From Unification to Nazism by Eley Geoff

Author:Eley Geoff [Geoff, Eley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Germany, General
ISBN: 9781000007442
Google: Z0yfDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-26T03:03:06+00:00

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Social Imperialism in Germany: Reformist Synthesis or Reactionary Sleight of Hand? Like

Like the previous one, this essay has already been placed into context by the introduction to the volume. Essentially, it grew immediately out of the discussion of Sammlungspolitik, because social imperialism had been one of the principal concepts used to define the political function of the big navy policy adopted in 1897–8. It also featured centrally in conventional treatments of the Navy League and the other nationalist pressure groups, and once I had finished my doctoral thesis in 1974 (on ‘The German Navy League in German politics, 1898–1914’, D.Phil., University of Sussex, 1974), it seemed a logical next step to sort out my thinking on the subject. In fact, I had already presented a paper on social imperialism to the thesis writers’ Work in Progress Seminar in Sussex in the spring of 1973, and this gave a welcome opportunity to step back both from the highly particularized discussion of the Sammlungspolitik article (which was written during 1972–3) and from my materials on the Navy League (which I was then beginning to write up). In the event, the resulting essay became too large, and I split the text into two separate articles. One, the longer of the two, was published in Social History, vol. 1 (October 1976), pp. 265–90 as ‘Defining social imperialism: use and abuse of an idea’, and large parts of it were subsequently incorporated into Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1980). The other, the one included here in an unrevised form, appeared in the memorial volume for Georg W. F. Hallgarten (originally conceived as a Festschrift) edited by Joachim Radkau and Imanuel Geiss, Imperialismus im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1976), pp. 71—86.

Basically, once I had pursued the origins of the term through the political discourse of the earlier twentieth century it rapidly became clear that the usage developed by German historians since the late 1960s obscured a rich diversity of thinking about the relationship between imperialist expansion and domestic political mobilization. For one thing, government and other establishment attempts to utilize the popular enthusiasm generated by imperialist expansion were invariably outflanked by broader and more radical mobilizations further to their right, an argument I developed in ‘Defining social imperialism’ and more extensively in my book, and one which has unsettling implications for any manipulative conception of the relationship between government propaganda and popular opinion. But, as I discovered in my discussion of Sammlungspolitik and the 1898 Navy Law, imperialist agitation could also be linked ideologically to ambitious programmes of social and political reform. By tying discussion of social imperialism rigidly to a notion of diversionary and manipulative resistance to reform in the interests of an immobilist and traditional power structure, recent German historians were making it more difficult to see the importance of this reformist nexus, and in fact rather summarily dismissed its significance. My essay is an attempt to restore the liberal or reformist versions of

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