Wrede, Martin <br/><br/>
Between Emperor, Empire, and Nation: The Rise of the "Political Spirit" in Modern Germany (Thirteenth to Fourteenth Century) 

 -  2007.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 82 
<br/><br/> The Holy Roman Empire succeeded to consolidate itself from the 1670s after the crisis of the Thirty-Year War, despite its internal tensions and heterogeneity as a political system. This consolidation was encouraged and supported by a strong wave of German patriotism which focused on the Empire, and the German nation. The empire had to face three enemies: the Turks, France, and Sweden, and these conflicts turned out to be decisive for this newly developed or invigorated national consciousness. The military threat the Empire’s enemies posed as well as the victories eventually achieved reinforced the identification of princes, estates, and subjects with the empire and with the emperor as its political leader, and helped to create a German nation as a community marked by mutual assistance and a collective memory at the same time. Empire and nation defined themselves in opposition mainly to France and to the Turks, both described by propaganda as hereditary enemies. The wars with Sweden were not of the same importance since the Elector of Brandenburg did not succeed in creating a similar image of evil for this power, soon considered feeble and marginal. But even in this conflict, the office and the person of the Emperor were focal points of a federal and multi-confessional national identity. The empire exhausted its potential for modernization after these decades of relative success in wars and internal reforms. The internal cohesion of the empire declined in the absence of any direct and serious threat from its external enemies. The new confessionalization and the Europeanization of politics within the empire created a number of new internal conflicts which could not be settled due to the dynastic crisis of the house of Habsburg in 1740. Without common enemies and without common images of potential enemies, emperor, empire, and nation decayed more and more in the second half of the eighteenth century.