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Comments: Contesting And Constructing National Identity in Central Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Daniel Unowsky
Daniel Unowsky*
Affiliation:
University of Memphis, U.S.A.
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Extract

With his contingent of geographers, historians, and other academic “experts” collectively known as The Inquiry in tow, Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in January 1919 to redraw the map of Europe. Wilson wanted to fulfill his Fourteen Points and guarantee national self-determination to the peoples of Europe. A peaceful community of ethnically homogeneous nation-states was to replace the great multinational empires (defined by central European nationalists as prisons of the peoples) that had previously dominated central and eastern Europe. During the inter-war period, the governing elites of central Europe, their new “nation-states” legitimated by the post-war settlement, created new national holidays, national anthems, and nationalist school text books lauding the history and achievements of the state-bearing nation. These simple and seemingly coherent national narratives elided the messy, confusing, and jumbled past of multiple identities, mingled ethnic groups, and alienated social orders, and legitimized political, economic, and territorial claims made in the name of the “national community” lending its name to the new state.

Information

Type
Forum: Grenzmarken: Negotiating National Identity on the Borders of Germanness
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 2001, pp. 493 - 497
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. Of course, the new Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, like reborn Poland, were in fact multi-national entities. However, the prevailing ideology, based on the notion of self-determination, proclaimed these new states as reflections of existing dominant national communities, which effectively defined large proportions of state inhabitants as second-class citizens—minorities within states whose acknowledged raison-d'etre was to further the interests of the dominant nationality, not the interests of all citizens.Google Scholar

2. See, among many others, Marsha Rozenblit, Reconstructing National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Robert Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Marsha Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Acculturation and Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Robert Wistrich, ed., Austrians and Jews in the Twentieth Century: From Franz Joseph to Waldheim (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992); Jacob Katz, ed., Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987).Google Scholar

3. Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries. Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Ibid., p. 262.Google Scholar

5. See Ibid., and Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).Google Scholar