Unruly Borderlands: Border-making, Peripheralization, and Layered Regionalism in Post-WWI Maramureș and the Banat

The Maramureș (Maramaros) and Banat (Bansag) regions of dualist Hungary were classic borderlands with markedly different characteristics. While both zones were multiethnic, the former was a mountainous, backward and agricultural area. The latter was one of the richest and most industrialized in the country, with thriving cities and a developed economy. While social life in Maramureș was dominated by interethnic and trans-religious noble kins, who ruled over Ruthenian- and Romanian-speaking peasants and Orthodox Jews, the Banat had a diverse yet stratified society defined by a landowning aristocracy, urban bourgeoisie, families of military descent, immigrant worker groups and a multiethnic peasantry. These regions had very different roles and positions within Austria-Hungary and were ruled in a differentiated way. The new boundaries that were drawn after the First World War resituated these areas: new centres emerged; new elites came to dominate in the successor states; and the new state borders cut previously existing economic and social ties. Both Maramureș and the (Romanian) Banat were relocated in terms of space, economy and society. The once economically central and self-supporting Banat became dependent on a central government that aimed at its political subordination, which generated strong regionalist political currents. Maramureș became the most peripheral area of the new state, and the local elites had to rely on resources provided by the centre. Divided among themselves, Maramureș regionalists, Transylvanian regionalists and centralizers competed for favour in Bucharest, creating unexpected alignments within the framework of a layered type of regionalism, and offering diverging visions of the regions’ futures.