This book examines aspects of the national struggle along several “language frontiers” in late-Imperial Austria: in southwestern Bohemia, where Germans and Czechs co-existed: in southern Styria, home to Germans and Slovenes; and (more briefly) in German-Italian South Tyrol-Trentino. Author Pieter Judson begins, however, by questioning the very notion of the frontiers referred to in his subtitle. They arose mainly as by-products of the first language censuses, which data, when rendered in the form of linguistic (or “ethnic”) maps, created images of finite ethnic territories separated from each other by unofficial, undefended, and in the nationalist imagination precarious “frontiers.” Except these frontiers did not really demarcate; more often, they denoted extensive zones of ethnic intermingling, bilingualism, indeterminate national identities, and indifference to nationalist categories. While this situation changed, of course, as nationalist ideas were introduced to the inhabitants of these regions, non-national attitudes (Judson: “the fundamental logic of local cultures in multilingual regions”) persisted longer than is commonly believed and remained a viable alternative to ethnic nationalism. Nationalist activists themselves, in Judson's view, remained acutely aware of the gap between their ideal of a nationally conscious and mobilized society and widespread indifference to this project, especially in rural areas.

While German, Czech, Slovene, and Italian nationalists behaved in many of the same ways, Judson's German-nationalist sources seem to have been more fertile; at any rate, the activities of such organizations as the Deutscher Schulverein (est. 1880), the Deutscher Böhmerwaldbund (est. 1884), and the Südmark (est. 1889) receive the most attention. He concentrates on four aspects of the national struggle: first, the competition for linguistic dominance (or, in minority situations, parity) in the new public schools. Increasingly segregated by language, these schools became means of nationalist mobilization and objects of ethnic pride for the one group, and objects of resentment, fear, and sometimes violent attack for the other. Secondly, he examines efforts to shore up (or extend) the language frontier by attracting colonists from other places; in particular, the exceedingly modest Südmark effort in and around the present-day Slovene border town of Šentilj, which added a mere 400 people and 4,500 acres of farmland over an eight-year period. (By contrast, the contemporary, but state-sponsored German effort in Prussian Poland, which served as the inspiration for the Südmark, attracted some 150,000 settlers on more than one million acres of newly purchased farmland and should have been considered as part of this analysis.) A third major chapter is devoted to efforts by the Böhmerwaldbund to encourage (German) tourism as a boost to the economies of majority-German communities in the Bohemian Forest. A fourth chapter analyzes cases of violent national conflict, above all, a related pair of 1910 incidents in majority-German Bergreichenstein and majority-Czech Sušice. Interestingly, and perhaps symptomatic of the strengthened Czech position by this time, the German demonstration in the former town was suppressed by (Czech-commanded) militia, whereas the Czech outburst in the latter town went unrestrained. Judson believes that most such incidents were the result of general rowdiness or personal disputes rather than nationalism, although they were exploited by nationalist organizations (on both sides) to support the desired image of two nations locked in day-to-day struggle. In general, he questions the “deeper national significance” of most such events and is less interested in late-Imperial national rivalry as such than in its encouragement or manipulation by nationalists from away, seeking to impose their worldview on still-ambivalent rural populations.

This is a thoughtful and well-written book that opens some interesting windows into the thinking, rhetoric, and strategies of ethnic-nationalist organizations and into daily life along Austria's “language frontiers.” But it also has its problematic aspects. For example, we do not get to know the nationalist “activists” themselves. Judson provides extensive accounts and analyses of their organizations and projects, but little about their membership and leaders (aside from some of their names). He maintains an attitude of critical aloofness toward his activist subjects, and makes little effort to understand their motives, social circumstances, the sources of their ideas, and the not-entirely-fanciful reasons for their defensiveness. Similarly, his consistent references to “Czech nationalists” and “German nationalists” suggest that they were part of a larger population of regular Czechs and Germans; but aside from the occasional harried Imperial official, there are few such people in this account.

A second problem is that Judson's well-researched monograph on forms of late-Imperial national rivalry coexists awkwardly with repeated assertions of his slight regard for nationalism itself, which he sees as “an unnecessary discursive prison” from which historians need to be “liberated.” His declared aim is to correct the impression created by (unnamed) “nationalist historians,” who “stubbornly prefer to view the evidence in contexts shaped by … nationalist discourse” while ignoring “the clearly non-nationalist worlds whose existence this evidence more than confirms” (p. 138). A third problem is the whereabouts of such evidence. Unfortunately, there is no bibliography that would allow the reader to see at a glance what sources have been consulted, but judging from the footnotes, this study relies mainly on the records and publications of the nationalist organizations themselves, supplemented by the occasional official source. Judson looks to “inconsistencies” in these sources to “reveal spaces where alternative viewpoints can … be surmised, if not reported. It may be impossible to reconstruct other points of view with any accuracy, but their existence can often be plotted” (p. 182). But that produces little more than well-reasoned conjecture; and while Judson's assertion of a substantially non-national substructure among the rural populations of Austria may be plausible, a substantial historical-evidence deficit still persists.

In the end, this remains a factually dense and revealing study, based on nationalist sources, of nationalist organizations doing nationalist things in communities increasingly dominated by the categories of ethnic nationalism; all the while its author is proclaiming the artificiality, unreasonableness, contingency, superficiality, incompleteness, and futility of the nationalist project itself. A final chapter looks at the post-1918 period, but notes only tangentially the extent to which most of the communities in this study were subsequently utterly transformed by nationalism, however evitable and contingent present-day scholars believe that idea to have been. By 1945, the “national indifference and the strength of local loyalties that often made un-mixing an exercise in futility” (p. 255) had been blown away, and the “fantasies about the wholesale movement of populations in and out of specific frontier regions” (p. 257) had become reality. Awareness of this adds an additional note of poignancy, of course, to the many interesting vignettes of life along the language frontier, which are this book's principal strength.