Moral Reconstruction

• Department of History

PhD defence by Wouter Baas

This dissertation analyzes how German-speaking Catholics developed new forms of international and transnational cooperation in the interwar period, which connected the promotion of Catholic values to the spread of German nationalism on the international stage. It describes a trajectory by which German-speaking Catholics overcame their initial aversion to both internationalism and German nationalism. At the start of the 1920s, they tried to adapt, infiltrate in and cooperate with the new institutions of the international order, such as the League of Nations, or set up their own organizations like Caritas Catholica. However, as it became clear that these organizations failed to deliver on their nationalist goals, particular in the protection of German-speaking minorities in East Central Europe, Catholic activists embraced transnational German nationalist activism in ways that would have been unheard of before the First World War. Arguing that the protection of the Catholic faith required the simultaneous promotion of German Volkstum around the world, they spread the idea of a distinctive German Catholic tradition, which they applied to intellectual and academic cooperation, Catholic social work, minority activism and the development of colonial settlements in South America. By decentering Catholic internationalism from the Vatican toward actors ‘doing’ Catholic internationalism from below, I show that through Catholic internationalism, German-speaking Catholics made an unprecedented turn toward the exclusionary and destructive forms of nationalism that determined European history in the years leading to the Second World War.

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