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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]