Borderlines and nation-building: Bukowina 1848 to 1947

Abstract

The current drawing up of (internal and external) frontiers on the territory of the Bukowina is the result of the idea of the nation state in the 19th century. The external borders of the former Austrian crown land emerged when this territory still was in a pre-national period. They were exclusively based on political and strategic considerations. State concepts fraught with national ideas, although the Habsburg Empire tried to avoid them right to its disintegration, began to gradually split the cultural landscape. It developed in more than 100 years of political and social continuity. There was a deliberate attempt to repress the grown regional identity by restructuring borders. Even the Soviet Union, which claimed to be supranational, was not able to emerge fully from the shadow of the Russian Empire. In the end, in this case too, national ‘liberation claims’ were the driving force behind territorial greed. In the area of Upper Moldavia the longue duree of political structures has remained particularly obvious to this day, even though the appearance has radically changed. First, the Habsburg and Russian Empires filled the power vacuum of political instability left by the Ottoman Empire. Both tried to consolidate the territory in different ways by exercising the power of a centralised state and to offer a new structure. Finally, the development of a regional identity, which had started in the late 19th century, in the course of the radicalisation of national claims during World War I, turned out to be too weak to act as a sufficient counterbalance to the latter. For both Ukraine and Romania, the striving for national union and demarcation has been a constant and dominant factor to this day. The repeated major revisions of the frontiers of the Bukowina in the first half of the 20th century are the result of this. The artificial dividing lines between the ethnic groups, which were drawn up on the basis of the nation state ideology, became manifest in the changing territorial structure of the Bukowina after 1918. At the moment, it is unforeseeable whether in view of this situation the historical Bukowina will be able to develop a common regional identity beyond national claims, which is supported by a majority (for instance in the Euro region Upper Pruth). Moreover, this will to a large extent depends on future European integration. Projecting national ideas of the 19th century and at the same time establishing programmatic guidelines for the future, as Ion Nistor did, is obviously not in the interest of a European spirit. It tries to overcome the nation state idea with its frontiers und promote identities that are linked to a cultural landscape. The Bukowina is certainly a Europe en miniature in both the positive and the negative sense. The overcoming of the political nation state concept in this peripheral area of Europe thus might become an indicator of the seriousness of a new supranational Europe. The following probably applies to the cultural landscape of the Bukowina more than to any other European region: “Territory is not; it becomes, for territory itself is passive, and it is human beliefs and actions that give territory meaning.”