Pieter M. Judson is one of those historians who retrieve interpretations that have long been stowed away in historiography's deep freeze, chop away the icy encrustations, and thaw them for a fresh look. That was precisely what he did in his thought-provoking book about liberalism in the Habsburg monarchy. Now he turns his attention to what was purportedly the central problem of the monarchy's last decades: the nationality question. He does so not in long, abstract theoretical discussions but, rather, in masterful, elegantly written microstudies. The examples he marshals show what really can be accomplished with a thick description that is well grounded in theory and links the particular with the general. He looks behind the political bluster of the conflicts among the monarchy's nationalities and poses a simple question: how far-reaching was the nation-building process, and how widespread, in fact, was nationalism among the rural population?

For the answer, Judson visits the rural language frontier in Tirol, Southern Styria, and the Bohemian Forest. His methodology in going about this is, on one hand, to do “close readings” of nationalist documents and, on the other, to analyze the nationalist discourse by reconstructing actual village life. Whereas the nationalists wanted to shift the “nation” into the central position of the identity of people living on the language frontier, the actual inhabitants of these rural regions were frequently bilingual, nationally indeterminate, and—depending on the opportunities available to them—more interested in economic or social-welfare issues. Therefore, the nationalists attempted to redefine these problematic situations as the “national question” to dissolve this frequently mixed milieu that displayed scant interest in nationalism and to force monolingualism as a signal of an unambiguous national identity. In doing so, they linked nation building to the modernization of rural regions regarded as backward. This was possible because most nationalists were not locals—they were more often city dwellers, better educated, with no agricultural background. These were the protagonists who wanted to finally bring the blessings of modernity to willful, unruly villagers.

Judson thus contradicts the opinion of prominent historians that nationalism had already become established in rural regions in the early twentieth century. He quite properly mistrusts the respective language censuses as criteria for a distinct sense of belonging to a specific nationality. But this line of argumentation also raises questions: Does bilingualism really mean equal mastery of both languages? Does not the author underestimate language as a means of communication with a high emotional value? After all, is not a person who learned Czech as a child and speaks German with a Czech accent identified thereby as a non-German? Does not there also exist among people who are bilingual a vague group identity that, in premodern fashion as it were, binds them more strongly to one language group than the other?

These are legitimate questions; nevertheless, the great value of Guardians of the Nation stems from its excellent microstudies. Here, Judson displays his exceptional capacity to bring great sensitivity to the process of understanding this small milieu and, at the same time, to explain it analytically with well-chosen examples. And, moreover, he does so in a language that makes this book a real page-turner! Please permit me a bit of pathos here. This is a display of consummate artistry, a textbook example of what can be accomplished nowadays with historiography that has assimilated postmodernism but has never lost touch with the reality of a day and age gone by. The result: in these hotly disputed territories, even the most ordinary, everyday conflict could be cast in a nationalist light. Indeed, the nationalists on both sides were positively eager to foment such disputes. But was the language frontier then actually just a construction of the nationalists as Judson suggests? Was not there, nevertheless, a nationalistically tinged basic conflict in this rural realm that the nationalists certainly exploited to provide ammunition in the “big struggle” among the nationalities?

The final chapter precisely draws the lines of this conflict up to World War I and beyond. The author concurs with Maureen Healy's plausible hypothesis in Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire (Cambridge, 2004) that it was the internal disintegration of society due to the hardships and stress of war that precipitated the monarchy's demise. The multifaceted aspects that Judson addresses and his intelligent analysis of them are a more-than-worthy replacement for many, many books about the end of the monarchy. As an Austrian historian, one is somewhat ashamed of how a historian from the United States has once again made a large portion of Austrian research about our own history look rather provincial.