Dynastic Empires

With the fin-de-siècle, the feelings of apocalypse and the anticipation of a new society intensified. War accompanied the decline and eventual fall of the great, dynastic empires of the 19th century, as well as the rise and domination of the nation state in the 20th century. The nation-state is an innately human construction, derived from the fundamental and natural belief that human beings are divided into social groups, or nations. At the basis of each nation state is self-governance, because in their indivisibility only nations “know what is best for themselves”. This self-governance is realized through territorial sovereignty or the establishment of an independent state. However, if homogeneity and self-governance define the nation state,

Empires in their nature were multilingual and more often than not, there was no clear ethnic minority or majority. The ethnic groups were mostly stable and held together by the ruling dynasties. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was religiously and linguistically diverse—the inhabitants practiced a range of religions from all denominations of Christianity (Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodoxy) to Islam and Judaism and spoke over ten languages, and they all acknowledged the Hapsburg monarchy as their rulers. The territory of the Russian Empire at its height stretched over three continents, comprised of over 185 ethnicities, and was united under the sovereignty of Romanov dynasty. Vilnius-Vilna-Wilno serves as a case study for this ethnic tolerance and preservation. Vilnius’ different names reflect the different cultures, who resided and have laid claim to the city—the Lithuanians, Jews, Poles and the Russians. However, paralleling the imperial attitude towards minorities, “the history of Vilnius demonstrates rather the ability of diverse ethno-cultural groups to live in close proximity almost without noticing each other.” This indifference towards “the others” in Vilnius created a stability and the minority ethnic groups enjoyed some sense of autonomy and privilege that they did not enjoy when Vilnius was under the control of a

Poland’s reformation as a nation state after World War I had positive effects for the Poles, but negatively impacted the Ukrainians and Jews. In 1898, the initial pogroms and violence in rural (pre-nation state) Poland against the Jews targeted taverns, not synagogues nor were Jews bodily harmed. The peasants targeted the Jews as an other and a link to the outside world and their landowners. The Jewish presence became charged with a notion of exploitation and represented an outside, foreign economic power. These initial instances of violence were not racially or religiously motivated, rather economic in nature. The peasants targeted institutions that appeared to be the source of their frustrations, such as the capitalist, Jewish ventures. However, in a Polish nation state, the government was successful in implementing policies to suppress and assimilate their ethnic minorities as a way to preserve Polish influence. In contrast to the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Polish nation state did not support higher education in languages other than Polish. This effectively demoted Ukrainian to a peasant culture and stunted the development of a Ukrainian literary language and intellectual culture, therefore severely hindering the Ukrainian national movement. In the universities, the government also instituted a numerus clausus