Poets, Revolutionaries and Shoemakers: Law and the Construction of National Identity in Central Europe During the Long 19th Century
| Author | István Pogány |
| Date | 01 March 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663907073451 |
| Published date | 01 March 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
POETS, REVOLUTIONARIES AND
SHOEMAKERS: LAW AND THE
CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL
IDENTITY IN CENTRAL EUROPE
DURING THE LONG 19TH
CENTURY1
ISTVÁN POGÁNY
University of Warwick, UK
ABSTRACT
This article examines notions of identity in central Europe during the ‘long’ 19th
century and the role of law in defining and in reinforcing the boundaries of the nation.
During the 19th century, nationalist thinking in Hungary tended to focus on charac-
teristics such as language, culture and political allegiance rather than on race, ancestry
or religion. Consequently, membership of the nation was not necessarily fixed at
birth. This inclusive model of the nation contrasts markedly with the rigid, racially
informed theories of identity that were to prove so seductive in Hungary, as in much
of continental Europe, in the inter-war era and during the Second World War. The
article goes on to consider the extent to which the apparently inclusive conception of
the Hungarian nation was embedded in social and economic practice as well as in the
statute books. Notwithstanding the passage of comprehensive emancipation laws, the
evidence suggests that Jews were not readily admitted to public sector employment
of various kinds. Thus, the liberal Hungarian laws of this period served, at least in
part, to mask rather than to transform illiberal social and economic practices. The
article concludes by briefly examining contemporary notions of nationhood in central
Europe and the extent to which these have transcended 19th- or early 20th-century
ideas concerning national identity.
KEY WORDS
central Europe; emancipation laws; Hungarians; Jews; national identity
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 16(1), 95–112
DOI: 10.1177/0964663907073451
INTRODUCTION
INJoseph Roth’s novel, The Radetzky March (2003), a young army officer
risks his life at the Battle of Solferino, in 1859, to save the Habsburg
Emperor from mortal danger. Although the officer is of Slovenian peasant
stock, his loyalty to the Empire and to its Austrian Emperor is unwavering.
In due course, the officer’s son becomes an imperial civil servant in the
province of Moravia, rising to the rank of District Commissioner. Like his
father, he identifies unreservedly with the Empire and with its ruling dynasty:
He himself, the District Commissioner, had never felt any desire to see the
home of his fathers. He was an Austrian, a servant and official of the Habsburg
monarchy, and his home was the Imperial Palace in Vienna. If he entertained
any notion of a political restructuring of this great and varied Empire, then it
would have pleased him to see all the Crownlands simply as large and colour-
ful wings and extensions of the Imperial Palace, and all the peoples of the
Monarchy as the Habsburgs’ faithful servants. (p. 138)
In due course, the District Commissioner has a son of his own who embarks
on a military career in the aristocratic dragoons. The young man’s regiment
is based in Moravia, although the soldiers under his command are drawn
from the Empire’s Ukrainian and Romanian subjects. The regimental doctor
is a Jew from the province of Galicia.
In Roth’s novel, the Habsburg Empire is presented as a tolerant, broadly
inclusive polity in which national or ethnic background, mother tongue or
religion generally count for less than loyalty to the Habsburgs, to the Empire
and its ideals. As portrayed by Roth, the ideological bonds holding the
Empire together ultimately rest on the devotion, both religious and secular,
that the Habsburg dynasty is able to inspire in its subjects.
Roth’s novel is suffused with a sense of imminent catastrophe, of the inevi-
table collapse of the fragile, multinational Empire and of the civilizing values
that it represents. As Count Chojnicki – an ethnic Pole and one of the book’s
more far-sighted characters – observes ruefully to guests at his estate on the
eastern fringes of the Empire:
The age doesn’t want us any more! This age wants to establish autonomous
nation states! People have stopped believing in God. Nationalism is the new
religion. People don’t go to church. They go to nationalist meetings. (Roth,
2003: 176)
Roth wrote The Radetzky March during 1930–2, more than a decade after
the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and at a time when many of
the successor states of central and eastern Europe were falling under the
influence of Fascist or extreme nationalist ideologies (Seton-Watson, 1945/
1967: 157–267; Polonsky, 1975). His book is an elegy to a supposedly gentler,
less chauvinistic era when, by and large, religious and other minorities were
not merely tolerated but welcomed for their talents, resources and industry.
In The Radetzky March, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Romanians, Ukrainians and
96 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 16(1)
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