Interdisciplinary Conference on Nationalism
Copenhagen, 25-26 May 2023
Abstract
Jonas Wernz (University of Cologne), e-mail: jonas.wernz@uni-koeln.de
Preventing Defeat after Victory: European Peace due to Federal Nationalism in Germany,
1814-1815
The end of the Napoleonic Wars created a sweeping momentum for early German nationalism. For its liberal proponents, allied military victory over Napoleon was just the necessary starting point for a more fundamental reorganisation of political affairs. Defeat, from this perspective, was still possible, perhaps even more likely. In their objective to secure victory along their political demands and in line with their anticipation of an unparalleled openness of the future during the transition from war to postwar in the years 1814-1815, German national actors flooded the public sphere with pamphlets and articles. Their national imaginations, however, followed quite different modalities, and war – one common cornerstone of their reasoning – was invoked for various national designs and identities.
The paper aims to shed light on one of these versions of early German nationalism, which took war as an argument to intertwine national creation with European peace. With the framework of the Holy Roman Empire in mind, the advocates of such a nationalism proposed a rejuvenated German “Föderativnation” (Dieter Langewiesche) – a conception of “Germany” that did not yet comply with the paradigms of the modern nation state. Since
it promised national unity in state diversity, it linked the federal past with a national future, equally bridging the epistemic breaks of the Napoleonic period and capturing the nationalist impulses of the so-called Wars of Liberation. Concerning European order, the long federal tradition of the German states was used as a blueprint for an integrative European confederation. For “Germany’s” transnational moment was affirmatively described
as an already existent microcosm of long-practiced interstate balancing, it became the archetype of postwar European state diversity. As such, the pamphleteers made a federal German nation axiomatic for the prevention of war and the continent’s pacification after Napoleon.
The reason behind this discursive nexus of federal nationalism and European peace against the backdrop of large-scale war experience was threefold. First, it was a tool to safeguard the German states from further annexation or strong ‘national’ centralisation as well as to justify the territorial incorporation of Switzerland, Denmark, and the Netherlands into the prospective ‘national’ German confederation. Second, it constructed a
German nation as a prerequisite for international security, making it the indispensable core of a multipolar post-Napoleonic European order. Likewise, the entanglement of the federal, the national, and the European strategically matched great power interests and provided its proponents with an advantageous position within the unfolding inner-German debate about the future organisation of “Germany”. Third, it gave room for the production of flexible, eclectic identities, potently integrating regional, dynastic, and national loyalties. In juxtaposition to alleged French hegemonic universalism, its notion of a political culture of peacekeeping produced a federal version of German exceptionalism that implied the idea of a deep-rooted German ‘Europeanness’.
The case study exemplary delves into the close relation between war and the early formation of German nationalism at the onset of the modern era. It highlights the polymorphism of nationalism as it emerged in the context of war around 1800. Though bellicist logics of exclusive in- and out-groups and the idea of national homogeneity were already powerful driving forces for the definition of nationhood (as, for instance, the well-known
contemporary writings of Ernst Moritz Arndt show), other ways of imagining ‘the nation’ were possible. The references to the history of German state diversity and the concept of “Europe” still functioned as strong legitimising resources, embedding the federal strand of German national discourse after Napoleon into a conceptual tradition of European thinking that ranged from Abbé de Saint-Pierre to Immanuel Kant and Henri de Saint-
Simon. As the modern equivalent of the “Reichsidee”, the federal conflation of the national with the European persisted well into the second half of the 19th century, but increasingly came under the aegis of a more radical and pronounced centralised-“kleindeutsch” form of German nationalism. Moreover, the case study questions the often perceived distinctiveness of victory and defeat from a contemporary post-Napoleonic liberal perspective. Far from being clearly defined and fixed concepts, these antagonistic topoi appear to be subject to ideological interpretation and negotiation, making them effective buzzwords for political mobilisation in transitional periods from war to postwar.