extensive cultural, linguistic and geographic ties among their peoples - but, politically, until the late 19th Century they were divided into smaller, extremely competitive, principalities. As western Europe emerged from the post-Napoleonic era, when the "emperor's" "republican" conquests covered the face of the continent at one time or another, those principalities exhibited distinctly different political and economic personalities, ranging from the autocratic to the burgher (or bourgeois) republican, from nascent industrialism to agriculture-intensive. It was Count Otto von Bismarck who, in 1871, finally united the German principalities under a federation headed by his "Kaiser," the hereditary ruler of Prussia. Prussia embraced most of what was to become East Germany. Strong in organizational skills and a disciplined military tradition, it did not have the same burgeoning bourgeois traditions of the France/Belgium/Holland/Denmark-bordering industrial and trade regions (particularly the large Westphalia and Hanover), nor the insulated, "Germanic" conf
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