Scholarship of nationalism in East-Central Europe and the Balkans has made great strides in the last decade. Though Robert Kann (1950) once analyzed the Habsburg monarchy as “the Multinational Empire,” recent scholarship, however, has increasingly problematized such narratives of the Habsburg Empire as a mosaic of mutually exclusive nations. Work on national indifference (King 2002; Judson 2006; Zahra 2011; Ginderachter & Fox 2019) has shown that nation-ness and ethnicity were not relevant in all situations and for all people.
As the implications of national indifference have sunk in, recent years, Habsburg scholars have preferred to analyze the multilingual monarchy itself a locus of dynastic loyalty (Cole and Unowsky 2007; Fichtner 2014; Judson 2016), or as an administrative state or Rechtstaat transcending ethnolinguistic loyalties (Heindl 1991; Deak 2015; Adlgasser & Lindström 2019). Scholars have also written innumerable provincial or regional histories emphasizing regional, multi-lingual, and even consciously trans-national forms of belonging. Urban studies, for example, has repeatedly demonstrated routine polylingual practices, perhaps best symbolized in the scholarly literature by book or article titles with multilingual city names, e.g. Neurath’s Bratislava, Pressburg, Pozsony (2010) or Peter Fassler’s Lemberg-Lwow-Lviv, or Christopher Mick’s Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv (2016). Indeed, Jeremy King so emphasized the importance of bilingualism in that he gave Czech/German names not only for the town of Budweis/Budějovice, but also for its civic organizations, streets, and politicians, e.g. the town mayor “Franz Josef Klawik/František Josef Klavík” (2002: 1).
As for the national movements that have so dominated the historiography of nationalism in the region, constructivist scholarship has made it increasingly obvious that nations did not evolve out of pre-existing ethnic groups as discredited primordialist or ethno-symbolist narratives once held, but were instead the product of nationalist movements (Magocsi 1999; Kosi 2013; Maxwell 2009 and 2020; Hudek, Kopeček & Mervart 2022). Nevertheless, scholars interested in nationalism still mostly follow political actors in focusing on an individual ethnolinguistic nationalism, as defined by an ideology memorably characterized by Tomasz Kamusella (e.g. 2022: 66, 212) as “the normative isomorphism of language, nation and state.” Scholars acknowledge the multilingualism and diversity of monarchical states or historic regions, but not of national movements.
For this project, therefore, we seek to apply the insights of recent work on polylinguistic practices to the study of nationalism in East-Central Europe. While Michaela Wolf has famously argued that the Habsburg Empire in the aftermath of the French Revolution acquired a “many-languaged soul” (2015), multilingualism also informed individual nationalists within individual provinces. The estate-based natio hungarica, for example, gave way not only to the chauvinistic and ideally monolingual Magyar nemzet, but also to the aggressively multilingual Ungarus concept. Early in the nineteenth century Bohemian scholar Bernard Bolzano wrote about a Bohemian nation, which would include both German and Czech speaking inhabitants of the province. Similar ideas had their supporters among the members of the bilingual, Slav and Romance speaking, Dalmatian elite, whose nazione Dalmata was to include the entire population of the province. During the 1903 Ilinden rising, furthermore, the Slavic leadership of IMRO professed a vision of a multi-ethnic Macedonia, home not only to Slavs, but also to Greeks, Turks, Vlachs, and so forth.
Similar questions also apply to individuals. How did multilingual patriots understand their diverse linguistic competencies, or relate them to their national visions? Can ethnonationalism be multi-lingual? While acknowledging the importance and interest of bilingualism, we are particularly interested in studies of poly-lingualism, here understood as something involving three or more varieties/dialects/languages.
Such questions can also be approached not as part of the history of nations and nationalism, but also as the history of language. Was the “national language” always understood as the language of public discourse, or scholarly investigation? What attitudes did linguistic nationalists take toward speakers of different yet related varieties? When and why are differences perceived as “merely dialectical,” and by whom, or alternatively how do differences come to be seen as defining distinct “national languages”?
We suspect visions of multi-lingual nations may be more widespread than scholars have previously realized. Do the archives contain evidence of other projects to develop multi-lingual nations, destroyed and forgotten in the crush of normative isomorphism, but awaiting rediscovery? Scholars working on such questions are urged to submit their papers.
A workshop will be jointly organized by Alexander Maxwell of Victoria University of Wellington, and Rok Stergar of the University of Ljubljana. The event will take place at the University of Ljubljana on 26 June 2024. There will be no registration fee and everything will be open to the public. Limited funds will be available to support travel / accommodation costs. We regret that we cannot accommodate online participants: this will an exclusively in-person event. Abstracts are due on 26 May 2024.
We also expect to publish proceedings in a themed issue of a scholarly journal. The journal Nationalism and Ethnic Politics has expressed a provisional interest in publishing proceedings. In 2022, the journal had an impact Factor of 0.6, a five-year impact factor of 1.0, a Scopus CiteScore of 1.9, and an acceptance rate of 26%. Written versions would be due in December 2024. Chicago-style footnotes; word limit: 9,500 words. Interested scholars may participate in the themed issue without attending the workshop. If you cannot attend the event but would like to submit a paper, send us an abstract! Send all communications to both Alexander Maxwell and Rok Stergar (alexander.maxwell@vuw.ac.nz and rok.stergar@ff.uni-lj.si).