Preliminary Programme

The Maramure? (Máramaros) and Banat (Bánság) regions of dualist Hungary were classic
borderlands with markedly different characteristics. While both zones were multi?ethnic, the
former, in the northeasternmost corner of Hungary was a mountainous, backward and
agricultural area. The latter, in the south, was composed of mountains and fertile plains and
it was one of the richest and most industrialized area of the country, with thriving cities and
a developed economy. Social life in Maramure? was dominated by transethnic and transreligious
noble kings, who ruled over Ruthenian and Romanian speaking peasants and an
Orthodox Jewry. Meanwhile, the Banat had a diverse and stratified society, with a
landowning aristocracy, urban bourgeoisie, families of military descent, immigrant worker
groups, and a multiethnic peasantry. Consequently, these regions had very different roles
and positions within Austria?Hungary and were ruled in a differentiated way, typical for
empires, before 1918. The drawing of new borders after WWI resituated these areas. New
centers emerged, new elites came to dominate the successor states, and state borders cut
earlier connected localities off from each other and from their previous markets. Maramure?
and the (Romanian) Banat were relocated in space, economy and society.
So far, it is just another, almost ordinary case of how the new boundaries affected
borderlands. In my contribution, however, I compare these cases focusing on how
peripherality has evolved due to the new boundaries and state structures. While the once
economically central and self?supporting Banat became dependent on the central
government, which also aimed at its political subordination, generating strong regionalist
political currents, Maramure?, once a region with a tendency for self?colonization, was
divided between Czechoslovakia and Romania. In the Czechoslovak part, the central
government started a civilizational program, resembling colonial endeavors, with the goal of
elevating the backward area. Such attempts, however, were not unknown as the thencentral
government had made similar efforts before 1918. The difference was the political
relation between center and periphery, Czechoslovakia being less accommodating toward
local elites. The Romanian part became the most peripheral area of the new state, and the
local elites had to rely on resources provided by the center. Divided themselves, Maramure?
regionalists, Transylvanian regionalists and centralists competed for favor in Bucharest,
creating unexpected alignments within the framework of a layered regionalism, and offering
diverging visions of the regions’ future.
A comparative analysis of these interwar trajectories will reveal factors of peripheralization,
with a special focus on its cumulative variety, when different types of center?periphery
relations within subsequent states affected the same area. It also enables the analyses of
how peripheralization affected politics, the reactions of local elites and their attempt to
negotiate the region’s place and role under different regimes. (Show less)

Galicia and Bukovina had been borderlands already in the Habsburg period. The location of the two provinces at the eastern periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had influenced their socio-economic situation, shaped by a weak industry and high emigration rates. Though Galicia and Bukovina continued to be peripheries after the First World War, the war events and the post-war order affected the region in many ways. After repeated border and regime changes in this embattled area between 1914 and 1920, it was especially the establishment of the Polish and Romanian nation states and of their borders that caused substantial changes to the Galician-Bukovinian border region. While the Russian occupations during the war and the short-lived Western-Ukrainian People’s Republic had blurred the borders between the two Austrian provinces, the new Polish-Romanian border between Galicia and Bukovina disrupted former close economic and personal ties. Notwithstanding the good relations between Poland and Romania the two states established a strict border regime, not least because of their fears of political contacts between Galician and Bukovinian Ukrainians or Jews, whom they regarded as disloyal minorities. The aim of the paper is to investigate the consequences of nation-state building to the local population in the Galician-Bukovinian border region regarding political and economic developments and everyday experiences. (Show less)

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the dissolution of the Austro?Hungarian Empire,
a citizen science experiment was hosted at the University of Vienna, during which 66
bachelor students in the humanities studying at 12 different border regions’ universities
throughout the ex?Habsburg area met 23 border scholars participating in the Association for
Borderlands Studies World Conference as equals in order to talk about the meaning of
borders. In this article, light is shed on how these students referred to the Habsburg past in
their narrations, first during their individual monologue addressed towards either a border
scholar or another student, later in interaction with their interlocutor, and at the end, in a
Facebook?like digital café aiming to come to a collective understanding of borders among all
participants. In the end, how (and where?) was the border verbally drawn, and how did it
evolve during the students’ discussions? (Show less)