Obstacles to Nationalization on the Hungarian-Romanian Language Frontier

Abstract

In 1863, the geologist Adolf Schmidl published a thick book on the Bihar/Bihor Mountains, a highland region on the border between the Hungarian Kingdom and Transylvania. Calling the Bihar/Bihor Mountains one of the “least known regions in the Austrian Monarchy,” Schmidl offered his work as small contribution to Vaterlandskunde and one, he hoped, that would inspire others to follow him into the region. The book provided a detailed analysis of the mountains' hydrography, topography, flora, and fauna. The biological diversity of the region especially excited Schmidl, and his discoveries included four new species of plants and a new species of animal (a leech found only in thermal waters). Schmidl was no less impressed by the ethnographic diversity of this region. Although Romanians belonging to the Greek Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches comprised the vast majority of the population, Schmidl counted six ethnic groups and as many religions in the mountains. According to Schmidl, “national agitation” was “entirely foreign” to the region, whose inhabitants enjoyed peaceful and fraternal relations with one another. The Romanians, he underlined, “are among the most loyal in the Austrian monarchy and their devotion to the dynasty is unfeigned and unshakeable.”

National indeterminacies at the periphery of the Habsburg Monarchy: Nationalisms versus multi‐ethnic identities in Fiume/Rijeka and Trieste, 1848–1867

“…Such hope seems contradictory insofar as it does not chime with the attempts at Magyarization of the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Monarchy endorsed by central authorities in Budapest, and thus the imposition of the Hungarian language on other nationalities. HW#owever, the Fiuman context highlights the complexity of multi‐ethnic relations also in the Hungarian half of the Monarchy, which “have too often been reduced to sterile debates over the campaign of linguistic Hungarianization waged by the Hungarian state and its local officials” (Nemes, 2012: 29–30). In Fiume, support for Hungary implied a guarantee for the preservation of the city's autonomy as corpus separatum and special status as free port in the face of Croatian aims over the city.…”

Introduction: Questions of Space and Place in Scholarship on Modern Hungary

“…At the risk of creating a list that any one scholar would be hard-pressed to master fully, it is worth noting that space and place studies have also seen a growth in the study of borderlands (see for example Kürti 2001, Brown 2003, Davis 2011, Nemes 2012, and with this also the role that the demarcation and mapping of state borders in the early modern period played in the creation and evolution of national and imperial identities, and in turn also the generation of modern consciousness and subjectivities (see for example Fischer et al 2010 Pyrenees (1989), and building directly on Valerie Kivelson's ground-breaking study of cartography and state building in seventeenth-century imperialist Russia (2006), Veres employs archival material gathered in Vienna and Paris to explore Austrian attempts to map out, and thus assert power over, the eastern border of the Habsburg Monarchy (for a similarly inspiring study on imperialist Russian cartography on its western border, see Seegel 2012).…”