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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2009
Paul robert magocsi has written an informative and intelligent article about the relationship between the various nation-states of central Europe that found themselves behind the Iron Curtain and their respective national diasporas in North America. His comparison of the relationship between the countries and their diasporas at the “temporal nodes” of 1918 and 1989 suggests that the real difference between the two was that in 1918 the ideal of the nation-state was in the ascendancy, both in America and among the various central European national groups, whereas in 1989 the American diasporas were still beholden to the nation-state ideal at a time when their counterparts “back home” had moved on from the outdated nation-state ideal to embrace the supranational—or at least multinational—ideal of the European Union. This explains the relative importance of the diasporas in 1918 and their unimportance in 1989. Given the parameters of his subject, this is in general a useful and thoughtful thesis. There are, however, some points of detail that I would like to address; and, particularly for those who are interested in Austrian history and notions of Central Europe (with a capital “C”), there are broader aspects to the question, outside the given parameters, that merit discussion. It is to these broader aspects, centering on what we mean by “central European diasporas” and indeed “central Europe,” that the following commentary is mainly devoted.
1 In both the Polish and Hungarian cases, the argument that 1989 took everyone by surprise is a little hard to accept, given the long liberalization process in Hungary and the Solidarity movement in Poland.
2 Anderson, Benedict, Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics (Berkeley, 1992).Google Scholar
3 Roth, Philip, The Prague Orgy (Harmondsworth, 1987, orig. pub. 1985).Google Scholar
4 See, for instance, Hughes, H. Stuart, Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; for Britain, see Snowman, Daniel, The Hitler Émigrés: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (London, 2002).Google Scholar
5 See Singer, Peter, Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna (New York, 2003).Google Scholar
6 Knight, Robert, ed., Ich bin dafür, die Sache in die Länge zu ziehen: Wortprotokolle der österreichischen Bundesregierung von 1945–52 über die Entschädigung der Juden (Frankfurt am Main, 1988).Google Scholar
7 Hacohen, Malachi Haim, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge, 2000).Google Scholar