Most surveys of urban growth in the long sixteenth century stress the comparatively high level of early modern population mobility encouraged by the emergence of qualitatively new phenomena in the spheres of economics, culture, and religion. There is also a prevailing consensus among historians referring to “natural decrease theory.” Historical demographers have suggested that, because of the high mortality rates caused by epidemics, wars, natural catastrophes, and continual problems with hygiene, the natural increase of the urban population was either moderate or nonexistent. Therefore, it was primarily immigration that either produced the rise or compensated for population losses.

Historians have conventionally presented the beginnings of Pest Jewry as a function of legal developments. According to this approach, Jews were denied entry until 1783, when Joseph Us Patent allowed Jews to settle freely in Pest and other royal free cities. “Only in 1783,” wrote historian Nathaniel Katzburg, “did the situation [for Jews] improve when Emperor Joseph II nullified the discriminatory laws directed against Hungarian Jewry, and the gates of the ‘free’ cities, including Pest, opened to Jewish settlement.” This privilege was sharply curtailed by Law 38 of 1791. This law, enacted by the National Diet following the nullification of Joseph II's Patent, barred royal free cities from evicting Jews wholesale, but allowed these cities to evict all Jews who had not obtained legal residence by 1 January 1790. As scholar Vera Bácskai pointed out: “After the death of the emperor, the Pest council wanted to expel [the Jews] and only a special order by the palatine made possible Law 38 of 1790, according to which Jews who had settled before 1790 could not be expelled from the city.” Law 38, the argument concludes, defined the parameters of Jewish settlement in Pest and other royal free cities until 1840, when the National Assembly enacted Law 29, allowing native-born and naturalized Hungarian Jews to settle freely in Pest and other royal free cities.

Most theories of nationalism depend to a greater or lesser extent on formulating explanations in terms of the dynamic relationship between culture and politics in the development of a given ethnic group. Nationalism was famously defined by Ernest Gellner as “a political principle which holds that the political and the cultural unit should be congruent.” Irrespective of whether such a cultural unit is considered to be “real” or “imagined,” “primordial” or “constructed”—and however one might define culture and politics—there is a widespread consensus in the theoretical literature that nations owe a great deal to the activities of the literary elite who saw their role as creating and defining a group identity for a given people; and that these activities gradually became the basis for mass activism and a claim to political sovereignty. In the words of Miroslav Hroch, “the national consciousness has found expression in the conduct, the activities, of concrete personalities.” The historians task, therefore, becomes that of “finding out which kinds of social media within the emerging small nation afforded a relatively stronger response to patriotic agitation.”

This essay addresses the political role of nationally defined scholarship in multiethnic milieus. The focus is on Transylvania, one of the marginal provinces of the Habsburg Empire without stable, state-funded institutions of higher learning and research. The time frame is the Hungarian Vormärz, known as the Reform Era, which extended from the 1830s until the revolution of 1848 and was a pivotal moment in the maturation of the national perspective in scholarship and politics, challenging the traditional order of the composite monarchy. The liberal and national impetus of the period was manifest in the foundation of numerous regional voluntary associations intended to serve the public good, and further education, scholarship, and “national improvement.”

The golden age of history as an academic discipline was the era of nationalisms, because modern social science history was created in the form of national historical narratives. This is particularly true of Ukrainian nationalism and Ukrainian history. Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi, who created the most compelling Ukrainian grand narrative, did it under the influence of late-nineteenth-century social theory, and he is still considered to be the greatest Ukrainian historian. Modern history appeared in the nineteenth century not just as an academic discipline, but also as part of the identity of the modern individual; therefore, it figured prominently in all projects aimed at the creation of stable collective identities. Ukrainian history was entailed in the construction of a Ukrainian national identity, and had to respond to the challenges this construction faced.

Issues concerning the status and rights of ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe have become significant in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A focus on co-nations in neighboring states, “others” in so-called nation-states, and questions of immigration dominate the media in many areas in Europe. Even though ethnic minorities and ethnic identity are part of modern conversation, the subject of ethnic minorities needs to receive serious scholarly attention to demonstrate its nuanced sense of meaning. Like nations, ethnic minorities are not static entities; they are not primordial. They are constructed or imagined in the same way nations are, even though there has been little scholarly attention devoted to minority building. In order to understand the complex meaning of an ethnic minority, one needs to view the creation of a minority—minority building—on different levels, and understand it as members of the minority understand it and as others perceive it.

In the course of the twentieth century, two years stand out as symbolic turning points in the historical evolution of Europe as well as of much of the rest of the world. Those years are 1918 and 1989. The first marked the end of World War I and the beginnings of the political reconstruction of Europe and the Middle East. The second marked the end of totalitarian-like communist rule throughout half the European continent and the rest of Soviet political space stretching across northern Asia to the coasts of the Pacific Ocean.

Professor paul robert magocsi should be commended for his article, “In Step or Out of Step with the Times? Central Europe's Diasporas and Their Homelands in 1918 and 1989.” It provides an important overview of a significant but hitherto generally neglected topic, and represents an essential contribution to our discussion of diasporas. One can only hope that by framing the issue as he has done and posing the questions mentioned in the article, our attention will be drawn to this subject with renewed interest. I find myself agreeing, for the most part, with his general observations. As such, the commentary that follows is intended largely to provide accentuated remarks and, where needed, some points of constructive criticism.

Paul robert magocsi has written a thought-provoking essay on the role of North American political diasporas from east central Europe before and after the seminal years of 1918 and 1989. While he showed that the pre-1918 diasporas had a major impact on the future of east central Europe during and after World War I, he found very little evidence of a similar impact before and after 1989. He suggested that we look closely at 1989 to see what, if any, impact such diasporas had at the end of the twentieth century.

Paul robert magocsi has written an informative and intelligent article about the relationship between the various nation-states of central Europe that found themselves behind the Iron Curtain and their respective national diasporas in North America. His comparison of the relationship between the countries and their diasporas at the “temporal nodes” of 1918 and 1989 suggests that the real difference between the two was that in 1918 the ideal of the nation-state was in the ascendancy, both in America and among the various central European national groups, whereas in 1989 the American diasporas were still beholden to the nation-state ideal at a time when their counterparts “back home” had moved on from the outdated nation-state ideal to embrace the supranational—or at least multinational—ideal of the European Union. This explains the relative importance of the diasporas in 1918 and their unimportance in 1989. Given the parameters of his subject, this is in general a useful and thoughtful thesis. There are, however, some points of detail that I would like to address; and, particularly for those who are interested in Austrian history and notions of Central Europe (with a capital “C”), there are broader aspects to the question, outside the given parameters, that merit discussion. It is to these broader aspects, centering on what we mean by “central European diasporas” and indeed “central Europe,” that the following commentary is mainly devoted.