Abstract
Albeit not ignored in the field of International Relations (IR), the local history of East-Central Europe has seldom been a primary subject of historical IR syntheses: the leading volumes on war and peace focus on decisions made and actions taken by great powers, viewing the region generally as their playground. Theoretical ideas of East-Central European political thinkers about the emergence of war and peace have also only rarely become part of the international discourse. This article highlights the potential of a more inclusive approach in improving the existing theories in security studies. Applying Benjamin Miller’s concept and theory of state-to-nation balance (a central element of which is the compatibility between political boundaries and national identifications) to East-Central European political history, the article argues that focusing on the political and social history of the East-Central European region provides valuable lessons vis-à-vis the question of war-proneness of regions and states. Invoking the theoretical framework for peace-making in ethno-territorial conflicts developed by István Bibó, a Hungarian political thinker, the paper demonstrates how connecting the works of lesser known East-Central European academics with the established mainstream of IR could prove beneficial for the study of international politics in the region and further beyond.
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Notes
For the purpose of this article, East-Central Europe refers to the region with changing borders comprised of the successor states of Austria-Hungary.
In their monograph Causes of War Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson (2010) do not even pronounce the name of Poland at all. Hungary is mentioned in connection with the definition of war (whether 1956 counts as such); the same goes for Czechoslovakia (about the definition of the 1968 invasion), which is nevertheless mentioned once more but only in evaluating Hitler’s plans toward it (Levy and Thompson 2010: 20). Joseph S. Nye’s magnum opus Understanding International Conflicts (2007) is not different: the word Hungary is only there once in a sentence listing military invasions of the two super-powers during the Cold War, in connection with crushing the 1956 revolution (Nye 2007: 163).
The last war in the region was the one over Kosovo in 1999.
The account of Susan L. Carruthers (‘International history 1900‒1945’ in Baylis and Smith 2001: 51‒73) is based on a narrative of imbalances of the European great power structure (the ‘German problem’ and the ‘Eastern Question’) while, it must be said, the author also mentions local nationalisms in the Balkans and Central Europe as a factor for further tension. Henry Kissinger’s World Order (2014) concentrates rather on diplomacy and claims that ‘World War I broke out because political leaders lost control over their own tactics’ or, in another formulation, ‘it arose from a series of miscalculations made by serious leaders who did not understand the consequences of their planning’ (Kissinger 2014: 80‒82).
According to Joseph S. Nye, ‘the deep causes of World War II were systemic—the unfinished business of World War I. The intermediate causes were largely domestic—the social and ideological disruptions that produced Hitler in Germany and the political and economic weaknesses in the democracies. The precipitating cause was Adolf Hitler’s strategy for domination. Similarly, besides Hitler’s ambitions, Kissinger further lists ‘facile pacifism, geopolitical imbalance, and allied disunity’ (Kissinger 2014: 86). According to Susan L. Carruthers, the path to the war in Europe was cause by the ‘imbalance of power which had existed on the continent ever since the unification of Germany’ plus ‘human agency’, i.e. Hitler’s conscious ‘determination to achieve world mastery’ (Baylis and Smith 2001: 66). The ethnic-national incongruence is mentioned only as a pretext of Nazi belligerency: ‘Here, Hitler again deployed as legitimation the fact that Germany had been wronged in 1919, when three and a half million Germans of the Sudetenland had been incorporated within the new Czech state’ (Baylis and Smith 2001: 69).
‘The story of cold-war historiography is often told in the form of a Hegelian triptych. First there were the traditionalist or orthodox accounts of the 1950s and 1960s which on the whole supported the official American position: the totalitarian Soviet Union started the Cold War by its expansionism while the democratic United States initially reactive, eventually moved to stop this and so defended the free world. Then, antithetically, came along the revisionists of the 1960s and 1970s for whom the all-powerful United States initiated the Cold War for ideological and economic reasons, and the Soviet Union was cautious, reactive and nationalistic, restrictive in its security claims rather than messianically ideological and expansionist. Finally, the disciplinary resolution arrived with the post-revisionists of the 1970s and 1980s, emerging from the preceding confrontation to create a superior synthesis by choosing the best elements of both schools: a transcending Aufhebung in other words’ (Anders Stephanson in: Reynolds 1994: 27). ‘I think the ‘new’ history is bringing us back to an old answer: that as long as Stalin was running the Soviet Union a cold war was unavoidable. […] For the more we learn the less sense it makes to distinguish Stalin’s foreign policies from his domestic practices of even his personal behaviour. […] Who […] was responsible? The answer, I think, is authoritarianism in general, and Stalin in particular’ (Gaddis 1997: 292‒94). A refreshing counter-example where social conditions and popular sentiment in East-Central Europe are taken into account as a factor for post-1945 Soviet policies in the region is Mark Kramer’s ‘Stalin, Soviet Policy and the Consolidation of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe 1944‒53’ (in Tismaneanu 2009: 51‒101).
The terms ‘cold war’ and ‘hot peace’ can be misleading here as Miller uses the first term for the interwar period and the second for the post-Second World War era. Contrary to this, cold war is generally used to describe the latter period. However, Miller focuses here solely on inter-state relations within the Western European region.
Besides the deep moral problems connected to the practice of ethnic cleansing one can also question whether in line with political aims it really became a factor in reducing secessionist or irredentist claims. In other places where national minorities remained, like Hungarian minorities in the neighbourhood of Hungary, such claims also diminished. But the potential of ethnic conflict is still there as it becomes manifest from time to time in minor political skirmishes, e.g. connected recently to the language law of Ukraine, or a legal dispute about the Uz-valley war cemetery in Romania.
See, for example, the following claims: ‘When there is a high state-to-nation imbalance in a region, the peace-making strategy which focuses on changing the capabilities of the local antagonists is most effective. This strategy has to do with great power involvement in the region and is carried out most effectively in the form of great power hegemony or cooperation’ (Miller 2005: 230). ‘Similar to the Middle East, an active engagement of the great powers is crucial for stabilizing another region with acute state-to-nation problems: the Balkans’ (ibid.: 260). He also claims that according to his theory (as opposed to realism) the role of great power is ‘less important than regional actors, at least regarding certain major war and peace outcomes’ (Miller 2006: 672).
The same can be said about other reviews of Bibó’s essay. One published in the Journal of International Studies (Sims 1976) found the piece hard going because of stylistic problems in translation and also because of ‘the high level of generality at which the argument is sustained’. Another one in the American Political Science Review (Hazleton 1978) shows confusion about the subject: ‘with renewed emphasis being placed on human rights, one is led to ask whether the basic principle of self-determination should not be first applied by the states themselves in hopes of achieving a stable and legitimate internal order before tackling the international community’.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Maria Malksoo for her generous and invaluable help in clarifying and smoothing the draft. I am also grateful to Iván Zoltán Dénes for giving me expert advice on the reception of István Bibó’s works, to my colleagues, Beáta Huszka and Gergely Romsics, for their insightful suggestions on the topic, and to the anonymous reviewers for their most useful and constructive comments.
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Schweitzer, A. Treasures in the backyard: how a peaceful region can contribute to the study of international conflicts. J Int Relat Dev 24, 960–979 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-021-00239-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-021-00239-7