| Zusammenfassung: | Our understanding of the Holy roman empire has been transformed in the last fifty years. the older, ‘Borussian interpretation’ dismissed the empire in its last two centuries as moribund and doomed to be supplanted by dynamic, centralizing ‘power states’ like Prussia. A succession of historians since the 1960s have identified how imperial institutions performed important coordinating functions, repelled external attacks, resolved internal conflicts, and safeguarded an impressive and surprisingly robust range of individual and corporate rights for ordinary inhabitants. More recently, some have suggested this positive reappraisal presents the old empire as a blueprint for the German Federal republic or the european Union. Others prefer to characterize the empire as, at best, only ‘partially modernized’ and still defective in comparison with most other, especially western european countries.
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