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Nationalities without Nationalism? The Cultural Consequences of Metternich’s Nationality Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2022

Philipp Decker Open the ORCID record for Philipp Decker [Opens in a new window]
Philipp Decker*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and International Relations, Turkish-German University, Istanbul, Turkey
*
Email: philipp.decker@tau.edu.tr
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Abstract

The Austrian statesman Metternich is widely recognized as a leading actor in European affairs in the first half of the nineteenth century. What has been surprisingly neglected is the long-lasting impact of his nationality policy, which he devised and partly implemented within the context of restoring order after the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The devastation and dislocations caused by two decades of warfare gave rise to a critical historical juncture in which Metternich took the lead to form a counterrevolutionary regime and to pursue what can be termed his empire project. A state modernizer, he devised an intellectually elaborate conservative response to the French Revolution that rested on his distinction between supposedly natural nationalities and artificial nationalism. The resulting idiosyncratic governance of empire fostered a vertical integration of societies-in-the-making through the expansion of state infrastructures, while at the same time determining horizontal fragmentation along provincial and linguistic lines. Metternich’s nationality policy helped to create the ideational and institutional foundations of modern nation-building across Central and Southeastern Europe. Its legacy outlasted the monarchy and is reflected in the distinctive culturalist tradition of nationhood in post-Habsburg Central Europe.

Keywords

Habsburg Empirenationality policyMetternichnation buildingCentral Europe
Type
Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 51 , Issue 6 , November 2023 , pp. 1357 - 1374
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Nationalities

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