Introduction

National Indifference in Post-Ottoman Spaces: A Case from Northwest Bulgaria

“…But this does not necessarily mean that they accepted its premises. It is not enough to know that they did not show enough national enthusiasm and “failed to align themselves to the nationalist propaganda” (Van Ginderachter and Fox 2019b, 4), we should also be able to answer the question of why. In the case of Voyvodovans, we know that they saw the mission of nationalist recruiters, in comparison with saving one’s soul, to be rather insignificant.…”

“…In the first decade of the new millennium, “a new school of historians” developed in the United States (Stourzh 2011, 296). In a number of works, these historians developed the concept of “national indifference” into its own independent interpretational paradigm, which “ranks among the most innovative concepts shaping research on nationalism in the past two decades” (Van Ginderachter and Fox 2019b, 1). The “canonic” authors of this school include Pieter Judson (2006), Jeremy King (2005 [2002]), and Tara Zahra (2008; 2010), who often cite Gary B. Cohen in their works as (not only) a source of inspiration, primarily his monograph The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Cohen 1981).…”

“…Nevertheless, the image I have presented in this way is significantly insufficient. The key authors (King 2005; Zahra 2010) as well as the recent contributions (Van Ginderachter and Fox 2019c) demonstrate that national indifference is “a response to … the claims made by nationalist” (Van Ginderachter and Fox 2019b, 4). A typical situation of national indifference thus involves two parties: nationalist propaganda by states and/or local elites and the (usually) rejection of this by minority communities.…”

Tangible belonging and national indifference: Being German in interwar Hungary1

“…Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox and Liana Grancea took some of the influential ideas that Brubaker developed in his earlier work, such as Nationalism Reframed , and applied them to documenting the everyday workings of ethnicity and nationhood in the city of Cluj, Romania (Brubaker et al, 2006). Maarten Van Ginderachter in his work on modern Belgium as well as in the edited volumes on ‘nationalism from below’ and ‘national indifference’ confronts the question of how everyday people understood and experienced nationness (Van Ginderachter, 2019; Van Ginderachter & Beyen, 2012; Van Ginderachter & Fox, 2019). And my own recent work attempts to give voice to everyday rural dwellers in 20th‐century Hungary and demonstrate that villagers were not necessarily indifferent to Germanness or another form of ‘German’ group identity, or even membership in a nation.…”

National indifferences during everyday nationalism: Experiencing the nation in Finland in the aftermath of the Second World War

“…However, as a point of departure, the concept provides a crucial service to the study of nationalism by drawing attention to situations where there is less of the nation than earlier or where nationalism takes milder forms (cf. Judson, 2018: 153; Miller, 2019: 65; Van Ginderachter & Fox, 2019: 7–8; Zahra, 2010: 118).…”