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Pan-slavism is one of the elusive idea-concepts which can be easily defined. But the historian can hardly say how far they correspond to a political reality which exercises a decisive impact on the course of history. A similar contemporary ideaconcept is Pan-Africanism, propagated and commended by most Africans. So far it has failed to create a political or economic union. The only example of that kind, and that on a very minor scale, the Mali Federation, dissolved after a short existence. The same holds true of another similar concept, Pan-Scandinavianism, which is approximately as old as Pan-Slavism but better based on a much closer cultural and religious affinity.

TenYears after Bismarck's creation of the Reich, a Swabian philosopher, Karl Christian Planck, bitterly regretted in his posthumous Testament of a German, that "our people has now entered, similar therein to the Jewish people, its period of selfish national messianism." Like an Old Testament prophet, he regarded the German nation-state armed to the teeth as a perversion of the true Germany. "If such a universalist people, situated in the heart of Europe, forms in sharp contrast to its preceding history a centralist nation-state and sets before its neighbor nations an example of increased armament, what can result in an age of acute nationalism but total conflict?" Planck foresaw the war of 1914, but he hoped that out of it a reformation of Germany would come. He was too optimistic; the defeat of 1918 brought no reformation but an intensification of the trends of the Bismarckian Reich. With German scholarship leading the march to the abyss, the gulf between Germany and the West grew wider during the Weimar Reich. Thus the catastrophe of 1933 came about, and this in turn led to the war of 1939. The developments after that war, however, fulfilled Planck's hope for a reformation of Germany, for the rise of a new spirit.