 years, the empire had more than 300 territories (the number varied). Should each member get one vote? If so, any hillbilly could block progress. Or should votes be weighted by territory? If so, big princes could bully little ones. Should decisions be taken by simple majority, qualified majority or unanimity? The empire answered these questions as the EU does: with a characteristically decisive it-all-depends.
• the various groschen, florins and pfennigs in circulation were pegged to larger accounting units. The Upper and Lower Saxon Kreise formed the taler zone, for instance, and the Bavarian, Franconian and Swabian Kreise had the gulden zone. These blocks met at regular Kreistage, analogous to today’s euro group, the diet of finance ministers from the 17 countries in the euro zone. It thus fell to the Kreise to police monetary naughtiness. Typically, a prince tried to inflate away his own debt or make himself nominally rich by mixing bits of lead or copper into the gold or silver coins coming out of his mint, so that he could produce more of them. This debased the currency, until the coins were carefully weighed again at a Kreistag. The results were captured on conversion charts, in effect the new exchange-rate pegs.
• the empire had grown weak long before Napoleon, and that development may offer the real warning to the EU. In the mid-18th century two members, Austria and Brandenburg-Prussia, outgrew the empire, reducing the other territories to a “third Germany,” says Peter Wilson at the University of Hull. That was destabilising. 
• the problem was that Prussia became so powerful that the empire could no longer discipline it. While it cooperated with Austria, as Germany and France have done in the EU, the duo maintained order. But once Prussia began putting its own interest above the empire’s, even fighting against Austria, a far-sighted observer could have seen the beginning of the end.
• The EU, prompted by Germany, in 1997 signed a “stability and growth pact” to impose fiscal discipline on member countries and to avoid crises. But that pact lost its bite a decade ago once Germany itself broke it. The EU should have taken Germany to task, but Gerhard Schröder, the chancellor, got off scot-free. The EU can discipline Ireland or Greece, but probably not Germany or France.