Cooperative Empires: Provincial Initiatives in Imperial Austria (original) (raw)

Austrian History Yearbook, 2016

Abstract

The title“CooperativeEmpires”may seem contradictory—or even provocative—to many historians of empire. It is widely believed that one of the defining characteristics of an empire is the presence of little or no cooperation among its individual provinces. More than that: there is a deliberate separation between the provinces that can go so far as to become a prohibition against cooperation. In theory, at least, each province must communicate with the imperial center, but not with other provinces. This contradiction between empire and cooperation is neatly illustrated by a true family story. The story is set in the 1970s in Prague, on the western edge of that space that historians today describe as the Soviet Empire. My mother, an East German from East Berlin, was then working as an interpreter in Prague. She was sitting on the tram on the way to visit some Czech friends who shared her love of jazz music. A queasy feeling began to come over her as she recalled that she was in fact forb...

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