1st Edition
Debordering and Rebordering Central and South Eastern Europe after the First World War
This book addresses practices of bordering, debordering and rebordering on the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy after state borders had been remapped on the negotiation tables of the Paris Peace Treaties following the First World War.
As life in borderlands did not correspond to the peaceful Europe articulated in the Paris Treaties, a multitude of (un)foreseen complications followed the drawing of borders and states. The chapters in this book include new case studies on the creation, centralization or peripheralization of border regions, such as Subcarpathian Rus, Vojvodina, Banat and the Carpathian Mountains; on border zones such as the Czechoslovakian harbour in Germany; and on cross-border activities. The book shows how disputes over national identities and ethnic minorities, as well as other factors such as the economic consequences of the new state borders, appeared on the interwar political agenda and coloured the lives of borderland inhabitants. The contributions demonstrate the practices of borderland inhabitants in the establishment, functioning, disorganization or ultimate breakdown of some of the newly created interwar nation-states.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, European Review of History.
Introduction – The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: border making and its consequences
Machteld Venken
1. Unruly borderlands: border-making, peripheralization and layered regionalism in post-First World War Maramureș and the Banat
Gábor Egry
2. New state borders and (dis)loyalties to Czechoslovakia in Subcarpathian Rus, 1919–25
Stanislav Holubec
3. The new borders as local economic possibility? The case of post-1920 Hungary
Péter Bencsik
4. The role of history and geography teaching in the building of national identity in interwar Vojvodina
Dragica Koljanin, Biljana Šimunović-Bešlin and Paulina Čović
5. Bohemia by the sea: establishing a Czechoslovak port in Hamburg in the interwar period
Sarah Lemmen
6. The traitorous national periphery: the legacy of identity politics of imperial Hungary in a new eastern metropolis of Czechoslovakia – Košice/Kassa
Ondrej Ficeri
7. Reinforcing the border, reconfiguring identities: Polish initiatives in the Carpathians in the interwar period
Patrice M. Dabrowski
Biography
Machteld Venken is Professor of Contemporary Transnational History at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) of the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg. Her research interests are transnational, transregional and comparative histories of Europe; migration and borderlands; oral history; the history of families and children; and citizen science.
Steen Bo Frandsen is Professor at the Centre for Border Region Studies at the Department of Political Science at the University of Southern Denmark, Denmark. A regional perspective on history, culture and societies characterizes his research. His approach questions national traditions and their interpretation of political, cultural or economic relations that typically originate from a simplified centre-periphery relation.
