State-Building and Local Administration in Imperial Border Regions, c. 1800-1900

Over the course of the Nineteenth century, six nation-states emerged in the Balkans out of territorial losses suffered by the Ottoman Empire: Greece, Serbia, Romania, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and finally Albania came out as winners in the highly competitive game of state-building in the region. Such an outcome was neither completely contingent nor entirely predetermined. The European Great Powers played a decisive role in the rather frantic state-building process in South-eastern Europe: It was for them to determine, whether a new state was to be created in the first place, where its boundaries would be drawn, whether the state was to become semi-autonomous or sovereign and which Western European dynasty would rule the emerging state. This project attempts at intertwining the slow (but not inevitable) demise of the Ottoman Empire with the Habsburg expansion (Bosnia) on the one hand and the difficult birth of a nation-state (Serbia) on the other. Sarajevo and Belgrade have been chosen to take a closer look at state-building and the changes of administrative structures on local levels with flexible cross-sections at around 1800, 1850, and 1900. The years are picked accidentally on purpose in order to avoid bias through historical landmarks and even more to question them. Such a longue-durée approach with time slices of approximately fifty years allows both synchronic and diachronic comparisons and makes visible the transformations on the spot. The two areas located in classical imperial border regions stand for imperial order (e.g. Ottoman and/or Austrian-Hungarian) and what was later to be considered national (e.g. Serbian) sovereignty. To reflect better the ever-changing dynamics at local/regional levels and to hint at the contingency of historical events in general, then existing administrative units instead of the clearly confined states of today build the basic categories of analyses in this project. The innovative approach of this project is to examine local administration and network structures, further to conceive state-building beyond ethno-national loyalties as well as to avoid what Rogers Brubaker aptly called groupism. With respect to the latter, a still very dominant narrative that is to say the native Christian vs. alien Muslim dichotomy will be contested here. The guiding research question is how the state-building process and local administration structures developed within an international context shaped by the Great Powers, between imperial realities, national aspirations, and local traditions. It will be of utmost importance to scrutinize, whether and how the intended efforts from above at building a state were implemented on the spot and whether and how local developments itself proved to be incentives for international, imperial and/or national reactions.

Over the course of the Nineteenth century, six nation-states emerged in the Balkans out of territorial losses suffered by the Ottoman Empire: Greece, Serbia, Romania, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and finally Albania came out as "winners" in the highly competitive game of state-building in the region. Such an outcome was neither completely contingent nor entirely predetermined. The European Great Powers played a decisive role in the rather frantic state-building process in South-eastern Europe: It was for them to determine, whether a new state was to be created in the first place, where its boundaries would be drawn, whether the state was to become semi-autonomous or sovereign and which Western European dynasty would rule the emerging state. This project attempts at intertwining the slow (but not inevitable) demise of the Ottoman Empire with the Habsburg expansion (Bosnia) on the one hand and the difficult birth of a "nation-state" (Serbia) on the other. Sarajevo and Belgrade have been chosen to take a closer look at state-building and the changes of administrative structures on local levels with flexible cross-sections at around 1800, 1850, and 1900. The years are picked accidentally on purpose in order to avoid bias through historical landmarks and even more to question them. Such a longue-durée approach with time slices of approximately fifty years allows both synchronic and diachronic comparisons and makes visible the transformations on the spot. The two areas - located in classical imperial border regions - stand for imperial order (e.g. Ottoman and/or Austrian-Hungarian) and what was later to be considered national (e.g. Serbian) sovereignty. To reflect better the ever-changing dynamics at local/regional levels and to hint at the contingency of historical events in general, then existing administrative units instead of the clearly confined states of today build the basic categories of analyses in this project. The innovative approach of this project is to examine local administration and network structures, further to conceive state-building beyond ethno-national loyalties as well as to avoid what Rogers Brubaker aptly called "groupism". With respect to the latter, a still very dominant narrative - that is to say the "native Christian vs. alien Muslim dichotomy" - will be contested here. The guiding research question is how the state-building process and local administration structures developed within an international context shaped by the Great Powers, between imperial realities, "national" aspirations, and local traditions. It will be of utmost importance to scrutinize, whether and how the intended efforts from above at building a state were implemented on the spot and whether and how local developments itself proved to be incentives for international, imperial and/or national reactions.