Different paths to the nation : regional and national identities in Central Europe and Italy, 1830-1870

Contingency, construction, complexity' -perhaps no other terms better encapsulate the main trends in research on nationalism in Europe over the last couple of decades. 1 As historians and social scientists have sought to analyse nation-building processes and to de-construct national discourses, they have increasingly emphasised three points. Firstly, they maintain that nations and a sense of 'national belonging' have not always existed, but emerge from particular historical circumstances and can change as those conditions alter -'contingency'. Secondly, it is argued that the process of 'becoming national' derives from the social and cultural creation of new group identities, which involves the 'invention' or re-discovery of national myths and traditions -'construction'. Thirdly, scholars stress that, while national identity basically constitutes a new kind of identity, it does not necessarily represent an all-consuming one; rather, it stands in a series of relationships with other spatially (regional, local, municipal) or socially (class, gender, generation) defined identities -'complexity'. If this may look like some kind of consensus, that is in one sense deceptive. As Miroslav Hroch has recently argued, there is at the general level a wide discrepancy as regards definitions used: some scholars refer to 'nationalism', others speak of 'national identity', 'nationhood' or 'nationness', with the various terms often masking important differences in approach and interpretation. 2 For those, like the contributors to this volume, who are especially interested in the intertwined histories of Central Europe and Italy in the nineteenth century, the apparent consensus looks problematic for practical as well as for theoretical reasons. Closer inspection of the recent literature on nationalism reveals that certain areas of nineteenth-century Europe remain relatively understudied. Of nowhere is this truer for those areas where the lands of 'Unity Versus Difference': The Politics of Region-building and National Identities in Tyrol, 1830-67 Front Matter....Pages i-xvi Introduction: Re-examining National Identity in Nineteenth-century Central Europe and Italy....Pages 1-15 A Mission of Mediation: Dalmatia’s Multi-national Regionalism from the 1830s–60s....Pages 16-36 ‘Unity Versus Difference’: The Politics of Region-building and National Identities in Tyrol, 1830–67....Pages 37-59 Trieste, 1830–70: From Cosmopolitanism to the Nation....Pages 60-81 Voluntary Associations and Nation-building in Nineteenth-century Prague....Pages 82-99 German, Austrian or ‘Salzburger’? National identities in Salzburg c.1830–70....Pages 100-121 Searching for a Role: Austrian Rule, National Perspectives and Memories of the ‘Serenissima’ in Venice, 1848–66....Pages 122-143 The Construction of National Identities in the Northern Bohemian Borderland, 1848–71....Pages 144-156 Between the Federative Nation and the National State: Public Perceptions of the Foundation of the German Empire in Southern Germany and Austria....Pages 157-179 Similar Paths, Different ‘Nations’? Ultramontanisation and the Old Catholic Movement in Upper Austria, 1870–71....Pages 180-199 Symbolic Representations of the Nation: Baden, Bavaria, and Saxony, c.1860–80....Pages 200-219 Conclusions: Performative Effects and ‘Deep Images’ in National Discourse....Pages 220-229 Back Matter....Pages 230-240 On his way through Tyrol in the year 1828, on a journey from Munich to Genoa, the German poet Heinrich Heine stopped in two of the largest towns in the province: Innsbruck, where he heard at first-hand stories from the famous 1809 uprising against the Bavarians and French; and the episcopal residence of Brixen, where he was on the look-out for the hordes of Jesuits he had been warned about. Leaving Brixen, he continued his journey south, noting that he was passing from one cultural area, Germany, to another, Italy, though without specifying where precisely the boundary between the two lay. He simply wrote that, 'in southern Tyrol the weather began to clear, the sun of Italy let its nearness be felt ...'. South Tyrol, he added several lines later is 'where Italy begins'.1 In identifying the southern part of this Austrian crownland as the start of Italy, Heine was feeding into a debate that had been going on since the early modern period, as humanist travellers and thinkers wrote on the issue as to where the border between the realms of 'Italia' and 'Germania' might be drawn Recent years have seen great interest in questions of national identity in modern Europe, yet there have been few comparative studies of the mid-nineteenth-century, which was a crucial period for national identity formation and state-building. Different Paths to the Nation analyzes the changing perceptions of nation, region and state in areas on the border between Germany, Austria and Italy. On the basis of original case-studies, it challenges still prevailing master-narratives of national history in modern Germany, Italy and the Habsburg Monarchy. By analysing the ambivalence and flexibility of regional and national identities in the period, the contributions demonstrate how Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century were faced with a range of different paths towards nationhood

A collection of essays exploring the issues of national identity in modern Europe, Nations, States and Borders focuses on the 'age of state-building' period c.1830-c.1870. During this time, social and economic changes brought questions of national and regional identity to the top of the political agenda. This volume looks at the implications of these questions on a comparative basis, by analysing changing perceptions of national identity in the 'border zones' between Germany, Austria and Italy.

The essays in this volume analyse issues of national and regional identity during a key phase of nation-state formation in mid-nineteenth century Europe. By asking how contemporaries articulated regional and national identities, the book offers a fresh prospective on the process of nationalization in modern German, Austrian and Italian histories.