Abstract
The region of east-central Europe is one that for many centuries was inhabited by multi-national dynastic empires: Ottoman, Habsburg, Romanov and Hohenzollern. Their break-up after the First World War left a host of memories, ideas, even institutions. It also left a series of apparently intractable problems of identity and membership, as groups that had previously occupied a wide imperial space found themselves caged in nation states, many of which were of recent formation. There were conflicting memories of past existences, and past relationships between groups. These memories have continued to influence present politics, including attitudes to “Europe” and membership of the European Union. This chapter will seek to understand the historical origins of these questions, and especially the role played by memories of past empires.
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Notes
- 1.
My grateful thanks to Chris Hann and Ildikó Bellér-Hann for their help with many aspects of this chapter. Thanks also to the editors of this volume for their many suggestions, which have been invaluable in the revision of the chapter.
In a recent volume on “liberal nationalisms and the legacy of empires”, the editor Iván Dénes notes, with respect to Central and Eastern Europe, the need to investigate the “damnosa hereditas” of the empires in the region. “In order to understand [the region’s problems] one needs to break with the traditional paths of national histories, by digging out the suppressed heritage of the Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman empires, including their dissolutions” (Dénes 2006, 8). It is a measure of the difficulties, and of how much still needs to be done, that not one of the contributors to the Central and Eastern sections of the volume chooses to engage with this aspect of the question, focusing instead entirely on nineteenth-century issues.
- 2.
The use by Kundera and others, such as Georgy Konrad, of the term “Central Europe”, as opposed to “East-Central Europe”, or the more cumbersome “Central and Eastern Europe”, the terms more favored in academic discourse, is meant to indicate a distinct sensibility, and a distinctive set of values, that have traditionally been associated with the concept of “Central Europe” in literature, history, and philosophy. It also emphasizes the importance of certain countries—Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland especially—which are said to have embodied those values most completely. These are also the “Habsburg” countries, which is why the Habsburg Empire figures so prominently in their thinking. Other countries in the region—Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic countries—are not generally included in “Central Europe”. Of course both “Central Europe” and “East-Central Europe” are designed to exclude Russia, hence also they are the preferred alternatives to “Eastern Europe”, which before the fall of the Soviet Union encompassed all of the countries in the Soviet bloc. For a discussion of these concepts with bibliographical references to the relevant literature, see Kumar (2001, 74–103, 279–91); see also Okey (1992), Trenscényi (2017), Schenk (2017).
- 3.
It was strikingly evident to me, lecturing to graduate students from the region at the Central European University in Prague in the 1990s, how indifferent they were to Russian culture and history, and how strongly they insisted that they were even beginning to forget the Russian language that most of them had had to learn at school. It is part of the misfortune of the recent history of the region that Russian culture, once admired there, has been so comprehensively rejected, to the region’s impoverishment (while there has been almost slavish adulation of Western thought and culture).
- 4.
- 5.
The Mandates Division of the League of Nations played a particularly important role in seeing that the interests of the imperial powers were represented, though as with the later United Nations it was not always possible to contain anti-imperial sentiment, see Pedersen (2015).
- 6.
It can fairly be said that the Ukrainians and the Belarusians did not properly have their own nations either, simply in both cases Soviet republics that claimed to represent them. But that did not necessarily still nationalist claims and hopes to create “true” Ukrainian and Belarusian nation states. For a good examination of the Belarusian case, see Rudling (2015).
- 7.
Chris Hann notes that indignation at the “injustice of Trianon” has re-awakened in Hungary with the end of socialism after 1989, and the difficulty of relating to the authoritarianism of the Horthy regime of the interwar period and collaboration with the Nazis in the Second World War. What is left, in the face of this “inglorious history of the twentieth century”, is reversion to the memory of the “Thousand-Year” Kingdom of St. Stephen, and especially Hungary’s role as “equal partner” in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. “It seems that Hungary is still struggling to come to terms with the loss of imperial power … Its contemporary leaders would like nothing more than to blot out the entire twentieth century and return to the nineteenth, when they constructed their splendid capital city and the key elements of the richly ambiguous mythomoteur that remains in place today” (Hann 2015b, 103, 118).
- 8.
Steven Beller (2006, 200) notes that “forbidding the union of Austrian Germans with Germany contravened the principle of national self-determination, and it had a disastrous effect on Central European politics”. In that sense the new Austrian Republic formed in 1919 was not really a nation state at all but simply “what remained” of Habsburg Austria or “Cisleithania”. Kann (1980, 42–43) notes that “in late 1918 and 1919 a sizeable majority of the Austrian people … favoured Anschluss”.
- 9.
The full quote from Kafka is: “We are nihilistic thoughts that came into God’s head … There is plenty of hope—no end of hope—only not for us!” (in Brod 1947, 75). The well-known joke, attributed to Galicians about the Galician front in 1914, is another good expression of some typical Central European attitudes. A German officer reports: “The situation is serious, but not hopeless”. The Austrian officer retorts: “The situation is hopeless, but not serious” (Davies 2011, 468). Davies’ chapter on Galicia gives a very good picture of a very characteristic part of East-Central Europe. See also Wolff (2010). Milan Kundera sees the “tragicomical” as the typical Central European outlook, a “view of the world which considers the comical side as an indivisible part of every human situation. Nobody, nobody is spared the comical which is part of our condition, our shadow, our relief and our condemnation (quoted Rupnik 1989, 204). Elsewhere he speaks of “our special humour: a humour capable of seeing history as grotesque” (1984b, 27). For another account of Central and Eastern European “mental reflexes”, see Fodor (2013, 409–10). It is probably worth stressing that not all thinkers and artists from the region adopted this ironic or acerbic attitude.
- 10.
A good example would be the English—themselves invaders of the British Isles—who for long lived under French Normans (the Norman and Angevin kings), then under Welsh (the Tudors), then Scots (the Stuarts), then Germans (Hanoverians and Saxe-Coburgers), whose descendants still rule. Arguably the English have not governed themselves since Harold Godwinson was defeated by William the Conqueror in 1066. One could also mention the experience of India, under “foreign”—Muslim and British—rule from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries; or China, ruled by the Mongols (Yuan dynasty, thirteenth to fourteenth centuries), then later by the Manchus (the Qing dynasty, 1644–1912). Most states, for most of the time, have been ruled by “foreigners”: that was virtually the norm before the nineteenth century.
- 11.
Germany of course, in the form first of Prussia, then of the Second German Reich, then of the Third Reich (the Nazi empire), played an important role in the region. There is no room here to consider the legacy of that complex experience. For some stimulating thoughts, see Mazower (2009b, esp. 553–604); Conrad (2012, 153–68).
- 12.
The religious divisions and their imperial sources were vividly displayed in the great exhibition on the Protestant Reformation in Hungary at Budapest’s National Museum in 2017 to mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Theses. Maps showed the areas of Ottoman rule and how they coincide with the current distribution of Protestants. It is made clear that it was Ottoman protection that made possible the survival of Protestantism in Hungary. Ottoman patronage of Protestantism was not merely political, though that was perhaps the main reason, as it wooed Protestant nations as allies against its principal enemies, the Catholic Habsburgs. But Ottoman thinkers also saw many parallels between Islam and Protestantism, for instance in the absence or diminution of church and clergy, and the hostility to making images. For the example of the close relation between the Ottomans and Protestant Elizabethan England, see Brotton (2016). John Elliott (1993) has also emphasized the extent to which Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry forced Catholic rulers, including the Habsburgs, to make concessions to local Protestant communities in order to get support for their wars. Ottoman pressure and presence therefore contributed to the making of European diversity.
- 13.
Kim Scheppele, intervention at the Conference of Europeanists, Philadelphia, April 2017.
- 14.
Historical points of comparison—“golden ages”, periods of greatness and grandeur, as well as of traumatic suffering and defeat—clearly vary greatly, depending on present circumstances. For instance, Czechs in the immediate aftermath of the failure of the Czech Spring of 1968 looked back nostalgically to the first Czech Republic of the Masaryk era; while in 1946 it was the Hussite Wars that were seen as the most significant (Subrt 2018, 226). For other examples of this variety, see Varga (2018).
- 15.
E.g., the essays in the volumes edited by Pakier and Wawrzyniak (2016b), Moskalewicz and Przybylski (2018), and—with some exceptions—Kopecˇek (2008). Pakier and Wawrzyniak, in proposing Eastern Europe as a “regional” framework of memory, argue that “making use of Eastern Europe as an umbrella concept makes sense since its societies were once influenced by a Soviet-type metanarrative and also by some resistance to it. Working through communism is thus very often a filter for other representations, especially for Fascism and Nazism” (2016a, 15). They are aware of course of earlier shared experiences in the region, but choose to focus only on the latest, the Soviet experience. This should be compared with earlier volumes on the region, e.g. Schöpflin and Woods (1989), Graubard (1991), where references back to the early empires are quite common. A recent volume edited by Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz (2013) also ranges within the earlier empires in searching for the roots of twentieth-century violence in the region.
It should be said that this narrowing refers mainly to academic “memory studies”; references to earlier imperial experiences—e.g. of Habsburg Galicia, for both Poles and Ukrainians—remain strong in popular and political discourse.
- 16.
Some have also proposed adding a “Poland C”, the plains and parks east of the Vistula, see Gazeta Wyborcza (1999). Again, it has to be emphasized that these distinctions and divisions are fairly crude, with many exceptions and variations. But their continuing popularity shows that they still have real significance.
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Kumar, K. (2022). The Legacy of Empire in East-Central Europe: Fractured Nations and Divided Loyalties. In: Lewis, S., Olick, J., Wawrzyniak, J., Pakier, M. (eds) Regions of Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93705-8_4
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