This book features contributions that examine the responses of local populations to nationalizing and state-building projects in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on bottom-up, peripheral, and marginal reactions to top-down nation-building efforts, the volume covers border regions of Romania, Austria-Hungary (before 1918), Poland, Finland, the Russian Empire, and the USSR between 1900 and 1940.
Historiography continues to privilege top-down approaches, focused on elites, institutions, and official policies. Despite previous notable works on this topic, in-depth studies of bottom-up perspectives on these regions remain rare. This volume seeks to redress the imbalance by emphasizing the perceptions, discourses, and everyday practices of ordinary people confronted with (often repressive) nation- and state-building agendas. It also addresses multiple levels of social interaction (combining perspectives from above, from below, and from the middle), involving several categories of actors and navigating through different scales of analysis. Individual and comparative case studies explore the social and political peculiarities of various local communities, particularly their evolving forms of national identification across neighboring regions.
This volume contributes to both nationalism studies, by critically engaging with the concepts of everyday ethnicity and “national indifference,” and borderland studies, through a trans-sectional approach focusing on the agency of various marginalized communities.
Editors’ Introduction 1. Treasonous Stripes: Minoritizing Ethnic Romanians in Dualist Hungary Ágoston Berecz (European University Institute, Italy) 2. State Categories, ‘National Soul-Catching’, and Local Responses: Jewish and Ukrainian Challenges to the Census in Eastern Galicia and Eastern Lesser Poland, 1880–1931 Martin Rohde (Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany) 3. Populism, Anti-Imperialism, and Alternative Nation-Building ‘From the Left’ in Modern Romania Andrei Cu?co (Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania) 4. From National Indifference to Indifferent Nationalism: Ukrainian Peasants’ Confrontation with Nationalism over the Twentieth Century Fabian Baumann (The Research Center for the History of Transformations, Austria) 5. The Positivist Education of Peasant Children: Village Schools and Local Agency on the Eve of Polish Statehood Kathleen Wroblewski (University of Michigan, USA) 6. What Does It Mean to Be Polish? Local Opposition to the Soviet Minority Experiment in Interwar Ukraine Olena Palko (University of Basel, Switzerland) 7. Courting the Straggler Sheep? Hungarian Nation-Building and Popular Reactions among the Cengai/Csangos, 1920-1940Gábor Egry (Institute of Political History, Hungary) 8. Interwar Dniester Jews between Romania and the Soviet Union: Struggles for Cultural Agency and Economic Survival Dmitry Tartakovsky (Slavic Review) 9. Criminalising Belief and Disciplining the Masses: Gendarmes and Orthodox Priests in the First Trial against Old Calendarists in Bessarabia Andreea Kaltenbrunner (University of Vienna, Austria) 10. Singing a Different Tune: Jewish Converts and Musical Resistance in Interwar Bessarabia Iemima Ploscariu (Directory of Open Access Journals, Spain) 11. Moving Between Hierarchies: Small Finnic Nationalities in the Finnish and Soviet Modernisations during the Interwar Years Takehiro Okabe (University of Helsinki, Finland) 12. Peasants Against the Nation: Popular Responses to Schooling and Nation-Building in the Interwar Romanian, Polish, and Soviet Borderlands Petru Negura (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Germany) 13. Choosing the Soviet Union over Romania? The 1940 (Jewish) Exodus as Protest and Survival Strategy Svetlana Suveica (University of Göttingen, Germany) Index
Petru Negura is a researcher at Moldova State University and a lecturer at the University of Regensburg. He is the author of Ni héros, ni traîtres : Les écrivains moldaves face au pouvoir soviétique sous Staline (2009). Andrei Cusco is a researcher at the A. D. Xenopol Institute of History of the Romanian Academy in Iasi, Romania. He is the author of A Contested Borderland: Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Century (2017). Svetlana Suveica is a senior research associate at the Leibniz-Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg and an associated Professor at the University of Regensburg. Her latest monograph, Post-imperial Encounters. Transnational Designs of Bessarabia in Paris and Elsewhere, 1917–1922 (2022) won the Book Prize of the Society for Romanian Studies.
Reviews for Nationalism From Below in the East European and Soviet Borderlands: Popular Responses to Nation-Building, 1900-1940
This volume masterfully bridges history from below with the study of nationalism, focusing on moments when ordinary people asserted their agency against the nationalizing agendas of states and self-proclaimed elites. It reminds us that we grasp the dynamics of nationalism and nationalization most clearly not when they proceed smoothly, but rather when they falter. Featuring leading scholars, this book offers fresh perspectives and compelling case studies about nations and their making. * Börries Kuzmany, Professor for Modern History of Central and Eastern Europe, University of Vienna, Austria * This expansive collection of essays addressing cases from across the numerous borderlands of Eastern Europe represents an essential tool for the comparative study of nationalism from below. Thoughtfully introduced bringing social theory and regional historiography into dialogue, the editors have crafted an invaluable contribution to the field. * Professor James A. Kapaló, Senior Lecturer, University College Cork, Ireland *
