In the century of nationalism, the House of Habsburg ruled over a vast territory in East Central Europe. Second only to Russia in size on the European continent, the Habsburg lands stretched from the Alps to the foothills of the eastern Carpathians and from the shores of the Adriatic to the Sudetes mountain range on the border with Saxony. The core of this territory in the Alps, corresponding roughly to what is today Austria and Slovenia, had been ruled by the Habsburgs from the High Middle Ages. In 1526, the Habsburgs made a decisive step to become East Central Europe’s leading power by acquiring the Bohemian and the Hungarian crowns. After one and a half centuries of warfare against the Ottoman Empire, the long eighteenth century witnessed the Habsburgs’ decisive eastern expansion. First, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they reconquered central Hungary and Transylvania from the Ottomans.

A specific type of nationalism developed in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. It differed from New World nationalisms (in the tradition of George Washington, Toussaint Louverture and Simón Bolívar) in a number of respects. It was spearheaded to a large extent by writers, artists, and intellectuals (in the fields of cultural production and knowledge production) rather than by political and popular activists; as such it affected existing states and newly emergent nations alike; and its main impact was through the reconceptualization of the state, its self-image, and its institutions, rather than through popular mobilization. Its main tenet – that the state should reflect, and indeed be defined by, the ethnocultural nationality of its inhabitants – was applied in the Peace Treaties of 1919 as an overriding principle in international law (the peoples’ right to self-determination) and still informs our current assumption that the default state is the “nation-state.”