ABSTRACT
Scholars and commentators writing about the modern history of Central Europe frequently remark that ethnic or ethnolinguistic nationalism is typical of this region. However, most authors do not venture beyond emphasizing the importance of national languages (Einzelsprachen) for Central Europe’s nationalisms, meaning specific actualizations of the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism. This remark is often combined with the commonplace assertion that prior to the Great War the political scene of Central Europe was dominated by empires, which are qualified with the labels “multinational,” “multiethnic,” or “polyglot.” This situation basically leaves the reader alone to interpret what the practices of ethnic nationalism were, and still are, in Central Europe, and how ethnolinguistic nations and their nation-states are created, legitimized, maintained and dismantled. This dilemma is deepened by the continuing methodological quarrel between primordialists (often nationalists themselves, that is, supporters of ethno-linguistic nationalism) and modernists (constructivists, and at times anti-nationalists). The former believe that nations (or the ethnic groups underlying them) are “eternal” (as emanations of nature or a divinity’s will) or at least “centuries-old,” while the latter stress that nations have been built, each constructed from a myriad of micro-ethnic groups, in Europe during the last two centuries, or only in the modern period, so there is no evidence for the earlier existence of nations or even the very concept of the nation. In reply, primordialists criticize modernists for paying too much attention to nation-states, which are seen as secondary to nations in the Central Europe of ethnolinguistic nationalism. They agree with modernists that there is no evidence available for any pre-modern existence of nation-states, but claim that the lack of such evidence does not deny the fact of the premodern existence of nations as “emanations of nature, a divinity’s will,” or of some unspecified “national destiny.” In this line of reasoning, it is proposed that nations existed earlier than the technology of writing, statehood, and scholarly research; that scholars with their concepts and theories only now are able to catch up with such “eternal” characteristics of nations by describing them and “(re-)discovering” their “centuries- or millennia-old” history. In this stance, primordialists confuse historiography with national history (or national master narrative), and mistake nationalism for scholarship. But their “research” is of much use as a potent instrument of state-hood legitimization for the governments of Central Europe’s nation-states, so it is lavishly financed. In turn, university professors’ monographs written in the primordialist vein become the much needed “scientific proof” and basis for writing history textbooks for schools. As a result, the primordialist self-perception of a given nation housed in its own nation-state is fortified and reproduced, passed from one generation to another. Typically, such a self-perception (often indistinguishable from self-deception) was constructed and codified no earlier than a century or two ago.
