The nineteenth century was characterized by the development of modern national and political movements in Europe, which grew out of the tradition of the French Revolution. In the first half of the 19th century the national idea was echoed in Central and Eastern Europe. These processes were initiated by socioeconomic changes. The crisis of the feudal economy led to the development of the production of goods, the growth of exchange and the emergence of new money markets. Peasants freed from serfdom settled in cities, and the vernacular increasingly heard in Germanized urban centers deepened the process of urban nationalization. In Austria, a country with multiple nationalities, this caused national conflicts, accelerating the formation of modern consciousness among its Slavic peoples.

In the course of these sociopolitical changes, the ideologies of the Enlightenment and Romanticism played important roles. The Enlightenment, proclaiming the equality of all before the law, spread the concept of the nation to different social classes. Romanticism exposed elements of folk culture and brought to light evidence of a marvelous past belonging to nation-states and also stateless nations. The attempt undertaken in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to take a new look at Slavic cultural heritage found support in the philosophy of the German thinker Johann G. Herder, who showed the historic role that Slavs were to play in the future.