Comments: Contesting And Constructing National Identity in Central Europe

Abstract

With his contingent of geographers, historians, and other academic “experts” collectively known as The Inquiry in tow, Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in January 1919 to redraw the map of Europe. Wilson wanted to fulfill his Fourteen Points and guarantee national self-determination to the peoples of Europe. A peaceful community of ethnically homogeneous nation-states was to replace the great multinational empires (defined by central European nationalists as prisons of the peoples) that had previously dominated central and eastern Europe. During the inter-war period, the governing elites of central Europe, their new “nation-states” legitimated by the post-war settlement, created new national holidays, national anthems, and nationalist school text books lauding the history and achievements of the state-bearing nation. These simple and seemingly coherent national narratives elided the messy, confusing, and jumbled past of multiple identities, mingled ethnic groups, and alienated social orders, and legitimized political, economic, and territorial claims made in the name of the “national community” lending its name to the new state.