Irina Marin,Contested Frontiers in the Balkans: Ottoman and Habsburg Rivalries in Eastern Europe

Reviewed by: Lucian N. Leustean, Aston University, Birmingham, UK

Irina Marin’s Contested Frontiers in the Balkans: Ottoman and Habsburg Rivalries in Eastern Europe is one of only a few books published in recent years to stir up the reader’s imagination and about the history of Eastern Europe. The book charts the varied past of the Banat of Temesvár in relation to its adjoining countries, Hungary, Serbia and Romania, within a wider Eastern European framework.

For the general public, the Banat of Temesvár is most likely associated with two aspects, namely the city of Timişoara (Temesvár) as the birthplace of the 1989 Romanian Revolution, and as the native place of Herta Müller, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, the region has a wider resonance and, as Irina Marin points out:

The History of Banat is, on a small scale, the history of Central and Eastern Europe with its overlapping imperial rules, population reshuffles, redrawing of boundaries, composite identities, Procrustean nation-states straddling multi-ethnic regions, the onslaught of Communism and its vagaries, and the resuscitation of regionalism within the framework of the European Union. (2)

The book is written for a general readership rather than providing extensive archival data. It comprises 15 chapters whose temporal analytic framework ranges from the ‘Medieval Bans and Banates’ to the ‘War and Democracy: The Banat after 1989’. The material covered is extensive and novel. In particular, the chapters on ‘Habsburg Borderland’, ‘Orthodox Peoples’, ‘The Banat in Yugoslavia’ and ‘The Banat in Romania’ provide unexplored paths for understanding the social and political intricacies of this region. The Banat of Temesvár was an ethnic melting pot that brought together not only Bulgarians, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, Roma, Romanians, Serbs, Slovaks and Germans, but also Italians, French and Spaniards. The very term of ‘banat’ dates back to the emergence of the Slavic frontiers after the dissolution of the Byzantine Empire. The governors of these frontier regions between the Slavic world and the territories inhabited by Hungarians were known as ‘banates’. In Marin’s words, ‘This office was similar to that of the Lords Marcher in medieval England, who guarded the Welsh borders (or Welsh Marches), or the Germanic Margraves in charge of frontier territories, or Marks, in the Holy Roman Empire’ (4).

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Banat came under consecutive Bulgarian, Tatar, Wallachian, and Hungarian rule until the integration of its western part into the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Ottoman rule lasted 164 years until 1716 when Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736) conquered the region and placed it under the Habsburg Crown. The Banat’s strategic significance for the frontiers of the Habsburg Empire was noted in the 1807 Military Border Constitution, at a time when the spread of nationalism and modernization carried conflicting aspirations and allegiances between the Hungarian, Serbian and Romanian communities. Marin’s historical overview analyses under-researched events which shaped the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the 107-day siege of Temesvár in 1848; the unusually extensive development of the Hungarian railway network in the region; the concepts of ‘citizenship’ (Staatsbürgerschaft) and ‘citizen rights’ (Staatsbürgerrecht); the impact of the controversial 1868 Law of Nationalities; the 1919 integration of the south-western part of the Banat to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and most of the remaining part to Greater Romania; the rise of xenophobia in 1930s Romania; the similarities and differences under Yugoslav and Romanian communism; the comparison of ‘the Rise of Milosević and the fall of Ceauşescu’; the place of multi-ethnic Vojvodina in Serbia and of the Romanian Banat in the European Union; and the significance of the post-1989 establishment of the Danube-Kris-Mures-Tisa Euroregion for the future of the Banat.

As Marin concludes the book, ‘The old Banat of Temesvár was carved into being by wars and peace treaties and disappeared off the map in much the same way. With each redrawing of frontiers, old ways of life were disrupted and new ones came into being’ (188). Written in an accessible style, the book is a welcome contribution to the history of Eastern Europe and an excellent introduction to the multifaceted history of the Banat of Temesvár.