On the 140th Birthday of Otto Bauer (1881-1938)

published in: Walter Baier, Eric Canepa, Haris Golemis, The Radical Left in Europe – Rediscovering Hope. transform! Yearbook 2019, London: Merlin Press, 2019, pp. 73-84.

Eric Hobsbawm deemed it appropriate to recall at the beginning of his study on Nations and Nationalisms ‘the first noteworthy attempt to subject the issue to a dispassionate analysis’: ‘the important and under-appreciated debates among the Marxists of the Second International on what they called the “national question”’ involving ‘the best minds of the international socialist movement  –  and they could boast some of the most brilliant thinkers – [who] tackled this problem: Kautsky and Luxemburg, Otto Bauer and Lenin, to name only a few’.
Luxemburg and Lenin – cosmopolitanism and the unconditional right to form a state made up the two extreme points of an axis around which all theoretical and practical attempts at a solution of the national problems, regardless of the vocabulary they used or use, turned up to the present day. In this regard, with his concept of ‘national-cultural autonomy’ aimed at realising equal national rights while maintaining a multinational state, the Austrian Otto Bauer occupied a middle position.

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