Kokoschka, Modigliani, Gellner: An Intellectual Sociology of the Post-Habsburg Legacy in Nationalism Studies
Abstract
The present contribution addresses the intellectual currents in nationalism studies derived from the experience of European national self-configuration, specifically the language-based nations emerging within, and after 1918 out of, the Habsburg Empire. Models of nation-formation conceived by scholars with direct personal experience in Habsburg and post-Habsburg Europe (Kohn, Gellner, Hroch) not only have had significant impact on scholarship, but equally have entered into popularising or journalistic discourse as ideas with trajectories beyond their authors' original formulations.
At the same time, Eurocentric formulations are increasingly revealed to be intellectually limited in their application outside the traditional Global North. My aim here is, on the one hand, to "provincialise" (Chakrabarty 2000) the Habsburg-based interpretations to test their limits and possibilities, yet equally to trace their historical course within the pre- and post-1989 "West" and "East" of the Global North: to anchor them within the sociology of academic, dissident and policy-making spheres of the late 20th century.
Examining the situation, i.e. "situatedness" of Central European nationalism and its actors -whether as nationalism's creators or explicators - across a historic framework between 1918 and 1989 is intended not only as an examination of assumptions present within the disciplines of nationalism studies, but equally as a reflection of the self-configuration of the discipline(s) as equally participant as much as observer in the processes around nations and national collectivities.