The Changing Views of Marx and Engels about the Nationalities in the Austrian Monarchy, 1845–1855

Abstract

Since developments of the last century increasingly involved the political emergence of ethnic and national minorities within polyglot empires, the concern of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with nationalities is not surprising. It was they, in fact, who claimed a “scientific” basis for advocating revolution and who asked the important question: “What is the relationship between nationalist aspirations and social revolution?”The authors of the few works in English about the Marxist view of nationality tend to take a simplistic approach to this complex issue. Treating Marx's and Engels' ideas as though they were static has led to an interpretation portraying Marx and Engels as mere revolutionary nationalists. But although it avoids the complexities of a dynamic treatment of a problem in intellectual history, such an interpretation not only stumbles into oversimplification but it also, and almost unavoidably, misses one of the most novel interpretations of the European nationalities question in the mid-nineteenth century.An accurate analysis of Marxist ideas on the nationality issue can be made only in the context of Marx's and Engels' materialist view of history and with reference to the actual political upheavals in which Marx and Engels themselves participated and which colored their perceptions. This combination of ideology and experience evolved, slowly, within the Marxist framework into a set of clear criteria on nationality.