Compared to the new state borders of the Danube basin after World War One, the drawing of the Austro-Hungarian border was not only different but required the longest time (1918-1924). It was not a territorial dispute between a victorious and a losing state, but one between the two losers of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Austria and Hungary. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic (March to August, 1919), only the Austrian delegation was invited to the peace conference. This delegation successfully argued, through peaceful diplomatic channels, to make Western Hungary part of the new Austrian Republic. Under the Austrian peace treaty of Saint-Germainen- Laye (September 10, 1919) and the Hungarian one of Trianon (June 4, 1920), Austria received the area as well. However, the Hungarian side, using the means of political violence namely the paramilitary activity, enforced a referendum on Sopron/Ödenburg, the natural capital of the territory, which was previously judged to Austria (December 12, 1920). The participants of the referendum and the entire frontier population decided about their homelands not on ethnic grounds but on purely economic interests.
This article discusses and expands on two related issues. The first is the unexplored reasons for the departure of Polish migrant women: the forced migration phenomenon. The author describes the system behind forced migration as created at the intersections not only of care, gender and migration regimes but also of legal regimes. Second, the author points out that the close relation between forced migration and the process of ‘unbecoming a wife in the transnational context’ creates a distinctive type of trans-national motherhood experience. In order to explain the specificity of these types of experiences better the author introduces a new typology of transnational motherhood biographies. The case study of Al-dona is representative of the experiences of some Polish women in the period under study, 1989–2010.
Cwaniary (Female Wanglers) is not only a metatextual novel with numerous references to popular culture, but above all an important contribution to the discussion about the place and role of women in contemporary society. The author breaks with the nineteenth-century image of matka Polka, the Polish Mother, whose existence is confined to family and home. The creations and actions of the female wanglers in Cwaniary, outsiders who defy popular stereotypes by pursuing outré lifestyles, are underpinned with allusions to a nascent rebellion against patriarchy, systemic suppression of women's rights, and the resulting marginalization of women in society. Unfortunately, Poles still have great problems with openness to other cultures, nations, and non-heteronormative sexual orientations. The Poles, it seems, are caught between an irrational fear of disintegration of the structures of their relatively homogeneous society and the need to move on and reinvent themselves as the 'modern subjects' of critical theory. It is a choice between holding on to an anachronistic model of Polish culture founded on suppression or catching up with the 21st-century world of openness, diversity and multiculturalism.