Whitewashed empire: Historical narrative and place marketing in Vienna

ABSTRACT

The historical narrative of Habsburg grandeur has played a decisive role in branding the Austrian capital of Vienna. While scholars have situated place-marketing strategies within de-historicized frameworks of the neoliberal city, the nostalgic framing of imperial spatial assemblages should be critically interpreted from a historical vantage point. In tourist spaces such as the Kaiserforum, urbanists, museum curators, right-wing groups, and real-estate investors employ the discourse of Habsburg patrimony to leverage past spatial inequalities for contemporary purposes. Such nostalgic narratives obfuscate the historical material conditions of their making. I argue that this very obfuscation constitutes a continuing legacy of empire. I call this process ‘whitewashed empire,’ the redeployment of imperial structures through the preservation, renovation and assemblage of material heritage. As a memorial assemblage of narrative selection and a political economic relation of exploitation, imperial nostalgia extends the work of Habsburg spatial production into the present.     

Habsburg coffeehouses in the shadow of the empire: Revisiting nostalgia in Trieste

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on Trieste’s representation as ‘the ghost of its Habsburg past’ (Hametz, M. 2014. ‘Presnitz in the Piazza: Habsburg Nostalgia in Trieste.’ Journal of Austrian Studies 47 (2): 131–154. doi:10.1353/oas.2014.0029., 136) – a city that laments the irreversibility of time – to explore instead the ways in which nostalgic attachments to the empire have come under suspicion. Drawing on interviews, literary texts, and atmospheric data (McCormack, D. 2014. ‘Atmospheric things and circumstantial excursions.’ Cultural Geographies 21 (4): 605–625. doi:10.1177/1474474014522930), I explore the narrative and performative strategies adopted to reframe the political and cultural relations with the empire. By discussing how events and places expected to celebrate the Habsburg legacy refuse to become nostalgic, I trace the emergence of contested feelings for the empire to explore how nostalgia becomes an ambivalent sentiment that is discursively and performatively re-appropriated and mobilized to attach and detach Trieste from the empire.     

Writing imperial history in the age of high nationalism: imperial historians on the fringes of the Habsburg monarchy

For a long time, the late period of the Habsburg Monarchy has been characterized as a battlefield of nation-building elites who employed historical scholarship (among other means) to promote nationalistic ideas. More recent studies, however, have examined and called attention to the powerful structures which held this monarchy together. In the age of historicism, the Habsburg Monarchy also needed a plausible historical narrative on which it could base claims of the legitimacy of its rule. This narrative was created first and foremost by Viennese historians. Yet there were historians in the Habsburg Monarchy’s regional centres who made significant contributions to the development of concepts of an imperial history, too. In this article, the author examines their efforts. Until around 1900, supranationalism and regionalism were the dominant concepts in the historical writings of the authors in the Military Frontier and Bukovina and also in the works of the renowned Prague historian Anton Gindely. Loyal to Vienna, some Hungarian historians reassessed national history in order to reconcile it with the imperial past. Transnational history was also a method of demonstrating the congruity of national and imperial interests. In the age of high nationalism, historians thus contributed to both national and imperial cohesion.     

Between Vienna,St Petersburg,and Warsaw: August Lobkowitz in Galicia, 1826–32

Abstract

This article analyses the relationships between Austrian imperial bureaucrats and the Polish elites in Habsburg Galicia during the 1820s and 1830s. Its main focus is on Prince August Lobkowitz, who was the governor of Austrian Galicia between 1826 and 1832. Even though he was a representative of the German Habsburg dynasty, with family roots in the Bohemian aristocracy, Lobkowitz switched allegiances in Galicia and declared himself a Pole. Against the instruction of his senior colleagues in Vienna, he supported the idea of an independent Poland as a buffer state between the Habsburg monarchy and the Russian Empire. Between 1828 and 1831, he maintained close contacts with Polish politicians — both in Galicia and in the Russian empire — and promised them Austrian support in the event of a Polish uprising against Russian rule. The article seeks to challenge the historiographical stereotype of a uniform Austrian bureaucracy that enforced its will upon the largely non-German elites in the Habsburg provinces.     

Imperial inventories, “illegal mosques” and institutionalized Islam: Coloniality and the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

Looking at the architectures of governance that have characterized the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this essay explores the ways in which imperial inventories of colonial institutions come to influence and arbitrate contemporary debates over what constitutes legitimate practices of Islam in Bosnia–Herzegovina and Austria. Examining the larger political context in which these debates emerge, including the criminalization of Muslim communities that refuse to submit to the authority of state-sanctioned Islamic religious institutions, I detail the ways in which colonial histories are recruited to curate a homogenized, continuous representational mandate for Muslim communities and practices in Austria and BiH. Attending to nostalgic invocations of the late Habsburg governance of Islam and Muslims, I argue that these discourses serve to legitimate specific Muslim institutions and actors in Austria and BiH that privilege the Habsburg legacy through the exclusion of outlawed/illegal Muslim communities and practices in both countries.     

Traces of empire: Architectural heritage,imperial memory and post-war reconstruction in Sarajevo and Beirut

ABSTRACT

Beirut and Sarajevo share a long Ottoman past followed by urban expansion under the protectorate of further imperial rule – of the French and Habsburg Empires, respectively, as well as a recent experience of urban warfare, segregation, and post-war reconstruction. This article examines how the architectural heritage of empires in the two cities has been transformed, reimagined and mobilized through urban post-war reconstruction by a number of actors: local authorities and politicians, architects, international organizations and investors. Discussing the tensions between the memory of empire and contemporary nation-building processes, the essay argues that the politics of memory and amnesia surrounding the recent wars shape and reconfigure the memory and heritage of empire. Moreover, it reflects how the reshaping of urban space acts both as an arena and as an enhancer of the politics and practices of memory and amnesia.     

Foreign rule? Transnational,national, and local perspectives on Venice and Venetia within the ‘multinational’ empire

The history of the Habsburg Empire in the post-Napoleonic era is frequently approached from the perspective of its various component nationalities. These were traditionally portrayed in the historiography as engaged in more-or-less open struggle with control from Vienna. This article argues that the over-privileging of such national categories can distort the picture. By looking at a number of case studies – the naming of Lombardy-Venetia, the Biblioteca italiana, the Panteon veneto – the relationship between Venice (and its Terraferma) and Habsburg rule during the second Austrian domination is examined. It will be argued that it is more profitable to see Venetian identities (municipal, local, Italian, and as part of a wider transnational European culture) as capable of working for as well as against the empire, and that Habsburg policy was as often concerned with managing potential local rivalries (notably between Lombards and Venetians) as with controlling a perceived Italian threat. It is also suggested that, while cultivation of local identity was often used to reinforce the national, the Austrian authorities were also happy to annex both to further imperial interests.     

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

In the 1848–1867 period, the Habsburg Monarchy was shaken by the first waves of nationalism. Yet in the case of the Habsburg port cities of Fiume/Rijeka and Trieste, contended by several different opponents, Italian and Croatian nationalisms had to face centuries‐long traditions of municipal autonomy. In both cities, municipalism and attachment to the House of Habsburg were particularly strong and were coupled with local urban identities that defied national forms of identifications, insofar as they were ethnically and linguistically hybrid. Nationalist activists sought to exploit ethnic and linguistic elements as markers of defined national identities, yet without widespread success. The final demise of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918 has been generally taken as proof of the cogency of nationalist discourse, especially the Italian, in the region. However, the northern Adriatic rim points to the forcefulness of Habsburg multinationalism and the existence of ethnic hybridity, which provided effective bulwarks against nationalisms for decades.     

Silences of Grass: Retrieving the Role of Pasture Plants in the Development of New Zealand and the British Empire

This article discusses the role of grasslands and their products in the development of empire between 1850 and 1930. It explores the paradox that, despite the significance of introduced grasslands in terms of environmental transformation and imperial trade, most contemporary observers ignored this or took it for granted as, generally, have today's historians of empire. The article charts relations between grassland development, improvement and empire building, and examines how retrieval of this neglected story might encourage reconceptualisation of empire relationships, focusing particularly on those between New Zealand and Britain.     

Imperial Nightmares: The British Image of 'the deadly climate' of West Africa,c. 1840-74

In the first half of the ninteenth century West Africa became associated with the term 'white man's grave'. This was mostly due to the extremely high European mortality rates resulting from endemic disease, especially malaria. The second half of the nineteenth century is usually described as the birth of tropical medicine, which indicates a development in scientific medicine partially attributed to the empirical experiences of the mid-century. The treatment and prevention of the above-mentioned disease changed substantially in the period. This article discusses the public perception of West Africa in the years between the Niger Expedition in 1841 and the Ashanti campaign in 1874. The two events, which mark the chronological framework of the paper, both played a significant part in the history of malaria as much as in the history of British imperial expansion in the region. Using mostly contemporary printed works, it is argued that despite the development that occurred in the field of medicine and subsequent decline in European mortality, the associated image of 'the deadly climate' of West Africa prevailed between the two events for a variety of political, economic and cultural causes.     

Italian masculinities

Abstract

After both world wars Italy struggled to have territories in the Upper Adriatic, among them the port city of Trieste, included within its national borders. Italy’s hopes to utilize Trieste as a barrier against incursion from the east and the city’s symbolic importance as an outpost for the defense of italianità are well known, but the city’s role as a conduit to former Habsburg provinces in Central Europe remains overlooked. In fact, regional associations with Mitteleuropa, seen by those on the peninsula as indications that the city was distant or foreign, formed one facet of a regional identity which proved compatible with national expectations. From annexation in 1918, the competing visions of Trieste as a bulwark against the east and as a junction in Central Europe shaped local identity and carved a niche for the city within the national framework.     

Time and the Global: Against the Homogeneous,Empty Communities in Contemporary Social Theory

What are the chronopolitics of global–local relations? This article reconsiders the oversymmetric portrayals of identity and nationalism in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, and reopens questions about chronopolitics raised by Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other. Anderson relies heavily on Walter Benjamin, but seriously misunderstands him, in his portrayal of nations as parallel communities in ‘homogeneous, empty, time’. Against Anderson's premise that homogeneous, empty time is real, this article argues that calibrated asymmetries in global time were made real by colonial practices, that we have forgotten that glory and hierarchical self-assertion, not horizontal comradeship, were central to Europe's Rome-fantasizing imperial nations, and that élite diaspora have replaced imperial conquests precisely in the wake of decolonization and the rise of UN ideology.     

The Partisan Nature of Race and Imperialism: Dadabhai Naoroji,M. M. Bhownaggree and the Late Nineteenth-Century British Politics of Indian Nationalism

This article examines Dadabhai Naoroji's and Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree's contribution to politically partisan ideologies on Indian empire as London MPs and reform advocates late in the nineteenth century. Exploring politically nuanced, cultural definitions of racial difference, this article reveals how their participation in British parliamentary and press debate on Indian nationalism adhered to distinct liberal and conservative imperial political conceptions of race and governance during this period. Beyond an analysis of Naoroji and the Indian National Congress's relationship with British liberalism, this essay explores Bhownaggree's contribution to a sustained conservative imperial tradition. This article postulates that Edmund Burke's separation from a liberal imperial rationality and a British Tory critique of liberalism informed a nineteenth-century conservative governing justification in India predicated on conciliating organic national racial difference. As Naoroji's devotion, as a Liberal MP for Central Finsbury (1892–95), to a liberal civilising mission informed an advocacy of political self-governance in Britain and India, Bhownaggree's pursuit of female and technical education reform while Conservative MP for Bethnal Green N.E. (1895–1905) represented a conservative espousal of racial difference.     

Geographical imaginations,public education and the everyday worlds of Fascist Italy

This article explores the phenomena of geographical imaginations and their seldom-noted promotion within various corners of Fascist Italy. Imagined geographies are socially constructed understandings of other places and regions and, as such, they are malleable, contingent, shifting and unquantifiable. Nevertheless, these imaginaries help us to navigate our imaginative worlds and our relative place in the material world. In 1930s Italy, various interest groups associated with the colonial and expansionist projects of Fascism promoted the development of wider geographical imaginaries among Italians. Academic geographers were often key figures in these initiatives: some prompted these projects, while others did so at the behest of the regime and its desire to expand Italians' coscienza geografica (the geographical imagination) to an ‘imperial level’. This article explores how academic geographers from Trieste sought to contribute to this project and to embed their geographical knowledge into the ordinary, everyday circuits of public life. The article therefore outlines the notion of the geographical imagination and demonstrates via case studies how Triestine geographers tried to nurture these phenomena. Finally, it suggests that, although elusive and amorphous, geographical imaginations were a feature of everyday life in some corners of Fascist Italy and, as such, they deserve academic attention.     

Protection,Federation and Union: The Global Impact of the McKinley Tariff upon the British Empire, 1890–94

This article takes a global historical approach to American protectionism and the British imperial federation movement of the late nineteenth century, showing how US tariff policy was intimately intertwined with the political and economic policies of the British empire of free trade. This article argues that the 1890 McKinley Tariff's policies helped call into question Britain's liberal, free trade, global empire by drumming up support for an imperial, protectionist, preferential Greater Britain. The tariff also speeded up the demand and development of more efficient transportation and communications—technological developments that made imperial federation all the more viable—within the British Empire. This article is thus a global history of the McKinley Tariff's impact upon the British Empire, as well as a study of the tariff's effect upon the history of modern globalisation.     

Geographical knowledge and scientific survey in the construction of Italian Libya

Studies of colonialism and imperial cultures have increasingly recognized the roles of geographical knowledges in European efforts to construct the colonial world materially and imaginatively. Simultaneously, the discipline of geography has undergone a thorough self-critique of its part in the constitution of colonial space. This article discusses the imbrication of geographical knowledges and colonialism in Italy, and especially how the production and circulation of geographical knowledges about Libya worked hand in hand with its territorial occupation and control. In particular, the article discusses the expeditions directed and co-ordinated by the Italian Geographical Society that were despatched into the Saharan interior in the early 1930s to produce 'scientific' representations of the region. The article examines the roles of geographical sciences in the construction of Italian Libya, but particularly how this performance of 'colonial science' surveyed Libya's populations and contributed to their classification as 'primitive' and 'Other'. These conclusions supported Italian authority in the region, but also reinforced the development of a 'colonial consciousness' among Italians as African space and peoples were rendered legible by European epistemologies.     

Subjects,citizens and others: the handling of ethnic differences in the British and the Habsburg Empires (late nineteenth and early twentieth century)

This article focuses on the role of ethnic inclusions and exclusions in administering citizenship and nationality within the British and the Habsburg Empires. The analysis discerns three ways of dealing with ethnically heterogenous populations. One follows the nation-state model and aims for internal ethnic homogeneity and legal equality. This model coined developments in Canada and Hungary. The second obeys an imperialistic pattern and implements legal discrimination between different ethnic groups. It played a decisive role in East Africa and in Bosnia to a certain degree. The third model follows a statist logic and enforces either supra-ethnic neutrality or a politics of recognition. It was most influential in Austria and India. In the British as well as in the Habsburg context ethnic differences gained significance around 1900. This ethnicising of law and administrative practice produced different results, though, in both cases, mainly due to the empires' divergent political structures. Whereas within the Habsburg Empire the three models were juxtaposed, British law and administration came to be dominated by the imperialistic pattern of ethnic discrimination against ‘non-white’ subjects. Thus, the customary distinction between a politically inclusive nationalism in Western Europe and an ethnically exclusive one in the continent's Eastern half – sometimes linked with the difference between ius soli and ius sanguinis – cannot be upheld.     

The Case for a Pre-emptive Strike,and so forth …

Abstract

This article is a response to the piece by Stephen Strehle in issue 5.1. It is recognized that a variety of theological and political perspectives come from the US, but argues that this is a poor illustration of contemporary political theology. Strehle, it is suggested, has a mistaken understanding of US history and represents a strand of American thought which has failed to acknowledge the faults of an imperial past, in particular the crimes committed against ‘native’ peoples. The war against Iraq is presented as a further illustration of an imperial mentality which pervades parts of US culture. Strehle fails to recognize the flaws apparent in the morality of the West. The critique of the place of just war theory in contemporary geo-political conflicts is challenged, as is the assertion that the church has a duty to follow the government of the day. The article ends with a recognition of the value of, and inspiration resulting from, much US political theological thought.     

The historical trend of Ming China: An imperial agric-mercantile society

Majority of contemporary Chinese historians have been employing a conceptual framework focusing on the difficulty of capitalistic development in China to analyze the historical trend and potentials of late imperial China. This approach based upon the presupposition of viewing the pattern of Chinese history as abnormal reflects with the remaining influence of the Western-centric methodology. Further, based upon a “normal” point of view, seven fundamental, irreversible, and systematical changes to the Ming society could be identified. By conclusion, China in the Ming period was transforming into an imperial agric-mercantile society. This process proves that late imperial China was not stagnate society without “history,” meanwhile, its pattern of development was clearly not identical to the Western style modernization progress.     

After Empire: Karl Renner's Danubian model of pluralism

This article argues that Karl Renner's multinational model for the Austrian‐Hungarian Empire is an alternative model for contemporary a‐territorial, multinational and federal arrangements. Nations, in his view, should act as intermediary bodies between the relevant communities and the state. His concept of ‘subjective public law’ combines principles that most authors find mutually exclusive: individual rights, choice over one's national cultural membership, non‐territorial administration of national communities and overseeing of equal collective rights by the state. Neither Staatsnation nor Kulturnation, the model is a combination of the two under the auspices of a federal state combined with a strong theory of individual and collective rights. I provide the reader with a comprehensive intellectual biography of Karl Renner, as I argue that an understanding of the man himself, his political pragmatism and his statism are crucial to comprehending this theoretical position. Throughout his life, Renner was a German nationalist, held a strong nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire and voted in favour of the Anschluß. His concurrent careers as a scholar and as a politician account for a series of contradictions. I argue however that these can be reconciled and explained by a careful comparative reading of his scholarly work and his political statements.