Objectivising national identity: The introduction of national registers in the late Habsburg Empire.

Western societies over the last few decades have seen an increased interest in questions of group belonging and group identities, including ethno‐national groups. According to essentialising or constructivist paradigms, belonging to a national group is commonly conceptualised in the range of objective versus subjective criteria, where objective entails ascription and subjective, self‐identification. This paper suggests disentangling the paired dimensions—objective and other‐classification versus subjective and self‐classification—by analysing the late Habsburg Empire. I argue that the introduction of national registers in the new provincial constitutions and electoral laws of Moravia, Bukovina and Galicia accelerated an objective understanding of nationality and increasingly favoured other‐classification over self‐classification in cases where national belonging had become an administrative category. Yet, to do justice to the individual's subjective feelings, authorities were supposed to investigate objectively a citizen's subjective identification—a procedure that can be termed "objectivisation." Such objectivising procedures thus reconciled an individual's subjective identification with an increasingly objective understanding of nationality by developing guidelines on how classification by others should proceed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]