ABSTRACT
After the Great War the Allies transformed Central Europe in accordance with ethnolinguistic national-ism’s principle of the normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state. In 1910 (Map 14), there were only three isomorphic polities in this region, namely, Bulgaria, Norway, and Romania. In 1918, when the political shape of the region was in flux, as many as five further nation-states joined the isomorphic club, that is, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, for a total of eight countries. German-Austria and Germany might have joined this group of fully isomorphic nation-states had the Allies not banned any union between these two countries. In addition, Vienna was required to drop the adjective “German” from the country’s preferred name. Obviously, even if the Allies had not stood in the way of Vienna’s and Berlin’s desire of unification after 1918, the official use of German in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg would have continued to undermine the status of full ethnolinguistic normative isomorphism for such a hypothetical common “Greater German” (Großdeutsch) nation-state of Germany and Austria.
