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11 Mapping the Hungarian Borderlands Robert Nemes Austria-Hungary typically merits one or perhaps two maps in most modern European history textbooks. Almost invariably, one of them shows a multicolored Austria-Hungary fractured into a dozen small regions, each occupied by a discrete nationality.1 That no other European states have comparable maps is unsurprising, since maps of the modern world usually represent states as “more integrated, distinct, and centralized than was and in fact is the case.”2 Austria-Hungary stands as a distinct exception to this cartographic rule, and it requires no great imagination to see in these maps not only the diversity and decentralization of Austria-Hungary, but even foreshadowing of the assassination at Sarajevo, the disappearance of the empire, and the century of ethnic tensions and national conflict that followed. Such maps draw upon models created in the last decades of Austria-Hungary, and they have been a feature of scholarship on the region ever since. The spread and survival of these nationalities maps thus raise historical and historiographical questions. What explains their creation and dissemination around 1900? Why do historians continue to reproduce them? To begin to answer these questions, we must recognize that maps contain interpretations , arguments, and messages about the political systems they depict. For Austria-Hungary , the multicolored maps just described reflect a distinctly nationalist worldview, according to which Austria-Hungary was hopelessly divided into a limited number of bounded, permanent , and antagonistic national groups. In recent decades, however, scholars have begun to draw a very different picture of Austria-Hungary, emphasizing the state’s resilience and resourcefulness in an era of mass politics; the expansion and professionalization of its public administration; and the emergence of a broad, vibrant civil society.3 Particularly in the Austrian half of the monarchy, traditions of liberalism and legal equality tempered the state’s response to the “national question.” This is not to deny the salience of nationhood (a sense of national belonging) and nationalism (a means of political mobilization) in Austria-Hungary 210 Robert Nemes in the decades around 1900. As elsewhere in Europe, the wider processes of state building, mass education, and economic modernization contributed to the emergence of a political culture in which national activists could and did play a prominent role. But prominence rarely meant dominance, and the citizens of Austria-Hungary often greeted nationalist agitation with indifference or only short-lived support. This revisionist scholarship is crucial to reconceptualizing the multicolored map of Austria-Hungary, with its thick lines separating different national groups. So too is a growing literature on borderlands, which has shifted the spotlight from the imperial centers to the edges of empires. This work has drawn attention to the processes by which boundaries are imagined and constructed, as well as to the movements of peoples, goods, and ideas across real and imagined borders. Such approaches can illuminate the role of the state and its practices of cartography and classification (censuses, passports, schools, and so on). Scholars have also emphasized the importance of Europe-wide ideologies, and in particular the model of the nation state and of territorial citizenship, in redefining the meaning of boundaries and border regions. Thinking about borderlands thus encourages us to ask how states went about making borders; to look closely at the posture of state officials and at power relations on the ground; and to understand the ways in which borders did—and did not—become rooted in everyday social practices.4 The focus of this chapter is not an existing international boundary, the starting point for much scholarship on borderlands. It instead examines one of Austria-Hungary’s “national borderlands,” as I call regions of ethnographic diversity contested by competing national activists. Its subject is Bihar/Bihor County, a region today divided between Hungary and Romania.5 A century ago, Bihar/Bihor was a rather unremarkable corner of the Hungarian Kingdom, one situated far from international boundaries. Its population was almost equally split between ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Romanians, a fact of little consequence until the last decades of the nineteenth century, when a number of local middle-class national activists began to emphasize the region’s status as a national borderland and worked to define and defend the Hungarian–Romanian border they saw running through it. This case study demonstrates the many consequences of political mobilization around national borderlands in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It is organized around two distinct interpretative frameworks, which the geographer John Agnew has identified...

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