PAN-GERMANISM. — This expression, used outside Germany in an essentially polemical sense, generally denotes a movement, both doctrinal and political, tending to unite all the populations of Germanic race in Europe. In this regard, the Germans use the expression Alldeutschum; but they generally deny that it has the aggressive meaning which foreign interpreters often intend to attach to II.
While the doctrinal origins of the movement go back to the mid-nineteenth century, its political development took place during the Wilhelmine Empire, with extensive ramifications also in Austria, reaching its culmination in the years immediately preceding the First World War; after the unfortunate outcome of that war, Pan-Germanist currents found a receptive acceptance National Socialism (v.), which, albeit for a brief period, in fact succeeded in realizing almost entirely that Grossdeutscher Reich so long envisaged by the Pan-Germanists of the preceding decades. After the Second World War, the continuing partition of Germany among the opposing occupying powers and the substantial territorial amputations suffered by it, especially in the east, have already produced, as a natural reaction, the first symptoms of a widespread aspiration (for the moment still unorganized) toward the reconstitution of a renewed single state organism intended to unite all Germans.
Pan-Germanist ideas (aimed at the formation of a great German Empire, extending from the Adriatic to the Black Sea and capable of providing a stable home for Germany’s growing demographic needs for several cen-
turies) had already been propagated around the middle of the nineteenth century by the economists Federico List and Guglielmo Rasches. Once the Wilhelmine Reich had been established, these same ideas began to be vigorously promoted again, with particular success toward the end of the century, when, on the one hand, in Austria, the political predominance of the German ethnic group seemed to be endangered by the Habsburg policy of placing the other nationalities on an equal footing, while, on the other hand, the Treaty of Zanzibar of 1890 with England (which obtained part of German East Africa in exchange for the cession of the Island of Heligoland) seemed almost to signify Germany’s open renunciation of any further large-scale colonial activity.
Thus, while in Austria the Alldeutsche Vereinigung was formed, which under the leadership of the deputy G. V. Schönerer waged fierce parliamentary battles against the political emancipation of the other nationalities of the Habsburg Empire (without much success, because its anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic tendencies conflicted with the convictions of the ruling classes), in Germany the Allegemeiner Deutscher Verband, founded in 1891 by the explorer Karl Peters and considerably developed during the following twenty years under the leadership of Ernst Hasse of Leipzig (also through the publication of the weekly Alldeutsche Blätter), contributed significantly to the spread throughout the country of those powerful expansionist currents (directed toward strengthening the economic development of the Reich through a determined colonial and naval policy; absorbing, at least initially through a mere customs union, the neighboring populations of Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland; and resisting the growing autonomies obtained by the Slavic and French minorities) that contributed so greatly to bringing about the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.
All the political activity mentioned above was ultimately nourished by a broad doctrinal substratum, consisting of numerous publications, often merely pseudo-scientific, which asserted the superiority of the Germanic race and the necessity that it assume a function of guidance and political direction with regard to the supposedly less gifted other European races, especially the Slavic and Latin races (v. RAZZISMO).
Paolo Biscaretti di Ruffia