Suchergebnisse

This study explores the role that geographical knowledge production played in the post-World War I "discovery" of Austrian Burgenland, focusing in particular on the relationship between geographical discourse and the politics of identity formation in the 1920s and 1930s. The primary task is to offer insight into this knowledge-making process by highlighting the discursive strategies employed in a variety of scholarly and popular texts, and by shedding critical light on the various actors and epistemic communities responsible for the imagining of Burgenland from its annexation to Austria in 1921 to the dissolution of the region and its subsequent re-invention as a Greater German border zone after the Nazi Anschluss of 1938. As Jankó and Jobbitt argue, Burgenland's discovery between the wars was both figurative and literal. Whether the "discoverers" were Austrian or German, national or local, Burgenland was as much a discursive concept as it was a physical reality. Its emergent identity as a region, therefore, much like its actual borders, was fluid and often contested.

After 1989, there have been changes in internal migration in Hungary, triggered by several factors such as economic transformation, accelerated suburbanisation and transport development. Increasing internal migration has affected each settlement differently, and from a demographic point of view there are also "winners" and "losers" in this process. Sopron, with almost 63,000 inhabitants, can be counted among the first group, as the town on the Austrian border is one of the most attractive destinations for Hungarian internal migration. In the past, the number of in-migrants usually exceeded the number of out-migrants. The differences depended largely on socio-economic transformations and the political situation of the respective period. In this study, we assess Sopron's position in internal migration and analyse how the different types of internal migration have contributed to migration gains. Based on our empirical research, we show the main demographic and spatial-structural characteristics of the in-migrants to Sopron. In addition, we examine whether there are significant differences in the composition of migrants who arrived before and after the economic crisis of 2008, respectively. In recent decades, the population of Sopron has grown steadily, while the populations in rural and other urban areas have declined. The main reason for the increase was the positive domestic migration balance which increased significantly after the turn of the millennium. Between 1990 and 2016, the population of the town rose by 13,000. This migration gain is primarily due to a temporary inflow. The most important reasons for the significant in-migration to Sopron were: a location-specific advantage after 1989 due to the nearby border, improved accessibility, relative proximity to the Austrian capital and the developed towns of neighbouring Burgenland and, finally, the abolition of all labour market restrictions in Austria in 2011. The results of our survey reveal that the latest economic crisis has brought a significant change ...