'German Nation' in International Status-Seeking Prac

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A Nation in a World of Status: The Echoes of the Representations of the ‘German Nation’ in International Status-Seeking Practices

Bruno Miguel Correia Rocha

Dissertação em Ciência Política e Relações Internacionais (Especialização em Rel ações Internacionais)

Novembro, 2020

Dissertação apresentada para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciência Política e Relações Internacionais, especialidade em Relações Internacionais, realizada sob a orientação científica da Professora Doutora Madalena Pontes Meyer Resende e do Professor Doutor Nuno Miguel Peres Monteiro

To my Grandfather, João Rocha, and my Great Grandmother, Maria Bemvinda Correia

Acknowledgments

When I began the Master’s in Political Science and International Relations, at the NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, in 2018, I did not dream the endeavor it would turn out to be, nor the collective nature of the effort. Often it felt to be a lonely adventure, but, in reality, I have never walked alone. However, I cannot fully express my gratitude. I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Madalena Resende and Professor Nuno Monteiro. Without them this dissertation would not have any prospects of success. Professor Madalena has been an inspiration. I am grateful for her encouraging words, her patience, friendship and selfless readiness to hear my fears, both academic and personal. Professor Nuno has been the genuine example of what means to be a scholar, nowadays. I am thankful for the attention and intellectual enthusiasm I received from him. From their examples I learnt what means, to be a ‘good person’ in the academic community. I would like to thank all the ‘informal’ supervisors without which this work could not have been done. My appreciation goes to Professor António Araújo, Professor Pedro Tavares de Almeida, Professor Carlos Gaspar, Professor João Sedas Nunes and Professor Craig Calhoun, who read several versions of this work and provided valuable suggestions and academic reassurance. A special acknowledgment to Professor Carmen Fonseca and Professor Ana Santos Pinto, whose uplifting words and advices helped me to restructure the dissertation in a logical manner in the later stages of the work. A distinct thank you to my friends. To Beatriz, Patricia, Renato and Ruben for the sincere and enduring friendship, with whom I have been lucky to celebrate all these years. To Andre, who has been the companion of this undertaking, for the incessant support and for the honest friendship throughout the years – this is a path we have journeyed together. To Eduarda, for the candid love, for believing in me when I did not; for taking care of me and assuring that everything was going to be alright; for helping pass through the storm. A tender word to my beloved family. To my great grandmother, Maria da Glória, for all the affection and for raising me. To my grandmother, Maria Rocha, for teaching me the importance of humility. To my grandparents, Francisco Correia and Maria Alice, for showing me the value of curiosity. To my parents, Ana Paula and Manuel Rocha, for the unreserved love and dedication, for showing me that happiness is in the little things. To my grandfather, ‘my man’ João Rocha, and my great grandmother, ‘my jewel’ Maria Bemvinda, who set off before they could see this milestone. This work is devoted to them, who I know have been by my side all this time. I hope to have made them proud.

Resumo

Uma Nação num Mundo de Estatuto: Os Ecos das Representações da ‘Nação Alemã’ nas Práticas de Procura de Estatuto Internacional

Bruno Miguel Correia Rocha

Resumo

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Teoria das Relações Internacionais, Nacionalismo Alemão, Estatuto Internacional, História das Relações Internacionais, Viragem da Prática, Pierre Bourdieu

Esta investigação tem como principal argumento que diferentes representações da ‘nação alemã’ ressoam nas práticas de procura de um estatuto internacional, contribuindo para a desconstrução da premissa de que processos domésticos e internacionais devem ser separados no estudo das Relações Internacionais (RI). Ao invés, esta dissertação, inspirada na gramática sociológica do sociólogo francês, Pierre Bourdieu, e na ‘viragem da prática’, argumenta que estes processos estão inerentemente relacionados, porque qualquer agente, seja um ‘estado-nação’, nasce dentro de um jogo social que já decorre, o ‘campo transnacional do poder’. Neste ‘jogo duplo’, os líderes dos Estados olham para dentro, mas também competem uns com os outros, pelo ‘poder’ de definir o princípio legítimo de divisão e legitimação (um nomos), enquanto doxa incontestável da política mundial. Neste sentido, se uma representação da ‘nação alemã’, uma categoria simbólica que é objetivada e subjetivada em estruturas mentais, na história internalizada, dos agentes, muda – isto é, se os elementos constitutivos (e.g. natureza introvertida) acoplados se transformam –, então, a maneira como os líderes alemães procuram estatuto internacional irá mudar concordantemente; tal como a intensidade das preocupações em torno de um estatuto internacional nas narrativas nacionais, no esforço incessante de fazer coincidir as representações ao estatuto internacional reconhecido intersubjetivamente. O último, como será proposto, deverá ser compreendido como uma matéria de “distinção”, um traço intrínseco da política internacional, a qual parece estratificada em vários campos sociais, do que anárquica, como as abordagens mainstreans das RI tendem a retratar. Para compreender o processo de construir, imaginar ou inventar, a ‘nação alemã’, este contributo avança um modelo de análise, teórico e heurístico, do nacionalismo. O nacionalismo é entendido como uma prática, que mobiliza e reproduz a categoria da ‘nação’, inventada por intelectuais (em particular, académicos e historiadores), os quais, sendo dominados-dominantes, são coniventes com os líderes de Estado, i.e. os dominadores-dominantes. Só apreendendo a discussão intelectual em torno da ‘nação alemã’, que inclui sempre uma dimensão externa – isto é, não só a posição que a ‘nação’ detém em relação a outras ‘nações’, mas também a natureza dessas relações em si mesmas –, se pode compreender a sua ligação ao Estado, que precisa da primeira para manter a estabilidade da ordem doméstica e, além disso, para justificar e legitimar as práticas de procura de um estatuto internacional. Pese embora as últimas se relacionem, ainda, com o ‘sentido prático internacional’, denotado pela doxa consolidada. Esta dissertação foca-se no caso alemão, um único estudo de caso, ainda que alargado por uma análise diacrónica desde as primeiras discussões da ‘nação alemã’, até ao final da Segunda Guerra Mundial, quando o nacionalismo dos líderes e intelectuais alemães foi responsável pela transformação dos elementos acoplados à categoria simbólica da ‘nação alemã’. Não obstante, a dissertação argumenta que as preocupações com um estatuto internacional continuaram a ser processos presentes, e que o projeto de integração europeia deve ser entendido como um eco da ideia de que as reconstruções da Europa e da Alemanha eram duas faces da mesma moeda, como a análise dos minutos parlamentares do Bundestag ilustra.

Abstract

A Nation in a World of Status: The Echoes of the Representations of the ‘German Nation’ in International Status-Seeking Practices

Bruno Miguel Correia Rocha

Abstract

KEYWORDS: International Relations Theory, German Nationalism, International Status, History of International Relations, History of Modern Germany, Practice-Turn, Pierre Bourdieu

This research is built on the core argument that different representations of the ‘German nation’ resonate in international status-seeking practices, thus, contributing for the deconstruction of the premise that domestic and international processes should be separate in the study of International Relations (IR). Instead, this dissertation, that draws from the sociological grammar of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu and IR’s Practice-Turn, argues that these processes are inherently interrelated, because every agent, as a ‘nation-state’ is born within the already on-going social game of the ‘transnational field of power’. In this ‘double game’, state leaders look to the inside, but also compete against each other, for the ‘power’ to define the legitimate principle of division and legitimation (a nomos), as the unquestioned doxa of world politics. In this sense, if the representation of the ‘German nation’, a symbolic category that is ‘objectified’, and ‘subjectified’ in the mental structures, in the internalized history, of national agents, changes – that is, if the constitutive elements (e.g. introvert nature) attached to it are transformed –, then, the manner according to which German leaders seek international status will change accordingly; as will the intensity of international status concerns in national narratives, in the incessant attempt to make those representations equate to the intersubjectively recognised international status. The latter, as will be proposed, should be understood as a matter of “distinction”, an intrinsic trait of international politics, which seems rather stratified by manifold social fields, rather than anarchic, as IR mainstream accounts tend to portray. To understand the process of constructing, imagining or inventing, the ‘German nation’, this work advances a theoretical, heuristic model of analysis of nationalism. Nationalism is understood as a practice, which mobilises and in fact reproduces the category of ‘nation’, invented by intellectuals (especially, scholars or historians), who, being dominated dominants, are connivant with the state leaders, i.e. the dominant dominants. Only by grasping the intellectual discussion of the ‘German nation’, which always entails an external dimension – that is, not only the position that the ‘nation’ detains in relation to other ‘nations’, but also the nature of that relations themselves –, could one understand its bond to the state, which needs the former to maintain the stability of the domestic order and, moreover, to justify and legitimate its international status-seeking practices. These yet, nonetheless, relate, too, to the ‘international practical sense’ denoted by the consolidated doxa. The dissertation focuses on the German case, a single case study, yet through a diachronic analysis extended since the first discussions of a ‘German nation’, until the end of the Second World War, when German leaders and intellectuals’ nationalism was responsible for the transformation of the elements attached to the symbolic category of the ‘German nation’. Nevertheless, the dissertation argues that international status concerns continued to be ever- present processes, and the European integration project should be grasped as a resonance of the idea that the reconstruction of Europe and Germany were two faces of the same coin, as the analysis of Bundestag minutes illustrates.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... i Resumo ...... ii Abstract ...... iii Annexes ...... vi List of Abbreviatures ...... ix Chapter 1: Research Setting ...... 1 1.1. Research Question and the Pertinence of the Dissertation ...... 1 1.2. Research Objectives ...... 2 1.3. Chapter Outline ...... 2 Chapter 2: Methodology ...... 5 2.1. Classification Criteria and Case Selection ...... 5 Chapter 3: Theory and Concepts ...... 7 3.1. Pierre Bourdieu into IR: Habitus, Field and Practice ...... 7 3.2. Intellectuals and Intelligentsia ...... 11 3.3. Nationalism and the Symbolic Category of Nation ...... 14 3.4. Nationalism and IR Theory ...... 20 3.5. International Status, Symbolic Capital and Distinction ...... 23 3.6. Nationalism is Janus-Faced or Relational? ...... 28 Chapter 4: The Evolution of the Nation and Nationalism ...... 30 4.1. Origins of the German Nation and Nationalism ...... 30 4.2. National Conservatism, Little Germany and Unification ...... 37 4.3. Bismarck’s State Nationalism ...... 43 4.4. The Wilhelmine Road to the First World War ...... 47 4.5. The Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic ...... 53 4.6. Hindenburg’s Authoritarian Coup ...... 62 4.7. Nazism, Eastern Germanization and Anti-Semitism ...... 64 4.8. Collective Guilt, Democracy and Europe ...... 70 Chapter 5: German International Status-Seeking Practices ...... 85 5.1. The Origins of the External Dimension and the Deutscher Bund ...... 85 5.2. Neutrality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and Unification ...... 87 5.3. Germany’s Colonial Expansion ...... 88 5.4. Weltpolitik, the Blank Cheque and the First World War ...... 89 5.5. Revision of Versailles and Admission to the League of Nations ...... 91 5.6. Destruction of Versailles, Reversion of Munich, Territorial Conquest ...... 93

5.7. The Post-War Framework and the European Integration ...... 96 Chapter 6: Analysis: Theory and Evidence ...... 104 Chapter 7: Conclusion ...... 120 7.1. Final Remarks ...... 120 7.2. Research Caveats and Future Lines of Research ...... 121 References ...... 123

Annexes

Figure 1 - Wilhelm I Monuments in Imperial Germany (1870-1902) (Source: Smith, 2020, p. 371)

Figure 2 – Places/Occasions of the Public Addresses of the Wilhelm II (1900-1905) (Source: Smith, 2020, p. 363)

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Figure 3 - West German Attitudes (Polls of the Allensbach Institute) (1949-1983) (Smith, 2020, p. 558)

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List of Abbreviatures

Catholic German Patriotic Press, Deutscher Press und Vaterlandsverein German Customs Union, Deutscher Zollverein German Progressive Party, Deutsche Fortschrittspartei (DFP) General German Worker’s Association, Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV) National Liberal Party, Nationalliberale Partei (NLP) Catholic Centre Party, Deutsche Zentrumspartei (Centre) German Reform Party, Deutsche Reformpartei (DRP) Free Conservative Party, Freikonservative Partei (FKP) German Conservative Party, Deutschkonservative Partei (DkP) German Colonial Association, Deutscher Kolonialverein German Liberal Party, Deutsche Freisinnige Partei (the new DFP) Social Democratic Party of Germany, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) German Navy League, Deutscher Flottenverein Liberal People’s Party, Freisinnige Volkspartei (FVp) Liberal Association, Freisinnige Vereinigung (FVg) Progressive People’s Party, Fortschrittliche Volkspartei (FVP) Democratic Union, Demokratische Vereinigung (DV) Hammer League, Reichshammerbund Germanic Order, Germanenorden Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (USPD) German Democratic Party, Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP) German People’s Party, Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP) Communist Party of Germany, Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) German National People’s Party, Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) National Socialist German Workers’ Party, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) Security Force, Schutzstaffeln (SS) Enabling Act, Ermächtigungsgesetz Christian-Democratic Union, Christlich-Demokrartische Union (CDU) Christian Social Union, Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU) German Party, Deutsche Partei (DP) Free Democratic Party, Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) Bavarian Party, Bayernpartei (BP)

Chapter 1: Research Setting

1.1. Research Question and the Pertinence of the Dissertation International Relations (IR) has always tried to grasp the relevance of other factors aside power in the international context.1 After Constructivism changed the course of IR, by introducing social theory, international status, for instance, became a study topic (Paul et al., 2014a; Renshon, 2017; Ward, 2017). And, as globalization developed, so did the urge to have approaches to IR that could explore the social dimension of international politics:

“the increasing rate at which some states and societies are integrating on the one hand, and the drastic exclusions of other societies/states/social groups on the other, has created a need for deeper reflection on the social constitution of world politics” (Adler-Nissen, 2012a, p. 2).

As theory developed, reality came biting. The first decade of the twenty-first century only emphasised the potential effects of international status concerns. And, yet, concomitantly, the “return of history” (Kagan, 2009) highlighted other challenges, though some were old ones in new colours: one of the most intriguing was the nationalist resurgence in Western liberal democracies. Confronted with these two social processes, i.e. international status concerns and nationalism, IR hastily revisited its basics: in regard to international status, which had remained linked to non-mainstream approaches, old theory was reviewed, and original models were suggested; while, in the case of nationalism, IR remained fairly still: it continued to take it as a domestic issue with a war-causing nature (van Evera, 1994, p. 5), an homogenous and aggressive ideology (Gruffydd-Jones, 2017; Mearsheimer, 2018; Schrock-Jacobson, 2012), nevertheless important for Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA); and when it valued the content of each nationalism, dualistic models rose – oft “moving from the model of reality to the reality of the model” (Mérand and Pouliot, 2008, p. 610). Following this conception, a small step was left for one to arrive at the taken for granted lessons of the German nationalist experience. But what happens if one questions the understanding of the case that is most oft associated with a racialized, introvert, status- concerned portray of nationalism and aggressive international practices, on the one side; and that is ordinarily referred to as the example of the possibility to transcend nationalism and status concerns, with a supranational, extrovert, cooperative attitude, on the other?

1 For a discussion on the relevance of power in IR scholarship, see (Barnett and Duvall, 2005).

In effect, and taking one of manifold analyses emerging from the above thought, IR seems to have overlooked the advantages of a systematic study of the relation between nationalism and international status. This dissertation addresses the following question: in what ways, if any, do distinct representations of a ‘German nation’ resonate in status- seeking practices? The construction and reconstruction of a ‘nation’ occurs, inevitably, within an inter-national social game that pre-exists the former’s intersubjective formation, and that implies the presence of other players, other ‘nations’, which can hold dominant or subordinate positions in relation to each other. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory and its IR applications, and by analysing evidences from the paradigmatic case of German nationalism, this research links two domestic and international social processes, contributing to underline the urge to question and surpass traditionalist approaches to IR.

1.2. Research Objectives The core goal of this dissertation is to explore the relation between representations of the ‘nation’ – nationalism’s imaginations –, and international status-seeking practices. It tries to discuss the conceptualisation of nationalism’s external dimension, without defining it as a result of international events, but in a straight relation with domestic developments. It tries to suggest a heuristic frame, based on Bourdieu’s sociological grammar, cojoining two social processes that seem to occur in different levels of analysis. Moreover, it aims to address studies professing the relation between international status and nationalism and its Janus-faced character, to develop a critique of dualistic approaches, advancing instead, a relational approach which maintains the dynamism of nationalism’s practice and, thus, its ineluctable link to international status concerns, for ‘nations’ exist in a world of status.

1.3. Chapter Outline Building on Chapter 1 (Introduction), the dissertation is distributed through six chapters. Chapter 2 presents the methodological considerations that guided the preparation and the making of this research. Chapter 3 deals with the current literature on the problematiques, from IR to political science. It first reviews the uses of Bourdieu’s concepts (e.g. habitus, field, practice) in IR and renders one of the leading heuristic devices, the ‘transnational field of power’. Secondly, it discusses the concept of ‘intelligentsia’, and its conservative outlines, and emphasises the role of academics (a segment of the general ‘intellectuals’), which are crucial to understand the formulation of the ‘German nation’ and nationalism. Thirdly, it situates the theoretical framework, which is inspired in Bourdieu’s sociological

grammar, in the debate around nations and nationalism, arriving at two central arguments: ‘nationalism as a practice’ and ‘a nation as a symbolic category’. Fourthly, one finds the review of the literature that introduces nationalism into IR, progressing into the analysis that connects the former to international status and status-seeking international practices. Fifthly, it extends the problematisation of ‘international status’ in IR to illustrate how, by being in dialogue with Bourdieu’s sense of distinction, it appears to be integrally linked to nationalism and to any representation of a ‘nation’, which always involves an ‘external dimension’. Finally, it reviews the latter conceptualisation, to conclude that, by refusing outdated dualistic models and by dealing with two levels of abstraction, simultaneously, ‘nationalism is relational’, therefore, sustaining the argument: ‘nations’ are imagined in a world of international status, and national leaders aim to improve their international positions through international practices that echo the content of their nationalism. Chapter 4 opens the historical narrative, gathering evidences which illustrate the evolution of the ‘German nation’ and the content of German nationalism. It starts with a view over its national liberal origins and the sociogenesis of the field of power;2 then it analyses its conservative redrawn and the characteristics exploited during the unification. The third section of the chapter describes Bismarck’s state nationalism and the domestic origins of the German colonial agenda. Afterwards, it analyses the evolution throughout the Wilhelmine era, characterised by national militarism and radicalization, until the First World War. The fifth section takes on the effects of the Treaty of Versailles in the political context of the Weimar Republic and in the national content attached by German leaders to the constructed category of the ‘German nation’ (e.g. innocence complex). After a short analysis of the consequences of Hindenburg’s authoritarian coup, that prepared Germans for the coming of Nazis, the narrative proceeds to depict the radicalization of nationalism under the Third Reich and Hitler’s designations. Finally, the chapter ends with an analysis of the transformation of the national content and of German nationalism itself, during the post-war reconstruction, which reimagined the ‘nation’ and created a new German state, the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany, in 1949. It takes several examples from the leading political figures’ interventions in the Bundestag that illustrate the attempt to bond the German reconstruction to the European integration momentum, and, therefore, to make the ‘German nation’ and the ‘European ideal’ two sides of the same coin.

2 One, indeed, “cannot grasp the dynamics of a field if not by a synchronic analysis of its structure and, simultaneously, [one] cannot grasp this structure without a historical, that is, genetic analysis of its constitution and of the tensions that exist between positions in it” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 30).

Chapter 5 continues, in parallel and shadowing the time scope division of Chapter 4, the ‘analytic narrative’ but, in turn, focuses on the international status-seeking practices of German leaders. First, it characterises the origins of the external dimension of German nationalism and sees it in the context of the creation of the German Confederation. Then, it looks at the Prussian decision of neutrality in the mid-nineteenth century and the route to unification in 1871, marked by the German War and Franco-Prussian War. Thirdly, it analyses the setting of the German colonial agenda and expansion, particularly promoted by the Berlin Conference, that preceded the Wilhelmine’s Weltpolitik. The fourth section looks into latter’s context and the German leaders’ preparation for (or acceptance of) the need of the radical revision of the ‘balance of power system’, effected by the First World War. The fifth session analyses the international practices enacted during the Weimar era, which attested to Stresemann’s revisionism against the Versailles Order, expressed in his effort to reestablish the international status of German leaders by admitting Germany into the League of Nations or ending payment of reparations. Next, the sixth section examines Hitler’s cumulative efforts to destroy the Treaty of Versailles, revert his stance in Munich, and initiate his territorial conquest and, thus, the Second World War. The final section of the chapter deals with the German leaders’ decisions to head the European integration, in the context of the new configurations of the ‘transnational field of power’, after 1945. Chapter 6 comprehends the systematic analysis of this dissertation, by connecting the “analytic narratives” of Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, using the theoretical outline built on Chapter 3. Therefore, it constitutes the substantial, innovative part of the work, in which one tries to make sense of the theoretical discussion, inspired in Bourdieu’s contributions, recurring to the empirical evidence drawn from the study of the German case. In the end, Chapter 7 draws the main conclusions of the research, evincing, furthermore, not only the limitations and the difficulties encountered during the analysis – those caveats the reader is to be aware of –, but also the avenues for further research on the German case or others.

Chapter 2: Methodology

2.1. Classification Criteria and Case Selection Being descriptive-exploratory – what imbues a theory generation strategy into it (Gerring, 2004, p. 346) –, the dissertation explores the relation between nationalism’s content and international status-seeking practices, avoiding the step of formulating solid hypothesis.3 Research follows a sociological-historical approach, grasping historicity (Quirk, 2008, p. 520) as “international practices are not a-historical patterns of action, but evolving sets of activities that connect with past social and political struggles over the meaning and ruling of the world” (Pouliot and Adler, 2011, p. 23). It stresses historicization that “neutralizes, at least theoretically, the effects of naturalization and, in particular, the amnesia of the individual and collective genesis of a given world that presents itself under all the guises of nature” (Bourdieu, 2003 [1997], p. 262 cited in Pouliot, 2007, p. 367). The research is designed to be qualitative. The analysis builds on the exploration of practices, not ex ante (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 100). It seeks the detachment from traditional taxonomies (e.g. civic, ethnic nationalisms) (see Calhoun, 2007), inviting one not to take them for granted, but as heuristic tools. A longitudinal and diachronic, approach was led in a single case study, “an intensive study of a single unit for the purpose of understanding a larger class of (similar) units” (Gerring, 2004, p. 342, emphasis in original), even though “descriptive case study propositions are implicitly comparative” (Gerring, 2004, p. 347). The case-study explored was ‘German nationalism’, a historical case of relevance, from which one draw an “analytic narrative” (Bates et al., 1998). It suits the theoretical problem; it is relevant for the problematics one plans to understand and takes into consideration the amount of available historical data and literature. As stated in Chapter 1, the research addresses the question: “in what ways, if any, do distinct representations of a ‘German nation’ resonate in its status-seeking practices?”. To assist in answering to the latter, one formulated the following tributary interrogations: ‘how did the representation of the ‘nation’ evolve throughout the time?’, “what practices were considered in agreement to the representation of the ‘nation’?”, ‘what was the nature of international relations for German leaders?’, ‘how was nationalism’s practice first

3 As Timothy J. McKeown (2004, p. 167) contended, “the test of a hypothesis – the central theoretical activity from the standpoint of conventional quantitative research – is but one phase in a long, involved process of making sense of new phenomena”. Further, if “the reasons shaping human action are relational”, it makes little sense to speak of dependent or independent variables (Bigo, 2011, p. 228).

enacted in Germany?’, “where was the ‘nation’ placed in the inter-national world?”, ‘how do changes in nationalism’s external dimension echo in status-seeking practices?’. On data collection, discourses and texts are paramount, even more since we cannot conduct an ethnography, practice-oriented method par excellence. Analysis until 1949 resorts to historiographical works, secondary sources which compiled not only several works from non-English literature (e.g. German), but also primary sources, practices (e.g. discourses) which one utilizes to illustrate the articulation of the relation under analysis. From this data, the research takes accounts from agents controlling influential discourse, “members of more powerful social groups (…), and especially their leaders (…), [who] ha[d] more or less exclusive access to, and control over, one or more types of public discourse” (van Dijk, 2001, p. 356), “manifest[ing] the participants’ respective positions in social space and categories of understanding” (Adler-Nissen, 2012a, p. 6). A documental analysis was conducted of the plenary minutes of the Bundestag, from 1949 to 1957. Documents were selected using the ‘search term’ engine available at the Bundestag online archive: the words ‘Große Macht’ and ‘GroßeMacht’ were chosen for the first sample list, from which, after the reading of the table of contents of each ran document, a shortlist was, then, elaborated with those understood to be most relevant for the analysis (see Chapter 7, Section 7.3.). Furthermore, following the analysis of the historiography on post-war Germany, specific Bundestag minutes were picked afterwards through a focused search, using the exact year (e.g. 1957), or a particular subject (e.g. Saarland). Documents are indirect derivative conduits that recover meanings social agents attribute to reality (Pouliot, 2007, pp. 369, 374). In the analysis, a particular attention was given to the German political leaders, due to their “vital role of re-presentation in the dual sense of articulating a conceptual schema and set of representations, and of allowing a group to see itself as a group” (Williams, 2012, p. 137). The “spokesman (…) creates the group” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 204 cited in Williams, 2012, p. 139; Kauppi, 2003, p. 780), its “labour of enunciation” seems to establish the “principles of classification capable of producing the set of distinctive properties (…), capable also of annulling the set of non- pertinent properties” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 130 cited in Williams, 2012, p. 141).

Chapter 3: Theory and Concepts

3.1. Pierre Bourdieu into IR: Habitus, Field and Practice The habitus represents the “incorporation of her history, both personal and collective, into a set of guiding principles and dispositions”, the past actualised in the present (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 56), informing practices.4 As some observed, “state representatives have history” (Adler-Nissen, 2012, p. 184; Crossley, 2002, p. 172), a habitus, since they have “specific dispositions (…) that are shaped by their position and trajectory within the social field to which they belong” (Mérand, 2010, p. 347). The habitus grants agents’ social conditions of existence, perceived to be naturally granted, socially qualifiable, guiding their schemes of action in sociality.5 When one thinks of the European project, for instance, and in the role attributed to Adenauer (or to the other Christian-democratic leaders of the time), the sharedness of a habitus, or the likelihood of “two habitus (domestic and international) cohabiting in the same individual” (Bigo, 2011, p. 251), appears particularly interesting. In IR, some have shown that variances of habitus between regional officials and members of central the government in Norway, have helped to explain the foreign policy decisions around Russia, inside the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Neumann, 2002, pp. 637, 642). Yet, if a habitus is shared, cooperation could follow.6 Some have advanced the argument that the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) was built on a “cross-habitus” of French and British diplomats (i.e. diplomatic capital) and military staffs (i.e. military capital), in two interrelated fields, respectively, “the European foreign policy field, (…), and (…) the international defence field” (Mérand, 2010, pp. 343, 367– 368).7 Its success against other scenarios, or alternatives, rested in the fact it “d[id] so,

4 Other definition can be a “system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 82- 83 cited in Pouliot and Mérand, 2012, p. 29). It is akin to the idea of Background: “all of our intentional states, all of our particular beliefs, hopes, fears, and so on, only function in the way they do – that is, they only determine their conditions of satisfaction – against the Background of know-how that enables me to cope with the world” (Searle, 1998, p. 108 cited in Pouliot, 2008, p. 267). See also James C. Scott’s mètis (1998). To identify a habitus is “to name the principle which generates all their proprieties and all their judgements of their, and other people’s, properties”, the “necessity internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 170). 5 Dispositions are not a result of agents’ behavioural micro foundations, of psychological needs, but rather “socialized subjectivity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 126 cited in Pouliot, 2008, p. 274) coming from the process of “internalization of externality” (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 262 cited in Pouliot, 2008, p. 274) by which dispositions are primordially social before absorbed into the agent’s mentality. 6 Bourdieu (1984, p. 223) observed that to see where each epistemic agent belongs, one should look for “the learnings of their habitus (…), and, with it, [their] kindred spirits”. 7 The “international defense field has been structured around a common illusio (NATO), a hierarchy (the Americans, the British, and the Germans in descending order, with the French as challengers), and schemes of perception and action based on military professionalism”. While the “European foreign policy field, for

however, without threatening the deeply internalized social dispositions of diplomatic and military actors who ha[d] developed a strong sense of attachment to the practices of EU foreign policy and NATO” (Mérand, 2010, p. 372). Nonetheless, a habitus is necessarily linked to agents’ relative positions in social fields (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 175). In a way, a social field resembles a market, where agents compete for resources (i.e. valued capitals), to make their meanings dominants. In the field, a “historically derived system of shared meanings, which define agency and make action intelligible”, agents “develop a sense of the social game” (Adler-Nissen, 2008, p. 668). Adler-Nissen (2008, pp. 665, 668, 673) explained how British and Danish diplomats manage, because they developed a sense of the social game, in the Council of the EU, a political field of diplomacy, their opt-out clauses through compensatory, missionary or self-censorship strategies. Connecting to the habitus, “those whose dispositions reflect a better feel for the rules of the game gain advantages over others (…) [that are] forced to learn, and adapt to, the game and its rules” (Nexon and Neumann, 2018, p. 7). This sort of domination logics could be useful to understand, as one will see, Prussia’s ascendence in the context of the German Confederation and the unification process, or of Nazis quest to revert the implicit regularities imposed by the Order of Versailles. Field approaches have been very important for IR’s hierarchy-centric scholarship: world politics is an echo of “complex social stratification”, “distinctive political spaces”, constituent hierarchies (Mattern and Zarakol, 2016, p. 634; Musgrave and Nexon, 2018, p. 592). Julian Go’s (2008, pp. 202, 207, 216–217) comparative analysis of British and American imperial forms, during hegemonic cycles, framed a global field of competition “over species of capital”, whose mutable pattern – along with anti-colonial nationalism which shifted their cultural content –, promoted distinct organisational models of Empire (i.e. formal or informal). Each position is took from the “control of a variety of historically constructed and determined forms of capital”, either economic, political, social, cultural or symbolic (Epstein, 2012, p. 30). Capitals signal “position[s] in the field and thus their relations with each other” (Mérand, 2010, p. 351). Political leaders have, in this manner, strategies to acquire capitals: the Apollo program was a “choice to secure dominance in arenas (…) symbolically critical to leadership and security” (Musgrave and Nexon, 2018, p. 592). Yet, besides the five types of capital and the sub-species (e.g. diplomatic capital),

its part, has been structured on the EU as the dominant illusio, the Franco-German axis as a key power structure, and the coordination reflex as habitus” (Mérand, 2010, p. 353, emphasis in original).

the meta-capital, that is the centralization of distinct natures of capital by the same power exercising power over capital (Bourdieu, 2018), is distinct because it credits ‘hegemony’,

“hegemons use their superior position in global, or regional, military and economic fields – the meta-capital that their outsized capabilities provide them with – to create, shape, and shove other fields – each of which involve patterns of super- and subordination derived from the possession of field-relevant capital” (Nexon and Neumann, 2018, p. 11).

Throughout the nineteenth century and at least until 1945, military power (or capital) was determinant in the conception of overall meta-capital, and, consequently, of international status (see discussion below). State leaders, informed by their habitus and who held strong armies, that competed against other states’ forces, could state rules of the game that most suit them and that could ensure the reproduction of domination (doxa). German insistence in developing its armed forces could be, indeed, related to the fact that war was recognised as the international practice, competent and accepted, by every other player of the game. International practices arise from this relation between habitus and field. They are non-reflexive, as they do not “stem from a process of reflexive cognition based either on instrumental calculations, reasoned persuasion, or the psychology of compliance” (Pouliot, 2008, p. 262).8 They embody practical knowledge, one “that every social being carries and uses constantly, if unconsciously, in daily practices” (Pouliot, 2008, p. 269), such as the preparation for war, or the consecutive efforts to solve conflicts by peaceful means. Peace in “security communities”,9 for instance, lies in the existence of a practical sense around the international practice of diplomacy,

8 Bourdieu’s “economy of practices” denies structural determinism and the consequentialism of rational choice theories: the homo sociologicus or the homo œconomicus are both “inadequate models or at least incomplete” (Mérand and Pouliot, 2008, pp. 605, 612). Agents act rationally not due to an egoistic human condition that impels them to be alert of their foes’ relative gains, but because it is an effect of the practical sense constituted by former practices and trajectories, by the encounter of the habitus and field. As Bourdieu (1984, p. 94) argues, “the dispositions constituting the cultivated habitus are only formed, only function and are only valid in a field, in the relationship with a field which, as Gason Bachelard says of the physical field, is itself a ‘field of possible forces’, a ‘dynamic situation’, in which forces are only manifested in their relationship with certain dispositions. This is why the same practices may receive opposite meanings and values in different fields, in different configurations or in opposing sectors of the same field”. 9 The employment of the concept “security community” is consubstantiated in the existence of a so-called “community of practice”, in which the like-mindedness of the members “endows the practitioners with a sense of joint enterprise”, informing, structuring and “translating structural background, intersubjective knowledge into intentional acts”, binding “the community together through the collective development of a shared practice” (Adler and Pouliot, 2011, pp. 16, 18).

“Inside a mature security community, diplomacy is the only thinkable way to solve disputes, to the exclusion of all others (including violent ones). (…) Thus a theory of practice of security communities argues that peace exists in and through practice when security officials’ practical sense makes diplomacy the self-evident way to solving interstate disputes” (Pouliot, 2008, p. 279).

Accordingly, while reflecting on NATO-Russia diplomatic practices, Pouliot suggested that the Russian growing hysteresis in the “international security field”, consequential of NATO’s double enlargement, and the reclamation of a great power habitus, hampered the successful extension of the Western security community’s practical sense (one that aimed for a peaceful, collective resolution of clashes) to Eastern Europe, as “Russian practioners take for granted that as a great power they ought not to adopt others’ procedures without a minimal amount of negotiation and compromise” (Pouliot, 2010, p. 235). An akin point could be made, too, around German practioners’ attitude, throughout the interwar period. The practical sense, as a contingent, historical and intersubjective social process, turns practices into self-evident, non-reflexive enactments that agents execute. It fosters a sense that there is no socially recognised substitute to it, henceforth, contributing to the maintenance of a situated state of affairs and the exclusion of others. It can mutate into a doxa,10 the “common sense” orthodoxy benefiting the field’s dominant players and their interests, similar to a neo-Gramscian hegemony (Pouliot and Mérand, 2012, p. 38), a “true fundament of a realist theory of domination and politics” (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1992, p. 143 cited in Guzzini, 2012, p. 82, translation in original; Swartz, 1997, p. 63). A realist theory in which however, the state is not merely an actor, but outright embodiment of the field of power, a space of positions within which different agents struggle to impose their “principles of vision and division” of the social (Mérand and Pouliot, 2008, p. 618). State leaders do not exist in international social nothingness but in relation. Every agent exists in relation, because ‘national fields of power’ relate to one another:

“national fields of power contrast and contend with one another according to the degree of competition between states as a result of the power struggles for global or regional

10 Like habitus, which is not a “malin genie of perfect reproduction (…) [for] the limit situation of perfect reproduction is only a ‘particular case of the possible’ (…) where the conditions of the production of the habitus and the conditions of its functioning are identical or homothetical” (Bourdieu, 1974, p. 5, emphasis in original); doxa is not static: though rather stable, it is mutable when one feels the game and enhances its position, or when “practices fully break down” due to “their failure, the rise of a newly emergent practice, the invention of a new object, or a new encounter between practices (Bueger and Gadinger, 2018, p. 103).

domination and within states as a result of the power struggles to set the goals of the state – the international and the national being therefore deeply intertwined” (Cohen, 2011, p. 335).

If the international and the national are intimately tangled, thus it refuses, on the one hand, the separation between domestic and external affairs implied in the concept “international system”, or on the other, the Western concept of “international society” or “international community” (see Chapter 7, Section 7.1.). The proposal of the “transnationalisation of meta-fields” is useful to explore the relation under analysis: how distinct representations of the ‘German nation’, construed as an echo of the power struggles of the field of power, wherein nationalism is but one practice (see the discussion below), resonate in the sort of status-seeking international practices (inside an international power struggle) pursued by state leaders that “work simultaneously inside the state by the verticalization it produces, and beyond this, by the existence of chains of interdependences” (Bigo, 2011, p. 247); that compete within a transnational field of power. On the international level, state leaders struggle “to set the value of their initial capital and eventually convert part of this capital, thereby diversifying their portfolio of capitals in occupying dominant positions in other social fields” (Cohen, 2011, p. 335). On the national side, and especially when a symbolic category of ‘nation’ is formed, political leaders tend to gather the support of dominated dominants, the intellectuals (and, particularly, the academic segments), whose politicised form, the intelligentsia, has a role in its establishment, consolidation and transformation.

3.2. Intellectuals and Intelligentsia Intelligentsia is a concept often misused in the scholarship of nationalism. Its clarification is of utmost importance, not only as it pertains to Walter B. Gallie’s (1955) “essentially contested concepts”, but also as it is misunderstood by intellectuals or les notables,11 and confined to its critical, socialist, revolutionary normativeness that objects to the idea of a conservative specie (Charle, 1996, p. 249), as the German case seems to evince. It emerged in the second half of the nineteenth-century (Charle, 1996), as a by- product of Russian cultural Westernization (Pipes, 1960, p. 487). It defined an amorphous

11 Intelligentsia and intellectuals were two notions that seemed to conflate, as both were corollaries of co- evolving processes of modernization and industrialization; though, etymologically, the first did not exist de facto as a word until the 1860’s (Confino, 1972, p. 125). Furthermore, intelligentsia became ambiguous after the Dreyfus affair, a political scandal which opposed the majority of French intellectuals, such as the novelist Émile Zola, who, believing in Alfred Dreyfus’ innocence, wrote the open letter J’Accuse…! (1898), to the French President and army. Indeed, among European elite circles, the affair generated solidarity links between intellectuals, albeit fostering the confusion around the difference between them and intelligentsia.

“social group distinguished from the mass population by its education, its way of life, and a general sense of affinity with the Western cultural community”, a group “whose outlook was secular and broadly liberal”, that is, the “public body which by virtue of its education was separated from the ‘people’, and by virtue of its enlightened, European oriented outlook, from the monarchy and its bureaucratic apparatus” (Pipes, 1960, p. 488; Gellner, 1964, pp. 169–170).12 It arrived as social-economic and political innovations transformed the role of intellectuals, the subordinated of the dominant class (Vandenberghe, 1999, p. 45), in the establishment of traditions (Confino, 1972, p. 119). As Michael Confino (1972, p. 121) argued, they were “instruments of change when change was the basic orientation of the powers; served loyally as instruments of conservation and consolidation when conservation (of the new tradition) was the chief orientation of those in authority”. Only when they breed a political, critical facet can one speak of intelligentsia. The dissemination of this aspect among intellectuals, which oft resembled a class artificially produced by political reforms, was vital for conceptual autonomisation. It was neither a class, nor an estate (Confino, 1972, p. 117), nor was its constitution exclusively dependent on intellectuals (e.g. bureaucrats). The latter were its base membership, but intelligentsia was a political metamorphosis of institutional (e.g. academics, or technocrats) and para- institutional (e.g. writers, poets) cultured individuals, embedded in philosophical-political currents whittling European traditions,13 which granted them a “sense of distinction”. In Germany, as will be analysed, intelligentsias, educated in gymnasiums and universities, were conscious of their distinction in relation to both the nobility and the peasantry. Their

12 In 1971, Pipes (1971, p. 615) issued a short note in which he reflected on the German use of the word intelligenz, used as early as 1849 (a decade earlier than Russians), expected to have inspired the concept, since it also named a “group distinguished from the rest of society by its education and ‘progressive’ attitude”. In 1849, German politicians at the Frankfurt Parliament were close to associate the notion of intelligenz with intelligentsia (when setting the membership of the German Volk) as the group who, by their superior intellect, was needed to guide the masses, in a symbiotic fashion (Pipes, 1971, p. 616). 13 The transformation is not, however, immediate. In Russia, a proto-critical intelligentsia, caught by the 1848’s revolutionary fervor (Charle, 1996, p. 247) that befell over other European intellectuals, namely in Germany, sprouted from the tsarist intellectuals’ heart. It endorsed “a monistic view of nature, socialism (in some one of its several forms), and the idea of revolution” (Pipes, 1960, p. 488), the “emancipation of the serfs” and the freedom of the press (Confino, 1972, p. 126), which contrasted with Russian tradition of political conformation. This first clash between the Russian ruling elite and the “men of the 1830’s and 1840’s” was an evolution and involved their politicisation, yet not followed by organised, effective political action against the state. The majority in Moscow circles spoke of Russia’s progressive reform and preserved the conservative “psychological make-up of Russian grands seigneurs” (Confino, 1972, pp. 127–128). Only in the “generation of the[ir] sons”, in late 1850’s, did their mobilisation occur. The latter occurred moreover, as they were introduced to European nihilism, which, though facilitated by several other factors (e.g. the Russian defeat in the Crimean War in 1856), was the thought molding its moral and ideological foundations. Its members, coming from the gentry, opposed to their fathers, considered as “men of knowledge without will”, whose ethos was “refrained from action” (Confino, 1972, p. 130); they advocated, instead, radical ideas, as the “democratization of the social basis of the intelligentsia” (Confino, 1972, pp. 128–129).

politicisation looks closely related to their subordinate position in the national field of power, wherein they attempt to capitalize cultural capital’s “exchange rate” (Mérand and Pouliot, 2008, p. 616), to access the meta-capital required to restructure fields (e.g. block economic blocs’ influence on education), and to maintain or improve their social position. As Confino (1972, p. 118) argued in 1972, adding more qualities to Pipe’s case, the markers that distinguished intelligentsia from intellectuals were the

“deep concern for problems and issues of public interest – social, economic, cultural and political; a sense of guilt and personal responsibility for the state and the solution of these problems and issues; a propensity to view political and social questions as moral ones; a sense of obligation to seek ultimate logical conclusions (…) at whatever the cost; the conviction that things are not as they should be, and that something should be done”.

Intelligentsias resemble countercultures (Confino, 1972, p. 135) with a particular ethos and whose inspirations are the past experiences of fellow national intellectuals (Confino, 1972, p. 137), their sources of “cultural background, linguistic competence, intellectual breadth and sophistication”, or foreign intellectuals, through cultural accretion’ process (Pipes, 1960, p. 493), or motivated by the very circulation of ideas. Scholars, being part of the intellectuals and linked to the state, from which they take cultural legitimacy, have a distinctive role in the representation of the ‘nation’, and in nationalism’s practice. With a dominant position at the university (the cultural institution of nationalism) (Bourdieu, 2018, p. 235), they teach state elites and (re)invent the ‘nation’. They can be conservative, in the sense that the critical role could “be just as readily exercised from a conservative, anti-rationalist position” (Pipes, 1960, p. 497), such as the German case’s “tendency to go to extremes in pushing logical arguments to their ultimate conclusions” (Mannheim, 1953, p. 79 cited in Confino, 1972, p. 144), clarifies. As Eric Hobsbawm (1962, p. 166) contended, “the progress of schools and universities measures that of nationalism, just as schools and especially universities became its most conscious champions” (see Bourdieu, 2018, p. 235). A nation is, in this sense and summarily, “a construction of the intellectuals that (…) are interested in the nation” (Bourdieu, 2018, pp. 499–500).

3.3. Nationalism and the Symbolic Category of Nation In 1882, Ernest Renan questioned “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?”,14 that “idea which, though seemingly clear, len[t] itself to the most dangerous misunderstandings” (Renan, 1990, p. 8). Race, for instance, was often “confused with the nation and a sovereignty analogous to that of really existing peoples attributed to ethnographic or, rather linguistic groups” (Renan, 1990, p. 8).15 Nations were “fairly new in history” (Renan, 1990, p. 9), resulting from a series of processes, such as “effected by a dynasty, (…) brought about by the direct will of provinces, (…) a general consciousness, belatedly victorious over the caprices of feudalism” (Renan, 1990, p. 12). The individuals’ will to decide “the family with which one unites oneself for life or for death” (Renan, 1990, p. 17) was its fundamental process, because nations were ‘souls’, merging past and present, based on the legacy of memories and on “present-day consent”, on a “daily plebiscite” (Renan, 1990, p. 19). Renan’s view set out the European debate,16 between modernists, primordialists – who defined nations as pre-modern creations –, and those who noticed origins of nations in pre-modern times, yet only effective in modern societies. Modernists, as Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, John Breuilly or Liah Greenfeld saw that rather than daily plebiscites, nations or nationalisms were modern and related to the state. Kedourie (1993, pp. 1, 23), from a functionalist view, identified nationalism in the early nineteenth century Germany, in the doctrine of self-determination, “a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy government exclusively of its own”. Nationalism ‘made’ nations coherent with an “original language”, “cleansed of foreign accretions and borrowings, because the purer the language, the more natural it (…) [was], and the easier it bec[ame] for the nation to realize itself, and to increase its freedom” (Kedourie, 1993, p. 61).

14 In 1990, Walker Connor (1990) contested Renan’s interrogation “What is a nation?”, which had been guiding the discussion on the topic, and introduced the equally important question “When is a nation?”. 15 As Renan (1990, p. 13) criticised, if a population’s race is what constitutes a nation’s right, then the “Germanic family, (…) [would have] the right to reassemble the scattered limbs of the Germanic order, even when these limbs are not asking to be joined together again. The right of the Germanic order over such-and-such a province is stronger than the right of the inhabitants of that province over themselves”. 16 Part of the debate was on the philosophical foundations of nationalism. Kedourie (1993, p. 30) postulated nationalism within Kantian and Post-Kantian traditions in which “the end of man is freedom, freedom is self-realization, and self-realization is complete absorption in the universal consciousness”. Gellner (1983, pp. 131–132, 134) criticised Kedourie’s inculpation of Immanuel Kant’s self-determination: besides a written coincidence, “if a connection exists between Kant and nationalism at all, then nationalism is a reaction against him”, that is, against cosmopolitanism and rationality, favoring, instead, the taste for the specific. An alternative is Hans Kohn (1944), who rooted nationalism on the works Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Gellner defined nations “only in terms of the age of nationalism, rather than (…), the other way around”, they were ‘invented’ and not mere elite ideological fabrications.17 Nations were “standardized, homogeneous, centrally sustained high cultures, pervading entire populations and not just elite minorities” (Gellner, 1983, p. 55). Nationalism, as a sentiment or movement, derived from the spatial, “political principle, which h[eld] that the political and the national unit should be congruent”, according to which the political legitimacy of power-holders was not separate from non-holders along ethnic boundaries (Gellner, 1983, p. 1). The state was quintessential, because “nationalism d[id] not arise for stateless societies” (Gellner, 1983, p. 4). Drawing from a “distinctive style of conduct and communication” (Gellner, 1983, p. 92), nationalism implied

“entry to, participation in, identification with, a literate high culture which is co- extensive with an entire political unit and its total population, and which must be of this kind if it is to be compatible with the kind of division of labour, the type or mode of production, on which this society is based” (Gellner, 1983, p. 95).

Nationalism was “rooted in a certain kind of division of labour” (Gellner, 1983, p. 24), in which sub-communities inept of sustaining an independent educational system, could not reproduce (Gellner, 1983, p. 32) and could not “enjoy full and effective moral [and, say, cultural] citizenship” (Gellner, 1983, pp. 34, 46).18 In the industrial society, the doctorals d’etat substituted army officers, a monopoly of legitimate education replaced a monopoly of legitimate violence (Gellner, 1983, p. 34). The nation defined the self (Gellner, 1983, p. 36), being the “necessary shared medium, the life-blood (…) rather the minimal shared atmosphere, within which alone the members of the society c[ould] breathe and survive and produce” (Gellner, 1983, p. 37). Embedded in the pervasive and normative processes of the Reformation – that “universalised the clerisy and unified the vernacular” – or the Enlightenment – that secularised the vernacular into a national idiom (Gellner, 1983, p.

17 Gellner’s oeuvre has several Marxist dimensions. Gellner (1983, p. 57) admits that, though the Divine was, before the age of nationalism, a prism of “amnesias and selections”, nationalism too, albeit secular, “can be profoundly distorting and deceptive”, a false consciousness. Indeed, “nationalist ideology suffers from pervasive false consciousness” rooted in the anonymous mass society (Gellner, 1983, p. 124). But his model diverges from Marxism in accepting that, though “a sharp polarization and social discontinuity does indeed occur in early industrialism”, both are “attenuated by social mobility, diminution of social distance, and convergence of life-styles”; and in deliberately ignoring “the control or ownership of capital”, but rather emphasising “identity of culture, access to power, and access to education” (Gellner, 1983, p. 96). 18 As a product of Modernity, nationalism did not demand cultural homogeneity, as Kedourie, for instance, emphasised (Gellner, 1983, p. 39). Homogeneity was rather an objective need, emerging from the modern impracticality of cultural pluralism (Gellner, 1983, p. 46). It took pre-existing cultures and turned them into high cultures, or nations, while purging others (Gellner, 1983, pp. 49, 55).

78) –, nations were springs of political legitimacy; and national feelings the politicisation of the congruence of cultural and political borders (Gellner, 1983, p. 110). Anderson similarly argued that nations were ‘imagined communities’ territorially placed, sovereign through state control of space. Nationals were classified in accordance to state-set standards and shared an image of communion, albeit never meeting each other (Anderson, 2017, p. 25). Nations made reference to an immemorial past and connected to a future, with the help of the idea of the “homogenous empty time”, the acceptance of temporal coincidence of events, measured by clock and calendar and reflected in the novel and newspaper (Anderson, 2017, pp. 33, 46–47). Nations were substantiated on national consciousnesses awakened by the modern coalition of print capitalism and Protestantism, propelling secular languages which, while above vernaculars and beneath Latin, fostered cross-class communication and mobilisation (Anderson, 2017, pp. 68, 72). Nationalism came to Europe at the time of the French Revolution. It had ensued the shape of national consciousnesses of crioulos in the Americas in late eighteenth-century – albeit only with pivotal consequences after the coming of print capitalism (Anderson, 2017, pp. 92, 103). But European nationalism emanated from above: the state stated it ‘official’, and, through administrative and education systems, hailed “every native a national”, even in colonies – what came to fuel national liberation movements (Anderson, 2017, pp. 85, 182–183). Kedourie, Gellner and Anderson secured the place of the state (and colonialism) in modernist literature, whose attention had been on the general social conditions behind nations and nationalism. However, John Breuilly (1998, p. 21) stressed that the search for those conditions leant to disdain the effect of aporia. Nationalism was best seen as a form of politics, “a political behaviour in the context of the modern state and the modern state system” (Breuilly, 1998, p. 1), mass politics and the industrial society. It manifested itself in the opposition to figures of state or to the ruling class by other groups, and in the state reaction (state-led nationalism) against politically significant nationalist movements. The elaboration of a systematic thesis of nationalism, henceforth, could not be condensed in structural analysis of political, economic, cultural, social processes of Modernity, nor in utterances of national consciousness of intellectuals (or intelligentsias),19 but mostly in its relation to the state (Breuilly, 1998, p. 69). Furthermore, nations, grasped by Breuilly (1998, p. 19) as representations of national identities, could be pre-modern.

19 These, however, hoard nationalist ideologies (Breuilly, 1998, p. 54) according to sociohistorical readings of Gemeinschaft to make sense of the world and to manage the transformations brought by Modernity, such as the elevation of culture and its autonomisation from politics (Breuilly, 1998, pp. 57–58).

Liah Greenfeld agreed on that: “national identit[ies] [were] simply the identit[ies] characteristic of nations, (…) nationalism a product or reflection of major components of modernization” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 18). Nations were Modernity’s constitutive elements which emerged from the association of the category ‘nation’ from “elite” to the “people” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 6). The change conceded dignity and sovereignty to common people, recognising in a democratic manner, an elite status to all nationals independently of social strata. National identities could precede, or succeed, or coevolve the construction of the ‘nation’ (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 12). The principles and content of these identities, however, could manifest in different ways which defined nationalism’s contribution to democratic development (e.g. an individualistic-civic content in England, while a collectivist-ethnic in Germany). Precisely, when the principle was fused with the psychological resentment towards an Other,20 it risked democracy, due to its “inherently authoritarian” drive in the form “of a collective (…) possessed of a single will” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 11). Overall, every modernist draws from the premise: “modernity br[ed] nationalism” (Motyl, 1992, p. 323, emphasis in original). Opposing to their primordialist colleagues,21 most studied nations bearing in mind the “civic-territorial tradition of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Western Europe and North America” (Smith, 2008, p. 13). Yet, as revisionists recently argued, there were “nations which radically differ from the standard Western concept” that was, or is, “in need of considerable revision” (Smith, 2008, p. 105). As Anthony D. Smith said, nationalism would be best seen as “an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity, and identity on behalf of a population, some of whose members deem it to constitute an actual or potential nation” (Smith, 2008, p. 15, emphasis in original). Thus, some spoke of “historical nations”, that is,

20 Nihilist resentment and the “threatening Other” were in Isaiah Berlin’s account of nationalism (Jaffrelot, 2006, p. 31). German antiphon to French domination, in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, was a “pathological exaggeration of one’s real or imaginary virtues, and resentment and hostility towards the proud, the happy, the successful” (Berlin, 1990, p. 246 cited in Jaffrelot, 2006, p. 31). Greenfeld’s (1992, p. 15) account of resentment consisted, too, in a “psychological state resulting from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred (existential envy) and the impossibility of satisfying these feelings”. 21 For Smith (2008, p. 9), Primordialism was first “advanced by Edward Shils, who distinguished various kinds of ties – personal, sacred, civil, and primordial – (...) [and] taken up by Clifford Geertz, who sought to account for the problems besetting the new states of Africa and Asia in terms of a conflict between their desires for (…) [a] rational order based on ‘civil ties’ and their continuing cleavages and ‘primordial’ attachments to certain social and cultural ‘givens’ – of kinship, race, religion, (…) – which had the effect of severely dividing the new polities”. Recently, Primordialism’s influence led to Neo-Perennialism, whose main supporter was Adrian Hastings, for whom nations emerged “from ubiquitous but fluid oral ethnicities as the result of the introduction of a written vernacular, because a literature fixes the field of a vernacular language and defines its reading public, or nation” (Smith, 2008, p. 4).

“self-defined human communit[ies] whose members cultivate shared myths, memories, symbols (…) identify with a historic homeland, create and disseminate a distinctive public culture, (…) and common laws (…) [a national identity based on] the continuous reproduction and reinterpretation of (…) symbols (…) that compose the distinctive heritage of nations, and the identification of individuals with that pattern and heritage” (Smith, 2008, p. 19, emphasis in original).

A nation was over a longue durée a product of continuities and discontinuities. Often, it linked ethnoreligious, stateless pasts to modern, industrial futures, where religious leaders were replaced and symbolic features were selected from ethnic cultures (Smith, 2008, p. 21). Processes, such as self-definition (i.e. sets a collective name), cultivation of symbolic features (e.g. the myths of origins), territorialisation – along with the “territorialization of memories” that established the inside and outside –, rise of public culture (e.g. system of symbols and public ceremonies), and standardization of laws and customs (e.g. uniformed legal codes, institutions, duties governing social relations), have a substantial importance when cultural resources, as a shared ethno-history, elevate a national identity to the point of being sacralised and transformed into “sacred foundations” that backed the individuals’ claim for nationhood (Smith, 2008, pp. 33–41). ‘Modern nations’, those that followed the revolutionary era in the Western hemisphere, were not a-historical sequels of nationalism: cultural foundations were rooted in ethnocultural communities,22 glazed by internal (e.g. religions) and external factors (e.g. invasions), of pre-modern eras (Smith, 2008, p. 29). Drawing from these debates, one could argue that a symbolic category, a ‘nation’ is arbitrarily “invented” (by intellectuals); an epistemic but objective category legitimized by a produced and reproduced ‘national history’ which strengthened the “enclosure and administration by nation-states of geographical areas and their populations” (Hill, 2002, p. 170). Nations have an objective reverberation on sociality: “nations offer themselves in spectacle and make themselves exist by the spectacle of themselves that they give themselves; they make themselves exist in and by a civic liturgy, by the liturgy of civil religion” (Bourdieu, 2018, p. 502, own translation). The ‘nation’ is, hence, objectified in

22 Ethnocultural communities consist in “named and self-defined human populations with myths of common origins, shared historical memories, elements of common culture, and a measure of ethnic solidarity” (Smith, 2008, p. 31, emphasis original). England was the first medieval nation wherein the “Anglo-Saxon elites possessed a fund of common myths, memories, symbols, and traditions”, which later backed “the ideal of an English ethnopolitical nation” (Smith, 2008, pp. 96–97, 130). The French nation, a product a republican nationalism – a “sole object of worship and veneration, (…) a new secular religion, based on the sacred communion of the people and replete with its own symbols of honor [sic] and devotion” –, and the ideal of the ‘modern nation’, too, “assumed an ethnic axis for the nation (Smith, 2008, pp. 147, 149).

everyday practices – albeit more ‘visible’ in times of certain crisis (e.g. exceptional times of social, political unrest), it is expressed in “settled times” (Bonikowski, 2016, p. 428). Nationalism is best realised as a relational practice “involv[ing] people thinking, talking, and acting through and with the nation” (Bonikowski, 2016, p. 430). It is “a claim on people’s loyalty, (…) to change the way people see themselves” (Brubaker, 2004b, p. 116 cited in Bonikowski, 2016, p. 430), a practice which reproduces a “heterogeneous set of ‘nation’-oriented idioms, (…) continuously available or ‘endemic’ in modern cultural and political life” (Brubaker, 1996, p.10 cited in Bonikowski, 2016, p. 430). ‘National history’, as taught in schools and universities, “serves as a simultaneous explanation of the political and economic formations of the nation-state and of the geopolitical relations between different nation-states”, and nationalism ends up “naturaliz[ing] the nation-state (…) naturaliz[ing] the organization of the world into a system of nation-states” (Hill, 2002, p. 180). ‘Nations’ are symbols “evoked in everyday practice”, taken-for-granted (doxic) social totalities (Malešević, 2011, p. 154), symbolic artefacts that “reproduce the unquestioned cultural and political dominance of the nation-state” (Bonikowski, 2016, p. 431), that ‘give live’ to a world hierarchically divided by dominants and subordinates. Thus, a ‘nation’ remains a privileged object of symbolic struggle mobilised in the field of power, where manifold national representations clash, are rejected and fused into the narrative, and where agents “talk both about and with the nation” (Bonikowski, 2016, p. 432), and in the name of the nation. Again, and paraphrasing Bourdieu,

“According to this logic, a nation is a group of people who have the same categories of state perception and who, having suffered the same imposition and inculcation by the state, i.e. by the school, have principles of vision and division [common] over a number of very close fundamental problems” (Bourdieu, 2018, p. 500, own translation).

Nationalism relates to the “monopoly of the legitimate principle of vision and division of the social world” (Bourdieu, 2000a, p. 64 cited in Guzzini, 2012, p. 84); to the power to nominate, granted by the possession of meta-capital, which defines the “exchange rate” of all capitals (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 56) and arrays national and international “differences around pervasive understandings of reality” (Adler and Bernstein, 2005, p. 296; Adler and Pouliot, 2011, p. 7). In the field of power, marked by the gap between powerholders and the rest (Gellner, 1983, p. 89), the ‘nation’ redraws, through symbolic violence, the national nomos: what/who stays in and out of the ‘nation’. State leaders and intellectuals

(humanists, scholars, national historians, in particular) take it as an idée-force (Bourdieu et al., 1991; Bourdieu, 2002), a leading idea they use when engaged as “part of the game of affecting the social world by changing its vision and divisions (…) engage[d] in the [transnational] field [of power] and its political struggles” (Guzzini, 2012, p. 85). The epistemic category ‘nation’, bounded to the dominant legitimate culture, is ‘internalized’ and embodied by agents who reproduce it (e.g. national holidays). A category which

“creates in the mass of the members of a nation-state personality dispositions [a national habitus] which make them inclined to exert all their strength, to fight and if necessary to die in situations where they see the interests or the survival of their society threatened” (Elias, 1996, p. 157).

Nationalism echoes in the internal affairs, and invites intellectuals and national leaders to ‘cooperate’ on justifying international strategies which demonstrate the place of a ‘nation’ amongst others, in a world of nation-states. This turns nationalism a relevant problematic of IR, some have already shown how important is to conceptualize its external dimension. Studying the formulation and reformulation of National Catholicism in Spain and Poland before, during and after the democratic transitions, Madalena Meyer Resende (2014, p. 5) showed that nationalism entails, too, the “attitude towards sharing sovereignty with other nations”, “distinguish[ing] between extrovert nationalists, who view positively the nation’s relations with other nations, and introvert nationalists, i.e. nationalists who view relations with other nations as inherently ridden with conflicts”. Resende (2014, p. 5) went beyond the ethnic-civic division logic: while “cosmopolitan convictions of extrovert nationalists stem from the recognition of other nations’ rights and a positive view of relations among nations”, introvert nationalists “amplify the specificities of their national history and culture, setting it apart and superior to all others, to the point of seeing nations as enemies”. Hence, “there are two separate dimensions: one in terms of how they deal with other nations or nationalities within the state, the other focusing on relations with forces outside the state” (Resende, 2014, p. 5) (see discussion below) and, thus, on IR.

3.4. Nationalism and IR Theory Studies relating nationalism and IR were delayed by the separation of domestic processes from state behaviour (Griffiths and Sullivan, 1997, p. 54). As some criticised, IR “seem(d) to have converged on little else but the sustained exclusion of the national problematic” (Lapid and Kratochwil, 1996, p. 105). Yet, nationalism’s theorists argued that the latter’s

effect on international politics was to be theorized by IR (Breuilly, 1998), and, indeed, it was developed by constructivists’ identity focus (Wendt, 1996, 1999; Wendt et al., 1996). One of the roots behind the traditional neglection in IR is the taxonomy, the doxa between rational and irrational behaviors. The focus on rational choice overlooked IR’s emotional trait, avoiding the “explicit consideration of the passions” (Crawford, 2000, p. 116), or purely remitting accounts to the “irrational exuberance” of leaders, responsible for the distortion of decision-making (Widmaier and Park, 2012, p. 129). Yet some argued that emotions were social and cultural, marked “by attitudes such as beliefs, judgments, and desires, the contents of which are not natural, but are determined by the systems of cultural belief, value, and moral value of particular communities” (Armon-Jones, 1986, pp. 33–34). If these systems shift, emotions are relearned, reappraised (Crawford, 2000, p. 133), they could “promote fear of outsiders and love of country”, decrease bellicosity, or “when conflicts are represented in ethnic or racial terms, (…) a reservoir of pre-existing negative beliefs (…) toward out-groups” (Crawford, 2000, pp. 149–150). But building on the idea that the greater the identification with a group, the more likely is discrimination against out-groups (Mercer, 1995, p. 251), IR saw nationalism as an homogenous ideology with pernicious effects in international practices. It was highly seduced by the view of nationalism’s “revolt against immemorial restraint (…), inevitable accompanied by powerful social strains which may explain (…) [its] dynamic and violent character” (Kedourie, 1993, p. 96).23 Barry Posen (1993, p. 81) argued that “nationalism increases the intensity of warfare, and (…) the ability of states to mobilize the creative energies and the spirit of self-sacrifice of millions”.24 Others displayed its resonances on foreign policy according to its traits. Michael Ignatieff (1993) argued ethnic nationalism was more violent than its civic equal. Gretchen Schrock-Jacobson (2012, pp. 826, 845– 847) stated ethno-organic nationalism was more likely to have the “necessary conditions for nationalist bidding wars”25 than its civic part. Rick Kosterman and Seymour Feshbach (1989) related chauvinism to bellicose foreign policies. Ilya Prizel (1998, p. 20) argued

23 The “emotional intensity of the identification of the individual with his nation stands in inverse proportion to the stability of the particular society as reflected in the sense of security of its members. The greater the stability of society and the sense of security of its members, the smaller are the chances for collective emotions to seek an outlet in aggressive nationalism, and vice versa” (Morgenthau, 1948, pp. 122–123). 24 These creative energies might be more salient after annual national celebrations, when governments, both democratic and non-democratic, tend to exploit public national feeling to gain support for “assertive acts overseas”, which may “push regimes into unwanted confrontations” (Gruffydd-Jones, 2017, pp. 699, 702). 25 “Nationalist bidding wars” should be understood in the sense of the formulation of John Hutchinson (2017, p. 161), as militarized conflicts, instrumentalized by the elites, “fought in the name of the identity, territorial integrity, and political autonomy of the nation”, as Bismarck’s Franco-Prussian War illustrates.

romantic nationalism, when based on a strong sense of resentment, inspired aggressive foreign policies. While Kathleen Powers’ (2018) “equality-based” nationalism, grounded on reciprocity principles, reduced militarism, while its “community-based” equal did not. All seem to take for granted dualistic models or the premise of nationalism as an instrument of political elites.26 These assumptions picture “foreign policy legitimation as a fundamentally top-down process”, wherein insecure elites “develop a policy program and then work to gain support for it”, sometimes through nationalism; but forget the fact that national myths are only likely to be heard insofar as they are “supplemented by (…) the conditions under which deeply aggressive policies are likely to be more easily sold than moderate policies” (Ward, 2017, p. 32; Downs and Saunders, 1998, p. 115).27 Social processes propend the increase or decrease of bellicosity: from the “inviolable homeland” of rulers and the majority of inhabitants in the nineteenth century (Kadercan, 2017, pp. 370, 379), to “centrifugal ideologization” and “cumulative bureaucratization of coercion” processes without which macro social cohesion, that is, the “integration of thousands of micro solidarity networks”, would be, perhaps, demanding (Malešević, 2011, p. 149). Moreover, if ‘nationalism is relational’, then there is no reason to assume it should be taken solely as a (in)dependent variable – or as a variable at all. Nationalism, a practice of agents, influences and is influenced by social processes, being foreign policy – whose nature matters –, one amongst many others (Mylonas, 2012; Mylonas and Kuo, 2018). William Bloom (1990) analysed how international events ignited mass public reactions, based on the perception of threat to the national identity. Matthew Kocher et al. (2018, pp. 117–118, 130, 142, 150) argued the international context juddered the potential power of nationalism and nationalist resistance to foreign intrusions (e.g. the Vichy nationalists’ decision to collaborate with Germans in the European context, in order to thwarter the electoral victories of the Cartel des Gauches). Nicholas Sambanis et al. (2015, pp. 279– 280) saw how “individuals’ identification with their nation is contingent on the nation’s

26 In his theory of nationalist conflict, Jack Snyder noted that, under democratization, elites, who recurrently need of mass cooperation to achieve their goals, resort to nationalism to portray goals as vital to the nation’s existence (2000; Mansfield and Snyder, 1995; cf. Wolf et al., 1996). And he related the leaning “to support assertive national policies (…) to embark on aggressive foreign policies, and (…) even war as a means of increasing or maintaining their domestic support”, to power and prestige (Snyder, 1991, p. 101). 27 Analysing the internal and external behaviors of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), some observed that the CCP’s major challenge is to maintain the equilibrium between its internal source of legitimacy, nationalism, and the external one, economic openness to foreign trade. Hence, instead of pursuing an aggressive foreign policy substantiated in its national narrative, for example, when dealing with Japan over the Diaoyu Islands, the CCP saw “both sources of legitimacy in a complementary manner”, that is, while “nationalistic credentials through propaganda aimed at a domestic audience”, it kept “China’s desire for international cooperation to foreign audiences” (Downs and Saunders, 1998, pp. 122, 145).

relative status, which, in turn, is a function of military outcomes” – a formulation useful to understand the German case and in dialogue with the suggested transnational field of power. State leaders have “strategies of internationalization to strengthen their position in the domestic field of power” (Pouliot and Mérand, 2012, p. 36).28 The resources they receive from their strategies contribute for access to meta capital, which they process to (re)structure the national order, to spread national identification or reduce social distance among groups, which, by having larger benefits from identifying with the nation, are more willing to consent to unification investments (Sambanis et al., 2015, pp. 281, 285). From the last accounts, it seems that international status is integral to nationalism. Due to the transnationality of all fields of power, the ‘nation’ is represented in relation to, and in struggle with, others. The meta-capital could be processed to set an ‘international legitimate principle of legitimation’ that founds the implicit regularities and, eventually, a doxa, that decides each nations’ positions, and which benefits the dominant agents and the reproduction of their domination – with the complicity, or rather connivance of the dominated (Guzzini, 2012, p. 81). Thus, the transnational field of power is the space “of dominant and subordinated positions” which, too, draws “its distinctive properties from its internal relationship to all other epistemic positions”, implicating that “a change in one of them will necessarily have repercussions for all the others” (Vandenberghe, 1999, p. 52). International status concerns are not triggered when expectations are not met by a “status community” (cf. Renshon, 2017, p. 23) but are incorporated by national leaders, whose ‘nation’ does “not embark on the game by a conscious act, (…) [but, instead, is] born into the game, with the game” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 67), in a world of status.

3.5. International Status, Symbolic Capital and Distinction International status is often muddled with analogous, contiguous concepts, such as power, prestige, honor and authority.29 Yet, its conceptualisation received new impetus when IR

28 Niilo Kauppi’s study on “dislocating effects of European integration on the Finnish and French national political fields and elections to the European Parliament” is helpful. In Finland, “elections to the European Parliament enabled individuals who would not normally succeed politically [in the national field of politics] to gain an electoral position”; in France, too, elections “attract[ed] a variety of individuals, from those with no political capital to politicians dominated in terms of their capital structures. For those with no political capital, European elections provide an opportunity to transform other assets such as cultural capital into political capital. For women politicians and regional politicians, dominated in domestic political structures, European elections serve as an entrance point to national politics” (Kauppi, 2003, p. 784). 29 Honor is “similar to status in that both are social characteristics, and thus both involve and require beliefs of third parties”, but it is not positional (Renshon, 2017, p. 38), nor cumulative, nor is it characterised by scarcity (Paul et al., 2014b, pp. 9, 16); it is binomial: something one possesses or not. Authority is different as both are intersubjectively created: while status only binds the weak side of the relation, authority carries a two-side obligation, one that affects subordinated fractions, who have to comply to the “rightful rule[r]”,

equated that the “ordering principle of international politics [wa]s hierarchy, not equality” (Paul et al., 2014b, p. 17; Renshon, 2017, p. 1). Indeed, it matters more to know “how” international status concerns are articulated, rather than asking ‘when’ are they important (e.g. after humiliating, or disrespectful, international events happen) (cf. Renshon, 2017, p. 3; Barnhart, 2017, pp. 386, 390), since they are a concern born into the agents. International status derives from a national leaders’ (international) position in the transnational field of power. Some even saw it as a social identity linked to a membership into a peer club (Paul et al., 2014b, p. 7). By accumulating international status markers, recovering, here, the idea of symbolic capital, “states show their deference to others (…) vary[ing] with cultural context and historical era (…) [with] the prevailing international culture and practices” (Paul et al., 2014b, p. 20).30 Joslyn Barnhart (2017, p. 386) argued,

“status-challenged states engage in these competitive acts in order to signal that they possess characteristics and capabilities that distinguish them from lesser powers (…) to signal their willingness to vigorously exercise the prerogatives associated with their desired status”.31

If international status is socially constituted and historically contingent, then, the analysis of the representation of the ‘nation’ in the world of status has to grasp, simultaneously, not only the domestic, state-driven transformations brought by national leaders and state representatives into the content of nationalism (see Chapter 4), but also changes brought to the international (see Chapter 5), the other face of the theoretical frame proposed to understand the resonance of German nationalism in international status-seeking practices.

and one that bounds the latter with the legitimated task of providing and maintaining the social order (Lake, 2009, 2007, p. 54). Finally, power and international status can never dissociate from each other: “while the sources and effects of power and status overlap, they may also diverge”, they “usually co-vary, but there are interesting cases where they diverge (…). Norway is widely viewed as having status as an international diplomatic intermediary and peacemaker, but low military capabilities” (Paul et al., 2014b, p. 14). Power “is not in the resource as such, but is defined through its role within the field” (Guzzini, 2012, p. 80). 30 Some contended “the social value of given resources [or capitals] is neither immanent nor self-evident, but historically contingent and socially defined” (Pouliot, 2014, p. 195). The “notions of rank, prestige, and hierarchy make sense only as part of larger structures of meanings”, therefore “a great power (…) is a social denomination that rests on various other social artifacts, including (…) sovereignty, diplomatic practice, (…) an intersubjective and relational ascription (…) embedded in a set of relationships, in which meaning is intersubjectively negotiated” (Pouliot, 2014, p. 196). It is needed to read “dynamics over time and space” as “on the world stage (…), proto-systems of classes and classifications, titles and entitlements remain hotly contested, poorly institutionalized, and unequally enforced” (Pouliot, 2014, pp. 192, 194–195). 31 Barnhart’s example of “the ability to conquer and administer vast swathes of territory”, in the nineteenth century, as “a symbol of high international status” illustrates the point. Its mutability is also experienced in the replacement of the norm of territorial integrity by Western powers, after 1945 (Barnhart, 2017, p. 394), at odds with Westphalian culture’s corollary, territorial sovereignty (Mérand and Pouliot, 2008, p. 620).

IR accounts of international status steem from other social sciences. Building on social psychology, some accurately denoted that, due to competition, status was relative, constituted in relation to peers.32 Henry Tajfel and John Turner’s (1979, p. 38) integrative theory of social conflict in stratified societies maintains that the “unequal distribution of objective resources promotes antagonism between dominant and subordinate groups, provided that the latter rejects its previously accepted and consensually negative self- image, and with it the status quo, and starts (…) the development of a positive group identity”.33 Comparison to a ‘relevant Other’ is competitive rather than conflictual (Tajfel and Turner, 1979, p. 41), and a higher status tends to rise collective self-esteem, as “the lower is a group’s subjective status position in relation to relevant comparison groups, the less (…) it can make to positive social identity” (Tajfel and Turner, 1979, p. 43). Accordingly, national leaders use strategies to improve their positions. Following Tajfel and Turner (1979, p. 35), they can seek a strategy of social mobility when a field is “flexible and permeable (…) to move (…) into [a position] (…) which suits them better”. Political leaders change their membership and, through the acquisition of valued capital, engage in other international practices (e.g. colonial expansion). Or they can seek social creativity,34 producing positive distinctions “by redefining or altering elements of the comparative situation” (Tajfel and Turner, 1979, p. 43). This is rare, as the redefinition of the capital at stake, the rules of the game or the nomos, from a subordinate position is difficult and requires a disruption of the game itself (Mérand and Pouliot, 2008, p. 619); instead, they highlight other fields, in which possessed capital has a higher relevance, or to convert the negative perceived attributes into positive properties (like Adler-Nissen’s missionary strategy). In the interwar period, Axis powers strained to convince Europeans of the superiority of authoritarianism to the detriment of democracy or the rule of law. Or, they can pursue social competition, engaging in direct battle with out-groups (Tajfel

32 According to Tajfel, “the characteristics of one’s group as a whole (…) achieve most of their significance in relation to perceived differences from other groups and the value connotations of these differences (…) A group becomes a group (…) only because other groups are present in the environment” (Tajfel, 1972, p. 295 cited in Turner, 1975, pp. 7–8). However, as some alerted, “groups do not necessarily develop a collective consciousness, whether false or not, (…) in the sense that they cannot be read off the social map”, that is, out of the intersection of positions and dispositions (Bourdieu, 1994; Guzzini, 2012, p. 84). 33 It is worth highlight that Tajfel speaks of individuals rather than groups. His “theory concerns above all comparisons between individuals (in groups) and not comparisons between groups”, thereby “comparisons between groups (and no longer between individuals) are not aimed at bringing together but at setting apart, are made not in the name of homogeneity but rather for the sake of heterogeneity” (Lemaine, 1974, p. 25). 34 Lemaine’s case for the carving of an “original social position” (process of social originality) is different. In his theory of social differentiation, it occurs when the distance between the dominant and the subordinate parts is to wide, and when the “rivalry and competition for scarce resources within” impels agents to “define the goals in another way, (…) [to] invent new dimensions of activity” (Lemaine, 1974, p. 24).

and Turner, 1979, p. 44), snowballing antagonism and conflict. Nazi Germany’s quest for international status, for instance, led to antagonism and conflict with Allied powers. The reference other changes in time and space. Often, rather than making global comparisons, national leaders opt for local ones (Frank, 1985, pp. 7–8; Renshon, 2017, p. 44), looking at those culturally similar or geographically proximate peers. In Germany, after the Second World War, the local weigh was dramatic, and nothing compared to the pre-war global ambitions. Likewise, comparisons tend to be upward against groups with higher international status (Brown and Haeger, 1999, p. 36; Lemaine, 1974, p. 21), rather than downward and focused on self-enhancement (Wills, 1981). East Germans compared themselves to the “superior and proximate” West Germans (Haeger et al., 1996). Social psychology, yet, does not fully draw the relational aspect of international status: drawing from the “logic of practicality”, “from a practice perspective, people seek status because they were born into a state of profound sociality, surrounded by other people at every minute of their life, constituted and reconstituted through continuous social interaction, always standing in relation to others” (Pouliot, 2014, p. 197). International status has expression only in a social space; it can be related to psychological needs (e.g. resentment), but it is irreducible to behavioural micro mediators (Renshon, 2017, p. 61). Relationality displays international status’ collective nature, it “rests on collective judgment (…) [thereby, if] social position[s] were assessed differently by everybody (…) [there] would [be] no social status at all” (Marshall, 1977, p. 198 cited in Paul et al., 2014b, p. 8). In the nineteenth-century, because of the focus on the military substance of power, Leopold von Ranke argued France’s droit de regard within Vienna’s ‘balance of power’, “rested upon the superiority of her military forces and upon her inner strength, so it could only be really challenged if other opposing powers either regained or attained (…) general importance” (Ranke, 1950, p. 189).35 ‘General importance’ was an fiction of subjectivity (Paul et al., 2014b, p. 8), dependent on agents’ practices and interpretation.

35 Ranke’s argument reflected what was cogitated as prestige, which has been treated interchangeably with international status. As sometimes “honor and prestige were even more important than security and wealth” (Lebow, 2008, p. 284), few saw them (in particular prestige) as the force behind more than half of the wars fought since Westphalia (Lebow, 2010, p. 171). Theories of international status, thus, have been inserted within causes of war and conflict research programmes. Hypothesis ranged from “status inconsistency” (Galtung, 1964), developed upon the “disjuncture between the status the international community attributes to an actor and the status they actually deserve” (Renshon, 2017, p. 11), to “status dissatisfaction”, in which states were “likely to initiate violent military conflicts to shift beliefs about where they st[ood] in a given hierarchy” (Renshon, 2017, p. 24), and to Power Transition Theory (PPT) which linked prestige (and status) to international change (Gilpin, 1983; Kugler and Lemke, 1996; Organski, 1968; Organski and Kugler, 1989). PTT (and hegemonic realism) has been the chief alternative to the recently developed theories of international status (Renshon, 2017, p. 67). Both share that international politics is pyramidical and cyclical:

In this context, Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver’s “three-tiered scheme” appears as a heuristic effort to position each epistemic agent. The first class were superpowers, which had “broad-spectrum capabilities exercised across the whole of the international system”, “first-class military-political capabilities (…) economies”. They were acknowledged and embodied universal values that consubstantiated their higher relative position (Buzan and Wæver, 2009, pp. 34–35). In the middle space, great powers did “not necessarily have big capabilities in all sectors”, nor were “actively present in the securitization processes of all areas”, but were crucial to the power calculations as “prospective superpowers (…) capable of operating in more than one region”, or as declining superpowers (Buzan and Wæver, 2009, pp. 35–36).36 In lower ranks, regional powers “loom[ed] large in their regions (…) their influence and capability [we]re mainly relevant to the securitization processes of [that] particular region” (Buzan and Wæver, 2009, p. 37). The scheme was, however, insufficiently relational and unduly attached to Weberian notions of international status, easily conflated with ‘power’, and confined to security issues, overlooking symbolic (and cultural) capital(s) that is (are) key to persuade others of the relative position one thinks is entitled (Neumann, 2014, p. 87). International status is, overall, whilst related to capitals (Williams, 2012, p. 136), which have a certain degree of fungibility, that is that could be converted to enhance one’s position in other fields, a matter of ‘distinction’. Drawing from Bourdieu’s analysis of the “field of cultural consumption”, the practices of the few are “designated by their rarity”, and the practices of the many are “socially identified as vulgar because they are both easy and common”, and even others have practices that “are perceived as pretentious, because of the manifest discrepancy between ambition and possibilities” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 176). Political leaders can “struggle over the appropriation of economic and cultural goods (…) symbolic struggles to appropriate distinctive signs in the form of classified, classifying goods or practices, or to conserve or subvert the principles of classification of these distinctive proprieties” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 249). They increase the symbolic capital (e.g. colonies) that “yield[s] a profit in distinction, proportionate to the rarity of the means required to appropriate them, and a profit in legitimacy, the profit par excellence, which due to a law of uneven growth (Gilpin, 1983, pp. 30–32), a unit dominates the system for a period of time, receiving from an established “hierarchy of prestige” (Organski and Kugler, 1989, pp. 173, 184), grounded on military-economic substances of power, receiving larger benefits than competitors, until an unsatisfied challenger rises to question the status quo and its leadership. Only in the latest years as systemic theorizing progressed to an autonomous program of international status (Wohlforth, 2009; Greve and Levy, 2018). 36 In this level, we could find the status underachievers, the agents’ who “lack full status proportional to capabilities and behaviour” (Volgy et al., 2014, p. 63).

consists in the fact of feeling justified in being (what one is), being what it is right to be” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 228). Some could even call themselves the historical holders of the dominant class, detaining a historical order of precedency, a capitale d’origine (Bourdieu, 2010, pp. 136, 395, 497);37 nevertheless, they committedly struggle to “control the display of symbolic capital, which only exists through display” (Bourdieu, 2018, p. 319, own translation), thus to avert vulgarization of distinctive proprieties. They “maintain constant tension in the symbolic goods markets, forcing the possessors of distinctive properties threatened with the popularization to engage in an endless pursuit of new proprieties through which to assert their rarity” (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 251–252; Mérand and Pouliot, 2008, p. 616).38 So, international status unites and separates at the same time, as the

“expression of a privileged position in the social space whose distinctive value is objectively established in its relationship to expressions generated from different conditions (…) [it] unites all those who are the product of similar conditions while distinguishing them from all others” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 56).

3.6. Nationalism is Janus-Faced or Relational? The postulate that nationalism is Janus-faced is not new, and several of the examples of above follow this antithetic logic. Anderson (2017, p. 215, own translation) suggested its legacies had a double face, as “between the responsible for those legacies one cannot solely find San Martín or Garibaldi, but also Uvarov and Macaulay”. Tom Nairn (1998, p. 212),39 who argued for the “break-up” of Britain and her Gramscian “occluded multi- nationalism” marked by “ossified state structures, and (…) vulnerable (…) peripheries” (Wellings and Kenny, 2019, p. 6), was, too, an example: nationalism is both progressive and regressive, creative and destructive (Nairn, 2003, p. 317). Yet, would not one grasp, or understand better the process entailed in nationalism using a relational approach? Firstly, from a relational view, there are not two levels of abstraction, especially when one separates between internal and external dimensions of nationalism, but, instead, two faces of the same game: the ‘transnational field of power’. Secondly, the social game is not motionless, the balance of forces changes. The ‘nation’, an echo of nationalism’s

37 Bourdieu’s capitale d’origine resembles George Modelski and William R. Thompson’s (1988, p. 245) code of seniority, defined as a state’s “years in global status” and often mobilised by ‘great powers’. 38 Therefore, in a way, the dominant are themselves dominated by the field in which they are dominant, as they are always impelled to look for new ways to exert their domination and protect their distinction. 39 Nairn’s work was crucial for peripheral elites and nationalisms in the world system (Wallerstein, 1984), and contraposed Hobsbawm (1983), for whom elites “invented traditions”.

practice, could be reinvented, reimagined and its symbolism reconstructed – though it is inherently discretionary and grounded on divisionary conceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Should we expect introvert nationalists to stress international status concerns with harsh status-seeking practices (Ward, 2017, p. 20),40 while extrovert nationalists tame them and opt for passive status-seeking practices, as diplomacy? Both are, however, fundamentally, symbolically violent (e.g. those who define the agenda or the pace of meetings dominate performances), and could, nonetheless, chance the status quo. Extrovert nationalists could still pursue international status aggrandizement practices, yet that follow the rules of the game and that reproduce the international doxa (e.g. peaceful resolution of conflicts), as Adenauer when he connected Germany to Europe. Similarly, introvert nationalists could pick practices, while pretending to have benign intentions, so that, in a later stage, go full revisionist, as Stresemann’s ‘passive revisionism’ evolved to Hitler’s radical revisionism. The ‘analytic narrative’ initiates with the analysis of the evolution of the ‘German nation’ and nationalism’s contents. Throughout the empirical chapters, one should see as ‘nationalist discourse’ any expression that in some way, in a more explicit (e.g. a codified citizenship law, or when speaking of the traits of ‘Germanness’) or implicit manner (e.g. when placing a German nation among others, or speaking of a national history), mobilises the idea of ‘German nation’ with objective echoes. All these expressions of nationalism’s practice inform the production of the symbolic category of the ‘German nation’. Through it, one understands how German nationalism emerged as a practice, and comprehends the evidence which suggests the consolidation of a national doxa. As a symbolic category it began to be mobilised by educated people as early as in the sixteenth century, though only politically effective once led by a German nationalist intelligentsia that felt it could have a determinant role in the creation, consolidation and maintenance of the national nomos. Moreover, they, too, were the first to understand that to make the ‘nation’ an idée-force, they had to place her in the world of other nations, of international status. A formulation that, later, was taken by national leaders whose international status-seeking practices (see Chapter 5), to acquire symbolic capital, resonated the nation and nationalism’s content.

40 Ward (2017, p. 24) suggests that “there are two kinds of leaders – moderates, who prefer policies of pragmatic caution; and hardliners, who prefer more aggressive expansionist policies”, both “have to make public arguments to try to win support from other elites and the public”; yet, while “moderate leaders quite often invoke the costs of international rule-breaking and norm violation”, hardliners, when supported by domestic audiences, can spell out, in their claim against “the legitimacy of status quo norms, rules, and institutions”, the moderate ingenuity as politically unsustainable.

Chapter 4: The Evolution of the Nation and Nationalism

When did a first consolidation of a symbolic category of the ‘German nation’ occur? One has to understand the sociogenesis of the traits that came to consubstantiate the ‘German nation’ and nationalism, since, as will be shown, they changed over time and their setting was, furthermore, coeval to process of constructing a unified ‘German state’.

4.1. Origins of the German Nation and Nationalism The first manifestation of a German historical nation can be traced back to the breakdown of European Christendom, with the mutation of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the Imperial Diet of Cologne of 1512 (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 279; Smith, 2020, p. 30). Without an established political or cultural ‘identity’, political life in the Empire was marked by imperial electors’ reluctancy to accept any form of effective central power,41 either from the Emperor, whose itinerant political centre was “predicated on presence and visibility (…) as far as he could travel” (Smith, 2020, p. 31), or from Rome (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 280). There were, however, manifestations of imperial patriotism that mobilised the word ‘nation’, although it was merely connected to an elite sense of ‘Germanness’.42 The representants of this imperial patriotism were German knights, whose protest against the Curia and the decay of lower nobility’s social privileges, invoked the need of a German ‘nation’, in which the knighthood’s social status would be renewed (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 281). Ulrich von Hutten, a German knight and humanist, was an example of the use of such ‘Germanness’ for justifying change in German society – in this case, through revolutionary means (e.g. the Knights Revolt of 1522). Hutten, along with other knights and humanists, reclaimed German language and imperial history, inciting the fight against the Papacy, in favour of a narrative edified in opposition to the latter (Smith, 2008, p. 109; Greenfeld, 1992, pp. 281–282). He was one among other educated patriotists which, by attending universities, gained an interest in the study of ‘Germanness’ (e.g. Johannes Böhm’s study of German peasants) (Smith, 2020, p. 58). The University of Wittenberg,

41 As Heinrich August Winkler (2006, p. 10) explains, “the agenda of the electors – to the extent that they could agree, which happened rarely enough – was also not necessarily in harmony with the common good of the Reich. While they were recognized as the co-bearers of imperial authority (…), the seven electors did not alone constitute the ‘nation’. It also included the princes and the other imperial estates, who had far less influence on imperial policy and legislation, not to mention the cities, which were most burdened by imperial taxation but had no voice in the Imperial Diet (…) in the fifteenth century”. 42 This Germanness based on an ethnie, “a sense of common German ethnicity” shared among Renaissance humanists – an “elite sense of a wider German cultural and political identity” (Smith, 2008, p. 175) –, one that would be recovered later on, along with other symbolically converted objects (e.g. Tacitus’ Germania).

in particular, was vital for this patriotism’s conception; there, Hutten met Martin Luther, converted to his cause and promise to defend Lutheran theologians that supported him. At the same time, however, the conception resonating from the dialogue between imperial patriotism and Lutheranism revealed problematic. Imperial patriotism had little encouragement in the sixteenth century, not only because of the centrifugal impetus of territorial rulers, but also due to the German experience of Reformation. The Reformation in Germany meant “the liberation from the ecclesiastical coercion increasingly perceived as foreign rule and the establishment of a new, interiorized, state-supporting regime of coercion” (Winkler, 2006, p. 12, emphasis in original). German princes plotted with the Lutheran episcopate in order to get “access to church property, thereby increasing their government revenue and reinforcing their lordship” (Winkler, 2006, p. 13). Such tactics destabilized the Empire’s Ständestaat, breaking the Emperor’s power, and, with the rising tensions between Protestants and Catholics, reaping its uniting force. When Protestantism won the solidarity of northern territorial princes, humanists and students (Winkler, 2006, p. 16), educated in Protestant institutions, such as the University of Heidelberg, or living in Protestant cities, religious frictions culminated in the Thirty Years War, in 1618. After the failure of the Peace of Prague (1635), attempted by Emperor Ferdinand II, a hardline Catholic (Smith, 2020, p. 94), the Peace of Westphalia (1648), by reinstating religious toleration, redefined the imperial power, dictating “the imperial estates’ right to co-determination (…), full territorial sovereignty in secular and religious matters, and the right to enter into alliances with foreign powers – restricted only by a clause forbidding such alliances to be directed against the Emperor of the Reich” (Winkler, 2006, p. 20). The context culminated in Prussia’s union under the Hohenzollern-Brandenburg banner, an absolutist dynasty patented, too, by the struggle between king and manorial lords, the Junkers, who preserved the intimate link between throne and altar (Winkler, 2006, p. 20). But the Hohenzollerns’ resilient absolutism had a history in effectively contesting higher nobility’s exercise of power: the latter had been duty-bound “to acquiesce to the creation of the standing army and permanent civil service” by the Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 288; Winkler, 2006, p. 21), who had been a student at the University of Leiden and made Prussia a ‘regional power’ by 1688 (Smith, 2020, p. 111); or, when the Soldier-King, Friedrich Wilhelm I, taxed nobles’ economic capital to pay for Europe’s fourth largest standing army (Smith, 2020, p. 125; Winkler, 2006, p. 25).

This royal pattern changed with the enlightened absolutism of Friedrich II, Kant’s Enlightenment’s champion (Kant, 1970, p. 54-60, 58 cited in Greenfeld, 1992, p. 310), and self-declared King of Prussia by 1772, to whom the nobility nurtured a sympathetic view. After the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), that riled the relations between Prussia and the Austrian-led Empire, which willfully denied the Enlightenment’s views, Friedrich der Große (the Great) created financial devices (Landschaften) which lent capital to local distrait nobles. The latter were a “species of men apart from the rest of humanity”, whose “preservation was to be one of the chief goals of the monarchy” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 290). They were an essential force for Prussia’s militarization (Smith, 2020, p. 127), so their social role had to be valorised, and the social gap enlarged by a re-feudalization (Winkler, 2006, p. 25). As Otto Büsch argued, this traditional nobility, these Junkers’ were qualified

“for a leading role in the military system (…) enjoyed a societal status higher than that of every civilian, and w[ere] appointed (…) to higher – indeed the highest – offices in the civil administration. Called to the dominant positions in government and society, the Prussian aristocrat enjoyed almost unlimited power in both spheres” (Büsch, 1952, p. 164-165 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 25).

In the Court, noble military officials took “precedence over ministers of state” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 291). And noble bureaucrats, who, though not taking military careers, undertook the role of administrating Prussian territories (e.g. census), had a “preferential treatment, quick promotion, and tenure”, while their lower middle-class counterparts took more time to arrive at similar offices (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 291). Prussian nobles benefited from such suitable context, prepared by Prussia’s First Servant of State, who found in these estates the basis for the promotion, establishment and expression of Prussian patriotism. The debate of the ‘national’ appeal, in the Empire, was circumscribed to educated circles, first by humanists, and later on, by eighteenth century’s “unattached” intellectuals (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 293), who, witnessing imperial collapse, sought to invest a meaning aiding the latter to prevail, internally, as well as, externally, and to improve their social position that lingered on between the serf peasantry and the higher nobility. They led the advances on German higher education, chiefly in Protestant areas where universities, as the University of Göttingen, endorsed the neohumanist revival, that is, the “intellectual environment which was putting increasing emphasis on particularity and variety in human affairs and in which history was developing as critical discipline” (Breuilly, 1998, p. 56), that valued the inner spirit (Bildung) and the anti-utilitarian self-cultivation of the mind

(Ringer, 1969, p. 19). They constituted an educated faction, characterised by university permutability and by the interchange of experiences, in German literary saloons (Smith, 2020, p. 171). A community of inquiry (O’Boyle, 1983, p. 6), wherein the German scholar, a man of pure learning, judged a category of ‘nation’ on intellectual terms. But, as Fritz Ringer (1969, p. 22) argued, “in the hostile environment of eighteenth-century Germany, the various segments of the educated upper middle class drew together, (…) a homogeneous ideology of the cultivated emerged from this process”. They were a distinct group “with its own ethos, and opportunities, aspirations, and frustrations peculiar to it”, which “had as little in common with the bourgeoisie in general as they had with either the nobility, which looked down on them, or the peasantry, to which a significant number of them could trace their origins” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 293; O’Boyle, 1983, p. 7). This “alternative nobility (…) [of] culture rather than birth”, this Bildungsbürgertum stood “above the middle class”, and detained the power to both certify competence and control her representants (Greenfeld, 1992, pp. 295–296; O’Boyle, 1983, p. 6). They were an “aristocracy of intellect” (Pechar, 2012, p. 617), which often shared a Pietistic background and inclined towards cultural movements, such as Romanticism, that were “the dream and hope of scholars and poets” (Kohn, 1944, p. 30). The perfect example of which was Johann Gottfried von Herder, who had been educated in a Pietistic context before attending universities or literary salons, with peers who did not necessarily have the same family background (e.g. Goethe), but were drawn towards Romanticism. From Pietism’s inwardness (Smith, 2020, p. 180), which tallied the German social lethargy, “unacquainted with worldly success, but intimate with hardship and disaster” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 315; Winkler, 2006, p. 26), these individuals internalized, through family influence or attendance to Pietistic institutions, such as the University of Halle, where most Prussian officials were educated in cameralistics (e.g. “the primitive science of administration and statecraft”) (Ringer, 1969, pp. 16–18), the social misery of their inner spirit as a “sign of grace” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 316). They praised the Deutsch as “the means through which God manifested Himself to a people” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 319) and supported their assimilation in the State (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 320). Permutating between universities, such as the University of Jena or the University of Heidelberg, while teaching, or occupying offices at the Courts of Weimar or Berlin, these intellectuals befell acquainted. But they detached from the rest of society, albeit carrying on cultivating the interest on the making of a history of Germans (Smith, 2020, pp. 193, 198), encouraging travels to the countryside, where the Volk could be ‘felt’ and ‘seen’ (Smith, 2020, p. 200).

Coupled with Romanticism (and the Sturm und Drang since 1760), they broke the inertia of social structures in German society. Herder, who denied the “intellect-through- Reason”, spoke of a German Volksgeist from a secular, moral philosophy, through which faith echoed an emotional bond (Greenfeld, 1992, pp. 326, 329). Contra cosmopolitanism and Prussian militarism, Herder, bearing in mind a ‘German nation’, argued for national relativism, stating that “Every nation ha[d] its centre of happiness within itself” (Herder, 1774, p. 509 cited in Greenfeld, 1992, p. 330; Kohn, 1944, p. 32). However, to Germans was reserved a distinctive role, because it had been through them that “the major part of Europe ha[d] been, not only conquered, cultivated, and arranged after their own manner, but protected and defended: otherwise that which has sprung up there could never have sprung up” (Herder, 1853, vol. XXX p. 3, 16 ff., 23 ff. 30ff. cited in Kohn, 1944, p. 106). Yet intellectuals’ cultural role endured undervalued. University certification, for instance, ascribed much less status than did noble origins. As Wilhelm Schlegel protested, he “used to count for less than nothing if he was a writer and nothing else” (Schlegel, 1971, p. 163 cited in Greenfeld, 1992, p. 299). Society kept on negating the pass to its higher ranks; and, as social frustration stretched, fuelled by the rising unemployment of the educated,43 resentment against nobles followed (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 297). An hostility based on their devotion to “knowledge for its own sake” (O’Boyle, 1983, p. 10), a claim appropriated by an academic “mandarinate”, the holder of German exceptionalism:

“a social and cultural elite which owes its status (…) to education qualifications, (…) rather than to hereditary rights or wealth. (…) The ‘Mandarin intellectuals’, chiefly the university professors, are connected with the educational diet of the elite. They uphold the standards of qualification for membership in the group, and they act as its spokesmen in cultural questions” (Ringer, 1969, p. 6).

This fraction of intellectuals argued for upward mobility and to have it they “brought into being and controlled the German press”, aloof from nobility, to whom “writing (…) [was not] a proper occupation” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 209). As Greenfeld (1992, p. 309) argued,

43 Bildungsbürgertum members’ employment was very limited not only in bureaucracy, where “a middle- class official had to prepare for a long moratorium and could not expect to support himself until the age of twenty seven”, but also in the clerical sphere, wherein middle class theologians “had to compete only among themselves (…) [for] the Church (…) could accommodate only a minority”, or in universities, which “could support only a minority of exceptionally talented – and lucky – individuals” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 298).

“All who read German, therefore, inevitably became readers of the middle-class ‘unattached’ academics and were exclusively exposed to their view of the society of which they believed themselves to be members, (…) their view of its scope and nature, as well as their specific perception of its imperfections and injustices and the solutions they proposed to ameliorate these”.

In addition, in the late eighteenth century, the state had become an issue of concern. The state, in the Pieto-Romantic worldview, was the incarnation of the collective totality,44 an expression of the “organic, living nature” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 347). War was “the proper way of being and self-assertion”, whose ‘emotional’ push was Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s “masterstroke by which she [Nature] ha[d] much life” (Greenfeld, 1992, pp. 339–340). The French Revolution was, thus, abstrusely greeted by Germans, as it shared the hatred towards nobility and provided an answer to their problems: “the nation as the new center and justification of society and social order” (Kohn, 1944, p. 20). However, Pieto- Romantics, as Christoph Martin Wieland, soon “condemned the deposing of the French king as an act disrupting the proper balance between the legislative, judicial, and executive powers” (Wieland, 1857 [1789], p. 58 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 37). From Romanticism, intellectuals learnt to revile Reason, and, from Pietism, they to sacralize Emotion that was rather “unthinking and natural; it reflected the (…) insatiable ambitions to which reflection gave rise” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 333). Georg Friedrich Rebmann, who had been a student at the University of Jena and a Bavarian civil servant, affirmed that such revolution “would be absolutely impossible in Protestant lands, and (…) Catholic territories nearly also” (Mehnert, 1982, p. 55, 117 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 38-39). Nevertheless, anxiety grew around a potential revolution among political elites in Prussia and Austria. While in reforming Prussia, wherein, because of the Prussian General Code of 1794, universities had become state-controlled – the “ultimate supervision and control of higher education, together with its financial support, remained with the state” (Ringer, 1969, p. 23) –, Karl Gustav von Struensee pointed out that “the revolution (…) [the Frenchmen] made from the bottom up w[ould] take place (…) slowly from the top” (Meinecke, 1906, p. 46 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 39); in Austria, anti-revolutionary replies were lessened by the promise of a constitutional monarchy (Winkler, 2006, p. 40).

44 This ‘collective totality’ resembled Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s assumption of the State as “the realization of Freedom, i.e. of the absolute final aim, and that it exists for its own sake”, thus, “the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth” (Hegel, 1890, p. 40 f., 70 cited in Kohn, 1944, pp. 110–111).

A period of imperial patriotism resurged, this time taking the French practice as its raison d’être. Pondering Empire’s virtuosities, Wieland said the imperial constitution was “despite its undeniable faults and failures, (…) more congenial to the inner peace and prosperity of the nation, more appropriate to its character and to the level of culture upon which it stands, than the French democracy” (Wieland, 1857 [1789], p. 364, 365, 367 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 41). Yet, after the Treaty of Basel (1795), which surrendered territories on the left bank of the Rhine to France, and the Treaty of Campo Formio (1797) which surrendered Mainz and Belgium, Germans felt betrayed by political leaders – and without Prussians or Austrians, imperial patriotism steadily faded (Winkler, 2006, pp. 43–44).45 After the Second Coalition (1802), the Empire’s fate was decided, but its last breaths, as the Final Recess of the Imperial Deputation (1803), were designed to reform itself: compensations were provided to estates harassed by international arrangements, a swift secularization imposed, some imperial free cities “renounce[d to] their status as self- governing subjects”, and some kingdoms expanded their lands – “about 3 million people found themselves under new rulership” (Winkler, 2006, p. 44). In 1804, taking advantage of the Empire’s critical state, Austrians proclaimed the Austrian Empire of the Habsburg Monarchy – violating the imperial constitution –, joining Third Coalition (1803) against Napoleon, who had the support of southern German estates (as Baden) – also in defiance of the imperial constitution –, while keeping Prussia and northern estates neutral. France’s German allies amassed large spoils of war, in the form of new territories taken from the Habsburgs, and, thereafter, revoked their imperial oath to set the Rhenish Confederation (Winkler, 2006, p. 44), subservient to French desires. Soon Emperor Francis II discharged all estates and assumed the Austrian Empire, putting an end to the Holy Roman Empire. German intellectuals, as did the general Volk, turned hostile to the outlandish, and especially French influence in language, economy and politics. Deutsch was uncorrupted by other languages, nations or nationalities; a faithful image of the Volkstum, the “unique spirit of the people”, that shared the ‘Germanness’ in the unpolluted blood of the Urvolk, and in the blood spattered in war (Brubaker, 1992; Greenfeld, 1992, p. 368). In Addresses to the German Nation (1808), Fichte spoke to all educated Germans and the Volk, hailing

45 Though “imperial patriotism was still very much alive in the eighteenth century (…) wars between 1740 and 1763 [had] reveal[ed] how far from reality such fantasies were” (Winkler, 2006, p. 32). As Helmut Walser Smith (2020, p. 120) argued, looking at the patriotism of individual states, “in the late eighteenth century (where utopias were first thought temporally – imagined in the future rather than in another place), no one in the German lands sketched out the contours of a future Germany”, a Reich.

the Deutsch for being still a Ursprache (Primal Language), that challenged Romanization (Winkler, 2006, p. 52). As Fichte argued, the ‘nation’ was for the noble-minded person,

“a totality which live[d] and represent[ed] a definite and particular law of the development of the Divine… its distinctive characteristics… [were] the Eternal to which entrust[ed] the eternity of himself and his continual influence, the eternal order of things in which he places his portion of eternity; (…) [eternity was] promised to him only by the continuous and independent existence of his nation” (Fichte, 1979 [1808], p. 134- 136 cited in Greenfeld, 1992, p. 363)

After Prussia’s debacle (see Chapter 5, Section 5.1.), a “community of interest” lessened the hatred of nobility and reassessed Prussian intellectuals’ cultural role (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 359). The latter allied with nobles for a ‘German cause’ against France: “a German nation [was] experienced by growing number of educated Germans, who maintained contact with each other across the borders (…) [and] read the same poets and thinkers in (…) German”, and who believed in God, without which “the gospel would have reached only a minority of the educated, and the Volk not at all” (Winkler, 2006, p. 54). The nationalist intelligentsia “spoke to every German who could read through their novels, poems and periodicals, (…) the Romantic Weltanschauung [that] was already becoming the German Weltanschauung” (Greenfeld, 1992, pp. 359–360, emphasis in original).

4.2. National Conservatism, Little Germany and Unification At the beginning of the 1820’s, German nationalism had inscribed a national liberal, albeit fairly romantic emphasis, to a ‘German nation’, which, in an introvert manner, was placed in confrontation, in conflict with the other European states, in particular France. For the first nationalists, like Jahn, Fichte or Arndt, a German nation-state could be liberal in nature – not certainly democratic –, for German unity and liberty in the form of political rights were not irreconcilable goals in a German co-determined state (Winkler, 2006, p. 59). After the Congress of Vienna and design of the German Confederation (see Chapter 5, Section 5.2.), German conservative kings, when the time to draft constitutions arrived, faced the protests of intellectuals and students (e.g. Festival of Wartburg, in 1817) as German nationalism was close to liberalism albeit with the introvert trait versus France. Yet, conservative rulers secured the Polizeistaat in the Teplitz Accord (1819), reinforcing control over universities, press, parliaments. The Karlsbad Decrees certified the dismissal of academics diffusing nationalist ideals, the ban of student fraternities, and enabled the

censorship of newspapers to quell the spread of ‘national liberalism’ even though it was publicly known, yet lacking the masses’ support (Winkler, 2006, pp. 66–67).46 In northern Germany however, Karlsbad, mainly after the French July Revolution of 1830, did not exempt rulers from dealing with opposition – in fact, some had to concede to liberal demands (e.g. Saxony-Weimar). In the German south, on the contrary, national liberals found in bicameralism a fitting model of political participation: some were led to power in lowest chambers, where they voiced their critiques – only with relative success, since most of these ‘national-minded’ intellectuals became a generation of exiled (Smith, 2020, p. 284). Nonetheless, the early nationalist idea of liberty and union gained regional exposure. It swayed moderate liberals, as Carl Theodor Welcker of Baden or Paul Pfizer of Württemberg, to criticise the Confederation for lacking, not only a People’s House, a second chamber centered on national parliamentary representation, but also the pursue of the German twin goals: national unity and civil liberty (Winkler, 2006, pp. 72–73). Southern Germany became the antrum of liberal and democratic dreams. Philipp Siebenpfeiffer, a radical democrat from Baden and the co-founder of the German Patriotic Press in Protestant Palatine, suggested the future of Germany rested in Germans, in a free and democratic state without Prussia and Austria – a proposal that for its radicalism was severely repressed, although it had a remarkable adherence of students, in 1832 (Winkler, 2006, p. 73), markedly the educated in gymnasiums whose classical, idealistic curriculum differed from the educated in the realschulen, whose nonclassical degrees did not entitle one “to enroll at a university or to take any of the important state examinations” (Ringer, 1969, p. 26). Moderate liberals, nonetheless, vetoed the democratic principles, as did the conservative Volk and German political elites that rather preferred stricter readings of the Karlsbad Decrees. Critiques of the status quo continued (e.g. Göttingen Seven) where the repressive system was less draconian. In Baden for instance, moderate liberals and radical democrats discussed how could a state be edified: on the one hand, moderate liberals saw the latter through Prussia’s reform, an agreement between Junkers and the cultural nobles, which would head national representation without the masses (and workers); on the other, democrats, close to socialist, revolutionary activities, familiar with Marxism, envisioned universal suffrage and monarchy’s overthrown (Winkler, 2006, p. 88). Northern Germany

46 After the Congress of Vienna, the era of the book replaced the sword, the number of books published in Germany overtook France and Britain’s: as it got to the countryside, “more than a quarter of the German population, and half of the men, regularly read newspapers and magazines” (Smith, 2020, pp. 269–270).

opened, on the contrary, a tinnier space of political participation as these rulers prioritized economic renewal (and expansion) over political liberty (Winkler, 2006, pp. 76–77). However, the northern ordering of priorities was not simply rejected by Germans: the German Customs Union in 1834 contributed to Prussia’s national appeal.47 In the 40’s, the hopes of national unification under Prussia were noteworthy – in Austria, that endured without constitution, deindustrialised, and repressive of liberalism and nationalities (e.g. Magyars), it was never a thought. In this prodding context, blatant by tensions with France over the left bank of the Rhine or Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s rise to the Prussian throne, Karl Biedermann, professor of history at the University of Leipzig, advocated “unity, power, and indivisibility of the German nation on a lasting basis” (Biedermann, 1991 [1842], p. 58, 60 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 79); a scheme, most probably, Prussian-led once it had the loyalty of southern mittelstaaten. But, though the Polizeistaat was easing, and anti- French feeling strewing, Friedrich Wilhelm IV repelled any constitutional progressivism – albeit further modernisation, as railroad construction throughout the German lands, was only realistic in a co-determined structure of power (Winkler, 2006, pp. 86–87). The Revolutions of 1848 denoted that reality. It was tamed by the cultural nobility, whose majority were moderate liberals, due to the revolutionary drive of the rural lower classes and the proletariat, especially in Austria, that protested for better living conditions – often by defending exclusionary policies against the Jews (see discussion below) –, as agricultural production decreased and the level of education rose.48 Demands for political liberty and unity marched, liberals and democrats were elected to the March Governments (Winkler, 2006, pp. 91–92). After confrontations in Berlin, Friedrich Wilhelm IV showed willingness to reform the Bund in federal lines, implying the draft of a catalogue of basic rights. Wearing the “old German colours”, he spoke to German students at the University of Berlin, the inn of German mandarins, and pledged “his support for German unification,

47 The Zollverein was inspired on Friedrich List’s economic nationalism against the English cosmopolitan theory of political economy. It was built “on the lessons of history”, on ‘nationality’, on a national system of economy with “high protective tariffs to facilitate Germany’s rapid industrialization and to enable her to compete with Britain, the building of a net of railroads to forge a closer link among the German states, and the construction of a German navy to expand German trade on the high seas” (Kohn, 1944, p. 54). 48 Statistically, “between 1816 and 1848, the percentage of children enrolled in the elementary grades rose from 54 to 78 percent” (Kuhlemann, 1992, p. 107-108 cited in Smith, 2020, p. 271). Yet, “nonclassical schools were still primarily the preserves of the lower middle class (…) gymnasium cultivation was an upper-class trait” (Ringer, 1969, p. 29). Indeed, “the vast majority of German children went to school for only eight years and spent all those years at the primary schools, (…) they were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion under a regime of the most rigorous discipline. They were destined to be useful as producers, as soldiers, and as docile subjects. (…) Even their teachers came from the preparatory institutes and not from the regular secondary schools and universities, so that there was practically no contact at all between the elementary and the higher levels of the educational system” (Ringer, 1969, p. 30).

(…) his personal mission to lead the princes and people of Germany to the realization of this”, because “Prussia w[ould] merge into Germany” (quoted in Winkler, 2006, p. 93). Yet, Prussian military and aristocratic apparatuses were left unchanged, and the balance of forces in German society untouched. In the Pre-Parliament, in 1948, moderate liberal opposition was deceived to withstand the “peaceful evolution on the foundations of monarchy”, and radical democrats were excluded (Winkler, 2006, p. 94). The Frankfurt Parliament, in 1848, a national assembly of educated men dominated by German scholars linked to constitutional, reform liberalism (Winkler, 2006, p. 97), was, too, a casualty of conservative forces,49 proved in its ineptitude to build an agenda against revived political repression. While the radical left was persecuted, the peasantry reconciled with Junkers, and moderate liberals turned more conservative (Winkler, 2006, pp. 98, 100, 103; Smith, 2020, p. 300). Hence, the “birth of a republican and liberal German nation” in 1848, from such parliamentary experience, was steadily abandoned in favor of national conservatism (Smith, 2008, p. 175; Breuilly, 1998, p. 105)50 – though such experience would be key for the national valorization of a Little Germany solution (Winkler, 2006, pp. 112–114).51 Austria, conservatism’s champion, was a ‘national antagonist’ – albeit Catholics, democrats and moderates did not see askance a statehood project including Austria (with all nationalities), in which it would merge into Germany: a Greater German solution. In this respect, however, the Little German solution, that backed a ‘nation-state’ of Prussian leadership without Austria – with which economic and political ties would be preserved due to the Tsarist menace –, amassed the support from moderate liberals, conservatives, lower bourgeoisie and peasants, and the relief of southern states, as Prussia was not a tout court absolutist state (Winkler, 2006, pp. 105–106, 108, 112), yet still very conservative. Yet, in the 50’s, as the industrial revolution struck Germany, the political order of the German Confederation was restored to pre-revolutionary status. Austria kept without constitution; and Prussia’s constitution was revised in favor of the king (e.g. instituting a

49 Two cases of its powerlessness were when Friedrich Wilhelm IV rejected (as did the major mittelstaaten) the parliament’s offer of an imperial constitution that consecrated a suspensive veto; or when he attempt to impose a ‘coalition of the willing’ in the Bund (Three Kings’ Alliance) that would grant him absolute veto and obstruct universal, equal suffrage – indeed, a minor concern for the cultural nobility in general –, that assured that democratic legitimisation – that “separated him [King] from his equals, the emperors in Vienna and Russia and the kings of capitals in Europe”(Winkler, 2006, p. 110) –, was sentenced. 50 For a discussion of the life in, and of role of, German nationalist fraternities in spreading the “aristocratic code of honour”, in the second half of the nineteenth century, that included the militaristic ethos, expressed in the ritual of duelling, that differed from the initial national liberal orientation see (Elias, 1996, p. 89-90). 51 Cf. Breuilly’s (1998, p. 104) assumption that, due to the absence of a significant party organisation, it was “problematic, therefore, to what extent the Frankfurt Parliament was the centre of any nationalist movement as opposed to being a forum for the expression of views on the national question”.

House of Lords), to suit a constitutional monarchy (Winkler, 2006, pp. 120-121). Despite Prince Wilhelm’s commitment to abide to constitutional arrangements, modernization in the German lands did not imply the advance of political rights as cultural nobles expected. Wilhelm, neither a liberal, nor a puppet of his brother’s Camarilla, pushed the renovation of Prussia, but, at the same time, educated the Volk, especially those individuals attached to the idea of a Greater Germany, to protect the status quo (Winkler, 2006, pp. 131, 136). His reforms were more dependent on noble compliance than on the budgetary consent of the Prussian assembly where the first German modern party was established, in 1861. The German Progressive Party (DFP) owned “a firm party infrastructure from the local to the national level”, and was formed by the youth critic of the Vincke Fraction and the decline of democratic goals, representing, instead, a mutual ground where liberals and democrats defended a Little German solution through constitutional reform (Winkler, 2006, p. 137). As parliamentary seats fell to the DFP in 1862, Bismarck was nominated head of the Prussian state ministry, ruling unconstitutionally on the basis of Lückentheorie, or gap theory.52 Liberals resisted only legally, abandoning the practices of ‘48. They lacked the support of a traditionalist Volk and the General German Worker’s Association (ADAV), a proto-party of the Prussian workers; yet, they condemned Prussia’s militaristic drift: if Prussia was to lead Germany, it would be constitutionally. Bismarck, a Prussian patriotist, at first, was aware of it and yet, successfully mislead liberals, further eroding their liberal orientation and image. In a missive to Karl Witt, in 1865, Leopold von Hoverbeck gaged on the difficulty of the national liberal narrative to attract a national conservative Volk:

“upon the great mass of the people, (…) our debates have no influence, since they learn nothing of them – if the official provincial press doesn’t make them even more absolutistic than they are already, by virtue of their whole education” (Parisius, 1897, p. ii. 53-55 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 140).

The resonances of economic modernization were, instead, the main concern for the Volk and the new industrial classes. In education for instance, modernization contributed to the clash between the industrial class, that sought a more utilitarian, practical education (e.g. technical schools) to tackle the functional needs of industrialisation, and the mandarins,

52 Lückentheorie worked “whenever on of the two chambers upset the balance between the three legislative powers (…) by withholding necessary budgetary funds (…), then, according to the monarchic principle, it was the duty of the royally appointed state ministry to rule without budgetary legislation until the chamber in question retrospectively approved the expenditures made in the interim” (Winkler, 2006, p. 139).

who, hitherto, had enjoyed a privilege status over the reform of education and had profited from economic development in the early industrial phase (Pechar, 2012, p. 619). Also, after Bismarck’s action on the Schleswig-Holstein crisis, few DFP members began to understand that a conservative executive could achieve unification – a feat, some pondered, would only come with a constitutionally, democratically-minded state ministry (Winkler, 2006, p. 148). The national liberal stance was established, but it bounced in the absence of an accord about the Schleswig-Holstein crisis: whilst some moderates shifted to an annexationist narrative of Prussia, democrats were hostile to Prussia, sponsoring the national self-determination of every German territory (Winkler, 2006, pp. 153–154). And such divide was reflected, too, when war between Prussia and Austria to settle the national unification quest was on sight. But, in this period, Prussian leaders, including Bismarck, were unsure of the political groups and mittelstaaten that would be on their side. When war broke out in 1866, Bismarck could count on northern Germans to enlist in his ranks, while southern Germans, democrats and Catholics alike either sided with Austria or chose neutrality. After the Austrian downfall in Königgrätz, and once an Austrian secret alliance with Bonapartist France was discovered, the Greater German design was abandoned. The Little German solution began to circulate among the workers of the ADAV, that had turn their backs on Austria, and among radical democrats (Winkler, 2006, pp. 164–165). Bismarck rived the DFP after the conservative landslide win, in 1866. DFP’s right wing national liberals came to terms with the postwar milieu and, thus, tactically granted indemnity to Bismarck (Winkler, 2006, pp. 167, 169). Dissident liberals, soon members of the National Liberal Party (NLP), became acquainted with the idea, as did intellectuals that steadily dissociated from liberalism, that a ‘nation-state’ could form from Bismarck’s national conservatism. At the Northern Reichstag, whose representatives were elected in general, equal and direct male suffrage – a progress in relation to Western, liberal polities –, national liberals were the majority and agreed, despite Catholic and DFP’s opposition, to a Bismarckian constitution molded to edify a Prussian federal state. It planned a Federal Council (Bundesrat), where a two-third majority was unlikely against Prussia as it needed presidential consent, and a Federal Chancellor nominated by a Federal President (Kaiser) and responsible – therefore not accountable – before a Federal Parliament that had a voice on foreign policy (e.g. in enforcement of treaties) – although, in matters of war and peace, the Federal President was sovereign (Winkler, 2006, pp. 174–175). Moreover, Bismarck created a customs design with a Federal Customs Council (Zollbundesrat) and parliament (Zollparlament), promoting free trade in the north and providing economic incentives to

southern states, where due to German particularism and Catholicism, an enmity to Prussia and empathy towards France endured (Winkler, 2006, p. 176; Howard, 1962, pp. 59–60). The union of north and south seemed only feasible if war convened Germany (Sambanis et al., 2015, p. 289). As Bismarck concluded, “the great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions – that was the great mistake of 1848-9 – but by iron and blood” (Bismarck, 1924 [1862], p. x.139-140 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 139). Nevertheless, “on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war anti-Prussian sentiment in the south was (…) growing stronger, not weaker” (Carr, 1991, p. 172). Behind the French veto to a Spanish-Hohenzollern ruler, Bismarck held Germanness and treaty duty would unite the Germans (Böhme, 1971, pp. 231–232; Wetzel, 2001, pp. 155–158). Bismarck’s “major war aim was not the conquest of French soil, but the voluntary acceptance by the south of the north German constitution without essential change” (Pflanze, 1990, p. 490). His tactics, as the Ems Dispatch, consistent with his goal of national unification, benefited from the aid of the southern states (Pflanze, 1990, p. 491), because, “though the princes, soldiers, and bureaucrats of south Germany had a vested interest in remaining outside of Prussia, millions of south German citizens wanted a nation-state” (Wawro, 2003, p. 24; Gildea, 2003, p. 206). Bismarck undertook national liberals’ national call and equaled his war to the Wars of Liberation, making Sedan a national subject (Winkler, 2006, pp. 184– 185).53 The enterprise of the German Empire (Deutsche Reich), by revising the northern constitution (e.g. the Federal Council assented to war declarations), received intellectuals’ support (with the exception of Catholics, democrats and DFP), and, in 1971, the Germans crowned Wilhelm I, German Emperor (Deutsche Kaiser) (Winkler, 2006, p. 188).

4.3. Bismarck’s State Nationalism As exploited during the unification, German nationalism’s content was different from the early national liberal focus, instead it had grown conservative, albeit keeping the romantic and introvert traits inscribed in the ‘German nation’, which now confronted Britain. The German Empire was a ‘nation-state’, albeit the ‘nation’ derived from being a Kulturnation, a ‘cultural nation’ – for some a ‘German nation’ did not exist just yet, that it was rather an “unfinished nation-state” (Winkler, 2006, p. 194,199; Smith, 2020, p.

53 See Emil Rittershaus’ Against Bonaparte for a portray of Germanness in 1870: “A united Germany! Ah, how long desired, / how often besought in our dreams’ gloaming! - / And it is here! Now must the Frankish sword / hammer us together with one blow! / But ever since the Mother was dealt disgrace, / no border on our map we recognize, / we only know one single cry of rage / and battle to the finish, to the death! / One war cry only: Down with Bonaparte!” (Jeismann, 1992, p. 246 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 185).

337). The Empire was incorporated in objects as a ‘daily reminder’ to Germans, through postal stations, which had been expanded to every hometown, or the creation of a passport that granted freedom of movement (Smith, 2020, pp. 340, 342). Yet, it did not impede the NLP, the strongest faction in the Reichstag (Winkler, 2006, p. 195), along with Bismarck, in the first federal elections in 1871, to deal with the lack of widespread national feeling. Bismarck’s answer was to root the Empire in Protestantism, what seemed to be a uniting force between princes. It inscribed a religious connotation to Germany and unleashed two processes against political liberalism: the Kulturkampf and modern anti-Semitism. The Kulturkampf, the struggle between the State and Church, ostracized Catholics, which had the Catholic Centre Party (Centre), created in 1870, as its political arm. When the Centre criticised the independent states’ sovereignty on culture and religion, Bismarck decreed a rigid anti-Catholic policy, to preserve Protestant cultural hegemony and eschew Catholic-influenced Polish nationalism in the Reich. With the support of national liberals, the Reichstag declared criminal offense the discussion of affairs of the state “in a manner endangering the public space” by priests (Winkler, 2006, p. 202). It was another direct assault against liberalism, but the NLP grasped its rewards: in 1873, a segment of the cultural elite was socially promoted, for the appointment to ecclesiastical offices was conditional upon a college certificate obtained by passing a Bildung cultural exam (ibid.). On anti-Jewishness, however, Protestants and Catholics were in agreement. After the economic crisis of 1873, which started with the crash of Vienna’s stock market, anti- Semitism and anti-liberalism were a pax de deux: ideological hostility against economic and political liberalism was associated to Jewishness. Since 1848,54 Jewish emancipation had been a cause of German liberals (e.g. the Frankfurt’s imperial constitution entailed the end of discrimination against Jews) and of Bismarck himself, who, in 1869, approved a law for the equality of religious confessions in civil and citizenship affairs, that is, Jews’ legal emancipation (Winkler, 2006, pp. 178, 205). But, in 1873, anti-Semitism had been secularised, growing modern, political, appealing not only to the petty bourgeoisie,55 due

54 Before 1848, anti-Jewishness was also in the minds of Germans, in particular those close to Romanticism, even though Jewish salonnières, as Rahel Varnhagen, had been hostesses and patrons of Romantic literary circles. Jews, the “eternal enemy of the Christian peoples”, were, after Napoleon, compared to “Frenchmen, and philistines” (Greenfeld, 1992, pp. 378, 381; Pulzer, 1988, p. 31). As Heinrich von Treitschke affirmed, “the War of Liberation brought to light all the secrets of the German character; (…) all the old and profound hostility to everything Judaic once more made itself manifest” (quoted in Lowenthal, 1936, p. 230). 55 Industrial workers, connected to socialist and Marxist groups, were uninterested in anti-Semitism. Some socialist representants were Jews and tried to maintain the racial question outside class struggle conception – what, nevertheless, caused friction when Marx published the On the Jewish Question. But by staying out of it, socialists and social democrats – whose opposition around Alsace-Lorraine’s annexation, couple with

to the significant presence of Jews in German universities (e.g. Berlin) (Winkler, 2006, p. 209),56 but also to national liberals or leading intellectuals, as Heinrich von Treitschke, who wrote a national history of Germany wherein ‘Germanness’ was great (Smith, 2020, p. 344). Despite few, as the Emperor or Max von Forckenbeck, the Reichstag’s president, manifested their opposition to anti-Semitism, speaking, instead, of a rich mixture between ‘Germanness’ and ‘Jewishness’, it had crystalized in society. That was only a short step until some sectors, readers of Arthur de Gobineau’s racial theories and members of the anti-Semitic German Reform Party (DRP), called for the physical destruction of the Jews – as did, later on, Paul de Lagarde, in 1887, after christening the Jews “rampant vermin” (wucherndes Ungeziefer) (Winkler, 2006, p. 212). Any civic disposition of national liberals was traded by ostensibly racial concerns that resonated the annexation of Alsace- Lorraine. As Ernest Renan argued in 1879, rivalling French and German policies,

“In terms of language and race, Alsace is German. But it does not desire to be part of the German state. (…) Our policy is the policy of the rights of nations. Yours is the policy of races. (…) You have raised the banner of ethnographic and anthropologic policy in the world in place of liberalism” (Euchner, 1995, p. 131-132 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 199).57

By 1875 following Bismarck’s impetus to erode political liberalism, economic liberalism, too, came to an end and a Listean economic protectionism was pushed. The cause against any liberalism expanded and found allies in old enemies: after the reconciliation with the Catholic Church, that would lead to the abolition of the cultural exams in 1886, Bismarck was being encouraged by the Centre, the Free Conservative Party (FKP) and NLP’s right wing, which was now a trifling party in political calculations (Winkler, 2006, p. 215). The latter situation promoted NLP’s antagonization and to the further relegation of liberalism. In 1878, after the dissolution of the Reichstag, the FKP and the German Conservative Party (DkP), that had converted to nationalism, won the majority of federal

Paris Commune’s events, had led to detention and political relegation –, became prêt-à-porter categories, in which the ‘red threat’ merged into a putative Jewish threat of world domination (Winkler, 2006, p. 197). 56 Anti-Semitism was, perchance, endemic to the university: “half of all Berlin students had signed a petition in the early 1880’s demanding limits on the immigration of foreign Jews, the exclusion of Jews from positions of public authority (…) and a statistical accounting of Jewish population” (Smith, 2020, p. 360). 57 About Germany’s historical right, based on ethnic elements, to Alsace-Lorraine, Treitschke exclaimed it “ours by the right of the sword and we will rule them in virtue of a higher right, in virtue of the right of the German nation to prevent the permanent estrangement from the German Empire of her lost children. We desire, even against their will, to restore them to themselves” (Kohn, 1944, p. 61).

seats. Bismarck trapped elections on national issues (Snyder and Ballentine, 1996, p. 16), characterising every other who disagreed with him Reichsfeinde, i.e. enemies of state and nation (Pflanze, 1955, p. 558). The NLP turned against social democracy and consented Bismarck’s Sozialistengesetz, anti-socialist laws banning socialist press, association and enabling a “minor state of siege” in ‘endangered’ districts (Winkler, 2006, p. 217). The national narrative, built by Bismarck, was “against everybody engaged in the struggle for greater societal openness, greater openness, and greater equality” (Winkler, 2006, p. 221). Yet, Bismarck’s loss of governmental majority, in 1881 (Winkler, 2006, p. 225), inclined him to look for support in the space left by the socialists and social democrats, that dealt with the protagonists of industrialization: the workers. Bismarck took advantage of the latter’s social, economic, political insecurities and further deepened the Sozialstaat (Social State), granting them social insurance (e.g. the Health Insurance Law, in 1883). Moreover, in the effort to multiply the social intervention of the state, Bismarck removed from universities the function of assignment of privileges (Berechtigung), “earned upon the completion of a specified curriculum” (Ringer, 1969, p. 32) and made it a state role. As Bismarck publicly declared, in 1890,

“May it be our holy duty to nourish a strong and proud national sentiment and also to impregnate [our] children with the doctrine that the German, as soon as he crosses his border loses in prestige if he cannot say that fifty million Germans stand united behind him, ready to defend German interests and German honor. (…). our national future lies to a great extent in the hands of the German teachers (Bravo!) The schools have a very healthy influence upon our national institutions. Like our German officers’ corps our schools -and in this even the smallest state is no exception - are a peculiarly German institution which other nations will not be able to imitate easily and quickly. (Stormy applause!) In the course of the last century the seeds planted in our youth have borne fruit and have given us a national political consciousness and a political understanding which. previously were not ours” (quoted in Pflanze, 1955, p. 559).

As Germany became industrialized, the assumption of colonial expansion was mobilised in political debates. Treitschke wrote, “it is very easy to imagine that, one day a country which has no colonies will not be counted amongst the European Great Powers any more, however powerful it might otherwise be” (Hewitson, 2004, p. 156). The NLP was the first to advocate the need for colonies to solve social problems rising from industrialization, but there was an “ideological consensus” (Wehler, 1968, p. 12-26 cited in Smith, 1974,

p. 645). A colonial agenda was set up, in 1882, by the German Colonial Association, an organization of industrialists, merchants, bankers and politicians from the NLP and the FKP, to discover new markets (Winkler, 2006, p. 226). However, Bismarck vetoed the acquisition of colonies, at first (see Chapter 5, Chapter 5.3.), focusing instead, on French revanchism. In 1868, Bismarck had been against any Prussian colonial expansion, stating, at the Prussian House of Representants, that “the advantages which people expect from colonies for the commerce and industry of the mother country are mainly founded on illusions, for the expenditure very often exceeds the gain (…), as is proved by the experience of England and France in their colonial policy” (quoted in Stoecker, 1986, p. 17). But Bismarck’s rule was facing hard challenges by 1888. After the death of Wilhelm I and the brief emperorship of Emperor Friedrich, a supporter of the German Liberal Party (the new DFP), against Bismarck and an enthusiast of British parliamentarianism (Winkler, 2006, p. 232), the ascent of Emperor Wilhelm II brought a change into the German monarchy.58 Wilhelm II was conservative, authoritarian, anti-socialist and (oft-) anti-Semitic, and espoused war against both France and Russia – hence, in confrontation with Bismarck’s realpolitik. Also, with the cessation of the anti-socialist laws, which he could not renew, in 1890, Bismarck’s base of support lost the elections to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the fresh DFP. Together these parties became the Reichstag’s strongest factions (Winkler, 2006, pp. 233–234). Bismarck dedicated his life “to the service of the German nation” and also to the “establishment of the German nationality” (quoted in Pflanze, 1955, p. 561, 563), but as his anti-parliamentary strategy crumbled, as did his rapport with the Emperor, he resigned and was replaced by Caprivi.

4.4. The Wilhelmine Road to the First World War During and after Bismarck, German nationalism maintained the elements exploited in the unification process, although, in first decades of the Empire, it had engraved, in addition, a primitive, racial, anti-Semite feature, and a solider authoritarian, militaristic connotation to the ‘German nation’, which would have to enhance her position vis a vis Great Britain. Post-Bismarck Germany was governed by Protestant conservatives while national minorities (e.g. Polish) and revisionist forces (e.g. social democrats, or socialists) endured submissive. The mythic postulate of the great German living-space (Lebensraum) and the Germanization of Polish territories, was gradually incorporated in the national narrative

58 For an overview of the life of Wilhelm II, his interests and attitudes, see (Röhl, 2001, 2014).

(Kohn, 1944, p. 70),59 which was being formulated by intellectuals, especially academics, which shared the Junkers’ hostility towards the modern massification of German society. But against Bismarck’s realpolitik and protectionism, Caprivi opened society (e.g. reduced the years of military service) and made commercial treaties against the opposition of conservative fractions, sustained by farmers, peasants and those who lived from state- protected agricultural production. When the conflict of interests between Chancellor and the Junkers (and the Emperor) worsened, it culminated in the dissolution of the Reichstag, in 1893,60 and, thus, Caprivi’s dismissal. His successor, Prince Chlodwig von Hohenlohe- Schillingsfürst, a Catholic and a moderate liberal, was far more obedient to the Emperor’s authoritarian impulses: the Subversion Bill, in 1894, forbade declarations of class hatred against the Junkers and insults to the monarchy or religion (which appealed to Catholics), albeit ending up rejected by a Protestant-dominated Reichstag (Winkler, 2006, p. 242). Political attentions were on the upshots of industrial capitalism, as it was the origin of the conflict of interests which was disturbing the social order. The context encouraged movements concerned with the ‘interests of Germany’, as German Navy League, whose propaganda, fostering the creation of a German navy (see Chapter 5, Section 5.4.), spread among the Volk, and was sustained by the Kaiser, an ally of “an international policy based on the sole foundation of [Germany’s] position as one of the Great Powers of Europe” (Hewitson, 2004, p. 161). The Junkers however, aware of the declining weigh of the army and agricultural interests, were not clear allies of these military expenditures (Winkler, 2006, p. 246). That reignited the conflict of interests, and, in 1902, as the German navy grew, a new chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, who stated the twentieth century was “the century of Germany” (Smith, 2020, p. 364), was nominated. Yet, the dispute between agriculture and industrial was surpassed: the Bülow Tariff increased the grain tariff and,

“Industry and agriculture came to an agreement that each would not seek alone to control the state and to exclude the loser from the use of the legislative process; rather they would together erect an agro-industrial condominium directed against the proletariat” (Kehr, 1965 [1928], p. 164 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 246).

59 Poland was the quintessential territory of German state elites’ Eastern Germanization, which had begun in 1886, in order to counter the rising Polish nationalism. The “Germanization of the Soil” (Deutschtum), thus, entailed, above all, in an ethno-linguistic fashion, linguistic Germanization (Winkler, 2006, pp. 227– 228). Until 1914, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler argued, the “wave of linguistic and national standardization made its way into the most remote legal district” (Wehler, 1969, p. 112 ff. cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 228). 60 In 1893, the liberal DFP split up and two parties were created, the Liberal People’s Party and the Liberal Association. Behind the split was the acceptance of Caprivi’s army bill in May 1893, by few DFP delegates.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, maintaining the history of Prussian militarism, Germany’s national representation was dynastic and military. It reflected the devotion to the Emperor – exceptionally, to Wilhelm I (see Figure 1) –, to war and to tradition. When Emperor Wilhelm II, whose charisma was far less attractive than his brother’s, travelled through Germany (see Figure 2), taking advantage of railroads, his speeches, intending to gather support for the monarchy, were taken as national celebrations. Albeit apparently contrasting with the modern features of Germany, these pre-unification, Prussian symbols had been a constant element in the education of Germans. In the university, for instance, academics invented the Humboldt’s tradition which sanctified the University of Berlin in the minds of newly admitted students coming from middle and lower classes (Paletschek, 2001, p. 40). It was a relevant educational step, consubstantiated in state elites’ emphasis on the study of German, modern languages and history, in the curriculum of every school; that is, on “civic instruction” to educate the youth “to cope with the duties of a citizen in an increasingly fluid society” (Ringer, 1969, p. 49). By 1908, universities had prospered, but technical institutes had grown in standing, through the increase of state funding; and to secondary graduates was conceded “at least the right to enroll at the German university of their choice” (Ringer, 1969, p. 51). Economic capital blocs had gained control of the political life of Germany (Ringer, 1969, p. 43), therefore, swaying educational policy that began to be focused on the mass production of technicians to answer the demands of industrialisation.61 In modern Germany, the bearers of exceptionalism, loss

“their moral and cultural leadership in a society (…) increasingly dominated by shallow utilitarianism and materialism, by the unprincipled interest politics of the mass parties (…) and by the monotony of the machine age. What was needed was a revitalization of German learning, and a recovery of its philosophical roots in the German neo-humanist and idealist tradition” (Ringer, 1986, p. 157).62

61 The number of students enrolled in German universities increased dramatically in the first decades of the twentieth century: from twenty thousand, in 1880, to seventy-two thousand in 1918 (Ringer, 1969, p. 52). The social composition of student body at the universities changed, disrupting the pristine (un)balance of ‘cultivated caste’ defended by orthodox German intellectuals, especially with the sound inflow of students coming from the lower middle class, rather than from a sudden increase of the percentage of students coming from the working classes (Ringer, 1969, p. 61). 62 As Ringer (1969, pp. 44–46) said, the loss of mandarins’ political influence can be statically showed. In fact, this group “never after 1849 achieved the overwhelming preponderance it had enjoyed in the Frankfurt Assembly”, for instance, in 1881, “more than six percent of Reichstag deputies were still academics and teachers”, but, after 1887, the number “moved within the limits of three and six percent” (ibid.). Also, in regard to the state of academic life, as Ringer notes, “one cannot avoid the impression that interpersonal

As German education incorporated Prussian militaristic elements, so too did the general political debate. German politics were characterised by “nationalistic agenda-setting and electoral propaganda”, shaping political parties according to “nationalist themes around which elections were fought. Militarist ideas promoted in these campaigns and fostered by the middle-class, Protestant, patriotic organizations (…) became standard fare in right- wing thinking” (Snyder and Ballentine, 1996, p. 21). It was in this context that nationalists constituted the “Bülow Block”, which proceeded with the navy’s expansion, by defining it as a national issue and making it an utmost reference of public rhetoric (Winkler, 2006, p. 267). By 1908, Germans reacted fiercely to what they saw as national issues, such as the publication of Wilhelm II’s interview to the Daily Telegraph, in which Germany as an equal of Great Britain, the two being destined to rule the world together, catching both the Volk and Chancellor Bülow himself by surprise:

“Like a punch in the ribs, (…) conversations (…) violently reminded the nation of all the political errors the Emperor had committed in the twenty years since the beginning of its rule, and of all the wrathful prophecies of the deposed Prince Bismarck” (Bülow, 1930, p. 356-357 cited in Winkler, 2006, pp. 269–270).

Nonetheless, the Emperor (the Junkers) preserved not only his image, but his power, and found an apt successor to Bülow in Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, in 1909 – although, later in 1910, the federal parliament and the opposition parties had become stronger, after the establishment of the new Progressive People’s Party (FVP), the Centre’s discussion around its political identity, and the redefinition of the NLP’s liberal-oriented economic view to one accommodating state intervention (Winkler, 2006, pp. 275, 277).63

relations within the scholarly community were not very satisfactory, whether between students and teachers, between younger and older faculty members, or even between colleagues” (Ringer, 1969, p. 55). 63 In particular, the NLP’s change came after the Democratic Union (DV) had stolen its left-wing members, who considered the cooperation between liberal bourgeoisie and social democrats. This dispute was rooted in the broad talk of social democracy in Germany. After the Erfurt Platform (1891), drafted by Karl Kautsky and apparently, more Marxist-oriented than the Gotha Program (1875) criticised by Karl Marx, the SPD, had adhered only partially to Marxism: they defended historical materialism and the premise of class struggle, but neither of Marx’s postulations of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the socialist revolution (Winkler, 2006, p. 259). As Kautsky (1909, p. 44-46 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 259) argued, struggling to drop the negative and violent connotation, social democracy was “revolutionary, but not a revolution- making party”. Yet, the issue is related to the broad debate in the Second International – in which factions agreed, after the French Socialist Coalition experience, to decline any invitation to form coalitions with bourgeois parties –, of means and ends: some, embedded in the tradition of British socialist reformers, such as Eduard Bernstein, declared the ‘movement everything’, while others, drawing from the Russian socialist experience, as Rosa Luxemburg, saw the socialist revolution as an ineluctable end.

Hollweg, who annulled the education bonus for “bearers of culture”,64 drafted the first German citizenship law in 1913 after the immigration of Poles and Eastern-European Jews. German citizenship was consubstatiated on the jus sanguinis and deemed the Volk as “a genetic, biological entity”; thus it was built to guard its purity (Green 2000, p. 108 cited in Palmowski, 2008, p. 548-549). As Europe fell into conflict, fleetingly after a Second Morocco Crisis (1911), depicted in Germany as a national humiliation (Winkler, 2006, pp. 278, 280),65 the law built solidarity among Germans, and non-Germans, if the latter enlisted in the army (Gosewinkel, 2001, p. 325–326 cited in Palmowski, 2008, p. 550). Yet the narrative linking social democrats and Jewishness resurged in the landscape, with attacks from the Pan-German conservative front which fought to preserve Germany as an ‘ethnic nation’ instead of a ‘French-civic nation’. Anti-Semite associations were founded, as Theodor Fritsch’s Hammer League, whose inner circle, the Germanic Order, had “a system of lodges and us[ed] the swastika as its symbol” (Winkler, 2006, p. 287). In 1914, in the antechamber of the First World War (see Chapter 5, Section 5.4.), Germans were preparing for a European war. As army propagandist, General Friedrich Bernhardi argued back in 1912, war was “unambiguously positive, a form of regeneration (...) that contributed to biological, social, and moral progress” (Smith, 2020, p. 375) of Germans, “the greatest civilized people known to history” (Bernhardi, 1914 [1912], p. 14). And he continued, “[Germany was] prevented from expanding, and at the same time she is a World Power which is able and entitled to give Germanism that position in the world which, by right, is her due” (Bernhardi, 1914 [1912], p. 17). War was presented as, concurrently, a war of hegemony against Britain, and of national defense against Russia (and France).66 It asked for exceptional actions, as a Burgfrieden, a political truce between the social democrats and the conservatives (Mombauer, 2002, p. 23), which safeguarded Germany’s ‘innocence’ and further military growth (Winkler, 2006, p. 300).

64 According to Ringer (1969, p. 46, emphasis in original), the “bearer of culture”, “a Kulturträger was defined as a man who, having completed a minimum of three years of study at a university, had passed the state examinations in his field, or one who had well served the state as an official or as an army officer”. 65 Friedrich von Holstein, a senior figure in German foreign policy, stated that Germany’s “toes [could not] be trodden on silently”, facing the risk of “repetition elsewhere” (quoted in Schöllgen, 1990, p. 125). For a different view on the suggested ‘humiliation’ (Murray, 2012, p. 144; Ward, 2017), see (Renshon, 2017). 66 On October 1913, Wilhelm II explained that “the question (…) of whether Germany should fight against England, if necessary, for her world position (…) or confine herself in advance to the position of a European Continental Power of the second rank, this question is in the last resort a matter of political conviction. In the end it would seem more worthy of a great nation to fight for the highest objective and perhaps to perish with honour, than ignobly to renounce the future” (Röhl, 2014, pp. 994–995).

But as war continued more than its perpetrators had initially hoped for, the idea of a ‘peaceful resolution’ to the conflict, backed by democratic forces, seemed difficult. Yet to see a new military budget approved, Georg Michaelis, Hollweg’s successor, falsely accepted that proposal, albeit, he stated, it had to be in agreement with ‘German interests’, that is, the interests of the governing elite (Winkler, 2006, p. 316). Moreover, a peaceful resolution looked rather bizarre considering government’s propaganda: Germans “did not really ‘feel’ defeated (…) they had been led to believe that peace would come in the shape of German victory (…) [because] Little news of defeats and setbacks on the various fronts had ever reached them during the war” (Mombauer, 2002, p. 36). Also, whenever national discontent followed the war, Germans’ attention was diverted to the persecution of the Jews, whose conscription in the German war effort had increased since the adoption of the Judenstatistik, in 1916 (Winkler, 2006, p. 309); or to the intimidation of socialists, those who, under Karl Liebknecht, endured against the war credits and criticised the state of emergency (Coetzee, 1992, p. 371) that justified German mass production of armament under the Patriotic Labour Service Act (1916), which demanded national service from all men, between the ages of 17-60 – thus, crushing labour rights, even though the SPD and the Centre helped workers to counter policies through mass strikes or large-scale protests. Near the end of the war, the threat of a civil war similar to the Russian one, raised the SPD’s keenness to build cross-class coalitions between bourgeoisie and working class against radical nationalism and the revolutionary socialism portrayed by the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) (Winkler, 2006, p. 325). The SPD’s leaders thought they had to reject revolutionary plans and achieve power according to the extant rules (e.g. October Reforms), for a parliamentary democracy was to emerge, one in which a chancellor, the embodiment of an Emperor’s verdicts, was dependent on parliamentary confidence (Winkler, 2006, p. 328). Both the Army High Command and Wilhelm II were not yet favorable to such compromise, appointing Prince Max of Baden as chancellor to attempt peace negotiations and protect the conservative figures (Winkler, 2006, p. 326). Such reluctance to compromise on a non-violent transition, however, did not lead to radicalization of social democrats, who, besides willing to save the figure of Emperor, were more worried to prevent a “revolution from below” (Winkler, 2006, p. 327). Yet, as Woodrow Wilson publicly stated his demands for armistice, among them the abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II, the SPD assumed it as the only way to avoid a violent civil war: the monarchy’s full power could not be restored. Some German cities had already gone

‘red’, as Konrad Adenauer’s City of Cologne (Winkler, 2006, p. 330), and the struggle between military and democratic forces tended to soar, albeit the SPD had successfully canceled new recruitments for the war effort. In the end of 1918, in what looked like a tamed revolution from below, the Emperor yielded and a Constituent National Assembly, led by Friedrich Ebert, leader of the SPD and the First People’s Chancellor, representing the cross-class pact, was summoned to decide Germany’s future (Winkler, 2006, p. 333).

4.5. The Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic After the First World War, German nationalism was not transformed, as some expected. Anti-Semite, militarist, introvert traits, which had been exploited during the conflict, did not vanish; instead, they were attenuated by the process of democratization, that, for the first time, introduced (without success) Germans to democratic, parliamentary principles. In the end of 1918, Germany, a defeated state – along with Bolshevist Russia –, isolated from the rest as the Habsburg Monarchy collapsed, faced the challenges imposed by the illusory peace of victorious powers. German politicians, in the Council of People’s Commissars, expected territorial losses, albeit willing to accept it, if that would translate in the preservation of national unity, which was the concern of moderates, since the USPD was committed to advance the Bolshevist agenda, even at the cost of a civil war (Winkler, 2006, p. 340). Post-war Germany, however, as Bernstein contended, due to its democratic and economic advances, as an industrial society, was unfit for any Bolshevik revolution,

“As backward as Germany was in important questions of its political life due to the continued existence of semi-feudal institutions and the power of the military, as an administrative state it had nonetheless achieved a stage of development at which simple democratization of the existing institutions meant a great step towards socialism. (…) Under the influence of the workers’ representatives who had gained access to the legislative and administrative bodies of the Reich, the states, and the communities, the measure of democracy present at those levels has proved itself an effective lever to promote laws and policies endorsed by the socialist movement” (Bernstein, 1998 [1921], p. 65 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 341).

Until Germany was ready for democratic elections, the Council of People’s Commissars was focused on social peace rather than socialist revolution. For that reason, commissars felt compelled to work with the old, conservative power elite, the Army High Command, the Junkers and bureaucrats for the maintenance of public order. As economic recovery

was of utmost importance, nationalizations of key sectors of the national economy would be stalled, as would reforms of the army (Winkler, 2006, p. 343). In fact, social democrats “did not believe they had the democratic mandate to undertake drastic political and social change” (Winkler, 2006, p. 345), they were rather, as Ebert explained later on, in February 1919, “literally the bankruptcy trustees of the old regime”, who could, thus, only hope to prepare German society for a Constituent German National Assembly:

“All barns, (…) all provisions were fast becoming exhausted, credit was shaken, morale had sunken low (…), we devoted all our energies to fighting the dangers and afflictions of the interim period (…) where time was of the essence and the situation required it, we strove to accomplish the most again (…). If our success was not commensurate with our wishes, the circumstances that prevented it must be justly recognized” (quoted in Winkler, 2006, p. 345).

The German Republic’s issues were to be decided democratically in a National Assembly, a parliament supervised by, rather than subordinated to, a Central Council (Zentralrat) of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils.67 Parties clarified their views of the domestic scene, and some even presented themselves to society. The Centre stayed neutral throughout the revolution in agreement with its fresh interconfessional identity (Winkler, 2006, p. 351), while the liberal FVP join in the German Democratic Party (DDP), and NLP’s members, such as Gustav Stresemann, founded the German People’s Party (DVP) with well-defined nationalist traits, liberal in mind and with a social agenda, loyal to the imperial monarchy, considered to be “the most appropriate form of government for our people, according to our history and character” (Mommsen, p. 1960, p. 519-531 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 351). Conservatives were united in the German National People’s Party (DNVP), which, too, absorbed anti-Semitic associations (Winkler, 2006, p. 352). When the time came to debut democratic elections, in which women could vote and stand for, conservative and right-wing parties lost for moderates, while the DDP and the Centre increased their share in parliament and denied a socialist majority led by the SPD, forcing the latter to constitute a coalition with them. The first democratic government, led by Scheidemann,

67 This formulation, whose approval did not go without contestation from the extreme left, openly removed the threat, felt by moderates from all fractions of the political field, of a dictatorship of the proletariat that, following the events of Lenin’s suppression of the constituent assembly, looked like rather a dictatorship over the proletariat. The Communist Party of Germany (KPD), created in December 1918, was intended to delay such further deviation from the socialist revolution that had started that year in Germany, therefore adopting anti-parliamentary strategies to hamper the elections to the national assembly – even though some members, as Rosa Luxemburg, advised not to promote such counterproductive measures.

proclaimed the German Socialist Republic in the city of Weimar, the home of Goethe and romantics, the provisional centre of Germany’s political life, while Berlin was unstable.68 The SPD continued the policies that had been halted due to the war, what caused discontent from the extreme left wings of German politics that, in the general strikes of 1919, after the election of the new government, tried to restructure Germany in the lines of Bolshevism. With relative success, for instance, by creating the first Work Committees (Betriebsräte) which followed the principle of employer-worker co-determination, these people wanted to lead the second stage of the revolution but were clogged and ruthlessly repressed after the experiences of the Munich Council Republics. The latter fostered the rising hatred of anti-Semitic propaganda, mostly in cities where communist experiences had taken place, where opportunists (e.g. Adolf Hitler) exploited popular resentment and redirected it towards the Left. It was not restricted to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), but extended to the SPD and the DDP – funded by Jewish bourgeoise –, to those who had retained their position, albeit responsible for the Dolchstosslegende, that is, for “stabbing the victorious German army in the back” (Winkler, 2006, pp. 351, 355–357). In May, when the German delegation, led by Ulrich Brockdorff-Rantzau, received the peace terms at Versailles, the sense of injustice, impunity flooded society and powered nationalist rhetoric. Brockdorff-Rantzau, excluded from the negotiations, expressed that:

“We are under no illusions as to the extent of our defeat and the degree of our powerlessness. (…) We know the intensity of the hatred which meets us, and we have heard the victor’s passionate demand (…) we shall be made to pay, and that as the guilty we shall be punished (…) we shall acknowledge that we alone are guilty of having caused the war. Such a confession in my mouth would be a lie” (Luckau, 1941, p. 220 ff. cited in Mombauer, 2002, pp. 38–39).

Brockdorff-Rantzau’s stout speech was one of the first political expressions of Germany’s ‘innocence complex’: the Treaty of Versailles was rather an unfair and unjust settlement imposed by the Entente to abuse Germany, attributing to her and her allies, on the grounds of the ‘war guilt article’, the sole responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War.69

68 Protests against the government got out of hand during the January Uprising, incited by Karl Liebknecht and the KPD. The social democratic government reacted by deploying right-leaning Free Corps (Freikorps) and the Army High Command to handle the escalating situation, culminating in the murders of Liebknecht, Luxemburg and other several KPD’s figures (Winkler, 2006, p. 350). 69 The war guilt clause was stated in Article 231st: “The Allied and Associated Governments and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her Allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied

By justifying war reparations on the allegation that Germany was responsible for the war, it became clear for Weimar leaders that the purpose of the Republic would be to disprove Allies’ allegations to put an end to reparations/sanctions regime (Mombauer, 2002, p. 38). The ‘innocence campaign’ was led by the German Foreign Office, which directed a powerful propaganda organization, a War Guilt Section (Kriegsschuldreferat), in 1919, regarded as “one of the best-kept state secrets of the Weimar Republic” (Geiss, 1983, p. 31 cited in Mombauer, 2002, pp. 50–51). At the University of Berlin, the cultural site par excellence of German academics, Scheidemann proclaimed to the protesting students and scholars, “What hand shall not wither that binds itself and us in these feathers?” (Heilfron, 1919, p. 2646 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 358). Students felt provoked by the Entente’s ultimatum to German unconditional acceptance of Versailles, and hailed Scheidemann’s outcry. The latter, however, resigned in June 1919, to a new Prime Minister, Gustav Bauer, who was left with the difficult, colossal task of being responsible for the signing of Versailles, under the scrutiny of rejectionist nationalists from the DVP and the DDP, who opposed it (Winkler, 2006, p. 359). Nonetheless, as Bauer’s note of acceptance stated, the Versailles was consented because “the German people d[id] not wish for the resumption of the bloody war” (quoted in Mombauer, 2002, p. 43). Former state representatives, who had been in charge of Germany’s foreign policy before the war, did not restrain too, in the course of the ‘innocence campaign’, from trying to shift their lion share in the outbreak of the war. As John Röhl insightfully explained,

“Given the scale of the disaster, it is hardly surprising that those few men who held power in Berlin in 1914 should afterwards deny responsibility and seek to shift the blame, at least in public, particularly when the punitive peace terms imposed at Versailles were predicated on the guilt of Germany and its allies, and there existed a real possibility of extradition to face trial before an international tribunal” (Röhl, 1995, p. 27 cited in Mombauer, 2002, p. 47).

Political leaders transformed “the historical question of the responsibility for the outbreak of war into a political issue” (Mombauer, 2002, p. 47). German politicians created “mass propaganda distribution center[s]” (Herwig, 1996, p. 103 cited in Mombauer, 2002, p. 53), as the Working Committee of German Associations that ensured “that hundreds of articles on the topic of the war guilt question were published”, or the DNVP’s chairman, and Associated Governments and there nationals have been subjected as consequences of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her Allies” (Marks, 2003, pp. 14–15).

Alfred Hugenberg’s Telegraph Union Wire Service that granted nationalists the control over half of German press (Eksteins, 1975; Mombauer, 2002, p. 53). Weimar textbooks denied German responsibility and argued that in 1914, “there was no wish for war in Berlin (…) [that] every informed person (…) kn[ew] that Germany [wa]s absolutely innocent with regard to the outbreak (…) Russia, France, and England wanted the war and unleashed it” (Dance, 1960, p. 62). Children, “far from feeling cold or indifferent toward their absent parent [who most likely died in the war] (…) idolized their fathers at the front as brave warriors eager to fight and die for country from the purest motives” (Hausen, 1984, p. 515-516 cited in Smith, 2020, p. 429).70 The whitewash, patriotic self- censorship of German foreign policy was conducted by ‘politically reliable’ historians, “suppressing honest scholarship, subsidising pseudoscholarship, underwriting mass propaganda, and overseeing the export of this propaganda, especially to Britain, France and the United States” (Herwig, 1996, p. 88-89 cited in Mombauer, 2002, p. 56).71 Throughout the Weimar Republic, academics and intellectuals, particularly those associated with the right-wing, worked to revise the Reich’s idea (Winkler, 2006, p. 491). Hitherto, German leaders had successfully consented to a Little Germany, but, from the First World War onwards, in the context of the fall of the Habsburg Empire, the claim of the Reich’s rebirth through a Greater Germany solution threatened the founding ground of the German democratic experience, as Hermann Oncken argued,

“Now that Austria-Hungary has completely broken apart and the bloodless body of the German Reich has been rendered incapable of pursuing an active foreign policy for a long time, we have only one last line of retreat: the return to the idea of Greater Germany. (…) Greater Germany has now become possible, since the Austrian dynastic state no longer exists, and it has become necessary, since German Austria cannot survive by itself. (…) the theoretical raison d’être of the Little Germany idea of 1848/1866 been

70 Some of them, “felt they had something to prove to them. It should come as little surprise, then, that an idealized war captured the imagination of this fledgling generation. Too young to fight but old enough to hope to show their mettle in battle, the boys and later young men of what the historian Detlev Peukert called the ‘superfluous generation’ proved fertile recruiting grounds for paramilitary associations, like the Free Corps, and filled the ranks of extreme parties, especially of the right” (Smith, 2020, p. 429). 71 An episode that shows the consequences of the government’s rejectionist approach was Karl Kautsky’s research on the German secret archives of the First World War, that aimed to prepare “an edition of official documents”. Kautsky’s collection, ready to be published in March 1919, was, however, delayed for having “an unfavourable light” on German policy right before the outbreak of the war (Mombauer, 2002, p. 58). Yet, whitewash approaches were not curbed to Germany; all Entente states hurried to publicly present their views on the origins of the war. As British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, enlightened the British documents’ editor, it was his “first duty [...] to preserve peace now and in the future. I cannot sacrifice that even to historical accuracy” (Wilson, 1996, p. 2 cited in Mombauer, 2002, pp. 68–69, emphasis in original).

invalidated; the Little Germany Reich (…) has lost the realpolitical justification of its existence. The Little Germany (…) must automatically be absorbed into the idea of Greater Germany” (Oncken, 1935 [1920], p. 61, 62, 64 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 491, emphasis in original).

Political events however, expressed other reality. The newly approved constitution, albeit called Constitution of the German Reich, was intended to hamper any independent state’s hegemony inside the Reich and federatively integrate as much as possible. In this scheme, nor a Prussian hegemony would be possible, nor southern states would have any privilege status in military or diplomatic affairs. Every German, regardless of their territorial ruler, would participate in the popular election of the Reich President, who had the provision to let German chancellors “to govern by constitutionally granted emergency decree”, what came to be abused, due to its “intermittently [proclamation] between 1920 and 1924, and continually after March 1930” (Evans, 2004, p. 80 cited in Smith, 2020, p. 421). The democratic turn of German politics was believed to be a pre-condition for the economic recovery of Germany. Through bold economic reforms, SPD’s executives tried to control the rising inflation, although with rather timid success, if not a total failure that left Germany less prepared for the 20’s economic volatility (Winkler, 2006, pp. 365–366). Adding to these economic concerns, German executives dealt with the political violence, informally backed by some parties, which afflicted the first years of a Republic (e.g. Kapp Putsch) that recorded the largest protest of German history (Smith, 2020, p. 423). During this period, whilst some free states became the bulwark of the Republic, as Prussia, others turned more conservative. Bavaria (more concretely, Munich) became the stronghold of hostility towards the Weimar Republic, leading in August 1921, to emergency measures that banned all press, assemblies, and associations hostile to the Republic – among them the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), to whom Jews were a scapegoat for everything the German Volk suffered (Winkler, 2006, p. 377, 383). At the same time, workers turned to the far left, to the KPD, and the bourgeoisie curved to the right side of the spectrum, to the DVP and DVNP (Winkler, 2006, p. 372). In 1920, when Konstantin Fehrenbach, from the Centre, formed government for the first time without the SPD, the polarization of German politics and society was, therefore, already being established. And, by 1921, the fact that the amount of reparations Germany had to pay was yet under debate only made things worse: a state of perpetual uncertainty “made it impossible for potential private creditors to realistically asses the creditworthiness of the country”

(Winkler, 2006, p. 373). Several governments fell victims to the economic and political instabilities, at least, until the Weimar Coalition (i.e. the SPD, the Centre and the DDP), led by Joseph Wirth, a Centre politician, was formed in 1921. Wirth was a nationalist, as “were almost all major political parties”, in the first decade of Weimar Republic, speaking to a ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) (Hardtwig, 2013, p. 248 cited in Smith, 2020, p. 386), which witnessed the militarization of public life that fettered civil society. Right-wing intellectuals were the strongest sponsors of a Greater Germany policy, but so were social democrats and liberals (Winkler, 2006, p. 492). That policy seemed to be the answer for their social misery, as hyperinflation began to take its first victims in post-war Germany, only to reach unthinkable levels after the French, Belgian (and Italian) troops occupied the Ruhr, in 1923, in response to Germany’s failure to supply wood, coal and telegraph poles, leading to total collapse of the mark (Ringer, 1969, p. 62).72 Scholars were severely hit by the economic depression: while continuing a life-style that demanded high expenditures, their income was reduced, which meant “less travels for study, books became luxuries, research institutes fought to survive, printing costs were high” (Ringer, 1969, p. 63). For students and lecturers, too, the economic deprivation impoverished them to the point of misery, increasing their appetite for drastic measures (Ringer, 1969, p. 64). But there was a growing number of enrollments in institutions of higher education. Germans “apparently stayed on to get an education. (...) Permanent jobs were hard to find; money earned was not worth much, and it was better to be hungry at a university than at home” (Ringer, 1969, p. 65). It was a reverberation of the democratization of education occurring during the Weimar Republic. And thus an evil for leading right-wing scholars, who not only were the majority of German academia, but also opposed to any “misguided democratic tolerance for laxness and mediocrity”, to any state intervention that could put into question “university autonomy” (Ringer, 1969, p. 78). When social democrats and liberals announced the intent to bring “German institutions closer contact with the life of the whole nation”, on utilitarian purposes – sponsored by the economic elite, prominent businessmen and public figures –, and to make scholars “more engaged with the problems of the republic”, to accord to an understanding “between workers and students, ‘the hands and the head’ of a progressive society”, intellectuals reacted (Ringer, 1969, pp. 69–70). The Corporation of German Universities “violently opposed every innovation which was

72 In 1922, a full moratorium on the payments was provisionally granted, as Germany’s reparations scheme was destroying the economy. Due to the depreciation of the mark, under the crisis of hyperinflation, “the value of paper mark plunged from 100 per one gold mark to 2500 per gold mark” (Marks, 2003, p. 53).

proposed or actually carried out by individual reformers, political parties, or ministries”, publicly declaring “their preference for the old form of the gymnasium and insisted that a full course of training in the ancient languages was by far the best preparation, if not actually a prerequisite, for university study” (Ringer, 1969, pp. 77–78). It, too, declared, in 1923, that “all German universities w[ould] hold fast to January 18, Founding Day of the Empire, as a day of patriotic memories and spiritual elevation, (…) to give expression to the unity of the German universities” (Oncken, 1921, p. 21 cited in Ringer, 1969, p. 216). Otherwise, they felt, democratization would lead to “inevitable reduction in quality associated with it [education]” (Spranger, 1930, p. 36 cited in Paletschek, 2001, p. 42). The majority of academics was against modern education and, more importantly, for it was associated with the latter, was anti-Semite. While outside the universities, anti- Semitism rose among “displaced burghers”, who consumed anti-Semite propaganda, for they felt endangered by the modern economic situation; and among the fans of volkish narratives and German Romanticism, either “incompletely educated”, university students, or radical primary teachers, who transmitted ideas; inside the universities’ campi, the anti- Semite intellectual was a member of the academic establishment:

“He is intellectually and socially respectable, even conventional (…) He develops his ideas within the framework of mandarin political orthodoxy (…) to build a flimsy theoretical bridge between the symbol of the Jew and the shortcomings of modern interest politics (…), he moves the whole weight of the mandarin political tradition into the anti-Semitic camp” (Ringer, 1969, pp. 137–138).

Ringer (1969, pp. 215, 250) notes, “whenever a lecturer expressed anything resembling pacifist or Marxist views, there was a student riot against him, particularly if he was Jewish”, thus, stressing the “anti-republican, chauvinist, Pan-German (…) sentiments [that] became ever more pronounced among the students, while socialist or liberal ideas made very few converts”.73

73 The liberal, progressive intelligentsia was a minority in German professorate (Ringer, 1969, p. 134). These accommodationists, or “enlightened conservatives”, such as Meinecke, “hoped to guide the social and political forces that had been released by the industrial revolution, to take the sting out of democracy, to wean the social democratic workers from the radicalism and internationalism of Marxist orthodoxy, and to inculcate in the masses a certain minimum of respect for the cultural traditions and national ideals of the mandarin heritage” (Ringer, 1969, p. 132). They identified with the DDP’s republicanism and defended the revision of the Treaty of Versailles, “the old regime had lost control of the masses; it was futile to seek its restoration” (Ringer, 1969, pp. 201–202). The democratization of the university was a need and the union of the mandarin traditions with political democracy a requirement to the end of social exclusiveness, “which had unfortunately become characteristic of German ‘cultivation’” (Ringer, 1969, p. 212).

When society tended gradually to the right (as in other European states, as in Italy, where in 1922 Benito Mussolini had already marched on Rome), democratic leaders, with President Ebert’s support, made the foundations for a Grand Coalition, which integrated the DVP, so as to deal with the cultural, economic and intellectual crisis in Germany. The head of such government, in which social democrats did not intend to uphold leadership, was Stresemann, leader of the DVP, who, with the Ebert’s approval, decreed a state of emergency and putted an end to the ‘passive resistance’ to the Ruhr Crisis. Stresemann, a nationalist and revisionist, did not possess, however, the support of heavy industrialists, nor of monarchists that stayed with the DNVP. But Stresemann’s executive successfully kept the control of the Reichstag, namely by appealing social democrats with a new labour law that abolished wage autonomy as well as the monopoly of market forces (e.g. the Minister of Labour, from now on, could decide on wages) (Winkler, 2006, p. 393). If in education, democratic reform faced the resistance of German academics, then controlled economic concessions to workers could provide the required leverage for the reform that resonated in the Rentenmark miracle: stabilization of the exchange rate between the mark and dollar to its pre-war rate, through debenture bonds and mortgages on agricultural and industrial land (Winkler, 2006, p. 397). This was the basis for the gold-backed Reichmark in 1924, whose main beneficiaries were the large landowners and heavy industrialists, to the detriment of middle classes’ savings (Marks, 2003, p. 58; Winkler, 2006, p. 400). With the approval of the Dawes Plan (1924) (see Chapter 5, Section 5.5.), which connected the Germany’s reparations to the Entente’s war debts to the USA (Marks, 2003, p. 63), the feeling was that European relations were stabilizing;74 unemployment dropped, and Germany profited from an economic upturn that tamed the radicalization during the elections in the end of 1924. Yet, it was not the end of German challenges: in 1925, after the death of President Ebert – who had been the existential core of the Republic, behind the rapprochement between the moderate forces of the labour movement and the forces of the bourgeoisie (Winkler, 2006, p. 408) –, General Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, supported by the conservative and right-wing fractions and by the executive, which, by the time, was under the leadership of Hans Luther, an independent, was elected. Hindenburg was a nationalist, like Stresemann, and a loyal monarchist, like Bismarck, a representant of the ‘Reichsblock’, which eroded what was left of Weimar parliamentary

74 Germany was back to the economic head of Europe, as British state elites had hoped: “a healthy Germany in a healthy Europe would alleviate Britain’s deep-seated economic problems” (Marks, 2003, p. 54).

democracy’s chances of survival from 1925 onward (Winkler, 2006, p. 409). In this scene, orthodox intellectuals, were satisfied with the election of Hindenburg, and the events after his election contributed for his rising support (see Chapter 5, Section 5.5.). The triumph of Stresemann’s international strategy paired with an economic boom coming from Germany’s industrial profits brought domestic stability, though the path of the second half of the 20’s seemed to anticipate the end of the Republic, wherein “growing levels of migration from formerly German territories, and continued migration especially from Poland made the question of who was admitted into the German community all the more acute” (Palmowski, 2008, p. 550), along with anti-Semitism. In 1927, the Minister of Interior, Walter von Keudell, from the DNVP, publicly shared his “inner solidarity” to anti-Semitic students’ associations (Winkler, 2006, p. 420). Concurrently, the war guilt dilemma remained an ever-present piece of the national narrative, more intensely as the economic depression approached Europe’s shores, which inspired social strife and guided people to the political extremes of the KPD and the NSDAP. Germany descended to chaos in the streets, after the fall of the Grand Coalition, and German political leaders turned to Hindenburg, who, however, headed the transformation of the parliamentary system into a presidential system which greatly nurtured German authoritarian seed.

4.6. Hindenburg’s Authoritarian Coup Hindenburg’s authoritarianism consolidated German nationalism’s tendency to reinforce the authoritarian, introvert, ethnic and racial elements of the ‘German nation’, which had been tamed, but not extinguished, during the Weimar’s democratic deviation. In the 30’s, on the contrary, Germans idealized hegemonic and Greater Germany solutions. When the Grand Coalition collapsed, Germany moved to a presidential system, in which President Hindenburg overpowered the National Assembly. It was Hindenburg’s authoritarian coup, consubstantiated in the emergency powers stated in Article 48th of the Weimar Constitution, which he used to form governments of presidential initiative. If that did not suffice to gather support for a bill to cover the national budget, the dissolution of the Reichstag followed. Yet, from 1930 onwards, the decision to dissolve the parliament could not be taken casually, as Bismarck had once practiced. The support of the NSDAP had grown “from somewhat more than 800 000 votes in May 1928 to 6.4 million (…) an increase from 2.6% to 18.3% of the vote and from 12 to 107 seats in parliament” (Winkler, 2006, p. 437). Nazis took advantage of mass media to spread their extremism, their anti-

Semitism and a nationalized version of socialism, different from the Marxist reading, thus appealing to bourgeoisie parties that matured right-oriented (Winkler, 2006, p. 439). Hindenburg continued, however, suspicious of Hitler’s intentions and preferred to count on cooperation between parties, led by the Centre and with the consent of the SPD, to form a sustainable government. The moment, however, did not favor social democracy. On the contrary, the chances for its survival were low: on the one hand, the Reichstag met infrequently, and, on the other, Hitler directed the anti-Western sentiment against the un- German, already fragile, parliamentary democracy, and the rights to political participation of minorities (Winkler, 2006, p. 443). Furthermore, the 30’s had brought the downturn of the economy due to the Great Depression: austerity policies, an unaccountable parliament and large protests characterised society and circumscribed political debates. In 1932, Kurt Schumacher, from the SPD, summarized the situation as “a continual appeal to the inner bastard in people (…), [the NSDAP] ha[d] successfully accomplished the total mobilization of human stupidity” (quoted in Winkler, 2006, pp. 447–448). The real centre of power in Germany, however, remained around Hindenburg and his conservative camarilla, the Junkers. A conservative cabinet of the DNVP was formed, the “Cabinet of Barons”, led by Franz von Papen, who pursued nationalist, conservative objectives (Winkler, 2006, p. 455). Papen had relative success, being able to set the final payment of reparations, at Lausanne. But 1932 had violent federal elections (Marks, 2003, p. 143). The NSDAP was the strongest party, holding a majority with the KPD (Winkler, 2006, p. 459). The Barons refused to yield to two anti-parliamentary, anti-constitutional parties, and Hindenburg refused to ask Hitler to lead a government. The solution they found was a constitution, committed to authoritarian principles in a manner that offered the means for conservatives, nationalists themselves, to obstruct Nazis’ rise to power. In the summer of 1932, Germany’s democratic condition was at a critical state, as Hindenburg established “an authoritarian presidential state with professional-corporative elements”, wherein “the will of the people found expression primarily through a one-time elective act, the plebiscitary legitimation of the head of state. The president, not the parliament, embodied the general will and was the centre of power” (Winkler, 2006, p. 465). He benefited from a “non-partisan national leadership” which, however inherently conservative, implied detachment from a Volk that found more tempting Nazis’ idea of a ‘national revolution’. Not only unions (e.g. Free Trade Unions) turned more nationalistic, advocating their cultural task to prepare workers “to the social struggle in the interests of the nation”, but also the Junkers commenced to back Hitler as chancellor (Winkler, 2006,

pp. 470–472). Yet, in the end of 1932, whilst refusing to make Hitler chancellor (as Papen hoped), Hindenburg was willing to declare war on the Reichstag and march the army over democratic legitimacy – only Kurt von Schleicher, Minister of Defense, in his Planspiel Ott (War Game), persuaded him not to go forth. Such achievement led Schleicher to the chancellery, for a time, albeit with Hindenburg’s reluctance (Winkler, 2006, p. 475). By 1933, under pressure from large-scale agricultural interests in the east and the rightist heavy industry, Hindenburg instructed his camarilla to negotiate with Hitler, to whom moderation was solicited. In January, opposition to the government came from all sides of the political spectrum, even from the SPD and the Centre, which thought Hitler’s ascension to power through legal and democratic means would be the lesser evil, when compared to the institution of Hindenburg’s military dictatorship. Social democrats and liberals, at bottom, assumed they could accommodate Hitler and the NSDAP (Winkler, 2006, p. 484). In 30 January 1933, Hitler was nominated Chancellor and Hermann Göring was put in charge of the control of police forces in Prussia (Winkler, 2006, p. 487). SPD member, Rudolf Breitscheid, reacted in the following manner:

“If at first Hitler remains within the constitution, and be it hypocrisy (…), it would be wrong so to give him an excuse to violate the constitution (…) If Hitler takes the path of the constitution, then he stands at the head of a government we can and must fight, even more than the previous ones. But it is still a government by constitutional right” (Schulze, 1975, p. 145-146 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 487).

4.7. Nazism, Eastern Germanization and Anti-Semitism The Nazi seizure of power represented a radical expression already anticipated in German nationalism, wherein anti-Semite, militarist and introvert traits were pushed to their most malign reverberations. The ‘German nation’ was in this period, a ‘social totality’ believed to be destined to conquer Europe, to be a ‘spiritual hegemon’ and defeat all of its enemies. In March, the Reichstag was dissolved, Hindenburg declared state of emergency and Hitler governed until new elections were called by emergency decree, under Article 48th. National Socialism was militant and totalitarian aiming to reinstate the Germany that was threatened by the “November Criminals” of Weimar. Per Hitler, Germany would

“either be a World Power, or it will cease to be at all (…) it will need be of such size as to give it the significance it requires at the present time and to provide life for its citizens (…) [hence to] stop the eternal Germanic migrations to the south and west and direct our

gaze to the lands towards the east (…) [a] the territorial policy for the future” (Hitler, 1942, p. 742—743 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 6).

In Hitler’s point of view, Germany was destined to redraw the map in the East, including Bolshevist Russia, though it was still unknown to the majority of Germans, because it did not attract broad, mass support (Winkler, 2007, p. 7). First, Germany had to reinforce her armed forces and her economy. In 1933, Hitler knew France was still more powerful than Germany (Hilgruber, 1981, p. 57). In a cabinet reunion on budget priorities, on 8 February 1933, Hitler associated Germany’s military and economic revival:

“Germany was now negotiating with foreign countries about her military equality of rights. (…) But Germany could not content itself with that. This theoretical recognition must be followed by practical equality of rights, i.e., by German rearmament. (…) This had to be the dominant thought, always and everywhere. (…) Germany’s position in the world was decisively conditioned upon the position of the German armed forces. The position of the German economy in the world was also dependent on that” (quoted in Weinberg, 2009, pp. 26–27).

Accordingly, the Reichbank’s policies were redirected to fully fund military rearmament, through limitless credit programmes (Weinberg, 2009, pp. 27–28). These funded Hitler’s Greater Germany design, revealed in his secret speech in the Department of General von Hammerstein-Equord,

“Extirpation of Marxism root and branch (…). Strictest authoritarian government. (…) Building up of army most important prerequisite for the attainment of goal: regaining of political power. (…) How should political power be used, when it has been won? (…) [The] conquest of new living space in the east and its ruthless Germanization” (Vogelsang, 1954, 434-435 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 10).

Those considered enemies or contenders of the national ideal, as the members of the KDP or the SPD, were banned, censored and preventively detained (Winkler, 2007, p. 11). This also applied to intellectuals, or academics, whose conservativism was traded by a dormant acquiescence of Nazism, because of the prevailing policy of state repression. In 1933, as Carl Schmitt headed the NSDAP’s organization for university professors, only nationally minded academics were not harassed, those who, albeit not anti-Semite in their everyday practices, turned a blind eye to the consequences of Nazism (Winkler, 2007, pp. 27–28).

Some repelled “the plebeian character of the movement” and the intellectual mediocrity of Nazi ideologues, yet they would go on an “inner emigration” (Winkler, 2007, p. 44). In fact, “fully committed supporters of the Third Reich were a small minority within the German academic community” (Ringer, 1969, p. 442). Nevertheless, there were young students and intellectuals who were loyal to National Socialism’s utopia and paramilitary groups (e.g. the SS or the Gestapo), which carried the spiritual revitalization of Germany, through whatever practices (e.g. persecution) Nazis saw fit (Winkler, 2007, p. 45).75 Nazi repression was legally justified in the Enabling Act of 1933, which “gave the government unrestricted powers for four years to pass laws that were not in accordance with the constitution” (Winkler, 2007, p. 13). Hitler placed Nazis in individual provinces’ cabinets (Gleichschaltung) (Winkler, 2007, p. 11), extinguishing all German legislative process. Trade, labour unions and workers’ associations, which were popular spaces for social democrats and communists, were unified in Nazi-led workers’ committees because independent workers’ associations jeopardized Hitler’s totalitarian goals (Winkler, 2007, p. 19). Political parties either joined the revolutionary crusade of National Socialists (e.g. DNVP, the DVP), traded their presence for concessions and guarantees (e.g. Centre), or its members were severely hounded or murdered (Winkler, 2007, p. 23). The Junkers, the traditional, conservative, agricultural elite, which had underpinned Hitler’s nomination, saw their lands expropriated: Hitler required their land to accomplish a state of economic autarky to subsidize his coming wars, thus every ‘vital’ land (either inside or abroad) was not to serve any estate or other state elite’s interests (Winkler, 2007, p. 20). Also, just before Hindenburg’s death, Hitler managed to successfully combine the offices of Reich President and Chancellor by a plebiscite, positively voted by the majority of Germans (Winkler, 2007, pp. 38–39). It made him Germany’s absolute judge: in 1935, through the Nuremberg Laws, Hitler made the swastika the official symbol of the Reich

75 One of the practices that essentially affected university education was the law against the overcrowding of universities and schools that reduced the number of students and professors – and, particularly, of Jews –, attending universities, whose rectors, according to the Führerprinzip, were nominated by the Ministry of Culture (Winkler, 2007, p. 30). Universities were integrated in the regime without much resistance, even if that included replacing 20-25 percent of German professoriate (Ash, 1995, p. 6 cited in Paletschek, 2001, p. 44). Furthermore, the Nazi regime introduced training camps for lecturers (Dozentinlager) in order to indoctrinate the bearers of the legitimate culture (Losemann, 1980, p. 107 cited in Paletschek, 2001, p. 45). In this respect, Ringer’s (1969, pp. 439–440) account of the Nazi rule of universities is enlightening: it “was employed to destroy academic self-government. The freedom of learning and the idea of objectivity in scholarship were (…) repudiated. (…) The number of students at German universities dropped by almost a third (…). Meantime, certificates of good character and political reliability were required of applicants for university study. Future teachers and university instructors had to demonstrate their integration into the national community (…). Higher education lost its purely intellectual and scholarly character”.

and banned marriages between Jews “and citizens of German or “related” (…) blood”. Citizenship “was defined not by the rights and duties of citizenship, but by the identity of the Volk” (Palmowski, 2008, p. 551). It was redefined to the benefit of Aryan Germans, granted with the status of “Reich citizen” (with full political rights), and to discriminate against “citizens”, understood as “tolerable guests” (Winkler, 2007, p. 46). Contrasting with that duplicitous image abroad (see Chapter 5, Section 5.6.), drawn from Germany’s putative alacrity to cooperate, Hitler was straightforward in the domestic policy: all of public life was to be militarized from the moment the NSDAP took over (Weinberg, 2009, p. 156). Hitler reintroduced conscription in 1935, departing from the anti-war agenda (e.g. cuts on military budgets) took by other European states, as Great Britain, but in agreement with his and Goring’s Four Year Plan (1936), a reform plan to build a synthetic industry, even though sailed against heavy industrialists’ interests (Weinberg, 2009, pp. 304–305). And in 1938, in a conversation with Moritz von Faber du Faur, Hitler expressed how, in his view, the immediate future would evolve and its consequences for Germany:

“I shall initiate an operation against Austria. It will go smoothly; I have come to agreement with Stojadinović [the Yugoslavian Prime-Minister]. He prefers the Anschluss to the Habsburgs. Mussolini will put on a good face to a bad situation; he does not have much choice since he alienated England and France in his Abyssinian venture. It will be more difficult when I start on Czechoslovakia; but because Stojadinović has only a smile left for the Little Entente, that too will work. Only when I attack Poland will every one jump on me” (du Faur, 1953, p. 204-205 cited in Weinberg, 2009, p. 393, emphasis in original).

Hitler believed the Western powers would not interfere in German territorial incursions, at least for a time. The same applied to Eastern states, as Poland, which had been informed beforehand that the Wehrmacht would move to Austria – indeed, Polish leaders expected to win territories from the annexation in return for neutrality (Weinberg, 2009, pp. 441– 443). In this sense, and without a strong opposition from other states, the march on Vienna was a fait accompli, one Hitler hoped to replicate in the future. The Anschluss, intimately related to the Greater Germany solution advocated by National Socialists, conservatives and liberals alike, was received with broad support by the German people (Winkler, 2007, p. 51). And in Vienna, Hitler was crystal clear on his intentions to continue to march East:

“It is keeping with the commandment that once brought the settlers of the old German Reich to this land. The oldest Eastern March of the German people must, from now on, be the newest bulwark of the German nation and thus of the German Reich” (Domarus, 1965, p. 823-824 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 51).

After the international reaction to the annexation of Austria (see Chapter 5, Section 5.6.), the invasion of Czechoslovakia was postponed by the Munich Conference, in 1938. For Hitler, it was a “flawed triumph” (Weinberg, 2009, p. 636); while for Britain and France, whose heads of state were happily saluted by German citizens (Weinberg, 2009, p. 633) and overtly pledged to guarantee the sovereignty of what was left of Czechoslovakia, in case of an unprovoked attack, the conference had served its deterring raison d’être. The efforts to revert Munich began as soon as Hitler left the conference, such as the amplification of propaganda among, and radicalization of, the masses, that had shown their unpreparedness for a massive war effort and territorial expansion first to what was left of Czechoslovakia and, later, to Poland. The latter, which had remained on Germany’s side on the Czech question, had yet gotten steadily excluded from the Führer’s diplomatic circle (Weinberg, 2009, p. 664). By 1939, the indoctrinated Germans were prepared to follow Hitler (Weinberg, 2009, p. 678). In the end of February, Hitler became protector of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain did not waste time to establish a consultive pact with Poland, particularly after the Pact Molotov-Ribbentrop (1939) (see Chapter 5, Section 5.6.). Yet, earlier on 31 March 1939, he told the British House of Commons:

“In order to make perfectly clear the position of His Majesty’s Government before those consultations are concluded, I now have to inform the House that during that period in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power” (quoted in Weinberg, 2009, p. 709).

Albeit a war on Poland was not popular among the Volk, neither among Germany’s allies (e.g. Mussolini was unprepared and favored neutrality), most were prepared to follow, as the President of Lower Bavaria concluded, on September 1939: “The populace doesn’t want war, but nonetheless, despite the lack of a war enthusiasm like in 1914, will calmly and optimistically support the unavoidable, confident in the Führer, even in a situation of war” (Kershaw, 1980, p. 127 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 69). Historians, in particular, were

prepared to lead Poland’s Germanization: as Theodor Schieder argued, in Report on the Settlement and Ethnicity Questions in the Regained Eastern Provinces (1939), a “new ethnographic order, (…) a resettlement of the nationalities so that (…) there will be clearer lines of separation that it is the case today” (Winkler, 2007, p. 71). By 1940, Poland was overwhelmed, and Hitler’s Western campaign had started; France fell at the hand of the Blitzkrieg. In the summer, thanks to his military successes, Hitler was the most popular figure in Germany (Winkler, 2007, p. 72). At the universities, academics rejoiced with Germany’s military spoils. Friedrich Meinecke, who had always maintained a difficult relation with the orthodox line of German academy, confessed that

“For me, too, joy, admiration, and pride in this army must dominate for the time being (…) How could one’s heart not throb? Building up such an army of millions from the ground up in four years and training it for such accomplishments – an astonishing achievement, probably the greatest positive accomplishment of the [Third] Reich” (Meinecke, 1962 [1940], p. 364 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 73).

With time, however, the winner aura faded. Britain, which had affirmed that no settlement could be made and thus had declared war on Germany, was unconquerable, and the USA had increased their military assistance to the latter (Winkler, 2007, p. 75), especially after the Atlantic Charter (1941). Furthermore, the launch of the Barbarossa Campaign, in June 1941, against the USSR, perceived in the German academy as the upshot of the historical task of Germany,76 was tragical – not only for Germans, but for Soviet prisoners of war and Jews, whose genocide was hastened.77 The Jews, marked with a yellow Jewish star, were Nazism’s scapegoats, portrayed as the enemy of Germans, architects of the USA’s declaration of war (Winkler, 2007, p. 85).Yet, already in 1938, in the November pogrom,

“more Germans than ever before [had] crossed a threshold of violence, participating, actively or passively, in the brutalization of a minority population [i.e. Jews]. Once this threshold [had been] crossed, it became hard to step back and articulate anti-Semitic

76 As Erich Maschke said in 1942 Germany had “drawn the eastern territory to Europe, organically, without breaks, without symptoms of poisoning, from the Narva and St. Petersburg to the Black Sea, connecting with Europe, its fate and the future” (Schönwälder, 1992, p. 245-246 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 79). 77 As Smith (2020, p. 477) describes, “The death rate in the Reich itself reveals that the murder of Soviet POWs [i.e. prisoners of war] was by no means a matter of military exigency. Between July 1941 and April 1942, nearly half of all Soviet prisoners brought to the Reich died there, mainly of starvation and typhus. Some died in camps that later assumed notoriety, like Bergen-Belsen”.

measures as intrinsically wrong. Instead, many Germans justified them” (Smith, 2020, p. 457).

After the defeat of Fascist Italy in 1943, as the war turned out to be a war of attrition, for which German military and economic supplies were not sufficient, the cult of the Führer crumbled. At the universities, for instance, which had helped the regime to reproduce its legitimate culture, projects to leave higher education subordinate to Hitler and NSDAP’s needs, that is, aligned with the Nazi Weltanschauung and devoted to the education of the leaders of the regime (i.e. a ‘political university’), was, concurrently, abandoned as armies bordered Germany (Paletschek, 2001, p. 46). The Red Army advanced to Berlin, in 1944, and the Western powers berthed on Normandy with the unconditional surrender in hand, recovering France and marching to the western borders. While refusing to surrender, what led to the massive devastation of German infrastructures (e.g. state buildings, houses, etc.), the Third Reich capitulated, in May 1944, to the encirclement of the Allies.78

4.8. Collective Guilt, Democracy and Europe The end of the Second World War brought the transformation of German nationalism and of the ‘German nation’. If before, every critical juncture had confirmed the elements that were part of its conservative orientation (e.g. introvertism, race, etc.), the post-war context redefined the latter, although not completely, along cooperative and extrovert outlines. In post-war years, Germany did not exist as a sovereign state. After the agreements between the Allied powers in the Conferences of Yalta and of Potsdam (see Chapter 5, Section 5.7.), the German territory was divided in four zones, each occupied and directed by one of the Allies. Each zone was ‘relatively autonomous’ from the other, although the Western zones shared the impetus to educate Germans to democracy and to resistance against extremist rhetoric (e.g. Nazism or Communism), for Hitler, who had committed suicide, had been a national hero for Germans, for many years (Winkler, 2007, p. 111).79 The (near complete) destruction of German infrastructures, along with directives approved by the High Commission, left German society, in all its spheres, from the upside

78 Roberto Rosselini’s cinematographic piece, Germania anno zero (1948), masterly illustrates the desolate living conditions, in Berlin, in 1948, following the Allied bombardments against Nazi Germany. 79 The broad German Volk was still nationalist and attached to the Empire: “In response to a question about Germany’s best period in the twentieth century, 45% of respondents came out for the Wilhelmine Reich before 1914, 42% for the years 1933-1939, 7% for the Weimar Republic, and only 2% for the present. In July 1952, when asked their opinion about leading men in the Third Reich, 42% expressed themselves positively about Hjalmar Schacht; 37% had a good opinion of Goering; no less than 24% of West Germans still thought favourably of Hitler” (Winkler, 2007, p. 156) (see also Figure 3).

down. Farms, proprieties, schools, markets, industrial factories, buildings were torn apart – in part, because all had been put at the services of Nazi interests –, launching Germany into economic, social, sanitarian crises. The great landowners, the Junkers, for example, ceased to exist as a class, and the heavy industrialists were broken up and subjected to the instructions of the external authorities, that would take care of German economic renewal (Winkler, 2007, p. 112). The ordinary German lived in miserable conditions; the supplies brought by the Allies (e.g. medicine or food), along with what had escaped the bombings, were scarce, compelling Germans to look for provisions in an evolving black market. The the word that encapsulated German feeling was “collapse” (Winkler, 2007, p. 102). Parallelly, under supervision of the Allied powers, the process of de-Nazification was initiated. Some spaces were left untouched, as, for instance, the judicial one (Winkler, 2007, p. 112), while others were transformed. In education, for instance, de-Nazification was led with the help of academics, historians and intellectuals, who minted the meaning of Schuldfrage to Nazism.80 Karl Jaspers, in The Question of the German Guilt (1946), discussed the “moral collective guilt”: “We all bear responsibility for the fact that the spiritual-intellectual conditions of German life contained the possibility of such a regime” (Jaspers, 1979 [1946], 55-57, 69-70 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 103). Thomas Mann, who had been in exile in the USA since 1939, criticised the “inwardness of Germany” that had done more harm than good: on the one side, German Romanticism had brought “deep and vitalizing impulses” to Europe, but Germans became “the people of the romantic counter- revolution against the philosophical intellectualism and rationalism of enlightenment – a revolt of music against literature, of mysticism against clarity” (quoted in Winkler, 2007, p. 106). As Mann contended to his fellow nationals,

“This story should convince us of one thing: that there are not two Germanies, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt, in ruin (…). Not a word of all I have just told you about Germany or tried to

80 As Erich Ollenhauer, leader of the SPD from 1952 until 1963, argued in 4th Session of the Bundestag (28 October 1953), “Democracy demands the thinking citizen. The civic education of the young generation is a vital question of democracy”. Own translation. See original: “Die Demokratie fordert den denkenden Bürger. Die staatsbürgerliche Erziehung der jungen Generation ist eine Lebensfrage der Demokratie” (Bundestag, 1953, p. 45).

indicate to you, came out of alien, objective knowledge. It is all within me. I have been through it all” (quoted in Winkler, 2007, p. 106).81

In politics, the fall of the NSDAP reopened the party system to new parties, whose leaders were already known for their participation in the German political life before the Nazi’s abolishment of any political opposition. Adenauer, for example, who, during the Weimar Republic, had detached himself from Catholics’ reconciliation to anti-republican feelings (Winkler, 2006, p. 382), headed the Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) that, along with the Christian Social Union (CSU), backed the creation of a federal German state. Rightist and conservative parties were a minority, but found their way back to the German political life, as was the case of the German Party (DP), in 1946. The SPD was restored, leaded by Kurt Schumacher, and soon shared the political scene as CDU’s ‘nationalist’ alternative. West Germany was created, in 1949, after the introduction of the deutschmark, in 1948, building on the instructions of the Frankfurt Documents which stated the temporary status of a divided Germany (Winkler, 2007, p. 122). The Basic Law (Grundgesetz), made by a constituent assembly, a parliamentary council (Parlamentarischer Rat), envisioned a representative democracy, in which the federal president was a symbolic figure, and the chancellor was elected by a Bundestag. According to the Basic Law, West Germany had a conditional sovereignty: Western powers’ Occupation Statute of Germany (1949) made certain issues of the German political life, as foreign policy, dependent on the Allied High Commission. Nevertheless, the concept of ‘sovereignty’ itself, in the Basic Law, differed from the other European countries, for, as Article 24th declared, German political leaders had the possibility to transfer sovereign powers to intergovernmental institutions, if that was required to maintain the peace in the European continent. As Erich Köhler, the first President of the Bundestag and co-founder of the CDU, stated, in the 1st Session of the Bundestag (7 September 1949),

81 Trying to revive the cultural spirit, intellectuals, as Meinecke, organized “public readings of the German classics, combined with recitals of the best German music (…) to reactivate the original sources of the nation’s spiritual life in the uncorrupted age of Goethe”. But there was “a state of ideological exhaustion” (Ringer, 1969, p. 443), and a “certain placidity [that] was the necessary socio-psychological and political medium for the transformation of our post-war population into the citizenry of the Federal Republic of Germany. (…) The new German state had to be erected against the ideology and politics of National Socialists, the catastrophe of which had also spelled the downfall of the Reich. It could hardly be erected against the majority of the people” (Lübbe, 1983, p. 333-334, 335, 341 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 162). Such placidity, yet, led to the repression of the Schuldfrage, especially during the Adenauer years, in which the slogan “overcoming the past” (Vergangenheit Bewältigung) was frequent (Traverso, 2020, p. 52, 72).

“By acting in this way, we will also fulfil in the deepest sense one of the fundamental provisions of the Basic Law, namely to serve world peace. Article 24 of the Bonn Basic Law commits us, as you know, to voluntarily renounce sovereign rights if this can bring about a peaceful and lasting order in Europe and between the peoples of the world. I believe I am entitled to make the following commitment: At this historic moment, we commit ourselves not only with our minds but also with the passion of our hearts to such a new order for Europe and the world. Serving peace is truly the deepest aspiration of our people. At the beginning of our work I believe I may say that we are filled with the hope that a new Germany of law and justice, that the Federal Republic of Germany will always draw its strength for a happier future from this belief that we want to serve peace, from a new order for Europe and the world, from the belief in this transformation”.82

Europe and European integration covered, along with reunification, in 1949, the German debate. In the same session, Paul Löbe, a former president of the Reichstag (1925-1932) and member of the SPD, declared that “Germany wants (…) to become a sincere, peace- loving, equal member of the United States of Europe”.83 And Köhler continued,

“The outcome of the elections has shown that we are not committed to power, but to the great idea of communion with other peoples, and that, within the framework of that communion, we are willing to draw from the earth and its people the greatest possible material and spiritual strength, not only for the benefit of our people, but of the international community as a whole”.84

82 Own translation. See original: “Indem wir so handeln, werden wir auch im tiefsten Sinne eine der grundlegenden Bestimmungen des Grundgesetzes erfüllen, nämlich dem Frieden der Welt zu dienen. Mit dem Artikel 24 des Bonner Grundgesetz verpflichten wir uns bekanntlich, Hoheitsrechte freiwillig aufzugeben, wenn dadurch eine friedliche und dauerhafte Ordnung in Europa und zwischen den Völkern der Welt herbeigeführt werden kann. Ich glaube zu dem folgenden Bekenntnis berechtigt zu sein: Wir bekennen uns in dieser historischen Stunde nicht nur mit dem Verstand, sondern auch mit der Leidenschaft unseres Herzens zu einer solchen Neuordnung Europas und der Welt. Dem Frieden zu dienen, das ist wahrhaft die tiefste Sehnsucht unseres Volkes. Ich glaube am Beginn ‘unserer Arbeit aussprechen zu dürfen: wir sind von der Hoffnung erfüllt, daß ein neues Deutschland des Rechtes und der Gerechtigkeit, daß die Bundesrepublik Deutschland aus diesem Glauben, daß wir dem Frieden dienen wollen, aus einer Neuordnung Europas und der Welt, aus dem Glauben an diese Wandlung immer ihre Kraft für eine glücklichere Entwicklung der Zukunft schöpfen wird” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 5). 83 Own translation. See original: “Deutschland will (...) ein aufrichtiges, friedliebendes, gleichberechtigtes Glied der Vereinigten Staaten von Europa werden” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 2). 84 Own translation. See original: “Der Ausgang der Wahlen hat gezeigt, daß wir uns nicht zur Macht bekennen, sondern zur großen Idee der Gemeinschaft mit anderen Völkern, und daß wir im Rahmen dieser Gemeinschaft gewillt sind, aus Erde und Menschen ein Höchstmaß materieller und geistiger Kräfte nicht allein zum Nutzen unseres Volkes, sondern der gesamten Völkergemeinschaft herauszuschöpfen” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 5).

In political discourse, Europe and Germany became entwined, for as Theodor Heuss, the West Germany’s first President and member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), argued, in the 2nd Session of the Bundestag (12 September 1949),

“Germany needs Europe, but Europe also needs Germany. We know it in our minds: we became poorer during the Hitler era, when the power of the state cut us off from the lives of the people. But we also know this: the others would become poorer without what Germany means. We face the great task of building a new national feeling”.85

Heuss’s new national feeling had in “the ideal of European integration (…) the prospect of liberation from the burdens and demons of the recent past in a well-ordered civic state” (Smith, 2008, p. 177). In this context, anti-Semitism had no place in Germany, as Konrad Adenauer declared in his first address to the Bundestag, as Chancellor, in the 5th Session (20 September 1949): “We consider it unworthy and in itself unbelievable that after all that happened during the National Socialist era there should still be people in Germany who persecute or despise Jews because they are Jews”.86 In accordance, federal legislation was approved to cleanse racial features from the meaning of citizenship, and “the political and intellectual leadership of the FRG sought to overcome the racial and anti-Semitic undercurrents of the ethno-cultural ideal of the Volk, which had been the ascendant from the early part of the twentieth century” (Palmowski, 2008, p. 553). Nor had “The Franco-

85 Own translation. See original: “Deutschland braucht Europa, aber Europa braucht auch Deutschland. Wir wissen es im Geistigen: wir sind in der Hitlerzeit ärmer geworden, als uns die Macht des Staates von dem Leben der Völker absperrte. Aber wir wissen auch dies: die anderen würden ärmer werden ohne das, was Deutschland bedeutet. Wir stehen vor der großen Aufgabe, ein neues Nationalgefühl zu bilden” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 11). 86 Own translation. See original: “Wir halten es für unwürdig und für an sich unglaublich, daß nach all dem, was sich in nationalsozialistischer Zeit begeben hat, in Deutschland noch Leute sein sollten, die Juden deswegen verfolgen oder verachten, weil sie Juden sind” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 27). Later, in the 165th Session of the Bundestag (27 September 1951), Adenauer reinforced the position against anti-Semitism: “The Federal Republic’s attitude towards its Jewish citizens is clearly defined by the Basic Law. Article 3 of the Basic Law stipulates that all people are equal before the law and that no one may be discriminated against or favoured on account of his or her sex, ancestry, race, language, home and origin, faith, religious or political beliefs. (...) In order to ensure that this educational work is not disturbed and that internal peace is maintained in the Federal Republic, the Federal Government has decided to combat those circles which are still engaged in anti-Semitic incitement by means of strict criminal prosecution”. Own translation. See original: “Die Einstellung der Bundesrepublik zu ihren jüdischen Staatsbürgern ist durch das Grundgesetz eindeutig festgelegt. Art. 3 des Grundgesetzes bestimmt, daß alle Menschen vor dem Gesetz gleich sind und daß niemand wegen seines Geschlechtes, seiner Abstammung, seiner Rasse, seiner Sprache, seiner Heimat und Herkunft, seines Glaubens, seiner religiösen oder politischen Anschauungen benachteiligt oder bevorzugt werden darf. (…) Damit diese erzieherische Arbeit nicht gestört und der innere Friede in der Bundesrepublik gewahrt werde, hat die Bundesregierung sich entschlossen, die Kreise, die noch immer antisemitische Hetze treiben, durch unnachsichtige Strafverfolgung zu bekämpfen” (Bundestag, 1951, pp. 6697–6698).

German antagonism which has dominated European politics for hundreds of years and caused so many wars, destruction and bloodshed must be finally overcome”.87 Yet, the terms in which the Franco-German hostility would come to an end were still under discussion, and related to German reunification. For instance, speaking in the name of the SPD, Schumacher argued in the 6th Session of the Bundestag, that

“a Franco-German understanding, which is so vital, cannot be created through pathetic oaths, but only through objective democratic discussion of the problems. We should not give a blank cheque here either. That would only encourage hegemonic tendencies in Europe and weaken the goodwill of the broad masses of the German people towards international cooperation”.88

Later that year, in the 17th Session of the Bundestag (15 November 1949), he returned to it: “The peoples of France and Germany should come to an agreement and mutual trust. (...) That is why a mere rapprochement in this economic upper class is not an understanding as the German people want it, and certainly not as the French people want it”.89 The return of German hegemonic impulses were, also, part of social democratic concerns, as Carlo Schmid argued, in the 10th Session of the Bundestag (29 September 1949), in a response to Gebhard Seelos, from the Bavarian Party (BP),

“You also mentioned Austria. I do not want to do you the dishonour of thinking that you meant something like ‘Anschluss’ of a Nazi nature. You have not done so. But what has happened here is extremely dangerous, because it sounded a bit like the myth of the ‘Holy Reich of the Germans’, a great myth, but a bitter and dangerous reality. (...) You see, this kind of romanticism has the quality of rising above its founders. (...) You see, such things tend to change hands in the next generation. A man like Constantin Frantz has also been a follower of Nazism, (shouts) not only because of his anti-Semitism! You see: there were few things at the beginning of the 19th century that were as great and as

87 Own translation. See original: “Der deutsch-französische Gegensatz, der Hunderte von Jahren die europäische Politik beherrscht und zu so manchen Kriegen, zu Zerstörungen und Blutvergießen Anlaß gegeben hat, muß endgültig aus der Welt geschafft werden” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 30). 88 Own translation. See original: “eine deutsch-französische Verständigung, die so lebensnotwendig ist, kann doch nicht durch pathetische Schwüre geschaffen werden, sondern nur durch sachlichen demokratischen Austrag in der Diskussion der Probleme. Blankowechsel sollten wir auch hier nicht geben. Das würde nur hegemoniale Tendenzen in Europa fördern und den guten Willen der breiten Massen des deutschen Volkeszu internationaler Kooperation schwächen” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 42). 89 Own translation. See original: “Zur Einigung und zum gegenseitigen Vertrauen kommen sollen die Völker Frankreichs und Deutschlands. (...) Darum ist eine bloße Annäherung in dieser ökonomischen Oberschicht keine Verständigung, wie osie das deutsche Volk will, und erst recht keine Verständigung, wie sie das französische Volk will” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 30).

loud and as pure as the German national movement (...). But this movement very soon found its target, and this is how it became perverted: it became the impulse of (...) Germany and made it the imperialist power of continental Europe”.90

Yet, Schmid argued, “Even without the Federal Foreign Office and also without legations and embassies (...) Germany is a political agent in the world. (...) Germany is a foreign policy agent in potentia through its existence, its mass, its location and its future”.91 Germans accepted the Marshall Plan,92 because not only, as Euger Gerstenmaier, member of the CDU, declared, in the 17th Session of the Bundestag (15 November 1949), “it gave the impetus for the restoration of our German economy”,93 but also, as August- Martin Euler, of the FDP, argued, that same day, because it “integrated [Germany] into the Western world, a reliable building block of a new order that – we hope – will become so strong that in time it will lead Russian policy to a wise self-limitation”.94 Germans would have a role, as Hans-Joachim von Merkatz (DP) argued, in that session,

“It is a new factor ‘Germany’ in the world, a factor that includes what was perhaps previously demanded of us. We have now become a mature nation. I believe it is the first

90 Own translation. See original: “Sie haben auch Österreich angesprochen. Ich will Ihnen nicht die Unehre antun, zu glauben, als ob Sie etwas wie ‘Anschluß’ nazistischer Art gemeint hätten. Das haben Sie nicht getan. Was aber hier geschehen ist, ist höchst gefährlich, denn es klang, etwas an von. dem Mythos des ‘Heiligen Reichs der Deutschen’, als Mythos großartig, aber als Realität eine bittere und gefährliche Sache. (…) Sehen Sie, diese Art von Romantik hat die Eigenschaft, über ihre Begründer hinauszuwachsen. (...) Sehen Sie, solche Dinge pflegen in der nächsten Generation umzuschlagen. Ein Mann wie Constantin Frantz ist auch ein Verläufer des Nazismus gewesen, (Zurufe) nicht nur wegen seines Antisemitismus! Sehen Sie: es hat wenig Dinge zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts gegeben, die so großartig und lauter und rein gewesen wären wie die deutsche Nationalbewegung (...). Aber diese Bewegung fand sehr bald ihren Treitschke, und damit wurde sie pervertiert: sie wurde zum Impuls des (…) Deutschland und machte dieses zur imperialistischen Macht Kontinental-Europas” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 180). 91 Own translation. See original: “Auch ohne Auswärtiges Amt und auch ohne Gesandtschaften und Botschaften (…) Deutschland ein Agens der Politik in der Welt. (…) Deutschland ist durch sein Dasein, seine Masse, seinen Ort und durch seine Zukunft ein außenpolitisches Agens in potentia” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 182). 92 The exception was the KPD, leaded by Max Reimann, who confronted Adenauer, in the 17th Session, saying: “Chancellor, according to your proposals, you are prepared to subordinate the interests of the German nation to those of American imperialism. Your policy is to maintain the division of Germany in the interests of American imperialism”. Own translation. See original: “Herr Bundeskanzler, Sie sind nach Ihren Vorschlägen bereit, die Interessen der deutschen Nation den Interessen des amerikanischen Imperialismus unterzuordnen. Ihre Politik ist die Aufrechterhaltung der Spaltung Deutschlands im Interesse des amerikanischen Imperialismus” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 429). 93 Own translation. See original: “weil er den Anstoß gab für die Wiederherstellung unserer deutschen Wirtschaft” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 409). 94 Own translation. See original: “Eingeordnet in die westliche Welt wollen wir sein, ein zuverlässiger Baustein einer neuen Ordung, die — so hoffen wir — derart erstarken wird, daß sie im Laufe der Zeit die russische Politik zu einer weisen Selbstbeschränkung führt” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 418).

time ever in our history and we will prove that our word about what is discussed here and said by our government will be a loud, a sure, a reliable word”.95

Accordingly, Adenauer’s international (see Chapter 5, Section 5.7.) and domestic goals were to regain the trust of Western powers, so that Germans could recover its sovereignty, as the chancellor explained, in the 18th Session of the Bundestag (24-25 November 1949),

“Finally, I believe that in everything we do, we must be clear that we are without power as a result of total collapse. It must therefore be clear that in the negotiations which we Germans have to conduct with the Allies in order to gain more and more state power, the psychological aspect plays a very important role, but that we cannot from the outset demand and expect full confidence. We cannot and must not assume that there has suddenly been a complete change of mood towards Germany among the others, but that confidence can only be regained slowly, bit by bit”.96

If Germans had to prove their reliability to Western powers, in the case of Berliners, the executive, with the support of all other parties (with the exception of the KPD), was much clearer. After the end of Stalin’s blockade of Berlin, due to the mass migration of Eastern Germans to West Germany, Adenauer guaranteed Berliners and Eastern Germans, in 11th Session of the Bundestag (30 September 1949), that

“The Federal Government is also deeply imbued with the obligation it has towards the people of Berlin. It has been quite rightly said here that we in the West must do everything we can to create jobs in Berlin. Support alone is not enough! We must ensure that unemployment in Berlin is reduced and eliminated through the supply of raw materials and orders from the West. I ask our Berlin friends to be fully convinced that the whole German Government fully recognises the importance of this issue and will do

95 Own translation. See original: “Es ist ein neuer Faktor ‘Deutschland’ in der Welt, ein Faktor, der das in sich schließt, was man vielleicht früher von uns verlangt hat. Wir sind nun eine reife Nation geworden. Ich glaube, es ist das erstemal überhaupt in unserer Geschichte, und wir werden den Beweis erbringen, daß unser Wort über das, was hier besprochen und von unserer Regierung gesagt wird, ein lauteres, ein sicheres, ein verläßliches Wort sein wird” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 422). 96 Own translation. See original: “Endlich glaube ich, daß wir uns bei allem, was wir tun, klar darüber sein müssen, daß wir infolge des totalen Zusammenbruchs ohne Macht sind. Man muß sich deswegen darüber klar sein, daß bei den Verhandlungen, die wir Deutsche mit den Alliierten zu führen haben, um fortschreitend in immer größeren Besitz der staatlichen Macht zu kommen, das psychologische Moment eine sehr große Rolle spielt, daß man aber von vornherein nicht ohne weiteres volles Ver- trauen verlangen und erwarten kann. Wir können und dürfen nicht davon ausgehen, daß nun bei den anderen plötzlich ein völliger Stimmungsumschwung gegenüber Deutschland eingetreten ist, daß vielmehr das Vertrauen nur langsam, Stück für Stück, wiedergewonnen werden kann” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 472).

all it can to help Berlin and, let me add, the whole of Eastern Germany, which we do not want to forget at this time”.97

The ‘national question’ of Berlin however, was constantly mobilized by social democrats, which, contrary to the CDU, prioritized national unification over European integration. In 1950, for instance, the SPD posed a draft for the emergency admission of Germans to the federal territory, which ended up rejected by the governing parties, because, as Ernst Kuntscher, delegate of the CDU, argued in the 27th Session of the Bundestag (18 January 1950), West Germany was “simply not in a position, economically and in terms of housing, to absorb this influx here, to accommodate these people in a humane manner”.98 Nonetheless, the CDU’s rejection did not invalidate the fact that there was still an “ethnic definition of citizenship (…) [so that expelled] Germans could be integrated as quickly as possible (…) [as well as] Germans living in the GDR” (Palmowski, 2008, p. 552). Furthermore, in 1950, attentions were focused on the General Agreement between France and the Saar region, that contradicted, according to Schumacher in the 46th Session of the Bundestag (10 March 1950), the Basic Law’s “view of a unified Germany including the Saar, including the Soviet occupation zone and including the occupied territories east of the Oder and Neisse”.99 Adenauer, too, had a similar reading, in that Session:

“The General Agreement makes the Saar entirely dependent on France in the political sphere. (...) However, we consider these four treaties to be unlawful, not only because they violate and make illusory our right to have a say in the order of Saar relations, but also because they are contrary to the provisions of international law and, in part, private law. The French Government does not have the right under international law to conclude such treaties in respect of the Saar region. (...) Well, ladies and gentlemen, what applies

97 Own translation. See original: “Die Bundesregierung ist auch tief durchdrungen von der Verpflichtung, die sie gegenüber der Berliner Bevölkerung hat. Es ist durchaus richtig hier ausgeführt worden, daß wir vom Westen her alles daransetzen müssen, um in Berlin Arbeit zu schaffen. Unterstützung allein tut es nicht! Es muß durch Lieferung von Rohmaterialien und durch Bestellungen aus, dem Westen dafür gesorgt werden, daß die Arbeitslosigkeit in Berlin zurückgeht und beseitigt wird. Ich bitte unsere Berliner Freunde, vollkommen davon überzeugt zu sein, daß die gesamte Bundesregierung die Bedeutung dieser Frage im vollsten Umfang würdigt und die ganze Kraft daransetzen wird, um Berlin und damit – lassen Sie mich das auch noch hinzufügen – dem gesamten deutschen Osten, dessen wir in dieser Stunde nicht vergessen wollen, zu helfen” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 243). 98 Own translation. See original: “Wir sind wirtschaftlich und wohnraummäßig ganz einfach nicht in der Lage, diesen Zustrom hier aufzunehmen, diese Menschen menschenwürdig unterzubringen” (Bundestag, 1950, p. 846). 99 Own translation. See original: “Die Schaffung des Bonner Grundgesetzes hat diese Auffassung von dem einheitlichen Deutschland einschließlich der Saar, einschließlich der sowjetischen Besatzungszone und einschließlich der besetzten Gebiete östlich von Oder und Neiße in nichts aufgegeben” (Bundestag, 1950, pp. 1565–1566).

to the Germans in the East must also apply in the same way to the Germans in the West”.100

Yet, Adenauer’s criticism of the General Agreement did not diminish his friendly view of France, and, in particular, of Robert Schuman, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs. In respect to the Schuman Plan, the Chancellor famously said, in the 68th Session of the Bundestag (13 June 1950),

“Ladies and gentlemen, I repeat the sentence once again. I do not declare that whoever declines the invitation declares himself in favour of the East. But, ladies and gentlemen, one thing is certain: whoever declares himself in favour of rejecting the invitation declares himself against the West”.101

The leader of the opposition, Schumacher, on the contrary, while being coherent with his statement in the previous year, was expressively against the Schuman Plan, as he affirmed in that same debate shortly after Adenauer’s declaration,

“Europe cannot be built on the basis of predominantly commercial interests. It cannot be created on the basis of predominantly national, class- or clique-based or private business interests. Europe, ladies and gentlemen, is something more than balancing steel production in favour of one side and coal production possibly in favour of the other. Europe is more important and more valuable than cheap Ruhr coke for the new French steel industry”.102

100 Own translation. See original: “Das Allgemeine Abkommen macht die Saar auf politischem Gebiet völlig abhängig von Frankreich. (...) Wir halten aber diese vier Verträge für rechtswidrig, nicht nur weil sie unser Mitspracherecht bei der Ordnung der Saarverhältnisse verletzen und illusorisch machen, sondern auch weil sie den Bestimmungen des Völkerrechts und zum Teil auch des Privatrechts widersprechen. Die französische Regierung hat völkerrechtlich nicht das Recht, derartige Verträge über das Saargebiet abzuschließen. (…) Nun, meine Damen und Herren, was für die Deutschen im Osten gilt, muß in gleicher Weise auch für die Deutschen im Westen gelten” (Bundestag, 1950, pp. 1557–1559). 101 Own translation. See original: “Meine Damen und Herren, ich wiederhole den Satz nochmals. Ich erkläre nicht. daß derjenige, der sich für die Ablehnung der Einladung ausspricht, sich damit für den Osten erklärt. Aber, meine Damen und Herren, das eine steht fest: wer sich für die Ablehnung der Einladung erklärt, der erklärt sich gegen den Westen” (Bundestag, 1950, p. 2466). 102 Own translation. See original: “Europa kann nicht auf der Grundlage vorwiegend geschäftlicher Interessen geschaffen werden. Es kann nicht geschaffen werden auf der Grundlage vorwiegend nationalgeschäftlicher, klassenmäßigbzw. cliquenmäßiggeschäftlicher oder privatgeschäftlicher Interessen. Europa, meine Damen und Herren, ist etwas mehr als der Ausgleich der Stahlproduktion zugunsten der einen und der Ausgleich der Kohleproduktion eventuell zugunsten der anderen Seite. Europa ist wichtiger und wertvoller als der billige Ruhrkoks für die neue französische Stahlindustrie” (Bundestag, 1950, p. 2475).

The contrast between social democrats and Christian democrats’ views was also reflected in the question of German rearmament, which was broadly unpopular (Winkler, 2007, p. 135), in the context of the Pleven Plan and the project of a European Defense Community (EDC) (see Chapter 5, Section 5.7.). Adenauer explained the government’s position in the 98th Session of the Bundestag (8 November 1950),

“We see the Pleven Plan as a major contribution to European integration. The integration of Europe remains one of the main objectives of German policy. We believe that the creation of a European army – with the participation of England if possible – will represent a very substantial step towards the ultimate goal of European integration. We therefore wish to cooperate in the deliberations on the Pleven Plan”.103

Europe was at the centre of the German political debate, but national developments, such as the ‘equalization of burdens’, were also a concern of the governing parties. Following the ideas of “social market economy”,104 the government expanded the co-determination model to iron, steel and coal industries. Nonetheless, on national issues, the debate was, by 1951, concentrated in the state of relations with the Eastern bloc: all parties (with the exception of the KPD) denounced the political repression in the Soviet zone. The SPD, in particular, to emphasise its detachment from the revolutionary KDP, was clinical in the criticism of the communist methods – which, in East Germany, had demanded the fusion of social democrats with the KPD. As Schumacher censured, in the 125th Session of the Bundestag (9 March 1951), in the eve of the Four Powers Conference,

“In fact, the Eastern Zone Administration is only the component of a satellite system in which there is only one will, namely the will of the central client and ruler, the Soviet

103 Own translation. See original: “Wir betrachten den Pleven-Plan als einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur Integration Europas. Die Integration Europas ist nach wie vor eines der Hauptziele der deutschen Politik. Wir sind der Auffasung, daß die Schaffung einer europäischen Armee – möglichst unter Teilnahme Englands – einen sehr wesentlichen Fortschritt auf dem Wege zur Erreichung des Endzieles: Integration Europas, bedeuten wird. Wir wollen deswegen gern bei der Beratung des Pleven-Plans mitarbeiten” (Bundestag, 1950, p. 3565). 104 According to Franz Etzel, a delegate of the CDU, in the 80th Session of the Bundestag (27 September 1949), a “social market economy” had “genuine competition on merit, with monopoly control, with planned influence on the economy and the organic means of a comprehensive economic policy, participation in profits, co-determination in the company and the participation of trade unions and associations in self- administration”. Own translation. See original: “Soziale Marktwirtschaft mit echtem Leistungswettbewerb, mit Monopolkontrolle, mit planvoller Beeinflussung der Wirtschaft und den organischen Mitteln einer umfassenden Wirtschaftspolitik, Beteiligung am Gewinn, Mitbestimmung im Betrieb und die Mitbestimmung der Gewerkschaften und Verbände in der Selbstverwaltung” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 140).

Union. (That’s right! by the SPD and on the right.) Pankow’s system is the complete clarification and complete sovietization of politics”.105

Soviet growing hostility towards Eastern Germans was not, however, a compelling reason for SPD’s change of approach in respect to German rearmament, neither for the approval of the EDC Treaty. As Erich Ollenhauer argued, in the 190th Session of the Bundestag (7 February 1952), in favor of the precedence of social services over military security:

“The first and foremost objective of rearmament of democracy is to maintain and secure peace. The question of the scale of the threat of war and the Soviet Union’s aggressive and belligerent intentions is largely a matter of speculation for us all; but the Cold War is a reality. (...) Here in Germany, in our special situation, with our extraordinary social obligations, the social security of democracy must take precedence over the military. A democracy which is determined to defend itself must take a proactive approach to infiltration and disintegration through effective and comprehensive social services”.106

On the contrary, CDU’s members, as Heinrich von Brentano, had a different view of the role military security would have for West Germany’s recovery. As he said, in the 255th Session of the Bundestag (19 March 1953), “the aim of German policy had to be to lift Germany out of its dependence and lack of freedom and to make it once again a participating and equal member of the Community of free peoples. I believe that it is a steep path that has brought us closer to this goal”.107 A goal that, he continued, countered the putative sense of the Germans’ quest of hegemony: “In a Community such as the one proposed in the draft, the individual life of the peoples and States making up the

105 Own translation. See original: “Tatsächlich ist die Ostzonenverwaltung nur der Bestandteil eines Satellitensystems, in dem es nur einen Willen gibt, nämlich den Willen des zentralen Auftraggebers und Herrschers, der Sowjetunion. (Sehr richtig! bei der SPD und rechts.) Das System von Pankow ist die völlige Entdeut schung und die völlige Sowjetisierung der Politik” (Bundestag, 1951, p. 4762). 106 Own translation. See original: “Die Aufrüstung der Demokratie hat als erstes und vornehmstes Ziel die Erhaltung und die Sicherung des Friedens. Die Frage nach der Größe der Kriegsgefahr und nach den aggressiven und kriegerischen Absichten der Sowjetunion gehört für uns alle weitgehend in das Reich der Spekulation; aber der Kalte Krieg ist eine Realität. (...) Hier in Deutschland, in unserer besonderen Situation, mit unseren außergewöhnlichen sozialen Verpflichtungen muß die soziale Sicherung der Demokratie vor der militärischen stehen. Eine zu ihrer Verteidigung entschlossene Demokratie muß der Infiltration und Zersetzung offensiv, durch wirksame und umfassende soziale Leistungen begegnen” (Bundestag, 1952, p. 8111). 107 Own translation. See original: “daß das Ziel der deutschen Politik sein mußte, Deutschland aus der Unselbständigkeit und aus der Unfreiheit herauszuheben und wieder zu einem mithandelnden und gleichberechtigten Sub- jekt in der Gemeinschaft der freien Völker zu machen. Ich meine, daß es ein steiler Weg ist, der uns diesem Ziel näher geführt hat” (Bundestag, 1953, p. 12311).

Community is guaranteed. However, the hegemony of a single State or group within the Community is excluded”.108 By the second half of 1953, resonating Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard’s economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) which promoted an unprecedent period of prosperity and modernized West Germany’s society (Winkler, 2007, p. 148), the CDU won the second federal elections.109 In his opening address, in 3rd Session of the Bundestag (20 October 1953), Adenauer evaluated the achievements of his first government:

“Voters have seen and experienced first-hand how the economic situation of most people has been steadily improving in the social market economy. The increase in German industrial production from 55.5% in the second quarter of 1948 to 156.5% in the second quarter of 1953, measured against the figures for 1936, marks a build-up which has created many new jobs and substantially improved supplies for all shifts. Since the currency reform, German foreign trade has quadrupled its turnover to a level which, after years of complete paralysis, secures our food and raw materials supplies from world markets. German exports have increased sevenfold in the same period”.110

In the same day, Adenauer left his view on the future Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) “Our agriculture, like the rest of our economy, will therefore face the fact of the common European market in measured time. By means of self-help and state aid measures, the performance of German agriculture must be developed in an appropriate transitional period to enable it to compete in the European market”.111 Also, on the Oder-Neisse: “the German people will never recognize the so-called Oder-Neisse border. (…) But let me

108 Own translation. See original: “In einer Gemeinschaft, wie sie der Entwurf vorschlägt, wird das Eigenleben der die Gemeinschaft bildenden Völker und Staaten garantiert. Die Hegemonie eines einzelnen Staates oder einer Gruppe innerhalb der Gemeinschaft ist jedoch ausgeschlossen” (Bundestag, 1953, p. 12312). 109 In the elections, following the calls for the rehabilitation of “former Nazis” from the DP and the FDP, the vote of these “Ehemalige erstwhiles” was relevant for the CDU, as for the SPD (Winkler, 2007, p. 155). 110 Own translation. See original: “Die Wähler haben gesehen und am eigenen Leibe erfahren, wie sich bei den meisten Menschen die wirtschaftliche Lage in der sozialen Marktwirtschaft ständig gebessert hat. Die Steigerung der deutschen Industrieproduktion von 55,5 % im zweiten Vierteljahr 1948 auf 156,5 % im zweiten Vierteljahr 1953, gemessen an den Zahlen von 1936, kennzeichnet einen Aufbau, der viele neue Arbeitsplätze geschaffen und die Versorgung aller Schichten wesentlich verbessert hat. Der deutsche Außenhandel hat seit der Währungsreform mit einer Vervierfachung seiner Umsätze einen Stand erreicht, der nach Jahren völliger Lähmung unsere Ernährung und Rohstoffversorgung von den Weltmärk ten sichert. Der deutsche Export konnte in der gleichen Zeit um das Siebenfache gesteigert werden” (Bundestag, 1953, p. 15). 111 Own translation. See original: “Unsere Landwirtschaft wird also genau wie unsere übrige Wirtschaft in gemessener Zeit vor der Tatsache des gemeinsamen europäischen Marktes stehen. Durch Maßnahmen der Selbsthilfe und Staatshilfe muß die Leistungsfähigkeit der deutschen Landwirtschaft in einer entsprechenden Übergangszeit so entwickelt sein, daß sie im europäischen Markt konkurrenzfähig ist” (Bundestag, 1953, p. 17).

emphasise one thing here with all due emphasis: The problems associated with the Oder- Neisse line should not be solved by force but exclusively by peaceful means”.112 In 1954, as the EDC treaty failed and as the meeting of the Big Four brought no advances to the German question, the question of German rearmament remained open (see Chapter 5, Section 5.7.). But Adenauer, in 46th Session of the Bundestag (6 October 1954), was certain of the weigh of cooperation in the policy of the federal government, and in the minds of the German people living in West Germany:

“The policy of cooperation with them was able to become a determining factor in the behaviour of the Federal Government because, after the suffering of two wars, the conviction had taken deep root in all circles and strata of the German people that only the unification of the European nations would secure for Germany and Europe a future in which a life in freedom and dignity was possible. (...) This insight is the best possession Europeans have gained from the experience of the recent past. If this insight is lost or diminishes, the dangers for Germany and for Europe of a still restless and uncertain world will grow. The European idea has deeply and happily influenced our national lives. The Germans have rejected reactionary nationalism”.113

After the revision of the Treaty of Germany, implied in the admission to NATO, in 1955, West Germans had full sovereignty (Winkler, 2007, p. 152) (e.g. reestablishment of the diplomatic relations with the USSR), albeit the agreement reserved some exceptions that mostly referred to German reunification, the question of Berlin, and the right of the Allies to enter the German territory in the case of an emergency (see Chapter 5, Section 5.7.). By 1956, succeeding the negotiations and reconciliation between Germans and French on the Saar question, the latter was prepared to rejoin West Germany. Von Brentano, who

112 Own translation. See original: “wird das deutsche Volk die sogenannte Oder-Neiße-Grenze niemals anerkennen. (…) Lassen Sie mich aber eines hier mit allem Nachdruck betonen: Die mit der Oder-Neiße- Linie zusammenhängenden Probleme sollen nicht mit Gewalt, sondern ausschließlich auf friedlichem Wege gelöst werden” (Bundestag, 1953, p. 20). 113 Own translation. See original: “Die Politik der Zusammenarbeit mit ihnen konnte deshalb zu einem bestimmenden Faktor für das Verhalten der Bundesregierung werden, weil in allen Kreisen und Schichten des deutschen Volkes nach den Leiden zweier Kriege die Überzeugung tief Wurzel geschlagen hatte, daß nur die Einigung der europäischen Nationen Deutschland und Europa eine Zukunft sichern würde, in der ein Leben in Freiheit und Würde möglich ist. (...) Diese Einsicht ist der beste Besitz, den die Europäer aus den Erfahrungen der jüngsten Vergangenheit gewonnen haben. Wenn diese Einsicht verlorengeht oder abnimmt, wachsen die Gefahren, die eine noch immer unruhige und unsichere Welt für Deutschland und für Europa in sich birgt. Der europäische Gedanke hat unser nationales Leben tiefgehend und in der glücklichsten Weise beeinflußt. Die Deutschen haben dem reaktionären Nationalismus abgesagt” (Bundestag, 1954, p. 2233).

was in charge of West Germany’s foreign policy, expressed his contentment, in 1957, during the 188th Session of the Bundestag (31 January 1957), for the new national context:

“The Saarland can be convinced that the Federal Government is aware, also in the context of foreign policy, of the special obligations it has assumed with the return of this part of Germany to the Federal Republic. (...) And the French people and their government, who have jointly brought about this decision of world history in a spirit of true friendship and understanding cooperation with us, may rest assured that the Federal Republic will do everything in its power to deepen the close and friendly relations between the German and French peoples, to contribute to close political cooperation and to develop cultural, economic and human relations between these two peoples”.114

In 1957, too, West German political leaders celebrated the Treaty of Rome (see Chapter 5, Section 5.7.), with the support of all political parties (with the exception of the KPD), which saw its importance for the ‘national question’. As Walter Hallstein concluded, in the 200th Session of the Bundestag (21 March 1957), days before the signing of the treaty:

“The recent reaffirmations by the French, Italian and Belgian Ministers of Foreign Affairs on the need for German reunification and on the compatibility of reunification with Community law and order give us every confidence that we will continue to have reliable allies in our partners. I would like to emphasize this point, because we all know that without the support of our Western allies we will not be able to achieve our fundamental objective, the reunification of Germany”.115

114 Own translation. See original: “Das Saarland darf überzeugt sein, daß sich die Bundesregierung auch im Rahmen der Außenpolitik der besonderen Verpflichtungen bewußt ist, die sie mit der Rückkehr dieses Teils Deutschlands in die Bundesrepublik übernommen. (...) Und das französische Volk und seine Regierung, die diese welthistorische Entscheidung im Geiste wahrer Freundschaft und verständnisvoller Zusammenarbeit mit uns gemeinsam herbeigeführt haben, dürfen gewiß sein, daß die Bundesrepublik alles tun wird, was in ihrer Macht steht, um die engen, freundschaftlichen Beziehungen zwischen dem deutschen und dem französischen Volke zu vertiefen, zu einer engen politischen Zusammenarbeit beizutragen und die kulturellen, wirtschaftlichen und menschlichen Beziehungen zwischen diesen beiden Völkern auszubauen” (Bundestag, 1957, p. 10640). 115 Own translation. See original: “die in jüngster Zeit abgegebenen mehrfachen Bekräftigungen des französischen, des italienischen und des belgischen Außenministers über die Notwendigkeit der deutschen Wiedervereinigung und über die Vereinbarkeit der Wiedervereinigung mit der Ordnung der Gemeinschaft berechtigen uns zu dem vollen Vertrauen, daß wir in unseren Partnern wie bisher verläßliche Bundesgenossen haben werden. Mir liegt daran, dies auch hier besonders zu unter- streichen; denn wir wissen alle, daß wir ohne die Unterstützung unserer westlichen Bundesgenossen unser fundamentales Anliegen, die Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands, nicht verwirklichen können” (Bundestag, 1957, p. 11332).

Chapter 5: German International Status-Seeking Practices

German nationalism had, since the consolidation of a symbolic category of the ‘German nation’, an external dimension, which emerged parallelly to the events of the international context. An external dimension that functioned as a map that expressed the ‘German way’ to play the game of international politics (e.g. war), and placed ‘Germany’ in the world.

5.1. The Origins of the External Dimension and the Deutscher Bund The representation of Germany in the world, although a ‘nation-state’ did not exist, was already discussed before Prussia’s declaration of war to Napoleonic France (see Chapter 4, Section 4.1.). Fichte, for instance, in his The Basic Features of the Present Age (1804), develop the argument that Germany would become “the fatherland of the truly educated Christian European”, acknowledged as Europe’s cultural leader (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 365; Kedourie, 1993, p. 47). Similarly, Adam Müller, a student at Göttingen and a romantic in Berlin, stated that a “great confederation of European nations (…) [would] wear German colors; for everything great, thorough and lasting in all European institutions [would be] German” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 366). Yet, in the early nineteenth century, it was uncertain which German ‘great power’, Prussia or Austria, could be the leader of a ‘German nation- state’ after the Empire’s ending. For Prussians, as Baron Heinrich Karl Stein,116 Prussia’s leading minister from 1807 to 1808, a ‘German nation-state’ was not meant to be a sole task, but a joint order with Austria and the princes, some of were allied with France. Prussia’s defeat against France, however, resounded in the part that Prussia could take in the German national unification: after the Treaty of Tilsit (1807), in which Prussia lost lands west of the Elbe and those saved in Polish partitions, academics and students endorsed national resistance, that came to be used during the recruitment of the Volunteer Corps for the Battle of the Nations (Smith, 2008, p. 175; cf. Breuilly, 1998, p. 99). It was in modernizing Prussia – a recognised European ‘great power’ since Frederik the Great’s militaristic reforms –, where universal conscription was being reintroduced and a modern reform of education was taking place – that had been made a concern since 1789 (Kohn,

116 Stein, a Prussian reformer, though influenced by Fichte’s lectures, with a background as imperial knight, was very much attached to Prussian patriotism, rather than German nationalism (Breuilly, 1998, p. 98). In fact, Prussian patriotism was often stronger than German nationalism (Smith, 2020, p. 243), but, after 1813, Prussia reversed its strategy against Napoleon, betting on a nationalist approach that exploited the effects of the Prussian press, by financing it as an extension of the intellectuals’ (especially from Berlin) influence.

1944, p. 26) –, led by the neohumanist University of Berlin (1810), that the promise of a grand national levée en masse, a ‘German cause’ against Napoleonic France emerged. Nationalists, as Fichte for instance in 1813, were convinced of Friedrich Wilhelm III’s role as ‘Imposer of Germanness’ (Zwingherr zur Deutschheit) and of a Prussian-led ‘German nation-state’, heir of the Holly Roman Empire and which excluded Austria,

“[Prussia] is an authentic German state; as emperor [Friedrich Wilhelm III] has absolutely no interest in subjugating or being unjust – provided that in a future peace it gains back the provinces belonging to it and bound to it by Protestantism. The spirit of Prussia’s history compels it to stride forward along its path to the Reich. Only thus may it continue to exist; otherwise it will crumble” (Fichte, 1845-1846 [1813], p. 554, 565 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 54).

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, educated in the Universities of Halle and Göttingen, declared that “Germany need[ed] a war of her own (…) a war against Frankdom to unfold herself in the fullness of her nationhood” (Snyder, 1952, p. 28 cited in Greenfeld, 1992, p. 370). Jahn, active among student fraternities and a rival of democracy after the excesses of the French Revolution, agreed with Fichte: Prussia was to lead a ‘German nation-state’, since only “in and through Prussia, the timely rejuvenation of the venerable old German Reich” was likely and, if based on liberal constitutionalism, with an “elected (…) representatives selected from all of society”, it would “develop immense powers, powers it ha[d] never yet used, (…) [but that would make her the] founder of perpetual peace in Europe” (Jahn, 1884-1887 [1810], 146 ff., p. 159-163, 203 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 56 emphasis in original). Ernst Moritz Arndt, too, sharing an anti-French feeling and inciting Prussia’s militarism, stated that “only the bloody hatred of the French c[ould] unify German power, restore German glory” (Arndt, 1912 [1813], p. 169 cited in Winkler, 2006, pp. 58–59). However, in 1814, the Congress Vienna, after the Napoleonic Wars, envisioned a conservative frame for Germany. The German Confederation (Deutscher Bund), a “union of sovereign nations with a single common institution”, with a Federal Diet (Bundestag), located at Frankfurt am Main, was the solution found to preserve the history of a ‘balance of power’ among the European ‘great powers’. In it there were representants of “the forty- one German states (…) that had survived the Napoleonic era or were resurrected after 1815”, along with three non-German kings. As a conservative framework, it ensured an

equivalent ‘international status’ to Prussia and Austrian Empire,117 which formed the axis of the Confederation and guaranteed to Germans ‘international recognition’. In effect, the Confederation proved to be a great power, conservative project (cf. Breuilly, 1998, p. 99), regulated by a Federal Act which left the draft of each estate’s constitution captive to each ruler’s wishes, thus, delaying constitutional rights (Winkler, 2006, p. 65).

5.2. Neutrality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and Unification Though in the German Confederation, Prussia and Austria were seen as equal partners in a German unification process, German nationalists, nonetheless, expected Prussia to, at a certain point in the century, lead the unification of the German states; even if that meant excluding Austria from the equation – something which came to be decided mid-century. Prussian leaders had been suffering from the hostility coming from the East, from Tsarist Russia, acutely after the Punctuation of Olmütz (1850), which ordered Prussia to reduce its army to peacetime levels. Prussian leaders, thus, chose neutrality, as their main approach to international politics. From the Crimean War (1853-1856) (Baumgart, 2001; Small, 2018), in which Prussian watched the fall of the Holy Alliance in the East and the rise of a continental power in the West, that is, France; to the Italian War of Independence (1859), that dictated the end of the first apparatus to “govern the world” (Mazower, 2013), and to the Treaty of Villafranca (1859), Prussia stayed ‘outside’ of the European conflicts and indirectly broke her relations and ties with falling Austria (Winkler, 2006, p. 122) Prussia’s neutrality in the Italian War of Independence reverberated Bismarck’s realpolitik, that rowed against not only Little Germany liberals’ intention to assist Austria “in return for the latter’s recognition of Prussia’s political and military leadership in non- Austrian Germany”, but also Greater Germany liberals, democrats and socialists (such as Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels), and conservatives that unconditionally supported Austria in order to eradicate Bonapartist France (Winkler, 2006, pp. 132–133). Yet, albeit neutral to international events, Prussia, under the supervision of Bismarck and Prince Wilhelm, increased its military personnel, since conscription time was extended for three years (see Chapter 4, Section 4.2.). And following his realpolitik postulates, Bismarck reinforced Prussia’s economy in relation to liberalizing Austria, establishing a Prussian-French Free

117 Prussia and Metternichian Austria, whose lands exceeded those of the German Confederation, were members “with the parts of their territory that had formerly belonged to the Reich”, enjoying distinct privileges (e.g. a larger military) that attested their ‘international status’ (Winkler, 2006, pp. 64–65).

Trade Agreement, in 1862, withdrawing from the Zollverein, in 1863, and, productively, creating an alternative customs treaty, in 1864 (Winkler, 2006, pp. 144–145). In 1866, when Prussia and the Austrian Empire clashed to determine which one of them would lead the German unification, the positions of both in Europe, made highly unlikely an intervention of either France or Russia in the German conflict, that was seen by some as a civil war, rather than a conflict between two distinct powers. As Austria lost the battles, Bismarck, himself, conducted the peace dialogues with Napoleon III, who, at the request of Austria, offered to mediate the conflict. In order to achieve peace, Bismarck was crystal clear in his terms: Habsburg territories, such as Hanover, would join Prussia, the German Confederation would come to an end, because Austria could not compete any longer with the Prussian military and economic energies, and a new non-Austrian German structure, the Northern German Confederation, which would be tied to southern German states, economically and militarily, would be provisioned (Winkler, 2006, pp. 158–159).

5.3. Germany’s Colonial Expansion After the unification led by Prussian leaders, whose international practices (e.g. war) had gathered the recognition from the German and European states, Germany was a ‘great power’, which had to continue to play the social game of international politics, if it wished to keep its international status, its distinction; so, it had to follow the practices of its peers. After the Franco-Prussian War, which finished the process started in the Austrian- Prussian War, and its proclamation in Versailles, the German Empire was, fundamentally, a Machstaat, a ‘power state’ capable of defending itself from external intimidations. But Bismarck, in agreement with the tradition of Prussian militarism, continued to strengthen the German military power. In the Reichstag, for instance, Bismarck directed a change in the way the military budget of the German Empire was approved by the parliament: from the annual Äternat to the Septennat, i.e. the adoption of a military budget for seven years, to consolidate Germany vis a vis the other European powers (Winkler, 2006, p. 214). The premise of colonial expansion started to be mobilised in political rhetoric (see Chapter 4, Section 4.3.). Although Bismarck had not been a full supporter of the German colonial expansion, colonial territories were necessary for the long-term competition with Great Britain, which continued to be the strongest naval and colonial power in the end of the nineteenth century. As Friedrich List, the “apostle of German economic nationalism”, contended, regarding Britain’s challenge to a German leadership in the world economy,

“English national economy has for its object to manufacture for the whole world, to monopolize all manufacturing power, to keep the world (...) in a state of infancy and vassalage by political management as well as by the superiority of her capital, her skill, and her navy” (quoted in Snyder, 1978, p. 87 cited in Greenfeld, 1992, p. 377).

By 1883, Germany had begun her overseas expansion, proclaiming protectorates in New Guinea, Southwest Africa, Togo and in the Cameroons (Smith, 1974, p. 652). In 1885, as it became known to German political leaders that British and French authorities were dividing West Africa, Bismarck, influenced by the mounting interest on a colonial agenda by German businesses and industrialists, convened the major European powers to Berlin. At the Berlin Conference (1884-1885), Bismarck and the leaders of the European colonial powers shared, or rather partitioned, the African continent and internationally recognised, among themselves, the ‘Scramble for Africa’ and its ‘moral legitimacy’. With it, Germans “acquired [the] fourth largest colonial empire at the time” (Conrad, 2013, p. 544). For Bismarck, who “not for as moment did (…) seriously consider giving up these new additions to the Reich” (Strandmann, 2011, p. 199), the colonial program connected with the development of the German navy, which was to “be strong enough to achieve a decisive victory in an all-out battle of annihilation in the North Sea” (Berghahn, 2017, p. 153). In 1887, when the Septennat had to be renewed, Bismarck assured that Germany’s military power would increase, due to the German-Russian Reassurance Treaty of 1887, which ensured Russian and German neutralities, if one was attacked by an unprovoked Austro-Hungarian Empire or France, respectively.118 Germany was to remain at the centre of every major power’s calculations, “a total political situation in which all powers except France need [Germany], and are restrained as much as possible by their relationships with each other from entering into coalitions against [Germany]” (Winkler, 2006, p. 230).

5.4. Weltpolitik, the Blank Cheque and the First World War For Germany to remain at the centre of the international political context – and if colonies did not recognise the required and projected distinction from the other European powers –, German leaders had to continue to push military reforms, that not only modernized the army, but also developed a German navy, with the clear intention of confronting Britain.

118 It is worth noting the German-Russian Reassurance Treaty of 1887 not only came with end of the Three Emperors’ Alliance (Dreikaiservertrag) of 1881, because of the conflict between Bulgaria and Servia that turned Austria and Russia contra each other, but was also signed in opposition to the Mediterranean Entente, celebrated between Great Britain, Italy, Austro-Hungary and Spain, that aimed at preserving the status quo in the Mediterranean, and that, besides its signatories, only Germany had knowledge of.

An industrialized power, Germany competed militarily with Britain, but required was a naval fleet. With “a fleet against Britain”, Rear Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz awaited, Germany would stabilize its Weltpolitik (global policy) and guarantee internal order, due to the economic and demographic advantages retrieved from it (Winkler, 2006, p. 245). As Wilhelm II, who was at the centre of the German foreign policy making, declared,

“As my grandfather did for the Army, so I will, for my Navy, carry on (…) the work of reorganization so that it may also stand on equal footing with my armed forces on land and so that through it the German Empire may also be in a position abroad to attain that place which it has not yet reached” (quoted in Williamson and Van Wyk, 2003, p. 77).

In the secular transition however, Germany was isolated: as Wilhelm II decided to impose its will over Tangier following the signing of the Franco-British entente cordiale, in 1904, and the British-Russian Treaty, in 1907, Germans felt encircled (Winkler, 2006, p. 268). By 1908, German-British mutual limitation of naval expenditures was useless, as German unwillingness to cease the building of its navy was seen, in Britain, as a threat to the status quo (Mombauer, 2002, p. 6).119 The ‘European system’ that had accommodated a German unification, in 1871, was in great distress, by 1914. On the one hand, after the Second Morocco Crisis over Agadir, albeit asserting their “right of intervention and consultation in world politics” (Hewitson, 2000, p. 594), Germans aimed at the radical revision of the status quo. On the other, the consecutive crisis in the Balkans following the Ottoman fall, the Bosnian Annexation Crisis (1909) and the Second Balkan War, in 1913, added to the rising tensions and arms race in the region (Stevenson, 1996). Because Servia doubled its territory and influenced the Serbian minorities in Austria-Hungary, the growing threat of the Dual Monarchy’s collapse reinforced the hostility in the Balkans and made the murder of the Austrian heritor, an event the Central Powers could not, however, ignore (Snyder, 1991; cf. Clark, 2012, pp. 416–417). Thus, Germany imparted a blank cheque to Vienna, as the Austrian ambassador to Berlin, Count Szögyény, reported in a confidential telegram, in 1914, to the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Berchtold:

“The Kaiser authorised me to inform our Gracious Majesty that we might in this case, as in all others, rely upon Germany’s full support. (...) He did not doubt in the least that Herr von Bethmann Hollweg (…) would agree with him. (…) If we had really recognised

119 As Sir Eyre Crowe acknowledged, in 1907, “Germany had won her place as one of the leading, if not, in fact, the foremost Power on the European Continent” (Geiss, 1967, p. 29 cited in Renshon, 2017, p. 196).

the necessity of warlike action against Serbia, he (Kaiser Wilhelm) would regret if we did not make use of the present moment, which is all in our favour” (Geiss, 1967, p. 77 cited in Mombauer, 2002, p. 14). 120

The First World War dragged all the European powers against each other, and Germany, in relation to others, as France, seemed to be winning the war by evading a direct invasion on German territory, which, since the beginning of the century, had been enlarged by the “straight annexation of large swaths of territory [in the East] (…) made economically and political dependent on the Kaiserreich”. Moreover, donating to that ‘illusion of victory’, the German military defeated Bolshevik Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in 1918, which granted more territories for German annexation in the East, that came to be under the command of General Erich Ludendorff (Berghahn, 2017, p. 153; Winkler, 2006, p. 322). Even after the USA decided to join the war, the German military was sustaining the war effort, but yet yielded outside the German soil, wherein a ‘revolution’ was occurring.

5.5. Revision of Versailles and Admission to the League of Nations After the First World War, the German military was dismantled in the expectation that its militaristic and hegemonic drives would cease, as democratisation proceeded. However, as the ‘German nation’ did not stop to exist in relation to other nations, international status concerns and status-seeking practices continued to be a vital element for German leaders. In the end of 1918, Germany was a defeated state. As General Groener concluded about the German surrender, in May 1919: “We have unconsciously aimed at world domination (…) before we had secured our continental position” (quoted in Fischer, 1969, p. 1 cited in Berghahn, 2017, p. 154). Germans were obliged to abdicate its productive industrial regions, the Saarland and the Rhineland remained under the administration of the League of Nations. Conscription was abolished, their army and navy substantively reduced, and their air force eliminated. All colonies, as with some parts of the Reich, were granted the right to self-determination. And, more importantly, whilst heavily sanctioned, Germany was forced to pay an astronomic amount of war reparations to all the Allies, in particular to France, as the “war guilt article” stated (see Chapter 4, Section 4.5.).

120 Norbert Elias (1996, p. 143), in his work, makes an interesting point which could be read as an expression of the ‘formality of war’, as a practice that is part of the “code of honour” of European ruling classes: “As in the case of duelling, noblemen and gentlemen who encountered each other as opponents in the case of war might do their utmost to defeat and even to kill the men on the other side; but even the use of physical force, even violence and killing, were, within limits, subject to a code of honour and valour which military officers on both sides shared with each other”. The blank cheque was an expression of such ‘formality’.

As the end of reparations was Germany’s postwar goal, the Wirth executive chose a ‘policy of fulfilment’ (Erfüllungspolitik), in which Germany would accept the demands imposed on herself to demonstrate the preposterous value of reparations (Winkler, 2006, p. 374-375). Later, in 1922, in Genoa Conference, planned to decide the value of German reparations, Germany exploited her understanding with Russia, too, an isolated and pariah figure, culminating in the celebration of the Treaty of Rapallo (1922), in which the two, besides deepening military secret arrangements against Poland,121 “renounced all mutual claims to compensation for wartime damages, restored full diplomatic relations with each other, and committed themselves to a most-favoured nation clause” (Winkler, 2006, pp. 378–379). In effect, at Genoa, Germany profitably lowered the reparations, albeit at the price of growing French hostility – and of increasing Bavarian resentment that ardently refused any consent to the reparations. Others, however, did not desist from rejecting any dialogue within the framework of the League of Nations or with Entente powers, which in the Treaty of St. Germain (1919) with Austria, had forbade the political union between Germany and Austria, that is, the Anschluss, on the basis of international law. The Dawes Plan (1924), which came when French occupation of the Ruhr was too much a burden – a cost to add to the war debts contracted to the Americans –, and when France was getting internationally isolated, concluded that the value of reparations was unbearable for the German economy, advising creditors to draft a new payments scheme which would not imperil the reichmark’s stability (Winkler, 2006, p. 402). In 1925, the Locarno Accords reintegrated Germany in the international European scene: the accords, which tended in favor of Germany, established that the western borders were considered inviolable, as the French illusory security demanded, but German eastern borders, namely with Poland, were left undefined. Stresemann, a nationalist revisionist, who did his best to destroy the Treaty of Versailles (Marks, 2003, p. 72), traded the Rhine for the Vistula and held eye on the East. As the Polish border question was not answered, he wrote:

“without the precarious economic and financial situation in Poland having reached the most extreme point, placing the whole Polish state in a condition of powerlessness (…) Thus, overall, it will have to be our goal to delay Poland’s final and permanent rehabilitation until such time as the country is ready for a border agreement corresponding to our wishes and until our own position of power is strong enough (…)

121 Such military arrangements involved the construction “on the Russian plains, far from the prying eyes of military control commissioners, (…) [of] factories to produce prototypes of airplanes, poison gases and tanks forbidden by the Versailles Treaty” (Marks, 2003, p. 51).

Only the unrestricted return of sovereignty over the territories in question can satisfy us” (quoted in Winkler, 2006, p. 418).

In 1926, Germany became a member of the League of Nations, and a permanent member of the League’s Council. In addition, Germany deepened her relation with the USSR, that remained outside the League’s framework, by signing of the Treaty of Berlin (1926), that was an extension of Rapallo intended to exert pressure on Poland (Winkler, 2006, p. 419). Later, in 1929, the Young Plan approved a new reparations scheme and Germany restored its economic sovereignty (Winkler, 2006, p. 436). Yet, though economically empowered, in the end of the 20’s, as the Great Depression’s effects resonated in the European shores (e.g. the adjustment of the reparations scheme of 1929), Germany was swallowed in both national (see Chapter 4, Section 4.6.) and international crises: the chance of a German- Austrian Customs Union, to prepare a political union that contradicted St. Germain, met the French negative reaction to such continental scheme (Winkler, 2006, p. 446).

5.6. Destruction of Versailles, Reversion of Munich, Territorial Conquest The revisionism, which had started right after the end of the First World War and which had marked every German in the interwar period, mutated, in 1933, to a radicalized form. In a certain sense, what had been done gradually until the 20’s, was accelerated by Hitler, who wasted no time in the preparation for war, the ‘German international practice’. In 1933, Germany withdraw from the League of Nations, when few powers were reluctant to leave the international body (e.g. Italy), and others endeavored to join in (e.g. USSR). In Hitler’s view, multilateral commitments were too politically binding, an obstacle to his spontaneous international practices, substantiated in the belief that bilateral agreements were more easily ruined when these stopped being useful for German interests (e.g. non-aggression pact with Poland, in 1934). Commitments, as those imposed by the Versailles Treaty or the Disarmament Conference of Geneva (1933) limited Germany’s rearmament for the short period of time and the acquisition of Lebensraum (vital space) in the East, where Poland rested with an army with twice the size of Germany’s (Weinberg, 2009, p. 36). Yet, Hitler continued to partake in multilateral meetings, though Germany would be “talking and stalling while arming” (Weinberg, 2009, p. 157). Moreover, Germany’s relations with other European Central and Eastern powers were fading: Soviet-German relations reached a low after French-Soviet rapprochement, Austria was pressured for the realization of the Anschluss, as did Czechoslovakia, wherein

Sudeten Germans were dissatisfied in their new state (Weinberg, 2009, pp. 80, 86, 143). As Hitler explained to Alfred Frauenfeld, in 1935, when speaking of the Anschluss, “the Austrian question could be solved only by means of foreign policy [i.e. war]. This would take a period of three to five years until Germany had rearmed to a point where no one could interfere with it” (quoted in Weinberg, 2009, p. 182). Yet, in 1935, Germany had established the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, which, though contributing to France’s European isolation, seemed to protect British naval preeminence from a German military fleet and from an already anticipated Anglo-German war (Weinberg, 2009, pp. 166, 169). Nonetheless, Hitler’s attentions were on German territorial growth. In 1936, Hitler ordered the occupation of the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, in the context of the Anglo-French impasse, after the ratification of the Soviet-French Pact (1935) (Weinberg, 2009, pp. 188, 192, 197). It was concluded without an effective response from Western powers (Winkler, 2007, p. 49) whose decision was a ‘policy of appeasement’ towards the Führer. The occupation increased German industrial production, making her a preeminent power in the European continent (Weinberg, 2009, p. XXI, 198, 203), which resonated in Hitler and Göring’s Four Year Plan (1936), the scheme to reconstruct the army and the economy so as to wage war in the periphery of the Third Reich in four years (Winkler, 2007, p. 50). In the Plan, the idea of Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’) was refined: it did not presume total mobilization of German home forces, but, instead, a sufficient and strategic amount, aided by the superiority of the Luftwaffe, that enabled a quick military conquest and, afterwards, the complete use of raw materials and human personnel of the occupied lands in following wars. These territories’ economies would be subordinated to the war effort, crafting an overwhelming force, yet with little reserves, that would prevent a lengthy war of attrition and secure rapid expansion (Weinberg, 2009, pp. 272–273, 275). Following the Plan, Hitler made agreements with Austria, in which he recognised Austria’s sovereignty, in return for compliance to his economic and diplomatic maxims (Winkler, 2007, p. 52; Weinberg, 2009, p. 210). In addition, Germany would capitalize on Polish ‘balancing’ practices and plan the invasion of Danzig, preserve Soviet-German trade for raw materials, establish a (temporary) non-aggression pact with Czechoslovakia to sponsor Sudeten Germans, exploit Hungarian revisionist ambitions on Austria and Czechoslovakia, reapproach Romania and strengthen Yugoslavian, Bulgarian and Greek military and economic dependency towards the Third Reich (Weinberg, 2009, pp. 236, 240, 242, 249, 250, 253, 254). But the most relevant quality of the German program, in respect of diplomatic relations, was the basis of what would become, in 1940, the Axis

Treaty: the celebration of the German-Italian protocol and, later, the Anti-Comintern Pact (1936) with Japan, joined by Fascist Italy, in 1937 (Weinberg, 2009, p. 262). Albeit continuing the ‘policy of appeasement’, British leaders queried the changes fostered by the Germans. As Chamberlain wrote in 1937, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, to Lord Lothian, who was in favor of the British acquiescence to a German annexation of German-speaking regions according to the principle of self-determination,

“I am afraid I have a lurking suspicion that there is no real bona fides in Germany, and that she is merely playing for time until she finds herself strong enough to make her next spring. At the same time, one must not let any opportunity slip by, and I am prepared to deal with her on the basis that she means what she says; and, if I could see a prospect of a real settlement, I would be prepared to go a long way to get it” (quoted in Weinberg, 2009, pp. 335–336).

Hitler and Göring’s annexation scheme, either through direct pressure upon the Austrian leaders, or indirectly through Mussolini, an admirer of German military superiority who urged Austria to cooperate, was successful (Weinberg, 2009, pp. 490–491). Preparations for the invasion of Czechoslovakia endured, but Hitler faced a new setting stemming from the other European powers, since France and Great Britain had, too, began to coordinate efforts to deter Germany (Weinberg, 2009, p. 609). Yet, it did not mean further warnings to Germans, as some feared that rhetoric attacks could, instead, precipitate the course of war. Moreover, Western powers did not find any support in Germany’s Eastern border, in Poland, which, expecting to expand its lands to the Czech territory, as it did in Austria, had further aligned itself with German designs (Weinberg, 2009, p. 616). The invasion of Czechoslovakia was, for a time, postponed. Not only the Anglo- French military coordination, but also Mussolini’s reluctance to join Hitler in an eventual war, in a time when Italy’s military effort was dispersed, led the Führer to the negotiation table (Weinberg, 2009, p. 631). The Munich Conference, in 1938, that reunited European powers – yet, without the USSR or any Czech delegation –, was the agreement in those suspicious circumstances. For Hitler, it had been a “flawed triumph” and the reversion of Munich, began shortly after, because, as Hitler explained:

“When the collapse came in 1918, the numerically strongest people in Europe lost its political position and, with it, all possibility of asserting its most important and most natural life-interests with all means and under all circumstances. Really, we are talking

about the strongest people not only in Europe, but (…) practically in the world. (…) We must make up for the neglect of three centuries (…) Ever since the Peace of Westphalia, our people has been traveling a path that led us away from the world power and increasingly into immiseration and political impotence” (Thies, 1976, p. 112-116 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 61).

In the late 30’s, the USSR approached Germany for the reestablishment of diplomatic and economic relations as well as for Poland’s partition between the two. Therefore, in 1939, the powers agreed to the Pact Molotov-Ribbentrop, including a secret addendum which added Baltic states’ partition to Poland’s (Winkler, 2007, p. 65). For Hitler, what applied to the state of affairs in 1931 was still practical eight years later: “if it should be necessary, there will be peace for a while even with Stalin” (Calic, 1968, p. 80 cited in Weinberg, 2009, p. 718), especially if that meant drafting a pact to accommodate a plan that would be realized in the future – and the Second World War broke out (Weinberg, 2009, p. 750).

5.7. The Post-War Framework and the European Integration The Second World War transformed the international context wherein Germans were one of its strongest players. In the new configuration, Germans had to replace, reimagine their destroyed and divided ‘nation’ in a world which continued to be a world of ‘nation-states’ and of international status; and the Europe integration project was their chosen ally. The post-war order was decided in the final years of the Second World War. In the Atlantic Charter (1941), which came to function as the Allies’ war statute, interpreted the destruction of Nazi Germany as the solution for peace. In 1943, in the Conference of Tehran, the British, the French and the Soviets discussed the unconditional surrender of Germans, that could not be a voluntary peace. In the Conference of Yalta in 1945, the Allies began the debate about the partition of Germany and Berlin between themselves, which was resumed in the Conference of Potsdam, in which the Eastern borders of Europe were redefined (e.g. German line to the East was the Oder-Neisse Line), and the Allied powers clarified their objectives for the partition of Germany (e.g. the transfer of Germans from Poland, chiefly Oriental Prussia, to create homogenous states). In 1947, the Marshall Plan led the European economic reconstruction, increasing the European productivity and tackling social inequalities in the European capitals (see fn. 76, p. 69). Germany received the Plan, that was not exclusive to Western Europe, and endorsed the USA’s presence in Europe – what few called an ‘empire by invitation’, due to the US long-term commitment towards Europe. In addition, the Plan projected the end of the tripartite regime in West

Germany, which was to be reindustrialized and realigned with the momentum towards European integration, which consubstantiated the French Monnet Plan (1946-1950) and the Schumann Plan (1950). In 1947, the ‘bizone’ (the joining of the American and British sectors) was edified, and, in 1948, evolved to the ‘trizone’ (adding the French zone), while the deutschmark was restored; all was intertwined with the Treaty of Brussels (1948). After the creation of West Germany, in 1949, and the election of Adenauer (see Chapter 4, Section h.), West Germans’ ‘semi-sovereign’ foreign policy was characterised by being a ‘fulfilment policy’ (Erfüllungspolitik), in order to build its confidence in the West and associate West Germany to the Western bloc. That implied, for instance, in the Petersburg Agreement (1949), to concede to the dismantle of West Germany’s industrial infrastructures, which had been turned into military facilities, during the war (Winkler, 2007, p. 132). In the end of 1949, Kurt Kiesinger, of the CDU, resumed West Germany’s viewpoint, in the 18th Session of the Bundestag, by saying to Germans

“We must have the courage to believe that the era of anarchic nation-state ownership is really over. Anyone who still clings to us or to others of that time and that conception would indeed belong to a fossilized age. (...) We Germans want to make politics once again (...) in the course of time: because politics is always successful when it truly lives and acts in the spirit of the times and not against time, as we have so often done. (...) This spirit of the times is well understood by all those who are not caught up in a one- sided, dogmatic political conception. It is the spirit of unity, it is the spirit of freedom, and it is the spirit of peace, the spirit that is not, as we are led to believe, used as a propaganda pretext by a few malicious capitalists, but the spirit that inspires hundreds of millions of people in this world”.122

In 1951, Adenauer inclined West Germans to the European Coal and Steal Community (ECSC), established in the Treaty of Paris, an international ‘authority’ that would manage the core European coal and steel industries. In the 161st Session of the Bundestag (12 July

122 Own translation. See original: “Wir dürfen den Mut haben, daß die Zeit des anarchischen Nationalstaatentums wirklich vorbei ist. Wer bei uns oder bei den anderen jener Zeit und jener Konzeption noch anhangen sollte, der würde in der Tat einer versteinten Zeit angehören. (…) Wir Deutsche wollen doch wieder einmal (…) im Zuge der Zeit Politik machen: denn immer dann ist Politik erfolgreich, wenn sie wirklich im Geiste der Zeit lebt und handelt und nicht entgegen der Zeit, wie wir es so oft getan haben. (…) Dieser Geist der Zeit wird von allen, die nicht in einer einseitigen, dogmatischen politischen Konzeption befangen sind, durchaus begriffen. Es ist der Geist der Einheit, es ist der Geist der Freiheit und es ist der Geist des Friedens, der Geist, de nicht, wie man uns glauben machen will, ein paar bösartige Kapitalisten als Propagandavorwand gebrauchen, sondern der Geist, der Hunderte von Millionen Menschen auf dieser Welt beseelt” (Bundestag, 1949, p. 493).

1951), Adenauer stated his view on the issue: “This treaty requires the European countries that are members of it to act together. Something else emerged in the course of the negotiations. I believe that for the first time in history, certainly in the history of the last few centuries, countries are willing to give up part of their sovereignty voluntarily and without coercion”.123 By 1952, the CDU continued to back Adenauer’s view, for, as Etzel contended, in the 182nd Session of the Bundestag (9 January 1952),

“States want to give up sovereign rights, albeit only in a limited area, that they want to transfer these sovereign rights to a supranational authority, and that for the first time in Europe we will have a supranational political authority on a voluntary basis. This is where national antagonism is eliminated through solidarity in action. In order to create a European federation, a new condition for maintaining peace will be created. Solidarity of production in coal and iron will make war impossible”.124

Later that year, the Germany Treaty gave West Germany near full sovereignty in domestic and foreign affairs, in the exception of reunification and Berlin, which had to be mediated by the Allied powers. Article 7th, paragraph 3rd declared a reunited Germany bound to the dispositions of the treaty and the treaties establishing the European Community: “the new rights and privileges of the FRG would also be granted to a reunified Germany, provided the latter adopted the obligations of the May 1952 treaties” (Winkler, 2007, p. 140). In effect, Adenauer securely refused the Soviet initiative of German reunification (Winkler, 2007, p. 138), on the basis of what he had stated, in the 98th Session of the Bundestag (8 November 1950), and that still applied, two years later,

“There is no representation in the Soviet zone based on free, equal and secret elections. (That’s right! Centre and Right.) It is out of the question that we should enter into any negotiations with the Soviet zone on the formation of a joint body before the demand we

123 Own translation. See original: “Dieser Vertrag nötigt die europäischen Länder, die ihm angehören, zusammen zu handeln. Etwas weiteres hat sich im Laufe der Verhandlungen ergeben. Ich glaube, daß wohl zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte, sicher der Geschichte der letzten Jahrhunderte, Länder freiwillig und ohne Zwang auf einen Teil ihrer Souveränität verzichten wollen” (Bundestag, 1951, p. 6501). 124 Own translation. See original: “Staaten auf Souveränitätsrechte verzichten wollen, wenn auch erst auf einem begrenzten Gebiet, daß sie diese Souveränitätsrechte auf eine supernationale Behörde übertragen wollen, und daß wir zum erstenmal in Europa eine übernationale politische Autorität auf freiwilliger Grundlage haben werden. Hier erfolgt eine Beseitigung des nationalen Gegensatzes durch eine Solidarität der Tat. Zur Herstellung einer europäischen Föderation wird eine neue Voraussetzung zur Wahrung des Friedens geschaffen. Wegen der Solidarität der Produktion in Kohle und Eisen wird ein Krieg unmöglich gemacht” (Bundestag, 1952, p. 7605).

have repeatedly made for free elections to be held in the Soviet zone is fulfilled. (Loud applause from the governing parties and the SPD)”.125

Following the institution of the ECSC, the proposal for a European common army, at the service of the High Authority, began to be discussed, and with it the possibility of German rearmament. The Pleven Plan (1952) projected the creation of a supranational entity, in which signatory states (Germany included) would accept the formation of political body that would control a European common army: the European Defense Community (EDC). Adenauer’s willingness to participate in the military scheme did not go without criticism (see Chapter 4, Section 4.8.), chiefly from the SPD, that defended distinct international practices. As Ollenhauer said, in the 242nd Session of the Bundestag (5 December 1952),

“But international developments have reached a point where this step should be taken, rather than struggling with the unfortunate compromises between past and future. The only ones who can take this step under the present circumstances are us, (...) by rejecting these treaties for this reason, not out of cowardice, (...) not out of nationalism but out of European responsibility. There is a risk in one or the other step, rejection or acceptance. Acceptance carries the risk of a half and dubious sovereignty enshrined in the Treaties, the deepening of the division of Germany and the full burden on the German people of a policy and strategy over which we have very limited influence. In rejection lies the risk of a brief vacuum (...) with the great opportunity of moving forward into the international community of peoples of free and equal rights. (...) Social democracy chooses the second way: it rejects the Treaties”.126

125 Own translation. See original: “Es gibt in der Sowjetzone keine auf Grund von freien, gleichen und geheimen Wahlen zustande gekommene Vertretung. (Sehr richtig! in der Mitte und rechts.) Es ist ausgeschlossen, daß wir in irgendwelche Verhandlungen mit der Sowjetzone über Bildung eines gemeinsamen Organs treten, ehe das von uns wiederholt gestellte Verlangen auf Durchführung freier Wahlen in der Sowjetzone erfüllt ist. (Lebhafter Beifall bei den Regierungsparteien und bei der SPD)” (Bundestag, 1950, p. 3564). 126 Own translation. See original: “Aber die internationale Entwicklung ist an einem Punkt angelangt, an dem dieser Schritt getan werden sollte, statt daß wir uns hier mit den unglücklichen Kompromißformen zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft herumschlagen. Die einzigen, die unter den gegebenen Bedingungen diesen Schritt auslösen können, sind wir, (…) indem wir aus diesem Grunde, nicht aus Feigheit, (…) nicht aus Nationalismus, sondern aus europäischer Verantwortung diese Verträge zurückweisen. Der eine und der andere Schritt, die Ablehnung oder die Annahme, enthalten ein Risiko. In der Annahme liegt das Risiko der vertraglich verankerten halben und zwielichtigen Souveränität, der Vertiefung der Spaltung Deutschlands und der vollen Belastung des deutschen Volkes mit einer Politik und Strategie, auf die wir nur sehr beschränkten Einfluß haben. In der Ablehnung liegt das Risiko eines kurzen Vakuums (…) mit der großen Chance des Vorstoßes nach vorn in die internationale Gemeinschaft der Völker von Freien und Gleichen. (…) Die Sozialdemokratie wählt den zweiten Weg: sie lehnt die Verträge ab” (Bundestag, 1952, pp. 11455–11456).

The SPD continued to resist Adenauer’s exclusive Western orientation, fancying, instead, as Ollenhauer argued, in the 4th Session of the Bundestag (28 October 1953),

“I therefore ask you to consider whether the membership of a free and united Germany in the United Nations might not form a better basis for resolving this vital issue. (...) It would have to be established as part of the agreements of the four powers over Germany in order to prevent a veto. But it would give the German people the same opportunities for security that any member of the United Nations enjoys and, on the other hand, it would offer each member of the United Nations appropriate safeguards against possible German aggression”.127

Nevertheless, Adenauer’s approach, after his re-election in 1953, was fully committed to the European integration effort, and German reunification in the context of the latter. As he stated, in the 3rd Session of the Bundestag (20 October 1953),

“The Federal Republic’s foreign policy will continue to have to deal with the following central problems: establishing its own independence, reunifying Germany, uniting a free Europe and integrating Germany into the European Community”.128

In 1954, in meeting of the Big Four, the Molotov Plan, exposed by the USSR, was rejected by the Western powers, and afterwards equally by Adenauer, whose viewpoint contrasted with the SPD’s policy of détente.129 As Adenauer argued, in 16th Session of the Bundestag

127 Own translation. See original: “Ich bitte daher einmal zu überlegen, ob nicht die Mitgliedschaft eines freien und vereinigten Deutschlands in den Vereinten Nationen eine bessere Basis für die Lösung dieser Lebensfrage bilden könnte. (…) Sie müßte als Teil der Vereinbarungen der vier Mächte über Deutschland festgelegt werden, um ein Veto zu verhindern. Sie würde aber dem deutschen Volk dieselben Möglichkeiten der Sicherheit gewähren, die jedes Mitglied der Vereinten Nationen genießt, und sie würde auf der anderen Seite jedem Mitglied der Vereinten Nationen entsprechende Sicherungen vor einer möglichen deutschen Aggression bieten” (Bundestag, 1953, p. 49). 128 Own translation. See original: “Die Außenpolitik der Bundesrepublik wird sich auch weiterhin mit den folgenden zentralen Problemen zu beschäftigen haben: der Herstellung ihrer eigenen Unabhängigkeit, der Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands, dem Zusammenschluß des freien Europas und der Integration Deutschlands in die europäische Gemeinschaft” (Bundestag, 1953, p. 19). 129 In the 47th Session of the Bundestag (7 October 1954), Ollenhauer’s communication against the effort to remilitarize Germany, mainly by joining NATO, already evinced what would be Willy Brandt’s foreign policy principles: “During the Cold War, a comprehensive social security policy is more important for strengthening the free world than the establishment of new divisions”. Own translation. See original: “Im Kalten Krieg ist eine umfassende Politik der sozialen Sicherheit von größerer Bedeutung für die Stärkung der freien Welt als die Aufstellung von neuen Divisionen” (Bundestag, 1954, p. 2240). However, the SPD’s willingness to promote a policy of mediation between the West and the East was not to be confused with support for Soviet methods, as Ollenhauer clarified later, apropos of the debate on the establishment of diplomatic relations between West Germany and the USSR, in the 102nd Session of the Bundestag (23 September 1955): “For us Social Democrats, the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union also does not mean a change in our assessment of the internal Russian system or the systems of communist parties in other countries which it supports. (...) With our consent, we do not in any way identify

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(25 February 1954), “The aims of this plan are to remove the United States and, in practice, Great Britain from the continent (...) to break up the alliances of the free states, while preserving the alliance system of the Eastern Bloc and thus ensuring the Soviet Union’s supremacy in Europe”.130 Moreover, as the EDC treaty was rejected in the French assembly, Britain and the USA presented West Germany the possibility of joining NATO (Winkler, 2007, p. 151) and the Treaty of Brussels (1948), during the London Conference of 1954 – in which a German delegation, as Adenauer declared in the 46th Session of the Bundestag (6 October 1954), “participated for the first time in an international conference of major powers of global political importance”.131 After the accession to NATO in 1955, Adenauer admitted that West Germany had achieved full sovereignty over its foreign policy. In the 84th Session of the Bundestag (27 May 1955), Adenauer declared to the German delegates:

“Firstly, the current President of the Council, the Greek Foreign Minister, Mr Stephanopoulos, and then the representatives of all the powers expressed their unanimous satisfaction that the Federal Republic of Germany has now acquired full sovereignty and has formally joined the community of free peoples of the West, that the Federal Republic will now also deploy forces for its own defence and for the common defence of Europe, and that the conditions have thus been created for a balance to be struck in Europe between the military forces of the West and the East”.132

ourselves with the political ideas of the Soviets. We are in favour of normal relations with the Soviet Union, but this does not change the irreconcilable opposition between social democratic and communist ideas”. Own translation. See original: “Für uns Sozialdemokraten bedeutet die Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen zur Sowjetunion auch keine Veränderung in unserer Bewertung des innerrussischen Systems oder der von ihr getragenen Systeme der kommunistischen Parteien in anderen Ländern. (...) Mit unserer Zustimmung identifizieren wir uns in keiner Weise mit den politischen Vorstellungen der Sowjets. Wir sind für normale Beziehungen zur Sowjetunion, aber das ändert nichts an dem unüberbrückbaren Gegensatz zwischen sozialdemokratischen und kommunistischen Vorstellungen” (Bundestag, 1955, p. 5655). 130 Own translation. See original: “Die Ziele dieses Planes sind, die Vereinigten Staaten und praktisch auch Großbritannien vom Kontinent zu entfernen, (…) die Bündnisse der freien Staaten zu sprengen, dagegen das Allianzsystem des Ostblocks zu erhalten und der Sowjetunion so die Vorherrschaft in Europa zu sichern” (Bundestag, 1954, p. 519). 131 Own translation. See original: “zum ersten Male an einer internationalen Konferenz der Großmächte von weltpolitischer Bedeutung teilnahm” (Bundestag, 1954, p. 2229). 132 Own translation. See original: “Zunächst der derzeitige Präsident des Rats, der griechische Außenminister Stephanopoulos, und hierauf die Vertreter aller Mächte sprachen übereinstimmend ihre Genugtuung darüber aus, daß die Bundesrepublik Deutschland nunmehr ihre volle Souveränität erlangt hat und jetzt auch formell in die Gemeinschaft der freien Völker des Westens eingetreten ist, daß nunmehr auch die Bundesrepublik Streitkräfte zu ihrer eigenen Verteidigung und zur gemeinsamen Verteidigung Europas aufstellen wird und daß damit die Voraussetzungen dafür geschaffen sind, daß in Europa ein Gleichgewicht der militärischen Kräfte des Westens und des Ostens entstehen kann” (Bundestag, 1955, p. 4601).

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Later that year, Adenauer made his first visit, as Chancellor, to the USSR, meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, with whom he decided to establish diplomatic relations. However, as Adenauer reported, in the 101st Session of the Bundestag (22 September 1955),

“During the discussions with the representatives of the Soviet Government, the Federal Republic delegation made it very clear that under no circumstances could normalization of relations consist in legalizing the abnormal state of the division of Germany. It has also been pointed out that the existence of diplomatic relations between two States is not the same as a friendly contractual relationship”.133

Comparably, and according to his so-called Hallstein Doctrine, “the German Government would continue to regard the establishment of diplomatic relations with the GDR by third countries with which it maintains official relations as an unfriendly act, as it would be likely to deepen the division of Germany”.134 And on the question if the establishment of relations with the USSR denied the Western orientation, Adenauer replied,

“Not only do the Western treaties not stand in the way of normal relations with the Soviet Union. Rather, the treaties are a forward-looking means of international détente, which should bring peace for the world and state unity in freedom for Germany. We leave no room for the slightest doubt about our loyalty to the Treaties. After all, Germany’s membership of the West is much deeper than its political constellation, namely its inseparable affiliation with the Western Christian cultural circle. (...) Germany is a part of the West, its intellectual and social structure, its historical tradition and according to the will of its people. (...) The establishment of diplomatic relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet Union is therefore not contrary to the interests of the West. I believe I may even go further: it serves the interests of the West”.135

133 Own translation. See original: “Die Delegation der Bundesrepublik hat in den Gesprächen mit den Vertretern der Sowjetregierung mit großer Klarheit darauf hingewiesen, daß eine Normalisierung der Beziehungen unter keinen Umständen darin bestehen kann, daß man den anormalen Zustand der Teilung Deutschlands legalisiert. Es ist auch darauf hingewiesen worden, daß das Bestehen diplomatischer Beziehungen zwischen zwei Staaten nicht mit einem freundschaftlichen Vertragsverhältnis gleichzusetzen ist” (Bundestag, 1955, p. 5644). 134 Own translation. See original: “die Bundesregierung auch künftig die Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen mit der DDR durch dritte Staaten, mit denen sie offizielle Beziehungen unterhält, als einen unfreundlichen Akt ansehen würde, da er geeignet wäre, die Spaltung Deutschlands zu vertiefen” (Bundestag, 1955, p. 5647). 135 Own translation. See original: “Die Westverträge stehen normalen Beziehungen mit der Sowjetunion nicht nur nicht im Wege. Die Verträge sind vielmehr eine in die Zukunft weisende Möglichkeit einer internationalen Entspannung, die für die Welt den Frieden, für Deutschland die staatliche Einheit in Freiheit bringen soll. An unserer Vertragstreue lassen wir nicht den geringsten Zweifel zu. Deutschlands Zugehörigkeit zum Westen liegt ja auch viel tiefer als in der politischen Konstellation, nämlich in seiner

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Nonetheless, Adenauer recognised, as in the 168th Session of the Bundestag (8 November 1956), that cooperation with the Soviets was imperative for restoration of German unity:

“Whatever the developments in this area, there can be no doubt that the restoration of German national unity will not be possible without the consent and cooperation of the Soviet Union. We will therefore continue to approach the Soviet Union and ask it not to refuse to cooperate in resolving this issue. Ultimately, world peace depends on this cooperation”.136

Succeeding the negotiations and reconciliation between Germans and French on the Saar question, the Saarland rejoined West Germany in 1957. The epitome of Adenauer’s policy was the Treaty of Rome (1957), the corollary of the sets and backs of the Franco-German axis. As Hallstein concluded, in the 200th Session of the Bundestag (21 March 1957),

“As the Treaty on the European Economic Community stands before us today, it is a laboriously negotiated but healthy compromise among all concerned. It is the sine qua non for Europe’s economic development. It is also a guarantee of our political freedom and even of the existence of our people. The vital political importance of the European Economic Community cannot be emphasized strongly enough. It also offers real opportunities for the future political unity of Europe”.137

untrennbaren Zugehörigkeit zum christlich-abendländischen Kulturkreis begründet. (…) Deutschland ist ein Teil des Westens, seiner geistigen und sozialen Struktur, seiner geschichtlichen Tradition und nach dem Willen seiner Bevölkerung. (…) Die Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen zwischen der Bundesrepublik und der Sowjetunion widerspricht also nicht den Interessen des Westens. Ich glaube sogar weitergehen zu dürfen: sie dient den Interessen des Westens” (Bundestag, 1955, p. 5644). 136 Own translation. See original: “Wie auch immer die Entwicklung in diesem Bereich verlaufen mag, so kann es doch keinen Zweifel darüber geben, daß die Wiederherstellung der staatlichen Einheit Deutschlands nicht ohne die Zustimmung und Mitwirkung der Sowjetunion möglich ist. Wir werden daher nicht aufhören, immer wieder an die Sowjetunion heranzutreten und sie aufzufordern, sich der Mitwirkung an der Lösung dieser Frage nicht zu versagen. Letzten Endes hängt von dieser Mitwirkung der Friede der Welt ab” (Bundestag, 1956, p. 9261). 137 Own translation. See original: “So wie der Vertrag über die Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft heute vor uns liegt, ist er ein mühsam ausgehandelter, aber ein gesunder Kompromiß unter allen Beteiligten. Er ist die unerläßliche Voraussetzung für eine freizügige wirtschaftliche Entfaltung in Europa. Er ist darüber hinaus ein Unterpfand für unsere politische Freiheit, ja für die Existenz unseres Volkes. Nicht eindringlich genug kann auf diese vitale politische Bedeutung der Europäischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft hingewiesen werden. Sie bietet echte Chancen auch für die künftige politische Einheit Europas” (Bundestag, 1957, p. 11334).

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Chapter 6: Analysis: Theory and Evidence

As a symbolic category, the ‘German nation’ emerged in the opening of the nineteenth century. Until this period, the ‘nation’, however, was doubtlessly vague to resist the test of time “in the absence of real unitary power” (Smith, 2008, p. 109) as in Holly Roman Empire. There was no ‘nation’, nor nationalism, but instead, manifestations of imperial patriotism that mobilised the word ‘nation’, in connection to an elite sense of Germanness, shared by knights and humanists, educated patriotists like von Hutten. Their subordinate position, as knights, in relation to the higher nobles, and the likely sharedness of a habitus, internalized as they circulated between German universities, and Protestant cities, as Wittenberg, inclined them to practices so as to have a greater social recognition. Nonetheless, the course of constructing and spreading the ‘German nation’ began in Prussia, in the eighteenth century, as an echo of the subordinate position in the Prussian field of power held by German intellectuals in relation to the German traditional elite, the nobles. Particularly since Frederik the Great, who reversed the policy of his predecessors, nobles’ social position had been enhanced, with objective effects in the enacted practices, such as for example, when deciding ‘who enters first in a state rite’. Nobles seem to have benefited from the implicit regularities and the dominant principle of legitimation and nomination, imposed by Frederik, who, centralizing the symbolic and handling the meta- capital, redraw capitals’ ‘exchange rate’ and restructured the ‘power gradient’ of society. On the contrary, “unattached” intellectuals, as members of the Bildungsbürgertum apparently sharing a habitus (e.g. Herder’s case) stating who could join their ranks, were dominated dominants, who socially resented their condition. Their repertoires, informed by Pietism,138 that offered a moral justification to the ‘nation’, and by Romanticism, that clarified its social, cultural contents, inclined them to certain practices (e.g. thinking about the ‘nation’ and ‘state’). They tried to reconfigure what was ‘at stake’ in the Prussian field of power, presenting an alternative organization of the political, in which their specialized capital (i.e. cultural capital) would be reappreciated and thus their position improved and crystalized in the practicalities of a hierarchical society, where ‘distinction’ was key “for

138 Pietism, as a doctrine among others in the religious field, fitted the misery of the lower classes, and, thus, was an ally of the national idea. Whilst these intellectuals, sometimes as religious specialists, had “an interest in the accumulation of ‘religious capital’ and compete[d] therefore for the monopoly of the administration of the goods of salvation and the legitimate exercise of religious power over the laypeople, (…) the lay population ha[d] an interest in their messages insofar as, according to their respective position in the field of classes, they need[ed] either justification for their social privileges (…) or compensation for their relative deprivation (dominated class)” (Bourdieu, 1971; Vandenberghe, 1999, p. 55).

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the fulfillment of the highest good and the purpose of nature, as well as for human self- fulfillment, and thus a good in itself” (Greenfeld, 1992, p. 350); but also, for the first time, introduced a ‘German nation’ in an inter-national world opened by the French Revolution (1789) and structured by an international sense of distinction, by international status. If before the French revolutionary practice, the ‘German nation’ had collected its moral, social and cultural traits, after 1789, the symbolic category of the ‘German nation’ conceived its political element. As one saw in Fichte’s contributions, the ‘nation’ required a political roof, i.e. a state, to materialize it and not let it dissipate in rhetoric vagueness. Only with a German state would the ‘nation’ be fully recognised as a ‘high culture’, “with its political (…) institutions which would be identified with it and committed to its maintenance” (Gellner, 1983, pp. 98–99). In this context, Prussia became, recurrently in nationalists’ practices, the bearer of ‘Germanness’. Her modernization, after the debacle in 1807, meant a potential rediretcion of the nomos based on birth by one based on vocation: “a new division of society by profession and education”, where the educated were a “functional ruling class” of a society wherein “the cultural stamp valued a lot” and named the haves and have-nots (Pechar, 2012, pp. 617–618; Ringer, 1969, pp. 16, 35). Binding Prussia to the ‘German nation’, to the symbolic category that was being constructed from their Pieto-Romantic background, seemed, for nationalists, a paramount necessity for the preparation of war against France, as “the more valuable the content, the greater the state’s right to assert itself at home and abroad” (Ringer, 1969, p. 11). Besides, if nations were imagined in relation to each other, and if Prussia was to lead a unification process, the result of that war had to assure the recognition, the international status needed to consubstantiate the international practices, as waging war and settling peace,139 which would make Germans qualified for setting the international principle of legitimation, the nomos of the transnational field of power which she would use to preserve her distinction, in relation to other powerful nations, especially France and, later on, Great Britain. Thus, the German national content, which developed from these processes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that represented inter-national relations as genetically conflictual, looked defined in introvert (external) and ethnic (internal) signs; two markers that remained intertwined and related to each other in what one could name

139 Geoffrey Blainey’s (1988, p. 293) suggestion is insightful to this point, according to which one of the mechanisms used to ascertain relative power – and, one adds, international status –, is the ability to wage war. Indeed, as Carlos Gaspar (2012, p. 7, own translation; see also Aron, 1967, p. 190) argued, one is in agreement with Aron’s praxeological approach, because “the specificity of international politics is the legality and legitimacy of resorting to war in interstate relations war”.

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a ‘national liberalism’. On the one hand, building on the anti-French feeling, the narrative articulated strong international status concerns, which had to be satisfied through Prussia in a war against Napoleon. On the other, taking the experience of imperial patriotism and of the conflict between Kultur and Zivilisation (Elias, 1996) , after 1789, the nationalist intelligentsia fathomed its position could change in a German state, which could be liberal in nature – albeit monarchical at first –, wherein they legitimized the reproduction of state elites. Though the nineteenth century had been “a century of writers not doers” (Wenzel, 1828, p. 1 cited in Smith, 2020, p. 257), they mobilized and politicized in their social role. The echo of the Congress of Vienna, the German Confederation, yet, hampered their expectations, by accommodating the interests of both Prussian and Austrian leaders, and traditional elites, in a conservative agenda, that delayed a Prussian-led German state. Their participation in the political game, and thus their acquisition of political capital “to mobilize individuals around a common goal” (Kauppi, 2003, p. 778), was blocked or only relatively successful, in southern estates. The same happened in the ephemeral Frankfurt Parliament, which, dominated by scholars and intellectuals, after the brief dissolution of the Confederation in 1848, failed to advance German unification – even though fostering the debate between the Great German and Little German solutions. Though Prussia had been, hitherto, the preferred choice of Germans, in the context of the Confederation and after Olmütz – a blow in Prussia’s international status –, the national issue was semi open. Yet, Bismarck’s neutrality in mid nineteenth century and successful realpolitik in the 60’s, which attracted the industrial class of Prussian economic modernisation, as well as Prince Wilhelm’s endeavor to regain the recognition, the international status of Prussia, still very much attached to the possession of military capabilities and the practice of war, reverberated the view that, still, only a Prussian statehood project would build a ‘German state’. After the Austro-Prussian War, which decided the leader of the unification without the interference of third parties (e.g. France, Russia), Prussia’s distinctiveness not only as the German ‘great power’, but also as one of the European great powers, was confirmed and her leaders nominated as the German representants in the transnational field of power. Being led by Bismarck and Wilhelm, Prussia’s regime, in which the Junkers were dominant, differed from what earlier nationalists had projected (Elias, 1996, p. 119). Yet, after the international successes of Prussians, they mutated such ‘national liberal’ content into ‘national conservatism’, which kept the introvert and ethnic markers, but questioned the need of a liberal state and the possibility of achieving, simultaneously, the twin goals of political liberty and national unity – indeed, they ended up prioritizing the latter, which

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promised international status, in the short run, and the improvement of social conditions, in the long run, especially as the economic capital of the middle classes began to be valued in the struggle of the Prussian field of power, to the anger of bearers of cultural capital.140 In these lenses, the DFP’s indemnity to Bismarck did not seem like an acceptance of a fait accompli, but rather the resonance of the coeval social process behind the making of the German modern state and the transmutation of the symbolic category of ‘nation’, along conservative lines. Bismarck’s “revolution from above” was realized in the Franco- Prussian War, that, indeed, served his purpose (Breuilly, 1998, p. 111). After it, there was “a German national feeling (…) impossible to negate” (Confino, 1997, p. 21), a symbolic category of ‘nation’ rooted in the premises of Little Germany, anti-French sentiment and improved international status. In 1871, Germany “could hold its own, economically and politically, with the older national states of the west” (Winkler, 2006, p. 167). Germany had a ‘high culture’, a political roof with political institutions to sustain it, and thus could sharpen its domestic order to fit that constructed image. Germany began to establish its ritual dimension: national celebrations were arranged, national heroes were applauded, and the national colours selected to appeal to the romantic, Christian Volk that was now educated in a national framework.141 And so, the state would ‘state’ the national doxa. At the international level, unification was a geopolitical earthquake that nominated Germany a ‘great power’, in nineteenth century standards, able to practice war and settle for peace – that is, to dominate or to be dominated –, and, therefore, to challenge Britain that had been worried with the North-American normative threat (Schake, 2017). After 1871, nationalism’s practice did not cease. Bismarck’s “state nationalism”, intended to impose the symbolic category of the ‘nation’, recovered the Protestant roots, against Catholicism and the particularism of southern states (e.g. Bavaria). Yet, whereas it tried to consolidate the content of German nationalism, it unleashed a new process that would antagonize the conservative division of society: modern anti-Semitism. Moreover, as Bismarck preserved the social balance of forces – that is, the dominance of the Junkers,

140 Recovering the Bourdieusian idea of the relative autonomy of fields, “the struggle that goes on in the field of power determines whether the principle of the hierarchization of the field of class relations is of an economic or of a cultural nature (…) The dominant classes are only dominant if they successfully impose their sort of capital as the dominant principle of hierarchization” (Vandenberghe, 1999, p. 53). Bismarck seem to have grasped that “the authority that ha[d] the propertied classes and the intellectuals on its side [wa]s guaranteed the power to rule” (Rochau, 1972 [1853], p. 146 ff. cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 125). 141 These were ‘rites of institution’, those that made a “real State”, through the construction of the ‘nation’; that is “to construct a nation through the state, that is favouring the ‘integration’ of the dominated”, through “a national habitus, that may implicate the adhesion, through the civic religion, to national values or even nationalist ones” (Bourdieu, 2018, pp. 514, 516, 520, own translation, see also Elias, 1996).

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of the landed aristocracy –, and focused his attention on expanding the hand of the state often without the intellectual consent (e.g. education), and often in favor of the industrial classes (e.g. utilitarian view), leading intellectuals turned more conservative and adhered to the radical assumptions unleashed by the “state nationalism”, principally anti-Semitism (e.g. the Jews were responsible for the delay in the improvement of their social condition). In this respect, and although Bismarck’s approval of the insurance laws, his “state nationalism” reproduced the Pieto-Romantic idea that German society was to be socially divided: between those entitled to govern that define the principles of legitimation of the social order, and those who stated the overthrown or change of the latter, the economic, individualist liberals and the revolutionary, deprived of power (e.g. socialists). To belong to the first, one had to be cultured by the conservative social exclusivist “intellectual royal guard” of the Hohenzollerns (Pechar, 2012, p. 620), by the gymnasium teacher to the full professor, often “made Geheimräte, if (…) not actually ennobled” (Ringer, 1969, p. 38). Following the mounting anti-Semitism, part of this cultural program comprised a racial element – which, in fact, had been more or less present in the practices of the early nationalists, as Fichte, and even more acutely among Romantics. The assumption of racial superiority had, indeed, spread among Germans, who, moreover, used the it to rationalize the beginning of the German colonial expansion in the 80’s. This point is central, if one takes in consideration what the possession of colonies meant in that period, for German political leaders and for the rest of the European leaders (e.g. British or French). Colonial territories were, in fact, symbolic capital, international status markers that outsourced the common European practice of territorial conquest, by a practice that dealt with domestic problems, but also innovated the distinction markers embodied by European great powers – which they had agreed to at Berlin. War was still unquestioned in the European practical sense, but instead of being enacted in Europe, it was enacted in the African continent.142 In the end of Bismarck’s rule, German nationalism’s content had abandoned any liberal inclination: it was objectively introvert, ethnic-racial and illiberal. Its echo in the transnational field of power had inclined Bismarck to protectionism, in order to safeguard the economy against foreign competition, and also to colonialism, to ensure Germany’s international status. Bismarck was at first a Prussian patriotist (Ritter, 1950, p. 669 cited

142 Contra rational choice approaches, colonies did not confer substantial material advantages for Germany, yet were symbolically important. They were irrelevant for the German economy: “covered a million square miles, attracted one in a thousand of Germany’s emigrants, absorbed a paltry 3.8 percent of Germany’s overseas investments, and accounted for 0.5 percent of its overseas trade” (Strachan, 2001, p. 10).

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in Pflanze, 1955, p. 549), but he “founded the German Reich not by opposing the idea of nationalism, but by skillfully exploiting it” (Pflanze, 1955, pp. 549–550). He seemed to have acquired the sense of the ‘double game’ and of what required for state nationalism’s practice to be competent: the incorporation of the ‘German nation’ had to happen through the state, with the connivant acknowledgment of leading intellectuals – and particularly, of scholars –, and reproduction by Germans; but had to have an external expression that would reinforce the recognition of the principle of division instituted, the nomos stating who was ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the ‘nation’. Weltpolitik was the international practice reflecting such understanding, later resumed and preserved by Caprivi and Wilhelm II’s militarism. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Junkers upheld their political, social dominance, as the German traditional elite. From their dominant position, they were fairly successful in dealing with any challenges. Commercial elites, with their economic capital, incorporated their lifestyle, but neither that distinction could be overcome, nor could their interests outweigh landed agriculture’s (e.g. Bülow Tariff). Cultural nobles, instead, did not even pose an effective challenge, for they intended to be as ‘autonomous’ as possible from both nobles and industrialists, “recruit[ing] (…) successors to a remarkable extent from along its own offspring”, preserving the gymnasium curriculum and the cultivated- family background of students, and stalling the entry of the “sons of workers, occasional laborers and servants (…) [and, above all, of the sons] of middle and lower state officials and teachers without university educations” (Ringer, 1969, pp. 40–41). They secured their ‘relative autonomy’ because they adhered to the upper-class lifestyle and agreed to protect it and to have role in the reproduction of that legitimate culture – ‘national conservatism’. But, as the first decade of the twentieth century unfolded, and the euphoria around colonialism (outer Europe) disappeared in German society, for it did not crack the socio- economic problems as expected – as, in particular, SPD’s leaders frequently highlighted –, the national conservative content drove political leaders to turn again to the European context. Militarism followed this shift and tailed the unsuccessfulness of the international practices enacted by German leaders (e.g. the Agadir Crisis). Because international status seemed to have been constantly present in the national narratives, and because it seemed to be familiar that a ‘German nation’ existed in a transnational field of power, in relation to others, the Volk was by 1908 heedful to any national development, expressly what they felt humiliating to their representation of the nation, as the reaction to Emperor Wilhelm’s interview illustrated. Steadily, but in an interested manner (e.g. citizenship law), German leaders prepared for a European war, the practice that was most familiar to Germans, and

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that could, once again, attest Germany’s international status, as it hitherto had done – and, also, dismiss social democratic opposition and decrease its leaders’ political capital, since in order of priorities, war came first, not citizenship, nor labour rights, nor revolution. This practical sense for war however, subsidized different situations, domestically and internationally, though the understanding of one is difficult without the other. While by 1917, three years after the outbreak of the First World War, Germans were effectively battling Russia; at home, however, the balance of forces of society was in question. SPD’s pacifist agenda resounded in the critical juncture of the war, in a manner that rejected the revolutionary ethos of socialist and communist fractions, that is, that was committed to play the game in its current form (e.g. winning the federal elections) so as to change it. In late 1918, when the SPD took power, Germany’s position in transnational field of power had changed. The symbolic category of the ‘nation’ had to be redefined, as, the more people were educated and introduced to the university, the more they were exposed to the national conservative content reproduced by academics, whose majority remained loyal to the pre-war ‘German nation’ and to nationalism. The loss of international status cultivated national despair, so a new putative national narrative, besides the need of being accepted as legitimate by Germans, had to re-place Germany in the world of status; a task that revealed to be impossible, because of the ideal that “united almost the entire political spectrum of the new German Republic (…) the fight against the Versailles settlement” (Mombauer, 2002, p. 37) and against the Entente’s allegations of Germany’s war guilt. Furthermore, in the interwar period, though social democrats had taken the control over the state, whose meta-capital they could have used to restructure the German field of power, as well as, all other fields, they maintained the symbolic structure of the German Empire.143 Democratic legitimacy aside, the new executive was rather an extension of the Empire’s nomos, for the traditional power elite, the Junkers endured dominant dominants. As the German social principle of division persisted unaltered, social democratic attempts to provide a democratic orientation to nationalism’s content and to the symbolic category of the ‘nation’ revealed only relatively successful. For instance, when democratic forces turned to the University of Berlin,144 to gather the support of historians for the “innocence

143 As Rudolf Hilferding confessed, in the Prague Manifesto, in 1934, “the most serious historical mistake of the German workers’ movement, disoriented as it was by the war, was that it adopted the old state apparatus virtually unchanged” (Klotzbach, 1984, p. 236-237 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 40). 144 The German university was the bulwark of nationalism, with its ethnic and introvert traits, and the home of right-wing opposition to Weimar. Nationalism grew in these spaces, in which, because of hyperinflation, student and scholars living conditions decreased. Nevertheless, reflecting the democratization of education fostered by social democrats, the number of student enrollments increased. For students the cultural capital

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campaign”, they were confronted with an academia that was at the service of the state but that defended the postulates (e.g. introvert, racial, ethnic, etc.) of the national conservative narrative – thus, being against the Republic and the reparations’ core premise (i.e. German sole responsibility for the war) and hostile to Bauer’s unconditional acceptance of the Versailles Treaty, in 1919, after the Entente powers had issued the ultimatum. There was no rupture with Wilhelmine Germany’s signs: the Weimar Constitution, being called “of the German Reich”, was a symbolic statement not to be underscored as it already foretold the precarious foundation of the Weimar Republic. Seen from this light, Hindenburg’s election later on, expressed the balance of forces in the German field of power that despite Weimar’s democratic experiment, remained unchanged or rather deepened as the military and manorial lords kept a close contact with the Kaiserish head of state. German introvert qualities were further reinforced. While Germany was the most powerful state in economic terms, in continental Europe, the national narrative depicted the ‘German nation’ as a victim of the Entente’s injustice, whose international practices had jeopardized the romantic design of Germans to lead the world. For nationalists, it had been the conflictual nature of international politics what channeled Britain to antagonism with Germany and the settlement of Versailles had to be an interlude to the ascent of the ‘German nation’ and to the restitution of its international status. German international practices, in the interwar years, echoed the failure to change the content of the national narrative, but were, nevertheless, different from those chosen before the First World War. Albeit German political leaders continued to be the educated during the imperial experience – those that more actively reproduced, in their practices, the national conservative narrative –, they were for the first time, in a subordinate position in the transnational field of power (e.g. her military had been dismantled), wherein other European leaders did not recognise German international status; the nomos was unaltered, military capital continued to be appreciated. Revisionism still informed Germans, as the Genoa Conference (1922) showed, but they would enact it through ‘disguised’ practices, in accordance with the Wilsonian effort to make diplomacy, rather than military conquest, the international practical sense. Stresemann’s practices when negotiating and revising

retrieved from a university diploma – and the social capital from the student fraternities – was too valuable. Mandarins disliked this interference of democratic, political forces – albeit indeed, it was contradictory in relation to the positions hitherto undertaken: before Weimar, they fostered state-led education as it secured their privileges as cultural leaders of society. The nationalist intelligentsia developed hostile to Weimar, to the democratization of education, related to the growing interest of economic capital. Yet, their miserable living conditions, and low life expectations, contributed for students and academics’ growing interest in the national socialist movement, which promised the social recognition they desired.

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the reparations scheme in 1924, or when reestablishing a relation with the USSR, seemed to have embodied this logic, whose catharsis occurred with the Locarno Accords. In 1925, these not only sealed German leaders’ readmission to the ‘great power club’, as being a permanent member of the League’s Council was an international status marker,145 but assured the revision of the Eastern border with Poland. The latter was crucial for German renewal and in agreement with the ethnic and racial features of German nationalism – in effect, the Treaty of Berlin, ‘disguised’ as a socially recognised, competent, patterned and accepted international practice (i.e. bilateral treaty), represented a way to pressure Poland when German nationalism depicted immigrant Poles as inferior and un-German. When Stresemann died in 1929 revisionism against Versailles was being effective. Germany was a ‘great power’ restarting its military rearmament, financially capable and without external supervision. Stresemann’s practices were not progressive, or rather close to that envisioned by German mandarins of the accommodationist side (cf. Winkler, 2006, p. 419). He acknowledged “the futility of imposing upon a great power a treaty which it w[ould] not accept” (Marks, 2003, p. 114). Germany, as the USSR or even Italy, was a revisionist power that damaged the core body of the League of Nations and used Anglo- French deadlocks in its favor (e.g. regain of the Rhineland).146 German leaders played the international game according to a socially approved implicit regularity, i.e. diplomacy, to regain their position, but, nevertheless, retained war as the practical sense. With the help of German intellectuals (chiefly academics), the national history of the German Empire endured and corroded any democratic orientation. The Republic had failed even before Arnold Toynbee’s annus horribilis (1931), because by maintaining the balance of forces in the German field of power, as well as the symbolic framework of society, and by weakening the Little Germany nexus of the nation, social democrats and liberals, with a minority of intellectuals, lingered connivant victims of the authoritarian impulses. By 1930 the Weimar Republic seemed a democratic illusion of German history.147 The 30’s chose nationalism; and the Great Depression’s economic downturn contributed

145 The distribution of permanent seats in the Council represented two essential characteristics of the League as an organization consubstantiated in the sense of distinction: on the one hand, it reflected the Eurocentric view that Europe was to lead the world and the East, preserving international asymmetry and, often, neo- colonial processes; on the other, it demarked Western European ‘great powers’ from the Rest. As a British observer noted, “From the West-European point of view it seemed intolerable that the destinies of a region which was the cultural centre of the Western World should be at the mercy of outlying countries whose international position was comparatively secure and whose contribution to the common culture of Western Society could hardly be compared to those of France, Germany, and Great Britain” (Marks, 2003, p. 85). 146 Others tend to see Stresemann as the maker of a European Détente (Ward, 2017; Wright, 2002). 147 As Josef Schwalber, a delegate of the CSU, argued, “[the Weimar Constitution was so democratic] that it granted the same, if not more, rights to the enemies of the state than to the friends of the constitution. It

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to its practice. The centre of power in Germany was around Hindenburg and his camarilla, the dominant dominants of the field of power, the Junkers, whose control of the state and its meta capital proved effective in the restructure of the political field, through the introduction of presidentialism – with the risk of a military dictatorship. Moreover, in 1932, the category of the ‘German nation’, attached to the idea of Empire and Greater Germany, was mobilised from both sides of the constitutional reformists, whose worry of a civil war reverberated their radicalization – and, thus, their toleration of Hitler. After the emergency decree of Hitler, the republican ideal was finished both politically, socially and culturally. It dictated the end of liberalism and the arrival of a plebiscitary democracy, wherein the “president (…) enjoy[ed] the confidence of the entire people, communicated not through the medium of a factious and partisan parliament, but unified directly in his person” (Schmitt, 1957 [1928], p. 350-351 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 413). Martin Heidegger’s fear of the dictatorship of das Man (the they) was sorted out.148 In the end of 1933, the national narrative was a mishmash of illiberalism, ethnicity – with a clear racial element –, and international status concerns enhanced by the introvert perspective. It was explosive, and from this point onward, as Nazis took over, national conservatives, as the scholars, whose social condition had inclined them against Weimar, “powerless as they were, they had to watch the unfolding tragedy from the sidelines: commentators, not actors, in the events which affected their fate” (Laqueur, 1972, p. 227).149 In 1933, the symbolic category of the ‘German nation’ was Schmittian, dividing the social between the concepts of friend and foe,150 and the same applied to the national narrative’s content. This principle of division, in addition, concerned both domestic and

was so liberal that it offered the enemies of freedom and democracy a platform from which they could, by legal means, destroy both” (quoted in Pikart and Werner, 1993, p. 93 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 123). 148 As Heidegger criticised, “The they is always present, but in such a manner that it has always stolen away whenever existence presses for a decision. Since the they presents every judgement and decision as its own, however, it strips the individual existence of responsibility. The they can afford, so to speak, to have ‘them’ constantly appealing to its authority. It can most easily take responsibility for everything, because it is not someone who needs to take a stand for anything. It ‘was’ always the they who did it, and yet it can be said that it was ‘no one’. In the daily routine of existence, most things come about in such a way that we must say, ‘it was no one’” (Heidegger, 1957 [1927],p. 127 cited in Winkler, 2006, p. 413). 149 It agrees with Ringer (1969, pp. 446, 448): “The orthodox mandarins did not actively desire the triumph of the Third Reich; nor were they to blame for the actual propositions of National Socialist propaganda (…) But their responsibility was great nonetheless. They helped to destroy the Republic, without having chosen its successor. They willfully cultivated an atmosphere in which any ‘national’ movement could claim to be the ‘spiritual revival’. They fostered chaos, without regard for the consequences. (…) mandarins prepared the ground for the anti-intellectualism that finally overwhelmed them”. 150 As Smith (2020, p. 437) notes, “the rise of the Nazis was part of a larger drift to authoritarianism and radical nationalism that came to define European politics in the interwar years”. Further, as Nancy Bermeo (2003, p. 21) informs, “twenty-six of twenty-eight European countries were parliamentary democracies in 1920—yet by 1938, thirteen had become authoritarian regimes”.

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international processes: for instance, if most of the European powers (with the exception of Italy) were enemies (or future foes) of Germany, it made little sense, under Nazism, to participate in multilateral agreements, since bilateral agreements were more easily broken and offered a higher chance of mutual supervision. In multilateral negotiations, attentions were dispersed, what could, following the Nazi national narrative, imperil German goals, as it would give other powers, as France, the chance to restructure their military effort, or to establish military, defensive alliances (as France did with Czechoslovakia). Germany’s urgency to revise the status quo could not be delayed by mere, good willing cooperation. On the domestic level, drawing from the racial element, the representation of the ‘enemy’ were the Jews (and Slavs), for ‘Germanness’ expressed itself in opposition to them.151 Exploiting academic opportunism and fear, and also the access to the state’s meta- capital, ‘national socialism’ established itself as the German legitimate culture and, being a ‘totalitarian system’, instituted a principle of division of society, a nomos, a national doxa: political parties were extinguished, trade unions were assimilated into other Nazi- led organizations, the Jews were persecuted, segregated and purged from the bureaucracy, from the universities, from the German life. The Nuremberg Laws (1935) aimed exactly to the restructure of the symbolic structure of Germany, as did the citizenship laws which built “a national ‘we’ in relation to a banned, denationalized ‘they’”(Smith, 2020, p. 390). Nonetheless, Nazis did it with Germans’ broad support, as they were absorbed by Hitler’s international practices, which, whereas abiding by the implicit regularities, retrieved more international status and enhanced Germans’ dominant position. Regarding anti-Semitism, it was so rampant in 1941 that the Final Solution could not be a ‘one-person job’, the

“slaughter of millions of Jews required not only an army of subalterns following orders. It also required the participation of the elites: the military, whose successes in battle cleared the way for the extermination camps; the captains of industry, who joined in and profited from the policy of killing through forced labour; the banks, who transformed the wedding rings and gold fillings of murdered Jews into assets for the Reich and provided credit for the construction of extermination camps; scientists and technicians, who prepared the machinery of mass murder; jurists, who lent a sheen of legality and processual regularity to the dispossession and persecution of the Jews; historians and

151 As Barrington Moore, Jr. (1966, p. 436) contended, “From the side of the landed aristocracy came conceptions of inherent superiority in the ruling class, and a sensitivity to status, prominent traits well into the twentieth century. Fed by new sources, these conceptions could later be vulgarized (…) appealing to the German population as a whole in doctrines of racial superiority”.

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economists, who prepared the way for the ‘solution of the Jewish question’ by placing their knowledge at the service of the regime” (Winkler, 2007, p. 92).

A quintessential marker of Germany’s consolidation was the restoration of German armed forces (and economy), as Hitler recognised in the cabinet meeting of February 1933. All German interests, either from the Junkers or the working class, had to be subordinated to rearmament, which would, then, enable Hitler to realize the Greater Germany design and to continue, without external interference, the Germanization in the East – which did not meant assimilation, but depopulation and relocation (Smith, 2020, pp. 462–463). Hitler’s fixation with rearmament was not unfunded, for, in his understanding, war endured as the German international practice par excellence, an inevitable facet of Germans’ nationalism practice, what still constituted the core of the international practical sense. War was the practice which gave substance to the Four Year Plan, that was clear-cut on how Germans would do it – the remilitarization of the Rhineland, in 1936, was just the start. Some tried fruitlessly to make diplomacy the socially recognizable international practice to resolve international disputes, the international practical sense. Great Britain’s ‘policy of appeasement’ was based on that belief, even if that meant making concessions to Hitler (e.g. the restoration and increase of the German colonies) – that would let British leaders to focus the attentions on the economy, on the absence of a land army and on the maintenance of the empire (Weinberg, 2009, pp. 291, 327–329). But the British were not deluded: the practical sense was war, and Hitler desired a free hand in Central and Eastern Europe, in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland – and he was not far from getting it.152

152 Central and Eastern Europe had a reason to be concerned. The League, which had been their instrument of choice for dealing with issues peacefully, became an artifact of powers with absolute veto in the Council. And, moreover, it is interesting to note how colonies had lost their symbolic value – partly due to Wilson’s emphasis in the end of European imperialism, after the First World War. For Hitler, not colonies outside Europe, but territorial conquest in Europe (e.g. the Anschluss) was the symbolic capital Germans required. Poles, too, believed in this concept, otherwise they probably would not have consented to the Anschluss, from which they hoped to retrieve symbolic capital, in the form of Austrian territories. French leaders, too, had a reason to be worried, as Germans were bolstering their defenses in the Western borders. However, a preventive war against Germany, waged by Britain or France, was unlikely and (superficially) unjustified. On the one hand, Chamberlain not only regarded any alternative to the Führer worse than the Nazi regime (Winkler, 2007, p. 56), as German anti-Bolshevist propaganda was a valuable faucet against communism, but also not opposed to the assimilation of Sudeten Germans into Germany, if they so desired according to the principle of self-determination (Weinberg, 2009, p. 532). On the other, France was averse to be dragged into war by Czechoslovakia, with which France had a fanciful defensive alliance (Weinberg, 2009, p. 533). But Chamberlain was right when he stated, on March 1938, that “where peace and war are concerned, legal obligations are not alone involved, and, if war broke out, it would be unlikely to be confined to those who have assumed such obligations. (…) The inexorable pressure of facts might well prove more powerful than formal pronouncements, and in that event it would be well within the bounds of possibility that other countries (…) would almost immediately be involved. This is especially true in the case of two countries like Great Britain and France” (quoted in Weinberg, 2009, p. 548).

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Hitler issued Austria’s ultimatum, from a dominant position in the transnational field of power; Austrian political leaders, instead, in a subordinate position, had no other choice but to accept Hitler’s legal cover of the annexation. As with the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Western powers endured still, though France and Great Britain could suspect that Czechoslovakia would ultimately suffer an equal fate even if Germans were deterred for a time. Rapidly after the signing of the Munich Agreement, which looked to Hitler as his weakest moment since it downplayed German international status concerns, Germans approached the USSR – albeit the German spread of anti-Bolshevist propaganda –,153 and guaranteed Soviet neutrality in a German invasion of Poland, and prepared (e.g. intensification of propaganda) for the opening to unleash the Second World War.154 The Second World War was the transformative event of German nationalism and the International (see fn. 33, p. 24). The transnational field of power was restructured: the implicit regularities, the nomos, the practical sense as well what made international status changed. The Third Reich had been a cultural state tout court, “a vehicle, a worldly agent or form for the preservation and dissemination of spiritual values” (Ringer, 1969, p. 116). Nazis received “the support of the learned elite, who would serve it not only as trained officials but also as theoretical sponsors and defenders” (ibid.). Its fall implied the reformulation of the national narrative, of the content that informed German nationalism – a process that could not simply vanish, since Germany had to be rebuilt and reimagined in a transformed world. If after the First World War, Germans believed that their practices had not been responsible for the conflict, the same could not be said for the Second World War. Germans, as a whole, were responsible for never-seen atrocities, for in their quest for living space, they furnished “a corresponding death space for most of Europe’s Jews”

153 For Hitler, domestic propaganda would not interfere with foreign policy decisions – a doubtful ambiguity he assured Stalin, with whom he shared the anti-Western attitude (Weinberg, 2009, pp. 64, 691). However, it is worth noting that Hitler’s relationship with Mussolini, whose nationalism shared some of the postulates of the German one (e.g. anti-Semitism), was also supported on ambiguity and mutual distrust. For example, when the Duce replied with apprehension to Hitler’s intention to invade Poland, because of Italy’s military exhaustion in the wars in Ethiopia and Spain, the Führer felt frustrated. Similarly, Mussolini felt betrayed once the information of Göring’s proposal of a treaty with Britain, in case of an Anglo-Italian war in the Mediterranean, arrived in Rome (Dahlerus,1948, p. 70-71 cited in Weinberg, 2009, p. 774). 154 Bourdieu’s (1984, p. 208) perspective of the charismatic leader sums up the implications of the cult of Hitler: “Charm and charisma in fact designate the power, which certain people have, to impose their own self-image as the objective and collective image of their body and being; to persuade others, as in love or faith, to abdicate their generic power of objectification and delegate it to the person who should be its object, who thereby becomes as absolute subject, without an exterior (being is own Other), fully justified in existing, legitimated. The charismatic leader manages to be for the group what he is for himself, instead of being for himself, like those dominated in the symbolic struggle, what he is for others. He ‘makes’ the opinion which makes him; he constitutes himself as an absolute by a manipulation of symbolic power which is constitutive of his power since it enables him to produce and impose his own objectification”.

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(Smith, 2020, p. 520, emphasis added). Yet, it was liberated from Nazism: Germany could not be reborn, rebuilt from a tabula rasa; the path, that defined national reconstruction – and the place left to international status –, lied in understanding ‘German responsibility’. The German national narrative, constructed after 1945, was marked by the broad sense of ‘collective guilt’ and anti-anti-Semitism, sponsored by scholars, historians and intellectuals, such as Mann. It was, nonetheless, an echo of the de-Nazification process that was placed in practice by the Allied powers, whose objective was to educate Germans for democracy – and, thus, taking into account the role of the university and academics in the spread of a new national content, it was not surprising that the German universities were one of the first objects of de-Nazification. The process did not end immediately after the creation of West Germany, in 1949, although there were political parties, as the DP or the FDP, that fought to put a finish as soon as possible in the criminal procedures, in particular for those Germans who, in their conceptions, did not commit crimes against humanity. Adenauer, later, tended to agree with them, and frequently saw the process as an obstacle to the emergence of a ‘national solidarity’ among West (and East) Germans. As a new national content was built and attached to the symbolic category of the ‘German nation’, that had to be entirely redefined, the words ‘nationalism’ and ‘nation’ were repeatedly censored in public or political rhetoric. In 144th Session of the Bundestag (30 May 1951), Adenauer proclaimed “We have enough of the nations! Whoever wants to overcome nationalism cannot simultaneously breed new national sentiments”.155 And, later, in 3rd Session (20 October 1953), he reinforced his idea,

“The Federal Government’s policy will continue to be geared towards this integration. The painful experience of the history of Europe over the past centuries has reassured us that the nationalism that has been the cause of so many catastrophes must be overcome. We must place the life of the European peoples on a truly new basis of cooperation on great practical tasks in order to secure peace, in order to make Europe a factor in politics and economy again”.156

155 Own translation. See original: “Wir haben genug der Nationen! Wer den Nationalismus überwinden will, kann nicht gleichzeitig neue Nationalgefühle züchten” (Bundestag, 1951, p. 5669). 156 Own translation. See original: “Die Politik der Bundesregierung bleibt weiter auf diese Integration ausgerichtet. Die schmerzlichen Erfahrungen, die wir aus der Geschichte Europas in den letzten Jahrhunderten gesammelt haben, haben uns die Gewißheit gebracht, daß der Nationalismus, der die Ursache so vieler Katastrophen gewesen ist, überwunden werden muß. Wir müssen das Leben der europäischen Völker auf wahrhaft neue Grundlagen der Zusammenarbeit an großen praktischen Aufgaben stellen, um den Frieden zu sichern, um Europa wieder zu einem Faktor in Politik und Wirtschaft zu machen” (Bundestag, 1953, p. 20).

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Albeit German political leaders, as Adenauer or Schumacher, struggled to rhetorically detach themselves from the ideological overtone of the words ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, indeed, they were ‘nationalists’ and enacted nationalism, nonetheless. They struggled to institute a new symbolic category of the ‘nation’, one that was implied renouncing to all the elements of the former national content (e.g. introvert, illiberal, war, etc.), and, hence, redirect the nation (almost) to the exact opposite lines: democratic, extrovert and willing to share sovereignty with supranational, European institutions, but, nevertheless, ethnic – as the maintenance of the citizenship norm and the question regarding Germans outside the Western zone (e.g. in the Saar, or in the new Polish territories) showed. Adenauer was the very interesting case of the split nature of the habitus. On the one hand, Adenauer never left the idea he was not committed to the German reunification, thus he never renounced to his national habitus as Chancellor of West Germany. Several times, from 1949 to March 1957, Adenauer regularly made reference either to fragilities of fellow Germans in Berlin or in the East, to the unacceptability of the Oder-Neisse line, to the illegitimacy of the Saarland outside the political (and cultural, due to the French interests in the area) frame of the federal republic, or in his strict policy of not recognising the independent sovereignty of East Germany. On the other, Adenauer embodied perhaps, more than any other German politician, the ‘European habitus’: he had rejected, in 1952, to negotiate with the USSR, because of the repression and the illegitimate, undemocratic government of East Germany; he established the Western orientation of West Germany, consolidated in full commitment to the European integration and the Atlantic community projects, to the EEC and to NATO (and before that to the EDC). Europe, indeed, became, along with democracy and the extrovert face of international relations (i.e. cooperation is possible, and harmony of interests can be achieved), the central principle of the symbolic category of the ‘nation’ – the future of the German nation was ‘equality’ through Europe. If nationalism continued to be practiced and the ‘nation’ reproduced, international status concerns, similarly, did not stop from being present simply because preparation for war stopped being the international practical sense. The Second World War transformed status concerns (Lebow, 2008, p. 490), as it restructured international mentalities, the rules of the game – imposed by the two new superpowers, the USA and the USSR –, the transnational field of power, in which the meta-capital was fairly in the possession of American leaders, who became the closest allies of Adenauer. West Germany had to be replaced in the status world, and Adenauer made sure, in his ‘fulfilment policy’, in his pledge to the European project and Atlantic community, that West Germans would have

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“the status a great power must have” – and which was paramount for the reunification process –, and in 1957, they could “rightly say that [they] [we]re once again a great power” (quoted in Buchstab, 1990, p. 258 cited in Winkler, 2007, p. 153). Adenauer’s efforts were to make West Germany sovereign in his foreign policy; and when he attained it, he established relations and built treaties with other sovereign states, including the USSR, for, as von Merkatz concluded, in 47th Session of the Bundestag (7 October 1954), “Every international treaty contains obligations and thus waivers of sovereignty”.157 Political leaders, particularly in the Western bloc, therefore, could not retrieve symbolic capital from colonies, or other territories, as they once did, but rather through diplomacy, democratic government and Europeanization – to lead the European supranational project gave the symbolic capital Germans struggled to have throughout their national history. Contrary to Stresemann, Adenauer was no revisionist. He wanted Germany to be a ‘great power’ but through leading the European, post-war project; Germans would play by and fortify the implicit regularities, and reproduce the nomos, the legitimate principle of division of the Western states, through diplomacy, the international practice, that was socially recognised by democracies, and certainly, too, to some extent, by the USSR, as the new international practical sense. NATO and the EEC were products of such practical sense, they reproduced the post-war nomos and, moreover, cheered the social recognition of diplomacy, as the unquestionable (doxic) manner to conduct inter-national relations. As Erhard eloquently put, in 200th Session of the Bundestag (21 March 1957),

“Germany was the first country, and in an almost hopeless situation, to take the path of liberalization, and it has always operated in the direction of greater freedoms in all European bodies, be it the OEEC or the Payments Union, the GATT or the Monetary Fund. From the outset, Germany has sought to put an end to protectionism between the various countries and to overcome the spirit of nationalist selfishness. We have set ever greater freedoms in the international movement of goods, services, money and capital; we have moved forward in Europe. That is why I can justifiably describe myself with a clear conscience and a clear head as a confessor of Europe. (Applause from the governing parties)”.158

157 Own translation. See original: “Jeder völkerrechtliche Vertrag enthält Bindungen und damit Souveränitätsverzichte” (Bundestag, 1954, p. 2259). 158 Own translation. See original: “Deutschland war das erste Land, und zwar in einer fast ausweglosen Situation, das den Weg der Liberalisierung gegangen ist und das in allen europäischen Gremien, sei es bei der OEEC oder bei der Zahlungsunion, beim GATT oder beim Währungsfonds immer in der Richtung umfassenderer Freiheiten operiert hat. Deutschland war von Anbeginn an bemüht, den Protektionismus

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Chapter 7: Conclusion

7.1. Final Remarks Answering to the research question, “in what ways, if any, do distinct representations of a ‘German nation’ resonate in its status-seeking practices?”, one could, first of all, argue that the representations of the ‘nation’ seemed to have resonated the international status- seeking practices of German leaders. Hence, it reinforces the argument that the domestic and the international social processes are deeply intertwined, so that IR could not simply focus on the ‘international level’ – perhaps, one should avoid speaking of ‘levels’ at all. Conversely, if the imagination, invention or creation of a ‘nation’, echoing nationalism’s practice of agents (e.g. state leaders, intellectuals, citizens), merely focus on the domestic dimensions of the process, it leaves other coeval processes that contribute for a Bourdieu- inspired ‘relational understanding’ of phenomena. Nationalism, a practice which does not cease, has an external dimension. It deals with how national agents see how their ‘nation’, a symbolic category that is objectified, relates to other ‘nations’, and grasp the nature of these relations, either conflictual, introvert (as was German leaders’ case until the Second World War), or cooperative, extrovert. An international projection that inherently covers concerns over international status – as the ‘transnational field of power’ is asymmetric. The ‘transnational field of power’ involves all the other fields of the social. It joins in one analysis all the several national fields, puts them ‘in relation’ to each other; all the agents, which are, in a sense, ‘de-nationalised’, yet connected by the idea of transnational. The state is one amongst other international actors but not an agent – yet being constituted by several agents (e.g. political leaders, diplomats, ministers, representatives, etc.), those that, indeed, have ‘power of agency’, whose dominant position in the national fields sets them as agents of the international. Until de end of the Second World War, state leaders were dominant, since the state was judged as the ‘dominant actor’ of international politics. But after 1945, as a nomos was established, other domestic agents enhanced their position, and, thereafter, became more politically, socially engaged, more interventive, equally, or even more, important for the understanding of the social processes of contemporary IR.

zwischen den einzelnen Ländern niederzulegen und den Geist des nationalistischen Egoismus zu überwinden. Wir haben im internationalen Waren-, Dienstleistungswie auch im Geld – und Kapitalverkehr immer größere Freiheiten gesetzt; wir sind in Europa vorangegangen. Aus diesem Grunde kann ich mich füglich mit reinem Gewissen und mit freier Stirne als einen Bekenner Europas ¡bezeichnen. (Beifall bei den Regierungsparteien)” (Bundestag, 1957, p. 11342).

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Germans, through the period under analysis, always sought, and legitimized their international status-seeking practices in accordance with the representation of a ‘German nation’, constructed by nationalism’s practice, and mediated by the international practical sense. While war, or the preparation for war, was the international doxa that substantiated the international practical sense, German leaders sought symbolic capital, those markers historically, socially constituted and reproduced by other European leaders (e.g. colonies, territories), through war, the international practice of choice. But, when the international practical sense was diplomacy, or rather the peaceful resolution of conflicts, the doxa of the post-war world, West Germans’ international status-seeking practices, such as leading the European integration, followed the former, but nevertheless made her a ‘great power’. The evolution of the ‘German nation’ was a two-tail story, one that related to the construction of the ‘German modern state’, to the balance of forces in the field of power; and, also, in a connected way, to the history of German intellectuals and the intelligentsia, in particular its academic fraction, the dominated dominants, the warders of nationalism in the German universities. The latter made sure the representation of the ‘nation’ and the several contents of German nationalism – which could be seen as a steady radicalization, until the end of the Second World War, which destructed the national nomos – spread and were considered legitimate principles of symbolic division of the world, national doxas, which always favor the domination by the dominant dominants, as the German Junkers. The ‘German nation’ could be understood as the epistemic echo of the ‘interested collusion’ entrenching German nationalism’s practice, initiated by German nationalists, as Fichte, in the beginning of the nineteenth century – albeit always referring to the Pieto- Romantic background. A consent between dominants and dominated, whose reproduction practices for the enforcement of the doxa were often fervent (e.g. national celebrations), especially when nationalism’s external dimension held introvert traits that, by portraying Germany as a ‘power’ competing in a conflictual world of status, resonated in hegemonic trends and prescient international status concerns – while extrovert elements, though not ending the latter, put them in a context of cooperation, as Bundestag minutes have shown.

7.2. Research Caveats and Future Lines of Research The first research alert one should concede is the chosen time scope, which comprehends (almost) two and a half centuries of German ‘modern history’, albeit distributed by, or divided through, critical junctures (e.g. German unification, or the Second World War). Such large temporal frame overlooks each period’s minutiae, either certain agents (both

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individual or collective), certain institutions, or certain events that take place in that span of time, and that most certainly could also relate and interact with the evolution of German nationalism or the transnational context, as a whole. However, as stated in the “Research Objectives”, this research intends to explore a putative relation through a (semi-)original theoretical framework, so the analysis of a single case study (i.e. German nationalism) through a long period of time, which, indeed, helps to explain the rather stable nature and the critical, extraordinary transformation of the social process, seems to be an advantage in the early stages of what could be a “path-breaking research” (Gerring, 2004, p. 349). Nonetheless, manifold features, which are not addressed in this dissertation, but that are relevant for the understanding of German nationalism or even of international status itself, are to be tackled in the future. Secondly, one should disclose that the analysed German historiography falls into the label ‘Prussian-centred historiography’, which tends to stress the relevance of Prussian agents and institutions in the formation of Germany. It overlooks, for instance, the role of Austrian agents, or of the agents of the smaller German states that composed, first, the Holly Roman Empire, then the German Confederation, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, West Germany, and, particularly, East Germany, whose historiography was left outside the scope of analysis. Thirdly, and linked to the latter, the analysed historiography, definitely for the Third Reich’s era (but, more broadly, for the era of Wilhelmine Germany), often draws clearly from a top-down historical writing tradition, explaining “the actions and beliefs of the masses (…) in terms of the influence exerted on them by manipulative elites at the top of society” (Evans, 1978, p. 23). This dissertation, in a way, draws from this practice, but, globally, it attempts (one hopes rather successfully) to attach a more dynamic, competitive relation between those in dominant and subordinated positions, which could be aware, or not, of their social positions and dispositions. To ‘critically comprehend’, and therefore not ‘explicate’, with a framework inspired by the productive sociological grammar of Pierre Bourdieu.159 Finally, it would be interesting to further the analysis with data from the Correlates of War Project (COW), that measures the distribution of assets (e.g. military expending, number of diplomats, etc.) among countries (Sarkees and Wayman, 2010).160 It assists in joining the work with IR’s recent trends that quantify international status (Duque, 2018).

159 Nonetheless, one should hope not to have stretched excessively, or wrongly, the reading of Bourdieu’s understanding into IR, because, as Bourdieu argued, “les penseurs à grande élasticité sont paint bénit, se je peux dire, pour un interpretation annexionniste et pour les usages stratégiques” (Bourdieu, 2002, p. 5). 160 For a debate on the Composite Index of National Capabilities (CINC), see (Kadera and Sorokin, 2004).

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