In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

26 Caught in Between BORDER REGIONS IN MODERN EUROPE Philipp Ther Introduction The metaphorical term “lands in between” alludes to the fact that many border regions in modern Europe, and in particular in Central Europe, were shaped by a distinct mixture of cultures and languages. Precisely because of this mixture many borderlands stood under the competition of two or more national movements and nation states. This was already an issue in the age of empires that preceded World War I. When an order of nation states was established in 1918–1920, this competition often turned into a bitter struggle over disputed regions. While these disputes have been a very important topic of historiography, a discourse often tailored to legitimize the competing claims of various nationalisms and nation states, the issue of human identification with regions has for a long time been relatively neglected.1 In this chapter the term regionalism is used to explore the political and social dimensions of regional identification. In certain periods regional movements achieved a high degree of political mobilization and developed their own ideologies. However, the European nation states perceived regional movements as competitors and fought against political projects that stressed the autonomy of border regions. On the one hand, this was an issue of the administrative power of the centers over the periphery, in particular over disputed borderlands . On the other hand, it was a struggle over ideological domination. The centers aspired to define the national codes, i.e. the ways in which the various nations defined themselves. There was little toleration for regional identifications that stressed the particularity of regions and their blends of cultures and languages. A “compulsory unambiguity” (Zwang zur Eindeutigkeit ) was not only directed against regional movements and regionalisms, but imposed on society at a very basic level. 486 Philipp Ther As the second part of this chapter shows through the example of Upper Silesia, the population of the borderland in the age of nationalism had to find various strategies to cope with the compulsion to be unambiguous. The first ideal type (in the Weberian sense) was to join one of the competing national movements, the second one to resist and to establish regional movements, the third one to retreat into the private sphere and to keep a distance from political activities in general, including the competing nationalisms. Quite often, the population of border regions would show conformity with the ruling ideology in public, especially when confronted with National Socialist and Stalinist regimes, while preserving a strong identification with the region in the private sphere or the neighborhood. But the preservation of regional identification and the perseverance of a peculiar mix of cultures and languages should not be romanticized as a case of multiculturalism. The population of the borderlands was often “caught in between,” and was discriminated against, persecuted, or even deported. This will again be shown specifically in the case of Upper Silesia (in Polish the specification “Upper” is unusual, the region is mostly called Śląsk/Silesia, in contrast to Dolny Śląsk, and its center is Wrocław/Breslau), which forms the empirical core of this article. The evidence for other European border regions is gathered from a project about “Regional Movements and Regionalism” which was carried out in 2001–2003 at the Center for Comparative History of Europe in Berlin.2 Problems of Historiography As Ron Suny once pointedly stated, the institutionalization of history is more closely linked with the project of the nation than that of any other science.3 Although historiography has largely freed itself from misuse by various nationalisms, the nation and the nation state have remained the most important units of analysis or at least points of reference for historians until the end of the twentieth century. Ernest Gellner once found a wonderful metaphor for this still prevailing nation state perspective, which for him resembles a modernist painting.4 Thereby, the historical map of Europe is shaped by homogeneously painted areas of various sizes and colors, sometimes bizarrely shaped, but always clearly outlined. These colored territories demarcate the European nations which were able to form their own states over the course of their history. Shading or transitional areas between the individual colors, or nations, is certainly not provided; nor is any grading of color tone, although some national categories that persist in the language, such as German or Polish, meant something quite different 200 years ago than they do today. This state-national or modernistic view does not do justice to the...

Share