Zensus und Ethnizität

Censuses might be defined as distractions from lived life that annoy people at regular if infrequent intervals or as objects of study that even the best writers struggle to make interesting. Yet they rank among the major encounters between a state and its inhabitants—in theory, all of them, at the same time. And the ever-evolving social categories that underpin census questions affect myriad determinations of who gets what. In other words, censuses are politically very important. Wolfgang Göderle’s book, Census and Ethnicity, centres on the Austrian (as opposed to Hungarian) half of the Habsburg Monarchy between the revolutions of 1848 and the First World War, when censuses and other forms of scientific knowledge counted for more and more in the formulation of public policy. Officials and scholars of that country contributed significantly to the advancement of administrative statistics, especially in the pioneering years of the 1850s through the 1870s, when multiple European states coordinated and refined their census questions and techniques. Polyglot Austria–Hungary counted as a leading laboratory for polling language. Another factor making the Habsburg Monarchy a fine case through which to make sense of censuses is its well-developed scholarly literature. Emil Brix’s Die Umgangssprachen in Altösterreich zwischen Agitation und Assimilation (Vienna, 1982), for example, is a paragon of archival research and of analysis, still fresh today with its constructivist approach to race or nationality, or what Göderle, using a more modern term, calls ethnicity.

Census · Citizenship · Ethnic group · Immigration · Monarchy · Nationality · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · State (computer science) · Central European national history · Demography · European history and politics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law