In 1884, Janez Trdina — a retired history teacher, a reasonably popular writer, and a Slovene nationalist activist — published a series of ethnographic reports about the peasant inhabitants of Lower Carniola. In one, he pointed out to the educated readers of the magazine Slovan (The Slav) that the Lower Carniolans were still not very familiar “with their own national name.” Apparently, they still often referred to all Slavs as Slovenci, even though the Slovene language already had a new word, Slovani, for the people belonging to this language group. The word Slovenci was now only supposed to refer to the members of the Slovene nation, a much smaller entity. The Lower Carniolan peasants — Trdina also reported — were somewhat familiar with the modern meaning of the word, but they did not think it applied to them. Namely, peasants also used the word Slovenci as a label for the bourgeois supporters of the so-called national party; that is, Slovene nationalists. To them, the Slovenes — Trdina explained — were “some kind of special caste” that spoke Slovene and sang Slovene songs. Their own language, the peasants had assured Trdina, was not Slovene, but rather Carniolan and so were their songs (Trdina 1884, 118).

The article seeks to fill a gap in existing scholarship on explicit and implicit linguistic, ethnic, and national classifications in Habsburg schools and their effects. It attempts to reconstruct the classifications that appeared in textbooks and other teaching materials as well as in daily practice, pupils’ exposure to them, and their engagement with these categories. Temporally, the study begins with the establishment of compulsory education (1774) and ends in the revolutionary period of 1848–49 and focuses on the Slavophone population of the Habsburg crownlands Carniola, Carinthia, Styria, and the Austrian Littoral. Our research suggests that systematic and uniform classification schemes were not yet in place in the school environment in the period under review. As a result, the influence of classificatory systems on identifications was limited. If anything, the schools inadvertently reproduced existing local and provincial identifications while the students’ limited internalization of emerging transregional identifications only happened through their personal relationships with a few teachers and peers. The transition from familiarization with emerging transregional ethnolinguistic identifications through personal networks to the systemic (and often completely unintentional) reproduction of nationalist ideology happened only after 1848.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, Austrian schools effectively developed a robust system of civic education that attempted to cultivate the patriotism of all students, regardless of their nationality. While the ultimate goal of Habsburg civic education was loyalty to the imperial state, officials realized that this loyalty would not be able to supplant regional or national identities. Instead, officials designed a curriculum that would enhance these other identities hoping they would contribute to imperial patriotism. Students learned they shared their home with different national groups and that they belonged to a larger family of nations. While this concept was earnestly supported by the school curriculum, the way in which this material was taught may have impacted its effectiveness. For example, when discussing national groups, educators often drew from prevailing ethnographic theories that relied on stereotypical assessments. Moreover, compromises made in the early 20th century complicated these efforts. As nationalists gained increased control over school administration, the emphasis on shared local identity weakened. These factors did not necessarily alter Austrian civic education, but they do point to the ways in which it would have needed to adapt to the Monarchy’s changing political circumstances.

Research on the nexus between education and nationalism in the Habsburg Empire has often focused on the role that language may have played in top-down nationalization processes and the popular dissemination of national thought. According to contemporary nationalist logic, undergoing education in a certain language of instruction also entailed the internalization of nationalist values inherent to its corresponding nationalist movement. The present article argues that the Habsburg educational experience was much more contingent, and draws attention to the diversity of pedagogical approaches towards nationalism and nationality that could be encountered in Austrian schools during the last five decades of Habsburg rule. By using examples from German- and Slovene-language textbooks, it shows that sociopolitical, temporal, as well as institutional factors played an important role in determining the practical values and attitudes towards the nationalism that students encountered during their school years. With systematic empirical studies remaining rare, further research will be necessary to gain a fuller insight into the complexities of the Habsburg education system and its potential effects on popular collective identity formation.

This article explores aspects of the organization of refugee education in imperial Austria during the First World War. Authorities in charge of refugees’ control and their eventual assistance interpreted access to education in two ways. First, it was an avenue of relief through schooling, aimed to counter the effects of uprootedness and, thus, safeguard some continuity in refugee children’s lives. Second, it was a way to ensure the making of productive and loyal citizens. In this context, this article looks at various policies regarding organization of schooling for displaced children. Moreover, it analyzes the ways language entered the realm of the refugee-focused classroom. Officials used schooling in refugee students’ vernacular to relieve the effects of their displacement and to reinforce ethnonational classifications of imperial subjects. At the same time, education through refugee children’s growing exposure to German language courses became a measure of a gradual inculcation of an imperial consciousness. Furthermore, it was a civilizing dimension of displacement management and, in this way, it became an avenue to consolidate a war-feeble state.

Golden Dawn (GD), Greece’s most prominent far-right political organization, strategically utilized antisemitism as its core ideological principle rather than a marginal prejudice or rhetorical device. This article argues that antisemitism served primarily as an epistemological conspiratorial framework central to GD’s ideological worldview, providing a coherent interpretive lens through which all political, economic, and social phenomena were explained as elements of a singular Jewish-orchestrated plot. Drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of over 10,300 GD publications spanning 1993 to 2020, the study illustrates how this epistemological master frame enabled the party to unify diverse domestic and international issues, from foreign policy tensions and immigration debates to economic crises, under a consistent antisemitic narrative. Additionally, by explicitly employing Holocaust denial, endorsing Nazi symbolism, and openly propagating antisemitic conspiracies, GD deliberately violated post-Holocaust European norms. This normative transgression was integral to the party’s identity, positioning it in overt defiance of mainstream moral and political boundaries. The article thus demonstrates how GD’s antisemitism functioned not merely as a rhetorical provocation but as the foundation of a comprehensive ideological system that consciously challenged established European taboos. These findings also suggest broader implications for understanding the role and adaptability of conspiratorial antisemitism and normative transgression in other extremist ideologies beyond the Greek context.

This article develops the concept of meritocratic nationalism to unpack the online backlash surrounding the rise to fame of a Tibetan cyberstar, Tenzing Tsondu (Ding Zhen), on Chinese social media. Meritocratic nationalism not only embeds ideals of individual achievement, education attainment, and productivity within narratives of national identity and regime legitimacy, but also sustains structural inequalities through racialized and gendered assumptions about who is capable of merit and whose success is ‘deserved’. First, critics frame state media’s endorsement of the internet celebrity as a betrayal to the meritocratic ideal the state is supposed to safeguard. However, this does not lead to a critique of meritocratic legitimacy itself but rather its reaffirmation. Secondly, the reproduction of a Han-centric and masculine-coded ideal of merit is integral to the construction of majority male victimhood, which denies and normalizes structural violence. Thirdly, we note the multifaceted representation of the international in the backlash, where users deploy the figure of ‘white American men’ as fellow victims of ‘political correctness’ to animate a racialized imagination of shared majoritarian grievance. The article contributes to nationalism studies and broader debates on meritocracy, racism, and the grievance politics of ethnic majority men.

To explain why Vladimir Putin launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this article foregrounds a crucial but understudied dimension: national memory. It argues that both discontinuity in national memory and dislocation between national memory and territory threaten states’ ontological security. The Soviet collapse marked a profound break in Russia’s national memory. To restore the ontological security thus shattered, Russia’s ruling elite adopted a narrative of radical continuity of Russian statehood, linking Kievan Rus, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Romanov Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation into an unbroken thousand-year tradition. Yet by placing its origins in independent Ukraine, this narrative was inherently precarious. While mending the discontinuity in national memory, it produced a dislocation between memory and territory, rendering Russia ontologically vulnerable. By asserting their own claim to Kyiv as the birthplace of Ukrainian nation- and statehood, Ukraine’s ruling elite exposed this dislocation and laid bare both the precarity of the radical continuity narrative and Russia’s resulting ontological vulnerability. The Kremlin’s response was to seek political – and, when that failed, military – control over Ukraine to redress this dislocation and eliminate the sources of ontological vulnerability that flowed from the radical continuity narrative.

This article reexamines the Ottoman Turkish term millet, which is supposedly central to understanding Ottoman governance over non-Muslim subjects. While scholars have largely assumed that the use of millet for non-Muslim collectives reflected top-down imperial control, this article challenges that premise by extensively examining how the term was employed in Ottoman documents from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The findings reveal that the extant understanding of millet as a rigidly defined, state-recognized confessional community lacks empirical support throughout the empire’s history. Instead, the term millet, as used in Ottoman documents, vaguely denoted a group of people who supposedly shared a common origin and culture, though not necessarily defined by a common religion or confession. Furthermore, millet’s use for non-Muslim collectives gradually increased from around 1805, not due to state imposition, but influenced by non-Muslim actors who responded to millet’s acquired distinction as a term denoting modern nationhood. Thus, this article contributes to revising the prevalent state-centric view of Ottoman history by demonstrating the participation of non-Muslims in the development of Ottoman discourse.

The Banat, like all territories lost after the First World War, was part of Hungarian irredentist plans. On the eve of the German occupation of Serbia, Hitler promised both the Bačka and the Banat to Hungary. Romania, the other ally of Nazi Germany, also had interest in the Banat as compensation for its territorial losses and as fulfillment of its First World War goals. To avoid a possible conflict between its two allies, Germany decided to occupy the Banat and appointed an ethnic German administration to the region. This article explores how the Banat Hungarian cultural elite navigated this new situation in the shadow of the Reich German occupation and the ethnic German administration. The failed and indefinitely postponed return of the region to Hungary raised self-doubt in the Banat Hungarian minority elites, causing them to rethink their position in the region and in the Hungarian nation. In the hopes of strengthening their positions, these elites discussed their ideas in the only Hungarian-language daily in the Banat during the period. The texts published in the Torontál repositioned the historical borderland of the Banat as a core part of the Hungarian nation-state and reinforced the border only towards the Balkan peninsula.

This article takes xenophobia in right-wing ecological conservation in contemporary Germany as its research object, first examining its manifestation in the history of right-wing ecotourism. Then, using species and animal protection as examples, it specifically analyzes the ways, argumentative characteristics, and underlying motives of the NPD, the AfD, and the Third Way in combining ecological topics with xenophobia. This article emphasizes the continuity and importance of xenophobia in the history of right-wing ecological conservation in Germany and its new characteristics in contemporary times. My conclusion is that xenophobia has always been an important objective of right-wing ecological conservation, and contemporary German right-wing ecological conservation has both maintained historical traditions and undergone contemporary updates. In right-wing ecological conservation in contemporary Germany, far-right parties and organizations use both traditional biologism and more covert cultural racism to incite xenophobia. However, whether advocating the superiority of “species (race)” or “culture,” the underlying ideology is one of inequality. Similar to the argumentation methods in the history of right-wing ecological conservation, species conservation and animal protection in right-wing ecological conservation in contemporary Germany ultimately equate to homeland protection. Therefore, species conservation and animal protection are merely tools for far-right parties and organizations to build their image, disguise xenophobic ideas, and greenwash their agenda. This article contributes to research on immigration and the far right in contemporary Germany.