This book is an edited and annotated translation of Karl Renner’s seminal Der Kampf der Österreichischen Nationen um den Staat (1902). Its main topics – national diversity within states and its possible accommodation – occupy the minds of academia and wider society today as much as they did in the multinational Habsburg Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. The central question of this book, i.e. how different nationalities can peacefully – and on equal footing – co-exist within the boundaries of the same state, has not lost its salience over the course of the hundred and twenty-three years since it was written. If anything, it has only grown in importance and urgency across a world where the nation-state remains a prevalent form of political organisation.
