Page - 9 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Introduction ♦  9 between Cis- and Transleithania but also within these semi-autonomous entities. National languages increased in importance, and German, the de jure nonnational language of the empire that was endowed with imperial and national allure, witnessed a decrease in practicality in the face of opposition by nationalists.36 Academia was directly included in this process, influenc- ing it and being influenced by it. Moreover, the spatial projects of different nationalist activists overlapped to create hierarchies, particularly in Galicia, where Poles controlled the provincial Diet, creating micro-imperialisms.37 The growing influence of nationalist discourses meant that projects to consolidate imperial space could no longer be induced by the center.38 The empire’s policy-driven structure led to conflicts, for example, the Badeni Crisis of 1897. The introduction of compulsory bilingualism in Bohemian government offices led to serious opposition from German-speaking politi- cians and nationalist activists, who saw this measure as undermining their privileged position, not as promoting equality or improving communication for Czechs.39 At the same time, the national space was increasingly represented as different from the imperial space, having its own boundaries as well as a distinct history and culture. The eminent Prague historian František Palacký created, for example, an ethnicity-based history of Bohemia, in which Czechs and Germans constituted historically disparate factors, divided by language, religion, and folklore.40 Polish-language scholarship energetically pursued research based on the space of the Commonwealth despite polit- ical restrictions.41 The legal distinctiveness of some Habsburg provinces and historical non-Habsburg state traditions had already been the subject of treatises in the first half of the nineteenth century. A similar strategy was seen in the late nineteenth century for Ruthenians/Ukrainians, whose historical ethno-spaces were divided between the Russian Empire and the Habsburg Empire.42 In comparison to Czech nationalists, who imagined autonomy within the Habsburg Empire, both Polish and Ruthenian national- ists’ imagination went beyond Galicia’s boundaries; in particular, the Polish nationalists early on envisaged the reunification of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Recall, however, that the Commonwealth generally did not mean an independent national state but rather an autonomous entity within the Habsburg Empire, as Austro-Slavism and loyalty to the emperor were popular in Galicia, in large part because of the threat of Russian imperial- ism, which was often referred to and was commonly codified in writing and popular culture.