This is an interesting book that intends to achieve a lot. Kurt Scharr, who is in the Institute of Geography at the University of Innsbruck, sees his work as belonging to the field of historical geography. This explains why most of the book focuses on the evolution of the institutional development of Austrian Bukovina, the definition of its external and internal borders, its administrative structures, its demographic composition, and its status within the Habsburg Empire.

Historiographically, the book situates itself in contradistinction to ethnic nationalist discourses that dominate Romanian and Ukrainian history writing on Bukovina. Scharr sees those discourses as highly problematic exactly because they ignore the reality of what he calls the Bukovinian cultural landscape, a particular regional mentalité that distinguishes its residents from their co-ethnics in the rest of their respective countries. Romanian and Ukrainian nationalists, in contrast, argue that Bukovina as a region had been an illegitimate creation, from the moment of its inception in 1775 when it emerged as a consequence of Austrian annexation of northern Moldova from the Ottoman Empire, and until its disestablishment as a regional entity following its annexation by Romania in 1918. From this perspective, its history is useful only in so far as it sheds light on the struggles of each respective ethnic group for Bucovina's unification with its own nation state.

At the same time, it has become quite popular in the West, mostly in its German-speaking part, to circulate a sentimental myth of Bukovina as an island of Western cultural refinement, interethnic tolerance, and civility bordering the world of Oriental crudity. As Scharr convincingly demonstrates, some, mostly younger historians and other literati from Romania and Ukraine have also been articulating, in the post-Communist epoch, this view of Bukovina as “a small Europe.”

While understandably sympathetic to this latter view as more relevant to the values and policies of European integration, Scharr tries to keep a certain distance from it. In particular, he goes out of his way to emphasize that the Europeanness of Bukovina must not be equated with the presence of German populations or domination of German high culture and language. It was rather through the development of regional institutions, themselves a product of international circumstances, the domestic climate in the Habsburg monarchy, and interactions between the regional and central elites, that Bukovina came to be, and with it, so too did its residents' awareness of its reality. Thus, according to Scharr, the study of Bukovina's institution-building leads to an understanding of Bukovinian identity, which has been obscured by decades-long policies of Romanianization, Sovietization, and Ukrainization in its respective parts.

Much of what Scharr says in the chapters centering on the history of Austrian Bukovina is useful and well thought-out. He seems to be particularly interested in showing the role of historical contingency in framing the construction of what by the end of the nineteenth century many saw as “a West in the East.” This is especially evident in Chapter Five, in which Scharr discusses the gradual establishment of Bukovina's borders under the influence of such considerations as Vienna's desire to counterbalance St. Petersburg's headlong advance to the Black Sea; Austria's cordial relations at the time with Istanbul; West European distractions in the wake of the French Revolution; and personal relations between Joseph I and Alexander I of Russia. Most rewarding is Chapter Seven, which illuminates the policy of colonization of Bukovina by settlers from outside of the region. Here, Scharr demonstrates how inefficient this government-decreed policy was, given chronic lack of funds and divergent perspectives of central and regional authorities, the implication being that although the demographic composition of the region did change (the main accusation of Romanian historians against Austrian rule in Bukovina), it was less a product of Vienna's conscious efforts and more a result of uncontrolled population movements and unforeseen circumstances.

My major complaint is that the book stops short of discussing, other than barely mentioning, the 1910 Ausgleich, in which Bukovina's two main ethnic groups, Romanian and Ukrainian, seemingly reached a compromise on the constitution of the region. Indeed, if, as the author insists, it is not territory per se but “human beliefs and actions that give territory meaning” (247), then this was exactly the moment when Bukovina's supposed identity as a land of interethnic cooperation came to the fore. This disappointing shortcoming, however, does not diminish the book's substantial strengths.