It is a pity that, once more, a thread on this subject turns wrongly because some people can't help moving to the question of determining who was right.
If you don't want to discuss that question, stop discussing it. If you do, accept that there are different opinions than just yours and the wrong one.
The fact is that there was 2 conceptions about nationality that were antagonist :
- the french one that was about political community and the sense of a national consciousness. And it is to a large extent the model of most of existing nation States. It is the political frontier that determines the nation.
- the german one that very long was (until the end of WW2) about filial link and language. Whatever people think, they were german if they were of german blood and the most obvious sign of this national identity was speaking german.
If only the Germans
had defined nationality/claimed teritory upon language. In that case we wouldn't be having this discussion. WWI (as we know it) would likely and WWII certainly have been prevented.
The matter has been settled politically. Pan-somethingism, be it pangermanism or panfrenchism or pan englishism or pan chinesegism is very dangerous because it calls for conflictual relationships.
The fact was that when the french royal or republican State took control of territories, it assimilated the people and culturally turned them into french people feeling french which did not prevent them from also feeling a local identity (be it britons, provencials, or alsacians).
Are you saying forced assimilation doesn't call for conflictual relationships???
The fact is also that the 19th century was the century of national identities forgery. Some writers and poets strongly contributed to the emerging of national identities that had not existed because there were just in fact in the past there were just some common feature of languages. But they created a national mythology. Common german was set-up in the 19th century while there had forever been several germanic dialects and that there still remained other germanic languages than german, such as english, danish, dutch, and that there were other nations than Germany that spoke a germanic language or even german.
Common German began when Martin Luther translated the Bible, so in that aspect, Germany was actually early.
And AFAIK there is no German speaking territory that wasn't part of Germany for some time in history - just as there is no French speaking territory that was never French.
Claiming that Alsace was a german land because it was inhabited by people speaking a germanic language from the 4th century on is the same as claiming that Brandenburg, Saxony, Mecklenburg-Pommern, not to say about Prussia and Silesia, were polish lands because they had been inhabited by slavian people before germanic settlers began colonizing these areas from the 10th century on. It is like claiming that germans took french-celtic lands south of Denmark because the lands between the Rhine and the Alps was inhabited by celts that were ancestors of the french since there are many celtic roots in the french language.
All this is subjective and contains a lot of gross manipulations.
In case no one told you, all territories that were still Danish or Slavic speaking in 1918
were taken away from Germany, and I've heared of noone saying "I'm not a German native speaker, but I still want to stay German".
The mismatch between nationality and language in A-L is quite unique.
EDIT: To avoid misunderstandings, I'm
not saying A-L should be German. I just object to the picture of evil 19th century Germans that condemned the absolutely not German Alsaciens to exile vs. the white French nights who freed them from their suffering in 1918. That picture is utterly wrong for both sides.
But the decisive point is that, in the 19th century, there was a massive surge in national consciousnesses and of the idea of national of sovereignty as the base of popular will. This implied that it became much harder to exchange territories as if they were goods, which had been common in the past.
Neither Germany
nor France ever bothered to make a referendum, and both Germany and France made a partial ethnic cleansing after they took it.
So if we just came back to the question of this thread, I will sum it up again by saying that, no, if Germany had just taken Alsace but not Moselle in 1871, it would have changed nothing because of all that has already been written on this thread.
That much I agree with. Neither the French nor the German mistakes are removed even by total waiver of annexations:
France had a long history of aggression against Germany. A-L was an excellent excuse for France to continue this emnity, but not the only one that could be found.
Gemany would have been just as arrogant without A-L and perhaps even more paranoid if a stronger France allied with Russia.
They need some sort of common project to learn how self-destroying that enmity was - like OTL cold war.