Nationalizing the multi-ethnic borderlands: state surveillance and security policies in interwar Turkey and Romania

Abstract

This article aims to elucidate Turkey and Romania's state policies in their multi-ethnic frontier regions, namely Eastern Anatolia and Transylvania, and their security-oriented strategies towards those, regarded as a threat to national unity and territorial integrity during the interwar period. Two post-imperial nation-states, Turkey and Romania followed similar policies towards national consolidation, as both aimed at constructing and then consolidating centralized and homogenized nation-states in the 1920s. In this process, the Kurds in Eastern Anatolia and the Hungarians in Transylvania were seen as the primary security risks to the state, because of their demographic concentration, linguistic unity, and dense population in a particular territory, as well as capacity to resist the emerging central authority. Drawing mostly on primary sources, this research demonstrates that the level of conflict in multi-ethnic regions was overwhelmingly affected by the extent of state-imposed security and surveillance policies within the nationalizing framework of interwar Turkey and Romania.