Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria

by Pieter M. Judson

In the decades leading up to World War I, nationalist activists in imperial Austria labored to transform linguistically mixed rural regions into politically charged language frontiers. They hoped to remake local populations into polarized peoples and their villages into focal points of the political conflict that dominated the Habsburg Empire. But they often found bilingual inhabitants accustomed to cultural mixing who were stubbornly indifferent to identifying with only one group.

Using examples from several regions, including Bohemia and Styria, Pieter Judson traces the struggle to consolidate the loyalty of local populations for nationalist causes. Whether German, Czech, Italian, or Slovene, the nationalists faced similar and unexpected difficulties in their struggle to make nationalism relevant to local concerns and to bind people permanently to one side. Judson examines the various strategies of the nationalist activists, from the founding of minority language schools to the importation of colonists from other regions, from projects to modernize rural economies to the creation of a tourism industry. By 1914, they succeeded in projecting a public perception of nationalist frontiers, but largely failed to nationalize the populations.

Guardians of the Nation offers a provocative challenge to standard accounts of the march of nationalism in modern Europe.

(20070901)

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, European History

332 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Pieter M. Judson (born 1956, Utrecht) is professor of history. He has taught history at Swarthmore College, and is currently a professor of 19th and 20th century history at the European University Institute in Florence.

His research interests include modern European History, nationalist conflicts, revolutionary and counter revolutionary social movements, and the history of sexuality

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the more interesting books I read in graduate school, although I can’t recall ever citing it, seeing it cited, or discussing it once the class was over. This may be because Judson went a bit too far in his thesis – or it may just reflect my own tunnel-vision and selective reading since that time. Coming back to it now, I still find the evidence and conclusions provocative, and the writing clear and accessible, and I hope that Judson has continued to work along similar lines.

While this is a study of nationalism, and indeed a study of nationalist activists and their work in “language frontiers” (or national/cultural frontiers), primarily in Bohemia, what makes it distinctive is the degree to which Judson rejects nationality and frontiers/borderlands as essentialized concepts. The populations his activists addressed were very comfortable with bilingualism and a dual national identity, and had traditions of raising their children with exposure to two or more languages and were highly comfortable with changing their identities for census purposes over time. Where most historians accept national identity within individuals as essential and unchanging, so that a Czech remains a Czech whether he lives in “Bohemia,” “Czechoslovakia,” “the Czech Republic,” “The Holy Roman Empire” or some more transient political arrangement, Judson argues that many people were content to shift from “Czech” to “German” or “Slovene” depending on convenience and whim, right up to the time of the First World War.

This places Judson within discussions of the formation of nationalism as conceptualized by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, although he takes it still further. For Anderson, the concept of national identity only became possible in the technological and cultural context of modernity, being forged through new media and administrative apparatus. Judson argues that even within that context, some areas resisted nationality’s attractions well into the twentieth century, and some populations remained fluid and focused on other identifying factors (such as religious affiliation) as primary over nation.

I do think Judson may have gone too far in rejecting “the very concept of frontier of border” (p.3) despite its use in the subtitle of the book. I see his point that the people living in these regions didn’t (at least until nationalist activists told them) see themselves as being in such a space, but from an analytical point of view this book addresses the “borderlands” as defined in current historical scholarship. In failing to engage more directly in this scholarship, Judson has possibly limited the reception of his argument and also missed methodological tools that could have been of use to him. Also, given the scale of his case studies, I am not certain that he has passed the test of representativeness adequately to support his larger argument about the lack of nationality within his frontier regions.

As a scholar with a special interest in fascism, however, the timing and nature of Judson’s study is provocative and fascinating to me. The nationalist activists he studies here are the antecedents to (and in some cases, later participants in) fascist movements throughout central Europe. Indeed, the concept of “national socialism” was first introduced in Czech areas during the period of his study, albeit in a less militarized form than it would later assume in Germany. The resistance of local, especially poor and rural, populations to nationalist propaganda and thinking before World War One can inform our understanding of the later growth of ultra-nationalisms in often urban and lower-middle class contexts. Judson briefly discusses the clash of these fascist movements in this region in his final chapter (pages 243-245), although he is not as interested in how the nationalists of his earlier period informed these movements and their ideology.

In all, this remains a challenging book, and I’d like to see more scholars take up its challenge.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

My own studies on nationalism in the Habsburg Monarchy focused on the way the military dealt with nationalism among its conscripts in the last half-century of the Monarchy, and Pieter Judson's "Guardians of the Nation" goes back a step further than my own doctoral research--- looking at how nationalism is first imported into provincial towns on the "language frontiers" of the Monarchy. Judson argues that nationalism was not "organic" in the rural world, where village identities were often fluid and indistinct, but actively imported by activists who were often frustrated and angry at the inability and unwillingness of locals to choose and defend a single 'national' or linguistic identity. Styrian or even Bohemian villagers were far more used to seeing themselves in local terms where class and district were important and languages could be learned and hybridised. This fits very well with my own work, with the ability of conscripts to adopt a regimental identity and speak an "Army German" or "Army Slav" made up of mix of vocabularies and grammars rather than seeing themselves as intrinsically "Czech" or "Slovene". Judson's book is well-done and very much recommended for anyone interested in how a "national imaginary" is imported into local cultures.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding critical look at how stupid nationalism is as a paradigm for studying the past. Refusing to be taken in by nationalists' own arguments, Judson peeks into the "frontier" language zones of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, "frontiers" which were hilariously made up by nationalists trying to push through their exclusivist agendas, whether from the left or right. Judson looks at a series of small towns in an arc south from Bohemia to the Tyrol and shows that mixed-language villages really had no problem with their heterogeneity and were exasperated at nationalist attempts to show them that German and Czech speakers, for instance, were engaged in an age-old, teleological war which only the nation could end. Whatever. An amazing work which calls much into question.

[Dr.J.G.]

The beautiful village in Alps on the cover reminds one of the place we holidayed in Austria most recently, in the greater Salzburg area, where the residents were generally united in declaring they were closer to Munich than Vienna in spirit, and one did wonder if the residents of the then Austria felt this way when Germany marched in. Vienna is and has generally been proud of her own identity, what with the imperial past and having been larger in Europe than France and Germany, but Austria is now ambivalent about an identity post the German turmoil of last century.

That Austria had a hugely diverse population and the regime attempted to uniformise them but failed, is not a surprise - Europe, US, generally attempt to iron out any diversity of culture of residents, what with the "now you are here in this country you must speak this language", and variations thereof of behavioural rules and interpretational ones as well (as in "calling someone "son" is an insult in this country" which was conveyed on an internet site about an internet exchange of global scale about global issues) - but even so, Austria was more varied than most other nations of Europe, and the two couldn't survive together, the diversity and the uniformisation instinct. The consequent break up of Austria gave rise to a few new nations, just as another break up more recent added to the number.

With that background it is a good question if Europe will ever be able to live with diversity or the whole EU experiment will stagnate at a stage.

[Nienna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and new take on the national problems in Habsburg monarchy, however, there is at least some understament of importance of the nation, which was shown by Slovene historian Janez Cvirn.