Possibilities and pitfalls of the concept of national indifference

This introduction to the themed section ‘The history of national indifference. A critical appraisal’ explores the challenges and possibilities of the concept of national indifference. It starts from the premise that national indifference remains a very useful concept to avoid falling into teleological narratives of nationalism. The central argument is that national indifference needs to be theorized as a non-binary, relative concept that is not the complete opposite of national identification. Indeed, the contributions show that national indifference has gradations and can coexist with explicit, banal or everyday forms of nationalism, both among elites and ordinary people, both in and outside of East Central Europe, both before and after the Two World Wars. This central argument results from an engagement with three areas of debate surrounding the national indifference literature, which all relate to its (inadvertent) reproduction of binary understandings of nationalism: the dichotomous conceptualization of east versus west, nationalisation versus non-nationalisation and elites versus masses.