Page - 278 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

278 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 one’s respective national language, as a means of internal historical politics, and publishing in English, as a means of international propaganda. Also, scholars working on local histories complain about losing readers, and thus the impact they desire, when forced to publish in English. The most proba- ble future form is thus multilingualism for scholars and their publications; academics will most likely publish the same results in one language for local publics and in English for the international forum. With this we are, ironi- cally, back in the late nineteenth century, when scholars at Slavic academies of sciences opted for precisely this solution, with German and French as the languages they published in for readers abroad. That the interests of scholars and politicians diverge may be a truism, but it connects well to the dynamics of the changes in the academic system. In the Habsburg Empire, centralist politicians’ ideas of internationalizing knowledge failed, especially those connected to imperial structures and to German as the imperial language. Rejecting imperial internationalism, scholars opted for a different kind of internationalization and chose different paths to achieve it. One can translate this process into more recent changes in the European and global academic system, in which English became omnipresent at the universities. These changes—often described as a result of the Bologna Process, a process of assuring the compatibility of higher education in Europe that started in 1999—have met with criticism and op- position. One can only assume that these changes might have been accepted more readily if they had been a gradual process led by the academics in their respective institutions rather than being left to politicians.19 The role of language in international communication becomes even clearer when one looks at the post–Great War discussions on the internationalization of, for instance, Polish science. These discussions of strategies Polish scholars foresaw as guaranteeing that the internationalization process would profit most, and not exclude many, underscore once more that the solutions are numerous and cannot be uncritically imposed.20 Empire’s Many Spaces The final question remains what lessons about the Habsburg Empire can be drawn from the story of scholarship meandering between imperial space and national spaces. In this, my findings align well with two recent proposals to conceptualize the nineteenth-century Habsburg state. Pieter M. Judson has recently favored the idea that nationalist movements in the Habsburg