The Politics Of Language And Nationalism In Modern Central Europe

This work focuses on the ideological intertwining between Czech, Magyar, Polish and Slovak, and the corresponding nationalisms steeped in these languages. The analysis is set against the earlier political and ideological history of these languages, and the panorama of the emergence and political uses of other languages of the region.

During the 1980s, Central Europe re-emerged as a concept of socio-political analysis in samizdat publications brought out in the region when the Cold War division of the continent into Eastern and Western Europe still stood fast. This concept of a newly found self-definition among Central Europe's literati and dissidents was brought to the wider attention of the West in 1984 by the Czech(oslovak) writer Milan Kundera in his seminal essay published in the New York Review of Books (Kundera 1984). To some it was a revelation that Central Europe could be a world unto itself, while others criticized this concept as a political delusion. More nationally-minded critics also saw it as a tool for a potential renewed German domination over the region. They reiterated how during the First World War Mitteleuropa had been a blueprint for building an economic-cum-political bloc in Central Europe under the joint control of Germany and Austria-Hungary (Naumann 1915). The breakup in 1989 of the Soviet bloc gave a lease of political reality to Central Europe. However, following the 1993 founding of the European Union (EU) the region's freshly postcommunist states applied for membership in this union, seen as a synonym of the West or, more exactly, of Western Europe. The Central European wish to join the European Union was a desire to become part of Western Europe. The curiously changing membership of the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) vindicates this view. Founded in 1992 by Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, the original member states promptly left it when they joined the EU in 2004. Nowadays, CEFTA embraces Albania, Moldova, and the post-Yugoslav states that have not joined the EU yet.--

During the last two centuries, ethnolinguistic nationalism has been the norm of nation building and state building in Central Europe. The number of recognized Slavic languages (in line with the normative political formula of language = nation = state) gradually tallied with the number of the Slavic nation-states, especially after the breakups of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. But in the current age of borderless cyberspace, regional and minority Slavic languages are freely standardized and used, even when state authorities disapprove. As a result, since the turn of the 19th century, the number of Slavic languages has varied widely, from a single Slavic language to as many as 40. Through the story of Slavic languages, this timely book illustrates that decisions on what counts as a language are neither permanent nor stable, arguing that the politics of language is the politics in Central Europe. The monograph will prove to be an essential resource for scholars of linguistics and politics in Central Europe.

After 1918 Central Europe's multiethnic empires were replaced by nation-states, which gave rise to an unusual ethnolinguistic kind of nationalism. This book provides a detailed history and linguistic analysis of how the many languages of Central Europe have developed from the 10th century to the present day.

This book examines the role of nationalism in post-communist development in central Europe, focusing in particular on Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

With forty-two extensively annotated maps, this atlas offers novel insights into the history and mechanics of how Central Europe’s languages have been made, unmade, and deployed for political action. The innovative combination of linguistics, history, and cartography makes a wealth of hard-to-reach knowledge readily available to both specialist and general readers. It combines information on languages, dialects, alphabets, religions, mass violence, or migrations over an extended period of time. The story first focuses on Central Europe’s dialect continua, the emergence of states, and the spread of writing technology from the tenth century onward. Most maps concentrate on the last two centuries. The main storyline opens with the emergence of the Western European concept of the nation, in accord with which the ethnolinguistic nation-states of Italy and Germany were founded. In the Central European view, a “proper” nation is none other than the speech community of a single language. The Atlas aspires to help users make the intellectual leap of perceiving languages as products of human history and part of culture. Like states, nations, universities, towns, associations, art, beauty, religions, injustice, or atheism—languages are artefacts invented and shaped by individuals and their groups.

“Central Europe” is a vague and ambiguous term, more to do with outlook and a state of mind than with a firmly defined geographical region. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Central Europeans considered themselves to be culturally part of the West, which had been politically handicapped by the Eastern Soviet bloc. More recently, and with European Union membership, Central Europeans are increasingly thinking of themselves as politically part of the West, but culturally part of the East. This book, with contributions from a large number of scholars from the region, explores the concept of “Central Europe” and a number of other political concepts from an openly Central European perspective. It considers a wide range of issues including politics, nationalism, democracy, and the impact of culture, art and history. Overall, the book casts a great deal of light on the complex nature of “Central Europe”.

This book focuses on the ways in which biological discourses of race and ethnicity affected and shaped nationalism and the idea of national superiority in Central Europe between 1880 and 1918. Preface; In this book, Marius Turda shifts a familiar and topical debate on to unfamiliar and neglected ground. Since the shattering events of the 1930s and 1940s much has been written about the genesis of notions of race in Central Europe. The blending of organic and collectivist traditions in German thought with the evolutionary arguments which derived especially from Darwin and with biological ideas about heredity was catalysed from the 1860s onward by increasingly intense nationalist sentiments. None of this led directly to Nazism, but it did create a climate in which such racist conceptions might be able to thrive. Their relation to forms of ethnic self-assertion was direct and immediate. Here is Turda's starting-point. Austria-Hungary in its last decades became notorious for nationality conflicts, but hitherto it has been generally held that racial theories played a comparatively minor role there. Austria as a pressure-group. Their rabid anti-Semitism shaded into a more broadly-shared dislike of the salient role of the Jews in the country's public life. Turda expands on the theoretical and quasi-scientific context for this, demonstrating in particular the influence of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who lived for some time in Vienna, and of Ludwig Gumplowicz, the cult sociologist of his day. But Turda's real novelty is to extend to the other half of the Dual Monarchy his analysis of the growing role of race. Hungary had some essential preconditions for it to infect national ideology. There was acute competition between ethnic groups, mainly a series of bilateral contests between the dominant Magyar interest, with its relative majority of the population, and the half-dozen other significant nationalities. Moreover, there was still an inherited discourse of an essentially tribal kind: the Magyars as a pristine blood-brotherhood, as conquerors and warriors, or (to their opponents) as Asian immigrants and uncultivated barbarians. nineteenth century from vindication of the nobles and their political and social privileges to cover a whole ethnic community bound by fierce adherence to Hungarian integral statehood and to Magyar linguistic culture. Yet the racial element has usually appeared to be balanced for historians by another long-established feature of Magyar hegemony: its attractiveness to many born outside the Magyar camp and the concomitant willingness of the latter to accept on equal terms those who assimilated to its values. Over the centuries that had been a historical reality, as well as (equally importantly) a perception of Magyar hospitableness, magnanimity, and adaptability. With most of the commentators whom Turda examines it remains a clear principle. This is hardly surprising: whereas only one of them, Zsolt Beothy, was the scion of an ancestral noble or gentry family, fully half came themselves from a non-Magyar background. Anti-Semitism, in particular, was largely absent from the Hungarian debate. of his innovative account of racial thinking among influential representatives of the ruling culture of Dualist Hungary. He sets it in relief with his concluding portrait of a Romanian, Aurel Popovici, whose ideas about race likewise drew on a traditional national agenda, in this case defensive attitudes specifically resistant to Hungarian assimilatory pressures and stressing purity of descent as distinctive of Romanians' ethnic identity. Popovici's work was a milestone in the heightened sensitivity to issues of national degeneracy which set in after the turn of the twentieth century; and as such anticipated one of the principal obsessions of later fascist ideology. In 1908 a 'wandering Scotsman, ' Scotus Viator, nom de plume of the young historian Robert William Seton-Watson, published a devastating critique of the politics of integration being pursued by Magyars. He called it Racial Problems in Hungary. Thus the most significant work of the leading foreign contributor to the debate on the nationality issue in the Habsburg Monarchy carried the keyword of Turda's investigation in its very title. been called 'peoples', and in our day are often known as 'ethnic groups: ' there is no imputation for this British liberal of blood descent, common physical characteristics, or claims to inborn superiority. Yet the terminology itself could easily become loaded with fresh meanings. That would take place dramatically a decade later, when the whole Habsburg edifice collapsed, and a resultant new structure (which Seton-Watson had a share in creating) unleashed yet more embittered nationalist clashes on the region. Marius Turda has been uniquely placed to bring this project to fruition. Bringing good knowledge of all the relevant languages, including German and Hungarian, as well as his native Romanian, he has studied and researched in a number of different environments and acquired a notable scholarly detachment for dealing with these highly controversial issues. and opens up broad and rich new perspectives on the political thought and intellectual culture of a part of Europe which contributed greatly to the instability of the whole continent in the early twentieth century. R.J.W. Evans Regius Professor of History Oxford Universi