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processes, allowing me to tell a story of neither outright violence nor synergy and of neither simple

resistance on the part of local people nor inevitable state integration. Rather, they reveal both a

complex picture of contingency based on localized dynamics and the exclusions that constitute an

integral—if sometimes well-disguised—component of “inclusive” nationalism. When it came to

questions of inclusion and exclusion, local context always mattered. What, precisely, were people on

the fringes being included in? What were the conditions of that inclusion? And did these people want

to be “included” in the first place?

This on-the-ground story of how state power operated in contested borderlands fits into a

much broader field of scholarship that has burgeoned over the past thirty years or so. Writing on

regions as diverse as the French-Spanish Pyrenees, French-German Alsace, and Austrian-Italian

South Tyrol, historians of modern Europe have traced how borderlands constitute nationally

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contested spaces that modern states try—often unsuccessfully—to integrate and control. In the case

of central and eastern Europe, scholars working on multiethnic imperial and post-imperial

borderlands—and on towns and cities with mixed populations within those regions—have considered

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the processes by which nationalizing projects came to be recast in spaces along the fringes. Such

insights are frequently based on the idea that borderlands are not places that simply exist out-there-

in-the-world, but rather that they are the constructs of a nationalist imaginary. As Pieter Judson

points out, while “the borderland” has become a ubiquitous scholarly category, historians should

34 Sahlins, Boundaries; Roberta Pergher, Mussolini’s Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy’s
Borderlands, 1922-1943 (New York, 2017); Alison Carrol, The Return of Alsace to France, 1918-1939 (Oxford,
2018).
35 These works include, but are not limited to, Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for
Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 (Ithaca, 2008); Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on
the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, 2006); James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole:
Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, 2008); Alison Fleig Frank,
Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Caitlin Murdock, Changing Places:
Society, Culture, and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870-1946 (Ann Arbor, 2010). On multiethnic
cities, see, for instance, Theodore R. Weeks, Vilnius Between Nations, 1795-2000 (Dekalb, 2015); Tarik Cyril Amar,
The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists (Ithaca, 2015); Omer
Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town called Buczacz (New York, 2018).

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