PODCAST: Pieter Judson: Empire, Nation, and Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change", a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Study Group for Minority History to mark the Institute for Historical Research’s centenary.

In this episode, Pieter Judson, Professor of 19th and 20th Century History at the European University Institute in Florence talks to Jan Rybak at Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism about the relation between Empire and nation and what they meant for minorities in the Habsburg Empire and its successor states. Judson speaks about how both imperial institutional practices and nationalists’ activism invented minorities in a decidedly multinational/ethnic/linguistic space. With the downfall of the monarchy nationalists aimed to make the category ‘nation’ the bedrock of their new states, leading to often disastrous consequences for those who could not identify with the titular majority nation. Pieter discusses the long-term trajectories of imperial practices and nationalist politics and ideologies and what they meant for minorities in the former Habsburg space.