Page - 6 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

6 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 the Russian Empire, creating a sense of togetherness and state unity more decisively than any legal measures could have.18 Recent work on higher education in the United States and Britain has highlighted universities as similarly unity-promoting institutions. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, universities, although rooted in local circumstances, remained crucial parts of the unifying networks of education; norms and values were transferred at the same rate as scholars.19 The tensions among the state/ empire, ephemeral transnational science, and local cultural, social, and re- ligious contexts were obvious, but skillful mediation created a network of institutions guided by the same norms, thus supporting the state that im- posed them. As different as universities became, they were part of the project of intellectual unification—e pluribus unum, to use the slogan of the time. While hierarchies and hegemonies influence the production of space, the spatial turn pays more attention to how people live in the space, ex- ploring the possibilities offered by its contingency. This also means that the center-periphery structure is socially constructed, even if it is perpet- uated by politics and accumulated prestige.20 Works on the Spanish and German university systems clearly show how certain universities became centers, thereby influencing outcomes for the system as a whole.21 However, while politics played an immense role, the structuring of academic space in Continental Europe into universities of entrance, universities of promotion, and final-station universities (Einstiegsuniversität, Promotionsuniversität, and Endstationsuniversität), as German historian Marita Baumgarten has named the different types of institutions, was a long-lasting process resulting more from the accumulation of cultural capital than from academic policy or financial issues. The present work draws attention to another academic space: the univer- sity system of the late Habsburg Empire, and more precisely its Cisleithanian (“Austrian”) part.22 Not acknowledged as an empire sensu stricto, the area enclosed by Habsburg imperial boundaries witnessed in the sixty years be- tween the “Spring of Nations” in 1848 and the “War of Nations” in 1914–18 a nexus of concurrent imperialism and nationalism, or of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies.23 At the same time, it had to accommodate differing geographic projects, as stable “cultural nations” exceeded the monarchy’s boundaries and became more and more bound to spaces defined by linguistic affinities. The identity issue of being a loyal national and imperial subject (ei- ther both or one or the other; the two were by no means mutually exclusive) was experienced both collectively and individually through inscriptions in