Ethnic cleansing has been an all too common feature of recent European history. Leslie Waters has focused on one particular region that underwent the process more than once, namely, the area commonly known as southern Slovakia in its current political settings and as Felvidék among Hungarians. This southernmost segment of historic Upper Hungary was incorporated into the new Czechoslovak state after World War I in spite of its Hungarian majority population. The ethnically and religiously diverse region reverted to Hungary following the 1938 First Vienna Arbitration, only to rejoin Czechoslovakia in 1945. It forms the southern rim of independent Slovakia today.
All these territorial adjustments triggered migratory processes, which form a central focus of Waters’ analysis. The study is organized around individual border changes. Drawing on the concept of everyday ethnicity developed by Rogers Brubaker and others, Waters focuses especially on the effects of these political transformations on the everyday lives of the local populace. She traces the changing demographic and power structures, but also the use of social welfare policies for nationalist purposes.
Alternating governments tried to secure the local dominance of their respective titular nations. This involved the establishment of reliable administrative institutions, but also voluntary and involuntary resettlements. In connection with the wartime persecution of the Jewish population and the early postwar deportation of ethnic Hungarians, population policy also played an important role in welfare policy, as confiscated property could be formally or informally redistributed to designated beneficiaries.
When Hungary regained control of the area in 1938, interwar Czech and Slovak arrivals as well as government officials were targeted for expulsion. On a general level, however, the treatment of Slovaks remained ambiguous because of Budapest's continuing hopes for regaining all of Slovakia. These aspirations necessitated a modicum of accommodation with local Slovaks, albeit with an understanding that ethnic Hungarians would regain political, administrative, and economic dominance.
The policy toward the local Jewish population was more openly hostile. The reannexed area became a testing ground for designs to alleviate Hungarian social and economic problems through the confiscation of Jewish property. The invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 radicalized Hungarian as well as Slovak policy, and the German occupation of Hungary in 1944 further accelerated the destruction of the area's Jewish community. A mere fifth of this community survived the war.
After World War II, justice meant punishing national minorities. The Czechoslovak government strove to expel virtually all Germans and Hungarians but only received international permission to drive out the former. Instead, Czechoslovakia was given the right to deport as many Hungarians as could be recruited for voluntary re-emigration among Slovak minority members in Hungary. This created a postwar contest between Prague and Budapest for the hearts of Slovaks in Hungary. In the end, 73,000 Slovaks moved to Czechoslovakia, which was a much smaller number than anticipated by the Czechoslovak government. To neutralize the political relevance of the remaining Hungarian minority, it was partially transferred to the Sudeten region, which had recently been cleansed of its native inhabitants.
Borders on the Move is an ambitious book. The author places it at the intersection of borderlands studies, Holocaust studies, the history of ethnic cleansing, and welfare history. Due to this multifaceted research design, the study sometimes struggles to define its central focus. For a general history of the borderland, the politically most transformative event, namely, the postwar deportation of ethnic Hungarians and the resultant change in local majorities, remains somewhat underdeveloped. For the well described Jewish experience, in turn, which can draw on the extensive collection of personal narratives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the alternating political boundaries were not the most decisive aspect because persecution occurred in both Hungary and Slovakia. It therefore remains open if the book is primarily a study of borders or people on the move.
These conceptual questions do not diminish the overall value of the study. It provides an insightful analysis of an often-neglected borderland, based upon informative, multilingual source material. It highlights the economic aspects of ethnic cleansing, which have increasingly become the focus of international scholarship. And by defining multilingualism and mixed marriages as an expression of borderland culture rather than national indifference, Waters also intervenes in an important theoretical discussion. As a result, her new study will prove useful for a wide selection of scholars.
