Call For Articles 132
Local Communities in Austria-Hungary and Beyond
Special Issue of Acta Poloniae Historica
Call For Articles
Deadline: 1 September 2024
Changes in the management of the Habsburg Empire and new technologies, expanding the circulation of social communication, accelerated the modernisation processes taking place in Central Europe. It was an area inhabited by various ethnic, national, religious and linguistic communities; they had to rework their modus vivendi and to find their place in complex networks of relations, in the context of the liberalising legal framework of the 1860s in the Austrian part of the monarchy and the tightening grip of the state on the local non-Magyar initiatives in the Hungarian part. Deep and multi-faceted socio-cultural changes were leading to new cumulations of symbolic (and political) power; new groups, termed here as local communities (political, social, religious), were gaining visibility and sought recognition, according to changing configuration of values and integration impulses. We pose the question how the new or redefined communities were formed and managed. We are interested in the local perspective and local reflections of ongoing processes in general, as they have not been sufficiently represented in research on the cultural and socio-political space of the Habsburg monarchy. On the one hand, it is interesting to see how individual actors functioned in the triangle of loyalty, between belonging to a local group (municipality, urban community, etc.), national identity and loyalty to the emperor and the state. On the other hand, their strategies and choices were influenced by the conditions of the individual countries of the monarchy, which are also worth analysing.
We invite papers that address the time frame between the establishment of Austria-Hungary (a longer process that started in the early 1860s and finished in 1867) and the start of the World War Two in 1939, thus encompassing the last decades of the Habsburg Empire, World War One, the interwar period and the fate of the successor states in Central Europe.
We propose the following thematic areas:
❖ networks of contacts between the centres and the periphery
❖ formation and the role of local centres
❖ cooperation and confrontation of old and new elites
❖ civic ethos between the ideas of the state, nation and local community
❖ new local leaders and charismatic personalities
❖ intellectual and economic elites and their role at the local level
❖ communication and language politics from the local perspective.
Contributions are to be submitted by email to Acta Poloniae Historica (
For inquiries, please contact the guest editors of the special issue:
Maciej Falski,
Anna Kobylińska,
Aleksander Łupienko,
