Confession, Loyalty, and National Indifference: Perspectives from Imperial and Postimperial Borderlands

Possibilities and pitfalls of the concept of national indifference

“…Tara Zahra, for one, has explicitly defined national indifference as a reaction to the demands of modern mass politics and not as a pre‐modern remnant of ‘eastern’ or ‘ethnic’ societies (Zahra, 2010, p. 98). Recently, the geographic reach of national indifference research has been extended beyond Central/Habsburg Europe, to the Post‐Ottoman Balkans (Jakoubek, 2021), the Russian empire (Brüggemann & Wezel, 2019; Cusco, 2019; Musgrave, 2019; Paert et al, 2022) and the interwar Carpathians (Dabrowski, 2020). Yet the continued ‘eastern’ focus of most research has unintentionally reproduced the idea that Western Europe's supposedly more successful nation‐building projects entailed less national indifference than in Central and Eastern Europe.…”