Die Nation als Waffe und Vorstellung

IN a speech he made in the House of Commons in June 1917, during his dogged campaign against women's suffrage, Arnold Ward, the Conservative member for Watford, declared that it was impossible to ‘separate the life of the nation from the capacity to fight for it’. Even though Sven Oliver Müller quotes this passage towards the very end of his study, Ward's contention really marks the starting point of this instructive investigation of the role nationalism played in Germany and Britain between 1914 and 1918. So dramatic and all-pervasive were the demands with which governments confronted their populations under the conditions of total or near-total war, that the threat the conflict posed to the very life of the nation proved the only adequate grounds to justify them. ‘Only by referring to the common weal of the fighting nations, which in the eyes of the politically active transcended factional interests’

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