Theory, Practice and Transfer of National Personal Autonomy

This proposed project focuses on one particular strategy that was intended to solve or at least appease national conflicts. It appears under various names, but is most often referred to as national personal autonomy. In contrast to territorial autonomy, which provides all inhabitants of a certain administrative district, regardless of their national affiliation, with some kind of self-rule, personal autonomy applies to all adherents of a national group irrespective of their place of residence within a given state. As a result, personal autonomy seems to particularly suit states with fuzzy national dividing lines and with minority populations scattered all over the country. The biggest problem for personal autonomy regulations, however, is to determine which citizens can or should benefit from this autonomy. In order to compile a list of members, the authorities introduced national registers or cadastres, where citizens had to register their nationality. As one might expect, this categorization of national affiliation gave rise to new difficulties. Three main questions are guiding me through the project. The first set of questions focuses on the Habsburg Empire where the idea of personal autonomy developed and was first implemented. In fin-de-siècle Austria we find several theorists outlining different solutions for the arduous national conflicts. Among the most prominent were the Austro-Marxists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. In parallel three Austrian provinces introduced personal autonomy at the beginning of the 20th century: Moravia (1905), Bukovina (1910), and Galicia (1914). The virtually unstudied Galician Compromise between Poles and Ruthenians, even though never implemented, can serve as a showcase example of how personal autonomy solutions were negotiated and how they were intended to work. The second set of questions concentrate on the continuities and transfers of personal autonomy concepts in interwar Europe. Several countries like the short-lived Ukrainian People`s Republic, Lithuania and Austria either stipulated or discussed national self-rule for parts of their minority populations. However, only Estonia, and to a certain extent also the Soviet Union, implemented personal autonomy regulations. Still, this form of self-government was heatedly discussed within the Jewish Labour Bund and the Congress of European Nationalities. Finally, I want to address the problems arising from personal autonomy regulations, mainly from the necessity to create a national cadastre. In addition to individual reservations, national registers also accelerated the ethnification of the whole population. Thus, instead of taming the nationalist storm, cadastres squeezed every citizen into tight national categories and to some extent rather exacerbated national thinking. This project thus contributes to two fields: The study of non-territorial autonomy concepts and the ethnification of entire populations. It intends to bring together various historic personal autonomy case studies and searches for continuities and transfers from the Habsburg Empire to the interwar period.

This project aims at writing the history of national-personal autonomy (NPA) as an idea and as an applied policy. NPA is an integrative concept to appease national conflicts by granting self-rule to the ethnic nation as a corporate body. Hence, neither citizenship nor territory are the key denominators to enjoy autonomous rights, but ethnic affiliation, which inevitably leads to highly problematic forms of defining national belonging. My project traces back the origins of NPA to its origins in the Habsburg Empire, where it developed in theory and in practice. Moreover, policy makers in Europes interwar period successfully adapted national-personal autonomy to their current political needs. This project, hence, ties together not only two centuries, but also case studies with theoretical writings. It tells the history of an idea with an emphasis of the processes of transfer it underwent. The Schrödinger scholarship allowed me to spend one year at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at the Central European University in Budapest and a six months return phase at the Institute for East European History at the University of Vienna. This scholarship was intended as a start-up for a larger project application that was eventually successful. In November 2014, I was awarded the three year APART habilitation scholarship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Besides concentrating on writing funding applications, I plunged deeper into methodological literature on the concepts of transfer and transnationalism, which I also had the opportunity to thoroughly discuss during these 18 months in the thriving intellectual atmosphere of the IAS. I also continued reading primary and secondary sources for my research project. This resulted in a number of scholarly presentation of my research topic as well as into two peer-reviewed articles with preliminary results. One argues that national-personal autonomy regulations were at the top of the agenda in the late Habsburg Empire. The other analyses the opponent Jewish attitudes towards the provisions for Jewish representation in the Galician constitution of 1914 that included some national-personal autonomy regulations. Back in Vienna, I organised an international, interdisciplinary workshop with 20 scholars on the larger field of my research. Finally, I organised several activities for a larger public. Most importantly, on the centenary of the Galician Compromise in February 2014, I prepared an exhibition at the Library of the University of Vienna on this very compromise, but also on other national-personal autonomy regulations in the Habsburg Empire, the interwar period and today. Simultaneously, I recorded a 20 minutes broadcast on radio Österreich 1 on the same topic with a reach of 600,000 people.