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The Romanian Battlefront in World War I. By Glenn E. Torrey. Modern War Studies. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. xvi, 422 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Maps. $39.95, hard bound.

operation, there is little here to nourish views of the "Might-Have-Beens" of Reill's conclusion or clear evidence of a practicable "multi-nationalism." Dall'Ongaro's and Valussi's early pro-Slav sympathies were based on assumptions of their potential contribution to the Italian cause. Tommaseo acknowledged that his vision of ethnic cooperation was a matter of centuries, and Benedetto Croce's criticism of his overblown notion of the role of peripheries in forming nations, based on Dalmatia, Corsica, and Corfu, seems just. The author herself tempers optimism today about a "natural" victory of the "multi-national project" in Europe where despite her subjects' efforts the "seemingly unwise dreams of mono-dimensional nation-states prevailed" (243-44). This formulation raises the issue of the interpretive framework mentioned above. Reill offers no explanation of why multinationalism failed, but her introduction implies an ideological answer reflecting recent historiography's indictment of the nationalist turn in the region. Thus she speaks of the formation of nation states confronting Europe with the "ensuing horrors of denationalizing pogroms, holocausts and forced population transfers" (2) and comments that "in national histories the question of whether the nation should exist has rarely been posed" (4). But twentiethcentury tragedies were surely the product not only of nationalism but of clashes over class, secularization, great power rivalries, and racial ideology, compounded by world war; and it seems to overproblematize the idea of the nation to put it, as often here, in quotation marks. In practice, she shows the ubiquitous attraction of the national idea for her protagonists. The German historian Konrad Clewing has convincingly demonstrated the rational case for popular education in the Slav mother tongue, rather than as hitherto Italian, in a province that had little but its human capital. Not everyone in central Europe fit this linguistic scenario, as research on bilingual cities and border areas shows, but the large majority did. The institutional consequences of this language issue, writ large, are more fruitful in explaining the failure of Habsburg pluralism than ideological approaches with moralistic overtones. Reill's distinction between "mono-dimensional," "exclusionary," and "separate" paths of national development as opposed to "mutual" development "in tandem" is analytically unoperational because of the subjectivity of the terminology. Just one example: Tommaseo accused DalPOngaro of subordinating the separate identity of the Dalmatian Slavs to Italianism while the latter claimed to be operating in the spirit of a multinational Adriatic. In Dalmatia the Catholic-Orthodox divide provided a further social cleavage that did not become seriously politicized until after Reill's period. All her protagonists were Catholic. Reill's book is well worth reading for its lively study of interesting personalities and situations, attractively evoked. My critical comments are directed more at the theoretical influences reflected in her initial Fragestellung than at the substance of her contribution. Regrettably, there is no bibliography.