ABSTRACT
The subject of this book, the creation of national capitals in post-imperial Central and Southeastern Europe, illuminates a fundamental development of modernity: the overwhelming victory of nationalism and the nation-state model. The book shows how, both before and after formal independence, multi-ethnic cities of Central and Southeastern Europe became national capitals, or, in the case of Cracow, served as de facto capitals during imperial rule, only to relinquish capital status to another city. Yet there was nothing inevitable about this process, as the chapters on Bratislava and Sarajevo demonstrate, and we must exercise caution to avoid a teleological approach. Much of the planning that occurred in these cities before the Great War had less to do with the creation of a national capital – particularly in Central Europe where the continued existence of the Habsburg Empire was taken for granted – than with the ‘modernization’ or ‘Europeanization’ of these cities. Cities that were the birthplace of modern nationalist agendas, such as Lemberg, where Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish nationalism all gained ground, were, above all, imperial cities before the war (Prokopovych, 2009). Furthermore, planners were frequently imperial subjects, and not necessarily local patriots. That certain cities became capitals of nascent or ‘restored’ nation-states does not necessarily mean that the national trajectory was the only storyline associated with these cities’ late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century development, and in fact, it may not have even been the most important one.
