Chapter 17 explores how far the new Atlantic order that began to take shape in 1919 could be extended to the most unsettled region after the war: the post-imperial terrain of central and eastern Europe. It reassesses how the victors sought to balance in different ways newly prominent claims of national self-determination and fundamental strategic considerations in their efforts to create a stable system of states in this region – and of how they interacted with the representatives of the numerous east European national causes. While also analysing the Czechoslovakian settlement it then focuses on the victors’ attempts to “solve” the most critical problems in this context, the Polish and the Polish-German questions. And it underscores how extremely difficult it proved to establish a viable Polish nation-state that was not from the outset divided from its more powerful German neighbour by conflicts over contested borders and minority problems. More broadly, it shows how challenging it was to establish effective mechanisms to protect the rights of German, Jewish and other minorities in the new and very heterogeneous east European states. And it elucidates that the western powers’s capacity to forge a durable new order reached distinctive limits in the east.

Chapter 1 frames the main empirical question of The Everyday Crusade. By explaining the importance of myth in nation-making and the role of these myths in establishing American nationalism, this chapter explores how the religiously nationalistic ideology of American religious exceptionalism developed and embedded itself in American political and social culture. The authors delineate the ideology’s rich history and its link to restrictive and illiberal attitudes. This chapter reveals the power and persistence of national origin myths, their linkage to ideas about the specialness of America, and how over time they become a banal part of everyday American society.

Is America a chosen city on a hill? What does that commonly used phrase even mean and how does it shape Americans’ understandings of themselves, their neighbors, and their nation’s role in the world? The Everyday Crusade argues that Americans’ answers to these questions are rooted in a national myth that the authors call American religious exceptionalism. This chapter introduces the core questions of this book and provides a preview of the argument and research methodology employed.

Chapter 1 offers a reappraisal of the pathbreaking efforts of the peacemakers of the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) to establish a more durable European peace order, and a new European concert, after the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It then shows how the 19th century’s Vienna system provided novel mechanisms, rules and understandings to preserve peace and a new, more legitimate international equilibrium in and beyond Europe, thereby also creating essential conditions for the rise of the United States. Yet it also illuminates how changes in international politics and competing nationalist aspirations eventually led to the disintegration of the peace order of 1814–15 and the European concert in the aftermath of the trans-European revolutions of 1848–49 and the Crimean War of 1853–56.

Chapter 2 introduces and validates the authors’ measurement of their main theoretical concept, American religious exceptionalism. It provides a detailed portrayal of who adheres to American religious exceptionalism, the “disciples,” by juxtaposing their various religious identities, beliefs, and behaviors to American religious exceptionalism’s “dissidents,” and those who are more neutral in their adherence, the “laity.” The uniqueness of American piety vis-à-vis other industrialized nations’ religious beliefs, behaviors, and commitments is quite apparent. The authors explicate how Americans view their relationship between God and nation as uniquely American. Shifting toward an analysis of the disciples, this chapter uncovers several social, ideological, demographic characteristics that differentiate the disciples from the dissidents and the laity. Drawing on an impressive array of global and national survey data, the chapter provides strong empirical support for American religious exceptionalism as a distinct concept from other measures.

Beginning with Claude McKay’s “The Harlem Dancer”—in which the national space of Harlem opens up to the Caribbean from which its eponymous dancer has likely emigrated—this chapter reads the mass migration resulting from the structures of imperial capital as the determining social ground of modernist literature. Indeed, modernism registered, to an unprecedented degree, in both formal and thematic terms, an early moment of what we have now come to call globalization. But if modernist form betrays a complicity with globalization, in its persistence representation of the way national literary spaces open themselves up to cultural materials from elsewhere, it also levels a consistent critique of both capitalism and nationalism, a critique that unites its left and right wings. Modernist texts thus tend to separate economic and cultural globalization, critiquing the first, while advocating for the second, even as they demonstrate their deep inter-relationship.

The introduction provides an overview of the ways in which globalization can be defined and how this relates to literary studies. It sets out the book’s main approach, which is to view literature as being a key factor that shapes actual and imagined global phenomena. It also provides an overview of each of the books sections and chapters, flagging up connections between these and showing how they link in with other key fields of enquiry.

The chapter reconstructs the biographical and political background to the most widely known project of the brothers Grimm, the Children’s and Household Tales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began the collection when they were in their twenties and Jacob worked as a civil servant in Kassel, partly under French rule. By surveying the larger repertoire of genres preferred by leading nationalists reacting to Napoleon’s occupation, such as propagandistic pamphlets and war songs but also collections of folk narratives, the chapter uncovers the specific ideological function of the folktale collection as literary proof of cultural nationhood. Influenced by the volatile geopolitical situation during the Napoleonic wars, the brothers believed that the state should coincide with the German nation as defined by linguistic and cultural criteria, and they thought that the independent existence of this cultural unit was authentically demonstrated by collections of materials such as their folktales. Nationalism emerged as an ideology crucially dependent on scholarly documentation, which the brothers thought they could supply.

The chapter reconstructs Jacob Grimm’s political thought in the 1840s when he emerged as a leader of the new association of Germanists and a prominent delegate in the first German national parliament. Speaking in different venues, Grimm declared his commitment to national unity and claimed it was supported by disciplinary knowledge of language, literature, law, and myth. In particular, he asserted that the linguistic scholar could demarcate national collectives on the basis of verifiable grammatical knowledge and by so doing provide states with a sound, even scientific foundation. The chapter analyzes how Grimm used research findings about the distinctiveness of different Germanic languages to suggest authoritative answers to questions about units of legitimate rule in the post-revolutionary era. Grimm was not a radical and did not wish to subvert monarchy, but he insisted on the coincidence of royal rule with a national homeland, the outlines of which were best traced by the philologist.

In August 1846, the folktale collector, grammarian, mythographer, and lexicographer Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) wrote a letter to the Prussian king, Frederick William IV (1795–1861), in which he urged the monarch to support the German-speaking population of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the areas between Denmark and the German lands. At the time, the Danish king, Christian VIII, was also the duke of the twin duchies; in the summer of 1846, he had publicly declared that they must allow female succession, a reform that would secure continued Danish rule; the Danish royal family was running out of male heirs.

The chapter focuses on a persistent problem within nationalist ideology, as it emerged in Jacob Grimm’s reflections on the rise of mandatory schooling. School systems can impose a uniform language across a large territory, effectively giving shape to a national people. This became increasingly clear to Grimm as he witnessed the emergence of a veritable army of schoolteachers around the mid-nineteenth century. While he approved of greater national unification by means of mass schooling, the fact of public education also forced him to consider that the nation may not grow from below to delimit the proper reach of a state. Instead, an existing state apparatus could forge a more standardized culture by institutional means, at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language and customs within families. Hence the state may not need a philologist to trace national boundaries. Indeed, the school system itself, a necessary institution in the developed modern state, threatened local cultures with extinction and hence deprived populations of the cultural memory that Grimm had pledged to protect as a scholar.

The chapter shows how Jacob Grimm’s idea of culturally autonomous peoples was troubled by the intimate interactions that he uncovered in his historical scholarship on ancient German tribes. Seeking to unify his knowledge of diachronic linguistics and ethnic history in a final work, Grimm paid special attention to the one thing that had survived of the myriad tribes – their names – but also conceded that names were always generated by outside observers; names, Grimm admitted, were never chosen, always given. When Jacob Grimm explored the prehistory of Germany, then, he found not proud acts of autonomous self-naming by nations, but only boundary-defining encounters between groups and peoples. Grimm suspected that such cultural encounters had first become visible within the structures of literate imperial civilizations that housed multiple peoples and languages. Indeed, the practice of philology itself with its comparative grasp of several languages and cultures was an imperial phenomenon. The nationalist philologist, Jacob Grimm’s own writings ironically suggested, was the inheritor of the transnational and polyethnic empire rather than self-enclosed Germanic tribe.

The chapter examines Jacob Grimm’s political biography and presents his long government service in German principalities, punctuated by dramatic displays of public political commitment. Faced with the conflict between rigid, patriarchal rule by monarchs to whom he was often tied as a civil servant and his own vision of the nation as a natural community of love, Grimm hoped for the eventual appearance of a loving king genuinely attached to one national people. The resulting harmony between the people and the king would, Grimm believed, resolve a key political tension of his day, namely the one between princely sovereignty and popular influence. The chapter also reconstructs the curiously thin nature of Grimm’s political beliefs. While he was confident and at times strident in debates over the territorial shape of the nation, he was less vocal on other, domestic political issues, including discussions of rights and the distribution of vital goods in a society increasingly dominated by the so-called social question. In these areas, his nationalism provided no guidance. Grimm concentrated on one dimension of political legitimacy – national self-determination – and had little to say about other aspects of governance.