Majorities at War: Transformation of East Central Europe

The article begins and ends with a discussion of the censuses of East Central Europe before and after the First World War. Both the former and the latter were contested by minority activists despite the enormous changes brought about by the post-war settlement. This paradox can be explained, at least in part, through selected case studies that illustrate the asynchronicity of political, economic, and social transformations. The text discusses first the dynamics of this change: nationalist mobilization in the face of the refugee problem and local military conflicts. Second, it raises the question of the legitimacy of the consolidating national states in the region, especially the desperate and often futile appeals to the population to support the young states in their fight against the national and Bolshevik enemies. Both processes resulted in the construction of national majorities, albeit at different rates. The social and mental changes brought about by war, forced migration, and revolution proceeded much more slowly than the transformation of political discourses, and even more slowly than the language of ethnic statistics in the service of national states.