The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in the Prussian political imaginary: a politico-anthropological genealogy of the ‘special’ German–French relations

Abstract

This paper captures the processes by which the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars redefined enduringly the logics of interaction between Prussia/Germany and France. It explains transformations of power, political imagination and social organisation that are key to understanding the ‘special’ nature of contemporary German–French relations. The paper finds that historical and international relations narratives fail to address the entire range of system-level transformations in the international order. Making use of approaches and concepts such as liminality, communitas, mimetic theory and the sacred, this paper proposes a novel, political anthropological perspective on such transformations, conceiving them as the interlocking of mimetic binds. First, I present wars and revolutions as liminal moments of collective threshold experiences. Second, I show how the liminal process functions at the international system-level. Third, I explain the challenge that the approach of liminality is posing to theories of international and systemic change. Fourth, I analyse the liminal process in Prussia and show how the said wars brought the French and the Prussians/Germans in a long-term mimetic rivalry. Finally, I argue that the proposed theoretical framework can take the research on international institutions and nationalism beyond the narratives of sociology, political science and historical studies.