Nation-Building and Defeated Trust: Central European Reconstruction from 1866 to WWI
This paper positions World War I into the context of a long-term failure of the liberal-nationalist
“reconstruction” of Central Europe since the late nineteenth century. Observers of the military conflicts
and constitutional reforms of 1866/67 and 1870/71 described the “wars of unification” not just as a
political reordering of Central European borders but also emphasized the modernizing and state-building
aspects of this process. The paper argues that the new states in Germany, Austria and Hungary after 1866
had moderate success in building what a political science concept calls “generalized trust”, for example in
the response to humanitarian crisis, the homogenization and integration of diverse populations, and the
conservation and interpretation of “national heritage.” However, the experiences of the German
industrialist Walther Rathenau in Africa and the Austrian journalist Hermann Bahr in Dalmatia reflect the
failures of state- and trust building in the colonies and peripheries of Central European empires before
1914. At the outbreak of the Great War, the Hungarian painter and officer Béla Zombory-Moldován
described a similar fraying of generalized trust that seeped from the Habsburg periphery to the capital of
Budapest. By using a wider regional and temporal approach, the paper suggests that the project of liberalnationalist
reconstruction in Central Europe suffered its defeat even before the breakdown of the Central
powers in 1918.