>>62437
>The HRE was never a culturally unified political entity, even during the time of Charlemagne.
Least of all during his time, because he unified them in the first place. I don't know where to draw the line at which the tribes became German, just as I wouldn't know where to draw the line at which the different groups in America became Americans.
>Despite total political unity under feudalism for a short time, the cutural commonality of The Carolingians was not enough to bind the peoples of regions as disparate as Swabia and Austria. Rather, you had a loose collection of independent electors that often fought amongst each-other, with local populations most strongly identifying with the city or region around which each elector was centered, and the local nobility which ruled over them.
That was true everywhere around the time. Before the French Revolution, your identity as a member of a large nation was not of primary importance. That never prevented people from identifying as English, French, Italian or German on top of whatever region or House they foremost belonged to. I know that even Machiavelli spoke of these groups back when they were all involved in internal wars, and that was in the 16th Century.
>This was further exacerbated during the reformation. By and large, pan-Germanism was a creation of the revolutions of 1848.
Neither of these really matter. Germany became a nation before the reformation and before someone came up with pan-Germanism. Movements like Pan-Germanism, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Slavism are always movements that want to bring a single nation under one political leadership, but they have nothing to do with creating that nation in the first place.
>Indeed, the majority of times in which Europe has found itself in political turmoil are those when the area referred to as Germany saw the strongest degree of centralization.
Wasn't that always the case when someone started to centralize shit?
And I'm not talking about centralizing Germany, or about it having to be centralized. Even if it went compeletely ancap from one day to the next, I have little doubt that the German identity would be kept for another few hundred years. It would probably enter the background more and more, but it wouldn't be abandoned altogether that easily. Same with many other nations.
Again, nations are distinct from states. Yugoslavia was a state, but it was barely a nation, and a hundred years down the line, it will be an anecdote. The Armenians, on the other hand, are a nation, whether they're under leadership by Turks, Russians or fellow Armenians.