The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe

The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe
Author: T. Kamusella
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 1167
Release: 2008-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230583474

This work focuses on the ideological intertwining between Czech, Magyar, Polish and Slovak, and the corresponding nationalisms steeped in these languages. The analysis is set against the earlier political and ideological history of these languages, and the panorama of the emergence and political uses of other languages of the region.

Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe

Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe
Author: Timothy Snyder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2018
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0190846070

Timothy Snyder opens a new path in the understanding of modern nationalism and twentieth-century socialism by presenting the often overlooked life of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, an important Polish thinker at the beginning of the twentieth century. During his brief life in Poland, Paris, and Vienna, Kelles-Krauz influenced or infuriated most of the leaders of the various socialist movements of Central Europe and France. His central ideas ultimately were not accepted by the socialist mainstream at the time of his death. However, a century later, we see that they anticipated late twentieth-century understanding on the importance of nationalism as a social force and the parameters of socialism in political theory and praxis. Kelles-Krauz was one of the only theoreticians of his age to advocate Jewish national rights as being equivalent to, for example, Polish national rights, and he correctly saw the struggle for national sovereignty as being central to future events in Europe. This was the first major monograph in English devoted to Kelles-Krauz, and it includes maps and personal photographs of Kelles-Krauz, his colleagues, and his family.

Language and Nationalism in Europe

Language and Nationalism in Europe
Author: Stephen Barbour
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2000-12-14
Genre:
ISBN: 019158407X

This book examines the role of language in the present and past creation of social, cultural, and national identities in Europe. It considers the way in which language may sometimes reinforce national identity (as in England) while tending to subvert the nation-state (as in the United Kingdom). After an introduction describing the interactive roles of language, ethnicity, culture, and institutions in the character and formation of nationalism and identity, the book considers their different manifestations throughout Europe. Chapters are devoted to Britain and Ireland; France; Spain and Portugal; Scandinavia; the Netherlands and Belgium; Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg; Italy; Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic; Bulgaria, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Albania, Slovenia, Romania, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo; Greece and Turkey; the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the Baltic States, and the Russian Federation. The book concludes with a consideration of the current relative status of the languages of Europe and how these and the identities they reflect are changing and evolving.

Politics and the Slavic Languages

Politics and the Slavic Languages
Author: Tomasz Kamusella
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-06-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000395995

During the last two centuries, ethnolinguistic nationalism has been the norm of nation building and state building in Central Europe. The number of recognized Slavic languages (in line with the normative political formula of language = nation = state) gradually tallied with the number of the Slavic nation-states, especially after the breakups of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. But in the current age of borderless cyberspace, regional and minority Slavic languages are freely standardized and used, even when state authorities disapprove. As a result, since the turn of the 19th century, the number of Slavic languages has varied widely, from a single Slavic language to as many as 40. Through the story of Slavic languages, this timely book illustrates that decisions on what counts as a language are neither permanent nor stable, arguing that the politics of language is the politics in Central Europe. The monograph will prove to be an essential resource for scholars of linguistics and politics in Central Europe.

Words in Space and Time

Words in Space and Time
Author: Tomasz Kamusella
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 9633864186

With forty-two extensively annotated maps, this atlas offers novel insights into the history and mechanics of how Central Europe’s languages have been made, unmade, and deployed for political action. The innovative combination of linguistics, history, and cartography makes a wealth of hard-to-reach knowledge readily available to both specialist and general readers. It combines information on languages, dialects, alphabets, religions, mass violence, or migrations over an extended period of time. The story first focuses on Central Europe’s dialect continua, the emergence of states, and the spread of writing technology from the tenth century onward. Most maps concentrate on the last two centuries. The main storyline opens with the emergence of the Western European concept of the nation, in accord with which the ethnolinguistic nation-states of Italy and Germany were founded. In the Central European view, a “proper” nation is none other than the speech community of a single language. The Atlas aspires to help users make the intellectual leap of perceiving languages as products of human history and part of culture. Like states, nations, universities, towns, associations, art, beauty, religions, injustice, or atheism—languages are artefacts invented and shaped by individuals and their groups.

Religious Nationalism in Modern Europe

Religious Nationalism in Modern Europe
Author: Philip W. Barker
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2008-08-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 113597392X

This volume examines the enduring nature of religious nationalism in modern Europe. Through a series of in-depth case studies covering Ireland, England, Poland, and Greece; the author argues that religious frontiers, or geographic lines of division between different and unique religions, are central to the formation of religiously-based national identities. Typically, as states develop economically and politically, religion plays a lesser role in both individual lives and national identity. However, at religious frontiers, religion becomes useful for differentiating and mobilizing groups of people. This is particularly true when the religious frontier also represents a threat or conflict. Although religion may not be the root of conflict in these instances, the conflict takes on religious tones because of its ability to unite an otherwise diverse population. Religion takes precedence over language, culture, or other national building-blocks because the "other" can best be distinguished in religious terms. The in-depth case studies allow for a deep historical understanding of the processes which converge to create a modern religious nation. Greatly expanding our current understanding of the conditions in which religious nationalism develops, this important book has implications for our understanding of religion and politics, secularization, European politics and foreign policy.

Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 1880-1950

Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 1880-1950
Author: Tomasz Kamusella
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2016-04-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317279670

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Upper Silesia was the site of the largest formal exercise in self-determination in European history, the 1921 Plebiscite. This asked the inhabitants of Europe’s second largest industrial region the deceptively straightforward question of whether they preferred to be Germans or Poles, but spectacularly failed to clarify their national identity, demonstrating instead the strength of transnational, regionalist and sub-national allegiances, and of allegiances other than nationality, such as religion. As such Upper Silesia, which was partitioned and re-partitioned between 1922 and 1945, and subjected to Czechization, Germanization, Polonization, forced emigration, expulsion and extermination, illustrates the limits of nation-building projects and nation-building narratives imposed from outside. This book explores a range of topics related to nationality issues in Upper Silesia, putting forward the results of extensive new research. It highlights the flaws at the heart of attempts to shape Europe as homogenously national polities and compares the fate of Upper Silesia with the many other European regions where similar problems occurred.

Kidnapped Souls

Kidnapped Souls
Author: Tara Zahra
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2011-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 080146191X

Throughout the nineteenth and into the early decades of the twentieth century, it was common for rural and working-class parents in the Czech-German borderlands to ensure that their children were bilingual by sending them to live with families who spoke the "other" language. As nationalism became a more potent force in Central Europe, however, such practices troubled pro-German and pro-Czech activists, who feared that the children born to their nation could literally be "lost" or "kidnapped" from the national community through such experiences and, more generally, by parents who were either flexible about national belonging or altogether indifferent to it. Highlighting this indifference to nationalism—and concerns about such apathy among nationalists—Kidnapped Souls offers a surprising new perspective on Central European politics and society in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on Austrian, Czech, and German archives, Tara Zahra shows how nationalists in the Bohemian Lands worked to forge political cultures in which children belonged more rightfully to the national collective than to their parents. Through their educational and social activism to fix the boundaries of nation and family, Zahra finds, Czech and German nationalists reveal the set of beliefs they shared about children, family, democracy, minority rights, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. Zahra shows that by 1939 a vigorous tradition of Czech-German nationalist competition over children had created cultures that would shape the policies of the Nazi occupation and the Czech response to it. The book's concluding chapter weighs the prehistory and consequences of the postwar expulsion of German families from the Bohemian Lands. Kidnapped Souls is a significant contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of modern nationalism in Central Europe and a groundbreaking exploration of the ways in which children have been the objects of political contestation when national communities have sought to shape, or to reshape, their futures.

Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe

Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe
Author: Stefan Auer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2004-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134378599

After the collapse of communism there was a widespread fear that nationalism would pose a serious threat to the development of liberal democracy in the countries of central Europe. This book examines the role of nationalism in post-communist development in central Europe, focusing in particular on Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It argues that a certain type of nationalism, that is liberal nationalism, has positively influenced the process of postcommunist transition towards the emerging liberal democratic order.

Language and Social Change in Central Europe

Language and Social Change in Central Europe
Author: Patrick Stevenson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2010-07-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0748635998

This book explores the dynamics of language and social change in central Europe in the context of the end of the Cold War and eastern expansion of the European Union. One outcome of the profound social transformations in central Europe since the Second World War has been the reshaping of the relationship between particular languages and linguistic varieties, especially between 'national' languages and regional or ethnic minority languages. Previous studies have investigated these transformed relationships from the macro perspective of language policies, while others have taken more fine-grained approaches to individual experiences with language. Combining these two perspectives for the first time--and focusing on the German language, which has a uniquely complex and problematic history in the region--the authors offer an understanding of the complex constellation of language politics in central Europe. Stevenson and Carl's analysis draws on a range of theoretical, conceptual and analytical approaches - language ideologies, language policy, positioning theory, discourse analysis, narrative analysis and life histories - and a wide range of data sources, from European and national language policies to individual language biographies. The authors demonstrate how the relationship between German and other languages has played a crucial role in the politics of language and processes of identity formation in the recent history of central Europe.