The conclusion places the findings of this study within contemporary debates about Germany’s colonial past, using the Humboldt Forum as an entry point. It contrasts the official culture of remembrance, shaped by a redemption narrative, with a broader argument about global interconnectedness: German colonialism shaped not only societies in Africa, the Pacific, and China, but also the metropole and its political system. Yet these entanglements remain largely hidden, as their structural effects were absorbed into the institutions of the nation-state. To counter this obfuscation, the study traces the colonies’ imprint on imperial (later presidential) authority, the accountability of political officials, parliamentary leverage, the growth of the federal administration, naval expansion, increasing fiscal centralisation, the nationalisation of citizenship, and the expansion of civil society, revealing these developments as responses to the varied challenges of colonial governance. Taken together, they contributed to Germany’s consolidation as a more centralised nation-state. The argument culminates in a lateral theory of state formation, highlighting the pathways and mechanisms through which cross-border entanglements have shaped European nation-states.

Even as many of its institutional legacies endured, the First World War brought about the collapse of the German colonial empire. The July Crisis of 1914 was triggered by mounting tensions in the Balkans, but colonial rivalries and the naval arms race had already helped to entrench some of the alignments that defined the war. Germany’s bid to construct Mittelafrika and to challenge Britain at sea failed. Most German colonies were conquered early with only Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaign in East Africa continued until 1918. Germany’s war aims combined continental annexations with overseas expansion, but these ambitions collapsed with the military defeat on the Western Front, creating the conditions for the November Revolution. For Germany, the Treaty of Versailles brought a double loss of empire with the cession of its European borderlands and the transformation of its colonies into League of Nations mandates. Reduced to its national core, the Weimar Republic codified a more centralised nation-state, consolidating institutional developments fostered by the colonial empire in preceding decades. At the same time, the loss of imperial status fuelled a politics of resentment that contributed to the erosion of the republican order.

This chapter explores the genesis, structure, and potential of the European Union’s out-of-court dispute settlement bodies (ODSs), a cornerstone of the Digital Services Act (DSA) aimed at regulating social media platforms. As a manifestation of Governance by Emulation, ODSs blend public law principles with private governance, emulating individual rights adjudication to hold platforms accountable. This chapter examines the political context behind their creation, tracing the EU’s regulatory evolution and the legislative battles that shaped Article 21 of the DSA. While hailed as innovative tools for ensuring accountability, ODSs face significant structural limitations, such as non-binding decisions, weak cost incentives, and a narrow enforcement focus. Nonetheless, they present a promising avenue for resolving disputes efficiently and experimenting with integrating large language models in decision-making. Early implementation highlights a mix of creativity and challenges, offering insights into the EU’s broader regulatory ambitions to administrify platform governance and set global standards. By analyzing ODSs’ hybrid institutional design and initial practices, this chapter illustrates their dual potential: advancing accountability while exposing the risks of emulating public law mechanisms in private contexts. It concludes by reflecting on ODSs’ role as Emulated Guardians and their implications for future governance of digital public spaces. European Union

The introduction establishes the book’s central argument: the German nation-state was shaped not only by domestic dynamics but also by its colonial empire. Rather than treating empire and the nation-state as incompatible forms of political organisation, the chapter situates them within a shared global constellation and underscores their historical interdependence. Moving beyond debates that focus exclusively on colonial legacies that mirror colonial structures – such as racism and global inequality – it argues that we must also attend to structural effects of empire that assumed different forms, thereby concealing their colonial origins. The European nation-state exemplifies this apparent paradox: historically shaped by overseas empire building yet appearing as its polar opposite. Against this backdrop, the chapter critically engages with scholarship ranging from Hannah Arendt’s reflections on imperialism to more recent debates on global entanglements, while advancing a mechanism-based approach. Its key conceptual innovation is to introduce challenge and response as a mechanism through which crises in the colonies prompted reforms in the metropole that contributed to the consolidation of the nation-state.

This chapter characterizes the very idea of autonomy as a response to two problems: understanding the source of normativity and the reality of freedom. Following debates on normativity (Pufendorf and Leibniz) and freedom (Locke, Hume, Rousseau), Kant introduces the notion of autonomy as a unified response to both problems. On this account, to be positively free and to be normatively bound are one and the same thing: to follow rules one has given to oneself. After discussing the attractiveness of this idea, the chapter elaborates a first fundamental challenge: the so-called paradox of autonomy, suggesting that autonomy at its very foundation reverts to heteronomy or arbitrariness. The chapter shows that Kant’s conception is indeed threatened by this paradox and develops Kant’s ways of avoiding it. It argues that Kant’s most important resource, however, has not yet been fully acknowledged: It consists in his concept of self-organizing beings from the third Critique. To avoid the paradox, we should no longer think of self-determination in terms of self-legislation but rather conceive of it in terms of living self-constitution. The chapter closes by discussing why Kant himself did not fully develop this resource and argues that the main reason resides in his notion of transcendental freedom.

Throughout history, children have been adopted across different states and cultures, particularly during times of war and other natural or human-made disasters, requiring care by adults other than their biological parents (Boswell, 1988; Grotevant & Lo, 2017). One of the earliest and most legendary examples comes from the Bible. Despite living on the same land and having similar appearances, Egyptians and Hebrews were culturally distinct. The biblical narrative describes the Hebrews as initially welcomed in Egypt during a time of famine but later enslaved. Around the thirteenth to fifteenth century BCE, to save her son from a decree by the Pharaoh, who had ordered all Hebrew baby boys to be killed to control the Israelite population, Moses’ mother placed her four-month-old infant in a basket and set him afloat on the Nile River. An Egyptian princess, the Pharaoh’s daughter, found the basket, took pity on the baby, and decided to raise him as her own son. Moses, however, preserved his birth identity and is considered to be the greatest prophet in Judaism. Like Moses, Eunice Williams, also known as Waongote (“one who is planted like an ash tree”) and Marguerite Kanenstenhawi Arosen, was adopted across cultures on the same soil. As a seven-year-old girl, she was captured by Mohawk warriors during the 1704 Deerfield Massacre, adopted into their tribe by a Mohawk family in the Kahnawake settlement near Montreal, instructed in the Mohawk language and customs, and fully integrated into Mohawk society. Eunice is known for choosing not to return to her English colonial family despite attempts to ransom her. These examples demarcate two extremes of adoption across cultures: preserving or transforming one’s cultural identity while being raised in adoption.

In contrast to liberal democracy, which translates constituent power into processes and institutions of representation and government, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri place a premium on constituent power: inspired by social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, they argue that the constituent power of a multitude should not be translated into the constituted powers of a state. Doing so would deprive the multitude of its revolutionary and radically democratic potential. Pure constituent power seeks to repeat in perpetuity the exception of the revolutionary founding moment of democracy. That Hardt and Negri rely on increasingly theological models in their account of constituent power and revolution highlights the antidemocratic tendency of their conception of “constituent governance.” A political theology that seeks to make the exception permanent is not compatible with democracy. The enactment of pure constituent power in the democracy of the common inevitably leads to what Carl Schmitt described as “sovereign dictatorship.” Hardt’s and Negri’s “constituent governance” is an arbitrary form of governance without any checks and balances.

The loss of community is often seen as one of the reasons for the alienating experience of modernity. Community seems to allow for a civic-minded solidarity that counteracts the legitimation crisis of democracy by returning agency to citizens. Such a demand for a communitarian correction to liberal constitutional democracy is not without dangers, even when this demand is intended to stand in the service of a more democratic life. This chapter traces the fate of this communitarian desire in a broader transatlantic field, highlighting the uncanny connections among the philosophical debate about communitarianism, the antidemocratic and authoritarian drift in American conservative political and legal thought, and central aspects of European neofascism. These connections should make us suspicious about the democratic potential often ascribed to community. The ease with which arguments for a communitarian correction of democracy can be used against democracy suggests that community lacks an intrinsically democratic and emancipatory potential.