PANGERMANISM. — The term, used outside Germany in an essentially polemical sense, is commonly employed to denote a movement, both doctrinal and political, aimed at uniting all the Germanic populations of Europe into a single whole. The Germans themselves use the expression *Alldeutschtum* in this connection, but generally deny that it carries the aggressive meaning often attributed to it by foreign interpreters.
While the doctrinal origins of the movement date back to the mid-19th century, its political development took place during the Wilhelmine Empire, with extensive ramifications also in Austria, culminating in the years immediately preceding the First World War. After the unfortunate outcome of that conflict, the currents of Pan-Germanism found a receptive acceptance in National Socialism (q.v.), which, albeit for a brief period, succeeded in realizing almost in its entirety that *Grossdeutsches Reich* so long dreamed of by Pan-Germanists in previous decades. After the Second World War, the continued division of Germany among the opposing occupying powers and the significant territorial losses suffered by it, particularly in the east, have already given rise, as a natural reaction, to the first signs of a widespread aspiration (for the moment still unorganized) for the reconstitution of a renewed unified state grouping all Germans.
The Pan-Germanist ideas, which 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 centuries to come, had already been propagated in the mid-19th century by the economists Friedrich List and Wilhelm Roscher. With the establishment of the Wilhelmine Reich, these same ideas were revived with particular vigor toward the end of the century, when, on the one hand, in Austria the political predominance of the German ethnic group seemed threatened by the Habsburg policy of elevating other nationalities to equal status, and, on the other, the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890 with England (by which Germany ceded part of its East African territories in exchange for the island of Heligoland) appeared to signify an outright renunciation of any further broad-based colonial activity.
Thus, while in Austria the *Alldeutsche Vereinigung* was formed, led by the deputy G. V. Schönerer, which waged fierce battles in Parliament against the political emancipation of the other nationalities within the Habsburg Empire (with little success, since its anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic tendencies ran counter to the convictions of the ruling classes), in Germany the *Allgemeiner Deutscher Verband*, founded in 1891 by the explorer Karl Peters and significantly expanded in the following two decades under the leadership of Ernst Hasse of Leipzig (also through the publication of the weekly *Alldeutsche Blätter*), contributed substantially to the spread within the country of those strong expansionist currents (aimed at strengthening the economic development of the Reich through a decisive colonial and naval policy; at absorbing, even if initially only through a customs union, the neighboring populations of Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland; and at opposing the growing autonomy secured by Slavic and French minorities) which did much to bring about the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.
All the above-mentioned political activity was ultimately nourished by a broad doctrinal underpinning, consisting of numerous publications—often only pseudo-scientific—which asserted the superiority of the Germanic race and the necessity for it to assume a guiding and directing political role vis-à-vis the less gifted races of Europe, particularly the Slavic and Latin races (q.V. RACISM).