Page - 267 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

267 concluSion Paradoxes of the Central European Academic Space The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Habsburg Empire, politi- cally united but culturally drifting further and further apart, was followed after 1918 by a politically divided but still intellectually entangled central Europe. Universities not only were influenced by this political development but also, as the foremost cultural institutions, took a vital part in shaping it. Therefore, in the history of universities, narratives intersect that have thus far been written in parallel, in the sense of both parallel national narratives and also traditions of writing the history of science and scholarship sepa- rately from the history of education or of culture in general. The case study presented in this book—of academic geography as a function of the cultural and political context and practice—thus allows us to draw more general conclusions about the functioning of academia at the interface of scholarship and politics. Although historians have many reser- vations about discussing the present, an analysis of the processes shaping academia in the nineteenth century can sharpen our understanding of cur- rent processes governing scholarly exchange. While I am far from arguing that the Habsburg Empire was a precursor of the European Union, as some scholars and politicians have repeatedly claimed,1 there are lessons to be learned from its history that would enable a better understanding of the different aspects of mobility that are now shaping both European and global academia. Two areas seem to me especially vital in this respect: the way the requirement of mobility has affected careers, that is, the advantages and