The Polish Nation: From a Multiethnic to an Ethnically Homogenous Nation-State

2009

In Chapter 4 I focused on the stateless noble natio of partitioned Poland-Lithuania that sought to transform itself into a Polish nation. The Polish-Lithuanian noble leaders paid lip service to the French model of the nation-state but, apart from a few lonely dissenting voices, had no intention to broaden the confines of the planned Polish nation to embrace the ‘third estate,’ that is, the peasantry and burghers. The social barrier of serfdom alone kept the nobles from associating with peasants. In the cities, a large and sometimes predominant, segment of the population was made up of German-speakers and Yiddish-speaking Jews. Their idioms disqualified them from participation in the emergin…

The Broader Linguistic and Cultural Context of Central Europe

2009

Central Europe is an extremely malleable concept. It denotes a region whose political shape has been changing dramatically throughout the last millennium since the emergence of the first polities. This work focuses on the rise and political uses of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak. But this would mean tearing away the roots of the sociolinguistic reality that surrounds and has deeply interacted with the everyday realities of Slovak-, Polish-, Magyar- and Czech-speakers. The resulting picture would agree with the predominant ethnonational thinking about Central Europe as an area neatly divided among the nation-states that contain the corresponding nations speaking exclusively in their own l…

The Hungarian Case: From Natio to the Ersatz Nation-State

2009

The Kingdom of Hungary had been part of the Habsburg realms since 1526 when the Sultan Suleyman I the Magnificent (ruled 1520–1566) defeated the Hungarian armies at Mohacs. The King of Hungary and Bohemia, Louis II (ruled 1516–1526), died in the battle. Due to the dynastic agreement between the Jagiellonians and the Habsburgs, the latter were to take over Hungary and the Czech lands should the former fail to produce male heirs. In the other case, the Jagiellonians could hope for the imperial throne in Vienna. Mean­while, the Ottoman Empire seized most of Hungary proper, including Buda (1541), the seat of Hungarian Kings. Foreseeing this outcome, the Habsburgs had already moved the capital o…

The Slovak Nation: From Czechoslovakia to Slovakia

2009

This chapter differs in composition from the two previous ones devoted to the politics of language in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the short 20th century. With the exception of the brief wartime interlude of independent Slovakia (1939–1945), the Slovak nation found itself residing in Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1992. This necessitated the representation of much Slovak history, and the vicissitudes of Czech-Slovak relations in the previous chapter, which nominally was devoted to matters Czech. It would soon be demonstrated that the past of the common state of the Czech and Slovaks could not be seamlessly divided into separate Czech and Slovak parts. Likewise, numerous international even…

The Szlonzokian Ethnolect in the Context of German and Polish Nationalisms1

2008

This article analyzes the emergence of the Szlonzokian ethnic group or proto-nation in the context of the use of language as an instrument of nationalism in Central Europe. When language was legislated into the statistical measure of nationality in the second half of the nineteenth century, Berlin pressured the Slavophone Catholic peasant-cum-worker population of Upper Silesia to become ‘proper Germans’. Polish ennationalizing pressure was added after the division of Upper Silesia between Poland and Germany in 1922. Ennationalizing policies changed in 1939 when the entire region was reincorporated into wartime Germany and, again, in 1945 following Poland's annexation of Upper Silesia. Frequ…

The Czech Case: From the Bohemian Slavophone Populus to Czech Nationalism and the Czechoslovak Nation

2009

Bohemia emerged as a separate polity after the Magyar conquest of Greater Moravia. The Frankish protection that extended to Bohemia attached this country to the empire, while Moravia became a province permanently linked to the Principality of Bohemia in the late 1020s. In 1079, Moravia was organized as a margraviate. Usually sons or younger brothers of the Bohemian princes reigned as margraves of Moravia, which emphasized the separateness of Moravia vis-a-vis Bohemia. A similar arrangement developed in Poland-Lithuania where sons or younger brothers of the King of Poland ruled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Třestik 1999: 140).

Nations and their Borders: Changing Identities in Upper Silesia in the Modern Age

2001

Kevin Hannan. Borders of Language and Identity in Teschen Silesia. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. xxii, 255 pp. $49.95.

2002

Language in Central Europe: An Overview

2009

The linguistic picture of Central Europe, as we know it, started forming in the 6th to 9th centuries. The coming of the Slavs (or rather the spread of their language and way of life to unrelated various ethnic groups) marks the beginning of this caesura that largely closed in 896 AD when the Magyars crossed the Carpathians into Pannonia. This event gradually divided the hypothetically continuous area of Slavic settlement into a southern section, extending from contemporary Slovenia to Bulgaria, and into a northern section, which coincided with the areas from the Elbe in today’s eastern Germany to the upper Volga in north­eastern Russia. In the west, the Magyar-speakers skirted the East and …

The Hungarian Nation: From Hungary to Magyarország

2009

This chapter’s title is a linguistic pun that needs explanation. Magyarorszag means ‘Hungary’ in Magyar. But scholars writing in languages that used to be minority ones in the Hungarian section of Austria-Hungary are careful to distinguish between multiethnic historical Hungary and the ethnically Magyar nation-state that emerged after World War I. Obviously, this distinction originated due to the 19th-century insistence on the part of Magyar politicians that the Magyar language should be spoken by all the inhabitants of the multiethnic and multilingual Kingdom of Hungary. But one can find the first recorded instance of conscious distinguishing between Hungaris and Magyaris in the 1778 Latin…

The Slovak Case: From Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Populus to Slovak Nationalism and the Czechoslovak Nation

2009

As a political entity, Slovakia emerged in 1918 within the broader framework of Czechoslovakia. The ethnonym ‘Slovak,’ though known since the mid-15th century, denoted either a Slav in general or a Slavophone inhabitant of Upper Hungary. Only in the course of the 19th century was the usage limited exclusively to the latter case. Although the name ‘Slovakia’ for the region where the Slovaks lived appeared at the end of the 18th century, it did not gain any official recognition until 1918 when Czechoslovakia came into being. Clearly, the nationalism of the Slovaks is much more steeped in ethnicity than that of the Magyars, the Poles, or the Czechs (Flajshans 1924: 5, 307).

Language as an instrument of nationalism in Central Europe

2001

This article presents a brief survey and analysis of the most intimate coupling of culture and national projects that occurred in Central Europe following the success of the Italian and German nation-states established in this manner during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Language is the very ‘stuff’ of culture as well as the instrument of communicating and reaffirming cultural difference vis-a-vis other cultures. As such, language became central to the processes of nation- and nation-state-building in Central Europe, leading to politicisation of language and also of linguistics and philology, which were expected to fortify the nations and their nation-states than rather to len…

The Czech Nation: Between Czechoslovak and Czech Nationalism

2009

According to a popular saying, when Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918, it became an Austria-Hungary in miniature. This historian’s simile indicated that the nation-state of the Czechoslovaks displayed all the good and undesirable features of the Dual Monarchy. On the positive side, it was the only Central European polity where democracy survived throughout the interwar period. In general, the state was a welcoming home to three nations (the Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians), and three sizeable minorities (Germans, Magyars, and Poles). The Czechoslovak economy (concentrated in the Czech lands, formerly Austria-Hungary’s most significant powerhouse) was the strongest in the region and enabled…

The Polish Case: From Natio to Nation

2009

The reader may ask why I chose to deal first with the Poles and their language politics. In Chapter 2, I focused first on Czech out from the four Central European languages to which this book is devoted. I took as a guideline the fact that the initial documents written in Czech predate those jotted down in Hungarian (Magyar), Polish, or Slovak. Here, however, I decided that continuity of literary tradition and the use of an idiom as an official language allows me to concentrate on Polish first. With this approach I do not wish to rank these four languages along some imaginary scale of importance or quality; not at all. Simply, I stress the use of a language in public and political sphere as…