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Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis
Abstract
Since the birth of mass political movements, European nationalists have lamented the failure of their constituents to respond to the siren song of national awakening. This article explores the potential of national indifference as a category of analysis in the history of modern central and eastern Europe. Tara Zahra defines indifference, explores how forms of national indifference changed over time, probes the methodological challenges associated with historicizing indifference, and examines the intersections between national indifference and transnational history. Making indifference visible enables historians to better understand the limits of nationalization and thereby helps to challenge the nationalist narratives and categories that have traditionally dominated the historiography of eastern Europe.
... It is worth emphasising that until the outbreak of the open conflict in the 1940s and the ensuing deportations, social (ethnic and religious) boundaries between Poles and Ukrainians were fluid (Snyder 2003a). Today, we would probably refer to the identity of some Polish-Ukrainian borderland residents as being nationally indifferent (Zahra 2010) or anational (Halemba 2015). ...
The mobilisation process of members of the Ukrainian national minority in Przemyśl is discussed and analysed in this chapter. Faced with the crisis precipitated by the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, Przemyśl residents of Ukrainian origin became deeply involved with aid efforts for forced migrants. Ukrainian minorities have lived in this smallish town in Southeast Poland and the entire Polish-Ukrainian border region for centuries. This cohabitation, particularly in the 20th century, was bristling with conflicts, which included mass deportations of the Ukrainian population. The ability to speak Ukrainian by the community in question was one of the resources at the disposal of local Ukrainians, which they used to effectively help those affected by the crisis. Mobilisation of the Ukrainian minority and its commitment to the humanitarian aid effort were also acknowledged by local and regional authorities and the national majority, which, thus far, were prone to marginalise the presence and significance of the Ukrainian minority in this region.
... Both "void" or "no neighbour's land" are new concepts in the field of study of the ethnically diverse past of Central and Eastern Europe that otherwise has been studied for decades. Attention was paid to the topic of ethnic identities and their (in)stability in the period before World War 2 (Zahra 2010;Judson 2023), as well as to the problem of why these multiethnic communities disintegrated during and after World War 2 (Burzlaff 2019;Snyder 2010). One of the reasons for such large-scale violence in the communities that might have seemed idyllic before the War was a desire for property. ...
The article focuses on how residents of the north Bohemian town of Liberec deal in their family histories with possession of post-displacement. The objects they use were confiscated from the German-speaking minority in the aftermath of World War 2. The text provides an overview of narratives of this event in the Czech public discourse and discusses how these are reflected in family stories. The study is based on three family histories collected during ethnographic fieldwork and the analytical framework is informed by memory studies and theories of hauntology.
... Jalagin, 2021;Suodenjoki, 2022;Verschaffel, 2019;Whittington, 2019). Depending on the context, national indifference has been associated, for example, with borderland populations possessing a marked local identity but with little linkage to nationalist projects, people shaping hybrid forms of regional and national identities or inhabitants in ethnically mixed regions pendulating between different national identifications (Miller, 2019;Zahra, 2010). According to Fox et al. (2019), the usefulness of the umbrella concept of national indifference relies on its ability to direct attention away from the 'purveyors of nationalism' to the agency of ordinary people and to probe the limits of their nationalisation. ...
Our article discusses the adaptability of the concept of national indifference to the context of post‐war Finnish society and everyday nationalism. This period witnessed a transformation of previously exclusive and aggressive nationalism into a tempered and relatively inclusive version. Within this historical context, national indifference became an entangled category that could not be clearly attributed to a specific group of people but which carried with it a gradual change in subjective attitudes and consciousness. The case of post‐war Finland demonstrates that just as nationalism changed its shape over time, becoming subtly embedded in everyday life, so too did national indifference. The article thus argues that an increase in the level of national indifference could actually make space for national integration and, furthermore, that any given expressions of nationalism, as well as the lack of them, must be studied against the background of people's experiences, which lend historically conditioned meaning to national sentiment and indifference alike.
Kroz konkretne primjere iz arhivske građe u ovom se članku kritički analizira nacionalni pristup povijesnih narativa u sjevernojadranskom prostoru nakon Drugog svjetskog rata te se ukazuje na potrebu transnacionalnog (odnosno anacionalnog) te „isprepletenog“ iščitavanja povijesti (entangled history) pograničnih područja. Upravo se u tim područjima, koja su podložna čestim promjenama (država, granica, vlasti, itd.), manifestiraju oblici višeslojnih, fluidnih, nedefiniranih, hibridnih te ambivalentnih identifikacija stanovništva, pa se dosadašnji etnocentrični povijesni prikazi čine neadekvatnim, odnosno nedovoljnim za dubinske analize širih društvenih fenomena u kompleksnim i tranzicijskim procesima koji su uslijedili nakon Drugog svjetskog rata. Stoga se može zaključiti da skorija povijest Istre nudi značajan uvid u procese izgradnje nacija i država, pružajući pritom bogat materijal za istraživanja kroz nove metodološke pristupe i perspektive putem kojih je moguće detaljnije analizirati međuodnose između društvenih i političkih aktera te fleksibilne strategije i prakse, podložne stalnim redefinicijama, u kojima su nacionalne identifikacije često samo sredstvo u postizanju stanovitih ciljeva. Using specific examples from archival sources, this article critically analyses the national approach to historical narratives in the post-World War II Upper Adriatic region and highlights the need for a transnational (or rather, non-national) and entangled approach to the history of the borderlands. Indeed, these territories, subject to frequent changes in state sovereignty, were characterized by forms of multilayered, fluid, undefined, hybrid, and ambivalent identifications of the population. Therefore, ethnocentric historical representations in times of crisis and transition appear inadequate or insufficient for in-depth analysis of broader social processes. This article focuses on the case study of the multilingual countryside of Istria after World War II, during the period of negotiations over the new Italian-Yugoslav borders. In particular, it considers the dynamics of the categorization of the Istrian population from above (the new Yugoslav authorities) and the reactions from below (the ordinary people in everyday life). As a result, social and political actors pursued a variety of flexible strategies and practices, subject to constant redefinitions, in which the possibility of national identification was often only an instrument to achieve specific and contingent goals. The transition in the postwar period thus underlines the specificity of borderlands, where the determination of (exclusive) national or linguistic belonging was a matter of situation. Not only were the forms of identification fluid and multifaceted, but the families themselves were intertwined by centuries of coexistence. Consequently, the efforts of the new authorities to divide the inhabitants of the newly annexed regions into exclusive national groups produced ambiguous results. Indeed, fluctuations in identity categories are a constant feature of Istrian history and have remained visible in almost all population censuses up to the present day.
While historical narratives of the communist legitimation of power in Yugoslavia have often marginalized perspectives of lesser-known civil servants, this study highlights the crucial role of Dr. Rudolf Bićanić, a renowned Yugoslav economist. Departing from the diplomatic, foreign political, and military perspectives when investigating the Yugoslav émigré government actions, this article explores the ideas espoused, networks created, and actions performed by Bićanić across diverse transnational settings. Bićanić’s lens as a vice-governor of the Yugoslav National Bank demonstrates that the debates regarding the future social and economic policies shaped the transition process between the two Yugoslav states. Driven by a mission to enhance peasant living conditions in Yugoslavia, Bićanić embarked on a brief yet impactful governmental career from 1941 to 1945. The article posits that Bićanić’s anti-government propaganda disseminated through the United Committee of South Slavs and his financial malversations led to the transfer of economic and political legitimacy over Yugoslavia in April 1944 to the National Liberation Council. With this action, Bićanić accelerated the signing of the Tito-Šubašić agreement in June 1944, which empowered him to negotiate the post-war reconstruction aid and loans in Washington, DC, carving a unique path for Yugoslavia between socialism and capitalism.
The article deals with the phenomenon of shaping Ukrainian national identity in artistic works of autobiographical nature, created at the time of life crisis and oppressive sociopolitical situation, using Leon Getz as an example. Getz (1896–1971) was a painter who was raised in a Polish-Ukrainian family in Lviv but made a decision to identify nationally with the Ukrainian minority, oppressed both in pre- and postwar Poland. After WWII, he was subjected to surveillance by the Polish Security Office because of his Ukrainian identification. That led him and his wife (also a Ukrainian) to attempt suicide—unsuccessful in the case of the artist, fatal in the case of his wife. Getz wrote down his memoirs twice: the first time in the 1930s, the second time after his wife’s death in the 1950s. The first memoirs expressed his loneliness in an environment dominated by Poles, and they were drawn up openly, though for the author’s needs only. The second memoirs presented his personal tragedy and were kept in secret because the Security Office sought to intercept Getz’s notes as documents incriminating the officers. However, the author hoped to make the text public in the future. The subject of the analysis is constituted by memoirs read in the context of the artist’s other personal documents and works. They present the formation of his Ukrainian national identity as the chosen one and at the same time as the one that, in his opinion, was related to his and his wife’s tragedy. I interpret these memoirs in two different but complimentary ways: first, as life writing at the time of a man’s personal life crisis and, second, as life writing in a situation of oppression by the authoritarian and after WWII totalitarian state, under surveillance by the Security Office, whose moves put the very subjectivity of an individual in crisis. Both interpretations highlight the process of building Getz’s self-identification not as a discovered preexisting nationality, but as a deliberate—and nonobvious—choice of national path. The article is based on Getz’s unpublished memoirs and works, which are held in archives in Cracow (Poland) and Rome (Italy).
This article explores the consequences of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's end through the tumultuous biography of a philanthropic entrepreneur and quasi-consul community leader known today for assisting thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II. Focusing on Paul Komor (1886–1973) and the migrant community of Shanghai Hungarians, the article contends that postimperial diasporas preserved a piece of empire in their commitment to Jewish emancipation, imperialist nationalism, multiple loyalties, and political nostalgia. It also argues that diasporic networks and charitable actions communicated political and national loyalties while creating and defining the boundaries of the community. Presenting original research involving sources in multiple languages from China, Hungary, the U.S., the U.K., and the Netherlands, the article traces the fortunes of a Jewish Hungarian family in colonial Shanghai, shows the limits of its son's charity-rooted advancement in community leadership, sheds light on the seemingly contradictory political ideas of a postimperial expatriate to explain his complicated relationship with his kinstate, and analyzes the institutionalization of communal charity and the competing prerequisite definitions of postimperial national belonging.
This chapter discusses recent theoretical attempts to redefine national philology through a focus on literary multilingualism, by looking at them from the perspective of East-Central European literature, a region “comparative by birth” (Emerson). How, and to what extent, can studies of literary multilingualism function as moves of resistance against the traditional Herderian triad of national language—national identity—national literature? Claims that multilingual literature is subversive per definition need to be interrogated, given that both the monolingualizing impulse of literature and its opening up to the multilingual character of world literature can be traced back to the same source, early German Romanticism. Drawing on Vladimir Biti’s conceptualization of post-imperial literature, particularly on the notion of translatio imperii, it is argued that a number of current developments which scholars of literary multilingualism celebrate as postnational (or postmonolingual) can already be observed in post-imperial East-Central European literature. Vice versa, medievalists remind us that the linguistic is the key to any operation of translatio imperii. If used complementarily, theories of literary multilingualism, post-imperial and world literature can illuminate how the monolingual paradigm in East-Central European literature emerged and how linguistic diversity in individual literary texts was shaped by and responded to the post-imperial condition.
This introductory article highlights the main developments in the Republic of Moldova from the breakup of the Soviet Union to the present from the perspective of national sentiment and manifestations. Using Mark Beissinger’s concept of “tides of nationalism”, the article examines the bottom-up ethnic mobilisation between the “quiet” and the “noisy” phases of national projects in Moldova. With the persistence of the “quiet” phase of nationalism, in the last three decades, Moldova’s population transitioned from identification based on ethnicity to one focused on civic coexistence. However, Russia’s attack on Ukraine risks disrupting this balance, while contributing to the resurgence of ethnic sentiment at the expense of civic cohesion. Following an analysis of the literature in the field of “everyday nationalism”, the authors present the contributions to this thematic section, highlighting the relevance of the Republic of Moldova’s case within the regional and international context.
Keywords: Republic of Moldova; perestroika; everyday nationalism; ethnicity; civic identification
Some students of anthropology must be familiar with passages from Bronisław Malinowski’s work (1981), in which, based on his personal field experience gained in the Trobriand Islands, he formulated guidelines and postulates defining a new type of research method in social anthropology. One of the most important aspects of Malinowski’s methodological manifesto was drawing attention to the fact that the language of the studied community is a necessary tool. Malinowski strongly emphasised that ethnographers cannot explore the culture of the studied communities, and especially their “spirit”, without knowing the language of the local people. Thus, the ability to speak the respondents’ language, in addition to long-term research, became a rubric for ethnographic studies. In this article, the starting
point for the reflection on ethnographic presence in the field is the language and the ethnographer’s level of linguistic (in)competence. Using my own research experience as an example, I show that the language of locals spoken by ethnographers is not only a tool for communication with fieldwork
partners, but also that the very use of this language and the level of its competence or the use of its specific variants can become, if ethnographic reflexivity is maintained, the subject of observation and reflection, revealing selected aspects of the explored community and its culture.
In our opinion, the scholarly and general ways of perceiving the emigrants from the Czech lands are based on methodological nationalism, which identifies the concept of society with the modern national state. Based on this, Bohemian resettlers who founded several settlements on the southern border of the Habsburg Empire in present-day Romanian Banat in the early nineteenth century have hitherto been divided, in the spirit of ethnicism and methodological nationalism, into Czechs (Bohmen) and Czech Germans (Deutschbohmen). Against this, an alternative research perspective, represented by the concept of national indifference, can be applied. The object of this article is hereby to re-assess of the collective identity of emigrants resettlers from the Czech lands towards its nationally indifferent character. We propose to overcome the ethnicist framework of the research on Bohemian resettlers by introducing what we term as the inclusive approach to expatriatism. This article is based on archival and local written sources and ethnographic field research (interviews) collected during the years 2010-2017.
Restoration censorship forced European Romantic literature to retreat from society and politics into subjective intimacy, fantasy, mythology, history, and exotic places. In addition to conforming to restrictions, however, censorship also led writers to evade its control (pseudonyms, publication abroad, allusive style) and, more rarely, to overt or covert rebellion (petitions, satire, etc.). An example of this is the German sonnets written by the Slovenian romanticist France Prešeren in the mid-1830s as a poetic response to the public controversy over the cultural strategies of national revival (the so-called Slovenian ABC war) and the behind-the-scenes struggles over the censorship of the poetry almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee). With their illocutionary force, Prešeren’s sonnets are directed against prominent collaborators of censorship and the centers of ecclesiastical and secular power that wanted to keep the embrionic Slovenian literary field under their control. These poems move between satirical irony and sentiment, between the fictional suspension of dominant positions in the field and the search for sympathy for the depressing lack of consecration. The satire against the censors of his elegy dedicated to Matija Čop stands out with its acrostic and the affect of rage.
At the outset, a distinction is drawn between globalization, that takes the shape of a consensus imposed from above, and worlding, that takes the shape of a dissensus developed from below. In Jacques Rancière’s terms, globalization “polices” a political space, suppresses conflicts among its constituents, appropriates and translates everything into its own identity parameters. By pointing out the “political” gap between what is claimed and what is within the given space, worlding, in contrast. insists on disagreement. However, these two reconfigurations and recalibrations of human being-in-common are never diametrically opposed, but are interrelated and intertwined. Worlding can start as a liberating “politics” but, as soon as it institutes its platform of commonality, may slip into an imposed “police”. Since political disagreement necessarily aims to legitimize its unrecognized identities, a surreptitious perversion of dissensual politics into a consensual police is its inescapable ultimate consequence. Disagreement invents names and utterances, setting up new collectivities that solidify their identities by “policing” their spaces. Accordingly, one can conclude that worlding starts as an emancipating project that gradually turns into discriminating globalization. The continuous slide of one into the other impeded and disconcerted the political space of European modernity from its very beginnings, accompanying it like an uncanny shadow. This space repeatedly proliferated both its internal (intra-European) and external (extra-European) “zones of indistinction”, whose residents forged transborder alliances with the aim of its recalibration and reconfiguration.
Working-class Britons played a crucial role in the pioneering settlement and integration of South Asians in imperial Britain. Using a host of new and neglected sources, Imperial Heartland revises the history of early South Asian immigration to Britain, focusing on the northern English city of Sheffield. Rather than viewing immigration through the lens of inevitable conflict, this study takes an alternative approach, situating mixed marriages and inter-racial social networks centrally within the South Asian settlement of modern Britain. Whilst acknowledging the episodic racial conflict of the early inter-war period, David Holland challenges assumptions that insurmountable barriers of race, religion and culture existed between the British working classes and non-white newcomers. Imperial Heartland closely examines the reactions of working-class natives to these young South Asian men and overturns our pre-conceptions that hostility to perceived racial or national difference was an overriding pre-occupation of working-class people during this period. Imperial Heartland therefore offers a fresh and inspiring new perspective on the social and cultural history of modern Britain.
El presente artículo analiza seis publicaciones recientes que abordan la historia del siglo XX en Europa central y del este. El objetivo del texto es comentar críticamente los principales temas de la investigación reciente sobre la región, conectando estos libros con otras publicaciones y debates que han marcado las líneas de fuga de la historiografía de las dos últimas décadas.
Western societies over the last few decades have seen an increased interest in questions of group belonging and group identities, including ethno‐national groups. According to essentialising or constructivist paradigms, belonging to a national group is commonly conceptualised in the range of objective versus subjective criteria, where objective entails ascription and subjective, self‐identification. This paper suggests disentangling the paired dimensions—objective and other‐classification versus subjective and self‐classification—by analysing the late Habsburg Empire. I argue that the introduction of national registers in the new provincial constitutions and electoral laws of Moravia, Bukovina and Galicia accelerated an objective understanding of nationality and increasingly favoured other‐classification over self‐classification in cases where national belonging had become an administrative category. Yet, to do justice to the individual's subjective feelings, authorities were supposed to investigate objectively a citizen's subjective identification—a procedure that can be termed “objectivisation.” Such objectivising procedures thus reconciled an individual's subjective identification with an increasingly objective understanding of nationality by developing guidelines on how classification by others should proceed.
This article demonstrates how and when the nation—whether in the shape of concrete national symbols or as an abstract frame of reference—became relevant to ordinary people. It focuses on the experiences and activities of Amsterdam citizens in the second half of the 19th century. Central to the analysis is the apparent contradiction between ‘banal’ or ‘everyday nationalism’, in which nationalist symbols and rhetoric appeared to successfully reach their audience because of their omnipresence in daily life, and ‘national indifference’, as referring to the absence of national identification among the masses. It argues that in order to overcome the dichotomies between elites and masses and national and non‐national performances, we should focus on the popular incentives for national identification, rather than on the ideological content and the (physical or symbolic) borders of the national community.
Building on arguments from my book Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth‐Century Hungary , this article examines the sense of ‘being German’ in Hungarian‐German villages in interwar Hungary. The basic argument is that rural dwellers possessed a kind of tangible belonging (a tangible sense of being German, in this case) defined by the immediate world around them and that this tangible belonging was continually in negotiations with other constituencies trying to define Germanness, such as Reich Germans, Hungarian‐German leaders, and the Hungarian state as well as other Hungarians. This article also engages with the concept of national indifference, which has become a very common catchphrase in explanations concerning belonging in East Central Europe, especially in borderland regions and on the margins of states.
This introduction to the themed section ‘The history of national indifference. A critical appraisal’ explores the challenges and possibilities of the concept of national indifference. It starts from the premise that national indifference remains a very useful concept to avoid falling into teleological narratives of nationalism. The central argument is that national indifference needs to be theorized as a non‐binary, relative concept that is not the complete opposite of national identification. Indeed, the contributions show that national indifference has gradations and can coexist with explicit, banal or everyday forms of nationalism, both among elites and ordinary people, both in and outside of East Central Europe, both before and after the Two World Wars. This central argument results from an engagement with three areas of debate surrounding the national indifference literature, which all relate to its (inadvertent) reproduction of binary understandings of nationalism: the dichotomous conceptualization of east versus west, nationalisation versus non‐nationalisation and elites versus masses.
Nationalism in the Habsburg Empire is traditionally viewed through an ethnic lens. Despite a growing literature on ‘national indifference’ that studies nationalism in Habsburg central Europe from a constructivist perspective and advances our knowledge concerning variations in national identifications, the nationalism implied in these works remains largely limited to an exclusionary ethnic type. This reductionist view of central European nationalism mirrors the traditional dichotomy of ethnic ‘Eastern’ versus civic ‘Western’ nationalism. In order to avoid this reduction, this article approaches nationalism as a thin-centred ideology and explores varieties of nationalism in Habsburg Austria during the long 19th century. Although certain ideational paths made ethno-nationalism appear, retrospectively, as a quasi-natural feature of central Europe, the findings show that there developed rival discursive traditions of nationalism and competing representations of nation.
KEYWORDS
central Europe, ethnic-civic, ideology, national indifference, nationalism
Between 1899 and 1917, hundreds of Finnish citizens approached the Russian authorities with letters of denunciation, in which they reported about the anti-government activity of their fellow citizens. These informers caused a public stir in Finland because their activity was associated with the intensifying political surveillance of the imperial security police. Finnish nationalists eagerly labeled informers as Russian-minded traitors, but how did the informers themselves relate to the nation and the empire? This article tackles this question by analyzing the communication of these citizens with the Governor General's Office and the Gendarme Administration and by drawing inspiration from the concept of national indifference, which has gained prominence in nationalism studies in recent years. The article shows the great variation with which informers framed their ideological stance in their letters to the imperial power. Some avoided referring to their Finnishness to emphasize their imperial loyalty, whereas others presented themselves as pro-Finnish and viewed the interests of Finland and Russia as uniform. As a distinctive group of informers, the article examines Orthodox people, whose letters to the imperial authorities highlight experiences of religious discrimination and consequent national ambivalence.
By analyzing selected Slovene newspapers, the article discusses the role of slivovitz in the reproduction of everyday nationalism in interwar Yugoslavia. The article is based on an analysis of texts containing the word slivovka (the Slovene word for slivovitz or plum spirit) that appeared in three major Slovene newspapers and three minor Slovene pro-Yugoslav newspapers in the period 1919–1945. In the period in question, slivovitz did not (yet) have the role of a signifier of the Yugoslav state, the Yugoslav nation and other elements associated with Yugoslav identity, but it was becoming part of the “structure of national feeling” – the specific experience of life in a given time and place that was common to the Yugoslav nation. Slivovitz, frequently included in repetitive and everyday habits, practices and assumptions, began to define the Yugoslav nation through a specific culture of drinking and drinks and became a component of this everyday, largely unnoticed reproduction of the Yugoslav nation.
This article discusses discourses of Czech tourism on the Eastern Adriatic coast between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1930s using the Czech resorts in Baška on Krk Island and Kupari near Dubrovnik as case studies. The author argues that the ideological foundation of this type of tourism was a narrative of proximity between the Czechs and their fellow Slav Croatians. At the same time, the practice of Czech tourism was characterized by a pattern of cultural paternalism and economic exploitation toward the local population. It thus became a pseudo-colonial enterprise that distorted the Czech national myth of democracy, rationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, tourism still contributed to cultural mediation between Czechs and South Slavs. This article illustrates that point by highlighting the commemoration of the Yugoslav playwright Ivo Vojnović by Czech tourists in the 1930s.
This article highlights the role investment in Hungarian-language skills played in the social reproduction of the Romanian national elite in Dualist Hungary. At any point during the era, little less than half of middle-class Romanian students attended Hungarian-language high schools, which their parents largely considered as language training institutions. Parental choices and the sons’ experiences gain significance when set against the view that such investment in linguistic capital was a subversive practice challenging nationalist mobilization. Based on former students’ memoirs, school yearbooks, and histories, this article concentrates on the strategies of parents, the class-based inequality of access to Hungarian, the language policies of schools, and teachers’ ambiguous treatment of Romanian students.
Scholars of nationalism have long looked to material forms of symbolic power to understand the politics and cultures of nations, and national monuments specifically have been studied as reflections of ideological programmes of political regimes. However, these approaches have paid insufficient attention to processes of creation. Given the importance of material symbols as sites through which the nation is understood, I argue that analysing the dynamics of creation expands our understanding of symbolic nation making. Using the case of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and focusing on moments of creation and the actors involved in them, I build a conceptual framework for understanding the construction of national symbols on the ground based on three interconnected and co‐constituting dynamics: spatial, temporal and aesthetic/semiotic. Using this framework, I demonstrate how meaning and materiality are related to one another both as component and consequent in the creation of national monuments and how it is their very imperfection as material representations that provides the context for the nation to emerge as a category of discourse.
Kolonialismus im familiären Gedächtnis. Kolonialismus ist Teil vieler europäischer Familiengeschichten: Bis heute bewahren Familien Tagebücher, Militaria oder Beutestücke auf, die VorfahrInnen als koloniale AkteurInnen nach Hause gebracht haben. Sie bezeugen nicht nur familiäre Verstrickungen, sondern haben obendrein über Jahrzehnte hinweg kollektive Vorstellungen über die koloniale Vergangenheit geprägt. Fotografien waren daran – als vermeintlich authentische Zeugnisse – ganz wesentlich beteiligt. Über den Tod der »Erlebnisgenerationen« hinaus vermittelten sie koloniale »Erfolgsgeschichten«, wodurch Familien zu einem Hort kolonialer Geschichtsmythen, etwa der »anständigen« KolonialherrInnen, wurden. Dieses Buch nimmt die kolonialen Bildbestände von Familien in der italienischen Provinz Bozen / Bolzano in den Blick, deren (Groß-)Vätergeneration am faschistischen Kolonialkrieg gegen das Kaiserreich Abessinien (1935-1941) teilgenommen hatte. Markus Wurzer untersucht die »sozialen Leben« kolonialer Bilder, also wie und wozu diese durch Soldaten und ihre Familien (re-)produziert, gebraucht und über Generationen hinweg weitergegeben wurden.
The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000. Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholars from all over Europe have pooled their knowledge on comparative themes such as identities, cultural encounters, power and citizenship, and economic development to reflect the complexity and heterogeneous nature of the European experience. Rather than another grand narrative, the international author teams offer a multifaceted and rich perspective on the history of the continent of the past 500 years. Each major theme is dissected through three chronological sub-chapters, revealing how major social, political and historical trends manifested themselves in different European settings during the early modern (1500–1800), modern (1800–1900) and contemporary period (1900–2000).
This resource is of utmost relevance to today’s history students in the light of ongoing internationalisation strategies for higher education curricula, as it delivers one of the first multi-perspective and truly ‘European’ analyses of the continent’s past. Beyond the provision of historical content, this textbook equips students with the intellectual tools to interrogate prevailing accounts of European history, and enables them to seek out additional perspectives in a bid to further enrich the discipline.
The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000. Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholars from all over Europe have pooled their knowledge on comparative themes such as identities, cultural encounters, power and citizenship, and economic development to reflect the complexity and heterogeneous nature of the European experience. Rather than another grand narrative, the international author teams offer a multifaceted and rich perspective on the history of the continent of the past 500 years. Each major theme is dissected through three chronological sub-chapters, revealing how major social, political and historical trends manifested themselves in different European settings during the early modern (1500–1800), modern (1800–1900) and contemporary period (1900–2000).
This resource is of utmost relevance to today’s history students in the light of ongoing internationalisation strategies for higher education curricula, as it delivers one of the first multi-perspective and truly ‘European’ analyses of the continent’s past. Beyond the provision of historical content, this textbook equips students with the intellectual tools to interrogate prevailing accounts of European history, and enables them to seek out additional perspectives in a bid to further enrich the discipline.
The present paper addresses the manner in which local population of the Polesie voivodeship perceived the Soviet invasion of Poland through the prism of encounter with “others”. In particular, this paper focuses on the local understanding of “others” and how this changed due to the invasion. Also, as an important part of its contextualization, I explore the image of the Soviets held by local communities before the war.
The article considers how the Latgale region became a part of the Latvian state. The focus is on the crucial phase, which took place from April to December of 1917 between the first and second Latgale Congresses. First, it is argued that the administrative incorporation of Latgale into Latvia's territories is largely due to foreign policy consequences in the context of Russian Revolution of 1917, and to the domestically divided Latgalian political leadership as well. Second, the ambivalent role of the Latgalian politician Francis Kemps is highlighted, who on the one hand played a key role in the development of Latgalian political culture and was close to the zeitgeist with his socialist views, but on the other hand experienced a political defeat in the decisive political phase of 1917 and only now regains fame as an outstanding politicoian.
This special issue addresses practices of border-making and their consequences on the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. As the reality did not correspond to the peaceful Europe articulated in the Paris Treaties, a multitude of (un)foreseen complications followed the drawing of borders and states. Articles include new case studies on the creation, centralization or periph-eralization of border regions, such as Subcarpathian Rus, Vojvodina, Banat and the Carpathian Mountains, on border zones such as the Czechoslovakian harbour in Germany, and on cross-border activ¬ ities. The special issue shows how disputes over national identities and ethnic minorities, as well as other factors such as the economic consequences of the new state borders, appeared on the interwar political agenda and coloured the lives of borderland inhabitants. Adopting a bottom-up approach, the contributions demonstrate the agency of borderlands and their people in the establishment, functioning, disorganization or ultimate breakdown of some of the newly created interwar nation-states. Major border changes (triggered by the demise of the Cold War setup following the collapse of communism, the Yugoslav wars and the enlargement project of the European Union), as well as the recent strengthening of state borders as a response to asylum seekers and the COVID-19 pandemic, have inspired contemporary historians to read¬ dress or shift their lens of analysis to the physical demarcation lines between states. Space, which was functioning in the background of most historical analyses, has begun to come to the foreground. It is no longer assumed to be independent of humans, with historical events manifesting themselves within the closed box of the nation-state, but is perceived as 'a product of human agency and perception, as both the medium and presupposition for sociability and historicity'.1 An understanding of space as a social, political and cultural product invites us to approach nation-states as flexible and historically changing phenomena. What then becomes visible is that space is transient, in the sense that it is 'created through economic, social, cultural or political movements and interactions', and is 'meaningful for historical actors only in relation to a specific set of perceptions, interests and strategies, and in a given temporal context'.
Bu çalışma Orhan Pamuk’un 2021 yılında yayımlanmış olan romanı Veba Geceleri’ni milliyetçilik çalışmaları alanının başlıca kavramsal çerçevesi ve tartışma alanları ışığında yorumlama amacını taşımaktadır. Roman genel itibarıyla, Osmanlı Devleti sınırları dahilinde Müslüman ve Hıristiyan nüfusun bir arada yaşadığı hayali bir vilayet olan Minger Adası’nda ortaya çıkan veba salgınının beraberinde getirdiği toplumsal ve politik karmaşanın nasıl Minger milliyetçiliğinin yükselişi ve adanın bağımsızlığı ile sonuçlandığını anlatmaktadır. Ayrıca söz konusu anlatı bir yandan modernist perspektiflerin milleti milliyetçilik tarafından inşa edilmiş bir olgu olarak değerlendiren, diğer yandan milletlerin tarihine dair kabulleri sorgulayan boyutu ile önemli şekilde örtüşmekte, kurgusal bir metin olarak tarihsel realite iddiasındaki olguların kurgusal boyutunu açığa çıkaran bir işlev görebilmektedir.
In the late Habsburg period, Fiume's municipal flag became the representative symbol of local patriotism. This article argues that local patriotism in Fiume was a form of identification that combined features of modern nationalism with loyalties to the Habsburg Empire. With the disappearance of the dual monarchy and the subsequent transition period (1918–24), the Fiumian flag was redefined and contested both as a symbol of Italian irredentism realised through annexation and of Fiume's independence by local autonomists. Thus, the article demonstrates how local patriotism survived the empire's dissolution and how attachment to a locality was a significant feature of European political life in general during that period.
Among the Croatian speaking population and their elites in former Western Hungary and later Burgenland, standard written language issues have been debated throughout the 20 th century. Various language policy entrepreneurs favored for a convergence with Serbo-Croatian / Croato-Serbian or the common Štokavian standard language, respectively. My article focuses on one such linguistic entrepreneur, Ignac Horvat, who was not a linguist by training, but as a priest, editor and writer one of the leading voices since the interwar period. His language policy articulated in newspaper articles as well as two typewritten and autotyped orthographic compilations vividly shows that minority languages always have to position themselves in a multilingual context and that language policy actors of such “small” languages try to follow the concepts of “bigger” standard languages. His linguistic policy, however, eventually failed and highlights that in standardization processes of minority languages ideologies are often oriented differently, rejecting stigmatization of local forms, but exaggerated emphasizing intelligibility as the main factor for language maintenance.
Despite a widely shared assumption, Gellner’s theory of nationalism was not well accepted by historians. This was due to (i) methodological assumptions by historians and (ii) a misunderstanding of the level of abstraction of Gellner’s theory. The theory was treated as if it were underdetermined (while the opposite was the case). In fact, it could be effectively applied to European history. The shadow effect of industrialization has been neglected by historians. Gellner’s assumptions on the relationship of nationalism to equality, industrialization, homogeneity and unequal development are quite sustainable. In 1991 Gellner began to reformulate his theory in a more chronological manner. Commentators on Gellner’s work now tend to emphasize the importance of his Jewish and Czech background, but this is misleading.KeywordsGellner Ernest A.Theories of nationalismHistoriography of nationalismIndustrialization and nationalismEquality and nationalism
The demise of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War marked the end of centuries of multi-ethnic coexistence. To this day, outside the field of history, the perception of both empires is rooted in the idea of the inevitability of their demise, which, as the story goes, was due to the strength of nationalist movements and the intensity of inter-ethnic strife. The ‘orientalising’ of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire has been translated into current understandings of Central Europe, the Balkans and the Middle East and their politics. While ethnic clashes have characterised the histories of these regions in the 20th century and nationalisms still play a central role in their politics, from Hungary to Turkey, national indifference, dynastic loyalty and multi-ethnic coexistence had been central to the life of the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Habsburg and Ottoman Empires.
While nationalism theorists have mostly rejected primordialism, politicians and the wider public typically have a primordialist and essentialist understanding of national history. On the eve of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin invoked several primordialist tropes so as to justify military action, which is unsurprising in a politician. Yet Western scholars criticizing Putin's historical narratives in newspaper editorials or in scholarly talks posted to YouTube only rarely suggest modernist or social constructivist historical narratives. Several posit counter-primordialisms instead. Primordialism, then, enjoys more support than is widely realized, even among scholars who ought to be familiar with its problems. Meanwhile modernist theorists of nationalism, however popular among nationalism theorists, require more vigorous promotion in academic circles.
In 1848, Habsburg Trieste became the target of German nationalists gathered in Frankfurt. The Frankfurt parliament, born out of the revolutions of 1848, has been widely depicted as a liberal experience. Yet its nationalist stances, which included the creation of a unitary German state through the absorption of vast multiethnic regions of the Habsburg monarchy, whose Austrian crownlands were part of the German Confederation, bear witness to the illiberal nature of the Frankfurt parenthesis of 1848-1849. Notwithstanding the assimilatory tendencies of the Frankfurt parliament, Italian activists in Trieste supported the inclusion of the Habsburg port in an enlarged Germany, hoping to break away from Habsburg rule, which they portrayed as oppressive. This article argues that the contradictory Italian support for the German Confederation highlights the paradoxes at the basis of nationalist movements at their onset, while also pointing to the difficulty that nation-states would soon witness in dealing with other ethnic groups within their borders. On the contrary, it was the Habsburg monarchy that, in its centuries-long tradition of accommodating different ethnicities into its fold, represented what to present-day observers comes closer to political liberalism than the so-called liberal national parties that opposed Habsburg rule.
Hungarian historiography needs to review its negative representation of towns and burghers typical of the first half of nineteenth-century Hungary, as Vera Bácskai, a major figure of Hungarian urban history suggested in a paradigmatic paper. Starting from her statements, this article examines the historical narratives of secondary school textbooks and wider historical syntheses of Hungarian history published in the age of Austria-Hungary (1867–1918). The author shows that the burghers’ negative image was rooted in the political fights prior to the 1848 Revolution and the emergence of modern nationalism.
This article critically examines the prevalent nationalist interpretation of historical images featuring textiles from rural regions. In an effort to disentangle the threads of folk costumes, it proposes a conscious unlearning of the way we read images of rural material culture from the late 19th century. This period has entered historiography as a period of intensifying national movements and political use of rural culture, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe. So-called folk costumes have been viewed as a symbolic representation of the nation, whereas their broader social and economic role in the history of industrial society has been overshadowed. By bringing together the production, collection, and exhibition of rural material culture, this article reveals processes in industrial society that shaped the modern history of folk costumes. It draws on late-19th-century source material stemming from a network centered in Prague that promoted textiles from rural Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Galicia as ethno-commodities. Textiles were integrated into women’s industrial education and presented at events promoting national economy and the latest technological innovations. Thus, this article contributes to nationalism studies by discussing capitalism and industrialism and seeks to further scrutinize the history of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe.
This research explores how the post-Yugoslav film-makers, in particular Nebojša Slijepčević, Goran Dević, and Srđan Keča, investigate the dilemma of ethnic identity and face the cultural division in the post-conflict societies. The article aims to discuss cinematic representations of the other and conduct a deeper textual analysis of the film Srbenka (2018), in comparison to After the War (2006) and Imported Crows (2004). Also, the article bridges the gap between more conceptual literature on transnational cinema (Stephen Crofts, Steven Rawle, Saša Vojković), nationalism studies (Benedict Anderson, Rogers Brubaker, V.P. (Chip) Gagnon Jr.), as well as history (Tara Zahra) and more empirical analysis providing examples from the contemporary post-Yugoslav cinema. Therefore, the article demonstrates how applying theories from different disciplines enrich film analysis when investigating the otherness.
On 19 June 1911, dozens of Jews and Ukrainians were killed by the Austrian militia in Drohobycz at the command of the Jewish leader of the city, Jacob Feuerstein, to ensure the victory of the Jewish assimilationist candidate, aligned with the Polish elite, over the Zionist candidate. While dominating news at the time, reaching front pages around the globe, this event remains relatively unknown today even among specialists. This study for the first time explicates the history of this remarkable event while challenging the nationalist narratives that successfully shaped Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish collective memory in its aftermath. It questions the extent of the role nationalism plays in violent political conflict, even in a seemingly hypernationalized environment, and demonstrates how nationalist rhetoric masks other motivations of actors. This microhistory builds on recent efforts to locate national indifference in the modern period, in the eye of the nationalist storm. At the same time, the success of nationalists to reframe this event in nationalist terms demonstrates how nationalism could shape historical memory and successfully push back against this indifference. The massacre demonstrates that nationalization was a gradual process, during which other identities persisted and other factors guided political events, while exposing how nationalist leaders paradoxically used such moments to obfuscate this reality and advance their own agendas.
In this article Theodora Dragostinova examines the interplay between official policies and popular demands in the nationalization of the Greek minority in Bulgaria. She explores why national activists and ordinary people chose to "speak national" in the context of the conflicting national interests and territorial aspirations of Bulgaria and Greece. At the official level, the national discourse and practice showed the co-existence of essentialist and constructionist understandings of nationhood; while the rhetoric of the primordial nation was ubiquitous, politicians realized that certain policies could "improve" the national body. At the popular level, the profuse use of national rhetoric functioned as an "emergency identity," or a discursive strategy that allowed individuals to claim social legitimacy in emergency situations. Thus, despite the fact that people were forced to adopt clear-cut national allegiances, national side-switching remained a frequent phenomenon.
War Land on the Eastern Front is a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of their encounter with Eastern Europe. It presents an 'anatomy of an occupation', charting the ambitions and realities of the new German military state there. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, it reveals how German views of the East changed during total war. New categories for viewing the East took root along with the idea of a German cultural mission in these supposed wastelands. After Germany's defeat, the Eastern front's 'lessons' were taken up by the Nazis, radicalized, and enacted when German armies returned to the East in World War II. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius's persuasive and compelling study fills a yawning gap in the literature of the Great War.
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
This collection of essays does not perceive the impressive economic and political stability of the postwar era as a quasi-natural return to previous patterns of societal development. It approaches this stability as an attempt to establish “normality” upon the lingering memories of experiencing violence on an unprecedented scale. While the history of post-war Germany looms large in this collection, the essays cover countries across Western and Central Europe. They offer comparative perspectives and draw upon a wide range of primary and secondary source material. © The German Historical Institute 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2007.
"Fischer excels at dissecting the complexities of politics and culture in a land firmly located "in between" two larger neighbors...The great merit of Fischer's study is that it historically locates the tensions and ambiguities of Alsatian regionalism...Those interested in the history of border regions, and in the complex relationship between regional and national identities, will find in Fischer's book rich material for further reflection.". French Politics, Culture & Society "...a detailed and nuanced analysis of the various regional movements.". European History Quarterly "In presenting Alsatian history from the perspective of Alsatian regionalists, Fischer makes a valuable contribution to the historiography of Alsace, and of Germany, France and regionalism more generally.". Australian Journal of Politics and History "Fischer's prize-winning work gives evidence of much time spent in numerous archives. His lucid study, sober in thought, impartial in tone, detailed in construct, and thorough in research, offers a rewarding read for Alsatian history enthusiasts.". French Review. "This is an erudite and thoughtful book that makes a solid contribution to the body of literature on Alsace available in English and also intersects with scholarship on the construction of national and regional identities in contemporary Europe...By demonstrating how culture brokers drew upon a shared past to articulate competing definitions of regional identity, Fischer contributes to our understanding of the ambiguities of regionalism in Alsace and elsewhere.". American Historical Review. "Scholars interested in the larger questions of how multilinguistic regions and borderlands developed and changed with the advent of nation-states will find it a valuable example of how modern nation-states' claims of unity hfave proven complicated in practice.". Central European History. "Fischer does an excellent job of fleshing out the complex debates generated by the drafting of a constitution for the Reichsland (1910-1911) and the Zabern Affair (1913-1914)...[The book] should be of particular interest to anyone interested in the studies of nationalism, borderlands, and the Heimatbewegung.". German Studies Review. "...a fascinating and penetrating study .Fischer presents a nuanced analysis of Alsatian responses and shows how they were frequently contested, discontinuous, and even contradictory. General readers as well as scholars of France and Germany and those interested in problems of regionalism, nationalism, identity, memory, and cultural formation will find Alsace for the Alsatians? immensely beneficial and a pleasure to read." . Vernon L. Lidtke, Johns Hopkins University. "Christopher J. Fischer offers a fascinating account of the development, evolution and varieties of regionalism in the border region of Alsace... The book is both readable and anchored in solid archival research. It offers a nuanced account of the complexities of regionalism in Alsace and its function in France and Germany. This volume will prove of particular interest to historians of modern Germany, and makes an important contribution to literature on regionalism, nation-building and borderlands in modern Europe". German History. "[A] wonderfully broad and at the same time an impressive in-depth study...Fischer blends cultural and political history in exemplary ways. The strong interlinkages between regionalism and Catholicism in Alsace is powerfully highlighted by Fischer's narrative.". Stefan Berger, Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History, University of Manchester. The region of Alsace, located between the hereditary enemies of France and Germany, served as a trophy of war four times between 1870-1945. With each shift, French and German officials sought to win the allegiance of the local populace. In response to these pressures, Alsatians invoked regionalism-articulated as a political language, a cultural vision, and a community of identity-not only to define and defend their own interests against the nationalist claims of France and Germany, but also to push for social change, defend religious rights, and promote the status of the region within the larger national community. Alsatian regionalism however, was neither unitary nor unifying, as Alsatians themselves were divided politically, socially, and culturally. The author shows that the Janus-faced character of Alsatian regionalism points to the ambiguous role of regional identity in both fostering and inhibiting loyalty to the nation. Finally, the author uses the case of Alsace to explore the traditional designations of French civic nationalism versus German ethnic nationalism and argues for the strong similarities between the two countries' conceptions of nationhood.
This book provides a detailed account of the negotiation of the European Convention on Human Rights, the major achievement of the Council of Europe, and of its impact on the British Empire in its closing years. The book concentrates on the role of the United Kingdom in the negotiations, and the consequences which followed ratification. To provide the historical context for these negotiations it gives a detailed history of the protection of individual rights in the common law system, and of the rise of the movement for the international protection of human rights. This was largely a product of the Second World War, though having antecedents back in the 16th century and earlier.
Changing Places is an interesting meditation on the varying identities and rights claimed by residents of borderlands, the limits placed on the capacities of nation-states to police their borders and enforce national identities, and the persistence of such contact zones in the past and present. It is an extremely well-written and engaging study, and an absolute pleasure to read. -Dennis Sweeney, University of Alberta "Changing Places offers a brilliantly transnational approach to its subject, the kind that historians perennially demand of themselves but almost never accomplish in practice." -Pieter M. Judson, Swarthmore College Changing Places is a transnational history of the birth, life, and death of a modern borderland and of frontier peoples' changing relationships to nations, states, and territorial belonging. The cross-border region between Germany and Habsburg Austria-and after 1918 between Germany and Czechoslovakia-became an international showcase for modern state building, nationalist agitation, and local pragmatism after World War I, in the 1930s, and again after 1945. Caitlin Murdock uses wide-ranging archival and published sources from Germany and the Czech Republic to tell a truly transnational story of how state, regional, and local historical actors created, and eventually destroyed, a cross-border region. Changing Places demonstrates the persistence of national fluidity, ambiguity, and ambivalence in Germany long after unification and even under fascism. It shows how the 1938 Nazi annexation of the Czechoslovak "Sudetenland" became imaginable to local actors and political leaders alike. At the same time, it illustrates that the Czech-German nationalist conflict and Hitler's Anschluss are only a small part of the larger, more complex borderland story that continues to shape local identities and international politics today. Caitlin E. Murdock is Associate Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach. Jacket Credit: Cover art courtesy of the author.
Between 1880 and 1914, tens of thousands of men and women left France for distant religious missions, driven by the desire to spread the word of Jesus Christ, combat Satan, and convert the world's pagans to Catholicism. But they were not the only ones with eyes fixed on foreign shores. Just as the Catholic missionary movement reached its apex, the young, staunchly secular Third Republic launched the most aggressive campaign of colonial expansion in French history. Missionaries and republicans abroad knew they had much to gain from working together, but their starkly different motivations regularly led them to view one another with resentment, distrust, and even fear. This book tells the story of how troubled relations between Catholic missionaries and a host of republican critics shaped colonial policies, Catholic perspectives, and domestic French politics in the tumultuous decades before the First World War. With case studies on Indochina, Polynesia, and Madagascar, this book challenges the long-held view that French colonizing and "civilizing" goals were shaped by a distinctly secular republican ideology built on Enlightenment ideals. By exploring the experiences of Catholic missionaries, one of the largest groups of French men and women working abroad, the book argues that colonial policies were regularly wrought in the fires of religious discord - discord which indigenous communities exploited in responding to colonial rule.
Over the last two centuries and up to the present day, Eastern Europe's lands and peoples have conjured up a complex mixture of fascination, anxiety, promise, and peril for Germans looking eastwards. Across the generations, a varied cast of German writers, artists, philosophers, diplomats, political leaders, generals, and Nazi racial fanatics have imagined (often in very different ways) a special German civilizing mission in the East, forging a frontier myth that paralleled the American myths of the 'Wild West' and 'Manifest Destiny'. Through close analysis of German views of the East from 1800 to our own times, this study reveals that this crucial international relationship has in fact been integral to how Germans have defined (and repeatedly redefined) themselves and their own national identity and culture. In particular, what was ultimately at stake for Germans was their own uncertain position in Europe, between East and West. Paradoxically, the East came to be viewed as both an attractive land of unlimited potential for the future and as a place undeveloped, dangerous, wild, dirty, and uncultured. Running the gamut from the messages of international understanding announced by generations of German scholars and sympathetic writers, to ambitions for imperialism and the violent racial utopia envisaged by the Nazis, German imaginings of the East represent a crucial, yet unfamiliar, part of the history of modern Europe, and one that remains fundamentally important today in the context of an expanded European Union.
This book examines how one of Imperial Austria's principal ethnic conflicts, that between Czechs and Germans, developed in one of the major cities during the era of industrialization and urban growth. It shows how the inhabitants of Prague, the capital of Bohemia, constructed and articulated ethnic group loyalties and social solidarities over the course of the nineteenth century. The German-speaking inhabitants of the Bohemian capital developed a group identification and defined themselves as a minority as they dealt with growing Czech political and economic strength in the city and with their own sharp numerical decline: in the 1910 census only seven percent of the metropolitan population claimed that they spoke primarily German.
Le nationalisme est un sentiment directement lie a l'ideologie sovietique, qui contrairement a l'unite apparente, pronait les droits nationaux et la creation des nations toujours oppressees. La liberation nationale ne concernait pas seulement la Russie, mais bien toutes les communautes qui partageaient histoire, territoire, langue et culture. L'effort de l'A. se concentre sur la vehemence des efforts bolsheviks au nom du particularisme ethnique, qui hostiles et sans concession pour les droits individuels ont favorise les droits de groupes, qui ne coincidaient pas forcement avec les attentes du proletariat. Curieusement, le premier Etat des travailleurs et des paysans, fut aussi le premier Etat a institutionnaliser le federalisme ethnoterritorial, a classifier tous les citoyens en fonction de leurs nationalites biologiques et a prescrire officiellement des traitements preferentiels a certaines populations definies ethniquement x
This article explores how the French state, after having recovered Alsace and the lost portions of Lorraine in 1918, used large-scale purge trials to impose a moral and ethnic view of Frenchness that was at odds with the official republican concept of citizenship. The state was joined in this endeavor by local inhabitants who, troubled by the switchover from German to French rule, denounced fellow citizens to the purge commissions in order to establish their own patriotic credentials. This moral and ethnic understanding of nationhood was not just imposed from above but also forged from below by Alsatians and Lorrainers who manipulated state institutions for their own purposes. The postwar years in Alsace-Lorraine were a turning point in modern French history, characterized by the development of racialized notions of Frenchness, the state’s willingness to ignore republican values, and the weighing of collaboration and resistance to determine national belonging and sentiment.
In rethinking and reframing the American national narrative in a wider context, the chapters in this book ask questions about both nationalism and the discipline of history itself. They offer fresh ways of thinking about the traditional themes and periods of American history. By locating the study of American history in a transnational context, the chapters examine the history of nation making and the relation of the United States to other nations and to transnational developments. What is now called globalization is here placed in a historical context. The book examines the historiographical ... More
In rethinking and reframing the American national narrative in a wider context, the chapters in this book ask questions about both nationalism and the discipline of history itself. They offer fresh ways of thinking about the traditional themes and periods of American history. By locating the study of American history in a transnational context, the chapters examine the history of nation making and the relation of the United States to other nations and to transnational developments. What is now called globalization is here placed in a historical context. The book examines the historiographical implications of such a reframing and offers alternative interpretations of large questions of American history ranging from the era of European contact to democracy and reform, from environmental and economic development and migration experiences to issues of nationalism and identity. But the largest issue explored is basic to all histories: How does one understand, teach, and write a national history even as one recognizes that the territorial boundaries do not fully contain that history, and that within that bounded territory the society is highly differentiated, marked by multiple solidarities and identities?