Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme suivi de Discours sur la Négritude (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2004), 27–28 (emphasis in original).
18.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 148.
19.
Karl Marx, Letter of June 18, 1862, Marx Engels Werke (Berlin/DDR: Dietz Verlag, 1974), Band 30, 249.
20.
Quoted in Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte, Werke Bd. I, Herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Walther Hofer (Munich: R. Oldenbourg,
1976), 466.
21.
Meinecke, Staatsräson, 466.
22.
Meinecke, Staatsräson, 466.
23.
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 181.
24.
Wehler, Kaiserreich, 181.
25.
Helge Pross, Was ist heute deutsch?: Wertorientierungen in der Bundesrepublik (Reinbek-Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), 62.
26.
Pross, Was ist heute deutsch? 49.
27.
Wehler, Kaiserreich, 179.
28.
Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), 37. Cf. also E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 49–50.
29.
Herfried Münkler drew attention to the fact that for Roman authors, such as Virgil
and Horace, “empires are of world-historical importance, in a cosmological or salvationist
sense, as well as in terms of power politics. . . . Empires take it upon themselves
to shape the course of time. The strongest expression of this is the sacral charge
of the imperial mission. . . . In an age when decline and fall were seen as the natural
tendency of history, the world-historical role of empire was to arrest the decline
and to prevent the end of the world. . . . Once Christianity became the state religion,
it was necessary to give up some of the sacral components of the imperial mission
. . . . But the sense of sacrality remained so strong that in the eleventh century
the Hohenstaufen chancellery began to speak of the sacrum imperium—a term that then passed down into the Holy Roman Empire (of the German Nation).”
(Herfried Münkler, Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 88–89.)
30.
Cf. Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 103.
31.
In Russian: Pravoslavie: Samoderzhavie: Narodnost. On the exact connotation of the Russian word narodnost (nationality), see note 35.
32.
Alexander Chubarov, The Fragile Empire - A History of Imperial Russia (New York: Continuum, 2001), 61.
33.
David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974), 186.
34.
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 347.
35.
The German equivalent of narodnost is Volkstum. Volkstum, however, has a more cultural connotation: it stands mainly for the cultural expression of the people (Volk) in folklore, customs, language, poems, popular myths, and so on. The Russian word
narodnost has a more spiritual connotation and refers to the unique psychological and spiritual qualities that are
ascribed to the Russian people. This different focus probably results from the fact
that, unlike Germany’s population, the majority of the Russian population was illiterate
and excluded from (higher) culture. At the end of the nineteenth century, both German
Volkstum and Russian narodnost—originally conceived as counterconcepts against the cosmopolitism of the French Revolution—would
acquire clearly racist overtones.
36.
Cf. Frank Golczewski and Gertrud Pickhan, Russischer Nationalismus: Die russische Idee im 19. und 20: Jahrhundert. Darstellung
und Texte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 36.
37.
