New Generations and the Hopes of Empire: Youth Premilitary Training in Early-Twentieth Century Eurasia.

The article examines the emergence and state appropriation of premilitary training programs for male youth in the early twentieth-century Ottoman, Habsburg, and Romanov empires as a strategy to foster patriotism and address military and social anxieties. These initiatives, including organizations like the Ottoman Türk Gücü, Russian Poteshnye Roty, and Habsburg Reichsbund der Jugendwehren und Knabenhorte, aimed to mold boys aged six to nineteen into loyal imperial subjects but largely reinforced the dominance of the empire’s main ethnic groups—Sunni Turks, Orthodox Russians, and Catholic Germans—while exacerbating tensions around national identity and loyalty in multiethnic societies. Although these programs expanded before World War I, they faced organizational challenges, limited effectiveness during the war, and contributed to a crisis in imperial politics of difference by prioritizing nationalist over supranational imperial identities. Post-imperial successor states such as the Soviet Union, republican Turkey, and Austria adapted and transformed these youth mobilization models to serve new political regimes, reflecting continuities in the politicization and militarization of youth across the transition from empire to nation-state.