The territory of the Habsburg monarchy, especially its Hungarian part, is usually described as as a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-confessional area. A vast number of publications already deals with the topic of multi-ethnicity, especially for the crown land Galicia, which did not only consist of a variety of different ethnicities, but was also located at the border of the Habsburg Empire. A region which adjoins Galicia and often is characterized as a borderland as well are the Carpathians. This region, until now largely ignored by historical research is not only multi-ethnic and diverse in various perspectives, it is also an area that marks and marked borderlands of empires for several centuries, not least because the Carpathian mountain chain functions as a natural barrier. At the beginning of the 20th century, this traditional borderland became an area of upheaval. The Carpathians were a battle zone during the First and Second World Wars as well as the cradle of several national movements which tried to proclaim their own nation states. After the First World War and the fall of the Habsburg Empire, there were major changes enacted in the Treaties of Versailles and Trianon, which resulted in the shifting of borders as well.

In the past decades, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the interest in borders, borderlands and border regimes increased rapidly. Scholars of different disciplines like social anthropology, political science, history or social/human geography have dealt with the phenomena of the border and its functions. As well as the border itself, the borderland was in the centre of academic attention. Especially historians focused on everyday life in border zones. What has not been the focal point of research projects so far is the research on regions where borders not only existed, but shifted several times. The project which is being elaborated by Prof. Dr. Julia Richers from the University of Bern and me bridges this gap through a wider perspective on the life in an area of moving borders (rather than moving people). The Carpathians are chosen as a case study of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multiconfessional area where the moving of borders is not an exception, but the norm. The scheduled project will consist of several sub-projects, which will analyse sources in different languages and will focus on border regimes as well as on life in the Carpathian borderland at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. We are aiming at writing a history beyond the nation state, which focuses on how people dealt with changing orders and regimes.