‘National indifference’ in the Baltic territories? A critical assessment

ABSTRACT

Tara Zahra maintains in her article ‘Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis’ that many people in the early twentieth century were indifferent to the call of the national movements or oscillated between different national belongings. While finding Zahra’s perspective relevant, this article criticizes the choice of her central analytic concept, ‘national indifference,’ and also questions the absence of an integrated gender perspective. Finally, the article queries the general applicability of her theoretical approach. While useful in the analysis of demotic national movements, it is considerably less so when studying elite minority groups. This becomes evident when Zahra’s theoretical perspective is applied to the Baltic Germans.

KEYWORDS:

• Baltic Germans
• national indifference
• minority politics
• gender
• cultural autonomy
• national movement
• Latvians

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Per Bolin

Per Bolin is a Professor of History at Södertörn University, Sweden. He received his PhD in History at the University of Lund, Sweden in 1991. Since the late 1990s he has devoted himself to the study of Latvian modern history, particularly on matters connected to national identity and national institutions. He has written extensively on the creation of the national Latvian university in Riga, Latvijas Universitāte, in the 1920s and 30s, summarized in his recent monograph Between National and Academic Agendas: Ethnic Policies and ‘National Disciplines’ at the University of Latvia, 1919–1940 (2012). His most recent article on this topic is, “The Fall of Empire and the Emergence of New Elites: Creating a National Academic Elite at the University of Latvia, 1919–1922”, in Nordost-Archiv. Zeitschrift für Regionalgeschichte 23 (2015), pp. 67–85. Between 2010 and 2013 Bolin was research leader at CBEES, the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, and is presently Head of Department and a CBEES Associate.

Christina Douglas

Christina Douglas is Assistant Professor of History at Södertörn University, Sweden. She was awarded her PhD in History at the University of Lund, Sweden in 2011. Her dissertation Kärlek per korrespondens. Två förlovade par under andra hälften av 1800-talet. [Loving through Letters. Two Engaged Couples during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century] was published in 2011. Her fields of scholarly interests are primarily gender studies and the history of the Baltic territories in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. She is presently doing research on the Baltic German women’s movement in the early 20^th century in her project “Paradox at Road’s End. The Simultaneous Fall of the Baltic German Elite and the Emancipation of its Women, 1905–1939”. The first results have recently been published: “A Baltic German Women’s Movement. The German Women’s League in Riga Preserving ‘Germandom’ in Democratic Latvia, 1919–1934” in Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung 64 (2015), pp. 218–238.