Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian–Slovak Borderlands, 1938–1948, by Leslie Waters

Abstract

The Hungarian–Slovak border region underwent no fewer than five significant border revisions in the brutal years between 1938 and 1948. Each required the population of the territory to reorient itself to an altered geopolitical system, in which every step was a new negotiation through a minefield of fateful ordeals concerning changes in sovereignty, military occupations, a world war, migrations and ethnic cleansing. The borderland’s inhabitants repeatedly reassessed their public and private relationship to the state and its representative institutions, as well as to the surrounding society. How did they cope with such a restless environment? Leslie Waters captures this turbulent experience in her remarkable book. If the radical remapping of East Central Europe in the transition from empires to successor states after the First World War remade lives, then the series of border revisions beginning with the re-annexation of the territory by the Hungarian government in 1938, and ending with...