Since the birth of mass political movements, European nationalists have lamented the failure of their constituents to respond to the siren song of national awakening. This article explores the potential of national indifference as a category of analysis in the history of modern central and eastern Europe. Tara Zahra defines indifference, explores how forms of national indifference changed over time, probes the methodological challenges associated with historicizing indifference, and examines the intersections between national indifference and transnational history. Making indifference visible enables historians to better understand the limits of nationalization and thereby helps to challenge the nationalist narratives and categories that have traditionally dominated the historiography of eastern Europe.
In the aftermath of the First World War, a so-called ‘minority problem’ loomed large in European politics. This problem was understood, moreover, to be peculiar to central and eastern Europe. In fact, however, linguistic diversity was not a unique feature of the east, but also an ongoing challenge in states that had long claimed to have a unified national culture. This article compares policies of national classification and minority rights in France and Czechoslovakia after the First World War. It suggests that even as east/west binaries structured the unequal application of new international minority rights protections, France, rather than Czechoslovakia, implemented a more radical and racist policy of forcible national classification.
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