The tolerant policy of the Habsburg authorities towards the Orthodox People of South-eastern Europe: The formation of a new European Idea (18th-early 19th century)

The paper looks at the role of policies of tolerance practices by the Habsburg authorities towards the Orthodox people (Greeks, Serbs, Aromuns) and especially Ottoman and Venetian subjects, and that were meant to give them the possibility to establish their merchant communities in their own lands. The initial purpose of the Habsburg authorities was the encouragement of the commercial activities with the South-Eastern regions and with their people, who were experts in the commerce of products indispensable for the industrial development in the host countries. A series of special measures were taken by the Habsburg authorities to ‘invite’ these people to work on their commercial networks between South and Central-North Europe.

Besides the founding of their commercial and industrial business, the practices of tolerance established by the Habsburg authorities, especially in the framework of Josephinism, gave the immigrants from the South the possibility to establish their communities, to found their schools, to set up printing houses in the host lands (from Trieste to Austria, Hungary, Transylvania as well as in the Danube Principalities), to publish books, newspapers and journals in their own languages and to circulate them in their homelands, to give the possibility to Balkan students to study at the Universities of Vienna, Leipzig, Göttingen and Iena. The scholars, invited to work as teachers in the schools of the community, came in touch with the new cultural movements of the Enlightenment, learning about the political and social progress then sweeping across Europe. The new forms of communication thus established among the various South-Eastern European People in the host lands led to new forms of intellectual cooperation as well. For all Central Europe became the new ‘patria’ and with it the new way for their real participation in the dialogue of the constructing the Idea of Europe, as well as for their way towards the founding of their modern national states. The latter will be the basis of the argument we shall focus on.