Empire and Nationalism, 1860s–1920s

This chapter offers an analysis of radical nationalists in the empire and of how they incorporated imperial models and practices in different successor states. Its focus is on two self-defined nationalists—Stanisław Głąbiński and Karel Kramář—and their transition from the empire to Poland and Czechoslovakia. Building on the rich body of recent literature on nationalism, national radicalization, and national indifference in the late empire, it shows how certain nationalists’ long acceptance of the empire conditioned the political choices they made after its end, and it shows the consequences of these choices for their careers and for the political life of not only the countries they represented but Europe. Juxtaposing different aspects in the creation of this myth of radical nationalist resistance to the Habsburgs—the discourse, not just of nationalists in the Habsburg Empire, but also of their supporters among the Allies abroad—and tracing these beyond 1918, this analysis sheds new light on the evolution and different understanding of nationalism, as well as the continuity of national politics across the epochal divide, and on the role this myth played in several interwar states.