Discourses of hegemony and resistance under the Habsburgs

The present project deals with the hegemonic discourse and the discourses of resistance among certain ethnicities of the Habsburg Monarchy in the 19th century, especially after 1848. The scholarly interest of the project lies in the discourse strategies of representatives of the Empire on the one hand, and of exponents of ethnic identities, stirred by a nationalistic sentiment against the hegemonic power of the Habsburgs and against other competing ethnicities within the Monarchy, on the other hand. The discourses in question refer to the Italian speaking regions of the coast (Istria, Triest), of Welschtyrol and of Dalmatia, to the region of Bohemia and to the Bukowina. The documents upon which this investigation rests are taken from the media of the time such as newspapers and pamphlets, those carrying a bias towards the Habsburg Monarchy as opposed to those favouring decentralisation. The excerpts in question are focused on two historical moments: the revolution in 1848 as a focal point of ethnic conflict and the census of 1900 which was mostly significant bringing attention to the language debate of the Habsburg Monarchy. The methodology of historical discourse analysis permits the consideration of socio-psychological and cognitive dimensions of discourses and of the contexts surrounding those two events. The project is based on different steps of investigation. The first step of the process will be the collection of the primary sources from the appropriate media of each region. The second step will consist of a structural analysis as to the content of these primary sources and of an analysis of their social and historical contexts. The third step will be to reconstruct the discourse of hegemony and of conflict for each region. A special attention will be given to the ostensible resistances to the Habsburgs and to other competing ethnicities, as manifested by the Italians in Dalmatia, Istria, Triest and Welschtyrol, by the Czechs in the region of Bohemia and by the Rumanians in the Bukowina in the specific years 1848 and 1900 in question, both synchronically and diachronically with regard to the changes taking place between those years. The firth step evaluates the programmatic force of the hegemonic discourse and the discourses of resistance in the Habsburg Monarchy of the 19th century. Convergences and divergences of the discursive strategies will be compared for each region as to their linguistic realisations. The main task will be to trace historically the discursive programme of the Habsburg hegemony and the various forms of resistance to it.

The project`s focus has been on how language was used in several Habsburg lands to exert power, to resist the exertion of power, or to compensate power deficits, between 1848 and 1905. One part of the project investigated in the domain of administration, while the five others were dedicated to the analysis of political discourses in public media in several "lands" of the Habsburg Monarchy. The analysis of media run by the political and social elites of the Küstenland (Trieste, Istria, Gorizia and Gradisca), reveals - arguing on the basis of examples from 1848 and 1901 - that Italian elites were striving through their media to keep up their power position, which they justified applying a rhetoric of resistance. At the beginning of the 20th century a stiffening rhetoric "competition for the exclusive victim status" is perceivable, between `Slavic` and `Italian` oriented media. This was accompanied by national exclusivism, which was put into action with linguistic strategies of exclusion. Italian risorgimento media in the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom were analyzed taking texts from 1846 and 1848 as starting points. In these texts members of several higher` social strata first of all constructed a collective feeling of inferiority, which served as a motivation to mobilize and to strengthen identity. Resistance against `Austrian` rule, which had been an implicit one up to 1848, came to be practiced explicitly and publicly in this very year. Rhetoric drew on the symbols of `heroes and martyrs` now, replacing the victim metaphor. The investigation in texts from 1848 in Transylvania brought to light, that the Rumanians used a defensive victim- image as well - only the Rumanian elites of the Transylvanian national movement did not give up the tactics of a very subtle and implicit rhetorical resistance even in early 1848. In their texts, the `Kaiser` und `Austria` figured as allies. Political discourse of the Rumanians concerning `Austria` was defensive rhetorically and represented a collective forming of an opinion, amidst initial confusion. A close look at programmatic political texts from Czech media in Bohemia from the years 1848 and 1849 reveals specific historical communicative practices in a public sphere in statu nascendi. Media of diverse ideological and political orientations were engaged in the project of a collectively imagined `Us`. Ideological differences were extensively elaborated, in order to `colonize` the new discursive formation. The analysis of Serbian media from Vojvodina, from 1848 and 1905, also included non-political texts. The anti- hegemonic discourse on `Us`, which was still developing as a subculture in 1848, had established itself in 1905 and already partially took on forms of a counter-hegemony, consisting in the development of interdiscursive connections (not least through non-political texts), as they had been unimaginable in 1848, when connections were still being made mainly to other discourses. Investigations in the discourse of administration of the Bohemian school system, scrutinizing filed correspondences from 1853 and 1900, reveal how power relations were negotiated in bureaucratic discourse. The analysis of exactly this text type chosen makes the complexity of the Habsburg hegemonic structures visible. Thus, a picture of past reality in the Habsburg Monarchy has been drawn, as it can only be done with methods of discourse analysis and textual analysis.