Nationalism and the Nation-State in Central Europe

Abstract

This chapter has a dual purpose. The initial objective is to familiarize the reader with the ideas which from the late eighteenth century provided the stimulus for nation-building in the European continent. Within that the differences between the West European and East European experiences are made clear, as are the factors which caused such a contrast to come about. The second objective is to chart the growth of both the idea of nation and the doctrine of nationalism in Central Europe, the response of the imperial powers to this phenomenon, and finally to make some observations on the politics of ethnicity in Central Europe following the collapse of empire and the establishment of titular nation-states upon the ruins of the old order. As we shall see, the Versailles system contained the seeds of its own destruction and in order to appreciate why this system was so fundamentally flawed, we must first establish the intellectual propositions upon which ideas of nation and national self-determination in Central Europe were based.