Blood and Iron

Abstract

This chapter analyses ideas of national independence and how these were affected by fear of annihilation in many cases of nineteenth-century (pan)nationalism. The first half of the chapter does so from a general European perspective. Here it is discussed how the perceived lessons of the Revolutionary- and Napoleonic Wars and the international system created in its aftermath affected politics, ideology and the philosophy of history. It is argued that the increased dominance of the great powers together within the perceived lessons instilled not only a fear of annihilation within smaller and medium-sized nations. It also in some cases created a form of nationalism that corresponded with Hobsbawm’s idea of ‘threshold principle’—that is a type of nationalism, where small nations had to unify with closely related smaller nations to avoid being swallowed by larger nations. These European tendencies are used to analyse the arguments, the rhetoric and the view of the history of the political Scandinavianists. This is done within the framework of the geopolitical situation of Scandinavia in the post-Napoleonic and Vormärz period. Hence, the chapter discussed the Scandinavianists ambivalent relationship to German nationalism and pan-Germanism, German ideas of Denmark as an ‘admiral state’ within a future united Germany and the Scandinavianists’ fear of Pan-Slavism and Russian expansionism. The contemporary analysis of the geopolitical situation and the fear that the Scandinavian nations could be annihilated is pivotal to any understanding of political Scandinavianism, the attempts to unify Scandinavia and why war became central to these efforts in the same manner as it did in Italy and Germany.