In recent years, the nature of the Habsburg Empire (or Austria-Hungary) and its foreign policy successes and failures have been dramatically reevaluated. Authors such as Schmitt, Göderle, Callaway, and Judson and prominent works in the secondary literature, including the volume edited by Scheer and Ruthner and the Kakanien Revisited online journal, have paved the way for this revised assessment, which, within the framework of New Imperial History, has modified understandings of the actors, methods, and goals of Austrian foreign policy. This post-colonial approach, which emphasizes the imperial behavior and tendencies towards colonization in Austrian foreign policy, has even yielded significant insights in Hungarian historiography (Tarafás, Varga, Csaplár-Degovics, Egry).

Hirschhausen, one of the most prominent figures of the school of New Imperial History, has claimed that the evolution of a state into an “empire” should not be understood merely as the direct consequence of imperial society and modernization (the modernizing state). Terms such as capitalism and modernization and the economic terminology associated with them should be detached from the interpretation of the empire as a phenomenon. The Ottoman state was in permanent crisis, and preindustrial Tsarist Russia had a similar lifespan as the British Empire. New Imperial History has also challenged the very notion of “Eastern Europe” as a historical concept with the contention that this notion takes refuge in theories of modernization and overestimates the homogenizing effect and historical role of the modern nation state in comparison to the heterogeneous empires.

According to Roger Grigor Suny, empire is an “unjust hierarchy” in which the center rules at the expense of the peripheries (regardless of the competing definitions of the latter). According to Osterhammel’s “negative” definition, the empire is a large, multiethnic, multi-confessional, hierarchized political entity the coherence of which is primarily secured by the rule of the élite based on coercion, administration, internal collaboration, and ideas and symbolics which rest on and encourage a notion of shared identity instead of through political or social homogenization or any equality of civil rights.

What theoretical differences can be observed if the approaches used in and conclusions offered by national history writing are compared to the approaches used by New Imperial History, and where do these two schools overlap? How do the methodologies used in and interpretations offered by imperial research and diplomatic history differ? What are the new findings regarding Austria-Hungary’s behavior in the Balkans from the perspectives of New Imperial History? How has New Imperial History been received among Balkan scholars and Central European authors? We warmly welcome studies focusing on these questions, including theoretical discussions and case studies.

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 November 15, 2021.

Proposals should be submitted to the special editor of the issue by email:

demeter.gabor@abtk.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 February 15, 2022.

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 the 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: https://hunghist.org/call-for-articles