About

This ERC project aims at writing a transnational history of non-territorial autonomy as an intellectual concept with a chequered history across Europe and as an applied policy tool in handling national diversity. 

NTAutonomy explores both the idea of granting non-territorial autonomy to national groups as corporate bodies within a state as well as its travel and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe from the mid-19th century to the present. Relying on a mixture of historiographical methods, we propose to trace:

• the development of theoretical conceptions and political applications of non-territorial autonomy within the Habsburg Empire, by mapping the intellectual networks of its advocates;
• explore the interwar continuities in the development of the idea, its manifestations in policies adopted by governments, as well as its adaptations by diverse, sometimes warring  ideological currents: communist, socialist, liberal, conservative and far right;
•  analyse the treatment of non-territorial autonomy practices in international minority protection through the present day.

Based at the Institute for Eastern European History at the University of Vienna the project is geographically, chronologically and thematically divided into the following sub-projects:

• The late Habsburg Empire (Börries Kuzmany, PI)
• The Kingdom of Hungary (Anna Adorjáni)
• The early Soviet Union and revolutionary Russia (Matthias Battis)
• The Ukrainian People’s Republic (Börries Kuzmany, Yuki Murata)
• The interwar Baltic States (Timo Aava)
• Sudeten Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia (Oskar Mulej)
• International minority protection in the twentieth century (Marina Germane)