League of Notions?: Local Agency, State Power, and International Institutions in Interwar East European Borderlands

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Over the past two decades, scholars have increasingly focused on Eastern European borderlands, highlighting the limits of nationalization and centralization. More recently, growing attention has been given to the role of international institutions like the League of Nations—not only in shaping events on the periphery but also in terms of local actors. This research reveals how locals navigated shifting state structures, bypassed national authorities and appealed to higher international bodies, thus renegotiating prevailing notions of power, sovereignty, and governance. Shahollari investigates the League’s Mixed Commission and its attempts to categorize Muslims in the Greek-Albanian-Yugoslav borderland, arguing that efforts to delineate populations not only failed to resolve disputes but also intensified borderland violence. Beilinson explores how local stakeholders in Upper Silesia—parents, employers, nationalists, and school principals—leveraged the League’s arbitration to contest national education policies, effectively circumventing state control. Finally, Piskačová probes how Poland’s strained ties with the League fueled nationalist rhetoric, turning Czechoslovak-Polish commemorative sites from symbols of unity into arenas of division. Memory weaves through the entire panel, shaping new research that seeks to mend the historical record of the borderlands’ national claimants and international oversight. Remembered as triumphant and failing, respectively, both nation-states and international organizations emerge as more complicated, efficacious, and yet contested than popular memory and official historiography previously allowed.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Rok Stergar, U of Ljubljana (Slovenia)

Papers

• 'The very Categorical Desire': The 1924 Mixed Commission’s Survey along the Greek-Albanian-Yugoslav Borderland - Lediona Shahollari, U College London (UK)

• More than Language: Secondary Education in the German-Polish Borderlands, 1919–1939 - Orel Beilinson, Yale U

• Remembering the Divide: Public Commemorations and the Polish-Czechoslovak Conflict in Teschen Silesia, 1932–1938 - Zora Piskacova, Harvard U

Discussant

• Cristina Florea, Cornell U