Odessa, Vienna and Jerusalem: Zionism, Performative Nationhood and Multinational Empires

Early Zionism did not exist in a world exclusively composed of Wilsonian nation-states. Indeed, the centres of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian branches of the movement were both in multinational empires, as was their favoured destination of Ottoman-ruled Palestine. Rather, Zionism can be seen as a moment in the emergence of a world of nation-states when even the less likely candidates began to accept its assumptions. Prior to the certainty offered by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Zionists by necessity made contingency plans that compromised on both location and status. This meant that despite their religious, mythological and practical significance, they envisaged forms of success even without Palestine and full statehood. The perceived impossibility of the aims of Zionism was also consciously played up by Zionists, most notably the Viennese founder of the movement Theodor Herzl in his utopian novel Altneuland. Furthermore, Zionist writing anticipated various forms of success even without the physical inhabitation of territory, such as improvement in the perception, culture and even physique of Jews. Examining the national demand as a performative utterance as well as a means to acquire its object, this article argues that national demands also serve to constitute national identities and consolidate them, for both insiders and outsiders. Moreover, Herzl and others were aware of the constructed and publicly performative nature of nationhood in the same way we are today, characterising their own project as the construction of a national identity, in part through literature and performance. For performative national demands, as Arendt noted, means and ends are not distinct but are subsumed into momentum within a kind of discursive economy of competing nations, whether on the international stage or within a polity.