Land, Nation, State

I. Two Forced Marriages

I am a Rhinelander and have lived in Nuremberg for ten years. In “Mücher, not Mucher” I described why I feel bound to the land I come from, but not to whatever state happens to be administering it. This essay picks up from there. It asks what land, nation and state actually are, and why they so rarely fit together.

A coincidence of history helps me here, one that is not really a coincidence. After 1815 the Rhinelanders called themselves “Musspreußen”, Prussians by compulsion, because the Congress of Vienna had handed them to Prussia without asking them. The Franconians, without using the word, are Bavarians by compulsion. Both forced marriages go back to the same years and to the same man.

II. A Deal in 1806

The Duchy of Berg, to which my birthplace Much belonged, had been in the hands of the Wittelsbachs since the 17th century. In March 1806 the Bavarian elector Max Joseph, who had just become king by Napoleon’s grace, ceded Berg to France. Napoleon made his brother-in-law Joachim Murat Grand Duke of Berg. In return, Bavaria received the Principality of Ansbach, which Prussia had been forced to give up to France.

In September 1806 the Imperial City of Nuremberg followed, and Bayreuth in 1810. The prince-bishoprics of Bamberg and Würzburg had already gone to Bavaria in 1803; Würzburg then passed to a Habsburg for some years and returned for good in 1814.

The land of my ancestors and the land I live in today were thus set off against each other at the same negotiating table. Nobody asked anyone from Berg, nor any Franconian. Napoleon wanted a strong Bavaria as a buffer against Austria and as a reliable ally. His Bavarian counterpart, the minister Montgelas, wanted a compact, modern state. For both of them the land was a bargaining chip.

III. Much, a Border Town

Much has always been a place on a border. On the grounds of the Miebach inn there stood a castle; I saw its last remains myself before they were built over. Tradition says that Charlemagne had it built around 802 against the Saxons. That cannot be proven, but the story shows how people here saw themselves: as an outpost.

In the Middle Ages the lords changed. Windeck Castle, to whose district Much belonged, was held by Thuringia, by Cologne and by the Counts of Sayn before it passed to Berg in the mid-13th century. After the Reformation the confessional border ran just east of the town. The Lordship of Homburg became Reformed, Much stayed Catholic, and with the faith the dialect divided too.

Anyone born in Much learns early that borders are drawn by people and that they move. The land stays.

IV. The Land: What Remains

The land is the concrete: the slopes of the Bergisches Land, the sandstone cliffs of Franconian Switzerland, the Main with its vineyards, the vegetable fields of the Knoblauchsland outside Nuremberg. It shapes what people eat, how they build, how they speak.

The land has no opinion about whom it belongs to. Within two hundred years the Rhineland was Electoral Cologne or Berg, French, Prussian, part of the German Empire, of the Weimar Republic, of the Third Reich and of the Federal Republic. Franconia was part of the Holy Roman Empire, then of Bavaria, and with Bavaria part of all these states. The Rhine and the Main have stayed the same.

V. Franconia: A Land without a State of Its Own

Franconia is a textbook case of a land that can have a strong identity without a state of its own. The Franconian Imperial Circle, founded in 1500, was one of the first six Imperial Circles. From 1424 to 1796 the Imperial Regalia, the crown, the sceptre and the imperial sword, were kept in Nuremberg. The Bishop of Würzburg bore the title “Duke in Franconia”.

But before 1803 Franconia had never been a state. It was a patchwork of prince-bishoprics, Hohenzollern margraviates, imperial cities and hundreds of imperial knights. What Napoleon married off to Bavaria was not a bride but an entire wedding party.

Bavaria knew this and at first wiped away the Franconian memory. The new administrative districts were called the Rezat, Upper Main and Lower Main districts, after rivers, not after history. Only King Ludwig I introduced the names Upper, Middle and Lower Franconia in 1837. He had understood that you cannot take a land’s memory away; you have to take it in. Today the Bavarian coat of arms bears the Franconian rake, and since 2006 Bavaria has celebrated a “Day of the Franconians” every year.

The Franconians keep mocking all the same. The Bavarians, they say, are the footsore stragglers of the Roman Empire, the ones who never made it back over the Alps. The more common version calls them the footsore stragglers of the Migration Period. Both are mockery, but with a grain of truth: the Bavarians absorbed the Romanised population that stayed behind when Rome withdrew. Nobody talks about it out loud, but the forced marriage still hurts.

VI. The Nation: A Story

The nation is something other than the land. Benedict Anderson called it an “imagined community”: millions of people who will never meet one another consider themselves bound together because they tell the same story about themselves. Ernest Renan said in 1882 that a nation is “a daily plebiscite”, and that forgetting is part of how it comes into being.

Language shows how young most nations are. When Italy was unified in 1861, by common estimates only a few per cent of the population spoke Italian. The sentence attributed to Massimo d’Azeglio says it all: “We have made Italy, now we must make Italians.”

In the 19th century the German nation was a story laid over Rhinelanders, Franconians, Bavarians and Prussians. It was strong enough to wage wars. It did not dissolve the differences underneath.

VII. The Cultural Nation and a Sentence with Two Sides

There is, however, one nation that means a great deal to me, even though all the other national pomp is entirely foreign to me: the cultural nation. In 1907 the historian Friedrich Meinecke distinguished the political nation, defined by a common state, from the cultural nation, defined by language, literature, music, science and craft. The German cultural nation existed long before there was a German nation-state.

Goethe and Schiller put it in a nutshell in their Xenien of 1796: “Germany? But where does it lie? I cannot find the country. Where the learned begins, the political ends.” And: “To form yourselves into a nation, Germans, you hope in vain; instead, as you can, form yourselves more freely into human beings.” A few years later Schiller wrote in a draft: “The German Empire and the German nation are two different things.”

This nation needs no border, no army and no passport. You take it with you, to Medellín as much as to Nuremberg. It is the only form of nation that I do not experience as an offer but as an inheritance, and the story it tells about us is largely true.

Linked to it is a sentence I have always identified with: “To be German means to do a thing for its own sake.” It goes back to Richard Wagner, who wrote in 1868 in German Art and German Politics that being German means pursuing “the thing one does for its own sake and for the joy of it”. The short version only arose after his death.

The sentence has shaped the Germans for good and for ill. For good, it stands for the craftsman who does a job properly even where no one will see it, for the researcher who pursues a question because it will not let go of him, for Humboldt’s university, in which knowledge was not meant to be a means to an end, and for the inventor who looks for a solution because the problem fascinates him and not because a market demands it. That is how I have always understood my own work.

For ill, the same sentence stands for devotion to a task that no longer asks what it serves. Wernher von Braun built rockets because rockets thrilled him, and accepted that prisoners manufactured them under murderous conditions. The Reichsbahn ran the deportation trains as punctually as any other train. The National Socialists were fond of quoting the sentence, and Theodor W. Adorno later called it a formula of German collective narcissism.

Both are true. To do a thing for its own sake is a virtue, as long as one does not forget to ask whom it ultimately serves. Whoever asks that question stays within the cultural nation. Whoever forgets it ends up with the state that uses him.

VIII. The State: An Institution and Who Occupies It

The state is neither soil nor story but an institution: administration, law, taxes. Max Weber defined it in 1919 as the community that successfully claims the monopoly of legitimate force within a given territory. That is sober and correct. But it leaves out whom this monopoly serves.

Nietzsche was less sober. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he wrote in 1883: “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’” That lie is precisely the core of the nation-state: it claims that state and people are one and the same. And Nietzsche adds: “Only where the state ends does the human being begin who is not superfluous.”

Franz Oppenheimer, physician, sociologist and later Ludwig Erhard’s doctoral supervisor, drew in his 1907 book The State the sharpest distinction I know. There are two ways to prosperity. The economic means is one’s own labour and fair exchange. The political means is the appropriation of other people’s labour without anything in return. According to Oppenheimer, the state arose when conquerors set themselves over settled farmers and took tribute from them, and by its origin it is the organisation of the political means. Oppenheimer was no anarchist. He wanted a state in which the political means disappears and only the economic means remains.

In 1911 Robert Michels supplied the reason why this is so hard. Every large organisation, every democratic party included, produces a small leadership group that becomes independent. He called it the iron law of oligarchy.

This is not a theory I have merely read. In 2016 Christian Lindner recruited me to the FDP, the Free Democratic Party. For six years I tried to change something in that party, without success. In 2021, shortly before the federal election, I left again, even though it was clear to me that the FDP would be part of the next government. Anyone who wants to move something from the inside learns there what Michels meant.

And as a free inventor with no institution behind me, I have learned over decades how the actually existing state works and for whom its doors are open. I have learned to despise this state occupied by an oligarchy. My contempt is for the occupation, however, not for the idea. I work for a truly democratic state, and what we write here is part of that.

A state, incidentally, needs a territory, but not a nation. Switzerland works with four national languages. Conversely, there are nations without a state, such as the Kurds, spread across four states. And there are lands like Franconia that have a tradition but want to be neither nation nor state, only not to be overlooked.

IX. The Movements Nobody Talks About

Franconia is not alone. The wish to bring land and state back together appears wherever a forced marriage was concluded. In Franconia, associations and small parties have been calling for a federal state of their own for decades. They remain small, but the mood they express reaches further than their election results.

In 1949 Bavaria itself was the only state whose parliament did not approve the Basic Law, although it recognised its validity. The Bavaria Party still dreams of statehood. The Palatinate, on the other hand, belonged to Bavaria from 1816 to 1946, a piece of land west of the Rhine governed from Munich. After the war it went to Rhineland-Palatinate, and hardly anyone misses Bavaria.

Baden was merged with Württemberg in 1952. In 1970 the people of Baden voted by a large majority to stay. The teasing remains, the wish to separate hardly at all. Catalonia held a referendum in 2017 that Spain declared unconstitutional. Scotland voted in 2014 to remain in the United Kingdom. And in Colombia, people in Antioquia are Paisas first and Colombians second.

The examples show two things. A forced marriage can heal, as in Baden and the Palatinate. But it heals only if the state does not swallow the land and lets it be what it is.

X. The Nation-State: The Costliest Attempt at Alignment

The nation-state is the 19th-century attempt to make all three coincide: one land, one nation, one state. Its tools were the school with one language and one history, conscription, the railway with a single standard time, and the map with a single colour.

Where land, nation and state did not fit, they were made to fit, with language bans, border shifts, expulsion and murder. The two world wars were also wars over whose nation may have its state on which land. Yugoslavia repeated the pattern in the 1990s.

Napoleon did not invent the nation-state. But he stirred up the map so thoroughly that the old diversity of the Empire disappeared and larger, compact states remained. Out of them the nation-states later grew.

XI. What I Owe Each Level

If I keep the three levels apart, the question of loyalty becomes simple for me.

To the land I owe care, to the Rhineland I come from as much as to the Franconia I live in. I can be bound to both without being unfaithful to either.

To the actually existing state I owe obedience to its rules for as long as I live in it, and no more. That is a contract, not love, and respect is something it must first earn. It owes me protection, law and an administration that serves everyone and not a few. To a truly democratic state I would owe more: my cooperation. That is a state worth fighting for.

To the political nation I owe nothing. I can join its story; I do not have to. To the cultural nation, on the other hand, I owe a great deal: the language I think in and the attitude of doing a thing for its own sake.

XII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection comes from Munich, and it is not a foolish one. In 1806 the Imperial City of Nuremberg was deeply in debt, and Bavaria took over its debts. The small Franconian territories were cumbersome. Bavaria gave Franconia a modern administration and uniform law. The Franconian pride in the oldest tradition is open to challenge as well: the Bavarian stem duchy is just as old. A forced marriage can become a good marriage, and Franconia is doing well today.

The second objection concerns solidarity. Without a shared “we”, say liberal nationalists such as David Miller, nobody willingly pays for others, and the welfare state was born in the nation-state. This must be taken seriously. But it only shows that a community needs a shared story, not that the story has to be national. Jürgen Habermas proposed constitutional patriotism for this: attachment to shared rules rather than to descent.

The third objection is aimed at the contempt. Whoever despises the state, say Hobbes and his successors, forgets what comes without it: not freedom, but the direct rule of the strongest. And contempt for the state is today the business of populists who want not to improve it but to occupy it themselves. This too must be taken seriously. But the answer is not less state; it is a state that is not occupied. Whoever despises the oligarchy is defending democracy.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that people who love their land and merely respect their state are worse citizens than those who fuse the two.

XIII. The Answer

The land carries us. The state is meant to order our life together and is again and again occupied by a few. The nation tells us who we supposedly are, and only as a cultural nation does it tell something true. The land is necessary, the state is a task, the political nation is an offer, the cultural nation an inheritance.

I am a Rhinelander, I live in Franconia and I am governed from Munich. More than two hundred years ago a Corsican moved both lands about as if they were pieces on a board. The lands survived it. The question is whether the states that dispose of them today are wiser than he was.