National indifference

The concept was originated by scholars of the Bohemian lands, where many inhabitants historically resisted classification as either Czechs or Germans, around 2000.

[1] It was outlined by Tara Zahra in her 2010 paper published in Slavic Review, "Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis".

It also helps to study the resistance of pre-nationalist identities to nationalist activism, usually in cases where either one or multiple nationalism movements attempt to mobilize a population.

[9] Apart from Bohemia, the concept of national indifference has been applied to other Habsburg areas, in addition to the German–French and German–Polish borderlands.

Alternate terms have been proposed by other scholars such as Karsten Brüggemann [de] or Katja Wezel, including "anationalism", "national ambiguity", and "hybridity".

In 1906, Jan Kapica [ pl ] asked, "What is an Upper Silesian? Is he a German, a Pole, a Prussian, simply an Upper Silesian, or simply a Catholic or, perhaps, even just an abstract human being?" [ 9 ]