It is really extraordinary to have such an amazing group of historians of Central Europe gathered in one place—and for that place not to be the Hilton in St. Louis. But when I began to think about this talk, I had to admit, I panicked. What could I possibly say in a talk to honor Pieter Judson, who has shaped my adult life more than any other person? How do you address this audience, filled with all the mentors, colleagues, friends, and students who have also enriched my scholarship and life?

When I finally chose this address’s provocative title, I still had no idea what I was going to say. I knew that I wanted to think about the ways in which Central European history is “relevant”—a word I hate—to the crazy world we now inhabit. And I knew that Pieter Judson would somehow be part of this story. But I was not sure how.

I met Pieter Judson in 1994, when I became a student at Swarthmore College, a school I chose because it was two hours away from my family’s home in the Poconos, and two blocks away from the house where my grandparents lived. (Swarthmore, for those who do not know it, is a tiny liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia that mass-produced Central European historians, thanks to Pieter.) I was going to college because I had failed to become a professional ballerina, and I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up.

In the Spring semester of my first year, I enrolled in Pieter’s Modern Germany class. I could not tell Veimar from Weimar, and I had never been to Europe, and all of my knowledge of Austria came from The Sound of Music and one of my favorite books, which was a memoir I’d read about a young ballet dancer at the Vienna Opera during World War II. I remember looking at the alphabet soup of political parties on the blackboard—DVP, DNVP, KPD, SPD, USPD—and feeling like I’d landed in a diabolical word puzzle. I wrote all my papers on gender history, not because I had a passion for the subject at the time, but because I figured that I at least knew something about women. Although frankly, I did not know much about that, either, because I was barely a woman. I was out of my depth.

I certainly had never heard of the Habsburg Empire, a state that no longer existed. Had I known of its existence, I’d have considered it irrelevant to my life, let alone a world on fire. Pieter was well-known at Swarthmore as a fellow graduate of Swarthmore (class of 1978), an incredible supporter of queer students on campus, and an amazing teacher who taught a class on the history of sexuality and a seminar on fascism that every student wanted to take.

What happened next was not of world historical importance, but it was to me. Pieter wrote, “Please be a history major” in the margins of my first paper. And then my senior year, I finally took that fascism seminar and impulsively decided overnight that I had to become a historian. Pieter informed me that I would have to pick an actual time or place to study. At least a language. So I picked German, because I figured it was German history that made me want to be a historian. And then I invited myself to Vienna to be Pieter’s research assistant that summer. I was of zero assistance, since I could not speak a word of German, but I was so thrilled to be there. By the end of the summer, I was an aspiring Habsburg historian with mediocre German and a possible dissertation on schools in the late Habsburg Empire.

That was the beginning of my Pieter story, which has continued for the past thirty years. This year, we will finally publish a book together on Austria-Hungary during the First World War, which we have been working on for at least ten of those thirty years. But I feel like Pieter should be recognized as a coauthor of all my books; they have been so shaped by our conversations. Pieter has been my teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend. He has supported me, regardless of where my interests have taken me. He has only given me bad advice once in my life, and that was to go shopping at the BILLA in the Westbahnhof on a Sunday in 1999. That’s my Pieter story. I know there are many individuals here who have their own Pieter stories, which I hope you will share in the coming days.

***

To the extent that I began thinking about the “relevance” of Central European history in those days, it was embedded in a narrative of progress. I do not think I would have admitted this to anyone, and I certainly knew better than to write it in my grad school applications. But I was going to study the bad old days of nationalists and Nazis so that it would not happen again.

So I learned the languages, sat in archives, wrote books, and loved doing it. Until the past decade or so, when I frankly started to wonder if there was any point to it all. The world is on fire, my own country’s president is an arsonist, and all the libraries in the world filled with history books about nationalism, empire, fascism, and genocide have done nothing to stop it. For a historian of Central Europe, this feels like a radical failure.

As it turns out, taking a tour through Pieter Judson’s scholarly work did help answer the question of how it is relevant and why it matters. Not because I believe history books can take the place of old-fashioned politics, or that anyone will necessarily listen to us. But I do still believe that there is great value in trying to understand the past, the present, and the ever-changing relationship between the two. I say ever-changing, because radically new times require new perspectives on the past.

Pieter has always been politically outspoken privately, but not very explicit about politics in his work. But when you take a close look, there are deep political commitments not far from the surface. And there are also political lessons that we can read back from the perspective of our current predicament.

Let us start in 1996, with his first book, which was published while I was still an undergraduate at Swarthmore. I returned to it this summer for the first time in several decades, and not surprisingly, I read it differently.

Exclusive Revolutionaries, which was based on Pieter’s dissertation at Columbia University, is about German-speaking liberals in the Habsburg Empire during the nineteenth century. The general view in the 1980s and 1990s was that in the 1880s, Carl Schorske’s “Politics in a New Key”—Christian socialists, Zionists, German nationalists—rose up and radically rejected the liberal ideals and principles of their fathers. The liberals, in turn, buried their heads in the sands of culture, and produced the great art, ideas, music, and architecture of the fin-de-siècle but abandoned the political realm.

Pieter’s earliest work challenged this story of the binary oppositions between culture and politics, and between liberalism and nationalism, by showing how many of the hierarchies embedded within liberalism itself, including the liberal claim to have a monopoly on education and culture, molded the transition to nationalism in the late nineteenth century. “Liberal rhetoric and organizational practice actually determined the shape and content of nationalist mass politics well into the twentieth century,” he argues. Liberal nationalists in the nineteenth century once defined the German nation primarily in terms of its high cultural values. Anyone who subscribed to those values, which included education, private property ownership, enlightenment, and freedom, could belong to the German nation (with the caveat that you also had to speak some German). This definition obviously excluded individuals and groups who lacked these values and attributes, like working-class people and women. But increasingly after 1880, German liberals needed to survive in a new world of expanding suffrage and mass politics. They redefined their nation along new lines of inclusion and exclusion: now you could be German regardless of your social class or education, so long as you had German descent or blood—whatever that meant (and they argued intensely about what that meant).

Pieter recalls that he was motivated to write this book by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Some of you may be surprised to learn that. What did this have to do with Austrian liberals, you might wonder? In a recent interview with the Italian journal Passato e Presente, he explained, “For me, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s was a terrible political betrayal by people who had been very progressive and then turned around. The liberals in Austria, in my opinion, had also been quite strong in the 1870s, and I tried to show that. But at the same time, they turned to nationalism in order to remain politically important, and when they turned to nationalism, they got involved in a politics that was new and very different.”

What does this have to do with today, though? Well, you could say that the Exclusive Revolutionaries of the nineteenth century had a few things in common with the Exclusive Neoliberals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. And it is almost a truism that neoliberal economic policies and globalization have contributed to the rise of radical nationalism around the world, including Central Europe. Yet, Aga Pasieska reminds us in her new book on the European far right that we need to go beyond that observation and “pay attention to the … different forms of exclusion and social inequality (re)produced by liberalism.” This is precisely what Exclusive Revolutionaries did for the late nineteenth century in the Habsburg Empire.

Once in power, most authoritarian regimes have done little to address inequality. They have redefined nations along racial lines, reinforced borders, and increased tariffs—without necessarily slowing down the global flow of capital, which has been channeled to enrich their own friends and allies. Cultural, racial, and gender hierarchies are supposed to replace social hierarchies. Hence, Orbán and Trump’s assaults on universities, expertise, science, gender, immigrants, and (in the United States) initiatives to foster Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Some of this is even being done in the name of liberal principles like free speech. At my own university, the administration recently launched what was referred to me as a “website hygiene” initiative (with seemingly zero awareness of the eugenic overtones of that phrase), in which we had to cleanse university websites with discussions of diversity, equity, or inclusion, unless the word “diversity” is followed by the phrase “of thought and opinion.” Diversity of Thought and Opinion. This is intended to signal that we have abandoned the struggle for greater racial, gender, or social equality, or even diversity of experience, in favor of affirmative action for conservative thinkers. As in the nineteenth century, communities are being radically redefined—in ways that echo and distort liberal hierarchies and principles.

The book most of you probably know best is Pieter’s Habsburg Empire: A New History. It’s a book that the field needed for generations, and it will continue to be read and debated for generations. It was published in 2017, when the world was definitely on fire, but it was not yet clear how long it would burn or how widely the fire might spread.

The lessons most people have drawn from The Habsburg Empire are a set of revisionist arguments about the empire, drawing from Pieter’s own research and the last several decades of scholarship by many people in this room. Pieter shows that the empire meant something to people at the local level. Their emotional investment in imperial institutions and politics was generated and sustained from both above and below, regionally and locally. Certainly, the Habsburg Empire was not a prison of nations or peoples, and indeed, the categories of empire and nation were not and are not binary opposites. Nations and nationalism emerged within the framework that the empire created—they were mutually constituted. You can see that there is a pattern in Pieter’s thinking—when people claim that two categories or ideas are binary opposites, he uncovers the political and ideological stakes of that opposition and shows us that it is far more complicated.

Readers outside the academy have largely interpreted The Habsburg Empire as an argument that multinational polities are possible—at least for a while. To the extent that Pieter has been asked to comment on current affairs, he’s most often asked what the Habsburg Empire’s fate tells us about the future of the European Union. I’ll let him answer that question in the Q&A, because I really do not know.

But there is another, equally important message in The Habsburg Empire, less linked to the history of nationalism or multinationalism, but equally important for our own time (and perhaps also to the European Union). Why were so many Habsburg subjects loyal to the empire for so long? Pieter shows that they believed that the empire would uphold the rule of law, and specifically the ideal of equality before the law, for both individuals and national collectives. That belief created problems, because sometimes these two principles conflicted in practice—individual rights versus national rights. Meanwhile, Jews believed that imperial authorities would protect them—even as antisemites claimed, based on false rumors, that the emperor had authorized pogroms. For better and worse, imperial legitimation was meaningful for popular political mobilization—including nationalist mobilization. This mobilization occurred within, rather than against, the framework of imperial institutions.

What defeated the empire, then, was not nationalist revolt or an anachronistic political system, but the government’s abandonment of its own principles of equality before the law during the First World War. When the military was allowed to impose a harsh dictatorship on society, curtailing what were seen as basic rights, when the state began to treat certain subjects as disloyal by virtue of their language or nationality, faith in government eroded. This erosion was exacerbated by the failure of authorities to meet basic needs for food, heat, and housing—as well as massive inflation—which in turn generated more accusations and rumors of government corruption and bankrupted its legitimacy.

Today, the rule of law—both international law and domestic laws—is under threat around the world in ways we have not seen for decades. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine was a clear violation of international law, and it seems likely (as of 2025) that Russia will retain at least some of this illegally occupied territory in the long run. Israel has committed war crimes in Palestine by starving and killing civilians and blocking humanitarian aid, and it is unclear if there will ever be any justice, remedy, or end to the violence.

In the United States, even if the Supreme Court rules against Trump’s assaults on the civil rights of immigrants, who will enforce the law? When people are picked up in the streets and deported without due process, where can they turn? When domestic protests are squelched with illegal military force, what options remain for state and local governments? When Congressional appropriations are eliminated with the stroke of a presidential pen, what remains of the separation of powers? This is the making of a constitutional crisis, and several steps down the road to authoritarianism, as many have observed.

It is well known that Trump is a great admirer of Viktor Orbán, and that Hungary is a model for the administration. “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model,” according to Kevin Roberts, leader of the conservative thinktank that produced Project 2025. But some might say Trump has gone far beyond Orbánization in the brazenness and speed with which he is dismantling democratic institutions, and weaponizing government resources to reward his allies and punish his enemies. It took Orbán many years. It’s taken Trump less than seven months. Pretty soon, Harvard might be looking for real estate in Vienna.

Ultimately, you realize that democratic institutions and rights are meaningless—democracy itself is a fiction—without widespread belief that those ideals and institutions are worth defending.

So, how can history help?

The book that came between Exclusive Revolutionaries and The Habsburg Empire was Pieter’s Guardians of the Nation. I’m going out of order, because I think this might offer the most hope in answer to that question. Which is counterintuitive. This is the book in which Pieter first elaborated the concept of national indifference. Guardians of the Nation was born of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Everywhere you looked, people were talking about the ancient tribal hatreds that had supposedly reemerged after the end of Communism. Like many historians of the region, Pieter believed that it was a deeply ahistorical and orientalist argument.

He started out his research with the goal of better understanding what actually motivated nationalist activism—not by looking at ancient hatreds, but by looking at local dynamics and conflicts. And in his own words, he ended up wondering “whether ideas about nation had taken root at all.” Even when nationalist conflict did arise, it often had very situational roots—ranging from political and business grudges to drunken brawls. It was not necessarily a product of deeply held beliefs or historic divisions and tensions.

In many ways, this seems like the least plausible argument for our own time. I mean, honestly, what kind of moron is nationally or politically indifferent in 2025? In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was easy enough to criticize nationalism and the nation-state, and to imagine a world in which many people were indifferent to nationalism or to politics altogether, defining themselves, perhaps, in terms of global forms of mass culture. The fields of transnational history and the concept of national indifference were intellectual products of that moment, of a desire to unseat the nation from its privileged place in history and as an analytic category. This was particularly true in the field of Habsburg history, where nationalism had long been the field’s bread and butter. Bookshelves filled up with histories of internationalism, transnationalism, and globalization. I wrote one of them.

Obviously, the world looks very different now. But I do not think that means we should revert to old ways of seeing Central Europe and its history. That danger is real. And that’s why I’m not prepared to toss out Guardians of the Nation or national indifference. I do not think we need to revive outdated Cold War, nationalist, and orientalist tropes because it might be politically expedient in the moment.

For example, everyone here will remember that when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a revival in the press—and even among some academic historians—of Cold War rhetoric that insisted on an essential divide between a civilized Europe and a barbaric East. It was Milan Kundera’s “Tragedy of Central Europe” all over again. These Cold War ideas were expressed through the vilification of Russia and Russians in cultural terms—the claim that Russian aggression was a product of a deep-rooted imperial mentality—and in the defense of Ukraine as an imprisoned outpost of “western” values. The response to the war in Ukraine also reflected one of the negative consequences of European integration, which was the creation of “fortress Europe”—increased mobility and protection for those defined as Europeans (i.e., “white” people), and decreased access and rights for those defined outside European culture and history. Ukraine was inside Europe; Russians, Syrians, and Africans were out.

In the words of Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov at the time (speaking of Ukrainian refugees), “These people are Europeans. These people are intelligent, they are educated people. This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”

In the United States today, it remains the case that Ukrainian refugees face different and superior conditions than individuals who have come to the United States from Venezuela or Central America. Ukrainian parents attended their children’s graduation ceremonies at public schools in June 2025. Venezuelans did not, fearing that they’d be rounded up.

We might welcome any defense of Ukraine right now, particularly as the United States betrays its ideals and allies. But I still believe that we should defend Ukraine because it is a sovereign state with a democratically elected government, not because it is white, Christian, and European, and not because the Ukrainian nation is ancient or civilized while Russians are inherently imperialist or barbaric.

Since the early 2000s, a generation of historians, including Pieter—but also many others here—has challenged those Cold War ideas and orientalist binaries, not simply by absorbing East Europe into a preexisting notion of the “civilized West.” In The Habsburg Empire, Pieter writes, “We need not gravitate to an opposite extreme by asserting central and eastern Europe’s blanket similarity to the rest of Europe. Rather, we need to understand the history of this region—its institutions and its economic, social, political, and cultural development—within, not outside of, a broadly comparative European context.”

Many scholars in our field have shown the extent to which the histories of Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, and “the West” have been deeply intertwined for centuries. They have challenged the presumption of national conflict or a version of history in which “nations” are the primary subject. And historians have also increasingly recognized that many aspects of Central European history, including nationalism, antisemitism, empire, and illiberalism, are also present in the so-called West.

All this house-cleaning has created space for new topics and fresh perspectives on old topics, including the environment, the economy, science and technology, labor, gender, sexuality, and culture. Let us not toss out our own scholarly progress because times have changed. Instead, I think we need to continue to write new histories that reflect and shed light on the conditions of our current moment. That does not necessarily mean doubling down on the narratives of the 2000s and 2010s, but thinking about what new stories we can tell in the current moment.

I’m willing to predict that there will be an upsurge in histories of the interwar period and of fascism in the coming years. In the last decade, many historians in our field, including Pieter, have highlighted continuities between the Habsburg Empire and interwar successor states. Pieter has argued that the successor states should be understood as miniature empires, given that so many imperial practices and institutions survived the empire’s collapse. The continuities were both positive and negative, however. There were continuities in laws and institutions and material culture, but also in prejudices, colonizing strategies, and hierarchies.

We find these continuities and legacies in surprising places. In my own recent work, I’ve explored how the collapse of the empire generated radical new ideas about self-sufficiency and autarky in Central Europe, which became an epicenter of anti-global politics and social movements. Our current era of tariffs, energy independence, on-shoring, border control, and trad wives on Instagram echoes the 1920s and 1930s in many ways.

Quinn Slobodian has shown that the Austrian school of economics developed partly in reaction to the revolt against globalism in interwar Europe—these economists wanted to insulate and protect markets from democratic politics. The radical implementation of those ideas in the late twentieth century contributed greatly to our current predicament and links the liberal Austrian past directly to the European present.

Many other individuals and actors responded to interwar anti-globalism in new and creative ways. They often worked within the framework of the League of Nations, attempting to assist victims of anti-globalism, such as stateless people, minorities, and refugees. (We know this, thanks to the excellent collection edited by Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley.) They worked to reestablish severed ties in the realms of trade, policing, and infrastructure. League economists developed ideas that were intended to make global trade more equitable and sustainable.

Meanwhile, ideas about a Pan European Union also arose from the empire’s rubble—as a vision of reestablishing broken economic and political ties—as well as sustaining white, European supremacy, which is the subject of Lucile Dreidemy’s recent work. And as Natasha Wheatley has shown, legal thought from the empire, such as the notion of historic rights, went on to shape decolonization and continue to inform understandings of statehood and sovereignty today.

Equally close to home, some firms and individuals responded to the empire’s collapse and the rise of anti-globalism by leaning into globalization. In the 1930s, for example, the Czechoslovak shoe company Bat’a responded to anti-foreign sentiment and high tariffs by moving production overseas and using local labor. They exported factories instead of shoes and advertised themselves as “local firms.” Bat’a’s advertisements in India in the 1930s cleverly boasted that Bat’a shoes were all “Made in India” by Indians. At the time, Bat’a was producing cheap shoes in India for an Indian market, rather than shipping them back to Europe. But it was the beginning of the multinational corporation as we know it.

The moral of these stories—and there are certainly many more—is that there are always unintended consequences of a big political and cultural shift or movement. We do not yet know what new forms of globalism—or even democratic politics—might emerge from the current anti-global and authoritarian moment. Or from the debris of the Habsburg Empire, for that matter. We might ask: when did the Habsburg Empire actually end? You do not need to be the senile Count Morstin in Roth’s Bust of the Emperor to say that the answer might be “never.” You can bury a statue. But it turns out to be far more difficult to bury ideas, institutions, and cultures.

To return to Guardians of the Nation, when did national indifference end? We have argued that space for it diminished substantially after the First World War, when states often forced people to choose sides or even forcibly ascribed nationalities to them. But from another perspective, the answer to that question is also “never.” We need to remember that nationalism, even the kind fueling radical populist regimes around the world today, remains situational. When we insist, instead, that these conflicts are rooted in ancient hatreds or somehow unresolvable, this is a form of ahistorical thinking and defeatism that we cannot afford.

Another lesson from Guardians of the Nation is that there is often a significant gap between what is happening locally and how it is reported by professional nationalists. This is even more true in the age of social media. As I wrote this talk, Donald Trump was sending the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles to suppress protests against the wishes of the state’s government. In Chicago, there were also protests, and the mayor vowed that local police would maintain order but also protect the constitutional rights of citizens to assemble and protest. That’s largely what happened. But my parents sent me text messages from Pennsylvania asking if I was safe. They had seen news stories depicting Chicago as consumed by looting and mob violence. And that’s because we are getting very different news.

The Trump administration and its allies deliberately spread propaganda depicting protesters as threatening and violent to justify their blatant abuse of power. This sounds familiar to me from Habsburg history and Guardians of the Nation. Pieter demonstrated the ways in which nationalists used the press to distort and exaggerate violent conflicts, as well as the threat posed by their enemies. Today, political activists—both inside and outside the government—have tremendous technological resources to spread disinformation and sow division. For historians and ethically minded journalists, it is like trying to counter a wildfire with a water gun. But I think we all need to continue to generate and disseminate alternate narratives about the past and present, because it is not clear who else can or will.

It is admittedly a challenging time to be a historian of Central Europe. When people ask me how we are going to get out of this situation, I do not have a lot of reassuring historical examples. But one of the most hopeful messages of all history—and particularly the history of nationhood and national indifference—is that things can and do change. Allegiances and forms of self-understanding or identity that seem deeply rooted and unchangeable turn out to be relatively new and flimsily constructed.

When I want to find hope in our current moment, I tend to think less about historical examples—like, “Remember that time World War III didn’t happen?” And more about people: my colleagues who continue to speak up in a challenging time, whether that is in the media, through their scholarship, their teaching, their activism, or in everyday life outside the academy.

Every day, I see and hear about colleagues who are doing this, in big and small ways. This has been true for the past decade at least. It was true during the refugee crisis/panic of 2015/2016, through elections and referendums, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and in the face of many attempts to manipulate and distort history to serve the purposes of today’s authoritarian regimes. We are used to observing and commenting on History from a safe distance, rather than participating in it, but if ever there was a moment to participate, this is it. If ever there was a moment for public history and for doing history in public, this is it. I am proud to stand in front of a group of scholars who are rising to that occasion.

One thing my own Pieter story taught me is that you never know when and how you might make a difference—either in the world or in a person’s life. In my own career, as I have said, I have learned from and built heavily on Pieter’s scholarship, as have many in this room, but I have been just as moved by the desire to pay forward his humanity. His curiosity, integrity, humility, and generosity. It is possible, he has shown us, to generate and defend new knowledge and ideas and principles, but also defend quiet undergraduates, junior scholars, and the ideals of collegiality and friendship. Thank you, Pieter. And thanks to all of you who are paying forward his scholarship and friendship—and using history in whatever way you can to put out the fires of our own time.

Vienna, 17 July 2025