Borderlands

The Borderlands Region

Themes and Significance

Schedule

Seminar Series

Notes

Questions, Results, Implications

Contacts

Questions, Results, Implications

Questions:

The Project focused on an intriguing and under-researched area and posed questions that have never been systematically asked before. Before World War II, the area stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans and the former Ottoman territories was characterized by a multiplicity of ethnic groups and religions. In many villages, towns, and cities, people who spoke different languages, observed different religious rites, and had different ethnic traditions, lived side by side and interacted with each other on a daily basis. This had been the condition in these far-flung lands for many centuries. But as of the late nineteenth century growing nationalist tensions, followed by the disintegration of the four great empires that straddled this region, led to increasing violence between these various ethnic groups and denominations. World War II saw the final destruction of many of these multiethnic communities. The Project wanted to understand how these societies existed in the past (whether harmoniously or not), what were the main causes of the violence that characterized them in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, what were the consequences of the breakup of these communities, and what lessons can be learned from their experience in reference to such multiethnic and multidenominational communities that still exist today in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

Results:

The main conclusions of the Project can be summarized as follows. We have been able to determine that several factors combined to undermine the relations between and within communities in Europe’s eastern borderlands and to enhance tension between ethnic groups. The introduction of the idea of nationalism played a major role. In Eastern Europe nationalism was often grafted upon an earlier religious identity finding its rationale in previous religious loyalties and making the boundaries between religious identities more rigid and difficult to permeate. The evolution of the nation state was both a consequence of this process and an important engine in propelling it forward. The nation state determined the identities of its own citizens and of those of other states according to national-ethnic criteria, especially in East and East-Central Europe. The four empires that ruled over this region, the Russian, German, Austrian, and Ottoman, also became increasingly concerned with defining and categorizing the ethnicity of their citizens/subjects, even as their existence was threatened by the growth of nationalism. Finally, the cataclysm of World War I, which also saw the collapse of the multiethnic empires and their replacement by a string of ethno-national states and eventually of two mighty totalitarian empires, prepared the ground for the population policies, ethnic cleansing campaigns, and genocides that “simplified” the ethnic map of this region through a violent process of “un-mixing” its population. We have also seen how much of this transformation from coexistence to violence was imprinted in the cultural heritage of the region, whereby groups living side by side for many generations had nevertheless evolved very string stereotypes of each other that were capable of being mobilized under conditions of war, occupations, and economic destabilization. These also had to do with the tensions between urban and rural populations, which tended to have distinct ethnic characteristics, as well as between the poorer and wealthier, more and less educated, the more secular and more religious sectors of the population. Finally, in lands which were generally poor, property, greed, and fear of dispossession played a major role both in triggering violence and in the manner in which societies were reorganized in the aftermath of destruction and molded their memories of the past.

Implications:

Globalization and the new borderlands
The single most important implication of this project is that the category of borderlands can be an important tool in understanding the history of Europe, and by implication in grasping the history and the social and political dynamics operating in many other parts of the world. Borderlands are by definitions areas in which different ethnic and religious groups overlap, and where states or empires tend to merge one into the other or to clash with each other. These are areas were culture is created by a process of encountering other cultures, and where civilizations can be destroyed through the tectonic movement of the vast forces on whose edges they exist. This means that the paradigm of borderlands is one that can help us identify both the birthplace of many creative ideas and movements and at the same time to determine the location of fractures that may expand and bring down whole continents. In the rapidly globalizing universe in which we now live, in some respects we are all residents of the borderlands under conditions of swiftly shifting identities, loyalties, memories and futures. Yet we are also living in an era in which fear of change and a determination to hold on to the (often imagined) old way of life can and does trigger a great deal of violence. Moreover, while Europe’s eastern borderlands have been “simplified” through ethnic cleansing and genocide, Europe’s heartland, just like North America’s, has become the site of a new mixing of ethnic groups, cultures, and religious, under the impact of mass immigration from other parts of the world. Learning about the borderlands of the past may, then, help understand how to cope with the new borderlands of the present and the future.

History and other disciplines
While the Project has had a strong historical orientation, it should be clear that neither an understanding of Europe’s eastern borderlands, nor an appreciation of the implications of the borderland paradigm for our present conditions would be possible without an interdisciplinary approach that takes into consideration the tools of sociology, anthropology, political science, and other relevant disciplines. This is the case whether we examine the dynamics of individual interethnic communities, or when we investigate the workings of the state as an arbiter of identity for its citizens; whether we attempt to grasp how individuals and groups perceive their ethnic or religious identity and present it to themselves and to others, or when we analyze the power relations between elites and other sectors of society, between urban and rural populations, between rulers and subjects. Here it can be argues that the very introduction of the borderlands paradigm illustrates the need for and the potentially fruitful outcome from a much closer collaboration between related disciplines in the social sciences. Suffice it to evoke the role of stereotypes in multiethnic/multicultural societies in order the see how interdependent different disciplinary approaches would be in analyzing how stereotypes determine social behavior and under what conditions they can be eradicated.

Politics, Culture, and Identity
From all of the above it should be clear that the Borderlands Project was and remains an inherent part of the larger framework of the Watson Institute section of Politics, Cuklture, and Identity. It was, after all, in the Borderlands of Europe that these three crucial components of social existence interacted with each other in a particularly creative yet ultimately also in a devastatingly destructive manner. The shift in politics toward nation and state; the grafting of religion to ethnicity and the insistence on culture being inherent to race and ethnicity; the growing sense that identity was not chosen but determined by birth, location, and language – all of this was at the root of the destruction of a universe that had previously been characterized by much greater fluidity of political agendas, complex and overlapping cultures, and fluid individual and group identities. These are all lessons we need to learn and learn from when we face our new contemporary global borderlands.

On a more mundane level, it should be emphasized that the Borderland Project created a large, intense, and creative network of scholars and institutions which, it is hoped, will continue to thrive and interact long after the completion of the project. Ranging from eastern Europe to Germany and France, all the way to Israel and many campuses and research institutes in the United States, the project brought together scholars who would have otherwise most probably never known of each other’s work, and has shown how a new way of observing the past and the present can expose potential links and make for an array of creative undertakings and collaboration between fields and disciplines. In this sense, the Borderlands Project has not merely shown the importance of borderlands as an explanatory paradigm, but has also lifted the disciplinary barriers and made for new fields of cooperation and understanding.

Updated July 4, 2007