About the Book
Internationalist socialism and ethnic nationalism are usually thought of as polar opposites. But for the millions of men and women who made Social Democracy into twentieth-century Europe's most potent political force, they were often mutually reinforcing. Workers and Nationalism explains this apparent paradox by looking at the history of the Social Democratic workers' movement in Habsburg Austria, which was built on the mobilization of German and Czech
workers in the Empire's rapidly industrializing regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Lower Austria. Jakub Bene%s takes the history of socialism out of the realm of theoretical and parliamentary debates and into the
streets, city squares, pubs, and clubs of a vibrant but precarious multi-ethnic society. He reveals how ordinary workers became increasingly nationalist as they came to believe that they were the genuine representatives of their ethnic national communities. Their successful campaign to democratize parliamentary elections in 1905-1907 accelerated such thinking rapidly. It also split Social Democracy apart by 1911. Then, during the First World War, many Czech and German workers embraced
revolutionary radicalism, alienating them from the regime-friendly socialist leadership. Bene%s's study is the first to show the profound connection between major political events and the rich culture of the
Austrian workers' movement, revealing this culture's utopian and quasi-religious tendencies as well as its left populist nationalism. Based on research in eight archives and numerous libraries in Prague, Vienna, and Brno, Workers and Nationalism fundamentally rethinks the relationship between socialism, nationalism, and democracy in modern Europe.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Socialism, Nationalism, and Democracy
1: Narrating Socialism in Habsburg Austria
2: Exclusion from the Nation
3: Storms of November
4: Socialist Hussites, Marxist Wagnerians
5: The Logics of Separatism
6: War and Revolution
Conclusion: Ideology and Utopia
About the Author :
Jakub Bene%s was born in Berkeley, California to Czech and Slovak parents, one of whom was raised in America. He took his bachelor's degree at Middlebury College, Vermont before returning to California and completing his doctorate under the supervision of Professor William Hagen at UC Davis. Since 2012 he has lived and worked in the UK, first as postdoctoral fellow at the University of Birmingham, and most recently at Oxford. Bene%s's scholarly interests are
focused on modern central and eastern Europe, particularly on the history of nationalism, social movements, and popular culture. His next project looks at rural unrest during the collapse of Austria-Hungary.
Review :
This is an original work, exquisitely researched, exceptionally well informed by the secondary literature in a number of different fields, and engagingly written...a creative and provocative work of scholarly conceptualization that certainly marks a significant step forward in the discussion.
[T]his superb volume by Benes takes a decidedly bottom-up approach to Austria, providing a fascinating account of the emergence of Czech and German socialism, a topic bizarrely neglected in English-language scholarship....Highly recommended.
Beneš's...research is highly illuminating.
Deeply researched and clearly written, this book is a major contribution to the literature on nationalism in modem Central and Eastern Europe.
Workers and Nationalism is a much needed original intervention that will compel scholars to see the Austrian Social Democrats — both Germans and Czechs — at the centre of nationalizing post-1890 Austrian politics.
Beneš' monograph is as important to our understanding of the Central European labour movement as it is to a reassessment of the nationality question in the Habsburg Empire. He presents us with a very welcome challenge to simplistic accounts of nationalism in the region. More studies of this kind are needed.
[A] well-researched and richly-annotated monograph
[an] innovative study ... Workers and Nationalism provides captivating insights into the influence of nationalism on late Habsburg working-class culture.
an important book
This compelling study, which began as a dissertation in history at the University of California, Davis, explores how industrial workers in imperial Austria came to embrace nationalist forms of politics in the decades before the Great War... Rooted in an impressive array of archival materials, this book brims with telling popular texts, all translated into clear and colloquial English. Benes is to be congratulated for his original and significant contribution to the historical literature.
From start to finish, Beneš demonstrates a nuanced and dispassionate appreciation for how asymmetries between the German and Czech national movements played out among socialists of both tongues ... Rooted in an impressive array of archival materials, this book brims with telling popular texts, all translated into clear and colloquial English. Beneš is to be congratulated for his original and significant contribution to the historical literature.
[Beneš] directs our attention, rather, to the grass roots, where a transnational, socialist movement fighting exclusion from political society on class grounds gradually switched focus, once the vote had been won, to a struggle against exclusion on the grounds of national minority status. In the process, social democracy split along ethnic lines, because neither side understood the concerns of the other. As Beneš insists and illustrates, with copious and vivid evidence from Czech and German memoirs, newspapers, pamphlets and popular literature, this distinctly working-class variant of nationalism was, by the time of the First World War, a mass movement; the opinions of party leaders were irrelevant.
[an] inspiring study ... Beneš highlights the autonomy of ordinary workers to form their own views on nationhood, class relations, and political means and aspirations. He does so by analyzing a rich collection of sources, ranging from proletarian prose and poetry to speeches, essays, diaries, and memoirs of rank and file workers and party activists.
