> I don't understand how that could be a high-trust monocultural society in the 1800s.
It makes sense if you squint hard, and understand that "culture" in such arguments, is being used as a proxy of something else that is no longer acceptable to say out loud in polite company. So it was a bunch of disparate states with different traditions, but the same European "culture" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
And it goes the other way, if you want to play that game.
If what you were saying were true then "whiteness" couldn't possibly refer to things such as purely abstract cultural-norms (either don't exist or is weasel-word according to you). So then what are they referring to?
If my intepretation is in bad faith, I'm assuming you can answer GPs question then: how were the many pre-unification bavarian princedoms whose independent histories went back 100s of years monocultural?
It makes sense if you squint hard, and understand that "culture" in such arguments, is being used as a proxy of something else that is no longer acceptable to say out loud in polite company. So it was a bunch of disparate states with different traditions, but the same European "culture" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).