Contesting Mitteleuropa, the Middle European Idea in German Political Thought between Liberalism and Nationalism 1880-1919

Wang, James

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Year:: 2021
Contributor:: Wang, James (creator); Bartov, Omer (Advisor); Case, Holly (Reader); Hein, Benjamin (Reader); Brown University. Department of History (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: History; Economic History; World War (1914-1918); German history
Extent:: , None p.

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Abstract:: This dissertation examines the transforming idea in German political thought for a “Middle European” cultural, economic, and political sphere from the late-nineteenth century until the end of the First World War. The idea of a culturally distinctive Mitteleuropa, which would serve to entrench German political influence in East-Central Europe and to economically unify the region originated in the German romantic-nationalist tradition as well as the significance of customs union to the project of nineteenth century German unification. By the time of the German Empire, discourse on this still hypothetical Mitteleuropa was emerging as a major fault-line broadly dividing German liberalism and emergent voelksich nationalism with politicians, economists, military officers and bureaucrats all offering differing visions of Germany’s future role in East-Central Europe. In particular, this project argues that, from its origins in the early nineteenth century, German liberals generally regarded the possibility of a new Middle European order in terms of political-economy. Figures such as the economist Rudolf Delbrueck and later the industrialist and wartime armaments minister Walther Rathenau conceived of Mitteleuropa as a means of achieving economic autarky and financial parity with the rising industrial behemoth of the United States. Moreover, liberals such as Friedrich Naumann theorized that the extension of liberal economic (banks, railroads, abolition of tariffs) and political (above all parliaments and free press) structures beyond the boundaries of the Kaiserreich would in turn transform the illiberal Bismarckian constitution domestically. In contrast, what would by the interwar period coalesce into broadly the voelkisch far-right of German politics understood Mitteleuropa chiefly in bio-geographic terms of space and race. Drawing in large part from the semi-imagined history of the sporadic German settlement of Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages, voelksich intellectuals defined Mitteleuropa as a colonial project intended to Germanize the east. What both such competing visions for Mitteleuropa shared was the notion that changing the political, social, and economic landscape of East-Central Europe outside of the borders of the Reich held the keys to achieving sweeping domestic transformation within Germany.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2021

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Wang, James, "Contesting Mitteleuropa, the Middle European Idea in German Political Thought between Liberalism and Nationalism 1880-1919" (2021). History Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:rjfvws2z/

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History Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the History department.
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