Authors

Heidi Hein-Kircher¹;  ¹ Martin-Opitz-Library and Ruhr-University, Germany

Discussion

The multi-ethnic cities became important sites of nationalities’ conflict, because of the dense communication structures in the public sphere. Moreover, local governments enhanced the conflict potential through nationalizing politics. Particularly the local government of the autonomous statutory cities led usually by one dominating nationality saw ‘their’ city as a representation of the nation to be. Local politics replaced hence the lacking nation state. Because of that, multi-linguality was a major problem for local government, since the use of a non-dominating language seemed to be a threat and finally a loyalty problem for local government.

Within their broad scope for maneuverer, local governments could develop their own policies towards the local languages of the non-dominating national groups not only with regard to school system run by the city but also with regard to running the services of administration. Acknowledging the interdependencies of language use in local government and the institutions run by local government, the political elites established language policies in order to avoid (ethno-cultural) influence by the ‘other’ and could hence counteract to imperial rule. Local language politics became a tool for securitizing practices and served as a tool for ruling the autonomous city as a small-scale nation state. The presentation discusses language policies and politics from a bottom-up perspective and puts local government in the focus in order to show the rising impact of local government for nationality conflict. It makes clear that the Imperial Law on Local Government provided a particular platform for nationalizing politics. Securitizing politics became one major feature for nation and identity building, often more important than school and cultural politics.

The presentation aims at showing how important securitizing practices and discourses were for national identity building. Herewith, the presentation focusses of Lviv and elaborates the importance of autonomous language politics for local government discussing examples which go beyond school and cultural politics. These politics were legitimized through securitizing discourses which showed that the ethnic ‘other’ was a major threat for one own’s national group within the city. The presentation discusses that the autonomous status provided a particular frame for building and defending a national representation – the local government. In doing so, it shows that historical security studies and the securitization-approach as well as studies on local government provide new insights into the mechanisms of national conflicts and nationalism.