1
EASTERN, EAST-CENTRAL, OR CENTRAL EUROPE:
WHERE IS IT AND WHAT IS IT?
Paul Robert Magocsi
Where is east-central Europe? This is a question that
immediately provokes yet another: what is east-central Europe? Like
the terms western Europe, southern Europe, or northern Europe, eastcentral
Europe is a vague concept that defies any precise definition. It
is, nonetheless, a term that is used in the media, in books, and verbal
discourse.
Territorial extent
The concept of east-central Europe seems to have evolved
from the even more general terms, central Europe and eastern Europe.
Central Europe was the older of the two, and in the nineteenth century
it had come to denote territory ruled by various German states as well
as the Habsburg, or Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The term often
implied that there existed a religious-cultural dichotomy and a desire to
distinguish this part of the continent from the “less civilized” east and
southeast. In other words, central Europe was understood to comprise
the German states and the Germanic part of the Habsburg Empire that
were linked to the Catholic (and in part Protestant) “West.” This was
opposed to the unenlightened or heathen “other,” i.e., the Orthodox
“East” embodied in the Russian Empire, and the Muslim and
Orthodox “Balkans” under the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire.
As for the term eastern Europe, it began to gain currency in
the wake of World War I, which saw the creation of small successor
states sandwiched between Germany in the west and the Soviet Union
in the east. German literature sometimes referred to this area rather
prosaically as zwischen Europa, the in-between-Europe. When, after
World War II, the Soviet Union expanded its political influence farther
to the west, the term eastern Europe came to designate the so-called
satellite countries: East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Romania, and Bulgaria, as well as Yugoslavia and Albania, which were
also ruled by Communist regimes but which had at some point
succeeded in leaving the Soviet bloc. This Cold War definition of
eastern Europe remained in place until the collapse of Communist rule
during the Revolutions of 1989.
It is during the post-Communist era that the terms east-central
Europe and central Europe have gained increasing currency. These
terms have appeared, in part, in response to the wishes of the
inhabitants in the region itself, who often adamantly reject the adjective
“eastern,” which they believe is applicable to Russia or the Soviet
Union with whom they do not wish to be associated. Consequently,
the formulation east-central Europe, or preferably just central Europe,
are again – as in the nineteenth century – being used to underline the
association of oneself and one’s country with the rest of Europe and at
the same time to distinguish oneself from the “unenlightened” and
economically underdeveloped “East.”
This still leaves the question as to what precisely is the
territorial extent of east-central, or central Europe? Not surprisingly,
there is no consensus. Some authors, both within and beyond the
countries in question, consider east-central Europe to comprise only
Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and perhaps Slovakia, that is, the
proverbial “West.” Other writers extend the boundaries of east-central
Europe to include the Balkan peninsula (in some cases Greece as well),
while in the north the Baltic states and perhaps even Finland are added.
For some, the former Soviet republics of Belarus and Ukraine should
be added; for others those countries are relegated along with Russia to
eastern Europe. Clearly, the concepts east-central Europe and central
Europe vary according to the eye of the beholder.
Let us begin with physical geography. There is a general,
2
although not universal, consensus that the European continent
stretches from the coasts of Ireland and Portugal in the west to the Ural
mountains in the east. The longitudinal coordinates of that land mass
are 10°W and 60°E. If divided into three equal parts, the center
portion 10°E – 30°E, basically coincides with the east-west
geographical middle, or central third, of the continent. Looked at from
a north-south perspective, the territory referred to here as east-central
Europe falls within 55°N and 40°N latitude. This is also roughly the
middle, or central third of the continent as measured from the Arctic
coastline of Norway in the north to the isle of Crete in the south.
In terms of present-day political divisions, east-central/central
Europe as outlined above includes fifteen countries or parts of
countries: Poland, western Belarus, western Ukraine, the Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Slovenia, Croatia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), Albania,
Macedonia, and Bulgaria. The outside boundaries that encompass
these countries should not, however, be considered absolute but rather
as frayed edges. And beyond these edges are historical and
contemporary states like Brandenburg-Prussia, Lithuania, Austria,
Venetia, and Greece, which could at times be considered part of eastcentral/central
Europe.
From the standpoint of language and national cultures, eastcentral/central
Europe does respond to the proverbial description of a
“land in between,” that is territory roughly bounded by the Germanicand
Italian-speaking west, the Russian-speaking east, the Baltic
(Lithuanian)-speaking north, and the Greek- and Turkish-speaking
south. Since, however, language and national cultures are not
necessarily limited to a specific territory, one must also be mindful of
centers of cultural creativity beyond the land mass described above. In
that regard, St. Petersburg in Russia, Riga in Latvia, Trieste in Italy,
Berlin, Paris, New York City, and Toronto are just some of the other
paces that need to be factored into any serious cultural history of eastcentral/central
Europe.
Geographical zones
East-central/central Europe can be said to be divided into
three geographical zones: (1) the northern zone; (2) the AlpineCarpathian
zone; and (3) the Balkan zone. The northern zone is
bounded by the Baltic Sea in the north and the crests of the Ore,
Sudeten, and Carpathian mountains in the south. This zone is
characterized primarily by an unbroken plain that is part of the North
European Lowlands, stretching in a west-east band across the entire
European continent and including northern Germany, Poland, Belarus,
and part of the western Ukraine. Along the southern portion of this
zone located in east-central/central Europe are plateaus and foothills
covering large parts of southeastern Poland, southwestern Ukraine, and
northern Moldova. Because of its geographical features, the northern
zone has traditionally allowed for easy access from all directions, except
perhaps from the mountainous south. The lowland plain is drained by
several river systems—the Elbe, Oder, Vistula, and Neman—all of
which flow northward into the Baltic Sea or North Sea.
The second, or Alpine-Carpathian, zone is characterized by
mountain ranges that surround lowland basins and plains. In terms of
present-day countries, this zone includes the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
the Subcarpathian/Transcarpathian region of Ukraine, Hungary,
western Romania (historic Transylvania), northern Yugoslavia (the
Vojvodina), Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria. This zone is bounded in the
northwest by a triangle formed by the Sudeten Mountains, Ore
Mountains, and Bohemian Forest, which surround the lowland
Bohemia Basin and plateaus of Moravia. Immediately to the south are
the Alps, which cover most of Austria and Slovenia. Farther east the
zone is bounded by the wide sweeping arc of the Carpathian
Mountains, which stretch from Slovakia eastward across Ukraine’s
Transcarpathian region and southward into Romania, where the arc
turns abruptly westward until it reaches the Danube River at the socalled
Iron Gates. The Carpathian arc surrounds the Transylvanian
Basin and large Hungarian plain that covers virtually all of Hungary and
3
stretches southward into Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina and Croatia’s Slavonia
as far as the Sava River. Because the main geographic feature is the
Danube River and its main tributaries (the Tisza, Drava, and Sava), the
area is often referred to as the Danubian Basin. The mountain crests of
the Alpine-Carpathian zone traditionally served as natural protective
barriers that states hoped to secure and maintain as their political
frontiers. Despite the existence of several passes, those crests also
limited communication and trade with regions outside the zone.
The third, or Balkan zone, begins at the Sava River and
includes the Walachian Plain below the arc of the Carpathians. This
zone basically coincides with the Balkan peninsula, which is surrounded
by the Adriatic and Ionian Seas to the west, the Aegean Sea to the
south, and the Black Sea in the east. In terms of present-day states, the
Balkan zone comprises western Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, most of
Yugoslavia, southern Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, and
Greece. Most of this zone is covered by mountains (one range in
Bulgaria actually carries the name Balkan mountains), although there are
extensive lowland plains in southern Romania (Walachia) and northern
Bulgaria, which are together drained by the lower Danube, as well as
the Rumelian Basin in southeastern Bulgaria, the Thracian plain in
European Turkey, and the Vardar Basin in southcentral Macedonia and
northern Greece.
Although geographically part of the Balkan zone, the coastal
areas of Croatia (Dalmatia) and central Albania are quite distinct. This
is because they have traditionally been linked to the Adriatic and
Mediterranean maritime world and, until very recent times, were cut off
by high mountains from the Balkan hinterland. With the exception of
the coastal areas on all sides of the peninsula, communication within
the Balkan zone has been hindered because of the extensive
mountainous ranges. The result has been the existence of large tracts
of sparsely settled and frequently isolated areas that are incapable of
sustaining populations of any significance.
Cultural spheres
The population throughout most of east-central Europe is
characterized by great diversity in terms of religion, language, and
nationality. By the nineteenth century, all of Europe’s main religions
were well represented in the region: Catholicism in both its Roman
(Latin)- and Byzantine (Greek)-rite forms, Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam,
Judaism, and Protestantism. Numerically, the Catholic Church had
until the twentieth century the largest number of adherents, with an
estimated 56 million at the end of the nineteenth century and 83 million
at the end of the twentieth century. The majority of Catholics were and
still are of the Roman (Latin)-rite, with the Byzantine (Greek)-rite
Catholics numbering respectively 5 million (ca. 1900) and 7.7 million
(ca. 1995). Whereas both rites are within jurisdictions ultimately
responsible to the Pope in Rome, the Greek Catholics (or Uniates as
they are also known) use the Byzantine-rite and follow other practices
similar to the Orthodox world to which they had belonged before
accepting union with Rome.
The Orthodox represented the second and now largest group
in east-central Europe, having increased from 44 million at the end of
the nineteenth century to 87.5 million at the end of the twentieth
century. In contrast to the more unified Catholic world, with its
ecclesiastical center in Rome, the Orthodox are divided into several
self-governing, or autocephalous, churches. These autocephalous
churches are loosely linked together by what they call a “communion of
faith,” and most show respect to the “ecumenical patriarch” of the
Church of Constantinople (resident in Istanbul), a hierarch who is
considered the “first among equals.” Despite frequent analogies, the
ecumenical patriarch has never had the same jurisdictional authority
within the Orthodox world as does the pope within the Catholic.
The size of the Jewish population may have been considerably
smaller than either the Catholic or the Orthodox population;
nevertheless, the 7.4 million Jews living in east-central Europe at the
end of the nineteenth century represented 70 percent of the total
4
number of all Jews worldwide. The Jews of east-central Europe were
basically divided into two distinct groups, the vast majority of whom
were Ashkenazim, or Yiddish speakers. The other group, numbering
only about 193,000, were the Sephardim or Ladino speakers. Also in
contrast to the Catholics and Orthodox, the number of Jews has
decreased dramatically in east-central Europe during the course of the
twentieth century. This is largely the result of their physical
extermination during the World War II Holocaust, so that there are
only 594,000 left in east-central Europe (ca. 2000), and as many as
three-quarters of them live in the region’s former Soviet republics
(western Belarus, western Ukraine, Moldova).
The Muslim population of the region has undergone even
greater numerical fluctuation. At the outset of the twentieth century,
there were an estimated 4.4 million Muslims living primarily in the
Balkan zone in lands under Ottoman rule. As the Ottomans were
progressively pushed out of the region, so too was the Muslim, mostly
Turkish, population. Between 1912 and 1926 alone, nearly 2.9 million
Muslims were either killed or were forced to emigrate to Turkey.
Despite such demographic losses, a high birth rate (in particular among
Muslim Albanians) has resulted in a total of nearly 8.2 million Muslims
living in the Balkan zone of east-central Europe by the end of the
twentieth century.
Protestants in the region made their appearance already at the
time of the Reformation. Various Protestant sects gained a significant
number of adherents in east-central Europe, most especially in the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the eastern regions of the
Hungarian Kingdom. Despite their relatively small size, Protestants
had a significant impact on their surrounding environment as
promoters of education and in the printing of books and pamphlets in
vernacular languages. By the nineteenth century, the most important
Protestant denominations in east-central Europe were the Evangelical
(Lutherans) and Reformed (Calvinists).
Aside from these “mainline” religious orientations, east-central
Europe also became home to several other smaller groups, many of
which by the end of the twentieth century have dwindled further in size
or have virtually ceased to exist. Among these are the Armenian-rite
Catholics, Orthodox Old Believers, Karaite Jews, and Anti-Trinitarian
Protestants.
The spatial distribution of the major religions in east-central
Europe is uneven. The Catholics are concentrated in the northern zone
and in the Alpine-Danubian zone, that is in lands formerly belonging to
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Austria-Hungary. The
Orthodox are found in parts of all three zones, but most especially in
the western regions of the former Russian Empire/Soviet Union and
throughout the Balkan peninsula. By the end of the twentieth century,
fully 97 percent of all Orthodox Christians lived in the following
countries, listed in order of their size of adherents: Ukraine, Romania,
Greece, Belarus, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Macedonia, and
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Before its decimation during World War II, the Jewish
population was concentrated in what was known as the Pale of
Settlement, that is, lands acquired by the Russian Empire at the end of
the eighteenth century from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (i.e.,
present-day central and eastern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, central and
western Ukraine) and the Ottoman Empire (Moldova and southeastern
Ukraine). Whereas there were also Jewish concentrations in the
Habsburg Empire (especially in the northeastern counties of the
Hungarian Kingdom and in the urban conglomerations of Budapest
and Vienna), there were very few Jews throughout the Balkan zone
aside from some concentrations of Sephardim in small towns and cities,
especially Salonika/Thessaloniki.
Certain religious groups were linked to the state, while others
were associated closely with national movements among stateless
peoples. This was particularly the case in the Orthodox world, where
the self-governing, or autocephalous churches often came into being at
the initiative of the state’s secular authorities. In turn, the state would
frequently use the church to promote its national and even
socioeconomic policies. For instance, in late nineteenth-century
5
Macedonia, the Bulgarian, Serbian, and Greek Orthodox churches
competed with each other in an attempt to convince the local
population that it was either of Bulgarian, Serbian, or Greek nationality.
Similarly, Islam served the interests of the Ottoman state throughout
the Balkan zone, where it was not uncommon to find people who
converted to Islam (Bosnian Muslims and Albanians among others) in
order to become part of the ruling socioeconomic elite.
Whereas the Catholic world did not permit the establishment
of “national” churches, Roman (Latin)-rite Catholicism in practice
functioned as a state church in many countries, most especially in the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. This meant that for a long time the
Catholic Church controlled the Habsburg educational system, and
being Catholic certainly enhanced an individual’s socioeconomic
mobility, especially in the military and civil service.
Some religions, on the other hand, were closely associated with
stateless peoples and their efforts at attaining recognition as a distinct
nationality. In this sense, Greek Catholicism came to be perceived as
the “national” religion of the Ukrainians of Galicia, as did Roman
Catholicism for the Poles, who before 1914 lived as a stateless people in
the German, Austrian, and Russian empires. Some ideologists went so
far as to argue that one could not be a Pole unless one were Roman
Catholic, or that one could not be a Ukrainian from Galicia unless one
were Greek Catholic. The simplistic association between religion and
national identities at times produced anomalies. For instance, Slovaks
were traditionally associated with being a Catholic people, yet the
revered nineteenth-century national awakeners who promoted the idea
of a Slovak literary language and identity distinct from Czech were all
life-long Protestants and indeed ministers (L’udovít Štúr, Michal
Hodža, Jozef Hurban).
The linguistic configuration in east-central Europe is even
more complicated than the region’s religious structure. Taking into
account the unresolved debate about whether a given form of speech
should be classified as a language or as a dialect of another language, it
is still possible to refer to as many as 32 languages in the region. These
languages represent all the major linguistic groups spoken on the
European continent: Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Baltic, Turkic, and, in
their own category, Romany, Albanian, Greek, and Armenian.
By far the largest number of speakers are within the Slavic
group, which in turn is subdivided into East Slavic languages (Russian,
Belarusan, Ukrainian, Carpatho-Rusyn); West Slavic languages (Polish,
Kashubian, Lusatian Sorbian, Czech, Slovak); and South Slavic
languages (Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian). The
Germanic group is represented by German-speakers not only within
the boundaries of present-day Germany and Austria but in various
areas throughout east-central Europe. Some of these areas were part of
a continual German speech area stretching eastward into Pomerania,
Poznania, Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia. There were also Germans
who lived in compact colonies, some of which began to be settled as
early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (the Saxons of
Transylvania, the Zipser or Carpathian Germans in north-central
Slovakia, the East Prussians), others which were first established in the
fourteenth century (Galician Germans in southeastern Poland and
western Ukraine, the Gottschee Germans in Slovenia) or in the
eighteenth century (the Danube Swabians in southern Hungary,
Slavonia, the Vojvodina, and the Banat , and the Volhynian,
Bukovinian, Black Sea, and Bessarabian Germans in Ukraine). Many of
these German colonies were decimated as a result of the events during
and immediately following World War II; those that managed to
survive after 1945 had significantly reduced numbers. Another
Germanic language is Yiddish, which was spoken in Ashkenazim Jewish
communities until their destruction during World War II.
The Romance languages are represented primarily by
Romanian speakers in present-day Romania (historic Walachia,
Moldavia, Transylvania) and Moldova, as well as by Vlachs, a seminomadic
livestock-raising people based in the mountainous areas
throughout much of the Balkan peninsula. Italian remained the
dominant language for many coastal towns and cities along the Adriatic
coast from Trieste to Dubrovnik, although by the second half of the
6
twentieth century only a few Italian speakers remained in Istria
(Slovenia) and Dalmatia (Croatia).
The Finno-Ugric group is represented by Hungarian spoken by
Magyars in present-day Hungary as well as in linguistically contiguous
areas of all neighboring countries—Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania,
Yugoslavia (the Vojvodina), and Austria. There is still a large
community of Magyars farther east in Romania (in eastern
Transylvania), some of whom designate themselves by the term
Székely/Szeklers. The Baltic linguistic group is represented by the
Lithuanians within the present-day country of the same name; the
Turkic linguistic group by Turks (primarily in Bulgaria, Macedonia, and
Greece), by Tatars (in Romania’s Dobrudja region), and by Gagauz (in
Moldova and adjacent southwestern Ukraine).
As for the distinct language groups, Greek is limited primarily
to present-day Greece, although before World War I it was the
language of the large Greek population in western Anatolia as well as of
the traders and merchants living in numerous towns throughout the
Balkans and as far north as Budapest. Albanian is spoken in a compact
area covering present-day Albania as well as in neighboring Yugoslavia
(Kosovo) and Greece (Çameria/northern Epirus). Like Greek,
Armenian was the language of merchant colonists living in cities
stretching from Istanbul to as far north as Poland, although most of
that otherwise small group has become assimilated in the course of the
twentieth century. By contrast, the number of Romany/Gypsy
speakers has increased. Although not all Romany use or even know
some form of their ancestral language, the number of Roma/Gypsies
has increased dramatically, with conservative estimates being 820,000 at
the end of the nineteenth century to over 2.1 million at the end of the
twentieth. Traditionally an itinerant people, the Roma/Gypsies either
voluntarily or through state intervention (especially during the
Communist era after World War II) came to settle in permanent
abodes. They live on the outskirts of villages, and in towns and cities
throughout virtually all countries of east-central Europe, although the
largest concentrations are found within the present-day borders of
Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Slovakia.
Such extensive linguistic diversity might suggest that the
speakers of the nearly three dozen language groups were isolated
among themselves because they could not understand neighbors with
whom they often lived in the same state, province, city, or even town
and village. Leaving aside the possibility of at least basic
communication between speakers of related languages (in particular
among the Slavic languages), it was not uncommon for communication
to be carried out by a few lingua francas. Often lingua francas were the
state languages, so that in the nineteenth century the Russian language
served the role of an intermediary between Belarusans, Ukrainians, and
Jews, while the Polish language served the same function between
Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, and some Ukrainians and Belarusans.
German was the most widespread lingua franca in the Habsburg
Empire, making possible communication between Austro-Germans,
Magyars, Jews, speakers of various Slavic languages, and Romanians.
To a lesser degree Hungarian played the same role within the
Hungarian Kingdom, allowing for communication between Magyars,
Slovaks, Rusyns, Romanians, Croats, Danube Swabians, Jews, and
Serbs.
For those who received a higher education, spoken lingua
francas like German, Russian, or Hungarian could be used for more
sophisticated spoken and written communication. Therefore,
bilingualism – even multilingualism – became the norm for most
educated east-central Europeans at least until the mid-twentieth
century. After World War II, the status of Russian as a second
language was enhanced by virtue of the fact that it was a mandatory
subject in schools throughout most of the region as long as pro-Soviet
Communist regimes were in power. Gradually, however, the former
state languages – German, Hungarian, and eventually Russian – were no
longer being learned, since each was associated with an “imperialist”
and “occupying” power, whether the pre-World War I German and
Austro-Hungarian empires, or the postwar Soviet Union and Nazi
Germany. The result is that a much smaller percentage of educated
7
people in east-central Europe know German or Hungarian at the end of
the twentieth century than did their predecessors before and just after
World War I; similarly, Russian is unknown to young people educated
in the 1990s. Instead, since the Revolutions of 1989 it is English which
is becoming the lingua franca that more and more links the linguistically
diverse peoples of the region.
There is a crucial difference, however, between the old and
new lingua francas. In the former multinational empires, it was quite
common for educated individuals to have multiple identities, and the
lingua franca, especially if it was simultaneously a state language, was an
important badge associated with those identities. Hence, a native-born
Yiddish speaker from Prague, aside from being a Jew, might in certain
circumstances identify as a German or a Czech, because he or she had
learned and used those languages. By contrast, English is a kind of
“new Latin,” in that it is a neutral and purely functional instrument –
and one, moreover, that does not add another “national” identity to its
user in east-central/central Europe.
Language, of course, is not simply a functional instrument for
communication; it also has great symbolic value in relation to national
identity. As nationalist ideology increasingly established roots
beginning in the early nineteenth century, intellectuals throughout eastcentral
Europe were inspired by Herder’s theoretical question: “Has a
people, in particular a culturally underdeveloped people, anything dearer
than the language of its ancestors? Therein resides its whole intellectual
wealth, tradition, history, religion and principle of life – its very heart
and soul.” Some thinkers went even further and began to argue that a
nationality could not even exist unless it had is own language.
To be sure, all peoples spoke languages, but not all peoples had
a literary language. It was the struggle to create a literary language that
led to great intellectual debates and often political conflict in eastcentral
Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Questions such as, “Which dialect or dialects should form the basis of a
literary language,” or, “Should not a sacred language like Church
Slavonic or ancient Greek be adopted for modern usage?,” are the kind
of issues that for decades were to preoccupy the attention of national
awakeners. Nor did all national awakeners feel that their respective
people needed its own distinct literary language. For instance,
supporters of Pan-Slavism, who saw strength in unity, favored a
limitation on the number of Slavic literary languages. The Slovak Ján
Kollár suggested that number might be four (Russian, Polish, Czech,
Illyrian/South Slavic); the Slovene Jernej Kopitar respected all the
Slavic “dialects” but argued for the adoption of a single Slavic literary
language; Slavophiles in Russia also called for one literary language, and
that it should be Russian.
Since literary languages were almost always associated with the
existence of a distinct nationality, and since the creation of a literary
norm was to a degree an arbitrary intellectual construct, the decision as
to where the boundary of one language ended and another began often
led to conflict between neighbors. Is, for instance, Kashubian a dialect
of Polish or a separate language? Analogously, what is the relationship
between Ukrainian and Russian, Slovak and Czech, Rusyn and
Ukrainian, Macedonian and Bulgarian, Moldovan and Romanian? If
the first in each of these pairs became recognized as a distinct literary
language, this would imply and perhaps confirm that there exist distinct
Kashubian, Ukrainian, Slovak, Rusyn, Macedonian, and Moldovan
nationalities. These are the kind of debates that for most of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the languages of eastcentral
Europe into instruments of political, social, and cultural conflict.
As recently as the 1990s, one literary language has been
deconstructed because of political reasons. With the creation of
independent Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina alongside what remains
of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), the former common linguistic
medium called Serbo-Croatian (rendered in two alphabets, Roman and
Cyrillic) has been replaced by two new separate “national” languages,
Croatian and Serbian. There have even been attempts to create a third
variant, Bosnian. The linguistic diversity of east-central Europe has,
therefore, continued to evolve, since language remains both an
instrument for verbal and written communication as well as a political
8
weapon and badge of national identity.
Socioeconomic setting
At the outset of the nineteenth century, east-central/central
Europe was overwhelmingly rural in character. This remained the
situation as late as the 1870s, when the first European-wide census data
became available. The data not only revealed that most east-central
Europeans lived in the countryside, but that those rural areas were
relatively sparsely populated. In comparison with western Europe
(Germany, Italy, France, the Low Countries), where large blocks of
territory had well over 100 persons per square kilometer, only a few
areas in east-central Europe (northern Bohemia-Moravia and Upper
Silesia) reached those densities. Most areas had between 20 and 100
persons per square mile, whereas the entire Balkan zone (south of the
Sava-Danube rivers) had less than 50 or even less than 20 persons per
square kilometer.
The last decades of the nineteenth century were to witness an
increase of 50 percent in the total number of people throughout eastcentral/central
Europe, from 98 million in 1870 to 143 million in 1910.
While the Balkan zone experienced a 3 to 4 percent greater increase
during those four decades, it still remained the least populated part of
the region. Associated with overall demographic growth was internal
movement from the countryside to urban areas. If, for instance, in
1870 there were 21 cities in east-central/central Europe with a
population exceeding 100,000, by 1910 the number of such cities had
nearly doubled to 38. Nevertheless, even if by 1910 there were two
cities (Berlin and Vienna) with over two million inhabitants, and
another nine with between 500,000 and one million inhabitants, the
vast majority of settlements in the “urban” category were by presentday
standards really quite small, ranging in size from 50,000 to 100,000
inhabitants.
Another notable aspect of cities and even small towns was their
multiethnic character. In most cases, the towns and cities throughout
east-central/central Europe were like islands composed of populations
and cultures that were different from those of the surrounding
countryside. Beginning in the medieval period and continuing through
the early modern era, Germans, Jews, and, in the Balkan zone, Greeks
and Turks had come to form a significant portion of urban populations.
For instance, by 1900, Jews comprised as high as 50 percent or more of
the inhabitants of twenty cities and towns in east-central/central
Europe and a significant portion of the population in some of the
region’s largest cities: Odessa (34 percent), Warsaw (33 percent), Łódź
(32 percent), and Bratislava (24 percent). As a result, cities and the
larger towns were places where several different cultures flourished side
by side. And whether or not these various cultures influenced each
other – and at times they did – city and town dwellers had by necessity
to be multilingual in order to survive.
From this perspective, it is not surprising to learn that Vilnius
was a “Polish” city and a “Jewish” city, even though it was “in
Lithuania,” and that Bratislava was a “German,” a “Jewish,” and a
“Hungarian” city “in Slovakia.” The list of similar examples can go on
endlessly. The varied faces of these east-central Europe’s cities were
symbolized by their very names: Vilnius (the Lithuanian form) was as
much Wilno (Polish) as it was Vilne (Yiddish), and Bratislava (Slovak)
was as equally Pozsony (Hungarian) as it was Pressburg (German) or
Presburg (Yiddish).
The demographic patterns established before World War I
continued throughout the twentieth century. Despite the enormous
loss of life in east-central/central Europe caused by the two world wars
(16.3 million lives alone were lost during World War II), the overall
population in the region rose by 46 percent, from 143 million persons
in 1910 to 209 million in 1990. The relatively largest increases came in
the Balkan zone, where large portions of territory increased their
densities to 50-99 persons per square kilometer, with even higher
densities (100-200) in several districts of Walachia, Serbia, and central
Bulgaria. This meant that by the end of the twentieth century the
demographic disproportion between the Balkan peninsula and the rest
9
of east-central Europe was substantially reduced.
The biggest change was brought about through urbanization, in
particular during the decades after World War II, when the urban-rural
dichotomy was reversed. In other words, for the first time in history
the majority of the population of east-central Europe did not live in the
countryside but rather in the cities (59 percent). By 1990, only three
countries – Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Moldova – had less than
half of their population living in rural areas. These countries,
moreover, were among the smallest in the region in terms of their
geographic size and population.
The growth of individual cities was even more dramatic. By
the end of the twentieth century east-central/central Europe had four
cities with over two million inhabitants (Istanbul, Berlin, Kiev,
Bucharest), another eight with over a million inhabitants (Budapest,
Minsk, Warsaw, Vienna, Prague, Belgrade, Sofia, Odessa), and over 80
more with a population of over 200,000. In several cases the growth
was phenomenal, so that, for instance, between 1910 and 1990
ConstanŃa in Romania grew 2,791 percent to include 347,000
inhabitants and Skopje in Macedonia 2,120 percent to 444,000
inhabitants. The most exceptional example was the Baltic port of
Gdynia, a small fishing village of less than 1,000 (1910) which by 1990
had burgeoned to a city of 252,000.
Aside from sheer numbers, the twentieth-century migrations
also altered the multiethnic norm that had been characteristic of most
cities and towns. The influx of enormous number of people from the
surrounding countryside was one factor in the change. The forced
expulsion, physical elimination, or national assimilation of long-time
urban residents (Germans, Jews, Magyars, Greeks, Armenians) were
other factors that, most especially during the second half of the
twentieth century, made many cities and towns more unicultural. In
other words, Vilnius is now Lithuanian (although for other reasons
with a new Russian component) and Bratislava is now Slovak;
analogously, most other urban areas have taken on the ethnolinguistic
and national character of the country in which they are located.
Along with urbanization came industrialization. This was a
particular priority of the centralized command economies of new
Communist regimes set up in east-central/central Europe after World
War II. For them industrialization became the key to achieving
socioeconomic prosperity. One result of often rapid industrialization
was not only physical but psychological dislocation. In lieu of an often
placid village and small town rural environment, urban sprawl,
pollution, and residence in cramped cheaply-constructed apartment
blocks was quickly becoming the norm for over half the entire
population of east-central Europe.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries also witnessed the
introduction of technological advances to improve physical movement
and intellectual communication. In the four decades prior to World
War I, a relatively dense railroad network was constructed. The
hinterlands of each country were now more easily connected to their
own political and economic centers as well as to urban centers in
neighboring countries throughout the European continent. The high
mountain crests of the Carpathians, and the Alps, which had
traditionally hindered communication, were breached by engineering
feats that tunneled railway lines through places heretofore passable with
only great difficulty or not at all.
Not surprisingly, the railroads had a direct impact on migration
patterns. Not only did they contribute to increased urbanization, they
also permitted easy access to port cities and to emigration abroad.
Between 1870 and 1914, an estimated 7 million persons emigrated from
east-central Europe to the United States alone. It was from this time
that the seeds were laid for the creation of new centers of east-central
European culture, whether in New York City, or in subsequent decades
closer to home in Berlin and Paris.
The railroads certainly enhanced the ability of central
governments to control politically and, through an improved postal
system, to tax more efficiently their respective citizenries. The postal
services also made possible the relatively quick delivery of the everwidening
range of newspapers, journals, and books produced in
10
printshops and publishing houses based in the growing cities and
towns. Such communicational facilities were absolutely essential to
nationalist movements, especially among stateless peoples whose
cultures, languages, and understanding of historical tradition were either
allowed limited access or were entirely absent from the school system.
Despite efforts at censorship, the state could in effect be by-passed by
print technology which allowed intellectuals based in cities to reach
“their” national constituencies in the countryside. By the second half
of the twentieth century new technologies – the telephone, FAX, and
the Internet – were quickly adapted to promote anti-Communist
political dissent, the demands of national minorities, or the results of
“purely” artistic and literary creativity. Since 1989, the increasing use of
the neutral lingua franca, English, has placed east-central Europe well
on the way to full intellectual integration with the rest of the European
continent.
Political setting
At the outset of the nineteenth century, all of eastcentral/central
Europe was within the framework of three empires. By
the end of the twentieth century, those empires, as well as the Soviet
“empire” that had come into being during the interim, were gone. In
their stead were no less then 17 smaller countries, each of which
presented itself as a nation-state for one of the peoples that had
previously been subjected to rule by one or more of the former
multinational empires. All this suggests that the dominant theme in the
history of east-central Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries has to do with two complementary developments: the efforts
of the various stateless peoples to create for themselves independent
states; and the efforts of the empires to preserve their territorial
integrity by accommodating or suppressing the nationalist movements
within their borders.
An important assumption behind these developments has been
the belief that each people/nationality has a right to its own nationstate
and that all the members of a given people/nationality should live
within common borders. In other words, political boundaries should
ideally coincide with ethnolinguistic/nationality boundaries. But
because the demographic composition of east-central/central Europe
has been – and to a large degree still is – so complex, states have had to
resort to various means to include within their boundaries a single
people. Among those means have been national assimilation, forced
resettlement, physical annihilation, and military conquest, in other
words the very phenomena that have characterized much of the
political history of east-central/central Europe during the nineteenth
and, most especially, the twentieth century.
A brief overview of these centuries might be constructed
around a few key dates: 1789, 1848, 1918, 1945, and 1989. Aside from
the events that happened during each of these years, the dates
themselves really serve as temporal nodes whose importance is largely
determined by what occurred before and what immediately after.
The historic nineteenth century, which is generally assumed to
end in 1914, could be said to begin in east-central Europe sometime in
the 1770s. It was during that decade that one of the region’s oldest
states, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, faced its greatest threat.
Between 1772 and 1795, the territory of the commonwealth was
partitioned three times, after which it ceased to exist. Its territory was
divided between Prussia, Russia, and Austria, which together with the
Ottoman Empire came to control all of east-central Europe. Basically,
Prussia and Russia dominated the northern zone between the Baltic Sea
and the Carpathians; Austria ruled the Alpine-Carpathian zone,
including (Galicia north of the Carpathian crests and the Danubian
Basin encompassed by the Hungarian Kingdom); while the Ottomans
controlled virtually the entire Balkan peninsula south of the Sava River
and the Carpathian arc (including Walachia and Moldavia).
The 1770s was also the period of the Enlightenment, which in
east-central Europe found its greatest resonance in the Austrian
Empire. During the reigns of Maria Theresa (1740-1780) and her son
and later co-regent Joseph II (1780-1790), the Austrian government
11
initiated a series of reforms that included legal equality for all religious
groups, universal education in vernacular languages, and the regulation
– and for a time even abolition – of labor duties connected with
serfdom. The Theresan and Josephine period of reform effectively
came to an end with the death of Joseph II, within a year after the
outbreak of revolution in France in 1789.
During the quarter of century after the French Revolution, the
political order of east-central Europe was profoundly disrupted. The
success of Napoleon on the battlefield challenged Prussia, Austria, and
Russia, resulting in French rule over large parts of east-central Europe
either in the form of dependencies (most German states and the Duchy
of Warsaw in central Poland) or incorporation as French imperial
territory (Illyria – Slovenia and western Croatia). The French
ascendancy under Napoleon ended definitively in 1814, and the
following year at the Congress of Vienna, the pre-1789 political order
was restored with east-central Europe once again firmly under the rule
of Prussia, the Russian Empire, the Austrian Empire, and the Ottoman
Empire. The first three of these states were so alarmed by the collapse
in 1789 of the ancien régime and the Napoleonic aftermath that they
formed a Holy Alliance in an effort to ward off within their borders any
movement – real or suspected –that might be associated with the ideals
of the French Revolution. The new atmosphere of political reaction
that characterized east-central/central Europe during the first half of
the nineteenth century was associated with the name of Austria’s archconservative
foreign minister and was known as the Metternich era.
These same decades witnessed yet another phenomenon – the
rise of nationalism. The writings of the late eighteenth-century German
philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder, and the new wave of
Romanticism that was sweeping the European continent praised the
unique value of national cultures and the importance of history as the
key to revelation of the “national genius” and “national soul.” Ideas
such as these were greeted enthusiastically in east-central Europe, where
intellectuals set out to record the spoken languages and folklore of the
rural masses and to create literary works and histories for their
respective “nationalities-in-the making.” This was the so-called first, or
heritage-gathering, stage of intelligentsia-inspired national movements.
The “national awakeners” who carried out such work have ever since
been lionized as the “founding fathers” of the peoples they helped to
forge.
Whereas during the first half of the nineteenth century
nationalist movements throughout most of east-central Europe were
limited to the research and writings of the individual national awakeners
and, in some cases, to the establishment of “national” institutions
(theatres, museums, libraries), the Balkan zone witnessed the first
successful “wars of national liberation,” all directed against the
Ottoman Empire. Serbia (1813-1817), Greece (1821-1830), and
Walachia-Moldavia (1829) each gained a degree of autonomy or
independence that was to be consolidated in subsequent decades.
The next important temporal node is 1848, which has come to
be known as the “Spring of Nations.” Early in that year revolution
broke out in France and soon spread to east-central Europe where it
was to have the greatest impact on the Austrian Empire. In midMarch,
the hated reactionary foreign minister, Clemens von Metternich,
fell from power, and the empire’s Austro-German inhabitants
successfully campaigned on behalf of guarantees for civil rights, social
reform (abolition of serfdom), and the creation of an elected
parliament. As the revolutionary fever spread to other parts of the
empire, the various nationalities demanded recognition as corporate
entities as well as cultural and political autonomy. The Romanian and
Slavic peoples pressed their demands through legal channels (including
the newly-formed Austrian parliament). The Hungarians, on the other
hand, engaged in a full-scale war with imperial Austrian troops and even
proclaimed a short-lived independent state which lasted until their
defeat on the battlefield in August 1849. Despite the defeat of the
Hungarian “revolution” and the return of authoritarian monarchial rule
in Austria, it was clear that the national movements had moved from a
cultural to a political phase, and that in order to survive the Habsburg
rulers would have to address in a more serious manner the nationality
12
question.
The Russian Empire had not been influenced by 1848 at all,
although it had its own problems with the Poles who revolted twice
(1830-1831 and 1863). Although both revolts were crushed, the tsarist
government became ever more suspicious of the impact Polish
“revolutionary” ideas might have had on other nationalities living along
the western fringes of its empire, in particular the Lithuanians,
Belarusans, and Ukrainians. In the case of the latter two East Slavic
groups, they were not even recognized as distinct peoples, but rather as
branches (White, or Belorussians and Little Russians) of a single,
common-Russian nationality. The tsarist government attempted to
improve the efficacy of its rule by initiating a series of reforms during
the 1860s, the most important of which was the abolition of serfdom.
At the very same time, Prussia, whose borders reached well
into east-central Europe (Pomerania, Prussia, Silesia), was consolidating
its influence over the neighboring German states. Under the leadership
of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Prussia defeated Austria on the
battlefield (1866) and thereby eliminated Habsburg political influence
over the south German states. This made it easier for Bismarck to
unite them with Prussia and to proclaim in 1871 the formation of a
unified German Empire. As part of its efforts at further internal
consolidation, the German imperial government launched a “cultural
struggle” (Kulturkampf) with the goal to subordinate the Roman Catholic
Church and to limit the nationalist aspirations of the large Polish
population living in the eastern regions of the country.
The ascent of Prussia/Germany convinced its rival to the
south, Habsburg Austria, of its own need for internal changes. The
result was a series of reforms that resulted in the re-introduction of
parliamentary rule (1861) and eventually a compromise with the
Hungarians. With the signing of the 1867 Compromise/Ausgleich, the
country became the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, in which the
Habsburg ruler functioned as the emperor of Austria and king of
Hungary. The various nationalities in the Austrian “half” of the
monarchy essentially strengthened their national existence under
relatively benign Habsburg rule. On the other hand, in the dual
monarchy’s Hungarian “half,” the aristocracy ruled the kingdom
through a parliament whose leaders not only opposed the demands of
the various national minorities, but beginning in the 1870s imposed
upon them a policy of national assimilation known as magyarization.
Nevertheless, the 1867 Compromise did provide a modicum of political
stability for Austria-Hungary – ruled throughout this entire period by
the same emperor, Franz Joseph (reigned 1848-1916) – that more or
less lasted until World War I.
Having consolidated political authority over their respective
realms, Germany, Russia, and Austria were able to direct their attention
to another part of east-central Europe, the Balkan zone. There the
Ottoman Empire was being challenged by Greece, which hoped to
expand its borders northward; by Serbia and Romania (WalachiaMoldavia),
which hoped to transform their recently won autonomy into
full independence; and by the Bulgarians, who hoped to obtain their
own state. The Russian Empire eagerly stepped in to assist its fellow
Orthodox peoples in the Balkans, whose own success would weaken
further the Ottoman Empire and allow the tsarist state to reach its
ultimate goal: control of the straits of the Bosporus and access to the
Mediterranean. Europe’s other great powers – Britain, France,
Germany, and Austria-Hungary – were all concerned with Russia’s
interest in the Balkans, where each tried in various ways to assert its
own influence. The great power rivalry in the Balkans came to be
known as Europe’s “Eastern Question.”
In 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, a compromise was reached
between the Great Powers and their Balkan client states which
succeeded in stabilizing borders for over three decades. However, as
Ottoman power disintegrated further, Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia saw
an opportunity to expand. Unable to cooperate, they clashed over
conflicting territorial claims in Macedonia and Albania. The result was
two Balkan wars (1912-1913), after which Macedonian territory was
divided between the three warring states, while Albania, which had
declared its independence (1912), was recognized by the Great Powers
13
(1913).
The Eastern Question was still not fully resolved and was to
surface next in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This former Ottoman province
was, since the Congress of Berlin, held as a mandate by AustriaHungary,
which finally annexed it in 1908. Neighboring Serbia and
Serbs living in Bosnia-Herzegovina itself were adamantly opposed to
the “Austrian occupation.” In June 1914, a Serbian terrorist/freedom
fighter assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne, which was the
event that touched off World War I. The next four years of military
conflict were to have a devastating impact on large parts of east-central
Europe, in particular along the Eastern Front, which separated the
armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary from those of the Russian
Empire and that stretched for thousands of kilometers from the Baltic
Sea in the north to the arc of the Carpathians in the south.
It was the next temporal node, the year 1918, that initiated the
most profound changes in the region. By November 1918, Germany
and Austria-Hungary sued for peace and their exhausted troops
returned home. All the region’s empires disintegrated. In Russia, the
tsarist government had collapsed as early as February 1917, and before
the end of that year a Bolshevik regime was installed in its place.
Internal opposition to the world’s first Communist worker’s state soon
resulted in a civil war and the end of Russian rule in most parts of eastcentral
Europe. In Germany, the imperial government also collapsed,
but it was replaced by the so-called Weimar Republic that at least
managed to hold on to certain territories in east-central Europe
(Pomerania, East Prussia, Silesia). Austria-Hungary, on the other hand,
ceased to exist and was replaced by several smaller successor states.
Already during the last months of the war in late 1918, national
councils arose throughout east-central Europe to represent the interests
of stateless nationalities both large and small, from the Poles and
Ukrainians, to the Lusatian Sorbs and Carpatho-Rusyns. Some of these
councils hoped to attain independence, or at the very least autonomy
for their respective nationality; others joined together to create
confederations like Czechoslovakia, in which each of the component
nationalities was to be politically equal. Allied leaders and diplomats at
the Paris Peace Conference were deluged by conflicting national and
territorial claims, yet in the end they managed to redraw much of the
map of east-central Europe. Their decisions were outlined in treaties
signed at a series of palaces surrounding Paris (Versailles, St. Germainen-Laye,
and Neuilly in 1919; Sevrès and Trianon in 1920).
Guided by American President Woodrow Wilson’s principle of
the “self-determination of nations,” the new states that came into being
provided – at least for some nationalities – a more just arrangement
than that of the pre-war empires. Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia,
and Yugoslavia were among the newly-formed independent states;
Romania and Greece expanded their boundaries; Albanian statehood
proclaimed on the eve of the war was reconfirmed. The principle of
national self-determination was not applied to the defeated, however.
The inhabitants of Austria were denied their request to unite with
Germany, while Germany itself lost the Baltic port of Danzig and was
forced to cede a small block of territory to Poland (the later infamous
Danzig corridor) which divided East Prussia from the rest of the
country. Defeated Bulgaria also lost territory to its neighbors, but the
biggest loser was Hungary, which was forced to cede over seventy
percent of its territory (including thirty-two percent of all Hungarians
living at the time in the Danubian Basin) to each of its surrounding
neighbors: Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, even to “defeated”
Austria. Despite their relatively large size, nationalities like the
Ukrainians and Belarusans received no consideration by the Paris
peacemakers, with the result that the lands they inhabited were divided
between Poland and the soon-to-be Soviet Union.
In the end, the World War I peace treaties satisfied no one.
States like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania may have been
territorially large, but each had a high percentage of national minorities
among their inhabitants who opposed the governments under which
they felt they were forced to live. Interwar Hungary remained
unreconciled to the loss of so much of its former territory, and most of
its society whole-heartedly supported the popular slogan of the day,
14
“No, no never!” referring to the provisions of Treaty of Trianon. Even
new countries like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which had clearly
been favored by peacemakers at the Paris Peace Conference, were
wracked by conflict between the very peoples who created those states.
According to wartime agreements reached by exiled politicians, both
countries were to be established on the principle of equality among
their founding peoples, but Slovaks and Carpatho-Rusyns were
dissatisfied with a centralized government controlled by Czechs, while
Croats and Slovenes chafed within what essentially had become a
Serbian-led kingdom transformed into a centralized Yugoslavia.
Finally, Germany, whose economy was in shambles after
World War I, eventually allowed itself to be ruled by a dictator, Adolf
Hitler, the Nazi leader (Führer) who was bent on restoring his county
to the status of a world power. Part of that restoration was linked to
territorial expansion into east-central Europe, allegedly to protect
German-speaking people living outside the borders of Germany (the
so-called Volksdeutsche). As a result of Hitler’s designs, several new
concepts entered the world’s political vocabulary, and all were linked to
east-central Europe: Anschluss—Germany’s annexation of Austria
(February 1938); appeasement by the “West,” which accepted the
Munich Pact (September 1938) that just over half a year later destroyed
the Czechoslovak state; and Blitzkrieg – Germany’s “lightning war”
against Poland (September 1, 1939), which ended that country’s
existence three weeks later and which initiated a second world war that
was to last for another five and one-half years.
Throughout World War II, Nazi Germany dominated all of
east-central Europe. Its sphere of control covered territories
incorporated directly into the Third Reich (most of Poland, BohemiaMoravia,
Austria, northern Slovenia), administered by a German civil or
military administration (Lithuania, western Belarus, Ukraine, Serbia,
Greece), or governed by states allied to it (Slovakia, Hungary, Romania,
Bulgaria, Croatia). Those peoples who were brought under direct
German rule suffered a wide range of persecution, deportation, and
death. This was particularly the case for the Poles, an estimated six
million of whom perished. The percentage of Jews and Roma/Gypsies
who perished was even higher, since German death camps (Auschwitz,
Treblinka, Sobibór, Majdanek, BełŜec) were built to eliminate
systematically not only Jews and Roma living within Greater Germany,
but also those deported from countries allied to Germany.
The year 1945 marked not only the end of World War II, but
the implementation of Soviet political influence over virtually all of
east-central Europe. Soviet hegemony was a direct result of its military
role as a victorious Allied Power. The Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, was
obsessed with assuring that Germany would never again become a
powerful state, and to assure such a scenario he argued that Soviet
borders should be moved westward, that the countries in between it
and Germany should be Communist-ruled allies, and that Germany
itself should be demilitarized and remain divided under joint Allied
military occupation. Legend has it that the western leaders, US
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime Minister Winston
Churchill, gave in to most of Stalin’s demands and “sold out eastern
Europe” during the infamous negotiations at the 1945 Allied
conference held at Yalta.
Regardless of what was or what was not agreed at Yalta, the
result was the following. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were annexed to
the Soviet Union; Soviet Belorussia and Soviet Ukraine expanded their
borders westward into prewar Polish territory; the northern half of East
Prussia surrounding the German city of Königsberg was annexed to
Soviet Russia as the Kaliningrad oblast; Poland was compensated for its
losses in the east by the extension of its boundaries westward to the
Oder and Neisse Rivers; Germany was divided into Allied military
zones, with the Soviet zone forming the loyal Communist state of East
Germany; the Soviet Union annexed the former Czechoslovak province
of Subcarpathian Ruthenia (gaining direct access to the Danubian
Basin) and from Romania both northern Bukovina, which was given to
the Soviet Ukraine, and Bessarabia, which formed the basis of a newlyexpanded
Soviet Moldova.
As for the rest of east-central/central Europe, its boundaries
15
remained essentially what they had been during the interwar years.
Throughout the entire region the Soviets were successful in
encouraging from afar, or establishing through direct intervention, oneparty
Communist-led dictatorships known euphemistically as “people’s
democratic” and later “socialist” republics. Eventually, Yugoslavia
(1948) and Albania (1961) broke free of the Soviet bloc, although they
remained under Communist rule.
World War II and the immediate postwar years witnessed a
profound transformation in the demographic composition of eastcentral/central
Europe. Political leaders worldwide were convinced
that the excesses of nationalism (epitomized by Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy) as well as the existence of national minorities were the
primary factors causing both world wars. In an attempt to avoid similar
problems in the future, many leaders were convinced that populations
should be moved so that ethnolinguistic boundaries might better
approximate, and ideally coincide with, political boundaries. The
Jewish minority problem in most countries of the region was largely
resolved by the Nazis, who arranged for the killing of the majority of
Jews. Among those Jews who managed to survive, many emigrated to
Israel in the immediate postwar years, or to Israel and North America
from the western parts of the Soviet Union from the 1970s on.
Germans, too, were displaced in huge numbers. Those who
were not already “brought home” by Hitler during the war years, or
who had not fled before the advancing Soviet troops, were deported to
what remained of postwar Germany: 3.3. million from Poland
(Pomerania, Poznania, Silesia); 3 million from Czechoslovakia (the
Sudetenland); and nearly a million more from Yugoslavia (298,000),
Romania (254,000), and Hungary (213,000). Bi-lateral population
exchanges (whether voluntary or forced) took place between the Soviet
Union and Poland affecting Ukrainians, Belarusans, and Poles; between
Czechoslovakia and Hungary affecting Slovaks and Magyars; and
between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union affecting Czechs,
Ukrainians, and Carpatho-Rusyns. Unilateral expulsions pushed
Albanians, Bulgarians, and Macedonians out of Greece, and Italians out
of Yugoslavia. Aside from cross-border relocation, there was as well
extensive internal migration during the late 1940s, whereby an estimated
3.5 million Poles moved from eastern Poland to that country’s western
and northern territories recently annexed from Germany, and over 1.9
million Slovaks and Czechs moved into the Sudetenland to replace the
Germans who had been expelled. No less than 31 million people were
permanently or temporarily moved (sometimes more than once) within
east-central Europe during the years 1944 to 1948.
In every Communist-ruled country, whether or not under
Soviet hegemony, the governments were anxious to create a citizenship
loyal to the new regimes. Most non-Communist political and cultural
institutions were closed, churches were persecuted and religious
observance discouraged, strict censorship was imposed on the media
and publishing industry, and the school curriculum was reformed in an
effort to inculcate Marxist-Leninist ideology and to extirpate traditional
“bourgeois” moral values and national patriotism that in the case of
some peoples (Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians) was traditionally tinged
with anti-Russian feelings.
In order to carry out such sweeping social changes, intellectual
and physical coercion was necessary. It is not surprising, therefore, that
education and re-education was given high priority. For instance, of the
356 institutions of higher leaning (universities, polytechnical institutes,
professional schools) established throughout east-central Europe
between 1918 and 1999, nearly two-thirds (206) were established during
the Communist era (1944-1989).
Alongside educational institutions in the traditional sense was a
widespread network of prisons and forced labor camps, where elements
considered unreliable – non-Communist politicians, Communists
accused of ideological deviation, intellectuals and other critics of the
Communist system, actual and alleged war criminals and collaborators,
national minorities associated with defeated fascist regimes,
kulaks/peasants opposed to forced collectivization, religious believers –
were incarcerated for life or for a period of time deemed necessary for
their transformation into citizens who, after their release, might
16
function with some modicum of loyalty to the Communist-led regimes.
In territories ruled directly by the Soviet Union, re-education took place
in the vast system known as the Gulag, located in the northern Arctic
tundra and other little accessible parts of that vast country. As for the
“independent” Communist states of east-central/central Europe, each
had its own “Gulag.” At its height during the late 1940s and 1950s, the
greatest numbers of camps were in Hungary (199), Czechoslovakia
(124), Bulgaria (99), and Romania (97). The number of prisoners will
never be known, but two to three million throughout eastcentral/central
Europe during the entire Communist era (1945-1989)
would not be an exaggeration. The analogy with schools and education
is not far-fetched, since some prisons did indeed become “intellectual
centers,” where the works of figures like Milovan Djilas and Václav
Havel were written.
Although the Communist regimes claimed to represent the
urban and rural proletariat, working conditions were frequently difficult
and made worse by centralized command economies whose
disfunctionalism produced chronic shortages of consumer goods and
food. Discontent sometimes led to strikes by workers, and in some
cases these evolved into nation-wide revolts. The revolts in East
Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Poland (1979-1980) were among
the most famous uprisings against Soviet-imposed Communist rule. In
Czechoslovakia in 1968, there was no revolt, but rather a program of
reform known as the Prague Spring that was initiated by the leaders of
the Communist party in an attempt to refashion “socialism with a
human face.” All the above cases were brutally suppressed either by the
local authorities (assured of the backing by the Soviet Army) or by the
direct intervention of the Soviet military as in Hungary in 1956 and
Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Such periodic uprisings were unable to alter fundamentally the
political order in east-central Europe. Change first had to come within
the Soviet Union, and that was to occur with the appointment in 1985
of Mikhail Gorbachev as First Secretary of the Communist party of the
Soviet Union. Gorbachev was basically concerned with reforming and
strengthening the Communist way of life in the Soviet Union. He was
not prepared, however, to oppose reformist efforts among his country’s
Communist allies in east-central Europe, and certainly not intervene
should those regimes be challenged by their own citizens.
This is precisely what happened during the course of the
Revolutions of 1989, when one by one the Communist governments of
Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania,
and Albania collapsed. By 1990, each of these countries had created
pluralist democratic systems governed by the rule of law and a free
market economy. The physical and psychological barriers with the rest
of the continent were removed, and each country set out on what it
called the “return to Europe.” Within two years, the Soviet Union itself
collapsed, and in its stead seventeen independent states came into
being, including Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova. At the
outset of 1993, the two parts of the federated republic of former
Czechoslovakia agreed to separate and form independent states: the
Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The Revolutions of 1989 in east-central Europe and the
subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia
occurred with little or no violence or bloodshed. One glaring exception
was Yugoslavia. Actually, that country did not remove its Communist
leaders in 1989; rather, the old cadres remained in power, although they
tried to restructure the country so that each of its six component
republics would have greater control over its own affairs. The
Yugoslav federal government led by Slobodan Milošević was reluctant,
however, to acquiesce to the growing political demands of certain
republics like Slovenia and Croatia. All efforts at restructuring
Yugoslavia failed, and between December 1990 and February 1992,
Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina each declared
independence. What remained of Yugoslavia was only Serbia and
Montenegro, which together formed a new “democratic” instead of
“socialist” federal republic.
The federal government of rump Yugoslavia tried to stop
Slovenia’s declaration of independence; it fought a war with Croatia;
17
and it provided direct and indirect support to the self-styled Serbian
government of Bosnia-Herzegovina during that country’s brutal civil
war among Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs (1993-1995). Not long
after the conflict ended in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where a large-scale
foreign military contingent continues to maintain a delicate peace
between two self-governing entities (a Muslim-Croat Federation and
the Bosnian Serbian Republic), the Yugoslav federal government tried
to suppress by force a revolt on the part of Albanians living within
Serbia’s former autonomous province of Kosovo. Again outside
intervention (bombing and the eventual deployment of NATO forces)
in 1999 was needed to end the conflict.
In the ten years since the Revolutions of 1989, most countries
in east-central/central Europe have created stable democratic regimes,
whose basic goal is a rejection of their Communist past, redirection
toward the West, and full integration with the rest of Europe. Three
countries (Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) became members
of NATO in 1999, and they and another five (Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia) are expected to join the European
Union by 2004.
Paul Robert Magocsi, “Eastern, East-Central, or Central Europe: Where is it
and What is it?” Calendar-Almanac National Slovak Society of the USA, V113.
Pittsburgh, PA: National Slovak Society, 2005. pp. 128-140.