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 Reference Trdina1884, 118).

Like a myriad of similar sources, Trdina’s report clearly shows that popular reactions to nationalism were frequently marked by ignorance, scepticism, or even rejection. It shows that, especially in the countryside, older ethnic identifications often survived their encounter with nationalism, at least for a while (Verdery Reference Verdery1983; Himka Reference Himka1988; Cole Reference Cole2000; Stauter-Halsted Reference Stauter-Halsted2001; Struve Reference Struve2005; Judson Reference Judson2006; Řepa Reference Řepa2020; Toncich Reference Toncich2021; Negură et al. Reference Negură, Cuşco and Suveica2025; Radu et al. Reference Radu, Iordachi, Buruiană and Sora2026). Even in 1884, Trdina’s Lower Carniolan peasants identified as Carniolans, and perceived the Slovenes as a different group. Yet at the turn of the twentieth century the situation had changed, and these two identifications largely merged. Slavic-speaking Carniolans still identified as such, but also as Slovenes. With a few exceptions, Carniolans started to identify as a subgroup of Slovenes (Bernot Reference Bernot2024b).

As ethnolinguistic nationalisms slowly gained ground, a similar development could be traced across the Habsburg Empire and in large parts of Europe. Ernest Gellner described this as “the general imposition of a high culture on a society” and — using an allegory — the replacement of Oskar Kokoschka’s world by that of Amedeo Modigliani (Gellner Reference Gellner2006, 56, 139). Several scholars of nationalism have already shown that elementary education and schools played an essential role in these developments and that mass schooling was perhaps the most important and successful nation-building strategy (Balcells Reference Balcells2013; Darden and Mylonas Reference Darden and Mylonas2016; Tröhler Reference Tröhler2020; Acosta Reference Acosta, Tröhler, Piattoeva and Pinar2021; Darden Reference Dardenforthcoming). So have historians! Eugen Weber’s influential history of French nation-building is probably the most well-known among those studies (Weber Reference Weber1976; see also Chanet Reference Chanet1996), but there are many others. There is, for instance, a plethora of publications interrogating the role of schools in nation-building in the Balkan nation-states established in the nineteenth century (Bozeva Abazi Reference Bozeva Abazi2007; Zervas Reference Zervas2017; Negură Reference Negură2020; Negură and Cuşco Reference Negură and Cuşco2021).

These publications have one thing in common: they all focus on the role of schools and education in nation-states, which purposefully employed nationalizing policies to mold the (largely peasant) masses into nationalists. As Paschalis Kitromilides has observed, in cases like these, nationalism was “an expression of the state and an agency for the consolidation of its power,” which was used to destroy “pre-modern forms of culture” (Kitromilides Reference Kitromilides, Beaton and Ricks2009, 29). This special issue, however, is about empires; it is — to be quite precise — about the Habsburg Empire.

The Habsburg Empire was certainly not a nation-state, even if it is also debatable whether it was an empire (Judson Reference Judson2008; for a critique of this dichotomy, see Kumar Reference Kumar2010; Berger and Miller Reference Berger and Miller2015; Malešević Reference Malešević2017; Hall Reference Hall2024). Well into the 1980s, most historians understood it as an oppressive state that tried hard to suppress all non-German national movements and was thus destined to collapse because of a longstanding and irresolvable crisis caused by the so-called national question. With some notable exceptions, this was true for historians in the successor states, as well as in Britain, the US, and elsewhere (Cole Reference Cole2017; Harmat Reference Harmat, Rumpler and Harmat2018; Bellabarba Reference Bellabarba, Mazohl and Scharr2021; Šimetin Šegvić Reference Šimetin Šegvić, Bobinac, Müller-Funk, Seidler, Spreicer and Urválek2021). This was — as John Deak has shown — a consequence of nationalist teleologies on the one hand and academic genealogies on the other (Deak Reference Deak2014; see also Cornwall Reference Cornwall2022; Balikić Reference Balikić2022; Bellabarba Reference Bellabarba2026). In the last few decades, however, a new generation of historians — mostly from the US — challenged these views, showing that the empire had been a viable and rather normal state, that the “prison of peoples” trope does not explain the late Habsburg era all that well (Judson Reference Judson2018; Bellabarba Reference Bellabarba2019; Cohen Reference Cohen2021).

A new understanding of the Habsburg Empire and its attitude toward heterogeneity in general, and national movements in particular, emerged. Building on this new research, Pieter M. Judson was able to write a new history of the Habsburg state in the nineteenth century, showing that nationalisms — when they mattered and as much as they mattered at all — were largely not opposed to the Habsburg state, which in turn increasingly saw itself as the protector of its nations (Judson Reference Judson2016, for more on recent historiography, see Judson Reference Judson, Judson and Rozenblit2005; Cole Reference Cole, Van Ginderachter and Beyen2012; Stergar Reference Stergar2018; Boisserie Reference Boisserie2020; Varga Reference Varga, Carmichael, D’Auria and Roshwald2023). In fact, Judson in a recent article persuasively argued that “in terms of European comparison, Imperial Austria and even nationalist Hungary managed daily-life issues around language use and religious practice, more humanely and effectively than did the successor nation states after 1918. In fact, the term ‘Prison of Peoples’, then associated with the Habsburg Monarchy, might better be applied to the treatment of ethnic minorities by the successor states that called themselves ‘nation states’” (Judson Reference Judson2023, 560).

Moreover, scholars have already suggested that the empire — and after the Settlement of 1867 its Austrian half — did not only manage heterogeneity rather well but that it implicitly and explicitly endorsed national identifications through various policies, practices, and institutions (Stergar Reference Stergar, Pombeni and Mazohl2012; Stergar and Scheer Reference Stergar and Scheer2018; Almasy Reference Almasy2024; Hen-Konarski Reference Hen-Konarski2024). The Habsburg Empire, as Börries Kuzmany so aptly put it, “not only allowed several national movements to agitate their targeted populations, it embraced nationality as a relevant social category. It integrated the national into the polity through institutions, not unlike those of an ideal-type nation state” (Kuzmany Reference Kuzmany2023, 986). Occasionally it even advanced national identifications when it wanted to suppress them (Malešević Reference Malešević2021). Not only was the Habsburg Empire not a prison; in some respects, it was an incubator of nations! It is therefore no surprise that Habsburg schools were also crucially important for nation-building projects, which began to appear after the turn of the nineteenth century and transformed national identifications into viable modes of group-building toward the end of the century. That is why it makes sense to revisit this topic, trying to add nuance and fill in research gaps.

Historians have already shown that Habsburg schools were involved in nation-building in several ways. First and foremost, the introduction of compulsory elementary education in 1774 and the subsequent growth in literacy that followed cannot be overlooked. Literacy, which was one of the main goals of elementary schools, was also a necessary precondition for the spread of national identifications beyond the confined circles that formulated national programs from the turn of the nineteenth century onward. Moreover, schools and education were instrumental in the development of a modern public sphere, an essential requirement for the spread of nationalist politics, something Gary B. Cohen already argued almost two decades ago (Cohen Reference Cohen2007; see also Boyer Reference Boyer1989, 311). The fact that all of this did not happen in a single language but in several languages also mattered a great deal. Consequently, the already circulating perception that the Habsburg Empire was a multilingual state inhabited by peoples defined by languages was strengthened. In turn, this became the basis for ethnolinguistic nationalisms, which eventually became the dominant form of nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe.

In short, the schools that the Habsburg state established and funded from 1774 onward were of crucial importance for nation-building even if that was not their purpose. Quite the opposite, focusing on the pre-1848 period, Jan Bernot and Rok Stergar’s article in this special issue reiterates that, when it comes to ideology, schools were focused on promoting diligence, dynastic loyalty, and Christian piety before the changes brought on by the revolutionary year 1848. Habsburg schools in this era thus further confirm Agustina S. Paglayan’s proposition that compulsory elementary education was primarily established as a tool of social control (Paglayan Reference Paglayan2024). In their teaching, pre-1848 Habsburg schools often used provincial linguistic varieties and not the transregional languages that later became the cornerstones on which ethnolinguistic nationalisms were built. However, the Bernot-Stergar article also shows that already toward the end of the so-called Vormärz period — and regardless of official policies — schools started to emerge as venues in which novel transregional identifications spread through the personal networks of students and teachers.

Scott Moore’s article in this special issue points to a different dynamic that emerged after 1848. After the revolution, nations — at that moment called Volksstämme in German — their rights became a constitutional matter, and an officially sanctioned taxonomy of languages emerged (Stourzh Reference Stourzh1985, 17–41; Judson Reference Judson2016, 155–217; Stergar and Scheer Reference Stergar and Scheer2018). Teaching in languages other than German ceased to be a pragmatic response to a multilingual population, something that was often practiced but did not need to be. On the contrary, it became a legal obligation. Consequently, over the next decades, separate state-funded primary and secondary schools for each of the recognized ethnolinguistic nations were established. This was a contested development because not everyone was happy that entrenched linguistic hierarchies were being destroyed and that German, traditionally the language of educated elites, ceased to be almost the only language used in education beyond the first few years. Nevertheless, the change did happen, protected as it was by the constitution and enforced by the courts if needed. Pupils were taught in ten languages, using textbooks printed in those languages, and according to different curricula (Burger Reference Burger1995; Bruckmüller Reference Bruckmüller1999, Reference Bruckmüller and Beer2003, Reference Bruckmüller, Cole and Unowsky2007; for the evolution of schools after 1848, see Urbanitsch Reference Urbanitsch2025).

In this context, the ban on compulsory learning of the second local language, the so-called Sprachenzwangverbot contained in §19 of the Austrian constitution of 1867, was one of the crucial measures that helped strengthen and establish boundaries between various language groups. Nationalists greeted the ban as a measure that would prevent assimilation of children through their acquisition of a second language. Non-German nationalists especially feared the learning of the imperial lingua franca, German. In reality, however, it primarily helped eradicate bilingual education and erect and strengthen boundaries between slowly emerging ethnolinguistic groups (Burger Reference Burger and Hentschel1997; Feichtinger Reference Feichtinger, Almasy, Pfandl and Tropper2020, 39, 40; King Reference King2024, 296, 297). As the so-called utraquist schools started quickly disappearing, children were separated into linguistically homogenous groups even in regions where many were bilingual and where traditionally a clear separation between language groups did not exist (Almasy Reference Almasy2024, 131). The case of the Lower Carniolan villages Obergrass/Trava and Mittergrass/Srednja vas, recently analyzed by Jan Bernot, nicely illustrates the development. Children from those villages, situated at the edge of the so-called Gottscheer language island, mostly spoke the Germanic Gottscheer vernacular and the local Slavic vernacular that they called Carniolan or Slovene. When the district captain asked the local pastor to prepare a list of Slovene and German pupils in 1889, the priest responded that this was largely impossible because there was no way to know who was German and who was Slovene in those villages. Despite that, the district captain persisted, as did the German and Slovene nationalist activists, and after 1892 separate Slovene and German classes were established in the local elementary school (Bernot Reference Bernot2024a).

In the context of nationalized education, a three-tiered system of teaching identifications was developed that aimed to mold children into loyal and patriotic Habsburg subjects, members of an ethnolinguistic nation, and proud inhabitants of their crownland (Almasy Reference Almasy, Pfaffenthaler and Göderle2018a; Horejs Reference Horejs2020; Moore Reference Moore2020). After the Settlement of 1867, the situation in Hungary changed quite drastically as the ruling Hungarian nationalists rather unsuccessfully tried to use schools as vehicles of Magyarization (Berecz Reference Berecz2013). In the Austrian half of the empire, as Moore shows in his article, the triad of dynasty, nation, and crownland remained the backbone of patriotic education. Moreover, everyday school activities were permeated by national categories, and, in turn, helped to produce and reproduce national identifications. Quite like in nation-states, pupils were nationalized with the full approval of the state! Entirely unsurprisingly, the results were not absent. In a recent article, Karin Almasy has convincingly argued that Austrian schools were one of the main instruments of Slovene nation-building (Almasy Reference Almasy2024, see also Reference Almasy2018b, Reference Almasy, Zalaznik and Žigon2014).

It was therefore no coincidence that nationalist activists, who instinctively understood what was happening, invested a lot of energy in gaining as much control as possible over the schools. Not only did they invest huge sums in the parallel system of education in the so-called national borderlands, but they attempted to control state school boards, to police textbooks, and above all to make sure that children did not end up in the “wrong school.” In short, around the turn of the twentieth century, schools became “fortresses” and “outposts,” textbooks became “weapons of mass instruction,” and a proper “battle for children” raged (Zahra Reference Zahra2008; Ingrao Reference Ingrao2009; Zvánovec Reference Zvánovec2020, Reference Zvánovec2025).

Yet, as Doina Anca Cretu shows in her article in this special issue, the relationship between schools and nation-building was not static. During the First World War, when many children and teachers had to relocate to camps for the internally displaced, nationality defined through language remained the organizing principle in the camp schools, even if, as Cretu shows, the state-imposed classification continued to confound some refugees. There were still those who did not fit neatly in any of the categories. Additionally, some protagonists sensed an opportunity and wanted to use the extraordinary circumstances to develop a system of education that would strengthen pupils’ imperial patriotism through an expanded role for the German language.

Of course, the notion that German should have a special role throughout the empire was not new. At the end of the eighteenth century, for instance, the enlightened Austrian patriot and imperial advisor Joseph von Sonnenfels felt that German could bind the various peoples of the Habsburg Empire together even as they would continue to cultivate other languages (Fillafer Reference Fillafer2020, 24–26). Such reasoning was also behind the preeminent position of German in schools, when compulsory elementary education was introduced. In their article in the special issue, Bernot and Stergar mentioned how the authorities hoped that everyone would learn at least some German in primary schools, that German would continue to dominate secondary education, and that this would in turn help homogenize the population. As we have seen, such plans were dealt a serious blow in 1848, but soon after — during the so-called neo-absolutist era — an attempt was made to secure a preeminent position for the German language in education once again. Yet once Emperor Francis Joseph was forced to return to constitutional rule, the equality of languages was reinstated, and German lost its privileged position (Stourzh Reference Stourzh1985, 39–57).

Doina Anca Cretu’s article, however, reminds us that not everyone welcomed these developments and that efforts to reverse them were pondered and trialed during the First World War. It also reminds us that we should not overlook the differences between nation-states and the Habsburg Empire. Despite many similarities that the existing research and the articles in this special issue have highlighted, we need to acknowledge that the aim of patriotic education was much more contested in Habsburg schools. The three-tiered system that Scott Moore writes about in his article, and which prevailed in the second half of the nineteenth century, did not grow out of unidirectional efforts. On the contrary, it was a compromise that was forged because no one was able to impose their vision on the imperial system of education. The homogenizers favoring German could not, but the nationalists also were not able to.

That said, it is worth remembering that even the proponents of German as the imperial language were not arguing for a complete linguistic assimilation of the entire population; turning all peasants into Germans was hardly their goal, and a French-style linguistic homogenization was never attempted. While Emperor Joseph II did try to centralize his empire and made German its administrative language in 1784, he still encouraged the development and the use of other languages (Judson Reference Judson2016, 56). Clemens Metternich, the crucial figure of the pre-1848 era, was furthermore convinced that the population of the empire had “national feelings,” that they identified with ethnolinguistic groups, and had frequently suggested that the Habsburg Empire should be transformed into a federation of national units (Decker Reference Decker2023).

While Metternich’s federalizing plans never came to fruition, a belief in the existence of language-bounded peoples influenced state policies already in the pre-1848 era, most notably in the field of education. For instance, the use of pupils’ mother tongue was not only tolerated but explicitly suggested in the elementary schools when they were established in 1774; the same was true for Hungary, where compulsory elementary education was introduced in 1777 (Engelbrecht Reference Engelbrecht1984, 130; Štebih Golub Reference Štebih Golub, Ćavar and Lahorka Plejić2023, 54). After 1848, ethnolinguistically defined nations became a constitutional category, as a string of constitutional documents guaranteed the use of recognized languages in education (Stourzh Reference Stourzh1985, 17–41; Judson Reference Judson2016, 155–217). The roles that people like Metternich had in these developments clearly show that the results were not exclusively a consequence of nationalist efforts, as historians traditionally assumed. On the contrary, as Philipp Decker remarked, the constitutional recognition of multilingual education was a negotiated result of various initiatives stemming from the bottom but also from the top, from the imperial Austrian state itself (Decker Reference Decker2023, 1358).

There is one more important aspect of Habsburg schools’ role in nation-building that needs to be considered. Mostly for pragmatic reasons, the Austrian state was already involved in the standardization of languages in the first half of the nineteenth century. As communication with the multilingual population and their education became increasingly important, and as there were so many linguistic varieties, the state sought to reduce their number as a means to simplify its administrative tasks and reduce costs. Already in the 1830s, for example, the state intervened in the standardization of Slavic varieties used in Carniolan and Styrian schools. In the beginning of the 1850s, the Ministry of Education then ordered that a single standard and a unified orthography be used for textbooks in Carniola, Styria, Carinthia, and the Austrian Littoral (Almasy Reference Almasy2024, 126–30). This new language, the “new Slovene,” replaced older provincial standards and reduced costs because a single textbook could now be used in several provinces. More importantly, however, this novel linguistic classification also helped define the boundaries of the Slovene nation that the Habsburg state now recognized as one of the constitutionally protected nations.

Over the nineteenth century, along with the armed forces, census forms, and some other institutional venues and bureaucratic procedures, Habsburg schools became repositories of ethnolinguistic categories defined after 1848. The state-imposed taxonomy ultimately determined which linguistically defined nations would be recognized in curricula and integrated into the empire-nation-province triad. Consequently, Lower Carniolan children were not called Carniolans anymore in schools, for now they were Slovenes. They also learned the Slovene language and about Slovene literature and history. Sometimes they heard about a land called Slovenia even if a province by this name did not exist in the Habsburg Empire (Almasy Reference Almasy2018b, Reference Almasy2024). This was an important part of the transformation of Lower Carniolans into Slovenes over the second half of the nineteenth century, and in this respect Habsburg schools hardly differed from schools in nation-states.

Of course, the Carniolan category was not the only one that disappeared or was subsumed in the course of the century. Similar developments with comparable consequences could be traced across the empire. The naming of some languages in the Law Gazette (Reichsgesetzblatt) is a good illustration of this. Announcing the publication of the Gazette in several commonly used regional languages (landesübliche Sprachen), the 1849 edition explicitly subsumed Styrian Slovene (Windic, windische Schriftsprache) and Carniolan (krainerische Schriftsprache) under the Slovene language category. The Czech language category similarly incorporated Moravian (mährische Schriftsprache) and Slovak (slowakische Schriftsprache) (Allgemeines Reichs-Gesetz- und Regierungsblatt für das Kaiserthum Oesterreich 1850, vi). Over the next decades, Carniolan and Windic, as well as Moravian, disappeared from the nomenclature; the categories that remained were Slovene and Czech.

Analogous developments happened in schools as well. Over the course of the century, local linguistic varieties that were still used in the classrooms in the first half of the century were replaced by transregional standard languages that fit the state-imposed taxonomy. Ladino and Friulian were classified as Italian dialects, and the teachers were urged never to use dialects in the classroom and to make sure that pupils only used “pure Italian” (Boaglio Reference Boaglio2025, 219, 220). In Provincial Croatia before 1848, textbooks in so-called Kajkavian, the provincial variety, were used. This was no longer possible after 1849, when the Ministry of Education prescribed the use of transregional Illyrian for schools in Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia (Štebih Golub Reference Štebih Golub, Ćavar and Lahorka Plejić2023; Maxwell Reference Maxwell2026, 6). Of course, only textbooks in one of the recognized languages could receive state approval and be used in public schools. When Gottscheer-speaking children went to school, they were taught in standard German and used textbooks in standard German even though this was a language that was almost incomprehensible to many of them (Bernot Reference Bernot2024a, 409). So, not only were these largely bilingual children divided into two groups — Slovene and German — but they were also subjected to linguistic assimilation into these two groups. As Carniolans were becoming Slovenes, Gottscheers were slowly turning into Germans. Likewise, in the south of Tyrol, the inhabitants of the small mountain community of Lusérn/Luserna that spoke a vernacular classified as a German dialect were being transformed into Germans once German replaced Italian as the language of instruction (Frizzera Reference Frizzera2025).

Needless to say, these classifications and their practical consequences were debated, negotiated, and contested. The case of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a good example of how even the government was sometimes unsure about how to classify languages, and how the relevant ministers sometimes changed their decision more than once (Scheer Reference Scheer and Cornwall2020; Ilić-Marković Reference Ilić-Marković2025). Alexander Maxwell’s recent article, furthermore, shows that several Slovak intellectuals published grammars of Slovak in the 1850s despite the fact that the imperial Ministry of Education decided that Slav-speaking pupils in Upper Hungary should be taught in Czech (Maxwell Reference Maxwell2026). In Tyrol, Ladin philologists and activists continued to struggle with the standardization of the Ladin language and argued it needed to be used in schools, despite the fact that most linguists and the Habsburg state classified these vernaculars as Italian dialects (Pescosta Reference Pescosta, Füreder, Messner, Pescosta, Anvidalfarei and Moroder2024).

Yet while Ladin or Jewish activists worked hard to promote identification with the Ladin and Jewish nation, the fact that the state did not recognize their linguistic varieties as languages put them at a distinct disadvantage. Ladin and Yiddish speakers — or the speakers of Friulian, Silesian, or Roma — could not make demands to the state based on constitutional rights protecting their nationality. The use of their vernaculars in public schools, although it was sometimes allowed, was not guaranteed and could not be litigated in courts, which is something that Czech or Polish nationalists could do — and often successfully did (Stourzh Reference Stourzh1985, 58–74).

This is precisely why Jewish nationalists worked hard to gain recognition of Yiddish or Hebrew as a “commonly used language.” Because only then could they claim rights from §19 of the 1867 Constitution and demand that the state fund primary and secondary schools, perhaps even a university, or that the state ought to support the production of textbooks and the education of teachers capable of teaching in these languages (Stourzh Reference Stourzh1985, 74–80; Shanes Reference Shanes2012, 115). This in turn would have strengthened the idea that the Jewish nation really existed as an immutable and essential part of social reality. Precisely because of that, state-imposed taxonomies mattered so much. They enabled and even provided organizational grounding for some nationalisms while they did not for others. Without this, as Siniša Malešević has shown, the three-legged stool of nationalism cannot stand (Malešević Reference Malešević2019).

It is, however, important to stress that the results of nationalization in Habsburg schools were not predetermined and that people had agency and were protagonists. Lejla Voloder emphasized in her recent article on nationalism and education that it is wrong to assume that pupils were passive receptors of the nationalist ideologies that schools tried to transmit (Voloder Reference Voloder2025). This certainly applies to Habsburg schools. Simply put, there were factors besides the school a child attended that shaped their identifications. Josip Vošnjak, for instance, was a bilingual child and most of his primary and secondary education in his native Styria was in German. According to his memoirs, he was still largely apolitical and not explicitly national while he was at the University of Vienna, where he studied to become a doctor. Only later did he become a Slovene nationalist and one of the most prominent Slovene politicians of his era (Vošnjak Reference Vošnjak and Melik1982, 1–67, and passim). The evolution of Vošnjak was by no means unique. In the sources, there are hundreds, even thousands, of similar stories.

It is also worth noting that not all Habsburg public schools were exactly the same; not even if we limit ourselves to the Austrian half after 1867. They had diverse teachers and diverse textbooks, as Oliver Pejić has shown in his article in this special issue. Analyzing state-approved German and Slovene textbooks, he pointed out that there were noticeable differences between textbooks, which — while they were approved by relevant state bodies — were published by commercial publishers. Nationalist ideology was barely noticeable in some, but it was quite explicit and even surprisingly radical in others. This can at least partially explain why people remained nationally indifferent, and their identifications ebbed and flowed even when the basic tenets of ethnolinguistic nationalisms were a part of the prescribed curricula.

To sum up, even though the Habsburg empire was not a nation-state, its schools evolved into one of the main venues of nationalization. Many policies and practices that eventually contributed to the spread of novel national identifications primarily had pragmatic aims. Teaching the population to read and write as well as communicating with the citizenry were the most obvious. Their contribution to nation-building was unintended; it was a side effect. Yet not everything was an unintentional consequence. There were also well-elaborated policies that increasingly aimed at fostering national identifications. After 1848, and especially after 1867, the system of education in the Austrian half of the empire was in effect divided into separate national systems that were created on the basis of linguistic categories which the state helped define in the middle of the nineteenth century. Consequently, pupils were taught in one of those languages, they learned about the history of the nation they were told they belonged to, they learned about their national homeland and its natural beauties, about the writers and the heroes…

The articles in this special issue, however, show that the role Habsburg schools played in the spread and grounding of national identifications was complex. For one, as Scott Moore shows in his article, while schools tried to foster national identifications, they also attempted to promote imperial patriotism and dynastic loyalty, as well as provincial patriotism. Also, according to Jan Bernot and Rok Stergar, the intentional promotion of national identifications only started to happen after the revolution of 1848; in the first half of the century, this part of the ideological empire–nation–province triad was still missing. Oliver Pejić’s article further emphasizes the heterogeneity of public schools. Even while their teaching was aligned with the same curricula, the teachers actually teaching and the textbooks they used in the classroom were sometimes very different. Finally, Doina Anca Cretu’s article reminds us that the ideological goals of the schools were always contested. During the First World War, attempts to use education as a homogenizing tool resurfaced, showing that the pre-war approach was primarily a precarious compromise.