I believe that Ukraine should be part of Russia and that we should have never let them leave our control like they were during the reign of the Soviet Union.
Things were a lot nicer when Russia controlled east Germany and comrade and ex-KGB agent Putin has the best interests of Russia.
April fools
I thought so, so that's Austria. Because the HRE was very decentralized (like Voltaire used to exaggerate, neither holy, Roman nor an empire) and the Emperor had very little power. In fact, the French kings continually made alliances with the Rhineland princes in order to fight the Emperor.
My point is that it was very decentralized. It was a feudal throwback amidst the absolute monarchies of Renaissance Europe. Each German vassal had enormous power over his own fiefdom, and virtually all of them were still industrial powerhouses with a rich merchant class. More than a hundred different Germanies, and they were still the greatest power in Europe.
They weren't though. I'm not sure how you define 'greatest power', but by any definition, they won't be. Perhaps economic - the same way all of Europe economically outweighs the US, for all the zero good that it does us.
France was the greatest power in Europe, which is why the UK was constantly arranging balancing coalitions against them. So Germany on itself was not able to mobilize as much power as the more centralize 'absolute monarchies' (where, by the way, the state had much less power over people than the centralized states created by the French Revolution).