Modernism

The Creation of Nation-States
ISBN: 
978-963-7326-61-5
cloth
$111.00 / €95.00 / £90.00
Publication date: 
2010
500 pages

This is the first part of the third volume of the four-volume series, a daring project of CEU Press, presenting the most important texts that triggered and shaped the processes of nation-building in the many countries of Central and Southeast Europe. The aim is to confront ‘mainstream’ and seemingly successful national discourses with each other, thus creating a space for analyzing those narratives of identity which became institutionalized as “national canons.”

The 59 texts in this volume present and illustrate the development of the ideologies of nation states, the “modern” successors of former empires. They exemplify the use modernist ideological framaeworks, from liberalism to socialism, in the context of the fundamental reconfiguration of the political system in this part of Europe between the 1860s and the 1930s. It also gives a panorama of the various solutions proposed for the national question in the region.

Why, modernism and not modernity? Modernity implies the West, while modernism was the product of the periphery. The editors use it in a stricter sense, giving it a place between romanticism and anti-modernism, spanning from the 1860s until the decade following World War I.

Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945

Vol. I. Late Enlightenment

Vol. II. National Romanticism

Vol. III/1 Modernism
– The Creation of Nation States

Vol. III/2 Modernism
– Representations of National Culture 

Vol. IV. Anti-modernism 

Introduction by Maria Todorova

Chapter I. Making of the modern state in a multi-national context

Chapter II. Self-determination, democratization, and the homogenizing state

Chapter III. “National projects” and their regional framework

Chapter IV. Federalism and the decline of the empires

Chapter V. Socialism and the nationality question

"Discourses of Collective Identity bietet eine eindrucksvolle Lektüre und sei auch solchen Lesern empfohlen, die sich jenseits der ostmittel-, südosteuropäischen Area Studies für Nationalismusforschung interessieren. Für jene Regionalstudien bedeutet er einen gewichtigen Versuch, das Feld für eine kritische Ideengeschichte zurückzugewinnen, nachdem besonders für Südosteuropa ethnologisch-anthropologische, kultur- und sozialgeschichtliche Fragestellungen in letzter Zeit eine dominierende Stellung einnehmen."
"The collection does an admirable job of addressing multiple audiences. One could imagine these texts being used to great effect in an undergraduate course and, although the contexts would likely be too dense for students at this level, they would make the volume well suited to a graduate course. The series could just as easily be used by scholars well-versed in the intellectual history of one or more of the areas represented who are looking to broaden the context of their understanding."