From the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottomans to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia, Eastern Europe has been a battleground between the East and the West and a region of fluid frontiers. In Contested Frontiers in the Balkans Irina Marin follows the history of the Banat of Temesvar, a province situated on the edges of these competing empires and currently divided among Romania, Serbia and Hungary. The history of the Banat is, on a small scale, the history of Central and Eastern Europe as a whole - with its overlapping imperial rules, redrawing of boundaries, composite identities, Procrustean nation-states straddling multi-ethnic regions, the legacy of Communism and its vagaries, and the resuscitation of regionalism within the framework of the European Union. It is also the place where the Romanian Revolution of 1989 started which brought Ceau escu's Communist dictatorship to an end. The first history of its kind, this is an important study of Serbian and Romanian ethnicity, culture and influence explored through archival documents and a transnational historical approach, and provides new insights into the major empires of history and their relationship with the Balkan lands.
