Forging a Post-Imperial Rural Subject: Strategies of Rural Regeneration in Post-Habsburg Countries between Local State Building and Transnational Philanthropy

Abstract

In the aftermath of the First World War, several empires in the Eurasian borderlands collapsed, including the Habsburg Empire. In its successor states, various actors pursued what this paper calls "strategies of rural regeneration," aiming to transform not merely the countryside but also the bodies and minds of its inhabitants. Indeed, the primary objective of these biopolitical initiatives, as this paper demonstrates, was to create a new, post-imperial rural subject. Although competing visions of this subject reflected divergent political agendas, they uniformly promised that this transformed individual would shed the undesirable legacies of the Habsburg imperial past. These imperial legacies were thus conceptualized as embodied and medicalized, inviting intervention from interdisciplinary networks of experts, including public health specialists influenced by eugenics, engineers, and sociologists. While these efforts were integral to the local state building in the rural areas, they were significantly enabled by and negotiated with transnational philanthropic initiatives. To substantiate this argument, the paper compares four such biopolitical projects in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. By adopting and adapting specialized rural health demonstration areas, promoted and co-funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, these projects aimed to shape post-imperial subjects in rural settings in several distinct ways. By examining and comparing these divergent biopolitical strategies of rural regeneration, this paper sheds new light on the complex interplay between transnational philanthropy and local state-building actors in shaping the post-imperial world