Czech nationalism differs in one important respect from its Polish and Hungarian counterparts: the Czech nation did not have a “national” aristocracy. As a result, so the conventional wisdom goes, when the modern Czech nationalist movement emerged, even its leading elites were only a few generations removed from the countryside, giving it a supposedly more egalitarian and bourgeois coloring. This affected its ideology and political program, and by extension, helped account for the relative stability of the interwar Czechoslovak democracy, the most successful of the “successor states.”

In literature on diplomacy, the term Ostpolitik refers to the new foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany introduced in 1966. The policy, was initiated by the grand coalition of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic party (SPD) and was continued after 1969 by the SPD and Free Democratic party (FDP) coalition. The policy aimed at reconciling Germany with Poland and the Soviet Union. Willy Brandt, the SPD foreign minister from 1966 to 1969 and chancellor from 1969 until 1974, and Walter Scheel, FDP foreign minister from 1969 to 1974, were the architects of this new “selective Détente.” From the beginning, Brandt's Ostpolitik was “controlled” by the Nixon administration, especially by Kissinger. The United States feared that Brandt and Scheel would go too far without taking account of Washington's geo-political point of view.

TheSokol (Falcon), the Czech gymnastic organization, was a major component in the transformation of Czech nationalism into a mass movement. It was also one of the few organizations to mobilize women for the national cause, and their involvement in the club forms a major chapter in the history of women in Czech society. There are few sources on Czech women's history, in part because historians have tended to focus on the more advanced feminist movements of Western Europe or the United States to the detriment of the smaller nations of Europe's borderlands, where the complex ethnic composition created a special context for the emergence of the “women's question.” In the Czech lands, the rivalry between Czechs and Germans defined the conceptual framework of Czech feminism and lent the national struggle an overriding importance that served both to inspire and to limit the campaign of Czech women for expanded rights and opportunities. This convergence of feminism and nationalism is evident in the changing role of women in the Sokol from the founding of the organization in 1862 until World War I, a time when the Sokol emerged as a leading force in the Czech national movement, and when Czech women began to challenge traditional attitudes and demand equality with men. In manifesting these broader processes, the history of women in the Sokol exemplifies their larger effort to define their role within an evolving national community.

Any modern atlas or encyclopedia will inform us that Bratislava is the capital of the Slovak Republic, the center of Slovak political and cultural life. But before World War I—or even toward the end of it in 1918—it was far from clear that the city could or should be defined as “Slovak,” to say nothing of a “Slovak capital”; that it was to belong to the future state of Czechoslovakia; or that it was to be called Bratislava. This essay will describe the processes that led to these outcomes, and how a name shift became a crucial instrument in the “Slovakization” of the city. In focusing also on the ways local and central actors responded to these political and symbolic transformations, I hope to shed new light on the complexity of collective identifications and allegiances, and on the significance of renaming as a catalyst for processes of nationalization in Central Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The population of Austria-Hungary was counted five times between 1869 and 1910. This process of counting established a new relationship between the state and its citizens. The state procured vast knowledge about its citizens, and the latter became accustomed to contact on a regular basis with state authorities and administrative practices. By the end of the nineteenth century, both the state and its citizens knew more of each other than ever before. This article scrutinizes the administrative translation of reality into discourse and the effects this had on the two parties involved.

In the 1990s, the Julian (Giulian) Region that includes the cities of Trieste and Gorizia and the Istrian peninsula attracted the renewed attention of scholars for its qualities as a space in which both cosmopolitanism and nationalist polarization had flourished in the late Habsburg era. Although a healthy debate exists as to the degree to which forms of interethnic tolerance remain a feature of everyday life in these areas, most historians agree that this region underwent a series of increasing nationalizations (Italian, Slovene, Croatian, and Yugoslav) that began in the nineteenth century and culminated in the partisan anti-Fascist uprising and massive demographic shifts after World War II, as the majority of Istria's “Italian” population (together with a significant number of individuals self-identifying as Slovene or Croat) migrated from the territory that passed from Italian to Yugoslav control. The historiography of the modern era in the Julian Region has thus confirmed many of the assumptions made by nationalist activists along this classic “language frontier” about the inevitability, exclusivity, and irreversibility of ethnonational identifications.

Adistinctive Feature of nineteenth-century Czech nationalism was its consistent promotion of Czech business and economic interests. Since the 1850s, Czech national leaders had argued that economic prosperity was a prerequisite for eventual political power and provincial autonomy within the Habsburg monarchy. They demanded equality for Czechs and for the Czech language not just in schools, courts, and the bureaucracy, but also in the business world, and they gradually established a wide network of cooperatives and voluntary associations to support Czech business.

During the decades prior to World War I, the Habsburg monarchy experienced an upsurge in national conflict. Nationalism emerged both as a form of identity politics, through which individuals became increasingly aware of their own national identity as well as that of others among whom they lived, and as a political ideology, calling for increased political, social, cultural, and economic rights for each national group. Thus, the rise in national feeling in the Habsburg monarchy led to the hardening of the boundaries separating national groups. As Jan Křen, Gary B. Cohen, and other have noted, Czechs and Germans not only became staunch political opponents, they also ceased to associate with each other privately or in social contexts by the late nineteenth century.

The Hungarian Republic, which emerged from of the ashes of Austria-Hungary, experienced two revolutions between October 1918 and April 1919. However, neither the democratic regime nor the more radical Soviet Republic born in these revolutions was able to solve the country's most pressing economic and social problems. The collapse of the Soviet Republic at the end of July 1919, in turn, was followed by a rapid rise in extra-legal violence. Freikorps units (szabadcsapatok) and civic guards (polgárőrségek), aided by the members of the local police, set up kangaroo courts, organized summary executions, and ignited pogroms in the central and western parts of the country.

It is not an easy task for a historian to give an objective picture of the internal relations of the multinational empire. This is especially true with regard to Hungary's part and position in the monarchy. Was Hungary's status in the empire one of preponderancy or dependency? Did Hungary play a disintegrating role in the Dual Monarchy or was she the pillar of dualism? These are difficult questions to answer. Wherever he turns the historian finds articles and books dealing with the monarchy which are replete with arguments and counterarguments. The most common feature of studies thus far is that historians have approached these questions concerning Hungary's role with traditional sympathies or hostilities. Detailed objective accounts based on up-to-date methods for studies on Hungarian political, economic, and social development are missing.

This essay aims to shed light on the ways in which several empires, states, and nationalist movements competed for political power in the Adriatic space. In particular, it analyzes the ways in which international, national, and local narratives converged in the critical political and economic space of the Adriatic Sea both before and after World War I to justify territorial appropriation. The possibility of geopolitical changes triggered by the Great War whetted the territorial appetites of the new nation-states that had established themselves on the ruins of multinational empires in 1918. At the same time, the same possibilities spurred Italian irredentist aspirations, as Italy directed its imperial policy increasingly toward the East. Hence, the phrase “Scramble for Africa,” which prompted the title of this article, can also be applied to the Adriatic space in the same period.

The Austrian scholar and social theorist Othmar Spann (1878–1950) was a major figure in the “conservative revolution” that fired the imagination of many Central European intellectuals after World War I. Born in the Habsburg monarchy as it was disintegrating under the pressures of nationalism and industrialization, Spann seemed destined for a conventional academic career until war, revolution, and economic collapse destroyed the social and ideological foundations of the old order in 1918. A series of lectures delivered at the University of Vienna soon after the war quickly made Spann a major spokesman for the “war generation”—young men whose roughhewn idealism found few outlets in the grim world of postwar Central Europe.

In the last decade historical writing on the Habsburg monarchy has begun to stress the contingent, constructed, and historically determined qualities of nineteenth-century nationalist ideologies. This reexamination of nationalism questions long-held assumptions about what it actually meant to define one's community identity in terms of belonging to a particular nation. It also suggests that as a historical process, the rise of nationalisms creates spaces where conflicts of a non-nationalist nature can be fought out within a community.

During the past hundred years a vast literature ranging from scholarly analyses of a high order to crudely polemical disputations has been devoted to analyzing the question of why all attempts to consolidate the Habsburg monarchy ended in failure. Since 1945 it has become increasingly possible to investigate and explain the causes of failure without national or other partisan bias. The dissolution of the empire in 1918 was, after all, the result not of defeat on the battlefield but of a long organic process.

The Czechs have always been the Slavic nation living farthest to the west. With a population of 6,500,000 in 1910, they were the third strongest ethnic group in the monarchy, although they formed only 12.7 percent of its total population. At that time the Czechs, as well as the Magyars, Croats, and Slovenes, with a few minor exceptions, lived only within the Habsburg empire. In the largely agricultural countryside between the Czech and German populations there was a clearly demarcated line which changed only rarely. Strong nationalists on both sides of this boundary, however, paid much attention to even the slightest changes in it. The dividing line between the Czechs and the Slovaks, which was the same as the frontier between the Czech lands and Hungary, was also stable. It cannot be said that this line actually amounted to a language barrier, since dialects which were nearly the same were spoken on both sides of the Morava River. The gradual transition between Czech and Polish dialects in Silesia, together with the strong westward Polish migration, however, made the nationality frontier between the Czechs and Poles relatively unstable.

The wealth of literature published in the last twenty-five years on economic growth, economic development, and comparative economic history contains little information about Austria-Hungary. Fortunately, this situation shows signs of improving as the few recent articles and monographs on the subject are beginning to be utilized in the more general literature. Although the general lack of attention to Austria-Hungary clearly indicates that serious analytical work on the economic history of the area is still in a very early stage, the relatively few studies published on the subject have already changed the views of scholars on economic developments in the Habsburg lands.

The title “Cooperative Empires” may seem contradictory—or even provocative—to many historians of empire. It is widely believed that one of the defining characteristics of an empire is the presence of little or no cooperation among its individual provinces. More than that: there is a deliberate separation between the provinces that can go so far as to become a prohibition against cooperation. In theory, at least, each province must communicate with the imperial center, but not with other provinces. This contradiction between empire and cooperation is neatly illustrated by a true family story. The story is set in the 1970s in Prague, on the western edge of that space that historians today describe as the Soviet Empire. My mother, an East German from East Berlin, was then working as an interpreter in Prague. She was sitting on the tram on the way to visit some Czech friends who shared her love of jazz music. A queasy feeling began to come over her as she recalled that she was in fact forbidden to visit Czech friends, precisely because she was working in the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) embassy in Prague. It suited both the Soviet Union and the GDR that their foreign workers should not come into private contact with other nationalities, even if they belonged to allied fraternal countries. This was a sort of socialist version of the “divide and rule” principle as it was practiced in the nineteenth century.

Although it cannot be denied that the primordial manifestations of nationalism can be traced back to the pre-capitalistic age, it has long been obvious to scholars who have investigated the economic and social factors involved in nationalism that its development has been closely connected with that of modern capitalism. It is just as apparent that economic developments in Eastern Europe have differed fundamentally from those in the western part of the same continent.2 These differences in development can be detected as far back as the fifteenth century, and they have become more and more evident during the course of the succeeding centuries. The relationship between social and economic factors and nationalism has consequently been entirely different in Eastern Europe from what it has been in the countries of Western Europe, which have more advanced economies as well as populations constituting a more or less homogeneous nationality.

In spite of the recent transnational turn, there continues to be a considerable gap between Fascist studies and the new approaches to the transitions, imperial collapses, and legacies of post–World War I Europe. This article posits itself at the crossroads between fascist studies, Habsburg studies, and scholarship on post-1918 violence. In this regard, the difficulties of the state transition, the subsequent social unrest, and the ascent of new forms of political radicalism in post-Habsburg Trieste are a case in point. Rather than focusing on the “national strife” between “Italians” and “Slavs,” this article will concentrate on the unstable local relations between state and civil society, which led to multiple cycles of conflict and crisis. One of the arguments it makes is that in post-1918 Trieste, where the different nationalist groups contended for a space characterized by multiple loyalties and allegiances, Fascists claimed to be the movement of the “true Italians,” identified with the Fascists and their sympathizers. Accordingly, while targeting the alleged enemies of the “Italian nation” (defined as “Bolsheviks,” “Austrophiles,” and “Slavs”), they aimed to polarize the Italian-speaking community along different political fault lines to reconfigure relations between the state and civil society.