sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 4

Éva Kovács / Raul Cârstocea / Gábor Egry (eds.): Ethnicizing Europe

After World War I, the collapse of three major European empires produced a new political map of Central and Eastern Europe. For decades, the successor states were understood as embodiments of liberal democracy and "self-determination". Yet recent scholarship has challenged this narrative of popular national liberation. The new postwar order established at Versailles was highly contested, combining continuities and ruptures. The granting and enshrining of rights coexisted with the toleration and even legitimation of crimes, while prolonged negotiations and conflicts prepared the ground for the upheaval and widespread brutality of World War II. As the editors of this volume argue, what came to be known as the Paris System spurred rather than merely resulted from Europe's ethnicization before and during the war and brought with it much "hate and violence". [1]

Originating in a 2019 conference at the Simon-Wiesenthal-Institute in Vienna, this volume examines this fraught postwar moment through nine case studies spanning Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Poland, and the United States. These chapters are framed by an introduction outlining key concepts in the study of ethnicity and nationalism and a concluding essay by Tara Zahra that situates the volume and the history of the region within global imperial and racial hierarchies.

As in most collected volumes, the contributions vary in style and depth. Still, the overarching focus on ethnicization and on how ethnicity came to matter so much politically after World War I provides a productive lens. Across the volume's three main sections, ethnicization emerges as a multi-scalar process: articulated in global discourses of race and self-determination, institutionalized in national legislation, and enacted in local bureaucratic and social practice.

The first thematic cluster highlights the role of nationalist policies and bureaucracies. Legal and administrative reforms transformed ethnicity from a social descriptor into a governing principle with the power to integrate and exclude. Devlin M. Scofield shows how French authorities in Alsace posited "a fundamental incongruity between an Alsatian and a German" (41) and promoted the vision of a "timeless Alsace" that, after four decades of German rule, clashed with more complex social realities on the ground. Zachary Mazur examines the rejection of a Jewish family at Ellis Island because, according to US authorities, they could not be both Jews and Poles. Mazur interprets this as indicative of a shift in US policy both toward an ethnic understanding of nationality and a rejection of the Polish state's authority to issue identity papers for its citizens, while the Polish state, in turn, might have issued such papers with the precise aim of facilitating emigration. Zofia Trębacz traces interwar Poland's colonial aspirations and their intersection with projects for mass Jewish emigration and resettlement-ideas that became subject to a broad consensus in the 1930s. She thus situates ethnic categorization within global imperial imaginaries. Together, these chapters underscore ethnicization as a largely top-down process with real effects on the lives of individuals.

The next section turns to language, regional identity, and minority politics within several of the newly formed nation-states. Elisabeth Haid-Lener demonstrates how Polish education reforms in Eastern Galicia, especially the replacement of most imperial Ukrainian schools with bilingual ones, were perceived as instruments of Polonization. Pauli Aro analyzes the somewhat counterintuitive emergence of ethnoregional associations of Banat Swabians in Vienna, emphasizing their social and cultural functions. Zsolt Vitári explores generational dynamics among Hungary's German-speakers, connecting the rise of ethnopolitical mobilization within this group to the politicization and emancipation of the youth. Collectively, these contributions show not only how states instrumentalized ethnicization for nation-building, but also how individuals and groups navigated and negotiated these pressures in pursuit of welfare, security, or even survival.

The final group of chapters addresses radicalization and political violence, discussing more explicit uses of political mobilization, propaganda, and ideology. Pavel Kladiwa and Andrea Pokludová survey the ethnicization of public space in the Bohemian lands and the ensuing social tensions and struggles, while Béla Bodó traces the development of competing forms of paramilitary activism in interwar Hungary-the communist "red terror", the bourgeois (later fascist) "white terror", and the peasant "green terror"-and subsequent political radicalization. Jagoda Wierzejska analyzes Polish and Ukrainian atrocity propaganda in Eastern Galicia and shows how the conflict that developed there after World War I was thereby framed as one between "two antagonized state-building and national projects rather than between two states" (247), with long-term consequences for the relationship between self-identifying Poles and Ukrainians in the region. These chapters demonstrate that violence was not merely a byproduct of ethnicization but one of its accelerants, transforming ethnicity into emotionally charged and potentially militarized identities.

While the contributions are grounded in substantial archival research and present original case studies, most do not fully situate their findings within the broader historiography or engage deeply with recent theoretical debates. However, Zahra's concluding essay addresses this gap. She emphasizes both the limited sovereignty (semi-independence) granted to East Central European states after 1918 and the League of Nations' function as a "semicolonial power". (282-283) She further contends that the concept of ethnicity, typically associated with discussing Central and Eastern Europe in this period and framed culturally, became, in practice, hardly distinguishable from the concept of race.(281) The term, in her view, operated largely as a euphemism or as a means of creating distance from other forms of racism, thereby positioning Eastern Europeans in a liminal place within wider racial hierarchies of Europeanness, whiteness, and otherness. Consequently, Zahra questions the usefulness of the term ethnicization and its presumed localized and national embeddedness, arguing instead that, in the period, "Eastern Europeans became both racialized and racializers" within a global setting.(287)

In dialogue with recent scholarship on imperial continuities and racism, therefore, the volume successfully shifts attention from high diplomacy to the administrative, social, and discursive mechanisms through which notions of ethnicity evolved and hardened and to 1918 as a turning point. The case studies suggest that ethnicization, if we stick with this term, was neither purely imposed from above nor entirely generated from below; rather, it emerged through interaction between bureaucratic categorization, political mobilization, and everyday strategies of adaptation. Its central contribution is therefore twofold: for one, by foregrounding the immediate postwar years as a laboratory of ethnic governance rather than a prelude to the 1930s, it challenges teleological readings of interwar Europe. For another, it compellingly demonstrates that local practices, national policies, and global hierarchies were not separate layers but mutually constitutive arenas in which political belonging was renegotiated - a theoretical insight with implications well beyond the region under consideration.

Note:

[1] On violence, see Eric D. Weitz: From the Vienna to the Paris System. International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions, in: American Historical Review 113, 5 (2008), 1313-1343; on continuities and breaks, see Tara Zahra: Kidnapped Souls. National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 Ithaca/New York 2008; Pieter Judson: The Habsburg Empire. A New History, Cambridge, Mass. 2016, especially 442-452; and, more recently, Natasha Wheatley: Central Europe as Ground Zero of the New International Order, in: Slavic Review 78, 4 (2019), 900-911 and Natasha Wheatley: The Life and Death of States. Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty, Princeton, NJ 2023.