In recent decades, studies have argued persuasively that armed conflict and nationalism are firmly linked and many scholars regarded war as one of the main drivers of nation-building. As historians have shown, armed conflict can be used to strengthen the kind of group cohesion on which the concept of the nation relies and also to accelerate the cultural and political processes through which ethnic boundaries (literal and figurative) are drawn.
Armed conflicts also became pivotal elements of many powerful national mythologies. Often, wars recently fought to achieve “national independence” or to “reclaim” or “liberate” territories lost were used as “raw materials” for these myths. In other cases, conflicts from earlier centuries were reframed to serve as elements of foundation myths of the nation. The narratives (re)created concerning these conflicts lost and won helped to legitimize the aspirations of national elites and allowed them to mobilize the population. The links between armed conflict and nationalism have been intensely analyzed in the German, French, and Russian contexts, but they have only rarely been made the subject of scholarly discussion in the Central and Eastern European region. This special issue of the Hungarian Historical Review aims to explore the ways in which armed conflict and values and images associated with armed conflict influenced the region’s nationalisms. It seeks, moreover, to further understandings of how wars contributed to the nation-building processes in the region.
The journal welcomes submissions that look beyond the nation state and examine the role of military conflict in the nation-building processes on the regional and imperial levels. We particularly encourage papers analyzing different cases from a comparative perspective.
The geographical focus of the issue is on Central and Eastern Europe, including the territories of the former Soviet Union. We do not confine ourselves to the strict geographical borders of the region, however, especially in the case of comparative papers.
This special issue particularly welcomes papers discussing the following fields
The roles of martial virtues in national self-images in East-Central and Western Europe from a comparative perspective
The emergence of regional warrior mythologies, especially in the contested borderlands (for instance Tyrol or Transylvania)
The changing image of the “national warrior” (for instance the Czech legionnaire, the Hungarian Hussar, the Austrian Gebirgsjäger)
Women warriors, gender roles, and their mythologies
The cult of national wars in education, particularly in school textbooks
Public representations of nation-building wars (street names, memorials, etc.)
Veteran and other patriotic associations promoting martial virtues and/or the cult of certain conflicts
The changing cult of the fallen heroes killed in national wars
Transnational war heroes (for instance Miklós/Nikolaus Zrinyi) and their cults
Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short biographical note with a selected list of the author’s three most important publications (we do not accept full CVs) no later than May 15, 2021.
Proposals should be submitted to the special editor of the issue by email:
revesz.tamas@btk.mta.hu and hunghist@btk.mta.hu
The editors will ask the authors of selected papers to submit their final articles (max. 10,000 words) no later than September 15, 2021.
The articles will be published after a double-blind peer-review process. We provide proofreading for contributors who are not native speakers of English.
All articles must conform to our submission guidelines.
The Hungarian Historical Review is a peer-reviewed international quarterly of the social sciences and humanities, the geographical focus of which is Hungary and East-Central Europe. For additional information, including submission guidelines, please visit the journal’s website: www.hunghist.org