Debordering and Rebordering

Central and South Eastern Europe after the First World War

Machteld Venken, Steen Bo Frandsen, Machteld Venken, Steen Bo Frandsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032232027
• eBook ISBN: 9781000574890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

Unruly borderlands: border-making, peripheralization and layered regionalism in post-First World War Maramureș and the Banat

Gábor Egry

ABSTRACT

The Maramureș (Máramaros) and Banat (Bánság) regions of dualist Hungary were classic borderlands with markedly different characteristics. While both zones were multiethnic, the former was a mountainous, backward and agricultural area. The latter was one of the richest and most industrialized in the country, with thriving cities and a developed economy. While social life in Maramureș was dominated by interethnic and trans-religious noble kins, who ruled over Ruthenian- and Romanian-speaking peasants and Orthodox Jews, the Banat had a diverse yet stratified society defined by a landowning aristocracy, urban bourgeoisie, families of military descent, immigrant worker groups and a multiethnic peasantry. These regions had very different roles and positions within Austria-Hungary and were ruled in a differentiated way. The new boundaries that were drawn after the First World War resituated these areas: new centres emerged; new elites came to dominate in the successor states; and the new state borders cut previously existing economic and social ties. Both Maramureș and the (Romanian) Banat were relocated in terms of space, economy and society. The once economically central and self-supporting Banat became dependent on a central government that aimed at its political subordination, which generated strong regionalist political currents. Maramureș became the most peripheral area of the new state, and the local elites had to rely on resources provided by the centre. Divided among themselves, Maramureș regionalists, Transylvanian regionalists and centralizers competed for favour in Bucharest, creating unexpected alignments within the framework of a layered type of regionalism, and offering diverging visions of the regions’ futures.

From the perspective of statehood, the most defining characteristic of the end of the First World War in East-Central Europe was disintegration. While the new borders drawn at the Paris Peace Conferences sanctioned the territorial extents of successor states that faced the challenges of (re)integrating people, institutions and often disparate lands, for those living in these areas the primary experience was one of the loss of almost all integrating features of an imperial form of statehood. The most prominent manifestation of this unexpected ‘release’ from the ‘chains’ of empire was the sudden appearance of all kind of small republics in areas where people had not been considered mature enough for political participation by the previous imperial elites. Subsequent state-building efforts were therefore not just attempts at reform within a gradual process of transformation based on the principle of nation-statehood. They represented rather significant –one may even say radical –breaks from a past marked by centuries-old institutional traditions.

Part of this break was –besides the importance of the new guiding principle of nation-statehood –the effect that the new borders had on local and regional societies. With all their divisive consequences, with the generation of new borderland spaces on both sides of the new border, and with all the new forms of trans-border connections that emerged, they resulted in a relocation of these areas in a reconfigured space defined by the institutions of the new states. But however significant this break with the imperial past seemed, the practical outcomes of such depended on the legacies of the past.¹ Regional societies were not washed clean of their pasts, no matter the pretensions of the new ruling national elites. Additionally, both what these societies lost and what they preserved influenced their future positions in economic, social, cultural, political and symbolic terms. The impact of imperial legacies was often not direct or easily discernible. The goal of this article is to reveal at least one of its aspects: the consequences of peripheralization processes before and after the new boundaries were set, with special attention given to how the border changes affected political regionalism(s).

The argument starts with the imperial characteristics of dualist Hungary. The Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy is often seen simply as a nationalizing state that differed significantly from the truly imperial Cisleithania. Contrary to this assumption, Hungary was ruled via a system that resembled imperial rule² and was reflected in the variety of relations between the centre and its multiple peripheries. Thus, it was not primarily the economy, culture or the gradually unified institutional setting of the country that defined the peripheries within it, but rather local and national politics, which were still influenced by the pre-1848 and pre-1867 regimes. From this perspective, the thriving Banat was just as much a periphery as backward Maramureș (Máramaros) or Subcarpathian Rus.

Seen from a similarly broad angle, not much changed after 1918. Greater Romania, although nominally a unitary nation-state, struggled to bring together its disparate provinces. The energetic centralizing measures preferred by the National Liberal governments met with opposition from (at least some) regional elites with markedly different socializations. Regionalism at the level of the new provinces (Transylvania taken together with the Banat, Maramureș, Crișana, Bessarabia and Bucovina) became the order of the day and fuelled strong political currents. However, the conflicts that such regionalisms generated were more conditioned by the relationship between Bucharest and the acquired territories as a whole and less by local circumstances.³

Nevertheless, the actual political, social and cultural circumstances contained within a smaller area were not insignificant, especially in terms of how these smaller regions fared after 1918. The social fabrics and the resulting social hierarchies, habits and customs were part of the very legacies that conditioned reactions to the new state-building developments, a new turn in peripheralization. While the Romanian Maramureș remained a backward periphery, the Banat, prior to 1918 an economically and culturally developed area, lost its relatively favourable status –a change that had broad consequences. Thus, when looking at the politics and the symbolic roles and positions of these areas, the impact of the new borders on their societies and economies (including the fate of ethnic minorities) is considered as a significant factor together with the legacies of dualist Hungary.

The comparison of two zones disparate in economic and social terms is essential for my analysis. I argue that, despite both of these regions being political peripheries, the trajectories of the Banat and Maramureș differed greatly. In and after 1918 they were relocated in an abstract sense and exposed to further peripheralization. Furthermore, dualist and imperial legacies had a significant impact on both this process and the reaction of local elites. As both regions had been and remained peripheries in political terms, ruled or managed in a similar manner from Budapest, the differences and similarities of their trajectories in Greater Romania offer clues to understanding the role of the new boundaries (including how they shaped new state architectures) and their legacies.

Two (sub-)imperial peripheries?

Dualist Hungary was a ‘problematic’ part of the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867 only aggravated the situation. While the Austrian half of the empire remained a conglomerate of institutionally separated provinces with provincial legislations, Hungary, with the exception of Croatia, became a unified state after 1872, with the elimination of the territorial separation of the border regiments, the militarized territorial units along the Ottoman border under direct control of the Viennese authorities. Meanwhile, the Hungarian parliament passed a series of laws aiming at the unification of the judiciary and the public administration, effectively creating the framework of a uniform nation-state. Thus, it is customary to see Austria-Hungary as a composite empire of two different states, one properly imperial and the other a nation-state (or would-be nation-state).

But despite the palpable processes of unification and nationalizing,⁴ a closer look reveals that even at the beginning of the twentieth century Hungary retained characteristics that are familiar from the imperial set-up. What are these characteristics of imperial polities that are crucial for the argument of this article? First, empires are composite states, the result of acquiring territories with diverse legal and political traditions that are not transformed into a uniform state. Furthermore, empires typically employ differentiated rule, a method of exerting the power of the metropolitan centre over the peripheries according to the local circumstances. Differentiated rule often entails the co-optation of local and regional elites, who are ready to align with the central power in exchange for retaining their influence at the local level (and sometimes also gaining power at the centre). And empires often use imperial figures, whose loyalty and knowledge makes them suitable for connecting the empire’s distant spaces and adjusting the means of the central power to the local context.⁵

Although in 1914 Hungary had only two separate composite parts with some form of administrative separation –Croatia and the corpus separatum Fiume – that are rarely taken for being indicative of the state’s composite nature, it was a country whose parts were sewn together relatively recently. The Banat was annexed to Hungary in 1778 after serving for six decades as a model of enlightened development policies, including colonization. However, the southern areas of the region between the Maros, Tisza and Danube rivers remained under direct Viennese military control until 1872. Meanwhile, Transylvania was merged with Hungary in 1867 –though some of its legal peculiarities were not eliminated until the Communist period – and the privileged territories of feudal Hungary (like the Szepes/Spiš, Jász-Kun district and the Saxon Königsboden) were only gradually eliminated by a series of administrative laws issued through 1876. Some of these bodies were transformed into legally incorporated public communities that administered the resources drawn from vast properties. For instance, the former Romanian border regiments in the Banat, with their seat in the town of Karánsebes/Caransebeș, had possessions worth around 40 million Crowns. All these legacies still had an impact on the country four decades after the nominal unification.

The case of Maramureș was more straightforward, the county (and the adjacent ones in the Subcarpathian Rus) having been fully incorporated into the traditional Hungarian county system since the seventeenth century. But it was situated at the very edge of the country, along a road leading to Bukovina and Galicia, just like the Banat was on the border of the Ottoman Empire and its Balkan successor states. Due to its smaller size and more homogeneous natural environment of mountains and river valleys, its economy and society was more uniform than the Banat. But it was a peculiar place, with an unusually high percentage of people with noble origins, among whom the largest number were adherents of the Greek Catholic religion (who spoke Ruthenian and Romanian), and most of its inhabitants, the Jewish population included, were active in agriculture.⁶

By contrast, the Banat was a mini-empire in itself, a kind of ‘Belgium’ of the monarchy, with diverse natural zones, divided into fertile plains in the west and north and mountains in the east and southeast. Because of its composite character, it was defined as a region more by history and politics than by its economic or social features. The fertile plains of Torontál/Torontal and Temes/Timiș counties, dominated by latifundia, were complemented by the mining and industrial areas in the south, around Resica/Resița and Oravica/Oravița, an industrial hub that was born out of the imperial past, owing to the efforts and investments of Viennese companies (such as the Erste Donau-Dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction - The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: border making and its consequences
• 1 Unruly borderlands: border-making, peripheralization and layered regionalism in post-First World War Maramureș and the Banat
• 2 New state borders and (dis)loyalties to Czechoslovakia in Subcarpathian Rus, 1919–25
• 3 The new borders as local economic possibility? The case of post-1920 Hungary
• 4 The role of history and geography teaching in the building of national identity in interwar Vojvodina
• 5 Bohemia by the sea: establishing a Czechoslovak port in Hamburg in the interwar period
• 6 The traitorous national periphery: the legacy of identity politics of imperial Hungary in a new eastern metropolis of Czechoslovakia – Košice/Kassa
• 7 Reinforcing the border, reconfiguring identities: Polish initiatives in the Carpathians in the interwar period
• Index