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This article addresses the divided memory and contested meaning of the Great War in interwar Czechoslovakia. Focusing on the legacy of a loose and short-lived movement of army deserters called 'Green Cadres' that appeared in 1918, it suggests that the Czechoslovak nation building project faced challenges not only from sizable ethnic minorities within the fledgling state, but also from the restive Czech peasantry. As elsewhere in East Central Europe, many peasants regarded the Green Cadres as liberators and representatives of a more radical, rural oriented national revolution. These unfulfilled hopes resonated through the interwar period. This article thus sheds light on an important social and cultural fault line that has been neglected in histories of the world wars in Europe.

By 1911 it was clear that multiethnic Austrian Social Democracy could no longer resist the currents of ethnic nationalism that had already fragmented most of the late Habsburg political scene. The exit that year of most Czech Social Democrats to form their own party, along with Austrian Germans' insensitive reactions, signaled that workers were not immune to nationalism. The relevant historical literature has either viewed workers' nationalism as the product of elite manipulation and "bourgeois" influence, or, more recently, has questioned the extent to which nationalism actually resonated with ordinary people at society's grassroots. Jakub Benes'š article attempts to avoid the oversimplifications of both approaches and calls for more precise engagement with workers' own discourse. To this end, it highlights an important dimension of working-class political culture—socialist popular literature—in which proletarian authors articulated increasingly ethnic nationalist positions of a class-specific sort. Examining this influential but neglected genre illuminates how and under what circumstances workers found meaning in nationalism.

This work tells the story of how nationalism spread among industrial workers in central Europe in the twentieth century, addressing the far-reaching effects, including the democratization of Austrian politics, the collapse of internationalist socialist solidarity before World War I, and the twentieth-century triumph of Social Democracy in much of Europe

Internationalist socialism and ethnic nationalism are usually thought of as polar opposites. But for the millions of men and women who made Social Democracy into twentieth-century Europe's most potent political force, they were often mutually reinforcing. 'Workers and Nationalism' explains this apparent paradox by looking at the history of the Social Democratic workers' movement in Habsburg Austria, which was built on the mobilization of German and Czech workers in the Empire's rapidly industrializing regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Lower Austria. Jakub Benes takes the history of socialism out of the realm of theoretical and parliamentary debates and into the streets, city squares, pubs, and clubs of a vibrant but precarious multi-ethnic society. He reveals how ordinary workers became increasingly nationalist as they came to believe that they were the genuine representatives of their ethnic national communities. Their successful campaign to democratize parliamentary elections in 1905-1907 accelerated such thinking rapidly. It also split Social Democracy apart by 1911. Then, during the First World War, many Czech and German workers embraced revolutionary radicalism, alienating them from the regime-friendly socialist leadership. Benes's study is the first to show the profound connection between major political events and the rich culture of the Austrian workers' movement, revealing this culture's utopian and quasi-religious tendencies as well as its left populist nationalism. Based on research in eight archives and numerous libraries in Prague, Vienna, and Brno, 'Workers and Nationalism' fundamentally rethinks the relationship between socialism, nationalism, and democracy in modern Europe