Emil Sax · 1881
Emil Sax’s address to the electors of Troppau on 15 September 1881, reprinted from the Freie Schlesische Presse, combines a theoretical account of nationality with a partisan defence of Austria’s Constitutional Party. Its organizing claim is that nationality can unite populations through shared institutions and interests, but can also disintegrate an existing political community when reduced to linguistic difference. The speech moves from conceptual definition through an assessment of Austrian national conflict to a practical appeal for German defensive organization. Its concluding prescription exposes a tension within the argument: the party claiming to represent an inclusive Austrian nationality must, Sax maintains, temporarily organize along the ethnic lines it condemns.
Sax begins by defending abstraction as a means of distinguishing general relationships from incidental features. Nationality must first be separated from citizenship, racial descent, language, and political allegiance. France’s identification of nationality with citizenship cannot simply be transferred to Austria; historically mixed populations disprove descent as a sufficient criterion. Nor does a common language necessarily constitute a nation:
Wir müssen zugeben, daß die Sprache ein sehr häufig auftretendes Kennzeichen der Nationalität sei, aber wir erkennen, daß sie die Nationalität nicht begründe.
English translation: We must concede that language is a very frequently occurring characteristic of nationality, but we recognize that it does not constitute nationality.
Belgium, Switzerland, and the United States supply his counterexamples. Nationality instead arises when several natural and cultural connections become conscious sources of collective feeling and action. Drawing on Schäffle, Sax understands it as the predominance of mutually reinforcing bonds over divisions of class, party, and interest. This also underpins his objection to census questions about nationality: an individual declaration, he argues, risks recording partisan allegiance rather than an objective social relationship.
His decisive conceptual move is to turn this plurality of constitutive elements into a developmental hierarchy. Kinship, locality, and language characterize “lower” forms; shared history, institutions, and interests characterize “higher” ones. Political nationality represents the capacity of such cultural bonds to unite populations despite continuing differences of language or descent. Sax presents this integration as an achievement of civilization, not merely an administrative arrangement. The hierarchy supplies the standard by which he judges Austrian politics.
The Constitutional Party, in this account, sought to develop a liberal Austrian political nationality upon foundations laid by Maria Theresa and Joseph II. Sax insists that this project preserved the constituent peoples’ particularity:
Die Verfassungspartei war bestrebt, in Fortbildung der Grundlagen, welche bereits Kaiserin Maria Theresia und der große Kaiser Josef gelegt hatten, durch den Ausbau eines freiheitlichen Staatswesens eine politische Nationalität der Oesterreicher auszubilden und zu festigen, ohne dabei die ethnische Eigenart der einzelnen, in diesem höheren Ganzen begriffenen Volksstämme irgendwie zu schmälern oder aufzuheben.
English translation: The Constitutional Party sought, by further developing the foundations already laid by Empress Maria Theresa and the great Emperor Joseph, to develop and consolidate a political nationality of the Austrians through the construction of a liberal polity, without in any way diminishing or abolishing the ethnic distinctiveness of the individual peoples encompassed within this higher whole.
Slavic leaders, he alleges, reverse this development by making language the overriding basis of solidarity and demanding separate political organization. Because modern nations tend toward statehood, projects for a Greater Croatia or the Bohemian Crown appear to him as threats to Austrian cohesion. Conversely, a state without national solidarity risks maintaining its population’s unity through external force alone. Opposition to Taaffe’s government thus becomes, in Sax’s presentation, a duty to both fatherland and dynasty.
The speech’s second movement contrasts a constitutive nationality of “evolution” with a dissolving nationality of “involution.” German and Italian unification exemplify the former: solidarity mobilizes sacrifice, coordinates previously scattered energies, and promotes intellectual and material development. Sax acknowledges Czech achievements in literature, education, and contributions to the National Theatre. Nevertheless, he subordinates these concessions to a sweeping indictment of Slavic agitation.
His examples range from hostile journalism and allegedly partisan juries to clerical and educational activism, parliamentary discipline, rival associations, and pressure over children’s schooling. These are accusations within an electoral polemic, not independently established findings. Their common function is to portray national organization as replacing individual judgment and practical cooperation with compulsory allegiance. Sax’s complaint about Czech being spoken in mixed company also reveals how readily his ostensibly inclusive framework treats German linguistic predominance as normal sociability.
The social cost is the diversion of talent and institutional energy into mutual obstruction:
Die Folge ist die Stagnation in allen gesellschaftlichen Zuständen und dem Staatsleben; weil der beschränkte nationale Vortheil den Leuten höher steht, als der des Allgemeinen.
English translation: The consequence is stagnation throughout social conditions and the life of the state, because people place narrow national advantage above the advantage of the whole.
Even administrative reform and expanded autonomy become unacceptable to him when they would enlarge the arena of national conflict. His image of a locomotive exhausting its resources on greased rails condenses this diagnosis: intense activity produces no collective advance while neighbouring states progress.
The conclusion converts this defence of integration into a justification for German national mobilization:
Jetzt gilt es also für uns Deutsche, lediglich die Wahrung unseres Volksthumes in seinem gliedlichen Stande anzustreben, uns vor Verdrängung zu schützen und unser Ideal einer politischen Nationalität einstweilen an den Nagel zu hängen.
English translation: What matters now, therefore, is for us Germans solely to strive to preserve our peoplehood in its position as a constituent part, to protect ourselves against displacement, and temporarily to hang up our ideal of a political nationality.
Sax describes the change as compelled self-defence, transferring responsibility to opponents and the government. Yet he also anticipates electoral gains among Alpine peasants previously closer to clerical politics. The address is therefore significant both as a theory of supra-ethnic political solidarity and as an argument legitimating its suspension. Its civilizational hierarchy permits German defensive nationalism to appear as the preservation of common cultural goods, while rival national claims are classified as regression.
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