Pan-Germanism, also occasionally known as Pan-Germanicism, is a pan-nationalist political idea. Pan-Germanists originally sought to unify all the German-speaking people – and possibly also non-German Germanic-speaking peoples – in a single nation-state known as the Greater Germanic Reich, fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation.
Image: Rudolf Krziwanek Georg Ritter von Schönerer, um 1893
A nation-state is a political unit where the state, a centralized political organization ruling over a population within a territory, and the nation, a community based on a common identity, are congruent. It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant national or ethnic group.
Portrait of "The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster", one of the treaties leading to the Peace of Westphalia, where the concept of the "nation state" was born