State and nation in multi-ethnic societies : the breakup of multinational states
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
State and nation in multi-ethnic societies : the breakup of multinational states
Manchester University Press , Distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin's Press, c1991
Available at 35 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Revised contributions originally presented at a conference held in Vienna in Jan. 1991, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, Boston University, Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy, Boston University, and the Renner-Institut
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Most of the chapters of this volume are based on presentations given at the conference on "State and Nation in Multi-Ethnic societies" held in Vienna in January 1991. Wherever necessary, the contributions were revised to reflect recent developments. The idea behind the conference and the papers is: are there lessons to be drawn for contemporary multi-ethnic societies from the experience of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in its last decades? More specifically, can some of the thinking about the relation of state and nation that occurred during that period within the ambience of Austrian Social Democracy have possible applicability today? Karl Kraus, the great Viennese satirist, called Austria-Hungary "the dress rehearsal for the apocalypse". He was more right than he could possibly have known at the time. One area in which Austria-Hungary served as a "dress rehearsal" - or, if one prefers, a prematurely ended laboratory experiment - was that of ethnic turmoil. Indeed, the two parts of the monarchy constituted a sort of controlled experiment for two very different policies regarding what was then called the "nationalities problem".
The Hungarian elite understood its political entity as a modern action-state tout court, the nation in question was the Magyar nation, and other nationalities (Slavs, Germans, Rumanians) were subjected to powerful pressures (a mix of coercion and cajolery) to magyarize. By contrast, the Austrian half of the monarchy developed clearly in the directon of a multinational, multicultural political structure. It did so without a coherent theory, without political elan, in a muddle of halfhearted steps. Nevertheless, in retrospect it constituted one of the first cases of a modern state that could or can genuinely be described as a deliberately multinational policy. Nor should one too readily accept the conventional view that this experiment failed. The Austro-Hungarian state perished as a result of its defeat in a war provoked by its own disastrous foreign policy. The problems of this long-extinct state have a strikingly contemporaneous quality about them, and the idea of taking another look back is not at all outlandish.
The ethnic earthquakes currently shaking the Soviet Union and the countries of East-Central Europe (many of them, of course, "successor states" of the monarchy) give an added timeliness to such an intellectual exercise. More specifically, Austrian Social Democracy (the party celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1990) was very much involved in the debates over the "nationalities problem" in the monarchy around the turn of the century. Two of its pre-eminent thinkers, Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, wrote highly influential monographs on the subject, and their ideas were embodied for a number of years in the party's programme and applied in some practical policies (notably in Moravia).
Table of Contents
- Part 1 Concepts: nation and state - order out of chaos, Uri Ra'anan
- reducing conflict through cultural autonomy - Karl Renner's contribution, Theodor Hanf
- the political feasibility of Austro-Marxist proposals for the solution of the nationality problem of the Danubian monarchy, Alfred Pfabigan. Part 2 History: problems of conflict resolution in a multi-ethnic state - lessons from the Austrian historical experience 1848-1918, Gerald Stourzh
- attempts to achieve a German-Czech "Ausgleich" in Austria and the consequences of its failure, Zdenek Karnik
- national conflicts and the democratic alternative in the Austo-Hungarian monarchy and its successors, Peter Sipos. Part 3 Contemporary applications: the end of the multinational Soviet empire?, Uri Ra'anan
- the "Yugoslav question" - past and future, Dusan Necek
- the social construction of national identies - the case of Catalonia as a nation in the Spanish state, Joan Estruch
- state and nation in the United Kingdom, Richard Parry
- the Canadian conundrum - two concepts of nationhood, Berel Rodal
- between race, class and culture - social divisions in South Africa's political transition, Lawrence Schlemmer
- state, nation, and ethnicity in modern Indonesia, Robert W. Hefner. Part 4 Coda: what's wrong with "Nationalist"?
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