Wars of Forms: Constitutional challenges to the continental concept of ”empire” and the rise of the German nation (1848-1863)

In modern Europe, most existing states are understood as nation-states. Nevertheless, concepts of kingdoms and princes are omnipresent in childhood stories and narrations. Every boy at one time acts out as a prince on a white horse and every girl understands herself as a little princess. Roles of prime minister or secretary of state do not come near the popularity level of their royal antecedents.
Today, The European kingdoms and empires are mostly extinct, with royal households being mostly intra-constitutional safety measures and popularizers of “nationality”. But the continuation of royal households and fragments of earlier political empires, such as the Danish Realm (rigsfællesskab) with Greenland, The Faroe Islands and the Danish State, poses the important question: how did the replacement and re-formation of the European political system happen?
I argue, that we can observe a semantic, both political and military, war between the two forms, the post-napoleonic, Fichtean notion of nationality (1807-8) and the historical notion of imperium. “Nationality” entered the political semantics witch such a force and shook the existing political order of empires to the ground because of its simplicity, compared to the absolutist understanding of nationality as patriotism and loyal subjects to the monarch. It did so also because of superior management of the temporal dimension.
In the present paper, I compare two cases from the uproar of revolution in 1848 until the dismantling of the one empire, whereas the other kept its existence for another 70 years. The Danish and Austrian cases fascinate by their similarity, as they both were partially connected to the holy German empire, but with major parts of the realm located outside the borders of the “Reich”. Both had to cope with separatist uprisings and apply appropriate forms of response.
To unravel the two complex cases of political ‘management’ of the rise of german nationality, I have to open up the semantic complex of “crown”, “state”, “kingdom”, prince and government, as they are used in governmental, internal communications, dispatches and international treaties.