Building Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe, 1848-1939

This book examines patterns of national integration and the mobilisation of the peasantry across two historical regions, Central and Eastern Europe, over a long historical timeframe, spanning from the 1848 Revolution to the outbreak of the Second World War. It discusses how national elites in these regions interacted with the peasantry during the process of building modern nation-states and democratic political systems, and how political integration occurred by transforming peasants from subjects of various public actors into active citizens. The authors focus on the mechanisms employed by nation-states to achieve the socio-political integration of the peasantry, including land redistribution, universal suffrage, state-sponsored education, taxation, and military conscription, and on diverse channels of communicating the state’s agenda of modernisation, such as the church, the press, political parties, and other types of intermediaries. This book promotes interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to the question of the social and political integration of peasants within the various societies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the emerging nation-states of Central and Eastern Europe.