Regionalism and Modern Europe Identity Construction and Movements from 1890 to the Present Day, Editors: Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, Eric Storm, Bloomsbury Press,., 2019
Regional identities may be more enduring than national ones in East-Central Europe, where regions... more Regional identities may be more enduring than national ones in East-Central Europe, where regions, regional identities and regionalist movements have attracted renewed interest, spurred by the historiographic flowering that ensued after 1989 as much as by the search for a useable past. The end of the Soviet bloc, the Yugoslav wars, the Velvet divorce between Czechs and Slovaks and separatist conflicts in the former Soviet Union, as well as the eastern expansion of the European Union have stimulated this interest. European Union architecture seems to welcome a ‘Europe of Regions’. The search in former communist lands for a less tainted past has wandered through centuries-old imperial borderlands such as Transylvania, Bukovina, Slovakia, Silesia or Banat, where the lack of linguistic homogeneity and frequently shifting boundaries favoured political compromise and mutual tolerance. Nation-centred narratives have failed to account for hybrid identities of some populations in East-Central Europe, particularly those in cosmopolitan cities and frontier zones. Regions construed as transitional spaces (Zwischenräume), as well as small nations have been ignored by national histories, but they can be rescued by region-focused scholarship.
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the country’s borders were most expansive; it has since dwindled to roughly
23,000. Yet a significant German legacy persists in post-communist Romania,
as James Koranyi shows in his fascinating new cultural history of Romanian
Germans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
by Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Historisches Institut, Justus Liebig-Universität, Gießen