engleski

The Habsburg Nostalgia: What Can Fascination With the Imperial Past Tell Us About the (Dis)contents of Multilingualism Today?

According to a number of scholars of the Habsburg history, the period in question provides a feasible model of a multinational state and an alternative vision of governance and community in the heyday of nationalism. Within the flourishing themes on cultural diversity and multiculturalism, the Imperial rule is frequently romanticized as an example of cosmopolitanism and multicultural tolerance towards its different “peoples” and their languages, as the land where “everyone was born zwölfstimmig” (Magris 1963) – with twelve tongues and twelve souls. This nostalgic remembrance can be frequently observed in the region of Istria, where the souls and tongues were at least four, Italian, Croatian, Slovenian and German, if we forget different Romance and South-Slavic varieties subsumed. However, this idealization of the cultural diversity neglects the fact that control over language and culture in this multilingual society was one of the most important features of the Habsburg imperial rule and necessarily meant control of social hierarchy and suppression of the intellectual traditions of other cultures and languages. The construction of ethnic stereotypes within the Habsburg Monarchy in the name of pluralism during the 19th century and the evaluation of peoples according to criteria that included "level of civilization" yielded rankings of ethnic groups and the exclusion of some languages from the public sphere. The paper situates these vexing questions in the broader context of the debates around nationalism and multiculturalism in Europe and aims to show how this nostalgic idealization is symptomatic of the deep identity crisis in the construction of national and European identities within the context of the multilingual reality.

multilingualism; Habsburg monarchy; nationalism; cosmopolitanism; anthropology

nije evidentirano