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With the establishment of republics in Germany and Austria after the First World War, many conservatives and those on the radical Right challenged this new form of government on the grounds that it was un-German. This article explores the attempts made by the defenders of the Weimar and Austrian Republics, or republicans, to legitimize parliamentary democracy. It argues that the großdeutsch idea (the historical idea that a German nation state should include Austria) and support for an Anschluss (an Austro-German political union) were central to republicans’ energetic efforts to win over sceptics and attack the claims of their political opponents. Members of the Weimar Coalition parties and the Social Democratic Party of Austria drew a distinction between großdeutsch (greater German) and alldeutsch (pan-German) conceptions of nationhood, and thereby attempted to articulate a form of German nationalism that was compatible with a democratic body politic, a pluralistic society and peaceful international relations. They aimed at nothing less than fashioning their own version of German nationalism, one that stood in direct opposition to the exclusionary and violent nationalisms of the political Right. In revealing the pervasiveness of the großdeutsch idea at this time, this article points to the necessity of looking at developments on both sides of the Austro-German border when considering topics such as the redefinition of Germanness and the creation of democracy in interwar central Europe. Additionally, it demonstrates that support for transborder German nationalism was not simply the prerogative of the radical right after 1918. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to contextualize support after the Second World War for European integration in Germany, analysing continuities between interwar, wartime and postwar debates about unifying Europe both within and beyond Germany. Using such a temporal framing serves to highlight that many groups advocating European integration in the post-1945 period emerged out of more long-standing internationalist communities, not all of whom had supported international political frameworks and cooperation from a pro-democratic standpoint. Rather, a significant number of groups on the Left and Right sought to construct international bodies as a means of restraining what they saw as the harmful potential of majoritarian democratic nation-states. The article is therefore a contribution to recent research initiatives that have more critically assessed the growth in support for a united Europe after the Second World War and which have enriched the study of European integration from an earlier focus on primarily diplomatic processes and institutional histories. A case is made for an intellectual history of European integration, and the article highlights the importance of intellectual and political communities that argued for a Third Way Europe. The groups featured are not simply German organizations, but are communities whose membership, connections and impact were transnational. The article therefore seeks to challenge the approach typified by Alan Milward's important text, The European Rescue of the Nation State, which saw nation states as the major players in the history of integration, and their leaders as largely uninfluenced by the activities of civil society organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]