Imperial Afterlives: How Ordinary People Perpetuated Austria-Hungary
Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on November 8, 2024 in order to attend this event.
Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Gábor Egry, István Deák Professor of History. Moderated by Aleksandar Bošković.
What was common in a Romanian MEP running on the list of Jean Marie Le Pen’s Front National (whose seat was probably bought by the Romanian Communist secret services), the mayor of the Slovenian city Murska Sobota in 1930, a Romanian politician in the Banat sitting on the board of directors of a local textile company, and the chairman of the Brasov bar association in the 1930s? All of them were linked to the defunct dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary to the extent that their actual behavior was a function of that imperial past.
Based on the research conducted by the team of the ERC-funded Nepostrans (Negotiating post-imperial transitions: from remobilization to nation-state consolidation. A comparative study of local and regional transitions in post-Habsburg East and Central Europe) research project, this talk will highlight the ways individuals who were anything but prominent before 1918 facilitated the persistence of imperial rule in Austria-Hungary’s successor states. Using examples from the administration, judiciary, symbolic spaces, ways of doing local politics, and patterns of corruption, Egry argues that practices those figures carried over from Austria-Hungary had their origins in the empire as a management of difference. Thus, these examples reveal a more systemic facet of post-imperial state-building than just ironic stories, they show how seemingly banal social practices helped create the empire from the bottom up.
