5 - Recasting the Emigrant Nation

Summary

The German emigrant nation proved strikingly resilient despite the Allies’ global efforts to undermine it. The leadership in many of those states confused the presence of Germans all over the world with a German presence somehow beholden to and shaped by the German nation-state.That was their great miscalculation.The demise of Imperial Germany did not dramatically undermine these communities or undercut their soft forms of power because neither had been Imperial Germany’s creations.As a result, Germans quickly returned to being the United States’ greatest rivals in Latin America and their businesses and communities again were flourishing by the middle of the 1920s.At the same time, however, the creation of German minorities across central and eastern Europe mattered a great deal; contributing to the rise of virulent ethno-nationalism, particularly among a younger generation.Within those new contexts, the global flows of people were now channeled and shaped by ever-more stringent immigration laws in the United States and elsewhere as well as ever-more political refugees from the USSR and the nationalizing Central and Eastern European states.