PAN-GERMANISM. - By this expression, used outside Germany in an essentially polemical sense, it is customary to designate a movement, at once doctrinal and political, tending to gather into unity all the populations of Germanic race in Europe. The Germans use, in this regard, the expression Alldeutschum: but they generally deny that it has that aggressive meaning which foreign interpreters often intend to confer upon it.
While the doctrinal origins of the movement go back to the mid-nineteenth century, its political development occurred 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 war, the pan-German currents found a welcoming acceptance on the part of National Socialism (v.), which, albeit for a brief period of time, indeed succeeded in almost integrally realizing that Grossdeutscher Reich so long dreamed of by the pan-Germans of the preceding decades. After the Second World War, the continuing dismemberment of Germany among the opposing occupying powers and the considerable territorial mutilations suffered by it, especially in the east, have already determined, 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 directed at regrouping all Germans.
The pan-German ideas (aiming at the formation of a great German Empire, extending from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, and suited to give stable shelter to the growing demographic needs of Germany for several centuries) had already been propagated, toward the mid-nineteenth century, by the economists Friedrich List and Wilhelm Roscher. Once the Wilhelmine Reich was constituted, the same ideas began to be agitated again with particular success toward the end of the century, when, on the one hand, in Austria, the political preponderance of the Germanic ethnic group seemed to be placed in danger by the Habsburg policy of elevating the other nationalities to the same level, while, on the other hand, the Treaty of Zanzibar of 1890 with England (which obtained a part of German East Africa in exchange for the cession of the Island of Heligoland) seemed almost to signify an open renunciation by Germany of any further large-scale colonizing activity.
Thus, while in Austria the Alldeutsche Vereinigung was being constituted, which under the leadership of the deputy G. v. Schönerer conducted harsh battles in Parliament against the political emancipation of the other nationalities of the Habsburg Empire (without much success, because its anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic tendencies were in conflict with the convictions of the ruling classes), in Germany the Allgemeiner Deutscher Verband, constituted in 1891 by the explorer Karl Peters and considerably developed in 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 in the country of those strong expansionist currents (directed at strengthening the economic development of the Reich with a decisive colonial and naval policy; at absorbing, albeit initially through a mere customs union, the neighboring populations of Holland, Belgium and Switzerland; and at countering the growing autonomies obtained by the Slavic and French minorities) which so greatly contributed to bringing about the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.
All the aforementioned political activity was nourished, finally, by a broad doctrinal substratum, constituted by the numerous publications, often merely pseudo-scientific, which upheld the superiority of the Germanic race and the necessity that it assume a function of guide and political direction with respect to the less gifted other European races, especially Slavic and Latin (v. RAZZISMO).
Bibliography6 works
Paolo Biscaretti di Ruffia