Conclusion

Abstract

By the turn of the 19th century, the Czech, Polish, and Magyar languages had been made into the ideological bases of the corresponding nationalisms. These nationalisms, increasingly steeped in language and culture, soon acquired the garb of ethnicity as their main ideological principle. This development unfolded earliest in the case of Czech and Magyar nationalisms. It was a reactionagainst the replacement of universal Latin with ethnically specific German in the Habsburg realms during the second half of the 1780s.

[N]ation […] a wonderfully convenient word, since one makes of it whatever one wishes.¹

Considerations on France (1796, chapter 4) Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821)

My old home, the Monarchy [Austria-Hungary], alone, was a great mansion with many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men. This mansion has been divided, split up, splintered. I have nothing more to seek for, there. I am used to living in a home, not in cabins.

‘The Bust of the Emperor’ (1935) Joseph Roth (1894–1939)

[National languages] are all huge systems of vested interests, which sullenly resist critical enquiry.

(in Mandelbaum 1963: 118) Edward Sapir (1884–1939)

We must give up the mental habit of assuming ‘nations,’ and of ignoring nonnational kinds of politics. We must stop thinking ahistorically. That is an important step toward understanding things as they are and were.

Jeremy King (2002: 211)