Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 11:385–414, 2005

Copyright
C Taylor & Francis Inc.

ISSN: 1353-7113 print

DOI: 10.1080/13537110500255619

MULTIPLE NATIONALISM: NATIONAL CONCEPTS

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY HUNGARY AND BENEDICT
ANDERSON’S “IMAGINED COMMUNITIES”

ALEXANDER MAXWELL
University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, USA

Nineteenth-century Slovaks expressed loyalty to both a Hungarian “political na-

tion” and a Slavic “cultural” or “linguistic” nation, and invoked multiple lin-
guistic nations, variously imagined as Pan-Slavic, Czechoslovak or Slovak. Com-
paring the Slovak and Croat experience in nineteenth-century Hungary shows
that “nation” status bestowed concrete political benefits. Since historical actors
invoke the “nation” for multiple communities, the desire for statehood should not
be a defining criterion of nationalism. Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism,
however, can accommodate multiple nationalism.

This article examines a series of political actors who expressed alle-

giance to more than one nation at the same time. It takes Hungary’s
nineteenth-century Slovak minority as a case study, but the phe-
nomenon of multiple nationalism exists elsewhere in the world,
and I will situate Slovak ideas in the context of national ideas else-
where in the Habsburg Empire. This phenomenon underscores
the political potency of “the nation” as a rhetorical device, but also
calls into question the frequent assumption that nationalism is a
quest for statehood.
Any theoretical argument about nationalism requires a brief
discussion of the “notoriously difficult to define”1 terms “nation”
and “nationality.” I start from the empirical observation that the
term “nation” is a popular polemical tool: historical actors fre-
quently use this word while making political arguments. Histori-
ans rely on political polemic to uncover the intellectual history
of nationalism, so the word “nation” can be initially approached
as a rhetorical phenomenon. Before devising a definition of the
word “nation” that appeals to contemporary scholars, we should
ask what the term meant to those who used it, and the political
Address correspondence to Alexander Maxwell, University of Nevada-Reno,
Department of Political Science/302, Reno, NV 89557-0060. E-mail: amaxwell@zworg.com

385
386 A. Maxwell

work the term was expected to perform. We may remain agnostic

about what, if any, referent the term describes: as Rogers Brubaker
put it,
One does not have to take a category inherent in the practice
of nationalism—the realist, reifying conception of nations as real
communities—and make this category central to the theory of nationalism.2

Brubaker asks how the concept of “nation” functions “as a practical

category, as classificatory scheme, as cognitive frame.”3 I adopt a
similar approach, asking how the concept of “nation” functioned
as a rhetorical strategy in a specific place and period in Central
European history.
Slovaks making political claims repeatedly referred to a nation
(národ) in order to legitimize political demands. Their arguments
borrowed from discussions in other languages of the Habsburg
Empire; words such as nemzet, Volk, and Nation also played a role
in the discussion. What work did the term “nation” (or similarly-
invoked terms “Volk,” “nemzet,” “nationality,” “race”) perform in
such texts? Why were they so important to political rhetoric, and
so hotly contested?
The answers to these questions lie in the political history of
the period. During the nineteenth century, the territory of the
modern Slovak Republic was part of the Kingdom of Hungary and
had been so for almost a millennium. The Hungarian nobility,
which dominated Hungarian politics, was hostile to Slovak na-
tional aspirations, and Slovak nationalism arose primarily to resist
Magyarization, i.e. state-sponsored policies of linguistic and cul-
tural assimilation to the culture of ethnic Hungarians (Magyars).4
Slovaks who showed too much sympathy for the Hungarians risked
being called “Magyarones,” a derisive term connoting lickspittle
collaboration and national cowardice. Twentieth-century Slovak–
Hungarian relations have been characterized by shrill if mostly
bloodless confrontation. Because of these conflicts, the histo-
riography on East-Central European nationalism assumes that
Slovak nationalism was in inherent contradiction with Hungarian
nationalism.5 During the nineteenth century, however, Slovak na-
tionalists typically accepted the legality and legitimacy of the Hun-
garian Kingdom, even while defending a Slavic linguistic com-
munity, variously imagined as Pan-Slavic, Slovak, or Czechoslovak.
During the nineteenth century, Slovaks did not seek statehood for
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 387

this linguistic community: Slovaks struggled for a multi-ethnic and

multi-linguistic Hungary, not a Pan-Slavic, Czechoslovak or Slovak
state.6
The word “nation” was prominent both when Slovaks affirmed
their Hungarian political loyalties and when they defended their
Slavic cultural loyalties. The word “nation” was a complex term in
nineteenth-century Hungary, and telling its history is a complex
task. In the eighteenth century, the dominant “nation” concept in
Hungary was the so-called natio hungarica, which characteristically
referred to Hungary’s multi-ethnic nobility in Latin, an important
lingua franca of the period.7 During the period of the French Revo-
lution, some Hungarian national thinkers began to extend the “na-
tion” down the social hierarchy, resulting in a multi-ethnic, socially-
inclusive vision of Hungarian nationalism: the so-called Hungarus
idea. Historians of Hungary generally treat the Hungarus concept
as transient and insignificant:

The Hungarus idea was based on emancipation and modernization. . . . [Its

supporters] wanted neither to defend one-sidedly the old Hungarian class
privileges of the “natio hungarica” nor to engage solely in upholding the
national language and culture. . . . The Hungarus idea did not, however,
stand up to the popular efforts of the [Magyar] language reformers. . . . The
Hungari and their few followers were suspected of being “apatriotic” and
“anational,” even of being “Austrians,” or at least of working for Vienna.
This sounded the death knell for the Hungarus concept as far as public
opinion was concerned. It was discarded as a possible variant of Hungarian
national concepts. With hindsight, it hardly stood a realistic chance of
realization anyway.8

Though I do not entirely share Haselsteiner’s counterfactual pes-

simism, the ultimate failure of the Hungari is beyond dispute.
The dominant theme in Hungary’s reform-minded liberal no-
bility shared with the Hungari the belief that the “nation” must
be expanded down the social scale to include the educated mid-
dle classes. Most Hungarian nobles, however, added an ethnic
dimension. National education had to take place in Hungarian,
otherwise what would separate Hungarians from their Austrian
oppressors? During the 1830s and 1840s, as increasing numbers
of Hungarians accepted that the nation must extend down the so-
cial hierarchy, the Hungarian national concept lost its multi-ethnic
quality.
388 A. Maxwell

The key concept of Hungarian liberal nationalism was the

Magyar politikai nemzet, the “Hungarian political nation,” which
János Varga summarized as “a nation concept whereby, by def-
inition, the Hungarian (Magyar) nation was the only nation in
Hungary, and every person living in the country was a member
of this nation.”9 In 1843, Gustáv Szontágh, whom Varga credits
with inventing the concept, defined “the nation” in opposition to
a mere “people”:
A nation is the community of people living together in a common sovereign
state and homeland; an independent civil society, it has a history of living its
own political life as a morally responsible entity. “Nation” is the totality of a
country’s citizens; “people” are its component parts, grouped according to
their common race and language. Consequently, while a country can have
only one nation, it can have a variety of peoples.10

So far, this is compatible with the Hungarus concept, but Szontágh

distinguished himself from the Hungari by granting a special pri-
macy to the Magyars:
The founders of a nation are the people who occupy a nation and found a
state. With this act they transform a people to a nation. . . . likewise with this
act, a people stamps its name, its character and its language on the land
it settles, the society it establishes, and the political life it lives. It follows
from this that in Hungary an aspect of political life is national only if it is
Hungarian.11

This argument is logically inconsistent: the Magyars are both a

“nation,” and a distinct “people” in that nation.12 Nevertheless,
Szontágh made a simple political claim: though the Hungarian
state contains many different ethnic groups, ethnic Hungarians
should be dominant.
Varga’s analysis of “Hungarian” national ideas, however,
treated the history of ethnic-Hungarian (Magyar) national ideas as
the history of national concepts in the Hungarian state.13 Though
variations of the Hungarus concept—multi-ethnic, class-inclusive
visions of the Hungarian nation—proved a minor theme in Magyar
nationalism, they proved much more attractive among those in-
habitants of Hungary most likely to benefit from them: speakers
of languages other than Hungarian.
As a measure of how widespread Hungarian loyalties were
among the cream of the Slovak nationalist intelligentsia, con-
sider the only Slovak patriots who rose up in arms against Hun-
garian rule during the nineteenth century: The Slovak National
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 389

Council. In 1848, the Slovak National Council organized a small

volunteer army to oppose Lajos Kossuth’s revolutionary govern-
ment, the Slovak Volunteers.14 Two of the Council’s three lead-
ers, M.M. Hodža and Jozef Hurban, will be discussed below. The
third, L’udovı́t Štúr, language reformer, journalist and political
leader, is widely acknowledged as the most important figure of
nineteenth-century Slovak history. Described by Ludwig Gogolák
as “the true founder of the new Slovak nation,”15 Štúr’s face graces
the Slovak Republic’s 500 Crown banknote. No modern scholar
could possibly call him a Magyarone.16 Despite these impressive
Slovak-nationalist credentials, Štúr articulated a passionate loyalty
toward Hungary in an 1843 polemic against Magyarization:
We Slavs. . . . are devoted to our country, and have made service to our
fatherland from the earliest times up until today. . . . We always fulfilled our
obligations to the fatherland as Slavs, even because of this, we must possess
full and equal rights with others, for obligations without rights is bondage.17

Štúr also justified his famous language reform in Hungarian terms:

“From the point of view of our written language we are domesti-
cated in our homeland. . . . We are already, and wish to remain,
at home; but we will see that our neighbors, and particularly our
Magyars, will welcome us home.”18
Equally passionate declarations of Hungarian loyalty domi-
nate the literary newspaper Štúr edited, Orol Tatranský [Eagle of the
Tatras].19 One contributor proclaimed his willingness to die for
multi-ethnic Hungary:
Hungarian land! Sweetly pleasing is this name! How much blood has flown
to the glory of this name! But that blood belonged not to one nation
alone:. . . . Mad’ar and Slav, German and Vlach have as one sacrificed their
lives for her. Oh my dear homeland, Hungarian land, my heart beats for
you with an ardent love.20

Bohuš Nosák wrote that “in these times our Hungarian homeland
requires nothing more urgently than reciprocal confidence be-
tween all the classes and nations in Hungary.”21 Slovak fiction of-
ten contained similar themes: the hero of Janko Kalinčjak’s short
story “Milkov hrob” [“Milk’s Grave”] at one point exclaims, “My
dear Mária! My love for you is great, but even greater is my love for
the Hungarian homeland!”22
Slovak patriots expressed these Hungarian loyalties right to
the end of the Monarchy. Consider Andrej Hlinka, a Catholic
390 A. Maxwell

priest, who led the Slovak autonomy movement in interwar

Czechoslovakia and graces Slovak’s 1000 Crown banknote. Dur-
ing his trial over his role in the so-called “Černová massacre,”
in which police shot Slovaks protesting the Magyarization of a
Church, Hlinka affirmed his loyalty to Hungary:
The prosecutor says that several years ago I left out from the prayer “the
lady patron of Hungary,” but I assure you that I have prayed to the lady
patron of Hungary more often than the prosecutor.23

Hlinka also expressed hope “that the day has come when all nation-
alities of Hungary may freely work for freedom, equality and broth-
erhood.” Owen Johnson has argued that Slovaks became disillu-
sioned with Hungarian rule in the decade before the First World
War. This timing, however, implies that Slovaks continued to seek
accommodation with the Magyars after the successive disillusion-
ments of the 1848 Revolution, the 1867 Ausgleich between Hungary
and Austria, the 1875 election of arch-Magyarizer Kálmán Tisza,
and the 1906 Černová massacre.24
In short, Hungaro-Slavism25 was the norm among nineteenth-
century Slovak patriots, and might have continued into the twenti-
eth had the First World War not intervened. This loyalty may have
derived partly from the inability to imagine any realistic alternative:
the private correspondence of Slovak leaders suggests that loyalty
to Hungary had a strained quality after the Ausgleich. Ján Mallý,
for example, wrote with resignation that “we [Slovaks] cannot be
against the unity of the country, even if we wanted to.”26 Slovaks
were also quick to abandon their Hungarian loyalties when the
collapse of the Habsburg monarchy offered them a viable alter-
native. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, repeated declara-
tions of loyalty and affection for the Hungarian homeland should
be treated as genuine.
Slovak patriots borrowed many of their “national” concepts
from the Hungarians; specifically from the Hungarus tradition. Slo-
vak thinkers worked in a Hungarian political context, claimed to be
patriotic Hungarians, and often sought to address a Hungarian au-
dience: it is not surprising that they sought to further Slovak goals
using Hungarian terminology. Their ultimate goal was not a Slavic
nation-state, but “poly-ethnic rights,” which Will Kymlicka defined
as measures “intended to promote integration into the larger soci-
ety, not self-government.”27 Their struggle against Magyarization
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 391

and the Magyars was not a battle against Hungary, but a battle for
Hungary, specifically for a Hungary that protected and promoted
Slavic language and culture.
The path-breaking Slovak theorist of Hungaro-Slavic nation-
alism was a Protestant pastor named Samuel Hojč. He wrote two
books arguing that Slavic language and culture had a legitimate
place in Hungary, and that the Magyars must accept the Slavs as
fellow Hungarians. Both books were published abroad, both were
anonymous, and both were written in German, the primary lan-
guage of inter-ethnic communication. Hojč’s second work, Apologie
des ungrischen Slawismus [Apology of Hungarian Slavism], appeared
in 1843, at the peak of the so-called “Language War” over linguistic
rights in Slovak northern Hungary.28 Its theoretical discussion of
nationality defined key terms in several languages; the following
translation gives Hojč’s original German, Slavic, Hungarian and
Latin words in brackets. The analysis, however, focuses on Slavic
terminology, since the main theme of this research is the develop-
ment of Slovak nationalist thought.
Hojč began by describing the natio hungarica as Hungary’s
“diplomatic” nation:

who is then the nation in Hungary?. . . Well, we know it very well that the
nation in Hungary, in the diplomatic sense, is composed of four estates:
the clergy, the magnates, the nobility and royal free cities.29

Hojč cited this diplomatic nation solely to emphasize its multi-

ethnic character. “Which peoples . . . belong in these estates? I be-
lieve, all of the peoples which live in Hungary. . . . One would find,
next to the Magyars, also heaps of Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and
Germans.”30
Much like Szontágh, Hojč then defined “a people” [G: Volk;
H: nép, faj; L: gens, S: národ] in terms of language: “a quantity
of human beings who are bound to each other by the bonds of
language, style of thought, customs and habits.”31 Hojč granted
each “people” a characteristic “peopleness” [G: Volksthümlichkeit;
“in Hungarian no term is in common use, maybe one could say
nèpiesség ”; S: nàrodnost 32 ]. He then contrasted the “people” with
the “nation” [G: Nation, Staatsbürger ; H: nemzet; L: populus, civis; S:
Národ], and its accompanying “nationality.”
392 A. Maxwell

While nation refers to the totality of citizens, to the totality of a country’s

inhabitants who are bound by common laws, government and common
well-being, so nationality is nothing more than observing the law, respect-
ing the government, and eagerly striving to promote the well-being of the
fatherland.33

Notice that in Hojč’s Slavic terminology only a capital letter distin-

guishes the linguistic/Slavic národ from the political/Hungarian
Národ.
Hojč finished by defining the “Fatherland” [G: Vaterland; H:
haza; L: patria; S: wlast] as the place
which served our fathers as a place to live, where we and our ancestors
were born, nourished, raised, and educated; where we find the love of our
parents, friendship, the protection of laws, an inherited or self-made fame
and privilege, a welcome profession, perhaps also a peaceful house and
home, also the resting place of the grave. How many sweet and dear things
this word contains!34

“The Sons of the Fatherland” [G: Vaterlandssöhne, Staatsburger, Na-

tion; H: hazafiak, “the collective name nemzet”; L: cives, populus; S:
kragané, obcané (sic)] include “everyone who resides in the father-
land, considers it to be his own, lives as well under the same laws,
is subordinated to the same ruler, has a common goal to strive
for.”35 This formula could just as well describe a Slavic ethnoter-
ritory or the Hungarian kingdom, but Hojč’s reference to “the
same ruler” suggests the Habsburg Empire as a whole. In addition
to dual Hungaro-Slavic nationalism, Hojč left space for Habsburg
loyalism—arguably for an österreichische Nation.
In summary, Hojč invoked several nations. The Slavs in the
north of Hungary belonged to the Hungarian Národ and there-
fore had Hungarian nationality, yet were also part of the Slavic
národ since they had Slavic peopleness, and additionally were the
sons of a presumably Habsburg fatherland. These complex defini-
tions, however, made a straightforward political argument: Slovaks
are good Hungarian citizens even if they remain attached to their
own language and culture. In Hojč’s words, “yes, without damag-
ing our Hungarian-national sympathies, we wish to hold tight to
the unity which binds us with [other Slavs], so that in the wide
north, as in the far south, we have brothers, in whose veins re-
lated blood flows.”36 Hojč invoked “national” rhetoric for at least
two very different imagined communities: Slovaks were part of the
Slavic nation, encompassing Poles, Russians and Czechs, but also
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 393

part of the Hungarian nation, including Magyars, Romanians and

Germans. Hojč did not grant either priority over the other: his
whole argument was that both loyalties were important and coex-
isted unproblematically.
Hojč may have drawn his three-fold division of Slovak loyal-
ties from Alexander Pusztay’s 1843 Die Ungarn in ihrem Staats- und
Nationalwesen von 889 bis 1842 [The Hungarians in their State and
National Existence]. Pusztay distinguished three different “names of
nations,”37 though he actually used the German word Volk, which
could also be glossed as “a people.” Specifically, Pusztay distin-
guished geographic, genetic and political Völker:

in the geographic sense, Pannonians, Huns, Avars, Magyars and Slavs are
one nation [Ein Volk], just as the English, Scots, Cornish, and Gauls are one
nation, because they have lived and partly still live in a single country: the
former in Hungary, the latter in Great Britain.
In the genetic or historical sense, individuals only make a nation when
they have one origin. . . . Since nations have no genealogical charts, only
linguistic similarity reveals this common origin. . . .
Finally, in the political sense, one calls all of a group of individuals
a nation if they are bound to a single state or under a single ruler. So in
Hungary, the Slav, the German, the Croat—all call themselves Hungarians,
even when none of them speak Hungarian.38

Pusztay apparently viewed language merely as a visible surrogate

for common descent, lacking any significance in its own right.
Pusztay also used Szontágh’s bait-and-switch technique, conflating
Slavic willingness to accept political Hungarian loyalties and a will-
ingness for cultural assimilation. Both Pusztay and Hojč developed
complex and confusing terminology to make straightforward po-
litical arguments, but Pusztay supported Magyarization, while Hojč
opposed it.
M.M. Hodža, a linguistic scholar and a leader of the Slovak
Volunteers, also rejected Magyarization:

Is it true that in our homeland, that is to say, Hungary, we cannot be any

other nationality [národnost’i] than Hungarian [uhorská], that is to say, Mag-
yar [mad’arská]?. . . . We do not want to Magyarize, we want to stand by our
own language, by our own nationality [národnost’i], in our own homeland.39

While Hojč’s defense of Slovak linguistic rights became mired in

a bog of confusing terminology, Hodža’s train of thought sank
completely into conceptual quicksand. He started by claiming that
394 A. Maxwell

Slovaks form a nation [národ], and that every nation has the right
to nationality [národnost].
And what is this nationality? This is about the same as if we would say of
a good man that he was a man of the people [l’udskı́ človek]. Though every
man is indeed a man, not every man is a man of the people, and so not every
nation is a national nation [je ňje každı́ národ národnı́ národ].40

Hodža then distinguished a “national nation” from a mere “nation”

as follows:
If a nation does not have nationality, we call it nationality-ness
[narod’enstvom] (with a short a); if it has nationality, we call it nátionality-ness
[národ’nenstvom] (with a long á). This is an important difference. Perhaps
only for nátionality-ness have I and the people struggled; it elevates no
nation when, as frequently happens, nationality-ness stupidly hates itself.
Then the nation is for other national nations merely an ape. It would rather
know every foreign language before its own, it works well, but it works on
the publications of other nations, but not for its own movement.41

I assure the reader that Hodža’s original text is as incompre-

hensible as my translation: even a modern Slovak version of
Hodža’s Štúrovčina text baffled native-speaker informants. Need-
less to say, the proposed distinction between narod’enstvom and
n árod’nenstvom did not take root. But why did Hodža insist on us-
ing a variant of the word národ to discuss so many different things?
The answer to this question lies with his political aims.
Both Hodža and Hojč, despite their terminological difficul-
ties, saw themselves as Slavic Hungarians: both wanted Magyars to
end the policy of Magyarization and recognize Slavs as good citi-
zens of Hungary. Both described saw the “slavic” half of Hungaro-
Slavism as truly Slavic, not Slovak particularist. Hodža claimed that
Hungary was a mostly Slavic country: “the Slavic nation (by which
we understand the Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Rusyns), . . . is the great-
est in Hungary.”42 Finally, both Hodža and Hojč insisted on using
the word “nation” (národ), or some variant thereof, to describe
both Hungarian political loyalties and Slavic linguistic affiliation,
presumably because they thought this word lent the most legiti-
macy to their arguments.
Neither Hodža nor Hojč had much influence on Magyar pub-
lic opinion. During the Language War, Hungarians generally re-
fused to acknowledge any national groups inside the Hungarian
nation. Károly Nagy, for example, felt that “only one nation can
inhabit a country at any one time, but there can be a number
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 395

of languages.”43 Kossuth explicitly denied non-Magyars both the

status of “nation” and “nationality”: “I shall never ever recognize
any other nation and nationality [nemzetet és nemzetiséget] under
the holy Hungarian crown than the Hungarian. I know there are
people and races [emberek és népfajok] who speak other languages,
but there is only one nation here.”44 Meeting in Mikuláš after the
Revolution of 1848, the Slovak leadership issued the 10 May “Dec-
laration of the Slovak Nation”; one Hungarian historian has de-
scribed the demands as “conciliatory,”45 but Kossuth nevertheless
responded with arrest warrants for Slovak leaders. Only then did
Štúr, Hurban and Hodža flee Hungary, eventually forming Slo-
vak National Council and raising an army of Slovak Volunteers in
Vienna.
Kossuth’s revolution failed, however, and during the 1850s,
the Habsburg Empire, in A.J.P. Taylor’s words, “became, for the
first and last time, a fully unitary state.”46 During this so-called
“Bach Regime,” named after interior minister Alexander Bach,
discussions of nationality throughout the Habsburg lands were in-
terrupted. Discussion of national questions, however, resumed af-
ter the Habsburg monarch issued the February Patent in 1861.
In June 1861, Slovak leaders met in Martin to formulate Slovak
demands; the result was the “Memorandum of the Slovak Na-
tion,” which insisted that “we Slovaks are also a nation [národ],
just like the Magyars or any other nation of this homeland
[vlast].”47 In the meantime, however, Hungarian terminology had
shifted.
The Magyar politikai nemzet remained the essential concept,
but the leading Hungarian leaders from the 1860s, determined to
avoid Kossuth’s mistakes, expressed a new willingness to accommo-
date what they described as the “justified demands” of non-Magyar
collectives, who gained the status of “nationality [nemzetiség ].”
Ferenc Deák, echoing Hojč, advised the Hungarian liberal move-
ment: “If we wish to win over the nationalities we must not seek at all
costs to Magyarize them.”48 József Eötvös, in his A nemzetiségi kérdés
[The Nationality Question], also wanted to win over the minorities,
though he also felt that “the demands of the linguistically diverse
nationalities can only be satisfied if the unity of the Kingdom and
its existence as a state are guaranteed.”49 In the 1860s, the distance
separating Hungarian and Slovak conceptions of “Hungarian” na-
tionality shrank to its lowest point.
396 A. Maxwell

In 1867, Franz-Joseph made his famous Ausgleich [compro-

mise] with the Hungarian leadership, which gained as a result the
right to regulate the internal politics of the Hungarian kingdom. In
1868, the Hungarian parliament passed the infamous Nationalities
Law, Law XLIV. Historians are divided as to the merits of this leg-
islation: Arthur May described it as “one of the most enlightened
measures of its kind ever adapted,”50 though Kontler observes that
the law’s lack of guarantees allowed subsequent Hungarian lead-
ers to ignore those provisions that protected minority rights.51 It
obligated all municipal governments to keep records in Hungar-
ian, though such records could also be kept in minority languages
if a fifth of the municipality’s members desired it (paragraph 2).
Minority languages could also be used in courts (paragraph 7) and
church administration (paragraph 24). Though universities would
teach in the Hungarian language, departments in minority litera-
tures were permitted (paragraph 19). Paragraph 23 assured that
“every state citizen may use his own language in petitions to the
municipal government, church administration, county administra-
tion, or organs of the central government.” Eötvös, the main figure
behind the law, had wanted to grant even more rights to Hungary’s
non-Magyars: His draft law of 26 June 1867, for example, had al-
lowed county assemblies to select their language of administration
by simple majority vote.52 For our purposes, however, note that
Law 44 included a legal definition of the Magyar politikai nemzet:
It distinguished the Hungarian nation, the “nation in the political
sense,” from its constituent “nationalities.”

According to the fundamental principles of the constitution all the inhabi-

tants of the Kingdom form one nation in the political sense, the indivisible
Hungarian nation, of which each citizen, regardless of nationality, is an
equal member, and enjoys the same rights as every other citizen.53

This formula denied any collective legal status to “nationalities.”

In 1875, with the election of Kálmán Tisza, Hungarian pol-
icy became sharply more hostile to non-Magyar aspirations. Tisza
moved against Slovak cultural institutions, most notably the Matica
slovenská. He justified these steps by denying Slovaks the status of
“nation” status: “there can be only one viable nation within the
frontiers of Hungary: that political nation is the Hungarian one.”54
When a Serb deputy asked Tisza to return the Matica’s funds to the
original donors, Tisza observed that the Matica’s statutes declared
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 397

its assets the property of the Slovak nation, and claimed that he
knew “no such nation.” Oscar Jászi described Tisza’s policy as “in
flagrant antagonism both with the spirit and the positive statement
of the nationality law,”55 but the interesting aspect of the story is
that Tisza invoked the rights of the “political nation” to shut down
a cultural institution. Andrew Janos blamed Tisza for transforming
the magyar nemzet “from a political into a cultural concept.”56
Nineteenth-century Hungarian politicians never granted Slo-
vaks the status of a “nation.” Indeed, in 1878, during the Tisza
era, at least one Hungarian nationalist went so far as to deny Slo-
vaks the status of “nationality”: Béla Grünwald’s A Felvidék [The
Highlands, i.e. the mountainous part of Hungary that is now the
Slovak republic], claimed that “in Hungary there are households
speaking the Slovak language, but there is no Slovak nationality
[tót nemzetiség ].”57 When Ferdiš Juriga addressed the Hungarian
parliament in Slovak on 19 October 1918, the only time Slovak
was ever spoken in the Hungarian parliament, his reference to the
Slovak nation was immediately interrupted by the shout “where is
this Slovak nation? In which province?”58
Slovak leaders always insisted on “nation” status. Consider how
Jozef Hurban, whom nineteenth-century German and Hungarian
observers saw as the main figure in the Slovak National Council,59
rejected the distinction between “nation” and “nationality”:

We are to say nationality [národnost’ ] and not nation [národ] . . . The nation
has nationality, but nationality is not there, where there is no nation. Slovaks
are a nation by reason of their thoughts, language, life, poetry, literature,
common life, virtues, piety, wisdom, glory; nationality, that is shame.60

This outrage is somewhat ironic, given that Hurban, in an earlier

work on Slovak language reform, had happily described the Slo-
vaks as a tribe: “We are a tribe [kmen] in Slavdom, but we are also a
tribe of the Hungarian state.”61 However, this previous work was di-
rected at a Slavic audience: when asserting linguistic rights vis-à-vis
Magyarizing Hungarians, Slovak leaders described their language
and culture as a “nation.”
Slovak lawyer Viliam Pauliny-Tóth also rejected the status of
“nationality.” In 1870, he proposed a new law to replace the Nation-
ality Law 44, which was published in the Národnie noviny [National
Newspaper ]. Pauliny-Tóth accepted the Hungarian concept of the
“political nation,” but borrowed Pusztay’s concept of a “genetic”
398 A. Maxwell

nation to refer to the Slovaks. (Note the decline of All-Slavism: the

Slovaks form a genetic nation by themselves, distinct from Serbs
and Rusyns.)

1. In Hungary there is only one political nation, the Hungarian

[uhorský] nation, composed of the following genetic nations:
Magyars [Mad’arov], Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs, Rusyns, and
Germans.
2. All of these genetic nations, forming the political nation, are com-
pletely equal.
3. In Hungary, there are two administrative languages: The state and
municipal.
4. The state language is exclusively Magyar. Municipal languages are:
Magyar, Romanian, Slovak, Serbian, Rusyn and German.62
Further points ascribe elementary schools, and local adminis-
tration to municipal languages, and give the parliament, min-
istries, the highest court, and universities to Magyar. The details
of Pauliny-Tóth’s draft law are not all that different from that of
Law XLIV. Both divide Hungary’s public sphere into Hungarian
and non-Hungarian parts, both assigned universities and parlia-
ment to the Hungarian-language sphere, and both allocated ele-
mentary schools and local administration to minority languages.
The most striking difference is terminological: Pauliny-Tóth, like
Hurban, claimed the status of “nation” for both his Hungarian
citizenship and his linguistic group, instead of distinguishing the
“Hungarian nation” from “nationalities.”
Why was “nation” status so important to Slovak leaders? One
might expect Slovak leaders to concentrate on concrete demands,
yet Hojč, Hodža, Hurban, and Pauliny-Tóth expended much of
their energy on terminology. The status as a “nation,” however,
contained important symbolism, accompanied by significant po-
litical benefits. These benefits are particularly obvious when one
compares the Slovak experience under Hungarian rule with that
of the Croats in the same period.
After the Ausgleich, the Hungarian parliament had made its
own miniature Ausgleich with Croatia, the Nagdoba, which created
an autonomous region with borders similar to those of the modern
Croatian republic. This was known as the Triune kingdom, since
it claimed jurisdiction over three historic provinces: Dalmatia,
Slavonia and Croatia proper (the region around Zagreb).63 The
Triune kingdom boasted a distinct parliament, an autonomous
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 399

education system up to university level, and the right to use the

Croatian language in local administration. Hungarian willingness
to grant autonomy to the Croats, like Franz-Joseph’s willingness
to compromise with the Hungarians, may reflect military prowess
during the Revolution of 1848, but even before 1848, Hungarian
authors had drawn a distinction between Croats and other Hungar-
ian minorities on the basis of medieval legal precedent. The me-
dieval Croatian kingdom had enjoyed a distinct legal status within
the kingdom of Hungary, and since Hungarian reformers legiti-
mated their demands against Vienna with reference to Hungary’s
ancient constitution, they had long expressed the willingness to
grant the Croats a special status.64 However one explains the Nag-
doba, the important point here is that the Croats received the status
of “a separate nation from a political point of view.”65
Indeed, during this period Croat “nation” concepts more
closely resembled those of the Magyars, since Croatian leaders at-
tempted to impose Croatian “political nationality” on non-Croat in-
habitants of the Triune kingdom. Just as Hungarian liberals wanted
Hungary’s minorities to become “political Hungarians,” August
Harabašić called on Serbs to “simply declare that you are Croatian
citizens, that your homeland is Croatia, and that you are in that
regard political Croats.”66 Josip Strossmayer and Franjo Rac̆ki, per-
haps borrowing Pusztay’s terminology, similarly contrasted a Croat
“political people” with Serbian and Slovene “genetic peoples.” Ob-
sessive arguments about how to define the term “nation” came to
dominate Serb–Croat relations as well as Slovak–Magyar relations.
In Nicholas Miller’s words, “Serbs feared the loss of their identity in
the Croatian political nation, whereas Croats would not welcome
Serbs unless Serbs accepted that they were part of the Croatian
political nation.”67 Serbian historian Vasilije Krestić even drew an
explicit analogy between the Hungarian and Croatian case: “On
the model of the Hungarian feudal policy initiated at the end of
the eighteenth century, which was expressed in the slogan that on
Hungary’s soil there was only one nation—the Hungarian nation—
the majority of Croat politicians believed that in the territory of
Croatia there was only one “diplomatic” nation, and that was the
Croatian nation.”68
The contrast between the Croatian and Slovak experience
under the Ausgleich illustrates that the status of “nation” was a
powerful political asset. Hungarian willingness to grant the Croats
400 A. Maxwell

“nation” status symbolized Hungarian willingness to accept Croa-

tian autonomy, complete with a Croatian parliament and school
system: It is unsurprising that Slovaks insisted on claiming the sta-
tus of “nation,” and that they contested Magyar terminology with
such vigor. While observing Slovak insistence that Slavs were a na-
tion, one must not lose sight of the fact that Slovak theorists pro-
claimed that their Hungarian loyalties were also “national.” Slovaks
proclaimed two national loyalties simultaneously.
Indeed, some Slovak thinkers appear to have simultaneously
proclaimed themselves members of as many as three nations. We
have seen that nineteenth-century Slovaks imagined their “politi-
cal” nation in Hungarian terms. Slovaks juxtaposed this “political”
nation with a Slavic nation, variously described as “cultural,”
“spiritual,” or “genetic,” but as ultimately derived from linguistic
loyalties. However, nineteenth-century Slovaks also expressed
diverse linguistic concepts, variously describing their speech as
a dialect of a Slavic language,69 a variety of Czech,70 or a distinct
language.71 This in turn meant that some Slovak leaders, such as
Hojč, imagined the non-Hungarian half of Slovak nationality as
Pan-Slavic, while others, such as Pauliny-Tóth, thought in more
familiar Slovak-particularist terms. Some Slovaks took an even
more complex position, however, and invoked multiple linguistic
nations. The above-mentioned M.M. Hodža, for example, claimed
both Slovak and Pan-Slavic “nationality”: “we Slovaks, in our
Slovak nationality [slovenskej národnost’i], also have a Slavonic
nationality [slavjanskú národnost’ ], which is a world nationality.”72
Daniel Lichard’s 1861 pamphlet Rozhowor o Memorandum národa
slowenského [Conversation about the Memorandum of the Slovak Nation]
similarly described both Slavdom and Slovakia with the word
“nation”:

Slowan or Slawian signifies all who belong to the great Slavonic nation
[národu slawianskeho], which nation, all counted together, counts more than
80 million souls. . . . we understand with this term Russians, Poles, Czechs,
Croats, Serbs, Slovaks; but when we say Slovak, we understand that is a son
of our Slovak nation, which lives in Hungary.73

Lichard also described both “our Slovak nation” and “the great
Slavonic nation” as compatible with Hungarian political loyalties.74
These multiple Slavic nations, then, should be seen as compatible
with membership in the Hungarian political nation.
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 401

This is the proper context for understanding Slovak

Czechoslovakism in the nineteenth century. At the turn of the
century, there was a modest movement to promote Czechoslovak
unity and to downplay the linguistic quarrels between Czechs and
Slovaks. In 1881, for example, Hurban proclaimed that “the nation
is one from the Tatras to the Elbe. The philological quarrels are
melting away.”75 In 1896, Czech and Slovak intellectuals living in
Prague founded a society called Československá jednota [Czechoslo-
vak unity],76 and in 1898 began publishing a journal called Hlas
[Voice].77 The opening editorial in the first edition of Hlas mostly
spoke of a “Slovak nation”; one revealing passage proclaims: “we,
the Slovak intelligentsia, are the nation.”78 However, the essay also
contains the following description of a “Czechoslovak nation” as a
“cultural” nation.
In the Czechoslovak Question, finally, we stand by the position of our awakeners
and contemporaries, who in every serious moment emphatically stressed
the cultural unity of the Czechoslovak nation. On the ruins of all cultural
centers in Slovakia we must doubly proclaim the inevitability of this unity,
we must cultivate it with all our strength, sustain ourselves with the fruits
of this our common culture [emphasis in original].79
The Czechoslovak “cultural nation,” therefore, was a qualified and
limited nationality, restricted to a non-political sphere. I have not
been able to find any Slovak author who explicitly juxtaposed
a Czechoslovak cultural nation with the Hungarian political na-
tion, presumably because Czechoslovakism was a minor theme in
nineteenth-century Slovak thought. Nevertheless, Slovak contrib-
utors to Hlas also proclaimed their loyalty to the Hungarian state
while denouncing Magyarization,80 and Hlasist Czechoslovakism
was a variant of Hungaro-Slavism.
One might add that a similarly complex understanding of
linguistic nationality existed in Croatia, where several thinkers
juxtaposed the political nation with Jugoslavenstvo [Yugoslavism,
south-Slavism], which Franjo Rac̆ki defined as the striving “to
become one nation in the spiritual sense.”81 South-Slavic “spir-
itual” nationality, like “genetic” or “cultural” nationality, was
linguistic in practice; and found expression primarily in the
theory of a single Serbo-Croat language. Linguistic Yugoslavism
had practical consequences: Strossmayer, for example, supported
“myriad publications, schools, exhibits and edifices from Slovenia
to Bulgaria,” including the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and
402 A. Maxwell

the Croatian University in Zagreb.82 Both Croats and Slovaks,

therefore, felt special ties to Slavs in other political units, and
described that tie with the word “nation,” though both qualified
this use of the word “nation” with non-political adjectives.
The correlation between these diverse non-political nations
and disagreement about linguistic status suggests that “cultural”
and “genetic” nationality refer primarily to language. This suspi-
cion is strengthened by Karl Zmertych’s 1872 pamphlet Rhapso-
dien über die Nationalität [Rhapsodies on Nationality], a Hungaro-
Slavic theory that explicitly juxtaposed “political” and “linguistic”
nations.
Before we however begin a rational critique. . . . of the nationality question,
we must give a popular definition of the concepts of a country, father-
land and nation as science has taught us . . . we absolutely must draw the
extremely important—yea, essential, if we wish to solve the nationality ques-
tion with justice—distinction between a political and linguistic nation.83
Zmertych, a Slovak politician, defined a linguistic nation as the
“totality of people who have a common origin, speak the same
language, and consider themselves a family;—in this sense, the
Slovaks, the Serbs, the Romanians and so on are each a nation.”84
He probably borrowed these terms from the Austrian half of the
Monarchy: Hannelore Burger’s study of linguistic rights in Cislei-
thenia observed that “the concept of a linguistic nation emerged
to compete with the idea of a state nation (which was super-ethnic,
centralistic, and stamped German).”85
Slovak declarations of multiple nationality expressed straight-
forward political claims, though rhetorical complexity sometimes
obscures the simplicity of the argument. Slovaks wanted the
Hungarian government to grant them group rights, mostly linguis-
tic rights. Membership in the “Hungarian nation” enabled them
to pose legitimate demands of the Hungarian government, while
a linguistic, cultural, or genetic nation, whether Slovak particular-
ist, Czechoslovak or Pan-Slavic, justified attachment to linguistic
rights and opposition to Magyarization. Furthermore, simultane-
ous Slovak and Czechoslovak (Pan-Slav) “nations” justified both
cultural distinctiveness vis-à-vis the Czechs (other Slavs) and cul-
tural action in conjunction with them.
The phenomenon of group nationality demonstrates the ex-
traordinary rhetorical importance of the word “nation.” The con-
trast between Slovak and Czech experiences after the Ausgleich
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 403

suggests that a “nationality” did not, apparently, enjoy the same

political rights as a “nation.” Action undertaken in the name of a
“nation,” however imagined, carries political legitimacy.
The extraordinary political potency of the word “nation” has
consequences for the use of the word “nation” as a term of polit-
ical analysis. Clear terms for articulating one’s research interests
are desirable, but any definition must be rejected if it impedes
understanding of historical actors. Any definition of nationalism,
however concise and elegant, that oversimplifies the complexity of
nationalist thought and action must be rejected: as John Deutsch so
memorably put it, “no terminology should try to be more accurate
than life.”86 The phenomenon of multiple nationalism suggests
that it is a mistake to make the desire for political independence a
defining characteristic of nationalism, even if struggles for political
independence remain a frequent and important feature in many
national movements, because empirical evidence shows that politi-
cal leaders invoke the term “nation” without demanding statehood
or independence.
This stance will encounter resistance from what might be
called the “high political” school of nationalism. Several scholars
insist on the importance of political sovereignty or the desire to
achieve it. Dominique Schnapper defined the nation as “a partic-
ular form of political unit,” defined in part “by its sovereignty,”87
Hans Kohn wrote that “nationalism is inconceivable without the
ideas of popular sovereignty,”88 and John Breuilly defined national
movements in terms of the claim that “the nation must be as inde-
pendent as possible.”89 Breuilly cheerfully concedes that scholars
“have achieved a great deal in the way of identifying and describing
certain sorts of national consciousness,” yet insists “this should not
be confused with nationalism.”90 Historical entrepreneurs who de-
sire or wield state power are, of course, a coherent and complex
object of study; it is understandable that scholars interested high-
political varieties of nationalism would define the term “national-
ism” to be congruent with their research agenda.
This approach, however, places scholarly terminology in in-
surmountable contradiction with that of historical actors, who fre-
quently, as Brian Porter observed, “repudiate political contestation
while still placing something called ‘the nation’ at the center of
their rhetoric.”91 Observation must be the final judge: historical
actors invoked the “nation” in apolitical contexts. If one defines
404 A. Maxwell

“the nation” in terms of a desire for statehood, then one is forced to

the unpalatable conclusion that the nineteenth-century Slovak in-
telligentsia, which fought so tirelessly for Slovak rights, consisted
of Hungarian nationalists: did they not explicitly and repeatedly
disavow any claims to Slavic statehood, and proclaim their attach-
ment to the Hungarian state? This approach might, in fact, yield
some interesting results: the notion that the Slovak Volunteers,
for example, fought in a Hungarian civil war would seem to ex-
plain their proclamations of Hungarian loyalty better than the
traditional interpretation that the Volunteers were an indepen-
dence movement. Nevertheless, Štúr, Hurban, Hodža and the Slo-
vak Volunteers obviously cannot be seen in exclusively Hungarian
terms.
Defenders of the high-political school often interpret histor-
ical figures who talk about a nation without claiming statehood
as forerunners of a state-seeking national movement. Inspired by
Miroslav Hroch’s famous A-B-C theory of nationalism,92 historians
of Central and Eastern Europe have been particularly enamored of
stage theories.93 At first glance, the stage theory approach would
seem applicable to Slovakia: Slovak nationalism indeed evolved
through several phases before an independent Slovak state was
founded. Hroch himself took Slovakia as one of his case studies.
But how can Hroch, or a revised version of Hroch’s stage the-
ory, account for Slovak expressions of Hungarian nationality, or
even more importantly for expressions of Czechoslovak and Pan-
Slavic nationality? The stage theory, however, by its nature assumes
that a national movement, sooner or later, will become politicized
and seek statehood,94 and thus forces one to disregard any na-
tional concepts that do not ultimately develop into a state-seeking
national movement. Such theories shed little light on a national
movement that does not develop in the foreordained manner, or
on the internal dynamics of political movements. Multiple national
loyalties do not fit into a stage theory. Stage theories also have trou-
ble accounting for individuals who invoked multiple nations, since
such individuals obviously cannot support multiple independent
states.
My insistence that the word “nation” should not be defined
in terms of statehood may strike some readers as heavy-handed,
particularly those with expertise in non-state national movements,
variously theorized “minority nationalism” or ‘separatist national-
ism,” to cite the titles of two recent edited volumes. However, the
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 405

contributors to these volumes examine an almost canonical list

of usual suspects: both volumes, for example, contain chapters
on Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Quebec and Basqueland.95 Schol-
ars interested in these cases often show a certain reluctance to
describe state loyalties as “national.” Stephen Velychenko’s com-
parative study of Scotland and Ukraine, for example, contrasted
nationalism with non-national “Empire loyalism.” I am not an ex-
pert in either Scotland or Ukraine, but would be very surprised if
Scottish and Ukrainian loyalist rhetoric avoided the word “nation”
as scrupulously as Velychenko did in his description and analysis.96
If “Great Russian” loyalty to the Romanov dynasty can be “nation-
alism,” should not that of “Little Russians” also be “national”?
The reciprocal unwillingness to consider more than one
“nation” at a time prevents a common scholarly terminology.
Louis Vos, for example, claimed “the Belgian nation had to make
room gradually for the birth of a Walloon and a Flemish ethnic
identity,”97 while Joseph Rudolph described Belgium as “a multi-
national state” with “separatist tendencies.”98 This disagreement
is more than hair-splitting, because, as Dominique Schnapper so
eloquently put it, “a definition of the nation is in itself already a
theory of the nation.”99 The term “nation” carries such tremen-
dous political potency that the decision to grant “nation” status to
Belgium, or to Walloonia and Flanders, grants legitimacy to one
collective while denying it to the other.
Scholars should therefore grant “nation” status to any group
that claims it, and should not attempt to “translate” their state-
ments into a personal terminology, however clear. Not all scholars,
however, share this willingness to describe several different ideas
using the word “nation.” Some have sought to distinguish nations
from other sorts of social collectives: the “nation” has, for example,
been contrasted with the “tribe”100 or the ethnie.101 Usually such dis-
tinctions are clear in context but are difficult to generalize, and
lead to unnecessary terminological squabbles. We saw above how
vigorously Slovaks resisted the status of “nationality”; what Walloon
or Welshman would accept the status of “tribe” or “ethnie”?
The consensus that nationalism implies a claim to statehood
encourages scholars to overstate conflict. Graham Spry’s 1971 work
on Quebec described “two ideas of nation in confrontation,”102
but opinion polls from the 1970s suggest that coexistence was an
equally prominent theme: though Lawrence LeDuc found that
Quebecois had less loyalty to Canada than other Canadians, they
406 A. Maxwell

were nevertheless attached to both Canada and Quebec with al-

most equal passion.103 Had LeDuc given respondents the option
of expressing loyalty to both Canada and Quebec simultaneously,
this third option might have been most popular: a similar study of
Swiss Army recruits found that while 11% expressed primary loy-
alty to Switzerland, and 17% to their linguistic group, 73% chose
both together.104
When discussing nationalism, vigilance is needed to pre-
vent normative preconceptions affecting our analytic vocabulary.
Several scholars of nationalism, attempting to tame the daunt-
ing diversity of the topic, have divided nationalism into types:
indeed, Anthony Smith has classified 39 different “types” of
nationalism.105 Several scholarly taxonomies, particularly binary
oppositions, conflate analytical distinctions with moral judgments.
Kohn’s dichotomy between “Eastern” and “Western” nationalism
was particularly Manichean,106 but Michael Ignatieff’s division be-
tween “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism also contains a normative
element.107 Philip Spencer and Howard Wilson, who have identi-
fied no fewer than 13 such binary oppositions, accurately summa-
rize the dichotomies as “Good and Bad Nationalisms.”108
Scholars need a vocabulary to discuss both state and non-
state loyalties without taking sides between them. Indeed, scholarly
vocabulary should not assume that such loyalties are in conflict,
nor assume that non-state loyalties will someday develop into state-
forming national movements.
Fortunately, Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism re-
quires only minor tweaking to accommodate these ambitions.
The “imagined community” has become such a ubiquitous
cliché of nationalism scholarship that Anderson’s actual defi-
nition rarely receives much attention. It bears repeating that
Anderson defined the nation not merely as an imagined commu-
nity, but as a community “imagined both as inherently limited and
sovereign.”109 The great virtue of Anderson’s first criterion (“in-
herently limited”) is that the mechanism of limitation need not
be specified: a nationalist may imagine a political unit such as the
Hungarian “political nation,” or a genetic, cultural, linguistic or
spiritual entity, such as Pauliny-Tóth’s Slovak “genetic nation,” the
Hlasist Czechoslovak “cultural nation,” and so forth. The criterion
accepts Pusztay’s “political,” “genetic,” and “geographical” nations
simultaneously; it accounts for both Croat Yugoslavism and the
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 407

Croat political nation. It can accommodate multiple and simulta-

neous national concepts.
Anderson described his second criterion, sovereignty, in high-
political terms: “nations dream of being free . . . the badge and em-
blem of this freedom is the sovereign state.”110 This is not com-
patible with multiple nationalism. Nevertheless, the link between
“nation” status and political legitimacy suggests that a “nation”
is indeed a special kind of inherently limited community. A “na-
tion” has privileges and rights that other communities do not;
successfully invoking a “nation” bestows legitimacy on political
demands. One could probably save Anderson’s definition by re-
defining sovereignty as “legitimate political agency,” but since the
term “sovereignty” is so closely associated with state-formation, the
best approach is probably to replace Anderson’s second criterion
with something only slightly different.
I suggest a revised Andersonian definition of the nation: “an
inherently-limited imagined community possessing the power to
legitimate action.” If the action being legitimated is the policy of a
sovereign state, or efforts to create one, this definition is equivalent
to Anderson’s. This revised definition, however, also accounts for
national work in spheres other than high-politics, and does not
lead to contradictions when individuals invoke many communities
at the same time.

Notes

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, second edition (London: Verso,

1991), p. 3.
2. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond Identity,” Theory and Soci-
ety, Vol. 29 (2000), pp. 1–47, especially p. 5.
3. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), p. 16.
4. See e.g. Tibor Pichler, “The Idea of Slovak Language-Based Nationalism,”
in Tibor Pichler and Jana Gašparı́ková (eds), Language, Values and the Slovak
Nation (Washington, DC: Paideia, 1994), p. 37; Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations
and States, p. 169.
5. See Vladimir Matula. “The Conception and the Development of Slovak Na-
tional Culture in the Period of National Revival.” Studia historica slovaca,
Vol. 42 (1990); Jozef Lettrich, History of Modern Slovakia (New York: Praeger,
1955), p. 42.
6. On Slovak loyalties to Hungary, see Theodore Locher. Die Nationale Dif-
ferenzierung und Integrierung der Slovaken und Tschechen in ihrem Geschichtlichen
408 A. Maxwell

Verlauf bis 1848. Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk & Zoon, 1931; Alexander Maxwell,
“Hungaro-Slavism: Territorial and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century
Slovakia,” East Central Europe/l’Europe du Centre-Est (ECE/ECE), Vol. 29/pt.
1 (2002), pp. 45–58.
7. Despite the inroads of French and German, Latin remained Hungary’s ad-
ministrative language until the nineteenth century. On Latin in Hungary,
see István Tóth. “Latin as a Spoken Language in Hungary during the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries,” CEU History Department Yearbook, 1997–
1998 (Budapest: CEU Press, 1999), pp. 93–111. On Latin’s decline as an
administrative language, see R.W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Czechs and
Slovaks. Hamden, CN: Archon books, 1965 [1943], p. 260; Gyula Szekfü,
Iratok a magyar államnyelv kérdésének történetéhey 1790–1848, Budapest, 1926.
8. This passage discussed Gergely Berzeviczy, a Magyar from Zips (in mod-
ern Slovakia). Horst Haselsteiner, “Comment” on Peter Sugar’s article “The
More it Changes, the More Hungarian Nationalism Remains the Same,”
Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 31 (2001), p. 158.
9. János Varga, A Hungarian Quo Vadis: Political Trends and Theories of the Early
1840s, translated by Éva Pálmai (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1993), p. 39.
10. I cite this passage from an English translation and am thus unable to give
the original Hungarian. Quoted in Varga, A Hungarian Quo Vadis, p. 42.
Varga cites Gusztáv Szontágh. Propylaemok a társasági philosophiához, tekintettel
hazánk viszonyaira (Buda: Egytemi, 1843).
11. Quoted from Varga, A Hungarian Quo Vadis, p. 42.
12. This inconsistency rests on conflating two meanings of the Hungarian word
Magyar : “inhabitant of the kingdom of Hungary,” and “ethnic Hungarian.”
See Alexander Maxwell, “Magyarization, Language Planning, and Whorf—
The Word “Uhor” as a Case Study in Linguistic Relativism,” Multilingua,
Vol. 23, No. 3 (2004), pp. 319–37.
13. For a discussion of multi-ethnic Hungarian national ideas from Hungarian
historians, see Moritz Csáky. “ ‘Hungarus’ oder ‘Magyar,’ Zwei Varianten des
ungarischen Nationalbewußtseins zu Beginn des 19 Jahrhunderts,” Annales:
Sectio Historica, 22 (1982), pp. 71–84. István Käfer has also discussed the “hun-
garus patriotizmus” of literary figures that “belong to Hungarian, but also to
Slovak literature”: “O niektorkých kritériach analyzy mad’arsko-slovenských
literárnych vzt’ahov,” in Tradı́cie a literárne vzt’ahy, Hagyományok és irodalmi
kapcsolatok (Bratislava: SAV, 1972), p. 53.
14. The Slovak volunteers were not a mass movement: larger numbers of Slovaks
proved willing to join the Hungarian Honvéd militia. Elena Mannová and
Roman Holec (eds), A Concise History of Slovakia (Bratislava: Historický ústav
SAV, 2000), p. 196.
15. Ludwig v. Gogolák, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Slowakischen Volkes III, Zwischen
zwei Revolutionen (1848–1919) (Munich: Verlag R. Oldenbourg, 1972), p. 23.
16. In the 1930s, however, Czechoslovak-minded historian Karel Chotek con-
demned Štúr’s “loyalty to the Magyar [k mad’arom].” Karel Chotek, “Politické
snahy slovenské v rokoch 1848–49,” Carpatica (Prague: Orbis, 1936), p. 115.
17. Štúr even wrote this work under the pen-name ein ungarischer Slawe [“a
Hungarian Slav”]. L’udovı́t Štúr, Beschwerden und Klagen der Slaven in Ungarn
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 409

über die gesetzwidrigen Uebergriffe der Magyaren (Leipzig: Robert Binder, 1843),
p. 35.
18. L’udovı́t Štúr, “Panslavism a naša krajina,” Slovenskje národňje novini (3–14
Sept. 1847); reprinted in Jozef Ambruš (ed.), Slovo na čase, Vol. 2 (Martin:
Kompas, 1941), p. 239.
19. See e.g. Bohuš Nosák, Janko Kalinčjak and anonymous, Orol Tatrásnky, Vol. 1,
No. 11, p. 85; Vol. 1, No. 8, p. 60; Vol. 1, No. 14, p. 109.
20. Orol Tatrásnky, Vol. 1, No. 14, p. 109.
21. Bohuš Nosák. “Listi k ňeznámej zeme. . . . ” Orol Tatrásnky, Vol. 1, No. 11,
p. 85.
22. The hero later declares his loyalty to King Matyás. Janko Kalinc̆jak. “Milkov
hrob.” Orol Tatrásnky, Vol. 1, No. 8, p. 60.
23. American Slovak Association of Journalists, A Political Criminal Trial in Hun-
gary in the Year of Our Lord 1906 (New York: Slovak Press, no date), p. 45.
24. Owen Johnson “Losing Faith: The Slovak-Hungarian Constitutional Strug-
gle, 1906–1914,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies: Cultures and Nations of Central
and Eastern Europe, Vol. 22, ed. by Zvi Gitelman, Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian
Research Institute, 1998.
25. Slovaks do not fit the pattern of “Austro-Slavism”: Slovaks expressed loyalty
to the Kingdom of Hungary, not the monarchy as a whole. On Austro-
Slavism, see Václav Žác̆ek, “Die Rolle des Austroslavismus in der Poli-
tik der österreichischen Slaven,” L’udovı́t Štúr und die Slawische Wechselseit-
igkeit, Gesamte Referate und die integrale Diskussion der Wissenschaftlichen Tagung
in Smolenice 27–29 Juni, 1966, ed. by L’udovı́t Holotı́k. Bratislava: SAV,
1969.
26. Letter to Ján Francisci, December, 1869. Reproduced in František Bokes.
Dokumenty k slovenskému národnému hnutiu v rokoch 1848–1914, Vol. II.
Bratislava: Vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej Akadémie Vied, 1962, document 218
(c), p. 231, 32.
27. Will Kymlicka. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 30–31.
28. The phrase was coined by Johann Thomášek [Thomas Világosváry], Der
Sprachkampf in Ungarn (Zagreb: Illyrian National Typographie von Dr.
Ljudevit Gaj, 1841). In a letter of 26 February 1842, Thun also used this
term as a description of recent events: Leo Thun, Die Stellung der Slowaken in
Ungarn (Prague: Calve’sche Buchhandlung, 1843), p. 1.
29. Samuel Hojč, Apologie des ungrischen Slawismus (Leipzig: Friedrich Vlockmar,
1843), p. 27.
30. Hojč, Apologie, p. 27.
31. Ibid., p. 12.
32. The eccentric diacritics on nèpiesség and nàrodnost are in the original text.
Ibid., p. 13.
33. Ibid., p. 17.
34. Ibid., p. 16.
35. Ibid., p. 15–16.
36. Ibid., p. 101.
410 A. Maxwell

37. Alexander Pusztay, Die Ungarn in ihrem Staats- und Nationalwesen von 889 bis
1842, Vol. 1 (Leipzig: Mayer, 1843), p. 12.
38. Ibid., p. 12–13.
39. M.M. Hodža. Dobruo slovo Slovákom (Bratislava: Tatran, 1970 [Levoc̆a:
nákladom tatrı́na, 1847]), p. 30.
40. Emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 27.
41. The parenthetical remarks about the long and short A are in the original
text. Ibid., p. 28.
42. Ibid., p. 30.
43. Quoted from Varga, A Hungarian Quo Vadis, p. 39.
44. Quoted from György Spira, The Nationality Issue in the Hungary of
1848–49 (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1992). The Hungarian translation can
be found in István Pelyach, “Honpolgárok egyteme” (Sept. 2002),
http://www.inaplo.hu/na/200209/13.html.
45. István Deák, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–
49 (New York: Colombia University Press, 1979), p. 123. Alice Freifeld com-
ments: “Slovak demands were modest, but as the weakest they were also the
ones the Magyars were least inclined to appease.” Nationalism and the Crowd
in Liberal Hungary, 1848–1914 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center
Press, 2000), p. 67.
46. A.J.P. Taylor. The Habsburg Empire, 1809–1918 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976 [1948]), p. 85.
47. Beňko, Dokumenty, p. 338.
48. Quoted from Arthur May, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914 (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 83.
49. József Eötvös, A Nemzetiségi Kérdés (Budapest: Révai testvérek, 1903 [1865]),
pp. 34, 41.
50. May, The Habsburg Monarchy, p. 83.
51. Kontler, Millenium, p. 283.
52. This provision was abandoned because “Eötvös’ original proposal enjoyed
no support at all in leading Hungarian circles.” Paul Bödy. Jozef Eötvös and
the Modernization of Hungary: 1840–1870: A Study of Ideas of Individuality and
Slocial Pluralism in Modern Politics (Boulder: East European Monographs,
1985), p. 113.
53. Gábor Kemény, Iratok a nemyetiségi kérdés történetéhez Magyarországon a dualiz-
mus koráan, Vol. 1 (Budapest: 1952), pp. 49–52. For a Slovak translation,
see Ján Bec̆ko. Dokumenty slovenskj národnej identity a štátnosti, Vol.1
(Bratislava: Národné literárne centrum—Dom slovenskej literatúry, 1998),
pp. 361–6.
54. Cited from John Lukacs, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and its
Culture (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), p. 126.
55. Oscar Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago: Phoenix
Books, 1964 [1929]), p. 317. See also R.W. Seton-Watson’s description of a
Magyar expert on national questions in Jan Rychlı́k (ed.), R.W. Seton-Watson
and his Relations with the Czechs and Slovaks, Documents (Matica Slovenská:
Ústav T.G. Masaryka, 1995), p. 114.
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 411

56. Andrew Janos, The Politics of Backwardsness in Hungary 1825–1945 (Princeton,

NJ: 1982), p. 129.
57. Felvidék means “highlands,” i.e. the mountainous region of northern
Hungary that later became Slovakia. Béla Grünwald A Felvidék (Budapest:
Ráth mór, 1878), p. 35.
58. “Rec̆ Ferdiša Jurigu v uhorskom parlamente” Quoted from Ben̆ko, Doku-
menty, p. 499–502. Ben̆ko cites Képviselház-Napló, Vol. 41 (Budapest, 1918),
pp. 345–57.
59. Modern Slovak historiography often describes Hurban as a mere “col-
laborator of Štúr,” but an anti-Slovak pamphlet from 1850 described the
volunteers as “Hurban and company.” Furthermore, the Hungarian gov-
ernment’s “wanted poster” listed Hurban first. See “Deutscher Michel”
[Carl Stock], Die Umtriebe Hurbans und Compagnie und das Schattenreich
der Slowakei (Wien: Carl Gerold & Sohn, 1850). The poster appears in
Fraňo Ruttkay, L’udovı́t Štúr ako Novinár (Brno: Vydavatelsvı́ Novinář, 1982),
plate 14.
60. Quoted from Samuel Osudský, Filosofia Štúrovov, II. Hurbanova Filosofia (My-
java: Daniel Pažický, 1928), p. 314. Osudský gives no date. The original quote
appeared in Cirk. Listy, No.10, p. 314.
61. Jozef Miroslav Hurban, Českje hlasi proti Slovenc̆iňe (Skalice: Skarniel, 1846),
p. 26.
62. Viliam Pauliny-Tóth, “Návrh zákona o urovnoprávnenı́ národnostı́” (23 Oc-
tober 1870), printed in BeÚko, Dokumenty, pp. 367–8.
63. The diet of the Triune Kingdom, however, did not have authority over Dal-
matia, which remained under the jurisdiction of the Austrian Reichsrat.
On the status of Dalmatia, see Mirjana Gross, “The Union of Dalmatia with
Northern Croatia: A Crucial Question of the Croat National Integration
in the Nineteenth Century,” in Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter (eds.), The
National Question in Europe in Historical Context, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1993, pp. 270–92.
64. For an example of Hungarian noble respect for Croatia’s distinctive institu-
tions, see Pulszky’s comments in Leo Grafen v. Thun. Die Stellung der Slowaken
in Ungarn (Prague: Calve’sche Buchhandlung, 1843).
65. R.W. Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question, p. 67.
66. Nicholas Miller, Between Nation and State: Serbian Politics in Croatia Before the
First World War (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1997), p. 55. Miller
cites Stenografički zapisnici sabora Kraljevine Hrvatske, Slavonije, i Dalmacije
(1901–1906), Vol. 2, part 2 (Zagreb: Tisak kraljevske zemaljske tiskare, 1903),
p. 70.
67. Miller, Between Nation and State, p. 43.
68. This “diplomatic” nation, unlike Hojč’s, was class-inclusive. Vasilije Krestić,
History of the Serbs in Croatia and Slavonia, 1848–1914, translated by Margot
and Boško Milosavljević (Belgrade: Beogradski izdavac̆ko-grafic̆ki Zavod,
1997), pp. 102, 104–5.
69. Ján Herkel, Elementa Universalis Linguae Slavicae (Buda: Regiae universitatis
Hungaricae, 1826); Jan Kollár, Über die Wechselseitigkeit zwischen den verschiede-
nen Stämmen und Mundarten der slawischen Nation (Pest: Trattner, 1837). For
412 A. Maxwell

treatment of Slovak Pan-Slavism in secondary sources, see L’udovı́t Holotı́k

(ed.), L’udovı́t Štúr und die Slawische Wechselseitigkeit (Bratislava: SAV, 1969);
On Štúr’s unusual ideas about a “Slovak dialect,” see Alexander Maxwell “Lit-
erary Dialects in China and Slovakia,” International Journal of Sociolinguisitics,
No.164 (2003), pp. 129–49.
70. See František Kampelı́k, Čechoslowan Čili Narodnj gazyjk w Čechách, na
Morawě, we Slezku a Slowensku (Vienna and Prague: Czech museum,
1842); Jan Kollár (ed.), Hlasowé o potřebě jednoty spisowného jazyka pro
Čechy, Morawany a Slowáky (Prague: Czech Museum, 1846); Stěpán Launer,
Povaha Slovanstva se zvláštnı́m ohledem na spisovnı́ řeč Čechů, Moravanů, Slezáků
a Slováků (Leipzig: Kommissı́ Slovanského Kněhkupectvı́, 1847).
71. Hurban, Českje hlasi proti Slovenčic̆e; Samo Czambel. Prı́spevky k dejinám jazyka
slovenského (Budapest: Joloman Rózsu a manželka, 1887).
72. Hodža, Dobruo slovo, p. 43.
73. Daniel Lichard, Rozhowor o Memorandum národa slowenského (Buda: Tlačiarny
uhor. uniwersity, 1861), pp. 20–21.
74. “We who are called Slovaks, additionally our brothers the Serbs, Croats,
Russians; Magyars, Germans, Romanians . . . —we are all Hungarians, because
we live in the Hungarian country and live under the same laws” (emphasis in
original). See Daniel Lichard, Rozhovory o matiči slovenksej, Banská Bystrica:
Matičnych spisov No. 4, 1865, p. 8.
75. These geographical references sketch a Czechoslovak territory. Quoted
from Albert Pražák, “Slovenská otázka v dobĕ J.M. Hurbana,” Sbornı́k filo-
zofickej fakulty, Vol.1, No.13, Bratislava: University Komenského v Bratislave,
1923, 530/202.
76. Unusually, Vladimı́r Kulı́šek gives the name of this group as Českoslovanská
jednota. “O činnost a význama c̆eskoslovanské jednoty před vznikem ČSR.”
Historický Časopis, Vol. 10, No. 3.
77. Historians treat Hlas as the embodiment of late-Habsburg Czechoslovak feel-
ing. See Paul Vyšný, Neo-Slavism and the Czechs, 1898–1914 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1977), p. 13; Owen Johnson, Slovakia 1918–1938:
Education and the Making of the Nation (Boulder: East European Monographs,
1985), pp. 43–4.
78. “Naše snahy,” Hlas, Vol.1, No.1 (1898) p. 6.
79. Ibid.
80. See e.g. Vavro Šrobár. “Mad’arisácia,” Hlas, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1898) p. 68; “Tiszov
národnostný programm a národnostnı́ agitátori,” Umelecký Hlas, Vol. 1, No. 5
(1898), pp. 321–2.
81. Franjo Rac̆ki, “Jugoslavenstvo,” in V. Kušc̆ak (ed.), J. J. Strossmayer, F Rac̆ki,
Politic̆ki spisi (Zagreb, 1971), p. 278. Cited from Marcus Tanner, Croatia: A
Nation Forged in War (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1997),
p. 97.
82. Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 89.
83. Karl v. Zmertych, Rhapsodien über die Nationalität (Skalice: Fr. X. Skarnitl’s
Söhne, 1872), p. 7.
 National Concepts and Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” 413

84. Zmertych defined the political nation through (1) A lawful leader, (2) a well-
defined fatherland, (3) its own constitution and laws, (4) its own customs
and habits, and (5) its own history. A tribe of nomads, he tells us, “even
though they posses a lawful leader, their own customs and habits, their own
history and their own language, still do not make a political nation, because
they have no well-defined fatherland.” Zmertych, Rhapsodien, p. 8.
85. Hennelore Burger, Sprachrecht und Sprachgerechtigkeit im österreichischen Unter-
richtswesen, 1867–1918 (Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 1995), p. 24.
86. Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication, an Inquiry into the Foun-
dation of Nationality (Cambridge: MIT press, 1953), p. 63.
87. Domnique Schnapper, Community of Citizens: On the Modern Idea of Nationality,
translated from the French by Séverine Rosée (New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 1998 [1994]), p. 16.
88. Hans Kohn, “The Nature of Nationalism,” The American Political Science Re-
view, Vol. 33, No. 6 (Dec. 1939), pp. 1001–21 esp. 1001.
89. John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1993), p. 2.
90. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, p. 5.
91. Brian Porter, “The Social Nation and its Futures: English Liberalism and
Polish Nationalism in Late 19th Century Warsaw,” American Historical Review,
Vol. 104, No. 5 (Dec. 1996), p. 1472.
92. Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative
Analysis of the Social composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European
Nations, translated by Ben Fawkes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), p. 23.
93. Keely Stauter-Halsted described Hroch’s book as “the prototypical work on
capitalist transition and the spread of nationalist movements.” Robert Kaiser,
in his detailed The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR, wrote
that Hroch’s schema was “well suited to the study of national consolida-
tion in the Russian Empire,” and classified nationalist events in reference
to it. See Keely Stauter-Halsted. The Nation in the Village, the Genesis of Peas-
ant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca/London: Cornell
University Press, 2001), p. 4, note; Robert Kaiser. The Geography of National-
ism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994),
p. 34.
94. Some scholars have attempted to distinguish chronological development
from the progression between stages; see Paul Robert Magocsi, “The
Ukrainian National Revival: A New Analytical Framework.” Canadian Review
of Studies in Nationalism, Vol. 41, No. 1–2 (1989) pp. 45–62.
95. Michael Watson (ed.), Contemporary Minority Nationalism (London/New
York: Routledge, 1990); Colin Williams, National Separatism, Cardiff: Uni-
versity of Wales Press, 1982.
96. Stephen Velychenko, “Empire Loyalism and Minority Nationalism in Great
Britain and Imperial Russia, 1707 to 1914: Institutions, Law and Nationality
in Scotland and Ukraine,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 39,
No. 3 (July 1997), pp. 413–41.
414 A. Maxwell

97. Louis Vos, “Shifting Nationalism: Belgians, Flemings and Walloons,” in

Mikuláš Teich, Roy Porter (eds), The National Question in Historical Context
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 143 (128–47).
98. Joseph Rudolph, “Belgium: Controlling Separatist Tendencies in a Multi-
National State,” in Colin Williams, National Separatism (Cardiff: University
of Wales, 1982), pp. 263–79.
99. Domnique Schnapper, Community of Citizens: On the Modern Idea of Nationality,
translated from the French by Séverine Rosée (New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 1998 [1994]), p. 15.
100. Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations
and the Politics of Nationalism (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 1–6.
101. Schnapper, Community of Citizens, p. 16.
102. Graham Spry, “Canada: Notes on Two Ideas of Nation in Confrontation,”
Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1971), pp. 173–96.
103. On a scale of 1 to 100, with 50 being “neutral,” Francophone Quebecois rated
Canada as 71.8 and Quebec as 73.3. Rounding to two significant figures, the
affect ratings are almost identical: 72 and 73. Lawrence LeDuc, “Canadian
Attitudes Towards Quebec Independence,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol.
41, No. 3 (Autumn, 1977) p. 353 (347–55).
104. Daniel Frei and Henry Kerr, Wir und die Welt: Strukturen und Hintergründe
aussenpolitischer Einstellungen (Bern: Eidgenössische Drucksachen, 1974),
quoted in Kenneth McRae, Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies
(Waterloo, ONT: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983), p. 110.
105. Anthony Smith, Theories of Nationalism, (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983),
p. 227.
106. Hans Kohn, “Western and Eastern Nationalisms,” in Hutchinson and Smith
(eds), Oxford Reader on Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969),
pp. 163–5.
107. Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging (London: BBC Press, 1992), pp. 3–5.
108. Their list includes the binary oppositions of Kohn and Ignatieff, as well
as “political vs. cultural,” “liberal vs. illiberal,” “individualist vs. collec-
tivist,” “Staatsnation vs. Kulturnation,” “universalistic vs. particularistic,” and
“women-emancipation nationalism” vs. “patriarchal nationalism.” Philip
Spencer and Howard Wilson, Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (London:
Sage, 2002), p. 96.
109. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6.
110. Ibid., p. 7.

Alexander Maxwell finished his doctoral dissertation, Choosing Slovakia, at

the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2003. He has since taught at the
University of Wales, Swansea, won a Merian fellowship at the University of
Erfurt, and is presently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Nevada,
Reno.