The clear symbolic break with the Monarchy was often obscuring, sometimes deliberately, how the pre-1918 past has shaped the successor states in their everyday operation and how this legacy served as a leverage for specific social groups and local societies to promote their peculiar interests. States were ready to relinquish some of their authority and bargain over administrative practices. Bound by trajectories set by an institutional legacy impossible to dispose of in a moment (existing laws, persisting institutions) states and statehood soon started to resemble a patchwork within the new boundaries. It is, however, not easy to grasp what it meant for the people of the time and how statehood changed during a long transition period.A local approach promises a viable route to systematic napping of the varieties of state transition. This chapter sets out a comparative analysis of such local cases, arguing that not 1