Poets, Revolutionaries and Shoemakers: Law and the Construction of National Identity in Central Europe During the Long 19th Century

Abstract

This article examines notions of identity in central Europe during the ‘long’ 19th century and the role of law in defining and in reinforcing the boundaries of the nation. During the 19th century, nationalist thinking in Hungary tended to focus on characteristics such as language, culture and political allegiance rather than on race, ancestry or religion. Consequently, membership of the nation was not necessarily fixed at birth. This inclusive model of the nation contrasts markedly with the rigid, racially informed theories of identity that were to prove so seductive in Hungary, as in much of continental Europe, in the inter-war era and during the Second World War. The article goes on to consider the extent to which the apparently inclusive conception of the Hungarian nation was embedded in social and economic practice as well as in the statute books. Notwithstanding the passage of comprehensive emancipation laws, the evidence suggests that Jews were not readily admitted to public sector employment of various kinds. Thus, the liberal Hungarian laws of this period served, at least in part, to mask rather than to transform illiberal social and economic practices. The article concludes by briefly examining contemporary notions of nationhood in central Europe and the extent to which these have transcended 19th-or early 20th-century ideas concerning national identity.