The Determination of Nationality in Selected European Countries up to 1938

Abstract

Assessment of the census routine in Cisleithania and after 1918 also in Czechoslovakia requires a comparison with census routines in neighbouring countries. Nationality assessments have been always accompanied by controversies that became a part of a political fight and their results have been often impugned. The study sums up opinions as for relevance and trustworthiness of census routines as they were demonstrated at the time of censuses and also later in journalisms and historiography. The greatest attention has been paid to a situation in Germany and Poland due to a numerous German and Polish minority in the Czechoslovak Republic and also due to the fact that in these countries it was mainly the language that was perceived as the main criterion of the nationality and the nationality did not use to be associated with the state citizenship. We can follow how, gradually, in particular historical conditions the very notion of the nationality was being changed together with criteria perceived as the background of the nationality assessment. Various controversial disproportions, as it seems, were much more evident in Poland or Germany than in Cisleithania or in the interwar Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, it has also turned out that applying of central standpoints upon the situation in much more distant regions would be always precarious, which does not concern the census category only.