The German Confederation: Foundation and Cooperation

The German Confederation emerged from the Congress of Vienna in 1815, bringing together monarchies including Austria, Prussia, and Bavaria, and free cities including Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, and Frankfurt. Articles 1 and 2 of the Federal Act defined its common aims as maintaining internal and external security while protecting members' independence and territorial integrity. The king of Denmark joined for Holstein and the king of the Netherlands for Luxembourg; only the relevant territories of Austria and Prussia belonged to the Confederation.

The Act explicitly bears the date June 8, 1815, at its conclusion. A separate text, the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna dated June 9, incorporated the Confederation's organizational principles in Articles 53–64, while Article 118 identified the June 8 document as part of the overall settlement. The relationship between the document's date and the congress's final instrument can thus be checked against their provisions. June 8 should not simply be treated as the date on which all signatures, ratifications, and institutional operations had been completed.

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The Federal Assembly consisted of members' plenipotentiaries, met in Frankfurt, and was presided over by Austria. Its smaller council for ordinary business had seventeen votes: smaller states shared votes, and the four free cities also shared one. Matters concerning fundamental institutions and similar issues went before a plenary assembly in which every member had at least one vote and larger states had more. This was a permanent body of state representatives, not an elected national parliament.

Article 7 distinguished ordinary majorities, the two-thirds majority of the plenary assembly, and matters that could not be settled by majority vote, including fundamental laws, members' particular rights, and religion. It also limited recesses to four months to prevent the common institution from remaining inactive indefinitely. The planned opening on September 1, 1815, was delayed until November 1816. War, accession procedures, and diplomatic disputes created a gap between arrangements on paper and actual operation.

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Committees investigated matters and prepared proposals. Kreutzmann's research shows that they usually met at their chairman's residence and returned reports or opinions to the Assembly. Members were not confined to repeating their governments' instructions, but gradually acquired room to offer their own expert judgments. The relationship between sovereign governments and joint working bodies was therefore not a simple one-way chain of command.

Financial cooperation also developed gradually. The contribution schedule adopted on August 20, 1818, was based chiefly on population, counting only the relevant regions where a state belonged for part of its territory. A contribution treasury established in 1819 initially financed repairs to fortresses and on-site preparations for new construction, collecting 30,000 gulden that year. It later assumed more committee expenses. Members supplied troops and shared the costs of common affairs, with specific burdens subject to negotiation and registration.

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Article 18 required the Assembly to discuss freedom of the press and protection for authors and publishers against unauthorized reprinting. In 1817, Berg, Oldenburg's representative, was assigned to compile the states' regulations. He first presented a report on protection against reprinting in 1818, then joined representatives of Hanover and Baden on a committee that submitted a draft in 1819. Differences over the book trade's interests, protection periods, censorship policy, and local legislative authority prevented the investigation from immediately producing uniform rules.

A federal resolution of November 9, 1837, eventually established minimum protection principles, which Prussia promulgated on November 29. Articles 1 and 2 prohibited mechanical reproduction without the rights holder's consent and provided at least ten years of protection for qualifying works, with different starting points for existing and future works. Article 6 required states to report their implementing laws or orders and the procedures for proving an original edition and its publication date. The common standard still had to enter individual member institutions; it was not an already fully unified modern copyright law.

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The federal press law of September 20, 1819, demonstrated another kind of coordinated action. Article 1 required daily newspapers, periodicals, and publications of no more than twenty printed sheets to obtain prior approval from their state's authorities. Articles 4 and 5 extended governments' responsibility to the Confederation as a whole, requiring active supervision to minimize disputes between members arising from publications. Common rules directly intervened in the circulation of information between authors, editors, and readers.

Article 6 allowed an affected government to complain in writing to the Assembly. It also permitted the Assembly, following a committee investigation, to ban on its own initiative publications considered dangerous to the security of the Confederation or its members, leaving enforcement to the relevant governments. Article 7 barred editors of prohibited publications from editing similar ones in any member state for five years. Cross-border complaints, collective decisions, and local enforcement formed a chain of joint action whose efficiency served to suppress political discussion.

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Article 11 of the founding Act required members to guarantee one another's security and refrain from war against each other, referring disputes first to committee mediation and, if necessary, adjudication. Yet the same article preserved their right to enter external alliances, prohibiting only those detrimental to the security of the Confederation or other members. Union constrained the states without eliminating their separate diplomatic identities.

Article 13 promised constitutions based on representation of the estates, and Article 18 called for discussion of press freedom. Neither provision establishes that a common democratic system already existed. Copyright protection could be coordinated gradually and press supervision institutionalized rapidly, showing that cooperation did not automatically produce liberty. The Confederation lasted until 1866. A central question in its early history is how common institutions raised money, investigated, decided, and enforced measures under conditions of divided sovereignty, and whose interests those capacities served.

References: [1] [3] [4] [5]