Lecture: Firefighters, Gipsy Bands, Peasant Riders, Canteens: East Central European Post-Imperial Local Societies in the World of Nation States 1918–1930

A lecture by Gábor Egry (Institute of History – Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Discussant: Rudolf Kučera (Masaryk Institute – AV ČR)

The end of WWI in East Central Europe brought about similar developments: the collapse of empires and the emergence of nation states. But behind the façade of seemingly uniform transformations and the general tendency of nationalizing in the new states, local societies and micro regions were sometimes less constrained in exerting influence upon the specific conditions of transition than it is presumed according to the overarching narrative of imperial collapse and nation-state building. The imperial past did not vanish without a trace, furthermore, the new entities often operated as mini-empires reviving or retaining people, methods and structures of imperial management of power and population.