Ever since I've first learned about his story in-depth, this idea has also fascinated me – but I've never seen anybody else raise it unprompted!
The analogy with software is right-on, in my view. He crated a system that was complex, sure, but very manageable and powerful if you understood it in sufficient detail.
For a fast-and-loose comparison, he was running foreign policy in Vim/Emacs, while his contemporaries were using Notepad, and of course he did a damned good job. His biggest fault is that he never taught any of his subordinates how to use Vim/Emacs.
He didn't seem to have a succession plan for himself. It's a mystery to me why (hubris, lack of interest?), but it regardless goes down as a fault against him, IMO.
Fascinating analogy, but you're being intriguingly vague. Come on, be honest, take your comparison one step further, a little faster and looser, and tell us what you REALLY think: do you believe Eric Schmidt is more like a Vim user or an Emacs user? And which text editor would Bismarck have used? ;)
One of the things that I really love about the tech industry is the way so many companies have adopted a dual-track seniority system, where you can advance as an individual contributor or as a manager.
I'm not familiar with the history, but it almost sounds like Bismarck was a brilliant individual contributor to diplomacy. Maybe what he needed was to work with an executive who would know how to systematize what Bismarck did - and building an organization to systematize what one brilliant person can do is a skill in itself!
But of course this perspective seems way more obvious now, more than a hundred years later, than it would have at the time. And even if you knew that this was what Germany needed, it would have taken a very, very well-run foreign ministry to pull it off.
gen220 does an excellent job explaining (above). Essentially, somebody who was brilliant at what they did, operating at the outer edge of their skills envelope, and no replacement at a similar skill level.
I understood that, I just don't understand why Bismarck is considered a diplomatic genius instead of reviled as the architect of a dangerously fragile diplomatic situation.
That's because the pointlessness of the butchery of WWI has largely been white-washed, and stripped of all context.
Every year, the British commonwealth celebrates the end of that war.
Every year, I ask why after the war, the public didn't string up every one of the leaders that was responsible for plunging the world into that pointless, industrial bloodbath. The silence I hear is, sadly, deafening.
Nobody cares to actually look at what caused that war. Nobody wants, or wanted to hold anyone accountable. The world collectively shrugged its shoulders, and forgot all about it.
Having been raised in a Commonwealth nation (Canada), I've come to realize how dreadful our education system is in teaching about WW1. That war, the events leading to it, and the events resulting from it are absolutely critical to understanding why the world is the way it is today. Everything from the Russian Revolution to the modern-day borders in the middle east to Irish independence to the reason why New York City became the financial capital of the world are a direct result of that war.
And all that schoolkids here are taught is "The noble British Empire led the glorious allied fight against some bad German people because reasons, here's some pictures of trenches, sometimes soldiers played soccer, now shut up and don't ask any more uncomfortable questions."
I also find it truly repulsive that so many people in this country keep repeating the lie that Canada was "born on Vimy Ridge", as if sending wave after wave of terrified and browbeaten conscripts to die in some shell-blasted hellhole is what "made" us. I'd argue that the true birth of Canada was the Suez Canal crisis, when we openly defied the motherland on the world stage and instead spearheaded a peaceful solution to the mess via an international consensus.
Fun fact: the Canadian politician who led that peaceful solution to the Suez crisis and would later keep Canada out of the Vietnam War, Lester Pearson, volunteered as a field medic for most of WW1. I can't think of any job more likely to permanently rewire one's brain into a "Never again!" orientation.
As an Australian, your story rings particularly true - simply replace Vimy Ridge with Gallipoli. We even celebrate our (arguably) most important national holiday on the day of the first landing.
It took listening to Dan Carlin's podcast [1], which I couldn't recommend more, for me to learn much of what I know and pique my interest to read further.
Because he wasn't? Bismark united Germany by waging wars against Austria, Denmark, and France. Once he gained the territory he wanted, he was careful not to punish these nations. He could have pulled a Napolean and taken over all of Europe.
He made it clear he was just trying to unite his people, not take over the world, and under Wilhelm I, this system was stable.
All of the major western nations were undergoing industrial militarization at this point, particularly with naval technology.
When Wilhelm II came into power, he removed Bismark whose sole goal at this point was managing peace in Europe.
At this point all of the tension was in the Balkans, Wilhelm was eyeing new conquests, the Serbians murdered the Austrian heir to the throne, and every major power thought they were God's chosen people. They also thought any new conflict would be short and sweet just as the recent Prussian wars had been. No one understood how new technology and tactics would change the dynamic of war.
Bismarck was chancellor until 1890 and died about 10 years later. WWI didn't start until about 25 years after he was no longer running the show. People had moved on from his notions of European peace and wanted to play with their new toys.
Additionally, the chancellor was elected by the nobility. It was not as if he could have handed the role down to a successor. He would have had to find someone that appeased the new king, a younger nobility, and the public at large who were quibbling over democracy vs a semi constitutional monarchy.
Bismarck's talent was uniting people and keeping them happy, even when not everyone got what they want. He was respected by his enemies because he illustrated that he was just trying to unify the remains of the Holy Roman Empire, a gelatinous blob of bickering principalities that had been central to European conflicts for hundreds of years. Unification finally stopped the bleeding, and Bismarck made it clear that he was after global stability, not conquest.
If you want to blame someone for WWI, there's not really one person you can point to. However Wilhelm II would fit that mold much better than Bismarck. If he had been alive and in power, he would not have wanted to start a massive war of attrition.
A genius would have built up successors to take over the system or designed it in such a way that it could be maintained lest he be hit by a bus suddenly. It is definitely a good story for tech.
