“Österreich wird ewig stehn”: The Continuity and the Change in Hans Kohn’s Thought

Abstract

  This study considers Hans Kohn’s concept of polity. There are two distinct interpretations. Some emphasize his coherent inclination toward a multinational society, where each nation has collective politico-cultural rights. Others insist that, in the 1930s, Kohn accepted a civic-national state model in which political ideas function as the most fundamental tie regardless of national identity, at least institutionally. Scrutinizing his discourse on the Austrian empire, this study concludes that the two theses are not contradictory. Kohn insisted that Austria should have been transformed into a multinational federation based on the idea of cultural autonomy, which he tried to introduce in Palestine until he emigrated to the US in 1934. In the US, however, although Kohn continued to lament that Austria missed out on becoming a multinational federation, he never addressed cultural autonomy in his discussions on that country. Instead, he emphasized the “Austrian Idea,” which he believed could have convinced inhabitants of the need for a supra- and multinational state structure. As long as Kohn kept hinting at the multinational federalization of the Austrian empire, he adhered to the idea of a multinational polity. Rather than cultural autonomy, he adopted an idea (i.e., the Austrian Idea) as a silver bullet, which illustrates that the civic-national state model infiltrated his thought.