Introduction
Demarcating East Central Europe
Johann P. Arnason
LA TROBE UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
Regional divisions have probably been more salient and their meaning more
contested in Europe than in any other part of the world. The debate on this
subject is complementary to the ongoing dispute on European exceptionalism,
seen as a macro-regional or civilizational feature, and it is no more likely to be
settled in definitive terms. Regional boundaries can only be drawn in approximate
ways, allowing for borderline cases and overlapping spaces that can be of
crucial importance. The criteria and the more detailed models of division depend
on analytical as well as historical contexts; changes to geopolitical or geo-cultural
settings may impose new frames of reference. To take an example of some significance
for the field to be explored in this issue, Soviet domination from 1945 to
1989 provided an obvious rationale for the idea of Eastern Europe as a region,
but the abrupt demise of the whole Communist power structure highlighted the
limits to more extensive use of this construct. A very different situation has taken
shape during the past 15 years. It is, at this stage, hard to predict how further
progress of European integration will affect the pre-existing – often blurred and
conflicting – patterns of regional division.
From Central to East Central Europe
A closer look at defining traits and problems of the region to be discussed here
might begin with the broader context: the attempts to revive the idea of Central
Europe during the last phase of Soviet domination. This notion has a long and
chequered history that cannot be discussed here; when it reappeared in dissident
writings and attracted international attention in the 1970s and 1980s, it came
with very specific connotations.1 The main emphasis was on a record of
important and original contributions to modern culture, cut short by imperial
and totalitarian rule. This cultural background was seen as evidence of a Western
identity suppressed during the Cold War (the theme of a ‘kidnapped West’ was
particularly prominent in the most famous – but not most insightful – contribution
to the debate, Milan Kundera’s essay on the tragedy of Central Europe).
Less interest was taken in the political history of the region, and there was no
direct link to strategies of political resistance: the protagonists of the debate were
responding to a situation where the obstacles to change seemed overwhelming,
European Journal of Social Theory 8(4): 387–400
Copyright © 2005 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
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and the very survival of an alternative culture was perceived as a realistic substitute
for goals that had to be postponed for an indefinite period of time. In retrospect,
the oppositional discourse on Central Europe was successful inasmuch as
it helped to consolidate a sense of cultural distance from the Soviet Empire (it
thus played a certain role in the complex internal de-legitimizing process that
undermined Communist power much more effectively than its opponents
realized at the time). But it had no significant impact on the political choices and
orientations of post-Communist regimes.
Reassessments of the Habsburg Empire – in light of the catastrophic sequel to
its downfall – played a prominent role in the debate on Central Europe, and in
some cases, they translated into outright apologetics; at the same time, the
German role in the historical vicissitudes of the region was given less than its due.
This may be linked to older but lasting reactions against German visions of
Mitteleuropa. In any case, the uneven treatment of the western part of the region,
together with the fact that the Czech, Hungarian and Polish protagonists of the
debate were obviously reflecting on the historical experiences of their respective
countries, may be seen as a pointer to more specific contexts. In brief, this particular
twist to the discourse on Central Europe was, first and foremost, a new phase
in the self-reflection of a more narrowly defined region, East Central Europe –
less familiar to the broader public, but now perhaps more frequently invoked by
historians, even if they find it difficult to agree on its boundaries. The reference
to the three above-mentioned countries suggests a first step towards demarcation,
based on recent history: Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland constituted the
most troubled region of the Soviet Empire, the frontier zone where tensions
between an imposed model and indigenous conditions led to recurrent crises and
gave rise to projects of transformation.2 In these three countries, reformist
Communism took a more concrete and practical shape than anywhere else; they
also developed the most vigorous dissident cultures, at first inspired by critical
versions of Marxism but later divided into post- and anti-Marxist currents. Most
strikingly, they experienced abortive exits from Communism: Hungary in 1956,
Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1980–81 (in the last case, there was no
Soviet invasion, but the military regime established after the suppression of
Solidarnosc in 1981 was only a shadow of the former party-state).
This record invites reflection on backgrounds and legacies. But attempts to
define a regional core, more or less identical with the three modern states and the
historical kingdoms which they claimed as their ancestors, run into difficulties.
To begin with an obvious point, the destinies of the countries in question have
always been affected by interaction with neighbouring states whose identities and
trajectories were in turn linked to more distant regions. On the north-eastern
side, the Lithuanian connection drew Poland into closer contact with the Russian
territories during successive phases of their history. From the west, the Austrianbased
Habsburg dynasty and – at a later stage – its Prussian rival intervened
decisively in the history of their neighbours. In the southwest, the long-standing
link between Hungary and Croatia was a bridge to the Mediterranean and
Southern Slav worlds. Finally, Romania is a particularly intriguing case. The
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Transylvanian input into its modern history links it to East Central Europe, even
in the narrowest sense of the term, although other aspects – including the historical
foundations of Romanian statehood – were closer to Southeastern Europe,
defined as the sphere of Byzantine traditions, Ottoman domination and
nineteenth-century nation-states with mutually contested borders.
These thoroughly blurred boundaries have often been seen as reasons to prefer
a broader perspective. On that view, the ‘lands in between’, located in a zone alternately
surrounded or conquered by stronger states with imperial ambitions
(German, Russian and Ottoman), constitute a distinctive region, variously
labelled as Eastern Europe (thus excluding Russia), or as Central and Eastern
Europe. It is, for obvious reasons, still demarcated from neighbouring German
states, but the division between East Central and Southeastern Europe
disappears, and at least in some cases, ‘Far Eastern Europe’ – the borderlands
between East Central Europe and Russia proper – is included.3 It seems likely
that historians will continue to use both definitions, and the broad one makes
more sense in some contexts than others. In this issue, it is represented by the
first contribution by Berend. But the main emphasis will be on the more specific
merits of the narrow definition, and on the historical-sociological questions
which it allows us to pose. The following discussion centres on the main trends
and landmarks that have – for more than a millennium – shaped the regional
profile of an East Central European core, even if its boundaries have varied
markedly from one historical phase to another.
Two historians from the region have done the most insightful and seminal
work on its formation within a broader European context: Oscar Halecki, who
began his career in inter-war Poland but wrote his best-known books in exile
after the war, and Jenö Szücs, whose work was obviously not unrelated to the
Hungarian debate on Central Europe in the 1980s, but who reformulated the
whole problematic from a long-term historical perspective that had otherwise
been widely ignored. Their approaches share a highly significant historical
starting point. The consolidation of the Carolingian Empire around 800 AD had
completed a foundational synthesis of Roman and ‘barbarian’ legacies, and at the
same time added new territories to the original domain of the Roman Empire,
from which it claimed to be descended. The difference between old and new
imperial domains is marked enough to be seen as a first distinction between
Western and Central Europe. But then we have to draw another boundary further
to the east: between the eastern part of the Carolingian Empire, later the core of
its East Frankish/German successor state that revived the imperial claim in 962,
and the adjacent zone to its east, where the institutional and ideological patterns
of Western Christendom were – from the ninth century onwards – diffused
without imperial conquest. East Central Europe is the most appropriate label for
the region that thus began to take shape within the civilizational orbit but beyond
the imperial borders of the emerging West. In the historical context (and to some
extent in line with medieval usage), the term ‘Eastern Europe’ could be reserved
for a more distant periphery: during the following phase, especially in the first
half of the eleventh century, Kiev Rus – this name seems preferable to any version
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of ‘Russia’ – entered into closer contact with Western Christendom. Even the
Byzantine heartland is, at this stage, best described as another Europe in the
making, whose development was later derailed by invasions from east and west.
Halecki interpreted the ‘inner dualism of Central Europe’ in explicitly ethnonational
terms. After defining Central Europe as the realm of Western
Christendom beyond the former Roman borders, he went on to distinguish a
western part, ‘ethnically and historically identical with Germany proper’, from
an eastern one, East Central Europe, which had, in spite of intermittent German
control, ‘always remained non-German, inhabited by a great variety of ethnic and
linguistic groups in contradistinction to the homogeneously German West
Central Europe’. On this view, the link between the two parts was ‘not any real
community, but rather an age-long struggle against a unification enforced by the
smaller, but more homogeneous and therefore stronger part’ (Halecki, 1962: 127,
129–30). Central Europe thus appears a permanent battlefield – an intracivilizational
rather than an inter-civilizational one – but the intensity of the
conflict could sometimes blur this distinction; as Halecki noted, it was not always
obvious that the two parts had more in common with each other than with
Western and Eastern Europe.4 By contrast, Szücs (1990), writing 30 years later
and in a very different context, emphasized divergent institutional patterns and
paths of state formation, as well as the impact of more global processes. In
particular, he argued that the simultaneous dynamics of Western European
expansion across the Atlantic and Russian expansion across Eurasia had
marginalized East Central Europe, and that the impact of this geopolitical as well
as geo-economic shift was aggravated by the growing power of the nobility – at
the expense of towns and peasants – within the region. The ‘re-feudalization’ of
East Central Europe was reflected in the character of its absolutism, in some ways
closer to Russia than to the West. From this perspective, the dividing line between
Germany and East Central Europe is much less marked.
Medieval Foundations
Following both Halecki and Szücs, the emergence of East Central Europe can be
traced back to the medieval transformation that some historians now describe as
‘the Europeanization of Europe’ and others as ‘Europe’s discovery of its own
diversity’ (Borgolte, 2002). The crucial juncture is the ninth-century division of
the Carolingian empire, accompanied by the diffusion of civilizational models
eastward beyond imperial borders. In the regional context, these changes
coincided with a key episode that went unnoticed in the two above-mentioned
accounts. The short-lived ninth-century Moravian state (‘Great Moravian
Empire’ would seem an inappropriate label) exemplifies the inter-civilizational
background to early East Central European history. It took shape in the aftermath
of a counter-offensive against Inner Eurasian rulers of the region
(Charlemagne’s destruction of the Avar state), and was in turn destroyed by a new
wave of conquest from that quarter (the Magyar invasion). During the interval,
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it became a contested domain between Western and Eastern Christendom. This
was not a clear-cut case of civilizational conflict. Rather, the course of events was
shaped by a complex set of intertwined factors. Differences between the two
Christian centres, Rome and Constantinople, were at this stage more institutional
than doctrinal (the Eastern Church was more willing to accept the vernacularization
of scripture and liturgy, but this was not an absolute contrast), and they
combined with rivalries of other actors in the field: the Eastern Carolingian state
had its own strategic interests, those of its episcopate were sometimes closer to it
than to Rome, and dissent within the ruling Moravian dynasty affected geopolitical
choices (for a succinct summary, see Krejcˇí, 1990: 1–8). The upshot of
these multiple conflicts was, however, a historical decision with long-term
civilizational implications: the alignment of a new region with Western
Christendom. Finally, there is a further – more conjectural – reason for stressing
the importance of ninth-century origins. The evidence is fragmentary and
inconclusive, but it seems likely that the Moravian state functioned as a transmitter
of Carolingian models to the later Slavic kingdoms that left more lasting
marks on regional history (Trˇesˇtík, 2001).
The Moravian episode was cut short by the Magyar invasion of the Danube
plain – not the last wave of invaders from Inner Eurasia, but the last one to give
rise to a new state in the region, and the only one to be assimilated into the
expanding ecumene of Latin Christendom. The Hungarian kingdom retained
some traces of its pre-Christian background, and this may have helped to
maintain a notably multicultural character in the new civilizational environment
(Berend, 2001). But more importantly, this integrative transformation was part
and parcel of a broader realignment; the tenth-century transfer of imperial claims
to the East Frankish kingdom – which thus came to be known as the Holy Roman
Empire – coincided with the crystallization of three new centres of state formation
beyond its eastern borders. These emerging kingdoms – Poland, Bohemia
and Hungary – became, at the dawn of the second millennium, the defining
components of East Central Europe as a distinctive region. Their separate
identities became increasingly clear, but this did not prevent attempts at dynastic
unification across their boundaries (the most successful project of that kind was
the late medieval expansion of the Polish-Lithuanian Jagellonian dynasty). At the
same time, they became the main geopolitical and geo-cultural frameworks for
the transfer of institutions and ideas from the more advanced regions of Western
Christendom. This entailed particularly close contact with Germany, and in all
three cases (although in varying degrees) the strong impact of German immigration.
In contrast to the neighbouring Baltic region, the influx of German
settlers was largely peaceful and actively supported by the indigenous states, but
there was some overlap between the two regional patterns, most momentously in
the conflict between the Polish kingdom and the German Order.
Halecki interpreted this constellation in overly ethnic terms. It would,
however, be unfair to dismiss his view as a total anachronism.The three kingdoms
were multi-ethnic states with expansionist ambitions that sometimes bordered on
the imperial level. But it is equally true that they were most closely linked to
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ethnic cores, consolidated through the experience of statehood and the identification
with long-lasting dynasties (the Piasts and later the Jagellonians in Poland,
the Prˇemyslids in Bohemia, and the Arpads in Hungary). In this sense, the
kingdoms and their later destinies were central to the long-term processes of
nation formation in the region. Western analysts of nationalism, prone to
invidious distinctions between West and East, have mostly failed to grasp the
complexity of this specific situation (for a forceful reminder, see Zernack, 1994).
Some historians would object to parallels between the three kingdoms and
argue that Bohemia was part of the Holy Roman Empire, whereas Poland and
Hungary never acknowledged their sovereignty in more than the loose terms
that could in theory apply to any European kingdom. This is a selective and
formalistic approach. Although definitive recognition of Bohemia as a kingdom
came later than in the two other cases (in 1212), the lord–vassal relationship
between the emperor and the Bohemian rulers – subject to attempts at
readjustment on both sides – did not entail any imperial authority over internal
affairs of the Bohemian polity. To quote the best German interpreter of Czech
history, ‘Bohemia is not an imperial territory’ (Seibt, 1983: 11). It was, in
comparison with the two other kingdoms, both more intimately involved in and
sometimes central to imperial politics, and the close contact could at times lead
to explosive conflicts. The landmarks of this historical entanglement include the
late thirteenth-century bid for hegemony within the empire by one of the last
Prˇemyslids, as well as the fourteenth-century ascendancy of an international
dynasty (the Luxemburgs) that made Bohemia the main basis of imperial
authority and presided over one of the most significant phases of cultural upgrading
in the region. But the most salient episode was the extraordinary Hussite
movement of the early fifteenth century, which contested both the imperial and
the ecclesiastical centres of Western Christendom and can – even if historians
continue to dispute its meaning – be seen as a forerunner of later upheavals in
the West, beginning with the Reformation.
Modern Transformations
The after-effects of the Hussite explosion were contained within a re-stabilized
Bohemian kingdom, and on the eve of early modern transformations, the region
seemed to be drawing closer to dynastic integration than ever before. On the
cultural level, this was perhaps – not least due to the influence of Renaissance
humanism – the moment when some regional centres came closest to being on
equal footing with the West. But trans-regional history soon took a different turn.
As noted above, Szücs’s reflections on this major watershed stressed the impact
of external factors: massive changes in the global balance of power, due to Western
and Russian expansion, as well as the direct and destructive effects of Ottoman
expansion from the south. Szücs linked this view to the more distinctively
Marxist conception of a ‘second serfdom’, established by the ascendant nobility
in response to the formation of a world market, with new outlets for agricultural
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products. This latter explanation for regional backwardness is now less favoured
by historians. The development of economic structures was less uniform and
some of the changes in question occurred earlier than the model would have it.
But there is no doubt about the importance of imperial expansion, outside and
inside the region. The genesis of the Habsburg Empire, which was to dominate
the regional scene until World War I, was directly related to the Ottoman threat.
The Habsburg realm first emerged under the aegis of a regional branch of the
dynasty which tried and failed to link the Holy Roman Empire to the Spanish
spearhead of Western expansion; it is difficult to determine when a composite
state crossed the imperial threshold, but when the imperial title was added to rule
over Bohemia and a part of the fragmented Hungarian kingdom, a new geopolitical
configuration had obviously taken shape.
The victory of imperial power over the historical states – as the three kingdoms
are often called – shaped the course of modern history in the region. But countercurrents
also left their mark on cultural memory and on political traditions that
could be reactivated at later stages. During the late medieval and early modern
periods, a political order based on estates and their assemblies reached an
exceptionally high level of development. This phase represents a very distinctive
episode in the history of European state formation. As one German historian puts
it, the three East Central European countries came closest to creating a ‘pure form
of the estate order’ (Reinkultur von Ständestaatlichkeit) that had first emerged as
a European phenomenon in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Schramm,
1996: 18, 23). In the end, imperial monarchy prevailed over the estate order; the
paths leading to that outcome differed from country to country, but were always
crucial to collective memories and self-images. The Polish estates, dominated by
the upper nobility, succeeded in blocking the development of absolutist
monarchy, but at the price of weakening their own state, exposing it to destruction
by neighbouring ones and providing the Russian Empire with a foothold in
the region. The swiftly defeated revolt of the Bohemian and Moravian estates
against the Habsburg push for absolute rule sparked a European conflagration
(the Thirty Years’ War); it was followed by a political and ideological counteroffensive
that changed the course of Czech history. The Hungarian version of the
estate order survived in remarkably vigorous shape in the Transylvanian remnant
of the kingdom, and proved strong enough to maintain some defensive positions
after the establishment of Habsburg rule over the whole country. To complete
this overview, it should be noted that the experience of the Ständestaat also gave
rise to tenacious political myths. The prime example is perhaps the image of the
Polish ‘republic of the nobility’ as a pre-figuration of purely political nationhood
(for an effective demolition of this, see Althoen, 2003).
The Habsburg Empire turned the tables on the Ottomans at the end of the
seventeenth century and went on to project its power – direct and indirect – into
South-eastern Europe. Compared with this dominant force, the East Central
European presence of the Russian Empire was more marginal. The Habsburg
background is central to all discussions about the identity and internal diversity
of the region. Imperial integration lent some substance to the idea of a larger
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Central Europe, but at the same time, the internal dynamics of power structure,
cultural traditions and economic changes reshaped the East Central European
constellation. The interpretation of absolute monarchy as a last-ditch defence of
‘feudal society’ is always misleading, but particularly so in this case. The
Habsburg version of absolutism had a transformative dynamic of its own,
expressed in changing political strategies as well as in readjustments of relations
to social and national forces. Epoch-making reformist measures were taken in the
second half of the eighteenth century; later rulers did not continue in the same
vein, but the capacity for autonomous action was still reflected in responses to
changing situations during the nineteenth century, especially after the abortive
revolutions of 1848. There are no compelling grounds to assume that this
adaptive potential had been exhausted when the imperial leadership opted for a
war which it was bound to lose in one way or another. Similarly, economic
modernization within the empire, however uneven and conducive to new
tensions, was nowhere near a dead end or a definitive blockage in 1914. It had
led to increased differentiation between centres and peripheries (industrial
growth in Bohemia and Moravia was particularly important for the overall
configuration), and this superimposed a general European pattern of unequal
development on the regional context; but the specific forms and consequences of
this dynamic were still marked by regional factors, and although the empire
cannot be credited with a developmental strategy, its manoeuvring ability was
certainly not negligible. However, the other side of the picture should not be
forgotten: the adaptive strategies of the empire were geared to further involvement
in the competition between the European great powers, and this made it
particularly vulnerable to international crises. It was the core group of the
Habsburg power elite that set the ball rolling in the summer of 1914, and its
main motive was to neutralize the impact of the Southeast European conflict zone
on the East Central European heartland of the empire.
Among the internal problems of the empire, the national question stood out
as the least manageable when external setbacks became critical. Within the
Habsburg realm, imperial and national dynamics interacted and clashed in more
complicated ways than anywhere else in Europe. The most seminal twentiethcentury
analyses of nations and nationalisms related directly to this constellation;
the authors included participant observers as well as exiles from the region (Otto
Bauer, Hans Kohn, Carl Deutsch and Ernest Gellner are the best-known names).
But if these works derived some essential insights from direct contact with the
East Central European experience, they can also be criticized for not doing justice
to the long-term processes of nation formation, and to the role of the historical
states in that context. What they did reflect, even through the prism of oversimplifying
theories, was the ambiguous relationship between imperial and
national aspects of modern transformations in the region. Imperial power was
perceived as an obstacle to full national development and self-determination, but
at the same time, imperial modernization opened up new possibilities for the
social and cultural consolidation of national identities, including those that had
to be built from below without support from traditional elites. Tensions between
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the two poles were aggravated by more specific factors. An institutional compromise
with the strongest and most strategically placed group – the Hungarians –
became both a model for and an obstacle to similar demands by others. And
although the Austrian part of the dual monarchy (as it was known after 1867)
could never be defined as a German state, the growth of Pan-Germanism among
its German subjects and the increasingly dependent relationship with a resurgent
Germany in the last decades before 1914 caused it to be widely perceived as such.
No discussion of modernizing processes in East Central Europe under
Habsburg rule can omit the achievements and destinies of the Jewish community.
The Jewish presence in the region goes back to the medieval period (it was part
and parcel of the early ‘multiculturalism’ of the Hungarian kingdom, and a major
wave of immigration to Poland in the late Middle Ages changed the geographical
distribution of European Jewry). From a long-term perspective, East Central
Europe appears – after the medieval Iberian experience – as the other major zone
of European interaction with the Jewish civilizational diaspora. In the advanced
modern phase, Jewish contributions to intellectual and cultural life – and to some
political movements, especially the socialist one – were of first-order importance;
the Zionist movement found its most important mass basis on the eastern margin
of the region, in the formerly Polish part of the Russian Empire. At the same
time, political anti-Semitism grew, but the regime that channelled it into the
most destructive assault on European Jewry was not indigenous to the region.
The East Central European successor states of the inter-war period (including
Poland, which combined the former Habsburg territory of Galicia with other
parts recovered from German and Russian domination) have been somewhat
unfairly condemned by later generations. They have, in particular, been accused
of imposing spurious national identities on multinational populations and thus
perpetuating the problems which they had pretended to solve. In this regard as
in others, the historical record varies greatly from country to country. The most
interesting case is discussed in one of the contributions to this issue. But in more
general terms, a balanced assessment should begin by acknowledging that
objective difficulties were formidable. Cumulative historical developments had
made the relationship between state formation and nation formation – both
integral components of the socio-cultural dynamic that shaped the modern world
– more complicated and conflict-ridden than it mostly was in the West.
Moreover, the multiple crises of Western modernity hit this region harder than
others. The general post-war failure to move towards a more stable international
economic and political order was compounded by the weakness of institutions
built on the ruins of an old order. The global economic crisis that began at the
end of the 1920s had a very destructive impact on East Central European
economies. Last but not least, the two main totalitarian challenges to Western
modernity – both of them rooted in the world war and its aftermath – affected
the region in specific and massive ways.
This last point merits further comment. Indigenous totalitarian movements
emerged in East Central Europe and its borderlands (the Fascist movements in
Hungary and Romania were perhaps the most vigorous among those that failed
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to gain power), but the main onslaughts came from outside. Nazi domination of
East Central Europe was the first step towards a larger war of conquest, and
although short-term tactics were different in each of the three core countries, the
results of this brief and destructive interlude differed only in degree. Within the
regional context, the racial imperialism of the Nazi regime did not translate into
any coherent political project. By contrast, Soviet domination lasted for almost
half a century and entailed social change of the most massive kind. The level of
domestic support for Communist takeovers varied greatly: it was, in particular,
much greater in Czechoslovakia than in Hungary and Poland. In retrospect, basic
similarities are nevertheless obvious. The imposed regimes suffered from a fundamental
lack of legitimacy, more acute in some situations than others, and their
projects were undermined by internal contradictions as well as by basic incompatibility
with regional conditions. As noted above, the three countries constituted
the most troubled zone of the Soviet Empire. In 1989, the Soviet decision
to abstain from further intervention led to the swift and total collapse of their
respective party-states.
Contemporary Perspectives
The above summary of successive historical experiences should help to demarcate
East Central Europe as a distinctive area – a Geschichtsregion, to use the term
favoured by German scholars (see, in particular, Troebst, 2003). Its contours have
been shaped by internal factors and trends at work within the larger European
arena, as well as by more global dynamics. There is no doubt that the last decade
and a half represents a new turning-point. The disintegration of the Soviet
Empire seemed to open the way for more autonomous development, but other
aspects of the situation have made that perspective less realistic. The wholesale
de-legitimation of socialist ideas left the region open to a wave of utopian
capitalism and to ideological dependence on a half-imaginary West. Global
economic forces set strict limits on the strategies and initiatives of the regional
actors in general and the governments in particular. Finally, integration into the
European Union is widely seen as the beginning of a new chapter in the history
of the region, although it is too early for clear-cut results to be visible, and prognoses
of rapid ‘re-Europeanization’ seem implausible.
The second part of this issue deals with post-Communist developments and
prospects in the region. But the first three articles discuss broader backgrounds
to contemporary perspectives, as well as some key aspects of the recent past. Ivan
Berend argues for a broader geo-historical framework and uses the term ‘Central
and Eastern Europe’ to refer to the larger region mentioned at the beginning. In
his view, this perspective is particularly useful when dealing with the advanced
phase of European modernity, from the late eighteenth century onwards. After a
long history of uneven development, industrial and democratic transformations
in the West gave that part of the continent a more definitive and visible advantage
over Central and Eastern Europe. Attempts to catch up, conflicts between
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ideological and political projects geared to that goal, and national rivalries
exacerbated by the problems and perceptions of backwardness have marked the
history of the region for the past two centuries. In this context, ideas imported
from the West have combined with intra-regional currents and often taken
directions markedly different from those more familiar in their original settings.
Berend’s retrospective analysis of this whole period portrays it as a case of ‘derailed
history’, a succession of failed strategies that often have aggravated the problems
they set out to overcome.
With Arpad Szakolczai’s article, the discussion returns to the more narrowly
defined East Central European scene. The particularly prominent role of
intellectuals in this region has often been noted. Their embrace of Communist
ideology and politics is part of that story, but so are the dissident cultures of the
late Communist phase. The region has also produced some of the most sustained
critical reflections on intellectuals in modern politics and society – from the
Polish anarchist Jan Waclaw Machajski, who first identified intellectuals as
candidates for a ruling-class role under socialism, to the recent work of Ivan
Szelenyi and his associates on the intellectuals as architects of post-Communist
capitalism. Szakolczai approaches this problematic from an unconventional
angle. As he sees it, the particularly troubling record of East Central European
variations on Enlightenment themes has inspired a rediscovery of transcendence
that may yet turn out to be the region’s most distinctive contribution to
twentieth-century European intellectual history. This radical reorientation is
inseparable from a new understanding of the relationship between the ancients
and the moderns.
The inter-war states of East Central Europe can be seen – and saw themselves
– as successors to the historical kingdoms that preceded Habsburg rule. The
Czechoslovak state founded in 1918 was, however, a more composite formation
than the others, and proved more fragile – it was the only one that did not survive
the exit from Communism at the end of the twentieth century. Johann Arnason
discusses the Czechoslovak trajectory, with particular reference to its successive
patterns of modernity. This case exemplifies a whole range of problems central
to the history of the short twentieth century. Due to the dynamics of international
conflicts and imperial rivalry, a successful national movement found
itself in possession of a state which in many ways reproduced the problems of the
defeated empire. These problems reappeared in different guises at successive
historical junctures. The Czechoslovak experience is especially instructive with
regard to the problematic of organized modernity and its internal differentiation.
This applies not only to the contest between Western and Communist versions,
but also to conflicts within the latter.
The last three articles deal with post-Communist developments. In this field,
the ‘transitological’ models popular in the early 1990s are now discredited, and
post-Communism has become a highly contested intellectual terrain. At the same
time, the real transformations, often unfolding in unexpected and ambiguous
ways, have highlighted both the diversity of background conditions and the
contingencies of history. If there is a post-transitological consensus on anything,
Arnason Introduction 3 9 7
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it is on the need for attention to the specifics of each case and for caution in
generalizing about a region, let alone about the whole post-Communist world.
The approaches taken by the three authors reflect this state of the field. Henryk
Doman´ski’s analysis of the Polish transformation stresses its inconclusive
character and the apparent discrepancies between structural indicators and
popular attitudes. A closer analysis of changes to social stratification goes some
way towards clarifying the situation, but Doman´ski nevertheless cautions against
sweeping conclusions about the state and prospects of Polish society. One lesson
to be drawn from the Polish experience is that acceptance – not necessarily
enthusiastic – of economic transformations along capitalist lines is not very
directly linked to the legitimation of the political system.
Jan Keller’s article on the Czech Republic draws more emphatic conclusions.
Here a more ambitious neo-liberal project – a kind of ‘great leap westward’ – has
more manifestly failed, with far-reaching consequences at the social and political
levels. A radical restructuring of society has taken place, but it has not created the
ownership-based civil society promised by the architects of the new order. The
growth of economic inequality, political apathy and social fragmentation has
resulted in a constellation unlikely to favour constructive responses to European
integration, and no new political project of any kind seems likely to emerge in
the near future. It would be interesting to compare this situation with the other
Czechoslovak successor state, where a neo-liberal leadership now seems intent on
becoming a regional model for a second round of such policies. But it was not
feasible to include an article on Slovakia.
Hungary played a pioneering role in the 1989 transformation of Eastern
Europe: it was the first country where the Communist Party relinquished its
monopoly of power. This was followed by a smooth transfer of power, a rapid
stabilization of a party system, and a more regular pattern of alternating governments
than elsewhere in the region. Against this background, the exceptional
polarization of Hungarian politics in recent years came as a surprise to most
observers, and is widely seen as a symptom of dissonances between the political
system and the political culture. This makes the Hungarian experience particularly
relevant to the ongoing debate on post-Communist democracy and its
specific problems. Elemér Hankiss in his article argues that this issue raises a
much more complex set of questions than the transitological models could
admit. As a way of underlining these ramifications, he proposes the metaphor of
a puzzle whose pieces do not always fit together in the same way, nor necessarily
make a complete pattern. From this point of view, Hungarian democracy has
some notable achievements to its credit, but some enduring weaknesses have also
been evident, and new obstacles to consolidation are emerging.
Acknowledgements
My work on this issue, including the writing of my contributions to it, was done in two
instalments: during my terms as a research fellow of the School of Languages, Cultures
European Journal of Social Theory 8(4)3 9 8
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and Linguistics, Monash University, Melbourne, in 2004, and as visiting professor at the
Zentrum für höhere Studien, University of Leipzig, in 2004–2005. I wish to thank both
institutions for their hospitality and support.
Paul Blokker’s discussion of postcommunist modernization goes beyond the boundaries
of East Central Europe. But the empirical and theoretical scholarship that he reviews
and criticizes is more directly linked to the core countries of this region than to any others,
not least because of their close relations with – and now formal membership in – the
European Union. Blokker reconstructs the main moves beyond the early ‘transitological’
approaches, and then argues for closer critical examination of the basic assumptions
behind transitology, more specifically its roots in modernization theory. As he sees it, the
main task is to bring more past, present and likely future diversity into the picture,
without losing sight of overarching theoretical issues. The increasingly visible diversity of
modernizing agents and programmes must be understood in light of multiple historical
backgrounds, but also in relation to the multiple institutional configurations that make
up the historical field of modernity. Blokker concludes with a plea for abandoning the
one-dimensional model of success or failure stories and moving towards more contextsensitive
research.
Notes
1 For a representative selection from this debate, see Schöpflin (1989).
2 To counter a possible objection, it should be noted that Yugoslav Communism was
not in the same category. Yugoslavia was never incorporated into the Soviet Empire.
Rather, a Communist regime that had risen to power largely through its own efforts
(but closely connected to Soviet victory in World War II) first asserted its autonomy
through a particularly extreme application of the Soviet model, as well as through a
foreign policy more overtly committed to revolutionary aims. When this led to open
conflict with the Soviet leadership, the Yugoslav regime had to adjust to a new geopolitical
situation and redefine its relationship to its domestic basis. This was achieved
through a limited but genuine and effective scaling down of the totalitarian project.
3 For the idea of a ‘Far Eastern Europe’ between East Central Europe and Russia (on
this view, the latter becomes an intermediate region between Europe and Inner
Eurasia), see Szporluk (1991).
4 For Halecki, West Central Europe was simply synonymous with Germany. The only
noteworthy later attempt to give this notion a more substantive sense was made by
Ferdinand Seibt (1989); he extended it to western margins and neighbours of the
Holy Roman Empire, and stressed, in particular, the importance of the Burgundian
connection for the early modern ascendancy of the Habsburg dynasty.
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■ Johann P. Arnason is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University,
Melbourne, and was until recently editor of the journal Thesis Eleven. His current
research focuses on theoretical problems of civilizational analysis. His recent
publications include Civilizations in Dispute: Theoretical Questions and Historical
Traditions (Leiden, 1997); Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden, 2004,
edited with S.N. Eisenstadt and B. Wittrock); Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to
Thirteenth Centuries (Leiden, 2004, edited with B. Wittrock). Address: La Trobe
University, Melbourne, Australia. [email: J.Arnason@latrobe.edu.au] ■
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