So you really do think that "the Italian nation gained a lot of territory in the national unification, even though territories like the Azure Coast, which were culturally Italian, voted to join France." I honestly don't know what to say to that. I said "nation", not "state". A nation is not a nation state.
I think your main error is to conflate duty with legalism. The ethics of duty is decidedly NOT legalistic, it is existential at the root. (The Dewey book gives some concrete examples.) Kant was of part-Scottish ancestry and was inspired by Scottish thinkers to try and come up with a deontological/existential approach to legalism, but it is consequentialism that is naturally legalistic. (with exceptional periods of "emergency", etc, but on the existential side you have stridently anti-legalistic eschatologists like Dostoevsky or even Berdyaev, really: https://archive.org/details/russianidea017842mbp Dostoevsky would of course have denied being an existentialist, and in a strict sense he would've been right, but I'd have trouble honestly justifying the claim that his approach is not existential in the loose sense that's relevant in this context, where Kant is also existential in the final analysis.)
(I'll let Orwell explain how much you owe to the culture of England: http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/The_Lion_and_the_Unicorn England is probably the least existential culture of our times. As you probably know, the Austrian school economists were trying to theorize the developments in England. Many German theorists belonged to English-inspired schools like that, but even legalist thinkers who considered themselves proudly non-English were more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSNJGymnLG4
That is satire, but notice how progressive Germans were accused of imitating the English in EXACTLY the same way that Islamists accuse progressive Arabs of copying the West. The nature of the relationship of England to the rest of Europe was previously identical to the nature of the relationship of Europe to the rest of the world.
That's what you get when you have existentialism at the bottom of your legalism. (And once you approve of the existential approach, it's difficult to shut the door when extremists start clamoring for a purer version of the approach to which you've already fixed your seal of approval.) I strongly disagree with the notion that the contemporary European idea is anything like that. (See Habermas' objections against Heidegger. Habermas is arguably the philosopher of contemporary Europe.) Even the notion of an "European idea" including Britain is an oversimplification because if you ask Europeans, many of them will tell you that England has a different culture from the rest of Europe. You need to integrate a lot more facts to get less crooked outlines of such matters IMO.
I don't want you to think I'm putting German culture down or anything, but proposing an interpretation of "the German idea" that has the figure of Faust expurgated from it is like confusing Islamic culture with the Arabian Nights theme.)
That is satire, but notice how progressive Germans were accused of imitating the English in EXACTLY the same way that Islamists accuse progressive Arabs of copying the West.
You call the collapse of democracy in 1933 a collapse of Germany but that democracy mostly was an American idea. After mostly losing to the US in WWI German's spent a decade wanting to copy the US.
You can't at the same time label stopping to copy other countries systems a collapse and copying other countries system a collapse.
...I don't want you to think I'm putting German culture do
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.