Research on the nexus between education and nationalism in the Habsburg Empire has often focused on the role that language may have played in top-down nationalization processes and the popular dissemination of national thought. According to contemporary nationalist logic, undergoing education in a certain language of instruction also entailed the internalization of nationalist values inherent to its corresponding nationalist movement. The present article argues that the Habsburg educational experience was much more contingent, and draws attention to the diversity of pedagogical approaches towards nationalism and nationality that could be encountered in Austrian schools during the last five decades of Habsburg rule. By using examples from German- and Slovene-language textbooks, it shows that sociopolitical, temporal, as well as institutional factors played an important role in determining the practical values and attitudes towards the nationalism that students encountered during their school years. With systematic empirical studies remaining rare, further research will be necessary to gain a fuller insight into the complexities of the Habsburg education system and its potential effects on popular collective identity formation.

Slovak national communism as a specific approach to the problem of Czech-Slovak relations gained a significant position within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia soon after its establishment in 1921. This article analyzes the foundations of this phenomenon and the evolving attitudes of the first generation of Slovak communist intellectuals and Party functionaries. The article’s primary focus is on the Slovak communists’ views regarding the official state doctrine of a unified Czechoslovak nation, Czech-Slovak relations, and the issue of Slovak autonomy. The study highlights the significant external influences, particularly the directives of the Communist International and the pre-existing national stereotypes, that shaped the worldview and nationalist tendencies of Slovak communists.

This article examines the involvement and interactions of Vienna's urban elites in the conflict of the early 1460s that marked the climax of the power struggle between the Habsburg brothers Emperor Frederick III and Duke Albert VI over rule in the Duchy of Austria. Vienna's role is addressed in two aspects: first, as a central stage for the conflict, and second, as an active participant as a political community that became increasingly integrated into the broader political networks of the duchy during the fifteenth century. Following an actor-centered approach and based on prosopographical groundwork, the study focuses on the actions of individual protagonists and various factions within Vienna's political elites. During the violent events, the urban representatives did not form a cohesive entity but interacted and allied in changing constellations with leading noble, courtly, and clerical actors in the duchy. Factors and conditions contributing to the formation of diverse interest groups among urban actors are closely examined, aiming to give a deeper insight into the dynamics and patterns of the entangled conflict.

The nine articles in this collection are the product of two workshops hosted at the University of Chicago in 2022 and 2023 in affiliation with the University of Vienna. They build on recent work that has called attention to the extraordinary political and religious diversity in the fifteenth-century Holy Roman Empire, and Central Europe more broadly. Pushing back against older historiography, in which this period was frequently overlooked or framed by uncritical use of such broad categories as the “state,” the “territory,” the “estates,” and the “feud,” this collection recognizes the polycentric nature of the fifteenth century's structures and institutions. Specifically, these articles return to the sources, especially documents of practice rather than normative texts, to open the door to a new understanding of conflicts and negotiations. They illuminate the patterns of conflict and negotiation evident in specific historical contexts by examining actors, networks, and practices of community building—as well as the processes through which conflicts emerged, evolved, and were negotiated and settled. Rather than relying on time-honored categories and meta-narratives, the contributors embrace the messiness of social and political relations and of the extant source material to shine new light on key themes in the fifteenth century's history.

This article explores the rise of international cooperation and policing in solving the so-called “Gypsy question” between 1870 and 1945. Situating this issue within a broader phenomenon of illiberal internationalism, it demonstrates how the central European powers often pursued international action to serve their own national agendas. In doing so, this study shows how the shared concern of cross-border Gypsy itinerancy and migration in central Europe prompted several international policing initiatives that eventually crystallized under the International Criminal Police Commission (or ICPC) in 1931 into a transnational framework for controlling Gypsies. Against this background, the article also investigates whether the role of Switzerland and Austria as major frontrunners for anti-Gypsy international measures changed once the ICPC was under Nazi control. By closely examining critical activities and antiziganist ICPC discourse between 1933 and 1945, it reveals how the ICPC created a matrix of surveillance that eased the way toward the Gypsy genocide.

MITEM (Mádach International Theatre Meeting) celebrated its tenth anniversary in October 2023, somewhat out of sync and out of time because of the festival’s cancellation due to Covid in 2020. It was absorbed into the Theatre Olympics (as discussed in New Theatre Quarterly, XXXIX, No. 4 (November 2023) [NTQ 156], p. 377–86), but its most recent edition was something of a replacement for the cancelled event, presented in the round figure of ten that has made everybody happy. It has also allowed this editor to follow through with a ‘PS’ to that article, acknowledging the importance of MITEM for both the National Theatre in Budapest and the theatregoing public. By contrast with the three and a half months of the Theatre Olympiad, MITEM lasted a modest twenty-four days.

Loess paleoenvironmental reconstructions on regional to supra-regional scales have recently gained much attention. Geochemistry comparisons in relation to reference datasets, such as the Upper Continental Crust (UCC) data, have furthered our understanding of the climatic and geomorphological conditions under which terrestrial sites have developed. However, UCC data differs from loess, thereby obscuring important features, and the existing “average loess” datasets also are not sufficient for modern investigations.

In this study, we examine the youngest Polish loess (L1LL1 = MIS 2, ca. 26–15 ka) for its suitability as a new, loess-focused reference dataset. Eighty-nine samples from seven sites were analyzed, using inductively coupled plasma spectrometry. The loess had assumedly been homogenized during transportation and/or sedimentary recycling (LaN/SmN = 3.34–4.06, median 3.78; Eu/Eu* = 0.46–0.66, median 0.55; GdN/YbN = 1.08–1.49, median 1.26), and weakly affected by pre- or post-depositional weathering (CIA = 53.64–69.12, median 57.69). The statistically significant differences between sites in elemental medians were mostly conditioned by variations in grain size and in the “fresh” to “re-deposited” sediment ratio. Nonetheless, the overall geochemical composition homogeneity provided a basis for the estimation of Polish Median Loess (PML) data, as determined for 41 chemical elements. When used, PML data highlight differences between loess regions in Europe, thereby providing a tool for cross-continental comparisons.

Why was the “Chinese Question” of immigration control and exclusion in the United States imagined as an appealing precedent for dealing with the “Jewish Question” of emancipation and citizenship in fin-de-siècle Romania, Hungary, and Austria? The present article examines a vast corpus of parliamentary debates, press, and pamphlets, in order to demonstrate how thinking in terms of “questions” enabled historical actors to place themselves within a “global moment” by highlighting structural similarities that would justify the analogy. By rhetorically turning to an America that was placed at the forefront of “liberal” progress, yet now began to explicitly place limits to its inclusiveness, politicians in Central and Eastern Europe sought to present their own exclusionary policies as timely and acceptable, rather than anachronistic affronts to the spirit of the age. Drawing upon this global precedent was therefore hoped to ward off criticism: if “civilized” America could draw the line, be it as a matter of principle or pragmatism, then antisemitism could be justified with reference to Sinophobia.

Geoarchaeological analysis of settlement stratigraphy is key to understanding continuity and change in economic, social and cultural spaces within complex (proto-)urban sites. Here, preliminary micromorphological and micro-refuse data from the Pungrt hillfort demonstrate the potential of a fine-scaled geoarchaeology-based approach for understanding the structuring and reuse of space, not just within settlements but within individual households, through time.

During the early fifth millennium BC, Linearbandkeramik groups along the Danube in Central Europe constructed hundreds of circular enclosures, or ‘rondels’. These monumental sites signalled major social, economic and ideological change among these early farming communities. Their absence north of the Carpathian and Sudeten Mountains has been taken to suggest that this area lay on the periphery of this Early Neolithic world. Here, the authors report on a systematic programme of non-invasive prospection, including aerial photography, in Lower Silesia. The survey has identified eight previously undocumented rondels, significantly extending their distribution. Their detection emphasises the importance of combining prospection methods, and calls for a re-evaluation of core-periphery interpretations of Early Neolithic Central Europe.

Several watershed events preceded the dissolution of Yugoslavia. One of these was the toppling of the Vojvodina autonomist leadership in October 1988. This was preceded by a series of rallies throughout Vojvodina in the summer of 1988, which may have seemed like a spontaneous affair and the work of “ordinary citizens.” It was called “the antibureaucratic revolution.” However, these rallies, including a standing group of demonstrators, continually and always referring to the grievances of Kosovo Serbs, turned out to be supported by the Serbian political elite centered in Belgrade. The elite, still headed by the Serbian Communist Chief Slobodan Milošević, gave thrust and coordination to efforts to organize the rallies. The Vojvodina leadership was toppled for their alleged “failing to understand the plight of Kosovo Serbs.” The overthrow was, further, with a view to achieve the Serbian elite’s pet project, the “united Serbia”—that is, doing away with Vojvodina’s and Kosovo’s autonomy. Written sources (including recollections by Yugoslav leaders of the time) and written sources are considered in research on the events.

The study addresses the absence of a comprehensive institutional analysis framework in the academic literature on state-minority relations. It does so by employing a framework of analysis based on Skocpol’s analysis of structural factors and Ostrom’s multi-level institutional analysis to understand the processes of radical and incremental institutional change. The article is empirically grounded in a case study of Roma communities in Slovakia. More specifically, it maps and analyzes the evolution and change of institutional frameworks of state-minority relations in the context of Roma communities in Slovakia from the 1960s to 2020. Drawing from archival materials, interview findings, and document analysis, this article shows how post-socialist Slovakia radically redefined and diversified its institutional framework for Roma communities at different institutional levels, which subsequently continued to change at an incremental pace. Overall, the study aspires to offer a more dynamic institutional approach to the study of state-minority relations, which are currently dominated by more static regime- and rights-based approaches, and to contribute with a prospectively useful framework for understanding the developments of state-minority relations in the broader post-Soviet space and beyond.

Right-wing populists often mobilize popular support by employing a people-versus-elite dichotomy in which they cast ‘the people’ as the underdog, or by ‘performing’ crisis to discredit the elite. Such ‘underdogism’, and the reliance on crisis more broadly, remains an effective strategy for as long as populists are in opposition. But what happens when populists gain power? One would expect that they would not be able to exploit their position as effectively and their appeal would weaken drastically. In certain cases, however, they still manage to sustain the underdog illusion. This article argues that memory politics are an important locus for populists to maintain their underdog rhetoric, and within that field the performance of victimhood is key. Building on theories about the performance of crisis and recent trends in research on memory politics in Central Europe, we propose a framework for understanding how governing right-wing populists justify vindictive policies and thus try to cement their power.

As nationalist and populist rhetorics have gained momentum in Central and Southeastern Europe, there is an urgency to disentangle the historical narratives and political agendas displayed by national museum paradigms. And yet, equally significant is the urgency to illuminate the strategies and mnemonic devices through which the past is rendered worthy of commemoration, both in those memory cultures that come to life in opposition, or those which are complementary to the national museum’s paradigms. In line with these considerations, this special issue addresses the vernacular dimension of public memory, with a special focus on those memory cultures instantiated by mnemonic actors who do not necessarily possess the public epistemic authority to materialize their narratives about violent pasts as official memories.

The article explores how cross-border heritage tourism is promoted in public schools to reimagine Hungary as an ethnically homogeneous nation by incorporating ethnic kin communities that live in neighboring countries. Cross-border heritage tourism has long served to establish strong ties to ethnic diaspora communities that live beyond the territorial borders of the nation-state. National borders in Central and Eastern Europe were repeatedly redrawn across ethnic groups over the twentieth century. Heritage tourism remains a key cultural and economic practice that symbolically questions current national borders and aims to increase the viability of ethnic enclave economies in countries where the given ethnic group is a minority. The article focuses on a large-scale student travel program that was launched by the Hungarian government in 2010, the year that marked the start of a brisk populist turn in Hungarian politics. The program provides funding to public school students for organized class trips to areas of neighboring countries (Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, and Ukraine) that belonged to the Hungarian state before World War I. It shows how the Hungarian government mobilizes the public education system to foster a narrow and exclusionary ethnic understanding of cultural membership by selectively overemphasizing Hungarian heritage in regions that have had multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multicultural histories for centuries. This project extends research on identity-based heritage tourism to show how it has become an integral part of the propaganda toolkit of populist governments.