Abstract
What the German nation is and what its boundaries are have always puzzled historians of the early construction of the German nation-state. Indeed the further back into history one searches, the more elusive the very notion of a German national identity becomes. According to Herder, nationalism has little to do with the state, let alone politics or citizenship. Nations are pre-political, their roots lie in language, culture and ethnicity. The German nation-state, at the beginning of Wilhelmine Empire, was a strong, politically widely accepted one. The completion of unity in 1870-71 stands in a complicated relationship with what had been created in 1866-7. The state was accordingly less unitary than the greater Prussia of 1867. Consequently, the federalism of the Second Empire took the form of tolerating different kinds of governments, rather than "devolving power from the centre on a uniform basis".
