ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the customary ‘statism’ of the account by emphasizing the unfinished character of the new nation-state, the ‘indeterminacy’ of national consciousness in the period of unification, and the origins of the ‘nationalizing’ impulse in the associational initiatives of the progressive German bourgeoisie. It describes a Festschrift for Eric Hobsbawm and sought to combine a discussion of Germany with a general argument concerning the relationship between nationalism, state formation and political culture. Political independence can be either a condition or a consequence of the ideological and cultural activity, and the growth of nationalism can just as easily follow as precede the formation of territorial units of the nation-state type. Nationalism had ceased to be the prerogative of a particular group in German society and had entered the universal currency of political debate. German political history is concerned to an inordinate extent with the mechanics of a formal political process.
