Metropole

From Hobson's Choice

In a colonial empire, the metropole is the seat of political power. In empires of the more familiar, Western European design, the metropole is a single powerful nation, such as the United Kingdom France. It is often called the "mother country."

The Trans-European Project as Mother Country

The Trans-European Project is the polity that formed in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. The effect of this period 1792-1815 was to so completely tax the states of Europe that they thereafter required both the support of a large ethnic majority as their social base and class solidarity among the elites. Hence, Europe was reorganized into more ethnically cohesive entities (replacing the many multi-state dynasties into single state ones), the haut bourgeois largely captured the monarchy as a political champion, and the elites of the several imperial powers developed a stronger sense of professional cohesion.

Nationalism emerged partly as a reaction to the shift in European class relations. For several centuries the "clash of civilizations" was (a) France versus the main German hegemon, usually Austria but lately Prussia, and (b) France versus England. Nationalism recast the grand narratives of these conflicts, but nationalism was initially the basis for social and class representation within the numerous princely states. The constitutional dilemmas posed by nationalist movements in places such as the Austrian Empire were acute, and frequently resulted in bitter attacks on the newly-emancipated B'nei Yisrael (Jews) and Rroma.

In the end, Austria and the German Empire would suffer a fissure that divided them politically from the other states of Western Europe. The industries of Germany and Scandinavia provided strategic depth for the markets and industrial demands of the TEP, but the Germanic states were generally aloof from the main coalition of Italy, France, Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. At this time, the democratic credentials of any of the TEP participants was poor, including those of the USA; the order of the day was oligarchy of slightly different flavors. So nations like Spain, Germany, and Austria had a relationship to the rest of the TEP analogous to that of the English countryside to London; the benefits, both in wealth and in intra-state hegemony accrued to the great cities, while the periphery suffered a process of mild-to-severe underdevelopment.