Péter Bencsik. <i>Border Regimes in Twentieth Century Europe</i>

Péter Bencsik is a historian of border regimes and territorialization in twentieth-century East Central Europe. In 2022, he published two monographs: Border Regimes in Twentieth Century Europe and Demarkációs vonaltól államhatárig: A határ menti társadalom és konfliktusai az 1920-as években [From demarcation line to state border: border society and its conflicts in the 1920s].1 While this review primarily concerns the former, considering his two publications together gives a greater sense of Bencsik’s innovative research and the historiographical challenges that he must grapple with as part of his scholarship.Demarkációs vonaltól államhatárig traces the development of Hungary’s post–World War I state borders. It is a localized analysis of “territorialization”—the process of asserting state control over territory through, among other things, policing borders and enforcing citizenship laws. Bencsik focuses primarily on the Hungarian-Czechoslovak border, but he includes findings on Hungary’s other borders as well. He explores smuggling, illegal border crossing, local border traffic, and dual landholding in considerable detail; his empirical study serves as a much-needed complement to the theoretical work of geographers and political scientists on borders and territorialization. Bencsik convincingly connects his microhistorical studies to the theoretical literature and the historiography on borders and borderlands in East Central Europe. However, situating his work within broader European historiography is much more difficult, as a comparative history of border regimes in the twentieth century had not yet been written.Border Regimes in Twentieth Century Europe rectifies this historiographical gap and, when read in tandem with Demarkációs vonaltól államhatárig, gives Bencsik’s own research a broader contextualization in European history. He describes two “models” of border regime: the “Western liberal” model characteristic of countries such as Great Britain and the United States and the “Eastern restrictive” model, characterized first and foremost by Russia and later the Soviet Union (38). Between these two poles, Bencsik argues that East Central Europe emerged as a “transitional zone” that vacillated according to the logic of geopolitics, sometimes having more in common with the Western model, sometimes with the Eastern. Border Regimes is a synthesis based on secondary literature rather than the deep archival work of Demarkációs vonaltól államhatárig.When it comes to studying border regimes, scholars of Western Europe, East Central Europe, and Russia / the USSR have focused on very different questions. For the West, the priority has been studying immigration and emigration (“permanent movements,” as Bencsik describes them), while East Central European historians have been more concerned with temporary spatial mobility, or the lack thereof. Border surveillance, on the other hand, has a well-developed historiography for East Central Europe and Russia / the USSR but is rarely discussed in Western historiography. These different thematic preoccupations complicate Bencsik’s task of writing a comparative history of European border regimes, but he notes that his book is a necessary “first step” in integrating these histories (1).Chapter 1 is an overview of the theoretical literature on borders and borderlands. Bencsik defines border regimes as “all those measures that persons crossing state borders could encounter through the actions of the authorities,” including border surveillance, passport administration, and customs regulation (12). His analysis is thus focused on state actors rather than the responses of individuals impacted by border policies. In chapter 2, Bencsik describes the development of the Western and Eastern models of border regimes. He argues that both models emerged gradually over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and suggests a path dependency for the persistence of distinct border regimes in the West and East, except in the transitional zone of East Central Europe, where outside influence led to much more pronounced deviations from one model to the other.The next two chapters cover the Eastern and Western border regimes during the short twentieth century. Chapter 3 focuses on the era of the World Wars. Bencsik describes the ways in which the Western border regimes “territorialized” (i.e., got stricter) as a result of World War I. In the West, the era of free international travel came to an end and passports became obligatory. Despite international efforts to roll back restrictions after the war, many remained in place permanently. After the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik regime ended up adopting many of the restrictions on mobility put in place by the tsarist regime before it. Protecting the revolution from enemies but also controlling labor and preventing an influx into cities were all part of the rationale. Stalin’s “Second Revolution” increased the harshness of these border regimes, and border infrastructures became more complex and militarized. Special border zones were created that were cleansed of “undesirable” residents, and the immediate territory around the border was left uninhabited. The Soviet regime also took steps toward “preventing exit” of its citizens, meaning that traveling internationally became nearly impossible (52).Chapter 4 covers the Cold War era, where in the West major developments included the beginning of European integration and stricter immigration controls on people coming from former colonial holdings. While freedom of movement—a fundamental right according to the UN Declaration of Human Rights—was considered inviolable for Western European citizens, the same did not apply to outsiders seeking to immigrate. “Once self-evident, the connection between liberal democracy and open borders seems to have come into doubt,” Bencsik argues. From that point on, “liberal democracies demand both openness and closure at the very same time” (77). The Eastern border regime, meanwhile, continued many of the practices put in place during the 1930s. In this chapter, Bencsik describes in some depth the internal border regimes that existed in the Soviet Union, which divided the state into “non-passportised rural territories (the inhabitants of which were not authorised to move to territories subject to a passport obligation); cities to which those who held a passport were, in principle, free to move; and, finally, ‘regime cities’ (that is, closed cities), where the right to move into the city—or to move out of the city, for that matter—simply did not exist” (80). He also demonstrates some of the ways in which the Russian Federation inherited former Soviet policies, taking many years to reform the laws related to internal mobility.Chapter 5 turns to the transitional zone of East Central Europe, which became undeniably part of the Eastern border regime during the Cold War. Bencsik looks at the development of East-West boundaries, but he also investigates what borders were like between Eastern Bloc states and generally shows that the sort of securitization associated with the iron curtain happened at intra-Bloc borders as well. He shows that much of the border regime policy in the region was compelled by the Soviet Union. This section goes into depth about the physical apparatuses of borders in ways that previous chapters do not, demonstrating once again the discrepancies inherent in the historiographies upon which Bencsik must draw. The book ends with general observations and a review of border regimes in Europe post-1989, when East Central Europe rejoined the Western border regime through accession to the European Union.Border Regimes in Twentieth Century Europe successfully integrates disparate histories and presents a cogent framework for understanding the topic. The stark differentiation between a free West and a restrictive East, however, is at times overstated. Bencsik attributes increased militarization of Western borders to “immigration pressure from the Third World” (121), but controlling bodies at the border has always gone hand in hand with controlling ideas. The US-Mexico border’s militarization began in response to the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the fear that fleeing refugees would serve as radical agents of socialism. A similar trepidation existed with regard to refugees fleeing from Russia to Western Europe during the Russian Civil War. Even though “preventing exit” may have been unique to the East, both types of border regimes concerned themselves with controlling the spread of “dangerous” ideologies. Furthermore, although Western border regimes did not historically rely on internal passports the way Eastern regimes did, they still had a variety of methods to limit citizens’ movement and geographically restrict settlement. The existence of Western and Eastern models of border regimes also raises the question, especially in the Cold War era, of how much adherents of these two models observed, copied, or rejected one another’s practices.Bencsik’s work—both local and archival in Demarkációs vonaltól államhatárig and broadly historiographical and theoretical in Border Regimes in Twentieth Century Europe—offers much-needed contributions to the history of borders. In both books, he demonstrates the ways in which border regimes have frequently changed over time and convincingly shows their importance to understanding modern European history.

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