Pan-movements emerged when landlocked nations lacked overseas colonies and turned expansion inward

Evidence

The birth of the pan-movements did not coincide with the birth of imperialism; around 1870, Pan-Slavism had already outgrown the vague and confused theories of the Slavophiles, and Pan-German sentiment was current in Austria as early as the middle of the nineteenth century. They crystallized into movements, however, and captured the imagination of broader strata only with the triumphant imperialist expansion of the Western nations in the eighties. The Central and Eastern European nations, which had no colonial possessions and little hope for overseas expansion, now decided that they “had the same right to expand as other great peoples and that if [they were] not granted this possibility overseas, [they would] be forced to do it in Europe.” Pan-Germans and Pan-Slavs agreed that, living in “continental states” and being “continental peoples,” they had to look for colonies on the continent, to expand in geographic continuity from a center of power, that against “the idea of England …expressed by the words: I want to rule the sea, [stands] the idea of Russia [expressed] by the words: I want to rule the land,” and that eventually the “tremendous superiority of the land to the sea…, the superior significance of land power to sea power…,” would become apparent. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 570

Categorization

• XREF: The sea-power vs land-power antagonism prefigures later rhetorics of maritime vs continental ‘civilizations’ that appear in postcolonial and area-studies critiques relevant to the Islamophobia readings.