Page - 2 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

2 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 twentieth-century scholars who migrated from Kiev or Warsaw to L’viv. This book tries to make sense of these patterns and proposes a concise view of the discourses and practices that shaped the Habsburg Empire, in particular its Austrian half, between 1848 and 1918. An analysis of imperial geography, in the modern sense of the social production of space, facilitates combining the centrifugal and centripetal moments that defined the empire: they become complementary rather than contrary processes. Between 1848 and 1918, the universities of the Habsburg Empire under- went significant changes that corresponded closely with political and social developments in the state and its culture(s). Beginning with the 1848 revo- lution, a language-bound concept of identity gradually gained importance, slowly replacing loyalty to the state as the guiding political principle. These changes affected the Habsburg Empire (from 1867 the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) in many ways. The autonomy of the Hungarian Kingdom and the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia (1867), the detachment of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia (1859/1866), the collapse of the German Confederation (1866), the growing self-governance of Galicia, and multiple nationalistic conflicts shaped the region, its history, and its historiography. At the same time, the Habsburg Empire stood at the intersection of cultural projects that extended beyond its boundaries, most importantly, but not exclusively, the pan-German, pan-Slavic, Polish, and Ukrainian projects. The state borders marking political territory thus crossed other communicative and ideolog- ical entities. The idiosyncrasies of the empire, often adduced when talking about its memory, are analyzed here from a unique angle, that of the institutional academic culture, at universities in particular. As institutions of higher ed- ucation and scholarship that were closely connected but, I claim, far from identical, universities played a special role in central Europe.6 Whether uni- versities should produce civil servants or should rather promote scholarship was a key tension in these institutions’ identity, which was shaped by com- plex and often conflicting social and political rules and expectations. In an increasingly decentralized empire, two needs emerged—the need to educate loyal citizens and the need to foster a cultural identity—and although these were not necessarily contradictory, they increasingly grew apart. This tension was most visible in Galicia, as both Poles and Ruthenians/ Ukrainians gravitated toward cultural identities extending beyond the em- pire; the fostering of these identities would inevitably end in conflict with the Crown. In contrast, the Czech, Hungarian, Slovenian, and other projects