World War I came at the end of a long process of domestic consolidation and outward expansion of the great European powers. Indeed, among the most distinct features of the new nation-state were the eradication of inner resistance to its claim to sovereignty and control and the ceaseless striving to expand either its proper borders or its overseas empire. This in turn tended to create a mechanism of selfdefinition and legitimization based on two mutually dependent conceptual and material requirements, namely, the need to define enemies and the urge to make victims, even if the intensity and severity of its application depended on specific circumstances in each individual state. From the state’s point of view, those seen as belonging to it had to be integrated, either willingly or by coercion, whereas those seen as not belonging to it had to be excluded or eliminated, no matter whether they wished to belong to it or not. Hence the definition of both foe and friend, compatriot and nonpatriot entailed the making of victims, that is, compelling people to conform to a definition they might not share, based on categories imposed on them by a larger community or a political regime.
The process of state formation in Europe was of course riddled with ambiguities and contradictions, occasionally leading to eruptions of violence and destruction. There were “border cases” along the frontiers of states as well as in the heartland. The identities of the Alsatians and the inhabitants of the Pyrenees, for instance, kept shifting for several centuries, as was the case with some of the peoples living along the eastern and expanding borders of the old and new German empire. Such groups could be defined either as enemies or as members of the national community, depending on changing political circumstances, military conquests, ideological determinants, and economic requirements. French peasants were in the process of becoming “Frenchmen” throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, while the inhabitants of the numerous states and principalities that eventually made up the newly unified German Reich were similarly undergoing a process of “Germanization.” If the Third Republic refashioned the notion of “true France,” the German Empire appropriated and expanded the concept of Heimat (home, birthplace, homeland). In the course of this process, some ethnic, religious, and linguistically distinct minorities within these large entities retained an especially ambiguous status. Paradigmatic of such ambiguity were the Gypsies and the Jews.
Of these two groups, the Gypsies presented less difficulties of definition, since they remained the domestic outsider par excellence, neither wishing nor being allowed to join the national community. No wonder that such terms as German or French Gypsies, or, for that matter, the very word Gypsy (or Zigeuner or tsigane) to designate the Sinti (German Gypsies) and Roma (the ethnic group as a whole) in the first place, tell us very little about the self-perceptions of the group. Instead, these terms reflect the long-standing prejudices in Europe and the growing inability of national communities to deal with those who remained outside of the consensus, fitting into none of the increasingly established categories of class, ethnicity, language, or residence. The Jews were a more difficult case. On the one hand, their legal emancipation coincided with the political, constitutional, and administrative emergence of the modern nation-state, as was the case in revolutionary France and, in the following century, with the establishment of the German Reich. On the other hand, it was this very same process that brought about a profound transformation in the age-old anti-Jewish prejudices of Christian Europe to modern political and racial antisemitism. Unlike the Gypsies, who appear to have largely preferred to retain their traditional way of life, the Jews experienced a massive process of “coming out of the ghetto,” motivated both by the state’s lifting of legal restrictions on occupation and residence, and by the Jews’ growing urge to achieve political and economic integration into gentile society, not least in order to improve their often wretched material conditions. And yet the parallel effort by increasingly assimilated Jewish communities to retain some features of their specific identity and some links to their coreligionists across national borders made them into a symbol of the “insider as outsider.” Thus the Jews served as both proof of and metaphor for the immense integrative powers of the new nation-state; simultaneously, they came to symbolize its exclusionary potential. Ambiguous identities produced tremendous social, political, and psychological tensions, which in turn made for that complex relationship between creativity and disintegration, ingenuity and annihilation, so typical of our century. In this sense, the Jews can be seen as the paradigmatic example of the preoccupation with identity and solidarity, exclusion and victimization that numerous states or at least some of their agencies have manifested in the modern era.
As it consolidated its domestic and international status, the nationstate was simultaneously beset by visions of decadence and degeneration, chaos and anarchy, disintegration and subversion, invasion and destruction. Europe on the eve of World War I was a society haunted by inarticulate fears and anxieties just as much as it was propelled forward by a fervent faith in progress and science. The hard-won domestic unity seemed to symbolize and facilitate the eternal grandeur of the nation; paradoxically, it also appeared to be in imminent danger of social, political, and moral upheaval. A source of confidence and security, the national community also generated anxieties about its potential dissolution, seemingly under attack from all quarters: organized labor “from below,” destabilization of traditional gender roles “from within,” and deterioration of international relations “from without.” Moreover, confidence in European superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the world, rooted in the newly conquered vast colonial empires, was undermined by fears about the West’s vulnerability to infiltration by other races and civilizations and alarm about the biological degeneration of the white race.