Author: Hoerder, Dirk

Source: German Politics & Society, Volume 26, Number 2, Summer 2008 , pp. 1-23(23)

Abstract:

Bordered nation-state approaches are increasingly challenged and they rarely hold up under critical questioning. In this essay I discuss the cultural interactions across Central Europe that preceded the nineteenth-century development of national consciousness and—for many only after 1918—independent states. I argue that identities based on religion, profession or craft, administrative or military expertise characterized people more than those founded on ethnocultural/regional origin during the various migrations of the period. A dual outward-inward perspective focuses on the influence of German-speakers in other parts of Europe and on men and women from other cultures in the core German-language regions. I carry the story up to the 1930s and I argue that transregional and transcultural approaches are empirically sounder than transnational ones. It follows that migrant destinations also need to be addressed as micro- or macro-regions—the several distinct locations in Eastern, East Central, and Southeastern Europe, for example—rather than in terms of states.

Keywords: GERMAN-LANGUAGE REGIONS; MIGRATION; CULTURAL INTERACTION; TRANSCULTURALISM; EMIGRATION; INTERNAL MIGRATION

DOI: 10.3167/gps.2008.260201

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