Recent historiography has increasingly turned to the East European dimension of World War I, highlighting the topics of imperial collapse, widespread social disruption, radical population politics and de-colonization as the major consequences of the conflict. This MA-level university course aims to transfer the debates focusing on these processes of (geo)political, social, ethno-national, and cultural transformation into the university curriculum. Keeping in mind the need for transcending the national framework and the entrenched disciplinary boundaries, this course discussеs the East European borderlands from a comparative, regional and pan-European perspective. This approach is based on the assumption that the East European experience was far from marginal for the overall transformation engendered by World War I. The war led to a peculiar kind of “synchronicity” between Eastern and Western Europe, accelerating processes of nation-building, ethnic and political mobilization, economic interventionism, social upheaval and revolutionary change. Even if this meant an immersion into the “dark side of modernity”, it nevertheless signaled a momentous shift. This was especially true of the contested borderlands, where the unraveling of the imperial order led to the apparent triumph of nation-states, but also to the emergence of a radically new and militant Communist project within the former space of the Russian Empire. The war profoundly changed the rules of the game in Eastern Europe, perhaps more so than in the West. The subsequent political radicalization of the interwar period cannot be explained without tracing its roots to the imperial borderlands in Eastern Europe, which became fields of ambitious experiments in state-building (and collapse), social transformation, radical cultural policies, ethnic cleansing, and geopolitical fantasies. The course aims at providing a novel perspective on East European modernity and the ways in which it was shaped by wartime and the postwar crisis. This region, while peripheral in many other respects, was central to the unfolding of the story of European modernity during the war and its aftermath.

Among the questions to be tackled during the course, the following are especially relevant: To what extent, and in what way, was the major upheaval known as the “Great War” different on the Eastern Front in comparison with the Western Front? How did the main belligerents of the region – the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires – mobilize societies, transform economies and, most importantly, deal with diverse, unruly and often dubiously loyal populations? How were modern “technologies of rule” and the corresponding visions of societal mobilization and radical transformation transferred, borrowed, adapted, appropriated and applied by the war adversaries in the East? What role did ethnicity in general – and trans-border ethnic ties in particular – play in the radically new and unprecedented context of total war? How did ethnic hierarchies shift and change under the strains of war and under the pressures of increasingly interventionist and assertive state apparatuses? In what ways were populations classified, categorized, repressed, moved, displaced and transferred (most often violently) by governments questioning their group status and loyalties? Finally, what role did ideology play in this process? The course specifically deals not only with the wartime developments but also with the consequences of the war on different levels. Thus, it seeks to deconstruct the “empire vs nation” dichotomy by discussing the nature of the new nation-states that emerged on the ruins of old empires and the endemic conflicts that plagued these ostensibly homogeneous, but actually multi-ethnic, political formations. One major preoccupation is to contrast and compare the East European “peripheral” postwar order with the developments at the “centre”, i.e., in Western Europe, but also with the Soviet experiment. The implications and repercussions of wartime developments in the (distorted) “mirror” of the centre vs the borderlands will be the main focus of analysis. The course goes beyond World War I itself, partially covering the first postwar decade in an attempt to account for the synchronic and diachronic elements of the “East-West” dynamics during and after World War I.

The wartime historical experience of the Russian-Romanian borderlands, which is placed at the centre of the course materials, can be interpreted in terms of various entanglements, followed by violent and brutal processes of disentanglement. An entangled-history approach could serve as a fruitful framework for the comparative analysis of the East European experience during and immediately after World War I. However, given its inherent limits, this approach is supplemented by a wider preoccupation with various transfers and borrowings that need not necessarily be described in terms of “entanglements”. The varying rhythms and agents of modernity should not obscure the importance of emulation, transfers and entanglements, be these institutional, ideological, practical, interpretative, or (more often than not) a combination of the above. The methodology of the course is based on insights from the fields of empire studies, comparative and entangled history, discourse analysis, and symbolic geography, coupled with an explicit emphasis on the link between modernity, mass mobilization, and violence that defined the transition from the imperial to the post-imperial order. Students are to be confronted with the issue of how radical visions and practices of modernity were imposed from above and received/adapted/rejected by the local populations. Thus, this course strives to familiarize students with the most recent trends in historiography, but also to apply them to concrete case studies. By so doing, it directly addresses the wider debate on the connection between total war, modernity, strategies of governance, state-building, and state collapse.