The editors of this wide-ranging volume question—up to a certain point—the binary approach traditionally adopted by most historians of Europe who write about the categories “nation” and “empire.” Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller seek to loosen or perhaps even undo the traditionally dichotomous treatment these categories have received as “two profoundly different types of political organization of society and space” (2). Their strategy in this collection is to draw historians' attention to processes of ethnic nation building that took place in imperial cores. The volume reads as the product of several workshops and conferences where, over time, the scholars involved engaged actively with each other's approaches. It includes sizable essays devoted to Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, the Habsburg Monarchy, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Spain, as well as five shorter essays that usefully comment on general questions of comparison.
In tackling the intimate and complex relations that bound ideas of core nationhood to practices of empire, the editors make two related and critical arguments. First, they remind us that the growing claims in the nineteenth century that particular ethnic nations constituted cores of the German, Russian, or Spanish empires (to name a few), often rested uneasily on untested presumptions of cultural homogeneity among peoples who often continued to see themselves more in terms of local and regional identifications than they did in terms of national ones. Moreover, nineteenth-century assertions of British or German ethnic nationhood, for example, were frequently products of specifically imperial practices that had brought together disparate and culturally heterogeneous regions and peoples in a single state. Many empires in the nineteenth century increasingly validated the idea that they rested on core nations, and worked to realize claims of a single national hegemony within a broader empire (for example, Russian nationalists in the Romanov Empire). In the second place, imperial projects could often grow out of an elaboration of national identifications in imperial spaces. As the essays in this volume demonstrate convincingly, nineteenth-century nationalists in several empires worked hard indeed to reorient admittedly multinational empires to specifically national cores, without arguing that their empires should become self-proclaimed nation states. The editors refer to this process specifically as an “imperial nationalism” whose ambitions did not extend to nationalize all imperially-ruled peoples or territories but rather to re-thinking empire as a resource or asset belonging primarily to a particular core nation. This point in particular undermines traditional presumptions that nation building within imperial borders sought to make national units congruent with political ones—a very post-1918 idea—or that nationalist activists sought to replace imperial with nation-state structures. It also suggests that many imperial regimes were adept at using concepts of nationhood for their own legitimizing purposes.
This approach makes it easier to compare various European empires more effectively without having to make problematic categorical distinctions that rest on spurious notions of relative national homogeneity (Russian or Habsburg multi-ethnicity versus alleged British, French, German, Italian, or Spanish ethnic homogeneity). Analyzing nationalizing processes in a range of imperial states across Europe undermines false categorical distinctions between an allegedly ethnically homogenous west and a complex ethnic mosaic in Europe's east. These arguments also remind us that imperial state-building strategies in the nineteenth century often mirrored those of states that we call nation states. In fact, several authors argue implicitly that the traditional distinctions drawn between these two types of states may ultimately be of little value.
While stimulating and persuasive, the volume does suffer from two particular drawbacks. This reviewer wished that the editors and authors had gone even further in rethinking the relationship between ideas of nationhood and empire. Because so many ideas about nationhood developed within imperial institutions, why continue to see nationalism and empire building as somehow independent developments that struggled to accommodate each other? Why should attempts by nationalists to claim for themselves a role as imperial core be seen as an attempt to somehow reproduce the independent idea of a nation state? Ideas of nationhood were not the independent products of allegedly independent national communities that existed inside empires. Instead, they were usually the products of imperial institutions. Ideas of nationhood depended for their very coherence on the particular imperial institutions that gave birth to them. Since the essays in this volume seek to undermine existing categorical dichotomies between national and imperial societies, why bother holding onto any distinctions between the two that are ultimately the product of claims made by nationalist historical actors themselves? The twentieth century self-styled nation state continues to haunt many of these essays as a teleological standard. By contrast, Andrea Komlosy's fine essay on the Habsburg Monarchy (and after 1867 the Austrian half) analyzes a telling example where the successful administrative, economic, social, and cultural integration of diverse territories and peoples depended on imperial principles of legal equality and economic integration and not on efforts to achieve increased linguistic or ethnic homogeneity. When nationalisms of all kinds developed as political forces in Habsburg central Europe, thanks largely to Habsburg language policy, they depended intimately on empire and its institutions (schools, bureaucracies) for their coherence and political persuasiveness. In turn, the Habsburg Monarchy came to justify its imperial existence increasingly in the late nineteenth century as an effective protector and mentor of those small nations who would otherwise be consumed by their large voracious neighbors.
A second difficulty is more typical of ambitious collections of essays like this one. The quality of the essays is mostly high. Those that are less than excellent stand out in their inability to fit the intentions of the volume. Several of the authors engage fruitfully with each other—or with literatures outside of their national fields—but some, unfortunately, do not. These complaints should be taken as a spur to further research about the relationship between nationhood and empire. Perhaps we can soon move beyond these two traditional categories altogether—especially that of nation—in favor of less teleological understandings of political organization and ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
