In their introduction to Shatterzone of Empires, Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz encourage studying the region where these empires met as a single entity in order to understand how the peoples who lived there coexisted and, eventually, “became . . . the perpetrators and objects of the worst violence imaginable” (2). This collection offers a highly successful exploration of that topic over the past two centuries and longer.

The essays examine how violence perpetrated by one group against another—something that had long existed—became something new in the modern era: totalized, thanks to integral nationalism, and far more brutal, thanks to technology and modern bureaucracy. The editors also argue that specifically examining the borderlands helps to undercut the all too prevalent teleological approach that considers the development of nations to be an organic process. The book makes clear that group identities are constructed and ever-changing, and highlights the role of contingency in their creation. These arguments are in keeping with broad trends in the study of nationalism that are exemplified by the work of Rogers Brubaker (Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, 1992), among others.

This volume examines the issue of borderlands beyond the more typically explored aspects of the topic, and includes one essay on the “liquid borderland” (423) of the Adriatic Sea (Pamela Ballinger) and another on “the endurance of regions as objects of identification” (496), which focuses on Upper Silesia (Philipp Ther). A couple of essays deal thoughtfully with coexistence and/or violence, but do not substantively connect to the concept of the borderlands as well as others do in the collection. The quality of the essays is nevertheless consistently high across the board.

A short review cannot explore the collection's twenty-six essays in depth. Given my own expertise, I will focus on a few that cover the Habsburg Monarchy. Larry Wolff's contribution, “The Traveler's View of Central Europe,” expertly captures the ambiguities and diversities of the region, as well as the sense of gradual change described by travelers moving eastward or westward across what are often seen as hard, ethno-national borders. Wolff connects the “historical character” of central Europe to the “legacy” (39) of the Habsburg state and cites the portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph in present-day L'viv. Gary Cohen's essay discusses the functioning of the political system and its relationship to citizens in Cisleithania, while Pieter Judson examines nationalist organizations that sought to strengthen the national identities among often nationally indifferent, bilingual, pluri-cultural populations in rural linguistic borderland areas. Similarly, Robert Nemes explores a county that was roughly evenly divided between native Hungarian and Romanian speakers, and places his work within “a growing body of literature that views borderlands in terms of mixing and hybridity, rather than solely as sites of opposition and othering” (218).

These essays reflect a specific trend within the broader historiography of nationalism in Austria-Hungary, with which Cohen engages most directly. He criticizes an older interpretation that depicts the “increasing alienation” (103) of the Habsburg peoples from the state. Cohen cites Maureen Healy's work to emphasize that it took the crises and failures of the state during World War I ultimately to break the bonds between the dynasty and its population. He highlights a number of promising developments prior to 1914 that “pointed in the direction of government for each nationality by officials and institutions of its own in a sort of ‘national autonomy’ under the Habsburg crown,” at least in its Austrian half. “One cannot know” (105), Cohen offers, what might have happened if not for the fall of the monarchy.

All this is true and provides an important corrective to the older school Cohen describes. He has been calling for historians to abandon this outdated picture for the past two decades–and most have. They largely agree that Austria-Hungary was not declining, nor was it in danger of dissolution under normal, peacetime circumstances in the years before 1914. But that is a relatively low bar to clear. Furthermore, in 1914 the emperor and his advisers perceived that their state was in decline and believed that nationalism might soon tear it apart. That perception pushed them to respond to Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination—itself motivated by a nationalist desire to bring together all Serb-populated land into a single nation-state—by plunging into a war that ultimately did the monarchy in. Given the connection between Habsburg foreign and domestic policy, can we really say that it was just the war and not the “nationalities problem” that caused the dissolution of Austria-Hungary? As Eric Weitz’s essay on German-Ottoman relations notes, “the entwining of the domestic and the international” was a “defining feature” (155) of the region’s states.

Has the historiographical pendulum swung too far? It is true that there was much national indifference before 1918. Hard-core nationalists may have been a numerical minority in terms of the overall population, but what has that to do with their political effectiveness–and hence historical import? Ultimately, national indifference was not strong enough when and where it counted—in the moments when nationalist leaders redrew borders and created countries—to overcome the power and force unleashed by integral, ethnic nationalism.

The “doomed Austria” school is rightfully a relic of the past. But the historiography of multiethnic Austria as a whole must highlight both its many strengths and a recognition of its fundamental weakness when compared to other states: as Healy has also written, “Austria had not generated a patriotism that allowed fellow citizens to feel a connectedness among themselves. Supranational Austria had failed as an ‘imagined community’” (Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I [2004], 311). It is no stretch to say it actively sought to stifle such a development, which it saw as a threat.

Anyone who studies nationalism, genocide, mass violence, or war in these regions, from the Enlightenment through the mid-twentieth century, needs to read Shatterzone of Empires. The book is also highly recommended to specialists in any field of central and eastern European, Jewish, and Ottoman history during those periods. Advanced undergraduates with a strong foundation in these fields would also benefit greatly from this collection. The book's breadth, its theoretical exploration of borderlands, and its overall quality mean that the editors and authors have produced something of lasting scholarly value.