Gordon (1974) on Weltpolitik’s domestic origins

The international implications were enormous in the German case. Two sorts can be distinguished. On the one hand were spillovers resulting from deliberate policies. German governments, in struggling  with the terrific centrifugal forces at home, were constantly tempted to fall back on their ultimate stratagem-the diversion of the conflict outward, the manipulation of foreign and colonial policy as a means of domestic control…  On the other hand was a critical spillover that arose quite irrespective of demagogic calculation, out of the inherent national situation of the Reich. For there was nothing basically solid or enduring about the Reich’s boundaries of 1871-the “Small Ger many” that Bismarck had created. Millions of German-speaking peoples continued to live outside them, in the Austrian Empire, Switzerland, the rest of Central and Eastern Europe. At the same time millions of non-German peoples (or, in the case of Alsace Lorraine, German-speaking but French-influenced in custom and politics) lived inside them. The result was an inherently uncertain situation in Central Europe-and not only uncertain but also dangerous.83 In effect Germany’s elites and masses were confronted with the choice, over time, of trying: (1) to preserve the Small Germany, which Prussia dominated and millions of whose inhabit ants, German-speaking or otherwise, were branded as enemies-in short, a basically unstable German situation; (2) to escape from that instability by creating a Great Germany, with Austria and parts of its empire absorbed; (3) to go further and seek a German-dominated Mitteleuropa running from the North Sea to the French Alps, from Alsace-Lorraine into Western Russia, and including as at least economic satellites the former members of not only the Austro Hungarian but the Turkish empires as well. Michael R Gordon, Domestic Conflict and the Origins of the First World War: The British and the German Case. Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Jun., 1974), pp. 191-226