The “bulwark” or antemurale myth—whereby a region is imagined as a defensive barrier against a dangerous Other—has been a persistent strand in the development of Eastern European nationalisms. While historical studies of the topic have typically focused on clashes and overlaps between sociocultural and religious formations, Rampart Nations delves deeper to uncover the mutual transfers and multi-sided national and interconfessional conflicts that helped to spread bulwark myths through Europe's eastern periphery over several centuries. Ranging from art history to theology to political science, this volume offers new ways of understanding the political, social, and religious forces that continue to shape identity in Eastern Europe.
Author(s): Liliya Berezhnaya; Heidi Hein-Kircher
Series: New Perspectives on Central and Eastern European Studies
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 406
City: New York
Rampart Nations
Copyright
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration and Toponyms
Part I — Background
Introduction — Constructing a Rampart Nation: Conceptual Framework
Chapter 1 — The Origins of Antemurale Christianitis Myths: Remarks on the Promotion of a Political Concept
Part II — (De-)Sacralizing and Nationalizing Borderlands
Chapter 2 — Not a Bulwark, but a Part of the Larger Catholic Community: The Romanian Greek Catholic Church in Transylvania (1700–1850)
Chapter 3 — Securitizing the Polish Bulwark: The Mission of Lviv in Polish Travel Guides during the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Chapter 4 — Ghetto as an “Inner Antemurale”? Debates on Exclusion, Integration, and Identity in Galicia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Chapter 5 — Holy Ground and a Bulwark against “the Other”: The (Re)Construction of an Orthodox Crimea in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Empire
Chapter 6 — Bastions of Faith in the Oceans of Ambiguities: Monasteries in the East European Borderlands (Late Nineteenth–Beginning of the Twentieth Century)
Chapter 7 — “The Turkish Wall”: Turkey as an Anti-Communist and Anti-Russian Bulwark in the Twentieth Century
Part III — Promoting Antemurale Discourses
Chapter 8 — Why Didn’t the Antemurale Historical Mythology Develop in Early Nineteenth-Century Ukraine?
Chapter 9 — Translating the Border(s) in a Multlingual and Multiethnic Society: Antemurale Myths in Polish and Ukrainian Schoolbooks of the Habsburg Monarchy
Chapter 10 — Mediating the Antemurale Myth in East Central Europe: Religion and Politics in Modern Geographers’ Entangled Lives and Maps
Chapter 11 — Bulwarks of Anti-Bolshevism: Russophobic Polemic of the Christian Right in Poland and Hungary in the Interwar Years and Their Roots in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 12 — Defenders of the Russian Land: Viktor Vasnetsov’s Warriors and Russia’s Bulwark Myth
Part IV — Reflections on the Bulwark Myths Today
Chapter 13 — Antemurale Thinking as Historical Myth and Ethnic Boundary Mechanism
Chapter 14 — Concluding Thoughts on Central and Eastern European Bulwark Rhetoric in the Twenty-First Century
Index
