This article provides an introduction to the special thematic section on political mobilization in East Central Europe. Based on a brief presentation of the main arguments of the individual articles, the authors discuss the recent political volatility in East Central Europe. They highlight the tension between fierce political rhetoric and populist policies on the one hand, and low levels of voter turnout and overall political participation in the region on the other. The authors argue that recent cases of successful as well as unsuccessful political mobilization in East Central Europe point to structural re-alignments in the region's political landscape. In particular, the parties that are successful are those that manage to communicate their visions in new ways and whose messages resonate with nested attitudes and preferences of the electorate. These parties typically rally against the so-called establishment and claim for themselves an anti-hegemonic agenda. The introductory essay also asserts that these developments in East Central Europe deserve attention for their potential Europe-wide repercussions – especially the idea of “illiberal democracy,”which combines populist mobilization and autocratic demobilization and finds adherents also in more established European democracies.

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In a memorandum presented to the Hungarian-Czechoslovak Boundary Commission on 23 February 1922 by the inhabitants of the southern Slovak town of Viškovce (Hungarian: Ipolyvisk), the twenty-five signatories requested “humbly for consideration and well-meaning settlement of the following concern.” The municipality was bordered on three sides by the Ipeľ (Hungarian: Ipoly) River, but had been cut off from the only usable road by the border, making communication extremely difficult. In winter and at high water in the spring and autumn, the place was “completely cut off from the outside world.” For three years, they had observed how provisional boundaries were continuously redrawn, and bore the brunt of these changes. The inhabitants said that all alternative routes had become inaccessible during that time and the center of Šahy (Hungarian: Ipolyság), which was just ten kilometers away, had become extremely difficult to reach even in urgent cases. Thus, they requested that the only existing road “be opened to us as quickly as possible and our traffic given back to us.”

Although the literature on nation building is truly vast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the formation of regional identities. This is in large part because those who specialize in regionalism have argued that state and region form an essentially contradictory relationship. This article analyzes one example of how a hitherto indistinct geographical entity was fashioned into a federal province and how its political elite complied with a constant need to popularize and entrench the concept of the region. The new regional identity was thus designed to counteract two challenges to its very existence as a federal province: one from the former mother state, Hungary, and the other from Austria, where consideration was given to dividing the newly created entity between two neighboring federal provinces. The outcome of this attempt was the creation of a regional identity, albeit one mostly defined in negative terms.

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