Raul Cârstocea, ‘Book Review: Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen 
(eds.), The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism 

in Europe’, in: Studies on National Movements 7 (2021) 

Book Review 

 

Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen (eds.), The Matica and 
Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe. 

Leiden: Brill, 2020, xvi+367 pp.,  

ISBN 978-90-04-42374-9 

 

 

In the over-theorised field of nationalism studies, recent research that 

has paid close empirical attention to the fine grain of the historical record 

has been a very welcome addition. Such studies have revealed the story 

of nationalism across the long nineteenth century as a profoundly 

uneven one, varying according to geographical location, existing power 

structures and the related political opportunities available for national 

mobilisation, competing political agendas, etc. Drawing also on an 

‘imperial turn’ that revised earlier accounts of empires, especially those 

in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, as increasingly obsolete 

entities in the nineteenth century, such research has been very helpful in 

complicating accounts of nationalism and nation-building that the 

dominant ‘modernist’ paradigm had simplified. The attention to detail 

has helped debunk teleological narratives that conferred a certain 

inevitability to nationalism and the nation-state form of statal 

organisation, as well as a developmental paradigm centred on the 

struggle for emancipation, progress, and their eventual triumph.  



Studies on National Movements 7 (2021) | Book Review 

| 2 Raul Cârstocea 

If the now extensive literature on national indifference has shown the 

limits of national mobilisation by looking at people who were not swayed 

by nationalist rhetoric and at the numerous and fluid modes of (self)-

identification that defied fixed notions of (national) identity, the present 

volume reveals the complexity of nationalism while focusing on the very 

people for whom the nation was all-important. It does so, as Joep 

Leerssen emphasises in the Introduction, by drawing attention to the 

intricacies of the institutional aspects of national mobilisation, at once 

dependent on and having consequential ramifications into a wide array 

of social, cultural, and political factors. The focus of the volume on 

cultural associations – epitomised by the matice (‘beehives’), a 

prototypical type of such organisation whose scope is shown to have 

overlapped (more or less) with both the area of the Habsburg Empire 

and a number of nationalisms associated with various Slavic groups – 

provides it with much-needed coherence, although this can be at times 

less convincing in the chapters going ‘beyond’ the matica form itself. 

Considering the two together is however very important, and not just for 

expanding the (impressive) geographical range of the volume, but also 

for exposing significant divergences that prompt the reader to consider 

the complexity, or ‘vexed calibration between the translational and the 

situational’ (p. 8) dimensions of such transnational phenomena. In other 

words, if the chapters dealing with matice point at transfer and 

translation of a specific institutional form from the original Matica srpska 

(Serbian beehive), those exploring the ‘beyond’ are rather cases of 

situational parallels arising in widely different political and cultural 

contexts.     

Following an excellent first chapter authored by Zsuzsanna Varga on the 

Buda University Press that acted as the logistical framework for several 

movements of national awakening, including the original Matica srpska, 

and which provides some useful transnational context, the structure of 

the volume follows for the most part the title. Chapters on the various 



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national matice are grouped in its first part, while the second deals with 

the ‘beyond’, in the shape of similar (but not quite the same) cultural 

institutions in Western Europe and the Romanov Empire. Considering 

this structure, the placing of the Galician-Ruthenian Matica (Chapter 14, 

by Iryna Orlevych) in the second part of the volume appears a rather odd 

editorial choice, at least to this reader. As its name suggests, this 

constitutes a rather typical matica institution established in the 

Habsburg province of Galicia and ‘modelled on other Slavic Maticas’ (p. 

319), and thus very much a translational case that seems stranded 

between two articles dealing with cultural associations in the Romanov 

Empire, a very different, and considerably more repressive political 

context than the Habsburg one. In turn, the glaring absence of a chapter 

devoted to the first such cultural association and the model for the 

subsequent matice appears regrettable, with the Matica srpska covered 

only briefly – although in very nuanced manner for such a short 

presentation – in a subsection of Varga’s chapter on the Buda Press.   

As is often the case with edited volumes, the chapters vary widely in 

terms of foci, level of detail provided, and the degree of critical approach 

to the subject at hand. The very good chapter on the Slovenian Matica by 

Marijan Dović and the rich and insightful analysis of the interplay of 

regional and territorial factors with nationalising efforts and 

transnational entanglements in the case of the Dalmatian/Croatian 

Matica by Daniel Baric are both critical of the self-referential tendencies 

in both the productions and the historiography of the matice (pp. 113-

114, 123). Such a critical perspective appears to be completely lacking in 

the chapter on the Czech Matica by Magdaléla Pokorná, which, styled 

more as an essay, seems to unreflexively reproduce the self-aggrandising 

triumphalist narrative projected by the institution itself. A potentially 

very interesting chapter by Liljana Gushevska on Macedonian societies 

in the complex setting provided by the ‘Macedonian Question’ falls short 

of the opportunity for critical engagement with the intricacies of 



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| 4 Raul Cârstocea 

competing claims to ‘Macedonia’ in the 1890s and falls back instead on 

essentialist tropes of national struggle (of a putative ‘Macedonian nation’ 

whose existence is questionable during the respective period) against 

‘foreign’ (Bulgarian or Serbian) ‘propaganda’.  

Such simplistic narratives can be contrasted with the exquisitely 

nuanced and reflexive approach of Miloš Řezník, whose excellent chapter 

on the Sorbian maticas in Lusatia and the Czech Opavian Matice in 

Austrian Silesia is the most compelling of the first part of the volume. The 

chapter shows in great detail the complexity of such institutions in 

cultural spaces much smaller than even the ‘small nations’ that the 

volume, following Miroslav Hroch, mostly focuses on. It also brings to the 

fore the ‘disunity’ engendered within the Sorbian movement ‘by 

linguistic, traditional, and confessional differences’ (pp. 83-84), 

eventually leading to the creation of a separate Lower Sorbian Matica 

(Mašica Serbska). The comparative perspective between the Sorbian and 

the Czech case, and of both with other regional (Moravian) and national 

(Czech) matice provides further nuance, drawing attention to the 

‘differing forms of regionality’ (p. 82) they expressed. These were 

dependent on internal factors (such as the social composition of the 

respective movements) as well as external ones (the political 

opportunity structures available), while varying also according to the 

different influences they were exposed to. In turn, this diversity of the 

types of regionalisation involved is employed to draw conclusions of 

broader validity for the understanding of the relationship ‘between 

nationality (ethnicity) and territoriality (regionality) [that] can be 

considered as characteristic of the role of regions as a mediatory “foil” of 

nationality and vice versa’, and to argue that ‘it was this mediation that 

made the incorporation of abstract national categories into the social 

and cultural discourse of regional or local communities possible’ (p. 79). 

The insights we can draw from Miloš Řezník’s chapter are in many ways 

similar to those that can be inferred from the volume as a whole, 



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especially when factoring in the case studies that refer to other cases of 

cultural associations than the matica type, i.e., those of ‘small’ 

national/regional movements in Western Europe and the Romanov 

Empire. As with the matice, we encounter intersections and 

entanglements between multiple reference points, from sub-national 

through national to supra-national ones, with the importance of the – 

still under-researched – pan-movements coming to the fore. Both the co-

existence of these different reference points and the tensions between 

them help us complicate a too-straightforward narrative of nationalism 

where a particular territorial-cultural unit, ‘the nation’, is somewhat 

naturalised as either the exclusive or at the very least the most viable 

one. We are also exposed to the asymmetrical encounter and occasional 

confrontation of ‘small’ or ‘minority’ nationalisms, regionalisms, or 

otherwise cultural ‘-isms’ with better established, ‘majority’ nation-

building projects – from the Galician case analysed by Xosé M. Núñez 

Seixas and Alfonso Iglesias Amorín, through the Welsh one presented in 

great detail by Marion Löffler, to the extraordinarily rich story of the 

‘Félibrige, or the Impossible Occitan Nation’ offered by Philippe Martel.  

The diversity of cases covered in the second part of the volume highlight 

the importance of political context in shaping the nature and activities of 

cultural associations. These range from the favourable one in Dutch-

speaking regions, presented by Jan Rock, where the Habsburg 

administration established an Imperial Academy in Brussels as early as 

1772; through the highly politicised context in Ireland analysed by 

Roisín Higgins, where such cultural associations had to grapple not only 

with imperial authorities but also with salient – and partly competing – 

nationalist political agendas; to the repressive political regime in the 

Romanov Empire, itself played out differentially in the Baltic provinces 

explored by Jörg Hackmann and the Tatar cultural and educational 

organisations and charities examined by Diliara M. Usmanova. Not only 

is there a striking chronological difference of more than a century 



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| 6 Raul Cârstocea 

between the beginnings of such cultural mobilisation in the Habsburg 

Netherlands and the two cases in the Romanov Empire, but the cases 

show how the divergent political contexts responsible for this difference 

also influenced decisively the forms such associations eventually took. 

The stories are further complicated by internal divisions, whether they 

were over the nature of the activities, with cultural activists confronting 

those in favour of more politically militant and even violent action in 

Ireland, based on competing nationalisms as in the Baltic states, where 

Latvian and Estonian activists vied with German ones while all of them 

had to engage with the Russification policies of the Romanov Empire, or 

between more progressive and more conservative activists in the case of 

Tatar organisations.  

As with Miloš Řezník’s contribution in the section on the matice, Philippe 

Martel’s excellent chapter provides a sophisticated analysis covering all 

the intricacies associated with the activity of cultural associations that 

the volume focuses on, and it does so by exploring the microcosm of the 

Félibrige, the main institution promoting the attempts at an Occitan 

revival in nineteenth-century France. Showcasing an example of failed 

national mobilisation, Martel’s chapter is exemplary in providing an 

illuminating comparative context spanning national movements across 

Europe, doubled by detailed analysis of the social composition of the 

Félibrige and of the effects of an uneven process of urbanisation on the 

geographical distribution of the movement. A transnational outlook that 

crosses ‘national’ boundaries with the discovery of the links between 

Occitan and Catalan confers the analysis ‘spatial amplitude’ rendering it 

‘no longer a provincial problem, but something far broader’ (p. 191). A 

keen eye for divisions along the lines of class and for patterns of social 

mobility whereby many of the Occitan activists sought their recognition 

in the French capital rather than the ‘Midi’ allows accounting for the 

paradoxes of a national movement on behalf of an Occitan-speaking 

population that it failed to reach. The politics of the respective activists 



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are given due attention, from an initial alignment with the Ancien Régime 

(more visible though for Breton or Basque) to the diversity of political 

positions that could be encountered within its ranks at the end of the 

century, from the notions of direct democracy espoused by the 

Communard Louis-Xavier de Ricard to the reactionary and later far-right 

politics of Charles Maurras. The typical ‘ingredients’ of nation-building – 

‘a proper language with a rich literary heritage, and a territory, an 

ancient province with long-established historical boundaries’ (p. 200) – 

are shown to be present in the Occitan case, but not sufficient for large-

scale mobilisation, given the presence and strength of a not so much 

competing as over-arching nationalism, the majority French one, and the 

absence of a specific social dynamic that would have rendered the 

emerging middle class losers rather than winners of France’s economic 

modernisation. All of these insights provide richness and depth to our 

understanding of nationalism and its protean character, able to 

accommodate left- and right-wing politics, and to the importance of a 

confrontational context (or the absence thereof in the Occitan case), 

itself shaped by class dynamics as much as by cultural or religious 

differences.  

Throughout the volume, despite the diversity of the cases it covers, the 

role of religion appears all-important, just as many of the cultural 

activists are revealed to be men of the cloth. The inclusion of a chapter 

on Tatar organisations is all the more useful along these lines, as it shows 

this pattern to not be limited to the different Christian denominations, 

but present within Islam as well. Against prevailing notions of 

nationalism accompanying processes of secularisation and the decline of 

religion (pivotal for example to Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined 

communities’), this calls for renewed attention to the importance of 

religion, understood as a dynamic factor fusing with national 

mobilisation rather than a static and increasingly obsolete contestant in 

terms of communities’ primary allegiance. Long recognised to have 



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| 8 Raul Cârstocea 

played a role in many national identities, religion is shown in this volume 

to be more than a cause for confrontation associated with confessional 

differences, with cases such as that of the Slovak matica analysed by 

Benjamin Bossaert and Dagmar Kročanová exposing how ‘the initiative 

of forming a literary society was taken first by the Catholics, then by the 

Protestants, and sometimes they worked together’ (p. 58). Such cases of 

inter-confessional cooperation are in need of more attention, as is the 

role played by clergy in the development and spread of nationalist ideas. 

Rather than the static image of religion as a cultural resource nationalism 

could draw on, or as a model for nationalism as ‘political religion’, 

scholars of nationalism would do well to factor in the active role it played 

in national mobilisation in conjunction with a process of secularisation 

that was highly uneven – not just geographically, but also according to 

social class and the urban/rural divide – and quite questionable for some 

spaces (e.g., nineteenth-century Eastern and South-Eastern Europe).   

Another common feature that comes through from the cases covered in 

the volume is that of the two main aims of the matice and similar 

institutions elsewhere. Scholarly pursuits related to the ‘study of history, 

language (including spelling), and literature’ (p. 204) were accompanied 

by campaigns to spread national culture among the ‘masses’ through 

affordable publications, as well as to improve literacy and eventually to 

educate new national elites, by providing stipends to students, for 

example. As many of the chapters in the volume reveal, these different 

aims were not always in tune and their co-existence could be less than 

harmonious, just as the actors associated primarily with one or the other 

could themselves be at odds. Alongside the seemingly successful 

National Eisteddfod of Wales which appears to have combined both, and 

the many interesting hybrid institutions (literary competitions and 

prizes, cultural festivals), we encounter many cases where cultural 

activists failed to reach their intended audience, or where the dominance 

of scholarly pursuits hampered efforts at popularisation. In turn, this 



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hints at the ambivalence of nationalism itself, where projects of social 

emancipation coexisted, often uneasily, with the attempts to canonise a 

suitable high culture and national history.  

The fact that most of the chapters explicitly refer to Miroslav Hroch’s 

paradigm is salutary not only for providing an additional layer of 

coherence to a volume that otherwise covers a wide array of cases in very 

diverse settings, but also due to the attention it devotes to the social 

factors at play in the passage from one phase of national mobilisation to 

another. In a volume dealing with cultural associations, this is a useful 

reminder of the broader social context, acting as a (quasi)-constant 

corrective to ‘culturalist’ interpretations focusing almost exclusively on 

elites. The attention to ideas of ‘Slavic reciprocity’ and the essential role 

of pan-Slavism in engendering and bolstering different nationalisms 

provide another unifying factor, in this case limited to the chapters 

dealing with matice institutions proper. The insightful afterword by 

Alexei Miller places the matice (but not the other cultural associations 

covered in the volume) in yet another important context, that of imperial 

studies, showing how inter-imperial rivalry as much as internal 

transformations within empires (especially of the Habsburg after the 

Ausgleich, but also of the Romanov after 1905) influenced the 

trajectories of ‘small’ nationalisms therein. Miller answers the important 

question of why the matice ‘developed primarily in the Habsburg 

Empire’ (p. 357), which the respective chapters mostly eschewed, and 

the answer is yet another indication of how imperial policies could have 

unintended consequences that ended up undermining the imperial 

administration, serving ‘rather to trigger nationalist mobilization than to 

promote reconciliation’ (p. 361). It would have been interesting if the 

eminent imperial studies scholar that is Alexei Miller had brought his 

vast expertise to bear on the relationship of the cases of cultural 

mobilisation in Western Europe presented in the volume with their 

respective imperial settings. Similarly, the insight of reading the matice 



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| 10 Raul Cârstocea 

and similar cultural associations elsewhere within the framework of 

centre-periphery relations is an important one, holding the promise of a 

history of peripheral nationalisms in Europe that would manage to 

bridge a still-persistent East/West divide.   

To sum up, this is an important volume, rich in detail and coherent 

enough despite the diversity of the case studies it covers to make a 

valuable contribution to nationalism studies, revealing a European 

dimension to the emergence of cultural associations with national 

agendas during the long nineteenth century. An interesting read for 

historians, with individual contributions highlighting the complexity of 

what are typically seen as the prototypical institutions promoting 

cultural nationalism, the many meaningful insights the volume provides 

might be slightly under-theorised for other scholars working on 

nationalism. While some of the chapters themselves emphasise the 

mutual influences and contacts between such institutions, as well as 

engaging in interesting comparisons, and while the case studies are 

framed by excellent introductory and concluding considerations about 

the transnational and inter-imperial contexts in which these associations 

emerged, some proper conclusions are still lacking. These could have 

been brought out more and rendered more relevant for nationalism 

studies and related fields, as I believe they are. More direct editorial 

intervention could have been useful here, as it would have been for 

providing consistency within the volume, where some chapters, for 

example, needed better language editing. Beyond such technical 

considerations, the fact that both the introduction and afterword are 

written by guest scholars, with no general commentary offered by the 

two volume editors, appears as a shortcoming, despite the considerable 

effort that must have gone into assembling such a rich collection. The 

interested reader will find a lot of valuable, thoroughly researched 

material within the pages of this volume, as well as inspiring insights of 

broader validity than the respective case studies. To do so, however, she 



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will have to dig deep into the individual contributions, with little 

guidance from the volume editors; perhaps this review will be of some 

help toward that.  

Raul Cârstocea  

University of Leicester