Nation as Tragedy: What is Special About Central Europe’s Nationalism

The popular literature on nationalism is a poor guide for students interested in why nationalism has led to conflict in East and Central Europe. The problem is captured in the phrase “imagined communities” – taken to mean that humans could make of nations whatever they desired – culturally, politically, or otherwise. In fact, specific, constraining ideas of nationhood had existed in Europe for centuries, and when democratic movements arose in the nineteenth century, people had a definite sense of what made up the self-governing communities they hoped to make: Czechs imagined an ethnically Czech state, and Germans an ethnically German one, Poles an ethnically Polish one, and so on. Because ethnicities coexisted within very old settlement patterns, the basic ambitions of these movements proved incompatible, leading to strife. The piece takes particular issue with the notion that “national indifference” constituted a serious option for European political life in the modern period.