>>18004984
There can be some foreshortening in such approaches. It is no accident that men of the Enlightenment like Sonnenfels and Gottfried van Swieten hailed patriotism as the supreme virtue for officials or that the Freemason Ignaz Born called his Vienna Grand Lodge a patriotic work. In the secondary schools, colleges and universities increasingly attended even by the magnate class as noble academies declined, a kind of esprit de corps developed, subtly integrating noble and non-noble elements into a new kind of elite. This nascent movements of the Monarchy's non-dominant nationalities were led preponderantly by educated sons from the upper levels of the common people, whose fathers were teachers, Orthodox or Lutheran parish priests, estate officials, millers, and merchants. A liberal nationalism, centered around the notion of patriotism as the opposite of servility, in which all could share regardless of class or creed, became part of the ambience in which educated young people grew up.

>>18004986
Paradoxical as it might sound, nationalism was thus an international movement whose ideas originated from Germany and were recycled in the monarchy’s polyglot institutions by Slavs and Magyars. Slovak nationalism was born in the Lutheran lycées of Bratislava and Budapest, attended also Magyars, Serbs and the ‘father of the Czech nationalism nation’, František Palacký. The Slovak writer Šafarik taught in the Serb Gymnasium of Novi Sad, while the founder of Yugoslavism Josip Juraj Strossmayer was trained in Pest and Vienna, where the greatest Slovene poets, France Prešeren, learnt his patriotism. Few creative writers worked in a monocultural frame-work. Vuk Karadzic, founder of modern literary Serbian, spent most of his life in Vienna; the leading Serbian novelist Jakov Ignjatovic grew up in central Hungary; the best German Bohemian writers of this time stressed motifs from Czech history and the Austro-German poet Anastasius Grün translated Slovene folk-songs. How could nationalism in such circumstances be other than the call to emulation? As interpreted by the young it challenged all national groups to implant the principles of freedom and progress in their own land, in order to prove their fitness for membership of the European community of nations. It was fraternal, rational and universalist.

Yet ultimately nationalism was more than the application of liberal principles in an ethnic setting. What, after all, was one’s fatherland? Was it a territorial-political unit, like the kingdom of Hungary, the province of Bohemia or indeed the Monarchy as a whole? Or was it the domain of one’s mother tongue, essentially a cultural concept? Liberal nationalism, with its stress on patriotism as civics, implied the former. In practice, nationalism in the 19th century Habsburg monarchy moved increasingly towards the latter. Confusion between the two remained, however, to inflict mischief in the political sphere.

>>18004987
In the emergence of language as the key criterion of nationhood, the major role was played by the romantic concept of the nation as a cultural group with its own distinctive contribution to make to the development of mankind. Here the nation was envisaged as the framework through which values were transmitted from generation to generation. Maturity was a matter of acquiring these values, of becoming rooted in a particular tradition. Since traditions were handed down through language it was language which defined the truly important groups into which mankind was divided, not the usurpations of princes. Most important, the songs of a humble peasant could penetrate just as profoundly into the human condition as the writings of enlightened sophisticates. J.G. Herder (1744-1803), the German Lutheran pastor whose work sowed the seeds of what historians term romantic nationalism, was first inspired by Latvian folk-songs when ministering in Riga. He went on to plead the cause of the Red Indians and to call on the 'Slavs, now sunk so low', to rise from their 'enervating slumber' and renew their peaceful, industrious ways on their ancestral lands.

It is romantic nationalism's appeal to the past which has drawn forth historians charge of anachronism. But this charge itselfis somewhat undiscriminating. Patriots of the early nineteenth century were not operating in a framework of 'modern' urban industrialism but in small Baroque towns dominated by Counter-Reformation churches, noble diets and the palaces of magnates, Bans and Palatines. The IIIyrian movement of Pre-March Croatia was hatched in the homes of old Zagreb, now a picturesque backwater. The Czech pioneer Dobrovsky spent much time on the estate of his magnate patron, Count Nostitz; his successor Palacky began his career working for another magnate and was long the Official Historiographer for the feudally structured Pre-March Bohemian Diet.

>>18005018
Views of national continuity in these venerable circumstances lacked proof and plausibility when they ascribed current resentments of German hegemony to the dark ages - but much less so where the early modern period was concerned. When Ljudevit Gaj founded the Illyrian movement in Croatia in 1835 he stood closer to Ritter-Vitezovic's patriotic Croatia rediviva (1700) than to our own day. The subordination of an administrative unit called Croatia, regret at its failure to include all Croats and awareness of a broader south Slav dimension were common to both situations. Nor is it clear, in psychological terms, why the very similar expressions of bitterness by 17th and early 19th century Czech writers at German superciliousness towards their language should not point to a common structure of resentment, at least for those writers. The current orthodoxy, which discounts elements of continuity between nineteenth-century and early modern nationhood in Europe, is rather too sweeping.

What was wholly novel was the proto-liberal climate of the first half of the nineteenth century. In this ambience 'patriots' were able to make their concerns a vital public issue which henceforth never left the region's agenda. But it is still worth saying that tradition was not wholly 'invented'. Where there was no precedent for 19th century concepts like Czechoslovak or Illyrian nationhood these projects failed. Nationalism took hold insofar as it built on existing realities, historical, linguistic or social. It reshaped them qualitatively to form new, more powerful identities but the process should not be absolutised . It was possible for national consciousness to exist below the ranks of the privileged before the 19th century. For nations which had once possessed their own states and social elites nationalist claims of rebirth and revival were not empty of content.

>>18005026
To be sure, there were peoples in the Monarchy the Slovenes, the Slovaks, the Ruthenians, and the Transylvanian Romanians who had no traditions of political nationhood or centuries of a native elite to look back on. It would be wrong to see even them as mere ethnic raw material, lacking any experience of forms of 'high culture'. The Bible had appeared in Slovene in 1584 during the later suppressed Slovene Reformation and Slovak Protestants continued to use the Czech Kralice Bible of 1579-94. Nor did it strictly matter, from the standpoint of romantic nationalism, that such people lacked a state past. Its basic rationale lay in the dignity it accorded the common people, their memories and folk ways. There was a democratic germ in this revaluation of the culture of the previously humble and despised. The romantic theme, quite correctly, was that tradition was not only a matter of the privileged orders; at the level of human psychology and empirical fact all communities have a history. Besides Palacky's roots in a region where Czech Protestantism and traditions of the slav apostles remained alive, Safárik inherited his migrant Czech Protestant forbears' recollections of Hus and Comenius; Kollár came from the High Tatra mountain region where Slovak was reputed to be purer than elsewhere. Such stray strands of sentiment and the sense of worth and meaning normal, healthy individuals feel in their lives could, for an educated minority exposed to Herderian ideology, become a real factor in psychological emancipation from the thrall of a dominant culture. They were elements out of which people who might once have considered themselves Hungarians of Slav stock, for example, could 'construct' themselves a new 'Slovak' identity.

>>18005077
Of course, the emerging intelligentsias of the 'nations without history' did not confine themselves to arguing their democratic right to exist. Transylvanian Romanians enthused over their distant Roman ancestry, Slovak and Slovene patriots over the shadowy realms of the ninth-century Svatopluk or sixth-century Samo respectively. Such windy bragging was arguably forced on them by the rules of the ethnic game set by the more powerful players, who played on their alleged lack of state-forming capacity'. In Herderian theory, or the Italian revolutionary Guiseppe Mazzini's vision of fraternal nations fighting for freedom, nations contributed jointly to a common Humanity. In practice, as national ideologies crystallised there were clashes in interpretations of past history and present interests. The on the whole generously emulative spirit of multi-national colleges bore much the same relation to attitudes in the wider world as does student idealism to the politics of our own day.

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