Expellee elites framed their lost-homeland cause as pan-European unification that would erase borders.
Evidence
The Europe which the expellee leaders had in mind was not confined to its western regions, however. As a prominent GB/BHE figure explained in 1954, the expellee elites regarded themselves as ” … the trailblazers of a real community of all European peoples” that would bring about a new system even in the “East European area” in which “state borders [would] sink to insignificance.” The end result of expellee-style unification would thus be a fairytale-like state of peace, happiness, and harmony throughout the continent. — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 60
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reading purpose: expellee elites reframed their territorial grievance as a universalist European project, an example of manufacturing moral-idealist justification to sustain the claim. — connects to: Expellee political power eroded once generational change and border settlement removed grievances — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 403; Europe’s contested borders function to separate it from communist and Islamic alienness — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 831
Related
- Expellee rhetoric of rights and Europe disguised irredentist territorial claims. (similarity 0.84)
- Unrealistic irredentist goals alienated expellee members and marginalized their organizations (similarity 0.82)
- Expellee organizations lost all influence once the territorial goal became moot (similarity 0.81)
- Europe’s contested borders function to separate it from communist and Islamic alienness (similarity 0.81)
- Expellee political power eroded once generational change and border settlement removed grievances (similarity 0.80)
- Expellees fixated on memory of home rather than the border propaganda war. (similarity 0.80)
- Expellee leaders weaponized rights rhetoric to mask annexationist aims toward the East. (similarity 0.80)
- West German governments codified expellee homeland rights as preconditions. (similarity 0.80)
- Expellee organizations sustained West German revanchism by reinforcing refusal to accept the postwar border (similarity 0.79)
- Successful economic integration did not dissolve expellee political communities organized around lost-homeland grievance (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Expellee political power eroded once generational change and border settlement removed grievances
#expands(0.85) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 403 - Europe’s contested borders function to separate it from communist and Islamic alienness
#corroborates(0.80) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 831