Questioning the Wilsonian moment: the role of ethnicity and nationalism in the dissolution of European empires from the Belle Époque through the First World War

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis dossier aims to problematize the widespread understanding of ethnic cleavages as the hard core undergirding national conflict. As such it questions the rise of ethnic nationalism during the late nineteenth century as the direct cause of the dawn of Europe’s ‘oppressed peoples’ after 1918. The different contributions evaluate the status of the First World War as the breakthrough moment of Wilsonian self-determination within the multi-ethnic states and empires in Europe. In this respect they investigate the recent powerful thesis propounded by scholars of national indifference in Central Europe that it was the unprecedented disruption of the Great War that politicized ethnicity as never before and made it into a marker of groupness rather than a mere social category, to use Rogers Brubaker’s terms. The articles in this dossier also contribute to recent investigations that focus on how European empires tried to accommodate nationalism and how nationalist movements in and outside of Europe used the disruption of the war and Wilson’s plea for self-determination to ask for independence. These articles demonstrate how the specific developments of war and revolution produced particular understandings of the general idea of self-determination. The Wilsonian discourse as such had a breakthrough in 1918 when the destruction of Austria-Hungary generally became accepted as an Allied post-war goal. Movements world-wide adopted self-determination as a goal and standard, but as this dossier demonstrates, all kinds of actors used Wilson’s words for their many purposes, such that one cannot speak of a coherent and meaningful Wilsonian moment.