CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Gombos, Taylor Jordan |
|---|---|
| Title | Electing the Nation: National Propaganda and National Ambiguity in the Sopron Plebiscite of 1921 |
| Summary | Historians of East-Central Europe have been preoccupied with the flourishing of nationalism after the First World War and the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, but the proliferation of national plebiscites throughout the region has received less scholarly attention. Where plebiscites do feature in the scholarship, it is too often their explicitly political dimensions which have been the focus. Plebiscites have also functioned as focal sites for biased national narratives. In this scholarship national plebiscites have not been sufficiently contextualized in the indeterminate and tumultuous post-war era. Nor has this scholarship been sufficiently attentive to the fact that plebiscites were themselves often strategic maneuvers devised by nationalists to overcome the national intransigence, indifference, and ambiguity they encountered in local populations. Focusing on a regional plebiscite in Ödenburg/Sopron in 1921, and following Rogers Brubaker’s influential work on ethnicity, I contend that plebiscites constitute an exceptional kind of event: an event which makes “ethnicity and nationness at least momentarily salient.” This paper argues that Austrian and Hungarian nationalists seized the opportunity afforded them by a disorientating post-war situation, as well as the polarizing forum of plebiscite voting in an attempt to ‘ethnicize’ and ‘nationalize’ (even if only momentarily) a borderland population that was traditionally nationally ambiguous. In this thesis I argue that nationalists attempted to forge a national binary (Austria versus Hungary) in the months prior to the plebiscite and in so doing attempted to overwrite or subordinate non-national concerns to their own national framework. Nationalists’ propaganda also betrays their insecurity with the persistence of non-national influences. Finally, I also contend, however, that in this endeavor, nationalists were only partially successful. Residents in the voting zone did participate in the plebiscite in remarkable numbers and therefore, did cast ballots either for Austria or Hungary, but their reasons for voting were at least not solely national. Economic and political concerns also appeared to factor heavily in the voting. |
| Supervisor | Janowski, Maciej |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/gombos_taylor.pdf |
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