Introduction

The introductory chapter begins with an overview of the historiography of national indifference before setting out the three critical interventions this collection of essays makes. The first is geographical. The volume extends its analysis beyond the original setting of national indifference in East Central Europe to incorporate a much wider array of cases from Belgium and France in the west, to the former Habsburg territories in Central and Southern Europe, and finally to Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union in the east. Second, the volume re-periodizes national indifference. It was not only a nineteenth-century phenomenon, reducible to a short-lived developmental stage of nationalism. Rather, it survived well into the twentieth century, even into the post–Second World War age of nationalism. The third intervention is conceptual. We expand and disaggregate the national indifference paradigm to develop a more flexible and variegated approach that can better account for regional and historical variation.