Liisa Lail, Creative Curator at the Estonian History Museum.
The theme of the conference — the centenary of the cultural autonomy of the Jewish national minority — directs us to a specific law and the institution born as a result of it. The Estonian Jewish cultural self-government began its activities in the summer of 1926. The aim of my presentation is not to start with this specific institution. Instead, I will try to take a step back and ask: what intellectual and political background made such a solution possible?
In other words, before asking how cultural autonomy functioned in Estonia, we must ask why cultural autonomy as such emerged in late 19th-century and early 20th-century Europe in the first place. Different languages, peoples, and religions have always coexisted side by side and intermingled in Europe. So, why then?
The goals of national movements varied in scope. Some primarily demanded the recognition and more independent organization of their language, education, and cultural life; others linked the national question to autonomy or (ultimately) to political separation and the creation of their own state. Against this backdrop, national diversity became a sharper political issue than before.
Liberal nationalism can perhaps be considered one possible solution of the 19th century. For Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) and many others, the nation was the bearer of political freedom, and the nation-state became the ideal — the nation had to be able to govern itself.
This ideal assumed, at least implicitly, that national self-determination was territorially feasible. However, nations lived intermingled; so-called historical borders did not coincide with linguistic borders, for example, and the autonomy of one nation would have created another minority. What would become of smaller nations? What about those who did not have a clearly definable territory?
This brings us to the question that became particularly acute from the mid-19th century onwards in large multi-ethnic empires: how to govern a multilingual empire? The idea of cultural autonomy began to take shape precisely as an answer to this problem.
To understand its roots, it is important to look back to the final decades of the century before last, to Austria-Hungary. This is not because the idea of cultural autonomy belongs exclusively to the history of the Habsburg monarchy, but because Austria-Hungary (then one of the largest empires in Europe, with approximately 44–48 million people) highlighted the exact problem that cultural autonomy sought to address.
In several regions, nationalities lived intermingled. Dividing the state into national-territorial units would have simply reproduced the same problems on a smaller scale. An example is Bohemia, where acute conflicts were related to the status of the Czech and German languages; the language laws enacted in 1897 meant that the administration had to become bilingual, which in turn led to the so-called Badeni crisis.
A need arose to find a state-structural solution that would allow different nationalities to manage their own cultural life and use their own language, while preserving the integrity of the shared state. The most influential debates on this issue took place from the late 19th century onwards within the Austrian Social Democratic Party. Thus, it is probably no coincidence that one of the most influential ways of thinking about cultural autonomy developed among Austrian Social Democrats.
In these debates, prior to Renner and Bauer, the Slovenian Social Democrat Etbin Kristan must be mentioned. His importance does not lie in creating the most influential treatment of later cultural autonomy, but rather in the fact that he brought the question of national autonomy into party debates even before Renner’s well-known formulation. In 1898, Kristan published an essay on national autonomy, and at the 1899 Brno Congress, he attempted to introduce non-territorial autonomy into the program of the Austrian Social Democrats on behalf of the South Slavic section.
Following Kristan, Karl Renner took center stage in the Austrian Social Democratic debate. Renner's importance lies in the fact that he did not treat the national question merely as a political demand or a general problem of minority rights, but sought to give it a legally and institutionally well-thought-out form.
Karl Renner was born in 1870 in Moravia, in the territory of the modern-day Czech Republic, and studied law in Vienna. He later became one of the most influential authors and politicians dealing with the national question within the Austrian Social Democratic Party. He was a member of parliament during the final decades of the empire, Austria’s first state chancellor after World War I, and Austria’s president after World War II.
Renner’s approach to national autonomy must be understood through the situation in Austria-Hungary. In the Habsburg monarchy, the national question was not merely a matter of cultural recognition or minority rights; it affected the functioning of the state — administration, school organization, the civil service, political representation, and the access of different nationalities to state institutions.
In this situation, Renner’s fundamental question was: how can a multi-ethnic state recognize nationalities without every national demand meaning a new territory, a new border, or the disintegration of the state into national units?
In 1899, Renner published the work "Staat und Nation" ("State and Nation") under the pseudonym Synopticus. In it, he put forward the idea that a nation does not have to be organized solely through territory. A nation could also be a non-territorial, so-called public-law corporation. This meant that a nation would not be a political unit bound only to a land area, but an organized membership within a shared state. In Renner's model, belonging to a national group would be voluntary and based on national self-determination. A person would belong to a national unit not based on where they lived, but based on which national cultural community they identified themselves with.
His work published in 1902 developed this concept further. There, Renner proposed a two-tier state structure:
To explain this idea, Renner drew a parallel with post-religious-war Europe. Multiple confessions could exist on one and the same territory without any single one having absolute, exclusive power in that area. Similarly, nationalities could exist within the same political space as separate cultural corporations. In such a case, national affiliation would not automatically mean territorial separation.
Otto Bauer turned this same vision into a book, binding it more strongly to socialist ideas. Renner and Bauer do not represent conflicting approaches, but rather two different emphases on the same problem. Renner's model gives national autonomy a primarily legal and institutional form. In the same debate, Bauer moves forward to the very concept of the nation, asking why a nation in modern society must be treated as a historically developed cultural collective. For him, a nation is not merely a territory, a state, or a language, but a community of culture and destiny, the preservation of which depends on education, social participation, and the transmission of cultural values.
At the same time, it must be emphasized that Renner and Bauer — both considered Austro-Marxists — did not see their ideas become official state policy in Austria-Hungary. Even within their own party, it did not develop into a universally accepted program.
On a practical level, however, these ideas were tested to some extent, as seen in the so-called 1905 Moravian Compromise or in Bukovina in 1909. These cannot be considered full cultural autonomy, but they utilized national registers, national curiae, and representative mechanisms that at least partially separated national representation from territory. In Moravia, for example, this meant that in addition to social curiae, voters were also divided into Czech and German national registers, and through national representation, attempts were made to ensure the participation of both communities in provincial politics.
In the Russian Empire, the idea of cultural autonomy found perhaps even greater support. Jewish politicians and parties in Russia were particularly active with the idea of non-territorial autonomy. One of the first to propose the idea of autonomy for Jews in the Russian Empire was the historian Simon Dubnow in 1897.
In the Jewish political debates of the Russian Empire, the idea of cultural autonomy gained significant meaning through the Bund. The Bund, founded in Vilnius in 1897 as a socialist party for Jewish workers, included the demand for national-cultural autonomy in its program a few years later, in 1901. At the same time, the meaning of this demand was not yet fully thought out initially. According to Roni Gechtman (Jews and Non-Territorial Autonomy: Political Programmes and Historical Perspectives, Ethnopolitics 2015), the 1901 wording was an early and still insufficiently justified version, the theoretical basis of which Vladimir Medem later tried to develop more clearly.
Medem was the Bund's most important theorist on the national question. His central text was "Social Democracy and the National Question," published in 1904, in which he sought to provide a Marxist justification for the Bund's national program. On one hand, the workers' movement had to be international and could not submit to the logic of nationalism. On the other hand, the situation of Jewish workers in the Russian Empire could not be explained solely through class, as they also experienced linguistic, cultural, and national oppression. Medem's desire was to show that the demand for national-cultural autonomy did not make the Bund a nationalist party, but could instead be a social-democratic response to national inequality.
In Medem's ideal, the state does not belong to one majority nation; instead, citizenship is nationally neutral. This means that a person is a citizen of the state regardless of which nationality they belong to, and the state must not give one nationality a privileged position over others. Medem proceeded from the fact that the nations of Central and Eastern Europe had lived intermingled for centuries and were interconnected economically, politically, and socially. Therefore, he considered dividing into nation-states an artificial solution that would not eliminate the national question but would create new minorities in each new state.
At the same time, Rennerian cultural autonomy ideas also reached Russia. Russian translations of both Bauer and Renner were published by Jewish parties. The idea of cultural autonomy was debated not only by Jewish political circles but also, for example, by Latvian and Georgian national movements, as well as by Russia's Muslims.
As a footnote, it must be mentioned that these ideas naturally found no support among the Bolsheviks. In 1913, Joseph Stalin published the essay "Marxism and the National Question," in which he criticized the Austro-Marxists and argued that national-cultural autonomy does not weaken, but rather strengthens nationalism.
In September 1917, the Congress of the Peoples of Russia took place in Kyiv. Representatives of various national movements, including Estonians, participated in the congress. The restructuring of Russia into a federative state was discussed. The principle was that nations with a clearer historical or territorial area of settlement could have national-territorial autonomy. Estonians participated in the congress, and this was reported in the Estonian press. Previously, the ideas of Renner and Bauer had likely entered the Estonian political thought space via multiple routes, both through original German-language works and Russian translations.
The central idea of non-territorial autonomy is the separation of state and nation. This differed from the logic of the nation-state, which assumed that the nation and the state should overlap as much as possible. In the case of cultural autonomy, the starting point was the opposite: national self-organization does not necessarily have to mean one's own state or a separate territory. Within a shared political state, a nation can receive the competence to organize its own cultural and educational life.
In the Habsburg context, non-territorial autonomy was intended for organizing the entire multi-ethnic state. After the war, however, it began to be seen increasingly as a tool for protecting minorities in new nation-states. Cultural autonomy shifted from an imperial model for resolving the national question into a tool of minority policy for the nation-state.
At the beginning of the presentation, I asked why the idea of cultural autonomy emerged at all and what problem it answered. At the heart of this question was the larger problem of the 19th and early 20th centuries: how to govern a multilingual and multi-ethnic political space so that autonomy would not mean a new border, a new territory, or a separate state every time.
This required three core prerequisites:
The need for cultural autonomy developed in political conditions where nation, state, and territory did not coincide. It was thus particularly visible in multi-ethnic empires, above all in Austria-Hungary, where the ideas of active politicians became perhaps the most influential.
Translated by AI Gemini
