Understanding Multiculturalism is structured in three parts: identity formation in multicultural societies; the dynamics of multicultural societies, politics, and the state; and identities expressed, negotiated, and challenged in multicultural settings. The editors give a very stimulating and convincing introduction by explaining the theoretical frame of the project (a research group that brought together twenty scholars) and their conception of Habsburg Central Europe. Here actually lies the main problem of the book: the Hungarian part (Transleithania) of the Habsburg monarchy is missing in the results presented, and the editors offer no explanation as to why this is so. This is very regrettable because a discussion of multiculturalism in Hungary and its successor states would have been profitable and enriched the picture. Some regions like Bácska (Bačka), Banat, and Transylvania should have been studied and then compared with Prekmurje and Bucovina. One wishes that the project had gone further and addressed this question. It would be extremely interesting to compare the issues of multiculturalism after both models failed in 1918: the Austrian one, dynastical and decentralized, and the Hungarian one, national and centralized. Romania's difficulty in “integrating” Transylvania after 1918 is a good example of how societies resisted national patterns.

Immigration and emigration are discussed in several essays, and it is a great achievement of the editors that Latin America and India are considered as points of comparison. Latin America could have been more deeply researched because many of the Austro-Hungarian emigrants found a place to live there (in Argentina and Brazil, for example). A comparative essay about North America could have been relevant as well. Internal migration, or maybe it is better to say mobility within Austria-Hungary, was also commonplace (among the military, civil servants, students, and merchants), as shown by the travels of Marija Hujs (169). Therefore, the “other” was not explicitly a foreigner because he or she was a citizen of one or both parts of the monarchy. This explains the difference in the statistics between natives and nonnatives, for the latter belonged to another territory of the monarchy.

However, the concept of Heimatzuständigkeit should have been explained more explicitly in order to make its significance clear to the reader. This concept not only introduces a difference between people who “come today and go tomorrow” and those who “come today and stay tomorrow” (175), but also refers to the integration of people coming from diverse locations. If we look at the Austro-Hungarian censuses, we see that the numbers of “real” foreigners (those from Germany, Russia, and Turkey) were very low. Andrea Corbea-Hoisie is very right in stressing the example of Czernowitz as a place where locals were marginalized by newcomers (183), a pattern one finds in many colonial cities. But Austria-Hungary was also a place of massive emigration in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth century. The monarchy lost hundreds of thousands of its citizens, mainly impoverished peasants from Dalmatia, Upper Hungary (Slovakia, Subcarpathian Ruthenia), and Jews from Galicia and Bucovina. The phenomenon preoccupied the authorities who saw emigration as an important loss of substance as well as multicultural character.

Language is rightly considered in some of the essays (Pieter M. Judson, Pamela Ballinger, and Oto Luthar) as key to understanding multiculturalism. Polyglossia is indeed an obstacle to the nationalization of language: polyglots are not necessarily literate, as shown by domestics or even analphabetic coach drivers in Czernowitz; the city's language is penetrated by words borrowed from other lexica. This in turn creates a specific collective memory of the city by identifying places related to its various groups. “Reading” the city goes along with national appropriation, and there is a struggle to nationalize the urban space. As evoked by Michael John, cities on the margins of the Habsburg Empire were often strongholds of nationalism (125). The cities on the peripheries of Austria or Hungary saw themselves as abandoned by the center and developed a proper narrative of multiculturalism. Alongside the “language frontier,” national activists also introduced the concept of the Sprachinsel (70). As shown by the Kronprinzenwerk mentioned by Ballinger (106), supranational identity was not supposed to fuse the cultures of Habsburg peoples, but rather to reside above them. But there was indeed a dynastic culture as well. Multiple identities were the rule and not the exception in this context, as stressed by Robert Musil in his definition of Kakanien as an integrative and not exclusive concept (though he omits the Hungarian).

Finally, a discussion about the distinction between pluriculturalism and multiculturalism brings together Anil Bhatti's and Moritz Csáky's essays: Bhatti's mention of “similarity” (39) can be applied to Habsburg Central Europe and help us to define both pluriculturalism as the simultaneous coexistence of diverse identities that mingle, operate, and transfer, and multiculturalism as a site where many cultures exist without mixing anymore, as seen in the case of Slovenian Istria (114).

The volume is highly recommended for anyone researching multiculturalism, and one can only agree with Csáky's assertion that Habsburg Central Europe was a “laboratory” of experiences that can be usefully discussed in a broader context.