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this policy and Austria became to Prussia the bridge to Asia and Africa by way of the Balkans and the Adriatic.[1]
11. In its historical perspective the German “Drang nach Osten” may be looked upon as an attempt to solve the old Eastern Question. After the Greeks in Europe, Asia and Africa, after Rome, after Byzantium, after the Franks and the German-Roman Empire, after the Crusades, and after Venice, Prussia, having restored the Empire, continued the task of uniting Europe with Asia and Africa and organizing an Old World, under a single control.
The condition of the world is, of course, other than it was in the ancient and mediæval eras; formerly Asia meant to Europe what we call to-day the Near East. The Far East was in no connection with the Near East, the Near East being racially akin to Europe. The Turkish and Mongolian invasions hindered the development of Asia, but were unable to change the given racial affinities and connection with Europe, India, the hazy dream of Alexander the Great, has been attached to England and partly to France, as Australia became a part of the British Empire. Persia and Asia Minor are reconquering their freedom as the Turkish Empire, step by step, is losing power and vitality; England, France and Russia have become the real rulers of Asia. Africa, of old in close connection with Asia, also has become a part of France and Great Britain.
The German plan of Berlin-Bagdad is therefore an attempt to displace the three other European nations in Asia.
But the situation in Asia has been changed by the development of Japan and China; to European Asia has been added Mongolian Asia—and both these civilised nations joined the European Asiatic nations.
At the same time in the West there grew up the great American Republic: Canada is now becoming a great country: a new world has arisen on the American continent. Therefore the idea of a Prussian Empire is not in harmony with the present conditions, is obsolete and out of date. The mediæval Empire was a great attempt to unite the whole of known mankind into a theocracy; the Pangermans may claim connection with the mediæval idea, but their ideas are more narrow, because they are German-national and exclusively economic—economic in a purely materialistic sense. In spite of its magnitude, the idea of a Pangerman world dominion is narrow, small—the Prussian dynastic autocracy and militarism absorbed the mediæval idea of spiritual Catholicism. The Pangermans show rather plainly that Germany hopes to become by this war a world empire alongside of the world empires of England, France and Russia. England and Russia arouse the jealousy of Prussia-Germany; Germany imitates England and Russia, the two principal empires of Asia and Africa, and hence the fight with the European-Asiatic empires.
Some Pangermanists are beginning to grasp the difference between the German Central Europe and the world organisation as conceived by the Allies and America. They glorify German Central Europe extended to Asia and Africa as the salvation against the threat of Americanisation, they cannot understand that Americanisation is not merely external, mechanical, but internal, spiritual—the belief in the political principles of the Declaration of Independence, in the principles of liberty and equality, humanitarian principles, in the unified organisation of all mankind, not merely a
- ↑ The German term “Drang nach Osten” is not quite correct geographically; this push is in fact directed towards the South-East or East and South. In a more detailed study the German push toward the East would have to be compared to similar movements of other nations: The French into Germany, the Italians into the Balkans, the Swedes into Finland and Northern Germany, the Poles into Russia, the Czechs into Galicia, &c.—we undoubtedly have to deal here with a historic phenomenon of a more general nature. This push toward the East would of course also have to be compared with the previous migration of nations from the East to the West at the beginning of the Middle Ages; and finally, the modern migration and occupation of the American continent, Africa and Australia would be the subject of an exhaustive study of the migration and settlement of nations.
