Nationalism From Below in the East European and Soviet Borderlands : Popular Responses to Nation-Building, 1900-1940

Bringing together an international cast of contributors, this book engages with popular responses to nationalising and state-building projects in Eastern Europe. The volume focuses specifically on the Western border regions of the Soviet Union and the eastern provinces of Romania, Poland, and the Baltic States during the interwar period, as well as their imperial legacies, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Top-down studies, which focus on political and intellectual elites, state structures and state policies, continue to dominate the historiography. Nationalism from Below in the Soviet and East European Borderlands compensates for this imbalance by approaching the East European borderlands from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective; it is based on the perceptions, discourses and practices of ordinary people as a response to the nation- and state-building projects. The book uses several case studies to highlight, from a comparative perspective, the local population’s social and political peculiarities around national identification. It considers how these positions have changed over time and impacted the relationships between these neighbouring regions, which today make up parts of various independent states. Lastly, it reflects on how gender-based statuses and hierarchies overlap and intertwine in everyday settings of staging nationhood, alongside ethnicity, religious affiliation, class, and age.

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.