Varieties of nationalism in the political discourses of Habsburg Austria

Abstract

AbstractNationalism in the Habsburg Empire is traditionally viewed through an ethnic lens. Despite a growing literature on ‘national indifference’ that studies nationalism in Habsburg central Europe from a constructivist perspective and advances our knowledge concerning variations in national identifications, the nationalism implied in these works remains largely limited to an exclusionary ethnic type. This reductionist view of central European nationalism mirrors the traditional dichotomy of ethnic ‘Eastern’ versus civic ‘Western’ nationalism. In order to avoid this reduction, this article approaches nationalism as a thin‐centred ideology and explores varieties of nationalism in Habsburg Austria during the long 19th century. Although certain ideational paths made ethno‐nationalism appear, retrospectively, as a quasi‐natural feature of central Europe, the findings show that there developed rival discursive traditions of nationalism and competing representations of nation.