The Rhetoric of Economic Nationalism in the Bohemian Boycott Campaigns of the Late Habsburg Monarchy

Abstract

During the decades prior to World War I, the Habsburg monarchy experienced an upsurge in national conflict. Nationalism emerged both as a form of identity politics, through which individuals became increasingly aware of their own national identity as well as that of others among whom they lived, and as a political ideology, calling for increased political, social, cultural, and economic rights for each national group. Thus, the rise in national feeling in the Habsburg monarchy led to the hardening of the boundaries separating national groups. As Jan Křen, Gary B. Cohen, and other have noted, Czechs and Germans not only became staunch political opponents, they also ceased to associate with each other privately or in social contexts by the late nineteenth century.