ABSTRACT
A large part of the world, including many of the existing states and empires of the nineteenth century, refrained from taking up any international obligations in regard to the BU. Though attentive observers of international developments, the multiethnic empires of Southeast and East Central Europe abstained from membership in the BU, motivated largely by political, but also by economic, considerations. In the course of the nineteenth century, both the Habsburg and the Romanov Empires developed elementary legal provisions regarding authors’ protection. Rather than international copyright regulation, however, their principal concern remained the cultural relationships within their own realms. The continental empires of Eastern Europe were not only multiethnic but also multilingual. As political realms they wavered between different, often contradictory legitimizing projects whose boundaries were continuously negotiated, such as: legitimation based on the traditional dynastic aura but also on modern forms of political participation; the application of censorship and control in the public sphere coupled with periods of political relaxation, including information and press freedom; and the desire and need to provide for mass education (in the spirit of the Enlightenment but also in order to satisfy the claims of rising ethnic groups) and the quest to keep the political project of empire together. These complex sociocultural and sociolinguistic conglomerates constituted multicultural and pluricultural communication spaces, 1 where language, social milieu and identity remained in a perpetually fluid and dialectical relation to one another on the level of everyday communication and exchange. At the same time, they also operated in a state of potential tension and conflict inherent in the structural asymmetry between the usage and the prestige of different languages. 2
