Abstract
Reviewed by: Caitlin E. Murdock, California State University, Long Beach, USA
Anyone seeking to familiarize themselves with the literature on European borderlands between the Rhine and the Urals, the Baltic and the Mediterranean, should read this book. Omer Bartov’s and Eric Weitz’s edited volume is an excellent introduction to the themes and arguments, as well as some of the significant scholars, that have made borderland history a growing field and have opened rich new lines of inquiry in existing national, imperial and regional historiographies. As the volume demonstrates, there is no single definition of borderlands – they are zones of division and of contact, of conflict and of coexistence. In the twentieth century they were sites of unprecedented violence and of unbridled fantasy. But the editors do not allow the diversity of definitions and analytical approaches in the book’s 27 chapters deter them from making this more than a representative collection of essays. Rather, they declare it their ambition to explore how diverse borderland populations in a region defined by the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and their successor states, long managed to coexist and why many of them descended into violence in the first half of the twentieth century.
A mix of local, regional, national and imperial-level studies, these essays show that borderlands became crucial political and demographic territories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries precisely because they were subject to the ambitions of a multitude of actors – states, social movements, nationalists and ordinary citizens – in reshaping the rapidly modernizing German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Empires. Some of those modern projects are familiar. Scholarship on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Eastern Europe has long focused on the ways in which nationalization efforts originating in imperial centres spurred violence when they targeted multiethnic populations on the periphery. Taner Akçam’s chapter on the Young Turks and Gregor Thum’s essay on the German myth of the East offer examples of this approach, illustrating how nationalizing states and nationalists in Anatolia and Germany redefined multiethnic spaces as ‘problems’ with devastating consequences.
Nevertheless, recent scholarship, especially in Habsburg history, has shown that efforts to ‘nationalize’ multiethnic borderlands did not guarantee imperial doom. Gary Cohen makes the case that Habsburg citizens showed remarkable political engagement and civic loyalty until World War I, while Pieter Judson and Robert Nemes both show that ‘national’ borders emerged in Austria-Hungary only imperfectly and as the result of hard work by nationalists, most of whom did not live in the borderlands they sought to define.
Indeed, many of essays highlight ways in which outside actors – Great Power states, nationalists from the metropole, modernizing imperial governments and military occupiers ignited national conflicts on the ground in ways that local differences alone never had. Eric Weitz argues that Germany’s campaign to influence the Ottoman Empire, and thus Great Power politics, reinforced the Ottomans’ push for a national Muslim Turkish state, and inflamed tensions with minority populations. And Frithjov Schenk shows that nineteenth-century Russian railway expansion which was intended to integrate disparate territories into the modern state, instead fuelled narratives of territorial and demographic fragmentation, and provided militants with the technological means to spread political violence and ethnic hatred in the western borderlands.
Ultimately, the book is driven by the question of how and why these multiethnic empires ‘shattered’, destroying states and unleashing mass violence across a vast territory. The editors challenge Timothy’s Snyder’s thesis that Eastern Europe’s World War II ‘bloodlands’ were the product of expansionist and violent Nazi and Soviet states. They suggest rather, that the roots of mass violence were broader, deeper and less inevitable than Snyder suggests. Their inclusion of the Ottoman Empire highlights the ways in which the Balkan Wars, the Young Turks, and Great Power politics in south-eastern Europe paved the way for twentieth-century European states to redraw political and ethnographic boundaries, often in violent ways. Further, they stress that these imperial borderlands ‘shattered’ violently as a result of interconnected local and international factors. Indeed, the essays and the introduction collectively make a case that Great Power politics, modernizing states and nationalist activism were most explosive when they tangled with the particular demographics, conflicts and aspirations of local communities, whether in Galicia or Bulgaria. As a result, the editors suggest that these essays, which at first appear to be a dizzying range of ‘borderlands’ investigation ranging from the local to the international, are in fact all part of a common, if multifaceted and sometimes elusive, story. That story can get lost as the reader moves from learning about Jews in Wilno, to German imperial aspirations in Anatolia, to national mythologies in the Carpathians. Nevertheless, there is much to learn here about specific histories while reflecting on larger questions of Empire, modernization and the origins of mass violence. This volume promises to be a useful teaching text and a welcome addition to a growing and dynamic historiographical field.