“The Republican Left in Danubian Europe, 1900–1948:
A Comparative History of Political Thought”

Cody James Inglis
Doctoral School of History
Central European University
Budapest/Vienna

For a mix of different institutional, political, and historiographic reasons, there exists very little interpretive or exegetical research on republicanism as a stream of modern political and civic thought in Central and Southeastern Europe. Mentions of republican elements in the thought of various intellectuals from this part of Europe are made in passing and infrequently, even when they certainly hew with other European cases. By contrast, the literature on the intellectual histories of republicanism in the French, German, and British cases is quite well developed. Certainly, the exception in Central Europe is the Polish case, which has an expanding, rich, high-quality body of literature on offer. My own focus rather lies on the territories which made up the dualist Habsburg state and its successors, what I will call “Danubian Europe.” In short, there have not been enough analyses of (or deeper mining for) shared intellectual histories of republicanism in the region. In part, this is due to the quite diverse linguistic, constitutional-legal, and state-administrative contexts which composed the Habsburg Empire, its immediate neighbors—particularly the Principality of Serbia—and their successor states. Making sense of the fundamental political, economic, and social histories of this part of Europe has meant that this topic has only too rarely been the subject of intellectual histories (or histories of political thought in particular).

In this lecture, I aim to give a comparative study of modern republican thought as it was articulated by the political Left in Danubian Europe between the turn of the twentieth century and the post-Second World War reconstruction period (1900–1948). While Romania and Bulgaria are not part of my study—though should certainly be included in this “Danubian” regional concept—I’d like to note that republican politics were present in these cases as well, most prominently in various socialist and agrarian groupings. Rather, I focus on the German, Hungarian, Slovene, and Serbo-Croatian linguistic contexts, which often fell across internal or external state-administrative boundaries, which in turn shifted dramatically during the period in question. Substantively, I will examine a few debates and personalities, creating rather a set of portraits of various size, where articulations of republican political thought on the political Left can be seen most clearly. In part, this talk is an attempt to show just how resilient republican ideas were as they made their way across the temporal thresholds typically set by events in the social, political, or economic histories of the region. But primarily it will be a way to demonstrate that Danubian Europe has much to offer existing international historiography on the topic, showing that republicanism here was a full part of a European discourse which is slowly being reconstructed.

Cody James Inglis (*1993, Phoenix, Arizona) is a Doctoral Candidate in Comparative History at Central European University. His research interests include the history of left-wing political thought in Central and Southeastern Europe between 1848 and 1948, the history of key socio-political concepts in the region, the history of historiography, and a further methodological interest in relating intellectual and social history more closely to one another. His dissertation, entitled “The Republican Left in Danubian Europe, 1900–1948: A Comparative History of Political Thought,” is a multilingual regional study of left-wing republicanism in the late Habsburg Empire and its successor states from the fin-de-siècle through the post-Second World War reconstruction period. Currently, he is employed as Junior Researcher on the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project “Negotiating post-imperial transitions,” hosted by the Institute of Political History (Politikatörténeti Intézet) in Budapest. There, he is a co-leader of the project’s fourth work package, entitled “Discourses of Transition.”