Josef Roth, right, with Stefan Zweig in Belgium. 1936. Credit: Imagno / Getty

In his short story, The Bust of the Emperor, the Austrian literary journalist and novelist Joseph Roth commented on the rise of nationalism in the last years of the Habsburg Empire:
“Everyone aligned themselves — whether they wanted to, or merely pretended to want to — with one or other of the many peoples there used to be in the old monarchy. For it had been discovered in the course of the nineteenth century that every individual had to belong to a particular race or nation, if he wanted to be a fully rounded bourgeois individual… All those people who had never been other than Austrians … now began to call themselves part of the Polish, the Czech, the Ukrainian, the Slovenian, the Croatian ‘nation’ — and so on.”
Born in 1894 into a Galician Jewish family and growing up to be a Left-leaning liberal journalist, Roth came to regard the empire of Franz Joseph as the embodiment of a civilised order. Its replacement by self-determining nation-states would not enable individuals to live more freely. Instead, there would be anarchy, a struggle for power and an era of barbaric dictatorship. Writing to Stefan Zweig in 1933, he warned: “We are drifting to great catastrophes … I won’t bet a penny on our lives.”
Roth understood the dangers of identity politics long before the term was invented. What he grasped is not only that societies that secure personal freedom are easily broken. There is an inherent instability in the liberal project that promotes the freedom to shape your own identity as you please.
With all of its faults — including a virulently anti-Semitic mayor in fin-de-siècle Vienna — the Austro-Hungarian Empire allowed its subjects to live with one another without having to define themselves as belonging in any particular group. It was not the Great War alone that killed off the Habsburg realm. Its collapse illustrated a self-defeating logic in liberalism. The pursuit of national self-determination in the disintegrating empire — aided and abetted by the US President, Woodrow Wilson — revealed a fatal contradiction in the liberal understanding of human identity.
For liberals, human beings fashion their identities according to how they choose to think of themselves. Any attempt to obstruct this choice is an assault on freedom. But as Roth knew all too well, human identity is not a unilateral act of self-assertion. It requires recognition by others, and this is a process fraught with difficulties. Not only is recognition sometimes denied — as when demands for nationhood are rejected by existing states. Worse, people find projected onto them identities they do not themselves recognise.
Defining yourself as part of the Polish, Czech or Ukrainian “nation” doesn’t only exclude being a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It means you don’t belong in any of the other nations either. Electing to have an identity for yourself inescapably entails attributing a different identity from other people. Having one’s identity defined by others is rarely auspicious, and during the 20th century was often lethal. What is choice for some, is fate for others.
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