Nationalism From Below in the East European and Soviet Borderlands: Popular Responses to Nation-Building, 1900-1940
(Hardback)
Publishing Details
Nationalism From Below in the East European and Soviet Borderlands: Popular Responses to Nation-Building, 1900-1940
By (Author) Dr Petru Negura
Edited by Dr Andrei Cusco
Edited by Dr Svetlana Suveica
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Bloomsbury Academic
11th December 2025
United Kingdom
Classifications
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Nationalism
Physical Properties
Hardback
320
Width 156mm, Height 234mm
Description
Bringing together an international cast of contributors, this book engages with popular responses to nationalising and state-building projects in Eastern Europe. The volume focuses specifically on the Western border regions of the Soviet Union and the eastern provinces of Romania, Poland, and the Baltic States during the interwar period, as well as their imperial legacies, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Top-down studies, which focus on political and intellectual elites, state structures and state policies, continue to dominate the historiography. Nationalism from Below in the Soviet and East European Borderlands compensates for this imbalance by approaching the East European borderlands from a bottom-up perspective; it is based on the perceptions, discourses and practices of ordinary people as a response to the nation- and state-building projects. The book uses several case studies to highlight, from a comparative perspective, the local populations social and political peculiarities around national identification. It considers how these positions have changed over time and impacted the relationships between these neighbouring regions, which today make up parts of various independent states. Lastly, it reflects on how gender-based statuses and hierarchies overlap and intertwine in everyday settings of staging nationhood, alongside ethnicity, religious affiliation, class, and age.
Author Bio
Petru Negura is Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Germany. Andrei Cusco is Researcher at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania. He is the author of A Contested Borderland: Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Century (2017). Svetlana Suveica teaches at University of Gttingen, Germany.
