Routledge History of East Central Europe Since 1700 (2017), by Livezeanu, Irina and Von Klimo, Arpad (Eds) - Taylor & Francis

T H E RO U TL E DGE HIS TORY OF
E A S T CE N TRAL E U R OPE S IN C E 1 7 0 0
Covering territory from Russia in the east to Germany and Austria in the west, The Routledge
History of East Central Europe since 1700 explores the origins and evolution of modernity in this
turbulent region. This book applies fresh critical approaches to major historical controversies
and debates, expanding the study of a region that has experienced persistent and profound
change and yet has long been dominated by narrowly nationalist interpretations.
Written by an international team of contributors that reflects the increasing globalization
and pluralism of East Central European studies, chapters discuss key themes such as economic
development, the relationship between religion and ethnicity, the intersection between culture
and imperial, national, wartime, and revolutionary political agendas, migration, women’s and
gender history, ideologies and political movements, the legacy of communism, and the ways
in which various states in East Central Europe deployed and were formed by the politics of
memory and commemoration. This book uses new methodologies in order to fundamentally
reshape perspectives on the development of East Central Europe over the past three centuries.
Transnational and comparative in approach, this volume presents the latest research on the
social, cultural, political and economic history of modern East Central Europe, providing an
analytical and comprehensive overview for all students of this region.
Irina Livezeanu is Associate Professor of modern European history at the University of

Pittsburgh, USA. Her research has focused on culture and politics in twentieth-century
Romania and Moldova. She is the author of Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism,
Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (1995). Her articles have appeared in Soviet
Studies, Südosteuropa-Jahrbuch, Austrian History Yearbook, East European Politics & Societies, and La
Nouvelle Alternative, among others. Her essays have been published in collective volumes in
France, Romania, Britain, and the USA. She is past president of the Society for Romanian
Studies, and co-editor of the Studii Româneşti/Romanian Studies/Études Roumaines/Rumänische
Studien book series at Polirom in Iaşi, Romania.
Árpád von Klimó is Associate Professor of History at The Catholic University of America
in Washington, DC, USA. His courses cover Modern Europe since 1789 and the History of
Catholicism in the Global Age. He has published and conducted extensive research on nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century Hungarian, Italian and German social history. Recently, he
also completed a monograph on the memory of World War II and the Holocaust in Hungary,
focusing on the Novi Sad massacre of 1942 (Remembering Cold Days, 2017). His current project
is on world-wide Catholicism and Anti-Communism during the second half of the 1970s,
focusing on the figure of Cardinal József Mindszenty.
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T H E R O U TL ED G E
H I S T O R Y OF
E A S T C E NT R A L EUR OPE
S I N C E 1700
Edited by Irina Livezeanu

and Árpád von Klimó
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Irina Livezeanu and Árpád von Klimó
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Livezeanu, Irina, editor of compilation. | Klimo, Arpad von
editor of compilation.
Title: The Routledge history of East Central Europe since 1700 /
edited by Irina Livezeanu and Arpad von Klimo.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, [2017] |
Series: The Routledge histories | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016056772| ISBN 9780415584333
(hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315230894 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Europe, Eastern—History. |
Europe, Central—History.
Classification: LCC DJK4 .R68 2017 | DDC 943.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056772
ISBN: 978-0-415-58433-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-23089-4 (ebk)
Typeset in New Baskerville Std

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
CONTE NT S
List of maps vii

List of figures viii
List of tables ix
Notes on contributors x
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction1
IRINA LIVEZEANU AND ÁRPÁD VON KLIMÓ
1 Space: empires, nations, borders 27

JAMES KORANYI AND BERNHARD STRUCK
2 Rural and urban worlds: between economic modernization

and persistent backwardness 81
JACEK KOCHANOWICZ AND BOGDAN MURGESCU
3 Demography and population movements 126

THEODORA DRAGOSTINOVA AND DAVID GERLACH
4 Religion and ethnicity: conflicting and

converging identifications 176
JOEL BRADY AND EDIN HAJDARPASIC
5 The cultures of East Central Europe: imperial,

national, revolutionary 215
IRINA LIVEZEANU, THOMAS ORT, AND ALEX DRACE-FRANCIS
6 Women’s and gender history 278

KRASSIMIRA DASKALOVA AND SUSAN ZIMMERMANN
7 Political ideologies and political movements 323

ULF BRUNNBAUER AND PAUL HANEBRINK
v
C ontents
8 Communism and its legacy 365

MALGORZATA FIDELIS AND IRINA GIGOVA
9 Returning to “Europe” and the rise of Europragmatism:

party politics and the European Union since 1989 415
REINHARD HEINISCH
10 Uses and abuses of the past 465

PATRICE M. DABROWSKI AND STEFAN TROEBST
Index 507
vi
MAP S
1.1 East Central Europe, 2000 28

1.2 East Central Europe, ca. 1721 29
1.3 Europe, ca. 1740 38
1.4 The partitions of Poland, 1772–95 41
1.7 World War I, 1914–18 52
1.8 Nazi-dominated Europe, 1942 58
3.1 Population movements, 1944–48 157
8.1 Cold War Europe 368
9.1 EU accession dates 416
vii
FIGUR ES
2.1 Per capita GDP of European socialist countries (1950–89) 107

2.2 Per capita GDP of post-communist countries 112
9.1 Support for EU membership among Central and East Central
European member states, 2011 442
9.2 Trust in the national government versus trust in the EU among
member states, 2011 443
9.3 Perceived benefit of membership of the EU, 2011 444
9.4 Trends in support for EU membership among East Central
European countries 445
9.5 Cumulative vote share of Euroskeptic parties in East Central
European countries 449
9.6 Protest parties in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia 450
9.7 Average corruption scores 2001–11, based on Corruption
Perception Index 451
viii
TABLES
2.1 The average yearly rates of growth of the world economy and
selected regions, 1500–2000 (%) 85
2.2 GDP per capita 0–2000 (1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars) 85
2.3 Per capita industrialization level of East Central European countries
(interwar borders) compared with UK = 10099
2.4 Per capita GDP in East Central European countries during the
interwar period (1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars) 100
2.5 GDP per capita in Purchasing Power Standards (PPS) (EU-27 = 100) 113
3.1 Immigration from East Central Europe to the
United States, 1899–1914 (partial data) 140
3.2 Immigration from East Central Europe to the United States and return
migration to Eastern Europe, 1908–23 141
3.3 Muslim migrations in the Balkans, 1815–1920 (partial data) 144
3.4 Migrations in the Balkans during the Balkan Wars and
World War I, 1912–18 (partial data) 146
3.5 Minorities in Eastern Europe in the interwar period 150
3.6 Wartime transfers, expulsions, and related population movements,
1939–44152
3.7 Total number of civilian workers in Nazi Germany, 1938–45 153
3.8 Postwar transfers, expulsions, and related population movements,
1944–48155
3.9 Prewar and postwar population in East Central European Countries
(in thousands) 159
3.10 The population of Yugoslavia according to nationality, based on the
1981 census 163
3.11 Internally displaced persons in the former Yugoslavia in 1993 164
ix
CONTRIBUT O R S
Joel Brady is Teaching Consultant and Coordinator of Teaching Assistant Services at

the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Teaching and Learning. He also teaches
in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Slavic Languages
and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled
“Transnational Conversions: Greek Catholic Migrants and Russky Orthodox
Conversions in Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Americas (1890–1914).” His
research interests include ethnoreligious conversion, migrant transnationalism,
and the history of Eastern Christianity.
Ulf Brunnbauer holds the Chair for the History of Southeastern and Eastern Europe
at the University of Regensburg, and he is director of the Institute for East and
Southeast European Studies, in Regensburg. His research deals with the social his-
tory of Southeastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He co-edits
four book series, among them Südosteuropäische Arbeiten (de Gruyter Oldenbourg),
and the journal Südost-Forschungen. His most recent monograph is Globalizing
Southeastern Europe: America, Emigrants and the State since the late 19th Century (2016).
His co-edited volume The Ambiguous Nation: Case Studies from Southeastern Europe in
the 20th Century was published in 2013.
Patrice M. Dabrowski is a Harvard-trained historian. She has taught at Harvard, Brown,
and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and presently is affiliated with the
“Austrian Galicia and its Multicultural Heritage” Doctoral College at the University
of Vienna. Dabrowski is the author of two books, Poland: The First Thousand Years,
and Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland. Several of her articles, on
topics related to her research on the beginnings of tourism in the Carpathian
Mountains, have garnered prizes. Dabrowski is a recipient of the Knight’s Cross of
the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic.
Krassimira Daskalova is Professor of Modern European Cultural History at St. Kliment
Ohridski University in Sofia, Bulgaria. She has published extensively on women’s
and gender history and on the history of the book and reading in Eastern and
Southeastern Europe. She is the author of four monographs and editor and co-editor
of eighteen volumes. Her most recent monograph in Bulgarian is Women, Gender and
Modernization in Bulgaria, 1878–1944 (2012). Daskalova has served as president of
the International Federation for Research in Women’s History and she has been an
x
C ontributors
editor of Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European
Women’s and Gender History.
Alex Drace-Francis is Associate Professor in European Studies at the University of
Amsterdam. He has published widely on the social, cultural, and literary history of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly on Romania and southeast-
ern Europe, and on topics such as literacy and print culture, travel and travel writ-
ing, history of ideas and cultural identity. His most recent books are The Traditions
of Invention (2013), and the anthologies European Identity: A Historical Reader, and
Where to Go in Europe (both 2013).
Theodora Dragostinova is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University
where she teaches classes in Eastern Europe, modern Europe, comparative nation-
alism and state-building, and global mobility and migration. She is the author of
Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria,
1900–1949 (Cornell, 2011) and Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Alternative
Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans (CEU Press, 2016). She is currently research-
ing global cultural contacts between East, West, and the Third World during the
Cold War from the perspective of a small state, Bulgaria.
Malgorzata Fidelis is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. Her research focuses on social and cultural history in post-1945 Eastern
Europe. In Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge
University Press, 2010), she explored how communist leaders and society recon-
ciled pre-communist traditions with radically new communist norms. Her new
book project is The Sixties behind the Iron Curtain: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland,
1954–1974. She is also working on a textbook co-authored with Jill Massino, Eastern
Europe: Peoples, Cultures, and Politics from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century
(forthcoming from Routledge).
David Gerlach is Associate Professor of History at Saint Peter’s University in New
Jersey. His forthcoming book, The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation
of the German-Czech Borderlands after World War II, will be published by Cambridge
University Press. He was awarded the R. John Rath Prize for Best Article in the
2007 Austrian History Yearbook, and the 2006–2007 Award for Best Dissertation by
the Austrian Cultural Forum. In addition to continuing to study migration, his cur-
rent research explores restitution, reparations, and other compensation programs
stemming from World War II.
Irina Gigova is Associate Professor of History at the College of Charleston, South
Carolina and a scholar of Bulgarian modern social and cultural history. She has
published in Aspasia, The Journal of Urban History, and History & Memory, and
she has an essay in Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Alternative Narratives to the
Nation in the Balkans, edited by Theodora Dragostinova and Yana Hashamova
(CEU Press, 2016). Her book manuscript, “At the Crossroads: A Generation of
Writers in Modern Bulgaria, 1900–1960” uses writers and literature to examine
broader processes of state-building, modernization, political transition, and
national culture.
xi
C ontributors
Edin Hajdarpasic is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University, Chicago. His

research interests include Balkan history, national movements, conflict and mem-
ory, and imperial (particularly Ottoman and Habsburg) politics. His book, Whose
Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Cornell
University Press, 2015) won the Joseph Rothschild Book Prize from the Association
for the Study of Nationalities.
Paul Hanebrink is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers
University – New Brunswick. He is the author of In Defense of Christian Hungary:
Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890–1944 (Cornell University Press,
2006). He has also published journal articles on this topic in the Journal of Modern
History and the Austrian History Yearbook, as well as essays in several edited volumes.
Currently, he is working on a transnational history of the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism
in twentieth-century Europe, tentatively titled “A Specter Haunting Europe,”
forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
Reinhard Heinisch is Professor of Austrian Politics in Comparative European
Perspective at the University of Salzburg, Austria where he also chairs the
Department of Sociology and Political Science. In addition, he is a faculty affili-
ate of the Center of European Studies of the University of Pittsburgh. His major
research interests are comparative populism, Euroscepticism, and comparative
political parties and democracy. He is the author of Populism, Proporz, Pariah: Austria
Turns Right (2002) and co-author of Understanding Populist Party Organisation: The
Radical Right in Western Europe (2016) as well as numerous other publications on
Austrian and European politics.
Árpád von Klimó is Associate Professor of History at The Catholic University of
America in Washington, DC. His courses cover modern Europe since 1789 and the
history of Catholicism in the global age. He has done extensive research on and
published in nineteenth- and twentieth-century social history, mostly on Hungary,
Italy and Germany, and recently wrote a monograph on the memory of World
War II and the Holocaust in Hungary, focusing on the Novi Sad massacre of 1942
(Remembering Cold Days, 2017). His current project is on world-wide Catholicism
and anti-communism during the second half of the 1970s, focusing on the figure
of Cardinal József Mindszenty.
Jacek Kochanowicz (1946–2014) was Professor of Economics and Economic History
at Warsaw University and at Central European University in Budapest. He was
Fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the Institute
for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Institute of Human Sciences (Vienna)
and other research institutions. A disciple of Witold Kula, he started working
on the early modern peasant economy, but gradually expanded his research to
long-term economic development and backwardness, to the complex relations
between cultural patterns and economic performance, as well as to the burden
of the past on post-communist societies. He is the author of Backwardness and
Modernization: Poland and Eastern Europe in the 16th–20th Centuries (Ashgate, 2006).
James Koranyi is Lecturer in Modern European History at Durham University. He
previously taught at the University of St. Andrews and the University of Exeter.
xii
C ontributors
His work focuses on Romania, Hungary, the Habsburg Empire, and Germany. He
has published on Germans from Romania, on commemorations in the Habsburg
Lands, and on landscape in late modernity. In his latest research he is concerned
with British travelers to the Carpathians in the nineteenth century. Together with
Bernhard Struck he is writing Modern Europe 1760s to the Present: A Transnational
History (Bloomsbury).
Irina Livezeanu is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University
of Pittsburgh. Her research has focused on culture and politics in twentieth-century
Romania and Moldova. She is the author of Cultural Politics in Greater Romania:
Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Cornell University
Press, 1995). Her articles have appeared in Soviet Studies, Südosteuropa-Jahrbuch,
Austrian History Yearbook, East European Politics & Societies, and La Nouvelle Alternative,
among others. Her essays have been published in collective volumes in France,
Romania, Britain, and the US. She is co-editor for the Society of Romanian Studies,
Studii Româneşti/Romanian Studies/Études Roumaines/Rumänische Studien series
at Polirom in Iaşi, Romania.
Bogdan Murgescu is Professor of Economic History and Director of the Doctoral
Studies Council at the University of Bucharest. He has been Roman Herzog Fellow
at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin, and Visiting Professor at the
University of Pittsburgh, and Central European University, Budapest. He is president
of the Romanian Society for Historical Sciences, and serves on the Advisory Board of
the Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. His research
interests are economic and social history, the history of communism and of post-
communism, and the development of human capital. He is the author of Romania
and Europe: The Accumulation of Development Lags, 1500–2010 (in Romanian) 2010.
Thomas Ort is Associate Professor of Modern European History and Director of the
Honors in the Social Sciences Program at Queens College, The City University of
New York. The main focus of his research has been modernist and avant-garde life
in early twentieth-century Czechoslovakia, but his most recent work concerns the
politics of memory in postwar Eastern Europe. He is the author of Art and Life in
Modernist Prague: Karel Čapek and his Generation, 1911–1938 (Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), which was recently published in a Czech translation (Argo, 2016). His essay,
“Cubism’s Sex: Masculinity and Czech Modernism, 1911–1914,” was awarded the
Czechoslovak Studies Association’s prize for best article in 2014.
Bernhard Struck is Reader in Modern European History, at the School of History,
and Founding Director of the Institute for Transnational and Spatial History at the
University of St. Andrews. His research focuses on German, French, and Polish his-
tory, the history of travel, borderlands, cartography, and space. He is the author
of Nicht West – nicht Ost. Frankreich und Polen in der Wahrnehmung deutscher Reisender,
1750–1850 (2006), and Revolution, Krieg und Verflechtung. Deutsch-Französische Geschichte
1789–1815 (with Claire Gantet, 2008). He is co-editor of Shaping the Transnational
Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s (2015).
Stefan Troebst is Professor of East European Cultural History at Leipzig University. His
Ph.D. and his habilitation are both from the Free University in Berlin. His research
xiii
C ontributors
focuses on international and interethnic relations in modern Eastern Europe and

the comparative cultural history of contemporary Europe. He has published widely
on the culture, history and politics of the Balkans, East Central Europe, Russia and
the Baltic Region. His recent publications include Zwischen Arktis, Adria und Armenien.
Das östliche Europa und seine Ränder (Vienna, 2017), and Remembering Communism:
Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe (co-edited with
Maria Todorova and Augusta Dimou (New York & Budapest, 2014).
Susan Zimmermann is University Professor at Central European University, and
President of the International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH).
She has published on women’s movements as well as social protection policies
in the Habsburg Monarchy and internationally, and on the politics of class, gen-
der and race of the International Labour Organization in the interwar period. In
2016/2017 she is a fellow at the International Research Center “Work and Human
Lifecycle in Global History” at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her project explores
the histories of socialist and communist trade union women and trade unions’
gender policies in the short twentieth century.
xiv
ACKNOWL E D G M ENT S
Like many collective projects, this book has been in the making for longer than any of
its contributors might have wished. For all of the time and effort that we all put into
it, we are also in the debt of institutions and additional people, beyond the authors
and editors, that made it possible. The University of Pittsburgh’s University Center
for International Studies, the Global Studies Center, the EU Center of Excellence,
and the University’s Honors College provided me with support through a series of
grants. The University of St. Andrews, in Scotland hosted an author workshop in
March 2013 sponsored by its Centre for Transnational History (now the Institute
for Transnational and Spatial History) and organized by Bernhard Struck. Melissa
Feinberg of Rutgers University and Mary Neuburger of the University of Texas at
Austin contributed written comments, bringing a fresh perspective to the chapters in
this volume. Mellissa Feinberg also helped edit Chapter 6. The four readers who eval-
uated the project in 2009 offered excellent suggestions (and some warnings) about
the complex task we were embarking on.
I am grateful for the many different kinds of help – conceptual, editorial, technical –
I received from Andrew Behrendt throughout the editing process, and for Simon
Brown’s research assistance on Chapter 5. I thank Lars Peterson and Valerie Sweeney
for their help with editing parts of the manuscript. I am most thankful for the excel-
lent support received from Eve Setch, Amy Welmers, and Allyson Yates at Routledge,
from George Warburton and his team at Swales & Willis, and from Mark Vehec at the
University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Teaching and Learning at various stages of editing
and production.
Irina Livezeanu, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
It has been a privilege to work with so many excellent colleagues and friends on
this project. I want to thank particularly Eve Setch and Amy Welmers of Routledge
who have supported and encouraged the editors throughout the years. I also have
to thank my colleagues and friends at the University of Pittsburgh, and, for the last
four years, at The Catholic University of America, who have made it possible for me
to find time to work on this volume while simultaneously being engaged in teaching,
mentoring undergraduates and graduates, doing research projects, and helping the
departments to grow. Finally, I want to thank all the authors for their tireless work,
xv
A cknowledgments
their patience when we went sometimes four or five times through the editing of their
chapters in order to have the best possible text, and those colleagues and friends in
Europe and the United States who have reviewed, critiqued, and encouraged the
present book.
Árpád von Klimó, Washington, DC
xvi
I NTRODU C T I O N
Irina Livezeanu and Árpád von Klimó
Since the fall of communism in 1989–1991, the region we are calling East Central
Europe has experienced a remarkable transformation. Civil society has blossomed
along with competing political parties, new legal and constitutional systems, and
a market economy. While untrammeled commercialism, corruption, deep social
inequality, a widening gap between urban and rural sectors, and urban homeless-
ness have also spread through the countries that communists once ruled, these phe-
nomena are part and parcel of capitalism, one could argue. The last decade has
witnessed populist authoritarianism take hold in some countries, making democracy
look fragile in a region that has known mostly imperial and dictatorial rule over the
past few centuries.1
The new right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland, elected by broad major-
ities in 2010 and 2016, may be examples of this fragility. Viktor Orbán, Jarosław
Kaczyński and their voters claim to have regained “national independence” (from
Western and post-communist elites), while also drawing on the ideological stock
of the 1930s and 1940s featuring the nationalism, religious conservatism, and anti
semitism of those turbulent decades.2 From the perspective of those of us studying
East Central Europe, it is both a consolation and at the same time perhaps more
worrying that these political trends are true of Europe in general. Similar parties or
coalitions have also gained strength in Austria, France, Britain, Germany, Denmark,
Italy, and Sweden, in part in reaction to the challenges of globalization manifest in
the large numbers of migrants, some of them Muslims from North Africa and Asia,
others new European Union (EU) members from Romania and Poland, all of them
seeking refuge and jobs in more prosperous, secure, and stable parts of Europe.
The great power to the east under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB
operative, has also been drifting in the direction of authoritarianism. Russia is the
main successor to the Soviet Union, which dominated the countries of the region
“formerly known as Eastern Europe” militarily and politically for half a century.3 In
the 1990s, and again more recently, experts and journalists have used the moniker
“Weimar Russia” to signal the danger of frailty and dictatorship in a Russia that was
humiliated and is nostalgic for its lost power, no longer the metropole of a sprawl-
ing empire, and wishing to restore its international prestige in ways reminiscent of
Germany in the decades between its lost World War I and the rise of Hitler.4 There
is an inevitable element of speculation here, but efforts to restore Russian prestige
and empire in the second decade of the twenty-first century or later could well have
a negative impact on the independent nations that were once part of the Soviet bloc.
1
I R I N A L I V E Z E A N U A N D Á R P Á D V O N K L I M Ó
The international alignment of the region has changed dramatically after the end
of the Cold War. While Greece and Turkey had been part of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) already since 1952, despite their being neither “northern,” nor
close to the Atlantic Ocean by any measure, these two states’ northwestern neighbors,
being Soviet satellites, were included in the 1955 Warsaw Pact Treaty, which brought
the countries of the Soviet bloc together against NATO. The stand-off between the
two security organizations was most visible in Berlin, a city divided since 1961 into East
and West by barbed wire, a cement wall, and armed guards who shot to kill on the
eastern side until November 1989 when they were suddenly ordered to fire no more.
The Warsaw Pact unraveled in 1989, but NATO continued to expand eastward to
Russia’s border. Between 1999 and 2009 twelve ex-communist countries – including
three former Soviet republics – joined NATO.
The EU, with its origins in a common market project for West European countries
launched with the 1957 Treaty of Rome, saw its most dramatic enlargement in 2004,
when the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia,
and Slovenia joined along with Cyprus and Malta. Three more former communist
countries, Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia joined the EU by 2013. Some Balkan
states and Turkey, the latter sitting astride Europe and Asia Minor, remain outside
“Europe” even while the route along which waves of Middle Eastern migrants attempt
to reach the wealthiest European states runs through them. It is noteworthy that
these countries, which the EU hesitates to welcome into its ranks, have large Muslim
populations – an overwhelming majority in Turkey – and were some of the last areas
to remain in the Ottoman Empire before its demise in 1920. This whirlwind tour of
the present-day region with whose history this volume concerns itself suggests the
importance of understanding the area’s past if we are to comprehend its unfolding,
often unsettled, present.
Definitions of time and space

This volume is about the history of East Central Europe from 1700 to the present.
But neither the beginning nor the end point of this more than three-hundred-year
long period are particularly salient dates. This book is, after all, not a political history,
nor the history of a single state, national group, or social movement. Thus there is no
obvious and clearly defined start to our “story.” Many chapters deal with structures,
ideas or developments that originated before or sometimes after 1700. This is most
obvious for topics such as religion, migration, economic development, gender rela-
tions, urbanization, literacy, and culture. Yet the eighteenth century as a whole was
an extended watershed “moment” filled with new ideas and radical reforms, and it
witnessed major shifts in political borders and the balance of power. It is important
to try to capture the old and the new, and the transition from the one to the other.
The decline and collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the rise to prom-
inence of the Habsburg and Russian empires under the rule of modernizing mon-
archs, the establishment of the Kingdom of Prussia, and the gradual retreat of the
Ottomans from the European continent, all had further impacts on the economies,
societies, and cultures of the region. After 1700, new political ideas were debated
and new institutions put in place. Events, publications, or phenomena – such as the
French Revolution, Enlightenment thought, the Encyclopédie, nationalism – were
2
INTRODUCTION
iscussed all over the continent, but they were interpreted differently according to
d
local circumstances as Chapters 5 and 7 show in detail.
How do we delimit the territory included in the region that we are here calling
East Central Europe? Given the relationships of power and cultural impact, and the geo-
graphical connections between parts of Western, Central, Northern, Southern, and
Eastern Europe we have found appropriate an expansive, open-ended, definition of
the area analyzed in this volume. We include Russia, Venice, Germany, the Ottoman
Empire, and even France, Britain, and the United States in our account at times, as
these powers, their revolutions, societies, economies, and cultures exerted enormous
influence on Eastern and Central Europe. But effects, pressures, and population
flows went in multiple directions as the narratives of various chapters will show.
We have chosen to use East Central Europe rather than Eastern Europe, Central
Europe, or other more complex phrasing (such as Central and Southeastern Europe)
as the name of the region under discussion. Others have continued to use Eastern
Europe, a term to which historians, social scientists, journalists, and politicians had
become accustomed over the roughly half a century of communist rule, and which
still today easily rolls off the tongue because of habit, tradition, and alliteration.
Eastern Europe may go back as a term further still. Yet, it is not without problems.
To begin with, it indicates a binary division of the continent into two separate parts,
as if the border between east and west were sharply drawn on the map and across the
landmass from north to south. In fact such a line has been difficult to discern in cen-
turies past, it was hard to enforce during the last decades of the Cold War, and has
become almost impossible to trace even in recent years, getting blurrier the more
time that passes since the chronological frontier of 1989.5
East and West are, of course, not just cardinal points on a map, but conceptual
places enveloping thickly layered religious, intellectual, and imperial histories, and,
in the second half of the twentieth century, mutually antagonistic political ideologies
as conceived and written by contemporaries and historians. During the Cold War
decades “Eastern Europe” made some sense as a label for the large territory here
under discussion because of the Soviet Union’s military and political dominion over
the countries to its west as far as Berlin, because travel to the West was a carefully
controlled and rare enough privilege for Easterners, and because Westerners’ access
to Eastern lands was restricted as well. Thus a binary conceptual division of Europe
resembled the facts on the ground to a substantial degree.
Central Europe, Mitteleuropa, Eastern Europe

And yet it was already during the last decade of communist rule, when Milan
Kundera, a dissident Czech novelist living in Parisian exile, challenged the appropri-
ateness of “Eastern Europe” as applied to at least some of the countries behind the
Iron Curtain.6 He explored the cultural identities of Europe’s regions, freely mixing
modern, contemporary, and medieval historical material in the service of a political
project: to prove that “Central Europe” – East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and
Hungary – did not belong in the Soviet bloc and that the West should help rescue
these states and their people. He asserted that the medieval adherence of princes
and populace to Roman Christianity made “Central Europeans” part of Occidental
Europe, while the Christianization of the peoples to the south and east by Byzantine
3
clerics relegated them to the Eastern European zone. Kundera did not bother with
many details, but it was less the chance conversion by Eastern or Western missionaries
that mattered, he implied, as what came after that in the Western Christian lands: cen-
turies of Latin liturgy, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation
and the baroque style in music, art, and architecture that Central Europeans shared
with the West, but that Eastern Europeans did not.7
To Kundera, Central Europe was the “Eastern border of the West,” and it had been
“kidnapped” in 1945 by the Soviets with the complicity of the West. The countries
of Central Europe experienced “not merely a political catastrophe . . . [but] also an
attack on their civilization.” It was thus no surprise, he claimed, that anti-communist
uprisings and reform movements had sprung up in Central Europe. His arguments
sounded compelling. Still, there was some sleight of hand in Kundera’s narrative,
or maybe just the novelist’s flair for a good story paired with the lack of a historian’s
punctiliousness. Were the lands of the Balkan Peninsula (except Greece and Turkey),
not kidnapped by the Soviets because Churchill had freely agreed to deliver them to
Stalin in the infamous “percentages agreement” of 1944? Or was it the different reli-
gious and cultural history of the Balkans that made their Sovietization not a case of
kidnapping? And what of the territories of eastern Poland, peopled by Orthodox East
Slavs, or of eastern Romania (the formerly imperial Russian province of Bessarabia
and Northern Bukovina – never before part of Russia), and of the former imperial
provinces on the Baltic Sea? It might be hard to speak of all of these lands as Central
European; some of their histories were too entangled with Russia’s, though some
of their peoples had the Occidental type of faith. Should the liberalization of com-
munist Yugoslavia, and its experiment in workers’ self-management and free travel,
one of the first in East Central Europe, be discounted because it occurred south of
Central Europe’s likely border? To avoid such awkward questions – and there are
many – Kundera asserted: “Central Europe is not a state: it is a culture or a fate” whose
geographic borders “it would be senseless to try to draw.”8
The concept of Central Europe had a history before Kundera, mainly as
Mitteleuropa. The Germans first used it probably in 1808 as a topographical term.
But it came to have more political, cultural, and economic meanings in the nine-
teenth century. Friedrich List envisaged a customs union between Prussia, Austria,
and other territories between Copenhagen and Trieste, and a political unification
might have taken a grossdeutsche (Greater German) shape, incorporating Austria and
its non-German imperial lands. But that did not happen. Having achieved German
unity, Bismarck considered Central Europe to be Germany’s “sphere of interest.”9
Some Germans outdid Bismarck with more extreme views on Mitteleuropa. Paul de
Lagarde’s anti-democratic, proto-Nazi discourse, for example, combined national-
ism, imperialism, and antisemitism. He was a philologist and Orientalist scholar but
also a public intellectual who thought, among others, that the non-German peoples
of the Austrian Empire “must give way to the superior culture of the Germans.”10 In
1915, the liberal economist Friedrich Naumann published a book titled Mitteleuropa.
Although his vision was that of a Central European confederation and customs
union, the timing of the publication led many to associate his ideas with German
imperialism.11 Also writing during the war in exile from Prague, Tomáš Masaryk, the
future founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, referred instead to a “zone of
small nations,” between Germany and Russia, and coined the term “New Europe”
4
INTRODUCTION
to conjure the democratic order he envisaged coming about after the defeat of the
continent’s empires. He proposed an “anti-Mitteleuropa” conception of democracy
based on nations.12
Still other views on this part of Europe emerged after the end of World War I. The
French historian Michel Lhéritier wrote in 1928 that with its variety of languages,
cultural influences, and religions, “Europe centrale appears as a synthesis of Europe,
and each state again as a synthesis of a synthesis, a little Europe centrale and at the same
time a whole Europe in miniature.” (Kundera would later echo him: “Central Europe
longed to be a condensed version of Europe itself in all its cultural variety, a small
arch-European Europe . . . made up of nations conceived according to one rule: the
greatest variety within the smallest space.”)13 Masaryk’s “Herderian” vision of a New
Europe where “the discrepancy between State and ethnographic frontiers” would
disappear proved utopian. Rather, Lhéritier’s “Europe in miniature” is a more apt
description of the states created or enlarged at the expense of the Central and Eastern
European empires. Another way to think of the successor states to Austria-Hungary
and the other empires that fell, all of which included culturally diverse populations,
is in line with Pieter Judson: “Each of these self-styled nation states in fact acted like
a small empire,” he writes.14 In the capital cities of the post-imperial states a discus-
sion of the continent’s “meso-regions,” unfolded, as notes Stefan Troebst. Among
those engaged in these debates was the Polish historian Oskar Halecki who would
later emigrate to the US. He considered that “the whole group of smaller countries”
between Germany and Russia belonged to “east-central Europe.”15 During the Cold
War Halecki published The Limits and Divisions of European History and Borderlands of
Western Civilization for which he is still well remembered. In the former, he divided
Europe into Atlantic Western Europe, Germanic West Central Europe, Jagiellonian
East Central Europe, and Muscovite Eastern Europe. This might have been also a way
to isolate Russia and the Soviet Union historically from the rest of Europe.16
Beyond Halecki’s Borderlands of Western Civilization, “borderlands” has been a
productive trope in the historical imaginings of this part of the world. Such terms
have long existed in the vernacular and imperial geographic lexicon of East Central
Europe. When the Habsburgs created the Military Frontier in the sixteenth century
to protect their lands from Ottoman advances, the South-Slavic name of that forti-
fied region was the Vojna Krajina. The area acquired some autonomy in exchange
for its military duties. The Serbs of the Krajina maintained their identity as fight-
ers as late as the 1990s when the war in Yugoslavia began there.17 Ukraine, to the
north-east, is related etymologically to this southern Krajina in the Balkans. Both
are frontier areas. In the early modern period “u kraina” meant at the border of the
Muscovite and Polish-Lithuanian realms. Run-away serfs and Cossacks fled there,
far from the reach of the state and the serf owners, forming free societies, mingling
with Tatars, and over time adopting a separate identity and speaking an evolving
dialect, that eventually became the Ukrainian language. Similarly, Poles used the
term kresy (frontier lands) to refer to the eastern region that had once belonged to
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and that was incorporated into the Second
Polish Republic. Demographically not very Polish and a source of political turmoil,
the kresy were annexed by the Soviets after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.
Historians have been drawing inspiration from these longstanding precedents of
vernacular self-representation or imperial state thinking imbedded in the geographic
5
lexicon of the region. Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz (and a group of d istinguished
contributors) examine the borderlands that historically stretched between the
German, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires; a large multiethnic swath of
territory where these states and their successors, as well as national and racial move-
ments competed for power and influence; but they acknowledge that ethnic groups
in these areas coexisted peacefully when conflicts were not purposely stirred up and
politicized.18 Timothy Snyder presents a rather narrower subject in Bloodlands, a book
that deals with the mid-twentieth century’s most brutal decades, focusing only on the
northern part of this borderlands region, a territory where some fourteen to seven-
teen million people were starved to death or murdered between 1930 and 1953 by
Soviets and Nazis.19 Bloodlands’ subject overlaps with that of Kate Brown’s, A Biography
of No Place, which uses an ethnographic approach to show how the multiethnic bor-
der zone was transformed by a succession of states’ modernizing and military policies
into an ethnically comprehensible, more modern and pure “nation space.”20 If Brown
has been criticized by some for lacking historical rigor, and Snyder for looking at
these particular “bloodlands” too narrowly, and for not fitting his narrative of state-
directed mass murder into a comparative analysis of the borderlands, as a “zone of
genocide . . . stretching from the Baltic through the Black Sea to Anatolia and the
Mediterranean,” both books offer compelling narratives of marginal places being
forced by states seeking order and power, and populations that became the victims
of these policies.21 We should add that borderlands, where states’ central power is
weak and where linguistic and faith communities interweave across international
frontiers, need not be coterminous with bloodlands or genocide, as the Bartov and
Weitz collection of essays shows.
In his influential book, Inventing Eastern Europe Larry Wolff evinces little inter-
est in either Central Europe or in borderlands, arguing instead that “Western
Europe . . . invented Eastern Europe as its complementary other half in the eight-
eenth century, the age of Enlightenment,” and by so doing, upended the classical
and Renaissance symbolic division of the continent into southern civilization and
northern barbarism.22 This particular imagining of Europe’s regions could be used
not only to pen entertaining travel accounts and philosophical treatises, but also
to justify and facilitate military, political and economic conquest, both with claims
about civilizing “wild” or “backward” areas and their inhabitants, and with knowledge
and techniques needed for such enterprises. Napoleon’s conquests in Poland, the
Balkans, and as far as Egypt, and his unsuccessful incursion into Russia made use
of military mapping.23 Wolff was inspired by Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism, one of
the most influential texts of the postcolonial turn, and in general by deconstructivist
approaches.24 He has come under some criticism for example by Csaba Dupcsik and
Alex Drace-Francis who have pointed out that East Europeans were themselves active
participants in the definition of their region of Europe, rather than being only passive
objects of Western thought.25
Maria Todorova provided another influential study of the imaginative construction
of “the Balkans” as the Other of civilized Europe at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury. “Balkan” became a pejorative term, she noted, and “Balkanization” a “synonym
for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian.” Like Wolff,
Todorova acknowledged her intellectual debt to Said, while also differentiating the
historically and geographically concrete Balkans from the more “intangible” Orient
6
INTRODUCTION
constructed in the discourse and imagination of Westerners. In fact she devoted a

chapter to the historical legacies of Byzantine and especially Ottoman rule, thus mov-
ing away from the analysis of discourse alone as both Said and Wolff had done.26
Opinions still differ among scholars, politicians, and citizens as to the proper
nomenclature and divisions of Europe. Soon after the revolutions of 1989 everyone
and every country in the region seemed to want to be considered Central European.
Certainly the Visegrád states were on the fast track to the EU and that was pragmat-
ically appealing. The US State Department had seen the disappearance of “Central
Europe” from its bureaucracy’s organizational chart during the Cold War, with dif-
ferent countries reassigned to Eastern European or Southeast European Affairs.
When reconstituted in the 1970s, the Office of Central European Affairs included
only non-communist states. But in 1991, the Czech-born future Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright suggested using the term Central Europe again to include
the former Soviet bloc countries. Her recommendation was eventually adopted by
the Clinton administration.27
The new (old) regional name caught on. Paul Robert Magocsi published his eru-
dite Historical Atlas of East Central Europe in 1993 in the long-running University of
Washington “History of East Central Europe” series which drew on Halecki’s division
of Europe. But a revised and expanded edition in 2002 saw not only updated maps
but also a change of title: Historical Atlas of Central Europe. As reasons for the change,
Magocsi cited “articulate elements in many countries of this region [who] consider
eastern or even east-central to carry a negative connotation and prefer to be con-
sidered part of Central Europe,” alongside the fact that in strict geographic terms
“the territory covered in this atlas . . . is literally the central third of the European
continent.”28 It was the first argument that had determined the change of title, since
the metrics had not changed.
Textbooks
A selective survey of textbooks devoted to the area reveals a range of strategies –
and titles adopted to serve these. Robin Okey’s Eastern Europe 1740–1980: Feudalism
to Communism (1982) was one of the first used to teach recent generations of English
speaking students before the fall of communism. Okey undertook to treat “the
[modern] history of the lands lying between Central Europe and Russia” chronolog-
ically. By Central Europe he clearly meant West Central Europe, since he included
the Czech lands, Poland, and Hungary in his survey, along with the Balkans.29 The
first textbook published in the US after 1989 was Piotr Wandycz’s The Price of Freedom:
A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. Despite the title that
might have suggested broader coverage, Wandycz provided a comparative regional
history of only Bohemia/Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland in accord with his
expertise and the Central Europe vogue of the moment. His book emphasized states
and ruling nations, giving short shrift to minorities.30 Several books followed shortly.
Philip Longworth’s The Making of Eastern Europe, appeared a year later (and a second
edition in 1997). His narrative begins in the present and runs in reverse chronology
perhaps to capitalize on the ambient knowledge students had of the region from the
still fresh and exciting current events that had been in the news during the revolu-
tions of the late 1980s and early 1990s.31 Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries’ A History
7
of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change challenged the champions of “Central Europe”
in many ways, portraying South-Eastern Europe as the “cradle of European civiliza-
tion” and resisting the fashion of using “Central Europe,” with its “connotations of
Mitteleuropa and of Austrian and German imperialism,” in favor of Eastern Europe.32
Lonnie Johnson, whose textbook Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends, first pub-
lished in 1996, is still in wide use, understands Central Europe to be distinct from
Western, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe based on religious and cultural traditions,
the profound historical experience of multiethnicity and “imperial subjugation,” con-
frontation with the Ottoman Empire (although with less time spent under its rule
than parts of the Balkans), and comparatively slower economic modernization than
in Western Europe.33 Of course, several of these criteria apply equally to Southeastern
Europe, arguing for the inclusion of “Central Europe” and “Southeastern Europe” in
the larger category of East Central Europe, as we do here.
Several textbooks in recent decades have focused on Southeastern Europe, a
region with a fine historiography going back to the generations of Leften Stavrianos,
Nikolai Todorov, John Fine, Richard Clogg, Barbara and Charles Jelavich, and
Traian Stoianovich among others. But each generation writes its own history from
its particular perspective and addresses the past from the perch of its own present.
The 1990s Yugoslav wars, the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the end of communism, the
return of ethnic nationalism, and the revival of negative stereotypes of the Balkans
spurred a number of Balkanists to write for beginners and general audiences. Mark
Mazower’s The Balkans: A Short History (2000) (or in its British version The Balkans:
From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day) surveys the history of the region in broad
thematic chapters, but ends with an essay titled “On Violence,” in which Mazower
rebuts journalists and politicians – based on the material he has just presented –
who portray the Balkans as a perennially strife-ridden, violent, and intrinsically cruel
part of Europe.34 Another textbook by Stevan Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans,
1804–1945 (1999), written in a more conventional way and based on a somewhat
dated bibliography, is focused mainly on the political history of the modern Balkan
nations, but it also alludes to the pejorative connotations of the term “Balkan” and
refers to the 1990s Yugoslav wars.35 Very promising and already rewarding, although
not for beginners, is the edited, multi-author series, Entangled Histories of the Balkans
launched in 2013. The volumes focus on outside influences as well as common lega-
cies and trends throughout the Balkans.36
This brief and incomplete survey of recent textbooks would be lacking without
the mention of Ivan Berend’s “informal trilogy” on the modern history of “Central
and Eastern Europe” published between 1996 and 2003. The three books focus on
how and why the region (which includes both Central Europe and the Balkans)
differed from the West, which was the point of reference, he argues, for local elites.
“It is through comparison with Western Europe that the region’s basic character-
istics are defined: the lack of the nation-state, a lack of industrialization, and the
absence of modern, urbanized society.”37 Berend’s trilogy distinguishes itself by
presenting the complex interrelationships between the cultural, economic, social,
and political realms and by both comparing the different sub-regions and countries
he includes and the connections of this part of Europe with the West. But its over-
arching theme is ultimately that of “backwardness” as Nancy Wingfield has written
in her insightful review essay.38
8
INTRODUCTION
The problem of “backwardness”

The “backwardness” of the eastern part of the European continent (along with that
of all the other continents) used to be assumed and it sometimes still is. In the past,
Marxist historians and anthropologists of all manner, among others, were part of the
construction of such hierarchies predicated on perceptions of leading and lagging,
or of different rates of development on a single evolutionary path.39 These assump-
tions in turn influenced how the history of East Central Europe was written. In such
narratives, “backward” countries developed more slowly, and they remained behind,
while those belonging to the West experienced the speed of progress both technolog-
ically and culturally, marking them as part of a superior civilization. While the West
was “ahead” and closer to the “future,” the Eastern “backward” region of Europe was
perpetually “stuck in the past.” The assumption that a region belongs to a certain type
of civilization can determine how its history is told.
In her 2005 article “The Trap of Backwardness,” Maria Todorova challenges the
historiographic trope of backward societies in Eastern (or East Central) Europe or
the Third World imitating notions such as nationalism that were organically and
earlier born in the West. Her argument is multifaceted. She reminds us, for instance,
that according to Benedict Anderson, nationalism first arose in the Americas rather
than in Western Europe, but she focuses mainly on the ubiquitous “sense of lack and
lag, analytically subsumed in the notion of backwardness . . . a dominant trope not
only in non-European historiographies” but also earlier in Germany, Italy, Spain,
and still now in East Central Europe. While Todorova praises the “soft” Marxists and
world systems theorists – sociologists, economic historians, and political scientists –
of a generation ago, who set the terms of the discourse on backwardness and under-
development, the article “argues for the relative synchronicity of eastern and western
Europe within a longue durée framework.” She posits that nationalism arose “in a com-
mon European or global space” and not through the diffusion of a “Western idea”
mimicked after some delay by the “backward” peoples of the East.40 She thus provides
an ingenious alternative way of conceptualizing the modern transformation of all
of Europe, and indeed the world, and relegates the issues of priority and diffusion
of political ideas (and much else) from center to periphery, or west to east, to rela-
tive unimportance. Todorova’s solution bypasses the subjective sense of difference
voiced by contemporaries, and “contemporaries’ recognition of asymmetry and asyn-
chronicity between the West and the Balkans” (or other “eastern” places) offered
during the nineteenth century by men like Titu Maiorescu of the Junimea movement
in Romania, or by the Slavophiles in Russia and elsewhere, men who refused as unfit-
ting, undesirable, or s uperficial the import of Western institutions and practices into
their societies.41
Trends in the historiography of East Central Europe since 1700

A growing number of historians, anthropologists, social and political scientists, and
literary scholars from the region as well as from beyond it have been researching and
publishing on a variety of topics related to the modern history of East Central Europe
using a range of established and novel methodologies. Given this abundance of work
we can only point to some of the trends here.
9
Work on East Central Europe’s modern history has expanded enormously in the
last decades, and research has become more diversified with the felicitous result
that our image of the region’s past is now much deeper, more complex, and richer
in detail than it was a quarter of a century ago.42 This historiographic boom is
related in part to the exponential increase in access to archival materials, especially
those pertaining to the communist period; these records had been kept out of
scholars’ reach because the communist regimes regarded secrecy as key to main-
taining power.43 Beyond archival access, however, a number of other factors have
also contributed to the increase in the quantity and quality of the historiography
on East Central Europe. The collapse of the communist dictatorships in 1989–91
catapulted questions about the region into the public eye. A heightened interest
in the space between Germany and Russia resulted in larger numbers of people
becoming involved in studying it professionally. There has also been a generational
transition among experts on the region, and they are now often working in new
and better-funded research institutions. New directions and methods in histori-
ography – and the humanities and social sciences in general – have also had an
impact on scholars working on and in East Central Europe. Together with their
colleagues who focused on other parts of the world or worked in other disciplines,
they embraced new foci or styles of research, foregrounding gender, material culture,
maps, and visual culture, among others.
The communist collapse of 1989–91 had a positive influence on the discipline of
history. At the time, related disciplines such as political science and sociology, which
had failed to predict these events, lost prestige.44 Historians, whose job, is to “predict
the past,” by contrast, were not under this shadow. The crisis of “East European”
studies in the late-1980s thus reflected poorly on the other social sciences, which
were identified closely with “Russian and Soviet Studies.” History, on the other hand,
dealing in the longue durée of centuries past, was the discipline to which many turned
when the predictive disciplines miscarried. Scholarship on the region has continued
to evolve in the quarter century since then.
During the Cold War, the field of modern East European history was dominated by
political and diplomatic historians, some of them émigrés from Soviet bloc countries,
and, in the region, by Communist Party historians, many of them also political history
specialists.45 Some of these pursued political and nationalist agendas. This is not to
say that extraordinarily valuable, even fundamental research, much of it on Russia,
the Soviet Union, and Poland, was not produced. Of course, many historians’ lives
and work straddle the divide between the Cold War and post-communist periods.46
With the end of communism and the accompanying generational transition, younger
cohorts of scholars emerged who began to ask different questions, and new types of
history became possible and attractive both in the region and beyond its borders.
Since 1989 we can observe two tendencies: on the one hand an over-politicization of
history – although in very different ways from those of the Cold War – and, on the
other hand, a shift away from a narrowly political understanding of history.
After the demise of communism, for some, history became a field of contesta-
tion, apologia, and recuperation, a field where business left behind by the defunct
regimes was transacted; where the litigation between perpetrators and victims took
place; where the state security services were opened up to public scrutiny; where myr-
iad accusatory, defaming, and disculpating texts were published. This melodramatic
10
INTRODUCTION
scenario is understandable for societies that had experienced mass violence, trauma,
repression, and strict censorship. While some professional historians were involved in
these debates, transactions, and investigations, it was politicians and representatives
of various victim groups that played the central role in this process.47
In most places, however, the revolutions of 1989 had different, even opposite
effects on the discipline of history. In some countries, such as Albania, where aca-
demic historiography had been almost unknown, the scholarly study of the past only
began in earnest after the fall of communism.48 Elsewhere the study of history became
normalized, that is depoliticized. Fresh research agendas, and new perspectives and
approaches resulted in a more complex understanding of the region’s past, one in
which politics was not completely absent, but it came to be understood as embedded in
a broader context provided by social and cultural structures.49 The focus thus shifted
to social and cultural history, and to the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte).
Interdisciplinary projects also gained ground. Scholars from the region and those
working abroad (from their perspective) embarked on collaborations that had been
impossible before 1990. Many Western experts on East Central Europe had already
been involved with social, cultural, and Alltagsgeschichte historical projects, as well as
with interdisciplinary work.50 Collaborations spread such perspectives and methods
among wider groups of researchers.
Communication between scholars from different parts of the world improved
dramatically after the fall of communism. Particularly during the two decades after
1989, scholars had more money for research, found travel more affordable, and
international borders and visa requirements easier to negotiate, making it comfort-
able to study, do research, and meet colleagues in different corners of the world.
Collaborative encounters and projects took place in the US and in Europe, that is the
broader area served by the European Science Foundation (ESF), which offers funding
not only in EU countries but also in Israel, Norway, Russia, and Switzerland. The ESF
has thus contributed to the integration of transnational European and comparative
perspectives in history by funding textbook development and collaborative research.51
But the Europeanization of historiography – that is the creation of a comparative
and transnational European historiography – is clearly driven by more than travel and
funding. Europeanization refers to all approaches that lead beyond the nation and
toward a Europe-wide perspective.52 The spread of English and German languages
after the precipitous decline of Russian as a compulsory foreign language in parts
of the former Soviet bloc, may also have contributed to the rise of comparative and
transnational historical studies in East Central Europe. Most important, however,
in this mix of factors have been the long-term historiographic trends and new the-
oretical and methodological models.53 History writing was first “nationalized” in
the second half of the nineteenth century, but after World War I, a few historians –
most prominently Marc Bloch and others of the Annales School – began to rethink
history from a post-nationalist perspective. The Annales impact was felt in East
Central Europe.54 Other examples of thinking beyond national boundaries include
the Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow (1860–1941), who wrote on the Jews of
Russia and Poland but also published in the 1920s a World History of the Jews, and the
Hungarian social historian István Hajnal (1892–1956).55 It was also at this time that
Oskar Halecki began working out his ideas on East Central Europe as a historical
region with specific structures.56
11
Of course, not all historians from East Central Europe worked outside the
nation-state paradigm in the interwar period. Most did not. But what is surpris-
ing is that the purportedly internationalist communist states that came into being
after World War II used their power to further delay the demise of national his-
toriography. The official Marxist-Leninist ideology, which served as the academic
framework throughout the Soviet bloc, with few exceptions, stubbornly held to a
narrow national understanding of the past.57 Even racism and antisemitism were
not totally absent from historiography during the Communist period although
they were hidden behind Marxist-Leninist phraseology.58
Some have written about a “return” to national historiography after 1989, but
a more accurate description of what happened beginning in 1990 might be the
“pluralization” of historiography. National and nationalist approaches have simply
continued, but alongside this traditional approach, there has been an opening to
innovation and a receptivity among some historians in the former communist coun-
tries to transnational and comparative approaches.59 As a result, transnational and
global developments affecting East Central Europe over the last three hundred years
such as population movements, the exchange of ideas within far-flung intellectual
networks, and economic interdependence are beginning to be better understood.60
Renewed interest in imperial states as complicated, multiethnic entities has inspired
new research on the (mis)functioning of the Russian, Soviet, Ottoman and Habsburg
empires that have dominated the region from the sixteenth to the end of the twentieth
century.61 A contemporary form of transnational history, histoire croisée, or entangled
history, which operates on multiple levels and which “urges researchers to take into
account their own ideological position and involvement in the process of knowledge,
and to reflect on the plurality of viewpoints” has become an attractive method for
historians of and from East Central Europe.62
Within this context, teleological, ethno-nationalist narratives of the “inevitable”
decline and fall of empires and the rise of nationalism and nation states have come
under attack.63 Nationalism, which has played an enormous role in modern Europe,
and has been studied by historians since the nineteenth century, has been the object
of several types of contention. The division of nationalisms into an Eastern cultural
and ethnic variety and a Western political and civic type dates to the postwar years
when German Nazism was still on everyone’s mind.64 By the 1980s, the Nazi question
had lost urgency. Andrzej Walicki pointed out the “Western” political nationalism of
the Poles, and many other scholars have come to the conclusion that different types
of nationalisms have existed throughout Europe for some time.65 Both nationality
and ethnicity as simple, immutable identities have also been questioned, with histo-
rians of the Habsburg Empire, and the Czech lands in particular, following in the
footsteps of sociologist Rogers Brubaker.66 Other scholars have done similar work
with regard to German and Hungarian minorities in interwar Yugoslavia, where they
did not regard themselves as distinct ethnic groups until they were mobilized into
political organizations in wartime.67
Breaking the mold of communist-era historiography did not happen overnight.
The debate that began in the 1980s about “Central Europe” as a distinct region lying
between Eastern and Western Europe, continued in the post-communist era, and it
helped to maintain the already lively interest people in the West had in the Czech
lands, Hungary, and Poland, places that had been made better known to Western
12
INTRODUCTION
publics by well-published dissidents. The debate also promoted the “emancipation”

of the historians of this sub-region of East Central Europe, long overshadowed as
East Europeanists by Russian and Soviet specialists. For Southeastern Europe, the
tragic Yugoslav war of the 1990s had a somewhat similar effect. The outcome of cyn-
ical communist politicians, the war brought the Balkan region back into the public
eye, and led to the emancipation of Balkan Studies from the Eastern European
field. Debates about the Balkans as an imagined “Other” to both Western and
Central Europe were related to the negative, distorted image that Western media
and political elites had of the region, and coincided with the Yugoslav civil war and
Western foreign policy needs. This made available more resources for studying
the region.68
The new freedoms obtained with the fall of the communist states, the enhanced
interest in East Central Europe, and the integration of former communist states in
European and Euro-Atlantic structures also led to more research funding from inter-
national, private, and state sponsors. New institutions were also created in the 1990s.
A number of new research institutes for the study of state security of the former com-
munist dictatorships after the model of the “Gauck-Behörde” Agency in Berlin came
into being in Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, and elsewhere. Since 2011
some Research Centers and NGOs devoted to the memory of communism, political
prisoners, the study of totalitarianism, and other aspects of communism have become
part of an EU Platform of European Memory and Conscience.69 New institutions
such as Collegium Budapest and its successor, the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Budapest, New Europe College in Bucharest, the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia,
the Central European University and the Institute for the Study of the Revolution
of 1956 in Budapest, Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Ostmitteleuropa in Leipzig,
and others opened and have contributed to an efflorescence of studies focused pri-
marily on East Central Europe. In addition, institutes for Jewish Studies and Women’s
and Gender Studies, either missing or underdeveloped under the old regime, were
opened and grew, injecting new energy and resources and academic life into previ-
ously taboo subjects.70
Much of the post-1989 scholarly activity at first concentrated on communist-era
topics, which were impossible to research freely until the change of regime, leading,
in the short run, to a relative neglect of earlier historical periods.71 But there are signs
that this initial imbalance is already being overcome. The Centre for Advanced Study
in Sofia, Bulgaria has become a hub of intense collective research projects result-
ing in the publication of important books. Among these, several are multi-volume
series featuring chapters or essays (and original text sources in English translation)
on fundamental topics in the modern history of East Central Europe going back to
the eighteenth century.72 Moreover, individual historians, even some working in or
hailing from former communist countries, have surpassed the initial enthusiasm for
the forbidden topics of the communist era, finding other subjects and earlier centu-
ries equally fascinating.73
Major paradigmatic shifts in the humanities and social sciences in general, and
historiography in particular have transformed the ways in which the history of East
Central Europe has been written in the last decades. Initially in the West, the dis-
cipline of history absorbed insights and fashioned methodologies in dialogue with
kindred fields such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, economics,
13
psychology, women’s and gender studies, and cultural studies; it profited from the rise
of “history from below,” quantitative history, cultural history and the linguistic turn,
memory and trauma studies, the spatial turn, the visual turn, and the digital turn. All
of these shifts in sensibility, focus, and methods were accompanied by intense discus-
sions inside the profession.
In the field of Soviet and communism studies, for example, a revisionist chal-
lenge to the totalitarianism paradigm starting in the 1970s moved research in new
directions.74 The understanding of communist regimes as totalitarian dictatorships
was based on a concept of politics that focused almost exclusively on elites in the
state and party apparatus, and neglected the majority of the people in the Soviet
Union and people’s democracies. The totalitarian model was mostly the province of
conservative political scientists during the Cold War. The discipline of the research-
ers and their relationship to the governments funding the research often limited
the sources used, and the questions asked. Revisionist social historians in the 1970s
began studying Communist Party politics in a wider context and based on differ-
ent sources to try to find out how the system worked from below, and how social
structures and social mobility might explain some level of popular support for the
communist dictatorship. The revisionists too had a political stance, of course, and it
was generally New Left style Marxism. Social history infused the entire field of his-
tory at the time, and that style of bottom-up history was a reaction to the top-down
political history from which workers, peasants, slaves, ethnic minorities, and women
had often been missing.75
During the 1990s, as social history was becoming fully accepted, cultural historians
posed a new challenge. Based on the ideas of post-structuralist philosophers such
as Michel Foucault and sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, historians and anthro-
pologists, among others, began to develop more complex concepts of politics and
historical change that took into account the symbolic construction of power relations
in society. In Foucault’s vision, power is exerted in myriad ways, through discourse,
through medical and psychiatric categories and institutions, penitentiaries, and
academic disciplines.76 Bourdieu has addressed himself to the semi-invisible power
relations and processes that structure the realms of culture, academia, literature, and
art. Scholars working on the Soviet Union and other countries of the Soviet bloc
began to apply these insights as well to their areas and objects of study, developing
new understandings of politics and society from a cultural perspective, for example
of “Stalinism as a civilization,” or of the promotion of nationalist ideology in socialist
Romania, among others.77
Scholars of East Central Europe trained in social, cultural, and political his-
tory, have turned their attention to a variety of themes – old and new – including,
among others, nationalism, linguistic policies, social movements, communism, labor,
regional and urban history, youth, tourism, fashion, cartography, migration, border-
lands, archives, women, gender and sexuality, religion, and commemorations. They
seem to more and more and better understand the diffuseness of power through
society, institutions, practices, and concepts, and to see power relations as being sym-
bolically undergirded and communicated. Such perspectives have helped them to
pose new questions about the region’s history, beyond the earlier standard national
histories that so often focused on high politics and male elites representing the
state.78 Archives have been the “bread and butter” of historians since the beginning
14
INTRODUCTION
of the profession in the nineteenth century, but in recent decades they have become
the object of anti-empiricist critiques and theories, the terrain of postcolonial schol-
ars searching imperial archival collections to decipher imperialist strategies, and the
serious playground of sophisticated cultural studies scholars.79 It is in this intellectual
environment that the Soviet Empire imploded and then its archives were thrown
open – including those of the Stasi and other Secret Police organizations around
the bloc. This archival boon thus occurred amid discipline-wide discussions of how
archives are constituted and maintained, to what purpose and for whose benefit,
using what categories and to what societal and intellectual effect. Scholars of East
Central Europe in various disciplines have produced innovative work particularly
about the Secret Police archives, sometimes examining the history of their own files.80
Debates – sometimes heated ones – have animated historians and other scholars of
East Central Europe in the last quarter century, and these have proven productive.
The most passionate arguments have been, not surprisingly about the history of the
twentieth century. For example, gender and women’s historians have struggled with
each other over approaches to women’s history, feminism, and the very nature of
communism. The fact that a growing number of journals are dedicated to the study
of gender, of women’s history, and of feminism (and many of these have hosted
special issues on Eastern Europe, socialism, or communism), and that departments,
centers, and institutes throughout Europe and the world are now devoted to the
study of women and gender has encouraged the development of empirical research
on these topics.81 Of particular importance in promoting this relatively new branch
of scholarship for this region is the annual Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central,
Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, which since 2006 has
been publishing scholarship and book reviews, as well as discussions in each volume’s
“Forum.” One recent debate among women’s and gender historians and feminists
was sparked by the American feminist philosopher Nanette Funk reacting in a 2014
article to research published in the past two decades on women under communism.82
She labeled the authors of this research “feminist revisionists” reminding them and
us of the 1970s debate over totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. Funk then received
a full set of replies in Aspasia (2016) and elsewhere ranging from the empirical to
the theoretical.83 What is on display in the articles grouped under the Forum “Ten
Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited” is dazzling in part because of
the wealth of empirical research since 2006 that these scholars can draw on to offer
a nuanced and complex portrait of communist society and women and women’s
organizations within it. Second, their arguments are not only with Funk, but also,
in smaller and diverse ways, with other scholars whose research or assumptions they
challenge or further develop. Some authors are criticized for overlooking this recent
research, much of which is by a younger generation of scholars; an earlier cohort of
feminists are called to task for their sweeping assumptions about patriarchy; Cold
Warriors are criticized for their accusatory stance and for lacking much complexity
of vision.84 Third, this wealth of new research is making it possible to make new broad
theoretical claims not only about women under communism but against universal-
izing liberal Western feminism, and about the history of communism in general.
Western feminism has been perceived as oppressive and a form of Orientalization
by scholars and activists in the Second and Third Worlds. In her essay in the Aspasia
“Forum,” Alexandra Ghit suggests that the body of work on communist women’s
15
organizations challenges this Orientalism, as well as the Cold War paradigm that con-
demns communism as criminal, and even the “state of the art” ambivalent assessment
of communism.85
There have also been extensive and passionate debates (especially in the region)
about the comparability of the Holocaust with Stalinist mass violence and about local
antisemitism. At times these debates have extended to the intellectual legacy of the
fascist or right-wing intellectuals of the 1930s and 40s.86 “Gulag vs. Holocaust” public
arguments took place in the context of a new historiography based on newly opened
archives about the involvement of local populations in the crimes committed dur-
ing World War II against Jewish neighbors, and the equally new narratives about the
crimes of the communist regimes. Publics that had received only Soviet-style educa-
tion about widespread antisemitism, and about the victims of the war during decades
of communist rule were not prepared to believe that anti-communist governments or
their own compatriots had persecuted Jews. The Princeton scholar Jan Gross’s books
Neighbors (2000) and Fear (2006) both stirred deep and long-lasting controversies par-
ticularly in his native Poland. Gross, who is the author of many books and articles
on twentieth-century Poland, was decorated in 1996 with the Order of Merit of the
Republic of Poland. Recently, Poland’s Law and Justice government has threatened
to remove that distinction.87
The historiographic boom in and about East Central Europe that we have traced
here might not continue indefinitely in all subfields. Some observers have started
to write about “the end of post-communism” even if in Albania, for example, post-
communism and public debates and scholarly work on the communist period have
only just begun.88 In other countries, such as Hungary, Ukraine, and Poland, the
process of pluralization of historical scholarship that began in the 1980s has started to
fray. The new Hungarian constitution of 2011, for example, provides a specific inter-
pretation of national history which includes some traditions (the revolutions of 1848
and 1956) but excludes others (communism).89 In Ukraine, a law introduced in 2015
bans the “unlawful desecration” of the memory of Stepan Bandera and the Ukrainian
Insurgent Army (UPA), which temporarily collaborated with the Nazi occupation
army, and in Poland the new conservative government is in the process of outlawing
the use of the term “Polish death camps.”90 Such measures will have a negative effect
on academic freedom. Together with growing financial problems, they could impede
critical historical research, particularly with regard to the communist period and the
twentieth century in general. And yet, the recent crisis of the EU’s common currency,
the euro, was not interpreted as a conflict between West and East, but rather between
North and South. Former “Eastern” countries like Poland and Estonia were labeled
“Northern” as against the “Southern,” mostly Mediterranean “problem” states. This
shift in the mental mapping of Europe and in the imagined hierarchy of “advanced”
and “backward” countries and regions more than twenty-five years after the fall of
Soviet-style communism in Europe indicates that the end of “post-communism” is in
sight, and new criteria of classification and judgment are already in play.
This volume is the fruit of the historiographic trends of the past decades, and its
aim is, among others, to document the flourishing state of East Central European
studies at this point in time. This is the first textbook on the modern history of East
Central Europe written collectively by historians from Austria, Britain, Bulgaria,
Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and the United States.
16
INTRODUCTION
Structure
The authors of this volume come from different places, institutions, disciplines and
backgrounds, reflecting the increased globalization of academia and the pluralism of
(East Central) European studies in our time. We welcome this phenomenon and its
reflection in this book. Does it make it somewhat messier to navigate? Perhaps. We
certainly do not all completely share the same training or assumptions, and this can
be seen in the varied perspectives represented by the authors. Most of the chapters
have been written collaboratively by specialists in different sub-regions, to attempt
to maximize expertise; across the volume readers will encounter different takes and
approaches. These differences were food for thought throughout the process of writ-
ing, editing, and revision. While we had interesting discussions on all the chapter topics
at our workshop at the University of St. Andrews in March 2013, certain views cannot
be completely reconciled. This is probably as it should be for a volume that is meant
to provide readers with a “state of the field” report rather than a single perspective.91
Chapter 1, “Space: empires, nations, borders,” by James Koranyi and Bernhard
Struck sets the stage for modern East Central European history by providing an analy-
sis of the region’s shifting political boundaries since 1700 in transnational perspective.
Using Charles Maier’s concept of “regimes of territoriality” the authors discuss the
rise, decline, and repositionings of Europe’s land empires, which shaped the history
of the region until the end of World War I, and the challenges that new nation states
posed to regional stability. This approach challenges conventional periodization for
which the major wars of the last two centuries served as principal caesuras.
In Chapter 2, “Rural and urban worlds: between economic modernization and
persistent backwardness,” the late Jacek Kochanowicz and Bogdan Murgescu trace
East Central Europe’s economic development, and the social consequences that fol-
lowed. (A draft of the chapter was completed before Jacek Kochanowicz passed away
in 2014.) The authors take issue with Larry Wolff’s exclusive focus on Westerners’
perception of backwardness, which they agree might well have been a cultural con-
struction. Their focus, however, is on the actual economic and social conditions that
have obtained in East Central Europe relative to the western part of the continent
from 1700 to the present.
Chapter 3, “Demography and population movements,” written by Theodora
Dragostinova and David Gerlach, examines the almost constant flow of human
migrations from and into the region as well as the many forced population move-
ments that have shaped the societies and economies of East Central Europe over the
past three centuries. This topic continues to be of acute relevance today.
Chapter 4, “Religion and ethnicity: conflicting and converging identifications,”
by Joel Brady and Edin Hajdarpasic, examines what has often been posited as the
special relationship between religion and ethnicity, or between religion and nation
in East Central Europe. The authors rely on the work of Rogers Brubaker and Jeremy
King among others to critique ethnicist and groupist approaches to the study of reli-
gion and ethnicity in the region, and they question the success of twentieth-century
secularization in eliminating religion from the region entirely.
In Chapter 5, “The cultures of East Central Europe: imperial, national, revolution-
ary,” Irina Livezeanu, Thomas Ort, and Alex Drace-Francis examine the intersection
between culture and imperial, national, wartime, and revolutionary political agendas
17
from above and from below. Their emphasis is on cultural institutions and literary
culture from 1700 to the present.
In Chapter 6, “Women’s and gender history,” Krassimira Daskalova and Susan
Zimmermann focus on different kinds of women’s lives, and status in comparison to
those of men in East Central Europe. The chapter is organized around six themes: edu-
cation; labor and social policy; law and citizenship; nation and ethnicity; sexuality; and
women’s activism so as to demonstrate a deeply gendered historical experience.
In Chapter 7, “Political ideologies and political movements,” Ulf Brunnbauer and
Paul Hanebrink begin by describing the political challenges faced by the Ottoman,
Russian, and Habsburg empires in the eighteenth century and the reforms each
undertook. They then analyze a wide range of political ideas, parties, and movements
that developed at levels of society below the imperial one, and in the new politi-
cal contexts created after World War I. Chapter 8, “Communism and its legacy,” by
Malgorzata Fidelis and Irina Gigova, continues where Chapter 7 leaves off. The chap-
ter differs from others in the volume, by focusing within the narrower chronological
scope of the communist period. This was a period during which the field of Eastern
European studies itself developed by leaps and bounds. The authors analyze not only
the history of communism but also its historiography and its legacy, given that this
short period left a long shadow.
Perhaps the hardest task has been that of our colleague Reinhard Heinisch, the
author of Chapter 9, “Returning to ‘Europe’ and the rise of Europragmatism: party
politics and the European Union since 1989.” Watching him attempt to ride the roller
coaster of recent and current politics has made some of us appreciate the beauty of
history, for dealing in matters long past.
The final chapter of the book, “Uses and abuses of the past,” written by Patrice
Dabrowski and Stefan Troebst, builds on the recent abundance of research on mem-
ory and commemorations in order to analyze how East Central Europe’s modern
history has been shaped by the politics of memory and invented traditions.
Notes
1 For an excellent overview of post-communism and its literature see Charles King, “Post
Communism: Is There Still an ‘Eastern Europe’?” in Extreme Politics: Nationalism, Violence,
and the End of Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 79–102.
2 For an analysis of the Hungarian case see Chris Hann, “Backwardness Revisited: Time,
Space, and Civilization in Rural Eastern Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History
57, no. 4 (2015): 898–908.
3 Sorin Antohi, “Narratives Unbound: A Brief Introduction to Post-Communist Historical
Studies,” in Sorin Antohi, Balázs Trencsényi, and Péter Apor, eds., Narratives Unbound:
Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007), xxi.
4 Charles Gati, “Weimar Russia,” The Washington Post, March 17, 1995; “The Authoritarian
Temptation: Weimar Russia, 1995–2015,” The American Interest, June 29, 2015; and Leonid
Luks, “‘Weimar Russia?’: Notes on a Controversial Concept,” Russian Social Science Review 49,
no. 6 (November 2008): 30–48.
5 On the many ties between the western and eastern parts of the continent see E. P. Thompson,
Beyond the Cold War (London: Merlin Press, 1982). For an overview of recent studies in this
vein, see Simo Mikkonen and Pia Koivunen, eds., Beyond the Divide: Entangled Histories of Cold
War Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2015).
6 Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” The New York Review of Books (April 26,
1984). The essay appeared first in France the year before under the title “Un Occident
18
INTRODUCTION
kidnappé: ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale, Le Débat 1983/5, no. 27. See https://europe
cosmopolitique.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/deba_027_0003-1-kundera1.pdf.
7 For an erudite historical study of Western, East Central, and Eastern structures and developments
in Europe see Jenő Szűcs “The Three Historical Regions of Europe: An Outline,” Acta Historica
Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 29, no. 2–4 (1983): 131–184. This thoughtful and weighty essay
published in a Hungarian academic journal received far less attention than Kundera’s. Szűcs, a
medievalist, spends most of his time on the Middle Ages, but he rather arbitrarily “disregards”
Byzantium since “the area was to secede from the European structure” (134).
8 Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” 35. Czeslaw Milosz reportedly defined Central
Europe as “all the countries [including the Baltic states] that in August 1939 were the real
or hypothetical object of a trade between the Soviet Union and Germany.” Cited in Marcel
Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, Towards a History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central
Europe: Theoretical Reflections, ACLS Occasional Paper no. 52 (New York: American Council
of Learned Societies, 2002), 2.
9 Karl Sinnhuber, “Central Europe: Mitteleuropa: Europe Centrale: An Analysis of a
Geographical Term,” Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers), no. 20 (1954):
20–21, 26–27; Tony Judt, “The Rediscovery of Central Europe,” Daedalus 119, no. 1: Eastern
Europe . . . Central Europe . . . Europe (Winter 1990): 24; and Bo Stråth, “Mitteleuropa from
List to Naumann,” European Journal of Social Theory 11, no. 2 (February 2008): 179.
10 Stråth, “Mitteleuropa from List to Naumann,” 181; and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural
Despair: A Study in the Rise of German Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1974), 56.
11 Stråth, “Mitteleuropa from List to Naumann,” 181–183.
12 Roman Szporluk, The Political Thought of Thomas G. Masaryk (Boulder, CO: East European
Monographs, 1981), 130–133.
13 Cited in Sinnhuber, “Central Europe,” 28. Cf. Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” 33.
14 Cited in Szporluk, Political Thought, 132. Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History
(The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 448.
15 Stefan Troebst, “Meso-regionalizing Europe: History Versus Politics,” in Johann Arnason
and Natalie Doyle, eds., Domains and Divisions of European History (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2010), 79; and Oskar Halecki, “The Historical Role of Central-Eastern
Europe,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1944): 9. A meso-region
is intermediate in size between a continent and a region that is part of a single country.
16 Oskar Halecki, Borderlands of Western Civilization: A History of East Central Europe (New York:
Ronald Press, 1952); Oskar Halecki, The Limits and Divisions of European History (London,
New York: Sheed & Ward, 1950); and Troebst, “Meso-regionalizing Europe: 80.
17 Dragutin Pavlicevic, ed., Vojna Krajina: Povijesni pregled, historiografija, rasprave (Zagreb:
Sveučilišna Naklada Liber, 1984); and Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan
War (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 5–7.
18 Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German,
Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press,
2013). See also Andrew Janos, who also uses “borderlands” in East Central Europe in the
Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre-to Postcommunism (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000).
19 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010),
x–xiii. See also Alexander Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands,
1870–1992 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
20 Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
21 See Katherine Jolluck’s review in American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 589–590;
and Mark Mazower, “Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands,” Contemporary European History 21, no. 2
(May 2012): 121.
22 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1–5.
23 Ibid., 8.
24 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, c1978).
19
25 Csaba Dupcsik, “Postcolonial Studies and the Inventing of Eastern Europe,” East Central
Europe/L’Europe du Centre Est: Eine wisseschaftliche Zeitschrift 26, part 1, 1999. Alex Drace-
Francis writes, “east Europeans participated in the elaboration both of the concept and of
the image of an undifferentiated ‘barbarous’ space,” and that “barbarous” could have vari-
ous meanings. See “Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing,” in Wendy
Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis, eds., Under Eastern Eyes A Comparative Introduction to East
European Travel Writing on Europe, (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008), 5.
26 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), viii–ix,
3–11, and ch. 7 “The Balkans: Realia – Qu’est-ce qu’il y a de hors-texte?”
27 Tamara Resler, “The United States and Central Europe: Principles and Pragmatism in the
Evolving Partnership,” in Zlatko Šabic and Petr Drulák, eds., Regional and International
Relations of Central Europe (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 147–148.
28 Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2002), xi–xiii.
29 Robin Okey, Eastern Europe 1740–1980: Feudalism to Communism (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, c1982). A second edition, Eastern Europe 1740–1985, was published
in 1986.
30 Piotr Wandycz, The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the
Present (London: Routledge, 1991).
31 Philip Longworth, The Making of Eastern Europe (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1992).
32 Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (London:
Routledge, 1998), xi, 1–2.
33 Lonnie Johnson, Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 3–4. Johnson seems to fall into an Orientalist trope when he
writes “Western Christendom’s centuries-long confrontation with the Oriental and Islamic
empire of the Ottoman Turks also helped define Central Europe as a cultural and historical
region.” Not only “much of the Balkan Peninsula became part of the Ottoman Empire,” but
also a large swath of Hungary although for a lesser period of time.
34 Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History (New York: Modern Library, 2000). Andrew
Wachtel’s The Balkans in World History (2008) also packs a lot of history into relatively few
pages. Written by a literature scholar, it is especially good on cultural aspects and is aimed
at an undergraduate audience.
35 Stevan Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans, 1804–1945 (London: Longman, 1999), 331.
For a review of various books on the Balkans, see Dejan Djokić, “Nationalism, History and
Identity in the Balkans: An Overview of Recent Histories of Europe’s South-East,” Slavonic
and East European Review 81, no. 3 (July, 2003): 511–524.
36 Vol. 1: Roumen Daskalov and Tchavdar Marinov, eds., National Ideologies and Language
Policies (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Vol. 2: Roumen Daskalov and Diana Mishkova, eds., Transfers
of Political Ideologies and Institutions (Leiden: Brill, 2014); and Vol. 3: Roumen Daskalov and
Alexander Vezenkov, eds., Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
37 Ivan Berend, History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xiii; Ivan Berend, Central and Eastern Europe
1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996); and Ivan Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe Before World War II
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
38 Nancy Wingfield, “The Problem with ‘Backwardness’: Ivan T. Berend’s Central and Eastern
Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” European History Quarterly 34, no. 4
(October 2004): 535–551.
39 Early anthropologists played an important part in the construction of these narratives
and on how they conceptualized the time and pace of different societies. See Hann,
“Backwardness Revisited,” 881–882. For the relationship between past, present, and future
in historical narratives, see Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Space of experience’ and ‘Horizon of
Expectation’: Two historical categories,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 255–275.
40 Maria Todorova, “The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of
Eastern European Nationalism,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (2005): 141, 145–147, 154, 157.
20
INTRODUCTION
41 See Roumen Daskalov and Diana Mishkova, “‘Forms without Substance’: Debates on the
Transfer of Western Models to the Balkans,” in Entangled Histories of the Balkans, Volume 2:
Roumen Daskalov and Diana Mishkova, eds., Transfers of Political Ideologies and Institutions
(Leiden: Brill, 2014), here 95; Balázs Trencsényi, “History and Character: Visions of
National Peculiarity in the Romanian Political Discourse of the 19th Century,” in Diana
Mishkova, ed., We, The People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe (Budapest:
CEU Press, 2009), 156; and Robin Aizlewood, “Revisiting Russian Identity in Russian
Thought: From Chaadaev to the Early Twentieth Century,” Slavonic and East European
Review 78, no. 1 ( January 2000): 33.
42 See Antohi et al., Narratives Unbound for the diverse post-communist historiography written
by scholars in the region.
43 The communist regimes were obsessively opaque about information, partly a legacy of the
Stalinist years. See Łukasz Kamínski et al., eds., Handbuch der kommunistischen Geheimdienste
in Osteuropa 1944–1991 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009); Leo Van Rossum,
The Former Communist Party Archives in Eastern Europe and Russia: A Provisional Assessment,
Research Paper no. 27 (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 1997).
44 William Outhwaite and Larry Ray, “Prediction and Prophecy in Communist Studies,”
Comparative Sociology 10 (2011): 691–709.
45 Bogdan Murgescu, A fi istoric în anul 2000 (Bucharest: Editura All, 2000), 42–44. Murgescu
discusses the dominance of political history in communist Romania.
46 The work produced by older generations of historians who have shaped the field in ear-
lier decades is cited throughout this volume. See Leonid Gorizontov, “East European
Studies at Harvard University during the ‘Cold War’ Era (based on the memories of
M. K. Dziewanowski),” in Jerzy Malicki and Leszek Zasztowt, eds., East and West: History and
Contemporary State of Eastern Studies (Warsaw: Centre for East European Studies, University
of Warsaw, 2009), 113–121, for an example of US Cold War style history.
47 See for example Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak, eds., Memory and Change in
Europe: Eastern Perspectives (New York: Berghahn, 2015), esp. Joanna Michlic, “The Path
of Bringing the Dark to Light: Memory of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe”; and
Lavinia Stan, ed., Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Reckoning
with the Communist Past (London: Routledge, 2009).
48 Oliver Schmitt and Eva Frantz, eds., Albanische Geschichte: Stand und Perspektiven der Forschung
(Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2009); and Ulf Brunnbauer, “Die Nation erschreiben: Historiographie
und Nationsbildung in der Republik Makedonien seit 1944,” in Markus Krzoska and
Hans-Christian Maner, eds., Beruf und Berufung. Geschichtswissenschaft und Nationsbildung in
Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Münster: LIT, 2005), 167–190.
49 Mark Mazower, “Changing Trends in the Historiography of Post-War Europe, East and
West,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 58 (Fall 2000): 275–282.
50 See for example the multi-year project that resulted in the prizewinning volume: Gail
Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: the Collectivization of Romanian
Agriculture 1949–1962 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). The two US-based
scholars, a sociologist and an anthropologist, collaborated with a large group of Romanian,
Hungarian, British, and American scholars including historians, sociologists, political scien-
tists, anthropologists, and lawyers. Some of their collaborators wrote, edited, and published
additional articles and books on related subjects. The project was funded from multiple
sources in the US, UK, and Romania.
51 See Hanna Schissler and Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, The Nation, Europe, and the World: Textbooks
and Curricula in Transition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). In Croatia the process of
integration into the European Union contributed to cooperation between Croatian histo-
rians and historians from other countries. See Jelena Subotic, “Europe is a State of Mind:
Identity and Europeanization in the Balkans,” International Studies Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2011):
309–330. One research project titled “Inventing Europe,” studied how technology was impli-
cated in European integration. See Thomas Misa and Johan Schot, “Introduction: Inventing
Europe: Technology and the Hidden Integration of Europe,” History and Technology 21, no. 1
(2005): 1–19. Another project funded by the ESF resulted in Richard Bonney, ed., The Rise
of the Fiscal State in Europe c. 1200–1815 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1999).
21
52 Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jurgen Kocka, Comparative and Transnational History: Central
European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012). For a gen-
eral overview of historiographic debates on the Europeanization of the past, see Ulrike
von Hirschhausen and Kiran Klaus Patel, “Europeanization in History: an Introduction,”
in Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel, eds., Europeanization in the Twentieth Century
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–18.
53 A few examples of new types of historical studies written by scholars from the region but pub-
lished abroad are: Mikolaj Szołtysek and Siegfried Gruber, “Mosaic: Recovering Surviving
Census Records and Reconstructing the Familial History of Europe,” The History of the Family
(2015): 1–23; Diana Dumitru, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The
Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016);
Heléna Tóth, An Exiled Generation: German and Hungarian Refugees of Revolution, 1848–1871
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Pavel Kolář, “Communism in Eastern
Europe,” in Stephen Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 203–219; and Natalya Yakusheva, “Spaces and Places in
Central and Eastern Europe: Historical Trends and Perspectives,” Europe-Asia Studies 67,
no. 6 (2015): 993–995.
54 Krysztof Pomian, “Impact of the Annales School in Eastern Europe [with Discussion],”
Review (Fernand Braudel Center) (1978): 101–121; Murgescu, A fi istoric, 33; and Domokos
Kosáry, “The Idea of a Comparative History of East Central Europe: the Story of a Venture,”
in Dennis Deletant and Harry Hanak, eds., Historians as Nation-Builders (Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 124–138.
55 Robert Seltzer, Simon Dubnow’s “New Judaism”: Diaspora Nationalism and the World History of
the Jews (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 184; István Hajnal, “Írásbeliség, intellektuális réteg és európai
fejlődés” ; and Idem, Technika, művelődés. (Budapest: História, 1933). Cf. also: András Kiséry,
“Literacy, Culture, and History in the Work of Thienemann and Hajnal,” Comparative
Hungarian Cultural Studies (2011): 34–46.
56 In 1923 Halecki presented a paper to the International Congress of Historians in Brussels:
“L’histoire de l’Europe orientale. Sa division en époques, son milieu géographique et ses
problèmes fondamentaux,” in La Pologne au Ve Congrès International des Sciences Historiques.
Brussels 1923 (Warsaw: Comité national polonais du Ve Congrès International des Sciences
Historiques, 1924), 73–94.
57 See Pavel Kolář, “Rewriting National History in Post-War Central Europe: Marxist Syntheses
of Austrian and Czechoslovak History as New National Master-Narratives,” in Stefan Berger
and Chris Lorenz, eds., Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan), 319–340; Macjei Górny, “‘Dialectical Negation’:
East Central European Marxist Historiography and the Problem of the Nation,” East Central
Europe 36, no. 2 (2009): 225–253; and Murgescu, A fi istoric, 35–37.
58 See for example Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural
Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Daniel
Blatman, “Polish antisemitism and ‘Judeo-communism’: Historiography and memory,”
East European Jewish Affairs 27, no. 1 (1997): 23–43; Thomas Fox, The Holocaust under
Communism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Kata Bohus, “Not a Jewish
Question?” Hungarian Historical Review 4, no. 3 (2015): 737–772; and Laslo Sekelj,
“Antisemitism and Nationalist Conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia,” Patterns of Prejudice 27,
no. 2 (1993): 63–80.
59 Michal Kopeček, ed., Past in the Making: Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989
(Budapest: CEU Press, 2008); and Sabrina Ramet, “Memory and Identity in the Yugoslav
Successor States,” Nationalities Papers 41, no. 6 (2013): 871–881.
60 Constantin Iordachi, “‘Entangled Histories’: Re-writing the History of Central and
Southeastern Europe from a Relational Perspective,” Regio: Minorities, Politics, Society 15,
no. 1 (2004): 113–147; and Philipp Ther, “Comparisons, Cultural Transfers and the Study
of Networks: Towards a Transnational History of Europe,” in Hans-Gerhard Haupt and
Jürgen Kocka, eds., Comparative and Transnational History. Central European Approaches and
New Perspectives (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 204–225.
22
INTRODUCTION
61 See for example Judson, The Habsburg Empire; Bartov and Weitz, Shatterzone of Empires;
Maurus Reinkowski and Gregor Thum, eds., Helpless Imperialists: Imperial Failure, Fear and
Radicalization (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013); Ali Yaycioglu, Partners of
the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2016); Anna Laura Stoler et al., eds., Imperial Formations (Santa Fe, NM:
Schools of Advanced Research Press, 2007; Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands:
Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and
Brown, Biography of No Place.
62 Iordachi, “‘Entangled Histories’,” 115.
63 Joseph Esherick, Hasan Kayalı, and Eric Van Young, Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on
the Making of the Modern World (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Maureen Healy, Vienna
and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Isa Blumi, Reinstating the Ottomans: Alternative
Balkan Modernities, 1800–1912 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
64 See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York:
Macmillan, 1944); and Taras Kuzio, “The Myth of the Civic State: A Critical Survey of Hans
Kohn’s Framework for Understanding Nationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25, no. 1
(2002): 20–39.
65 See Andrzej Walicki, The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Nationhood: Polish Political
Thought from Noble Republicanism to Tadeusz Kosciuszko (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1989), 7; and Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Jörn Leonhard, eds., Nationalismen
in Europa. West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2001), one of the
first comparative East–West German texts that emphasized that a variety of nationalisms
existed in Eastern Europe and even within a single region; for example Baltic cities and the
rural areas surrounding them did not share the same type of nationalism.
66 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004); Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity,
and Beyond,” in Maria Bucur and Nancy Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past: The Politics of
Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue
University Press, 2001), 112–152; Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the
Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006);
Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian
Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Tara Zahra “Imagined
Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1
(Spring 2010): 93–119.
67 Carl Bethke, Deutsche und ungarische Minderheiten in Kroatien und der Vojvodina 1918–1941.
Identitätsentwürfe und ethnopolitische Mobilisierung (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2009). See also
Mariana Hausleitner and Harald Roth, eds., Der Einfluss von Faschismus und Nationalso
zialismus auf Minderheiten in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa (Munich: IKGS Verlag 2006).
68 See Todorova, Imaging the Balkans; and Mazower, The Balkans. Before them, other schol-
ars wrote timely histories such as Robert Donia and John Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina: A
Tradition Betrayed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) to try to correct the distorted
image purveyed by popularizers such as Robert Kaplan whose Balkan Ghosts: A Journey
through History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993) was influential among politicians.
69 See www.memoryandconscience.eu
70 See for example Felicia Waldman and Michael Shafir, “Jewish Studies in Romania,” Journal
of Modern Jewish Studies 10, no. 1 (March 2011): 71–84; and Marcin Wodziński, “Jewish
Studies in Poland,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 10, no. 1 (March 2011): 101–118. For
Women’s and Gender Studies, see Krassimira Daskalova, “The Birth of a Field: Women’s
and Gender Studies in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe,” Aspasia: International
Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 4 (2010):
155–205; and Aspasia 5 (2011): 128–203.
71 On the decline of eighteenth-century studies, see Larry Wolff, “Eastern Europe in the
Eighteenth Century: Issues of Historiography,” Eastern European Politics & Societies 25, no. 4
(November 2011): 770–773.
23
72 Among these are: Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945):
Texts and Commentaries (Budapest: CEU Press, 2006–2011); We, the People. Visions of National
Peculiarity and Political Modernities in Southeastern Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2009); Balazs
Trencsenyi and Márton Zászkaliczky, eds., Whose Love of Which Country? Composite States,
National Histories and Patriotic Discourses in Early Modern East Central Europe (Leiden: Brill,
2010); A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016); and Diana Mishkova et al., eds., “Regimes of Historicity” in Southeastern and
Northern Europe, 1890–1945: Discourses of Identity and Temporality (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014).
73 See for example the social and cultural histories by Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu on the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Wallachia and Moldavia: În şalvari şi cu işlic:
biserică, sexualitate, căsătorie şi divorţ în Ţara Românească a secolului al XVIII-lea (Bucharest:
Humanitas, 2004); Focul Amorului: despre dragoste şi sexualitete în societatea românească (1750–
1830) (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2006); and Patimå şi desfåtare: despre lucrurile mårunte ale vieţii
cotidiene în societatea româneascå: 1750–1860 (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2015). They focus on
love, marriage, sexuality, religion, and everyday life.
74 For a more detailed discussion of communism studies, see Chapter 8 in this volume.
75 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (2007): 77–91.
In Hungary and Poland, historians were “catching up” with these social history trends but
mostly focusing on the nineteenth century. See Maciej Górny, “Historical Writing in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and Hungary,” in Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf, eds., The Oxford History
of Historical Writing: Volume 5: Historical Writing Since 1945 (2011): 254–259.
76 Foucault was an important influence on feminist and gender historians. See Joan Scott,
“Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History, rev.
ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 36, 42–43.
77 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995); Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject:
Stephen Kotkin’s ‘Magnetic Mountain’ and the State of Soviet Historical Studies” 44, no. 3 (January
1996): 456; and Verdery National Ideology.
78 Some examples of this new style of historiography are: Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and
His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2010); Christa Hämmerle, Heimat/Front: Geschlechtergeschichte/n des ersten Weltkriegs
in Österreich-Ungarn (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2014); Matthew Pauly, Breaking the Tongue:
Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923–1934 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2014); and Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in
Partitioned Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).
79 See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1995); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1997); Helen Freshwater, “The Allure of the Archive,”
Poetics Today 24, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 729–758; and Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic
Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, c2009).
80 See Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Katherine Verdery, Secrets and Truths:
Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police (Budapest: CEU Press, 2014).
81 Journals not topically dedicated to gender or women are also welcoming articles on
these topics as never before. For example, the 2015 volume of Jahrbuch für Historische
Kommunismusforschung was dedicated to “Frauen im Kommunismus”; and an article such
as Celia Donert’s “Women’s Rights in Cold War Europe: Disentangling Feminist Histories,”
was published in Past & Present in 2013.
82 Nanette Funk, “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations,
Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism,” European Journal of
Women’s Studies 21, no. 4 (2014): 344–360.
83 Francisca de Haan, “Forum: Ten Years After: Communism and Feminism Revisited,”
Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and
Gender History 9 (2016): 102–168; and Kristen Ghodsee, “Untangling the Knot: A Response
to Nanette Funk,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 2 (2015): 248–252.
24
INTRODUCTION
84 De Haan takes issue with Donna Harsch’s “Communism and Women,” in Stephen Smith,
ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, 1st ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 488–504, for overlooking the new research and writing on communist wom-
en’s organizations that has appeared in the last decade. Raluca Maria Popa in her “‘We
Opposed It’: The National Council of Women and the Ban on Abortion in Romania
(1966),” Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s
and Gender History 9 (2016): 152–160, challenges both those that condemned the wom-
en’s organizations affiliated with Romania’s Communist regime such as the authors of the
2006 “Final Report” produced by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Communist
Dictatorship in Romania, headed by Vladimir Tismăneanu; and Romanian feminists such as
Mihaela Miroiu, for judging the Communist regime and its organizations to be fundamen-
tally patriarchal across the board. See De Haan, “Forum: Ten Years After,” 103, 153. These
disagreements are about adding complexity to earlier indictments of communism based on
fresh empirical research. Popa also builds on, and amends Gail Kligman’s work on the harsh
pro-natalist policies of the Ceauşescu regime. Whereas Kligman’s The Politics of Duplicity:
Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
c1998) investigated the origins and implementation of those policies, Popa uncovers via an
oral history interview with a leading participant in Romania’s National Council of Women
disagreements voiced by NCW about the abrupt abortion decree imposed in 1966.
85 Alexandra Ghit, “Partisan Potential: Researching Communist Women’s Organizations in
Eastern Europe,” Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European
Women’s and Gender History 9 (2016): 160–166.
86 See Irina Livezeanu, “Les Guerres culturelles en Roumanie post-communiste: Débats intel-
lectuels sur le passé récent,” in Catherine Durandin and Magda Cârneci, eds., Perspectives
Roumaines: du postcommunisme à l’intégration européenne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004).
87 Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, c2001) (published in Poland in 2000 as Sąsiedzi: historia
zlałady ˙zydowskiego miasteczka); and Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in
Historical Interpretation (New York: Random House, c2006). See also, Antony Polonsky and
Joanna Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in
Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Jenny Wüstenberg, “Towards a
New Kind of Legitimacy? Jan Gross’s Neighbors and Poland’s Reckoning with the Past,”
CEU Political Science Journal (2007): 152–174; and “Polish move to strip Holocaust expert of
award sparks protests,” The Guardian, February 13, 2016.
88 Boris Buden, Zone des Übergangs. Vom Ende des Postkommunismus (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2009); and Oliver Jens Schmitt, “Albanien tut sich schwer mit der Bewältigung
seiner Vergangenheit,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, July 23, 2012. http://mobile.nzz.ch/albanien-
tut-sich-schwer-mit-der-bewaeltigung-seiner-vergangenheit-1.17382475.
89 The text is published in English at www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Hungary_2011.
pdf. For the political context see Csilla Kiss, “Divided Memory in Hungary: The House
of Terror and the Lack of a Left-wing Narrative,” in Simona Mitroiu, ed., Life Writing and
Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 242–259.
90 Ivan Katchanovski, “Terrorists or National Heroes? Politics and Perceptions of the
OUN and the UPA in Ukraine,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 48, no. 2 (2015):
217–228; and “Poland plans to punish use of the phrase ‘Polish death camps’,” The Guardian,
February 13, 2016.
91 Many authors completed drafts of their chapters in 2013 and 2014. This is reflected in the
bibliography they used.
Further reading
Antohi, Sorin, Balázs Trencsényi, and Péter Apor, eds. Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in
Post-Communist Eastern Europe. Budapest: CEU Press, 2007.
Bartov, Omer, and Eric Weitz, eds. Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German,
Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2013.
25
Conway, Martin, and Kiran Klaus Patel, eds., Europeanization in the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer. Towards a History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central
Europe: Theoretical Reflections. ACLS Occasional Paper no. 52. New York: American Council
of Learned Societies, 2002.
Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945): Texts and Commentaries,
4 vols. Budapest: CEU Press, 2006–2010.
Entangled Histories of the Balkans, 3 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2013–2015.
Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, and Jurgen Kocka. Comparative and Transnational History: Central
European Approaches and New Perspectives. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012.
Iordachi, Constantin. “‘Entangled Histories’: Re-writing the History of Central and Southeastern
Europe from a Relational Perspective,” Regio: Minorities, Politics, Society 15, no. 1 (2004):
113–147.
Judson, Pieter. The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2016.
King, Charles. Extreme Politics: Nationalism, Violence, and the End of Eastern Europe. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010.
Kopeček, Michal, ed. Past in the Making: Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989.
Budapest: CEU Press, 2008.
Magocsi, Paul Robert, Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2002.
Mishkova, Diana, ed. We, The People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe. Budapest:
CEU Press, 2009.
Mishkova, Diana, et al., eds. “Regimes of Historicity” in Southeastern and Northern Europe, 1890–1945:
Discourses of Identity and Temporality. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Scott, Joan Wallach. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” In Gender and the Politics
of History, rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Stan, Lavinia. ed., Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Reckoning with
the Communist Past. London: Routledge, 2009.
Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Todorova, Maria. “The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of
Eastern European Nationalism,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (2005): 140–164.
Trencsenyi, Balázs and Márton Zászkaliczky, eds., Whose Love of Which Country? Composite States,
National Histories and Patriotic Discourses in Early Modern East Central Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Trencsényi, Balázs, et al. A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. Oxford, UK:
Verdery, Katherine. Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police.
Wachtel, Andrew. Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.
26
1
SPAC E
Empires, nations, borders
James Koranyi and Bernhard Struck1
Maps offer powerful visual representations of space, since they tend to portray stability
and the dominant spatial order at any given moment. For this reason a contemporary
political map of East Central Europe would not present an accurate picture of long-
term processes of state-building in the region. A glimpse at any recent school atlas
would reveal twenty-one states on a political map of East Central Europe (Map 1.1).
From north to south these include: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Belarus, Poland,
the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine,
Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Macedonia,
Albania, and Greece. If one were to include neighbors and contested borderlands in
Germany, Turkey, Finland, Cyprus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Austria, or Russia,
this would complicate matters further.2
Consider, by contrast, a political map of this region in 1740 (Map 1.2). This would
show only three dominant geopolitical powers in the region: the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire. At the margins
were four others: Brandenburg-Prussia, Russia of Tsar Peter the Great (who was soon
to assume the title of “emperor”), Sweden, and Venice.3 Two of the three dominant
powers were to vanish from the map in the course of time. Poland-Lithuania was par-
titioned in the late eighteenth century, regaining independence only in 1918 on less
territory and as two separate states: Poland and Lithuania. The Ottoman Empire’s
influence over the region initially diminished slowly, then at a more rapid pace from
the 1860s on. Scandinavia no longer constitutes a part of our mental map of East
Central Europe.4 Yet, around 1700 Sweden was a major regional player, exemplified
by Charles XII’s extended military campaigns in Poland-Lithuania and Russia during
the Great Northern War in the early eighteenth century.5 Spatial concepts such as
Scandinavia, the West, Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, or Eastern Europe all have specific
origins and histories. Neither “Eastern Europe” nor “Scandinavia” existed in 1700
and only emerged in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century according to some
accounts.6 Focusing on space and territories, this chapter explores how and when
imperial and nation-state borders, as well as spheres of influence appeared in this
region from roughly 1700 to the present.
The juxtaposition of the two maps of the region illustrates the drastic territorial
changes and the shift in borders – and thus of the populations these encompassed –
in East Central Europe over the past 300 years. Such a long-term perspective reveals
that the multitude of independent states that we find today has not been the histori-
cal norm, but rather a relatively recent development with its roots in the second half
27
Map 1.1 East Central Europe, 2000
Source: From Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, p. 222 (University of Washington Press,
2002) © Paul Robert Magocsi.
Map 1.2 East Central Europe, ca. 1721
of the nineteenth century. The break-up of multinational empires after 1918 and of
smaller states at the end of the Cold War has contributed to the proliferation of poli-
ties in East Central Europe. As the last part of this chapter argues, both these ruptures
belong to a single regime of territoriality, which started around 1860.
Regimes of territoriality and the problem of periodization

Space and related spatial concepts, such as “East,” “West,” “Orient,” or “the Balkans”
through which we make sense of space, are not neutral. Space is not both absolute,
and relative and relational. Space can be interpreted as absolute in geography or
cartography. Geodetic surveys measure spatial relations and collect geographical data
based on mathematical operations, and they translate these into two-dimensional
maps. Such mapmaking takes the idea of absolute space as its foundation. Absolute
space can be imagined, measured, and divided through cartography, statistics, and
other forms of (spatial) knowledge. Such knowledge provides the basis for claims of
state sovereignty and serves as an essential tool for control over a certain territory.7
Territories are of course nothing new to historians. On the contrary, they are
arguably the most common geographic framework for their work. However, the
problem at stake in this chapter is not so much a history of territories as a history of
territory as political process in East Central Europe. Territories – at least in modern
Europe – are more than sections of the Earth belonging to this or that political
entity. They are also expressions of what Charles Maier has called “territoriality.”
Put briefly, this term describes the combined apparatus of political, economic,
scientific, technological, and ideological systems developed in Europe since the
early sixteenth century to define and preserve exclusive sovereignty over more or less
precisely bounded spatial entities. Along these lines, Maier calls a territory a “space
with a border that allows effective control of public and political life,” and, since
roughly the mid-1600s, the fundamental premise of state authority.8
While complex and all-embracing, territoriality is not a static concept; it is sen-
sitive to the evolution of historical structures on a grand scale, and so Maier (with
reference to Thomas Kuhn’s scientific paradigm and Michel Foucault’s épistème)
periodizes its shifts into “regimes.”9 According to Maier, there have been four ter-
ritorial regimes between 1519 and the present, three of these from 1700 to the
present; thus they provide a useful framing device for our analysis. The period
between the mid- seventeenth century and the last decade of the eighteenth
century is marked by two overlapping sub-regimes of territoriality. The “dynastic/
territorial” regime (1650–1780), and the “cadastral” regime (1720–90) help us
make sense of Enlightened absolutist reforms affecting East Central Europe in
the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century and the destruction of Poland-
Lithuania in the final decades of the century. The next regime arrived on the heels
of the French Revolution following the crisis of the Old Regime that unfolded
between roughly 1780 and 1840. Then a new regime, the Federal/Central (1850–80)
gradially gave birth to the nation-state. Between 1880 and 1980, this regime became
deeply entrenched within state borders as imperial rivalry spread it across the globe.
The fourth – and possibly final – regime, Maier argues, began in the mid-1960s.
He tentatively calls it the “Post-Territorial” regime and suggests that it heralds the
obsolescence of territoriality altogether.10
30
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Here, we simplify Charles Maier’s complex periodization of regimes of territori-

ality by examining only two distinct periods in the making of modern East Central
European geopolitical space. The first period runs from the 1700s to the 1860s, and
the second from the 1860s to the 1960s. It was in the second era that Eastern Europe
was constructed as a region. Thereafter, East Central European space became largely
subsumed into global structures. The outcome of this current period is still unclear
and open-ended. This way of carving up time allows us to apply a transnational
approach, to identify broad trends in the history of the region, and to account for the
shifts in the mental map of the region – that is, how it was p erceived by outsiders and
insiders – from one period to another.
Throughout, it is important to note that East Central Europe’s history unfolded in
conjunction with Western European and global trends, but also autonomously from
them. It is thus clear that the political history of East Central Europe must not merely
be modeled on a problematic Western standard, but should also be thought of in
imaginative and regionally specific ways.11 One of the challenges of transnational
and global history is to find spatial frameworks and entities that can supplement
the nation-state in established historical explanation. This then also casts a differ-
ent light on chronological conventions by exploring what lies beyond the national
framework.12
Periodization is to some extent an arbitrary exercise. However, historical peri-
ods are a key heuristic and analytical tool through which people interpret the past.
National histories generally follow important national events. In Polish historiogra-
phy, for instance, the years of “national disasters” (1772, 1795) or failed national
rebellions (1830, 1863) are important chronological markers. These are joined by
the major international events that comprise the classic milestones of European his-
tory: 1815, 1914–18, 1939–45, and 1989–91. We have tried to find a periodization
that goes beyond these national and international frameworks as it is a goal of this
chapter to provide a still different – transnational – way of understanding East Central
Europe.13 Transnational analyses of the region’s space, and the corresponding longue
durée periodization, challenge normative ways of understanding its history. We have
thus deliberately avoided seeing “big” international events as total caesuras. While
1815, 1914–18 and 1939–45 did mark turning points in modern European history,
and thus will be noted, we consider these not so much as the beginnings or ends of
historical periods, but as the acceleration or culmination of long-term processes in
the region and beyond it.14
The decades of the Balkan Wars and the two World Wars, for instance, may
be seen as part, indeed the culmination, of a longer process of “right-sizing states.”
We adopt this term from political science where it is employed to conceptualize the
process whereby elites in power imagine and shape a polity whose borders match
its practical authority, that they can achieve maximum control over its inhabitants.
(The phrase derives from the language of business management to describe a firm
that is organized in a way that promotes maximum efficiency.) Brendan O’Leary has
defined “right-sizing” as “the preferences of political agents at the center of existing
regimes to have what they regard as appropriate external and internal borders.” In
the industrial era, the “right size” preferred by political actors has often coincided
with the imagined boundaries of the nation. We assert that the regime of territo-
riality that was in force between (roughly) 1860 and 1960 was the “golden age” of
31
right-sizing the state so as to fit the nation.15 Of course, nationalist politicians did
not only argue in terms of “right-sizing.” Rather they made claims based on histor-
ical precedent, wherever an independent and/or larger Byzantine (that is Greek),
Serbian or Bulgarian state, had ruled territories later subsumed by the Ottomans
or the Habsburgs. Nationalists also advanced territorial claims based on cultural,
religious or linguistic kinship of populations divided by international boundaries.
Both imperial powers and nation-states made concessions and secret promises to one
another based on strategic considerations, the way they had always done. After World
War I, it was a combination of such arguments, political calculation, negotiations,
and secret treaty fulfillment that resulted in the major geopolitical reconfiguration
of 1918–23.
Another advantage of our style of chronology is that it highlights the emergence
of “Eastern Europe” as a counterpoint to “Western Europe.” During the first period
covered by this volume, stretching from 1700 to roughly 1860, the concept of East
Central Europe did not exist, while the idea of Eastern Europe only began to emerge
toward the middle of the nineteenth century.16 Distinct from “Eastern Europe” (which
appears in a number of nineteenth-century sources), Central Europe was coined by
dissidents and historians in the twentieth century in order to analyze a region defined
primarily by structural features, although politics was also a major axis of the debate.
In an essay published in 1983, the Hungarian historian Jenő Szűcs divided Europe into
three regions: “Western Europe,” “Central Europe,” and “Eastern Europe.”17 During
the Cold War “Central Europe,” which included Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary
(and perhaps other countries as well), was a way of separating these states from the
Soviet Bloc at least conceptually.
By looking at East Central Europe across the two longer periods that we propose,
it becomes apparent that the region’s political epicenter shifted, that is, the battle-
ground of territorial contestation moved from the northeastern corner of the region
where the partitions of Poland-Lithuania played out in the late eighteenth century, to
the southeastern corner, where major border re-configurations took place along the
Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian imperial fault-lines in the 1850s and 1860s. Finally,
the region emerged as “Eastern Europe” over the course of the nineteenth century
and most decisively during the Cold War, before being absorbed by globalization as
exemplified by the integration of most of East Central Europe into the European
Union with its, arguably, post-national territorial regime.
Borders and peoples

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries East Central European borders were far
more porous and fluid – particularly, linguistic ones – and as such were connectors
of shared and entangled histories, rather than stark dividers between clearly defined
national spaces.18 A boy born in 1770 just outside Warsaw would have been a subject
of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1795 when, as part of the third parti-
tion, Warsaw and parts of Mazovia became part of the Hohenzollern monarchy. He
would have become a citizen of the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807, and may have served
in the Napoleonic Grande Armée. In 1815 he would have become a subject of the
Kingdom of Poland and of the Russian Tsar due to the personal union between Russia
and Congress Poland. Similar cases of people who never moved physically from their
32
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birthplace but lived their lives in several different states can be found in East Central
Europe’s borderlands throughout the period covered by this volume.
Yet across most of East Central Europe, in particular in urban spaces, linguistic
groups did not live in separation, but rather along linguistic continuums that were
quite fluid. Individuals spoke different languages or dialects in different contexts. The
idea that the use of a particular idiom coincided with one’s nationality was unknown
to most people until around the mid-nineteenth century.19 Multi-ethnicity and multi
lingualism in towns and cities, as Ulrike von Hirschhausen has demonstrated in the
case of Riga, were the norm.20
Members of the elite, such as the szlachta of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
or the Hungarian natio, saw themselves as part of a social group – the nobility – not
of a “nation” in the ethnically exclusive sense of the term. Belonging to the Polish or
Hungarian or Bohemian natio was the equivalent of belonging to and exercising the
political and social privileges of the noble estate. Many members of these nobilities
moved effortlessly among different languages that often included Latin. It was only
during the latter half of the nineteenth century that the boundaries between lin-
guistic and ethnic groups hardened and became more tangible in connection with
nationalist ideology.
The process of transition from the earlier, imperial regime of territoriality to
the new one, governed by the national principle, was steered from often distant
centers of administration located in imperial capitals. The introduction of the
census from the 1820s onwards, with its exclusive categories of belonging – Pole,
German, Czech, Hungarian – left little space for fluidity or hybrid identities.21
Several decades of debates among experts and administrators later, around the
1860s, language (and not religion or social status) emerged as the key criterion of
nationality.22 In this way, administrative processes conceived in imperial centers
helped to shape the realities in distant and peripheral places.
National conceptions of identity often emerged first in urban areas where organ-
izing national clubs and societies was relatively easy. Zooming in on the local level
helps to explain East Central Europe in its complexity. Many recent studies on East
Central Europe have rediscovered the local. A number of monographs on the urban
history of Salonica/Thessaloniki, Wrocław/Breslau, Riga, Prague, Gdańsk/Danzig,
Czernowitz/Cernă uţi, Budweis/Česke Budějovice, Budapest, Cracow, and L’viv/
Lwóv/Lemberg, to name a few, have been published since the 1990s, enriching our
knowledge of East Central Europe as a region of multi-cultural cities.23 While each of
these cities – and many others – is unique in its history, these studies have highlighted
the relevance of a multi-spatial perspective on the region. There were relatively few
borders separating the imperial states of the region, and, before the invention of pass-
ports, they were quite permeable, so that travelers before World War I could generally
cross them with ease.24 Similarly, in border regions, international boundaries did not
separate population groups effectively, as Pieter Judson has shown in his study of the
linguistic frontiers of imperial Austria.25
Borders acquired new meaning with the emergence of modern citizenship, the
introduction of passports, and the increasingly institutionalized control of popula-
tions from the mid-nineteenth century.26 New technologies and infrastructure, such
as railways, the telegraph, telephone, and automobiles, helped unify spaces and
national communities.27 The advent of the nation, however, was not uncontested.
33
Jeremy King’s study of the Bohemian town of Budweis (Česke Budějovice) in south-
ern Bohemia is a case in point. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the inhabitants
of Budweis identified primarily as Budweisers and loyal subjects of the Habsburg
Empire.28 The intermediate national level did not play a major role until the
mid-nineteenth century, when nationalist movements gained sufficient political and
social resources to claim populations as “theirs.” It is precisely during this period
that a new regime of territoriality appeared and ideas of national belonging began
to polarize the local population. This process became visible in the nationalization –
Czech and German – of local politics, social life, and culture.29 Similar processes
characterized many other cities and towns as well. Cultural institutions such as uni-
versities and opera houses also became increasingly politicized and contested spaces
where populations with local or imperial identities might be turned into nations,
so nationalists hoped.30
For a nation-state-centered historiography, World War I marks a key turning point
for East Central Europe as multinational empires collapsed and a number of newly
independent states emerged in its aftermath. But the interwar decades also witnessed
the continuation of some open exchange. The emergence of independent nation-
states after 1918 went hand in hand with flourishing transnational flows of people,
knowledge, and ideas.31 During the same period, however, there was also a marked
increase in violence. While transnational exchanges continued, the militarization of
borders, as well as the persistence of ethnic minorities in newly carved states, whose
very legitimacy lay in their being homogenous nation-states, led to more palpa-
ble coercion and violence. Population transfers and genocides became part of the
arsenal for right-sizing states. The first to try both these methods was the emergent
Turkish Republic (and Greece in the case of the massive exchange of populations) as
is detailed in Chapter 2 of this book.32
The violence during World War II in the lands that Timothy Snyder calls “blood-
lands” was extreme.33 Yet as we argue in this chapter, this violence can be seen as part
of a broader chronology in tandem with the concepts of “regimes of territoriality”
and “modernity,” which, according to Zygmunt Bauman, encompasses a “quest for
order” that rejects hybridity and the “other.”34 Territoriality, in Maier’s view, admits
only one sovereign power within any given boundary. Thus, we argue, the “big events”
such as the wars and ethnic cleansing of the first half of the twentieth century are part
of the larger tale of “modernity” and “territoriality:” a story of fixing national spaces,
unifying societies, and eliminating ambiguities. While we acknowledge that World
War II and the Holocaust represent a period of extremes, we maintain that these
events can also be incorporated into the regime of territoriality lasting from the 1860s
to the 1960s. What effect did World War II have on East Central Europe, if – as we
propose – it belongs to a longer period and the regime of territoriality dominated by
the project of right-sizing states? We acknowledge that World War II and its immedi-
ate aftermath fundamentally changed East Central Europe’s political landscape.35 It
marked a deep rupture not only because of the mass killings, forced migrations, and
ethnic homogenization, but also because it foreshadowed future political trajectories.
The Cold War cut Europe into sharply demarcated western and eastern halves that
were marked ideologically, and it put a rather abrupt end to the many cross-border
and transnational networks that had emerged since the second half of the nineteenth
century.36 By the 1950s and 60s a new form of territoriality was taking shape: one that
34
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assumed that the contest over national space was over, and that enshrined an ideo-
logically divided bi-polar world as the new order of things. The end of communism
in Europe and the bold emergence of the Chinese model as a potent hybrid model
combining communism and capitalism in the 1980s and 90s has been the harbinger
of a truly globalized world.
The age of empires, ca. 1700–1860s: the

absolutist regime of territoriality
From the early eighteenth century until World War I, East Central Europe was
dominated by a number of multi-ethnic continental states: the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, the Habsburg Empire, Tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and
Brandenburg-Prussia (German Empire after 1870). The geopolitical balance of
power changed during the eighteenth century through the upheavals of the Great
Northern War (1700–21), the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48), and the Seven
Years’ War (1756–63). By the late eighteenth century the three dominant political
and military powers were Tsarist Russia, Brandenburg-Prussia, and the Habsburg
Monarchy. They would dominate the region throughout the “long nineteenth cen-
tury” until the end of World War I. This power shift took place at the expense of the
Ottoman Empire and, even more so, Poland-Lithuania, which was partitioned among
Brandenburg-Prussia, the Austrian Empire, and Russia between 1772 and 1795 and
would not re-emerge as two different independent states, Poland and Lithuania, until
after the end of World War I.
During the eighteenth century, Europe was in a constant state of diplomatic crisis
and frequent warfare. Indeed, from the perspective of state-building, warfare, and
diplomacy, we can speak of a “long eighteenth century” stretching from the wars
of the second half of the seventeenth century until the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
The campaigns of Louis XIV, the European-Ottoman conflicts, and the Northern
Wars were followed by the devastating Spanish War of Succession (1701–14) and the
Great Northern War; two decades of relative peace gave way to the War of Austrian
Succession and the Seven Years’ War. These were followed by the French Revolutionary
and Napoleonic Wars from 1792 through 1815. The peace and stability initiated by
the Congress of Vienna held – for the most part – until the Crimean War in 1853.37
The emergence of the two eastern powers, Brandenburg-Prussia and Russia, was
in part responsible for the constant crises of the eighteenth century. They made
the balance of power and diplomacy more complex than in the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries, when the Habsburg-French rivalry over European hegemony
had dominated.38 The economic models of the period, mercantilism and physio-
cratic theory, made warfare a logical (if not necessary) continuation of economic
policy by other means. A key assumption of mercantilism was that economic activity
between states was a zero-sum game: one side could gain only by the other’s loss.
Only the acquisition of territories – and their populations – could boost a state’s
wealth. Consequently, early modern states tried to seize territories from neighbors.
Mercantilist ideas contributed to Frederick II’s rationale for invading Austrian Silesia
in 1740 and for targeting Polish territories, when international conditions allowed,
as they did in 1772.39 Thus the weakening and subsequent partition of the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita), was caused primarily by economic and
35
geopolitical international rivalry, which included the trade and seizure of territories
in the context of the balance of power.
In the eighteenth century some European states strove to become absolutist
monarchies. This involved the growth of bureaucracy, an increase in state revenues
facilitated by more efficient and sometimes more equitable collection of taxes, and
the development of standing armies. The shaping of these “fiscal-military” policies
advanced at a relatively quick pace in Russia under Peter I (the Great, r. 1682–1725)
and in Brandenburg-Prussia during the reigns of Frederick Wilhelm I (r. 1713–40)
and his predecessor Frederick III (r. 1688–1713).40 Despite its great significance
as a regional player, Poland-Lithuania is strikingly absent from the literature on
the rise of the “fiscal-military state”; perhaps this aspect of its history awaits further
research, but the historiographic absence is surely related to the well-known lack of
absolutism in the noble republic, and also of a missing fiscal-military complex. In
part this was precisely the result of the strict limits on the size of its military, imposed
by Peter the Great in 1717 at the end of the Great Northern War as a condition of
Russian “protection”; in part it was the consequence of the Polish nobility’s “golden
freedoms.” These allowed the nobles to resist taxation and other manifestations of
absolutism.41
Thus, prior to the actual partitions of Poland-Lithuania, a gradual shift of power
from the Rzeczpospolita to Russia and Prussia had started. The War of the Polish
Succession (1733–38) was another signpost in this shift. With the death in 1733 of
Augustus II, who had ruled Poland-Lit0huania and Saxony in personal union, the
throne of the noble republic had become vacant. The candidature and ultimate
re-election of Stanisław Leszczyński, who had ruled between 1704 and 1706 under
Swedish protection, did not meet with Russian, Austrian, and Prussian approval.
The Sejm was forced to elect the Saxon Augustus III (1734–63).42 The succession
crisis demonstrated again the weakness of the Rzeczpospolita vis-à-vis its neighbors.
Poland-Lithuania had been drained by the almost constant warfare, since the
mid-seventeenth century, with Sweden, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.43 The
Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, an electoral monarchy in which the nobility
exercised the liberum veto, the right to pursue confederations against royal policies –
that is, armed rebellions – and other freedoms that radically limited the monarch’s
sovereign power, became increasingly dysfunctional.
Russia in particular expanded at its western neighbor’s expense and exercised a
growing role in the Commonwealth’s domestic affairs and in the region more broadly.
During the Great Northern War, Peter I had gained access to the Baltic Sea and had
built there the new imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Russia’s 1736 declaration of
war against the Ottoman Empire was driven by economic and political strategy, as
the Romanovs tried to expand there as well.44 Following a series of defeats against
the Persian Empire between 1731 and 1736, the Porte under Sultan Mahmûd I
(r. 1730–45) appeared vulnerable. Tsaritsa Anna (r. 1730–40) and her leading minis-
ters thought to take advantage of the opportunity to conquer territories around the
Black Sea so as to gain access to maritime commerce in the south.45
Typical of the regime of territoriality during this period was a complex and frag-
ile balance of power, in which one expansionist move could trigger another. Against
both Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire, stronger and ascending powers
moved in for the kill to take advantage of evident weakness and an impending
36
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power vacuum. But rulers also proved reluctant to stand by idly while their rivals
acquired precious land and resources. It was in this context that the “Eastern
Question” emerged, the question being, what power(s) balanced in what configu-
ration were to replace the failing Ottoman Empire in Southeastern Europe while it
was in decline. Because of the poor financial situation following warfare with France,
the Habsburgs joined Russia in its war on the Ottoman Empire in 1737, and started
a campaign in Serbia, Wallachia, and western Bulgaria. Though allied with Russia,
the government in Vienna feared a rapid Russian expansion into the Danubian
basin. Such calculations laid the ground for the future rivalry in the Balkans between
Russia and Austria.46
Russian troops took the Crimean Peninsula and territories around the Sea of Azov
before turning against the Ottoman-controlled Danubian Principalities. The Peace
of Belgrade, signed in September 1739, forced Vienna to return territories gained
through Habsburg intervention in the Ottoman-Venetian War (1714–18), including
Belgrade, northern parts of Serbia, and western Wallachia. Austria kept the territory
north of the Danube and Sava Rivers.47 Russia also returned all recent acquisitions
with the exception of Azov. The peace of Belgrade thus restored Ottoman control
around the Black Sea and limited further Habsburg expansion until later in the
nineteenth century.
German dualism and the power shift in Central Europe, c. 1740s–1800s

By 1740 both Sweden and Poland-Lithuania had lost their former dominant posi-
tions in the region. Along with an emergent Russia during the eighteenth cen-
tury, Brandenburg-Prussia had established itself as an increasingly influential
second-rank power. Given the disastrous effects of the Thirty Years’ War – population
losses were as high as 30 or even up to 50 percent – Prussia’s resurrection was
impressive.48 The Hohenzollerns had revived their territories through a combi-
nation of shrewd management and timely in-migration: the arrival in the seven-
teenth century of Huguenots from France proved a boon to Prussia’s rulers. The
rise of Brandenburg-Prussian power was symbolized by the Elector Frederick III’s
(r. 1688–1713) assumption of the prestigious title of “King in Prussia” in 1701.
During the reigns of Frederick III/I and Frederick Wilhelm I (r. 1713–40), the
Hohenzollerns centralized the government and built a significant and well-trained
army while avoiding burdensome military entanglements (Frederick Wilhelm I,
known as the Soldatenkönig, never even used his army). By eighteenth-century stand-
ards, Prussia also had an effective administrative apparatus. Thus they managed
both domestic and international affairs ably, transformed the duchy into a more
prestigious kingdom, and rounded off the state’s territories, for instance by incor-
porating parts of Swedish Pomerania.49 Nonetheless, by 1730 Brandenburg-Prussia
was still on par with Bavaria rather than with any of the first-rank European powers:
Austria, France, or Britain. In 1740 when Frederick II succeeded to the Prussian
throne, he inherited a relatively small country with a sparse population compared
to Poland-Lithuania, Russia, or Austria.50
For more than two decades between the Silesian Wars (1740s) and the Seven Years’
War (1756–63), the major European powers fought one another continuously, and it
was during these years that both Russia and Brandenburg-Prussia joined their ranks.
37
Map 1.3 Europe, ca. 1740
Source: Courtesy of University of Texas Libraries.
S PAC E
The two key conflicts were that between France and Britain fighting for overseas
dominance and that between the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns over continental
territories and supremacy within the Holy Roman Empire. British and French domi-
nance of European politics and diplomacy was replaced by the so-called pentarchy
that dominated European international politics until World War I.51
The conflict that shifted the center of gravity toward Brandenburg-Prussia both
within the Holy Roman Empire and in Europe as a whole was the War of Austrian
Succession (1740–48). When the Habsburg Emperor Charles VI died unexpectedly
in October 1740, Frederick II, who had just succeeded his father on the throne,
seized the opportunity to wage war in order to expand the Hohenzollern territo-
ries at the expense of the Habsburg monarchy. His objective was to conquer the
economically strategically important province of Silesia, as exacting the price for
guaranteeing Maria Theresa’s succession to the Habsburg throne and supporting
the election of her husband Stephen of Lorraine as Holy Roman Emperor.52 Prussian
troops occupied Silesia and triggered the War of the Austrian Succession and an
eight-year period of intertwined military conflicts, including a Russo-Swedish War
and the imperial rivalry between Britain and France in North America and India.53
Weakened by previous conflicts and lacking a centrally organized standing army,
the Habsburg monarchy was unable to defend itself effectively. The peace treaty of
Aachen in October 1748 conferred Silesia to Prussia. Geographically, Silesia did more
than extend the Hohenzollern territories. Strategically located between Saxony and
Poland-Lithuania (the latter ruled in personal union by Saxon monarchs between
1687 and 1763), Silesia proved to be a significant asset during the Seven Years’ War
and later during the Polish partitions. Most importantly, with its population and
economic strength, the province enhanced Brandenburg-Prussia’s geopolitical posi-
tion, not least since Frederick II implemented administrative reforms speedily and
doubled tax revenues coming from Silesia. Within a few years, Prussia’s successful
campaigns in Silesia, Bohemia and Saxony established the Hohenzollern monarchy
as one of the five leading European powers.54
The partitions of Poland-Lithuania

In the last half of the seventeenth century, Cossack rebellions and Swedish inva-
sions had devastated Poland-Lithuania’s infrastructure, destroyed its cities, ruined
its economy, and reduced its population.55 The country did not recover for decades.
Travelers of the later eighteenth century still reported depopulated villages and
cities in disrepair.56 The noble republic entered the eighteenth century weakened
while its two neighbors east and west, Russia and Prussia, gained in strength not
only politically, economically, and militarily but, eventually, in terms of territory at
its expense.
The last two kings before the partitions, Augustus III (r. 1734–63) and Stanisław
August Poniatowski (r. 1764–95) faced limited choices. Though officially neutral dur-
ing the Seven Years’ War, the Rzeczpospolita was helpless when Russian troops marched
through its territories and Frederick II bought Polish grain at artificially low prices.
The growing influence of the great eastern neighbor in the domestic affairs of Polish-
Lithuania became starkly evident in the years leading up to the first partition in 1772.
The Confederation of Bar, an anti-Russian, but also anti-centralizing association of
39
Polish nobles, tried to re-assert an independence vis-à-vis Tsarist influence begin-

ning in 1768. But the confederation also targeted the king himself. This led to a civil
war that further weakened the state and which was violently suppressed by Russian
troops in 1772.57 The Habsburg army also seized a small territory in a part of Poland-
Lithuania soon to become known as Galicia in 1769 in the region south of Cracow.
While this was a minor incident, the seizure highlighted the fact that the Rzeczpospolita
was hardly in a position to stand its ground.
Then, in 1772, Russia, Austria, and Brandenburg-Prussia seized much more sub-
stantial parts of Poland-Lithuania by mutual agreement. Russian interests as well
as potential conflict between the Habsburg Empire and Russia were at the core
of this first partition. During the Confederation of Bar the Ottoman Empire had
supported the Polish nobility against Russia. The Ottoman position triggered the
Russo-Ottoman War of 1768–74 in which the Ottomans were defeated. At the peace
treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in July 1774, Russia expanded into southern Ukraine, the
northern Caucasus, and the Crimean peninsula, at the expense of the Ottoman
Empire.58 Observing Russia’s willingness to threaten both of its weaker neighbors,
the Habsburgs, alarmed with the upsetting of the balance of power, were prepared
to go to war with Russia. It was in this context that Frederick II, who had raised the
possibility of expanding Hohenzollern territory at the expense of Poland-Lithuania in
his “Political Testament” as early as 1750, now proposed to partition Poland in order
to prevent a large-scale European conflict.59 As a result of the first partition Russia
took some 93,000 square kilometers in Polish Livonia, and a population of roughly
1.3 million. The Habsburgs seized the second largest share of the spoils: 82,000
square kilometers with a population of about 2.6 million people. The new territory,
including the palatinate of Rus’, Belz, and parts of Podolia stretching eastwards
from the Vistula river just outside Cracow to Lwów, was merged into the Kingdom of
Galicia-Lodomeria.60 The Hohenzollern share, stretching south from the Baltic Sea,
was the smallest of the annexations, with some 36,000 square kilometers and a total
population of less than 600,000 inhabitants.61
Following this substantial loss of territory and status as a sovereign power, Stanisław
August Poniatowski initiated a series of social, political, cultural, and economic
reforms, aiming to strengthen the rump state.62 The reforms culminated in the
promulgation of the first written constitution in Europe on May 3, 1791. The Ustawa
Rządowa (or Government Act) predated the French revolutionary constitution of the
same year. It substantially altered Poland, turning the elective noble republic into a
hereditary monarchy, enfranchising the middle-classes, and guaranteeing basic rights
and protections to the peasants, who formally remained serfs.63 The Constitution of
May 3 was regarded by many contemporaries as revolutionary, in the context of the
largely autocratic regimes of East Central Europe and the revolution going on in
France at the same time.64
Opponents to the constitution from within the Polish szlachta formed the mili-
tary confederation of Targowica in April 1792. With support from St. Petersburg the
confederates won decisive battles against the Polish-Lithuanian army. Prussia, which
had initially supported the pro-constitutional reformers, withdrew its support, sent in
troops, and came to an agreement with Russia, by which both countries seized, again,
substantial territories while the reforms and the Constitution in Poland were revoked.
The presence of Russian troops pressured the Grodno sejm – the commonwealth’s
40
Map 1.4 The partitions of Poland, 1772–95
Source: From Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, p. 71 (University of Washington Press, 2002) © Paul Robert Magocsi.
last – to agree to Romanov and Hohenzollern territorial demands.65 In the partition of

1793, Russia gained over twice the territory seized in 1772 and a population of about
three million people. Prussia acquired some 57,000 square kilometers, a territory that
was renamed South Prussia, with a total population of about one million people.
Rump Poland could hardly survive as an independent state, not least since Russia
assumed control of its foreign policy and stationed troops on its soil. The outbreak
of a national uprising in March 1794, led by Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746–1817), was
a heroic, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to defend Polish sovereignty.
Following some early victories, the Polish revolutionary troops were eventually
defeated. As a consequence the remaining territory was apportioned among Russia,
Prussia, and the Habsburg Monarchy, in order to maintain the balance between
the three powers. As in the two previous partitions, Russia incorporated the largest
share of land of some 120,000 square kilometers stretching from the Baltic Sea into
Volhynia, in today’s Ukraine. The area was relatively sparsely populated with around
1.2 million people. Prussia’s share had a total population of about 1 million in a
region named New East Prussia. The Habsburg monarchy gained a territory similar in
size to Prussia’s, some 47,000 square kilometers, named Western Galicia, with a popu-
lation of 1.5 million people.66 As a result of the three partitions the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, one of the dominant powers of the region during the early modern
period, had disappeared from the map. The complete political destruction of such a
vast territory and the loss of sovereignty of an entire country was unprecedented even
by early modern standards, when war over territories and influence and the constant
attempt to round off territories at the expense of neighboring states was part of the
complex balance of the power game. Despite a number of attempts to regain national
independence – the November uprising in Congress Poland in 1830, in the Prussian
provinces in 1848, and in the January 1863 uprising directed primarily against Tsarist
Russia – Poland did not regain full independence until after World War I.
Viewed from a regional perspective the demise of the Rzeczpospolita was a ruthless
action, an opportunity seized by the three partitioning powers during a period of a
complex re-balancing of power. It was a logical, if extreme, response, within the pre-
vailing regime of territoriality, to shifting political circumstances. Polish-Lithuanian
instability, however, need not be taken to mean that Tsarist Russia or the Habsburg
Empire were themselves in total control of all their provinces.67 Most monarchies of
the time, including Britain and France, but in particular the composite monarchies
of East Central Europe, relied largely on cooperation between the administrative
center and local nobilities and administrators. Following the French example, other
European powers including Brandenburg-Prussia, the Habsburg Monarchy, and
Russia had managed to establish a clear center of political and administrative power
and had curbed the influence of the nobility. This was hardly the case in Poland-
Lithuania where, by contrast, the nobility detained the majority of political power
and where the magnates de facto ruled large parts of the commonwealth on their own
terms beyond the control of the center.
Ottoman decline
When the decline of the Ottoman Empire began is not easy to say, not least since
the political, military, and economic weakening of one power is always measured
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against the rise of others.68 Did it begin during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent
(r. 1520–66)? Or after the failed siege of Vienna in 1683? Ottoman decline or stag-
nation might be measured against its northern neighbors, notably the Habsburg
Empire and Tsarist Russia under Peter I and Catherine II; both rulers had seized
Ottoman territories and expanded Russia’s frontiers southward, most importantly
in Crimea in 1783. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was repeat-
edly involved in wars with Russia or other European powers, or suppressing revolts
in the Balkans staged by Christian populations. A phrase associated with a later
stage of the Ottoman decline, “the sick man of Europe” is somewhat apocryphal.
In 1853, just before the Crimean War, Tsar Nicholas is reported to have referred to
the Ottoman Empire in less ringing terms: “as a ‘man,’ who ‘has fallen into a state
of decrepitude.’”69 Tellingly, the Ottoman Empire, which had fought the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth repeatedly during the seventeenth century, was a mere
bystander during the latter’s partitions.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Ottoman Empire had
become more insular and relatively less developed. While Russia’s Peter I traveled
to Western Europe in order to import technological and cultural knowledge at an
early stage of his rule, the heirs of Suleiman the Magnificent did not keep abreast of
new technologies. Ottoman leadership became more inward-looking, but the empire
continued its policy of religious tolerance throughout its far-flung territories.70 In
the Christian Balkans, this policy proved problematic, in particular during a period
of rising nationalism linked to Christian identity during the second half of the nine-
teenth century. Prior to telegraphy and steam engines, communication and political
control proved difficult over such extensive, disparate territories and populations.
The areas furthest from Constantinople, including the Christian-dominated areas of
the Balkans, were logistically out of reach, and thus vulnerable to conquest.71
The empire had long profited from its geographical position, exploiting it to trade
with both Asia and Europe. From the seventeenth century onward, however, new
sea routes and the shift of European trade toward the Atlantic and the New World
led to a slump in Ottoman and Venetian commerce and wealth. The loss of Crimea
to Russia cut off the Ottoman Empire from the Black Sea. By the beginning of the
Crimean War in 1853, the economic situation had worsened and the Ottomans were
forced to borrow foreign capital. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, loan repayments
amounted to more than 50 percent of state revenues. It was in this deteriorating
context that the empire’s territories in the Balkans (and in North Africa), started slip-
ping away, leading to skirmishes, rebellions, and also the independence of Greece in
1832, Romania and Serbia in 1878, Bulgaria in 1908, and Albania in 1912.72 Despite
its many losses, a rump Ottoman Empire survived until 1923 when it was dissolved
with the Treaty of Lausanne after which Turkey was declared a republic under Kemal
Atatürk.73
The French Revolution, Napoleon’s Empire, and the return of the Old Order
According to Paul Schroeder the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 was also the
start of a transitional period in European diplomacy and politics that lasted until
1848.74 At its heart were the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815).
Expanding rapidly and establishing satellite states including the Duchy of Warsaw
43
(1807–14) and the Illyrian Provinces (1809–14), Napoleon overturned the pre-1789
territorial status quo. His brief imperium left a territorial legacy that lasted well
beyond Napoleon’s defeat. In the German lands, a significant impact followed the
French occupation of 1801–07 and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in
1806. The German Confederation created at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the
result of the territorial revolution wrought by the revolutionary wars of the 1790s and
the French annexations as well as the creation of satellite states. The German Reich
did not emerge until the unification of 1871, though the thirty-nine medium-sized
states of the German Confederation created in 1815 represented a step in that direc-
tion compared to the more than 300 tiny secular and ecclesiastical statelets that had
belonged to the Holy Roman Empire.75
Ottoman retreat in the face of internal disarray in Constantinople and the prov-
inces, and of external challenges from Russia, Central, and Western Europe also
belongs to this transitional period. For the Porte, a peaceful period ended in 1768
as it declared war on Russia, one in a series of wars between the two states. The
war ended in 1774 with Russian victory and the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, which,
among other things, effectively transformed Wallachia and Moldavia into Russian
Protectorates. The Principalities were of military and strategic importance to Russia –
on the way to Constantinople, abutting the Black Sea, and a roadway for Ottoman
armies to Poland, Ukraine, and Crimean Tatar areas. Thus, after 1774, Russia was
the Ottomans’ most “formidable foreign adversary” although Austria too shared an
interest in partitioning the Ottoman Empire. For their part, Romanian boyars often
petitioned Russia and Austria for help with the Ottomans or the Phanariot princes
appointed by the Porte.76
The Porte faced the problem of military and state modernization to which con-
servative elites were generally opposed. Attempts to reform the military and naval
forces and to introduce new technologies from the middle of the eighteenth century
on were made with the help of foreign – including Russian – models and most often
French advisers. It was in Britain’s and France’s interest to strengthen the Ottoman
Empire. In the 1790s, however, Napoleon’s armies fought against the old regime
powers on the continent, and provoked a shift in alliances. As they threatened the
domains of the Sultan, including Egypt and the Western Balkans, the Porte allied with
Britain and Russia against Napoleonic France.77
In the longer run, of course, Russian interests in the Balkans were diametrically
opposed to both Ottoman and local ones. In the Danubian Principalities Russia
championed some princely candidates, and after 1802 obtained the right to approve
candidates to both thrones. When, in 1806, the Porte deposed two princes with-
out Russian permission, this was cause for yet another war. Negotiations between
Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I in 1806 and 1807 assigned the Principalities to
Russia, though at the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, Russia received just the east-
ern part of Moldavia, henceforth known as Bessarabia, thus diminishing Ottoman
territorial control still further.78 Meddling in the Balkan lands slipping away from
Ottoman control remained a long-term goal for Russian foreign policy. As Barbara
Jelavich has written:
The solution of Balkan and Ottoman problems was infinitely complicated by

the fact that in the nineteenth century this region became a major center of
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great-power conflict, and the fate of the area became intimately linked with
the maintenance of the European balance of power . . . The entire cluster
of issues surrounding the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the revolt of the
subject people, and the European intervention became known as the Eastern
Question.79
Despite two decades of warfare and an unprecedented expansion of the French

Empire, old regime Europe survived the revolutionary challenge with some territo-
rial adjustments. In the immediate aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the auto-
cratic, absolutist regimes of Russia, the Habsburg Empire, and Prussia formed the
Holy Alliance with the goal of preventing future revolutionary threats. Old regime
Europe was restored at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.80 The Duchy of Warsaw,
however, did not survive the Congress, which re-affirmed the territorial status quo
inaugurated with the third partition. Instead, a Kingdom of Poland (or “Congress
Kingdom”) was established, governed by the Russian Tsar, and enjoying autonomy
only in theory.
After 1815 the region dominated by the three autocratic empires was increasingly
identified as “Eastern” Europe.81 Autocratic rule in Prussia, the Habsburg Empire,
and Russia in contrast to the constitutional monarchies in France and Britain was
one element of a slowly emerging sense of difference vis-à-vis “Western” Europe. The
Ottoman Empire stood even farther apart from Western and Central Europe, not
only lacking a constitutional system, but also the level of efficiency and modernity of
the autocratic empires. The linguistic discovery of the “Slavic” peoples of East Central
Europe by the generation of Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt
was another element in the emerging concept of “Eastern” Europe. Moreover, as Ivan
Berend has argued, from the 1820s the intellectuals of East Central Europe shared
a sense of backwardness and otherness during a period of international peace after
decades of annexations and warfare.82
Right-sizing space in the era of nationalism, ca. 1860–1960

The 1860s mark a watershed in East Central European history. Though this is not
such a bold claim, it departs somewhat from the standard chronology. It would be
easier to employ an histoire événementielle (history of events) chronology punctuated
by wars and revolutions citing dates such as: 1848, 1914, 1918, 1939, 1945, and 1989.
Yet for understanding the reorganization of East Central Europe’s political space, it
makes more sense to focus on the two caesuras that occurred in the 1860s and the
1960s. According to Charles Maier, the period bracketed between these dates con-
stituted a particular “regime of territoriality,” one that shifted away from imperial
certainty in the mid-nineteenth century and an opened up history to global, inter-
national, and transnational structures and spaces by the 1960s. According to the
notion of “right-sizing” the nation and to Maier’s chronology of territorial regimes,
the second half of the “long nineteenth century” was characterized by attempts
to construct usable space.83 From the 1860s to the 1960s (although some national
communities, such as Greece, escaped from imperial dominance decades earlier)
smaller national polities came to replace sprawling dynastic empires. The quest for
usable space included two main areas: the battle for territory and the establishment
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of infrastructure for new and emerging nation-states. The revolutions of 1848 had
not yielded any immediate territorial concessions to aspiring nations in East Central
Europe, but over the next century the region’s empires succumbed to forces seeking
to dissolve them into smaller sovereign units based on the concept of nationality.
The revolutions of 1848–49 in East Central Europe were an unmistakable part of
a pan-European wave, but they also exhibited local particularities. Revolutionaries in
East Central Europe were not simply mimicking “western” ideas.84 The Hungarian
nationalists’ struggle, for instance, was characterized by contradictory goals. What
began on March 15, 1848, as a twelve-point petition concerning greater political
rights, soon became a complicated and fundamental battle over territory and politi-
cal power.85 While only one of the twelve points referenced territorial claims (union
with Transylvania), it became apparent by the summer of 1848 that much of the
insurgency and diplomatic wrangling was primarily concerned with who would exer-
cise territorial power: the Kaiser and imperial military in Vienna, or a Hungarian
parliament in Pest.86 The Hungarian revolutionaries of 1848, whose original demands
were limited to calls for constitutional monarchy, soon became caught between more
assertive Hungarian separatism, Habsburg endeavors to maintain the status quo, and
conflicting nationalist movements in Croatia and Serbia. Transylvania also became the
scene of Romanian and Hungarian rivalries; imperial authorities initially approved
the union of Transylvania with Hungary, a measure on which the Transylvanian Diet
had voted, though only a few Romanians of noble rank were represented on it.87
Despite its own struggle for independence, the revolutionary Hungarian government
rejected Romanian demands for national recognition in Hungarian-administered
Transylvania. The Romanians, like the Serbs, Saxons, and Croats facing similar
Hungarian refusals to acknowledge their national rights, collaborated with Habsburg
and Russian forces against the Hungarian insurgents.88
Aspiring nations in East Central Europe were thus struggling not only against
the imperial order, but also against each other. The Prague Slav Congress con-
vened in June 1848 initially as a riposte to the German revolutionaries who at their
Parliamentary meeting in Frankfurt had debated plans to detach Austria from the
Dual Monarchy and bring all Germans into one state, leaving out the Habsburg
Slavs. The Slav Congress, however, did not offer a full show of unity, but rather
pitted different visions, situations, and national programs of the Monarchy’s Slavs
against each other, including over the question of federalism in the Habsburg
Empire, not a goal desired by the Poles, for example.89 The competing agendas
of Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Croat, Serb, German, Czech, Ruthenian, Polish,
Russian, and other patriots in 1848–49 foreshadowed the disputes that were to
define the region over the next century. It is best not to think of the events of
1848–49 as the culmination and (temporary) end of liberal movements in Western
Europe, but as the first shot in the territorial struggle that would dominate East
Central Europe for the next hundred years. The decades following the revolutions
of 1848–49 witnessed the continued mobilization of nationalist movements and a
hardening of territorial claims. Czech–German antagonisms that had flared up dur-
ing the revolution continued to smolder. The contentious issue of a dual-language
policy governing official life was only really addressed in the so-called Moravian
Compromise of 1905, which created room for national identity within a heretofore
unbendingly non-national state.90
47
In the aftermath of 1848–49 the Hungarian independence movement was sup-

pressed by the Habsburgs. But the Ausgleich (Compromise) of 1867 established the
dualist Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. This event also belongs to the history of right-
sizing the nation as the Compromise signaled the emergence of a Hungarian polity.
Although some historians view the Ausgleich as Austria’s successful attempt at counter-
ing “centrifugal forces,” it allowed Hungary to begin nation-building in earnest while
suppressing other national groups in its half of the Monarchy.91
Borders and the great-power game

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the map of East Central Europe grad-
ually began its transformation into the shape that we today might recognize. The
revolutions of 1848–49 laid the foundations for the territorial reorganization to
come, while the Crimean War (1853–56) marked another important turning point.
Sometimes depicted as an imperial war, a religious war, or the world’s first “media
war,” the Crimean War also heralded a new period of territorial contestation in
Southeastern Europe.92 One might even say that with it the epicenter of geopoliti-
cal struggle shifted from Northeastern to Southeastern Europe. The former Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth had served as the crucial battleground among East
Central European empires but, after the 1850s, the Balkans became the main theater
of European power struggles.
The Crimean War, started by Russia in the hope of finishing off “the sick man
of Europe” ended in Russian defeat, thus changing the diplomatic game in con-
nection to the “Eastern Question.” Russia was forced to return three districts in
Southern Bessarabia – part of the region Russia had annexed in 1812 – to Moldavia,
a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, Russia’s protectorate over both
Principalities ended and was replaced by a system of collective security. During
the Russian Protectorate, Count Kiselev, an enlightened Russian administrator,
had introduced the Organic Statutes in 1831–32 in both Moldavia and Wallachia,
and thus created parallel institutions in the two states preparing the way for their
eventual union. Emboldened by European developments since 1848 and especially
1856, Romanian nationalists pushed for unification. Their cause was championed
primarily by Napoleon III who wished to impose the national principle in interna-
tional politics and sought to re-establish and expand France’s diplomatic prestige
following the debacle of 1815 and French victory against Russia in the Crimean
War. France was joined by Russia, Britain, Prussia, and Sardinia – each for tactical
reasons – and opposed by the Ottomans who wished to maintain sovereignty over
the Principalities, and by the Habsburgs, who feared the effects an independent
Romanian state might have on the Romanian-inhabited Habsburg provinces of
Bukovina and Transylvania. Union was achieved nonetheless when Alexandru Ioan
Cuza was elected by both Moldavian and Wallachian boyar assemblies in January
1859. Cuza was fully cognizant that he was an interim prince there to prepare the
advent of a foreign monarch.93 Although Cuza’s reign was brief (1859–66), it ini-
tiated the search for the proper shape of the nation under a foreign ruler from a
royal line, a necessary condition for full acceptance as a sovereign European state.
Cuza was replaced with Prince Carol I (1866–1914), a royal from the Hohenzollern-
Sigmaringen line, who continued to pursue full independence for his realm,
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a goal achieved in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin. The European powers recognized
Romania as a kingdom in 1881.94
The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and the Congress of Berlin (1878) acceler-
ated the transformation of East Central Europe into “Eastern Europe.” The region
increasingly came to be understood as different from the rest of the continent, being
associated with notions of backwardness and barbarism.95 This surge of orientalism
was partly informed by the political activity in Southeastern Europe. Contemporaries
labeled the region a “violent powder keg,” yet violence was symptomatic of the new
regime of territoriality. Unrest in the Balkans in the 1870s culminated in an April
1876 uprising by the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee.96 In suppressing
the insurrection in April and May 1876, Ottoman irregular troops known as bashi-
bazouks carried out reprisals against Bulgarian towns and villages; these actions
were labeled the “Bulgarian Massacres.” In one village alone, Batak, in present-day
southern Bulgaria, bashibazouks killed several thousand Bulgarians.97 Such events
solidified Southeastern Europe on the mental maps of Western Europeans and North
Americans as a place of irrational violence.98
Failed negotiations between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of
the Balkan crisis of 1875–76 (in which local social tensions in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria mixed with Russian Slavophile ideas in explosive
and tragic ways), resulted in Russia declaring war in April 1877.99 The Russian-led
coalition of Eastern Orthodox countries (Romania, Serbia, and the Principality of
Montenegro) recorded early victories against the Porte, but then suffered setbacks.
Nonetheless, the outcome was significant for the wider region. Following the Treaty
of San Stefano (1878) a large Bulgarian state was created, while the Austro-Hungarian
Empire occupied the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina.100 More gen-
erally, the end of the Russo-Turkish War resulted in important border changes
throughout East Central Europe. The United Romanian Principalities were recog-
nized as a kingdom in 1881.101 Bulgaria declared war on Serbia in 1885, following
which Bulgaria gained the former Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia.102 While
Serbia had attempted similar acquisitions, its claim to Bosnia in 1876 was rebuffed
because of the Habsburgs’ competing interests in Bosnia.103 Serbia continued its
quest for internal consolidation and international prestige; it was officially recog-
nized as a kingdom in 1882. Yet this, too, was fraught with problems. Suspected of
being an Austrian stooge, King Milan abdicated in 1889, handing over power to his
son Alexander I (r. 1889–1903), who sought to end political factionalism in Serbia,
thus pursuing a path similar to that of other monarchs in the region: one of shaping
the country “correctly,” that is, according to a particular national(ist) vision. This
search for the correct shape of the nation was followed for over a century, though the
consolidation of Yugoslavia after World War II took a different path.104
Between the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the Balkan Wars in 1912–13 few
major geopolitical changes occurred in the region: Romania became a kingdom in
1881, and Serbia in 1882; Bulgaria expanded into Eastern Rumelia in 1885; Bosnia-
Herzegovina was officially annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908 – the same year that
the Young Turk Revolution occurred in an attempt to save the Ottoman Empire
from implosion; and Montenegro – recognized as an independent principality in
1878 – also became a kingdom in 1910.105 While national independence movements
were gaining in strength, the truly momentous changes to the political map of
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East Central Europe were to take place after World War I when a new b
alance of
power had been re-established on the battlefields.
Internal nation-building
Beyond the great game of international politics, there is another facet to the right-
sizing of geopolitical space. While external borders were subject to challenges and
disputes, they were far more difficult to alter than internal spatial divisions that could
be modified to suit nation-building ambitions. Movements such as Pracy Organiczna
(Organic Labor) in Polish-inhabited territories under foreign rule were determined
to maintain the Polishness of space and cultural institutions against Russifying
and Germanizing efforts. Perhaps the strongest and most enthusiastic internal
nation-building campaign in this period occurred in dualist Hungary. After the 1867
Compromise public space was “Magyarized” by naming streets, city squares, and other
toponyms after national heroes, but also by developing an ostensibly “Hungarian”
architectural style.106 The erecting of national monuments was another manifestation
of this process, and Hungary was caught up in the veritable “statue craze” that swept
East Central Europe from the 1880s onwards.107 As a way of “confirming” the inter-
nal look of the Hungarian polity, unambiguously “Magyar” symbols began crowd-
ing out the multi-ethnicity of villages, towns, cities, public buildings, not to mention
representations of space on maps and atlases.
Similar processes of nation-building were at work in the Austrian half of the mon-
archy. But whereas the ascendant Magyar elite used its control of the Hungarian
state to “nationalize” public space in its own image, competing nationalist activists
in Austria used the relatively liberal constitution to turn linguistic “borderlands” into
zones of contestation. Growing Czech-German antagonisms in Bohemia and Moravia
expressed the search for a national space against the backdrop of a faltering imperial
system and attempts at a federalist compromise.108 Rival nationalisms and imperial
power games were thus played out not only in high politics, but also at the local
level.109 In the small southern Bohemian town of Bergreichenstein/Kašperské Hory,
for instance, the local population fought over competing visions for the future of the
town and indeed the wider region. In September 1908 the Böhmerwaldbund (German
Union for the Bohemian Forest) held a meeting in the center of town, which resulted
in clashes between German and Czech nationalists.110 Projects concerned with restruc-
turing space and borders necessarily manifested themselves on both macro (annexing
territory, redrawing borders) and micro (taking control of town councils, nationaliz-
ing local space) levels. Thus while international borders remained somewhat stable
(1882–1912), internal spaces became a real battleground.
After the turn of the century, struggles over boundaries and territories became
more pronounced. The two Balkan Wars (1912–13) resulted in some border changes
and the creation of yet another new state, Albania (1912).111 The formation of secret
societies such as the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation or IMRO in
Ottoman Macedonia in 1893; National Defence in 1908 and Unification or Death
in 1911, both in Serbia; and Young Bosnia in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the turn
of the century may be seen in conjunction with the quest for the “right shape” for
the nation-state.112 World War I was a dramatic intensification of such struggles in
view of existing territorial disputes and aspirations by political actors in the region
51
Map 1.7 World War I, 1914–18
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and just beyond it. World War I can be viewed as the acceleration of trajectories
already embarked on in the 1860s. The outcomes of the war and the planning for
those outcomes are revealing, as they often proved to be the (partial) fulfillment of
nationalist ambitions.113
Suppressed provinces, forgotten places

Many historians viewed changes to the political map of East Central Europe in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – and even later – teleologically: the pres-
sures brought by growing nationalist movements on fraying multinational empires
resulted in their break-up and in the emergence of nation-states, as happened most
dramatically after World War I. From the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania;
to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania in the center of the region; to the
southeastern polities of Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria, the emergence of states
has been often portrayed as the inevitable victory of the principle of national self-
determination.114 Many of the new polities confirmed at the Paris Peace Conference
in 1919–21 were products of complex negotiations and resembled ethnic conglomer-
ates, yet some national aspirations remained unfulfilled after World War I. The new
multi-ethnic Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (known as Yugoslavia from 1929
on) subsumed the previous states of Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina
and dashed some people’s hopes for independent Slovenian and Croatian states.
The newly established state of Czechoslovakia lumped together Czechs, Slovaks, and
Germans in a state that, ultimately, lasted just eighty years. Poland re-emerged as an
independent state that incorporated large East Slavic populations in its eastern bor-
derlands, though falling far short of the territorial expanse of the pre-partition Polish-
Lithuanian state. The Republic of Hungary achieved full independence in 1919, but
at the cost of losing two-thirds of the territory that had belonged to the Hungarian
crown. Austria’s independence was hardly welcomed by Austrians, as a divided politi-
cal elite saw its empire, then a hastily concocted federalization project meant to save
Austria-Hungary, and, lastly, union with Germany, all fail during the last year of the
war and at the Paris Peace Conference.115 The post-World War I map of East Central
Europe thus reflected not only a “New Europe” made up of right-sized nation-states,
but the peace makers’ other political agendas.
After the war some historical regions ceased to play important roles within the newly cre-
ated polities. The privileged position of Transylvania (and that of its Hungarian and
German minorities) had already been eroded after the province’s unification with
the Kingdom of Hungary during the 1867 Compromise; it was then further under-
mined with its incorporation into the newly formed Greater Romanian Kingdom.116
Greater Romania now also acquired Bessarabia from the Russian Empire, Bukovina
from Austria, and (in 1913) Southern Dobrudja from Bulgaria (and before that the
Ottoman Empire), following the Balkan Wars.117 All of these regions lost something
of their previous imperial identities in the transition to the new Romanian context.
A similar fate befell the historical region of the Banat of Temeswar.118 A military
frontier province after the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, over time the Banat had
achieved both political autonomy and a separate cultural identity. The multi-ethnic
make-up (Romanians, Serbs, Germans, Hungarians, Jews, Bulgarians) of this pre-
viously sparsely populated region led to conflict as a range of nationalist agitators
53
attempted to win over their own constituencies.119 Yet the region’s rather rural char-
acter, as well as the fact that much of its population consisted of colonists, resulted in
a particular Banat identity, one that opened up the possibility of interethnic cooper-
ation. As the Central Powers disintegrated in October 1918, the Banat Republic was
proclaimed on November 1, 1918. Its leader, the Banat Swabian Dr. Otto Roth, sought
unity among the main ethnic groups. While this appeared to work to some degree, the
Romanian representatives refused to participate. Two weeks later, on November 15,
1918, the Serbian army occupied and annexed the Banat for the new Yugoslav admin-
istration, though ultimately, the region was partitioned among Yugoslavia, Romania,
and Hungary.120
Other regions, such as Galicia, simply disappeared. The Habsburgs had invented
Galicia, (referring to medieval Hungarian claims to the principality of Halych/Galicia),
in order to justify their land grab in 1772. The province expanded in 1795 to include
Cracow and ceased to exist in 1918 with the implosion of Austria-Hungary. By then
it had become the battleground between Polish, Ukrainian, and Ruthenian nation-
alisms. With the break-up of the Habsburg and Russian Empires, Poland acquired
the territory following the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918–19. In the eyes of the Polish
nationalists, Galicia was tarnished by its imperial past and by its non-Polish popula-
tions that included principally Ukrainians, Łemkos, and Jews. Having disappeared
as an administrative unit, however, “Galicia remained . . . a meaningful place name,
a well remembered . . . geopolitical entity” and it later resurfaced as a district within
the Nazi-administered General Government until 1945.121 Other examples of “lost”
regions include Dalmatia, Rumelia, Moravia, Silesia, and Ruthenia, all of which either
disappeared or were subsumed and divided into various new states.122
National self-determination and its discontents

The Wilsonian rhetoric of national self-determination promised to bring closure to
all territorial disputes and to satisfy the aspirations of the national movements loyal
to the Allied and Associated Powers. But the Paris Peace Conference and the five
treaties it generated – Versailles, June 1919 (Germany); Saint-Germain, September
1919 (Austria); Neuilly, November 1919 (Bulgaria); Trianon, June 1920 (Hungary);
Sèvres, August 1920 (Ottoman Empire) – proved to be just one moment in a longer
process of “right-sizing” nations in East Central Europe through territorial change.
The outcome of the war did not match the teleological narrative of deliverance that
nationalists had propagated before – and long after – its conclusion.
Some states, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, achieved long-lost or new inde-
pendence and brought together in a single state territories that had been divided by
international borders. Others, like Romania and Serbia, expanded, also gathering in
provinces that had belonged to different states. Most states relied on compromise to
assume their post-war shape. Some populations were redefined as national minorities,
an unenviable collective status forced upon them after World War I even if notionally
protected by the Minority Protection Treaties forged at the Paris Peace Conference.123
By and large, Jews remained outsiders and without a state of their own, and their
position was more precarious in nation-states than in the Habsburg or Ottoman
Empires.124 Armenians continued to live as a diaspora, although an Armenian Soviet
Republic became part of the USSR in 1936. Millions of ethnic Germans made up
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new minority groups in the successor states.125 Turks in Southeastern Europe were
cut off from Istanbul. Macedonians were simply told to be Yugoslavs.126 “Forgotten”
groups such as the Łemkos in southern Poland or the Rusyns in Ukraine were boxed
into new national paradigms or ostracized.127 The Roma were not even thought of as
worthy of discussion.128 Thus the post-World War I period established a new territo-
rial order that was no more “correct” than the previous one, certainly not from the
perspective of those populations that found themselves relegated to marginality or
statelessness. Rather, the interwar period was characterized by attempts to nationalize
territory and power. The end of World War I marked a spike in a longer history of
territorial and border contests.
Indeed, political actors also continued in their perceptions of key issues during
the two decades after the war. For instance, the Baltic area was understood both
by local and imperial or nationalist actors from the 1860s, as a region in its own
right.129 A Baltic regional identity prevailed into the twentieth century and has per-
sisted to the present day. Likewise, Transylvania remained a crucial battleground
for power and control between Hungary and Romania, as it had been since 1867;
the post-World War I settlement simply aggravated this contestation.130 Bohemia’s
western fringes, the so-called Sudetenland, had been subject to competing national-
ist claims since the 1860s, and World War I did not resolve these. The Czechoslovak
solution was temporary as it came under challenge in the 1930s and 40s.131
The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, then Yugoslavia, under Alexander I
(1921–34) faced numerous assaults on its legitimacy, as the state was widely viewed as
Serb-dominated. The “Velebit Uprising” by the Croatian far-right Ustaša in July 1932
was an attempt to challenge the territorial sovereignty of the South Slav polity.132
Assassinations and political wrangling along ethnic and ideological lines followed.
The creation of the state satisfied few of the pre-war dreams of a “right-sized” South
Slav state free of Ottomans and Habsburgs; it merely transposed competing national
claims onto a different political geography.133
In the 1920s and 1930s, Hungary battled the terms of the Trianon Treaty (as
Hungarian nationalists are still doing today).134 Admiral Miklós Horthy, the head
of state (1920–44), made revising that treaty one of his central aims, even though
he had initially accepted it. The motto of nem, nem, soha! (“no, no, never!” – mean-
ing that Hungary would never accept the Trianon borders) resonated both with
the growing tide of far-right nationalism and long-standing territorial concerns.
It also ensured that Hungarian politics remained a dynamic battleground rather
than static and acquiescent.135 Romanian politics followed the mirror image of this
trajectory. While the generously expanded external borders were welcomed, suc-
cessive Romanian governments and local groups attempted to reshape the ethnic
composition of urban and professional elites in the Romanians’ favor, as well as
the appearance of public space in towns where the Romanians had only recently
constituted the minority. Having more than doubled the state’s territories and pop-
ulation, Romanian politicians and elites tried to impose a more uniform character to
the new areas, putting much pressure on ethnic minorities.136 Besides the domestic
tensions that arose in post-war multi-ethnic polities such as Romania, Czechoslovakia,
and Poland, in border regions such as those between Poland and Czechoslovakia,
Romania and the USSR, or Romania and Bulgaria, among others, territorial skirmishes
also flared.137
55
Far from resolving territorial conflicts definitively, the re-mapping of East Central
Europe in the wake of World War I made way for more contestation. Wars and civil
wars such as the Polish-Ukrainian War (1918–19), the Russian Civil War (1917–22),
and territorial struggles during the Hungarian Socialist Republic (March to August
1919) prolonged existing disputes. While the interwar period is often characterized
as one of radicalization, it continued the pre-war project of “settling the map,” inter-
nally and externally. In much the same way that the period prior to 1914 was marked
by external changes and challenges to international borders, as well as by domestic
disputes over infrastructure, public monuments, and municipal councils, the interwar
decades were as well.138
After the war, federalism appeared to have lost ground to nationalism, but feder-
alist thinking was by no means dead.139 As Holly Case has recently shown, federalist
projects came from both the left and right of the political spectrum, they surfaced in
both winning and losing nations, and they served to further nationalist ambitions in
various forms. The Little Entente and the Balkan Entente alliances for instance, were
proto-federalist schemes, but were nationalist in practice, as they sought to defend
the post-World War I territorial order against Hungarian and Bulgarian revisionist
goals, respectively. On the other hand, the Little Entente was conceived in some part
by statesmen in Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia as a retort to the Danubian
federation project envisioned by progressive Austro-Hungarians like Oszkár Jászi
and Karl Renner to replace the defeated Habsburg Monarchy. After World War II,
right-wing European federalists took anti-American, anti-communist, and antisemitic
stances.140 Thus the idea of creating a federation of states based on racial affinities,
or on political interest was malleable enough to be taken up in various forms by
socialists, fascists, nationalists, and liberals to suit a variety of purposes.
Perhaps the greatest change from the point of view of the individual in the 1920s
and 1930s was the experience of the national border.141 The success of various nation-
alisms was premised on the enforcement of frontiers, barriers, and clear divisions.
In his 1915 “Song of the Eastern Marches,” the German author Walter Flex lauded
the impenetrability of German border posts in the East.142 Yet this was a poem, a
rhetorical device, which did not reflect the actual experience of borders at the time.
Traveling across the region had been relatively unproblematic up until World War I.
Thereafter, border control became professionalized. Legally enshrined through a
number of League of Nations conferences on borders and passports (1920, 1926,
1927), Europeans began to experience international borders as real obstacles to free
movement.143 Moreover, some regions were divided without much consideration for
previous social structures. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Germans in the Romanian
Banat, for instance, were concerned with making sense of what was happening to their
compatriots across the new border with Yugoslavia. The train line between Kikinda
in Yugoslavia and Jimbolia in Romania was blocked by the new border and the usual
trade links between the two towns were broken as well.
Thus for all the continuities in ideas, territorial ambitions, and homogenization
projects across the World War I divide, momentous spatial experiences were also
introduced in the region; these accompanied the fragmentation of large imperial
polities and economies into smaller national ones. It was these new political and eco-
nomic structures that allowed some contemporaries to conceptualize an East Central
European region as a coherent and distinctive whole. The German geographer
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Albert Penck, for instance, coined the term Zwischeneuropa (Middle Europe) in 1921
to describe the region between the collapsing Russian Empire, the then still advanc-
ing German Empire, and the Ottoman Empire to the south.144 The future president
of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, began referring to the “zone of small
nations,” located between Germany and Russia, during World War I while he was in
exile and campaigning for an independent Bohemia, for a democratic Central Europe
free from the dominion of powerful empires, and eventually, for a Czechoslovak state
endorsed by the Allies. In his New Europe (The Slav Standpoint) published in 1918,
Masaryk argued that after the defeat of the Central Powers and after the Russian
Revolution, Europe was on the verge of becoming a “democratic, non-militaristic”
continent. The new small nations of Central Europe were no small part of this new
international order.145
Rather than anchoring a stable democratic order as Masaryk had predicted, the
zone of small nations between the large but, in the interwar period, deeply dis-
gruntled German and Soviet states, was particularly vulnerable to their aggressions
as well as to the revisionist ambitions of smaller neighbors that had lost territories
at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919–20.Thus the run-up to World War II and
even the war itself did not necessarily constitute a historical rupture. Rather, it fits
into the pattern of right-sizing space that had begun in the 1860s, albeit in accel-
erated fashion. Both the late nineteenth century and the 1930s and 1940s saw the
play of national ambitions to expand territory pitched against reactionary attempts
to undo such changes. Thus viewed, the Nazis’ Lebensraum project was an effort
to reverse the achievements of national movements that had succeeded in estab-
lishing a zone of small nation-states out of the rubble of empires in East Central
Europe, and, instead, to expand the German Empire.146 The Munich Agreement
of September 1938, which marked the de facto dissolution of Czechoslovakia, as
well as the First and Second Vienna Awards in November 1938 and August 1940,
which “returned” Southern Slovakia and Northern Transylvania to Hungary, undo-
ing parts of the Trianon Treaty, were neither as radical nor as unthinkable as
they might appear in retrospect.147 These border changes satisfied the wishes of
Hungarian and German populations, which had been relegated to minority status,
as well as the interests of the Axis powers and their allies. These border shifts can
then be seen as integral to the era that began in the 1860s when the “right-sizing”
of space was more generally on the agenda. The aggressive Realpolitik diplomacy of
the late 1930s might have destroyed the post-World War I European order, but that
order was itself built on the ruins of previous international settlements and had
brought its own traumatic population movements.148 The land grabs and border
changes prior to World War II were characterized less by the military force applied,
even if potential armed intervention was always implied, than by diplomacy. The
Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia
at Munich later that year, and the cession of the Memel Region by Lithuania in
March 1939 took place under varying degrees of intense diplomatic pressure, but
they were, to all intents and purposes, non-military successes.149
The attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, represented a substantial change in
German tactics, though not necessarily in ideas or vision. As Mark Mazower notes,
Nazi rhetoric about space, borders, and survival was not significantly different
from German political and strategic discourse at the beginning of World War I.150
57
Map 1.8 Nazi-dominated Europe, 1942
Source: Nicholas Atkin and Michael Biddiss, eds., Themes in Modern European History, 1890–1945, p. xvii, map 4 (Routledge, 2008).
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Still, the German attack on Poland and the subsequent total war marked a definite
rupture for the region in another way. The all-out warfare that raged particularly
brutally on the Eastern front represented the pinnacle of a process that had ele-
vated the nation, as an end, and aggression, as a means, to ultimate heights.151
World War II was a distinctively “savage war” in the East, to quote Omer Bartov.152
But it may still make sense to view the purging of undesirables and the extermi-
nation of East Central European Jewry and Roma as part and parcel of the longer
trend of right-sizing the nation, even if the racial calculus, and the speed, cruelty,
and industrial scale of the enterprise were unique in so many ways.153 The war
brought unprecedented levels of ethnic homogenization, the destruction of estab-
lished social structures, and a new reconfiguration of international borders.
The Axis powers carried out the wholesale reconfiguration of European political
space with surprising ease. Spaces that had been contested by nationalist movements
for a hundred years were simply occupied or exchanged during German- and Italian-
brokered arbitrations. Such was the case of Czechoslovak and Romanian territories
awarded to Hungary during the First and Second Vienna Awards.154 Since Western
European states were loath to forge alliances with Stalin against the Axis Powers, the
Soviet leader made a pragmatic deal with his ideological opposite, and, emulating
Hitler, also carved out a large Soviet sphere of influence. The Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact signed on August 23, 1939 in the Kremlin also presumably bought him time to
prepare for the coming war. A secret protocol, also signed that day, delineated the
spheres of interest that Germany and the USSR commanded in East Central Europe.
The Baltic States, east of the Vistula, and Bessarabia would go to the USSR, while
Poland and Lithuania west of the Vistula were left to Germany. Poland was subjected
to a fourth partition in September 1939 as Germans occupied its western territories,
and Soviet troops its eastern regions. The Baltic states came under Soviet occupation
on June 14, 1940, although Soviet military bases were already in place in Lithuania
a few months earlier, the price for the gift of Vilnius/Wilno taken from Poland and
restored after many centuries as capital of Lithuania. The Soviets next annexed
Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, although the secret protocol had made no men-
tion of the latter province, nor was there a historical precedent, such as its belonging
to the Russian Empire.155 In April 1941, Yugoslavia and Greece were occupied by
Italy and Germany.156 Hungary and Bulgaria also seized parts of Yugoslavia, while an
Independent State of Croatia run by the Ustaša and allied with the Axis was created
on a portion of the former Yugoslav territory. These wholesale shifts in borders and
attendant population transfers formed the prologue to Germany’s declaration of war
on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 as Operation Barbarossa was launched.157
It is impossible to overstate the impact these violent and rapid territorial changes
and comprehensive rearrangements, engineered by the Nazi, fascist, and Soviet
regimes, had on the societies of East Central Europe. While ethnic homogenization
had played a role in the fight for control over spaces in the region since the nineteenth
century, the wholesale purging, killing, starving, and relocation of entire population
groups fundamentally altered the make-up of these societies. Heinrich Himmler’s
Generalplan Ost represents the most far-reaching blueprint to reorder the internal and
external spatial structure of East Central Europe.158 Along with the invention of new
regions – Ostland (the Baltics), Ostmark (Austria), Wartheland (Poznań Region),
Generalgouvernement (Central Poland) – the war and initial German (and Soviet)
59
successes radically transformed East Central European space into an unrecognizable

map of the region, although some of these changes turned out to be temporary.159
Re-redrawing maps
After its victory at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942, the Red Army reclaimed much
of the territory occupied by the Wehrmacht. Soviet forces continued to push toward
Germany until May 1945, liberating and occupying every region and country on their
way.160 A number of the borders re-drawn since 1938 were un-drawn in the process,
although others, namely most of the ones marking the Soviet Union’s territorial
acquisitions by agreement with the Nazis, remained.161
The Allied conferences in Moscow (October 1944), Yalta (February 1945), and
Potsdam (July–August 1945) were concerned mainly with post-war political arrange-
ments in East Central Europe. Much has been made of the cynical “percentages
agreement” in Moscow in October 1944 when Stalin and Churchill agreed to divide
Balkan countries between Western and Soviet spheres.162 To the north, the Soviet
sphere of influence extended over East Central Europe, not due to the Big Three
agreements, but rather because of the reality that obtained at the end of war. The Red
Army was already present in most of the region, while Tito’s partisans were victorious
over both the occupying forces and over their ideological competitors, the Croatian
Ustaša and the Serbian Chetniks.
In this militarized and rapidly evolving environment, borders were re-drawn once
again. Only Austria, Hungary, and Albania returned to their pre-1938 boundaries.
While Latvia and Estonia also retained their pre-war frontiers, they became part
of the USSR. Lithuania kept Vilnius and its surrounding areas – that had earlier
belonged to Poland – but lost its independence and became a Soviet Republic as
well. Poland was moved westward into German territory, leaving its pre-1939 eastern
borderlands to the Soviet Union. The Czech lands and Slovakia were reunited into
a Czechoslovak state that lost Transcarpathian Rus to the USSR. Romania regained
northern Transylvania (lost to Hungary during the Second Vienna Award), while
losing Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia to the USSR (to the Ukrainian and
Moldavian Soviet Republics, respectively). Romania also lost Southern Dobrudja –
an area gained in 1913, but lost in 1940 – to Bulgaria. Yugoslavia was reunified and
its acquisitions in the eastern Adriatic were largely confirmed by the Treaty of Paris
in 1947; thus Istria, Rijeka, Zadar, and the island of Lastovo joined Yugoslavia. The
contested area of Trieste was initially declared a free territory, but in 1954, it became
part of Italy.163
The end of territoriality?

In the 1950s, the focus of geopolitics shifted away from exclusive claims to statehood
and territory and toward ideological spheres of influence. The quasi-universal use
of the label Eastern Europe, underscores our claim that a decisive shift in territorial
regimes occurred during the early Cold War period, although the region of East
Central Europe had been heading toward Eastern European status for a full century
before that. While it is a truism that the Cold War had a global dimension, it is impor-
tant to keep this in mind when considering the Cold War on one of its front-lines in
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Eastern Europe. In Europe the quest for national territoriality took place from about
1850 to roughly 1960 after which efforts to redraw ethnic boundaries and spaces
appeared to peter out, partly because they had been completed to a large degree
especially during the ethnic cleansing operations that took place during and just after
World War II.164
There were, of course, places where ethnic and national struggles continued in var-
ious guises during the communist period, through emigration and various domestic
campaigns, such as in Romania and Bulgaria. The Romanian Communist regime’s
drive to eliminate Hungarian autonomy and Hungarian-language education in
Transylvania after a decade of Soviet-style policies that had allowed for autonomy
and native-language education for ethno-national minorities began after Soviet
troops were withdrawn from Romania in 1958. The Romanian communist regime
then returned to the project of nationalizing Transylvania begun during the interwar
period.165 Similarly, in Bulgaria the campaigns to de-veil, and otherwise change the
attire of, Muslim women in the 1950s, and to re-name ethnic Turks in the 1980s con-
tinued the drive to modernize, homogenize, and Europeanize the country that had
started at the beginning of the century.166
By the 1950s new politicized and polarized geopolitical structures superseded
national imaginings of and claims to territory, space, and borders. New international
structures – the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Warsaw Pact, the
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) generated by the Cold War –
seemed to overwhelm concerns with national territory. The map of East Central
Europe hardened into a seemingly immutable form, as many (though not all) of the
contested regions were integrated into a “Soviet political, administrative, and socio-
economic system,” or the Soviet Bloc.167 The only ambiguity was Germany’s eastern
border, which remained in West German atlases until 1990 as a dotted line, with the
territories west of that line labeled “under Polish administration.”168 The Two-Plus-
Four Agreement (or the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany) of
September 1990 put an end to these potential claims.169 Eastern Europe in the post-
war period was thus mainly a product of international politics.
Communist regimes had been established throughout East Central Europe (with
the exception of Austria, Greece, and Turkey), but internationalism, as both ideology
and practice, was felt on both sides of the Iron Curtain. To the Bretton Woods mon-
etary system created in principle at a conference in 1944, and to the Marshall Plan
offered to all European states at the end of the war to aid in their recovery through
institutions like the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), “set
up in 1948, as a conduit for ERP [European Recovery Program] funds” the countries
of the Soviet bloc retorted by refusing to accept the American aid and by founding
their own Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in January 1949.170 The Cold War
had started. It heated up with the organization of the military alliances, NATO in
1949 and the Warsaw Pact in 1955.
Bygone contestations over national territory seemed irrelevant in the new global
but deeply polarized world order. Rather than reading the Cold War period as an
aberration in which national conflicts were simply suppressed, it can be viewed as a
geopolitical shift. Not only did supranational structures become more pronounced,
but the epicenter of political struggles and territorial disputes moved, as Odd Arne
Westad argues, to the “Third World.” The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and
61
its campaigns to win over non-aligned countries, and American aggression in East
Asia and Latin America, as well as territorial skirmishes throughout the non-aligned
world signaled a major shift away from the European arena of geopolitical struggle.171
Conversely, it is possible to see how in Eastern Europe communism put an end –
at least temporarily – to nationalist projects, even if the Plzeň and East Berlin upris-
ings of June 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 may suggest otherwise.
Czechoslovak and East German proletarian and Hungarian pro-democracy rebels
were protesting pay cuts and the dire effects of economic crisis as well as commu-
nist dictatorship under purportedly workers’ governments. No territorial demands
as such were made, although East Germans were fleeing in large numbers to West
Germany and Hungarian revolutionaries sought their country’s withdrawal from the
Warsaw Pact, thus challenging the bi-polar international order. Given the Kremlin-
controlled satellite system, any opposition to the communist order was also a protest
against the USSR, which was not only the center of the communist world, but also a
territorial power.172
These protests occurred in response to both economic and international factors –
currency reform which resulted in wage cuts combined with reform attempts in the
wake of Stalin’s death, thus the introduction of the New Course both in the USSR
and throughout the Bloc. This amounted to a moment of instability for commu-
nist elites and one of hope for reform communists and ordinary people in Eastern
Europe. Later moments of unrest – most notably the Prague Spring in 1968 and
the Polish Solidarity movement in 1980 – arose under similar circumstances.173
Influenced by international trends such as global student unrest and the election of
a Polish pope, but also spurred by domestic economic stagnation, these rebellious
moments represented attempts at returning to a previous European order. Unlike
many histories of these events and movements that read them as the pre-history of
1989, they might be more properly understood as aftershocks of the right-sizing
regime of territoriality (1860–1960).174 In any case, none of these political move-
ments attempted to revise international borders. Their goal, rather, was to dismantle
the Iron Curtain. Throughout the Cold War period, international treaties and
conferences were concerned with affirming the status quo. Thus the goal was to
solidify supranational structures that could guarantee the status quo. For instance,
the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe that began in 1972 and
concluded with the Helsinki Agreement in 1975, affirmed the status quo in Europe.
Unlike the big conferences of the previous 150 years that ushered in border changes,
Cold War diplomacy pursued political stability. The trajectory of politics and policies
within East Central Europe in the 1970s, therefore, was not to challenge the spatial
make-up, but to uphold it.175
The end of the Cold War did not bring about a return to pre-war Europe, since by
1989 new scales and structures made such a restoration impossible. According to Odd
Arne Westad, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc was part of a global trend of inclusion
and exclusion within supranational and global networks.176 Gorbachev’s glasnost and
perestroika policies could be seen as a plea for inclusion into the emerging commu-
nications technology that had begun to drive trade, banking, politics, and leisure.
In a sense, computer technology was beginning to order a new regime of territorial-
ity by shaping the way communication, exchange, and trade were conducted. On a
European level, this can be understood as Gorbachev’s “common European home”
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in which each nation would have its own room.177 Once the events in 1989 tore the
internal fabric of the East Central European states, and the international structures
of the Soviet Bloc – the Warsaw Pact and COMECON – former communist states were
brought into these international structures and spaces that already existed beyond
the nation-state. This made possible the adoption of neoliberal economic structures,
which in turn facilitated the fairly rapid inclusion into the European Union (EU)
(2004) as Jane Hardy has shown for Poland.178 Hungary presented a similar case.
With the end of János Kádár’s rule in Hungary (1956–88), roundtable talks were ini-
tiated in which a cross-section of parties – including the communists – p articipated.
Recurring debt crises ensured that successive Hungarian governments after 1989
helped to integrate Hungary into the international financial system. Like seven
other East Central European countries, Hungary joined the EU in 2004, followed by
Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, and Croatia in 2013.179
The end of communism, therefore, did not bring a return to an older regime of ter-
ritoriality, because some trans- and international structures, identified as “Western,”
that had come into being during the Cold War years were too embedded and power-
ful to be challenged.180 This does not mean that there have not been attempts to defy
the contemporary national territorial status quo. In all cases, however, such attempts
have produced ruptures along older internal boundaries rather than drawing wholly
new ones. The break-up of the Soviet Union between 1990 and 1992 resulted in the
(re)creation of several states, all of which emerged from internal Soviet borders.
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania reappeared as independent states on the map follow-
ing a partly violent break-away from the Soviet Union in 1991. Their borders are those
of the former Soviet republics of the same names. The break-up of the USSR gave
rise to the anomaly of the Kaliningrad enclave, which, although part of Russia, is cut
off from it by now independent Lithuania. Ukraine and Moldova, too, became inde-
pendent states within their former Soviet republic borders. In Moldova, contestation
ensued as Russophones in the eastern zone close to the Ukrainian border succeeded,
with Russian backing, to establish a Transnistrian Republic – the next best thing to
being part of the Soviet Union. Transnistria enjoys de facto independence, is home to
Russian troops, but it remains officially part of Moldova.181
The recent crisis in Southern and Eastern Ukraine in 2013–14 poses a challenge
to historians. Recent events might be seen as a throw-back to an absolutist regime of
territoriality: Russia is attempting to round out its imperial borders with areas it used
to control in its past incarnations (from tsarist Empire to Soviet Union), annexing the
Crimean Peninsula Catherine the Great first acquired in the eighteenth century from
the Ottoman Empire, and resurrecting Catherine’s Novorossiya that could become a
useful umbrella term for aggressive reclamation of an even larger swath of Ukrainian
and Moldovan areas. The crisis began over Ukraine’s option to sign a trade associa-
tion agreement with the EU which Russia opposed given its own plans for a Eurasian
Union to be inaugurated soon.182
Other conflicts became manifest in the aftermath of 1989 as well. Hungarian-
Romanian antagonisms had already been on the rise in the 1980s. In March 1990,
violence erupted between ethnic Hungarians and Romanians in the city of Târgu
Mureş/Marosvásárhely. While the clash was ostensibly about local issues, it signaled
wider tensions regarding the status of Transylvania and its Hungarian population.
Aspirations for the return of Transylvania (and southern Slovakia) to Hungary has
63
remained a strong rhetorical element in Hungarian politics, but in Romania, autonomy

for two Hungarian-dominated counties was the maximum that the Hungarian minor-
ity could even try to bargain for. In reality, however, Romania’s Hungarians have been
unable to achieve the degree of autonomy that they had from 1952 to 1968 in parts of
Eastern Transylvania.183
Czechoslovakia ceased to exist as a country on January 1, 1993. In spite of the
fact that only a minority of Czechs and Slovaks wanted the dissolution, the so-called
Velvet Divorce went through after negotiations in 1992.184 The split followed exist-
ing political and administrative lines (a straight split between the Czech and Slovak
components of Czechoslovakia) and did not constitute a revision of external bor-
ders. Demands by Moravian separatists were rebuffed and disappeared quickly after
1993.185 Even better than a Velvet Divorce, East and West Germany went through a
“renewal of vows” if we are to use conjugal metaphors. The Cold War borders of the
two Germanies were dissolved and the former GDR was incorporated into a reunified
Federal Republic of Germany.186
Even though most of the revolutionary events leading to the exit from commu-
nism occurred with relatively little territorial violence, Yugoslavia constitutes a major
exception. The last Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, Ante Marković (1989–91), had tried
to hold the federation together against the pressure of dissolution. His vision of solv-
ing economic problems through austerity programs supervised by the International
Monetary Fund did little to change the anti-Yugoslav, nationalist paths political elites
in Croatia and Slovenia had embarked on.187 In Serbia, Milošević was increasingly
melding centralist rule with aggressive Serb nationalism. Territorial and nationalist
demands gained evermore credibility as Slobodan Milošević (Prime Minister of Serbia,
1989–97/2001), Franjo Tuđman (President of Croatia, 1990–99), and Alija Izetbegović
(President of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1990–96) struggled for different territorial solu-
tions. Slovenia, which contributed much more than its share to the federal budget had
increasingly fewer reasons to remain in the federation as Serbian discourse and policies
became more nationalist and centralist. Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and
Macedonia all opted for secession, and Yugoslavia, gradually reduced to little more
than Serbia, waged several wars to attempt to put a stop to the state’s disintegration.
Bosnia-Herzegovina, the multi-ethnic republic between Croatia and Serbia – said to
resemble Yugoslavia in miniature – saw a particularly bloody and prolonged struggle
as Croats and Serbs allied with their co-nationals in Croatia and Serbia, respectively,
while Muslim “Bosniaks” tried to keep the republic’s territory intact. The Dayton Peace
Agreement of 1995 divided Bosnia-Herzegovina into two entities: the Republika Srpska
and a Bosnian-Croat Federation, which holds 51 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s terri-
tory. Kosovo/Kosova’s campaign for independence (1997–2008) followed, a small-scale
internal conflict within Macedonia (2001), and the “divorce” of Serbia and Montenegro
in 2006.188 In every instance of fighting in the “Third Balkan War” in what became over
the course of the decade 1991–2001 “the former Yugoslavia,” the main motivation was
a form of territoriality. Whether it was about redrawing borders or ethnic cleansing, for
that decade the southern Balkans proved to be a major exception to the post-territorial
regime we have argued began in the 1960s. Similar predictions made in the 1990s
regarding the status of Vojvodina in the north of Serbia have so far proved wrong.189
The territorial disputes that have flared up after the Cold War are difficult to cat-
egorize, particularly in light of the Ukrainian crisis that began in 2014.190 Are we
64
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witnessing a shift toward a greater emphasis on territoriality yet again? Or are these
mere exceptions? Whatever the case, the shift in territorial regimes in the 1960s
hailed the advent of new spaces and territories that were neither bound to the nation-
state nor immediately “tangible.” Communications, technology, economic structures,
and supranational frameworks have become the arena for disputes and concerns that
cannot compete in this de-territorialized world.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have tried to set the scene for this volume by approaching the
region we know as East Central Europe from the perspective of territorial regimes
since 1700. While our main focus is East Central Europe we tried to provide a transna-
tional perspective; in other words, we have presented the region in terms of the devel-
opment of individual states but also from a broader regional viewpoint. This chapter
also highlighted the different scales and spaces on which disputes occurred as well as
the wider and alternatively micro contexts in which they took place. Looking at the
region from a bird’s-eye view we have seen three rather different pictures.
The first, represented by a map from about 1740 would depict the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Ottoman Empire as the largest
states in the region. This period was characterized by constant rivalry among these
and also, increasingly, with the Russian Empire and Brandenburg-Prussia. A snapshot,
taken in 1815 or 1850, would reveal a very different picture in which the vast lands
of the former Rzeczpospolita had been seized by its three neighbors. The Habsburg
Empire, at the center of major European conflicts, had not only survived but had in
fact consolidated its territories. Some losses, such as the Austrian Netherlands during
the French Wars, had been balanced out by the acquisition of vast border regions in
Southeastern Europe. Furthermore, since the early eighteenth century, Russia and
the Hohenzollern Monarchy had developed into major European powers, and by
1850 Eastern Europe was beginning to emerge as a concept, as demonstrated in the
language of contemporaneous sources.
Thus our two cartographic snapshots of the region in 1740 and 1850 would look
quite distinct and reveal different geopolitical power structures. Despite the unprece-
dented partitioning of an entire state – and the Polish-Lithuanian territories were vast
by European standards in that period – the trading, seizing, and affirmation of terri-
tories and state borders were part and parcel of the practice of warfare, diplomacy,
and international relations in early modern Europe. In other words, the territorial
changes discussed in the first part of this chapter – most importantly the weakening
and subsequent partition of the Rzeczpospolita and the whittling away of the Ottoman
Empire – were primarily caused by international dynastic rivalries and the partitions
were the ultimate result of military campaigns, diplomatic trading, and the emerging
concept of a balance of power.
In the nineteenth century a relatively peaceful period ensued and politics operated
according to a different set of rules and practices from the 1860s on. In East Central
Europe, however, “peaceful” does not quite describe the scramble for territorial con-
trol after the middle of the century, as great powers pursued their own interests in
backing various national movements for independence. So, while the international
order appeared relatively peaceful until 1914 – albeit with major e xceptions such
65
as the Crimean War or the Russo-Turkish Wars – the societies and spaces ruled by
multi-ethnic empires in the region became unsettled and prone to conflicts. These
were driven by the continued growth of nationalist movements that had begun in
the early nineteenth century but had accelerated by virtue of the intervention of the
great powers, as well as by processes that may be subsumed under the banner of
“modernization” and the rise of mass society. The spread of literacy and mass media,
urbanization, the rise of mass political parties, and the democratization of suffrage all
contributed to the strengthening of nationalist sentiment. These changes happened
not only in East Central Europe but on a pan-European and global level, but they had
particularly explosive implications for multi-ethnic societies, causing growing tension
and territorial conflicts both within and between multinational empires – particularly
where national groups straddled international boundaries.191
If we fast-forward to the post-World War II period, East Central Europe emerged
profoundly transformed by the two World Wars, into what many readers might rec-
ognize as Eastern Europe. It had turned definitively into a region with a large number
of smaller states and many more miles of international borders. We have described
the era between the 1860s and the 1960s as that of “right-sizing” the nation. We have
shown that space became “hot property” not just in the conventional application
of the word, but also on a smaller scale: micro and local spaces were often battle-
grounds on which larger issues were contested. Both external and internal spaces
were important to nationalist struggles during this era. Along the external dimension,
there were spikes, such as in the late 1870s, when territories and external borders
were being contested. At other times, battles over space turned inwards and were
fought on a small scale in cities, villages, and town councils for dominance over local
politics and commemorative markers. Only in the years just prior to, during, and fol-
lowing World War I did territorial disputes become actual wars. The extended World
War I period was studded by declarations of independence (Bulgaria, Montenegro,
and Albania), annexations (most notably the Habsburgs’ annexation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina), wars (The two Balkan Wars, World War I, the Polish-Soviet War), and
post-war settlements and treaties (the Paris Peace Treaties).
The extreme ethnic violence that occurred around World War II can also be
included in this framework. Even the mid-century genocides could also be seen as
part of the process of right-sizing nations even if their ferocity and extent places them
in a class of their own also beyond national violence as it occurred elsewhere. The
end of World War II is often presented as a wholly new chapter as some of the pro-
cesses of “right-sizing” the nation continued in East Central Europe, albeit in a less
pronounced fashion. It is only by the late 1950s and 1960s that issues of territoriality
no longer took center stage in European politics. The region, by then known only
as Eastern Europe, was characterized by its belonging to an ideologically constructed
Soviet Bloc, and, during the Cold War, concern for territorial status quo. As the map
“hardened” during the Cold War, Eastern Europe was incorporated into new supra-
national structures, such as the Warsaw Pact and COMECON. At the same time, the
global context meant that Eastern Europe also operated against other supranational
or global structures such as the IMF, Bretton Woods, NATO, and the European
Community. The apparent end of territoriality was made even clearer by the new
importance of information technology and communication networks, on the one
hand, and the division of Europe into ideological camps on the other. Even though
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territoriality was no longer at the forefront of politics, nationalism was by no means

dead, with the attendant tensions and ambitions. It remains to be seen how impor-
tant these instances of territorialism are, and how the post-communist states of East
Central Europe will balance their freedom to assert openly their national aspirations
with the European and global structures that many of them have joined, or in some
cases, still aspire to. Moreover, international financial and economic structures have
been exercising a growing measure of control over the region since the late 1970s.
Computer and information technology has also brought about a very different under-
standing of space, while the proliferation of multinational companies has further
undermined the primacy of national territoriality.
So is this the end of territoriality? Has East Central European space – on whatever
level – been settled once and for all? Future predictions are a matter for soothsayers,
yet a historical reading of the region tells us clearly: no. In light of recent European
and global developments and of growing voices of disquiet and unrest, it is important
to note that maps, borders, and geopolitical space more generally are never final.
Ultimately, that is what this chapter has been about: charting a long history of East
Central Europe serves as evidence that regimes of territoriality may shift, but they do
not cease to matter.
Notes
1 The authors would like to thank the editors, Irina Livezeanu and Árpád von Klimó, for
their patience, critical feedback, and careful editing of our chapter.
2 On Germany and central Europe, see Philipp Ther, “Deutsche Geschichte als trans-
nationale Geschichte: Überlegungen zu einer Histoire Croisée Deutschlands und
Ostmitteleuropas,” Comparativ 4, no. 13 (2003): 156–181.
3 On Russia, see Walter Moss, A History of Russia, vol. 1: to 1917, 2nd ed. (London: Anthem
Press, 2002), 226–250; Gregory Freeze, Russia: A History, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 87–113; on the political map of East Central Europe around
1700 see Virginia Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged (London: Longman,
2007), 18–44.
4 See Benjamin Schenk, “Das Paradigma des Raumes in der Osteuropäischen Geschichte,”
Zeitenblicke 2, no. 6 (2007).
5 On the concepts of Northeastern Europe and North as historical regions see Ralph
Tuchtenhagen, “The Best (and the Worst) of Several Worlds: The Shifting Historiographical
Concept of Northeastern Europe,” European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’histoire 2,
no. 10 (2003): 361–374; Norbert Götz, “Norden: Structures that do not make a region,”
European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’histoire 2, no. 10 (2003): 323–341; Hans
Lemberg, “Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert. Vom ‘Norden’ zum
‘Osten’ Europas,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 33 (1985), 48–91; Klaus Zernack,
Osteuropa: Eine Einführung in seine Geschichte (Munich: Beck, 1977), 51–59, 73–74.
6 Hendrietta Kliemann, Koordinaten des Nordens. Wissenschaftliche Konstruktion einer europäis-
chen Region 1750–1850 (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2005); Larry Wolff, Inventing
Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford
7 James Akerman, The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2009); Peter Haslinger, Nation und Territorium im tschechischen
politischen Diskurs 1880–1938 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2010).
8 Charles S. Maier, “Transformations of Territoriality: 1600–2000,” in Gunilla Budde,
Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz, eds., Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und
Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2006), 34; and Once within Borders: Territories
of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016), 6.
67
9 Maier, “Transformations of Territoriality,” 44, and 44 fn. 19.

10 This most recent period ends with a question mark to indicate the uncertain character of
this model as well as the open-endedness of transition. This open-endedness resonates with
more recent scholarship on European history as well as transnational and global history,
which share the view that the late twentieth century represents a phase of transition toward
new forms of territorial and spatial organization. See Ludger Pries, Transnationalisierung
der sozialen Welt. Sozialräume jenseits von Nationalgesellschaften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007),
and Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann, “Global History and the Spatial Turn: From
the Impact of Area Studies to the Study of Critical Junctures of Globalization,” Journal for
Global History 5 (2010): 149–170.
11 See Maria Todorova, “The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study
of Eastern European Nationalism,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (2005): 140–164.
12 Patricia Clavin, “Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global,
Transnational and International Contexts,” European History Quarterly 40, no. 6 (2010):
624–640; Michael Müller and Cornelius Torp, “Conceptualising Transnational Spaces in
History,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 16, no. 5 (2009): 609–617.
13 Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), 114–140; Gerd Rainer
Horn and Padraic Kenney, eds., Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
14 For comparable treatments by recent historians see Christian Gerlach, Extremely
Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010); Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte
des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 2009), ch. 2; Ulrike Jureit, Das Ordnen von Räumen.
Territorium und Lebensraum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition,
2012). Jureit especially operates with the concept of “territoriality” and looks at longue
durée perspectives.
15 Brendan O’Leary, “Introduction,” in Brendan O’Leary, Ian Lustick, and Thomas Callaghy,
eds., Right-Sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), 1–14, here, 2. See also the chapter “The elements of right-sizing and right-peopling
the state,” 15–73.
16 Larry Wolff and others locate the beginnings of “Eastern Europe” as a concept in the
eighteenth century, primarily based on English and French travel accounts. We suggest a
later point of inception, around the middle of the nineteenth century. See for instance
Lemberg, “Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs,” who argues for the emergence of
Eastern Europe along with the discovery of differences between Romance and Slavic lan-
guages from the 1820s onward.
17 Jenő Szűcs, “The Three Historical Regions of Europe: An Outline,” Acta Historica Academiae
Scientiarum Hungaricae 29 (1983): 131–184.
18 Lucien Febvre and Albert Demangeon, Le Rhin: Problèmes d’histoire et d’économie (Paris:
Gallimard, 1935), 16, 72, 170.
19 Tomasz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009).
20 Ulrike von Hirschhausen, Die Grenzen der Gemeinsamkeit. Deutsche, Letten, Russen und Juden in
Riga 1860–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006).
21 Vytautas Petronis, Constructing Lithuania: Ethnic Mapping in Tsarist Russia, c.1800–1914
(Stockholm: Alquist and Wicksel, 2007); Nico Randeraad, States and Statistics in the Nineteenth
Century: Europe by Numbers (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010).
22 Morgane Labbé, “Institutionalizing the Statistics of Nationality in Prussia in the 19th
Century (from Local Bureaucracy to State-level of Population),” Centaurus 49 (2007):
289–306.
23 Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (London:
Harper Collins, 2004); Markian Prokopovych, Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space
and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772–1914 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press,
2008); Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City
(London: Pimlico, 2003); Peter Oliver Loew, Danzig und seine Vergangenheit 1793–1977. Die
Geschichtskultur einer Stadt zwischen Deutschland und Polen (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2003); Harald
68
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Heppner, Czernowitz: Die Geschichte einer ungewöhnlichen Stadt (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000);
Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, Czernowitzer Geschichten. Über eine städtische Kultur in Mittelosteuropa
(Vienna: Böhlau, 2003); Robert Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest (DeKalb, IL: Northern
Illinois University Press, 2005); Nathaniel Wood, Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and
the Making of Modern Cracow (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Gregor
Thum, Die Fremde Stadt: Breslau 1945 (Berlin: Siedler, 2003).
24 Struck, Nicht West, 193–229.
25 Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); William Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews:
The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772–1914 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1980).
26 John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000); Benno Gammerl, Staatsbürger, Untertanan und Andere.
Der Umgang mit ethnischer Heterogenität im Britischen Weltreich und im Habsburgerreich 1867–1918
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010).
27 Maier, “Transformations of Territoriality,” 35; and Once within Borders, 188–205.
28 See Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics,
1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 80–151.
29 Ibid.
30 See Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914, 2nd ed. (West
Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006); and Philipp Ther, In der Mitte der Gesellschaft.
Operntheater in Zentraleuropa 1815–1914 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2006).
31 See Chapter 3 of this volume on continued transhumance migrations during the interwar
period to 1933. See also Katrin Steffen and Martin Kohlrausch, “The Limits and Merits of
Internationalism: Experts, the State and the International Community in Poland in the
First Half of the Twentieth Century,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 5,
no. 16 (2009): 715–737; Martin Kohlrausch, ed., Expert Cultures in Central Eastern Europe:
The Internationalization of Knowledge and the Transformation of Nation-States since World War I
(Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag, 2010); Martin Kohlrausch, ed., Technological Innovation and
Transnational Networks: Europe between the Wars (Munich: Beck, 2008).
32 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 1998),
61–62.
33 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011).
34 Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), and
Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1993).
35 Andrew Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from
Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
36 On “nodes” and “honeycombs” as the loci and spaces of transnational history, see Patricia
Clavin, “Defining transnational history,” Contemporary European History 4, no. 14 (2005):
421–439. A number of younger historians and Ph.D. candidates are currently working
along these transnational nodes, in particular in relation to Polish history. See for instance
Sabrina Lausen (University of Paderborn) on student corporations; Katharine Kreuder-
Sonnen (University of Gießen) on bacteriology and transfers from and to Poland between
1885 and 1939.
37 Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2007).
38 Hamish Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System, 1740–1815 (Harlow, UK: Pearson/Longman,
2006); on Brandenburg-Prussia see Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall
of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London: Allen Lane, 2006).
39 Warren Samuels, “The Physiocratic Theory of Property and State,” The Quarterly Journal of
Economics 75, no. 1 (1961): 96–111; Zbigniew Konczacki, “Economic and Social Thought in
Poland during the Period between the Partitions (1772–1795),” The Polish Review 39, no. 2
(1994): 169–183.
40 See Rafael Torres Sánchez, ed., War, State and Development: Fiscal-Military States in the
Eighteenth Century (Pamplona: EUNSA, 2007); Christopher Storrs, ed., The Fiscal-
Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Essays in Honour of P.G.M. Dickson (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009). On Russia and Prussia: Paul Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism
69
(London: Longman, 1986); Dominic Lieven, The Cambridge History of Russia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008); Philip Dwyer, ed., The Rise of Prussia, 1700–1830
(Harlow: Longman, 2000).
41 Jan Fedorowicz, A Republic of Nobles: Studies in Polish History to 1864 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), 2; Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 1
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 499–502.
42 Hamish Scott, Emergence of the Eastern Powers, 1756–1775 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 104; Jerzy Łukowski, Liberty’s Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the
Eighteenth Century 1697–1795 (London: Routledge, 1991), 121–185; Daniel Stone, The Polish-
Lithuanian State, 1386–1795 (Seattle: Washington University Press 2001), 245–267; Adam
Perlakowski, “The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Electoral Saxony in the Early
Eighteenth Century: Crisis and Cooperation,” in Richard Evans and Peter Wilson, eds., The
Holy Roman Empire, 1495–1806: A European Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 281–292.
43 Frost, The Northern Wars; Robert Frost, After the Deluge: Poland-Lithuania and the Second
Northern War, 1655–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
44 Piet Strydom, Discourse and Knowledge: The Making of Enlightenment Sociology (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2000), 106.
45 Aksan, Ottoman Wars; Christopher Duffy, Russia’s Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature
of Russian Military Power 1700–1800 (London: Routledge, 1981).
46 Matthew Smith Anderson, Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450–1919 (London: Longman, 1993),
166–170; Michael Sheehan, The Balance of Power: History and Theory (London: Routledge,
1996), 97–120; Frederic Baumgartner, Declaring War in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave, 2011), 115–146.
47 Charles Ingrao, Nikola Samardż ić, and Jovan Pesalj et al., eds, The Peace of Passarowitz, 1718
(West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011).
48 Clark, Iron Kingdom, 19–42.
49 Christopher Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (Chicago, IL: Emperor’s Press, 1996);
Christopher Clark, “When Culture Meets Power: The Prussian Coronation of 1701,” in
Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms, eds., Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 14–35.
50 Dwyer, The Rise of Prussia. See Dwyer, “Introduction,” 1–26, Hamish Scott, “Prussia’s
Emergence as a European Great Power, 1740–1763,” 153–170; Dennis Showalter, “Prussia’s
Army: Continuity and Change, 1730–1830,” 220–236.
51 Heinz Duchhardt, Balance of Power und Pentarchie: Internationale Beziehungen 1700–85, vol. 4:
Handbuch der Geschichte der Internationalen Beziehungen (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh,
1997), 7–19, 96–187.
52 Martin Smith Anderson, The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748 (London: Longman,
1995); Dennis Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London: Longman, 1996), 38–89.
53 Mark Danley and Patrick Speelman, eds., The Seven Years’ War: Global Views (Leiden: Brill,
2012).
54 Anderson, Austrian Succession, 210–214; Derek McKay and Hamish Scott, eds., The Rise of
the Great Powers, 1648–1815 (London: Longman, 1983), 171–177; Christopher Duffy, The
Army of Maria Theresa: The Armed Forces of Imperial Austria, 1740–1780 (Vancouver: David and
Charles, 1977); Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge
55 David Gordon Kirby, Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic World 1492–1772
(London: Longman, 1990).
56 Struck, Nicht West, 281–282; David Pickus, Dying with an Enlightening Fall: Poland in the Eyes
of German Intellectuals, 1764–1800 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001).
57 Scott, Emergence, 180–182; Norman Davies, God’s Playground 2 vols; Łukowski, Liberty’s Folly,
121–180.
58 Łukowski, Liberty’s Folly, 34–35, 157–202.
59 Davies, God’s Playground, vol. 1, 515.
60 On the invention of and discourse on Galicia see Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History
and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
61 Davies, God’s Playground, vol. 1, 511–546.
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62 See Chapter 5 of this volume.

63 Klaus Zernack, Polen und Russland. Zwei Wege in der europäischen Geschichte (Berlin: Siedler,
1994), 284–286; Jerzy Łukowski, The Partitions of Poland 1771, 1793, 1795 (London:
Longman, 1999), 138–41.
64 Bernhard Struck, “Vom unbekannten Nachbarn zum ‘Meisterstück der Staatsklugheit’.
Die Reformzeit unter Stanislaw August II, politische Berichterstattung und Transfers im
Spannungsfeld von Reformabsolutismus und Französischer Revolution,” in Agnieszka
Pufelska and Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile, eds., Aufklärung und Kulturtransfer in Mittel- und
Osteuropa (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2009), 293–320.
65 Łukowski, Partitions, 155–158.
66 Davies, God’s Playground, vol. 1, 511–546.
67 Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
68 Jonathan Grant, “Rethinking the Ottoman ‘Decline’: Military Technology Diffusion in the
Ottoman Empire, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 1, no. 10
(1999): 179–201; for an earlier account see Bernhard Lewis, “Some Reflections on the
Decline of the Ottoman Empire,” Studia Islamica no. 9 (1958): 111–127.
69 Christopher de Bellaigue, “Turkey’s Hidden Past,” The New York Review of Books, March 8,
2001.
70 Khaled El-Rouayheb, “The Myth of ‘The Triumph of Fanaticism’ in the Seventeenth-
century Ottoman Empire,” Die Welt des Islams 2, no. 48 (2008): 196–221; Karen Barkey,
“Islam and Toleration: Studying the Ottoman Imperial Model,” International Journal of
Politics, Culture, and Society 19, no. 1–2 (2005): 5–19.
71 Şevket Pamuk, “Institutional Change and the Longevity of the Ottoman Empire, 1500–1800,”
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (2004): 225–247; Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of
Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988); Yakup Bektas, “The Sultan’s Messenger: Cultural Constructions of Ottoman
Telegraphy, 1847–1880,” Technology and Culture 4, no. 41 (2000): 669–696.
72 Barbara Jelavich and Charles Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States,
1804–1920 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000); and Kemal Karpat, “The
Transformation of the Ottoman State, 1789–1908,” International Journal of Middle East
Studies 3, no. 3 (1972): 243–281.
73 Heather Wagner, The Division of the Middle East. The Treaty of Sevres (New York: Chelsea
House Publishers, 2004), 92–93. Şevket Pamuk and Jeffrey Williamson, “Ottoman
De-industrialization, 1800–1913: Assessing the Magnitude, Impact, and Response,” The
Economic History Review 64, no. 1 (2011): 159–184.
74 Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994).
75 Helmut Berding, ed., Napoleonische Herrschaft und Modernisierung, Geschichte und
Gesellschaft 6, no. 4 (1980) (special issue); Michael Rowe, From Reich to State: The Rhineland
in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
76 Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans vol. 1 Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), 110–111.
77 Ibid., 116–119, and M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 42–45, 53–54.
78 Jelavich, History of the Balkans vol. 1, 122–123.
79 Ibid., 186.
80 Maier, “Transformations of Territoriality,” 39.
81 Lemberg, “Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs.”
82 Ivan Berend, History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century
(Berkeley: University of California, 2003), 5–40.
83 See Brendan O’Leary, “Introduction,” in O’Leary, Lustick, and Callaghy, Right-Sizing the
State, 1–14; and Maier, Once within Borders, 11 and 191–198.
84 Scholars tend to draw a line from France to Hungary (or other parts of East Central
Europe). While this transfer of ideas is undeniable, it is also important to bear in mind
that other forces were also at play here. As such, we would suggest viewing the Hungarian
71
revolution 1848–49 as the onset of a battle over territory. See, for instance, András
Gergely, “The Hungarian Nationalities Act of 1849,” in Ignac Romsics, ed., Geopolitics
in the Danube Region: Hungarian Reconciliation Efforts, 1848–1998 (Budapest: CEU Press,
1999), 41–58; and George Hodos, The East-Central European Region: An Historical Outline
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 31. Jonathan Sperber treats the Romanian revolution of
1848–49 as a small appendix to the events in France. He devotes only one paragraph
to the revolution in Romania and explains it solely as the outcome of French thought
being brought back by Romanian intellectuals. See Sperber, The European Revolutions,
1848–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 121. A similar narrative is
conveyed in the Ulmer series on European history. Here, Romania, Transylvania, and
1848 are treated as an afterthought and by-product of France in 1848. See Wolfgang von
Hippel and Bernhard Stier, Europa zwischen Reform und Revolution, 1800–1850 (Stuttgart:
Ulmer, 2012), 255–256.
85 See Hodos, The East-Central European Region, 34–35.
86 For a comprehensive list of the twelve points see Arnold Whitridge, Men in Crisis: The
Revolutions of 1848 (New York: Scribner, 1949), 265.
87 Jelavich, History of the Balkans vol. 1, 324. For a more complete account of the “Transylvanian
Question,” see Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea
during World War II (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), esp. Chapter 2.
88 Jelavich, History of the Balkans vol. 1, 325–326.
89 Lawrence Orton, The Prague Slav Congress of 1848 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs,
1978), 38, 68, and passim.
90 See T. Mills Kelly, “Last Best Chance or Last Gasp? The Compromise of 1905 and Czech
Politics in Moravia,” Austrian History Yearbook 34 (2003): 279–301.
91 See Robert William Seton-Watson, “The Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich of 1867,” Slavonic
and East European Review 19 (1939–1940): 123–140, and Oszcár Jászi, The Dissolution of the
Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, c1929).
92 See Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London: Allen Lane, 2010) who suggests
reading the war as a religious war. For the Crimean war as a media war see Georg Maag,
Der Krimkrieg als erster europäischer Medienkrieg (Berlin: LIT, 2010).
93 Gheorghe Platon, Românii în Veacul Construcţiei Naţionale (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică ,
2005), 326–379; Jelavich, History of the Balkans vol. 1, 266; and Dumitru Ivă nescu, “The
Romanian Principalities, Russia and the Problem of Bassarabia,” Revue Roumaine d’Histoire
43 (2004): 141–147.
94 Keith Hitchins, Rumania 1866–1947 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 1–54.
95 There is a large body of literature on the emergence of Eastern Europe as a spatial con-
cept. Various scholars locate this between the end of the Enlightenment and the twentieth
century. See, for instance, Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe; and Franzinetti, “The Idea and
the Reality of Eastern Europe,” 361–368.
96 An excellent overview of the period leading up to 1876–78 is provided by Richard
Crampton in Richard Crampton, Bulgaria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 81–95;
see also Jörg Fisch, Europa zwischen Wachstum und Gleichheit, 1850–1914 (Stuttgart: Ulmer,
2002), 219–221.
97 See Richard Millman, “The Bulgarian Massacres Reconsidered,” The Slavonic and East
European Review 58 (1980): 218–231.
98 See, for instance, Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History (New York: Modern Library,
2000), 89–90; a recent book deals with the issue of western perceptions of the region in an
imaginative way by looking at British aid responses: Rebecca Gill, Calculating Compassion:
Humanity and Relief in War, Britain 1870–1914 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University
Press, 2013).
99 For a good overview see Alexander Lyon Macfie, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923 (Harlow:
Longman, 1996), Chapters 7 and 8.
100 See Mark Pinson, “The Muslims of Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian Rule, 1878–1918,”
in Mark Pinson, ed., The Muslims of Bosnia Herzegovina: Their Historic Development from the
Middle Ages to the dissolution of Yugoslavia (Cambridge, MA: CMES, 1996), 84–128; and Misha
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Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–2011 (New York: Penguin,
2012), 249–306.
101 Hitchins, Rumania, 53–54.
102 Crampton, Bulgaria, 123–127. For an excellent history of Bulgaria told through the history
of tobacco, see Mary Neuburger, Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
103 The best overview of these territorial changes can be gleaned from maps: see Paul Robert
Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East-Central Europe (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press,
2003).
104 On the influence of Serbian radicalism during this period, see Milan Protić, “The Serbian
Radical Movement, 1881–1903 – A Historical Aspect,” Balcanica 36 (2005): 129–151.
105 Hanioğlu, A Brief History, 147–151; Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996), 136–155; Marko Attila Hoare, The History of Bosnia: From the Middle
Ages to the Present Day (London: Saqi, 2007), 66–99; Elizabeth Roberts, Realm of the Black
Mountain: A History of Montenegro (London: Hurst, 2007), 250–301; Živko Andrijašević and
Šerbo Rastoder, The History of Montenegro (Podgorica: Montenegro Diaspora Centre, 2006),
111–135.
106 For a good history of the development of the public presence of Hungarian cultural figures
see Árpád von Klimó, Nation, Konfession, Geschichte: Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im
europäischen Kontext (1860–1948) (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2003), 126–128, 152–156.
107 See, for instance, Maria Bucur and Nancy Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past: The Politics of
Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to Present (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue,
2001). See also Chapter 10 of this volume on Memory.
108 For an excellent book on competing claims to the Bohemian Lands see Nancy Wingfield,
Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007); see also Mandred Alexander, Kleine Geschichte der böhmischen Länder
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 2008), 351–386.
109 Jeremy King’s study on Budweis/České Budějovice takes a similar approach by looking at
local politics and thereby shedding light on broader issues related to the late-Habsburg
Empire. See King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans, 80–151. For Silesia see James Bjork,
Neither German nor Pole. Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
110 Pieter Judson, “Nationalizing Rural Landscapes in Cisleithania, 1880–1914,” in Nancy
Wingfield, ed., Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 127–148.
111 See, for instance, Bernhard Chiari and Gerhard Groß, eds., Am Rande Europas? Der Balkan–
Raum und Bevölkerung als Wirkungsfelder militärischer Gewalt (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2009),
especially Chapters 1, and 7–13; Glenny, The Balkans, 233–248, 302; Mazower, The Balkans,
96–100. For a simple and helpful overview see Richard Hall, “Balkan Wars,” History Today
62 (2012): 36–42.
112 Mark Biondich, The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence Since 1878 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 67–69; Glenny, The Balkans, 298–302.
113 On the interaction between envisioning future territories and the actual outcomes of the
war see, for instance, Peter Schöttler, “Der Rhein als Konfliktthema zwischen deutschen
und französischen Historikern in der Zwischenkriegszeit,” 1999. Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte
des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 9 (1994): 46–67; Seegal, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands, 211–265;
Vejas Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000).
114 For an excellent analysis of the construction of grand narratives in East Central Europe,
see Monika Baár, Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Ch. 8 “The Golden Age.” She establishes the
importance of a rise-fall-rise narrative for the emergence and establishment of East
Central European nation-states. At various moments of the twentieth century, this assertive
grand narrative re-emerged. For instance, the so-called continuity thesis on Transylvania
has been the site of contestation between Hungarian and Romanian historians. Can
73
Romanians lay claim to a longer history in the region than Hungarians, one that stretches
back to Roman and even pre-Roman times? This dispute reappeared in the 1980s and
1990s as a vehicle for the simmering nationalist tensions between Hungary and Romania.
See, for instance, David Prodan, Transylvania and again Transylvania: A Historical Expose
(Bucharest: The Romanian Cultural Foundation, 1992). For a good overview of Hungarian
historiography and nationalism, see Balázs Trencsényi and Péter Apor, “Fine-Tuning the
Polyphonic Past: Hungarian Historical Writing in the 1990s,” in Sorin Antohi, Balázs
Trencsényi, and Péter Apor, eds., Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist
Eastern Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007), 1–99. Here, the authors detail the re-emergence
of Hungarian nationalist historiography during the Cold War, and emphasize the “revital-
ization” of medieval studies in the 1980s (24–29) as part of a grand narrative.
115 Steven Beller, A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
116 The special position accorded to specifically Transylvanian institutions, such as the
Universitas Saxorum (an administrative body guaranteeing the autonomy of Transylvanian
Saxons), was destroyed once and for all. See Harald Roth, Kleine Geschichte Siebenbürgens
(Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 105–119; and Jonathan Kwan, “Transylvanian Saxon Politics,
Hungarian State Building and the Case of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein,” English
Historical Review 127, no. 526 (2012): 592–626, for a good history of the problem.
117 Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nationalism and Ethnic
Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 4–5, 8.
118 For an excellent study on the history of the Banat of Temeswar, including the forgotten fate
of the brief existence of a republic after World War I, see Irina Marin, Contested Frontiers in the
Balkans: Ottoman, Habsburg and Communist Rivalries in Eastern Europe (London: Tauris, 2012).
119 James Koranyi, “Reinventing the Banat: Cosmopolitanism as a German Cultural Export,”
German Politics and Society 29 (2011): 99–101.
120 There are very few studies on the Banat Republic of 1918. It features in Irina Marin’s
recent book, Contested Frontiers in the Balkans. One of the few articles that addresses
the contentious nature of the region after its de facto disappearance in the interwar
period is Karl-Heinz Schlarp, “Zwischen Konflikt und Verständigung. Die Jugoslawisch-
Rumänischen Beziehungen 1918 bis 1938,” Südost-Forschungen 50 (1991): 191–213. Victor
Neumann also mentions it, but uses it as evidence of a liberal continuity in the Banat due
to its multiethnic and multi-confessional make-up. See Victor Neumann, Between Words and
Reality: Studies on the Politics of Recognition and the Changes of Regime in Contemporary Romania
(Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2000), 16.
121 See Wolff, Idea of Galicia. See also Wilfried Trillenberg, Galizien: Teilungen und
Vereinigungen in Mittelosteuropa in den politischen Umbrüchen seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin:
Forschungsinstitut der IWVWW, 2010).
122 The disappearance of Dalmatia (and the Dalmatian languages) was a process that had
already begun when the Republic of Venice ceased to exist in 1797. See Dominique
Kirchner Reill, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg
Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 155–245. On
Silesia, see Tomasz Kamusella, Silesia and Central European Nationalisms: The Emergence of
National and Ethnic Groups in Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia, 1848–1918 (West Lafayette,
IN: Purdue University Press, 2007).
123 Mazower, Dark Continent, 54; Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the
Jews, and International Minority Protection (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
124 Most commonly Jews are treated as national minorities in existing historiography. For a
more transnational approach see, for example, Zvi Gitelman, ed., The Emergence of Modern
Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University
Press, 2003); and Howard Sachar, Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great
War (New York: Knopf, 2002).
125 Most studies on ethnic Germans in East Central Europe tend to pick up the story either
during the rise of the Third Reich or, more commonly, after World War II. An excellent
overview of the interwar period can be found in Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East.
126 See Nada Boskovska, Das jugoslawische Mazedonien 1918–1941: Eine Randregion zwischen
Repression und Integration (Vienna: Böhlau, 2009).
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127 See Paul Robert Magocsi, The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848–1948
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
128 Literature on the Roma in the interwar period is rather thin. Most studies focus on the
Roma Porajmos, the genocide, during World War II. Where work does exist, it tends
to treat Roma according to nation-state. See, for instance, Viorel Achim, The Roma in
Romanian History (Budapest: CEU Press, 2004); and David Crowe, A History of the Roma in
Eastern Europe and Russia (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
129 See, for instance, Ulrike von Hirschhausen, “Die Konkurrenz von Verortung: Raumentwürfe
zwischen ‘baltischen Provinzen’ und ‘Latvija’ im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert,” in
Christophe Duhamelle, Andreas Kossert, and Bernhard Struck, eds., Grenzregionen: Ein
europäischer Vergleich vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 2007), 155–180.
130 See Case, Between States.
131 See King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans, 153–188; and Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone
Saints, 231–256.
132 For a more comprehensive overview of these movements and events, see Sabrina
Ramet, “Vlado Maček and the Croatian Peasant Defence in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia,”
Contemporary European History 16 (2007): 215–231.
133 For a good overview see Glenny, The Balkans, 428–436, 457–460, 467–477, 485–495, 529–536.
See also Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1984); Vesna Drapac, Constructing Yugoslavia: A Transnational History
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 96–147; Dejan Djokić, “National Mobilization in the 1930s:
The Emergence of the ‘Serb Question’ in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia,” in Dejan Djokić and
James Ker Lindsay, eds., New Perspectives on Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies (London:
Routledge, 2011), 62–81; and Dejan Djokić, Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
134 A collection of essays edited by Ignác Romsics illustrates this point: Romsics, ed., The
Dismantling of Historic Hungary: The Peace Treaty of Trianon, 1920 (Wayne, CO: East European
Monographs, 2002). Árpád von Klimó, “Trianon und der Diskurs über nationale Identität
in ‘Rumpf-Ungarn’ (1918–38),” in Andreas Hilger and Oliver von Wrochem, eds., Die
geteilte Nation. Nationale Verluste und Identitäten im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: R. Oldenbourg,
2013), 11–26.
135 For a good overview of the interwar issues in Hungary, see Miklós Molnár, A Concise History
of Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 250–293; see also Anikó
Kovács-Bertrand, Der ungarische Revisionismus nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Der publizistische
Kampf gegen den Friedensvertrag von Trianon (1918–1931) (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1997).
136 For the problem of Romanians attempting to reclaim urban areas in newly annexed
territories see Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania; for a case study of altering
public space in interwar Romania, see James Koranyi, “The Thirteen Martyrs of Arad: A
Monumental History,” in Dominik Geppert and Frank Lorenz Müller, eds., Sites of Imperial
Memory: Commemorating Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 2015), 53–69.
137 See, for instance, Tímea Veres, “The ‘Slovak Question’ after the Founding of Czechoslovakia:
The Role of Béla Tuka in the Slovak Autonomy Movement,” in László Szarka, ed., A
Multiethnic Region and Nation-State in East-Central Europe: Studies in the History of Upper Hungary
and Slovakia from the 1600s to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011),
197–225; Attila Simon, “The Colonization of Southern Slovakia as a Means of Constructing
a Czechoslovak Nation-state,” in ibid., 226–252; Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War:
A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2005); Wim van Meurs, The Bessarabian Question in Communist Historiography: Nationalist
and Communist Politics and History-Writing (New York: East European Monographs, 1994).
138 Some studies such as King’s monograph on Budweis make this point quite explicitly by
using the timeframe 1848–1948.
139 Vojtech Mastny, “The Historical Experience of Federalism in East Central Europe,” East
European Politics & Societies 14 (1999): 4–96.
140 See Holly Case, “The Strange Politics of Federative Ideas in East-Central Europe,” The
Journal of Modern History 85, no. 4 (2013): 833–866.
75
141 See Martin Lloyd, The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document (Stroud,
UK: Sutton Publishing, 2003), 118–121; and Monika Baár, “Grenzen in nationalen
Historiographien,” in Duhamelle, Kossert, and Struck, Grenzregionen, 77–98.
142 Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East, 134.
143 See Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle, WA: University
of Washington Press, 1974), 8, 80–87.
144 Joachim von Puttkamer, Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: R. Oldenbourg,
2010), 149.
145 Tadayuki Hayashi, “Masaryk’s ‘Zone of Small Nations’ in his Discourse during World War
I,” in Tadayuki Hayashi and Fukuda Hirashi, eds., Regions in Central and Eastern Europe: Past
and Present (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2005), 3–20.
146 See Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Penguin, 2009).
147 For a basic overview of the First and Second Vienna Award see Anthony Komjathy, “The
First Vienna Award (November 2, 1938),” Austrian History Yearbook 15 (1979): 131–156; and
Gyula Juhász, “The Second Vienna Award,” Danubian Historical Studies 1 (1987): 23–38,
respectively.
148 von Puttkamer, Ostmitteleuropa, 92.
149 The Anschluss was initially interpreted as the victimization of Austria. Scholars and poli-
ticians referred to it as “the brutal takeover” or even “the rape of Austria.” See Gordon
Brook-Shepherd, Anschluss: The Rape of Austria (London: Macmillan, 1963); and Kurt
Schuschnigg, The Brutal Takeover: The Austrian Ex-Chancellor’s Account of the Anschluss
of Austria (New York: Athenium, 1971). The dominant interpretation of the Austrian
Anschluss has been both reproduced and challenged, which has helped to take Austria
out of a passive role of victimhood and has allowed for an interpretation of this period as
a reassessment of Germany’s geography in both Germany and Austria. See, for instance,
Evan Burr Bukey, Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938–1945 (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). On Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland
see Monika Glettler, Ľubomir Lipták, and Alena Mískova, eds., Geteilt, Besetzt, Beherrscht: Die
Tschechoslowakei 1938–1945: Reichsgau Sudetenland, Protektorat Bohmen und Mahren, Slowakei
(Essen: Klartext, 2004). On the Memel region, see Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East,
Chapter 7.
150 Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 78.
151 See Gerd Ueberschär and Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hitler’s War in the East 1941–1945 (New
York: Berghahn Books, 2002); Ben Shepherd, Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and
Partisan Warfare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); and von Puttkamer,
Ostmitteleuropa, 87.
152 Omer Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2003), esp. ch. 1 “Savage War: German Warfare and Moral Choices
in World War II”; Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave, 2004); Jonathan Friedman, ed., The Routledge History of the Holocaust (London:
Routledge, 2011).
153 There is a very large corpus of literature that deals with the Holocaust in East Central
Europe, in different areas. It is only possible to mention a small selection of sources. On
Eastern Europe, see Snyder, Bloodlands. For a broader coverage both chronologically and
temporally, see Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and
Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2013), esp. Chapters 3, 4, 13, 19, 20, 21, and 25. See also Omer Bartov,
The Eastern Front 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Houndmills, UK:
Palgrave, 2001). On Romania see Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction
of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000);
Dennis Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2006); and Vladimir Solonari, Purifying the Nation:
Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania (Washington, DC: W. Wilson
Center Press; Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). On Hungary see
David Cesarani, Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary 1944 (Oxford: Berg, 1997);
Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den
76
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ungarischen Juden 1944–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, c2002). On Latvia see

Andrej Andrick and Peter Klein, The “Final Solution” in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation,
1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn, 2009). On Poland see Dieter Pohl, “War, Occupation
and the Holocaust in Poland,” in Stone, The Historiography of the Holocaust, 88–119. For the
Balkans see Paul Mojzes, Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth
Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 45–109. On Ukraine see Wendy
Lower, Nazi Empire-building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 2005). For a spatial overview see Martin Gilbert, The Dent Atlas of
the Holocaust (London: Dent, 1993). For a review of recent Holocaust historiography and
the impact of new research in East Central European archives has made on it, see Dan
Stone, “Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’: Holocaust Historiography after the Cold War,”
Patterns of Prejudice 44, no. 5 (2010): 454–468.
154 Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World
War II (Stanford, CA: Stanford Publishing, 2009), 1–8; and Ernst Presseisen, “Prelude to
‘Barbarossa’: Germany and the Balkans, 1940–1941,” Journal of Modern History 32, no. 4
(December 1960): 359–370.
155 See Andres Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), Chapter 6, and p. 131; Snyder, Bloodlands, 141–143; and Presseisen, “Prelude to
‘Barbarossa’,” 359.
156 Mazower, Hitler’s Empire (New York: Penguin: 2008), 132–133, and Presseisen, passim.
157 See Alex Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel, eds., Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front: Total
War, Genocide, and Radicalization (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012).
158 This was not something new. The Generalplan Ost represented a difference in scale. See
Guntram Henrik Herb, Under the Map of Germany: Nationalism and Propaganda 1918–1945
(London: Routledge, 1997).
159 See Bruno Wasser, Himmler’s Raumplannung im Osten. Der Generalplan Ost in Polen, 1940–1944
(Basel: Birkhäuser, 1993), 19–46.
160 The origins of the Cold War continue to be hotly debated. For a study combining the
end of the war with the beginning of the Cold War see Martin McCauley, The Origins of
the Cold War, 1941–1949 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2008), 53–73; and Richard Raack,
Stalin’s Drive to the West: The Origins of the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1995).
161 For an excellent and concise overview of these years, see Mark Pittaway, Eastern Europe
1939–2000 (London: Hodder, 2004), 17–33.
162 See Maurice Pearton, “Puzzles about the Percentages,” Revue des études sud-est européennes 33
(1995): 279–284; and Bideleux and Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe, 459–461.
163 For an overview of the post-war changes, see Magocsi, Historical Atlas, 160–168.
164 A forcefully made argument in this respect can be found in Alexander Prusin, The Lands
Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010), 201–223.
165 Brubaker et al., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 68–73, 80–83.
166 Mary Neuburger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in
Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
167 Prusin, The Lands Between, 224.
168 See, for instance, Ferdinand Mayer, Diercke-Weltatlas (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1974).
169 Władysław Czapliński, “The New German-Polish Treaties and the Changing Political
Structure of Europe,” The American Journal of International Law 86 (1992): 163–173.
170 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 90–94,
170–171; Michael Kaser, Comecon: Integration Problems of the Planned Economies (London:
Oxford University Press, 1967); Jozef van Brabant, “On the origins and tasks of the Council
for Mutual Economic Assistance,” Osteuropa-Wirtschaft 19 (1974): 182–209.
171 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Time
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 288–363.
172 See Chapter 9 for more details. On Hungary see Terry Cox, ed., Hungary 1956 – Forty
Years On (London: Frank Cass, 1997); and György Litván, János Bak, and Lyman Howard
77
Legters, The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt and Repression, 1953–1956
(London: Longman, 1996). On the GDR see Jonathan Sperber, “17 June 1953: Revisiting a
German Revolution,” German History 22, no. 4 (2004): 619–643; Christian Ostermann, ed.,
Uprising in East Germany 1953: The Cold War, the German Question, and the First Major Upheaval
Behind the Iron Curtain (Budapest: CEU Press, 2001); and Judt, Postwar, 176–177. See also
Joseph Rothschild and Nancy Wingfield, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central
Europe Since World War II, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Chapter 5,
esp. 123–129.
173 George Schöpflin identifies these patterns by decades; see George Schöpflin, Politics in
Eastern Europe, 1945–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), Chapters 4–8. On Czechoslovakia
1968 see the following collection of essays: Mark Stolarik, ed., The Prague Spring and the
Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968: Forty Years Later (Mundelein, IL: Bolchazy-
Carducci Publishers, 2011). On Poland see Jason Sharman, Repression and Resistance in
Communist Europe (London: Routledge, 2003), 94–125.
174 See, by contrast, Geoffrey Swain and Nigel Swain, Eastern Europe since 1945 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1993).
175 For a good collection of essays see Oliver Bange and Gottfried Niedhart, eds., Helsinki 1975
and the Transformation of Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2008).
176 Westad, The Global Cold War.
177 Ibid.
178 See Jane Hardy, Poland’s New Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2009); Johanna Bockman,
“The Long Road to 1989: Neoclassical Economics, Alternative Socialisms, and the Advent
of Neoliberalism,” Radical History Review 112 (2012): 9–42; Bockman, Markets in the Name
of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2012); and Tadeusz Kowalik, From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).
179 See Chapter 9 in this volume, and Donnacha Ó Beacháin, Vera Sheridan, and Sabina Stan,
eds., Life in Post-Communist Eastern Europe after EU Membership: Happy Ever After? (London:
Routledge, 2012).
180 Tom Gallagher makes this point forcefully in his work on Romania: Tom Gallagher,
Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong (Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press, 2009).
181 See Rebecca Chamberlain-Creanga and Lyndon Allin, “Acquiring Assets, Debts and
Citizens: Russia and the Micro-foundations of Transnistria’s Stalemated Conflict,”
Demokratizatsiya 18, no. 4 (2010): 329–356; and Prusin, The Lands Between, conclusion. It
should be said that the crisis in the spring of 2014 marked an exception to the comments
above. It remains to be seen whether the territorial revisions around Crimea and any
potential revisions in the rest of Ukraine herald the onset of the return of territoriality.
182 See among others Robert McMahon, ed., “Ukraine in Crisis,” Council on Foreign Relations
at www.cfr.org/ukraine/ukraine-crisis/p32540. Accessed July 29, 2014.
183 On Târgu Mureş, see Paul Roe, “Misperception and Ethnic Conflict: Transylvania’s
Societal Security Dilemma,” Review of International Studies 28 (2002): 57–74. On the issue of
Transylvania more generally, see Brubaker et al., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity.
184 See Nadya Nedelsky, Defining the Sovereign Community: The Czech and Slovak Republics
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), Chapter 7.
185 Boris Blahak, “‘Wir sind keine Tschechen!’ Über das mährische Selbstverständnis und
die Distanz zu Prag,” Halbjahresschrift für südosteuropäische Geschichte, Literatur und Politik 2
(2004): 41–59.
186 See Jürgen Thomaneck and Bill Niven, Dividing and Uniting Germany (London: Routledge,
2001), 57–78.
187 Bideleux and Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe, 521.
188 Ibid., 521–525; Judt, Postwar, 673–685.
189 For an overview see Glenny, The Balkans, 634–662; and Mazower, The Balkans, 128–136.
190 This was an ongoing situation at the time of writing.
191 Osterhammel, Verwandlung der Welt, Chapters 5 and 6.
78
S PAC E
Further Reading
Brown, Kate. A Biography of No Place. From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland. Cambridge, MA:
Burbank, Jane, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev, eds. Russian Empire: Space, People, Power,
1700–1930. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Delanty, Gerard. Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
1995.
Hirschhausen, Ulrike von. “Imperium. Ein Problemaufriß.” In Studienhandbuch Östliches
Europa, edited by Dietmar Neutatz and Thomas Bohn. Cologne: Böhlau, 2009: 228–234.
Ingrao, Charles, and Franz Szabo, eds. The Germans and the East. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue
University Press 2008.
Jelavich, Barbara. The Habsburg Empire in European affairs, 1814–1918. Hamden, CT: Archon
Books, 1975
Jelavich, Charles, and Barbara Jelavich. The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.
Lemberg, Hans. “Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert. Vom ‚Norden’
zum‚ Osten’ Europas’.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 33 (1985): 48–91.
Leonhard, Jörn, and Ulrike von Hirschhausen. Empires und Nationalstaaten im 19. Jahrhundert.
Göttingen: Vandenhoek 2009.
Łukowski, Jerzy. The Partitions of Poland 1772, 1793, 1795. London: Addison Wesley Longman
1999.
Maier, Charles. “Transformations of Territoriality, 1600–2000.” In Transnationale Geschichte.
Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, edited by Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver
Janz, 32–55. Göttingen: Vandenhoek 2006.
McKay, Derek, and H.M. Scott, eds. The Rise of the Great Powers 1648–1815. Essex: Longman, 1983.
Müller, Dietmar. “Southeastern Europe as a Historical Meso-region: Constructing Space in
Twentieth-Century German Historiography.” European Review of History/Revue Européenne
d’histoire 2, no. 10 (2003): 393–408.
Neumann, Iver. Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations.
London: Routledge, 1996.
O’Leary, Brendan. “Introduction.” In Right-Sizing the State, edited by Brendan O’Leary, Ian
Lustick, and Thomas Callaghy, 1–14. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Prusin, Alexander. The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Savchenko, Andrew. Belarus: A Perpetual Borderland. Leiden: Brill. 2009.
Schroeder, Paul. The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994.
Schultz, Hans-Dietrich, and Wolfgang Natter. “Imaging Mitteleuropa: Conceptualisations of
“Its” Space in and Outside German Geography.” European Review of History/Revue Européenne
d’histoire 2, no. 10 (2003): 274–292.
Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Perseus Group Books,
2012.
Struck, Bernhard. Nicht West – nicht Ost. Frankreich und Polen in der Wahrnehmung deutscher
Reisender, 1750–1850. Göttingen: Wallstein. 2006.
Sugar, Peter. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1977.
Ther, Philipp. “Deutsche Geschichte als transnationale Geschichte: Überlegungen zu einer
Histoire Croisée Deutschlands und Ostmitteleuropas.” Comparativ 4, no. 13 (2003):
156–181.
79
Todorova, Maria. “Spacing Europe: What is a Historical Region?” East Central Europe. L’Europe
du Centre-Est. Eine wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 32, no. 1–2 (2005): 59–78.
Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Troebst, Stefan. “Introduction: What’s in a Historical Region? A Teutonic Perspective.”
European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’histoire 2, no. 10 (2003): 173–188.
Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Zielonka, Jan. Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
80
2
RU RAL AND U RBA N W O R LD S
Between economic modernization and
persistent backwardness
Jacek Kochanowicz and Bogdan Murgescu
This chapter traces the economic development of East Central Europe and its social
consequences from the eighteenth century to the present. As shown in other parts of
this book, the historical geography of East Central Europe is a topic which is elusive,
difficult, and value-laden, and any decision for one or another ordering is to a degree
arbitrary. This chapter covers mainly the territories corresponding to present-day
Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and the
former Yugoslavia. Only when relevant, it touches also the eastern parts of the pre-
1795 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but it does not treat the lands correspond-
ing to present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia itself in any systematic way.
What justifies this grouping is the fact that, in the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, all of these states engaged in relatively late nation- and state-building, all
of them experienced state socialism, and all are presently going through the disman-
tling of the socialist state. While Austria and Greece could be treated as part of the
region in terms of physical location and some economic and social characteristics,
their political history suggests otherwise. Unlike Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and the
Baltic States, throughout the communist period the countries under consideration
were not incorporated into the Soviet Union and retained their own statehood, albeit
(with the exception of Yugoslavia) with limited sovereignty.
The processes unfolding in East Central Europe are placed within the broader con-
text of European and world economic development. The region is geographically and
culturally close to Western Europe, which at least since the time of the Enlightenment
has served as its frame of reference. It has been perceived – both by Westerners and
by its own inhabitants – as less developed or “backward,” and for the last two centuries
“catching up” to the West was a project of the region’s elites. Thus, the chapter starts
with the discussion of “backwardness” and locates the region’s problems in a broader
context, and then discusses the development process in chronological order.
Relative backwardness
In his 1994 book Inventing Eastern Europe, the American historian Larry Wolff argues that
Eastern Europe is a cultural construct of the eighteenth century French p hilosophes and
81
J acek K ochanowicz and B ogdan M urgescu
travelers who thought in terms of the opposition between civilization and barbarism.1
For their Renaissance predecessors, civilization dwelled in the south of Europe, the
descendant of classical antiquity, whereas the north was barbaric. The thinkers of the
Enlightenment turned this opposition by ninety degrees: for them, Western Europe
became an incarnation of civilization, while savagery was in the East. Wolff’s argument
is based on the analysis of the correspondence of Voltaire and Diderot with Catherine
the Great, the German princess and Russian Tsarina who made civilizing Russia her
mission, and on accounts of other Westerners who traveled through the vast terri-
tories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Hungary, the Ottoman Balkans,
and European Russia. The philosophes and the travelers pictured “Eastern Europe” as
inhabited by a poor and primitive peasantry, and as having very little commerce and
few towns, which were small and hardly resembled their Western counterparts. Noting
this widespread poverty, they expressed amazement and disdain for the extravagant
luxury and lavish conspicuous consumption of the magnate courts.
In his analysis of these writings, Wolff suggests that the picture the Westerners
painted was not necessarily a reflection of reality, being rather predetermined by their
earlier mental models and value judgments. Thus, perhaps, we should be careful of
believing what they wrote.
Wolff’s argument, a version of a claim that the West is imposing its “hegem-
onic discourse” upon others, holding itself up as the standard and the model to
follow, has validity. Indeed, the inventors of this discourse turned out to be quite
successful; many in non-Western parts of the world (however one would define
the boundaries of “the West”) accepted various versions of this discourse, from the
eighteenth-century idea of progress to the twentieth-century concepts of develop-
ment and modernization. For economic historians, however, the stress on discourse
is somewhat disconcerting. While it is hard to deny that ideas of progress and devel-
opment are culturally constructed and value-laden, it is also true that people live
longer rather than shorter lives, eat more rather than less, and experience less pain
in countries classified as “more developed.” Thus, Eastern Europe has accepted the
Western ideas of progress, although this acceptance has been gradual, uneven, and
neither comprehensive nor universal.
As a result, from the eighteenth century onwards, the West indeed became a
point of reference, and the “invention of Eastern Europe” was accepted by many
of those that had been invented. Comparisons led to stressing the differences. In
some interpretations, the differences were not sharp, but gradual, as in Alexander
Gerschenkron’s concept of a “degree of backwardness.”2 Backwardness serves as a key
concept for Daniel Chirot and other authors of the 1989 The Origins of Backwardness
in Eastern Europe.3 Scholars disagree over the causes of developmental differences, as
well as over possible solutions to underdevelopment. In this respect, the debate on
Eastern Europe is part of a broader discussion of global economic development that
began in the interwar period and gained momentum after World War II. This con-
tinuum was due in part to the fact that a number of the economists working on the
Third World after the war hailed from East Central Europe, and brought to bear their
earlier experience gained in “the other Europe.”4
The positions in these general debates ranged between two extremes, explaining
economic and social differences between the “developed,” and the “backward” or
“developing” world in radically different ways.5 At one pole is neo-Marxist World-Systems
82
R ural and U rban W orlds
theory, presented by the American historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein.6 The

capitalist system, originating in late medieval and early modern Western Europe,
expanded and produced an international division of labor and uneven distribution
of wealth. The “core” specialized in manufactured products and used wage labor,
while the “periphery” exported raw materials produced by servile or semi-free labor.7
The beneficiaries of this system were the core’s bourgeoisie, to some degree the work-
ing class of the core, and the landowning classes and comprador bourgeoisie on the
periphery. The main victims were the working classes (including peasantry) on the
periphery. It is very difficult, if at all possible, for a peripheral country to escape its fate.
Overall, the escape is to change the capitalist system into a socialist world-government.8
A radically different perspective has been offered by classical political econ-
omists at the turn of the nineteenth century, and by contemporary neoclassical
economists. According to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, wealth is a product of
the division of labor, and thus of trade and specialization. Free trade, within and
between countries, is thus necessary for the increase of the “wealth of nations.”
In the 1950s, economists began to conceptualize this issue in terms of “economic
growth.” Economic growth occurs when new portions of factors of production
(capital and labor) are added to their existing stocks. New generations of growth
theories, formulated at the turn of the present century, stress the role of productivity
of the factors of production in the long-term growth, and thus of human capital and
of innovations. Parallel to that, new institutional economics focuses on the role of
good institutions, and in particular on the well-defined and well-protected prop-
erty rights, for economic efficiency.9 Thus, the gap between rich and poor regions
is not just the result of exploitation by the core, but of the slow pace of adopting
innovations, the low level of human capital, and bad institutions. More specifically,
these interpretations explain the early successes of Northwestern Europe as due to
a combination of good institutions (some established already in the Middle Ages),
a specific pattern of demographic behavior (resulting in lower birth rates than in
other parts of the world), and a relatively high level of human capital (better edu-
cation).10 According to such views, poverty was a universal phenomenon until the
Industrial Revolution initiated the “Great Divergence” between the “West and the
Rest.”11 Adopting Western institutions and technologies allows the Rest to come
out of poverty and economic backwardness.
Historiography
While neoclassical-type interpretations have been recently applied to various parts
of the globe, there has been little, if any research along those lines for East Central
Europe. Western interest in this region has been limited compared with that devoted
to Russia and the Soviet Union. Particularly after World War II, the latter attracted
attention because of its role in the Cold War; for this reason Soviet politics, and also
Soviet and Russian history, were widely studied in the West, especially in the United
States. The countries of East Central Europe were at that time often treated as satel-
lites and institutional clones of the Soviet Union. The region played some role only
in left-wing interpretations of world history, developed mainly in the 1970s, when it
was treated as one of the peripheries, analogous to other regions located outside the
capitalist core.12
83
While international scholars have largely ignored East Central Europe, the same
is not true for locally-based researchers, particularly in some countries. Thus, most
of the research in the local languages is more accessible to specialists than to gen-
eralists. The beginnings of modern historiography in the region can be traced back
to the last decades of the nineteenth century, and are closely related to nation- and
state-building processes. Economic and social history played a subordinate role until
World War II. The heyday of economic and social historiography can be dated to the
postwar decades, particularly from the late 1950s to the 1970s. These studies were
particularly intense in Czechoslovakia (until 1968), Hungary, and Poland, where his-
torians were able to stay in close touch with Western scholarship.13 Early modern
economic history especially attracted gifted young historians, who knew that more
recent political history fields would not allow as much freedom of inquiry. The work
of the most prominent economic historians from East Central Europe – such as Iván
Berend and György Ránki in Hungary, and Witold Kula and Marian Małowist in
Poland – is closer (avant la lettre) to the World-System theory than to the classical/
neoclassical perspective.14
While Marxism might have guided the choice of topics, local historiography
was, to a large extent, under the influence of long-term positivist traditions of seri-
ous research based on primary sources. The result was most often solid (if boring)
descriptive monographs, and paradoxically, the nation remained the focal point of
East Central European historiography under communism.15 There has been much
less interest in economic and social history after 1989 than before, at least in Poland;
indeed, the interest in this field had waned already in the late 1970s. The neoclassical,
econometric approach to the economic past now dominant in Anglo-Saxon historiog-
raphy has never been tried by Polish economic historians.16 Thus, this earlier body of
work remains basically uncontested, if often neglected, because of the drift to fields
other than economic history.
East vs. West

Whatever one’s perspective, there is no controversy that East Central Europe remained
economically less developed than “the West” (the term used here as a convenient
shorthand) through the last 300 years, and that developments in the east of Europe
were strongly influenced by the West, as much in a strictly economic as in a cultural
sense. Thus, the processes that unfolded in the West are an obvious comparative frame
of reference for any analysis of what was happening more to the east. For further
analysis, we want to highlight one issue, important for the comparative analysis –
that of economic growth. A systematic gathering of data regarding national income,
gross domestic product (GDP), and economic growth started only after World War II.
Retroactive statistics, pioneered by Simon Kuznets, have been extended back in time
due to the efforts of Paul Bairoch and Angus Maddison. Needless to say, the more dis-
tant the epoch, the less reliable and more tentative these estimates, which often are no
more than educated guesses. Also, they are less reliable in cases of “backward” coun-
tries with poor public administration and data gathering services. Finally, GDP figures
should not be idolized, as they reflect just one aspect of an otherwise infinitely rich
reality. Countries with the same GDP per capita may be very different. With these cave-
ats, the figures estimated by Maddison and presented in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 show the
84
Table 2.1 The average yearly rates of growth of the world economy and selected regions,
1500–2000 (%)
Region 1500–1820 1820–70 1870–1913 1913–50 1950–73 1973–2001
World 0.32 0.93 2.11 1.82 4.90 3.50

World per capita 0.05 0.54 1.30 0.88 2.92 1.41
WE Total 0.40 1.68 2.11 1.19 4.79 2.21
EE Total 0.41 1.41 2.33 0.86 4.86 1.01
WE per capita 0.14 0.98 1.33 0.76 4.05 1.88
EE per capita 0.1 0.63 1.39 0.60 3.81 0.68
Source: Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: Development Centre of the OECD,
2003), 260, 263.
Note: WE – Western Europe; EE – Eastern Europe.
Table 2.2 GDP per capita 0–2000 (1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars)
Region 0 1000 1500 1600 1700 1820 1870 1913 1950 1973 2001
World 445 436 566 595 615 667 875 1525 2111 4091 6049
WE 450 400 771 890 998 1204 1960 3458 4579 11416 19256
EE 400 400 496 548 606 683 937 1695 2111 4988 6027
EE/WE% 89 100 64 62 61 57 48 49 46 44 31
China 450 450 600 600 600 600 530 552 439 839 3583
LA 400 400 414 438 527 692 681 1481 2506 4504 5811
2003), 262.
Note: WE – Western Europe; EE – Eastern Europe; LA – Latin America.
difference of the level of economic development in Eastern and Western Europe, and
the divergence in their pace of economic growth already at the end of the sixteenth
century. These differences are not so much a result of Eastern Europe’s backwardness,
but rather of the extraordinary success of industrialization in the West, as shown by a
comparison with two other large regions of the world: China and Latin America (also
included in the table).17 Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, the absolute,
but also relative, gap between Eastern and Western parts of the continent increased.
Table 2.1 shows also the increase of growth rates in the nineteenth century, the
result of the stream of innovation usually referred to as the Industrial Revolution.
Simon Kuznets called the processes unfolding after 1820, when the dust settled after
the Napoleonic wars, “modern economic growth,” which he defined as a result of the
systematic application of scientific knowledge to production.18
The growth process has been uneven over time. Due to the spread of industrial-
ization, the rates of growth were significantly higher in the nineteenth century than
before. The real boost came with the speeding up of innovation in the period between
1870 and 1914. The transport revolution (railway and steamships) and the communi-
cation revolution (the electric telegraph) facilitated international trade, investment,
and migrations. Today, this period is referred to as “the first globalization.”19 With the
outbreak of World War I came deglobalization, which lasted until 1945. The period
85
was marked by two major wars, and by the Great Depression between them. World
trade slowed down, the gold standard was abandoned, and many countries pursued
autarchic economic policies; this resulted in markedly diminished rates of growth.
The three “golden decades” of 1945 to 1973, in contrast, witnessed the highest rates
of growth ever recorded. Due to the spread of innovation in the previous period and
the development of new technologies, the integrating Western Europe was on its way
to catching up with the leader, the US But this extensive growth had its limits, and
its rates diminished in the next decades, although fueled by technological change in
data processing and transfer, and by intensified globalization.
Economic growth allowed for the rise of living standards. Most people lived under
the threat of starvation until well into the eighteenth century, which prompted
Malthus to formulate his theory of population, arguing for the inevitability of univer-
sal poverty. Agricultural progress in Europe, imports of foodstuff from overseas, and
industrialization of agriculture eliminated famines in developed countries around
the mid-nineteenth century. Further advances of industrialization provided people
with abundant cheap clothing and better housing, and, in the twentieth century, con-
sumer durables. First the United States and, after World War II, Europe entered a
stage of high mass consumption.20 Concomitantly, life expectancy increased through
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from around 30 to 40 years to over 70.
Developed societies passed the demographic transition – first the decline of mortal-
ity, which produced a rapid increase of population, later followed by the decline of
birth rates. People today live much longer than they did two centuries ago, and in
much smaller households, often as singles.
Social change was part and parcel of the process of economic development. In
pre-industrial Europe there were a few large cities such as Constantinople/Istanbul,
Paris, and London, centers either of power or of commerce, but the majority of
people lived in the countryside. That changed dramatically in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries when the villages depopulated or changed into recreational
areas, and most of the population now lived in towns and cities, or in suburbia. The
status-based character of societies in which social position was determined by birth
changed into a class system, in which wealth and merit mattered. The class structure
changed as well, with the industrial urban working class playing an important role
in a century extending roughly from 1870 to 1970, to be gradually replaced by more
heterogeneous white-collar middle classes. The period after (roughly) 1970 is often
referred to as post-industrial, as knowledge became a key factor of production, and
access to knowledge an important condition of economic and personal success. In
many countries, researchers and academics, entrepreneurs, managers, lawyers and
financial advisors, fashion designers, and computer programmers are the core of the
successful upper middle class.21
The process unfolding in the highly developed countries impacted the peripheries –
in our case, East Central Europe – in various ways to be discussed in the following
sections. Most generally, we may distinguish the flow of innovations (technological
and institutional), the trade patterns, and human migrations. East Central Europe
no doubt modernized, roughly following a Western European pattern, but often
in specific ways. Whether we take as a starting point the year 1700, or 1820 (the
beginnings of modern economic growth), the position of the eastern periphery
(as measured by GDP per capita, shown in Table 2.2) was worse than that of the
86
developed West. The pace of development (measured, for instance, by the rates of
growth of the GDP, presented in Table 2.1) was roughly similar to that of the West,
with the gap increasing especially in the years 1820–70, and during the late phase of
state socialism. As a result, the relative gap between East and West (per capita GDP
of the East as the share of per capita GDP of the West) was stable as well, except for
the period after 1973, with the average Easterner enjoying around 40 percent of the
Westerner’s GDP.
The Old Order

The term “Old Order” (Ancien Régime) came into usage to contrast life in France
before the revolution with what replaced it after its modernizing reforms. Ancien Régime
evokes institutions such as the monarchy, the Church, and “natural” social hierarchies,
the division of society into the estates, and the organizing role of well-established cus-
toms and traditions. It presupposes a society’s agrarian character and the slow pace of
change. In other words, it means a world before “modernization,” whether its agent
was the reforming state or industrialization. Despite the claim of Alexis de Tocqueville,
who in his L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) stressed continuity rather than change
after the revolution, the dual impact of the French and industrial revolutions is usually
treated as a convenient turning point for “the West.” For students of modern eco-
nomic growth, 1820 is when the effects of the Industrial Revolution became obvious,
once the economy was reconstructed after the Napoleonic wars.22 The turning point
for the eastern and southeastern parts of the continent is more difficult to pinpoint.
Serfdom had been abolished by the middle of the nineteenth century. The spread of
industrialization was uneven and its impact partial, and thus far-reaching social change
was only completed after World War II. Even in terms of political structures, “nation-
states” modeled on the Western pattern of political organization were i ntroduced into
the region fully only after World War I.
Until the twentieth century, the social world of East Central Europe was predom-
inantly agrarian.23 The peasantry constituted the bulk of the societies living between
the Baltic and the Black Sea, and the peasants’ primary economic goal was survival.24
What the peasantry survived on depended on local climatic and soil conditions.
Cereals were the basic foodstuff everywhere, the main source of carbohydrates and
thus energy. At the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains and in other mountainous
regions, the soil might be too poor and the weather too harsh to secure a livelihood.25
There, peasants engaged in various other activities, such as sheep herding, hand-
icrafts, and seasonal work away from home in downhill regions, or sometimes
smuggling and banditry. Intensity of production also varied. In the sparsely popu-
lated Hungarian plain, for instance, as well as in other parts of the region, extensive
cattle grazing was important.26 Close to large cities, cultivation was often more inten-
sive. In the ˙Zuławy depression region near the Baltic port of Gdańsk, the large urban
market provided outlets for vegetable and dairy products where settlers from Holland
reclaimed marshes.27 On the southern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, as well
as further south, grape growing for wine production developed. Some regions of
Bohemia specialized in hop cultivation and beer brewing.
While in most of the Ottoman territories small holdings of legally free peas-
ants prevailed, in Poland-Lithuania, in most of the Habsburg Empire, and in the
87
Romanian Principalities, peasants were part of a larger “feudal” economy. Land

belonged to the crown, the nobility, and the Church. Most of the peasants were ten-
ants, not owners, and in return for the right to use land they were expected either
to pay money rent, or to perform labor duties. Additionally, serfdom had gradually
strengthened all over the region since the sixteenth century; thus, not only did the
peasants have to pay rents, but they were not free to leave their villages, and in many
places they fell under the jurisdiction of the lord of the manor.28
The noble landowners derived their revenues from rent, but also from various
manorial monopolies, such as mills, inns, distilleries, wine presses, and salt provision.
In the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the nobility also developed its
own direct economic activity in the form of manorial farms (folwarks).29 Folwarks were
commercial enterprises, but based on servile labor, somewhat similar to plantations
in the New World.30 Much of the grain was sold at foreign markets, particularly in
Holland and Britain. The Western demand for Polish grain was an important stimulus
that strengthened serfdom.
Regions outside Poland were less connected to distant markets. Bruce McGowan
has argued that some parts of the Ottoman territories were more of a “middle
Danube cul-de-sac.”31 Yet, the peasants of these regions also needed money to pay
taxes and buy goods that they could not produce in their own households, so they
specialized in animal breeding and in various transport and military services. In
some parts of the Ottoman territories, provincial notables managed to establish
large chiftliks, estates based on the work of peasants constrained to various duties in
labor or in kind. Many chiftliks were market-oriented, their goods either targeted for
the consumption of Istanbul or of other major cities, for export, or for the use of the
Ottoman armies.32
Their legal status and revenues from the land put the nobility at the top of the
social order, but across the region, their role and size varied. They were particularly
numerous in Poland and in Hungary and much weaker in the Czech lands as a con-
sequence of the 1620 defeat of the Bohemian protestant nobility. In the Ottoman
Empire, there was technically no nobility, but segments of the Ottoman elites – both
from the military and from the so-called “scholars” (ulema) – enjoyed a quasi-noble
status due to their role in the service of the sultan and to their amassed wealth.33
The situation was again different in the Romanian Principalities Wallachia and
Moldavia, where the local boyars resembled the nobility of Christian Europe more
than the Muslim elites of the Ottoman Empire.34 Thus, the nobility was by no means
a homogeneous group.
The independent position of the Polish nobility, until the collapse of the Polish
state in 1795, was unique in the region. In the absolutist monarchies of Prussia, Russia,
and Austria, the nobility had been, over the course of the eighteenth century, grad-
ually incorporated into military or administrative state service. In Poland, no central
administrative apparatus had been established, and the military was almost uniquely
limited to the nobility’s militias. The Polish nobility developed a republican, egalitar-
ian ideology (at least for themselves), targeted as much against the possible absolutist
power of the monarch as against that of the wealthy magnates. The peculiar politi-
cal system which evolved from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, with
an elected weak king, is often referred to as the “commonwealth (or republic) of
nobles.”35 In practice, it was run by coteries of magnates, on which the lesser nobility
88
depended through clientelistic networks.36 Lesser nobles, in return for their political
backing of the magnates, could receive financial help, positions at magnate courts,
or leases of folwarks belonging to their patrons. Such relationships contributed to
a dysfunctional state that teetered on the verge of ultimate demise. Although the
nobility’s position began to deteriorate, almost everywhere in the region they con-
tinued to enjoy privileged positions, if not legally, then economically and culturally,
well into the twentieth century, until the establishment of the communist regime.37
All over the region, the prevailing agricultural technology in grain-producing areas
was the open field system with two- or three-field crop rotation. Strips of land belong-
ing to peasants were dispersed among fields belonging to the manor. Apart from
the arable land, the village economy included also commons – pastures, meadows,
and woods, and occasionally water resources, used collectively. The three-field system
was a medieval innovation brought to East Central Europe by Western colonizers. In
the Middle Ages it had been a great improvement, but at the end of the eighteenth
century it was obsolete; in the West it had been replaced by more productive crop
rotations. Agricultural innovations appeared in the East as well, but with considerable
delay. On the Polish lands, the pioneers, already in the seventeenth century, were
Dutch settlers.38 But the spread of these innovations had been, to a large degree,
hampered by the institutions of the Old Order, particularly serfdom and complex
property rights to the land.
The dissolution of serfdom started in the eighteenth century, but gained momen-
tum only with the Napoleonic wars.39 In the Habsburg Empire, the state tried to
restrict the extent of the nobility’s power over the peasantry, and Emperor Joseph II
even decreed the liberation of serfs. Yet, the trend toward social reforms came to
a temporary halt due to strong noble resistance. The French Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars had a tremendous impact on peasant lives. Shaken by its defeat in
1806, Prussia abolished serfdom in 1807; the same happened in the Duchy of Warsaw
(1807–15) in 1807. The abolition of serfdom was not always followed by the immedi-
ate enfranchisement of peasants with property; they were treated as free tenants, often
still forced to perform labor duties rather than to pay money rents. Prussia gradually
enfranchised peasantry between 1811 and 1850, compensating the landowners with
portions of the land formerly used by peasants. The reform greatly facilitated further
agricultural progress, as it was accompanied by land consolidation and ownership
individualization.
Peasant reforms were often forced on imperial governments by revolutionary situa-
tions and the threat of peasant unrest, as in the Austrian Empire, where peasants were
granted both personal freedom and rights to the land after 1848–49. Similarly, Russia
abolished serfdom in 1861, as a reaction to peasant unrest triggered by the Crimean
war (1853–56) and Russian defeat. Russia granted ownership rights to (already free)
peasants in their Polish province, the Polish Kingdom (1815–1918) after the failed
anti-Russian uprising of 1863, mostly to punish the Polish nobles who had led the
rebellion and to co-opt the peasants. While in Prussia the nobles were compensated
with land, in the Russian and Austrian Empires the compensation was monetary, col-
lected through the increased taxation of the peasantry.
While such reforms granted personal freedom and property to peasants, they did
not abolish the old regime in the countryside completely, as they left the large-scale
landed estates intact. Landowners had to convert to wage labor and more modern
89
management methods, but often, in a new guise, the old paternalistic relations pre-
vailed. The former masters retained real, if not legal, power over a village. A poor
peasant remained dependent upon his master in time of trouble, and a money loan
from the landowner often was repaid in labor – quite like in the old days.
In contrast to the position of the nobility and, in most cases, the state, the towns
and urban strata in East Central Europe were relatively weak.40 The biggest city in the
region was Istanbul, with about half a million inhabitants in the eighteenth century;
it combined its exceptional geographic location with the status of an imperial capital
city. Vienna, Warsaw, and Bucharest also benefited from their political roles as capi-
tals. Other cities were smaller and weaker, with the exception of those located in more
urbanized regions, for instance, Poznań in Wielkopolska (Great Poland) and Prague
in Bohemia. The reason for a weak urban life was poorly developed commerce, as
much of the economic life had a non-monetary, natural character. The folwarks were
particularly detrimental to Poland’s urban sector, which became even weaker during
the seventeenth-century wars. Noble grain producers bypassed the local towns, selling
directly to Gdańsk merchants. In the territory of Poland-Lithuania, which at its peak
reached around 900,000 square kilometers, only a handful of cities had more than
10,000 inhabitants, and the rest were small towns of one to two thousand, sometimes
difficult to distinguish from large villages. In addition, many of these towns belonged
to the magnates; consequently their inhabitants did not enjoy personal freedom, like
the dwellers of the royal towns. Except for the northern province of Royal Prussia
around Gdańsk, the free burghers had no political representation in the Sejm, which
was monopolized by the nobility.
During the pre-industrial period, people moved, to a large degree, from the “core”
to “periphery,” from the more developed and more densely populated West toward
East Central Europe. These migrations brought ideas, skills, and institutional and
technological innovations. Thus, in the Middle Ages, villages and towns were settled
according to German law (which stipulated personal freedom, rents in money, and
administrative autonomy), and construction technologies and three-field rotation
were introduced concomitantly by the same migrants.41 Dutch settlers then brought
more agricultural improvements in the early modern period. In the sixteenth century,
Italian influences were important, as in the eighteenth those of the French. In terms
of numbers, however, the most important were the Jews and the Germans. Expelled
from Spain, and persecuted in many Western European countries, the Jews settled
in parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and in the Habsburg and Ottoman
Empires. They were welcomed mostly because, in these economically underdevel-
oped areas, they were capable of providing financial services to the landed classes.42
During the eighteenth century, the Habsburgs also colonized significant numbers of
Catholics originating from Southern Germany on the territories they had conquered
from the Ottoman Empire. Russia also followed this policy, but preferred colonists
from Northern Germany.43
Until the end of the Old Order, Jews had very few, if any, opportunities for assimila-
tion. Other immigrants integrated more easily because of common Christian beliefs.
Thus Jews in the diaspora formed close-knit communities apart from the surround-
ing communities, by which in turn they were treated with suspicion bordering on
hostility. From time to time this exploded into violence or expulsion. Legally, their
position was that of a quasi-estate, with particular restrictions and privileges specifying
90
where they could live and what kind of economic activities they could engage in. They
played a role in the social division of labor consisting of inland trade, money lending,
and inn-keeping.44 As commercial and financial competence was deficient, the Jews
provided an important service to the landed gentry. That made them relatively secure
in the social niche they occupied until modern antisemitism developed in the s econd
half of the nineteenth century.
Modern economic institutions and the mentality focused on profit-seeking as
the main goal of economic activity, which are considered crucial for what we call
“capitalism,” were scarce in East Central Europe until the end of the eighteenth
century. The estate system proved to be an obstacle in the development of the
social and cultural conditions that could have “freed” the economy, in the sense
of the “Great Transformation” described by Karl Polanyi.45 A Polish nobleman,
for instance, could not legally engage in any kind of commercial pursuit other
than the grain trade, at the risk of losing his noble status.46 Nor was he motivated
to do so culturally.47 He manifested an attitude of superiority and disdain toward
merchants and traders. For burghers there was also little space to develop modern
capitalist activity. Markets were narrow because of the mostly natural character
of the peasant economy, burghers were not allowed to invest in land outside the
towns, and banks did not develop until the very end of the eighteenth century. The
richest among them thus tried to imitate the magnates’ way of life. Religion also
contributed to social rigidity. For example, some of the Jews had skills, connec-
tions, and capital, but leaving their niche was even more difficult for them than for
the Christian burghers.
Belated modernization
The pace of industrialization in England and then in the western parts of the conti-
nent did not escape the attention of some elites in East Central Europe already early
in the nineteenth century. Increasingly, the industrializing and modernizing West
became a challenge for the intellectuals and politicians in the eastern parts of the con-
tinent. As Janusz Górski has shown, economists in the Polish rump state established
by Napoleon, the Duchy of Warsaw (1807–15), sought policies that would diminish
the gap between their country and those of Western Europe.48 Throughout the whole
nineteenth century, as Jerzy Jedlicki has shown, Polish intellectuals analyzed the grow-
ing differences between the Polish lands and the West and hotly debated what would
be better: to keep the local traditions and the inherited collective identity, or to follow
the Western ways of progress.49
Industrialization turned out to be the most important modernizing force for East
Central Europe as much as for Western Europe, but it came to the East much later,
and in a complex, often indirect way. Moreover, it was preceded by another impor-
tant set of processes, related to the state. The Romanov, Habsburg, and Ottoman
Empires might be classified as traditional and agrarian, compared to Western eco-
nomic advances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in contrast to the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, each of the empires was “modern” in at least
one sense, namely that it was developing a strong military. Military organizations –
large-scale, goal-rational structures based on rules, regulations, and systematic
training – are based on a profoundly modernizing process, with consequences that
91
go well beyond war-making. Modern militaries demanded effective taxation, and,

increasingly, conscription. Thus, states expanded and professionalized administra-
tion methods and introduced population censuses and land cadasters. The germs
of these processes were recognizable already in the eighteenth century, when tra-
ditional patrimonial systems of governance began increasingly to be replaced with
more centralized, bureaucratic ones.
In the nineteenth century, especially in its second half, rapid urbanization con-
fronted public authorities with new challenges, such as managing space (road
construction, building and urban regulations, etc.), public health, labor regulation,
and social assistance. Like the modern military, all this was financed by taxes, and
taxation in turn forced the peasantry to sell part of their output, deepening their
involvement in the market economy.
The modernizing role of the state in East Central Europe in the nineteenth cen-
tury is similar to that in the more developed countries of the northwestern part of
the continent – but only to a degree. As in the West, this is a story of increasing size
and scope of the state’s activities and responsibilities, and its growing penetration of
society. The differences stem from the region’s relative economic backwardness. East
Central European societies were poorer, had fewer resources, and thus what Michael
Mann calls the “infrastructural power” of the state, its ability to effectively penetrate
society, was more limited.50 But there were other differences as well, stemming from
a specific political economy of the “backward” countries. As the political scientist
Andrew Janos notes, for the privileged strata of East Central Europe, the role models
and reference groups were their counterparts in the much more affluent countries
of Western Europe.51 For the rich landed gentry to live the lifestyles of the Western
aristocracy was relatively easy, given their means to maintain luxurious residences and
spend much of their time in Western resorts. The middle classes, however, had limited
opportunities because of the underdeveloped private sector; for them, state employ-
ment was an attractive option. This produced powerful political pressure to expand
the administrative apparatus less in accordance with the state’s real needs than to ful-
fill the economic ambitions of the middle classes. Thus, while the modernizing role
of the East Central European state cannot be denied, it is also important to note that
it was similar to the Western state more in form than in function. Paradoxically, the
first to gain independent status as “nation-states” were the poorer and economically
less developed countries of the Balkans – Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, Romania, and
Bulgaria. Not surprisingly, the overambitious development of the military and the
bureaucracy led them to misallocate resources, contributing to social tensions and
waste, as well as to severe fiscal crises.52
The beginnings of industrialization in this part of Europe date to the eighteenth
century. It was initiated by the landowning gentry, who organized textile, glass, pot-
tery, metallurgy, and other manufacturing relying on the resources and labor on their
estates.53 Technologically, these endeavors lagged far behind the mechanized stage
reached at that time in England. The process, hampered by the Napoleonic wars,
gained some momentum in the first half of the next century, but industry was still to
a large degree related to agriculture, as it involved first and foremost food process-
ing, particularly sugar refining, beer making, and beverage distillation. In the Polish
Kingdom, for instance, the distillation of vodka grew in importance when a technol-
ogy was introduced which used potatoes for producing spirits.54 As the landed gentry
92
established industries on their estates, they could thus achieve (small scale) vertical
integration of the production process.
In the second half of the century, industrialization gained speed, while still lag-
ging behind the West. As elsewhere, industry was not evenly spread throughout the
country, but concentrated in specific areas. In East Central Europe, such islands of
modernity were smaller and less numerous, and the contrasts between them and the
surrounding rural poverty more pronounced. In Austria-Hungary, Bohemia became
the most developed industrial region.55 Budapest grew into a large center of food pro-
cessing, particularly flour-making, around which other industries arose.56 Another
important emerging industrial region was the Polish Kingdom; textiles were pro-
duced in and around Łódź (a “second Manchester”), heavy industry in the Dąbrowa
Basin, and diverse industries, including machine-making, in Warsaw.57 Between 1870
and 1890, the Polish Kingdom became the second most developed industrial region
of the Russian Empire (after Moscow). In Galicia, in the Austrian partition, the oil
industry developed.58 The oil fields near Ploieşti, Romania, were developed at the
end of the century.59 Overall, however, the Balkans lagged behind the rest of East
Central Europe.
While industrialization in East Central Europe was less intense than in the leading
Western European countries, technologically the gap narrowed as the innovations
of the Industrial Revolution reached the East: the mechanization of textile produc-
tion, coal-based iron making, the steam engine, steel making, electricity, the chemical
industries, and, last but not least, the railways.60 As these new technologies demanded
large amounts of fixed capital, the size of plants and the scope of operations increased.
New industries were now organized in the form of joint-stock companies and financed
by modern banks.61 With no domestic capital and experience for these new projects,
much capital and expertise (as well as managerial and technological know-how) came
from abroad, particularly from France, Germany, and England.62
The most important driving force for industrialization was the market, both inside
and outside national borders. Since the end of the eighteenth century, powerful
voices in Britain (among them David Ricardo, one of the founders of classical polit-
ical economy), representing the interests of manufacturing industries, argued for
economic liberalization – for abandoning guild privileges and for free international
trade, and for abolishing the protection of domestic agriculture, which made food
expensive. Britain itself abolished the protective Corn Laws and Navigation Acts in
the late 1840s and pushed other countries to follow. Sometimes, the pressures for
liberalizing foreign trade predated the British turn to free trade; this was the case
with the British-Ottoman trade treaty of 1838, which opened the Ottoman markets to
Western goods and capital.63 The adoption of the gold standard by many countries
in the second half of the nineteenth century led to the establishment of a de facto sin-
gle currency, which facilitated international trade. The revolution in transport and
communication – railways and steamships, and Morse telegraph – enabled the rapid
increase in international trade and migrations. As a result, the internal markets of
East Central Europe became more integrated, and the region as a whole better linked
with the outside world.
The growing industrial centers in the region were producing mostly for internal –
national or imperial – markets furthered by the rise in population, and by the emanci-
pation of the peasantry.64 While peasants generally remained poor, after emancipation
93
their livelihood became more linked with the markets. Those who did become more
affluent sought industrial goods such as iron tools, kerosene, cooking utensils, and
textiles. The increasing urban population also depended on industrially produced
consumer products. The state was a separate but important market for industrial
goods, since in each of the countries of the region the military was modernized
and expanded.
The new industries profited from abundant cheap labor, but they were endan-
gered by massive imports of cheaper, and often better, goods from the West, and
some of them were even ruined by competition with the industries of more developed
nations. Local industrialists thus argued for tariffs, and persuaded some governments
to offer protection. The Finance Minister of the Polish Kingdom in the years 1815–30,
Ksawery Drucki-Lubecki, introduced such policies in order to encourage the private
textile industry; he also established state-owned iron works.65 In the second half of the
century, the theories of the German economist Friedrich List, who advocated pro-
tectionist policies in the case of less developed nations, first and foremost Germany,
gained popularity in the region. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, many
governments (including Germany) raised tariffs to shelter native industries. David
Thomas has called this “economic proto-nationalism,” prefiguring a tendency that
asserted itself fully in the de-globalization period after 1914.66
The emergence of domestic industries was an important – but not the sole –
outcome of the overall, pan-European changes that industrialization and globaliza-
tion triggered in East Central Europe. Of perhaps greater importance was the rising
demand for food and raw materials in Western Europe due to a growing urban popu-
lation, larger incomes, and rapid industrialization. With the development of modern
transportation, particularly railways, East Central Europe became part of the global
economy and together with many regions in other areas of the world turned into a
grain supplier for Western markets. Thus, despite domestic industrialization, the role
of East Central Europe in the world-wide division of labor resembled that of Latin
America or of the Western colonies in Asia or Africa – all suppliers of raw materials
for the more developed and faster industrializing Western Europe.
Incorporating East Central Europe into European and global markets caused the
restructuring of the region’s economies. For instance, the Hungarian plain, used for
cattle grazing in earlier periods, converted to grain production. The opportunities to
sell grain allowed the landowning class to invest, and to live in style. Daniel Beauvais
has shown with the example of Western Ukraine how export possibilities led to the
economic improvement of Polish landowners, separating them even more from
the masses of poor, and ethnically and religiously distinct Ukrainian p easantry.67
However, the more successful and entrepreneurial peasants, now free, could intro-
duce modern agricultural technology, and even buy some consumer products
supplied by industry. Periods of low prices, in turn, put agricultural producers at risk.
For example, the crisis of 1873 was caused largely by the arrival of cheap agricultural
imports from the New World, particularly the United States.68 Indebted agricultural
producers could easily go bankrupt. In order to pay their taxes, small peasants had
to sell even at very low prices, even if they could not keep enough produce for their
own consumption.
Agriculture was thus part and parcel of the overall modernizing process, and very
much affected by industrialization. Without a significant increase in agricultural
94
roductivity and output, industrialization (entailing massive shifts in the labor force
p
from food production to other kinds of employment) is not possible. Increased agri-
cultural productivity, however, also depended upon industrialization, at least in three
ways. First, the industrial sector increasingly supplied agriculture with fertilizers and
machinery. Agriculture was also increasingly supplied “from the outside” with another
important factor of production: scientific knowledge. Second, industrialization and
urbanization provided new markets for agricultural products. Third, the urban sector
provided employment opportunities for migrants from rural regions.
The beginnings of agricultural modernization predated industrialization in
Western Europe as well as in East Central Europe, and the increase of agricultural
productivity was a necessary precondition and a cause of the Industrial Revolution.69
The “Agricultural Revolution” originated in seventeenth-century Netherlands and
England and then spread eastward. Already at the end of the eighteenth century,
some landowners experimented with new crop rotations, new plants, new animal
breeds, and to some extent with machinery (seed drills in particular).70 The spread
of innovation intensified in the nineteenth century. The logic of modernization,
however, worked differently with the landowners than with the peasantry. The
former, lacking labor power after the emancipation of the peasantry, invested in
labor-saving technologies, machinery in particular (threshers, reapers, seed drills,
etc.). The increasingly land-hungry peasants invested money, if available, into land
acquisition, and time into the intensification of production. For peasants in the
northern parts of the region, one of the most important innovations was the intro-
duction of the potato.71 This labor-intensive crop – but with most of the work done
almost bare-handed in the autumn, after the grain harvest – engaged the surplus
rural labor, including women and children. For the poorer peasantry, the potato
replaced grain as the main source of carbohydrates, and, alongside improvements in
hygiene, allowed for a considerable increase in population and population density.
Famines became less and less frequent. A case in point may be the Polish Kingdom
whose population increased by a factor of four between 1815 and 1914, while at the
same time the per capita consumption also increased.72 The fact that the average
height of military conscripts increased in this period is further evidence of a rise in
the standard of living.73
The spread of Western-style industrial capitalism was somewhat slower in other
parts of the region than in the north. The quarantine system introduced in the
Romanian Principalities and the Balkans prevented the spread of epidemics, and thus
caused a significant population increase. In order to feed the more numerous popu-
lation, the cultivated areas were extended, and corn played an increasingly important
role. Throughout the whole region the rise of grain production hampered animal
breeding, which had flourished previously but had exhausted its potential by around
1900.74 At the same time, Serbia’s liberation from Ottoman domination after 1815
and Bulgaria’s after 1878 caused a temporary decline in urbanization and economic
regression, as many peasants preferred to care primarily for household subsistence.75
The social situation differed a lot between the peasant-dominated new nation-states
of Serbia and Bulgaria, and the Romanian Principalities (united in 1859 into the
Romanian nation-state), where the boyars managed to consolidate their power as
major landowners and to continue dominating the countryside in spite of the agrar-
ian reform of 1864. In Romania, even the landlords’ demesnes were cultivated by the
95
peasants using rather primitive techniques. Throughout the whole region, the lack of
capital combined with widespread peasant illiteracy to block the adoption of modern
agricultural methods.76
An overall assessment of economic modernization in the nineteenth century is
difficult. As Table 2.2 shows, the absolute gap between Western and Eastern Europe
(the difference of per capita GDP) increased, while the relative gap (Eastern per cap-
ita GDP as a share of Western per capita GDP) remained stable. East Central Europe
did not join the West but remained within “the Rest” in the unfolding of the Great
Divergence. Its development depended on raw materials exports to the West and on
imports of capital, technology, and know-how from more developed countries. All
this strengthens the arguments of those who treat East Central Europe as a periphery
of the West. At the same time, the region did develop during the nineteenth century
and clearly enjoyed economic growth, as indicated not only by the GDP estimates,
but also by various data related to nutrition, urbanization, and education standards.
Moreover, growth during the nineteenth century occurred faster than either before
or after that time.
Although East Central Europe remained predominantly rural, economic develop-
ment also brought social change. Noble landowners generally adopted more capitalist
modes of behavior, though in Austria-Hungary they retained their economic, social,
and cultural privileges well into the interwar period. In the Polish Kingdom, the gen-
try’s position was weakened for political reasons; the Tsarist authorities held them
responsible for the 1863 anti-Russian uprising. At the other end of the social lad-
der, the situation of the peasants improved due to emancipation. In suburban areas,
peasants became increasingly involved in the market economy, which led to some
betterment in their situation.77 In some parts of the region, particularly in Austria-
Hungary, peasants gained access to education, and the rise in literacy led to their
inclusion in the broader culture and to their “nationalization.”78 Already before World
War I, peasants became involved with modern forms of organization, such as coop-
eratives, credit unions, and political parties. An example is the peasant Stronnictwo
Ludowe (People’s Party) formed in Galicia in 1895.79 After the war, in most of the
countries of the region, the peasants became a major political force.80 On the other
hand, rapid population growth under conditions of limited urbanization resulted
in rural overpopulation, land hunger, and an increase in the numbers of landless
peasants. Toward the end of the century, East Central Europe began to “export” this
excess population to Western Europe and, increasingly, overseas, particularly to the
United States and Brazil.
Amid this slowly changing rural landscape, East Central Europe developed several
large modern cities. Budapest, Bucharest, Łódź, Prague, and Warsaw resembled, at
the turn of the twentieth century, their Western counterparts, on which they often
modeled their city centers.81 They had electricity, tramways (even, in the case of
Budapest, the metro), and modern sewerage and water supply systems. Their upper
middle classes enjoyed comforts of everyday life similar to those available in Western
countries. But, overall, the bourgeoisie was less numerous and played a lesser eco-
nomic and social role than in the more economically developed West. Parts of the
bourgeoisie in East Central Europe were newcomers from various Central and even
West European countries. The assimilation of such groups into local society was
favored by the abolition of the Ancien Régime’s formal social distinctions and the
96
overall process of modernization. Integration was easier for Christian foreigners, but
in some societies, it was also an option for Jews.82 In Hungary after 1867 many assim-
ilating Jews were accepted into Magyar society and stepped up the social ladder.83
In Łódź, most of the flourishing textile industry had been established by German
and Jewish entrepreneurs.84 In Romania, the Jews were very active in trade, industry,
culture, and the liberal professions, yet the 1866 Constitution prevented them from
becoming full citizens.85
The Jews were in the forefront of capitalist activity in East Central Europe due to
the human and social capital they had accumulated under the Old Order, when they
were restricted to the commercial niche; they were also compensating for the rel-
atively weak entrepreneurial abilities of other social groups.86 Antisemitism, which
at the turn of the twentieth century was on the rise all over the region, and all over
Europe, might have also been a response in East Central Europe to the economic
and social roles of the Jewish bourgeoisie. This was one of the manifestations of the
politics of an insurgent mass society, adopting a variety of new ideologies including
socialism and nationalism. Increasingly, ideologues associated Jews with capital-
ist exploitation. To this day, in the parts of East Central Europe where Jews were
numerous before World War II, people are more suspicious of the market economy
than elsewhere.87
Interwar interlude
The repercussions of World War I were manifold in East Central Europe. The societ-
ies and states of the region proved unable to sustain the drawn-out supreme effort
required by total war and several did not survive the conflict. The new borders drawn
at the end of the war also had direct economic implications.88 New frontiers and
customs duties disrupted imperial economic networks and connections and deter-
mined efforts to adjust to the new realities. The military and administrative build-up
in the border regions provided only a partial substitute to the dwindling of demand
from the large cities that remained beyond the newly drawn international borders.
In some cases, industrial concerns reacted by founding subsidiaries in neighboring
countries. For example, the Czech shoe manufacturer Bata established a factory at
Borovo near Vukovar in Croatia, thus dominating the market in the new Yugoslavia.89
In other cases, existing economic networks were taken over by the new political and
economic capitals. This was the case in Transylvania, where Budapest- and Vienna-
based banks had to abandon most of their subsidiaries, which were replaced by
Romanian banks.
State-building absorbed a significant part of available energies and resources, espe-
cially in the first part of the interwar period. The tasks were huge, especially in the
newly established or enlarged states. For example, Poland had to integrate territories
with three different legal systems, currencies, and infrastructure standards, while
also fighting wars with Ukraine and Soviet Russia; Greater Romania merged the ter-
ritories of the so-called Old Kingdom with previously Russian Bessarabia, previously
Austrian Bukovina, and previously Hungarian Transylvania; and the Kingdom of
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes included territories with four different railroad systems,
five currencies, and six legal systems.90 Besides providing a new unified legal frame-
work, state-building implied practical measures for making institutions function.
97
Solutions varied, from expanding the bureaucracies and legal regulations existing in
parts of the new states, to recycling parts of the remaining imperial administrations,
to situations where new institutions and administrative elites had to be built from
scratch. The states which had lost territories in the wake of World War I – Austria,
Hungary, Bulgaria – had a relatively easier task, but they also had to accommodate
significant numbers of refugees, especially former officers and state officials who
had lost their positions due to the demise of empires or territorial losses. Moreover,
almost all states of East Central Europe experienced significant inflation, and strug-
gled to stabilize their currencies for most of the 1920s, often at large financial and
macroeconomic costs.
Since agriculture continued to form the largest economic sector in most of the
East Central European countries, its structural problems and weaknesses were par-
amount. World War I had caused significant losses of man- and horsepower, which
led to diminishing yields. In some countries, the problems were exacerbated by the
disruption of property rights in the context of land reforms, consisting of the partial
distribution of the large landed estates among the peasantry. Besides the impact of
war and of agrarian reforms, the overall situation of this sector was aggravated by
the depression of world agricultural prices which severely affected grains starting
in the mid-1920s and up to the late 1930s, and which discouraged investments in
agriculture.91
Land reforms were enacted for different reasons in various East Central European
countries.92 They were meant to alleviate existing rural tensions, to prevent “con-
tagion” from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and to enlarge the economic and
social base of the new nation-states. Peasant parties, increasingly important political
actors, also pressed for these reforms. Although the social and political rationale of
distributing land to poor peasants was indisputable, its economic consequences were
often dubious. Parceling out parts of estates among poor peasants was not accompa-
nied by the inflow of resources necessary to increase productivity, thus constituting
a step back from market agriculture toward household self-consumption. Under
these circumstances, the performance of the agricultural sector was somehow better
in countries where agrarian reforms were either avoided or enacted only to a very
limited extent (Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia).
Except for Czechoslovakia, the urban sector was unable to absorb a significant
part of the continuing rural population growth.93 As a result, fragmentation of
peasant farms became more severe in the 1930s, the small increases in yields were
annihilated by the overall stagnation of productivity, and suffering caused by relative
rural overpopulation became particularly acute. Visible in some regions already in
the second half of the nineteenth century, rural overpopulation was caused by high
population growth rates, due to a decrease in mortality while birth rates remained
high and the possibilities of absorption of the excess population out of agricul-
ture into other economic sectors were limited. According to some estimates, by
1920 the share of this excess rural population reached about 35 percent in Bulgaria
and Yugoslavia, 30 percent in Romania, 20 percent in Poland, and 10 percent in
Hungary.94
Political elites in East Central Europe perceived economic development as part of
the nation-building process, which prompts historians such as Jan Kofman, Henryk
Szlajfer, and Thomas David to refer to the interwar period as the heyday of economic
98
nationalism in the region.95 Industrialization was part of the broader nation-building

effort of newly established or reconfigured nations, striving for economic strength
and self-sufficiency. Governments attempted to industrialize, using a variety of means,
from protective tariffs to direct investments, fiscal incentives, and/or non-tariff pro-
tection on the domestic market. The Great Depression enhanced protectionism
and direct state involvement in industry. In the late 1930s, several countries in the
region had to conclude bilateral trade treaties with Germany, which allowed them to
exchange foodstuffs and raw materials easily for industrial products, but also dragged
them into subordination to the Nazi Großraumwirtschaft plan, a German-dominated
European economic sphere.96
In the first half of the twentieth century, industrialization efforts produced
mixed outcomes. According to the calculations of Thomas David, while in the tex-
tile sector the combined share of five East Central European countries in the total
European production increased from 4.2 percent in 1910 to 6.6 percent in 1937,
their share in the steel production declined from 8.6 percent in 1910 to 4.7 percent
in 1937.97 In spite of some technological breakthroughs (for example, car produc-
tion in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary, or aircraft manufacturing in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia) and of some spurts of industrial growth,
East Central Europe’s level of industrialization compared with that of the United
Kingdom actually declined. Overall, East Central Europe was unable to keep pace
with the more developed industrial nations, as shown in Table 2.3.
Many factors impeded industrial growth. Scarcity of domestic capital combined
with often hostile policies toward foreign direct investments. During the 1920s
in many countries, the ideology of economic nationalism led to policies of capital
nostrification, targeted either against the transnational companies or against ethnic
minorities, particularly the Jews. The 1930s saw a general trend toward the retreat
of international capital. Domestic demand became more limited, due to the poverty
of the rural masses, and East Central European industries were usually unable to
compete on foreign markets, especially in the severe international conditions of the
depression years. The poor quality of the labor force and insufficient human cap-
ital (in terms of skilled labor force) were additional factors in the region’s overall
poor industrial performance, although most countries experienced some progress in
diminishing illiteracy, increasing the number of students enrolled in secondary and
tertiary education, and in reducing infant mortality.98 Although East Central Europe
Table 2.3 Per capita industrialization level of East Central European countries (interwar
borders) compared with UK = 100
Country 1910 1937 Difference
Czechoslovakia 52.1 42.4 –9.7

Hungary 29.9 21.3 –8.6
Poland 30.1 15.2 –14.9
Yugoslavia 7.6 6.3 –1.3
Romania 6.2 5.9 –0.3
Bulgaria 5.3 3.7 –1.6
Source: Thomas David, Nationalisme économique et industrialisation: l’expėrience des pays de l’Est (1789–1939)
(Geneva: Drozd, 2009) 253.
99
Table 2.4 Per capita GDP in East Central European countries during the interwar period
(1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars)
Country 1913 1928 1938 1950
Albania 811 926 ? 1,001

Bulgaria 1,534 1,219 1,595 1,651
Czechoslovakia 2,096 2,977 2,882 3,501
Hungary 2,098 2,415 2,655 2,480
Poland 1,739 2,117 2,182 2,447
Romania 1,741 1,225 1,242 1,182
Yugoslavia 1,057 1,314 1,356 1,551
2003) 100–101.
succeeded in catching up in terms of some of these social indicators, the lag com-
pared to the industrial nations was still considerable at the end of the interwar period.
Disparities persisted also among the various countries. Indeed, during the interwar
period, inequality increased in most societies in the region; in general, the urban
middle classes made swift progress in consumption standards in contrast to the rural
population and many urban dwellers who continued to endure poverty. These social
cleavages were strengthened both by the price scissors favoring more expensive indus-
trial goods as against agricultural ones, and by the redistributive function of the state,
which in most of the region drained resources from the countryside in favor of city-
based political, administrative, and military elites.99 An exception from this pattern
was Bulgaria, which experienced significant agricultural-based economic growth in
the late 1930s.100
Bulgaria’s evolution, and the overall better performance of Hungary, Poland, and
Czechoslovakia (in the 1920s in the case of the latter two countries), have fueled
speculation as to whether the region would have managed to catch up with the pros-
perous countries of the West, had they not been engulfed by World War II and by
the subsequent Soviet takeover and communist restructuring. Such discussions flour-
ished in the region already during communism, as a form of nostalgia stimulated by
the social and economic hardships of state socialism, and even more after the demise
of communism, when many intellectuals tried to find a “golden age” to link with. Yet,
the data allow no such idealization of the interwar period.101 Overall, the decades
between the wars were a period when East Central Europe experienced considerable
hardships, increasing social disparities, and a growing lag in economic performance
relative to the more developed industrial nations.
Socially, all of the countries of East Central Europe except Czechoslovakia
remained only partially modern during the whole interwar period. Most of their pop-
ulations were still poor peasants, many of whom were illiterate. Many landowners,
the descendants of the former nobility, enjoyed wealth and prestige and kept to the
traditional way of life in their country or town residences or, if they could afford it, in
foreign resorts.102 The urban working class was small in number. In Poland the total
labor force employed in industry and constructions was about 2.5 million in 1931 out
of a total economically active population of about 14.8 million, in Hungary 922,000
in 1930 out of a total active population of almost 3.8 million, in Romania 953,000 in
100
1930 out of a total active population of almost 10.7 million, and in Bulgaria 274,000
in 1934 out of a total active population of about 3.4 million.103 The bourgeoisie was
relatively weak and sometimes of minority origin, a fact that often provoked hos-
tility on the part of the majority population. Much of the lower middle class was
Jewish, and antisemitism intensified after World War I, particularly during the Great
Depression. The political elites of East Central Europe often perceived ethnic and
religious minorities as obstacles or threats to the consolidation of the new nation-
states. Although Western pressures and the regulations of the League of Nations
forced the new states to sign and observe the Minorities Protection Treaties grant-
ing certain rights to the minorities living within their borders, insidious forms of
discrimination and inter-ethnic tensions and resentments persisted throughout the
interwar period.104 Hungary was the first to introduce numerus clausus legislation in
1920, though this was not strictly enforced. In Poland, Romania, and elsewhere radi-
cal right-wing student organizations demanded similar limits on Jewish enrollments
and harassed their Jewish colleagues. Middle-class Christian youth belonging to the
“state-owning nation” in various countries were aware of the slim opportunities at
their disposal due to the slow pace of economic development. They looked toward
the state rather than the private sector as a possible employer, but finding jobs in
the public sector became increasingly difficult in the 1930s.105 For this and other rea-
sons the middle classes became the social base for authoritarian-bureaucratic regimes
which predominated through much of the region.
Communist modernization
World War II caused immense human losses in many parts of East Central Europe.
Timothy Snyder estimates the combined number of non-military victims of the Nazi
and Soviet systems, in what he calls the “Bloodlands,” a region that more or less corre-
sponds to East Central Europe though it stretches further east, at 14 million between
1933 and 1945.106 Most of the Jews from the region, as well as many deported from
other parts of Europe, were exterminated, along with other groups of victims. Apart
from human devastation, the war brought material loss of infrastructure and hous-
ing, of industrial plants, of destroyed or abandoned arable land, of cattle and horses,
and of farming equipment. Destruction occurred in the course of military hostilities,
particularly during the advance of the Red Army in 1944–45 and the Germans’ fierce
resistance. The very nature of the war economy also amounted to devastation. The
Germans financed their own military effort by the far-reaching economic and human
exploitation of the occupied territories. Similarly, the advancing Red Army often dis-
mantled factories on the territories it occupied and used looted machinery for the
postwar reconstruction of the devastated Soviet Union. Thus, the societies of East
Central Europe were much poorer after the war than before.
In some places, such as eastern Poland and Romania, armed resistance to the
communists continued until the end of the 1940s, bringing even more deaths. The
particularly high number of middle class war victims amounted to a huge loss of
human capital. The surviving population was impoverished and exhausted. Large-
scale forced resettlement added to the overall misery. Wartime and postwar population
movements included deportations, fleeing refugees, and the expulsion of Germans
from postwar Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, followed – in the Polish case – by
101
the resettlement of people from the eastern parts of the country now incorporated
into the USSR, into the western territories annexed from Germany. The war thus
started a process of far-reaching social change that the communist regime continued
to engineer.107 Former elites and middle classes disappeared or lost their positions,
making room for the social mobility of new classes. Despite the defeat of the Nazis
and their allies, states became ethnically homogenized, which helped to legitimize
the new regimes in nationalist terms. Also, by shattering established institutions and
social hierarchies, the war made it easier for communist parties, acting under the
protection of the Red Army, to reach and consolidate power.108
The Germans’ defeat at the hands of the Red Army in 1943–45 allowed the Soviet
Union to take over militarily and to exert political control in most parts of East
Central Europe; a partial exception was Yugoslavia, which was liberated mainly by
the local communist-led resistance movement. Pro-Soviet governments were imposed
in all countries, and considerable economic compensation was extracted from Nazi
Germany’s former allies. In fact, this was only a part of the economic substance drained
by the Soviet Union, which included various requisitions and lootings by the Soviet
occupation troops, as well as the organization of several joint ventures which placed
under Soviet control the basic economic resources of the occupied countries.109 In
1947–48, when relations with the West deteriorated globally and gradually led to
the Cold War, the Soviet Union ended the various compromise arrangements with
segments of the existing political elites in the East Central European countries and
imposed the radical economic and political model of Soviet communism.110 Striving
toward total control over society and the economy, the communist party-states
throughout the bloc moved to nationalize without compensation industry and most
of the service sector, and to collectivize a large part of agriculture.
Central planning and close political control over production aimed to swiftly
change the existing economic and social structures, to foster ambitious industriali-
zation programs, to bolster the number and social weight of industrial workers, and
thus to strengthen the economic and social base of the communist regimes. As most
countries in the region were largely agricultural and relatively backward, communist
rule can be regarded as a specific form of “developmental dictatorship.” In the short
run, that is, the first fifteen to twenty years, the results of communist modernization
policies may have seemed impressive. In the longer run, however, they led to misde-
velopment, stagnation, and crisis.
Political command over resource allocation was a key aspect of this form of devel-
opment policy.111 Basing their actions on the experience of capitalist countries in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and on the Soviet experience of
the 1930s, economic planners in East Central Europe increased the inputs of labor
and capital into industry. Like the Soviets before them, they expected that massive
investment into producer goods industries would foster a “great leap forward” in
industrialization.112 Expanding the military potential was part of this overall develop-
mental strategy, which also drained scarce material resources and skilled labor from
other branches of industry. Most investment went to heavy industry, especially met-
allurgy, to the neglect of consumer goods and consumption in general. The shift of
labor power from agriculture to industry and the mobilization of women for work
outside the household greatly expanded the industrial labor force. Employment rates
in state-provided services such as education and health care also rose.
102
To a considerable extent, but with significant economic and social costs, these
policies implemented in the first decades of communist rule produced impressive
tangible results. New industrial plants emerged in all the countries of the region,
some of them becoming spectacular showcases of communist economic success.
Symbolically, the Soviet steel complex of Magnitogorsk, together with the “socialist
city” built close to it, became a model both economically and as a whole way of life
to be emulated all over the region.113 Nowa Huta in Poland, Eisenhüttenstadt (orig-
inally Stalinstadt) in the GDR, Kunčice in Czechoslovakia, Dunaújváros (1951–61
Sztálinváros) in Hungary, and Pernik (1949–62 Dimitrovo) in Bulgaria were local
variations on this model.114 From 1950 to 1970, industrial production increased five
times in Czechoslovakia, six times in Yugoslavia, seven times in East Germany, and
eleven times in Romania and Bulgaria.115 Industry’s share in the overall economy
expanded significantly, reaching levels between 50 percent (Yugoslavia) and 75 percent
(Czechoslovakia) of GDP by 1980.116
As a result, agriculture faced a twofold pressure, having to provide both the
labor and the food and raw materials for the development of industry. The drain
of resources was engineered via a massive restructuring of both property relations
and the organization of production. The Soviet model inspired massive collectivi-
zation starting in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1950s.117 Peasants were
forced to surrender their plots and to join the so-called producers’ cooperatives with
the exception of Yugoslavia and Poland where, for political reasons, the collectiviza-
tion drive was abandoned in the early 1950s and after 1956, respectively.118 Hungary
experimented with the rural economy, increasingly allowing a degree of individual
entrepreneurship within the collective system.119 Overall, depriving peasant families
of private land was also a means to encourage their younger members to search for
employment in industry and services, and thus to ease agricultural overpopulation by
migration to towns.120
In agriculture proper, the ratio between labor and capital inputs gradually shifted.
The consolidation of plots allowed even moderate inputs of modern machinery,
chemical fertilizers, and better seed to achieve significant increases in productivity,
especially in the cultivation of grains and other crops better suited to the large farms.
Modern animal husbandry contributed to an increase in meat and dairy production.
For the region as a whole, net agricultural output more than doubled from the late
1940s to the 1980s, and yet the productivity lag of East Central Europe relative to the
fast-developing Western European agriculture increased.121 Moreover, the agricul-
ture of Europe’s socialist countries failed to provide for all the needs of the region’s
rising urban population.
The communist development pattern, though impressive in scale, lacked balance,
favoring investment over consumption and the production of producer goods over
consumer goods. Yet, after the first signs of social stress in the mid-1950s (the 1953
rebellion in East Germany, the 1956 riots in Poland, and the revolution in Hungary),
and in the more liberalized political climate after Stalin’s death in 1953 and after
Khrushchev’s partial condemnation of his crimes in 1956, local leaders concluded
that some improvement in the population’s living standards was necessary for political
stability.122 This shift deepened in the 1960s and 1970s, when, due to the gradual eas-
ing of Cold War tensions, the citizens of East Central Europe became more exposed
to the demonstration effect of the consumerist West.123 Already in the late 1950s more
103
resources began to be channeled toward housing development, food processing, and

durable consumer goods such as radio sets and simple washing machines; by the
1970s color TV sets and even cars became available. Given the low starting points
of most of the region, the opportunities made possible by electrification, and the
relative advantages of urbanization, a large part of the population experienced sig-
nificant progress. For people coming from poor villages or urban slums, the move
to socialist-era apartment blocks meant access to an enlarged living area, indoor
plumbing, central heating, electric household appliances, and many other facilities
that compared positively to their previous housing. The policy of full employment
(indeed, ideologically, work was now a duty), together with subsidized prices for basic
necessities and the partial rationing of goods and services guaranteed basic needs and
a modicum of social security. The regime also granted access to free education, med-
ical care, and paid vacations.124 Many workplaces offered their employees housing,
clinics, nurseries, and vacation resorts, thus bolstering the sense of cradle-to-grave
social security.125 The more affluent members of the socialist middle class enjoyed
modest private country retreats, cars, and vacation trips to other socialist countries.
Most of the population experienced rising living standards starting in the late 1950s
and continuing throughout the 1960s and most of the 1970s.
Yet this program also had its dark side. Full employment and low prices were
accompanied by persistent shortages, shoddy consumer goods, and poor quality
state-provided services. In his Economics of Shortage, János Kornai gave a compre-
hensive explanation of the mechanisms that led to systemic shortages, while also
coining the famous ironic term of the title for the socialist economy.126 Planners
tried to solve the problem of shortages through various formal and informal ration-
ing systems, for instance, by granting easier access to scarce goods to the ruling
elite, and to the workers of particularly important enterprises. Most consumers
engaged in constant searches for insufficient goods, queuing, informal networks,
and under-the-table payments, in order to supply households.127 The overall grey-
ness of everyday life under state socialism struck outside observers. For many of the
rural population, progress was slower and more modest, while for the descendants
of the pre-communist well-to-do social classes, the improvements were mitigated by
their relative social decline. Moreover, in spite of the real progress of the 1960s and
1970s, average living standards in the Soviet Bloc remained significantly lower than
those of the inhabitants of the more affluent capitalist European countries. This
difference became more and more visible as contacts across the Iron Curtain eased
in the context of détente.
Economic growth in the first three decades of communist rule was substantial,
but largely extensive; it relied on increased inputs of capital and labor, as well as on
some catch-up factors which were more effective in the less developed countries of
the region (e.g. Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia) than in the more developed (e.g.
Czechoslovakia). The fast pace of growth of the socialist economies suggested a supe-
riority of centrally planned economies in overcoming backwardness, an argument
shared not only by the Marxists from the socialist countries, but also by many Western
economists. The argument was reiterated recently by Oxford economic historian
Robert Allen on the basis of a comprehensive econometric study of the Soviet case.128
An alternative interpretation explains the fast growth in Eastern Europe of the 1940s
and 1950s as the process of postwar reconstruction.129
104
Some of the factors bolstering growth in the 1950s and 1960s were not sustainable
in the long run. For example, the increase in the labor force by attracting more and
more women to work in industry and in the service sector drew on a limited resource,
and the increase in productivity brought by shifting labor force from low-tech agri-
culture to industry was a one-time occurrence. Similarly, the economic dividend
implicit in the demographic transition, which allowed a temporary improvement in
the relationship between the economically active and the economically dependent
population, was also by its very nature limited in time.130 More sustainable were the
increases in productivity determined by the rising education levels of large parts of
the population, as well as by the improved health conditions of the labor force. At
the same time, the pattern of socialist economics focused more on quantity than on
quality or efficiency of output led to wasted resources, and hampered increases in
productivity.
The limits of extensive economic growth became visible in the 1960s, first in the
Soviet Union, and then in other socialist countries. Attempts to introduce decentral-
ization and/or market-oriented economic reforms (most advanced in Yugoslavia,
in Hungary after 1968, and in Poland after 1982) in order to reduce the waste of
resources and to stimulate a shift to a more intensive pattern of growth achieved a
modest impact, mainly because of the resistance of the encrusted structures, both
at the level of the central administration and of enterprise management.131 Thus,
hope in the idea of a “market socialism” waned.132 The brutal response to the Prague
Spring in 1968 showed that there was only a very limited space for reforms more
generally.133 In place of structural reforms, the countries of East Central Europe
tried to reap the economic benefits of détente, importing more advanced Western
technology in order to bolster growth.
The forerunner in this respect was Yugoslavia, which was forced to seek Western
economic assistance due to the split with the Soviet Bloc in 1948. The Yugoslav
Communists designed a specific form of development path, a “third way,” distinct
from both the Soviet model of communism and from the capitalist West. It included
abandoning collectivization, the mitigation of centralized planning by developing a
system of labor management of socialist enterprises, and by allowing market trans-
actions between these. Although socially attractive, this model proved to be only
moderately effective. Yet, Western economic aid, including significant transfers of
technology, the opening of Western markets to Yugoslav products, the development
of international tourism in Yugoslavia, and the remittances of Yugoslav citizens
allowed to work in Western Europe, enabled the Yugoslav economy to perform bet-
ter than other socialist countries.134 Although Yugoslavia experienced economic
difficulties in the 1970s and 1980s, the crisis of post-Tito Yugoslavia was not caused
by economic failure, but by the outburst and manipulation of frozen national
conflicts.135
The other socialist countries did not dare copy all aspects of the Yugoslav model,
but some communist leaders realized that they could benefit from improving their
economic relations with the West. In the early 1960s Romania decided to avoid
deepening economic integration within the Soviet-led Council of Mutual Economic
Assistance (CMEA, established in 1949) and diversified its external economic rela-
tions with the West, importing Western technology and hoping to find new markets
for its own products.136 Other socialist countries also expanded their economic
105
r elations with the capitalist world, financing their continued economic growth and
part of their domestic consumption by taking large loans from the West. In spite of
some success stories, more often than not the new imported technologies were imple-
mented inefficiently and failed to significantly improve the receiving economies’
overall performance. As with the economic reforms, the structures of the socialist
economy proved resistant to change.137
Rigidity became the nemesis of East Central Europe’s state socialist regimes.
Communist economic growth was extensive in nature, based on the input of large
quantities of resources in order to increase output. As long as basic resources were
cheap and abundant, it worked. But, the oil shocks of 1973–74 and 1979–81 signaled
that cheap energy was coming to an end, and more efficient use of available resources
would be the key to future economic success. The developed capitalist economies
started relatively early to cross “the second industrial divide,” i.e. to restructure in
order to reduce costs, to move from the Fordist production regimes toward flexible
specialization and the knowledge-based economy.138 They also intensified the shift
from industrial activities to the service sector. The socialist countries of East Central
Europe, which benefited from cheap Soviet oil and gas supplies, reacted sluggishly
to the changing conditions of the world economy. Therefore, even if the socialist
economies continued to grow during the mid-1970s, and appeared to be on their
way to catching up with the West, in fact the delay in structural economic reforms
meant that the crisis was only postponed, and it became even more serious when it
finally unfolded in the late 1970s and 1980s. Statistics, as presented in Figure 2.1,
show clearly that the region’s lag relative to Western Europe increased during the
1980s, when the economic performance of Poland and especially Romania declined.
Communist modernization turned out to be, in Iván Berend’s words, a “detour from
the periphery to the periphery.”139
Socially, communist rule in East Central Europe started with a reckless struggle
against the established elites which were already weakened in the countries occupied
by the Nazis and/or the Soviets during the war.140 With the consolidation of commu-
nist power, these elites were dispossessed not only of their political positions, but also
of large parts of their accumulated property (enterprises, land, even houses). Many
members of the old elite were imprisoned, and some paid with their lives for their
resistance against communist rule. Others went into exile. In the first postwar decade,
compulsory agricultural deliveries were designed not only to provision the cities and
industrial workers, but also to ruin the well-to-do peasants and to undermine their
leadership positions in their villages. At the same time, discriminatory regulations
prevented the offspring of the old elites from accumulating cultural capital through
higher education; however, youths from peasant and worker families were encour-
aged to go to universities and institutions of technical higher education.141
The assault on the old elites on the one hand, and industrialization, urbanization,
and widening of educational possibilities on the other, opened paths of social promo-
tion for new people, particularly those of peasant and working class backgrounds. In
this sense, communism was a social revolution of sorts, a democratizing process – not
in a political, but in a social, sense. The countries of East Central Europe became
more egalitarian than ever before, and the possibility for rapid upward social mobility
guaranteed the new regimes a modicum of social acceptance and legitimacy, at least
as long as economic growth and expanding opportunities for individuals allowed.
106
18.000
16.000
14.000
12.000
10.000
8.000
6.000
4.000
2.000
–
1950 1960 1970 1980 1989
Albania Bulgaria Czechoslovakia East Germany

Hungary Poland Romania Yugoslavia
USSR USSR Average of 29 WE countries
Figure 2.1 Per capita GDP of European socialist countries (1950–89)

2003), 101.
Over time, however, the class struggle relaxed and the state socialist regimes
became less discriminatory against the pre-communist elites and their offspring.
Political prisoners were gradually freed, with some countries even granting amnes-
ties in the early 1960s. Descendants of the pre-war elites were again allowed to
pursue higher education, and many of them were able to assume technocratic
positions and to benefit from the economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s. The
situation of peasants also improved. Poland abandoned collectivization after 1956,
while Hungary combined its continuation with the “embourgeoisement” of enter-
prising farmers.142 Even in countries that were less permissive, such as Romania,
Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, or the GDR, there was a relative relaxation of social
tensions in the countryside. Parallel to these economic and social changes, the
official ideology was losing its edge and appeal. Some of those who had joined the
communist parties in the conviction that communism would build a better world
and succeed in overcoming backwardness became disillusioned after Khrushchev
disclosed Stalin’s crimes and after the Soviets crushed the Hungarian revolution
in 1956, or, later, after the suppression of the “Prague Spring” in 1968. Since the
significance of ideology declined in favor of the increased weight of consumer-
ism, joining the party had become mostly an opportunistic gesture. Generational
change accentuated this trend; youth was becoming more and more attuned to
Western music, fashion, and values, and just as cynical about the official ideology
and policies of the communist regimes.
107
As long as economic growth allowed for improvement in individual consumption,

this arrangement functioned reasonably well. People who did not want to adjust to
the system struggled to emigrate, while those who remained accepted that they could
live relatively comfortably if they did not confront the regime. This situation came to
an end in the 1970s, when East Central Europe began experiencing serious economic
difficulties, and when the Helsinki Agreements of 1975 gave people hope that the
regimes would refrain from cracking down on dissenters. When this hope proved
futile, social discontent accumulated and erupted in the strike of the Romanian min-
ers of the Jiu Valley (1977), in the Charter 77 Movement in Czechoslovakia, and
especially in the activities of the democratic opposition in Poland, which reached its
apex in 1980–81 in the Solidarity movement. These movements were each quite dif-
ferent but an important aspect that they shared was the discontent of the new middle
classes (professionals and highly skilled workers) because of their blocked economic
and political aspirations.143 A new phase of East–West confrontation in the wake of
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the imposition of martial law in Poland
in December 1981 seemed at first to signal the effectiveness of repression.
Yet the regimes cracked. Economically, the gap between East Central Europe and
the West increased and became more and more visible. In some countries, especially
in Poland and Romania, shortages led to a significant decline in living standards.
Confronted with the discrepancy between official discourses and living realities,
people became disillusioned with whatever remained of communist ideology. The
political legitimacy of the regimes was in free fall, and dissidents became more and
more vocal. Even more importantly, the Soviet Union proved unable to sustain the
technological and military competition with the West, and in the mid-1980s the new
Soviet leadership around Mikhail Gorbachev realized that saving communism neces-
sitated both an accommodation with NATO and significant internal reforms. The
Soviet leadership now increasingly perceived their East Central European satellites as
an economic burden that had to be shared.
Responses of the smaller socialist countries to Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost
policies and to mounting domestic pressure differed.144 While Polish and Hungarian
communists used the opportunity to proceed with the reforms they had already
started, the leaders of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Romania resisted
change. In Poland, the regime negotiated power sharing at a Round Table between
February and April 1989; the parliamentary elections of June 1989 hastened political
change. In Hungary, similar negotiations shaped the transition to power sharing. In
East Germany and Czechoslovakia, mass demonstrations forced the communists to
surrender power. In Bulgaria, a palace coup failed to prevent the anti-communist
opposition from becoming more and more vocal, while in Romania the decision of
Nicolae Ceauşescu to shoot demonstrators led to a bloody revolution, which ended
with the collapse of the regime.
Post-communist Westernization
Enthusiasm and high expectations accompanied the demise of communist rule in
the countries of East Central Europe. The peoples of the region might have felt
that history owed them a fresh start, to allow them to erase the malfunctions of state
socialism and the stigma of underdevelopment. Yet it soon became obvious that the
108
e xisting economic and social structures remained a heavy burden; these, and the
world economy, would largely determine post-communist options, and limit the pos-
sibilities of autonomous development paths.
The consensus was that the goal of the post-communist transformation had to be
to allow the countries of East Central Europe to copy the political and economic
systems of the prosperous West as closely as possible. Included in this consensus was
the need to establish a pluralistic democratic system based on free elections and a
capitalist market economy. When it came to concrete economic policies, however,
the consensus waned.145 While it was obvious that the transition implied economic
change in order to raise efficiency and to manage the unavoidable opening toward
market forces, opinions differed with respect to the scope, rhythm, and the exact suc-
cession of measures to be implemented. The range of options was quite large, from
so-called “shock-therapy” implemented in Poland through the Balcerowicz Plan, to
more gradual and slower reforms applied in other countries, such as Romania.146
Yet, in spite of these differences, common patterns of economic transformation
emerged in the post-communist countries. The structures of the command economy
collapsed everywhere, and states were forced to devise market-oriented instruments
for macroeconomic stabilization, and new regulations and mechanisms to secure
property rights, the rule of law, and fair competition. Since the state had utterly failed
as owner and manager during the communist period, restructuring property rights
became a crucial prerequisite for establishing a new economic, social, and political
framework. Forms of privatization differed.147 The stakes were especially high for
ex-communist industrial technocrats, many of whom tried to acquire as much state
property as they could. In most countries of the region, privatization was handled
according to political and social rationales rather than economic efficiency criteria.
In some countries state-owned houses and apartments were sold at favorable prices to
the tenants. More controversially, voucher privatization schemes were implemented;
these generally proved only moderately helpful for citizens and inefficient to the
operation of the privatized enterprises. In agriculture, the socialist cooperatives were
dissolved and most of the land was returned to the former owners and/or to their
descendants.148 With parcellization and the disruption of the production processes,
output fell; in some parts of the region, subsistence agriculture saw a temporary
revival. Some state-owned farms were sold or rented to private operators as large
exploitations; this helped maintain production levels, at the price of increased social
exclusion, as most of the former farm workers lost employment. Industrial output
also declined severely in the early 1990s, aggravated by the collapse of economic rela-
tions with the other countries of the former CMEA. Exposed to Western competition,
many enterprises either collapsed or resorted to massive state aid. Unemployment
rose, and sweeping inflation plagued the region for several years. With limited domes-
tic resources, revival from the economic slump of the early 1990s depended heavily
on foreign inputs, especially Western ones.
Although unprepared for the swift collapse of the communist system, the West
welcomed it, encouraging the democratic transformation and the transition toward
a market economy. Its own role in the new geopolitical setting and Western involve-
ment in East Central Europe were unclear. Under these circumstances, Western aid
to post-communist countries was selective, determined by perceptions about the com-
mitment of these societies to democratic values and to free market economy, as well
109
as by the geographic and cultural proximity of the different countries. Yet, after a first
phase of significant differentiation, under the impression of the post-Yugoslav wars
and of the possible backfire of the severe economic problems of the post-communist
countries in the early 1990s, the West gradually acknowledged the importance of
providing more massive aid to stabilize East Central Europe and to integrate it into
Western structures and organizations such as NATO and the European Union. The
prospect of this incorporation was crucial in encouraging the governments of these
countries to continue reforms and to adjust their institutions to EU standards (the
acquis communautaire), and in enhancing the confidence of major companies to invest
in these countries. Direct foreign investments, which were very uneven in the early
1990s when Hungary and the Czech Republic benefited the most, increased signifi-
cantly in the wake of EU accession throughout the whole region. Western companies
took over much of the service and industrial sector, providing capital, technology,
and marketing networks, which fostered the global integration of East Central Europe
into the world economy.
Direct foreign investments helped the countries of the region to catch up partially
with the more developed European economies in the development of crucial services,
such as communications and financial services. The swift growth of the service sector
led to its becoming dominant in all countries, accounting at present for one-half to
two-thirds of GDP. The combination of less stringent environmental and labor market
regulations, relatively cheap labor force, and proximity to the consumption markets
of Central and Western Europe also encouraged Western companies to reallocate to
East Central Europe some of their labor-intensive industrial operations, helping to
stop the industrial decline in the region. Consequently, foreign investments were a
major determinant of the structural change of the East Central European economies.
Weak regulation and institutions went hand in hand with capital accumulation
and with the emergence of a somehow wild type of capitalism, similar to that in the
United States of the nineteenth century rather than to forms of regulated capitalism
prevalent in postwar Western Europe.149 Privatization and new entrepreneurial oppor-
tunities fostered upward social mobility, creating a rapacious class of nouveaux riches.
Corruption and social polarization increased, becoming much more widespread than
in the communist past; large-scale poverty and social exclusion were now the visible
signs of this polarization. Gender and intergenerational relations were affected by
the new capitalism that put additional pressure on the already strained family fab-
ric. Social and individual safety nets stretched to the limits or collapsed totally with
the upsurge of unemployment and inflation. Large parts of society, especially state
employees, workers, and elderly people, found their accumulated resources eroding
and their social status declining. All this led to frustration and despair for those who
were not among the winners of the economic transformation. The fact that former
communist apparatchiks and security services functionaries managed to capitalize on
their resources and connections to become successful capitalists added to the resent-
ment against the malfunctions of post-communism. Many disillusioned with the new
order aligned themselves with the revival of nationalism or to nostalgia for the stabil-
ity of the communist period. Populism became a constant feature of the new political
landscape.150
At the same time, post-communism also opened new horizons. Job volatility went
hand in hand with increased mobility of people. Before 1989, the communist regimes
110
generally tried to limit the cross-border mobility of their citizens. After the demise of
communism, restrictions on free movement were lifted but the West was unprepared
for this situation, and at first tried to limit the influx through visa requirements; in the
early 1990s, these hindered the cross-border mobility of East Europeans, but could
not stop them. Not everyone was barred entry: Germans from Romania and the for-
mer Soviet Union could return to Germany, and large numbers of refugees from the
war regions of the former Yugoslavia were granted asylum. Limitations were gradually
lifted as the EU moved to incorporate various countries of the region. Temporary
labor migration became socially significant and the Polish plumber and the Romanian
strawberry-picker served as the symbols of the presence of cheap East Central European
labor in Western Europe. They fueled Western anxiety and prejudice, although they
were evidently needed, and represented only a marginal factor in the West European
labor market. These migrant laborers generally moved to low-wage activities spurned
by the citizens of the affluent societies. Less visible, but also significant, was the mobil-
ity of students and of white-collar workers, who experienced less severe integration
difficulties, and who often settled permanently in West European countries.
Cross-border migration had an ambiguous impact on the countries of East Central
Europe. It eased social tensions and unemployment in regions hit by industrial
decline, and the financial remittances of the people working abroad compensated to
a large degree for the massive commercial deficits of the post-communist transition
countries. At the same time, the migration signaled a substantial brain-drain, while the
fact that the more dynamic youth preferred to find their individual salvation abroad
diminished the pressure for internal reforms in their societies of origin. However,
those who returned after enriching experiences in Western countries brought back
both capital and know-how which have potential to help modernize the East Central
European societies and their economies.
The overall economic performance of the East Central European countries after
the fall of communism first diverged in the 1990s, and then converged in the context
of EU-accession (Figure 2.2, Table 2.5).
The differences of the 1990s are not difficult to explain. Poland had the best over-
all performance, especially due to the fact that the swift application of the Balcerowicz
Plan fostered a relatively quick recovery from the severe decline in output which
followed the demise of state socialism. The overall performance of Slovenia was also
very good since it had started in the early 1990s from the highest economic level in
the region and benefited from its proximity to the Austrian, German, and Italian
markets. Slovenia was hardly affected by the disruption of the post-Yugoslav wars, and
it chose a strategy of gradual economic reform and limited privatization. Hungary
and the Czech Republic recovered relatively quickly from the post-1989 economic
collapse, due to the influx of Western direct investments. Romania, Bulgaria, and
Albania paid the price of their lower economic starting levels and less modern social
structures, as well as that of their sluggish economic reforms in the first phase of
the post-communist transition. They were perceived as less promising markets than
the Visegrád Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), received
significantly less foreign direct investments, and after a short-lived recovery in the
mid-1990s, experienced a second economic slump in 1996–97 (Romania until 1999).
Even worse was the situation of the new states that emerged after the demise of
Yugoslavia, with the notable exception of Slovenia. The disruption of established
111
20.000
18.000
16.000
14.000
12.000
10.000
8.000
6.000
4.000
2.000
–
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
Albania Bosnia & Herzegovina Bulgaria
Croatia Czech Republic Czechoslovakia
Hungary Macedonia Poland
Romania Serbia & Montenegro Slovak Republic
Slovenia Yugoslavia
Figure 2.2 Per capita GDP of post-communist countries

Source: The Conference Board Total Economy Database, January 2010, www.conference-board.org/
economics/database.cfm.
economic links and the turmoil caused by civil war and international sanctions
caused a catastrophic fall in output and living standards.
Thus, in the 1990s, the region as a whole fell further behind Western develop-
ment levels, and a significant divergence occurred, with the Balkans and especially
some of the post-Yugoslav republics massively lagging behind. The situation changed
with the prospect of EU enlargement. Large foreign direct investments, tempo-
rary labor migration, and institutional improvements monitored by the European
Commission stimulated economic growth and structural adjustments, and allowed
post-communist countries to converge partially to the levels of the EU, at least until
the world crisis of 2008–10.
Concluding remarks
Five observations summarize the three centuries of economic and social development
of East Central Europe. The first is that economic backwardness has been real and not
invented. Larry Wolff made an important point that the way people thought about
backwardness (referred to at the time as “barbarity”) was culturally constructed. It is
hard to imagine, however, that he would go so far as to deny differences between the
western and eastern parts of the continent. If not during the Enlightenment, at least
112
Table 2.5 GDP per capita in Purchasing Power Standards (PPS) (EU-27 = 100)
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
EU (27 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
countries)
Bulgaria 32 28 26 27 27 28 30 32 34 35 37 38 40 43 44 44 46
Czech 73 75 73 70 69 68 70 70 73 75 76 77 80 80 80 80 80
Republic
Hungary 52 52 53 55 55 55 59 62 63 63 63 63 62 65 63 65 66
Poland 43 45 47 48 49 48 48 48 49 51 51 52 54 57 61 63 64
Romania : : : : 26 26 28 29 31 34 35 38 42 47 47 47 49
Slovenia 74 76 78 79 81 80 80 82 83 86 87 88 88 91 87 84 84
Slovakia 48 50 51 52 50 50 52 54 55 57 60 63 67 73 73 73 73
Croatia 46 50 52 52 49 49 50 52 54 56 57 57 60 63 62 59 61
Macedonia : : 27 27 27 27 25 25 26 27 28 30 32 34 36 36 35
Source: Eurostat (accessed March 2013).
during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, these differences became one of
the focal points for reflection for many representatives of the elites in East Central
Europe; their realization of these differences came not from reading Western texts,
but from their own observations of the surrounding reality.151 True, the language
they used may have been partly influenced by Western ideas or by their own travels
in Western Europe, but it would be unfair to deny them any originality or sharpness
of perception.
The second observation regards the close contacts and particular relationship of
the region with “the West.” The West provided both a frame of reference and desired
models. It is from the West that ideas, institutions, investment, and innovations came,
and in a peculiar form this was the case even under communism, which fiercely cop-
ied Western technologies, guided by the Soviet slogan dagnat’ i peregnat, catch up and
overtake. But, the West being a moving target, the region continued to lag behind,
despite its own significant progress. The relative gap, measured by Eastern Europe’s
per capita GDP as a share of Western Europe’s, remained relatively stable, at about 30
to 40 percent. Thus, after three centuries, the region remained in the same economic
position vis-à-vis the West, at the threshold of modernity.
The third observation is that while the modernization processes that occurred in
East Central Europe followed Western patterns, they arrived with a considerable time-
lag and in specific forms. Of particular significance was the weakness of capitalist
forms of economic activity and their often foreign or minority origin: in the second
half of the nineteenth century, the agents of capitalism were often entrepreneurs
and foreign companies from abroad. This pattern reoccurred after 1989, when com-
munism collapsed. Economic institutions were rebuilt first under the advice of the
World Bank and the IMF, and later under the guidance of the EU. The most impor-
tant private agents again were foreign and transnational corporations. In this respect,
post-communist modernization in East Central Europe stands in striking contrast to
that in the Far East starting in the 1960s; Asian (Japanese, Korean) modernization
relied mainly on local firms, many of which grew into large corporations.
The fourth observation is that, as a result of weak and belated capitalist modern-
ization, the countries of the region retained for a long time remnants of traditional
social structures. The middle classes were not numerous, and neither were the urban
working classes. Until the 1960s, these societies (except Czechoslovakia) remained
to a large degree rural and peasant-based. The paradox of their social modernization
was that much of it was achieved under state socialism, due to forced industrializa-
tion and massive urbanization. A new wave of modernization began after the demise
of state socialism; this resulted in a changed occupational structure and increased
the role of human capital and new types of social stratification. Assessing this lat-
est wave of modernization is difficult not only because it only just started recently,
but also because it occurs in totally new circumstances, under the unprecedented
impact of the West and the global economy. As of now, this social modernization
appears to be only partial, leaving behind many people unwilling or unable to adapt
to the changing world.
Our final observation concerns the high degree of institutional discontinuity
in East Central Europe, which has been more pronounced than in many Western
European countries, and which has had a political as much as an economic charac-
ter. Political regimes and political boundaries changed, from the traditional empires
114
to the semi-democratic or authoritarian regimes of sovereign nation-states, to the

non-sovereign states under Soviet domination, and again to sovereign democratic
nation-states after 1989. This series of political discontinuities was exacerbated by
bloody wars and revolutions, which brought physical destruction, human loss, and
pervasive misery. The institutional setting of the region’s economies also changed
frequently and sometimes violently. The pre-industrial Old Order was followed by
a period of relatively free markets coupled with involvement in the global economy
in the second half of the nineteenth century, to be replaced by the more national-
ist and statist regimes of the interwar period. State socialism signified the apex of
non-market, closed economic regimes, to be replaced dramatically by its opposite,
free-market capitalism fully opened to global capital and commodities. Thus, it would
be hard to find in East Central Europe examples (abundant in the West) of stable and
well-tested legal arrangements and practices, or of business firms accumulating expe-
rience for many generations. These profound discontinuities have also prevented
the accumulation of social capital, or the gradual betterment in the concrete func-
tioning of social, economic, and political institutions. They were detrimental to the
effectiveness of states and societies. This lack of long-term accumulation of wealth,
knowledge, experience, and practices holds an important place among the reasons
for the region’s slow economic and social progress. It remains an open issue, whether
integration into the EU and the implementation of the European institutional frame-
work will put an end to institutional volatility and provide a solid foundation for
sustainable development in the region.
Notes
1 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
2 Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962). The concept of
backwardness has been questioned by Maria Todorova (in the light of the relatively early
emergence of small independent states in the Balkans) as applied to understanding
nationalism in Eastern Europe. However, she does not contest it as applied to economics.
“The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European
Nationalism,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (2005): 140–161.
3 Daniel Chirot, ed., The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from
the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1989), passim.
4 To name a few: Irma Adelman, Michał Kalecki, Oskar Lange, Mihail Manoilescu, Ragnar
Nurkse, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan. Cf. Joseph L. Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing
Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
5 In the discourse, the “backward” countries changed into “underdeveloped,” “less devel-
oped,” and ultimately, “developing,” undoubtedly for reasons of political correctness.
6 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the
European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
7 The term “periphery” is also widely used without these Marxist connotations. Cf. Derek
Aldcroft, Europe’s Third World: The European Periphery in the Interwar Years (Aldershot, UK:
Edward Elgar, 2006). Aldcroft also uses the term “backwardness.”
8 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979), 35. Wallerstein insisted that the “real socialist system” is not by far such a
socialist alternative to the capitalist world-economy, because “[e]stablishing a system of
state ownership within a capitalist world-economy does not mean establishing a socialist
115
economy. It may not mean improving the economic well-being of the majority of the popu-
lation. It is merely a variant of classic mercantilism” (90).
9 For a comprehensive, non-technical account of this position, see Daron Acemoğlu and
James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (London:
Profile Books, 2012).
10 Cf. Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Jan Luiten van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial
Revolution: The European Economy in a Global Perspective, 1000–1800 (London & Boston,
MA: Brill, 2009).
11 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World
Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Nial Ferguson, Civilization: The
West and the Rest (London: Allen Lane, 2011).
12 Works of Wallerstein are cases in point. Cf. also Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist
State (London: Verso, 1979). Cf. Anna Sosnowska, Zrozumieć zacofanie: Spory historyków o
Europę Wschodnią, 1947–1994 (Warsaw: TRIO, 2004).
13 For a comprehensive account of the Polish economic and social historiography of the pre-
industrial period, see Sosnowska, Zrozumieć zacofanie.
14 Iván Berend and György Ránki, The European Periphery and Industrialization, 1780–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Iván Berend, History Derailed: Central
and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2003); Iván Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War
II (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1988); Iván Berend, Central and Eastern
Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999); Witold Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System (London:
NLB, 1976 (originally published 1962)); Jean Batou and Henryk Szlajfer, eds., Western
Europe, Eastern Europe and World Development: Collection of Essays of Marian Małowist
(Leiden: Brill, 2010).
15 Vlad Georgescu, Politică şi istorie: cazul comuniştilor români 1944–1977 (Munich: Jon
Dumitru Verlag, 1981); Mirela-Luminiţa Murgescu, “Rumänische Historiographie und
Geschichtsbilder,” in Thede Kahl, Michael Metzeltin, and Mihai-Ră zvan Ungureanu,
eds., Rumänien. Sonderband der “Österreichischen Osthefte” (Wien: LIT Verlag, 2006),
317–320; Florin Constantiniu, De la Ră utuşi Roller la Muşatşi Ardeleanu (Bucharest: Editura
Enciclopedică , 2007); Maciej Górny, Przede wszystkim ma być naród. Marksistowskie historio-
grafie w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej (Warsaw: TRIO, 2007).
16 On Poland, see Jacek Kochanowicz and Anna Sosnowska, “Economic History of Pre-
industrial Poland: An Obsolete Subject?” in Francesco Ammannati, ed., Where is Economic
History Going? Methods and Prospects from the 13th to the 18th Centuries (Florence: Firenze
University Press, 2011), 153–172.
17 For one possible explanation of Western Europe’s uniqueness, see Eric Jones, The European
Miracle: Environments, Economics and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981). Van Zanden (The Long Road) stresses “little diver-
gence” between the northwestern part of the European continent and, indeed, the rest of
the world already in the late Middle Ages.
18 Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven, CT: Yale
19 Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a
Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
20 Walt Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1960).
21 C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1951) is the classic on the rise of new middle classes which initiated the long stream
of sociological literature on the topic.
22 Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848
(New York: Mentor, 1964).
23 Hundreds of articles and monographs have been published on Polish agrarian, rural,
and material culture history. Useful syntheses are Bogdan Baranowski et al., eds.,
116
Zarys historii gospodarstwa wiejskiego w Polsce, 3 vols. (Warsaw: PWRiL, 1964–70); Stefan
Inglot, ed., Historia chłopów polskich, 3 vols. (Warsaw: LSW, 1970–80); and Witold
Hensel and Jan Pazdur, eds., Historia kultury materialnej Polski w zarysie, 6 vols. (Wrocław:
Ossolineum, 1978–79).
24 Jacek Kochanowicz, Spór o teorię gospodarki chłopskiej: Gospodarstwo chłopskie w teorii ekonomii i w
historii gospodarczej (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo, 1992); Kochanowicz, “L’exploitation paysanne
en Pologne à la charnière des XVIIIe et XIX siècles: Théorie, historie, historiographie,”
Acta Poloniae Historica 57 (1988): 203–237.
25 Cf. Celina Bobińska and Joseph Goy, eds., Les Pyreneés et les Carpates XV‑XX siècles (Warsaw &
Kraków: PWN, 1981).
26 Cf. István N. Kiss, “Die demographische und wirtschaftliche Lage in Ungarn von 16.–18.
Jahrhundert,” Südost-Forschungen 43 (1983): 183–222.
27 Antoni Mączak, Gospodarstwo chłopskie na Żuławach Malborskich w początkach XVII w (Warsaw:
PWN, 1962).
28 Why serfdom was strengthened in the East had been a matter of a long debate, focusing
on the one hand on the relations between the monarchy, the towns, and the peasantry,
and on the other on the profitability of the grain exports to the West. See Anderson,
Lineages; Wallerstein, The Modern World-System; T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The
Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). On Eastern Europe, see Jerome Blum,
The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978),
38–42; Peter Gunst, “The Agrarian Systems of Central and Eastern Europe,” in Chirot,
Origins, 53–91; Holm Sundhaussen, “Der Wandel in der osteuropäischen Agrarverfassung
während der frühen Neuzeit. Ein Beitrag zur Divergenz der Entwicklungswege von Ost-
und Westeuropa,” Südost-Forschungen 49 (1990): 15–56; William Hagen, Ordinary Prussians:
Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002); on the Polish lands, Jacek Kochanowicz, “The Polish Economy and the Evolution
of Dependency,” in Chirot, Origins, 96–111; on the Habsburg monarchy, Gale Stokes, “The
Social Origins of East European Politics,” in Chirot, Origins, 215–217. For a revisionist
interpretation denying the universality of the second serfdom: Markus Cerman, Villagers
and Lords in Eastern Europe, 1300–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
29 An interpretation: Kula, An Economic Theory. The book had many translations and initiated
intense debate in Poland and abroad. Jacek Kochanowicz, “La ‘Théorie économique . . . ’
après vingt ans,” Acta Poloniae Historica 56 (1987): 187–211.
30 For a comparison of Polish folwark and Brazilian sugar plantation, see Marcin Kula, Początki
czarnego niewolnictwa w Brazylii (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1970).
31 Bruce McGowan, “The Middle Danube Cul-de-sac,” in Huri Islamoğlu-Inan, ed., The
Ottoman Empire and the World-economy (Cambridge & Paris: Cambridge University Press &
Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1987), 170–177.
32 For the chiftliks, see especially Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation,
Trade and the Struggle for Land, 1600–1800 (Cambridge & Paris: Cambridge University Press &
Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1981), and Çaglar Keyder & Faruk Tabak,
eds., Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East (Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press, 1991).
33 For the classical pattern of Ottoman social elites, see Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire:
The Classical Age 1300–1600 (New York & Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1973), 65–118,
165–178.
34 Daniel Chirot, Social Change in a Peripheral Society: The Creation of a Balkan Colony (New York:
Academic Press, 1976), 83–89; Neagu Djuvara, Le Pays Roumain entre Orient et Occident: Les
Principautés danubiennes au début du XIXe siècle (Paris: Publications Orientalistes de France,
1989), 99–139: Gheorghe Platon and Alexandru-Florin Platon, Boierimea din Moldova în
secolul al XIX-lea: context european, evoluţie socială şi politică (date statistice şi observaţii istorice).
(Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 1995).
35 On comparison between the Polish and other political systems of the time, see Anderson,
Lineages, 279–298; also Antoni Mączak, Rządzący i rządzeni: Władza i społeczeństwo w Europie
wczesnonowożytnej (Warsaw: PWN, 1986).
117
36 Antoni Mączak, Nierówna przyjaźń: Układy klientalne w perspektywie historycznej (Wrocław:

FNP, 2003); Urszula Augustyniak, Dwór i klientela Krzysztofa Radziwiłła, 1585–1640 (Warsaw:
Semper, 2001); Urszula Augustyniak, ed., Administracja i życie codzienne w dobrach Radziwiłłów
XVI–XVIII wieku (Warsaw: DiG, 2009).
37 On the landed classes after partitions and in the twentieth century, see Janina Leskie
wiczowa, ed., Ziemiaństwo polskie 1795–1945 (Warsaw: IH PAN, 1985); Wojciech Roszkowski,
Gospodarcza rola większej prywatnej własności ziemskiej w Polsce 1918–1939 (Warsaw: SGPiS,
1986).
38 Władysław Rusiński, Osady tzw. ‘olędrów’ w dawnym województwie poznańskim (Poznań &
Kraków: Nakl. Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności, 1947).
39 For the overall treatment, see Blum, The Old Order, part III; for the Romanian Principalities,
where serfdom was juridically removed in 1746 in Wallachia and in 1749 in Moldavia,
see Vasile Mihordea, Maîtres du sol et paysans dans les principautés roumaines au XVIIIe siècle
(Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1971) and Florin Constantiniu, Relaţiile agrare din Ţara
Românească în secolul al XVIII-lea (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1972); for Poland, Stefan
Kieniewicz, The Emancipation of the Polish Peasantry (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press,
1969); Inglot, Historia, vol. II; Krzysztof Groniowski, Uwłaszczenie chłopów w Polsce: geneza,
realizacja, skutki (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1976).
40 For Southeastern Europe see Nikolai Todorov, La ville balkanique aux XVe-XIXe siècles:
Développement socio-économique et démographique (Bucharest: A.I.E.S.E.E., 1980); for a synthesis
of the history of Polish towns before 1795, see Maria Bogucka and Henryk Samsonowicz,
Dzieje miast i mieszczaństwa w Polsce przedrozbiorowej (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1986).
41 Charles Higounet, Les Allemands en Europe centrale et orientale au Moyen age (Paris: Aubier, 1989).
42 Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid, eds., Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern
Transformation of Southern Asia and Central Europe (Seattle, WA: University of Washington
Press, 1997); Murray Jay Rossman, The Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth During the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1990); Gershon David Hundert, The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatów
in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
43 Gerhard Grimm and Krista Zach, eds., Die Deutschen in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa: Geschichte.
Wirtschaft. Recht. Sprache, 2 vols (Munich: Verlag des Südostdeutschen Kulturwerkes,
1995–96); Mathias Beer and Dittmar Dahlmann, eds., Migration nach Ost- und Südosteuropa
vom 18. bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ursachen – Formen – Verlauf – Ergebnis (Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999).
44 Rossman, Lords’ Jews; Hillel Levine, Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and its Jews in the
Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
45 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Rinehart, 1944).
46 Jacek Kochanowicz, “Could a Polish Noble become an Entrepreneur? Mentality, Market and
Capital,” in Simonetta Cavaciocchi, ed., Impresa, Industria, Commercio, Banca. Sec. XIII–XVIII
(Florence: Le Monnier, 1991), 933–942.
47 Janusz Tazbir, Kultura szlachecka w Polsce: rozkwit, upadek, relikty (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna,
1983).
48 Janusz Górski, Polska myśl ekonomiczna a rozwój gospodarczy 1807–1830: studia nad początkami
teorii zacofania gospodarczego (Warsaw: PWN, 1963).
49 Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization.
(Budapest: CEU Press, 1999); Maciej Janowski, Polish Liberal Thought up to 1918 (Budapest:
CEU Press, 2002).
50 Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins: Mechanisms and
Results,” Archives européennes de sociologie 25, no. 2 (1984): 185–213.
51 Andrew Janos, East Central and Southern Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the
Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
52 See the argument regarding Serbia in Holm Sundhaussen, Historische Statistik Serbiens
1834–1914. Mit europäischen Vergleichsdaten (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1989), 22–29.
53 Witold Kula, Szkice o manufakturach w Polsce XVIII wieku, 2 vols (Warsaw: PWN, 1956).
54 Halina Roz˙ enowa, Produkcja wódki i sprawa pijaństwa w Królestwie Polskim 1815–1863
(Warsaw: PWN, 1961).
118
55 David Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 50–56, 58, 65–66, 99–102.
56 Good, The Economic Rise, 142.
57 Irena Pietrzak-Pawłowska, ed., Uprzemysłowienie ziem polskich w XIX i XX w (Warsaw: KiW,
1973).
58 Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2005).
59 Constantin Boncu, Contribuţii la istoria petrolului românesc (Bucharest: Editura Academiei,
1971).
60 Juliusz Łukasiewicz, Przewrót techniczny w przemyśle Królestwa Polskiego w latach 1852–1886
(Warsaw: PWN, 1963).
61 Richard Rudolph, Banking and Industrialization in Austria-Hungary: The Role of Banks in the
Industrialization of the Czech Crownlands, 1873–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976); Irena Pietrzak-Pawłowska, Królestwo Polskie w początkach imperializmu, 1900–1905
(Warsaw: PWN, 1955), 186–214.
62 Berend, History Derailed, 135ff.; Rudolph, Banking, 63ff. For the recent discussions regard-
ing the role of foreign direct investments in East Central Europe, see Jutta Günther and
Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast, eds., Willkommene Investoren oder nationaler Ausverkauf? Ausländische
Direktinvestitionen in Ostmitteleuropa im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Berliner Wissenchaftsverlag,
2006).
63 Şevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism 1820–1913: Trade, Investment
and Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Reşat Kasaba, The Ottoman
Empire and the World-Economy: The Nineteenth Century (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988).
64 Andrzej Jezierski, Handel zagraniczny Królestwa Polskiego 1815–1914 (Warsaw: PWN, 1967);
Ireneusz Ihnatowicz, “Rynki zbytu przemysłu łódzkiego w drugiej połowie XIX wieku,”
Przegląd Historyczny 47, no. 3 (1956): 413–431.
65 Jerzy Jedlicki, Nieudana próba kapitalistycznej industrializacji (Warsaw: KiW, 1964).
66 Thomas David, Nationalisme économique et industrialisation: l’expėrience des pays de l’Est
(1789–1939) (Geneva: Droz, 2009), 41ff.
67 Daniel Beauvois, La bataille de la terre en Ukraine (Lille: Septentrion, 1998). A similar argu-
ment for nineteenth-century Wallachia in Chirot, Social Change, 89–149.
68 Juliusz Łukasiewicz, Kryzys agrarny na ziemiach polskich w końcu XIX wieku (Warsaw: PWN,
1968).
69 Cf. Paul Bairoch, “Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution,” in Carlo M. Cipolla, ed.,
The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 3: The Industrial Revolution (London: Collins/
Fontana Books, 1973), 467ff.
70 Hensel and Pazdur, Historia.
71 Bogdan Baranowski, Początki i rozpowszechnienie uprawy ziemniaków na ziemiach środkowej
Polski (Łódź: Ossolineum, 1960).
72 Tadeusz Sobczak, Przełom w konsumpcji spoz˙ywczej w Królestwie Polskim (Wrocław: Ossolineum,
1968).
73 Michał Kopczyński, Wielka transformacja: Badania nad uwarstwieniem społecznym i standardem
˙zycia w Królestwie Polskim 1866–1913 w świetle pomiarów antropometrycznych poborowych (Warsaw:
Mówią Wieki, 2006). See similar work on Habsburgs.
74 Bogdan Murgescu, România şi Europa: Acumularea decalajelor economice (1500–2010) (Iaşi:
Polirom, 2010), 137–139. For the general pattern of this development bottleneck, see
Roger Price, “The Transformation of Agriculture,” in Derek Aldcroft and Simon Ville,
eds., The European Economy, 1750–1914: A Thematic Approach (Manchester, UK: Manchester
75 Michael Palairet, The Balkan Economies c.1800–1914: Evolution without Development
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Palairet’s argument runs against the
opinion prevalent in Southeast European societies that modern nation-state building has
favored economic development.
76 Around 1900 illiteracy was about 78 percent of the adult population in Romania, almost
80 percent in Serbia, 73 percent in the Russian Empire, 72 percent in Bulgaria, 40 percent
in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary and almost 24 percent in the Austrian part of
119
Austria-Hungary, compared to only 17 percent in France, 10 percent in the United Kingdom,

and 4 percent in Germany (data from Sundhaussen, Historische Statistik, 537–543).
77 Maria Krisań, Chłopi wobec zmian cywilizacyjnych w Królestwie Polskim w drugiej połowie XIX –
początku XX wieku (Warsaw: Nariton, 2008).
78 Michał Łuczewski, Odwieczny naród: Polak i katolik w Żmiącej (Toruń: UMK, 2012) analyzes
the long-term process of the nationalization of peasants in one village in the Austrian
Poland.
79 Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Rural National Identity in
Austrian Poland, 1848–1900 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
80 Cf. David Mitrany, Marx Against the Peasant: A Study in Social Dogmatism (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1951); Helga Schultz and Angela Harre, eds.,
Bauerngesellschaften auf dem Weg in die Moderne: Agrarismus in Ostmitteleuropa (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 2010); Dietmar Müller and Angela Harre, eds., Transforming Rural Societies:
Agrarian Property and Agrarianism in East Central Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2011).
81 John Lukacs, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and its Culture (New York:
Grove Press, 1988); Judit Bodnar, Fin de Millénaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of Urban Life
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Stefan Kieniewicz: Warsaw w latch
1795–1914 (Warsaw: PWN, 1976).
82 Ireneusz Ihnatowicz, Burz˙uazja warszawska (Warsaw: PWN, 1972); Artur Eisenbach, The
Emancipation of the Jews in Poland, 1780–1870 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Jerzy Tomaszewski,
ed., Najnowsze dzieje Żydów w Polsce w zarysie: do 1950 roku (Warsaw: PWN, 1993).
83 Andrew Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
84 Ireneusz Ihnatowicz, Przemysł łódzki w latach 1860–1900 (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1965).
85 Avram Rosen, Participarea evreilor la dezvoltarea industrială a Bucureștiului din a doua jumă tate
a secolului al XIX-lea până în anul 193 (Bucharest: Hasefer, 1995); idem, Contribuţia evreilor
la progresul industrial în România interbelică (Bucharest: Hasefer, 2002); Nicolae Cajal and
Hary Kuller, eds., Contribuţia evreilor din România la cultură şi civilizaţie (Bucharest: Hasefer,
2004); Carol Iancu, Les juifs en Roumanie 1866–1919. De l’exclusion á l’émancipation (Aix-en-
Provence: Editions de l’Université de Provence, 1978).
86 Jerry Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 96ff.
87 Irena Grosfeld, Alexander Rodnyansky, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, “Persistent anti-
market culture: A legacy of the Pale of Settlement and of the Holocaust,” working paper
no. 2010–33 (Paris: Paris School of Economics, 2011).
88 Uwe Müller and Helga Schultz, eds., National Borders and Economic Disintegration in Modern
East Central Europe (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag Arno Spitz, 2002).
89 Marie-Janine Calic, Sozialgeschichte Serbiens 1815–1941: Der aufhaltsame Fortschritt während der
Industrialisierung (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1994), 276–280.
90 John Lampe and Marvin Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950: From Imperial
Borderlands to Developing Nations (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 118.
91 Ingvar Svennilson, Growth and Stagnation in the European Economy (Geneva: United Nations
Economic Commission for Europe, 1954), 82–101. For Romania, see Vasile Bozga, Criza
agrară în România dintre cele două ră zboaie mondiale (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1975).
92 Wojciech Roszkowski, Land Reforms in East Central and Southern Europe after World War One
(Warsaw: ISP PAN, 1995).
93 For a classical analysis of peasant economics and overpopulation in the interwar East
Central Europe, see Doreen Warriner, Economics of Peasant Farming (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1939). On Poland, Ludwik Landau, Jerzy Pański, and Edward Strzelecki,
Bezrobocie wśród chłopów (Warsaw: IGS, 1939).
94 Roszkowski, Land Reforms, 36.
95 David, Nationalisme; Jan Kofman, Economic Nationalism and Development (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1997); Henryk Szlajfer, ed., Economic Nationalism in East-Central Europe
and South America, 1918–1939 (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1990); Henryk Szlajfer, Economic
Nationalism and Globalization: Lessons from Latin America and Central Europe, trans. Maria
Chmielewska-Szaljfer (Boston: Brill, 2012).
120
96 William Grenzebach, Germany’s Informal Empire in East-Central Europe: German Economic

Policy toward Yugoslavia and Rumania, 1933–1939 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag, 1988); for
German attempts to subordinate economically Southeastern Europe already before 1933,
see also Carola Sachse, ed., “Mitteleuropa” und “Südosteuropa” als Planungsraum: Wirtschafts-
und kulturpolitische Expertisen im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2010).
97 David, Nationalisme, 265, 273.
98 On human capital, see David, Nationalisme, 331–352. See also Murgescu, România şi Europa,
310–313.
99 Józef Stanisław Orczyk, “Noz˙ yce cen i akcja ich zwalczania w Polsce w latach 1929–35,”
Roczniki Dziejów Społecznych i Gospodarczych, XXIX, 1967.
100 Lampe and Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 329–519; Martin Ivanov and Adam Tooze,
“Convergence or Decline on Europe’s Southeastern Periphery? Agriculture, Population,
and GNP in Bulgaria, 1892–1945,” The Journal of Economic History 67, no. 3 (2007): 697–698.
101 Bogdan Murgescu, “The Economic Performance of Interwar Romania: Golden Age Myth
and Statistical Evidence,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte und Kultur Südosteuropas 6 (2004): 43–64.
102 Roszkowski, Gospodarcza rola.
103 Our calculations are based on the data from Brian Mitchell, International Historical Statistics.
Europe 1750–2000, 5th ed. (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 146–156.
104 For Romania, see Carol Iancu, L’émancipation des juifs de Roumanie (1913–1919): de l’inegalité
civique aux droits des minorité: l’originalité d’un combat à partir des guerres balkaniques et jusqu’à
la Conférence de Paix de Paris (Montpellier: Centre de Recherches et d’Etudea Juives et
Hebraiques, 1992); Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation
Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY & London: Cornell University Press,
1995).
105 Armin Heinen has argued that the lack of job perspectives determined numerous young
Romanian intellectuals to register in the fascist movement in the 1930s (Die Legion “Erzengel
Michael” in Rumänien: soziale Bewegung und politische Organisation (Munich: R. Oldenbourg
Verlag, 1986), 396–402; for a more general discussion on this lack of perspective, see the
comments in Lucian Boia, Capcanele istoriei: Elita intelectuală românească între 1930 şi 1950
(Bucharest: Humanitas, 2011), 33–35, and Irina Livezeanu, “Interwar Poland and Romania:
The Nationalization of Elites, the Vanishing Middle, and the Problem of Intellectuals,”
Harvard Ukrainian Studies 22 (1998): 407–430.
106 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010),
409ff.
107 Jan Gross, “Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of Imposition of
Communist Regimes in East Central Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 3 (1989):
198–214.
108 Anne Appelbaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (London: Allen
Lane, 2012).
109 Florian Banu, Asalt asupra economiei României: De la Solagra la Sovrom (1936–1956) (Bucharest:
Editura Nemira, 2004).
110 See especially the analysis of Mark Kramer, “Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of
a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1944–53,” in Vladimir Tismă neanu, ed., Stalinism
Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe (Budapest: CEU Press,
2009), 51–101.
111 For the most comprehensive theoretical interpretation of the state-socialism economic
system and its evolution, see János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of
Communism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
112 Derek Aldcroft and Steven Morewood, Economic Change in Eastern Europe since 1918
(Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1995), 105–108.
113 Cf. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1995).
114 Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast, Stahlgiganten in der sozialistischen Transformation: Nowa Huta in
Krakau, EKO in Eisenhüttenstadt und Kunčice in Ostrava (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag,
2010); David Turnock, The Economy of East Central Europe, 1815–1989: Stages of Transformation
in a Peripheral Region (London & New York: Routledge, 2006), 324–330.
121
115 Aldcroft and Morewood, Economic Change, 125.

116 Wolfram Fischer, “Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Staat in Europa 1914–1980,” in Handbuch der
europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte. Bd.6. Europäische Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte
vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987), 96.
117 Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian
Agriculture, 1949–1962 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
118 Dariusz Jarosz, Polityka władz komunistycznych w Polsce w latach 1948–1956 a chłopi (Warsaw:
DiG, 1998); Jacek Kochanowicz, “Stato e contadini: La politica agraria polacca negli anni
1956–1970,” Studi Storici 29, no. 3 (1988): 759–785.
119 Peter Bell, Peasants in Socialist Transition: Life in a Collectivized Hungarian Village (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1984); Nigel Swain, Collective Farms Which Work?
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Ivan Szelényi, Socialist Entrepreneurs:
Embourgeoisiement in Rural Hungary (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
120 For the patterns of rural migration to towns in communist Romania, see Per Ronnås,
Urbanization in Romania: A Geography of Social and Economic Change Since Independence
(Stockholm: The Economic Research Institute at the Stockholm School of Economics,
1984), 198–214; for an anthropological approach, see David Kideckel, The Solitude of
Collectivism: Romanian Villagers to the Revolution and Beyond (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1993).
121 Turnock, Economy, 344–357. Paul Bairoch, L’agriculture des pays développés, 1800 à nos jours:
Production – Productivité – Rendements (Paris: Economica, 1999), 24, 126.
122 Aldcroft and Morewood, Economic Change, 111–118.
123 For socialist consumerism, see Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics and
Consumer Culture in East Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2005), and Jonathan Zatlin, The Currency
of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
124 Paweł Sowiński, Wakacje w Polsce Ludowej: Polityka władz i ruch turystyczny, 1945–1989
(Warsaw: TRIO, 2005).
125 Daniel Chirot, “The Corporatist Model and Socialism,” Theory and Society 9, no. 2 1980;
Małgorzata Mazurek, Socjalistyczny zakład pracy: Porównanie fabrycznej codzienności w PRL i
NRD u progu lat sześćdziesiątych (Warsaw: TRIO, 2005), 101–110, 238–254.
126 János Kornai, Economics of Shortage (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1980).
127 Janine Wedel, The Private Poland (New York: Facts on File, 1986); Pavel Câmpeanu, România:
coada pentru hrană , un mod de viaţă (Bucharest: Litera, 1994); Liviu Chelcea and Puiu Lă ţea,
România profundă în communism: Dileme identitare, istorie locală şi economie secundară la Sântana
(Bucharest: Nemira, 2000); Małgorzata Mazurek, Społeczeństwo kolejki: O doświadczeniach nie-
doboru, 1945–1989 (Warsaw: TRIO, 2010); Jerzy Kochanowski, Tylnymi drzwiami: “czarny
rynek” w Polsce 1944–1989 (Warsaw: TRIO, 2010).
128 Robert Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
129 Támás Vonyó, “Socialist Industrialization or Post-War Reconstruction? Understanding
Hungarian Economic Growth, 1949–1967,” The Journal of European Economic History 39, no. 2
(2010): 253–300.
130 Jeffrey Williamson, “Growth, Distribution, and Demography: Some Lessons from History,”
Explorations in Economic History 35, no. 3 (1998): 241–271.
131 Cf. Christoph Boyer, ed., Zur Physiognomie sozialistischer Wirtschaftsreformen: Die Sowjetunion,
Polen, die Tschechoslowakai, Ungaren, die DDR und Jugoslawien im Vergleich (Frankfurt: Vittorio
Klostermann, 2007); Iván Berend, The Hungarian Economic Reforms, 1953–1988 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990); Dariusz Grala, Reformy gospodarcze w PRL (1982–1989):
próba uratowania socjalizmu) (Warsaw: TRIO, 2005).
132 János Kornai, “The Hungarian Reform Process: Visions, Hopes and Reality,” Journal of
Economic Literature 24, no. 4 (1986): 1687–1737.
133 See also Vladimir Tismă neanu, ed., Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia (Budapest:
CEU Press, 2011).
134 Fred Singleton and Bernard Carter, The Economy of Yugoslavia (London & New York: Croon
Helm & St. Martin’s Press, 1982). See also the more theoretical approach of Branko
122
Horvat, The Political Economy of Socialism: A Marxist Social Theory (Oxford: Martin Robinson,
1982).
135 Harold Lydall, Yugoslavia in Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); John Lampe, Yugoslavia as
History: Twice There Was a Country, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
322–331; for the economic divides and their nationalist instrumentalizations, see Dijana
Pleština, Regional Development in Communist Yugoslavia: Success, Failure, and Consequences
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), and Holm Sundhaussen, Geschichte Serbiens, 19.–21.
Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2007), 379–411.
136 Michael Montias, Economic Development in Communist Rumania (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1967), 193–230.
137 Aldcroft and Morewood, Economic Change, 156–165.
138 Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity
(New York: Basic Books, 1984).
139 Berend, Central and Eastern Europe.
140 Appelbaum, Iron Curtain, provides a lot of detail for the GDR, Hungary and Poland; for
Romania, see the detailed presentation of the repression in Vladimir Tismă neanu, Dorin
Dobrincu, and Cristian Vasile, eds., Raport final (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007).
141 John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher
Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
142 Szelényi, Socialist Entrepreneurs.
143 Michael Kennedy, Professionals, Power and Solidarity in Poland: A Critical Sociology of Soviet-Type
Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
144 On the dynamics of the collapse of communism, see Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic
Lantern: The Revolution of 89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (New York:
Random House, 1990); Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe, 1989
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989
and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, with a contribution by Jan Gross (New
York: Modern Library, 2009); Peter Siani-Davies, The Romanian Revolution of December
1989 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Norbert Ehrhart, Unsere Revolution: Die
Geschichte der Jahre 1989/1990 (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2008).
145 For the overview of transition policies and politics and their results, see Anders Åslund,
Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002); László Csaba, The New Political Economy of Emerging Europe (Budapest:
Akadémiai Kiadó, 2005); François Bafoil, Europe centrale et orientale: Mondialisation, euro-
péanisation et changement social (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences
Politiques, 2006); Iván Berend, From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union: The Economic
and Social Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe since 1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge
146 Leszek Balcerowicz, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister from September 1989
till December 1990, was the architect of the Polish early phase of transition. Vladimir Pasti,
Romania in Transition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).
147 David Stark and László Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East
Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
148 Katherine Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania
149 On the specificities of the new capitalism in East Central Europe, see Dorothee Bohle and
Béla Greskovits, Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2012); Gil Eyal, Iván Szelényi, and Eleanor Townsley, Making Capitalism without Capitalists:
The New Ruling Elites in Eastern Europe (London: Verso, 1998); János Mátyás Kovacs and
Violetta Zentai, Capitalism from Outside: Economic Cultures in Eastern Europe (Budapest: CEU
Press, 2012).
150 Béla Greskovits, The Political Economy of Protest and Patience: East European and Latin
American Transformations Compared (Budapest: CEU Press, 1998); David Ost, The Defeat of
Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2005).
151 Cf. Górski, Polska myśl; Janowski, Polish Liberal Thought; Jedlicki, Suburb; Love, Crafting.
123
Further reading
Aldcroft, Derek. Europe’s Third World: The European Periphery in the Interwar Years. Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2006.
Berend, Iván. Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Berend, Iván. From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union: The Economic and Social Transformation of
Central and Eastern Europe since 1973. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Bohle, Dorothe, and Béla Greskovits. Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Chirot, Daniel, ed. The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the
Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Csaba, László. The New Political Economy of Emerging Europe. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2005.
David, Thomas. Nationalisme économique et industrialisation. L’expérience des pays d’Europe de l’Est.
Geneva: Droz, 2009.
Frank, Alison. Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Good, David. The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984.
Grenzebach, William. Germany’s Informal Empire in East-Central Europe: German Economic Policy
toward Yugoslavia and Rumania, 1933–1939. Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag, 1988.
Islamoğlu-Inan, Huri. The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy. Cambridge & Paris: Cambridge
University Press & Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1987.
Kochanowicz, Jacek. Backwardness and Modernization: Poland and Eastern Europe in the
16th–20th Centuries. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate: 2006.
Kochanowicz, Jacek, and Anna Sosnowska. “Economic History of Pre-industrial Poland: An
Obsolete Subject?” In Francesco Ammannati, ed., Where is Economic History Going? Methods
and Prospects from the 13th to the 18th Centuries, 153–172. Florence: Florence University Press,
2011.
Kofman, Jan. Economic Nationalism and Development. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
Kornai, János. The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992.
Kovacs, János Mátyás, and Violetta Zentai. Capitalism from Outside? Economic Cultures in Eastern
Europe after 1989. Budapest: CEU Press, 2012.
Kula, Witold. An Economic Theory of the Feudal System. London: NLB, 1976 (originally published
in 1962).
Lampe, John, and Marvin Jackson. Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950. From Imperial Borderlands
to Developing Nations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Levine, Hillel. Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and its Jews in the Early Modern Period. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
McGowan, Bruce. Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade and the Struggle for Land,
1600–1800. Cambridge & Paris: Cambridge University Press & Éditions de la Maison des
Sciences de l’Homme, 1981.
Müller, Dietmar, and Angela Harre, eds. Transforming Rural Societies: Agrarian Property and
Agrarianism in East Central Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Innsbruck:
StudienVerlag, 2011.
Murgescu, Bogdan. “The Economic Performance of Interwar Romania: Golden Age Myth and
Statistical Evidence.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte und Kultur Südosteuropas 6 (2004): 43–64.
Murgescu, Bogdan. “Anything but Simple: The Case of the Romanian Oil Industry.” In Helga
Schultz and Eduard Kubů, eds., History and Culture of Economic Nationalism in East Central
Europe, 231–250. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2006.
124
Palairet, Michael. The Balkan Economies c.1800–1914: Evolution without Development. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Pamuk, Ševket. The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism 1820–1913: Trade, Investment and
Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Szlajfer, Henryk. Economic Nationalism and Globalization: Lessons from Latin America and Central
Europe, translated from Polish by Maria Chmielewska-Szlajfer. Boston, MA: Brill, 2012.
Turnock, David. The Economy of East Central Europe, 1815–1989: Stages of Transformation in a
Peripheral Region. London: Routledge, 2006.
125
3
DE MOGRAP H Y A ND
POPU L ATI ON M O VEM ENT S
Theodora Dragostinova and David Gerlach
In the mid-nineteenth century, the residents of the Black Sea city of Constanţa in
the Ottoman Empire (today in Romania) included the Austrian subject Janko, the
Prussian subjects Ernest and Christian Joseph, who was from Danzig. They had
all moved hundreds of kilometers from their homes to accumulate riches in the
Ottoman realms.1 As the economic conditions in the region changed and new oppor-
tunities emerged elsewhere, by the late nineteenth century many residents of Eastern
Europe were headed west, either to Western Europe or across the Atlantic. In the
early twentieth century, young Jews in the Pale of Settlement faced hard economic
times, persecution, occasional pogroms, and the draft. They were disinclined to serve
a country that showed little regard for their rights: “Bein’ you such a handy boy and
you want to be saved [from the draft], it’s goin’ to be a terrible war, so you should
go to the United States,” Moshe Lodsky of Lublin was counseled. He sailed to New
York alongside many “Polacks” and Jews in 1912.2 As the horrors of military conflict
engulfed the region, many prepared to emigrate in search of security and stability;
others were forced to do so as a result of international treaties sanctioning popula-
tion exchanges, such as the Muslims of once-Ottoman Salonica (today in Greece)
who wept as they were leaving their native city: “We’re used to living freely and in
honor, but seeing how they seize our fields and even enter our homes, we feel life has
become impossible.”3 In July 1945 as millions of German-speakers were being forcibly
removed from countries across the region the Allied leaders attempted in vain to
control the situation and prevent a humanitarian disaster. Winston Churchill made
it clear that British authorities were not eager to accept the expellees into their zone
of occupation in postwar Germany citing pragmatic concerns.4 Migration picked up
once more after the collapse of communism – whether people were crossing the
Bulgarian-Greek border illegally to pick olives, going on a trip from Poland to the
United Kingdom with the intention of staying, or fleeing the attempts of paramilitary
bands to round up young men in war-torn Yugoslavia, the inhabitants of East Central
Europe were on the move again.
If migration involves “moves that are relatively long and relatively definitive” and
entails a “break with the area of origin,” one could analyze the history of East Central
Europe in the last three centuries as migration history.5 According to Charles Tilly’s
oft-cited article, several types of migrations evolved in Europe in the modern period:
local migrations involved smaller distances and were connected to labor or marriage
practices; circular migrations led to a return to origins after seasonal work; chain
migrations included related individuals and produced clusters of people linked by
126
D emography and P opulation M ovements
descent; and career migrations linked to economic opportunities.6 In addition to

these rather routine reasons for relocation connected to family strategies and eco-
nomic motivations, military conflict emerged as a major factor in the movement of
people in East Central Europe, because of the large scale of individual or community
migrations during war but also due to the planned colonization and displacement
of targeted populations in its aftermath. With the rise of nationalism and the idea of
the homogeneous nation-state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the pace
of migrations accelerated as nationalist conflict produced both forced and voluntary
migrations that radically changed the ethnological and demographic structure of the
area. But even as such dramatic events affected the lives of people in important ways,
other, more personal factors also mattered in decisions about emigration; life plans,
labor demands, family networks, and personal motivations all supplemented offi-
cial plans for the movement of people. Thus, migration reflected the complexity of
life influenced by political events, military campaigns, religious discrimination, eco-
nomic circumstances, social organization, property-holding status, and demographic
characteristics while population movements also exhibited regional variations and
fluctuations.7
This chapter focuses on key developments in the migration history of East Central
Europe: from “mixing” of various ethno-linguistic and religious communities in the
period of empires to “unmixing” after the triumph of the nation-state; from routine
labor and seasonal migrations to more sustained economic and overseas migrations
beginning in the late nineteenth century; and, finally, from Cold War travel restric-
tions to renewed economic and ethnic migrations after the collapse of communism. In
the earlier centuries of military conquest and political or religious conflict, population
movements created borderland areas between and within empires where populations
of diverse ethnicities, languages, and religions were intermixed. This intermixing was
accompanied by parallel labor and economic migrations, which included long-distance
rural-to-rural migrations but also an increasing number of rural-to-urban and transat-
lantic migrations. Thus, demographic and economic pressures were the leading causes
for migration in the long nineteenth century due to the lack of economic opportunities
and an increasing population. But as nation-states made their appearance in the region,
the state became instrumental in causing and directing migration in order to create
nationally homogeneous states. Ultimately, the “ethnic unmixing” of the Habsburg,
Ottoman, and Russian Empires following World War I and the continued displacement
of populations during and after World War II redrew the borders of Europe along
putative ethnic and national lines. Warfare was a central cause of migration during
this period; as modern war practices increasingly targeted civilian populations, war
and migration went hand in hand. In contrast, the post-1950 period saw more lim-
ited migration movements connected to the drive for modernization in the area under
communist control, and only occasional overseas political or ethnic migrations (such
as those of Jews to Israel or Germans to Germany). The collapse of communism revived
old migration practices of an economic character and led to the last phase of “ethnic
unmixing” in the territories of former Yugoslavia. However, after the turbulent period
of early post-socialism, migration practices leveled off, following the integration of the
East Central European countries into the European Union.
As the territories of East Central Europe experienced a shift from empires to
nation-states to the Cold War divisions, and to European Union integration, the area
127
T heodora D ragostinova and D avid G erlach
saw both changes and continuities in the migration practices and motivations of states
and people. While the causes, nature, and extent of population movements varied
throughout this time period, similar labor and seasonal migration patterns emerged
while state policies involving immigration, emigration, and forced migration likewise
developed along parallel lines. Demography crucially influenced migration as pop-
ulation pressures provided their own spur to relocation. Ultimately, the interplay of
individuals’ priorities and pressures applied by economic and state policies produced
a range of experiences that were as varied as the many routes people traveled.
Historiographic trends
Migration movements and population shifts in East Central Europe have been covered
extensively in the historiography of the region, especially since the 1970s when more
scholars started paying attention to demographic processes and diasporic linkages.
Interest in religious and ethno-national change has motivated historians to examine,
for example, the process of Turkic colonization and Islamization in the Balkans,
and many scholars have produced pioneering works showing how the Ottoman con-
quest radically changed the population dynamics in the area.8 Others have traced
the demographic changes in the Habsburg territories, especially Bohemia, during
the counter-Reformation or during and following the establishment of the Austrian
military frontier.9 Cumulatively, these works depict a dynamic process of population
transformation from the early modern period on.
Later historians, interested in the impact of these changes beyond the region,
turned their attention to the existence of diasporic communities in the Black Sea and
Mediterranean areas. An early work of Olga Katsiardi-Hering examined the Greek
community in Trieste, Italy, opening the door for similar studies of diasporic commu-
nities throughout the entire Balkans.10 At the same time, inspired by the turn toward
quantitative methods associated with historical demography, some historians have
meticulously studied changes in the population of specific communities, questioning
stereotypes about the region based on scant empirical evidence. Maria Todorova and
Karl Kaser’s works are examples of sophisticated demographic history focused on the
Balkans.11 These works demonstrate a vibrant process of population change over the
centuries; many focus on trends within one region or use evidence coming from a
single national archive. In the regional historiographies, there are numerous stud-
ies of the various ethno-national or religious groups and their movement within or
without, which are too numerous to list. More often than not, scholars have tackled
“their” diasporas abroad and “their” refugees, without establishing connections to
the broader historical processes in the region. Overall, such studies portray a rather
isolated picture of one group or one trend, without engaging the broader framework
of the fluid borders or the numerous population movements across them.
Broader regional studies of the twentieth-century population movements first
emerged in the immediate wake of the massive migrations they sought to explain.
Two notable examples are Stephen Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities, on the popu-
lation exchanges among Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece in the interwar period, and
Joseph Schechtman, European Population Transfers, on the migrations during World
War II and its aftermath. These continue to be master studies of two traumatic pop-
ulation movements in the areas, even if later scholars have questioned the authors’
128
interpretive framework that assumed the “success” or “necessity” of population trans-

fers.12 These studies depicted the dynamics in the area as pathological and unique,
without making broader European comparisons. Newer studies, however, have taken
up this task.13
Only recently have scholars turned toward emphasizing the interrelatedness of
population movements, emphasizing common triggers and shared networks between
East and West. Klaus Bade’s Migration in European History presents a comprehensive
history of migration in Europe, which integrates the two parts of the continent in a
single narrative. Other works that include migrations in East Central Europe within
a broader framework are Saskia Sassen’s Guests and Aliens, which emphasizes the turn
toward controlling population movements everywhere in Europe in the modern
period, while also emphasizing the uniqueness of unmixing in East Central Europe
in the aftermath of empires; and Leo Lucassen’s The Immigrant Threat which com-
pares the story of the labor migrations of the Poles in Germany with that of the Irish
in Britain and the Italians in France, demonstrating the pan-European dynamics of
reception and integration of immigrants. This comprehensive approach is also evi-
dent in John Torpey’s The Invention of the Passport, which demonstrates that border
controls and immigration restrictions on both sides of the Atlantic were intercon-
nected so that trends in East Central Europe mirrored practices first pioneered in
the West; and in Mark Wyman’s Round-Trip to America which explains the large num-
ber of return immigrants from East Central Europe within the context of the New
Immigration trends since the 1870s.14
Much attention has been paid to the transformation of cities as major hubs of
population change. Nikolai Todorov’s pioneering work, The Balkan City, 1400–1900,
established an important comparative framework for researchers.15 Recently, more
scholars have paid attention to individual cities. These include, among others, Gary
Cohen’s study of demographic change in nineteenth-century Prague, Nathaniel
Wood’s subtle explanation of the allure of urban life in Cracow, Mark Mazower’s
comprehensive work on the transformations of Salonica over five centuries, and
Robert Donia’s longue durée examination of the changes in Sarajevo from Ottoman
rule through the Yugoslav wars.16
By adopting a close, micro-historical analysis of individual migration stories and
re-discovering social history, more scholars have scrutinized the actual experience
of relocation. In her study of the Greek refugees in Piraeus, Renée Hirschon ques-
tioned the premise of easy integration of refugees in the aftermath of resettlement to
their supposed national homeland, Greece.17 Philipp Ther presented similar findings
regarding the integration of the Germans arriving from Poland and Czechoslovakia
in the aftermath of World War II.18 Building upon these insights, anthropologists
have turned their attention to gender dynamics, inter-generational differences, and
the traumatic memory of the minority experience or exile.19 These studies problem-
atized the traditional focus on state-centered national homogenization efforts and
paid more attention to the plight of the affected populations.
Finally, more historians have recently adopted comparative and transnational per-
spectives on migration movements. The authors of this chapter, David Gerlach and
Theodora Dragostinova, highlight in their own work the interrelatedness of migration
movements within Central Europe and the Balkans, respectively.20 Ulf Brunnbauer
and Tara Zahra have likewise embarked on comparative studies of migration trends
129
across Europe.21 But the integrated, comparative study of migration and population
change for all of East Central Europe has yet to be written, and this chapter is an
attempt to chart both the commonalities and differences between Central Europe
and the Balkans.
The mixing of peoples: empires and borderlands

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the territories of East Central Europe
belonged to three large states, the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires and the
Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. Migrations within and from the region further
connected these lands to other areas, thanks to the influence of Prussian/German
and Russian policies on population movements. The people and spaces of East
Prussia, much of Ukraine, and parts of western Belarus comprised intrinsic parts of
East Central Europe’s migratory patterns. Similarly, Anatolia, Asia Minor, and the
Black Sea and Mediterranean were areas interlinked with migration trends in the
Balkans. At times these areas were destinations for migrants; at other times they
were launching pads, showing how difficult it is to talk about a coherent “eastern
European” migration pattern when discussing migration in the area. While common
trends existed in these diverse territories, there were also variations in the migration
patterns developing in Southeastern, East Central, and Northeastern Europe.
To complicate things further, modern ethno-national categories fail to explain
the fluidity of population dynamics in this large area, as many communities did
not have firm attachments to particular states, but rather prioritized their religious
affiliations to a particular church or their ethno-linguistic affinities to neighboring
peoples. Therefore, when discussing the time period before the twentieth century,
it is difficult to use accurate ethnic or even linguistic labels as different sources used
different ethnonyms, and these changed over time. Any group identity terms used
in this section have to be read with the understanding that when speaking of Greeks
in the seventeenth century, for example, Ottoman sources took into consideration
religion and not ethnicity. Similarly, Czech-speakers or Ukrainian-speakers of the
same time period are not the automatic ancestors of modern Czechs and Ukrainians,
and so forth.22
As a general trend, due to military conflicts between the powers, territorial expan-
sions and contractions, and religious tensions prior to 1700, extensive migrations
connected to the constant territorial and political changes decisively shaped the
demography of the region since the early modern period. Because military conquest
and religious conflict often went hand in hand with population displacement, forced
or voluntary religious conversion, and the planned colonization of strategic terri-
tories, Central Europe and the Balkans underwent dynamic intermixing of various
ethnic and religious groups. The population of the entire region was quite heteroge-
neous, but this was particularly obvious in strategic areas, many of which were located
in the borderlands between empires. Despite the fluidity of borders during this time
period, however, changes in the frontiers did not always entail mandatory migratory
movements because, together with political goals, the empires also pursued practical
economic aims often related to the agricultural development of these areas. In addi-
tion, early modern imperial governments did not consider ethnicity a key factor when
developing their population policies. Thus, while imperial governments sometimes
130
encouraged migration into newly acquired territories, they only reluctantly and
exceptionally displaced the people already living there.
In the Balkans, the intermixing of diverse ethnic and religious groups became the
rule after the Ottoman conquest of the various Byzantine and Balkan Christian prin-
cipalities from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Many Balkan Christians
fled before the armies that devastated the area. Entire communities escaped to neigh-
boring territories, retreated to mountainous regions, or resettled to cities, such as
Salonica and Ioannina, that enjoyed special privileges. The extensive Turkish col-
onization with settlers from Asia Minor as well as the conversion to Islam of local
Christians brought religious changes. But the establishment of relative peace and
tranquility after the conquest, often described as Pax Ottomana, led to the “abolition
of state and feudal frontiers, which enhanced movements and the interpenetration of
different population groups.”23 Following a significant demographic decline during
the conquest, this trend was overcome by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and population growth became the trend by the eighteenth century.24 Christians,
Muslims, Armenians, Jews, and others became thoroughly intermixed in a state that
distinguished among the populations based on their religious affiliations rather
than ethnicity. As Lady Mary Montagu, the English aristocratic writer traveling to
Istanbul in the early 1700s, remarked, using ethno-linguistic labels that have to be
treated with caution, in the capital “they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian,
Arabic, Persian, Russian, Sclavonian, Walachian, German, Dutch, French, English,
Italian, Hungarian.”25 By the eighteenth century, sources included in the category of
“Christians” people that were variously called Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Moldavians,
Wallachians, Gagauzes, Armenians, Vlachs, Hungarians, and Cossacks. The “Muslims”
consisted of Turks as well as indigenous Muslim converts of various ethnicities, but
also the categories of Tatars, Circassians, Albanians, Kurds, and Muslim and Tatar
Gypsies.26 All of these categories cannot be understood in the sense of modern nations,
but their sheer number demonstrates the radically different social organization that
the Ottoman state brought to the Balkans with its religious and ethno-cultural inter-
mixing. Despite the presence of large Muslim communities, a novelty in the area, the
ratio between Muslims and non-Muslims showed the numerical preponderance of
the non-Muslims in all Balkan provinces until the late nineteenth century.27
The Ottoman conquest facilitated the emergence of interspersed diasporic com-
munities that further complicated the demography of Southeastern Europe. By the
seventeenth century, the Sephardic Jewish population fleeing Spain had settled in
Istanbul, Salonica, and Edirne and turned Salonica into the chief commercial city
of the eastern Mediterranean.28 In the Danubian area, Sofia had the largest concen-
tration of Jews, some 20 percent. In the eighteenth century, there were also Jewish
migration flows from Central Europe, especially Austria, southward. Large Armenian
communities existed mostly in the eastern parts of the Balkans as a result of trade
relations between Istanbul and the west coast of the Black Sea.29 Greek communities,
marked as speakers of the Greek language, appeared throughout the Mediterranean
and spread to the Adriatic, Hungary, Austria, and Russia, and established connec-
tions with Greek-speaking centers in Ottoman Pontos, Asia Minor, and the Black
Sea.30 These diasporas were crucial to the facilitation of trade through Ottoman-
controlled lands and promoted the continued religious and cultural diversity of
the empire. As a result of all these processes, as late as 1785 foreign travelers to
131
the Ottoman lands casually described the everyday reality of religious and ethnic
intermixing: “I passed . . . villages of half Turks, half Bulgarians, where Moslems and
Christians live without hatred, even in alliance, and drink bad wine together, violat-
ing Ramadan and Lent . . . and are no less honest folk.”31
In the eighteenth century the Habsburg monarchy possessed a diverse ethnic and
religious composition that resembled in this respect the Ottoman Empire. Following
the Ottoman defeat of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1526, several territories were
placed under Habsburg authority. In addition to the remnants of the Kingdom of
Hungary and Croatia-Slavonia, the former Bohemian Kingdom also came under
Habsburg control. These changes transformed the ethno-linguistic make-up of the
realm from a German-speaking majority with Italian, Slovene, and Polish-speaking
minorities into a truly polyglot empire, with Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Slovak,
Romanian, Ruthenian, and Serbian-speakers added to the mix. By 1600 the hered-
itary lands had roughly 2 million inhabitants, the Bohemian crown lands 4 million,
and the remnants of the Hungarian Kingdom just over 1 million.32 In the aftermath
of the Reformation, new religions emerged. Many German-speakers as well as some
Slovene- and Slovak-speakers adopted Lutheranism; the inhabitants of Hungary
were mostly Calvinist; many Czech-speakers remained Catholic, but adopted anti-
Roman Catholic Hussite practices; Croatia was largely Catholic but many Orthodox
Christians also inhabited the area. By the early seventeenth century, Habsburg rulers
no longer worshipped the same church as the majority of their religiously diverse
subjects. However, policies directed against Protestants led to the ultimate victory of
Catholicism in the Bohemian and Austrian lands. Persecution of Protestants led to
extensive migration, much of it based on religion; roughly 200,000 people left the
Habsburg Empire in the 1620s, mostly nobles from Bohemia and Moravia who fled
Catholic forces after the defeat at White Mountain in 1620, but also tens of thousands
from the hereditary lands.33 Again, it is important to emphasize that people fled
these areas due to religious and political persecution targeting the nobility, and not
because of what might be construed as national pressures in the modern sense. The
situation differed in Hungary where the Habsburg rulers made no attempt to con-
vert the kingdom’s Protestants. Because of Hungary’s position between the Ottoman
and Habsburg realms, the Habsburg monarchy treated Hungary with moderation;
in Transylvania, after 1700 a diverse religious community included Lutherans,
Calvinists, Orthodox, and Uniates.
Further to the east, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which resulted from
the union of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1569,
had an equally complicated ethnic and religious configuration. By 1600 the popula-
tion of the Commonwealth was more than 10 million and continued to increase,
with the towns growing in size until mid-century. However, after 1650 the “Deluge”
(Potok) reversed these trends as Swedish, Muscovite, and Cossack forces fought for
control of the country and the population declined.34 A wide variety of languages
was spoken in the Commonwealth including Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian/
Ruthenian, Belorussian, Russian, German, and Latvian. In terms of religion, the
majority of Polish-speakers were Catholics while most speakers of East-Slavic dia-
lects, including Ukrainian, Ruthenian, and Belorussian were Uniates or Orthodox.
German-speakers were predominantly Lutherans. There was also a significant Jewish
minority. While the Commonwealth had long been a powerful country, by the early
132
eighteenth century the balance of power in Europe had altered drastically to its
disadvantage, particularly with the appearance of Prussia, Russia, and Austria as
powers competing for control in the area. On the eve of the first partition of 1772,
the population of Poland-Lithuania included over 12 million inhabitants, less than
a half of them Polish-speakers.35
The reconfiguration of empires and states and the changes in the religious com-
position of their inhabitants prior to the eighteenth century had spawned significant
migrations and a tremendous diversity of peoples in the entire area covered by these
multiethnic and multiconfessional empires. Much of the migration during the eight-
eenth century flowed from these earlier changes. In particular, the ongoing fighting
between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in the Balkans and Hungary caused
continued migration and ethnic mixing in these contact areas. By 1683, the Ottoman
armies had pushed the border between the two empires all the way to Slovakia and
threatened Vienna. When the Habsburg forces along with other Christian armies
forced the Ottomans to retreat, new migrations in both directions ensued. The
Habsburg government then actively encouraged the settlement of the border zone in
southern Hungary with German-speakers from the Bohemian crown lands in the
north and with Orthodox Christians from Serbia in the south. The Habsburg monar-
chy granted religious freedom and significant local autonomy to these colonists as well
as favorable land grants in exchange for their military service.36 On the Ottoman side
of the border, a large number of Muslim converts deserted from the Christian armies
to the Ottoman side; these were inhabitants of Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, and
Wallachia who lived along the Sava-Danube River line and often crossed the border in
both directions. This is how the military frontier (Militärgrenze) emerged, a stretch of
hundreds of miles of ill-defined border between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires,
which functioned as a frontier region, something like a no-man’s land, where people
moved in and out according to the treaty in force.37 While the military frontier was
unique with its permeable borders and intermixed population, it was also typical of
the extensive “mixing” of people from different ethnic groups that characterized East
Central Europe as a contact zone of several empires.
By the early eighteenth century the Habsburgs had reversed the Ottoman expan-
sion in Europe, re-conquering Hungary and Croatia and expanding into Italy and
Transylvania. After 1718, the Ottoman-Habsburg border was drawn on the Sava-
Danube Rivers and the crest of the Carpathian Mountains between Transylvania and
Wallachia-Moldavia. This remained an area of vibrant exchange between Serbian-
speaking populations in the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires because economic
activity, mainly cattle-breeding, led to frequent movements of the populations that
shared the same language, religion, and livelihood. New military frontiers were set
up in the 1760s and 1780s in Croatia-Slavonia, the Banat, and Transylvania, and
similar migration trends continued.38 During the reign of Maria Theresa (1740–80)
the government sponsored the relocation of German-speakers to former areas of
Ottoman control near Novi Sad (Neusatz) and in the Banat. These settlers became
known as Danube Schwabians and joined the already established communities of
Transylvanian Saxons along the southern Habsburg frontier. The state offered them
land, equipment, livestock, and tax exemptions for ten years. From 1689 to the end
of the eighteenth century it is estimated that some 350,000 persons migrated to
Hungary.39 After another war in 1790, some South Slav families from Serbia and
133
Croatia crossed over into the Habsburg realm and spent time in transit camps until
the final border adjustments were made.40 Others were given land allotments and
established as “border guards” (Grenzer) against the possible threat of Ottoman
incursion. By 1843, nearly half of the Croatian Military Border was composed of
Orthodox Christians. By this time, with the Ottoman Empire in retreat and the crea-
tion of the independent Serbian state, the Habsburg rulers began to discourage the
immigration of Orthodox Slavs to these regions.41 Habsburg policies shifted due to
the increasing pressure of nationalist politics. Earlier rulers had generally encour-
aged Christian settlement of the region, but they would later seek to prevent the
ethnic mixing that these defensive policies had helped to create.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman rulers also engaged in mil-
itary interactions with the Russian Empire, which was pushing for access to the warm
seas. The extensive Russo-Turkish conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries became the main factor in the movement of people in and out of the Balkans. In
the 1720s, the Sublime Porte sent punitive expeditions against the Herzegovinian and
Montenegrin tribes because they sided with Peter the Great in the Turkish-Russian
War. Ottoman officials moved many to eastern Bosnia while others fled north to
Serbia.42 As the Russian Empire advanced to the south and captured territories on
the Black Sea, new population movements emerged from the north to the south. The
Russian annexation of the Crimean Khanate (1783) provoked the mass emigration of
thousands of Turkic-speaking people, usually designated as Tatars, from the Crimean
Peninsula to the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (and particularly
the area of Dobrudja) where the Ottoman sultans colonized them to strengthen the
frontier against the Russians. More Tatars fled from Bessarabia in 1812 because of the
Russian occupation of the province. Population movements connected to the military
conflict between the Ottoman and Russian Empires continued in the nineteenth cen-
tury; only in Dobrudja, some 100,000 Tatars settled by the middle of the century.43
In East Central Europe, while the acquisition of new territories from the
former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not necessarily result in forced out-
migrations, extensive in-migrations occurred in these newly acquired lands due to
economic and religious considerations. The Habsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern
monarchies, similarly to the Ottomans in the earlier time period, promoted colo-
nization policies that encouraged the economic development of what often were
sparsely inhabited areas. In East Prussia, the Hohenzollerns made every effort to
speed the colonization of those lands by offering attractive terms of settlement
including livestock, building materials, and credit.44 Following the partitions of
Poland, Prussia continued to encourage peasant settlement from Brandenburg into
its newly acquired lands in the east, but these policies failed to bring large numbers
of new settlers from the west.45
While economic motivations were important, greater religious freedom also con-
tributed to people’s decisions to resettle. For instance, from 1713 to 1756 roughly
900,000 Czech-speaking settlers moved to Prussia. Some came for religious reasons,
others for the economic advantages offered by the state. During the Prussian-
Habsburg war in 1742, Czech-speakers moved both into and out of Silesian territories
acquired by the Hohenzollerns. Religious communities of “dissenters,” Protestants,
Lutherans, Evangelicals, and others, took advantage of the possibility to resettle in
these regions. This process continued throughout the eighteenth century, though
134
numbers remained low.46 Jews from Galicia also began migrating to

their total
Transylvania following Joseph II’s Edicts of Toleration issued in the late 1700s.47
However, the numbers of migrants who moved permanently for religious reasons or
for economic advancement remained low during the eighteenth century; even those
who moved because of military conflict were mostly confined to the border regions.
Demographic trends also did not work in favor of large-scale emigration. Like most
of Europe during the eighteenth century, the regions of Central and Southeastern
Europe were marked by high mortality and high birth rates. East Central Europe
tended toward higher birth rates (40 per 1,000) than Western Europe (30 per 1,000).
This difference was due in large measure to the lower age at which people in East
Central Europe married and began procreating. For the same reason, birth rates
tended to be higher in the Balkans than in Central Europe.48 While famines, plagues,
and negative climatic events took less of a toll than in previous centuries, gains in
health care and nutrition had yet to make a significant impact on life expectancy.
The relatively high birth rates more or less led to a sufficient replacement rate for the
overall population. Because the economic systems were overwhelmingly agricultural,
only through the significant expansion of food production could larger populations
be supported.49 Still, populations in East Central Europe did grow slowly, mirroring
the overall European trend. While reliable data for the years 1700 to 1800 is lacking,
for the Habsburg monarchy at least population growth rates after 1750 fluctuated
from 0.5 to 1 percent per year.50 Of course, regional variations were great and some
areas experienced a greater strain on land and resources. Nonetheless, large-scale
emigration was held in check; while people maintained seasonal labor migrations,
the vast majority of people remained where they were.
Overall for the entire region, despite the military conflicts and political upheavals
in the eighteenth century, border changes rarely entailed population displacement.
After the three partitions of 1772, 1793, and 1795, Poland-Lithuania disappeared
from the map of Europe, but this major political change was not accompanied by
mass migrations. Some Polish-speakers emigrated and established communities in
Western Europe, particularly in France, and the incoming regimes targeted selected
groups for resettlement. The Prussian government tried to expel the poorest Jews,
while Russian tsars forced out the poorest gentry, but no mass exodus ensued.51 State-
led efforts at population restructuring were exceptional. During the Napoleonic
campaigns that tore apart the Habsburg realms, political change and new borders
likewise did not trigger extensive population movements. The failure of the Polish
uprising in 1830 led to what is termed “The Great Emigration” of Poles to France;
some 9,000 people, mostly of noble origin, took part in the exodus.52 Thus, the eight-
eenth century saw only specific, localized permanent migrations as neither “natural”
“push” factors, such as population growth, nor politics, promoted them. Only with
the establishment of new nation-states in the Ottoman Balkans and the beginning of
sustained population growth in the early nineteenth century did migration practices
start to change.
Economic and labor migrations in the long nineteenth century

Migration was increasingly central to the economic lives of many eastern European
inhabitants in the nineteenth century when economic transformations, some of
135
them linked to urbanization and industrialization, produced new trends in the

movement of people. These more rigorous economic migrations did not interrupt
the ethnic intermixing but occurred in conjunction with it. Even before that period,
engaged in routine local migrations connected to labor exchange, marriage pat-
terns, and social mobility. Thus, old labor migration practices continued, although
the advent of new economic relations and demographic realities in the nineteenth
century somewhat altered the established patterns. Traditional seasonal labor
migration practices expanded, as did rural-to-urban movements and long-distance
migrations.53 While the increased mobility of individuals might have developed ear-
lier in the Ottoman territories because peasants were not tied to the land, these
trends also became prevalent in the Habsburg realms and the Polish lands after the
emancipation of serfs in the second half of the nineteenth century. Overall, several
trends converged in the population movements in East Central Europe in the long
nineteenth century: fast-paced population growth, larger internal rural-to-urban
migrations, more extensive seasonal labor migrations, and increased out-migration
to Europe and the United States.54
The interrelationship between old practices and new trends was evident in
the migration activities of the transhumant Balkan pastoralists (variously called
Sarakatsani, Vlachs, or Cincars) who practiced migration as a way of life since earlier
times. The presence of these groups well into the twentieth century demonstrates
a lack of interest in overarching “national” motivations, and the pastoralists’ focus
on local, community, economic, and family needs. The nomadic and semi-nomadic
cattle breeders led the extensive migrations of their livestock from the winter to the
summer pastures across hundreds of kilometers. The movement of people intensified
in the eighteenth century when they lost their previous privileges and low taxation
status and sought new opportunities to rent land for grazing.55 The establishment
of large, for-profit farms (ciftlik) in Thessaly, Macedonia, the Salonica and Edirne
areas, and the Maritsa and Danube regions created new incentives for the pastoral-
ists because during winter the estate owners allowed the flocks to graze their lands
if the shepherds paid rent.56 Throughout the nineteenth century, the Cincars of the
Macedonian Mountains and Pindus migrated between the summer grazing in their
home areas and the winter pastures near the Aegean shore.57 Similarly, shepherds
from Pindar in Greece drove their flocks in caravan groups as large as a thousand
horses, accompanied by their wives, children, and household goods.58 These pasto-
ralists combined old and new economic practices and continued to be a dynamic
migrant community in the interwar period. As the new borders could impede travel,
governments made special arrangements by offering duty-free transit and facilitat-
ing temporary migration between winter and summer grazing areas. After 1933 the
Karakachani of Bulgaria, who traditionally traveled from the Rhodopes, or Balkan
Mountains to the Aegean Sea, were no longer able freely to cross the Bulgarian,
Greek, and Turkish borders, so they limited their migrations to a single country or
became sedentary.59
In the late eighteenth century, new migration trends connected to changes in
economic development. Throughout the Ottoman Empire, fairs became popular as
centers for the sale of goods produced by the local population. As periods of peace
became longer, trade patterns became more extensive and local merchant groups
became directly involved in European trade in the Mediterranean, Central Europe,
136
and Russia.60 The Ottoman textile industry developed rapidly in the first half of the
nineteenth century as numerous manufacturing enterprises emerged that involved
the work of urban and rural populations.61 The development of industry and the
growth of urban centers to the west also began to draw greater numbers of people
from East Central Europe and the Polish lands who started migrating westward in
the hope of better opportunities.62 This migration flow from east to west altered pre-
vious patterns of migration that had been based on resettling imperial borderlands.
Agricultural workers increasingly took to the road in order to fill the gap left by other
workers moving to the cities and into the factories. Workers were also needed in the
construction of transportation (railroads, canals, and roadways) and service sectors
that supported the growing urban populations. The majority of migrants, whether
local or long distance, comprised a pool of unskilled laborers for industrial and agri-
cultural work. Others were involved in itinerant trade, while still others joined the
artisan class in urban areas.63 These new economic trends also contributed to the
steep rise in emigration beyond Europe, particularly to the Americas.
The changing demographic structure of the region was also critical to the migra-
tory shifts during this period and related to economic change. Several complex
factors converged during the nineteenth century that led to a vast increase in pop-
ulations. Historians call this crucial period the “demographic transition.” Mortality
rates began to decline, thanks to improved nutrition and health care. In East Central
Europe until 1860, the death rate hovered around 38 per 1,000 people (compared to
26.7 in Western Europe). By 1900, the death rate had declined to 33.3 per 1,000 peo-
ple. The decline did not proceed evenly across the region; it began first in Bohemia
and Moravia and then generally affected areas to the south and east over the follow-
ing decades.64 Fertility rates also began to decline, as did infant mortality, though
the extent and the rates of decline varied tremendously among different countries.
Although mortality declines everywhere preceded those of fertility, the reasons for
this remain unclear.65 Nonetheless, the lengthy decline in mortality rates and that of
fertility in the region, from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century, led to a
period of dramatic population increase. In 1850–51, the Habsburg realms counted
roughly 30 million inhabitants. By 1910 the overall population increased to over 49
million.66 According to the Ottoman census of 1831, the population in the European
provinces included 9 to 10 million people. Even if official statistics did not give a
completely accurate picture, by the beginning of the twentieth century the popula-
tion was clearly on the rise.67 Figures from 1910 for the remaining parts of Europe
under Ottoman control as well as the newly independent states in the Balkans totaled
over 22 million people.68 Such dramatic population expansion during a period of
economic change offered both pressure on traditional resource use and an outlet for
this pressure in urbanization and overseas emigration.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, urban areas substantially increased.
In 1870 there were 21 cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants and only three over
500,000 (Berlin, Vienna, and Istanbul). In the next forty years cities experienced a
dramatic rise in their number of inhabitants. Areas around Budapest, Prague, Warsaw,
Wrocław, and Zagreb witnessed growing population densities from under a hundred
persons per square kilometer to between one and two hundred persons. Vienna and
Berlin became cities with more than 2 million inhabitants.69 Some cities grew because
of the natural increase of births over deaths, while others experienced a heavy influx
137
of people from the countryside. For instance, 79 percent of the population growth
in Breslau (today, Wrocław) during the nineteenth century was due to the arrival of
migrants.70 Everywhere the urban populations increased; by the 1870s, urban dwellers
of the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire ranged from 14 to 23 percent of the
total population. From the 1830s to the 1870s, the new states of Serbia and Greece
developed their own urban networks while an even larger number of small and
medium-sized cities sprang up in the Danubian area.71 Even if the region remained
predominantly agricultural, the expansion of urban areas in and around East Central
Europe reflected changes in the demographic, economic, and migration patterns.
New employment opportunities emerged with the growing cities. Agricultural,
artisan, and industrial labor migrations that had already begun earlier in the century
expanded both within the region and into nearby regions of Europe. In the Balkans,
many migrants settled on the outskirts of cities and continued to do farming work;
others joined hired labor or became artisans. Most migrants were master builders
and construction workers, but tailors, bakers, potters, cartwrights, woodworkers, and
bronze tinkers also migrated and traveled extensively.72 For example, the popula-
tion of the Balkan Mountain areas had well-established links with the large-scale
stock raising businesses in Dobrudja, an attractive region because of the construc-
tion of the Russe-Varna railroad and the brisk traffic in the Danubian ports.73 This
new trend led to an increase in the migrant population in the northeastern Balkans
to 6 percent of the entire population.74 Industrialization in Bohemia and parts of
Austria provided for short-distance relocation to centers of production. Czech-
speakers, for example, migrated from the countryside to nearby industrial centers.
Those who lived in southern Moravia and Bohemia often moved to Vienna, while
those who lived in northern regions moved to Germany and to growing industrial
regions in northern Bohemia. Later, they moved further south in the Habsburg
realms. Similarly Poles, Mazurians, and others from East Prussia moved west into
German lands, first to Berlin, but later throughout the region. By the 1890s, Poles
and Mazurians traveled in significant numbers to the Ruhr region of Germany and
comprised a key segment of the growing mining and steel workers there. Poles from
Galicia moved to Silesia and Prussia.75
Despite the draw of the cities, many of these migrants also remained involved in
agricultural production. Seasonal labor migrations remained important. Agricultural
laborers in German areas east of the Elbe River included large numbers of migrants
from Russian Poland and Austrian Ruthenia, particularly after the 1890s. By the early
1900s, seasonal migration along the German-Russian border reached new heights.
By 1902 more than 280,000 agricultural workers were crossing the frontier in both
directions on eight-month passes. By 1913 the figure had risen to more than 800,000.
Women comprised a large percentage of these migrants.76 Labor recruitment agen-
cies or brokers helped to facilitate and profited from the seasonal migrations into
Prussia. In Austrian Galicia the government exercised little oversight of these bro-
kers and stable migratory currents emerged. In Russian-controlled Congress Poland,
authorities sought to control migration and prevented any recruitment efforts from
the German side. Despite these efforts, Polish and other agricultural migrants from
the east continued to move west in search of labor opportunities.77
The scale of periodic labor migrations expanded as migrant work provided an
important alternative or additional source of income. The Mazurians traveled to the
138
Ruhr during the agricultural off-season when they could earn money in the mines.
Hundreds of thousands of Poles likewise migrated seasonally to Germany to work
on farms.78 In the South Slav and Bulgarian lands, the periodic migrants were called
pečalbari or “profit seekers.” They traveled in search of work in an extensive area from
Istanbul in the east to the Bulgarian-Serbian borderlands to the west to Romania in
the north to Pindus in the south. In 1863, some 32,550 inhabitants of the Bulgarian
lands worked in Istanbul while in 1872 some 80,000 migrants from various Ottoman
provinces arrived in Serbia. In certain parts of Macedonia, such migrants comprised
66 to 69 percent of the entire workforce in 1894–95. Even as late as 1920 to 1935
Serbia sent out an annual average of 50,000 pečalbari.79
Most pečalbari traveled in groups after they had been recruited by paid contrac-
tors who agreed with interested landowners, and they lived, worked, slept, and ate
communally.80 Agricultural workers performed services on the large farms in Eastern
Bulgaria, Dobrudja, and the areas around Salonica, Edirne, and Istanbul. Some went
long distances, such as the workers from Niš who in the 1850s traveled each year in
groups of 200 to 500 to Istanbul, a walk of twenty days. Others traveled as far as the
large estates of Hungary where they earned handsome pay. There were also builders,
brick makers, and masons who were organized according to a hierarchy of masters,
journeymen, and apprentices, and each received a share according to his status. When
the Danube–Black Sea railway was built in the 1870s, masons arrived from all over the
empire and returned home in the winter months. These builders also contracted to
build cottages, town houses, stone bridges, administrative buildings, and churches.
Sometimes, unmarried young women were sent as domestic servants to nearby cities.
Some pečalbari remained with their families during the harvest season and migrated
during the winter months when work on the land diminished. They generally saved
their cash, built comfortable homes, and purchased additional land for their families.
Some men intermarried away from home while others brought new wives to their vil-
lages. The brisk pečalbari trade only came to an end after World War I when the newly
drawn borders forced most to work domestically.
By the early twentieth century, the distances labor migrants traveled were becom-
ing longer and many migrants were heading to new destinations. This period
coincided with the first systematic East Central European state attempts to regulate
migration practices, as in the rest of Europe.81 The Prussian government had pre-
viously required Polish and other foreign labor migrants to leave the country after
seasonal agricultural work. Similarly, the German government exercised control over
the Polish labor force in Germany because Poles comprised the vast majority of the
1.2 million foreign laborers that worked east of the Elbe in Germany in 1914. Fearing
a growing Polish immigrant population, German officials established a network of
regulations and agencies to monitor their presence and ensured their return migra-
tion to Russian territory at the end of every season.82 The Russian government began
monitoring its western borders more closely in 1828, recording the nationality of
foreigners who entered the country. Non-labor migrant groups increasingly began
facing harsher restrictions. As the number of Roma who fled to the West rose, many
attempted to go to the United States but immigration restrictions against vagrants
ensured that most of them stayed in Europe.83 Despite such attempts to regulate
migration, on the eve of World War I half a million South Slavs worked in industrial
centers in Western Europe.
139
The flow of people to the United States and elsewhere outside of Europe was also
connected to the economic and demographic changes in East Central Europe. In
particular, the demographic transition had created a reservoir of young people who
had few options for advancement other than through migration.84 By 1914, all areas
in the Balkans and Central Europe that experienced sustained periodic migrations
were also sending workers to the United States. Roughly 7 million people moved
from the region to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries.85 The combined territories of Austria-Hungary comprised one of the
four largest European sending countries to the United States, along with Italy, Great
Britain, and Russia, before the turn of the century.86 This migration became par-
ticularly significant beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. Before the 1880s
emigration from East Central and Southeast Europe to the United States was limited.
By the 1890s, nearly 600,000 people had emigrated from Austria-Hungary; by 1910
this figure had increased to over 2 million.87 The increase in immigrants from Polish
areas incorporated into Prussia, Austria, and Russia was similarly dramatic, though it
varied from region to region. Emigration from Prussian Poland began mostly in the
late 1850s and peaked by the 1890s. Polish emigration from the other partitioned
areas began later, in the 1890s and continued to rise after 1900. Overall somewhere
between 1.8 and 2 million inhabitants of the partitioned Polish lands emigrated to the
United States from 1870 to 1914.88 From the 1860s and 1870s until the period before
World War I, about 1 million Balkan Slavs emigrated to the United States, mostly
from Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Greek Macedonia, and Bulgaria (see Table 3.1).
The vibrant cross-Atlantic migration was facilitated by several factors. Shipping
agents as well as emigrants and successful return migrants encouraged others to
move across the ocean. German shipping agencies that had relied upon German
migrants for their profits had to turn to other areas of Europe when German emi-
gration declined. In response, these agencies pursued migrants from further east.
From 1894 to 1914 nearly 90 percent of emigrants from German ports were non-
Germans.89 In the Habsburg lands, the government’s censor committee eventually
outlawed advertisements by German transportation firms, in an effort to prevent the
Table 3.1 Immigration from East Central Europe to the United States,
1899–1914 (partial data)
Ethnicity or place of origin Number of immigrants to United States
Bulgarian and Montenegrin 142,441

Croatian and Slovenian 458,674
Greek 370,074
Jewish* 309,832
Magyar 456,994
Polish 1,402,695
Romanian 133,865
Ruthenian 254,379
Slovak 477,276
Source: Walter Wilcox, ed., International Migrations vol. 1 Statistics: International Tables
(New York: Gordon and Breach, 1969), Table 13, 460–470. (Serbs and several other
ethnic groups and places were not indicated in this source.)
Note: *Includes Austria-Hungary, Romania, and European Turkey only.
140
drain of available labor.90 But the returning migrants who had earned enough money
to buy land and build a new home “promoted America with more impact than did
handbills posted on village walls.”91 The communications of emigrants who had suc-
cessfully resettled and mailed their stories home induced many more to leave. Several
patterns marked the emigration beyond Europe during these years. It was heavily
male and migrants came primarily from peasant backgrounds. Emigrants from the
Balkans were over 90 percent male from 1899 to 1910; males comprised the majority
of migrants from Austria-Hungary as well.92 During the same period, the majority of
emigrants from Austria-Hungary worked in agriculture, and only a small percentage
worked in American industries.93
Many migrants returned to Europe. The patterns of return migration varied con-
siderably, and differences between short-term labor migrants and long-term settlers,
between those who had planned to settle permanently, but went back again, were not
always easy to distinguish. That some migrants made the trip more than once com-
plicated the picture. Some who moved to the United States earned enough money in
order to return home and secure a landholding, or to support their families. Others
moved with the intention of staying, but found that their work or social lives were
not what they had imagined and returned to more familiar surroundings. Most new
immigrants to the United States took the lowest paying and most physically demand-
ing jobs, and many lived in squalid conditions. Because many came from peasant
backgrounds, nostalgia for native cultural traditions combined with the rigors of new
work routines made return migration an attractive option. The highest rate of return
for the years 1908–23 belonged to Serbs, Bulgarians, and Montenegrins, though
Hungarians, Romanians, and Slovaks also returned in large numbers (see Table 3.2).
Thus, the overall picture of immigration to the United States fits within the larger
trend of economic migration; much of the population flow was work related and for
many people it was temporary or seasonal.
Table 3.2 Immigration from East Central Europe to the United States and return migration to
Eastern Europe, 1908–23
Origins (area or ethnicity) Immigrants into USA Return migrants % returnees
Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia) 77,737 14,951 19

Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro 104,808 92,886 89
Croatia, Slovenia 225,914 114,766 51
Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina 30,690 8,904 29
German 669,564 119,554 18
Greek 366,454 168,847 46
Jews 958,642 52,034 5
Lithuania 137,716 34,605 25
Hungarian 226,818 149,319 66
Polish 788,957 318,210 40
Romanian 95,689 63,126 66
Russian 210,321 110,282 52
Ruthenian 171,823 28,996 17
Slovak 225,033 127,593 57
Source: Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1996), 11.
141
The Balkans showed the largest percentage of returnees from the United States,
with nearly two-thirds of all immigrants from Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro
returning before 1914. By 1920, a high level of mortality combined with high return
migration levels had reduced the number of US residents from the South Slav lands
to 169,437 and from Bulgaria to 10,477. Most of the immigrants were coming to the
United States, earning wages, spending little, and departing with their savings.94 For
the Balkans, transatlantic emigration amounted to a form of transient migration,
linked to the old practice of pečalbari; the immigrants saw themselves as temporary
labor migrants while communities back home expected them to save, remit, and
return home, and community leaders sought to bring pressure on those who failed
to fulfill their obligations.95 That, before 1914, 50 percent of Austrian emigrants and
33 percent of Hungarian emigrants returned suggests that similar dynamics were at
work for people in the Habsburg realms, and that not all immigrants considered the
United States as a place of permanent settlement.96
Most migrant workers, however, remained on the continent. Polish continental
migration was twice as high as emigration to America. Those heading out of the
Habsburg lands were also much more likely to remain in Europe. The people of
East Prussia migrated in large numbers to western areas of Germany, but not much
further abroad.97 The years from 1854 to 1914 witnessed the height of migration,
turning East Central Europe into a vast network of migration chains within and from
the region. Klaus Bade reflecting on the Polish case argues that,
between 1860 and 1914, probably more than one-third of the total popula-
tion of almost 30 million in the Polish territories was familiar with different
forms of migration as part of their everyday working lives, whether short- and
long-distance migration in rural districts, rural-urban migration, or continen-
tal and overseas labor migration and emigration.98
But the aftermath of World War I curbed these extensive migration trends. The mass
overseas emigration was not repeated in the 1920s because of the new immigration
laws in the United States.99 The tighter enforcement of nation-state borders and pass-
port regulations limited the spontaneous labor and seasonal migrations.100 A period
of enhanced mobility was coming to an end.
The drive to homogenization: ethnic unmixing, 1878–1950

While economic migrations dominated much of the population movements of the
nineteenth century, the politics associated with the disintegration of the multiethnic
empires and their replacement with ethnically-based nation-states increasingly pro-
moted a new kind of migration. In 1923, the British diplomat Lord Curzon used the
term “ethnic unmixing” to describe the reality of war and displacement following the
Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 that led to the first compulsory population exchange
in modern Europe. Scholars have used the term to refer to the demographic changes
associated with the disappearance of the Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg Empires
and the establishment of new or enlarged nation-states in East Central Europe
after World War I.101 This process of “unmixing” continued during the turbulence
of World War II and involved some 46 million East Central Europeans. In fact, the
142
postwar period produced the most comprehensive ethnic cleansing of the continent,
with the forced migration of over 16 million individuals. The period from the Berlin
Treaty of 1878 to the end of World War II witnessed the greatest demographic shift
in European history. By 1950, the once diversely populated East Central Europe had
been redrawn along mostly homogeneous national boundaries.
Several trends determined the outcome of population movements in the late nine-
teenth century. With the expansion of the role of the state through taxation, education,
conscription, and the maintenance of public order, the bureaucracy was now actively
involved in regulating migration. With the new state borders and tighter citizenship
requirements, local mobility declined.102 Because the newly emerging nation-states
in the Balkans and, later, East Central Europe, were organized according to ethnic
criteria and generally espoused nationalist ideologies, elites strove to control and man-
age their populations to a degree never seen before. After the Berlin Treaty of 1878,
elite and state efforts to create homogeneous nation-states produced organized, vio-
lent, and massive population movements. The combination of modern bureaucracies
and armies, nationalist ideologies, and two world wars unleashed a flood of migrants
throughout East Central Europe, many of them fleeing their homes under duress.103
In describing his hometown, Ruschuk (today Russe in Bulgaria), in the years just
before World War I, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti captures the notori-
ous mixing of peoples in the Balkans:
If I say that Ruschuk is in Bulgaria, then I am giving an inadequate picture of

it. For people of the most varied backgrounds lived there, on any one day one
could hear seven or eight languages. Aside from the Bulgarians, who often
came from the countryside, there were many Turks who lived in their own
neighborhood, and next to it was the neighborhood of the Sephardim, the
Spanish Jews – our neighborhood. There were Greeks, Albanians, Armenians,
Gypsies. From the opposite side of the Danube came Rumanians . . . There
were also Russians here and there.104
Even if Canetti used normative national categories, his emphasis was on the con-
tinued ethno-linguistic and religious diversity of the Balkans well into the twentieth
century – a diversity that now stood in the way of the increasingly stronger national-
izing state, which saw its territory as the domain of the dominant state-owning nation.
While reaching its climax in the aftermath of World War I, in the Balkans the pro-
cess of “ethnic unmixing” had begun many decades prior when nation-states started
emerging in the territories of the Ottoman Empire. Because ethnicity was not yet the
marker by which governments and armies identified and targeted populations for relo-
cation, early forced migrations were mainly based on religious distinctions between
Muslims and Christians.105 During the period of the two Serbian revolts and the Greek
War of Independence between 1804 and 1830, Muslims fled their territories while
Christians of various ethnic backgrounds took their place. This description of the
arrival of Muslim refugees into Ottoman Bosnia from newly autonomous Serbia from
Ivo Andric’s novel, Bridge on the Drina captures the desperate plight of the fugitives:
[T]he first refugees . . . appeared on the bridge. The men were for the most
part on foot, dusty and bowed, while the women wrapped in their veils were
143
balanced on small horses with small children tied to the saddle-bags or to

boxes. Now and again a more important man rode a better horse, but with
lowered head and with funeral pace, revealing even more clearly the misfor-
tune which had driven them hither. Some of them were leading a single goat
on a short halter. Others carried lambs in their laps. All were silent; even the
children did not cry. All that could be heard was the beat of horseshoes and
footsteps and the monotonous clinking of wooden and copper vessels on the
overloaded horses.106
As Muslims fled, Orthodox Christians inhabiting Croatia-Slavonia and Vojvodina in

the Habsburg monarchy resettled to autonomous Serbia after 1815 to staff the admin-
istrations of the new state. In a similar trend, Greek-speakers from various places
in the Ottoman Empire resettled to the Greek Kingdom after its creation in 1830.
From 1830 to 1878, some 120,000 Muslims fled the territories ceded to the Balkan
states while a significant number of Christians moved to the new countries of Serbia,
Greece, and Romania (after 1859) (see Table 3.3).107
The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 had further dramatic demographic effects
in the entire Balkans. During the war, 34 percent (515,000) of the Muslims in what
would become Bulgaria became refugees. At the same time, some 187,000 Bulgarian-
speakers left the Ottoman territories. Roughly 160,000 Muslims left Austrian-occupied
Bosnia, most of them resettling to neighboring Kosovo or Macedonia.108 Despite the
“minority clauses” of the 1878 Berlin Treaty, which protected populations regard-
less of their “religious creeds and confessions,” more Muslims fled newly established
Bulgaria. Some 350,000 Turks fled Bulgaria between 1878 and 1912, and the number
of Muslims (including the Bulgarian-speaking Pomaks) decreased from 25 percent of
the population in 1880 to 14 percent by 1910.109 As a result of this flight, in the late
nineteenth century the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe (Macedonia, Thrace,
and Albania) now had a Muslim majority for the first time since the Ottoman conquest
of the Balkans.110 In contrast to the previous period, these population movements had
a pronounced political and nationalist edge, removing populations from certain terri-
tories because of their religion and ethnicity. At this point, unmixing started occurring
more along ethno-linguistic rather than religious lines as the idea of nationally pure
states became connected to the drive for political independence in the Balkans.
Similar trends of ethnically motivated resettlement based on nationalist principles
were evident in Central Europe. In 1886, the government of recently unified Germany
Table 3.3 Muslim migrations in the Balkans, 1815–1920 (partial data)
Time period Area of origins Number
1830–78 Serbia, Greece 120,000

1877–78 Bulgaria 515,000
1878 Bosnia 160,000
1878–1912 Bulgaria 350,000
1912–20 Macedonia, Thrace, Albania 414,000
Source: Justin McCarthy, “Muslims in Ottoman Europe: Population from 1800–1912,” Nationalities Papers 28,
no. 1 (2000), 32, 35, 36; Ali Eminov, Turkish and Other Muslim Minorities of Bulgaria (New York: Routledge,
1997), Tables 2.9 and 3.1.
144
created a Colonizing Commission (Ansiedlungs-Kommission) to buy out Polish farmers

and to settle Germans in Pomerania and Poznan (Posen). For a time, German offi-
cials even forced some Poles to move into the Russian partition of Poland. In 1894 a
subsidized Society of the Eastern Marches (Ostmarkenverein) was created to promote
German colonization in the east. The German government spent more than a billion
gold marks to alter the ethnic make-up of lands in the east, with only modest results.111
Polish national activists attempted to do the same, though they lacked the resources.
In 1867, when Galicia attained some autonomy within the Habsburg realms, Polish
elites promoted Polish education, which became the basis for a Polish-led govern-
ment. These policies accounted for a significant migration of Galician Germans to
West Prussia and Poznan in the 1900s.112
Jewish emigration emerged from analogous but much more violent targeting. By
the late nineteenth century the situation for Jews in East Central Europe had become
extremely precarious, and areas under tsarist control, in particular, were subjected to
widespread pogroms and intense persecution. As Michael Marrus argues, “Jews also
bore the particularly heavy weight of official hostility reserved for outsiders – in their
case, a community apart – not only in religion, but also in language, culture, dress,
and way of life.”113 The 1881 pogroms in the Russian Empire marked a watershed
in the history of modern Jewry. They were part of the broader shift toward national
chauvinism that negatively influenced the treatment of Jews across the region.
Imperial German officials considered Jews an “unwanted element” and ensured that
the 2.5 million Jewish emigrants, mostly from the Pale of Settlement, moved directly
to the ports of Bremen and Hamburg.114 Unlike other transatlantic migrants from
East Central Europe, few Jews made the return trip, especially after 1900. In addition
to persecution, the sheer poverty of Galicia’s Jews was a prime motive for their emi-
gration. The case of the Garrett family was typical of Jewish thinking about emigration
from the Polish lands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Alvin
Garrett related:
My father came here first. He wanted to go to either Palestine or the United

States. He had applications made to both countries. He got the visa to the
United States, and about a week or two after, we got the visa to Palestine,
but he chose the United States because he had three aunts living here and
because he felt it was the land of opportunity. My father hated the antisemi-
tism in Poland . . . It just got to my father so badly, he just wanted to get out
of there, and wanted his family out of there.115
Such cases reflected the multiple impulses, the desire to escape persecution and the
hope of a better quality of life, as well as the familial connections, that led many Jews
to leave their homes and move to America.
Another big wave of population movements occurred during the Balkan Wars
and World War I. In the Ottoman Empire, people living in borderland areas such
as Thrace, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Bosnia were forced to resettle multiple times as
successive armies and administrations entered their areas, initiating chain reactions
of human displacement. From 1912 to 1920, according to Ottoman statistics, some
414,000 Muslims migrated to Anatolia and Eastern Thrace (the regions that became
the Turkish Republic in 1923) from various parts of the Balkans; 250,000 moved in
145
1914 alone (see Table 3.3).116 In the Balkans for the entire period of the wars, more
than 2.5 million people were dislocated (see Table 3.4).117 But nationality was not the
main factor in the decision for or against emigration; while many would have pre-
ferred to remain in their areas as minorities, the progress of military campaigns or the
execution of state-orchestrated population movements often gave them no choice.
Beyond militarily motivated population displacements, “enemy” minorities were seg-
regated and interned or removed from strategic areas in wartime.118 For example,
after 1914 some 40,000 Greeks fled Western Thrace, which had been incorporated
into Bulgaria, while some 80,000 Bulgarians left their lands that had become part of
Serbia, Greece, or Romania, showing that the power of the state to dictate people’s
choices was increasing. Similarly, 20,000 Albanians resettled from Kosovo, now in
Serbia, to the new Albanian state. In 1914, 265,000 Greeks abandoned the Ottoman
Empire while 115,000 Turks left Greece. Characteristic of the temporary nature of
many migrations, some of these people sought repatriation to their original areas
after the wars’ end.119
These trends continued during World War I, which for the inhabitants of the Balkans
in many ways functioned as the “Third” Balkan War. During World War I in Serbia,
after the attack of the Habsburg and Bulgarian armies, 120,000 to 150,000 Serbs fled
with the Serbian army, only to return at the war’s end. When Bulgarian officials seized
Aegean Macedonia, previously in Greek hands, they interned 36,000 Greek inhabit-
ants of Macedonia to Bulgaria and they settled 39,000 Bulgarian migrants in their
place, hoping to secure the rapid Bulgarization of the area. Similarly, after 1918 some
180,000 Greeks moved back from Greece to their places of birth in Eastern Thrace
and Asia Minor in the Ottoman Empire. With the conclusion of the war, Hungarians
Table 3.4 Migrations in the Balkans during the Balkan Wars and World War I, 1912–18
(partial data)
Date Group From To Number
1913 Bulgarians Eastern Thrace (Turkey) Bulgaria 70,000

1913 Bulgarians Serbia, Greece, Romania Bulgaria 80,000
1913 Greeks Western Thrace (Bulgaria) Greece 40,000
1913 Albanians Kosovo (Serbia) Albania 20,000
1914 Greeks Eastern Thrace (Turkey) Greece 115,000
1914 Greeks Asia Minor (Turkey) Greece 150,000
1914 Turks Greece Turkey 115,000
1914 Serbs Serbia (occupied) Adriatic coast 120,000–150,000
1914 Greeks Macedonia (Bulgaria) Bulgaria 36,000
1914 Bulgarians Bulgaria Macedonia (Bulgaria) 39,000
1918 Greeks Greece Turkey under Greek 150,000
occupation
1918 Hungarians Vojvodina, Croatia- Hungary 55,000
Slavonia (Yugoslavia)
1918 Hungarians Transylvania (Romania) Hungary 220,000
Sources: Alexandros Pallis, “Racial Migrations in the Balkans during the Years 1912–1924,” Geographical
Journal LXVI (1925): 315–331; Dimitrije Djordjevich, “Migrations during the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars and
World War One,” in Ninić, Migrations in Balkan History (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1989), 115–129. More figures,
often with variations, are available in Stephen Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), 10–17.
146
fled the territories in Vojvodina, and Croatia-Slavonia ceded to Yugoslavia as well as

Transylvania ceded to Romania, some 55,000 and 220,000 people, respectively.120
The efforts to reshape the borderlands through expulsion and resettlement
became a recurrent feature of life in these regions during the wars and their after-
math. On the western borders of the Russian Empire, where the mix of populations
included Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Germans, and others, World War I
brought forced deportations. In December 1914 the Russian military began the
forced relocation of all Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman subjects from the
Polish provinces in the west.121 This policy expanded to target over 600,000 Jews for
expulsion from Russian-occupied territories by the end of 1915.122 After the Russian
defeat in the west, several million people fled eastward from the approaching
Austro-Hungarian and German armies. As the German offensive in the east began,
Poles started moving in the opposite direction to Germany, some voluntarily, others
by force. In one instance, the regular Polish seasonal laborers were prevented from
leaving Germany because they were needed to fill the positions vacated by military
recruits.123 The conclusion of formal hostilities in November 1918 did not mean
the end of widespread dislocation. Once Poland was established as an independent
country after the war, fighting continued along the Polish–Russian frontier into
1921 as the Bolsheviks attempted to secure their borders, consolidate power, and
spread the Revolution. This situation induced more people to flee, particularly as
famine spread and many people of Polish nationality moved to the reestablished
state of Poland.
While many wartime population movements were spontaneous flights, govern-
ments planned and implemented others by force. In an effort to minimize the
chaos, cost, and violence associated with these migrations, Balkan politicians
proposed the first population exchange treaties, based on the presumption of vol-
untary migration. Following the Balkan Wars, in 1913 Bulgaria and the Ottoman
Empire agreed on the “reciprocal exchange” of 100,000 Bulgarians and Turks in
the 50 kilometer zone of the new border established in Eastern Thrace. In 1914,
the Ottoman and Greek governments similarly discussed exchanging Greeks in the
Izmir/Smyrna area for Muslims in Macedonia and Epirus, a population of nearly
1 million people. Yet the outbreak of World War I stalled these negotiations.124
After the war, a Greek proposal outlined the need for a comprehensive population
exchange among Bulgaria, Greece, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes, but both Yugoslavia and Turkey declined to participate.125
Under League of Nations supervision, Bulgaria and Greece signed a Convention for
the Emigration of Minorities on November 27, 1919, which served “to regulate the
reciprocal and voluntary emigration of the racial, religious, and linguistic minori-
ties” between the two countries.126 Persons 18 years of age could submit a declaration
for emigration; the emigrants permanently lost citizenship in their country of ori-
gin, while that government took over their immovable property; representatives
of both countries decided on the procedures for compensating the emigrants for
their lost estates.127 The Convention set up special frontier posts, customs regu-
lations, reduced transportation rates, and the free export of cattle and movable
property, and encouraged representatives of the affected minorities to make visits
to the other country in order to identify suitable resettlement locations.128 The
guiding idea behind the Convention reflected the elites’ new prioritization of
147
national identities and held that its provisions would encourage people to volun-
tarily resettle in the country of their ostensible nationality.
Despite these clauses, by the summer of 1923 few Bulgarians and Greeks had
applied to emigrate.129 Only when large numbers of Greek Orthodox refugees
started arriving in Greece from Turkey in 1923, did the accompanying disorder
spill into the rest of the Balkans and cause the mass flight of both Bulgarians and
Greeks.130 In the end, these emigrations affected some 154,691 individuals. Despite
the provision for voluntary emigration, the Convention acted to pressure minorities
to emigrate.131
Even more radical measures of “umixing” were taken after the Turkish-Greek War
of 1921–22. In the summer of 1922 Turkish nationalist forces defeated the Greek
army, which had facilitated the expulsion and massacre of Muslims during its earlier
advance to the interior of Asia Minor; the Greek defeat exposed the Christian popu-
lation to reprisals by Turkish irregulars and the Turkish army. Orthodox Christians
chaotically fled their villages and towns for Greece. Civilian casualties were high;
many women were raped and abducted while men were detained in labor battalions
and disappeared.132 When the League of Nations initiated peace talks in Lausanne
in November 1922, all sides recognized that a peace settlement would involve popu-
lation displacement. Neither state was willing to accept the imposition of minority
treaties regarded as Great Power interference. Turkish representatives wished to
build a centralized, homogeneous, Turkish nation-state in place of the multieth-
nic Ottoman Empire. Because so many Greek Orthodox refugees had fled Turkey
already, Greek politicians recognized that their return was impossible, and preferred
instead to rid their lands of Muslim minorities. The goal was to establish nation-states
with homogeneous populations.
The Lausanne Treaty signed in July 1923 created the precedent of compulsory
population exchange between “Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion
established in Turkish territory” and “Greek nationals of the Muslim religion estab-
lished in Greek territory” who “shall not return to live in Turkey or Greece.”133 This
definition of the exchanged populations, focused on their religion rather than their
nationality, clearly demonstrates how fluid identity categories remained even after
World War I. But most characteristic of the radical shift in international politics was
the fact that, according to the Lausanne Treaty, in addition to the populations that
had already fled, a significant group of people who had not been affected by war in
1921–22 were now mandated to leave Greece and Turkey. Almost all Christian pop-
ulations in Anatolia and Turkish Thrace, about 1.5 million, were de facto expelled
from their homes. About 500,000 Muslims, predominantly Turks but also the Greek-
speaking Kritiki of Crete and Muslim Roma, Pomaks, and Albanians were expelled
from Greece. The Greeks of Istanbul, Imbros, and Tenedos, strategic islands over-
looking the Dardanelles, as well as the Muslims of Western Thrace were the only
populations exempted from this forced exchange due to a special agreement between
Greece and Turkey to preserve some of the most visible minorities in both coun-
tries. Overall, for both Christians and Muslims, a population of 2 million, exchange
entailed traumatic exile. But Greece, Turkey, and the international community saw
the ethnic homogenization of the two states as positive and stabilizing.
The presence of large refugee populations in the interwar period destabilized the
economy and society of East Central European states and became a source of political
148
instability. The refugees frequently became communist sympathizers and in defeated

countries such as Bulgaria and Hungary they furthered territorial revisionism.134 To
facilitate recovery after the war, the League of Nations actively helped the accommo-
dation of refugees. After the arrival of 280,000 refugees in Bulgaria, a 1926 League of
Nations loan allowed 40,000 families to receive land, agricultural equipment, seeds,
animals, homes, and loans by the early 1930s. In Greece, the Refugee Settlement
Commission under the League of Nations supervised the distribution of land and
agricultural equipment, house construction, amelioration and irrigation campaigns,
and communications improvements to the most destitute of the 1.5 million refugees
residing in the country. 135 Governments tried to use the refugees to colonize border
areas with sizeable minority populations; such campaigns were attempted in Greece,
Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia.136 Because of limited economic resources for integra-
tion and tensions between the newcomers and the local population, refugees played
an important role in domestic politics.
Despite the large wartime population movements, the East Central European
countries failed to achieve total national homogeneity during the interwar years and
minorities remained prominent in many areas (see Table 3.5). The end of Austria-
Hungary brought large numbers of refugees to the newly established successor states.
By the late 1920s Austria received 764,000 people that had resided elsewhere in the
empire prior to the war. With the Trianon Peace Treaty, Hungary lost 72 percent of
its previous territory and received roughly half a million refugees. At the same time,
3 million Hungarians became minorities in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
Unlike the Ottoman case, a relatively small percentage of Hungarians emigrated
abroad, and those who did were mostly elites. The majority of Hungarian peasants
stayed, something that the Hungarian government encouraged to foster irredentist
claims. Five million Germans were also transformed into minorities due to the puni-
tive territorial clauses of the Versailles Treaty. Many Germans who found themselves
in Poland after the war had been German citizens before the war. For them, both
political and economic conditions appeared more favorable across the border in
Germany. The exodus was particularly heavy from urban areas. While a majority of
Germans emigrated from Poland by the mid-1920s, most other minorities stayed in
their prewar country. Aside from former imperial civil servants and military person-
nel, most German-speakers remained in Czechoslovakia; in the Sudetenland, they
comprised 95 percent of the population.137
It is important to emphasize that the presence of minorities in censuses and irre-
dentist literature does not mean that people necessarily prioritized their national
identities – and there is a growing literature to show the opposite.138 Yet, from the
perspective of state security, the presence of minority populations produced particu-
larly tense relations in the contested territories of the former imperial borderlands.
After the war, Romania annexed several provinces with large minority populations;
Transylvania, lost by Hungary, had a significant Hungarian-speaking population, some
1.5 million people, almost 8 percent of Romania’s total population, but a quarter of
Transylvania’s.139 Similarly, Serbia and Greece split the formerly Ottoman province
Macedonia, but Bulgaria remained a strongly revisionist power maintaining that the
remaining 140,000 Slavic-speakers of Greek Macedonia were Bulgarians while criti-
cizing Serbia for pursuing assimilation measures in Serbian (Vardar) Macedonia.140
In Bulgaria, Muslims comprised 820,000 (14 percent) of all inhabitants in 1934.
149
Table 3.5 Minorities in Eastern Europe in the interwar period
Country and year Minority group by ethnicity Number Percentage

Romania (1930) Romanians 12,981,324 71.9
Hungarians 1,452,507 7.9
Germans 745,421 4.1
Jews 728,115 4.0
Ukrainians 582,115 3.2
Russians 409,150 2.3
Bulgarians 366,384 2.0
Bulgaria (1920) Bulgarians 4,041,276 83.4
Turks 542,905 11.2
Greeks 46,759 1.0
Jews 41,927 0.8
Czechoslovakia Czecho-slovaks 8,760,937 65.61
(1921) Germans 3,123,568 23.36
Hungarians 754,431 5.57
Ukrainians 461,849 3.45
Jews 180,855 1.35
Poland (1921) Poles 18,814,239 69.2
Ukrainians (Ruthenians) 3,898,431 14.3
Germans 1,059,194 3.9
Belorussians 1,060,237 3.9
Jews 2,110,448 7.8
Hungary (1920) Hungarians 7,156,727 89.5
Germans 551,624 6.9
Jews (by religion) 473,355 5.9
Slovaks 141,918 1.8
Yugoslavia Serbo-croats 8,911,509 74.36
(1921) Slovenes 1,019,997 8.51
Germans 505,790 4.2
Hungarians 467,658 3.9
Albanians 439,657 3.67
Romanians 231,068 1.93
Source: Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1974).
While the Bulgarian governments did not pursue uniform expulsion policies, discri
minatory taxation, economic marginalization, and educational restrictions encouraged
the flight of close to 200,000 Muslims, predominantly Turks, in the interwar years.141
Czechoslovakia also faced challenges of national heterogeneity with 3.2 million
German-speakers (22 percent of the population), and significant Ruthenian and
Hungarian minorities.142
Interwar Poland, where minorities constituted 30 percent of the population, offers
a good example of how the new nation-states pursued contradictory policies aimed at
minimizing the influence of their minorities. As Rogers Brubaker has argued, while
the Polish bureaucracy tried to assimilate the 5.5 million Ukrainians and Belarusians,
it adopted policies of dissimilation against the 2.5 million Jews and close to 1 million
Germans, choosing to keep the two groups distinct from the rest of the population.143
The Citizenship Act of 1920 permitted Poles living abroad to return and acquire
Polish citizenship. The Polish state also sought to settle Poles along its eastern border
150
regions; over 1.2 million immigrants from Russia arrived in Poland between 1918 and
1921. Many of these were Jews fleeing from persecution, White Army pogroms, or
Red Army reprisals, complicating the plans for Polish colonization of the region.144
Furthermore, a significant number of Poles migrated westward, first into the newly
awarded territories from Germany and later as seasonal laborers in Germany. Weimar
Germany, for its part, continued the originally Prussian policy of limiting the stay of
Polish migrant workers; this practice was formalized with a November 1927 treaty
that gave the German government control over the movement of farm laborers.145
Despite the Polish state’s efforts at homogenization, migrants moved to where they
saw fit without concern for state policies. In the late 1930s, the minority question
continued complicating the political decisions and social reform movement in many
East Central European countries.
During the late 1930s and 1940s, population movements became linked with the
nationalist programs of individual states, war, and the Nazis’ genocidal policies. Nazi
population policies focused on clearing the east of Jews and Poles and collecting
Germans into an integrated homeland or greater Reich.146 This dual aspect of Nazi
resettlement goals created complex and contradictory population policies, which
appeared immediately after the takeover of the Sudetenland in October 1938. Tens
of thousands of Czechs and Jews left the borderland areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and
Silesia. While they were not forced out in the manner that soon became commonplace
in areas of occupied Poland, many Czechs lost their jobs and most Jews understood
that the imposition of Nazi power threatened their immediate livelihood. Prague was
one destination for Jews from the Bohemian borderlands, though many also sought to
go abroad. However, as the Nazi persecution of Jews began to grow in the late 1930s,
emigration options declined as states began closing their borders to Jews. The British
government prevented Palestine, which had been an important receiving country
for Jews (accepting 215,000 – mostly from East Central Europe – between 1933 and
1939), from permitting further immigration.147 While some Czechoslovak Jews were
able to emigrate in 1938 and early 1939, increasing restrictions left 117,000 Jews in
the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on the eve of the war.148
The German-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 offered new possibili-
ties for population restructuring while unleashing massive refugee movements. In
the Soviet-controlled east, deportations ensued immediately as the NKVD rounded
up Polish officials, intellectuals, and others, and sent them to labor camps deep in
the interior of the USSR.149 These expulsions, however, differed from the Nazis’. The
Soviets feared potential enemies and they sought to eliminate the possibility of active
resistance. For the Nazis, population restructuring was part of a deep ideological
commitment to create ethnically homogeneous German “living space.”150 The Nazi
concept of Lebensraum included the relocation of German-speakers from the east,
the so-called Volksdeutsche, as the vanguard for German expansion into an enlarged
Third Reich and the removal of non-Germans from these areas. The Nazis avidly
pursued this policy after conquering Poland.
The first German-speakers to be resettled in accordance with this policy were
from South Tyrol, followed by those from the Baltic countries. This was followed
by an agreement between Germany and the USSR on November 16, 1939, for an
exchange of populations; to the Soviet Union went several thousand Ukrainians and
White Russians, a mere fraction of their total number, and Germans, mostly from
151
Volhynia and Galicia, went to Nazi-occupied Poland.151 The relocation of Volksdeutsche

necessitated the expulsion of others, mostly Poles, who owned the farms that these
German settlers were to occupy.152 These Poles were forced eastward into the
Generalgouvernement. By the end of 1941, roughly 1.5 million Polish citizens had been
forcibly deported and nearly 500,000 German-speakers settled in their place.153 This
pattern of resettlement and expulsion, whereby the arrival of one group required
the expulsion and relocation of another, repeated itself several times before 1942.
Throughout the war, the Nazis relocated almost a million German-speakers from
various parts of Europe to occupied Poland and to Germany.154
Nazi policies also led to population movements in other parts of East Central Europe
and especially to the reshuffling of minority populations. When Romania returned
southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria in 1940, this territorial adjustment was accompanied by
the exchange of Bulgarians and Romanians living in close proximity to the border.155
When Bulgaria entered the northern parts of Greece in 1941, Greeks fled the Bulgarian
regime. Hungarians retaking parts of northern and eastern Transylvania spurred the
migration of Romanians to the south; many of these were officials who had been moved
there during the interwar years. Hungarian authorities sometimes used violence to
induce people to leave. Large numbers of Hungarians, in turn, moved northward to the
expanded Hungarian state.156 The Nazi policies of re-shaping Europe by changing bor-
ders and moving populations had a spillover effect in the entire area (see Table 3.6).
Nazi war plans also necessitated the recruitment of foreign workers in order to
maintain industrial and agricultural production, and to replace Germans who entered
the military (see Table 3.7). Nazi Germany encouraged the migration of foreign work-
ers to the Reich already beginning in 1937. In 1938 and 1939 tens of thousands of
Poles, Czechs, and others migrated to work in the enlarged Reich.157 Once the war
began, Nazi officials turned to more coercive recruitment methods and harsher
regulations for foreign workers, particularly those from the east.158 They also began
to use POWs for labor. By the end of 1941 nearly 1 million Poles worked in Germany,
Table 3.6 Wartime transfers, expulsions, and related population movements, 1939–44
Year Group From To Number
1940–41 Polish citizens Poland USSR 312,000–380,000

1940–42 Polish citizens Poland Generalgouvernement 1.5–2 million
1939–44 Ethnic Germans Various German Reich 784,000–977,150
1940 Bulgarians N. Dobrudja S. Dobrudja 61,000
1940 Romanians S. Dobrudja N. Dobrudja 100,000
1940–43 Romanians N. Transylvania Romania 218,900
1940–43 Hungarians S. Transylvania Hungary 160,000
1940–43 Hungarians Various Hungary 47,600
1941 Croats Serbia Croatia 70,000
1941 Serbs Croatia Serbia 120,000
1941 Slovenes Slovenia Various 120,000
1941 Greeks Bulgaria Various 90,000
Sources: Joseph Schechtman, European Population Transfers, 1939–1945 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1946), 270–271, 482–487; Paul Robert Magosci, Historical Atlas of Central Europe (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2002), 164–167; Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced
Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), 118–119.
Note: Numbers do not include those who moved for work, or those who fled.
152
Table 3.7 Total number of civilian workers in

Nazi Germany, 1938–45
Ethnic group Number of workers
Bulgarians 30,000
Croats 100,000
Czechs 355,000
Hungarians 45,000
Poles 1,600,000
Serbs 110,000
Slovaks 100,000
Sources: Mark Spoerer and Jochen Fleischhacker,
“Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany: Categories,
Numbers and Survivors,” Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 33, no. 2 (Autumn, 2002): 187; Mark Spoerer
and Jochen Fleischhacker, “The Compensation of
Nazi Germany’s Forced Laborers: Demographic
Findings and Political Implications,” Population Studies
56, no. 1 (March, 2002): 5–21.
Note: Numbers do not include POWs, concentration
camp inmates, or Jews.
along with nearly 2 million POWs. As the war continued the number of foreign work-
ers increased. While the largest contingent of foreign laborers came from occupied
areas of the Soviet Union, significant numbers of Poles, Czechs, and others from East
Central Europe also labored in the Reich. While many were forced to work, others,
such as Bulgarians, went voluntarily. By 1944, more than 8 million foreigners were
working for the German Reich.159 For the entire period of the war, over 13 million
foreigners, including Jews and POWs, worked for the Reich – the vast majority under
forced labor conditions.160
The Nazis reserved their most radical measures for the Jewish population. These
policies stemmed from distinct ideological motives, but they became intertwined with
and were influenced by the resettlement of German-speakers. For example, when not
enough suitable property could be procured through the expulsion of Poles from
the incorporated territories in 1939, Nazi officials began deporting large numbers
of Jews in order to accommodate German-speakers who were being relocated from
the east.161 Jews began being moved into ghettos and were utilized for labor until a
“final solution to the Jewish question” could be found. Until the invasion of the Soviet
Union, Nazi plans had revolved around the idea of pushing the Jews further east or
overseas. Because alternative destinations, such as Madagascar – to which Jews might
be deported en masse – failed to materialize, Nazi officials decided on the policy of
extermination, though historians continue to debate the timing and reasons for this
decision.162 As the Nazi war machine rolled east into Soviet-held territory and, espe-
cially after Einsatzgruppen began killing Jews and others in large numbers in July 1941,
some fled further eastward into Soviet territory. Many Jews were simply rounded up
and shot into mass graves near where they lived. In the occupied east, Jews were
gathered and sent to extermination centers. In Poland the shipment of Jews to these
centers first involved their capture in the many villages and towns, after which they
were brought to larger towns for concentration and transport. This took place mostly
within a radius of 200 miles of the extermination centers.163
153
In countries not directly under German control during the war, Jews were also
expelled and at times murdered. For example, Romanian soldiers drove Jews from
Bessarabia and Bukovina en masse into Transnistria in 1941 in two separate actions.
During the first action in August German troops on the other side of the Dniester
prevented Jews from crossing; they remained in border towns for two months. In
September, the expulsions started again. Raul Hilberg indicates that roughly 35,000
Jews were killed during these events.164 Other countries approached the treatment
of their Jews differently. Some, like Hungary and Bulgaria, attempted to mitigate
or deflect Nazi demands to hand over Jews, and many survived. But even in a coun-
try such as Bulgaria, which did not deport its 40,000 Jews despite German pressure,
the Jewish populations from the just acquired lands in Yugoslavia, Macedonia, and
Northern Greece were treated more harshly, and more than 11,000 were deported
to extermination camps.165 Generally the plight of Jews in territories that had been
newly acquired – with the aid of the Axis powers – was worse than that of Jews who had
lived in the old country and forged deeper bonds with their Christian neighbors; the
new Jews were considered potentially disloyal, marginal, and dispensable. Ultimately,
nearly 6 million Jews and a more difficult to determine number of Roma perished as
a result of Nazi policies and actions and those of their collaborators.166 Tens of thou-
sands of other so-called “undesirables” were also targeted and murdered as a part of
the Nazi onslaught.
More massive migrations at the end of World War II were a continuation of war-
time policies and population movements. Jewish emigration particularly evolved from
wartime practices and attitudes. Returning Jews received little support and antise-
mitic violence continued in some places.167 Likewise, the ethnic cleansing campaigns
along the Polish-Ukrainian border had begun as a war within the war, caught in the
maelstrom of the sweeping eastern front and the heart of the Holocaust. While some
German-speakers were resettled as part of the Nazi empire building practices in the
east during the war, their ethnic cleansing from the region following the war was
nearly total and sanctioned by the Allied powers. Not only were Germans and other
minorities forced to leave their homes, but others moved in to acquire their property
and new opportunities at their expense. These postwar migrations in East Central
Europe concluded the population movements unleashed during the war, particularly
those of Germans and Jews, and may be seen as a continuation of the regional ethnic
unmixing practices begun during World War I (see Table 3.8).
The migration of German-speakers at the end of the war occurred in different
guises and at different times, but cumulatively over 12 million persons were dis-
placed by 1948. Many German-speakers fled from their homes with the retreat of
the German army from East Prussia, Romania, and Poland; some of these had just
recently been resettled there during the war. Red Army troops forced many others
to flee and unleashed a ferocious period of retribution against Germans. Those who
remained faced expulsion at the hands of the reestablished Czechoslovak, Polish,
Hungarian, and Yugoslav states, generally with Allied support, as a punishment for
the Nazis’ own brutal wartime policies. Some German-speakers were deported to the
Soviet Union and ended up in Gulag camps, though the vast majority was sent to
defeated Germany.168 The Czechoslovak government in exile was particularly active
in its attempts to gain Allied backing for the idea of a “population transfer.” With the
Allies’ tacit support, though without formal agreement, it initiated the expulsion of
154
Table 3.8 Postwar transfers, expulsions, and related population movements, 1944–48
Year Group From To Number
1944–45 Bulgarians Greece Bulgaria 120,000

1944–45 Ethnic and Reich Various USSR 408,000
Germans, Magyars
1944–46 Poles Polish land ceded German lands 1 million
to USSR ceded to Poland
1944–46 Ukrainians, Belorussians, Polish lands ceded USSR 518,000
Lithuanians to USSR
1944–48 Ethnic and Reich Various Germany 12 million*
Germans
1945–46 Various Subcarpathia Rus’ Czechoslovakia 30,000
USSR (former
Czechoslovakia)
1945–47 Poles Central Poland German lands 3 million
ceded to Poland
1945–47 Czechs, Slovaks Interior of Borderlands of 1.8 million
Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia
1945–47 Magyars Slovakia Hungary 165,000
1946 Polish émigrés Various Poland 60,000
1946–47 Czech and Slovak emigrés Various Czechoslovakia 200,000
1946–47 Slovaks Hungary Czechoslovakia 65,000
Source: Eugene Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–47 (New York, 1948),
164–167.
Note: *includes large number of people who fled.
the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia. From May to August 1945 somewhere
between 600,000 and 800,000 Sudeten Germans fled or were expelled. One expellee
later recalled:
In the station hall, all persons to be expelled and all their possessions were
subjected to a strict search . . . In the real and literal sense of the word, we left
the room as beggars. Then we were loaded into railway cars. It was after mid-
night when our train of cattle cars left, plastered with slogans “Heil Hitler”
and “Home into the Reich” . . . Nobody knew where to go the next day at the
start of an uncertain future.169
Similar scenes occurred in Poland. The Potsdam Accord, which the Allied powers
signed on August 2, 1945, merely sanctioned the ethnic cleansing of German-speakers
from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary, though it sought to secure the “humane
transfer” of the remaining population. By 1947, over 2 million more Germans were
put on trains and shipped out of Czechoslovakia.
A similar effort to expel the Hungarian population living in Slovakia proved
more difficult to achieve. As in the Czechoslovak and Polish cases, indiscriminate
expulsions began immediately after the war. However, unlike the Bohemian-Saxon
border across which the Soviet military authorities permitted the Czechoslovak
army to expel Germans, Soviet authorities in Hungary were less cooperative. The
expulsion of Hungarians was not approved by the Allied powers, but a bilateral
155
agreement was reached in February 1946 that permitted a population exchange

between Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Ultimately the negotiations over the number
of eligible candidates for exchange and the question of compensation prevented a
wholesale transfer of both countries’ Slovak and Magyar minorities.170 Nonetheless,
in Czechoslovakia tens of thousands of Magyars were forced to relocate to former
Sudeten German areas; in part as retribution, in part to shore up the shortage of
agricultural workers caused by the expulsion of Germans. Most of these Hungarian-
speakers, however, later made their way back to southern Slovakia. Many of the
wartime and postwar migrations involved multiple movements of groups. Migration
policies that targeted the removal of certain ethnic minorities simultaneously involved
the resettlement of other, usually titular ethnic groups, in their place. This process,
which sought to make “ethnic unmixing” a reality, though nowhere was it completed,
had the effect of vastly increasing the number of migrants during these years.
The readjustment of postwar Poland’s borders, moved west 200–300 kilometers
after the war, led to the flight of roughly eight million people, Germans, Poles,
Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Lithuanians. As a result of official agreements, Poles
and Jews could choose to move to Poland from areas given to the Soviet Union,
whereas Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Lithuanians were to go to their respective
Soviet republics.171 It was necessary to use force to induce some people to move.
On the other hand, more than three million Poles from central Poland relocated
to the so-called “recovered territories” in the west to take advantage of the opportu-
nities opened up by the departing Germans. The Polish government continued to
implement repressive ethnic policies into 1947 when Ukrainian-speakers were forced
out of the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands and dispersed throughout the country, so
that they would not represent a compact enclave along the border with the Soviet
Union.172 The Czechoslovak government pursued similar efforts with the remaining
Germans living in borderland regions.
Six to seven million displaced persons (DPs) lived in the western zones of post-
war occupied Germany, in addition to the streaming influx of German expellees;
a similar number of DPs lived in the Soviet zone. Many of the DPs were former
foreign laborers in the Nazi Reich, and the majority were Poles. POWs and for-
mer concentration camp inmates comprised the remainder. In October 1945 the
United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Administration (UNRRA) took control
of the administration of DPs, many of whom were living in camps. By the end of
1945 most DPs had returned home, so that only 737,375 people continued living
under UNRRA care. Many of these, however, did not want to leave the camps for
fear of persecution. Among the largest groups of remaining DPs were inhabitants
of the Baltic states, reluctant to return to the Soviet Union, and Poles from Poland’s
Eastern Borderlands that had become Soviet territory.173 Many had to be forced to
return. In the end, roughly two million Soviet citizens – Ukrainians, Belorussians,
Baltic peoples, and Poles, some of them Soviet citizens only since September 1939 –
were transported back east.174
Jews faced continued persecution after the war. When they returned from exile or
from concentration camps to their homes they faced hostile inhabitants and unsym-
pathetic local governments. Many then headed to Germany and the DP camps; by
December 1945, 3,000 Jews per week were arriving in DP camps in Germany from the
east.175 This volume increased dramatically in 1946, particularly following the pogrom
156
Map 3.1 Population movements, 1944–48
in Kielce, Poland during the summer.176 By 1947, 122,313 Polish Jews had become
residents in the UNRRA camps and the figure continued to climb. Jews comprised
25 percent of the UNRRA camp population in Austria and Germany in 1947.177 Some
of them found ways to escape the camps and they traveled abroad, helped by fam-
ily members or Jewish organizations including the so-called Bricha, which covertly
assisted the immigration of Jews to Palestine. Roughly 57 percent of Jewish emigrants
headed to Palestine, while nearly 30 percent went to North America.178
That “ethnic unmixing” generally succeeded can be seen from the drop in
the number of ethnic minorities in the countries of East Central Europe, though
states continued to manipulate such categories. From 1930 to 1960 Poland and
Czechoslovakia reduced the proportion of ethnic minorities within their borders
from roughly one-third to less than 10 percent. By 1956 Romania’s ethnic minor-
ity population had dropped from 28 percent to 14 percent of the population. The
other countries of the region also witnessed declines.179 The Holocaust, combined
with the emigration of Jews following the war, ended the large Jewish presence in
East Central Europe, which had been a crucial feature of the region’s culture and
demography. German communities, also a centuries-long feature of the region, were
first relocated and then expelled en masse as a result of Nazi policies of the war, and
the politics of postwar retribution. Although the volume of migration varied during
the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods, as did specific political rationales in each
period, these population movements had in common this effort to engineer eth-
nic homogeneity. The effects on people’s lives were also frequently devastating and
together these migrations substantially altered the demographic and ethnographic
make-up of the region.
The Cold War and post-communist migrations

After the late 1940s, migration throughout the region was framed by the emerging
Cold War. Thus the split between East and West significantly reduced out-migration
as travel restrictions, strictly controlled borders, and stringent passport policies
almost eliminated private travel abroad for the citizens of communist-ruled coun-
tries. The large-scale economic migrations that had previously characterized the
region were interrupted (with the exception of Yugoslavia), and replaced by more
limited political emigration. The majority of emigration took place within Europe
(including Turkey), while overseas migrations to the Americas, Israel, or elsewhere
were greatly reduced. Even migrations of ethnic minorities depended on bilateral
agreements. The main destination countries of Eastern European emigrants during
this period were Germany (68 percent), Israel (8 percent), Turkey (7 percent),
Austria, and the USA.180 Overall, Eastern European migration was relatively static
after 1950 while the most significant migration flows continued the process of
national homogenization that had begun before World War I and reached its apex
during the World War II period.
Each of the Eastern European countries had its unique demographic conditions,
but as a whole, and similar to Western Europe, population growth began to slow
after the war. This was, in effect, a continuation of the demographic transition par-
ticularly related to the drop in fertility. For example, in Poland, fertility rates were
still quite high with the average number of children for each woman still exceeding
158
three in the 1950s. It was not until the 1960s that the figure dropped to fewer than
three. Delayed marriage was a key factor in this change.181 Similar changes occurred
in other countries of the region, though they also varied. In 1974, the annual rate
of population growth ranged widely, from 0.3 in Hungary to 0.6 in Bulgaria and
Czechoslovakia to 0.9 in Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Regional differences also
existed within some countries, most notably in Yugoslavia where the Slovenes and
Croats had relatively low birth rates while the ethnic Albanian population increased
more dramatically. Despite the drop in fertility, and the losses connected with death,
border changes, and migration at the end of World War II, populations either
reached or surpassed prewar levels by the 1970s. See Table 3.9.
In part, liberal abortion policies helped to shape the trend of declining birth rates.
Beginning in the mid-1950s all of the communist countries permitted abortions upon
request. Fertility rates dropped dramatically in the ensuing years such that some gov-
ernments attempted to make access to abortion more difficult, with Romania taking
the most drastic step by outlawing the practice altogether in 1966. In most cases,
however, the governments were pressured into lifting even moderate restrictions on
abortions, and even in Romania abortion rates increased again in the 1970s. Abortion
policies and practices stood in stark contrast to pronatalist policies that encouraged
women to work and to procreate by providing payments, housing, and childcare
to families with children. While abortion policies were only part of the reason for
decreasing birth rates, pronatalist policies in general failed to reverse slowing popula-
tion growth, or did so only for a short time.182
Postwar migrations were closely related to broader political and economic
developments in the Soviet bloc. While overseas emigration declined, and most
migrations were confined to domestic ground, rural-to-urban migration particu-
larly accelerated. The rapid socio-economic transformations after the Communist
Parties took power led to the systematic transformation of the Eastern European
countries into industrial societies. Extensive financial and labor inputs for heavy
industry propelled this shift. Numerous large industrial cities emerged by the 1960s,
transforming a primarily rural region into an urban and industrial one. Poland and
Bulgaria, in particular, experienced the urban shift associated with rapid indus-
trialization. Eleven Polish cities exceeded 100,000 inhabitants in 1931; by 1966,
23 cities comprised over 20 percent of the population. Bulgaria was an over
whelmingly agricultural country in the 1930s, but by the 1970s 60 percent of its
population lived in cities.183 While in 1910 East Central Europe had only 21 cities
Table 3.9 Prewar and postwar population in East Central European countries (in thousands)
Country 1930s 1950s 1970s
Bulgaria 6,078 7,614 8,728

Czechoslovakia 14,730 12,338 14,345
Hungary 8,688 9,205* 10,322
Poland 32,107 25,008 32,642
Romania 18,057 17,489 21,560
Yugoslavia 13,934 16,937 20,523
Source: B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe 1750–1988 3rd ed. (New York: Stockton, 1992), 3–9.
Note: *1949.
159
with populations between 200,000 and 1 million inhabitants, by 1990 there were 82
such large cities and approximately 59 percent of the entire population lived in cit-
ies.184 Substantial differences in the rate of urbanization existed, of course. In 1974
the GDR was 75 percent urbanized; Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Poland
were more urban than rural but Albania was still two-thirds rural; and Turkey and
Yugoslavia were only slightly more urbanized than Albania. In addition, contrasts
existed within each country and among ethnic groups; this was most evident in the
case of Yugoslavia.185 Overall, communist policies of planned economic develop-
ment through industrialization and urbanization unleashed new waves of rural to
urban migration.186
In addition to widespread domestic migration to cities and industrial sites, some
international migration took place within the Soviet bloc linked to economic devel-
opment. In the late 1950s, Bulgaria sent workers to farms and construction sites in
Czechoslovakia to aid in building communism. Poles, Hungarians, and Yugoslavs also
went to work there, particularly in the 1960s. The GDR also received workers from
other countries in the Soviet bloc. Polish and Hungarian workers began moving there
in the mid-1960s, laboring on construction projects or participating in training across
the border. In the 1970s, Bulgarian workers engaged in construction and forestry
in the far north of Russia, Poland, and GDR.187 Unlike earlier labor migrations in
the region, the communist governments had much greater control over these guest
workers through official agreements and close monitoring.
In contrast to the other socialist countries, the Yugoslav government allowed its
citizens to participate in labor migrations outside the socialist orbit throughout the
1960s and 1970s. From 1964 to 1973, almost 1.5 million Yugoslav citizens migrated
to Western Europe; in 1973, one in ten migrant workers in Western Europe was a
Yugoslav; Germany, Austria, Sweden, and France were the main receiving countries.
The decision to open the Yugoslav borders in the 1960s was linked to the liberal
economic reform of 1965, which proposed international labor migration as a safety
valve for unemployment. Emigration was expected to be short-term and have the
positive effect of generating hard currency; the regime expected the majority of emi-
grants to be manual workers and petty farmers.188 Yugoslav authorities designated
these migrants as “temporary” and most of them wished to return home, pointing
to parallels with the nineteenth-century pečalbari.189 But expectations failed because
a large percentage of the migrants were highly educated or skilled workers, and the
process resembled “brain drain” migration. The immigrant remittances did not gen-
erate economic development as expected but were put into unproductive activities
and conspicuous consumption. In the early 1970s, the Yugoslav government began
encouraging the return migration of skilled workers. But a conservative backlash
together with a lack of policies to re-incorporate the returnees led to continued
migration waves of Yugoslav citizens to Western Europe.190
Another aspect of migration during the communist period was the continued
relocation of ethnic minorities. Most dramatically, from 1950 to 1987 roughly
1,367,790 German-speakers migrated to West Germany, primarily from Poland and
Romania.191 But similar trends were evident elsewhere as policies shifted from com-
munist internationalism to renewed nationalism. Between 1950 and 1952, 155,000
Bulgarian Turks left the country, and again in 1982–89 at least 350,000 Turks fled
from measures of forced assimilation in Bulgaria. While not just for ethnic reasons,
160
5.3 million GDR citizens relocated to the Federal Republic, and 1.5 million Soviet
citizens, mainly Jews, emigrated to Israel or the USA.192 The creation of the state
of Israel sped up Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. When the Jewish state
came into being in May 1948, it held an open door policy on Jewish immigrants;
some 340,000 Jews arrived from Europe in the first 18 months after independence.193
Migrations to Israel continued throughout the period. The majority of the Jewish
population of Bulgaria, roughly 40,000 people, resettled to Israel; between 1960 and
1992, Romania lost almost its entire Jewish population as 500,000 people emigrated
to Israel and the USA, while Israel paid for these Jews to be able to emigrate.194
Roma migration also continued during this period. During the late 1960s, for
instance, several Roma communities in Slovakia were forced to relocate to the
Czech lands.195 Despite an ostensible ideological commitment to internationalism,
communist regimes sometimes legitimized their authority by cracking down on
ethnic “outsiders.”
Finally, political refugees or dissidents fleeing to the West served as a potent symbol
of anti-communism or freedom-seeking throughout the period, despite the difficul-
ties of distinguishing political and economic factors for emigration. Communist
repression often included economic measures, such as the firing or demotion of
intellectuals or party leaders, or the confiscation of desirable housing, further blur-
ring the distinction between economic and political emigration. Poles and Czechs
left in significant numbers just after the war and into the 1950s. From 1948 to 1953,
44,000 people emigrated from Czechoslovakia.196 Following the Hungarian Uprising
in 1956, 194,000 Hungarians emigrated. One Hungarian described how good fortune
and a bit of hustle played a role in such escapes:
The decision [to leave] was a spontaneous one. We were thinking about it
before, but we never really materialized it in our mind. For a few days after
October 23rd, we thought the uprising might succeed, but even that was
mixed euphoria, not quite complete euphoria. . . . So I started to go and sud-
denly there is a guy with a machine gun, a border guard. He says, “Where
are you going?” and my friend says, “We are going to the movie.” [Laughs.]
He says, “Seriously, where are you going?” And we told him, “We want to go
out.” . . . “We want to get the hell out of here.” So the guy said, “All right. It is
five miles to the border. It is five miles to go and you have forty-five minutes
because in about forty-five minutes the train will come,” which is the Orient
Express. “When the train comes you have two things to do, you either climb
up there, in which case you would be captured, or you let the train run over
you.” So we started to run. We passed about one hundred and fifty people.
Apparently he let everybody through. We passed these people and we ran like
crazy. I was in tremendous physical condition. So we were going like crazy
and we were totally dead, and finally fell down onto the Austrian side of the
border. Three more people came, then came the train. Then nobody came.
We barely made it. That’s the way I got out.197
The situation in East Germany was unique since Germany had been divided; the
large number of emigrants, roughly 2.7 million from 1949 to 1961, when the Berlin
Wall was constructed, speaks to people’s desire to join their families and escape
161
communist rule.198 After the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring by Warsaw
Pact forces, Czechoslovakia also witnessed increased emigration; 127,000 people
departed the country in the next four years.199 In the 1980s, some 250,000 Poles
arrived in Western Europe after the imposition of martial law and the suppression
of Solidarity.200 While these emigrant waves accelerated during periods of political
persecution, it is unclear whether they occurred for exclusively political reasons,
or whether economic factors were also at play. Western countries allowed some
political refugees, but they remained wary about a massive influx from the East.
Yet “the West” as a coveted place of escape remained a powerful image for Eastern
Europeans living beyond the Iron Curtain.
With the end of the Cold War, it became clear that the Iron Curtain had served as
a barrier against East–West migration. As Klaus Bade points out, it is not coincidental
that the collapse of communism began with the dismantling of barbed wire posts
on the Hungarian-Austrian border and the flight of East Germans to the West in
the summer of 1989.201 After 1989, Poland, the former GDR, the former Yugoslavia,
Bulgaria, and Romania became sending areas to the West. Emigration from Hungary
and the Czech Republic was more limited. Overall, from 1989 to 1993, more than
5 million Eastern Europeans left their countries for the West. These new immigrants
included ethnic minorities, labor migrants, and political asylum seekers but their
motivations frequently overlapped. Since World War II, there had been no compa-
rable migration influx, which led to the tightening of immigration and refugee laws
in the West.202
Distinguishing between economic and political migration was as difficult in the
early years of post-socialism as it had been in the previous period. Many fled to the
West to seek better economic fortunes or to avoid persecution on ethnic, religious,
or sexual grounds, but often these factors went hand in hand. Following the end of
communist rule, migration flows from east to west reemerged along prewar patterns.
For example, Polish migrants resumed large-scale seasonal migration to Germany;
by 2003, nearly 290,000 Poles had seasonal employment there, and large Polish
communities emerged in Great Britain as well.203 Bulgarian labor migrants flocked
to neighboring Greece but also further, to countries such as Spain and Germany.
Romanians migrated in larger numbers to Spain, Italy often as construction, farm, or
domestic laborers. In these societies they could easily learn the language given the
similarity between Spanish, Italian and Romanian. Moldovans, by contrast, were more
likely to undertake labor migrations to Russia, given their likely knowledge of Russian
language and culture. While some migrants relocated abroad permanently, many
went as temporary labor migrants, like the pečalbari of old, who regularly returned to
their countries.204
The end of the Cold War also unleashed the mass migration of ethnic minori-
ties to their “kin states,” in the hope of escaping the growing nationalism of host
communities and of finding a better life during the turbulent period of post-
socialism. Following the persecution of the late 1980s, more Turks left Bulgaria for
Turkey where they expected to avoid political repression and find better economic
conditions.205 Between 1988 and 1993, at least 125,000 Hungarians left Romania
and Yugoslavia following the Hungarian government’s pronouncement that it was
the protector of all Hungarians, which created an anti-Hungarian climate in both
countries. Germans continued to leave Poland and Czechoslovakia. During 1989–92,
162
1.2 million Germans moved from East to West Germany while 230,000 (re-)emigrated
to the eastern part of the country.206 These migrants tended to abandon poorer areas
for better-off regions.
The complex motivations for migration are perhaps best illustrated in the emigration
of Roma, which began immediately after 1989. The main destination countries were
Germany and Austria, and the main sending countries Czechoslovakia, Romania,
Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. The Czech areas often served as an intermediate point to
which Roma moved in large numbers; some continued on to other European coun-
tries further west. Many of the Roma were economic migrants, but they also fled
social discrimination and harassment so they often sought political asylum in Western
Europe and the United States. By 1993, there were 250,000 Roma asylum seekers in
Germany, mostly from the Balkans. In 1997 continuing pressure against Roma com-
munities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia culminated in a large-scale exodus to
the West. But many Roma were obliged to leave Western European countries after
revisions in asylum laws, incentives offered by repatriation programs, and threats of
deportation undermined such movement.207 Like their neighbors to the east, they saw
the Roma as an unwanted group that posed possible threats.
The population movement associated with the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s was no
doubt the most dramatic shift related to ethnicity. Many scholars have classified the
outcomes of these wars as a variation on “ethnic unmixing” because the political
fracturing of Yugoslavia led to the creation of mostly homogeneous new states while
ethnic cleansing was widely practiced during the wars. Before the wars Yugoslavia
was one of the most heterogeneous states in Europe (see Table 3.10).208 This inter-
mixing of populations complicated the secession process of the former Yugoslav
republics because there were extensive Serbian populations throughout Yugoslavia.
Thus, the Yugoslav wars produced the most extensive European migration waves
since World War II.
As a result of the Yugoslav wars, between 4 and 5 million people fled from
their homes either as international refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs)
(see Table 3.11).209 By the time the Bosnian war ended in November 1995, there were
more than 2.5 million refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina. By mid-1997, of the
500,000 who were supposed to return after the Dayton Peace Treaty, only 300,000 had
returned because of the destroyed infrastructure and areas scattered with landmines.
Table 3.10 The population of Yugoslavia according to nationality, based on the 1981 census
Nationality Number (millions) Percentage
Serbs 8.1 36.3

Croats 4.4 19.7
Slovenes 1.8 8.0
Albanians 1.7 7.5
Macedonians 1.3 6.0
Montenegrins 0.6 2.6
Yugoslavs 1.2 5.3
Others 3.3 14.7
Total 22.4
Source: Klaus Bade, Migration in European History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 315, 317.
163
Table 3.11 Internally displaced persons in the former

Yugoslavia in 1993
Area of residence of IDPs Number of IDPs
Croatia 690,000
Serb-dominated Croatia 110,000
Serbia 565,000
Montenegro 82,000
Slovenia 45,000
Bosnia and Herzegovina 2,740,000
Source: Heinz Fassmann and Rainer Münz, “European East-West
Migration, 1945–1992,” The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, 476.
In 1998, some 1.8 million were still displaced. Overall, roughly half a million refugees
were taken in by European countries, notably Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden, as
well as the US, Canada, and Australia. But by 1993 most Western European countries
had closed their borders to the victims of war in Yugoslavia.210
During the war, Western European countries responded with new measures to
contain migrations caused by ethnic cleansing. The UN established the so-called “safe
havens” in the midst of armed conflict (which failed miserably, as evidenced by the
massacre in Srebrenica) or organized refugee centers in proxy areas (such as camps
for Bosnian Muslims in Croatia). European governments adopted ideas of “temporary
protection” in a number of refugee-receiving countries; the refugees were not recog-
nized as lawful and permanent residents but tolerated as temporary refugees. In the
aftermath of war, despite the attempts to encourage return migration, many people
fled their homes because of the destruction of their villages and towns or the politi-
cally motivated seizure of their properties. Thus, debates have emerged whether the
population policies after the wars, by not facilitating the return of refugees, actually
sanctioned rather than reversed the policies of ethnic cleansing.211 All these trends
posed serious dilemmas of how to deal with the continued “ethnic unmixing” of East
Central Europe in the twenty-first century.
Despite fears that a flood of immigrants would arrive from the East, since the late
1990s Western European observers have considered immigrants from the former
Eastern bloc to be relatively safe and economically attractive. Indeed, East Central
European states have been increasingly confronted with immigration challenges
of their own. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in particular have become
buffer zones for immigrants unwanted in the west and north of Europe; by the mid-
1990s, there were between 250,000 and 300,000 foreigners living in Hungary, which
completed its “transition from a country of emigration to one of immigration or
transmigration.” Thus these countries became “waiting rooms” for immigrants from
the former Soviet Union as well as Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.212 By the late
1990s, the former communist states of Eastern Europe hosted roughly 6.4 million ref-
ugees or involuntary displaced persons, 73 percent of Europe’s total.213 By 2000, the
immigrants in Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic were overwhelmingly from
neighboring states or from the former Soviet Union, including many Ukrainians
and, in the case of Hungary, citizens of Romania. Non-European migrants, notably
Chinese and Vietnamese, represented small but stable minorities with previous
164
connections to the region. Many performed unskilled labor and often traveled
illegally until the former Eastern bloc countries started enforcing their own legisla-
tion limiting migration and asylum.214 By 2000, migration flows into and out of the
region had begun to slow down. Return migrations continued after EU integration
and the improved economic conditions in the area. Previous émigrés returned to
Poland in large numbers when the legitimizing notion of political asylum from com-
munism no longer served to justify such migration.215 By the late 1990s some 150,000
Turks returned to Bulgaria after their curtailed integration into Turkish society.216
Overall, the beginning of the twenty-first century has brought a level of stability to
the region. While seasonal and more permanent labor migrations continue, the large
waves of refugee movements for political or ethnic reasons have come to an end.
Conclusion
Since 1700, residents of East Central Europe have moved residence for many reasons.
Social pressures and economic considerations were among the leading causes for
migration throughout the period as people moved to get married, seek land, engage
in seasonal work, or look for more permanent economic opportunities. As the region
entered the modern period, the state became increasingly involved in controlling
such migrations, limiting or encouraging settlement in certain areas according to
its strategic and nationalist priorities. Warfare was a central cause of migration in
the twentieth century, when military conflicts went hand in hand with population
displacement for humanitarian, security, or political purposes. While individuals did
not always comply with government and military orders, they experienced severe
limits in their ability to choose their place of residence, especially with the implemen-
tation of population transfers and genocidal policies. Only in the second part of the
twentieth century did migration in the region taper off, albeit with exceptions in the
1990s. With the migration crisis in Europe in 2015, the region was transformed from
an area of emigration, to one of in-migration, a trend that remains to be analyzed.
Today, political elites and ordinary citizens still debate the implications of migration
policies within the European Union despite the fact that historically, East Central
Europeans have always been people on the move.
Notes
1 Nikolai Todorov, The Balkan City 1400–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1983), 378.
2 June Namais, First Generation: In the Words of Twentieth-Century American Immigrants (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 45–47. Moshe Lodsky remembered in 1975 being
drafted for World War I in 1912. Of course, the war only began in 1914.
3 Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York:
Vintage, 2006), 314.
4 US Department of State Historical Office, Foreign Relations of the United States. The Conference
of Berlin; The Potsdam Conference, 1945 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office,
1960), 383.
5 Charles Tilly, “Migration in Modern European History,” in William McNeill and Ruth
Adams, eds., Human Migration: Patterns and Policies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1978), 50.
6 Tilly, “Migration in Modern European History,” 51–54.
165
7 Leslie Page Moch, “Moving Europeans: Historical Migration Practices in Western Europe,”
in Robin Cohen, ed., The Cambridge Survey of World Migration (New York: Cambridge
8 Some works include Speros Vryonis Jr., “Religious Changes and Patterns in the Balkans,
14th–16th Centuries,” in Henrik Birnbaum and Speros Vryonis Jr., eds., Aspects of the
Balkans: Continuity and Change. Contributions to the International Balkan Conference held at
UCLA, Oct. 23–28, 1969 (The Hague: Mouton, 1972); Antonina Zhelyazkova, “Islamization
in the Balkans as a Historiographical Problem: The Southeast-European Perspective,”
in Fikret Adanır and Suraya Faroqhi, eds., The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of
Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Anton Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans: Kisve
Bahası Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670–1730 (Leiden: Brill, 2004); and Tijana Krstic,
Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire
9 Some works include Gunther Erich Rothenberg, The Military Border in Croatia, 1740–1881:
A Study of an Imperial Institution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Hans
Hugo Sokol, Die k. k. Militärgrenze (Wien: Bergland Verlag, 1967); Ernest Sommer, Into Exile:
The History of the Counter-reformation in Bohemia (1620–1650) (London: The New Europe
Publishing Co., 1943); and Howard Luthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the
Catholic Reformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
10 On the Greek community of Trieste, see Olga Katsiardi, I Elliniki paroikia tis Tergestis,
1750–1830 (Athens: University of Athens, 1986). See also the proceedings of the
International Conference “Russia and the Mediterranean,” in Olga Katsiardi-Hering,
Athina Kolia-Dermitzaki, and Katerina Gardika, eds., Rossia kai Mesogeios: Praktika 1.
Diethnous Synedriou: Athina, 19–22 Maiou 2005 (Athens: Herodotos, 2011).
11 Maria Todorova, The Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic
Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1993); and
Karl Kaser, Patriarchy after Patriarchy: Gender Relations in Turkey and in the Balkans, 1500–2000
(Berlin: Lit, 2008).
12 Stephen Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities. Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1932); and Joseph Schechtman, European Population Transfers,
1939–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946); Joseph Schechtman, Postwar
Population Transfers in Europe, 1945–1955 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1962). Other works include Dimitris Pentzopoulos, The Balkan Exchange of Minorities
and its Impact upon Greece (Paris: Mouton, 1962); Eugene Kulicher, Europe on the Move.
War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948);
Malcolm Proudhood, European Refugees, 1939–52: A Study in Forced Population Movement
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1956).
13 Rogers Brubaker, “The Aftermath of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples,” in Karen
Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., After Empire. Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building:
The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, CO: 1997),
155–180; and Eric Weitz, “From Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and
the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,”
American Historical Review 113 (December 2008): 1313–1343.
14 Klaus Bade, Migration in European History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); Saskia Sassen, Guests
and Aliens (New York: New Press, 1999); Leo Lucassen, The Immigrant Threat: The Integration
of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
2005); John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The
Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
15 Todorov, The Balkan City.
16 Mazower, Salonica; Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: The Germans of Prague,
1861–1914 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006); Nathaniel Wood, Becoming
Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2010); and Robert Donia, Sarajevo: A Biography (Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 2006).
17 Renée Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Renée Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal
166
of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2003); Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece
and Turkey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
18 Philipp Ther, “The Integration of Expellees in Germany and Poland after World War
Two: A Historical Reassessment,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996), 779–805; and the
contributions in Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, eds., Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in
East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
19 Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe; Anastasia Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood:
Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–1990 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1997); Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the
Balkans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
20 Theodora Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the
Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); David Gerlach,
The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of the German–Czech Borderlands after
World War II (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
21 Ulf Brunnbauer, ed., Transnational Societies, Transterritorial Politics: Migrations in the (Post)
Yugoslav Region 19th–21st Century (Munich: Verlag, 2009); Brunnbauer, “Emigration
Policies and Nation-building in Interwar Yugoslavia,” European History Quarterly 42, no. 2
(2012): 602–627; and, Globalizing Southeastern Europe: Emigrants, America, and the State since
the Late Nineteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016); Tara Zahra, “Going
West,” East European Politics & Societies 25 (November 2011): 785–791; and The Great
Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York:
Norton, 2016).
22 For a detailed discussion of the use of ethnic and national categories, see Chapter 4 in this
volume. For a critique of the propensity of scholars to equate ethnic groups and nations,
see Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East-Central Europe. Ethnicism, Ethnicity,
23 Maria Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” in Carl Brown, ed., Imperial Legacy.
The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkan and the Middle East (New York: Columbus University Press,
1996), 62.
24 Maria Todorova and Nikolai Todorov, “The Historical Demography of the Ottoman
Empire: Problems and Tasks,” in Richard Spence and Linda Nelson, eds., Scholar, Patriot,
Mentor: Historical Essays in Honor of Dimitrije Djordjevic (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1992), 156–157. Yet, because of decentralization in the eighteenth century, it is
difficult to provide a comprehensive summary of the demographic situation during this
time.
25 Quoted in Mark Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History (New York: Modern Library,
2002), 46.
26 Todorov, Balkan City, 353. The census of 1866 distinguished only among non-Muslims,
Muslims, Muslim migrants, Muslim Gypsies, Non-Muslim Gypsies, Armenians, Jews, and
Catholics.
27 Todorov, Balkan City, 44–60, 455; Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” 62–63.
As far as long-term demographic processes and characteristics are concerned, such as
fertility, mortality, marriage patterns, family and household size and structure, there is
“no indication that the empire left a unique imprint which requires us to speak of a spe-
cific Ottoman legacy” (Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” 63).
28 Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts.
29 Todorov, Balkan City, 354–355.
30 Dimitris Tziovas, ed., Greek Diaspora and Migration since 1700: Society, Politics and Culture
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009).
31 Hauverive’s impressions from Bulgaria in 1785, as described in Larry Wolff, Inventing
Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1994), 118.
32 Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 7–14.
167
33 Ibid., 38–39; Robert Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (New York: Barnes
and Noble, 1974), 113. Kann cites the emigration as “the forced migration of possibly as
many as 40,000 families.”
34 Adam Zamoyski, The Polish Way: A Thousand Year History of the Poles and Their Culture (New
York: Hippocrene, 1987), 176.
35 Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe (Seattle, WA: University of Washington
Press, 2002), 70–71.
36 Ingrao, Habsburg Monarchy, 86; Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 76.
37 Peter Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1454–1804 (Seattle, WA: University of
Washington Press, reprint 2011), 104–107.
38 Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 67, 70–72.
39 Kann, Habsburg Empire, 197–200; Massimo Livi Bacci, The Population of Europe: A History,
trans. Cynthia De Nardi Ipsen and Carl Ipsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 28.
40 Rothenberg, Military Border in Croatia, 84.
41 Ibid., 125.
42 Radovan Samardžič, “Migrations in Serbian History,” in Ivan Ninić, ed., Migrations in
Balkan History (Belgrade, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts: Prosveta, 1989), 85–86.
43 Halil İnalcık, “Dobrudja,” in P. Bearman et al., eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill, 2008). Online:
http://dx.doi.org.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_2137 (accessed
October 18, 2016).
44 “Cabinet Order by King Frederick William I on the Cameral and Crown Properties
and Land Settlement in Lithuania (1718),” German History in Documents and Images
(GHDI), <http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3603>
(accessed March 23, 2011).
45 Schechtman, European Population Transfers, 257.
46 Jaroslav Vaculík, České menšiny v Evropě a ve světě (Prague: Libri, 2009), 11–13.
47 Ladislau Gyemant, “Immigration und Integration: Die jüdische Gesellschaft in Siebenbürgen
im Zeitalter der Emanzipation (1790–1867),” in Mathias Beer and Dittmar Dahlmann, eds.,
Migration nach Ost- und Südosteuropa vom 18. bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ursachen,
Formen, Verlauf, Ergebnis (Stuttgart: J. Thorbecke, 1999), 163–189.
48 Bacci, Population of Europe, 103.
49 Ibid., 40–42.
50 John Komlos, Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy:
An Anthropometric History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 64–66.
51 Piotr Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle, WA: University of
Washington Press), 14–18.
52 Ibid., 117.
53 For the same trend in Western Europe, see Tilly, “Migration in Modern European
History,” 67–68. See also Moch, “Moving Europeans,” 126. The new migration practices
reflected changing economic practices, agricultural activities and urban/rural economies.
Economic and demographic factors continued to shape migrations while human connec-
tions and migrant workers linked the individual migrants to the broader economic and
demographic conditions.
54 Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 93.
55 In the centuries after the conquest, Ottoman demands for milk, dairy products, wool, and
leather supplies led to low taxation exacted from shepherds to graze their flocks and other
privileges granted to cattle breeders. Zhenia Pimpireva, Karakachanite v Bulgariia (Sofia:
IMIR, 1998), 26.
56 Dragoslav Antonijević, “Cattlebreeders’ Migrations in the Balkans Through Centuries,” in
Migrations in Balkan History, 153–154.
57 Michael Palairet, “The Migrant Workers of the Balkans and Their Villages (18th Century–
World War II),” in Klaus Roth, ed., Handwerk in Mittel- und Südosteuropa. Mobilitat, Vermittlung,
und Wandel im Handwerk des 18. Bis 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Südosteuropa Gesellschaft,
1987), 32.
58 Antonijević, “Cattlebreeders’ Migrations in the Balkans,” 154.
168
59 Pimpireva, Karakachanite v Bulgariia, 27–29.

60 The Balkans became involved in European maritime trade as well as in caravan trade with
Central Europe. Todorov, Balkan City, 193.
61 Ibid., 459.
62 Heinz Fassmann and Rainer Münz, “European East-West Migration, 1945–1992,” The
Cambridge Survey of World Migration, 470–480.
63 For corresponding trends in Europe, see Klaus Bade, Migration in European History (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003), 6–9, 20–21, 41–45.
64 Jean-Claude Chesnais, The Demographic Transition: Stages, Patterns and Economic Implications,
trans. Elizabeth and Philip Kreager (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 54–55.
65 Ibid., 149–151.
66 Brian Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe 1750–1988, 3rd ed. (New York: Stockton,
1992), 3, 5. The number for Cisleithania is 17,535,000 in 1851, and for Transleithania,
13,192,000 as of 1850. These figures do not include those posted to the military.
67 Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” 64.
69 Ibid.
70 Bade, Migration in European History, 43.
71 Todorov, Balkan City, 310–312, 323.
72 Ibid., 314; Palairet, “The Migrant Workers,” 30–31. For similar trends in the West, see
Bade, Migration in European History, 58, 63.
73 Todorov, Balkan City, 369, 372–373.
74 Ibid., 382.
75 Bade, Migration in European History, 47–49; Wyman, Round-Trip to America, 18.
76 Walter Wilcox, ed., International Migrations vol. 1: Statistics (New York: Gordon and Breach,
1969), Russia, Table IX, 810. See also, Bade, Migration in European History, 66–68.
77 Bade, Migration in European History, 160–164.
78 Ibid., 58.
79 Palairet, “The Migrant Workers,” 23–25.
80 The rest of the paragraph is based on Palairet, “The Migrant Workers.”
81 See Sassen, Guests and Aliens; Torpey, Invention of the Passport.
83 Leo Lucassen and Wim Willems, “Wanderers or Migrants? Gypsies from Eastern to Western
Europe, 1860–1940),” in Cambridge Survey of World Migration, 136–140.
84 Chesnais, Demographic Transition, 169.
85 Magosci, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 93.
86 Wilcox, ed., International Migrations, vol. 1: Statistics, International tables, Table 13,
268–271.
88 Ibid., 109–110.
89 Ibid., 93–94.
90 Vaculik, České menšiny, 17–18.
91 Wyman, Round-Trip to America, 206.
92 Ibid., 39.
93 Wilcox, ed., International Migrations, vol. 1: Statistics, International tables, Table 27, 336.
94 Michael Palairet, “The ‘New’ Immigration and the Newest Slavic Migrations from the
Balkans to America and Industrial Europe since the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Thomas
Smout, ed., The Search for Wealth and Stability. Essays in Economic and Social History presented
to M. W. Flinn (London: Macmillan, 1979), 44–45. The re-emigration rates for 1908–13
are estimated at 18.7 percent for Dalmatians and Bosnians, 38.4 percent for Croats and
Slovenes, and 45.8 percent for Serbs, Bulgarians, and Montenegrins.
95 Palairet, “The ‘New’ Immigration and the Newest,” 49–50.
98 Ibid., 109.
169
99 Now, the main destination of South Slav migration became Brazil, Argentina, and Canada.
Carl-Ulrik Schierup, “Former Yugoslavia: Long Waves of International Migration,” in The
Cambridge Survey of World Migration, 285.
100 The pečalbari system declined as workers increasingly moved to urban centers and found
work in industry. Palairet, “The Migrant Workers,” 46.
101 Brubaker, “The Aftermath of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples”; and Weitz, “From
Vienna to the Paris System.”
102 Tilly, “Migration in Modern European History,” 68.
103 Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System,” 1314. See also Tilly, “Migration in Modern
European History”; Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century
Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Michael Mann, Dark Side of
Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
104 Quotation found in Andrew Baruch Wachtel, The Balkans in World History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 2.
105 Again, please refer to Chapter 4 in this volume.
106 Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1977), 97–98.
107 Justin McCarthy, “Muslims in Ottoman Europe: Population from 1800–1912,” Nationalities
Papers 28, no. 1 (2000): 32.
108 There were roughly 400,000 Muslims in Bosnia at that time. McCarthy, “Muslims in
Ottoman Europe,” 35–36.
109 Ali Eminov, Turkish and Other Muslim Minorities of Bulgaria (New York: Routledge, 1997),
Tables 2.9 and 3.1; and R. J. Crampton, Bulgaria (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), Table 15.1.
110 McCarthy, “Muslims in Ottoman Europe,” 36.
111 Schechtman, European Population Transfers, 257–258.
112 Ibid., 148.
113 Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford
114 Jack Wertheimer, “‘The Unwanted Element’: East European Jews in Imperial Germany,”
Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 26 (1981): 23–46.
115 Peter Morton Coan, ed., Ellis Island Interviews: In Their Own Words (New York, 1997), 163.
116 Ladas, Exchange of Minorities, 16; Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of
Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin, 1995), 156–164.
117 Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” 64–65.
118 Bade, Migration in European History, 175. For a case study of the complicated migration
movements in the Balkans, see Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands.
119 Many more figures are available in Alexandros Pallis, “Racial Migrations in the Balkans
during the Years 1912–1924,” Geographical Journal LXVI (1925): 315–331; and Dimitrije
Djordjevich, “Migrations during the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars and World War One”; Ninić,
Migrations in Balkan History, 115–129.
120 Djordjevich, “Migrations,” 118–119.
121 Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World
War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 124.
122 Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 138; Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War
and Population Changes, 1917–47 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1948), 31.
123 Bade, Migration in European History, 180; Marrus, Unwanted, 52–68; Kulischer, Europe on the
Move, 122.
124 Ladas, Exchange of Minorities, 18–23; Pentzopoulos, Balkan Exchange of Minorities, 54–60; and
Djordjevich, “Migrations,” 117–118.
125 C.A. Macartney, National States and Minorities (London: Oxford University Press, 1934),
435–436.
126 Mixed Commission on Greco-Bulgarian Emigration, Memorandum on the Mission and Work
of the Mixed Commission on Greco-Bulgarian Emigration (1929), 2.
127 Ladas, Exchange of Minorities, 41–48.
128 Memorandum on the Mission and Work of the Mixed Commission, 6, 12–13, 15.
129 Macartney, National States and Minorities, 440.
170
130 The literature of the topic is huge. Two recent works are Renée Hirschon, ed., Crossing the
Aegean; and Onur Yildirim, Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange
of Populations, 1922–1934 (New York: Routledge, 2006).
131 Theodora Dragostinova, “Navigating Nationality in the Emigration of Minorities between
Bulgaria and Greece, 1919–1939,” East European Politics and Societies 23 (2009), 185–212.
132 Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean; Naimark, Fires of Hatred.
133 Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean, 8.
134 István I. Mócsy, The Effects of World War I: The Uprooted: Hungarian Refugees and their Impact
on Hungary’s Domestic Politics, 1918–1921 (New York: Social Science Monographs, 1983);
Theodora Dragostinova, “Competing Priorities, Ambiguous Loyalties: Challenges of
Socioeconomic Adaptation and National Inclusion of the Interwar Bulgarian Refugees,”
Nationalities Papers 34, no. 5 (November 2006): 549–574.
135 Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean.
136 Dragostinova, “Competing Priorities, Ambiguous Loyalties.”
137 Annemarie Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 98; Brubaker, “The Aftermath of Empire,” 160–164;
Marrus, Unwanted, 72; Bade, Migration in European History, 199.
138 Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls; Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands.
139 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New
Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics
in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 8–9, 135–137; Joseph Rothschild, East-Central Europe
between the Two World Wars (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1974), 284.
140 Dragostinova, “Navigating Nationality.”
141 Eminov, Turkish and other Muslim minorities; Mary Neuburger, The Orient Within. Muslim
Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2004).
142 Rothschild, East-Central Europe, 89–90.
143 All numbers based on Rothschild, East-Central Europe, 36; for additional information, see
Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 84–103.
144 Kulischer, Europe on the Move, 122–130.
146 Götz Aly, Final Solution: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of European Jews, trans. Belinda
Cooper and Allison Brown (London: Arnold, 1999), 19; Christopher Browning, Nazi
Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Press Syndicated of the University of
Cambridge, 2000), 11.
147 Marrus, Unwanted, 152–154.
148 Ibid., 175.
149 Philipp Ther, “A Century of Forced Migration: The Origins and Consequences of ‘Ethnic
Cleansing,’” in Redrawing Nations, 51; Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and
Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press,
2004), 118–119; Marrus, The Unwanted, 196.
150 Krystyna Kersten, “Forced Migration and the Transformation of Polish Society in the
Postwar Period,” in Redrawing Nations, 77.
151 Magosci, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 166; Schechtman, European Population Transfers,
150.
152 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Policy, September
1939–March 1942 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), 53–58; Aly, Final Solution, 33–63;
Schechtman, European Population Transfers, 39–40.
153 Schechtman, European Population Transfers, 270–271, 349.
154 David Turnock, Eastern Europe: An Economic and Political Geography (New York: Routledge,
1989), 303, has 670,000; Marrus, The Unwanted, 224, has 1.25 million; Magosci, Historical
Atlas of Central Europe, 166, has 784,000.
155 Aly, Final Solution, 99.
156 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 77–78.
171
157 Kulischer, Europe on the Move, 194–195, 203.

158 Ulricht Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third
Reich, trans. William Templer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
159 Kulischer, Europe on the Move, 264; Turnock, Eastern Europe, 307.
160 Spoerer and Fleischhacker, “Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany: Categories, Numbers and
Survivors,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33, no. 2 (Autumn, 2002): 196–197.
161 Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, 58.
162 The decision-making process was contingent on several different factors and plans. For
some of these see Aly, Final Solution; Browning, Origins of the Final Solution.
163 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 2 (New York: Holmes and Meier,
1985), 492.
164 Ibid., 771.
165 Rumen Avramov, Spasenie i padenie. Mikroikonomika na durzhavniia antisemitizum v Bulgariia
1940–1944 (Sofia: Universitetsko izdatelstvo, 2012), 13.
166 While the literature on the Holocaust long ignored the persecution and systematic mur-
der of Roma alongside the Jews, that is no longer the case. For a recent work on the
subject focusing on Hungary see Janos Barsony and Agnes Daroczi, eds., trans. Gabor
Komasromy, Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma during the Holocaust (New York: International
Debate Education Association, 2008).
167 Jan Gross, Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation
(New York: Random House, 2006).
168 Kulischer, Europe on the Move, 268; Magosci, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 167.
169 Theodor Schieder, ed., The Expulsion of the German Population from Czechoslovakia, vol. 4,
Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central Europe, trans. G.H. de Sausmarez
(Bonn: Federal Ministry for Expellees Refugees, 1960), 463.
170 Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfers, 129–148.
171 Bohdan Kordan, “Making Borders Stick: Population Transfer and Resettlement in the
Trans-Curson Territorities, 1944–1949,” International Migration Review 31, no. 3 (1997):
705; Kulischer, Europe on the Move, 291–292.
172 Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003),
Chapters 8 and 9; see also the chapters on Poland in the following: Steven Várdy and
T. Hunt Tooley, eds., Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe (Boulder, CO: Social Science
Monographs, 2003); and Ther and Siljak, eds., Redrawing Nations.
173 Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1998), 38–60.
174 Magosci, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 167; Spoerer and Fleischhacker, “Forced Laborers
in Nazi Germany,” 197–198.
175 Wyman, DPs, 59.
176 For a recent study of the Kielce pogrom see Gross, Fear, 39–51.
177 Wyman, DPs, 149; Marrus, Unwanted, 331.
178 Spoerer and Fleischhacker, “Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany,” 181; Hilberg, The
Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 3, 1151.
179 Leszek Kosiński, Demographic Developments in Eastern Europe (New York: Praeger, 1977), 18.
180 Fassmann and Münz, “European East-West Migration,” 477–478.
181 Chesnais, Demographic Transition, 376.
182 See Chapters 3 and 8, and section IV “Women and Work: Production and Reproduction”
in Sharon Wolchik and Alfred Meyer, Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1985); Chesnais, The Demographic Transition, 127.
183 Schierup, “Former Yugoslavia,” 286. See also Robert Taaffe, “The Impact of Rural-Urban
Migration on the Development of Communist Bulgaria,” in Population and Migration
Trends in Eastern Europe, 157–180; Leszek Kosiński, “Demographic Characteristics
and Trends in Northeastern Europe,” in Huey Louis Kostanick, ed., Population and
Migration Trends in Eastern Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977), 42–43; Kosiński,
The Population of Europe: A Geographical Perspective (London: Longman, 1970), 103; Turnock,
Eastern Europe, 10.
172
185 Kostanick, Population and Migration Trends in Eastern Europe, 6–8.

186 Kostanick, Population and Migration Trends in Eastern Europe, 9.
187 Palairet, “The ‘New’ Immigration,” 56, 59; Turnock, Eastern Europe, 127–130.
188 Schierup, “Former Yugoslavia,” 286–287.
189 Palairet, “The ‘New’ Immigration,” 54.
190 Schierup, “Former Yugoslavia,” 286–287.
191 Daniel Levy, “Integrating Ethnic Germans in West Germany: The Early Postwar Period,”
in David Rock and Stefan Wolff, eds., Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic
Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic (New York: Berghan, 2002),
Table 1.3, 33.
192 See Fassmann and Münz, “European East-West Migration,” 472.
193 Moch, Moving Europeans, 169; Colin Holmen, “Jewish Economic and Refugee Migrations,
1880–1950,” in Robin Cohen, ed., The Cambridge Survey of World Migration (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 151.
194 Fassmann and Münz, “European East-West Migration,” 477, and Radu Ioanid, The Ransom
of the Jews: The Story of the Extraordinary Secret Bargain between Romania and Israel (Chicago, IL:
Ivan R. Dee, 2005).
195 Roman Kristof, “Roma Migration as an Integral Part of ‘International Roma Politics’ in
Europe,” in Will Guy, Zdenek Uherek, and Renata Weinerova, eds., Roma Migration in
Europe: Case Studies (Munster: LIT, 2004), 51.
196 Vaculik, České menšiny, 24.
197 Namais, First Generation, 148–151.
198 “The Refugee Movement (1950–1963),” German History in Documents and Images,
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3510 (accessed
November 30, 2010); “East-West Immigration Statistics (1961–1990),” GHDI, http://german
historydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=925 (accessed November 30,
2010); Kosiński, “Demographic Characteristics and Trends in Northeastern Europe,” 34.
199 Vaculik, České menšiny, 27.
200 Fassmann and Münz, “European East-West Migration,” 472–474; Bade, Migration in
European History, 266–267.
202 Fassmann and Münz, “European East-West Migration,” 478–479; Bade, Migration in
European History, 281–282.
203 Marek Okólski, “Migration Patterns in Central and Eastern Europe on the Eve of European
Expansion: An Overview,” in Agata Górny and Paolo Ruspini, eds., Migration in the New
Europe: East-West Revisited (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 28.
204 Elena Simona Vrânceanu and Mioara Nedelcu, “Romanian Post Communist Migration.
Issues Regarding Immigrants Integration,” Scientific Annals of the Alexandru Ioan Cuza
University of Iaşi. Political Science (Analele ştiinţifice ale Universităţii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din
Iaşi. ştiinţe politice), no. 4 (2009): 78–79.
205 Darina Vasileva, “Bulgarian Turkish Emigration and Return,” International Migration History
2 (1992): 342–351.
206 Fassmann and Münz, “European East-West Migration,” 472.
207 Bade, Migration in European History, 312–315; Kristof, “Roma Migration as an Integral Part
of ‘International Roma Politics.’”
208 Bade, Migration in European History, 315, 317.
209 Schierup, “Former Yugoslavia,” 288; Carl-Ulrik Schierup, “Eurobalkanism: Ethnic
Cleansing, Nationalism and the post-Cold War Order,” in Stefano Bianchini and Paul
Shoup, eds., The Yugoslav War, Europe and the Balkans: How to Achieve Security (Ravenna:
Longo Editore, 1995), 31–44; Fassmann and Münz, “European East-West Migration,” 476.
210 Bade, Migration in European History, 316–317, Bade claims 350,000; Schierup, “Former
Yugoslavia,” 288, lists 600,000.
211 Schierup, “Former Yugoslavia,” 288. For these debates, see also Florian Bieber and Dzemal
Sokolovic, Reconstructing Multiethnic Societies: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2001); and Carl Dahlman and Gerard Toal, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic
Cleansing and its Reversal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
173

213 Oxana Shevel, Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
214 Okólski, “Migration Patterns in Central and Eastern Europe,” 35–37.
215 Anna Kicinger, “Beyond the Focus on Europeanisation: Polish Migration Policy 1989–2004,”
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35, no. 1 (2009): 81.
216 Fassmann and Münz, “European East-West Migration,” 477.
Further Reading
Aly, Götz. Final Solution: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of European Jews. Translated by
Belinda Cooper and Allison Brown. London: Arnold, 1999.
Bade, Klaus. Migration in European History. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Ballinger, Pamela. History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002.
Barkey, Karen, and Mark von Hagen, eds. After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building:
The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997.
Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Brubaker, Rogers, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, and Liana Grancea. Nationalist Politics and
Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.
Brunnbauer, Ulf, ed. Transnational Societies, Transterritorial Politics: Migrations in the (Post-)
Yugoslav Region, 19th–21st Century. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2009.
Brunnbauer, Ulf. Globalizing Southeastern Europe: Emigrants, America, and the State since the Late
Nineteenth Century. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016.
Clark, Bruce. Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Danforth, Loring and Riki von Boethen. Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of
Memory. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2011.
Demshuk, Andrew. The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945–1970.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Dragostinova, Theodora. Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of
Bulgaria, 1900–1949. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.
Green, Nancy, and Francois Weil. Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and
Expatriation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.
Grossmann, Atina. Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009.
Guy, Will, Zdenek Uheker, and Renate Weinerova, eds. Roma Migration in Europe: Case Studies.
Munster: Lit, 2004.
Hirschon, Renée, ed. Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange
between Greece and Turkey. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003.
Hockenos, Paul. Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2003.
Kaser, Karl. Patriarchy after Patriarchy: Gender Relations in Turkey and in the Balkans, 1500–2000.
Berlin: Lit, 2008.
Mandel, Ruth. Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Marrus, Michael. The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford
174
Naimark, Norman. Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA:
Rock, David, and Stefan Wolff, eds. Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans
from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic. New York: Berghan, 2002.
Sammartino, Annemarie. The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922. Ithaca: Cornell
Sassen, Saskia. Guests and Aliens. New York: New Press, 1999.
Shevel, Oxana. Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe. New York:
Siegelbahm, Lewis, and Leslie Page Moch. Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of
Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.
Ther, Philipp, and Ana Siljak, eds. Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe,
1944–1948. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
Toal, Gerald, and Carl Dahlman. Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal. New York:
Todorova, Maria. The Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments
in Ottoman Bulgaria. Washington, DC: American University Press, 1993.
Torpey, John. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State. New York:
Tziovas, Dimitris, ed. Greek Diaspora and Migration since 1700: Society, Politics and Culture.
Burlington: Ashgate, 2009.
Weitz, Eric. “From Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories
of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions.” American Historical Review
113, no. 5 (December 2008): 1313–1343.
Wyman, Mark. Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930. Ithaca: Cornell
Zahra, Tara. The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free
World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016.
175
4
RE L IGI ON AND ET H NI C I T Y
Conflicting and converging identifications
Joel Brady and Edin Hajdarpasic
Ethnic, national, and religious identifications have been intricately intertwined in

East Central Europe.1 To be Polish, proverbially, has also meant being Catholic,
while Orthodox Christianity has “embodied,” seemingly necessarily, Greek, Serb,
Romanian, and other ethnicities. Ethnic and religious entanglement can be found
throughout East Central Europe. Scholars have invoked the close association between
markers of confessional and national difference in Bosnia and Macedonia as an
example of the conspicuous fusion of “ethno-religious” identities, based upon the
“commonplace [understanding] that religious identification and ethnic affiliation
have been very closely linked in the Balkan setting.”2 Language, culture and confes-
sion in this region have enjoyed relationships of mutual influence and support, as
well as of reciprocal, mutually constitutive antagonism(s): being Greek (Orthodox),
for example, relies heavily upon a sense of not being Turkish (Muslim). Complex
ethno-religious matrices have afforded multiple competing or coexisting options
for identifying self and other, while regional, imperial, and temporal parameters
have influenced the development of such matrices. For instance, Greek Catholics
(Catholics of the Byzantine Rite) within a broadly defined Slavic linguistic classifica-
tion were able, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to adopt
Rusyn, Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Polish, Boiko, Hutsul, Lemko, Romanian,
and other ethnic identifications, even as the narrow definition of Greek Catholicism
as the only legitimate “Ukrainian” option in the Austro-Hungarian context gave way
to broader acceptance of a national Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity after World
War I, something virtually unthinkable only a few years earlier.3
An inextricable link between religion and ethnicity, and between religion and
nation has been posited by some scholars as a hallmark of East Central Europe’s pecu-
liar development in modern times, even when the comparison with Western Europe
is only implicit: whereas in the West, the argument goes, nation supplanted religion,
in the East, religion begot and nourished the nation. As Brian Porter-Szűcs writes,
“many both inside and outside the region have contrasted a modern West against
a backward East, with an enduring Christianity often cited as one of the defining
features of the latter.”4 The symbiosis of religion and ethnicity or nation in Eastern
Europe is in many cases undeniable.5 On the other hand, ethnic groups and national
movements have also crystallized and advanced by revolting against religious institu-
tions such as the Greek-dominated Rum millet in the Ottoman Empire; or by stressing
linguistic, historical, and cultural features of distinction.6 Ethnicity and nation can
evolve without or with religion, in East Central Europe as elsewhere.
176
R eligion and E thnicity
Theoretical frameworks emerging from multiple disciplines that challenge the

analysis of ethnicity, nation, and religion as concrete “things in the world” have
helped to clarify this complex historical nexus. In the 1980s, new approaches to
nationalism, exemplifed by Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, and Benedict Anderson,
highlighted the modernity, conditioned-ness, and constructed-ness of nations.7
Whereas “primordialists” (including nationalists, scholars, and nationalist scholars)
had maintained the eternal “primordial” character of particular nations, modern-
ists argued that nations betrayed the evidence of their birth. Rather than enduring
and essential national unity, the “slumber” of essentially un-nationalized masses, and
the embarrassment of their “awakening,” modernists (or “constructivists”) argued
instead that nations came into being – that is, that they are “modern” constructions” –
through various socially, politically, and economically conditioning processes. The
application of constructivism to ethnicity, however, has been slower to develop. In
the 1970s, anthropologist Frederik Barth had formulated a constructivist theory of
ethnicity, understood as a form of identification emerging at the boundaries between
groups, rather than centering on the essential content found within such groups
(common customs, languages, religion, etc.).8 Yet, while the modernist assessment of
nationhood had become part of the disciplinary mainstream by the early 1980s, the
historical constructed-ness of ethnicity and other identities began to achieve paradig-
matic status beyond the field of anthropology only in 2000–06 with the interventions
of sociologist Rogers Brubaker and African historian Frederick Cooper. At about
the same time, European historians such as Pieter Judson, Jeremy King, and Tara
Zahra developed and applied these theoretical insights in their historical work on the
Habsburg Monarchy.9
As King notes in his critique of “ethnicism,” historians who accept the modernity of
nations (“there was a time when Poland was not”), do not generally extend this logic
to ethnicity (“there was a time when Poles were not”).10 A modernist historian might
argue that Hungary came into being as a modern political and conceptual nation in
the nineteenth century, for example, while assuming that ethnic Hungarians, the raw
material for the Hungarian nation, existed before nationalism, for an unspecified dura-
tion of time. King calls into question the validity of perennial ethnic identities as much
as national ones, and Brubaker questions the practice of attaching essential groupness
to ethnonyms, and of attributing singular agency to the groups’ supposed constituents.
The use of ethnic designations may obscure the fact that many individuals did not – and
still might not – believe in or act upon the basis of discrete ethnic identities: seemingly
all-encompassing, far-reaching (ethno-)national causes might in fact be championed
only by relatively small cadres of activists.11 Timothy Snyder has shown that even notable
nationalist activists can have biographies fraught with ethnic ambiguity.12
Constructivist and modernist approaches to nationalism and ethnicity have them-
selves been challenged, most prominently by Anthony Smith whose “ethnosymbolism”
represents an alternative to the modernist narrative.”13 Smith accepts that most
nations and nationalist ideologies came into existence in the modern period, but
insists that strictly modernist approaches suffer from a “systematic failure to accord
any weight to the pre-existing cultures and ethnic ties of the nations that emerged
in the modern epoch.”14 By neglecting to consider the pre-modern cultural inher-
itances which make modern nationalisms possible, whether those be languages, names,
rituals or “ethnic origins myths,” modernist-constructivist accounts fail to explain the
177
J oel B rady and E din H ajdarpasic
popular appeal and affective power of national sentiments, according to Smith. To

understand that appeal, ethnosymbolist scholars assert the salience of “ethnic com-
munities,” and study the pre-modern symbols and myths that bind them together
and are passed down over generations. Recent ethnosymbolist studies of East Central
Europe have, for example, analyzed the legacy of Prince Stephen the Great as a sym-
bol of the nation in Moldova, as well as constitutional preambles as declarations of
ethnicity in several post-communist states illustrating how nations and ethnic commu-
nities are based on historical pedigrees that predate their social construction in the
modern period.15
Historians of religion have long accepted the social construction of specific reli-
gions, anticipating the modernist turn in nationalism studies, by centuries, going
back at least to the Enlightenment.16 They have thus been telling religious history
as the temporally specific stories of humanity, rather than as a narrative of Divine
Providence from time immemorial. Individuals in East Central Europe were born
Christians, Jews, and Muslims only in the sense of being born into particular social
frameworks marking them as such. Still, groupist approaches are not unknown in
religious studies. Catholicism may refer to a singular entity, differentiated internally
by rites, imperial borders, or ethno-national groups, but still constituting a bounded,
discrete “thing in the world” to borrow Brubaker’s phrasing on ethnicity. Some argue
that Sunni Muslims believed and acted in all cases in particular ways, because they
belonged to Sunni Islam, when their motivations may have been based on class,
gender, family situation, or any number and combination of idiosyncratic factors.
Religious boundaries, though permeable through conversion in the long run, may
present themselves as clear and definitive, marking off mutually exclusive groups.
“Jew,” can thus signify “not Christian” and “not Muslim,” in much the same way that
“Ukrainian” may mean “not Russian” and “not Polish.”
Institutionally, religious boundaries have often been clearly marked in East Central
Europe, and transgressions, when possible at all, carried severe consequences.
Indeed, ethnic identifications have sometimes owed their ambiguity precisely to the
rigidity of religious boundaries.17 Yet, at other times these borderlines have seemed
flexible and inclusive just like ethnic ones, and have failed to command total,
unwavering allegiance. Students of religion often distinguish between the institu-
tional fluidity of (far)-Eastern religions – such as Hinduism or Buddhism – and the
confessional inflexibility of Western ones – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This
difference is generally attributed to the greater emphasis in Eastern religions upon
practice, rather than belief. But the religious traditions prevalent in East Central
Europe have also exhibited fluid margins, due also in part to the prominence of
religious practice. Here we problematize the concept of “religion” as something con-
crete, substantial, existing in reality so as to engage in a full analysis.18 Frequently,
it has been in the sphere of popular and lived religion that the limits set by religious
institutions have been blurred. Prior to the rise of modern nationalisms, religious
boundaries exceeded ethnic or national ones in rigidity, thanks to the formal insti-
tutions maintained by priests, rabbis, bishops, and mullahs. Yet the religion of the
home, the street, and the marketplace has confounded the best laid plans and polar-
ities of the mosque, the church, and the synagogue. Retreating from the idea of the
religious “group” as a unit of analysis may therefore be beneficial as a complement
to non-groupist approaches to ethnicity.
178
Finally, we have attempted to qualify the vision of growing secularization, as a

major premise framing scholarly understandings of religion and ethnicity in mod-
ern East Central Europe. There is some utility to seeing religion in modern East
Central Europe as a relic of the pre-modern era, a legacy of the Holy Roman Empire,
Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian orders, later partially supplanted by the “secular
religion” of nationalism only to be profoundly transformed by communist rule and
the post-socialist transition in the twentieth century.19 Over the course of the last two
decades, however, scholars have begun asking a number of critical questions about
the overarching narratives of ethno-religious fusion and ascendant secularization.
How central has religion been in different periods? In what ways did nationalist move-
ments engage with local religious institutions, traditions, and markers of confessional
difference? What factors have shaped the relationship between nationalization, sec-
ularization, and modern state-building? How did different communist governments
deal with questions of religion and ethnicity? How appropriate are the terms “secular”
and “religious” for defining the extraordinarily wide range of social, cultural, and
political processes in the region?20
We have kept these questions and caveats at the fore in this chapter, avoiding
references to groups where the latter did not exist, or to ethnonyms and religious
labels where they were not in operation, or where their salience lay primarily or
exclusively in external ascription. We therefore refer less often to Serbs, Poles, or
the Orthodox, preferring instead phrases such as Serb ethnic identification, Polish
speakers, and Orthodox partisans. While at the extremes there certainly were
historical actors whose relationship with religion or ethnicity approached total com-
mitment, in the main, groups and congregations were variegated and fragmented,
and they exhibited a multitude of motivations, interests, and goals, while operating
according to a variety of circumstances.
Empire and religious organization (1700–1848)

A critical exploration of the dynamics of religious and ethnic identification since the
1700s must attend to the imperial context: in Southeastern Europe, the Ottoman
dynasty, and in Eastern and Central Europe, Polish-Lithuanian, Prussian, Russian,
and Habsburg rule. Of all the distinguishing factors that lend modern Balkan states
a shared distinctiveness, their emergence from realms ruled by the Ottomans holds
exceptional significance. Maria Todorova regards the search for the Ottoman leg-
acy in the Balkans, quite simply, as “preposterous,” for, she writes, “the Balkans are
the Ottoman legacy.”21 To the North, multiple imperial legacies prevailed, arising
from Habsburg, Prussian, and Russian rule, and the further expansion of these
three powers at the conclusion of the eighteenth century to supplant the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The Ottoman Empire

Ottoman rule – stretching from the late thirteenth to the twentieth century – affected
areas of southeastern Europe unevenly, and historians have periodized and divided
this vast field in different ways. An extended and lively debate, for example, has focused
on the early modern Mediterranean as a space of religious, cultural, and commercial
interactions that shaped Jewish, Christian, and Islamic communities in the Balkans.22
179
Historians of Eastern Orthodoxy have been more interested in the institutions and
networks that sustained the Orthodox Church within the Ottoman Empire, while a
smaller number of scholars have explored Catholic-Ottoman encounters.23
The emergence of new Muslim communities in the Ottoman Balkans has attracted
a lot of scholarly attention and debate. Prior to Ottoman conquest, Orthodox and
Catholic Christianity were the politically dominant faiths while local fusions of pagan,
Gnostic, and Christian practices developed and flourished in Thrace, Bosnia, and
Albania.24 The Islamic character of advancing Ottoman rule formed an auspicious
context for the rise and growth of Muslim communities, which began to appear in cit-
ies and in some parts of the countryside in the fourteenth century. By the end of the
seventeenth century, many towns, among them Bitola, Prizren, Mostar, and Plovdiv,
had large and native Muslim populations. Many factors help explain the growth of
Islam in some Balkan regions. Scholars have stressed, for example, the arrival of Sufi
orders and early settlers from Anatolia as critical to the emergence of the first Islamic
communities in southeast Europe. There were also material incentives for conver-
sion, which bestowed privileged status on new Muslims who enjoyed more rights and
paid fewer taxes than non-Muslims to the Ottoman state. This was once viewed as a
crucial explanatory factor, particularly for the large numbers of formerly Christian
nobles who converted to Islam. According to Antonina Zhelyazkova “conversion to
Islam equally made sense to urban merchants and craftsmen, they were thus relieved
of discriminative taxes and forced new networks which might be useful in the pursuit
of their business activities.” The devşirme, or child levy, also helps account for growing
numbers of Islamic converts.25
Alongside these factors, recent scholarship has offered new sources and fresh
interpretations that stress the significance of social conditions, communal rela-
tions, and local histories in explaining conversion patterns. As Tijana Krstić has
pointed out, “family and social networks” were among “the most important con-
texts of religious change” in the Ottoman Balkans. While census records have long
demonstrated that conversion was a gradual process, recently analyzed conversion
narratives reveal that most converts-to-be were extensively familiar with Islam well
before their formal declaration of the new faith. For example, single men who
moved to largely Muslim cities, apprentices who worked for Muslim craftsmen,
women who married Muslim men, and children from religiously mixed marriages
proved to be disproportionately likely candidates for conversion.26 Parts of today’s
Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Bulgaria experienced particularly strong
Islamization by the eighteenth century. These varied Balkan Muslim populations,
such as the Pomaks (Bulgarian Muslims) and Bošnjaks (Bosnian Muslims), thus
came from various backgrounds, spoke different languages, and cultivated varying
historical narratives and regional traditions.27
The Ottoman Empire was in many senses a Muslim state. Its ruling dynasty and
the vast majority of its administrators were Muslims. The state’s legal structures, its
political symbols, and many of its institutional practices drew heavily upon different
Muslim traditions cultivated by the Seljuk, Arabic, and Persian states in the Near
East, though the Ottomans also adopted much of the Byzantine and Balkan Christian
architectural, artistic, and political heritage. Not only did the Sublime Porte cham-
pion Sunni Islam as its official state religion, but from the sixteenth century onward,
the sultan also became the Caliph himself: the guardian of Mecca and Medina and
180
the highest “Protector of Islam” within and beyond the borders of his Empire. Early
modern Ottoman officials, such as the famed vizier Mehmed-pasha Sokollu and the
eminent jurist Ebu’s-Suud, often invoked the Ottoman claims to the caliphate in both
domestic and diplomatic relations.28 It was only after the territorial losses and defeats
in the eighteenth century, however, that sultans increasingly rediscovered their pro-
file as caliphs in hopes of asserting authority over Muslims outside the shrinking
Ottoman borders and fostering a modern pan-Islamism, particularly under Sultan
Abdülhamid II (1876–1909).29
How did this Muslim state govern its realms and interact with its subjects –
especially with non-Muslims, who constituted the local majority in many regions in
the Balkans? A surprising number of scholars have found the answer to this ques-
tion in the notion of the millet system, a set of policies and principles purportedly
derived from inherited religious doctrines. Ottoman rule in the Balkans, historian
Peter Sugar characteristically wrote in 1977, closely followed precedents of earlier
Islamic states and conformed to the tenets laid out by the prophet Muhammed.
Following this Islamic tradition, the Ottoman state favored Muslims and generally
discriminated against non-Muslim (dhimmi) groups, but also offered them pro-
tection and “a sort of self-government” as long as such communities paid special
non-Muslim taxes to the Ottoman state. The Empire accomplished this balance
by incorporating each monotheistic group recognized as a “People of the Book,”
namely Christians and Jews, as a millet: a distinct religious community headed by a
clerical representative. Ottoman bureaucrats of the nineteenth century and later
professional historians of the twentieth century referred to this varying and unsettled
set of relations as the “millet system,” an appellation suggesting that the Empire car-
ried out a consistent “minority [sic] home-rule policy based on religious affiliation.”30
When approached in this way, the Ottoman Empire appears as a theocratic state
that divided its non-Muslim subjects into different Christian and Jewish communi-
ties, which in turn preserved their confessional identities precisely thanks to their
inferior, self-enclosed, and semi-autonomous standing.31
Since the 1980s, a number of historians have contributed important findings
and analyses that caution against overstating the “systematic” aspect of religious
differentiation in Ottoman societies. In their studies of Ottoman Christian and
Jewish communities, for instance, Benjamin Braude, Amnon Cohen, and Paraskevas
Konortas have shown that the Ottoman state continually made a number of
arrangements with different confessional groups (taife, millet, and cemaat were
common terms for such communities) as it expanded from the fifteenth to the
seventeenth century.32 These often improvised and later revised and formalized set-
tlements included, among many others, the special status of regional holy sites like
the Orthodox Mount Athos (recognized by Ottoman sultans by the 1420s) and the
evolving relations between Ottoman sultans and the Franciscan Order in Bosnia
(granted an imperial charter in 1463).33 It was only with the late eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century reforms that the Ottoman state sought to centralize its many
different and unevenly developed relations with various religious communities, by
bestowing privileges to officially incorporated Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and
Jewish millets. For all the appeal to venerated religious principles, Bruce Masters
recently concluded, the concept of the “millet system” was a “latecomer to the Ottoman
political scene, even if its workings were always cloaked in the rhetoric of an ageless
181
tradition.”34 Moreover, as Christine Philliou has observed, “the very terms of this
debate reflect a preoccupation with formal institutional and legal definitions. Such
definitions shed little light on the social realities of Ottoman governance” and local
practices across the Balkans.35 Nonetheless, many scholars continue to refer to the
“millet system” as a common, if confusing, shorthand for Ottoman state regulation of
religious communities.
The history of the Orthodox Church during the period of Ottoman rule exem-
plifies the complexity of confessional relations in the Balkans before the nineteenth
century. Immediately after conquering Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmed II
appointed Gennadios Scholarios as the patriarch of the Orthodox Church, thus
incorporating the surviving church structures into the Ottoman administration and
leaving a lasting Byzantine imprint on Ottoman–Orthodox relations.36 In the Balkan
villages and towns, however, Orthodox Christian life centered not on the patriarch
in Istanbul, but on various regional monasteries, priests, shrines, saints, and prac-
tices. Not only did the Mount Athos monasteries such as Zographou and Hilandar
remain great centers of Orthodox intellectual life, but many Balkan Orthodox priests
found significant autonomy in their parishes, usually quite removed from the affairs
in the Ottoman capital. Orthodox clergy in what is today Serbia and Kosovo, for
example, directly negotiated with Ottoman officials, corresponded with foreign dig-
nitaries, and enjoyed significant authority during the establishment of the Serbian
Orthodox Patriarchate in Peć, recognized in 1557 but closed by the Ottomans in 1766
in response to the church’s role in local uprisings.37 Indeed, it was decidedly after
the late eighteenth-century centralizing reforms that tensions and rifts within Balkan
Orthodoxy began to intensify and take on an increasingly national character. Under
Ottoman rule, then, the Rum millet – literally “Roman nation” – signified not only the
formally established Orthodox Church headed by the patriarch in Istanbul, but also a
diverse and linguistically heterogeneous religious community represented locally by
different clergy and embedded in a wide variety of political and regional networks.
Attention to prescribed policies, lived experiences, and changing doctrines
helps historicize and contextualize the relations between confessional groups in the
Ottoman Empire. In many ways, the Ottoman state was deeply invested in maintain-
ing and policing differences between religious groups, particularly between Muslims
and non-Muslims. Balkan Christian and Jewish communities, for example, had their
own religious authorities, schools, statutes, and customs that regulated their internal
affairs, such as marriages, disputes, and other relations (as long as such dynamics
did not directly involve Muslims). Sharia law as interpreted by local judges (kadis)
attended to most other issues.38 Churches and synagogues, although permitted a
significant degree of autonomy, were greatly restricted in size until the nineteenth
century.39 Balkan Muslim notables often used their privileged status to punish local
Christians suspected of anti-Ottoman sentiments and actions, particularly after the
Ottoman military defeats and territorial losses of the eighteenth century.40 Clothing
laws specified that Christians and Jews could not wear certain colors and fabrics, lim-
iting and defining styles of dress in an attempt to mark religious difference visually.41
“But regulations were one thing,” Mark Mazower notes in his study of Salonica
(Thessaloniki), “and what people did in real life was another, especially when out
of sight of the imperial capital.”42 Indeed, the history of Salonica presents a fascinat-
ing case of intertwined relations among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The city was
182
devastated during Sultan Murad II’s conquest in 1430, but it experienced economic
and social revival in subsequent decades. Tens of thousands of Sephardi Jews expelled
from Spain in 1492 eventually found refuge in Salonica (where Jews soon surpassed
both Christians and Muslims to become the city’s largest confessional community)
and other Balkan towns such as Sophia, Belgrade, and Sarajevo.43 While Ottoman
policies enforced Christian-Jewish-Muslim differences, numerous practices cut across
confessional divides; members of all three major religions often sought out rabbis,
imams, and priests for blessings, good health, life decisions, and other important mat-
ters. Shared neighborhoods, styles of dress, and holidays also made religious divides
more flexible and ambiguous without erasing them.44 Moreover, challenges and
divergences often arose within each religious community, pitting Bulgarian against
Greek advocates within the Orthodox churches, for example, or splitting the follow-
ers of Sabbatai Zevi, a rabbi and self-proclaimed messiah whose sudden conversion to
Islam in 1666 prompted hundreds of the city’s Jews to do the same.45 In this context, it
is not surprising that inter- and intra-confessional tensions in Ottoman Salonica could
run high, sometimes spilling over into overt hostility, yet at the same time “the daily
life of the city fostered a considerable sharing of beliefs and practices,” as Mazower
writes. Other scholars share this view: “[A]lthough religion was a key defining feature
of status within Ottoman society,” Mary Neuburger notes in her study of Muslims in
modern Bulgaria, “distinctions between cultures and peoples were often blurred on
the local level.”46
Indeed, convergences between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Ottoman and
post-Ottoman societies have fascinated historians, who have used “tolerance,” “trans-
ference,” and “syncretism” to describe such phenomena. Concepts such as “tolerance”
and “intolerance” are not new; in 1788, the Italian writer Alessandro Bisani visited
Istanbul and remarked that “a stranger, who has beheld the intolerance of London
and Paris, must be much surprised to see a church here between a mosque and a
synagogue, and a dervish by the side of a Capuchin friar.” Speculating that “it must
be from the degeneracy of Mahommedanism that this happy contrast has been pro-
duced,” Bisani also noted the general negligence of religious obligations across the
Ottoman Empire, a claim made by many other European travelers as well as religious
reformers in the Balkans and the Middle East.47 Some have stressed Ottoman elites
as particularly prone to “errant” religiosity; Bisani himself was struck by the words of
a Muslim poet: “The world, then, is divided into two descriptions of men; the first of
whom have sense, and no religion; the other have religion, and little sense.”48 Most
scholars, however, have focused on popular culture and everyday practices that com-
bined different religious traditions. For example, research on holy sites in Bulgaria
and Macedonia has shown that Christians as well as Muslims honored the grave of the
Sufi sheikh Bali Efendi in Sofia, and that many Muslims celebrated Christian holidays
and made pilgrimages to monasteries in Ohrid (St. Naum), Corfu (St. Spyridon), and
Mount Tomor (St. Elias).49
These issues – mutual borrowings, coexistence, and heterodox observance of
religion – have raised questions about syncretism versus religious orthodoxies and
more generally about confessional relations in the Balkans. Some historians have
associated syncretism explicitly with the Ottoman period and with Islam, either as
a venue for conversion or as a feature of local Sufi orders and Muslim practices.50
Others have contrasted the Balkan syncretism of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
183
faiths with the twentieth-century nationalist drives for ethno-religious purity, thus
stressing “tolerance” and “multiculturalism” as possible alternative legacies of the
Ottoman era. Still other scholars have critically questioned such largely anachronis-
tic and one-dimensional framings that downplay tensions and conflicts in Ottoman
societies. An important insight that has emerged from these debates is that toler-
ance and violence, harmony and hostility are not enduring opposites that exclude
one another; rather, they may be better seen as situational, quickly changing, and
locally embedded relations that make up the vast and complex field of religous
difference in the Ottoman Balkans.51
The Habsburg Monarchy and the Polish-Lithuanian

Commonwealth in the eighteenth century
By 1700 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Habsburg Monarchy had
become officially Catholic; that had not always been so. Charles Ingrao describes the
monarchy’s population in the second half of the sixteenth century as “a confessional
mosaic”:
A majority of the German-speaking peoples of the Austrian, Hungarian, and

Bohemian lands had adopted Lutheranism, as had most of Inner Austria’s
Slovenes and Upper Hungary’s Slovaks; Vienna itself was mostly Lutheran.
Hungary’s Magyars had become overwhelmingly Calvinist. Although many
Czechs remained nominally Catholic, most of them adhered to anti-Roman
Hussite, or Utraquist, religious practices . . . ; meanwhile many Czechs had
converted to Calvinism or to the even more radical Church of the Bohemian
Brethren . . . The Catholic Habsburgs were now a religious minority among
their own people.52
The Reformation also had many followers in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

where intellectual life and academic institutions reflected the struggle between the
Jesuit Order, first introduced there in 1565, and Protestant dissidents.53 There were
many other faiths represented among the Republic’s population as well. According to
Norman Davies, “between 1569 and the First Partition in 1772, the Roman Catholics
formed the largest single religious group, but accounted for barely half of the total
population” which included different types of Christians, Jews, and Muslims.54
Historical analyses of these two early modern states (often referred to as “multi-
national”) sometimes begin with taxonomies of the various ethno-national groups
within their borders.55 Yet in 1700, the vast majority of the people in the region
possessed little national or even ethnic consciousness. The Polish and Hungarian
nationes, for example, denoted the political nations, and thus only partial segments –
the aristocracy and the higher clergy – of a broader society often described alto-
gether as ethnically Polish and Hungarian, despite the lack of a sense of nationhood
on the part of the lower classes. Phrases like “the Polish peasantry” should perhaps
be reserved to a time when Polish nationalism had made significant inroads among
Polish-speaking peasants. Rogers Brubaker has highlighted the inherent anachro-
nism in references to these eighteenth-century states as “multi-national,” prior to
the emergence of cohesive and distinct national movements.56 The same perspective
184
informs the following analysis of the broader religious and ethnic interactions in
Eastern and Central Europe in the 1700s.
In the Habsburg Monarchy, Roman Catholicism was intertwined with German,
Hungarian, Croat, and Slovenian identifications, and in Poland-Lithuania with Polish
and Lithuanian ones. These identifications functioned primarily as markers of polit-
ical class, inapplicable to peasants, or of the language spoken by a group of people.
Moreover, one could acquire those identifications through conversion to Catholicism
or through ennoblement, resulting in hybrid self-identifications – such as natione
Polonus, gente Ruthenus (Polish by nationality, of the Ruthenian people), which were
entirely logical in the 1700s, but would be rendered oxymoronic and untenable by
developments during later centuries.57
The extension of the Catholic Counter-Reformation eastward had important religious
and ethnic consequences. In Habsburg realms the Peace of Westphalia was followed by
continued efforts to close down Protestant churches, expel Protestant preachers, and
convert their parishioners to the dynastic religion. The re-Catholicization of Bohemia
was nearly total by the 1700s, effected by force, but also by persuasion, for example by
the introduction of Baroque aesthetics into the churches, the establishment of devo-
tional shrines, and missionary-catechetical initiatives in the countryside.58 Catholicism
was a weapon in the hands of the empire’s rulers as they attempted to assert domin-
ion over rebellious areas with significant Protestant populations such as Bohemia,
Silesia, and Hungary. Religious persecution drove many into exile and was responsi-
ble for inciting several rebellions in Royal Hungary and Transylvania. The Ottomans
who ruled central Hungary sought to gain from this disunity by allying with the Kuruc
rebels against the Habsburgs. The Ottomans’ siege of Vienna in 1683 ultimately failed
due to the energetic defense by the Holy Alliance of Christian armies funded by the
Pope. In the aftermath of this victory the Habsburgs regained dominion over Hungary
and Transylvania – bastions of Protestantism in Eastern Europe.59 Clearly Catholicism
served the Habsburgs well in the expansion and consolidation of their domains against
states whose rulers and elites practiced Islam or Protestant forms of Christianity. To
quote again Charles Ingrao, “By 1700 the triumph of the Counter-Reformation was
evident in several media. The crown continued to play a prominent role in propagan-
dizing the link between the dynasty’s destiny and the True Faith.”60
Maria Theresa’s reign (1740–80) is often considered in the framework of
Enlightened Absolutism. In fact in matters religious it was a curious mixture of con-
servative and secularizing policies. Maria Theresa herself was deeply pious, but some
of her advisors and her personal doctor had been educated in Protestant German uni-
versities where rationalism and natural law theories were in vogue. Together, she and
they shared a desire to limit the influence of the Papacy in the monarchy. Early in her
reign she moved to diminish Jesuit power over censorship and book production and
distribution. While the institution of censorship continued, it became the province of
a government-appointed Censorship Commission, which soon banned Jesuit publica-
tions. The empress also reduced the Jesuits’ control over elite education in order to
modernize it. But these reforms were, according to Charles Ingrao, “driven by reasons
of state, not by . . . Enlightenment ideas.”61 The pressure to keep up with Prussia was
one of those reasons.
While Ingrao considers that the Theresian regime marked “a dramatic break with
the culture of the Counter-Reformation,” Derek Beales emphasizes Maria Theresa’s
185
commitment to the Counter-Reformation and the monarchy’s fundamental Roman

Catholicism, the sole legally recognized religion.62 Non-Catholics could not own
land, hold office, worship, or even live in the state’s central provinces. Apostasy
from Catholicism, attempts to convert Catholics, or owning Protestant books were
all illegal and punishable with hard labor, imprisonment, flogging, or deportation
to Transylvania, Banat, or Hungary where Protestantism was permitted and some
Protestants even held office. In fact there were quite a number of exceptions allowed
in different provinces and institutions, as Beales makes clear. Far from evolving toward
a more tolerant stance, the empress promulgated in 1778, just two years before the
end of her reign, the Religionspatent that summed up discriminatory regulations on
religion passed since 1752. Then in 1780, just before her death, she had Protestants
deported from Moravia to Hungary. To make sense of these attitudes, Beales points
out that in the eighteenth century “it was still widely believed that a state could not
be strong if its inhabitants had no common religion” and that “in the Monarchy
Protestants were . . . suspected of Prussian sympathies.”63
Joseph II (1780–90), Maria Theresa’s son and successor on the Habsburg throne,
introduced significant reforms with regard to the rights of non-Catholics. In 1781
he rescinded Maria Theresa’s 1778 Religionspatent, suppressed the contemplative
Orders, and began granting edicts of toleration to non-Catholic Christians and Jews
in different provinces. Wider religious toleration had been under review during
Maria Theresa’s last decade, without immediate results. During his ten years as sole
ruler, Joseph enacted religious toleration, thus abolishing the privileged position of
Catholics, in order to promote civic loyalty, immigration, and economic develop-
ment. Prussia, Austria’s enemy, would benefit, Joseph and his advisors reasoned, if
the monarchy were to refuse such measures.64
The relative religious tolerance for which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
had been widely heralded since the Warsaw Confederation Act of 1573 had waned by
the 1700s. The Counter-Reformation, in its correction of some of the church abuses
identified by Protestants, reasserted Catholic social and political superiority, and
contributed to an “age of confessionalism.”65 Drawing upon its substantial wealth
and influence, institutional Catholicism increasingly exercised political power as
it enlisted Jesuits – the monastic shock troops of the Counter-Reformation – to
establish definitive lines of demarcation around the True Faith, to attract or com-
pel those who might be persuaded within those bounds, and to expel or suppress
those who were not. Jesuits in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth also cham-
pioned the equation of Polish-ness with Catholicism, against those who identified
as non-Catholic and non-Polish. Jews, in particular, were assigned a kind of token
status as “other,” cast rhetorically as non-Catholics and non-Poles and therefore a
critical oppositional foil for the development of Polish consciousness, among seg-
ments of the aristocracy and clerisy.66 Other religious actors, including Protestant
and Orthodox Christians, responded in kind to the retreat from toleration, by nar-
rowing their own criteria for membership in their faith communities and launching
their own education initiatives among their constituents.
Another consequence of the Catholic Reformation was the development of
Uniatism or Greek Catholicism. Just as the Jesuits worked to re-Catholicize Protestants,
they also attempted to bring Eastern Orthodox Christians into the Papal fold.67 The
formation of Uniate churches meant the subjection of Eastern Orthodox churches to
186
Roman Catholic authority and doctrine, yet characteristically Eastern Christian ritual
forms and discipline, such as a married clergy, were retained. These innovations rep-
resented a site of ethno-religious contestation, and it took the Unia agreements of
Brest (Poland-Lithuania, 1596) and Uzhorod (Kingdom of Hungary, 1646) until the
mid-1700s to really take hold. Until then Eastern Orthodox Christian communities
converted and reverted in an often hostile atmosphere of ethno-religious polemics
and armed combat. Those who rejected the Unia, like the Dnieper Cossacks, argued
that it represented a “Polish-Hungarian-Papal-Jesuit” plot, while others, especially
clergy who accepted the Unia, viewed it as insurance against the tsarist threat emanat-
ing from the Moscow Patriarchate, and later, the Holy Synod.68
Subsequent Unia agreements, such as the one promulgated in Transylvania at
the turn of the eighteenth century, also created ethno-religious tensions, although
the Uniates there also enjoyed some advantages. Transylvania’s Protestant estates
opposed the Union since it promoted Catholicism and promised to deprive them of
income and services they had been receiving from the Orthodox Romanian-speaking
communities. Just like converts to the new church in Poland-Lithuania’s eastern bor-
derlands, Transylvanian Uniates disappointed by the lack of full equality with the
officially recognized churches and estates which had been promised during the Unia
negotiations, were on occasion driven back into Orthodox ranks.69
In the demise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ethnic and religious ten-
sions played their part despite the fact that Poles and Ukrainians hardly counted
as distinct identities at the time. Timothy Snyder has argued that “Cossack officers
and the Polish nobility (groups that overlapped) shared one, two, or even three
languages: Latin, Polish, and the vernacular Ruthenian (Ukrainian).” Religious
genealogy was equally flexible. In the seventeenth century Bohdan Khmel’nits’kyi,
the very hero – in retrospect – of Ukrainian independence, was also a member of
the Polish nobility, and he had learned Latin from Jesuits, while his “great foe” the
Polish Catholic Prince Jarema Wiśniowiecki, was also heir to an Orthodox clan.70
Notwithstanding the marginalization of religious minorities within Russia, Catherine
the Great exploited religious issues, among others, to weaken the Commonwealth.
Her trust in the allegiance of the Commonwealth’s Orthodox and Lutheran subjects
factored into her plans to weaken the Republic of Nobles and seize lands beyond
her empire’s Western borders. In a show of enlightened thinking directed mainly
“at foreign opinion,” the Russian Empress demanded freedom of worship, admis-
sion to the Sejm, and the right to hold government office for religious dissidents
in Poland-Lithuania.71 King Stanisław August Poniatowski obliged, thus facilitating
“the efforts by [Pereiaslav] Bishop Gervasii to support an Orthodox revival across the
Russian border.” A wave of conversions of Uniates to Orthodoxy ensued. Orthodox
Church clerics were grateful to Catherine for the opportunity she had opened to
extend the Pereiaslav jurisdiction, but the religious reforms eventually led to the
1768 Confederation of Bar in which Catholic gentry defended their monopoly of
religious and political rights by force of arms.72 In turn, Orthodox Christian peasants
and Cossacks – sometimes called anachronistically “Ukrainians” but identified at the
time as Rusyns, Little Russians, or Ruthenians – staged a violent uprising known as
the Koliivschyna. They killed many Catholics and Jews as well as Uniates with whom
they shared a language. To mobilize others to join them, the leaders of the uprising
forged a “Golden Decree” purportedly signed by the tsarina herself. It urged peasants
187
to revenge “the defenders of Greek religion.”73 This language of religious toleration

mimics that used by Catherine earlier in her disingenuous appeal for confessional
rights. The estimated number of victims varies according to source, and goes as
high as 200,000. Thus, widespread instability and violence was unleashed during the
Commonwealth’s twilight decades by a combination of social factors, and political
manipulation of confessional differences.74
The dissolution of Poland-Lithuania meant that most of that state’s popula-
tion came to inhabit the Habsburg Monarchy, Russia, and Prussia. The Habsburg
Monarchy inherited the newly named province of Galicia in 1772. Less than a
decade later Joseph II introduced important enlightened absolutist reforms. The
Patent of Toleration (1781) and Edict of Tolerance (1782) provided greater rights
for Protestant and Orthodox Christians and Jews, and protected non-Catholic reli-
gious congregations. At the same time, Joseph promoted German language and
culture throughout the empire, ousting Latin as the official language, and introduc-
ing requirements for education in German. In other words, the reforms attempted
to bring about a state simultaneously more unified and more tolerant.75 By the time
of the second (1793) and final (1795) partitions, Joseph II and his brother and like-
minded successor, Leopold II, had both died, and the Habsburg realms came under
more conservative rule. Former subjects of Poland-Lithuania, mainly Catholics,
now resided in Prussia, while the Russian Empire acquired numerous Greek and
Latin Catholics whose descendants came to identify as Belarusians, Lithuanians,
Ukrainians, and Poles.76
Religion and nationalism in the long nineteenth century

Nation-states formed later in East Central Europe than in Western Europe. It was
not until the mid- to late nineteenth century that nation-states emerged in the
Balkans, and not until 1918 in formerly Austro-Hungarian territories and Western
regions of the Russian Empire. Primarily because Vienna, Moscow, and Budapest
commanded stronger central governments than Istanbul, national movements in
the Russian and Habsburg Empires achieved independent statehood later than
those in the Ottoman Balkans. As a result national movements experienced a lon-
ger duration of stateless gestation in Central Europe than in the Balkans. The so-
called Springtime of Nations of 1848–49 marked a watershed moment. The various
national movements which arose across East Central Europe during the long nine-
teenth century shared some characteristics. Nationalist activists sought to “awaken”
the “slumbering masses,” whose sometimes sluggish or even openly oppositional
responses suggest that “national indifference” may have been the norm, rather than
an anomaly, so much so that one historian has asked, “Does indifference to nation-
ality require explanation?”77 Imperial policies adopted by the Ottomans, Romanovs
and Habsburgs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries influenced the devel-
opment of national consciousness. States alternated between suppressing national
rights and making concessions to some groups over others, or reluctantly accepting
autonomy or independence. After 1867 in Austria-Hungary concessions to Germans,
Hungarians, and Poles engendered new political articulations of ethnicity, vis-à-vis
the state and other groups. During this period of mass national mobilization, reli-
gion also played a role as nationalist activists tried to forge a nearly total symbiosis
188
between the church and the symbolic nation, and to coopt the power of religion
among the masses for national ends.
In the Balkans, the creation of new nation-states took place in the shadow of the
Eastern Question. As the Ottomans lost territory to the expanding Habsburg and
Russian states beginning in the eighteenth century, the prospect of further disinte-
gration provoked intense speculation as to what would replace rule from Istanbul.
Significant losses due to the Habsburg reconquest of Hungary or the Russian acquisi-
tion of Crimea compounded the financial woes of the Ottoman state, which struggled
to reform and increase its revenues amid wars and internal unrest. Across southeast-
ern Europe, many Muslim notables (ayan) and janissaries had secured their own
regional positions against the interests of the centralizing initiatives of the Istanbul
government, often by alternatively extorting taxation from local Christians and pro-
viding a sense of protection in the ongoing turmoil. By the end of the eighteenth
century, however, the abuses and extortions of regional Muslim lords had driven
many Christian peasants to open rebellion. Serbian uprisings around the Belgrade
district (1804–15), for example, led to the creation of the internationally recognized
Serbian Principality, while massive peasant mobilization in the Peloponnesus was
crucial to the success of the Greek War of Independence (1821–32).78
These protracted conflicts, accompanied by the establishment of Greece and
Serbia as the first nation-states in the Balkans, drove deep divisions between religious
communities. The Muslim–Christian confessional distinctions, ambiguities, and
antagonisms of the earlier periods of Ottoman rule were profoundly transformed
by the violence of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which increas-
ingly pitted Muslim and Christian neighbors against each other. Indeed, conflating
“Ottoman” with “Oriental” became a defining hallmark of Balkan nationalist projects.
In the process, the Ottomans came to be perceived as “a religiously, socially, and insti-
tutionally alien imposition on autochthonous Christian medieval societies.”79 Maria
Todorova has written that, “The central element of this interpretation is the belief in
the incompatibility between Christianity and Islam, between the essentially nomadic
civilization of the newcomers and the . . . settled agrarian civilizations of the Balkans
and the Middle East.” Deeply entrenched political inequalities that explicitly privi-
leged Sunni Islam as the ruling religion of the Ottoman Empire at the expense of
various non-Muslim communities undergirded the later nationalist view of basic irrec-
oncilability between the unequal and purportedly self-contained worlds of Muslims
and Christians.80
Nation-building projects in the nineteenth century constructed the new Balkan
states along what Todorova has called “the existing double boundary of language and
religion” separating mostly Orthodox Christian (e.g., Serb, Bulgarian, Greek) commu-
nities from the Muslim, usually Turkish-speaking Ottoman authorities. Compounded
by Ottoman policies that discriminated against non-Muslims, overtaxed many Balkan
communities, and often exposed them to the abuse of local Muslim notables, these
dividing lines provided ample grounds for the mobilization of peasant uprisings and
nationalist grievances against Ottoman misrule throughout the nineteenth century.
Moreover, Todorova has demonstrated that nationalist movements sought “not only
complete and radical breaks with the [Ottoman] past, but its negation” as well. In
other words, fashioning new nation-states “out of” the Ottoman context also entailed
a corollary process of “de-Ottomanization,” that is, sustained efforts by nationalist
189
activists “to achieve the . . . opposite of being Ottoman (or Oriental), namely, steady
Europeanization, Westernization, or modernization of society.”81
A pivotal implication of this process should be spelled out here. What Dominic
Lieven has called “the historical stigma of empire” marked not only “Turkey” as the
inheritor of the Ottoman state and its legacies.82 The long-standing conflation of Turk,
Mohammedan, and Muslim labels also enabled this political stigma – “Ottoman” in the
pejorative – to pervade a rather diffuse cluster of associations with “Islam”: as religion,
as social formation, and as a generalized set of cultural characteristics and practices.
In Bulgaria, as Mary Neuburger demonstrates, certain styles of “Oriental-type” dress,
architecture, arts, and music, particular symbols, Arabic- and Turkish-influenced
vocabulary, and personal names became linked in the nineteenth century to the
ignominy of “Turkish oppression.”83 In the regions emerging as fully independent
states by the beginning of the twentieth century, this association of Ottoman rule with
Islam thus exposed various Muslim communities, most of which had first established
their local presence hundreds of years earlier, as problematic “remnants” of “the
alien Turkish yoke” in need of containment, minimization, or expulsion. Indeed, mil-
lions of Balkan Muslims were expelled from the newly formed and expanding Serbia,
Greece, and Bulgaria over the course of the nineteenth century.84
But in addition to the conspicuous Muslim–Christian divide that was recast radi-
cally by the advent of modern nationalism, the toppling of Ottoman structures also
produced deep divisions and exacerbated old ones within Orthodox Christianity. For
example, the older Phanariot elites (high-ranking Orthodox clergy and notables head-
quartered in Istanbul but present across the empire) struggled to re-establish their
authority and reassess their loyalties amid competing nationalist movements, impe-
rial reforms, and external diplomatic pressures. Bitter disputes between the newly
created Church of Greece (in Athens) and the Orthodox Patriarchate (in Istanbul)
dominated the first half of the nineteenth century. Christine Philliou demonstrates
how some statesmen, such as Stephanos Vogorides, a Hellenizing Bulgarian-speaker
who climbed the ranks of the Phanariot networks, managed to survive the rift pro-
duced by the Greek Revolutions and remain an Orthodox Christian official in the
service of the Ottoman state well into the 1850s.85 At the same time, Orthodox clergy
within Greece itself began to advance claims on Orthodox co-religionists in surround-
ing areas including Macedonia, Thrace, and Bulgaria. Serbian Orthodox authorities
anchored in Serbia acted similarly. By 1870, Bulgarian Orthodox clergy successfully
broke away from the Greek Patriarchate and formed a Bulgarian Exarchate, which
later developed into a separate, autocephalous, Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Intense
national competition over Orthodox Christian loyalties was especially evident in late
nineteenth-century Macedonia, where Greek, Serbian, and Bulgarian clergy strug-
gled with one another over churches and communities.
Thus a new fusion of religious and national identities came to dominate polit-
ical life in much of the Balkans over the course of the long nineteenth century.
In Greece, activists appropriated Orthodox religious symbols, holidays, and proces-
sions to promote Greek nationalism in a process that several scholars have called
“the nationalization of Orthodoxy.”86 Later commemorations of the 1821 Greek
uprising against the Ottomans took place on Annunciation Day (March 25), thus
explicitly linking the central event of nation-building with Orthodox Christianity.87
Similar nationalist appropriations of Orthodoxy occurred in nineteenth-century
190
Serbia, where many patriots equated being nationally Serbian with being Eastern
Orthodox. In small but independent Montenegro, the national “awakener” Petar
Petrović Njegoš acted not only as the highest political authority of this polity, but also
as its presiding bishop who defined Montenegrin belonging against the specter of
the threatening Turkish – and explicitly Muslim – Other.88
Amid the fragmentation of institutional and communal religious structures, some
Balkan nationalists were careful not to tie their cause entirely to a single religion. In
fact, in multi-confessional areas such as Albania and Bosnia, adherence to any one
ethno-confessional cause risked alienating and further fragmenting an already pre-
carious political scene; it also could limit the spread of the nationalist message to only
one confession, be it Orthodox, Catholic, or Muslim. In these circumstances, cross-
confessional national activism became a recurring concern among n ineteenth-century
Albanian nation-builders. The Frashëri brothers, for instance, urged Albanian patri-
ots to always look beyond confessional divides; indeed, the emergence of Albanian
nationalism in the late nineteenth century successfully transcended differences
between Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic Albanian communities, thus subvert-
ing the Muslim–Christian split evident earlier in the nineteenth century in Serbia
and Greece.89 In a related but often overlooked development, advocates of Serbian,
Croatian, and Yugoslav unity also strove to bridge religious divides they encoun-
tered in Bosnia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia. Major figures, such as the Serbian language
reformer Vuk Karadžić and the Croatian Catholic bishop Josip Strossmayer, advo-
cated versions of national South Slav unity across religious boundaries. Moreover,
many political parties were compelled to style their image carefully to reach beyond
otherwise narrowly defined religious identifications. The fact that Croat nationalists
ultimately found resonance mostly among Catholics, while Serbians appealed primar-
ily to Orthodox constituencies, should not obscure the actual ways in which activists
sought to engage with and shape ethnic and religious identifications beyond simple
conflation of religious with national belonging.
Thus neither South Slavic nor Albanian national projects conform neatly to the
“millet to nation” trope – the idea that Ottoman-designated millets corresponded
one-for-one with subsequent nation-states; rather, they pose more questions about
the complex formations of national-religious identities across the Balkans. Where
Yugoslav nationalists tried but failed to establish an interconfessional foundation,
Albanian nationalists succeeded. The inability of “millet to nation” to account for
these variations suggests a need for alternative models, which might draw upon rich
evidence and examples to challenge well-rehearsed accounts of Ottoman legacies and
nationalist uses of religion. Stepping outside the Balkan framework to consider com-
parative cases outside the region (from the Middle East, Western Europe, or North
Africa) might alleviate some of the pressure to create an explanation exclusively for
Eastern Europe; doing so might also foster a rethinking of the ways in which patterns
of ethnic and religious identification converged amid the long-term emergence of
modern nation-state and their institutions.
From the Habsburg Monarchy to Austria-Hungary

Without national independence, ethnic and religious identification still held signifi-
cance for many – though hardly all – of Austria-Hungary’s subjects, and they held
191
particular significance for governmental decision makers. As part of a divide-and-

conquer strategy to maintain the integrity of its multi-national empire in the latter part
of the nineteenth century, Habsburg politicians pitted partisans of differing national
ideologies against one another. The rise of various movements in the 1830s and 40s
had led to increasingly assertive calls for autonomy within the empire, culminating in
the “Springtime of Nations.” The revolutions in 1848–49 augured centrifugal forces,
which unchecked nationalism could unleash. Imperial statesmen attempted to direct
various movements against one another through tactical concessions that gave some
national groups more rights than others, but that also constrained their power, by
not allowing any of them full national self-determination (until 1918, under compul-
sion). In a typical example of divide-and-conquer policy, in 1848 Galicia’s Governor
Franz Stadion “encouraged the creation of a Ruthenian National Council to rival
the Polish National Council” to which Polish nationalists retorted that “Stadion had
‘invented’ the Ruthenian question.” He also “provoked a petition to the emperor for
a division of Galicia into Polish and Ruthenian parts,” and declared the emancipation
of the peasantry in Galicia earlier than in other parts of the Habsburg Monarchy.90
Still, some national movements attained substantial measures of autonomy
within the Habsburg state. Most notably, following Austria’s 1866 defeat by Prussia,
Hungarian and Austrian politicians brokered the 1867 Ausgleich (compromise), estab-
lishing the Dual Monarchy or Austria-Hungary. The Hungarian Kingdom had its own
government, including a parliament and prime minister, and substantial autonomy
in domestic affairs, along with the Habsburg emperor as its king. The non-Magyar
groups in Hungary opposed the Compromise as they anticipated facing “Hungarian
hegemonist ambitions” without any more imperial protection.91 Polish overtures for
an identical arrangement with Vienna failed, but Polish nationalists also achieved
limited autonomy for Galicia through “piecemeal concessions.” After 1867 Polish and
Hungarian elites introduced policies in education, administration, and culture that
fostered Polonization and Magyarization in Galicia and Hungary, respectively.
In Galicia, upper-class Poles ran the government, Polish became the official
Landessprache, and the German universities in Cracow and L’wów were Polonized.
The crownland became a hub of Polish culture, important as well for other areas of
the partitioned Commonwealth not under Habsburg rule.92 In Hungary the 1868
Nationalities Act is judged by some historians, such as Arthur May, to have been “one
of the most enlightened measures of its kind ever adopted,” while others see mainly its
failure to “recognize the existence of separate nationalities” and the lack of “collective
national rights or political institutions.”According to Tibor Frank “the law was liberal
only as far as the usage of languages was concerned.” In fact Frank and May are not far
apart, since they agree about the long-term outcome of the law given its a pplication.93
In principle non-Magyar languages could be used in courts and administration in
counties where particular minority populations made up at least 20 percent of the
population, and state schools were to offer instruction “in the language of the major-
ity of the local population.” The law was regarded “as exceedingly generous” by many
Magyar politicians, yet “thoroughly inadequate” by non-Magyar national leaders.
Many historians, Andrew Janos and Hugh Seton-Watson among them, believe that
the law was never enforced.94 Alternatively, May argues that the Hungarian adminis-
tration “whittled away, one by one, the guarantees given to the no-Magyar groups.”
For example, the state failed to support any minority schools, and used secondary
192
schools to Magyarize minority pupils. Such measures were ultimately counterproduc-

tive, as they “impaired whatever prospects of reconciliation there may have been”
and gave rise to substantial agitation from Slovak, Rusyn/Ukrainian, Romanian, and
other national activists.95 Nationality conflicts arose in Austria as well. In Bohemia
German nationalists and Czech activists confronted each other, even as statehood
and international recognition, paired with cross-border irredenta lent new impetus
to Serbian and Romanian nationalism.
The evolution of Greek Catholic communities in Western Galicia and north-
eastern Hungary illustrates how the strategies of Austro-Hungarian power brokers
influenced emerging local identities. In Hungary, where after 1867 Hungarian
became the mandatory language of bureaucracy and the schools, the National
Committee of Hungarian Greek Catholics went along with official measures that
included changing the liturgical language from Old Church Slavonic to Greek. Some
Greek Catholic parishioners followed suit perhaps because adopting Hungarian
language and identity, over Rusyn/Ukrainian/Russian, was a means of acquiring
social capital.96 The majority of the peasants, however, opposed Magyarization due
either to the simple equation of “Magyar” with “tyrannical aristocratic oppressor,”
or because they felt that being or speaking Rusyn (or Russian) was antithetical to
being or speaking Magyar. The name of the language spoken by Greek Catholics
was itself contested, evolving together with shifts in national consciousness. People
contended they spoke “Rusyn,” “Russky” (which could mean both “Russian” and
“Rus’”), “Ukrainian,” “Lemko,” or “Boiko.” In practice, these signified idioms that
were relatively close linguistically, although not without differences, distinctive
vocabularies or scripts.97
In Galicia from the 1870s, partisans of the Polish national movement pre-
dominated in the Galician Diet and remained considerably beholden to Vienna.
Polonization affected the state apparatus, the school system, and Galician society
more generally – to the frustration of German-speakers who had previously rep-
resented Vienna. Austrian officials kept Polish ambitions for complete political
dominance in check by providing qualified support to Ukrainian partisans, also
known as Ukrainophiles, who agitated for electoral reform. The imperial govern-
ment supported such goals for a democratized franchise in Galicia and elsewhere.
As a result, a wider franchise became law in 1907. The reform benefitted most of
all the Ruthenians who “more than trebl[ed] . . . [their] previous parliamentary
representation at the expense of the Poles.”98
A majority of the Greek Catholic intelligentsia and clergy opted to become Rusyn-
Ukrainians while maintaining staunchly their Greek Catholic faith. A minority of them
embraced the Russophile orientation, often adopting Orthodoxy or at least a more
ambiguous form of Greek Catholicism. Both ethno-religious orientations eventually
found some response among Greek Catholic Galician peasants. Religious identifi-
cations then helped to crystallize the boundaries between ethno-national coalitions
(e.g., “Ukrainian Greek Catholic,” “Rusyn Greek Catholic,” “Russian Orthodox”),
even as the ambiguities of those identifications (for example, the multivalence of
terms like “Greek Catholic” or even “our faith”) permitted individuals to blur and
cross those boundaries.99 To varying degrees, emerging national movements, such
as the Ukrainian one, mapped onto religious identifications, and this had social and
political consequences. Those intersections took varying forms, according to regional,
193
political, and social contexts, as well as a host of other specific variables. Among these,
migration deserves special attention.
Ethnicity and religion from beyond: intra-European

and transatlantic migration
Distinguishing between internal and external influences on the religious and ethnic
identifications of the people in East Central Europe is helpful if also problematic.
Regardless of whether parts of European Russia are included in East Central Europe,
for instance, the Americas are clearly not. But even this simple geographic truth is
more complex than it appears. Did East Central Europeans who migrated to the
Americas remain part of East Central European history? If they returned to Europe,
did they rejoin that history, as if they had never left it? The indeterminacy of East
Central Europe’s political and cultural boundaries posited in this volume renders
our attempts at external/internal distinctions rather more suggestive than definite
and neat; however, even these tentative categories may be of analytical utility. Here
we explore one major “external” influence upon East European religious and ethnic
identifications: migration, particularly across the Atlantic.
The impact of migration upon religious and ethnic identifications in East Central
Europe is often presented in terms of population movements, as a preamble to sub-
sequent “cultures in contact.”100 The movement of Poles, Jews, Germans, Turks, and
others (and their primordial ancestors at the cusp of recorded history) into new
territories, set the stage for enduring ethnic conflicts, alliances, and co-existences,
unfolding to this day. One might consider, for example, the extensive documen-
tation of Ashkenazi Jewish migration from the Holy Roman Empire to Poland and
Lithuania and to what eventually became the Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian
Empire. Similarly, one could follow the movement of Sephardi Jews who took ref-
uge in the Ottoman Empire following their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula.
Romaniot Jews were already long settled in these lands since Byzantine times. The
encounter of the two groups with each other and of the Sephardim with non-Jewish
populations living in the area transformed Jewish and non-Jewish cultural and reli-
gious life after the late fifteenth century through the mixing of various Jewish cultures
and their interaction with the dominant cultures at their destination.101
Unlike such waves of more permanent migration covered in detail in Chapter 3,
the study of temporary intra-European migrations has been somewhat neglected,
despite their considerable impact, by historians of East Central Europe. For instance,
both the encounter in Prague of Austria-Hungary’s temporary laborers, who spoke
Slovak, Romanian, and Ukrainian, with the Czech national movement, and the
1848–49 sojourn of Russia’s military in Hungary, inspired novel ethnic and religious
movements. The former provided a model for other national movements, while the
latter resulted in a certain affinity and admiration among some Greek Catholics for
Russia and the Russians as an inspiring model of powerful fellow Slavs.102
East Central Europe comprised a major region within the system of global and
transatlantic migration in the late nineteenth century. Historians have generally
regarded those taking the “leap across the pond” as “exiting” East Central European
history. Nationalists, for their part, have seen nineteenth-century mass transatlantic
migration as detrimental to their cause, either because of the loss of human capital,
194
or because of the inveterate effects of “Americanization,” understood as the deteri-

oration of the mother language, culture, morality, religion, and other ties to “the
homeland.” Others simply perceived this out-migration as the unfortunate symptom
of economic disadvantage suffered by particular ethno-religious groups within the
East Central European social hierarchy.
Migration from East Central Europe to the Americas did not always uproot people
once-and-for-all at the turn of the twentieth century, but that misconception cap-
tured by the title of Oscar Handlin’s seminal book, The Uprooted, undergirds many
historians’ narratives about transatlantic migration.103 The vast majority of migrants
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first came as temporary labor
migrants. Many stayed briefly – perhaps three to four years – and made multiple
sojourns.104 Most came to the United States for work in mines and factories. But
Canada, Brazil, and Argentina also employed temporary European migrants in fron-
tier towns, railroad construction, and factory work.105 Whether they ultimately stayed
or returned, migrants regularly operated within a family economy that spanned the
Atlantic. Networks of kin and friends facilitated migration/remigration and sustained
ties between migrants and their families, communities, and organizations through
correspondence and remigration(s) in both directions, in a phenomenon generally
referred to as “migrant transnationalism.”106
Social remittances defined as “ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that
flow from host- to sending-country communities” – had a significant impact on ethnic
and religious interactions in the country of origin.107 Novel, remitted religious and
ethnic trends led to social upheaval, political destabilization, and resistance by church
and state in several East Central European regions. “The churches of Europe,” Mark
Wyman has remarked in his broad survey of return migration to Europe at the turn
of the twentieth century, “watched nervously as the trickle homeward from America
became a torrent,” especially as re-migrants challenged the status quo through the
spread of ethno-religious identifications acquired during their sojourns abroad, to
their non-migrant compatriots.108
Beyond the family economy, migrants donated substantially to ethnic and religious
organizations (especially native churches, mosques, and synagogues) in regions of
origin, often as an investment in their own future. They might, in a letter to their
native parish priest, include a portion of mining wages for a prayer service for safe
passage home, or for the construction of a bell tower, in the hope of soon enjoying
the chimes with their own ears, or the social status that such a contribution might
bring.109 If they wired money to “homeland” ethnic organizations and movements,
they may have hoped to join non-migrant compatriots (about which they read in “old
country” publications). In East Central European villages that contributed to migra-
tion, those staying put tracked, responded to, and interacted with developments across
the Atlantic through media, correspondence, and return migration. New ethnic and
religious movements thrived in “free America,” far from varying degrees of state- and
church-sponsored suppression in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.
The transfer of religious movements through migration streams have historically
undermined “the clergy’s monopoly on the truth”; even those faithful to their native
religion asserted their prerogatives, by becoming major donors to churches or pro-
moting literacy, traditionally the domain of the priest. Naturally, representatives of
established churches put up resistance. A Catholic priest assailed re-migrants who
195
returned to the new Poland in the 1920s as members of the Polish National Catholic
Church (still known in East Central Europe as “the American Church” because of its
association with returned migrants): “You left for America. You made money there
but you have lost your faith, the mother of Poland – you should have been hit by the
first bullet, you scoundrels.”110
Because transatlantic migration intensified just as national movements were
becoming mass movements, the two processes influenced each other. The Americas
thus served as a venue for the ethnicization and nationalization of individuals, who
then participated in nationalist movements in their countries of origin, via corre-
spondence and if and when they returned home.111 As far back as the 1850s, Austrian
officials looked with anxiety upon the United States as potentially fertile ground for
nationalism nurtured by émigrés who had left Austria following the suppression of
turmoil in 1848–49. Transatlantic migrants were sometimes far more radical in their
nationalism than those who never left their birthplaces. Stjepan Dojčić, for exam-
ple, originally from Croatia, became an ardent Croatian nationalist in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. He returned to Croatia in 1912 with the express purpose of assassinat-
ing the imperial governor, to whom Dojčić attributed the suppression of the Croatian
cause. His 1913 assassination attempt failed, although “another official was killed.”
In the American Croatian press and in pamphlets sent by the thousands to Croatian-
Americans, the Croatian politician Stjepan Radić pleaded that they stop sending such
radical nationalists.112
Transatlantic migration also affected religious identities and practices. This is
apparent with Greek Catholics from Galicia and northeastern Hungary emigrating
to Brazil, Argentina, the US and Canada at the turn of the century. Due to a combi-
nation of pre-existing orientations, Russia’s pan-Russianist and Orthodox missionary
efforts, Roman Catholic hostility, and other factors, some of them began converting
to “Russian” Orthodoxy in the 1890s, while also attempting to spread Orthodoxy
among their communities of origin. As a result, conflicts emerged between return
migrants from the Americas back to Austria-Hungary and local Greek Catholic
elites of Ukrainian, Rusyn, or Magyar orientation, as well as imperial government
representatives. A local priest, for example, might interpret a migrant’s conversion
as a betrayal of one’s native parish or parental religion, while an imperial repre-
sentative might interpret the same actions as treasonous in a political sense. The
Austro-Hungarian government in fact authorized the “American action,” sending
patriotic Protestant and Catholic Magyar clerics to promote loyalty to Hungary in the
immigrant press among communities in the US that increasingly identified as Rusyn,
Russian, or Slovak. The escalation of Russian Orthodox inclinations into full-fledged
conversions of entire East Central European villages in Galicia and northeastern
Hungary wrought dramatic structural changes to the ethnic and religious fabric of
these regions; the few thousand conversions officially registered by a hostile Austro-
Hungarian government masked a much broader transformation in religious identities
suggested by the rapid proliferation of migrant-inspired conversions counted in the
hundreds of thousands during the more liberal postwar decades.113
Expatriates continued to play a major role in East Central European politics
after World War I. The most famous example may be the signing of the Pittsburgh
Agreement (Dohoda) on May 31, 1918 on American soil. Representatives of the
Czechoslovak National Council in America met with the Austrian-born Czech leader,
196
Tomáš Garrigue-Masaryk, in Pittsburgh on May 31 1918 to draft the Dohoda, which

served as declaration of intent for establishing “a common state of the Czechs and
Slovaks.” At the time Masaryk, who was to become Czechoslovakia’s first president
in October 1918, was only Chairman of the Czechoslovak National Council, he was
also an exile from Austria-Hungary where he was wanted for treason. Pittsburgh, a
booming industrial city at the time, was home to a large number of Slovak and some
Czech immigrants. Masaryk was weary of allowing the Czechs’ union with Slovaks
to be decided by plebiscite, and probably for good reason. Roman Szporluk doubts
that Slovaks in Europe “given the opportunity in 1918 or 1919 would have voted
overwhelmingly for union with the Czechs.” Thus, the Pittsburgh Agreement, later
characterized by Masaryk as “a local understanding between American Czechs and
Slovaks endorsing his [Masaryk’s] policies,” and “technically [only] a private contract
made by foreign citizens,” circumvented a major potential problem in the creation
of Czechoslovakia.114 Masaryk himself was of mixed parentage, and both his personal
and political ideas on what constituted his nation evolved over time. Born in rural
Moravia, he had learned to speak both Slovak and German early on, later adding
Czech. He gradually moved through a number of identities in various contexts, adher-
ing in succession to Slav, Slovak, and later Czech and then Czechoslovak nationalism
beginning in his high school years. As a university student in Leipzig he met and
married an American-born woman, a New Yorker no less, whose last name, Garrigue,
Masaryk adopted as his own middle name.115
After World War I many migrants returned from the Americas to newly estab-
lished nation-states in their regions of origin, often to participate in the development
of their nation. Some re-migrants, schooled in nationalism across the Atlantic,
joined the newly constituted Polish state’s parliament.116 Another return migrant,
Gregory Zatkovich, involved in polemics with Slovak and Russophile partisans in
the US, briefly participated in similar conflicts in the Czechoslovak province of
Subcarpathian Rus in 1920–21.117 After being released from prison in Zagreb, the
Croat nationalist Stjepan Dojčić returned to the US in 1920 to agitate for further
economic and political intervention by diaspora Croatians against the new Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes dominated by Serbs.118
Interwar transformations in ethno-religious politics

After 1918, international borders shifted once more as empires vanished; the Austro-
Hungarian and the Ottoman states were dismantled in favor of smaller nation-states
whose borders were redrawn in part according to the principle of “national self-
determination.” Moreover, the turmoil of World War I had unleashed new political
forces that came to dominate the region after the war’s end. Here we turn our gaze more
directly upon the way in which ethnicity and religion interacted during this period.
While building on pre-war concerns with national independence, interwar
state-building projects, as well as minority politics, often took on radical forms in
the 1930s and even more so during World War II. Churches across much of East
Central Europe, far from declining with the old order that collapsed in World War I,
experienced revivals in the 1920s and the 1930s, often with enthusiastic support
of radical nationalist and conservative parties. One exception was Bulgaria where
Prime Minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski (leader of the Agrarian Union) and the
197
Holy Synod clashed over the legal statutes regulating the Bulgarian Orthodox
Church; this left the church in a much less prominent position than comparable
national churches elsewhere in the region.119 Interwar Romania, on the other
hand, stands out as an especially richly researched example of state–church col-
laboration. Despite ending up a victorious state that doubled its territory and the
size of its population, right-wing radicalism flourished there after the expansion. A
key to this development was the increased ethnic and confessional heterogeneity
of the much-enlarged population of Greater Romania. Nationalists viewed ethnic
and religious minorities as a blight on Romania’s legitimate expansion, especially
as non-Romanians predominated in the towns and cities of the new provinces.
Romanian-speakers residing in Transylvania and worshipping in Uniate churches
were also problematic from the perspective of radical nationalists who regarded the
Orthodox Church as the sole legitimate Romanian church.120
The prominence of clerics such as the Orthodoxist Nichifor Crainic and the forma-
tion of the Legion of the Archangel Michael in 1927 in Romania exemplify the manner
in which aspiring local leaders, public intellectuals, theologians, and government
authorities discovered the synthesis of Orthodox Christianity and authoritarianism
to be a potent and appealing platform with which to exclude new populations that
did not fit a nation defined by its essential Orthodoxy. The prominence of Orthodox
rituals in state ceremonies, the proliferation of new religious-nationalist literature
for popular audiences, and the expansion of organizations such as the National
Orthodox Society of Romanian Women signaled the ascendance of a new kind of
political Orthodoxy, deeply fused with the interwar state. Irina Livezeanu, Roland
Clark, and Maria Bucur, among others, have explored the religio-national synthesis
that drew on earlier national canons, as well as on modernist impulses that provided
novel modes of expression embraced by university students, urban women, clerics,
intellectuals, and policy-makers among others. By the 1930s, some of these actors
came to espouse a fascist ideology that challenged earlier conceptions of church–
state relations, and promoted the assimilation or exclusion of minorities such as Jews
and Hungarians.121
Far right religious-nationalists also appeared in interwar Slovakia and Croatia
among other areas that fostered “clerical fascism.”122 Higher clergy played prom-
inent roles in fascist regimes across East Central Europe in the late 1930s and
40s. Major disagreements within and between churches restructured ecclesiastical
schools, charities, and other institutions during an extended period of profound
instability, which fascist and radical right parties fostered and capitalized upon in
their quest for power and for ethno-national and religious “purity.”123 This mirrored
larger European trends of complex alignments of conservative, nationalist, and fas-
cist forces with Christian religious organizations. Dreams of a Christian Hungary
coalesced around the exclusion of Jews from social, economic, and political life.
Paul Hanebrink has shown that a range of Catholic and Calvinist views, coming
from different approaches and traditions, converged around pervasive antisemitic
assumptions that spanned the political spectrum. Though many church leaders
were reserved toward fascism, they countered with a “moderate antisemitism” of
their own that fed into the surge of the radical right – its violent persecution,
of ethnic and religious minorities.124 Similar patterns of right-wing mobilization
unfolded in Poland, Croatia, and Slovakia, appealing to an evolving combination
198
of anti-liberals, anti-communists, and antisemites, which gained popularity across

Europe in the 1930s.125
Clerical participation in fascist regimes during World War II is undeniable in parts
of East Central Europe, as much as beyond it. Catholic priest Josef Tiso in Slovakia,
Catholic archbishop Alojzije Stepinac in Croatia, and Orthodox bishop Nikolaj
Velimirović in Serbia, to name a few, played crucial cultural and political roles in
wartime regimes that were allied with Hitler’s.126 On the other hand, the Orthodox
Church in Bulgaria, which was a Nazi satellite, worked to save Jews during the same
period.127 Whether certain politicians and clerics joined the Nazis or worked against
them, we cannot dismiss them as mere opportunists; they must be taken seriously as
autonomous actors with their own, often contradictory outlooks, strategies, and poli-
cies that shaped and effectively constituted Hitler’s New Order on the ground across
Eastern and Central Europe.128
Politicians, clerics, and historians alike have vigorously debated the centrality
of antisemitism in the various syntheses of Christian, nationalist, conservative, and
liberal trends in East Central Europe. A foundational dichotomy posited in these
debates was that between “religious antisemitism,” a mutable but long-standing set of
popular Judeophobic prejudices and Christian theological enmities toward Judaism,
and “modern antisemitism” incorporating various political conspiracy theories and
stressing explicitly racist discourses of national struggle, survival, and purity. The
Catholic Church adopted and encouraged this distinction, when it argued in 1998
that Christian anti-Judaism, while shameful and destructive, nonetheless differed
essentially from “antisemitism.” The latter had “roots outside of Christianity” and
bore ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust, “the work of a thoroughly modern
neo-pagan regime.” Many scholars and clerics responded to such reductive distinc-
tions with trenchant criticisms and the historians among them have continued and
renewed historical research into links between Christian leaders, national govern-
ments, and antisemitic ideologies and policies.129 As Brian Porter-Szűcs has pointed
out, however, these critical endeavors themselves face new methodological chal-
lenges as they struggle to account for many different registers of antisemitic politics,
ranging from lived experience of communal relations to high-level diplomatic
contacts and theological doctrines. In his careful assessment, new approaches can
go beyond the earlier dichotomies (anti-Judaism versus antisemitism, collabora-
tion versus resistance) and show “how the teachings of the churches were woven
together in practice with the racism, authoritarianism, and violence of the radical
right.”130 In so doing, it might be possible to analyze what sorts of religiosity East
Central Europeans in the interwar and World War II periods themselves created,
invoked, and lived.131
Socialism, nationalism, religion

As a consequence of the clerical-conservative and clerical-fascist alliances of the
interwar period, conflict between the religious authorities and the leadership of
the communist parties deepened. From the October Revolution onwards, many
religious figures in East Central Europe avidly used the establishment of the Soviet
state and the growth of communist and socialist parties as rallying cries for the
urgent counter-mobilization of right-wing parties. Anti-communist religious literature
199
became a hallmark of the radical right. Croatian Catholic and Romanian Orthodox
youth organizations, among others, presented themselves as “defenders and con-
querors” who protected the national body from atheism, Jews, Bolsheviks, sexual
indecency, and other threats.132 Communist party leaders driven underground by
the surge of nationalism and fascism and by state repression in most East Central
European countries, funneled their general opposition to religion into intensified
hostilities toward collaborationist clergy and their churches.
Interwar and World War II conflicts eroded long-established genial or tense
relations between socialists and religious leaders, as political positions became
entrenched, setting the stage for creative reinterpretations and recombinations
throughout the post-1945 era. With the conclusion of the war and the beginning
of the Cold War, communist leaders across Eastern Europe, backed by the Red
Army, condemned, exiled, imprisoned, and in many cases executed clergy accused
of Nazi collaboration, alongside other non-communists.133 Communist-dominated
popular-front regimes from Poland to Albania demoted and denounced the esta
blished churches as, at best, outdated relics of the pre-communist past, at worst, as
enemies of the state. In addition to nationalizing much of the property of different
religious organizations, by the 1950s the new socialist regimes stripped most forms of
education away from religious institutions and greatly reduced their public activities
in the press, culture, and especially politics. At the same time, Marxist Orthodoxy
became the monolithic bedrock of socialist education and politics during the post-
war years. Many American scholars felt that communism was effectively replacing
“the functions of religion, culture, and education.”134
Since the opening of the communist archives after 1989, scholars have demon-
strated the existence of a much greater complexity in the relationships between
socialist states, religious institutions, and nationalist currents during the Cold War.
For example, in Czechoslovakia, where the Soviet-backed government convicted
and executed the Catholic priest and World War II Slovak leader Jozef Tiso in
1947, the regime’s “attempts to weaken the Catholic Church ran simultaneously
with efforts to build positive relations with Catholics and woo them into . . . the
Communist camp,” according to the recent work of James Felak. His insight that
Slovakia’s communists, “despite an atheistic outlook and a desire to cripple the
influence of the churches, were not unequivocally hostile” to religious organiza-
tions also holds for a number of other Eastern European states in the immediate
postwar period.135 In Romania, the Orthodox Church and the Communist regime
worked out a series of mutual accommodations in the early decades of the Cold
War. This arrangement, as Lucian Leuştean recently demonstrated, cannot be
reduced to stereotypical notions of collaboration or resistance, but must be his-
torically situated and approached as an evolving church–state relationship that
proved to be useful to both the postwar Romanian clergy and the communists. The
Orthodox doctrine of symphonia (church–state harmony) was especially important
in Romania and Bulgaria in fostering and justifying close relations between state
and ecclesiastical authorities, who found c ommon ground on issues ranging from
education to religious tourism.136
In Poland, the relationship between the Catholic Church and the new commu-
nist rulers was antagonistic, although some scholars note a Polish “exceptionalism,”
in that “staunchly Roman Catholic Poland experienced relatively mild antichurch
200
policies.”137 The only Catholic university in the entire Soviet Bloc remained in oper-
ation in Lublin, together with an active Catholic press and religious instruction in
schools. These privileges were guaranteed by an agreement reached in 1950 between
the Catholic bishops and the government with the help among others of Bolesław
Piasecki.138 A militant right-wing Catholic, Piasecki transitioned to Communism by
founding PAX, an organization that promoted Catholics’ cooperation with the new
regime. Persisting antisemitism was a bridge between the two political eras and those
of Piasecki’s career. He had risen to prominence in the 1930s as the founder of a
Catholic youth organization that promoted fascism and ethnic nationalism; during
the war he fought against both the Soviets and the Nazis before being imprisoned
and sentenced to death by the communists. However, he persuaded his captors to
release him. Denouncing his fascist past he reestablished himself as a communist, and
led efforts to reorient the Church toward a modus vivendi with the Communist state.
Though unsuccessful in keeping Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński from being arrested, and
later shunned by the Catholic intelligentsia, Piasecki’s career during the Stalinist years
demonstrates how communists in Poland “incorporated . . . elements of the Polish
nationalist canon: namely, the glorification of the national past, Germanophobia,
and antisemitism,” according to Mikołaj Kunicki.139 Communist anxieties about the
lack of popular support for the People’s Democracies found expression in new forms
and various degrees of antisemitism. The Kielce pogrom in 1946, the Slánský trial in
Czechoslovakia in 1952, the anti-Zionist campaign in Poland in 1968, and the nation-
alization of the Holocaust and World War II commemorations along e thno-religious
lines are instances in which antisemitism either challenged communist authorities or
could serve to solidify communist rule.140 The postwar appropriation of sites marked
as Jewish, ranging from cemeteries and synagogues to the Auschwitz death camp,
provided venues for strident expressions of Polish nationalism during and after
communist rule.141
These developments point to the persistence of nationalist politics during the Cold
War, both among Eastern European émigrés and within certain spheres of the com-
munist states themselves. On the one hand, many interwar clerics, intellectuals, and
former politicians who had been aligned with fascism, after 1945 tried to continue
their activities in emigration, often in Canada, the United States, or Western Europe.
In the case of Yugoslavia, for example, “several hundred Catholic clergymen from the
defunct Ustasha state and Slovenia” fled the country alongside significant numbers
of Serbian Orthodox and, to a lesser extent, Islamic clerics during the establishment
of the socialist state.142 By the 1960s, such émigré groups established their own pub-
lications and churches, sometimes producing church schisms as in the case of the
Serbian Orthodox Church in North America.
The exiles and the institutions they created also mobilized radical nationalist and
anti-Yugoslav voices in Yugoslavia, especially in the 1980s. Croatian Catholic clergy
in Canada and the United States, for example, were among the first and most vocal
supporters of the newly ascendant nationalist parties in Croatia, bolstering the cam-
paigns of Franjo Tudjman in particular.143 The Serbian Orthodox bishop Nikolaj
Velimirović presents another important case of this transnational dynamic. Widely
known for his promotion of antisemitic, anti-communist, and fascist views during the
interwar period and World War II, Velimirović fled to the United States in 1946 and
continued to teach and publish there until his death a decade later. In the 1980s,
201
r adical Serbian nationalists and Orthodox clergy appropriated Velimirović as a rally-

ing point of their anti-communist and anti-Yugoslav struggle, reprinting his writings
and acclaiming him as a saint. In 1991 following the fall of Communism and in the
run-up to the Yugoslav Wars, Serbian nationalists in Yugoslavia staged a prominent
reburial of the bishop. His remains were exhumed from Libertyville, Illinois, moved
across the ocean and given a funeral in his native village in Serbia. The attendees
included “representatives of the ruling political establishment” including the Serbian
Prime Minister and other high government officials, alongside radical nationalist
leaders like Vojislav Šešelj and Radovan Karadžić.144
Clearly, in socialist Yugoslavia, the relationship between socialism, nationalism,
and religion was very complex, producing shifting alliances across the political
spectrum. These turned toward the radical right only in the 1980s. As Vjekoslav
Perica and others have shown, Catholic, Orthodox, Islamic, and Jewish organiza-
tions after 1945 found considerable space for their work and even growth within
Yugoslav Communism, which espoused an unusually broad understanding of the
place of spiritual and atheist sentiments in socialist politics.145 Recent scholarship
has shown that the policies and the attitudes of socialist regimes underwent sub-
stantial changes over the course of the Cold War. It has put the post-1989 “revival”of
religion into a longer perspective. This also calls into question the very framework of
post-socialist religious “revival” by showing important continuities and political reap-
propriations of earlier canons that continue in the region.146 The long-standing links
between ethnic and religious belonging have been invoked by historians ever since
the mid-nineteenth century, as this chapter has discussed, but these were reinter-
preted with new political urgency in the 1980s, when nationalist parties formed amid
the rapid dismantling of communist rule.147 In this deeply destabilized and increas-
ingly violent context, radical nationalists were able to subdue alternative currents
within Yugoslav politics and impose the kinds of ethno-religious fusions that seem
normative today, equating Orthodoxy with Serbian, or Catholicism with Croatian,
nationality, for example. The Yugoslav Wars, with their ethnic cleansing campaigns,
and the peace settlements of the 1990s entrenched and enforced these patterns, in
many cases legitimizing the new, starkly drawn national and often ethno-religious
divisions from Slovenia to Macedonia.148
Conclusion
Careful study of religion and ethnicity in East Central Europe has the potential to
undermine a number of assumptions ranging from the essential nature of ethnic and
religious identifications, to the way these self-conceptions intersect, from the rela-
tionship between popular and institutional expression of religiosity and culture, to
the validity of relegating religion to the past and viewing modernity as entirely secu-
lar. What arise in the process are valuable challenges and opportunities to rethink
fundamental categories in the history of this region.
A variety of religious and ethnic identifications, state and religious institutions have
continually engaged each other in East Central Europe. The Habsburg, Romanov, and
Ottoman empires appealed to religious rituals, holidays, and ceremonies to remake
their public image throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.149 Religious
symbolism also shaped the politics practiced by national activists, who made sustained
202
efforts to align religious traditions such as the veneration of St. Stephen in Hungary
or St. Sava in Serbia with proliferating national movements across Central Europe
and the Balkans.150 The dismantling of East Central European dynastic empires and
the establishment of the Soviet Union, as well as other very short-lived “godless” com-
munist states in 1917–19, injected new urgency into the mixing of Christianity with
politics. Interwar clergy and politicians often relied on each other to shore up politi-
cal support for fragile – if increasingly authoritarian – institutions. Even communists
after 1945 tried cautiously to harness (and also limit) the appeal of religious organi-
zations and sentiments; their faltering strategies nonetheless demonstrate how the
legitimating power of religion, ethnic solidarities, and nationalism persisted across
different periods and regimes in East Central Europe.151
Notes
1 We use “identifications” rather than “identities,” in the spirit of the critique offered by
Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper concerning the ambiguities of the latter term, in
“Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (February 2000): 1–47.
2 Lenard Cohen, “Bosnia’s ‘Tribal Gods’: The Role of Religion in Nationalist Politics,” in
Paul Mojzes, ed., Religion and the War in Bosnia (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998), 45–46.
On “ethno-religious nationalism” in post-Ottoman realms, see Soner Čağaptay, Islam,
Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who is a Turk? (London: Routledge, 2006).
3 Other possible identifications for these Greek Catholics were: Austro-Hungarian, Slovak,
Czechoslovak, and in the Americas “Slavish” and “Hun.”
4 Brian Porter-Szűcs, “Introduction: Christianity, Christians, and the Story of Modernity in
Eastern Europe,” in Bruce Berglund and Brian Porter-Szűcs, eds., Christianity and Modernity
in Eastern Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010), 3.
5 See for example Janusz Bugajski, Ethnic Politics in Eastern Europe: A Guide to Nationality
Policies, Organizations, and Parties (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), xiii–xiv; and
Raymond Pearson, National Minorities in Eastern Europe, 1848–1945 (London: The
Macmillan Press, 1983), 21–23. Maria Todorova has criticized such East–West com-
parisons, although she does not address religion. See “The Trap of Backwardness:
Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism,” Slavic Review
64, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 140–164.
6 Examples include the evolution of separate German and Czech identities in Bohemia,
the development of a Montenegrin nationality apart from the Serbian one in spite of
the shared language and Orthodox faith, and the formation of Bulgarian, Romanian,
and Serbian national movements and churches out of the Greek Orthodox Rum millet.
See Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics,
1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, c2002); John Breuilly, Nationalism
and the State (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 103–106; and Elizabeth
Roberts, Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2007).
7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). It is possible to find earlier precedents
for this approach, particularly in the East Central European context. See, for example,
Paul Magocsi, The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848–1948 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
8 Frederik Barth, “Introduction,” in Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social
Organization of Culture Difference (Results of a symposium held at the University of Bergen,
23rd to 26th February 1967) (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget; London: Allen & Unwin,
1969), 22–24.
203
9 Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’”; Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), and Brubaker et al., Nationalist Politics
and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2006), where the authors analyze the fungible ethnic identities of the residents of contem-
porary Cluj-Napoca; Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism,
Ethnicity, and Beyond,” in Maria Bucur and Nancy Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past: The
Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Presen, (West Lafayette, IN:
Purdue University Press, 2001), 112–152; King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A local
history of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, c2002);
Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National
Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2008), and “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a
Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 93–119.
10 King, “Nationalization of East Central Europe,” passim. We have borrowed here the wording
of Arius, whose third-century Christian heresy was not national, but religious: “there was a
time when the Son was not” (i.e., the Son did not partake of the eternality and therefore,
essential divinity of the Father). Social science approaches to religion and ethnicity can
benefit from agnostic approaches to these subjects.
11 See Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities,” and Judson,
Guardians of the Nation. Judson shows that “frontier people,” living along linguistic borders
in the Habsburg Monarchy, did not regard themselves as living on a frontier. The inhabit-
ants of southern Bohemia, South Styria, and South Tyrol in fact pursued practices such
as intermarriage and bilingual education to further blur linguistic boundaries and blend
identities. Thus language divisions did not become criteria for self-identification or ethnic
conflict. Like King, Judson refers to “Bohemian,” rather than “Czech” lands, identifies as
“Czechs” and “Germans” only those who publically proclaimed themselves to be so, and
retains the multiple names given to geographic locations and people (a practice adopted
also by Timothy Snyder). Also emblematic of this shift in studies of East Central European
history are the essays collected in Robert Pyrah and Marius Turda, eds., Re-Contextualising
East Central European History (London: Legenda, 2010).
12 Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince: The Fall of a Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Europe (New York:
Basic Books, 2008), and The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus,
1569–1999 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 124–127.
13 For a review of the fundamental assumptions and methods of the ethnosymbolist approach,
see Anthony Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999); and Athena Leoussi and Steven Grosby, eds., Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History,
Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007).
14 Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 9.
15 Jonathan Eagles, Stephen the Great and Balkan Nationalism: Moldova and Eastern European
History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 186–195; Athena Leouissi, “National Symbols:
Ethnicity and Historical Continuity in Post-communist ‘New Europe,’” in Nationalism and
Ethnosymbolism, 161–188.
16 Jonathan Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Mark Taylor, ed., “Critical Terms for
Religious Studies” (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 269–284.
17 James Bjork, for example, has pointed to the Catholic Church’s maintenance of religious
unity as an underlying factor permitting shifting Polish and German identifications in
Upper Silesia: Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central
European Borderland (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
18 Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious”; Russell McCutcheon, “Religion before ‘Religion’?”
in Donald Wiebe and Panayotis Pachis, eds., Chasing Down Religion, In the Sights of History and
the Cognitive Sciences: Essays in Honour of Luther H. Martin (Salonica, Greece: Barbounakis
Publications, 2010), 285–301; and Willard Oxtoby, “Introduction: A Personal Invitation,”
in Oxtoby, ed., World Religions: Eastern Traditions (Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press,
2002), 1ff.
204
19 Vjekoslav Perica, Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 4. See also Carlton Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York:
Macmillan, 1960).
20 See for example Sabrina Ramet, Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-
Central Europe and Russia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). For a critique of the
secularization thesis and an exposition of the “religious turn,” in recent historiography see
Porter-Szűcs, “Introduction: Christianity, Christians, and the Story of Modernity,” 3–7.
21 Maria Todorova, “Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” in L. Carl Brown, ed., Imperial Legacy:
The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996), 46.
22 E.g., Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Virginia Aksan and Daniel Goffman,
eds., The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press 2007).
23 On Orthodoxy in the Balkans, see the extensive bibliography in Victor Roudometof,
Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy: The Social Origins of Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 241–286. On Catholicism, see Charles Frazee,
Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1923 (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1983); István Tóth, “Between Islam and Catholicism: Bosnian Franciscan
Missionaries in Turkish Hungary, 1584–1716,” Catholic Historical Review 89, no. 3 (2003):
409–433; and Antal Molnár, “Die Türkische Mission (‘Missio Turcica’) der Gesellschaft
Jesu im Osmanischen Ungarn,” Acta Orientalia: Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 61,
no. 1–2 (March 2008): 135–145.
24 John Fine, The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly,
1975); and Florin Curta, ed., The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars and
Cumans (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
25 The devşirme refers to the practice of the Ottoman military to conscript young Christian
boys into military service, and in the process converting them to Islam. For a review of
these factors, see Antonina Zhelyazkova, “Islamization in the Balkans as a Historiographical
Problem: The Southeast-European Perspective,” in Fikret Adanır and Suraya Faroqhi, eds.,
The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 223–266,
esp. p. 227.
26 Tijana Krstić, “Conversion,” in Gábor Ágoston and Bruce Masters, eds., Encyclopedia of the
Ottoman Empire (New York: Facts On File, 2009), 145–147; and Krstić, Contested Conversions
to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2011). See also Anton Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans:
Kisve Bahasi Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670–1730 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004);
and Marc David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
27 Harry Norris, Islam in the Balkans: Religion and Society between Europe and the Arab World (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
28 Colin Imber, Ebu’s-suʻud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997), 98–111; Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, 2010), 147–151;
Mustafa Alkan, Osmanlılarda Hilâfet, 1517–1909: Geçişi, tarihî gelişimi ve tesirleri (İzmir:
Çağlayan Yayınları, 1997).
29 Selim Deringil, “Legitimacy Structures in the Ottoman State: The Reign of Abdülhamid
II (1876–1909),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 23, no. 3 (1991): 345–359; Azmi
Özcan, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain, 1877–1924 (Leiden: Brill,
1997).
30 Peter Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1804 (Seattle, WA: University of
Washington Press, 1977), 5–6, 44–55, 75–76, 277–279.
31 Until recently, it was not uncommon to encounter the claim that “the Ottoman Empire
was a theocracy” and that its Christian communities lived in “static and self-contained
Orthodox theocracy;” e.g., Richard Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria (Cambridge,
UK, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 30; Leften Stavrianos, The Balkans since
1453, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University YU Press, 2000), 110–112, 149, 222.
205
32 Paraskevas Konortas, “From Ta’ife to Millet: Ottoman Terms for the Greek Orthodox
Community,” in Konortas, ed., Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy and
Society in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 169–180;
Daniel Goffman, “Ottoman Millets in the Early Seventeenth Century,” New Perspectives on
Turkey no. 11 (Fall 1994): 135–158; Macit Kenanoğlu, Osmanlı millet sistemi: Mit ve gerçek
(Aksaray and Istanbul: Klasik, 2004); Benjamin Braude, “The Strange History of the Millet
System,” in Kemal Çiçek, ed., The Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilisation, Vol. 2 (Ankara: Yeni
Türkiye, 2004), 409–418.
33 E.g., Elisabeth Zacharidou, “‘A Safe and Holy Mountain’: Early Ottoman Athos,” in
Anthony Bryer and Mary Cunningham, eds., Mount Athos and Byzantine Monasticism:
Papers from the Twenty-eighth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Birmingham, March 1994
(Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT, USA: Variorum, 1996), 127–133; and Julijan Jelenić,
Kultura i bosanski Franjevci (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1990).
34 Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World (New York: Cambridge
35 Christine Philliou, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 6–7.
36 Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople
from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (London: Cambridge
37 Aleksandar Fotić, Sveta Gora i Hilandar u Osmanskom carstvu, XV–Xlll vek (Belgrade:
Balkanoloski institut SANU Beograd, 2000); Mirko Mirković, Pravni položaj i karakter
srpske crkve pod turskom vlašću, 1459–1766 (Belgrade: Zavod za izd. udž. SRS, 1965); Suraiya
Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (New York: Cambridge
38 Rossitsa Gradeva, “Orthodox Christians in the Kadi Courts: The Practice of the Sofia
Sheriat Court, Seventeenth Century,” Islamic Law and Society 4 (1997): 37–69; Najwa
Al-Qattan, “Dhimmis in the Muslim Court: Legal Autonomy and Religious Discrimination,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 31, no. 3 (1999): 429–444; Sabrina Joseph,
“Communicating Justice: Shari’a Courts and the Christian Community in Seventeenth-
and Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Greece,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 20, no. 3
(2009): 333–350.
39 On these issues, see Karl Binswanger, Untersuchungen zum Status der Nichtmuslime im
Osmanischen Reich des 16. Jahrhunderts. (Munich: R. Trofenik, 1977).
40 E.g., see Barbara and Charles Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States,
1804–1920 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1977), 3–25.
41 Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 3 (1997): 403–425.
42 Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York:
Knopf, 2006), 65.
43 See Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish
Community, 14th–20th Centuries (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010);
Katherine Fleming, Greece: A Jewish History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2008).
44 Mazower, Salonica; Eyal Ginio, “Aspects of Muslim Culture in the Ottoman Balkans: A
View from Eighteenth-century Salonica,” in Dimitris Tziovas, ed., Greece and the Balkans:
Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate
2003), 114–126. See also Mazower, The Balkans: A Short History (New York: Random House,
2002), xx.
45 Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, trans. Zwi Werblowsky
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); Marc Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts,
Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2004), 28.
47 Alessandro Bisani, A Picturesque Tour Through Parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa (London:
Printed by J. Davis, for R. Faulder, 1793), 152.
206
48 Bisani, A Picturesque Tour, 153–154. Even the Ottoman sultans were rumored to be lax
Muslims; the fact that no sultan has ever performed the hajj pilgrimage (one of the five
pillars of Islam) was often raised as a charge to this effect; see Ahmed Akgündüz and Said
Öztürk, Ottoman History: Misperceptions and Truths (Rotterdam: IUR Press, 2011), 222–224;
and Hakan Karateke, “Opium for the Subjects? Religiosity as a Legitimizing Factor for the
Ottoman Sultan,” in Hakan Karateke and Maurus Reinkowski, eds., Legitimizing the Order:
The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 111–130.
49 The foundational work in this field is Frederick Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the
Sultans, ed. Margaret Hasluck, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1929). For cited
examples, see Maria Kalitsin and Krassimira Moutafova, “Historical Accounts about the
Halveti Seyh Bali Efendi of Sofia in a Newly Discovered Vita Dating from the 19th Century,”
Études Balkaniques no. 3–4 (1995): 117–131; and Norris, Islam in the Balkans, 32, 97–98.
50 See for example Harry Norris, Popular Sufism in Eastern Europe: Sufi Brotherhoods and the
Dialogue with Christianity and ‘Heterodoxy’. (London: Routledge, 2006), and Rositsa Gradeva
and Svetlana Ivanova, “Researching the Past and Present of Muslim Culture in Bulgaria:
The ‘popular’ and ‘high’ layers,” Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations 12, no. 3 (2001):
317–337.
51 E.g., see Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw, eds., Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of
Religious Synthesis (London: Routledge, 1994); Gilles Veinstein, ed., Syncrétismes et hérésies
dans l’Orient Seljoukide et Ottoman (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles) (Leuven: Peeters, 2005); and Karen
Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). On related debates in the modern Balkans,
cf. Robert Hayden, “Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in
South Asia and the Balkans,” Current Anthropology 43, no. 2 (2002): 205–231; and Glenn
Bowman, “Orthodox-Muslim Interactions at ‘Mixed Shrines’ in Macedonia,” in Chris
Hann and Hermann Goltz, eds., Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2010), 195–219. See also Aron Rodrigue’s important
contribution, “Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire,” interview by Nancy
Reynolds, Stanford Humanities Review 5, no. 1 (1995): 81–92.
Press), 28–29.
53 Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Vol. 1 The Origins to 1795 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982), 167–179; and Bolesław Klimaszeskj, ed., An Outline
History of Polish Culture (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Interpress, 1984), 73–74, 101–102.
54 Davies, God’s Playground, Vol. 1, 162–166.
55 See for example, Robert Kann and Zdeněk David, The Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands,
1526–1918 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1984).
56 Brubaker et al., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity, 30.
57 Robert Frost, “Ordering the Kaleidoscope: The Construction of Identities in the Lands
of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since 1569,” in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer,
eds., Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2005), 229. Such an identification could persist, however, even under duress, into the
twentieth century: although Ukrainian nationalists attacked the aristocrat and church-
man, Andrej Sheptickij/Andrei Sheptytsky as Polish and Polonizing – they made certain
to highlight his supposed favoritism for the Polish national orientation by using his title
(“Count”) – upon his appointment to the Metropolitanate of the Greek Catholic eparchy
of L’viv, he soon demonstrated himself to be a dutiful partisan of the Rusyn-Ukrainian
cause. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 124–25.
58 Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
59 Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 63–64, 67–70, 78, 90; Katalin Peter, “The Later Ottoman
Period and Royal Hungary, 1606–1711,” in Peter Sugar et al., eds., A History of Hungary
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 114–116; and Peter
Sugar “The Principality of Transylvania,” in Sugar et al., eds., A History of Hungary, 133–137.
60 Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 96.
61 Ibid., 165–167, 170.
207
62 Ibid., 165; and Derek Beales, Joseph II, Vol. 2 Against the World, 1780–1790 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 169.
63 Beales, Joseph II, Vol. 2, 168–177.
64 Ibid., 175–181.
65 Barbara Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church: Uniate and Orthodox Conflict in
18th-century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University,
2009), 11–14.
66 Magdalina Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-
Reformation Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
67 In the Catholic formulation, the Orthodox had separated from Rome. The Orthodox held
the reverse had occurred in the schism of 1054.
68 Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church, 35, and Davies, God’s Playground, Vol. 1,
174–176. The Orthodox Churches that resisted the Unia agreements in the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth in the sixteenth century had been under the jurisdiction of the
Metropolitanate of Kiev, which was itself subordinate to the Patriarch of Constantinople,
rather than to the Patriarch of Moscow. However, in 1685, with the subordination of
the Kiev Metropolitanate to the Moscow Patriarch, adherence to Orthodoxy within the
Commonwealth started to have “political implications that added to the confessional
divide” between Orthodox and Greek Catholics. Peter the Great’s 1721 ecclesiastical
reforms replaced the Moscow patriarchate with the Holy Synod, a college of bishops under
a state-appointed Ober-Procurator, lending further political import to pro-Orthodox
movements in Poland-Lithuania.
69 Davies, God’s Playground, Vol. 1, 175; and Keith Hitchins, The Rumanian National Movement
in Transylvania, 1780–1849 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 15–21.
70 Snyder, Reconstruction of Nations, 116.
71 Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000),
191–193; and Patrice Dabrowski, Poland: The First Thousand Years (DeKalb, IL: Northern
Illinois University Press, 2014), 258.
72 Barbara Skinner, “Borderlands of Faith: Reconsidering the Origins of a Ukrainian
Tragedy,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 107–108, 113.
73 Ibid., 109–110.
74 On the estimated number of victims of the 1768 Koliivschchina, see ibid., 88. Skinner
brings the Uniate-Orthodox conflict front and center in her narrative of this turmoil
and provides a thorough review of the conflicting and ambiguous estimates of casualties.
Similar Cossack insurgencies had occurred since 1648, but Uniates had not been targeted
earlier. See also “Khmelnytsky Uprising,” in Jonathan Dewald, ed., Europe, 1450 to 1789:
Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, Vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004),
403–404; Davies, God’s Playground, Vol. 1, 392: and Dabrowski, Poland: The First Thousand
Years, 260.
75 Benjamin Kaplan, Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 192; and Robert Kann, A History of the
Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 183–187.
76 Timothy Snyder suggests that an “early modern” national idea, inherited from the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth, guided nationalist ideology particularly in Poland until 1863,
after which “modern” Polish, Lithuanian, and Belarussian nationalisms predominated.
See Snyder, Reconstruction of Nations, 4.
77 Judson, Guardians of the Nation, 2. For a full exploration of the concept of “national indif-
ference,” see Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities.”
78 Jelavich, Establishment of the Balkan National States, 29–52.
79 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 162.
80 Ibid., 162–163; see also Todorova, “The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans,” 45–75; and
Todorova, ed., Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (New York: New York University Press,
2004), 12–13.
81 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 180. Todorova goes on to argue that such efforts at de-
Ottomanization countered local Balkan traditions as much as Ottoman cultural legacies.
Mazower’s term is “de-Islamicization,” see The Balkans: A Short History, xxxviii.
208
82 Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2000), 330.
83 Mary Neuburger, The Orient Within, 14–16.
84 On early alliances of Balkan nation-states and their attitudes toward Muslims, see Ioannis
Papadrianos, “The First Balkan Alliance (1860–1868) and the Bulgarians,” Balkan Studies
42 (2001): 15–20; and Ayşe Özkan, “Kanlıca Konferansı Sonrasında Müslümanların
Sırbistan’dan Çıkarılmaları ve Osmanlı Devleti’nin Sırbistan’dan Çekilişi (1862–1867),”
Gazi Akademik Bakış 9 (2011): 123–138. On the nineteenth-century expulsion of Muslims
from the Balkans, see Alexandre Toumarkine, Les migrations des populations musulmanes
balkaniques en Anatolie, 1876–1913 (Istanbul: Isis, 1995). During the Balkan Wars and
World War I, the Ottoman government ethnically cleansed Christian villages and resettled
many Balkan Muslim refugees across Anatolia during the Armenian Genocide; see Taner
Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 55–58.
86 Adamantia Pollis, “Greece: A Problematic Secular State,” in William Safran, ed., The
Secular and the Sacred: Nation, Religion and Politics (London: Taylor and Francis, 2003),
148; and Vasilios Makrides, “Orthodox Christianity, Rationalization, Modernization:
A Reassessment,” in Victor Roudometof, Alexander Agadjanian, Jerry Pankhurst, eds.,
Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age: Tradition Faces the Twenty-first Century (Walnut Creek, CA:
AltaMira Press, 2005), 198.
87 Victor Roudometof, Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy: The Social Origins of Ethnic
Conflict in the Balkans (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 101–130, here 103.
88 Christos Mylonas, Serbian Orthodox Fundamentals: The Quest for an Eternal Identity (Budapest:
CEU Press, 2003); Milovan Djilas, Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1966).
89 Ger Duijzings, “Religion and the Politics of ‘Albanianism’: Naim Frashëri’s Bektashi
Writings,” in Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd J. Fischer, eds., Albanian Identities:
Myths, Narratives and Politics (London: C Hurst & Co. Publishers Ltd., 2002), 60–69; and
Albert Doja, “The Politics of Religious Dualism: Naim Frashëri and His Elective Affinity
to Religion in the Course of 19th-century Albanian Activism,” Social Compass 60 (2013):
115–133.
90 Piotr Wandycz, “The Poles of the Habsburg Monarchy,” in Andrei Markovitz and
Frank Sysyn, eds., Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism: Essays on Austrian Galicia
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Institute, 1982), 78–79. See also Hans Henning
Hahn, “The Polish Nation in the Revolution of 1846–49,” in Dieter Dowe, ed., Europe in
1848: Revolution and Reform (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 177–178.
91 Tibor Frank, “Hungary and the Dual Monarchy, 1867–1890,” in Peter Sugar, Péter
Hanák, and Tibor Frank, eds., A History of Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994), 255.
92 Wandycz, “The Poles,” 84–86; and Ivan Rudnytsky, “The Ukrainians in Galicia Under
Austrian Rule,” in Andrei Markovitz and Frank Sysyn, eds., Nationbuilding and the Politics of
Nationalism, 36.
93 Arthur May, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914 (New York: Norton, 1968), 83; and Frank,
“Hungary and the Dual Monarchy,” 255.
94 Andrew Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary: 1825–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1982), 126–127. See also Hugh Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe Between the
Wars, 1918–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), 43.
95 May, The Habsburg Monarchy, 83–84; and Janos, Politics of Backwardness, 126–127.
96 Ludvik Nemec, “The Ruthenian Uniate Church in Its Historical Perspective,” Church
History 37, no. 4 (December 1968): 386.
97 Magocsi, The Shaping of a National Identity; and Maria Mayer, The Rusyns of Hungary: Political
and Social Developments (1860–1910), ed. Paul Robert Magocsi, trans. Janos Boris (Boulder,
CO: East European Monographs, 1997). Rusyn used the Latin alphabet while Russky and
Ukrainian used Cyrillic.
209
98 Rudnytsky, “The Ukrainians in Galicia,” 61; and Robert Kann, The Multinational Empire:
Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918, Vol. 2 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1950), 223.
99 John-Paul Himka, Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine: The Greek Catholic Church and
Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1999).
100 On this general issue, see Susanne Lachenicht, ed., Religious Refugees in Europe, Asia and
North America (Hamburg: Lit, 2007).
101 See Gershon David Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy
of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Esther Benbassa and
Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th–20th Centuries
102 Magocsi, The Shaping of a National Identity, Chapter 3.
103 Oscar Handlin’s depiction of European and East Central European migration to the
United States in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was very influential in migra-
tion scholarship during the 1950s and 60s. See Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the
Great Migrations that Made the American People (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1951).
104 Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
105 For most in East Central Europe, “America” could refer to any number of regions or states
in North or South America.
106 Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound:
Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-states (Langhorne,
PA: Gordon and Breach, 1994); Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton
Blanc, “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration,”
in Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism
Reconsidered (New York: Academy of Sciences, 1992); Thomas Faist, The Volume and Dynamics
of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000); Alejandro Portes, “Introduction: The Debates and Significance of Immigrant
Transnationalism,” Global Networks 1, no. 3 (December 2002); Alejandro Portes, “The
Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field,” Ethnic
and Racial Studies 22, no. 2 (March 1999).
107 Levitt, The Transnational Villagers, 11, 55. Levitt, “Social Remittances: Migration Driven
Local-Level Forms of Cultural Diffusion,” 926–948. Juan Flores, citing Levitt’s Transnational
Villagers, preferred the term “cultural remittances.” Flores, The Diaspora Strikes Back:
Caribeno Tales of Learning and Turning (New York: Routledge, 2009).
108 Wyman, Round-Trip to America, 169.
109 Bernard Poirine, “A Theory of Remittances as an Implicit Family Loan Arrangement,”
World Development 25, no. 4 (1997).
110 Wyman, Round-trip to America, 178.
111 On the ethnicization of migrants in the Americas, see Jonathan Sarna, “From Immigrants
to Ethnics: Toward a New Theory of ‘Ethnicization’,” Ethnicity 5 (December, 1978);
William Yancey, Eugene Ericksen, and Richard Juliani, “Emergent Ethnicity: A Review
and Reformulation,” American Sociological Review 41 (June 1976): 391–403. More recent
scholarship has focused on the interaction of “new world” and “old world” factors in a
transnational framework. See Katherine Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity: A
Perspective from the USA,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (Fall 1992): 3–41; and
Ewa Morawska, “Immigrants, Transnationalism, and Ethnicization: A Comparison of This
Great Wave and the Last,” in Gary Gerstle and John Mollenkopf, eds., E Pluribus Unum?
Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 2001).
112 George Prpić, “The Croatian Immigrants in Pittsburgh,” in John Bodnar, ed., The Ethnic
Experience in Pennsylvania (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1973), 280–281.
113 Keith Dyrud, The Quest for the Rusyn Soul: The Politics of Religion and Culture in Eastern Europe
and in America, 1890–World War I (Philadelphia Balch Institute Press; London: Associated
University Presses, 1992); Maria Mayer, The Rusyns of Hungary; Jurij Danilec, Pravoslavna
210
Tserkva na Zakarpatti u Pershy Polovyni XX Stolittya (Uzhorod: Karpaty, 2009); Joel Brady,
“Transnational Conversions: Greek Catholic Migrants and Russky Orthodox Conversion
Movements in Austria-Hungary, Russia, and The Americas (1890–1914)” (PhD Thesis,
University of Pittsburgh, 2012).
114 Roman Szporluk, The Political Thought of Thomas G. Masaryk (Boulder, CO: East European
Monographs, 1981), 140–142.
115 Szporluk, Political Thought, 10–12, 19–30.
116 Wyman, Round-trip to America, 166–168.
117 “Gregory Zatkovich,” in Paul Robert Magocsi and Ivan Pop, eds., Encyclopedia of Rusyn
History and Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).
118 Bodnar, ed., Ethnic Experience.
119 Daniela Kalkandjieva, “A Comparative Analysis on Church-State Relations in Eastern
Orthodoxy: Concepts, Models, and Principles,” Journal of Church and State 53 (2011): 587–614.
120 Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic
Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 7–11.
121 Livezeanu, Cultural Politics; Maria Bucur, “Romania,” in Kevin Passmore, ed., Women,
Gender and Fascism in Europe: 1919–1945 (Manchester, UK: 2003), 57–78; Elisa Heinämäki,
“Politics of the Sacred: Eliade, Bataille and the Fascination of Fascism,” Distinktion 10
(2009), 59–80; and Roland Clark, “Nationalism and Orthodoxy: Nichifor Crainic and the
Political Culture of the Extreme Right in 1930s Romania,” Nationalities Papers 40 (2012):
107–126; and Clark, “Orthodoxy and Nation-Building: Nichifor Crainic and Religious
Nationalism in 1920s Romania,” Nationalities Papers 40 (2012): 525–543.
122 Marius Turda and Paul Weindling, eds., “Blood and Homeland”: Eugenics and Racial
Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (Budapest: Central European
123 Constantin Iordachi, “Fascism in Interwar East Central and Southeastern Europe: Toward
a New Transnational Research Agenda,” East-Central Europe 37 (2010): 161–213.
124 Paul Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism,
1890–1944 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
125 Sandra Prlenda, “Young, Religious, and Radical: The Croat Catholic Youth Organizations,
1922–1945,” in John Lampe and Mark Mazower, eds., Ideologies and National Identities:
The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe (Budapest: Central European University
Press, 2004); James Felak, “At the Price of the Republic”: Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party,
1929–1938 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); and Miloslav Szabo,
“National Conflict and Antisemitism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: The
Case of the Czech Slovakophiles Karel Ḱalal and Eduard Lederer,” Judaica Bohemiae 44
(2009): 49–81.
126 James Felak, “Priests in East Central European Politics: Ignaz Seipel, Jan Sramek, and
Andrej Hlinka,” in Sabrina Petra Ramet and Donald Treadgold, eds., Render Unto Caesar:
The Religious Sphere in World Politics (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1995);
James Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Ithaca,
127 See Frederick Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution 1940–1944 (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972); and Tzvetan Todorov, The Fragility of Goodness: Why
Bulgaria’s Jews Survived the Holocaust (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
128 See contributions by Mark Biondich, Maria Falina, and others in the special issue: “Clerical
Fascism in Interwar Europe,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8 (2007).
129 Christian Wiese, “An ‘Indelible Stigma’: The Churches between Silence, Ideological
Involvement, and Political Complicity,” in Christian Wiese and Paul Betts, eds., Years of
Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies (London:
Continuum, 2010), 157–192.
130 Brian Porter-Szűcs, “Introduction: Christianity, Christians, and the Story of Modernity,”
19–20.
131 Brian Porter-Szűcs, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011); and “Antisemitism and the Search for a Catholic Identity,” in
Robert Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
211
University Press, 2005). John Connelly has traced a major transformation in Catholic
teachings on Jews from the interwar to the postwar periods; John Connelly, From Enemy to
Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012); on the wider context of racist and religious ideologies, see Marius
Turda and Paul Weindling, “Blood and Homeland.”
132 Waltraud Sennebogen, “Communism as a Common Enemy? Horthy’s Hungary, National
Socialist Germany, and Fascist Italy,” in Gerhard Besier et al., eds., Fascism, Communism
and the Consolidation of Democracy (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), 41–50; and Prlenda, “Young,
Religious, and Radical,” 92.
133 See Ramet, Nihil Obstat; Bradley Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture
and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 74–75, 79–88; István
Rév, “The Suggestion,” Representations 80, no. 1 (Fall 2002); and Anca Şincan, “Romania
the Exceptional Case? Mechanisms of State Control over the Religious Denominations,
in the Late 1940s and Early 1950s,” in Balazs Apor, Peter Apor, and Arfon Rees, eds., New
Perspectives in the Sovietization and Modernization of Central and Eastern Europe, 1945–1968
(Washington, DC: New Academia Publishers, 2008).
134 Richard Staar, The Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe: An Introduction (Stanford, CA:
Hoover Institution, 1967), 12.
135 James Felak, After Hitler, Before Stalin: Catholics, Communists, and Democrats in Slovakia, 1945–1948
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2009), xi.
136 Lucian Leuştean, Orthodoxy and the Cold War: Religion and Political Power in Romania,
1947–65 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and “The Concept of Symphonia in
Contemporary European Orthodoxy,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian
Church 11, no. 2–3 (2011): 188–202. See also Anca Şincan, “From Bottom to the Top and
Back Again: On How to Build a Church in Communist Romania,” in Bruce Berglund
and Brian Porter-Szűcs, eds., Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe, 191–216; Kristen
Ghodsee, “Symphonic Secularism: Eastern Orthodoxy, Ethnic Identity and Religious
Freedoms in Contemporary Bulgaria,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 27, no. 2 (Fall
2009): 227–252. For a wider context, see Paul Mojzes, Christian-Marxist Dialogue in Eastern
Europe (Augsburg Publishing House, 1981).
137 Patrice Dabrowski, Poland: The First Thousand Years (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2014), 431.
138 Christopher Cviic, “The Church,” in Abraham Brumberg, ed., Poland: Genesis of a Revolution
(New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 95–96.
139 Mikołaj Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in
Twentieth-Century Poland (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012), 4.
140 Jan Gross, Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation
(New York: Random House, c2006); Dariusz Stola, “Fighting against the Shadows: The
Anti-Zionist Campaign of 1968,” in Robert Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and Its Opponents
in Modern Poland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 284–300; Kevin McDermott, “A
‘Polyphony of Voices’? Czech Popular Opinion and the Slánský Affair,” Slavic Review 67, no.
4 (2008): 840–865; Jonathan Frankel, ed., Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
141 See Geneviève Zubricky, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist
Poland (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006), and Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces
(Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2009).
142 Jozo Tomašević, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001): 575–576.
143 Perica, Balkan Idols, 140–141.
144 Some of them would later be indicted for war crimes. Jovan Byford, Denial and Repression of
Antisemitism: Post-communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović (Budapest:
Central European University Press, 2008), 83–84.
145 Perica, Balkan Idols; Esad Cimic, Socijalističko Društvo i Religija: Ispitivanje Odnosa Između
Samoupravljanja i Procesa Prevladavanja Tradicionalne Religije (Bosnia and Hercegovina:
Svjetlost, 1970); Klaus Buchenau, “What went wrong? Church–state relations in Socialist
Yugoslavia,” Nationalities Papers 33, no. 4 (2005); Emil Kerenji, “Jewish Citizens of Socialist
212
Yugoslavia: Politics of Jewish Identity in a Socialist State, 1944–1974” (PhD dissertation,

University of Michigan, 2008).
146 See for example, Shari Cohen, Politics without a Past: The Absence of History in Postcommunist
Nationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and István Rév, Retroactive Justice:
Prehistory of Post-communism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
147 James Kennedy, “Religion, Nation and European Representations of the Past,” in Stefan
Berger and Chris Lorenz, eds., The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in
National Histories (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 104–134.
148 E.g., see Gerard Toal and Carl Dahlman, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Chip Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Ger Duijzings, Religion and the Politics of Identity in
Kosovo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Davide Sterchele, “The Limits of Inter-
religious Dialogue and the Form of Football Rituals: The Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina,”
Social Compass 54 (June 1, 2007): 211–224.
149 See also Chapter 10, “Uses and Abuses of the Past,” in this volume.
150 Árpád von Klimó, Nation, Konfession, Geschichte. Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im
europäischen Kontext, 1860–1948 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg 2003); Bojan Aleksov, “Natio
nalism in Construction: The Memorial Church of St. Sava on Vračar Hill in Belgrade,”
Balkanologie 7, no. 2 (December 2003): 47–72.
151 Paschalis Kitromilides, “A Religious International in Southeastern Europe?” in Abigail
Green and Vincent Viane, eds., Religious Internationals in the Modern World: Globalization
and Faith Communities since 1750 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Chapter 11.
Further Reading
Baer, Marc David. Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Benbassa, Esther, and Aron Rodrigue. Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community,
14th–20th Centuries. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010.
Berglund, Bruce, and Brian Porter-Szűcs, eds. Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe.
Bjork, James. Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European
Borderland. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Blobaum, Robert, ed. Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005.
Brubaker, Rogers. Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Çaǧaptay, Soner. Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who is a Turk? London:
Routledge, 2006.
Clark, Roland. “Nationalism and Orthodoxy: Nichifor Crainic and the Political Culture of the
Extreme Right in 1930s Romania.” Nationalities Papers 40, no. 1 (2012): 107–126.
Dragostinova, Theodora, and Yana Hashamova. Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Alternative
Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans. Budapest: CEU Press, 2016.
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5
THE CU L TU RE S O F EA S T
CE NTRAL EUR O P E
Imperial, national, revolutionary
Irina Livezeanu, Thomas Ort, and Alex Drace-Francis1
Introduction: key concepts

Culture was said by the literary theorist Raymond Williams to be “one of the two
or three most complicated words in the English language.”2 There are at least two
principal meanings, and they are rather opposed to each other. On the one hand
“culture” is frequently used to refer to elite literary, artistic, musical or other sophis-
ticated and complex productions. If a city is said to have an active cultural life, it may
have an orchestra, art galleries, poetry readings, theaters, an arts cinema, possibly also
publishing houses and a university. If it is said of a person that s/he is “cultured,” it
is assumed s/he is familiar with these types of activity, and participates in them. They
are “difficult” achievements, markers of social and intellectual distinction, perhaps
of exclusivity. On the other hand, “culture” in its anthropological usage signifies the
general, everyday traits of a broader group. If an organization or society has a certain
culture, this does not necessarily mean it produces many ambitious creative artworks,
but rather that a series of typical and not always admirable, characteristics apply to it.
A chapter treating the history of culture in East Central Europe could give greater
weight to one or the other of these approaches or try to encompass both. In either
case, it would be difficult to establish a “core” set of cultural characteristics which
define the entire region, for East Central Europe does not have a unitary culture but
rather is a frontier zone among several. It has been imagined at once as a meeting
place, a crossroads or a bridge, or as a “shatterzone” of faultlines and of indistinctly
bounded or “weak” identities.3 Some historians, notably of individual nations, have
emphasized the significance of cultural practices to national development. Bolesław
Klimaszewski, for example, claims that “the history of the Polish nation is inseparable
from its cultural heritage.”4 That view makes particular sense for nations that failed
to have or maintain their own states – a ubiquitous condition in this region – and
relied on culture to preserve distinctness. Political historians, on the other hand,
often set aside culture entirely, suggesting that cultural life, trends, events, and insti-
tutions form merely the icing on the cake of true history. This is not the view of the
present authors.
A discussion of culture in East Central Europe during the modern period, then,
could take any number of directions. Here the principal focus will be on the creation
215
L I V E Z E A N U, O R T, A N D D R A C E - F R A N C I S
of literary cultures, broadly conceived. Our approach is one that seeks to understand
the production of cultural representations in relation to social and political currents,
to which they are so often a reaction but also sometimes a preface. As a result, we
make frequent references to political, social, religious, and economic conditions.
The narrative begins approximately in 1700, during a period of imperial competi-
tion and during the Counter-Reformation, when the Jesuit Order held considerable
power over educational institutions in the Habsburg Monarchy, Poland-Lithuania
and the Catholic parts of Germany. Jesuit influence was even felt in parts of the
Orthodox world.5 In East Central Europe cultural institutions and literary and
artistic movements of all kinds were closely linked to imperial projects in the eight-
eenth century, and subsequently to the construction of nations and nation-states.
Furthermore, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cultural groups sometimes
tied to revolutionary movements of the left and right sought to challenge aristocratic
forms, hegemonic “world” or imperial languages, and bourgeois aesthetic norms.
Insurgent cultural elites sought to contribute to the modernization and democrati-
zation of their societies whether in a national direction or a social one – sometimes
both. Visual artists, architects, composers, and writers sympathizing with or leading
political movements struggling for national autonomy often drew inspiration from
folk culture, oral traditions, peasant song, and decorative art. But their ultimate goal
was to establish classical canons for their new nations emulating the established high
cultures of powerful European polities. National artists and poets strove to bridge
the distance between the realms of typical, anthropological culture and canonical
high culture, the latter being the mark of political power and of ultimate acceptance
into “Europe.”
The politics of culture in modern East Central Europe is not, however, lim-
ited to national or nationalist agendas. The art, music, and literature created by
self-conscious “modernists” at the turn of the century was cosmopolitan and anti-
traditional even if these anti-establishment artistic elites also reached out to the
folkloric repertoire.6 Culture-makers of all stripes were deeply concerned with
“the people,” with modernity vs. tradition, and with democratization. Whereas
modernists generally favored synchronization with Western European trends, tra-
ditionalists sought to uphold customary forms of expression against the influx of
foreign cultural imports. In addition, politically-involved artists and writers were
often socially minded, and their artistic vocabulary traditional. In the twentieth
century, pliable cultural elites or opportunistic writers and artists from the “correct”
social or ethnic background became valuable allies of communist and fascist
governments, which took culture seriously as an instrument of power. The line
between political propaganda and art could be extremely thin.
Because of the impossibility of treating all forms of culture in all corners of the
region, we have sought to trace major transformations through pertinent exam-
ples and cases. We regret that we cannot address fully visual, material, musical,
and popular culture. We use an open definition of East Central Europe, taking
into account travel, contact, and the transmission of ideas through the region
and across its borders. Besides the cultures and ideas that originated within the
region and are specific to it, others were “borrowed” from outside, and still others
were transmitted outwards. Cultural phenomena in the geographical spaces of
what are today Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia,
216
T he C ultures of E ast C entral E urope
Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Greece, Romania, and

Bulgaria are our main focus.
But to understand what shaped these cultures, we must have in mind a wider geo
graphy. Up until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most of these
lands were ruled from the imperial cities of Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and
Istanbul. Earlier, Venice was an important part of the region’s culture. The subse-
quent period, from 1914 to 1945, saw dramatic and often contested, but ultimately
successful attempts to divide and re-divide the region according to the principle of
nationality. From 1945 to 1989, Moscow exercised a significant influence. Important
changes occurred during the communist period, most sweepingly after Stalin’s death
in 1953 and during what came to be known as “the thaw.” The post-1989 period has
been characterized by liberation from coercive influences and the re-establishment
of domestic freedoms, including cultural ones, but also by the influx of new extrinsic
and “soft” influences, particularly, but not exclusively, from Western Europe and the
United States.
Despite the intrinsic diversity and heterogeneity of the region’s cultural
traditions – whether in terms of faith, region, language, class, nationality, or pre-
vailing ideology – there are great advantages to studying East Central European
culture comparatively. By this we mean not just in comparison or contrast to Western
European norms but in terms of its own contexts. While the culture of the region
was always significantly marked by models and currents of thought coming from
outside, it also developed a number of salient forms of expression, as well as partici-
pating in international trends and constituting a place of synthesis. Despite the often
abrupt changes in the conditions of cultural production – from imperial to national
cultures, from religious to secular education, from democracy to dictatorship, from
battlefront to peacetime, and from socialism to neoliberalism – there are continu-
ities in cultural practice across time. In particular, literary and intellectual activity
have had a symbolic importance and been closely related to questions of national
identity and politics. Andrew Wachtel offers a definition of Eastern Europe as “that
part of the world where serious literature and those who produce it have traditionally
been overvalued.”7 In this chapter we seek to understand whether that is the case and
if so why, and to explain historically how literary cultures emerged and assumed the
forms and functions that they did, both in different parts of East Central Europe and
perhaps as a distinctive feature of the region as a whole.
The eighteenth-century setting: empires, cities, faiths, tongues

In the eighteenth century, East Central Europe was not highly urbanized, and several
states were competing over its territories. Large metropolises on its margin – Vienna,
Berlin, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Istanbul, and Venice – not only housed some of the
most important institutions of government for the region, but also set the tone in
everything from dress, table manners, and architecture to typographical conventions
and visual cultures.8 Models of modernity and fashion arrived from all directions
including the Ottoman and Russian Empires, which also served as destinations for
intellectuals from East Central Europe and the West in this time period.
Two Habsburg cities had been central to cultural developments in the region. Prague
had served as capital of the Holy Roman Empire twice since the fourteenth century
217
and bore the architectural and cultural traces to show it. The city boasted the oldest
university in Central Europe, founded by the multilingual Holy Roman Emperor
Charles IV in 1348. A Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II (1576–1611)
also made Prague his residence and turned the city into a cultural capital rivaling
the great Italian cities in splendor and refinement. But by the late eighteenth cen-
tury Prague had become little more than a provincial backwater. Czech language
was hardly used by the upper and educated classes. The city’s architectural charm
derived in part from building projects associated with the triumph of Habsburg
Catholicism against the Hussites and Protestants in the seventeenth century. The
statues of Catholic saints adorning the Charles Bridge, for example, replaced the
severed heads of the 12 executed Czech leaders hoisted on the bridge in 1621. In
1784 Prague had approximately 72,874 inhabitants.9
Vienna, long the seat of the Habsburg dynasty, had competed with Prague for the
distinction of capital of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1365 Rudolf IV established a
university there that took the one in Prague as its model. Vienna expanded greatly
following the successful defense against the Ottomans in 1683. A century later it had
a population of over 200,000, and baroque architecture visible in churches, as well as
in private and imperial palaces, flourished. Having absorbed the influence of north-
ern Italian Baroque style, the city became a model of urban development for points
further east.10
St. Petersburg, a new imperial capital since 1713, was the youngest but most
stunning achievement, a completely new “window on the West” founded on land
recently captured by Peter the Great from Sweden. Peter had traveled far searching
for models of modernization. His new capital, designed by Italian architects, drew
also on German, Swedish, Dutch, and British culture and technological expertise.
St. Petersburg became “a shop window of the Enlightenment for all eastern Europe.”
To reform the Orthodox Church, Peter used Latin scholasticism and Polish models.
But the main goal was to modernize Russian culture so as to increase the state’s power.
In the process Peter introduced “Western” innovations such as all-night street lights in
his capital, and European fashion and balls, but also fundamental reforms in educa-
tion to create the professionals for modern institutions.11 Peter attracted learned men
from East Central Europe, among them the Moldavian Prince Dimitrie Cantemir; the
Serbian pedagogue Teodor Janković-Mirijevski, who had designed Serbian schools in
Austrian-controlled Balkan territories, and later used his experience to mold Russian
education; and the Greek prelate Eugenios Voulgaris, who served as Catherine the
Great’s court librarian. Other Greek intellectuals were also welcomed in Russia as
the tsars tried to benefit from the fading power of the Ottoman Porte and appeal
to its Orthodox Christian subjects. While Russia offered them employment and
protection, they had a hand in “Westernizing” Russian culture. Cantemir had spent
37 years in comfortable captivity at the Porte in Istanbul before becoming briefly Prince
of Moldavia. In 1711 he took refuge in Russia, eventually moving to St. Petersburg as
advisor to Peter. Cantemir then adopted a “Russian and European life style,” shaved
off his beard, gave up turbans, and began “dressing in the French style.”12
Berlin, also a relatively new city, became the capital of Prussia in 1710. Between
1700 and 1800, its population trebled to 170,000.13 A Berlin Royal Academy was
founded in 1710 under the supervision of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who later pro-
vided the most influential vision for the Academy in St. Petersburg, sponsored by
218
Peter the Great.14 (German, Latin, French, and Dutch were the main languages of
the Russian Academy until the 1740s. Prominent scientists and scholars sometimes
shared their time between the Berlin and St. Petersburg academies.)15
In the eighteenth century the Republic of Venice was a center of power and com-
munication to hinterlands in East Central Europe, housing political, commercial,
military, naval, and ecclesiastical institutions. It commanded an extensive maritime
empire in the Adriatic, the Ionian Islands, and Crete, with commercial agents in the
Black Sea region. While its political power was in decline, Venice influenced cultural
activity particularly in Dalmatia, but also in the Ottoman Empire, especially among
the Christians from the Greek lands and the Danubian principalities. Venice’s expan-
sion into inland Dalmatia, or “Illyria,” in the early eighteenth century stimulated the
production of travel accounts and geographical and anthropological descriptions.16
The University of Padua on Venetian territory, attracted many Ottoman Christians
who then returned to teach in Greek schools, at the Patriarchal Academy at Istanbul,
and in the academies at Iaşi and Bucharest.
Constantinople, “the city of Constantine,” had been an imperial capital since its
foundation in the fourth century by Emperor Constantine. By the sixth century it had
become one of the most populous cities in the world and was referred to simply as
“the City.” The Ottomans kept the name of Constantinople in official documents after
they conquered it in 1453, but they also used “Istanbul,” a Turkish rendering of the
Greek phrase “into the City.” Istanbul’s long-held status as the largest city in Europe
was lost in the eighteenth century. But it was during this time that it underwent an
architectural revival. A printing press – the first to produce works in Ottoman Turkish –
was also introduced, and an Academy opened at the Ecumenical Patriarchate. There
Greek, Latin, Arabic, and classical history were taught. Stefan Lemny describes it
as a “true Sorbonne of Byzantine traditions . . . that nourished . . . the mind of the
Orthodox intellectual elites.”17
From Istanbul new fashions and tastes radiated to communities in the Balkans.
According to Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, during
the Phanariot era in Moldavia (1711) and Wallachia (1716), “Oriental costume”
gradually became the fashionable norm. The stronger political influence of
the Ottoman Porte put its visible mark on all aspects of Romanian culture and
daily life: from clothes to vocabulary, from table manners to specific habits
(drinking coffee, taking the afternoon rest, smoking the water-pipe).18
Bulgarians and Cypriots were similarly affected, and travelers from the Balkans to
other parts of Europe stood out as exotics. The coffeehouse itself originated in the
Ottoman Empire but had an illustrious career – together with the coffee and tobacco
ritually consumed there – in Central and in Western Europe as well.19
The eighteenth century saw the spread of urbanization and the efflorescence of
cities throughout the region.20 Although Prague’s importance declined after the defeat
of Protestant forces at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, by the late 1700s,
members of Bohemia’s elite were participating in the Enlightened reform projects of
the Habsburgs. Bohemian aristocrats were also active in scientific societies, Masonic
lodges, art collecting, and the development of public gardens.21 Warsaw, the capital
of Poland since 1596, flourished even as the Commonwealth was being partitioned;
219
together with Cracow, it was the center of Polish-language literary activity through-
out the eighteenth century. Like Vienna and Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, and Cracow all
housed significant Jewish communities, with commercial connections which enabled
transfer of goods and ideas with western and northern European centers.22
Buda, the medieval capital of Hungary, had been a Pasha’s residence under
Ottoman rule, from 1541 to 1699. It did not regain the status of capital until long
after the Ottomans had retreated, and it remained separated from Pest, its more
commercial sister city across the Danube, until 1873. The seat of the Hungarian Diet
until 1825 was Pressburg/Poszony/Prešporok (today’s Bratislava, in Slovakia), which
was also the site of some early literary initiatives such as the first Slovak newspaper, the
Prešpurské noviny (1773). Likewise, the first Hungarian-language paper, the Magyar
Museum (1787), was published not in Buda but in Kassa/Kaschau/Košice, also in
today’s Slovakia.23
The smaller Balkan cities were cosmopolitan in their population and evolving
customs. They adopted Ottoman institutions such as baths and coffee houses, which
served as sites of entertainment and sociability as well as places of hygiene and con-
sumption. Bucharest, Wallachia’s capital since the late seventeenth century, was by
1800 the largest city in the Ottoman Balkans. Being the seats of Christian princes,
albeit subject to Ottoman suzerainty, Bucharest and Iaşi – Moldavia’s capital –
became places of refuge for scholars and clerics from all over the Orthodox world:
in the eighteenth century Romanian and Greek, but also Georgian, Serbian, and
even Arabic and Turkish books were printed here. They also attracted Albanian,
Bulgarian, and Armenian communities, which developed commercial and cultural
venues alongside the Jews and Greeks.24 Belgrade, while mainly an Ottoman for-
tress, also hosted some cultural activity: the English ambassador’s wife Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, visiting the city on her way to the Porte in 1717, wrote disparag-
ingly about the city’s “insolent soldiery” and the “extreme ignorance” of the Serbian
Orthodox priests in the surrounding country, but was impressed by the “polite
Eastern learning” and “very good [Arabic] library” of her host Achmet Beg.25 Other
smaller Ottoman strongholds such as Sarajevo, Sofia, and Vidin fostered libraries
and some intellectual exchange.26
Besides these political power centers, other commercial cities – Danzig/Gdańsk,
Leipzig, Trieste, Ragusa/Dubrovnik, Salonica/Thessaloniki, and Smyrna/Izmir – lay on
or close to the region’s edge. A new and important “edge-city” was Odessa, established
in 1794 by the Russian tsarina Catherine the Great on land recently captured from the
Ottomans. It was planned and developed initially by Don José de Ribas, a Spanish-Irish
adventurer born in Naples, and by Franz de Voland, a Dutch engineer. The city’s lingua
franca was Italian. Within the entire region of East Central Europe, many cities did not
necessarily reflect the ethnic or religious composition of the hinterland.27
Outside the imperial capitals and between metropolitan centers lay a vast swath
of territory that military historians have labeled “the trampled lands,” and which
were traversed by enormous armies many times from the seventeenth to the early
nineteenth century.28 Throughout these areas clerics were a link to literate culture
presiding over rituals related to life, nature, marriage, and death. The lower clergy
was generally recruited from the peasantry and differed little from the lower classes
either economically or culturally. Levels of literacy across the region varied par-
ticularly between urban and rural environments. Relatively high levels prevailed
220
in towns, where professionals versed in law, scripture, bookkeeping, bureaucracy,

and philosophy tended to live. The proliferation of Greek merchant colonies con-
tributed to the spread of literacy as these cosmopolitan traders wanted to educate
their sons in secular subjects. New high schools opened in Venice, the Habsburg
lands, the Danubian principalities, and Russia from the seventeenth century on.29
Western areas of the Habsburg Monarchy were generally more literate than east-
ern ones. Literacy rose as a consequence of the expansion of schooling during the
eighteenth century.
The Enlightenment
Much of the literature on the Enlightenment in East Central Europe has focused
on national contexts, proposing narratives of, for example, the “Romanian,” the
“Polish,” or the “Greek Enlightenment,” although some scholars have stressed the
Enlightenment’s regional dimensions as well.30 Here we seek to emphasize the move-
ments, networks, and schools of thought linking these various phenomena. Itinerant
intellectuals often bridged the divide between the more literate and cosmopolitan cit-
ies and the illiterate, rural areas, by articulating narratives that encompassed villages
and cities alike into unified “nations.” The movement of intellectuals and their ideas
among metropolitan centers suggests one possible account of the Enlightenment and
the factors that precipitated it in East Central Europe. This is often assumed to be
merely a matter of “east Europeans” traveling to “the West” and bringing back ideas
and narratives that they applied at home, but as Robert Evans, Paschalis Kitromilides
and Wendy Bracewell have shown, the connections among intellectuals within the
region might have been just as important in the development of programs and cul-
tural practices as imitation of Western models.31 This is not to deny that youth from
East Central Europe were increasingly traveling and studying in Western Europe
or that foreign tutors educated young Poles and Russians in foreign languages and
“advanced ideas,” but that is only part of the story.32
Greek scholars returning from Padua or Venice in the middle of the eighteenth
century cited historical accounts filled with admiration for classical Athens and Sparta
to Ottoman Greek audiences. Philologists and historians that would later found the
Latinist Transylvanian School in the region under Habsburg control had traveled
to Vienna and Rome to study at Catholic seminaries. They brought back a “Daco-
Romanian national narrative” that placed their countrymen in the lineage of the
ancient Romans, and the first-hand experience of the Latinity of the Romanian lan-
guage. Such intellectuals exploited their mobility to apply the Enlightenment trope
of the “Ancients versus the Moderns” to their own cultures, and to identify their own
peoples and pasts within the cultural bounds of “Europe.”33 This complex intellectual
process cannot be reduced to imitation.
Enlightenment philologists and historians also directed their pursuits to codifying,
categorizing, and historicizing the many languages of the region whose multilingual-
ism is quasi-proverbial.34 Some languages – notably Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and
Slovene – had traditions of writing and printing religious, legal, and historiographic
texts going back to the Reformation or even earlier. But a relatively limited number
of “supranational” languages dominated culture and communication. In prevalently
Catholic Central Europe, Latin was used in a number of elite contexts outside the
221
church. It was the language of the Hungarian, Croatian, Transylvanian, and other
Diets as well as of the educational institutions run by Catholic orders.35 Latin edu-
cation and neoclassical humanist pedagogy provided a common scholarly language
to the nobility and bureaucrats and bridged religious differences.36 Latin, alongside
Greek, was also used in the Orthodox world by ambitious scholars who wanted their
writings to be widely available to an international readership. Dimitrie Cantemir, for
example, wrote most of his books, including his History of the Ottoman Empire and a
work on Islam, in Latin.37
The languages of the major powers – German in the center and north, Russian in
the east, Turkish in the southeast – also spread through the region. Although these did
not become dominant to the same extent as Castilian, English, and French in Western
Europe, they were, to varying degrees, essential for anyone wishing to rise to a position of
government service and significantly influenced vernaculars. Habsburg Emperor Joseph
II (1765–90) attempted to demote Latin in the universities of his realm by designating
German “the only essential language,” to the keen displeasure of the Hungarians.38
In Southeastern Europe, Church Slavic had been in use in the Serbian and Bulga
rian churches before the Ottoman conquest, as well as in the chanceries of Wallachia,
Moldavia, and Lithuania. Greek also came into widespread use by Eastern Orthodox
peoples in ecclesiastical, educational, and commercial spheres. The spread of Greek
in the Balkans took on a decidedly modern aspect with the Phanariots’ political and
cultural ascendency in the eighteenth century during the Ottoman Empire’s steep
decline. Originating in Istanbul’s Phanar (Lighthouse) neighborhood – the home to
the Ecumenical Patriarchate – these Greek or Hellenized Romanian, Bulgarian, and
Albanian elites descended from families that had served the empire as high clerics,
diplomats, translators, and interpreters – professions crucial to the Porte in an age
when the Ottoman military could no longer effectively defend vast territories. The
most prized offices to which the Phanariots aspired were those of princes or hosp-
odars in the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. These rulers, along
with their retinues and merchant communities, continued to extend Greek culture in
these peripheral provinces, expanding libraries and princely academies with instruc-
tion in Greek. These, like the Great School in Constantinople, attracted Orthodox
students from all over the Balkans.39
Taking the region as a whole, speakers of the different Slavic vernaculars rep-
resented a clear majority, giving rise to the notion of “Slavonic Europe.” Even the
non-Slavic languages – Hungarian, Albanian, Romanian, Lithuanian – were signifi-
cantly colored by the Slavic lexicon. While some Slavic languages – especially Polish
and Czech – had an established literary tradition before 1700, in other cases there
were not always clearly demarcated boundaries between different Slavic dialects.
Thus, Vuk Karadžić, the noted nineteenth-century linguistic reformer, saw not only
Serbian and Croatian but also Bulgarian as part of the south-Slavic language contin-
uum. Ecclesiastical influences often affected linguistic developments across dialectal
boundaries. Russian Orthodox authorities, for example, provided books and spon-
sorship to their Serbian co-religionists in the Ottoman Empire, encouraging the
insertion of east Slavic vocabulary and orthography into Serbian.40
Linguistic divides often reinforced social boundaries – more saliently between
town and country than between religious or political jurisdictions. For instance,
222
German was widely spoken in Hungarian, Transylvanian, Bohemian, Silesian, and

Pomeranian towns, but the people in the rural hinterlands used a variety of different
tongues. Likewise, in Poland-Lithuania, the dominance of Latin, Chancery Slavic,
and Polish in court and urban environments did not erode the Polish, Lithuanian,
Belarussian, and Ruthenian vernaculars.41
Cities themselves had complex internal divisions, many housing Jewish, Greek,
and Armenian communities, each with distinct literary and religious traditions.
For the Jews of East Central Europe, Hebrew remained the learned and reli-
gious language that commanded the highest status, but this was hardly the only
Jewish tongue. Sephardic Jews in the Balkans communicated in Ladino (or Judeo-
Spanish), and those in Poland, Moldova, Russia, and the northern Habsburg
lands used Yiddish, a Germanic language with Hebrew and Aramaic elements.
Significant Roma populations also lived in the region, in conditions differing
widely from slavery to nomadism to sedentarization and degrees of assimilation.
The Romani language was first written down by missionaries in the late 1800s;
before then, literacy among the Roma was therefore not in this language.42 In
Balkan towns Ottoman troops or governors often resided amid a largely Slavic or
Greek peasantry, although many Muslims, even when called turci, were Slavic- or
Albanian-speakers who had converted to Islam. Along the Adriatic and Black Sea
coastlines, Italian was common in commerce and administration, without the pres-
ence of a s ubstantial ethnic Italian population.
The linguistic kaleidoscope of this region, then, was almost endless. But it was
not necessarily perceived as a weakness: as the medieval Hungarian King Stephen
allegedly said, “a kingdom with only one language and set of customs is lacking in
intelligence and strength.” With the rise of nationalism, however, this early modern
polyglot advantage would give way to “the rise of monolingual attitudes” and their
attendant political conflicts.
Scholars have tended to study the interest in vernacular language from the point
of view of the “non-imperial” nations, the “awakeners” of the eighteenth century
in relative isolation from their political context.43 Yet the first steps at linguistic
consolidation generally were undertaken by the imperial powers. Empress Maria
Theresa held that “We Austrians have a very wretched [German] language.” But
her son, the future Emperor Joseph II, was tutored in proper German, and went
on to declare German “Universalsprache meines Reiches” (the universal language
of my realm), ridiculing the use of Latin as a dead language.44 Peter the Great ini-
tiated the transformation of the Russian language by modernizing the alphabet,
embarking on a thorough lexical reform and a general transition to print culture.
He extricated printing from the authority of the Orthodox Church, thus elimi-
nating Church Slavonic as the literary language except in clerical contexts. These
dramatic changes were continued after Peter’s death by scholars at the Academy
of Sciences and the Russian Academy.45 For the Ottoman Turks a different prob-
lem posed itself, namely the great distance between the elaborate written Chancery
language – full of loanwords and constructions from Arabic and Persian – and the
colloquial speech of peasants. The modernization of Turkish and the Latinization
of its alphabet were not fully tackled until the foundation of the Turkish republic
in the twentieth century.46
223
Bureaucratization, commerce, language-building, and print development gener-

ally were concomitant processes, going hand-in-hand with projects to consolidate
imperial power, including the development of standardized systems of public educa-
tion. Prussia was a crucial example, the successful development of primary education
there bearing a direct influence on reforms enacted in Austria in the 1770s and
Russia in the 1780s.47 The rise of primary education acted as a catalyst for the devel-
opment of teaching materials in vernacular languages and for orthographic reforms.
Likewise, bureaucratic communication between imperial centers and their periheries
stimulated the development of newspapers, travel reports, and topographical des
criptions. In fact, the attempt to apply a common set of reforms across Eastern and
Central European empires lent a measure of uniformity to otherwise disparate groups
encountering Enlightenment doctrines for the first time.
The middle and late eighteenth century was marked by struggles over the con-
trol and reform of higher education and the establishment of new institutions.
Enlightenment ideas were invoked in the educational policies and cultural projects
of Catherine the Great, Maria Theresa, Joseph II, and Stanisław August Poniatowski.
These monarchs sought independence from churches and control of schools and
universities so as to train students to be loyal, patriotic, and effective bureaucrats.
The dissolution of the Jesuit Order in 1773 also provided the opportunity to bring
education in line with “rational” principles of governance in Catholic areas.48
We should note, however, that enlightened clergy also contributed to educational
reforms in this period.
Complex relationships between imperial institutions and subjects, rather than the
too often vaguely stated “Western influence,” provided the impetus, resources, and
framework for various cultural projects. Writers in Hungarian, for example, were
aided in their literary endeavors by positions they held in the Habsburg bureaucracy
or court. György Bessenyei (1747–1811), a key figure in developing Hungarian lit-
erature, encountered French Enlightenment ideas in Vienna. He was a member of
Maria Theresa’s Noble Hungarian Bodyguard created in 1760 to nurture imperial
ties with Hungary. The young Hungarians of the Bodyguard frequented Viennese
salons and often attended the Theresianum or the Oriental Academy. Upon their
return home, they advocated new ideas, in part through their literary activities.
Bessenyei’s cultural program was devoted mainly to the cultivation of the vernac-
ular so as to be able to spread “Enlightenment ideas through all classes of society.”
The regional restructuring of gymnasia and universities during Maria Theresa’s and
Joseph II’s reigns also provided spaces for educators, intellectuals, and administra-
tors from the same linguistic background to meet and collaborate.49
Maria Theresa introduced school reforms and uniform basic instruction. By the
end of Joseph II’s reign in 1790, as many as two-thirds of school-age children in the
Habsburg lands were being schooled.50 Schools and academies were also established
in Kiev, Iaşi, Bucharest, and Istanbul during the eighteenth century, although no
comparable attempt to introduce public primary education here took place until
the 1830s.51 On the other hand, eighteenth-century Poland-Lithuania was thriving
culturally despite the political clouds gathering above its skies. In 1740 the Piarist
priest Stanisław Konarski opened the Collegium Nobilium in Warsaw for noblemen
to receive instruction in secular subjects, hoping that an elite thus educated would
be capable of reforming the Commonwealth’s unworkable old regime. The bishop of
224
Cracow, Andrzej Stanisław Załuski, and his brother Józef Andrzej, the Bishop of Kiev,
opened a large public library in Warsaw in 1747.52
King Stanisław August Poniatowski lent his patronage to cultural projects. A year
after his coronation in 1765, he founded a theater company where Polish actors
performed comedies in the spirit of Molière. Beginning in 1768 he hosted a weekly
Thursday dinner that brought together intellectuals for cultural and political discus-
sions. Finally, in 1773, a year after the first partition, he established the Commission
of National Education, in effect the first Ministry of Education in Europe. The
Commission took over many Jesuit estates, schools, and libraries, transforming educa-
tion throughout the diminished territory and extending it well beyond the nobility.53
In the Habsburg lands the Jesuits were stripped of the rights of censorship during
Maria Theresa’s reign, when the faculties of history, geography, science, civics, and
natural law were added to the University and a network of state-financed gymnasia
was created. The empress also founded the Theresianum to train aristocrats for the
civil service, a military school, and an Oriental Academy to train diplomats to serve
in the Balkans. Joseph II also brought the training of the clergy under the aegis of
the state. With the passage of the 1781 Patents of Toleration, non-Catholics could
attend universities. New universities were established in Buda/Ofen (1777) and in
Lemberg/L’viv/Lwów (1784), while others were dismantled. All in all, according to
R.D. Anderson, “the Habsburgs were able to construct a uniform and centralized
educational system unprecedented for a large state, and unsurpassed until Napoleon.
Their reforms were a paradigm of what enlightened rulers sought to achieve else-
where as well. These changes to Habsburg higher education lasted down to 1848.”54
Culture in the age of revolution, reaction,

and reform (1789–1845)
The revolutionary and Napoleonic period (1789–1815) for this region is under-
stood often as one of intense contact with West European ideas and models, as if
this alone could drive cultural and political developments there. Such an inter-
pretation obscures the fact that major reforms and transformations in response to
the crisis of Europe’s old regimes were already under way there before 1789, and
that discourses of liberty and even revolution heard in Warsaw, Vienna, and else-
where, evolved in part independently from and sometimes in response to French
influence.55 By the time of Napoleon’s fundamental reforms in France, central-
izing and modernizing measures had already been introduced in the Habsburg
Empire, Russia, and Poland-Lithuania, accompanied by an explosion in cultural
production and by important new cultural institutions.56 It is not surprising then
that Joseph and his successor Leopold II (1790–92), and some of their high officials
welcomed the French Revolution, s eeing in it almost “an endorsement of their own
earlier domestic policies.”57
Nevertheless, the Western Enlightenment and the American and French revolu-
tions did influence progressive thinkers in East Central Europe, from emperors to
rebels.58 Polish revolutionaries fought with the Americans against the British, and
with Napoleon against the old regimes in Europe. They were also sent by Napoleon
to Saint-Domingue to put down the Haitian revolution. Thus they experienced first-
hand an array of new ideologies and practices, while not always in full a greement.59
225
Stanisław Staszic (1755–1826), a Catholic priest, who had studied in Leipzig,

Göttingen, and Paris, wrote that a “reconstituted Poland would be a conduit for
French influence among the Slavs.” But “French” ideas were adapted to local politi-
cal cultures, by local actors and thinkers, in the context of their needs, which often
differed from those of Western nations. As Andrzej Walicki has shown, Polish
reformers balanced Locke and Rousseau’s influence against their native Republican
traditions.60 Because the extensive rights of the nobility had weakened the execu-
tive power of the Monarchy, many Polish reformers were proponents of absolutism,
just at the time when the French and Americans were struggling to free themselves
from monarchic government. Second, the Poles were anti-imperialists just when
the French and British were building empires. Adam Rzewuski, for example, wrote
that “every nation, including the colored peoples of America, Africa, and Asia who
had been colonized by the Europeans, had an inalienable right to independence.”61
This view was formulated in 1790, when Poland-Lithuania was being dismantled by
its imperial neighbors. In 1802, many of the Polish legionnaires sent by Napoleon
to Saint-Domingue to suppress their rebellion, sympathized with the rebels, who in
turn identified the Poles as “the white Negroes of Europe.” Tadeusz Kosciuszko simi-
larly had been a proponent of the emancipation of American slaves, at a time when
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave-owners.62
With the deaths of Joseph II and his brother Leopold II in 1790 and 1792, and
Austria’s entry into conflict with France in 1792, Francis II (1768–1830) shifted to
a regime of repression and surveillance. Those suspected of sympathy for “French”
radicalism, including civil servants who had served under his uncle and father, Joseph II
and Leopold II, were tried for participating in “Jacobin conspiracies” and executed.
The Greek revolutionary and man of letters Rhigas Velestinlis, in exile in Austria, was
handed over to Ottoman authorities who executed him in June 1798.63 Yet cultural
production sometimes ran athwart the ebb and flow of war and revolution. After
1800, for example, the printing house of the University of Buda revived its activity,
and contributed to the development of a number of “smaller” vernacular literatures.
Under the watchful eye of the Habsburg censors, this Royal institution went from a
modest publisher of university materials to a disseminator of pedagogical, literary,
and historical works in Slovak, Serbian, Romanian, Polish, and other languages.64
Napoleonic institutions were established throughout the areas conquered by the
Grande Armée. The Duchy of Warsaw, created in 1807, was a satellite-state, but it
rewarded the Polish Legions that had fought with Napoleon since 1797. If many of
the Legion perished on foreign battlefields, the “Song of the Polish Legions” has since
been adopted as the Polish national anthem.65 Freemasonry, already a channel for
Enlightenment ideas since the eighteenth century, now provided venues for the bour-
geoisie and non-noble intelligentsia. Although the Duchy went down with Napoleon,
in the Polish imagination Napoleonic France was “identified with p rogress, glory, and
the national struggle for independence.”66
In Napoleon’s Illyrian Provinces (1809–13), French officials with scant familiarity
of local customs, conditions, or languages introduced the Napoleonic Code.67 A
school system was inaugurated with “Illyrian” as the language of instruction. The
first newspapers appeared, and the Napoleonic regime promoted a common lit-
erary language. French ideas also had sympathizers who expressed themselves in
songs, “the best media to transmit the ideas of the French Revolution,” according to
226
Wayne Vucinich.68 The Illyrian experiment had significant consequences for the
cultural development of the South Slav region. According to Vucinich, Napoleon’s
“Illyrian Provinces assumed the appearance of a miniature South Slav state.”
The Congress of Vienna (1815) inaugurated a period of political reaction, although,
again, one not lacking in cultural opportunities. In Hungary the Diet reconvened in
1825 after a twelve-year hiatus, moving from Pressburg to Buda and ushering in the
“Reform Age.” In the Habsburg lands this period was also marked by the growth of
associational life organized around mutual interests in areas such as trade, indus-
try, charity, education, reading, and such – independently of the state. People from
different classes also mingled in “casinos” (or clubs) where paying members could
find books and newspapers, alongside items of consumption. The casinos provided
a substitute for the coffee houses in the provinces where these were scarce, and they
contributed to the foundation of civil society.69
Polish, Greek, and Hungarian elites played a role in molding policies adopted by
the imperial powers both before and after the Vienna Congress. Poles in Russia’s
service included Adam Czartoryski and Count Seweryn Potocki, scions of the most
powerful aristocratic families. They shared with the liberal Tsar Alexander I the
ideas of the defunct Commonwealth’s National Education Commission, on which
the Russian education legislation of 1802 was modeled. Czartoryski became the cura-
tor of Vilnius/Wilno University and led that educational district, while Potocki was
appointed curator of the new university of Kharkov/Kharkiv and its respective dis-
trict. Both universities and their districts retained a Polish character and used Polish
as the language of instruction. The Załuski brothers also contributed to Russia’s
culture. During the Russian invasion to suppress the Kosciuszko-led insurrection of
1794, the collection of the Załuski Library in Warsaw had been packed and taken
to St. Petersburg. This became the basis for imperial Russia’s public library. Thus,
despite the geopolitical catastrophe of Poland-Lithuania, Polish culture had a ghostly
afterlife in the Russian Empire, which had swallowed the largest part of the former
Commonwealth. Polish noblemen intellectuals, ideas, and books helped shape mod-
ern Russian cultural establishments.70
After 1815 universities often became venues of political struggles, whether state
directed or nationalist ones. Universities established (or re-established) in Warsaw
(1816), Lemberg (1817), and Athens (1837) exemplify the link between politics and
higher education. The Alexander University in Warsaw, granted by the Russian tsar
to the Polish Kingdom, absorbed the city’s pre-existing higher educational institu-
tions. Instruction was in Polish, a concession from a notably liberal tsar who relied
on Polish councilors to modernize his empire’s educational system. But follow-
ing the suppression of the November insurrection in 1831, Nicholas I suspended
the universities in Warsaw and Vilna/Wilno/Vilnius, bringing their library collec-
tions to St. Petersburg. Students active in the Polish liberation movement marked
universities as nests of subversive politics.71 Secret student societies in the Russian
Empire were outlawed in 1821 but they continued underground. It was for such
activity in Vilna that Adam Mickiewicz was arrested and deported to the Russian
interior in 1823.72 In Habsburg Galicia, the University of Lemberg (founded in
1784 by Joseph II, then downgraded to a secondary school in 1805) was re-estab-
lished in 1817 as a German-language institution, though a chair in Polish language
and literature was offered as a concession.73 After Greece became independent
227
under a Bavarian king, a university was established in Athens in 1837; its pedagog-
ical model was German. For new states like Greece, universities were essential for
training national elites, and elaborating and pursuing cultural and political claims.
Athens University drew students not only from the Greek Kingdom, but also from
the Ottoman Empire where two-thirds of Greeks still lived.74
Improvements in print, education, and transportation impelled the growth of the
press and literature as democratized spheres of communication. The early nineteenth
century was notable for the creation of newspapers and journals in the vernacular
as national movements took aim at the foreignness of their cosmopolitan cities.
In Hungary, according to Robert Nemes, “a growing number of national minded
writers . . . insist[ed] that the twin towns of Buda and Pest were largely ‘foreign,’ an
epithet that described their new theater, their German-language journals, and many
of their residents.”75 In Prague the Czech reading public grew ten times from the
early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Historical journals such as Časopis
Národního muzea (Journal of the National Museum) appeared in 1827 under the edi-
torship of František Palacký.76 As this title suggests, periodicals were part and parcel of
a wider network of national or proto-national institutions. The National Museum in
Prague had opened in 1818 with the mission “to contain everything belonging to the
national literature and national production, as well as to survey everything brought
about anywhere in the homeland by natural or human agency.”77
Periodicals encouraged the formalization of literary norms and enabled com-
parison of standard cultural/linguistic features across political divisions. Czech and
Slovak ultimately came to be considered separate languages although earlier patriotic
intellectuals thought of them as dialects of a single language. In the early nineteenth
century, periodical cultures encouraged orthographic standardization and script
modernization. Czechs stopped using Gothic script in the 1840s and Romanian
shifted from Cyrillic to Latin in the 1860s.78 The term “Serbo-Croatian” first appeared
in 1836, culminating in the Vienna Literary Declaration of 1850 at which Serbian and
Croatian writers (and one Slovene) came together to proclaim and prescribe norms
for a single literary language.79
These kinds of endeavors belong to what Miroslav Hroch describes as the
earliest scholarly phase of patriotic mobilization in which small numbers of intel-
lectuals research and define the cultural, linguistic, and historical profile of a
people by elaborating and publishing dictionaries, grammars, periodicals, histo-
ries, geographies, folklore collections, and translations, and by founding theaters,
publishing houses, university departments, and museums.80 Hroch’s account use-
fully analyzes the activities of early nation-builders, but his assessment of pre-1848
cultural-patriotic activities as “apolitical” might be questioned, as these arose from
contemporary political conjunctures and conditions, rather than as a purely
“cultural” phenomenon.81
Imagining time and space

It was not just improved education and communication links that led to the trans-
formation of human identities in East Central Europe, but also writing itself, which
Michel de Certeau has argued, plays a role in establishing cultural differences along
the coordinates of time and space. In particular writers of histories situated their
228
communities along temporal coordinates and influenced their home readers to see
themselves as belonging to nations.82 The nineteenth century was a golden age of
history-writing throughout Europe. Historians paid attention to principles of source
criticism but also to the philosophical and political importance of the past. By stud-
ying the past, scholars thought they could both discern and demonstrate the desti-
nies of their nations. For example, Romanian historians saw in ancient Dacia “an
expression of primordial unity . . . [and] a vantage point for the definition of the
[modern] national space.”83 The role of historiography in the creation of national
identities is relatively well-studied as are ethnography and folklore studies. Travel
writing, however, has received less attention until recently.
Some historians now considered part of “nationalist” canons did not recount
the history of their people in their native language. Jan Potocki, for example, wrote
Recherches sur la Sarmatie (2 vols., Warsaw, 1789) in French, as did Mihail Kogălniceanu
his Histoire de la Valachie, de la Moldavie et des Valaques transdanubiens (Berlin, 1837).
František Palacký wrote his monumental Geschichte von Böhmen (5 vols., Prague,
1836–67) in German with the financial support of the Bohemian Estates. Such exer-
cises involved a desire to partake in the conversations of the “Republic of Letters,” but
also to convince international audiences, as much as compatriots, of the dignity of
the historian’s nation, sometimes in a polemical tone. Only later did Palacký translate
his study into Czech; each version was intended for a different readership. After the
defeat of the 1848 revolution, in which he had been the spokesman for the Czech
nation, he declared: “I have resolved to leave the ranks of German historians forever
and henceforth can only compose my work in the Czech language.” The Bohemian
Estates almost withdrew financial support, due to worsening relations with Palacký,
though in the end they did not.84 This episode reveals the instability of national
identities and linguistic practices in this period.
Other Romantic-era historians, writers, and bards had fluid identities as well,
depending on the languages they had mastered and the evolving status of their
birthplaces. Ján Kollár, a contemporary Slovak associate of Palacký, was also schooled
in German and contributed to the Czech revival; he compared using Czech “for
sophisticated purposes to ‘playing a piano which has no strings.’”85 Throughout the
nineteenth century many Bohemian writers were raised and educated bilingually,
and affiliation with the Czech national movement was not an inevitable step.86
Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s “strong poet,” who made his international reputation
in Parisian exile, grew up and was educated in Lithuania, where he was deeply influ-
enced by Belarusian folklore. He composed important works in Russian, French,
and Polish.87
Although they usually invoked the “scientific” principles of accurate documenta-
tion, dating, and philological proofs, some historical writers of this time had recourse
to highly exalted registers, influenced by the Romantic and Messianic currents
popular in France, Germany, and Russia. In consonance with conceptions of historio-
graphical activity as enabling the reconstruction or even (in Jules Michelet’s phrase)
a “resurrection” of the past, historians created both a documentary basis for legal
claims to territory or to sovereignty, and an imaginative recreation of the medieval
or ancient spirit of the nation they claimed to serve, but in many ways were in fact
creating. Nations were depicted as pilgrims, martyrs, innocent children, sometimes
as Christ himself in works such as Adam Mickiewicz’s Book of the Polish Pilgrims (1832),
229
Mykola (Nikolai) Kostomarov’s Book of Genesis of the Ukrainian People (1847), and the
Song of Romania, probably authored by Alecu Russo (1850).
While the role of historiography in cultural nation-building has been the focus of
attention for some time, the spatial dimension of nineteenth-century East Central
European literary culture has been mostly neglected, though there has been some
awareness of diaspora politics, travel, and exile.88 Travel accounts conveyed images
and ideas of foreign lands, drew cultural boundaries between different nations within
the region, and consolidated vernacular writing traditions.89 Already in the eighteenth
century, writers such as Adamantios Koraes and Dositej Obradović had provided
favorable reports of “Europe” to their fellow readers of Greek and Serbian. Dositej’s
Life and Adventures (1788) was one of the first extended narrative works in Serbian
and used the experiences of encounter and the genre of travel writing to present
European culture and society to his people.90 After 1815, reformers such as Hungary’s
István Széchenyi and Romantics such as Adam Mickiewicz, traveled westwards, often
to France.91 Some harangued and exhorted their fellow countrymen to imitate the
West; others used international languages and venues to reproach “Europe” (mean-
ing Western Europe) with ignoring the fate of their own nation. “Hungary is behind
in everything,” wrote Széchenyi in his Hungarian-language work Light (1831). He
recommended that Hungarians copy everything from technology, to gentlemen’s
clubs, to horse racing.92 Likewise, the Wallachian political reformer Dinicu Golescu,
in his Account of My Travels (1826) proposed developing institutions at home after the
European model.93 Especially after 1830, as Western cultural standards and goods
were conveyed more rapidly through print and rail, “Europe” became the point of
reference in both cultural and political endeavors for an ever greater number of
people in East Central Europe.94
But Western Europe was not the only destination. Bulgarians’ contact with Russia
in the nineteenth century was of consequence. The Slavic Benevolent Society in
Russia offered Bulgarian students university scholarships, hoping to steer them to
embrace pan-Slavic ideas. Some did, while others became radicalized in their encoun-
ter with Russian populist youth. There was also a substantial community of Bulgarians
in Istanbul and émigré communities in Romania and Serbia where Bulgarians pub-
lished newspapers and other works.95 Some Romanian intellectuals also journeyed
to and took inspiration from Russia: Barbu Paris Mumuleanu, among others, argued
in 1825 that his people “should imitate not just Western but also East Europeans.”96
At the same time, for some writers the important axis of travel was not east–west at
all, but rather north–south. Poles in particular developed something of a cult of the
Mediterranean and Near East, evident in the verse and prose of Adam Mickiewicz,
Julius Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, and Cyprian Norwid. This involved a combina-
tion of traditional or revived religious orientation toward Rome and a more modern
Romantic fascination with the Orient and the philosophy of history. Travel writing
became a vehicle through which all these themes produced Romantic representa-
tions important for the Polish self-image.97
Others penned accounts of journeys closer to home, or even within one’s own
country. The Croatian Illyrist Matija Mažuranić in Glance at Bosnia (1842), argued
that his people had spent too long “looking westwards,” and that it was “finally time
for us to turn around and find out for ourselves about the conditions prevailing
in this part of Illyria.”98 In the same period, Hungarian cultural reformers such as
230
Ferenc Kazinczy and Titusz Nagy wrote about social and national conditions in their
homeland; they tried to map the extent to which Hungarian was spoken in Upper
Hungary and made recommendations for expanding its teaching.99 Nationalists
belonging to Slavic groups in the age of Panslavism traveled in order to establish
the boundaries between different groups.100 Ján Kollár traveled to ascertain the
extent of the Slavic nation, and concluded that Slavs inhabited “not only all upper
Italy, Venetia and Lombardy, but also Switzerland, the Tyrol, and part of Bavaria.”101
Czech patriot Karel Havlíček Borovský, on the other hand, was expecting to find a
form of Slavic solidarity when he journeyed to Poland and Russia in the 1840s, but
was disappointed in his hopes: “I returned to Prague as a Czech, a simple deter-
mined Czech, even with some secret sour feeling against the name Slav, which a
better knowledge of Russia and Poland had made suspect to me.”102 As such, travel
and travel writing served on the one hand to enable a cosmopolitan outlook and the
advocacy of Western cultural models; on the other hand, it produced differentiation
from potentially similar neighbors and a more clearly imagined, if narrower, sense
of national identity.103
Numerous writers were inspired by the national spirit as expressed in folklore and
folk poetry which had special significance in East Central Europe. In some countries,
such as Hungary, interest in ethnography was initially an extension of the state’s drive
to collect data about its resources. The very term “ethnology” – Latin ethnologia –
appears to have been coined by Maria Theresa’s court librarian, Adam František
Kollár.104 Elsewhere in the region, an interest in folklore preceded state-formation
and even galvanized it, especially where few high-culture institutions capable of sus-
taining literary and cultural norms existed. For example, the Songs of the Serbian People,
collected by Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864) and first published in Vienna, became known
throughout Europe and were invoked as justification for Serbian political rights.105
Collections of cultural heritage went hand-in-hand with political claims such as those
made in Karadžić’s 1845 manifesto “Serbs all and everywhere.” In Montenegro the
Prince-Bishop Petar II Petrović-Njegoš published The Mountain Wreath (1848) which
exalted the traditional culture of his people while reviling that of the Muslims.106 In
pre-unification Moldavia, Vasile Alecsandri collected and published the Folk Poetry of
the Romanians (1852) while serving as a diplomat in Paris and elsewhere.107 Folklore
collections provided auxiliary “proofs” where national identities seemed insufficiently
anchored. In Bulgaria, folklore was particularly important as no classical tradition,
like that of Greece, existed to alert Europe to Bulgaria’s past and identity. In 1859
Georgi Rakovski published a Manual on How to Seek the Oldest Features of Our Life,
Language, Folk Generations, Our Old Rule, Our Glorious Past, Etc.108 Collections of folk-
lore were often translated into Western languages and could represent symbolically
little-known nations abroad.109
1848: the apotheosis of culture

Despite Prince Metternich’s determination to rid Europe of revolutionary move-
ments, insurrections abounded after 1815, including in the Balkans, Russia, and dif-
ferent parts of the former Commonwealth. Still, the 1848 Revolution stands out in
several ways. It was, for one, grander in scale as a result of its synchronicity across
Europe. Many leaders came from among the cultured classes, and culture framed
231
certain political-national claims, a novel feature. Freedom of the press was high on
the list of demands of revolutionaries throughout the Habsburg Empire and in the
Balkans.
Before the events in March 1848, seditious writings circulating in private gather-
ings in Vienna and Lower Austria demanding a constitutional order were printed
abroad, given the inflexibility of the Habsburg police state. Cultural associations such
as the Legal-Political Reading Club and the writers’ and artists’ society Concordia in
Vienna, and the Citizens’ Resource in Prague served a middle-class public, making
information available by subscribing to the domestic and international press. During
the revolution these clubs became “unofficial political centers, where the events of
the day were debated” and petitions were circulated.110 Vienna’s national clubs and
societies had organized concerts, plays and social gatherings for the city’s Slavs prior
to the revolutionary season of 1848. Now, they greeted the various Slavic delegations
that had come to petition the Monarchy and to join forces in common struggle.111
Communities of politically active exiles and students in Western Europe – Poles,
Czechs, Hungarians, Serbs, and Romanians – had also been in contact with each
other prior to the events of 1848 and arguably prepared their way. Students from
all over East Central Europe in Paris attended the courses of Jules Michelet, Edgar
Quinet, and Adam Mickiewicz at the Collège de France, and fraternized with each
other.112 A Society of Romanian Students founded in Paris in 1845, plotted insurrec-
tion and campaigned to gain sympathy for the national cause, inspired by Michelet’s
lectures, which wove militant politics into his courses and called, among other
things, for Polish freedom. After manning the Paris barricades in February 1848,
many boarded trains to bring the Revolution home. International collaboration
continued throughout the year. Moldavians, Wallachians, Transylvanians, and Poles
conspired in Moldavia “under the very nose of the gathering Russian and Turkish
troops.”113 An even more dramatic, if in the end mainly symbolic, collaboration of
1848 revolutionaries was that of the participants in the Prague Slav Congress in
June 1848. Most of the delegates came from the Habsburg lands, but also from
Prussia and Russia, including the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.114
Literature, newspapers, and freedom of the press also united liberal Europe sym-
bolically. During the heady June days in Bucharest, for example, a printing press
was paraded through the streets by a chariot adorned with tricolor ribbons; it car-
ried revolutionaries waving tricolor flags who distributed leaflets of poetry about the
freedom of the press.115 An end to censorship was high on the list of demands and
proclamations issued throughout the lands roiled by revolution, and a bounty of new
newspapers was one of the Revolution’s successes. If before March 1848 the Habsburg
Monarchy had not a single political daily, “suddenly dozens of large and small daily
and weekly newspapers of the most varied political currents appeared.” Cracow,
Prague, and Zagreb could all pride themselves with new “highly respected organs of
their national movements.”116
In East Central Europe poets, journalists and historians took leading political
roles, after the model of Restoration France, where historian François Guizot and
poet Alphonse de Lamartine (the latter the honorary president of the Paris Society
of Romanian Students) were carried to high office by cultural prestige. Moreover,
writers often symbolized the aspirations of their people through publications,
deeds, lives, and even deaths. Adam Mickiewicz formed a Polish legion in spring
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1848 that fought for the liberation of Italy, and František Palacký presided over
the Slav Congress in Prague.117 The Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi (1823–49) and
the Bulgarian poet Hristo Botev (1848–76) died for Hungary and Bulgaria, respec-
tively, Petőfi at the battle of Segesvár/Schäßburg/Sighişoara fighting against the
Russian army in 1849, and Botev in the April Uprising against Ottoman rule (1876).
Historian Mihail Kogălniceanu and playwright Vasile Alecsandri both participated
in the Moldavian 1848 revolution whose demands included constitutional govern-
ment, an end to Gypsy slavery and peasant serfdom, and the end of censorship.
Some bards died young in more passive but no less symbolic postures: Mickiewicz’s
fellow revolutionary Juliusz Słowacki (1809–49), although well enough to dictate
poems the day before he died, succumbed to tuberculosis in Paris. The Romanian
national poet Mihai Eminescu (1850–89) ended his life in an asylum, after suffering
from mental distress for several years.118
In 1848 literature and culture also served as an indicator of civilization or “Euro
peanness,” and liberal nationalists promoting their own cause against those of
neighboring nations were in fact adapting consistently to civilizational hierarchies
elaborated in Western Europe.119 In an effort to portray “the true personality of the
state,” the erstwhile Hungarian foreign minister Bertalan Szemere showed “the differ-
ence in degree of intellectual culture obtaining between the different races inhabiting
Hungary,” using statistics of newspapers, books, schools, and universities by national-
ity and language.120 Such hierarchical thinking was not universal in the region. Some
writer-politicians saw their own small nations as equal to others with which they could
ally to oppose the imperial powers. František Palacký’s famous Letter to the Frankfurt
Parliament, where he posited his own identity as “a Czech, of Slavonic blood” also
called on solidarity with “Slavs, Wallachians, Magyars and Germans, not to mention
Turks and Albanians” against domination by Russia.121
Institution- and nation-building (1848–90)

New or reformed cultural institutions were allowed to open even after the defeat of
the 1848 revolutions. State officials viewed museums, universities, and research insti-
tutes as concessions to be offered on their own terms, to satisfy the least alarming of
the demands expressed by the now suppressed national insurgents. The first Slovak
museum, Matica slovenská, was established in 1863, while the Serbian Matica srpska,
with earlier roots in Pest, was revived and transferred to Novi Sad in Hungary in 1864.
The University of Warsaw which had been closed since 1832 in retaliation for the
November insurrection reopened in 1869 as a Russian university.122
Cultural institution-building often, though not always, followed political turning
points, as in the foundation of the Universities of Iaşi (1860) and Bucharest (1864)
in the wake of the Union of Moldavia and Wallachia. Similarly, the Ferencz-József
University was established at Kolozsvár (today’s Cluj-Napoca) in 1872, following the
1867 Compromise which saw Transylvania incorporated into Hungary. The university
received lavish resources so that it might strengthen Hungary’s hold over Transylvania.
The German University founded in Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernivtsi, Bukovina, in
1875 by Austria, perhaps as a hedge against Polish and Hungarian cultural national-
ism, taught law to prospective administrators, and theology to Orthodox students,
both Romanians and Ukrainians.123 The University of Zagreb was created in 1874,
233
where Bishop Strossmayer had already established in 1866 the Yugoslav Academy of
Sciences, one of the first institutions to be called “Yugoslav.”124
Chairs in the Faculties of History and Letters in some universities, became
foci of national aspirations. In Prague, a dual structure of chairs of Austrian and
general history was instituted, and from the 1870s these were filled by one Czech
and one German professor.125 This presaged an eventual split into two separate
Czech and German universities in 1882. In Lemberg the Ukrainian historian
Mykhailo Hrushevsky received a chair in “World history with special reference to
Eastern Europe” rather than one in Ukrainian history. Likewise, at the University
of Czernowitz, the Romanian historian Ioan Nistor was appointed to a chair in
“Southeast European history.”126
Universities were not only institutions of higher learning, but also venues for
nationalist agitation that often overlapped with youth movements, and flowed out
of university circles, leading occasionally to violence. Students played an increasingly
important role in extremist politics, following the lead of widely regarded academ-
ics who professed militance or xenophobia from positions of cultural prestige. In
the Romanian universities prominent historians, writers, and philosophers such as
A.D. Xenopol, Vasile Conta, and Nicolae Iorga eloquently and authoritatively dis-
seminated antisemitic views. Jewish stereotypes popularized through fiction were also
invoked in political debates while intolerance became a badge of patriotism.127 In
the Habsburg Monarchy, a Ruthenian student with Ukrainian nationalist sympathies
at Lemberg University murdered Andrzej Kazimierz Potocki, the Polish governor of
Galicia, in 1908. Student politics also fed the Young Bosnia movement, which was
behind the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.128 In the Slav lands
the Sokol [Falcon] movements were organized ostensibly around gymnastics but were
really meant to improve both the moral and physical strength of the nation. They
represented a form of muscular youth organization borrowed from the German
Turnverein which had first used gymnastics to mobilize youth politically. The first Sokol
was founded in Prague in 1862 and spread rapidly to other Slavic lands. By 1908
the Sokol movement was considered “the most powerful organization in Slavdom.”
While in principle above politics, the Sokol movement was decidedly pan-Slavic in
orientation and, not surprisingly, anti-German.129
Education and written culture extended into the countryside in this time period,
despite significant discrepancies in levels of literacy between Central Europe and
Southeastern Europe, and between town and countryside. Literacy also differed by
gender, especially among the peasantry.130 While school attendance in Bohemia,
Moravia, and Silesia was nearly complete, in the lands of partitioned Poland-Lithuania
and in Romania high levels of illiteracy prevailed. In Austrian Galicia, better educated
peasants began to organize locally and published their own newspapers, benefitting
from experience in the Habsburg army and from being connected to centers of
power. Rural newspapers and associations developed throughout the entire region,
and after 1860 the press was relatively free. In Hungary, for instance, the number of
periodicals grew from 15 in 1850 to 44 in 1860 and to 119 in 1867.131
Museums and exhibitions also defined and disseminated ideas about national
identity and culture in this period. Run by the relatively small educated intelligentsia
of East Central European societies, these institutions of visual and material culture
could reach a large public that did not even need to be literate. The Hungarian
234
National Museum, founded in 1802, expanded by acquiring an ethnographic section

in 1872. Ethnographic museums were also opened in Warsaw in 1888, in Lemberg in
1895, and in Cracow in 1905. A National Museum had been established in Belgrade
in 1844, which included an ethnological department; in 1901 this became an inde-
pendent ethnographic museum.132 Ethnography could be used to make pointed
arguments about the permanent, immemorial nature of the nation or about de-
politicized ethnic groups living in close proximity. The Galician General Provincial
Exhibition of 1894 in Lemberg celebrated the province’s economic successes and its
ethnic variety. Showing ethnic complexity, the exhibition attempted to diffuse ten-
sion between the politically polarized Polish and Ukrainian national movements in
Galicia.133 By contrast, the Czechoslavic [sic] Ethnographic Exhibition in Prague a
year later, focused on the folk culture of the Czechs and other Slavs in the Bohemian
lands to the exclusion of the Germans of the area. It was in this Slavic folklore, com-
pletely independent of German or Austrian influences, that “Czechoslavic” national
identity was preserved, the organizers suggested.134
National cultures: fictions in and of Eastern Europe

If poetry and history were the literary forms of choice for early nineteenth-century
Romantics, fiction came into its own after the Springtime of Peoples, the failed
January 1863 insurrection in Russian Poland, and with the Dualist compromise in
Austria-Hungary. Writers in East Central Europe employed prose to explore local
culture, mores, tradition, and society but they adopted West European styles such
as realism and naturalism for their novels, a genre associated with the building of
industrial society in the era of capitalism. Fiction writers in East Central Europe
initially had small reading publics, especially in the more agrarian, less urbanized,
and less literate societies in the region. As industry, school networks, cities, and
newspapers developed, so did readership. The choice of rural and historical themes
reflected social, political, and national concerns in nearly all linguistic traditions.
Forging a national literature was a major goal for each of the region’s intelligentsias,
but so was international recognition. Many writers were conversant with foreign
cultures and literatures from their sojourns abroad or from life under imperial rule
or in exile. They were often also influenced by modern scientific and sociologi-
cal theories such as those of the utilitarians, Charles Darwin, and the positivism of
Auguste Comte.135
Positivism came into vogue in the Polish lands after the failed 1863 insurrection,
which brought casualties, expropriations, imprisonment, exile, and Russification in
its wake. Encouraging “organic work,” positivism became an alternative by which
the nation might yet survive without heroic self-sacrifice, but with concrete goal-
oriented activity. No longer so purely aristocratic, the Polish nation encompassed
and assimilated Jewish and German professionals and bourgeois, while the capitalist
mass-circulation press eluded Russification.136 Some writers associated with Positivism
also worked as journalists, blurring the boundary between realist fiction and reportage.
The novel was meant to portray the ordinary lives of modern urban professionals,
of the middle and lower classes, or, as the writer Eliza Orzeszkowa put it, “a burgher,
a banker, a factory owner, a merchant, tails and top hats, machines, surgeon’s instru-
ments, locomotives.”137
235
The foremost Positivist novelist was Bolesław Prus (1845–1912) who began as
a journalist before taking up fiction.138 In The Outpost (1886) he depicted village
life during modernization, and in The Doll (1887–90) urban life in contemporary
Warsaw. Here the gentry, the middle classes, students, the working poor, and char-
acters belonging to different generations all interact, showing the conflict between
Poland’s chivalrous traditions and the capitalist mentality in almost sociological
detail. The novel, which was serialized in The Daily Courier, was “written expansively
to sell papers,” according to Beth Holmgren.139
Another of Prus’s novels, The New Woman (1894), turned to the feminist movement.
Women began to make their mark at this time as writers, even though they were not
easily accepted in the literary world, and are still marginalized in the literary canon.140
While understood as essential consumers of literature, they were perceived as intruders
into the male literary establishment when they dared to publish themselves. Still there
were exceptions. Eliza Orzeszkowa (1842–1910) was among the most accomplished
Polish writers of her generation. Her work was translated into many languages, and
she was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize.141 In Bohemia several female writers in
this period came from hybrid German-Czech cultural backgrounds; they chose to write
in Czech and aligned themselves with the Czech national movement. Despite their
achievements in various genres including fairytales and children’s books, writers like
Božena Němcová, Karolina Světlá, and Teréza Nováková, had difficult careers, with male
critics often “judg[ing] them by a different yardstick” than their male colleagues.142
Historical novels were also a popular literary form in this period. While generally
discussed in terms of the uses of history for nation-building and the need to develop
historical myths, writers of historical novels also engaged themes beyond national bor-
ders. The Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, the first in the region to win the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1905, received the award primarily for his novel Quo Vadis
(1896) set in ancient Rome, which he wrote with an eye to commercial success; by
1900 the book had sold 400,000 copies in the United States.143 The Hungarian Géza
Gárdonyi’s novels mixed national with international history. Egri csillagok (The Stars
of Eger, 1899, published in English as Eclipse of the Crescent Moon) depicts Hungary’s
struggle with the Ottomans at the siege of Eger in 1552, and his A Láthatatlan ember
(Invisible Man, 1901, published in English as Slave of the Huns), shows Attila the Hun’s
court through the eyes of a fictive Byzantine emissary.144
Literary and cultural historians have recently rediscovered the importance of rep-
resentations of East Central Europeans in Western fiction.145 Benjamin Constant’s
Adolphe (1807) is an early example of a novel with a Polish heroine. Her name is Ellénore
and she proves to be a temperamental and potentially destructive lover for the French
student hero. A similar Eastern European heroine was to surface again over a hundred
years later in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1920), whose wealthy American hero
Newland has a tantalizing relationship with the beautiful, exotic, but impoverished
Countess Ellen Olenska. The similarity in names hints at the process whereby art imi-
tates art, and stereotypes are perpetuated without reference to the updated reality. At
the more popular level, the region had been the locale for Western fictions at least
since the beginning of the nineteenth century in works such as Charles Nodier’s novels
about brigands (Jean Sbogar, 1818), vampires (Le vampire, 1820) and castles (L’histoire
du roi de Bohème et ses sept châteaux, 1822). The tradition was r einvigorated towards the
end of the nineteenth century thanks to Jules Verne (Le château des Carpates, 1892),
236
Anthony Hope (The Prisoner of Zenda, 1894), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which
enjoyed a spectacular cinematic and transcultural afterlife in the twentieth century.
Whether or not these Western fictions can be equated with an “imperialism of the
imagination” and mapped onto economic or power relations, such depictions have
significantly affected popular conceptions of the region.146
The modernist turn (1890–1918)

Despite such portrayals by Western authors, certain centers in East Central Europe
hitherto perceived as backwaters were going through profound transformations
at the turn of the twentieth century. Cracow had been Poland’s medieval capital,
but since the partitions, and especially after 1846 when it was incorporated into
Austrian Galicia, it had lost prominence. A Pole from Warsaw like Bolesław Prus
could make as much fun of “backward” Cracow as any Viennese wit.147 By the end of
the nineteenth century, however, the city was growing at an exponential rate. Like
Vienna, it had pulled down its fortifications and opened itself up to suburbs. An
influx of rural workers led to an explosion in population from 91,000 to 150,000
in the first decade of the twentieth century. As Nathaniel Wood writes, “strolling
the city streets, sipping coffee in cafés, riding the electric tram, and above all, read-
ing the boulevard press connected Cracovians to modern big-city culture.”148 These
new experiences challenged traditional conceptions of identity, usually conceived
in terms of the categories of peasant and noble, while making urbanites’ under-
standing of the still rural hinterland more difficult. The same could be said of other
cities in the region from Istanbul to Vienna. Budapest had grown even faster than
Cracow. In the quarter century to 1900 “its population had trebled and its build-
ings had doubled” according to John Lukács. The city could surprise unsuspecting
tourists, who would find “a modern city with first-class hotels, plate-glass windows,
electric tramcars, elegant men and women, [and] the largest Parliament building in
the world about to be completed.”149 Emperor Franz Joseph’s 1896 visit to Budapest
for the millennium celebrations of the Hungarian Kingdom was one of the first
royal ceremonies to be captured on film; by 1914, the city had an astonishing
159 cinemas, a figure that few others in the world could match. Even small provin-
cial towns in Hungary had a cinema.150
An important shift in the cultural life of East Central Europe took place in the
1890s and first decade of the twentieth century. As the institutions of national cul-
ture matured, writers and artists across the region experienced a greater degree
of creative freedom and, paradoxically, began to rebel against the nation-building
imperative in favor of a more cosmopolitan and individualistic orientation. Usually
described in terms of the advent of modernism in East Central Europe and associ-
ated with styles such as symbolism and decadence, this rebellion was marked by a
self-conscious Europeanness, by the desire to liberate art from the constraints of the
external environment, and by the insistence that art adhere only to laws internal to
itself.151 The artists of the fin de siècle called for art-for-art’s sake and also frequently
championed democratic and social reforms, which put them at odds with their
nations’ conservative establishments. While the turn to modernism in East Central
Europe aligned the cultural avant-garde with that in Western Europe, the region’s
modernism remains distinctive.
237
The 1895 “Manifesto of Czech Modernism,” signed by twelve young Czech artists
and writers, epitomizes the aspiration to aesthetic autonomy. Its authors resound-
ingly rejected the patriotic dogmas of nineteenth-century Czech culture in favor
of total artistic freedom. They called for an end to national chauvinism in Czech
political life and for cooperation with the Germans of Bohemia, while also demand-
ing social and political rights for women and workers. But by no means did they
renounce all national ideals. Rather, they maintained that the real route to national
art lay through the individual. “Be true to yourself,” they declared, “and you will be
Czech.”152 Artists and writers associated with the “Young Poland” movement of the
1890s likewise advocated art-for-art’s sake and experimented with a range of new
artistic styles. Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868–1927) is probably the best-known Polish
decadent writer, while Stanisław Wyspiański (1869–1907) is highly regarded for his
symbolist poetry and neo-Romantic dramas. Some commentators have pointed out,
however, that art-for-art’s sake was “virtually impossible to cultivate in a partitioned
country whose intellectual elite had always been in the forefront of the national
struggle.” Thus national concerns continued to dominate the art of the “Young
Poland” movement.153
These examples point to the utility of the distinctions drawn by Hungarian cultural
historian Péter Hanák between the inwardly oriented “garden” of Viennese modern-
ism and the public and political “workshop” variety more typical of Budapest (which
stands in for East Central Europe as a whole). Building on Carl Schorske’s thesis
that cultural life in fin-de-siècle Vienna was characterized by a retreat into the private
gardens of the self, Hanák argues that in contrast to Austria, the truly characteristic
space for Hungary was the “workshop,” that is, Budapest’s public spaces: clubs, cafés,
or newspaper offices. Far from withdrawing into private realms, Hungarian intellectu-
als and artists were deeply embedded in civic life.154 In Hanák’s terms, Young Poland
and the Czech modernist movement, as well as others in the region, fall into the
“workshop” camp.
Hanák’s approach is compelling if somewhat reductionistic. The Czech mod-
ernist movement, for example, included both the socially engaged signatories of
the Manifesto and a decadent current, led by Arnošt Procházka (1869–1925) and
Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic (1871–1951), who advocated a radical form of aesthetic with-
drawal. The art of the Czech decadents was undoubtedly more akin to the “ garden”
than the “workshop.”155 More importantly, the very notion of the “workshop” might
not capture what is truly distinctive about East Central European modernism.
According to Mary Gluck, Hanák’s model presupposes a rational and individuated
public sphere where artists allied with activists to effect progressive reform. In her
study of the poet Endre Ady (1877–1919), Gluck argues that it was precisely the
absence of such a public sphere in turn-of-the-century Hungary that made possible
Ady’s poetry and gave it such wide resonance. Rather than seeking to re-integrate
the elements of a differentiated modern existence, Hungarian artists such as Ady
“gave symbolic expression to the totality of a national culture that had not yet
separated into autonomous intellectual spheres.”156
When modernists such as Ady, or the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin
Brancusi (1876–1957), looked to the “primitive” for examples of pure art freed
from all non-aesthetic encumbrances, they did not locate it in the exotic, non-
European other. Rather, they found it within their own societies and, for this
238
reason, felt linked to it emotionally and personally. Through their exploration of

the “primitive” at home, they submerged themselves in a mythic collective expe-
rience, usually conceived in national terms.157 For Gluck, then, the uniqueness of
East Central European modernism derives from its combination of modern and
premodern elements, reflective of the region’s development.
Gluck’s approach applies not only to Ady or Brancusi, but also to some of the
region’s modern composers, such as Béla Bartók (1881–1945), George Enescu
(1881–1955), or Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), who drew on folk music and traditions.
Bartók in particular sought not merely to integrate folk themes into his compositions,
as many Romantic composers had done, but rather to uncover in folk melodies the
essential elements of music as such, which he saw as the seed from which modern
music would grow.158 Similarly, modernist architects in East Central Europe crafted
distinctive new styles by fusing vernacular architecture with modern design. Ödön
Lechner (1845–1914), the leading figure of the Hungarian Secessionist movement and
architect of some of Budapest’s most notable buildings, was particularly successful in
this regard.159 The Romanian Ion Mincu (1852–1912) and his students experimented
with Arts and Crafts ideas in the “neo-Romanian style” using elements of traditional
village design in urban and even public architecture.160 In the 1920s, the pioneering
Czech architects Josef Gočár (1880–1945) and Pavel Janák (1881–1956) constructed
numerous buildings in the rondocubist style, using folk elements extensively.161 This
type of creative appropriation of folk culture by modernist composers, poets, artists,
and architects was explicitly theorized in 1937 by the Romanian philosopher and poet
Lucian Blaga (1895–1961) who argued that the intact richness of the nation’s village
life was the necessary precondition for the flourishing of its high culture.162
For the most part, then, modernist writers and artists in the region were not alien-
ated from national and social life in the way that Schorske claims of their Viennese
counterparts. Even among those who, like the Czech decadents, professed such alien-
ation, their inward turn was based less on a feeling of exclusion from the nation than
on a demand for greater individual autonomy.163 Still Schorske’s model does seem
to apply to at least some groups in East Central Europe, above all to the German-
Jewish writers of turn-of-the-century Prague, such as Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and
his circle. Excluded from the Bohemian German community as Jews and from the
Czech community on account of their German orientation, Kafka and his friends
suffered from a profound sense of dislocation that filled them with anxiety about
the future. They lived as if on a small island, whose shores were constantly receding,
eroded by the nationalist currents swirling around them. Such terrifying insecurity,
on the other hand, opened up Kafka and his peers to new creative possibilities,
allowing them to articulate with unusual clarity the experience of a modernity that
insisted on stable forms of identity while constantly subverting them. According to
Scott Spector, their “in-betweeness” meant that for them “the constructedness of
selves was not intuited but experienced in a literal sense.”164 And yet, even as he high-
lights Kafka’s alienation, Spector rejects Schorske’s notion of a retreat from politics
into culture, arguing that in turn-of-the-century Prague all cultural activity – even
aesthetic withdrawal – had a political valence.165
All of this suggests that cultural life in turn-of-the-century East Central Europe
remained more holistic and less differentiated than in Western Europe or even
Vienna. The aesthetic sphere had not acquired the same degree of autonomy; it was
239
still closely tied to politics and morality. For many artists, this condition produced
a contradictory impulse. On the one hand, they wished to modernize their societ-
ies and free art from the constraints of national politics and traditional morality.
On the other hand, they lamented the loss of their culture’s “wholeness” and they
wished to recover it at all costs. Because the loss was experienced as direct and
relatively recent, the desire to recreate an integrated culture was felt intensely and
emotionally. But this condition could also have pernicious effects. One of the rea-
sons for the powerful appeal of communism and fascism to the region’s cultural
elite is that these ideologies promised each in its own way to resolve the contra-
diction between modernity and the recovery of a lost communal sensibility. This
proved to be a fateful bargain.
After World War I (1918–39)

Any discussion of East Central European culture in the interwar years must begin
with the immense changes to the region brought by World War I and the collapse of
the empires that dominated it. Upon the ruins of the Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian,
and German Empires were erected a series of new or radically reconfigured nation-
states that represented, in many cases, the fulfillment of the most cherished aspira-
tions of national leaders and groups. But for every dream realized, countless others
were crushed. Thus the establishment, revival, or dramatic expansion of certain
states left a legacy of bitterness and recrimination in its wake. And even among the
victors, as the exuberance of the immediate postwar period yielded to the chal-
lenges of governance, the new states left many longing for renewed transformation
to redeem what they perceived as unfinished or unworkable. It was not a stable time,
and it did not endure.
Tomáš Masaryk, the first president of the newly created Czechoslovakia, famously
described Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War I as a “laboratory built
atop a vast graveyard.”166 This phrase aptly captures the experimental nature of the
unprecedented project in nation-building embarked upon in 1918 and the exercise
in political and social reconstruction it entailed. It also calls attention to the break in
European history effected by the war, for the conflict left behind a graveyard not only
of men, but also of empires, social systems, and ideas.
In the sphere of culture, the break with the past was equally sharp, signaling the
turn to a new, more militant, ideologically-driven intellectual and artistic agenda.167
Indeed, this shift was experienced with particular potency in East Central Europe
because the sense of discontinuity with the past was so acute there.168 For the
“young generation” of the 1920s and 1930s the war was “a dividing line between
two worlds,” an absolute break in time and history necessitating revolutionary
solutions.169 While some members of this generation turned to the right, most oth-
ers gravitated to the left. Alongside attempts to nationalize culture, generational
and ideological conflict became a central feature of cultural life in East Central
Europe in the interwar years.
The turn to the right was most visible in Romania. Even though it was a clear
winner of post-World War I arrangements, seeing its territory and population more
than double, Romania’s “embarrassment of riches” concealed immense challenges.
The expanded state’s large minority populations were more urban, more schooled,
240
and more modern than the titular nationality.170 Minorities stood at nearly 30 percent
in the country as a whole; in the new territories the towns were largely non-Romanian.
Moreover, their inhabitants – urbanites identifying as Hungarians, Germans, Russians,
and, less often, Jews – dominated regional economic and cultural life. In order to
redress this imbalance, the Romanian state embarked on a program to “nationalize”
towns and cultural institutions. It expanded educational opportunities at all levels,
intent on training peasant youth for a role in public life, thus cultivating ethnically
Romanian elites to replace the “foreigners.”171 Secondary school and university
enrollments soared by ten and five times, respectively, from prewar levels.172
This enormous investment in education translated into higher literacy rates and
increased social mobility, especially through the expanding state bureaucracy.173 What
ensued, however, was “a protracted, bitter struggle between peasant and urbanite,
between village and town, between Romanian and foreigner” that fueled a national-
istic, xenophobic, anti-urban, and antisemitic discourse. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s
(1899–1938) Legionary Movement (also known as the Iron Guard) was one of the
chief beneficiaries of this campaign, which it echoed in a radicalized fashion. Indeed,
the movement was founded by disaffected students and graduates of Romania’s
postwar universities.174
Many of the leading intellectual figures of this cohort sympathized with or
joined the Legionary Movement. Most prominent among these was Mircea Eliade
(1907–86), the leader of “the new generation,” who went on to become a distin
guished historian of religion at the University of Chicago. But the roster also
includes the philosophers Emil Cioran (1911–95), Constantin Noica (1909–87), and
Mircea Vulcănescu (1904–52), the poets Radu Gyr (1905–75) and Stamatu Horia
(1912–89), the sociologist Ernest Bernea (1905–90), and others.175 They wished to
modernize Romania, while at the same time trying to recapture a collective sensibil-
ity based on peasant traditions and Eastern Orthodoxy that modernization seemed
to threaten. Imbued with the anti-rationalist spirit of the age, the intellectuals of
the young postwar generation persuaded themselves that Codreanu’s Movement
stood at the forefront of a “mystical revolution” that could restore the spiritual
nation. They loathed liberalism, democracy, capitalism, and “foreign” (i.e. Jewish)
influences on traditional life, and came to share Codreanu’s vision of an ethnically
pure Romanian community united in Christian and rural values. Some found much
to admire in Nazism not only because of Hitler’s ideas about race but also because
Hitler’s revolution appeared to be a model of improbable modernity. In 1934, Emil
Cioran wrote ecstatically from Berlin where he was studying, “There is no politician
in the world today who inspires my sympathy and admiration to a greater extent
than Hitler.”176
Other intellectuals, writers, and artists belonging to the same cohort, refused
Codreanu’s antisemitic, xenophobic politics. An important oppositional segment
belonged to the modernist and cosmopolitan avant-garde, many of whose members
came from Jewish or ethnically mixed backgrounds, or stemmed from newly annexed
Transylvania. Artists and literati such as Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), Eugène Ionesco
(1909–94), Janos Mattis-Teutsch (1884–1960), Ilarie Voronca (1903–46), Benjamin
Fondane (1898–1944), Victor Brauner (1903–66), and Marcel Janco (1895–1984)
vociferously opposed the rightward turn. Most eventually left the country for points
west, joined the communist movement, or both.177
241
The reconstituted Polish state faced many of the same challenges as Romania,
bringing together disparate regions from three empires, all with significant minor-
ity populations. About two-thirds of the population were ethnic Poles, with the
rest Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians, and Germans. As in Romania, some minorities
were overrepresented in urban areas. Warsaw, Lódz, and Lwów, for example, were
all about one-third Jewish. Despite significant industrial development in the nine-
teenth century, Polish society remained overwhelmingly rural and most peasants were
poor.178 But the comparison with Romania extends only so far. Poland was home to
a self-confident intellectual and artistic elite convinced of the preeminence of Polish
culture and of its gravitational allure. Many of Poland’s post-World War I cultural
generation embraced the possibilities of the future, even if they were uncertain about
what it might bring. They turned mainly leftward, finding in communism the promise
of worldly salvation.
In Poland, the re-establishment of the state seemed to loosen rather than deepen
the patriotic commitments of the nation’s writers, liberating them to pursue their
craft without the constraints that the patriotic imperative had previously imposed. If
in partitioned Poland it had been impossible to truly segregate the demands of art
from those of political life, now it seemed as if such autonomy was finally attainable.
“Poetry, which had had to serve a cause for so long in Poland,” wrote Czesław Miłosz,
“could at last recover its lightheartedness and could perform a spontaneous dance
without recourse to compulsive justifications.”179 In the words of the young poet Jan
Lechón (1899–1956): “And in the spring let me see spring, not Poland.”180
Lechón was a member of an influential set of young poets grouped around the
review Skamander, which began in 1920. While fairly conservative stylistically, they
represented an important shift in Polish literary life not only in their commitment
to aesthetic autonomy but also in their celebration of contemporary life. Whereas
prevailing poetic tradition emphasized rural motifs and the natural world, they
turned their gaze to urban themes in the present tense. “We love the present with a
strong first love,” they wrote in their founding manifesto. “We are and we want to be
its children.”181 Some of interwar Poland’s most influential literateurs belonged to
Skamander, including Julian Tuwim (1894–1953), Jarosław Iwaszkiewcz (1894–1980),
Antoni Słominski (1895–1976), and Kazimierz Wierzyński (1894–1969). If in the
1920s, they had deliberately withdrawn from the politics of national life, by the 1930s
it became difficult to maintain their aloofness. With the rise of Hitler in Germany
and the shift of Polish politics to the right, they too became increasingly engaged in
social and political debates, mainly on the left.182 The fact that some of Skamander’s
members were Jewish (Tuwim and Słominski) contributed to this reorientation.
The slightly younger cohort of Polish literati of which Aleksander Wat (1900–67)
was a leading figure reacted differently to Polish independence at the end of the
war. While Skamander’s response was one of joy at the return to a life “where poets
could exist and write normally, fulfill the normal function of the poet,” Wat’s gen-
eration celebrated the same freedom with the transgressive joy of “fundamental
collapse,” the frisson that comes from destruction coupled with the expectation of
renewal. “We had a chasm in front of us, ruins,” explained Wat. And yet the wreck-
age of empires and old values was “cause for spiritual joy because, here, precisely,
something new could be built.” It was in the new states of East Central Europe,
that laboratory atop the graveyard of World War I, that this transgressive sensibility
242
assumed its paradigmatic form. “There was now room for everything,” wrote Wat,
“everything was doable.”183
This attitude ultimately led Wat and others of his artistic generation, such as
Władysław Broniewski (1897–1962), Bruno Jasieński (1901–38), Stanisław Stande
(1897–1937), Anatol Stern (1899–1968), and Witold Wandurski (1891–1934), to com-
munism. Their shattering of traditional forms did not stop at poetry: they wished to
“break things,” to tear down all the remnants of the old world. But once it was gone,
they found themselves unable to live within the vacuum of values that ensued. To
Wat and his peers there seemed to be “only one alternative, only one global answer
to negation: communism.” “I threw myself into the only faith that existed then,” Wat
confessed.184 Marci Shore sums up his predicament:
At a moment of historical optimism and faith in national self-determination,

the young avant-gardists were deeply persuaded that life could not con-
tinue as it had . . . Ultimately their nihilism proved unbearable, their belief
in radical contingency existentially unsustainable. Wat came to see his ina-
bility to endure nihilism as the fatal weakness that propelled him toward
communism.185
It was quite literally a fatal encounter: nearly all the members of the Polish avant-
garde and many of Poland’s communists in exile in the Soviet Union were purged,
arrested, and interned in Soviet prisons and labor camps in the 1930s and 1940s. Most
never returned.
As in Poland, the avant-garde in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Czechoslovakia,
and elsewhere turned overwhelmingly to the left in the 1920s and 1930s.186 In Hungary,
those who came together around Lajos Kassák’s journal Ma committed themselves to
revolutionary socialism and enthusiastically supported Béla Kun’s short-lived Soviet
Republic, as did György Lukács. But whereas Lukács became the cultural commissar
of the new regime, Kassák chafed at the Communist Party’s demands and restrictions,
leading to a break between him and Kun. For his part, Kun disparaged Ma as “a prod-
uct of bourgeois decadence” and banned it in the summer of 1919.187 In Yugoslavia,
the journals Zenit and Tank, edited by Ljubomir Micić and Ferdo Delak, respectively,
linked avant-garde artists in Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Zagreb to their counterparts all
across Europe. Accused by the Yugoslav authorities of propagating communism, Zenit
was banned in 1926.188
The most influential avant-garde group in East Central Europe was perhaps
Devětsil in Czechoslovakia. Some of its best-known members include Karel Teige
(1900–51), the writers Jaroslav Seifert (1901–86) and Vítězslav Nezval (1900–58),
the painters Jindřich Štyrský (1899–1942) and Toyen (1902–80), and the composer
Miroslav Ponc (1902–76). Founded in 1920, Devětsil initially rejected “technical
civilization” and the machine aesthetic favored by cubists and futurists, but it soon
embraced these as the most characteristic forms of modern life. It moved through
different phases, including proletarian art, constructivism, poetism, and surrealism
before dissolving in 1931.189
Like the artists of the Polish avant-garde, those of Devětsil viewed the slaughter
of World War I as evidence of the old world’s corruption; they longed for a new sys-
tem of belief to restore “wholeness” to the world. In communism, they thought they
243
found what they were looking for. This desire also manifested itself in Devětsil artists’
attempt to dissolve the boundaries between art and life. They wished to recreate a
culture in which art was an integral part of everyday life and not a special sphere that
served only to satisfy the unsatisfactory in bourgeois life. They elevated the utilitarian
products of industrial civilization to the status of art, eliminating the gap between
high and low art, and celebrated kitsch and popular culture.190 In its most radical
variant, poetism, this program meant re-making life from a basis in art, or, as Nezval
put it, “apprehending the world as a poem.”191 Poetism was the condition of life expe-
rienced as art, of life literally become a poem. And this, they believed, was the way life
would be lived after the revolution.
Devětsil’s political and aesthetic goals were strongly challenged by the slightly
older modernist artists grouped around the writer Karel Čapek (1890–1938), and
the conflict between the two generational groups forms a central feature of the cul-
tural life in interwar Czechoslovakia.192 Best known as the author of the 1920 play
R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), in which he introduced the word “robot,” and the
1936 novel War with the Newts, an apocalyptic satire of Europe in the age of dicta-
torship, Čapek shared the avant-garde’s desire to broaden the domain of art. But
when Devětsil declared the equivalence of art and life and the purpose of art to
revolutionize the world, Čapek and his associates fiercely defended art’s autonomy
and warned that the collapse of art into life would only destroy the former without
transforming the latter.193 In contrast to Devětsil’s quest for “wholeness,” they argued
that fragmentation and differentiation was the condition of modern life. The Čapek
generation’s distinctly liberal modernism emphasized pluralism and championed
progressive reform rather than revolution.194
The ideological turmoil and polarization of cultural life in the interwar years was
matched only by efforts to nationalize it. Just as the Romanian state desired to make
the country’s urban centers as well as cultural and educational institutions more
Romanian, so too every new or reconfigured state in the region strove to uphold the
status and privilege of its dominant national group and diminish that of its minori-
ties, with an eye to guiding cultural production in a national direction. Schools and
universities were one of the major sites of nationalization campaigns. The Polish state
worked mightily to overcome the legacy of partition and unify its formerly German,
Russian, and Habsburg educational systems. It also tried to use the school system
as a vehicle for “polonizing” its minority populations, especially Ukrainians and
Belarussians. Only with great reluctance did the state agree to support schooling in
the language of these populations, despite the assurances of the Minorities Treaty.195
Lithuania, in contrast, sought to undo the long legacy of Polish cultural hegemony.196
The Czechoslovak state similarly struggled to transform the Magyarized school system
in Slovakia. Making it more Slovak, however, involved first making it more Czech:
thousands of Czech-speaking teachers were sent to Slovakia in 1919–21 to replace
their Magyar-speaking counterparts.197 Across the region, universities were nation-
alized, and the language of instruction altered to accommodate the requirements
of newly dominant national groups. Hungarian and German faculties and students
moved to newly founded universities bearing old names, such as the Royal University
of Koloszvár in Szeged.198
Nationalization had democratizing effects, leading to educational opportunities
for groups that had long been denied these. In the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs,
244
Croats, and Slovenes, for example, a modern university was established in Ljubljana
in 1919, while a law school opened in Subotica, a school of pharmacy in Skopje, and a
forestry faculty in Sarajevo.199 But nationalization also led to exclusions. In Hungary,
a numerus clausus, or quota system, was established in 1920 to limit the number of
Jews studying at universities. Although not strictly enforced, it was a sign of how dras-
tically the situation had changed since the prewar years when Hungarian elites had
embraced Jews as Magyarizers and economic modernizers. The shift in attitude can be
traced in part to resentment at the prominent role of Jews in the short-lived Bolshevik
government of Béla Kun (Kun himself and 20 of his 26 ministers and vice-ministers
were of Jewish origin), but it also speaks to the transformation of Hungary after 1918
from an imperial to a national state.200 In the more or less homogeneous “Trianon
Hungary,” Jews no longer played any useful nationalizing role; instead they became
the outsiders par excellence, regardless of their Magyar patriotism.
Poland similarly attempted to implement a numerus clausus for Jewish university
students in 1923. Although the effort failed, by the mid-1930s “ghetto benches” were
introduced to segregate Jews in institutions of higher learning. Unsurprisingly, the
number of Jewish students declined by about 70 percent.201 And yet, this period was
also one of flourishing Jewish national culture based mainly on Yiddish. The unifica-
tion of Congress Poland with Galicia and the eastern borderlands prompted an influx
of Yiddish-speaking “Litvaks,” Lithuanian-Belorussian Jews, to Warsaw and other large
Polish cities, transforming their cultural life. Yiddish journalism, theater, cabaret, and
literature reached its apogee in interwar Poland, extending even into avant-garde
magazines.202 Despite the many ominous developments for Jews in Poland in the
1920s and 30s, the period is sometimes recalled as a golden age. Compared to what
came after, it was.
The militarization of culture (1938–45)

If war is the “continuation of politics by other means,” then World War II ushered in
the wholesale politicization of culture in East Central Europe, and this shift endured
long after the fighting ended. The war’s impact on cultural life was as great as in poli-
tics or economics. While Jan Gross and Bradley Abrams have written about the origins
of the communist revolution in the practices and structural transformations of the
war, we focus on the wartime cultural transformation that facilitated the revolution.203
During the war the Germans were crusading for a New Order, and as occupiers
they employed propaganda profusely, recognizing it as “an essential means of war
and equal to the armed struggle.”204 Press, literature, and art were forced into the
occupiers’ service in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Greece; cultural life was also tightly
controlled in the countries that joined the Axis. Naturally, cultural propaganda
played a part in the patriotic and leftist Resistance to the Axis as well. Intellectuals,
artists, journalists, writers, musicians, students, professors, and filmmakers all served
political causes either openly and opportunistically or clandestinely and at great risk.
Politics was immediate and inescapable for all those involved with culture.
The Nazis published periodicals in German and local languages to keep up the
morale of their soldiers and to shape opinion in the territories they conquered, where
they closed down autonomous media and established censorship. German radio
transmitters took over Polish airwaves within the first weeks of the invasion in 1939.
245
Listening to foreign broadcasts was prohibited, and radio equipment was confiscated
from racially or politically suspect populations.205 The official Polish language press
in Nazi-occupied Poland was called by those in the Resistance the “reptile press,” akin
to “serpents who treacherously slip into the cloak of the Polish language in order to
poison the organism of the Polish people. The language is Polish but the brain and
the guiding hand are German.”206
In Greece, the Nazi-controlled press published articles about “supposed Jewish
crimes against the Orthodox Greeks,” stirring up antisemitism prior to deporting
entire Jewish communities.207 Such publications were organized by the local German
propaganda office with the help of zealous Greek nationalists seizing the opportunity
to eliminate any traces of the Ottoman past – of which the Jews were a remnant and a
reminder.208 In turn, the Greek National Liberation Front (EAM) used radio broad-
casts, graffiti, and pamphlets to mobilize against the Italian and German military on
Greek soil. Symbolic and deeply emotional moments linked to religion, tradition, and
literature could catalyze patriotic courage and lead to political action. The funeral
of the poet Kostas Palamas on February 28, 1943, was such an occasion, albeit amid
an upsurge of student demonstrations in Athens. In the presence of Axis officials
and German guards, a large crowd of mourners heard stirring oratory in memory of
the deceased poet who had once written “monumental historical epics of national
liberation.” They responded by singing the Greek national anthem with its obvious
symbolism. A week later massive demonstrations against a “civil mobilization” plan
brought the city to a standstill and scuttled the plan.209
The war visited massive destruction and terror on East Central Europe, but the
human and material damage was unevenly wrought, most brutal in Poland which was
occupied by both Nazis and Soviets from September 1939, and where Europe’s largest
Jewish population outside the USSR lived. Despite the obvious ideological differences
between Poland’s two occupiers, both agreed on suppressing the Polish intelligentsia
which they viewed as essential to any attempt at national resurgence. Intellectuals
were specifically targeted by both occupation regimes. In an October 2, 1940, speech,
Hitler announced: “For Poles there must be only one master, the German. For this
reason, all members of the Polish intelligentsia are to be killed.”210
For their part, Soviet authorities murdered in the spring and summer of 1940
some 22,000 Polish officers, reserve officers, policemen, and civilians in the newly
occupied Polish borderlands. Many of them were from the intelligentsia.211 The Katyn
Forest Massacre, as this episode came to be known, was preceded by mutual hostility
between the invading Red Army and the officers they took prisoner. Polish POWs
recounted being treated as “enemies of the people” even though only three percent
of them were aristocrats. Most had higher degrees and worked as journalists, poets,
professors, teachers, priests, engineers, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, and actors.212
The Czechoslovak Republic had been dismembered before Poland, following
the September 1938 Munich agreement. Karel Čapek died in December 1938 but
the climate of fear prevented a proper commemoration.213 The Nazi-controlled
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was established in March 1939 as an independ-
ent Slovakia, in reality a Nazi puppet state, was also declared. Overall the Czechs
enjoyed a far milder occupation regime than the Poles, though both Polish and
Czech universities were closed in November 1939 for the duration of the war.
(German language higher education went on in the Protectorate, and Czechs deemed
246
worthy of German citizenship could attend.) In other ways, however, the two areas
fared differently, in accord with the Nazis’ estimation of the nations’ racial value.
About half the Czech population was slated for Germanization.214 In contrast, Poles
(and the east-Slavs in Poland’s eastern borderlands) were viewed as a reservoir of phys-
ical labor for the Reich economy. Nazis limited their schooling to primary grades and
the school day to just two hours. Moreover, one-third of Poland’s university profes-
sors perished, a far greater proportion than casualties in the general population. The
war was a catastrophe for Polish culture since the country suffered the “deculturation
policies” of both Nazis and Soviets. Yet, the brutality of the occupation also provoked
fierce resistance including in cultural and educational life. The Polish underground
state included a Department of Education and Culture. Remarkably, in the midst
of the occupation, 6,300 students received underground university-level instruction.
Another 100,000 benefited from underground high school instruction. According to
John Connelly, “the war was experienced as a heroic struggle for culture” something
that Poles had already gone through during the nineteenth century.215
In states allied with the Axis such as Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, or in
Slovakia and Croatia, established in 1939 and 1941, respectively, under Axis aus-
pices, or in Greece or Serbia where quisling regimes were installed, wartime cultural
policies fell largely to local politicians. Some used the opportunity to implement
their own agendas. In Romania from 1938 to 1945 measures were taken to exclude
Jews and political undesirables from state high schools, universities, and the profes-
sions. A Jewish College opened in 1941 in Bucharest to provide for the education
of Jewish youth excluded from state institutions. The Baraşeum Jewish Theater
provided Jewish playwrights, musicians, actors, dancers, designers, and directors
barred from other venues with a stage and an eager audience. The shows had to be
in Romanian but specifically not authored by racially true Romanians.216
In the Independent State of Croatia, an Axis client state established in April 1941
under Ante Pavelić’s Ustasha Party, racial definitions were left slippery, perhaps on
purpose, to allow for nepotism. Anti-Serb, anti-Roma and anti-Jewish policies were
generally implemented with extreme brutality, if less so in Sarajevo. Forced con-
version from Orthodoxy to Catholicism was one of the strategies the Ustasha used
toward Serbs, although Serb intellectuals were barred from conversion because they
“had developed too great a Serbian consciousness.” A Croatian Orthodox Church
was established; this allowed more Serbs to remain in the public sphere in Sarajevo
where they represented two-thirds of the school teachers and one-quarter of civil serv-
ants. Eliminating them would have risked chaos. The purification of the language of
Serbian influence also met with local resistance, as people insisted on using Sarajevan
idioms rather than the newly purified language.217
The Nazis branded modernist art “degenerate.” As they swept to power in Germany
and across Europe, artists who did not conform were forbidden from practicing, and
the Jews among them were in the greatest danger. Some Romanian-born Jewish lit-
erati and artists such as Tristan Tzara, Benjamin Fondane, and Victor Brauner had
settled in France in the previous decades. In 1940 Tzara and Brauner went into hiding
in the Vichy zone. While Tzara joined the French Resistance, Fondane remained in
Paris and was deported. He died at Auschwitz. The Villa Air Bel, on a grand property
in decline near Marseille, became a center for avant-garde exiles waiting to escape
to safer lands. A transit colony for artists and intellectuals under the protection of
247
the American Emergency Rescue Committee, the Villa became a venue for creative
collaborations, underground exhibits, and pastimes for people confronting arrest,
camps, distant journeys, and possible death.218
Those under Nazi occupation were prohibited from publishing anything that was
not Nazi-approved. Yet underground intellectual activity flourished. In Warsaw and
elsewhere books and periodicals were published clandestinely, secret poetry readings
were held, and actors performed in plays staged in private homes or monasteries.
Brutal shortages favored poetry for its brevity but journals featuring anti-Nazi articles
were also published using typewriters and primitive copy machines. Actors deemed
to collaborate with the occupiers were shot by the resistance.219 Czesław Miłosz and a
few others confronted the relative indifference of many Poles, who were themselves
victims of the Nazis, toward the more brutal and certain destruction of their Jewish
co-nationals with poems such as “Campo dei Fiori” and “A Poor Christian Looks at
the Ghetto” from 1943 when the Warsaw Jewish ghetto was leveled and its inhabitants
deported or killed.220
Miłosz partook of a vibrant underground cultural life possible in the context of
a vigorous resistance movement, but his experience was exceptional. The poetry
written in 1940s Romania in German by Bukovina-born Paul Celan (b. Antschel)
evokes that darkest of times, the Jewish poet struggling alone, betrayed by his mother
tongue, having irrevocably left behind the multilingual Austrian civilization of his
native region.221 Yet cultural life continued even in the ghettoes and camps where
undesirable populations were segregated, worked to death, experimented on, or
simply murdered. The Roma interned by the Nazis and the Ustasha, as well as by
the Hungarian and Romanian regimes, wrote folk songs and poetry about their
experience.222 Jewish resistance manifested itself not only in the dramatic Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising, but also in underground education, libraries, theaters, and cabarets.
Jewish theatres performing in Yiddish sprang up in the camps run by the Antonescu
government in Transnistria where Romanian Jews and Roma from Bukovina,
Bessarabia, and Moldova were deported.223 The camp at Terezín, north of Prague,
had perhaps the most remarkable cultural life of all, including musical recitals, the-
atrical performances, operas, cabarets, poetry readings, and lectures. One children’s
opera, Brundibár, ran for 50 performances. But all this was a play within a play. The
camp authorities permitted these events because Terezín was the Nazis’ model camp,
the Potemkin Village shown to international inspectors. Brundibár was even filmed
for use in a propaganda film, The Führer Gives the Jews a Town as a Gift. In reality,
Terezín was only a way station to more sinister destinations.224
Cultural activity in the camps was double-edged. While music sometimes served
as a medium of resistance, the Nazis also wielded it as an instrument of torture.
Prisoners were forced to sing antisemitic songs while working or marching at unbear-
able speed, to play loud instruments, or sing arias when others were beaten.225 It is
to underground cultural activity that we owe much of the historical knowledge about
life during what has come to be known as the Holocaust. Some victims recorded their
brutally circumscribed lives and the crimes to which they were subjected. While indi-
viduals kept diaries, historian Emanuel Ringelblum organized a group in the Warsaw
Ghetto to document collectively what seemed to be the last years of Polish Jewry.
Oyneg Shabes worked diligently to gather information and buried the archives in
milk cans and metal boxes in the ground. Some of them survived.226
248
An overwhelming politicization of culture, intellectual life, and literary and artistic

production were among the long-term results of the war. On the one hand, many
avant-garde artists and writers throughout the region who had begun by appealing to
a sophisticated elite, joined anti-fascist movements under the pressure of the political
situation in the 1930s. The war subordinated such activism to communist parties that
were illegal and operated under strict discipline. The Romanian avant-garde writer
and editor Saşa Pană noted that the entire non-conformist group around the revue
unu (1928–32) found themselves “enrolled” during the Antonescu years “in a disci-
plined way in the underground struggle led by our communist party.” But even Jews
with scant sympathies for the left before the war embraced the Soviets as anti-Nazis,
though certainly not all joined the Party.227 On the other hand, a number of intel-
lectuals and cultural figures collaborated with pro-Axis regimes and Nazi occupation
forces and profited from those opportunities. Pro-fascist declarations could assure
university posts, and intellectuals with fascist credentials received ministerial and
diplomatic positions. Many members of Romania’s new generation received leading
posts in the country’s wartime governments. Mircea Eliade, for example, was impris-
oned in 1938 when King Carol surpressed the Iron Guard. But after his release in
April 1940, Eliade served as Romania’s cultural secretary in London and continued
in diplomacy in Lisbon until August 1944. Other intellectuals of the new generation
also received leading posts in Romania’s wartime governments.228 To some, the war
was also a boon.
Landscape after battle: culture behind the Curtain,

culture in exile (1945–90)
In the areas of the greatest human and material destruction in East Central Europe,
the defeat of the Axis was warmly welcomed. Those victimized by the Nazis or by their
collaborators were elated. In Lublin and in many other Polish cities “people cried on
the streets and strangers embraced.”229 And yet, liberation by the Red Army was an
ambiguous gift, not only for Poles. Warsaw lay in ruins, having risen up in the sum-
mer of 1944, and Stalin was in some measure to blame. Territories that the Soviets
had taken in 1939–40, then lost to Hitler in 1941, now became Soviet again. Within
a few years of the war’s end, the countries to the west of the Soviet border as far as
East Germany became part of a sprawling empire with cultural policies and models
emanating from Moscow.
The cultural sphere, like everything else, had been transformed profoundly by the
war. First, the ethnic and linguistic diversity of many interwar states had been ren-
dered far more homogeneous. Second, during the war culture had been ruthlessly
instrumentalized. Artists and intellectuals who had already encountered anti-cosmo-
politan campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s had learned to bend their art, writing, and
ideas to those in power. And yet, prior to the era of Soviet control, high culture in
East Central Europe had been well integrated with European and global networks.
Even nationalist intellectuals maintained contacts with likeminded foreigners and
traveled the world. The Cold War severed scholars, writers, and artists from Western
colleagues and audiences while subjecting them to overwhelming Soviet and Russian
influence. Artists had to adjust their style and subject matter accordingly, losing both
international visibility and former collaborators. Scholars were rarely allowed to
249
travel to conferences in “the West” and their foreign correspondence was surveilled.
The Rockefeller Foundation, which had sponsored research in the region, now lost
contact with the scientists it had supported, leading some of them to “defect” to the
West. György Péteri has used the term Gleichschaltung – the process of subordinating
independent institutions to the Nazi regime after 1933 – to describe by analogy the
Sovietization of socialist academic institutions during the Stalinist period.230
As intellectuals emerged from wartime hiding or exile, they found “communism in
power, encroaching Stalinism, and socialist realism,” both in the newly annexed Soviet
territories and in the independent peoples’ democracies to the west.231 In response,
many writers and artists chose exile again. In 1945 Paul Celan left his beloved home-
town, by then Cernăuţi, for Bucharest. There, he found work translating Chekhov,
Lermontov, and Turgenev for the new publishing house Cartea rusă (The Russian
Book). In 1947, as Romanian communists consolidated their power, Celan contin-
ued on to Vienna, eventually settling in Paris in 1948.232 Jerzy Giedroyc, head of the
Propaganda Office of the Polish Army under General Anders, established the Instytut
Literacki (Literary Institute) in Rome in 1946; it soon moved to Paris, from where
the influential monthly Kultura was published alongside the book series Biblioteka
“Kultury,” and later, the historical quarterly Zeszyty Historyczne (Historical Notebooks).
Hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers and their families also remained abroad,
providing the initial audience for Giedroyc’s enterprise.233 Mircea Eliade and Emil
Cioran, also remained in Paris, re-inventing themselves as apolitical men of letters,
and succeeding in erasing their fascist political sympathies from the record. Even left-
ists such as Eugène Ionesco and Victor Brauner became émigrés, whose Romanian
origins were rarely remembered. Both Ionesco and Cioran wrote only in French
after the war. Cioran became celebrated as “one of the greatest stylists of the French
language,” while Ionesco stood at the center of the French Theater of the Absurd.
Monica Lovinescu, a Romanian literary critic, settled in Paris in 1947. From 1961 she
reached wide Romanian audiences through her Radio Free Europe broadcasts.234
Exile would remain a solution for waves of writers, directors, musicians, academics,
and artists from all the countries behind the Iron Curtain giving East European com-
munist-era culture a dual existence, at home and abroad, from the end of the war
until the fall of communism.235
For intellectuals and artists who “stayed” in the mid-1940s, these were exciting but
dangerous times. In Belgrade, functionaries, actors, writers, and artists labeled col-
laborators were executed in November 1944; these included Svetislav Stefanović, the
president of the Serbian Literary Guild, and the painter Branko Popović. To some
observers, communist and Gestapo tactics seemed hard to distinguish. It took nim-
bleness to navigate the choppy waters of political transition. The Serbian surrealist
writer Marko Ristić, who had spent the war in a spa town, saved his skin again by
demanding the “merciless destruction” of traitors; his stance brought him an ambas-
sadorship to Paris.236 In Poland, Henryk Józewski and his highly cultured anti-Soviet
associates were persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured. “Terror and culture were
intimately connected in Stalinist Poland,” writes Timothy Snyder, pointing to Jakub
Berman’s double duties on the Politburo – security and culture. In Romania, the
pro-Iron Guard philosopher Constantin Noica was committed to house arrest in 1948
and imprisoned a decade later. Many Romanian intellectuals were tried for fascist
leanings or, after 1948, Titoism and spying for imperialist powers.237
250
Yet during this early postwar period, communists, not yet fully in power, were
trying to gain local popularity, and they prized intellectual allies who might bring
others to the side of communism. In Romania and elsewhere, art, literature, and
the literary press flourished after the war before the crackdown in the late 1940s.238
Even after Communist regimes came fully into their own, they made room for
non-communist writers and for the classical and folk literature of their nations. It
was important to connect a new communist literature and art to the older familiar
canon. In Yugoslavia, for example, the communist poet and critic Radovan Zogović
explained that writers might be acceptable if their oeuvre linked “to the realistic
and revolutionary-romantic literary tradition, to the national-liberation struggles of
our peoples before the First World War, . . . to our folklore, etc.”239 The Yugoslav
government certainly needed non-communist writers given the dearth of com-
munist ones. The novelist Ivo Andrić, who had been ambassador to Germany in
1941, but who refused to work with the German occupation later in the war, was
acceptable even though his novels were not “Stalinist boilerplate.” At least part of
the older literary canon was “co-opted.” Zogović reinterpreted the Prince Bishop
of Montenegro, Petar Petrović Njegoš’s verse play The Mountain Wreath (1847), as
depicting Montenegrins’ embryonic class and anti-imperialist struggle against feudal
Ottoman domination and “foreign feudalists,” even though the play dealt with a
possible early eighteenth-century massacre of Slavic converts to Islam. In the visual
arts as well, Yugoslav communists rejected impressionism, reaching back to Serbia’s
Romantic national revival period for acceptable precedents.240
Throughout the region, Jewish artists, musicians, and intellectuals of the prewar
avant-garde – guaranteed not to have collaborated with fascist occupiers or pro-
Axis regimes – were reintegrated into cultural life and even pushed to the front of
departments, newspapers, and editorial boards. However, as communist censorship
hardened, they were not always deemed suitable, nor were they always interested in
leadership. The Polish poet Aleksander Wat retreated from cultural life rather than
accept Stalinism.241 For writers in particular relinquishing their community of lan-
guage was a solution of last resort. Czesław Miłosz became postwar Poland’s cultural
attaché in Washington and then Paris, hoping that Polish Communism would “not
be a copy of the Russian system.” However, he chose exile when confronted with the
obligatory new style, Socialist Realism.242
Forged in the 1930s by Stalin’s cultural lieutenant Andrei Zhdanov to bring litera-
ture and art to heel during the first Five-Year Plan, Socialist Realism had a ferocious
second wind in the postwar period when it reached the recently added territories of
the USSR and the new People’s Democracies. Writers here had to become “engineers
of human souls,” fully engaged in the building of socialism and using the heroic
style that disallowed pessimism and nuance.243 The “Zhdanovshchina” campaign that
began in 1946 aimed first to discipline Soviet literati who had experienced some-
thing of a reprieve during the war.244 In the new satellite states, cultural institutions
had to follow the Communist Party, often advised by Moscow, to the private dismay
of much of the cultural elite which had looked West and considered Soviet culture
inferior.
However, many of the literary intelligentsia, such as the young Czechs Milan
Kundera and Ludvík Vaculík, but also Miłosz, were attracted to communism.245 It
filled the void of meaning left by the war, and communist leaders, unlike prewar
251
politicians, took writers seriously, even giving them an exalted role, so long as they
worked with the Party, forged propaganda, instructed the masses, and wrote ener-
getically and positively. Young militant poets reciprocated writing a “genre of love
poetry” to the Party and its leaders.246 The pill of Murti-Bing was Miłosz’s metaphor
(borrowed from Ignacy Witkiewicz’s 1932 Insatiability) to describe how postwar intel-
lectuals renounced skepticism and embraced the “New Faith” of Marxism-Leninism.
Abandoning the typical alienation of their class under capitalism, they rushed to pen
“affirmative” prose and heroic poetry that cheered the construction of socialism; they
“composed marches and odes”; they painted “socially useful pictures” and sculpted
the statues of communist leaders. They were engaged, in a word, in the creation of
agitational and propaganda art, or agitprop.247
Even those who did not subscribe to the New Faith could act in its spirit to gain
the benefits extended to cultural workers, and these could be considerable. Artists
and writers were well paid and enjoyed a privileged existence that included prime
housing, special cafeterias, country retreats, free studios, and subsidized loans, as well
as prestigious and well-funded prizes. The status of “state artist” became the highest
honor cultural personalities could achieve – what better way to demonstrate the new
relationship between art and politics?248
Party policies and rituals enforcing conformity were implemented throughout
the new Soviet satellites in art and literature, with varied success. After the com-
munist coup of February 1948, abstraction, an important element in the interwar
Czechoslovak artistic vocabulary, was condemned as “bourgeois formalism.” The com-
munist leader Klement Gottwald urged artists and intellectuals to make their work
accessible and to accept communist leadership in nationalizing and popularizing
high culture. In return he promised that “in the people’s democracy, culture . . . will
never be a Cinderella.”249 In Yugoslavia, Radovan Zogović lectured painters on
Socialist Realist style soon after liberation. A young Miodrag Popović thought that
visual artists were being asked to copy images from the Third Reich magazine Signal
“and merely change the hats – in place of the helmet with the swastika, we should put
a cap with the five-pointed star!” Popović and others spent the summer of 1947 on the
Dalmatian coast, away from the overcrowded Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. They
became known as “the Zadar group,” and there they painted en plein air “mak[ing]
no attempt to follow the dictates of socialist realism.” The Academy expelled them
on their return to Belgrade.250
Once the popular front coalitions were replaced in 1947–49 by fully Communist
regimes, they established a monopoly over culture, expropriating privately owned
establishments, such as theaters, publishing houses, printing presses, periodicals,
and galleries. The Theater of Satire in Prague, for example, did not survive past
1949 even though it “staged critiques of the contemporary scene,” as it lacked the
“official optimism decreed by the Communist Party.”251 The unions of writers, musi-
cians, actors, and artists modeled on those in the Soviet Union, and new literary and
cultural publications became instruments in the control of cultural production and
dissemination.252 They generally rose from the ashes of pre-existing professional soci-
eties and now excluded members considered collaborators. Socialist writers’ unions
were founded with international fanfare in the presence of highly placed guests from
the Soviet Union and other Soviet bloc states.253 The same held true for the national
academies and research institutes, which received new names and were reorganized
252
for more effective control. Communist Party cadres took over media, publishing, and
educational institutions and ministries, insuring the coordination of state, party, and
guild policies. New institutions for training cadres were established.254
Given the lack of trust in bourgeois experts, upward mobility could be both
rapid and risky for communist intellectuals. Brilliant careers were made – and
unmade – in the 1940s and 1950s. Those versed in law, economics, or political
economy could now, for the first time, reach the highest levels of government as
they replaced bourgeois ministers and functionaries. The lawyer Rudolf Margolius
was ordered by the Communist Party to join the Ministry of Foreign Trade in
Czechoslovakia, while the political economist, philosopher and long-time commu-
nist, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, was appointed Minister of Justice in Romania. Both were
sophisticated, well-read, cosmopolitan, and non-doctrinaire; Pătrăşcanu also had
a successful academic career after the war. Both were arrested, investigated, con-
victed in Stalinist-style trials and executed. Many communist intellectuals involved
in politics followed such tragic trajectories.255
Aside from deciding which personalities to embrace and which to demote or liqui-
date, postwar Communist regimes confronted issues such as high rates of illiteracy in
some countries, and a dearth of communist intellectuals and creative workers needed
to construct and reconstruct society ideologically, socially, and politically as well as lit-
erally in terms of infrastructure, housing, and industry. One way to accomplish these
goals was to expand schools and universities. These would educate youth, build loy-
alty to the party-state, and graduate intellectual and professional cadres. A total of 141
new institutions of higher learning were opened in the Soviet bloc countries outside
Soviet borders between 1944 and 1989, compared to just 31 in the period between
1918 and 1943. At the same time literacy campaigns were launched, and schools were
opened at rates unseen before. The number of libraries, festivals, cinemas, and the-
atres grew, giving writers, directors, actors, and filmmakers, huge new audiences.256
Books, along with tickets to live performances, were subsidized and affordable. In
many respects, the products of high cultural life were more widely available than in
the West and certainly more accessible.257
The enormous investment in culture and education was accompanied by
Sovietization. Czechoslovak students established a virtual “studentocracy” dismiss-
ing faculty who failed to embrace communism, and practically ran the universities.258
In Poland, where communism had far less support, faculty reopened the universi-
ties with their moral capital intact. When the government tried to purge them,
introduce censorship, and copy Soviet models, it provoked resistance.259 In East
Germany, however, the thoroughly Nazified professoriate was purged; between
denazification and the brain-drain of those fleeing West, universities operated
in 1947 with only 17.5 percent of wartime faculty. It was in East Germany that
Sovietization, or “self-Sovietization,” was most successful since the prewar networks
and structures were effectively destroyed.260 Throughout the bloc, Soviet curricula
were copied, as was the Soviet periodization of medieval and modern historical
eras.261 In the territories newly annexed to the USSR, universities and other edu-
cational and cultural institutions were Sovietized even more thoroughly, down to
the language of instruction.262
The expansion of higher education in the Soviet bloc contributed to unprecedented
upward social mobility. New and larger cohorts of students – many more of them from
253
“healthy” worker and peasant backgrounds than in the prewar era – g raduated with
the skills necessary to obtain well-paying jobs and enjoy a higher standard of living.
At the same time, because of the ideological filter for university admission, students
became adept at hiding their genuine thoughts and opinions. In The Captive Mind,
Miłosz invoked the term Ketman to describe the deceptive practices employed by
intellectuals in People’s Democracies to disguise their convictions. They learned to
conform to political expectations, while continuing to derive national, political, moral,
and aesthetic satisfaction, knowing that the required display of conformity was just a
performance.263 But given the right circumstances Ketman could blossom into dissent.
Not all writers and artists submitted completely to party directives even during
the Stalinist moment. Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Ashes and Diamonds (1948) dealt with the
Home Army’s defeat and the transition to communism, but clearly transcended the
strictures of Socialist Realism. In coded language that passed censorship, it portrayed
the Home Army fighters tragically and sympathetically. Readers learned to read
between the lines. A decade later the film version of Ashes and Diamonds, directed
by Andrzej Wajda, further undermined the Socialist Realist plot through visual and
verbal symbolism “deliver[ing] a meaning entirely different, and much richer” than
the ostensible one, as Herbert Eagle has argued.264 Throughout the Soviet bloc the
public became skilled at deciphering Aesopic texts while film and theater directors
and actors succeeded in defying restrictions to produce movies and plays that spoke
to audiences’ real but disallowed concerns. They offered, in Jarka Burian’s words,
“covert resistance of the mind and spirit.”265
Thaw and dissent

The cultural thaw after Stalin’s death extended to the Soviet satellite states. In Poland
and later in Czechoslovakia, the critique of Stalinist policies, censorship, and propa-
ganda began among communist literati who had earlier embraced Zhdanovism. With
Stalinist apparatchiks such as Jakub Berman scapegoated and demoted, regime writ-
ers began to shift positions.266 Adam Waż yk’s “A Poem for Adults,” published in Nowa
Kultura in 1955, marked the Polish poet’s return to his youthful cubism. The poem
adopts a child-like view of communist slogans, disconnected from the grim realities
and human suffering of Stalinist-style industrialization. His 1955 “turnabout” was not
the first. He had been part of the avant-garde in interwar Warsaw, but later embraced
“Socialist Realism with a distinctly Neo-Classicist tinge.” After the war he became a
powerful “terroretician” in the Stalinist literary establishment, even nicknamed “our
little Zhdanov.” His latest shift anticipated the Polish October of 1956, the first major
political challenge to communism in Poland after which the reformist “national
communist” leader Władysław Gomułka came to power. Having survived the chal-
lenge, the regime still tried to control culture, but the thaw enabled a r esurgence of
exceptional works in film, poetry, and philosophy.267
In Hungary in 1954 Imre Nagy briefly replaced the Stalinist Rákosi, introducing
reforms. Young communist intellectuals and students began to meet in a group first
called the Bessenyei Circle (in honor of the Enlightenment thinker) and later the
Petőfi Circle (in honor of the national poet). Debate topics included economics, his-
tory, Socialist Realism, agricultural policies, education, the press, and philosophy. The
world-renowned Marxist philosopher György Lukács, recently rehabilitated, became
254
the Circle’s “grand doyen” and drew huge audiences speaking his mind about the
fraudulent practices of socialist education and the rote learning of Marxism. “We
began producing philosophers with no knowledge, no ability to think, no culture,”
he wrote. “I do not blame the individual philosophers, so much as the system that
produced them.” Lukács stressed the necessity of free debate in both culture and poli-
tics. The Petőfi Circle was itself a pioneer of such freedoms and laid the groundwork
for radical reform, which, however, was defeated with the crushing of the Hungarian
Revolution in 1956.268
In Czechoslovakia the thaw was delayed not only because Stalinism had been so bru-
tal, but also because many in the reigning communist elite had been intimately involved
with its crimes. Indeed, it was after Stalin’s death and barely a year before Khrushchev’s
secret speech of 1956 that an enormous statue of Stalin at the head of a group of
Czechoslovak and Soviet citizens was erected in Prague. It was dynamited in 1962 – on
Moscow’s orders.269 In 1963 Rudolf Margolius and the other victims of the Slánský trial
were posthumously rehabilitated, signaling a shift in political and cultural life.
The thaw in Czechoslovakia began with writers, playwrights, and filmmakers test-
ing the limits of censorship and using writers’ congresses to voice political criticism.
As in Poland and Hungary, these critical voices often came from militant commu-
nists who had previously toed the party line. The 1968 Prague Spring and the reform
communist government of Alexander Dubček was led by revisionist (and repentant)
Marxists who remained firmly within the socialist camp.270 The intellectuals of this
belated thaw – Ludvík Vaculík, Zdeněk Mlynář, Karel Kosík, Milan Kundera, Jiří
Hájek, Antonin Liehm, and others – took aim at Stalinism and at their own role in
it, seeking ways to integrate ethics and humanism into Marxism.271 Philosophical
soul-searching went hand-in-hand with new forms of fiction and art. Theater and
Czech New Wave film in particular drew on prewar avant-garde and absurdist tra-
ditions. Václav Havel, one of the few non-Marxists, deliberately staged “Western”
plays – including by the Romanian exile Ionesco.
The Prague Spring was also rooted in more popular forms of cultural life. Paulina
Bren argues that television prepared the ground for reform by broadcasting innova-
tive live discussion programs featuring ordinary citizens. After Dubček’s appointment
in January 1968 television producers became even bolder, hosting “confrontations
between former political prisoners and their torturers” and supporting programming
in which the falsification of history by the Stalinist leadership was clearly exposed.
Political meetings overtook soccer in popularity for many viewers.272 However short-
lived, the Prague Spring was born of intellectual, literary, and artistic antecedents
that promoted openness on a new scale through film, literature, theater, and the
mass media.
Unlike Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, where intellectual and cultural
movements preceded social and political ones, Yugoslavia and Romania followed a
different path to cultural de-Stalinization. Here, the party-state led the way. After
Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Comintern in 1948, the Party repudiated the doctrine
of Socialist Realism. In December 1949, Edvard Kardelj, a high-ranking ideologue
close to Tito, criticized the Soviet practice of suppressing free debate:
We believe our scholars must be free in their creativity. Precisely because

without the borba mišljenja [struggle of opinions] and without scholarly
255
discussion . . . there is no progress in science nor is there successful struggle

against reactionary conceptions and dogmatism in science.
The same month the League of Yugoslav Communists announced “the end of ‘admin-
istrative controls of cultural life.’” These policy shifts, connected to the high politics
of the Comintern, resulted in an opening for Yugoslav cultural elites, while inviting
further repression of intellectuals identified as “Titoists” elsewhere in the bloc.273
In Romania, as in Yugoslavia, the thaw arrived following a political conflict with
the Soviet Union. In 1963 Romanian leaders rejected a Soviet plan for economic
integration that would have prevented Romania’s full industrialization. With this
breach came wider openness in cultural domains. In the 1960s, many political pris-
oners, including intellectuals such as Constantin Noica, were released, previously
banned works by interwar writers and historians began to be republished, and
Socialist Realism came under attack. Ideological relaxation brought more intellec-
tuals into the ranks of the Party. The 1965 promotion of Nicolae Ceauşescu (who at
the time was perceived as a relative liberal) to the country’s leadership accelerated
these trends.274
Katherine Verdery has analyzed the interaction between the seemingly liberalizing
and increasingly nationalistic Ceauşescu regime and the intelligentsia in different fields
of the humanities in Romania. Intellectuals expressed “passionately held resistance to
Soviet and/or Marxist-Leninist rule,” while advancing their d isciplines – literature, his-
tory, and philosophy – and their individual careers, and while procuring resources for
their research institutes and projects. In the process they contributed to the entrench-
ment of the nationalist ideology of Romania’s late socialism. The “protochronist”
trend in 1970s cultural debates, Verdery shows, mirrored Ceauşescu’s attempt to rep-
resent Romania as strong, unified, and superior while it was in fact in dire crisis. First
formulated by the literary critic Edgar Papu, protochronism claimed the chronologi-
cal priority, and implicit superiority, of Romanian cultural achievements vis-à-vis both
Western and Soviet ones at a time when resources in the humanities were dwindling;
such arguments could help garner monies from Romania’s command economy.275
Compared to writers and artists in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, those in
Romania “appeared not to be a force for changing the increasingly inhumane rule”
of their regime. Ruthless repression and co-optation forestalled organized dissent.276
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, dissident intellectuals became bolder, more creative,
and more effective in their strategies. Only a few remained in the Marxist camp by
the 1980s.277 In 1976, members of the Polish oppositional intelligentsia extended legal
help and advice to striking workers. The Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) brought
laborers together with intellectuals and students. A “counter-culture” developed that
included underground periodicals and publishing houses as well as a “Flying University”
where scholars offered courses on forbidden topics in private apartments.278 Adam
Michnik, one of the KOR founders, described the strategy as “open but illegal”:
Books and periodicals were printed underground, but the names of their
authors and editors were openly disclosed. Openness was a way of fortifying
collective courage, of widening the “gray area” between the censor’s scissors
and the criminal code, of breaking down the barrier of inertia and fear. The
chances for success lay in openness, not in conspiracy.279
256
Michnik risked being harassed, tried, and imprisoned, but openness combined with
the policy of détente, the Helsinki Process, and contacts with Western intellectuals
protected him.
Dissent also emerged in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which had been “normal-
ized” after brief but spectacular moments of rebellion in 1956 and 1968. Charter 77
appeared in Czechoslovakia following the 1976 trials of a number of underground
rock musicians, some of whom were associated with the band The Plastic People of
the Universe. The musicians challenged normalization with their long hair, loud
music, and controversial lyrics. They played songs by the Velvet Underground,
Frank Zappa, and other foreign groups, and had mass appeal. The Charter collected
signatures on a petition to the Czechoslovak government in support of human
rights, invoking the Helsinki Declaration and other international covenants that
Czechoslovakia had signed.280
Interactions with the musical, cultural, political, and legal world outside
Czechoslovakia were threatening to the regime, and it was precisely this fear and
the international networks themselves that a document like Charter 77 exploited.
Dissidents from different countries were connected across borders. Václav Havel
wrote “The Power of the Powerless” (1978) for a Polish–Czechoslovak meeting that
never took place because some participants were arrested. The essay appeared in
samizdat along with those of other Czechoslovak participants, but it also reached
Polish strikers in 1979.281 One of the best known oppositional writings of late social-
ism, “The Power of the Powerless” urged citizens of “post-totalitarian” societies to stop
conforming to the ritualized but meaningless behaviors expected of them, to stop
“living within a lie,” and to “live in truth.” In Czesław Miłosz’s terms, it was a plea for
ending the dissimulation of Ketman.282
Despite the return of censorship and detention in post-1968 Czechoslovakia, nor-
malization was not Stalinism. If Socialist Realism represented the culture of Stalinism,
normalization was characterized by kitschy television serials with recognizable every-
day scenarios and down-to-earth characters that suggested the possibility of individual
self-realization and even consumer satisfaction.283 This was not the high cultural and
moral ground that most dissidents wished for, but rather a muddling-through for
both rulers and ruled. Havel had condemned the post-totalitarian rituals of com-
pliance aimed at maintaining false loyalty and a quiescent population. Kundera, for
his part, impugned Western Europe for turning its back on high culture in favor of
entertainment.284
Both popular culture and the earnest discussions in private homes, in samiz-
dat journals, or in Western publications by highbrow dissidents played their part
in bringing down communism. The ideas and style of peaceful (though at times
raucous) opposition and debate provided the habits of mind, political culture,
and alternative elites for the revolutions of 1989 to take hold. In places where a
robust underground with “parallel institutions” had functioned for a decade or
more, the transition from communism was more peaceful and fared better than in
countries where these had not evolved. Dissident cultures in East Central Europe
had encouraged debate and pluralism; they also fostered a milieu that produced a
stock of philosophical concepts as well as concrete political ideas about democracy,
civil society, and personal responsibility. Yet it was not only big ideas that mattered.
Padraic Kenney and Jonathan Bolton note the structural pluralism, dissonance, and
257
heterogeneity of these “worlds of dissent,” recognizing popular counter-culture as

a force in the great unraveling of communism.285 The years of normalization had
spawned a variety of oppositional movements – religious, musical, environmental,
anarchist – that allowed new generations of youth to confront the communist state.
The Socialist Surrealism of groups like the Orange Alternative in Poland or the John
Lennon Peace Club in Czechoslovakia weakened socialism by light-heartedly mock-
ing it, paving the way for round-tables and elections.286
Conclusion
As we have shown, culture in East Central Europe – literary culture especially – has
been characterized by a plethora of manifestations across space and time. Despite this
variety, the political climate everywhere most of the time affected both the styles and
genres of literature and art. Censorship inhibited intellectual and creative activity,
while occasionally stimulating underground work, and state policies nurtured educa-
tion, literacy, and the formation of educated elites. Throughout the region, the posi-
tion of writers, artists, and intellectuals was always dependent on the social, economic,
and political conditions within which they worked.
Since the late eighteenth century, literary, intellectual, and artistic activity was
frequently interpreted across the region as a barometer of development, civilization,
political liberty, and cultural strength, and such pursuits came to occupy a symbolic
place in the constitution of national and other collective identities. At the same time,
culture and literature could be aligned with a range of ideological causes. Literary and
artistic works could be a way to mold and express the national soul, or to align one’s
nation with “Europe”; they could be an expression of modernity or of traditional
social values; they could be deployed as an instrument of propaganda, compliance,
or pedagogy, or as a weapon of revolution or resistance. Whatever their use, there can
be no doubt about the central importance and high prestige of cultural, especially
literary, activity to the societies in East Central Europe.
Andrew Wachtel dates the high prestige of literature (and by extension the
humanities) in the region to nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism when writers,
linguists, folklorists, and historians became “founding fathers” to potential nations
seen by nationalist elites as struggling toward autonomy and cohesion against the
transnational imperial states that confined them. The cult of the national poet
became ubiquitous in this part of Europe.287 In this account we have traced the
unique place of literary culture and intellectual life to earlier roots, especially to
the absolutist experiments of the eighteenth century and the attempts to rethink
the relation between government and people in different ways since then. Initially
conceived as a broad category equivalent to erudition or general knowledge, liter-
ature was seen as an instrument of imperial reform and amelioration of what were
perceived in the European contexts to be “backward” lands and peoples. Advocates
of vernacular language development often took their cue (and their sponsorship)
from their position within institutions or networks of empire. In the nineteenth cen-
tury literary activity became much more closely aligned with national projects, and
the valorization of literature and language in terms of originality or as the most
authentic mode of expressing group identity led to its particular prominence in the
context of nationalist movements. The process also brought questions of language
258
use to the fore. Conflicts arose not just between “small” nations and “great” empires
but between neighboring nations of the region. The practical difficulties of literary
communication across language communities was compounded by the rise of com-
petition between different groups for resources or political rights. But while East
Central Europe could be seen as a zone of cultural conflict and fragmentation, it
has also been one of “literary interfaces,” to borrow Marcel Cornis-Pope’s term.288
Particularly in urban environments, prevailing conditions facilitated the transfer of
literary models across languages and fostered experimentation in composition.
From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, during which time culture was under
the control of the party-state, it was generously funded out of recognition for its
persuasive and pedagogic powers. Writers and artists willing to conform enjoyed
unprecedented privileges and an exalted (if also precarious) status. At the same
time, because official culture was often transparently mendacious or propagandis-
tic, books smuggled from abroad, texts written and distributed underground, or
poetry, film, and music that managed to speak past taboos to the lived experiences
of those silenced, held outsize meaning, and artistic meaning frequently took the
place of official truths. In other words, literary and cultural life achieved unique
social and political relevance in the eyes of the regimes in power, their opponents,
and the public at large.
This long-term process may have reached its apotheosis in the revolutions of 1989
when the dissident playwright and philosopher Václav Havel was swept to power
in Czechoslovakia. Other dissident intellectuals likewise received public recogni-
tion and government positions: the president of the Hungarian Writers’ Union
became Hungary’s president, while the Catholic journalist and Solidarity advisor
Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Poland’s prime minister. At the end of December 1989
Romania’s National Salvation Front counted among its members poets, literary crit-
ics, philosophers, and professors (of whom Mihai Şora and Andrei Pleşu would hold
ministerial appointments as well).289 But with democratization and the emergence
of capitalism, writers, artists, and intellectuals lost the elevated place they had held
during communism, along with the economic support of the party-state. The market
has now become the ultimate arbiter of taste and value, while democracy and politi-
cal pluralism means that the realm of high culture and artistic meaning matters less
as a space for the articulation of political or social goals and aspirations. With the
end of communism, the special status of literature, art, and culture in East Central
European society arguably came to an end.
Notes
1 This chapter was begun by Alex Drace-Francis who had to withdraw from the project due
to personal commitments. His initial draft was revised and completed by Irina Livezeanu
and Thomas Ort.
2 Raymond Williams, “Culture,” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 87. See also Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between
Practices and Representations, trans. L. Cochrane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988);
and Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
3 Oskar Halecki, Borderlands of Western Civilization: A History of East Central Europe (New York:
Ronald Press, 1952); Alan Palmer, The Lands Between: A History of East-Central Europe since
the Congress of Vienna (New York: Macmillan, 1970); and Gale Stokes, Three Eras of Political
259
Change in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Maria Todorova has
argued that in the Balkans stigma derives from the very “transitory status” both felt and
ascribed to the area. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), 15–16.
4 Bolesław Klimaszewski, ed., Outline History of Polish Culture, trans. K. Mroczek (Warsaw:
Interpress, 1984), 7. Cf. László Kósa, ed., A Cultural History of Hungary, 2 vols, trans. Tünde
Vajda (Budapest: Corvina, 1999); and Pavle Ivić, ed., The History of Serbian Culture, 2nd ed.
(Belgrade: Mrlješ & Verzal Press, 1999).
Press, 1994), 102; R.D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7; and Francis Dvornik, The Slavs in European
History and Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 511. For more
on religion see Chapter 4 in this volume.
6 See Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985), 7–8, 112.
7 Andrew Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4.
8 Christophe Charle, ed., Capitales européennes et rayonnement culturel (Paris: Publications de
la Sorbonne, 2002). See also Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, “Constructing a New Identity:
Romanian Aristocrats between Oriental Heritage and Western Prestige (1780–1866),” in
From Traditional Attire to Modern Dress: Modes of Identification, Modes of Recognition in the Balkans
(XVIth–XXth Centuries) (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011),
104–128.
9 Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1998), 35, 45–51; Jean Béranger, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1273–1700, trans.
C.A. Simpson (London: Longman, 1994), 242.
10 Béranger, Habsburg Empire, 60; Rebecca Gates-Coon, The Charmed Circle: Joseph II and the
“Five Princesses,”1765–1790 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015), 55; Ingrao,
Habsburg Monarchy, 120–126.
11 L.R. Lewitter, “Peter the Great, Poland, and the Westernization of Russia,” Journal of
the History of Ideas 19, no. 4 (1958): 493–506; Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested:
Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 296–300.
12 Virgil Cândea, “La Vie du prince Dimitrie Cantemir écrite par son fils Antioh. Texte
integral d’après le manuscrit original de la Houghton Library,” Revue des études sud-est
européennes 23, no. 3 (1985): 217.
13 George Rudé, Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Aristocracy and the Bourgeois Challenge
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 54.
14 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 310; Ludmilla Schulze, “The Russification of the St. Petersburg
Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Eighteenth Century,” The British Journal for the History of
Science 18, no. 3 (1985): 309–310.
15 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 314; Hans Aarsleff, “The Berlin Academy under Frederick
the Great,” History of the Human Sciences 2, no. 2 (1989): 194.
16 Larry Wolff, Venice and the Slavs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
17 Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2007); Yasemin Gencer, “Ibrahim Müteferrika and the Age of the
Printed Manuscript,” in Christiane Gruber, ed., The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten
Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2009), 155–193; and Ştefan Lemny, Cantemireştii: Aventura europeană a unei familii
princiare din secolul al XVIII-lea (Iaşi: Polirom, 2010), 54 for quotation.
18 Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, “Constructing a New Identity,” 105, 108.
19 Mary Neuburger, Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press), 13.
20 Pierre Chaunu, La civilisation de l’Europe des lumières (Paris: Arthaud, 1971), 35–70.
21 Mikulás Teich, “Bohemia: From Darkness into Light,” in Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich,
eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
260
1981), 147–173; Ivo Cerman, Rita Krueger, and Susan Reynolds, eds., The Enlightenment in
Bohemia: Religion, Morality and Multiculturalism (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011); and
Rita Krueger, Czech, German, & Noble: Status and National Identity in Habsburg Bohemia (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 149–150.
22 See for example Cornelia Aust, “Between Amsterdam and Warsaw: Commercial Networks of
the Ashkenazic Mercantile Elite in Central Europe,” Jewish History 27, no. 1 (2013): 41–71.
23 On changing urban space in Hungary and its social-cultural consequences see the spe-
cial number of the Hungarian Historical Review (New Series of Acta Historica Academiae
Scientiarum Hungaricae) 1, no. 1–2 (2012) on Urban History, especially Árpád Tóth on
Pressburg (79–103) and Gábor Czoch on Kassa/Kaschau/Košice (104–133).
24 Alex Drace-Francis, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005),
54–60.
25 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letter to Alexander Pope, Feb 12 [old style] 1717, in Letters
of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—-y M——e, 3 vols. (London: T. Becket and P. A. De
Hondt, 1763), 1: 139–149.
26 Ivan Lovrenović, Bosnia: A Cultural History (New York: New York University Press, 2001),
120–122; Orlin Sabev, “Private Book Collections in Ottoman Sofia,” Études balkaniques
no. 1 (2003): 34–82; Zorka Ivanova, “Les éditions imprimées par İbrahim Müteferrika
et la bibliothèque du waqf de Vidin,” Études balkaniques – Cahiers Pierre Belon, 16 (2009):
199–218.
27 See the essays by Richard Clogg, Catheine Koumarianou, George Frangos, and E.D. Tappe
in Richard Clogg, ed., The Struggle for Greek Independence (Hamden, CT: Archon Books,
1973); Charles King, The Black Sea: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),
163–168. For recent overviews of the literature on cities, see the special issue of East Central
Europe 33, no. 1–2 (2006), edited by Marian Prokopovich, Maciej Janowski, Constantin
Iordachi, and Balázs Trencsényi; and Chad Bryant, “After Nationalism? Urban History and
East European History,” East European Politics & Societies 25, no. 4 (2011): 774–778.
28 Brian Davies, Empire and Military Revolution in Eastern Europe (London: Continuum, 2011),
1–51. See also Virginia Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 1700–1870 (Harlow, UK: Longman/Pearson,
2007); and Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence (London: Longman, 2003).
29 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 318.
30 See Teodora Shek Brnardić, “Intellectual Movements and Geopolitical Regionalization:
The Case of The East European Enlightenment,” East Central Europe/L’Europe du Centre-Est
32, no. 1–2 (2005): 147–177; Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 295–325; Pompiliu Teodor,
ed., Enlightenment and Romanian Society (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1980); and Paschalis M.
Kitromilides, Enlightenment and Revolution: The Making of Modern Greece (Cambridge, MA:
31 Paschalis Kitromilides, “Imagined Communities and the Origins of the National Question
in the Balkans,” European History Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1989): 149–191; Robert Evans, Austria,
Hungary and the Habsburgs: Central Europe, 1683–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006); Wendy Bracewell, “Travels through the Slav World,” in Wendy Bracewell and Alex
Drace-Francis, eds., Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel
Writing on Europe (Budapest & New York: CEU Press, 2008), 147–194.
32 Lemny, Cantemireştii, 104–106; Joanna Karausz, “Reforming Hearts and Minds: The
Educational Reforms of the Polish Enlightenment,” Honors Thesis, Rutgers University,
2011, 12.
33 Kitromilides, Enlightenment and Revolution, 68–71; Alexandru Duţu, “Europe’s Image
with Romanian Representatives of the Enlightenment,” in Teodor, ed., Enlightenment
and Romanian Society 145–146; Ivan Berend, History Derailed: East Central Europe in the
Long Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 53. For the
“Ancients vs. Moderns” quarrel as constituent of the Enlightenment, see Dan Edelstein,
The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). For the East–
West divide and the idea of “Europe” as products of Enlightenment thought, see Charles
Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007), 29; Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of
Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
261
34 For surveys of East Central European linguistic phenomena, see Miloš Okuka, ed., Lexikon
der Sprachen des europäischen Ostens (Klagenfurt: Wieser, 2002) [= Wieser Enzyklopädie des
Europäischen Ostens 10]; Siegfried Tornow, Was ist Osteuropa? Handbuch der osteuropäischen
Text- und Sozialgeschichte von der Spätantike bis zum Nationalstaat (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
2005).
35 István Tóth, “Latin as a Spoken Language in Hungary during the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries,” CEU History Yearbook (1997–1998): 93–111; Robert Evans,
“The Politics of Language and the Languages of Politics: Latin and the Vernaculars in
Eighteenth-century Hungary,” in Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms, eds., Cultures of Power
in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 200–224.
36 Evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs, 47.
37 Lemny, Cantemireştii, 112–131; and Mihai Maxim, “Foreword” in Cristina Bîrsan, Dimitrie
Cantemir and the Islamic World (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2004), 10.
38 Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol. 2: Against the World, 1780–1790 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 310; and Anderson, European Universities, 27.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), xx–xxii, 5–18; Vlad Georgescu, The
Romanians: A History, trans. Alexandra Bley-Vroman (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University
Press, 1990), 64; and Ariadna Camariano-Cioran, Les Académies Princières de Bucarest et de
Jassy et leurs professeurs (Salonica: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1974), 23–92.
40 Thomas Butler, “The Origins of the War for a Serbian Language and Orthography,”
Harvard Slavic Studies 5 (1970): 1–80.
41 Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 18–20.
42 See Yaron Matras, I Met Lucky People: The Story of the Romani Gypsies (London: Allen Lane
2014); Lech Mróz, Roma-Gypsy Presence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 15th–18th
Centuries, trans. J. Fomina (Budapest & New York: CEU press, 2015); Viorel Achim, The
Roma in Romanian History, trans. R. Davies (Budapest: CEU Press, 2004).
43 See for example Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A
Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European
Nations, trans. Ben Fowkes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and
Emil Niederhauser, The Rise of Nationality in Eastern Europe, trans. K. Ravasz (Budapest:
Corvina, 1981).
44 Evans, “Language and State-Building: the Case of the Habsburg Monarchy,” Austrian History
Yearbook 35 (2004): 7–8.
45 James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004),
passim, esp. ch. 6, “The Language Question.”
46 Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999); Laurent Mignon, “The Literati and the Letters: A Few Words on
the Turkish Alphabet Reform,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
20, no. 1 (2009): 11–24.
47 See James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-century Origins of Compulsory
Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Isabel
de Madariaga, Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-century Russia (London: Routledge, 1998),
168–191.
48 Van Horn Melton, Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria; and Danuta Gorecki, “The
Commission of National Education and Civic Revival through Books in Eighteenth-
Century Poland,” Journal of Library History 15, no. 2 (1980): 138–166; T.C.W. Blanning,
Joseph II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 70; and Anderson, European Universities,
21, 26.
49 Cited in Robert Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2005), 26, 28. See also Lóránt Czigány, The Oxford History of Hungarian
Literature: From the Earliest Times to the Present (Oxford: Clarendon Press/New York:
Oxford University Press, 1984), 82–84; Péter Király, National Endeavours in Central and
Eastern Europe: As Reflected in the Publications of the University Press of Buda, 1777–1848
262
(Budapest: “Magyar Felsőoktatás,” 1993), 27–30; and Horst Haselsteiner, “Cooperation

and Confrontation between Rulers and the Noble Estates, 1711–1790,” in Peter Sugar
et al., eds., A History of Hungary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 155.
See also Ingrid Merchiers, Cultural Nationalism in the South Slav Habsburg Lands in the
Early Nineteenth Century: The Scholarly Network of Jernej Kopitar (1780–1844) (Munich: Otto
Sagner, 2007), 25–28.
50 Beales, Joseph II, 307–308.
51 Camariano-Cioran, Académies Princières; and Keith Hitchins, The Romanians, 1744–1866
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 196.
52 Patrice Dabrowski, Poland: The First Thousand Years (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2014), 248–249; Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 2nd ed. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), 156; and Klimaszweski, Outline, 137.
53 Klimaszweski, Outline, 137, 139, 156–157; Dabrowski, Poland, 266; and Miłosz, History of
Polish Literature, 161–162.
54 Anderson, European Universities, 26.
55 Benedict Rundell, “Republicanism in the University of Krakow in the Eighteenth Century,”
History of Political Thought 26, no. 4 (2005): 646–663; Richard Butterwick, “Political
Discourses of the Polish Revolution,” English Historical Review 120 (2005): 695–731; and
Larry Wolff, “The Spirit of 1776: Polish and Dalmatian Declarations of Philosophical
Independence,” in Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary
Cultures of East-Central Europe. 4 vols. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries:
The Making and Remaking of Literary Institutions (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company, 2006–2010), 3: 294–306.
56 See Otto Dann and John Dinwiddy, eds., Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution
(London: Hambledon Press, 1988). On German romantic nationalism as a reac-
tion to Napoleon, see Joseph Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 105–118. For a critique of East–West
distinctions in the study of nationalism, see Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewitson, eds.,
What is a Nation? Europe, 1789–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). For Vienna,
see Leslie Bodi, Tauwetter in Wien (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1977). For Russia, see
Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). For Poland, see Richard Butterwick,
“Between Anti-Enlightenment and Enlightened Catholicism: Provincial Preachers in Late
Eighteenth-Century Poland-Lithuania,” in Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies and Gabriel
Sánchez Espinosa, eds., Peripheries of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008).
57 Ingrao, Habsburg Monarchy, 220.
58 On Joseph II and Frederick II’s acquaintance with Voltaire see Franco Venturi, The End
of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776–1789, trans. R. Burr Litchfield, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 2: 627, 631, 633.
59 Alexander Grab, Napoleon and the Transformation of Europe (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave,
2003) 178–186; Jan Pachoński and Reuel Wilson, Poland’s Caribbean Tragedy: a Study of
Polish Legions in the Haitian War of Independence, 1802–1803 (Boulder, CO: East European
Monographs, 1986).
60 Miłosz, Polish Literature, 190–191; Andrzej Walicki, Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern
Nationhood: Polish Political Thought from Noble Republicanism to Tadeusz Kosciuszko, trans.
Emma Harris (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 58.
61 Walicki, Enlightenment, 17–18.
62 Ibid., 96–97; and Pachoński and Wilson, Poland’s Caribbean Tragedy, 5, 139, 213.
63 Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016),
90–91; Richard Clogg, “The ‘Dhidhaskalia Patriki’ (1798): An Orthodox Reaction to
French Revolutionary Propaganda,” Middle Eastern Studies 5, no. 2 (1969): 90; Loukianos
Hassiotis, “The Ideal of Balkan Unity from a European Perspective (1789–1945),”
Balcanica 41 (2010): 211–213; and Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, 3rd ed. (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 28–29.
64 Péter Király, ed., Typographia Universitatis Hungaricae Budae (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó,
1983); Király, National Endeavours in Central and Eastern Europe.
263
65 See Jaroslaw Czubaty, “The Attitudes of the Polish Political Elite towards the State in
the Period of the Duchy of Warsaw, 1807–1815,” in Michael Rowe, ed., Collaboration and
Resistance in Napoleonic Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Dabrowski,
Poland, 288, 298–300.
66 Piotr Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1974), 44–64; Dabrowski, Poland, 301.
67 Alexander Grab, Napoleon, 188–196; Barabara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, vol. 1: Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 162–163.
68 Wayne Vucinich, “Croatian Illyrism: Its Background and Genesis,” in Stanley Winters
and Joseph Held, eds., Intellectual and Social Developments in the Habsburg Empire from Maria
Theresa to World War I (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1975), 60–62. Vucinich,
“Croatian Illyrism,” 62. See also Elinor Murray Despalatović, Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian
Movement (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1975).
69 Judson, Habsburg Empire, 139–143; and Nemes, Budapest, 55.
70 Dabrowski, Poland, 287, 304–305; Edward Thaden with the collaboration of Marianna
Forster Thaden, Russia’s Western Borderlands, 1710–1870 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
71 Stephen Burant, “The January Uprising of 1863 in Poland: Sources of Disaffection and the
Arenas of Revolt,” European History Quarterly 15, no. 2 (April 1985): 144–146; and Wandycz,
Partitioned Poland, 96–97.
72 Dabrowski, Poland, 313.
73 Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia. History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford,
CA, 2010), 82; Blanning, Joseph II, 70; Wandycz, Partitioned Poland, 94; and Anderson,
European Universities, 77–78.
74 Clogg, Concise History, 49.
75 Nemes, Budapest, 58.
76 Some examples of eighteenth-century periodicals include the Czech Pražské poštovské
noviny, 1719; the Polish Monitor, 1765; the Serbian Slaveno-Serbski Magazin, 1768; the Slovak
Prešpurské noviny in 1783; the Hungarian Magyar Museum, 1787; or the Greek Ephēmerēs,
1790. See also Sayer, Coasts, 77–78.
77 Sayer, Coasts, 53. The “homeland” here is Bohemia, but the Czech word for Bohemia
is “Čechy.” This suggests some continuity between a Bohemian patriotism and modern
Czech nationalism.
78 Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy: From Enlightenment to Collapse (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2001), 286.
79 Robert Greenberg, Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its Disintegration
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 168–172, Appendix A: Text of the 1850 Agreement.
80 Sayer, Coasts, 53, 109–111; Hroch, Social Preconditions, 22–23.
81 For critical perspectives on Hroch’s theory of national development in East Central
Europe, see Alexander Maxwell, “Twenty-Five Years of A-B-C: Miroslav Hroch’s Impact on
Nationalism Studies,” Nationalities Papers 38, no. 6 (2010): 773–776; Alex Drace-Francis,
“Cultural Currents and Political Choices: Romanian Intellectuals in the Banat to 1848,”
Austrian History Yearbook 35 (2005): 65–93.
82 On the function of writing in creating difference and division in time and space, see
Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 2 vols. (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions,
1980), and Michel de Certeau, “Writings and Histories,” in Graham Ward, ed., The Certeau
Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 25–26.
83 Monika Baár, Historians and Nationalism: East Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 251. See also Walter Kolarz, Myths and Realities in Eastern
Europe (London: Drummond, 1946); Dennis Deletant and Harry Hanak, eds., Historians
as Nation-Builders in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press, 1988). A selection
of primary sources in English can be found in Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček,
eds., Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945). Texts and
Commentaries, vol. 2 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007), 19–100. For a more extensive treatment
of commemoration practices and “inventions of tradition,” see Chapter 10 below.
84 Zacek, Palacky, 56–60.
264
85 See Baár, Historians and Nationalism, 30, 138; quotation is on 138. See also Sayer, Coasts,
75–76. Although Slovak by birth, Kollár and Jozef Šafárik contributed to the Czech cultural
revival.
86 Sayer, Coasts, 108–109; Dobrava Moldanová, “Czech Women Writers from the National
Revival to the Fin de Siècle,” trans. Robert Pynsent, in Celia Hawkesworth, ed., A History of
Central European Women’s Writing (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 47–53.
87 Miłosz, Polish Literature, 208; Snyder, Reconstruction, 25–30; and Roman Koropeckyj, Adam
Mickiewicz: The Life of a Romantic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), ix, 2, 189.
88 On exile, see: Lloyd Kramer, Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience
in Paris, 1830–1848 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), ch. on Mickiewicz;
Allon Gall, Athena Leoussi, and Anthony Smith, eds., The Call of the Homeland: Diaspora
Nationalisms, Past and Present (Leiden: Brill, 2010), chs. on Armenian, Greek, Turkish, and
Ukrainian diasporas. On Romanian exiles, see Angela Jianu, A Circle of Friends: Romanian
Revolutionaries and Political Exiles, 1840–1859 (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
89 On travel writing from the region, see Bracewell and Drace-Francis, eds., Under Eastern
Eyes; Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis, eds., A Bibliography of East European
Travel Writing on Europe, 1550–2000 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008); Wendy Bracewell,
ed., Orientations: An Anthology of East European Travel Writing on Europe (Budapest: CEU
Press, 2009); Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis, eds., Balkan Departures: Travel
Writing from Southeastern Europe (Oxford & New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). See also
the selection of primary sources on spatial discourses in Trencsényi and Kopeček, eds.,
Discourses of Collective Identity, 2: 203–304.
90 Extracts from Koraes, Dositej, and others in Bracewell, ed., Orientations, 84–100.
91 George Barany, Stephen Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, 1791–1841
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968); Koropeckyj, Adam Mickiewicz. See
also Széchenyi’s account of England in Bracewell, ed., Orientations, 109–113. See e.g.
Mickiewicz’s lecture of April 1844, in Adam Mickiewicz, Les Slaves: Cours professé au Collège de
France, 1842–1844 (Paris: Musée Adam Mickiewicz, 1914), 321–325. An English translation
can be found in Alex Drace-Francis, ed., European Identity: A Historical Reader (Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 126–129.
92 Alexander Maxwell and Alexander Campbell, “István Széchenyi, the Casino Movement,
and Hungarian Nationalism, 1827–1848,” Nationalities Papers 42, no. 3 (2014): 509–510.
93 Dinicu Golescu, Însemnare a c ăl ătoriei mele, Constandin Radovici din Goleşti, făcută în anul
1824, 1825, 1826 (Bucharest: Minerva, 1977); excerpts trans. Alex Drace-Francis in
Bracewell, ed., Orientations, 101–107.
94 See Berend, History Derailed, 41–88.
95 See Thomas Meininger, “The Formation of a Nationalist Bulgarian Intelligentsia, 1835–
1878,” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1974, 13; Hristo Botev, “Hadji Dimiter, The
Hanging of Vasil Levski,” in Trencsényi and Kopeček, eds., Discourses of Collective Identity, vol. 2,
473–474; Jelavich, History of the Balkans, 1: 337–338; and Roumen Daskalov, “Transformations
of the East European Intelligentsia: Reflections on the Bulgarian Case,” East European Politics
& Societies 10, no. 1 (1996): 55–56.
96 Barbu Paris Mumuleanu, Caracteruri (1825), cited in Alex Drace-Francis, The Traditions of
Invention (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 141.
97 Maria Kalinowska, “European Identity and Romantic Irony: Juliusz Słowacki’s Journey to
Greece,” in Bracewell and Drace-Francis, eds., Under Eastern Eyes, 223–236; and Tomasz
Ewertowski, “Images of Rome in Polish and Serbian Literature of the Romantic Period,”
Vestnik Karagandinskogo Universiteta, Seria “filologiia” 3, no. 71 (2013): 17–26.
98 Matija Mazuranić, A Glance at Ottoman Bosnia, trans. Branka Magaš (London: Saqi Books,
2008), 7.
99 Irina Popowa-Nowak, “The Odyssey of National Discovery: Hungarians in Hungary and
Abroad,” in Bracewell and Drace-Francis, eds., Under Eastern Eyes, 208–210.
100 Ján Kollár, Reciprocity between the Various Tribes and Dialects of the Slavic Nation, trans. A. Maxwell
(Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2008).
101 Ján Kollár, Cestopisy: Cestou do horní Italie [1842], cited in Bracewell, “Travels through the
Slav World,” 163.
265
102 Karel Havlíček, cited in Bracewell, “Travels through the Slav World,” 185–186.
103 See especially Bracewell, “Travels through the Slav World.”
104 Michael Sozan, A History of Hungarian Ethnography (Washington, DC: University Press of
America, 1977), 20–89; Han Vermeulen, “Origins and Institutionalization of Ethnography
and Ethnology in Europe and USA, 1770–1845,” in Han Vermeulen and Arturo Alvarez
Roldán, eds., Fieldwork and Footnotes: Studies in the History of European Anthropology (London:
Routledge, 1995), 46, 52; and Evans, Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs, 24–25, 29.
105 A first edition appeared in Vienna in 1814, with subsequent enlarged editions in Vienna
and Leipzig as well as translations into other languages. See Woislav Petrovitch, Hero Tales
and Legends of the Serbians (New York: Stokes, [1915]), xxi–xxii.
106 See Zdenko Zlatar, The Poetics of Slavdom: The Mythopoeic Foundations of Yugoslavia, 2 vols.
(New York: Peter Lang, 2007), vol. 2, Appendix Five. From Zlatar’s list of English transla-
tions is omitted one of the best: The Sabre and the Song: Njegoš, The Mountain Wreath, trans.
E.D. Goy (Belgrade: Serbian P.E.N. Centre, 1995). See also Djordje Stefanović, “Seeing the
Albanians through Serbian Eyes: The Inventors of the Tradition of Intolerance and Their
Critics, 1804–1939,” European History Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005): 468–469.
107 E.D. Tappe, “The Rumanian Anthologies of E. Grenville Murray and Henry Stanley,” Revue
de littérature comparée 30, no. 3 (1956): 399–405.
108 Albena Hranova and Alexander Kiossev, “Folklore as a Means to Demonstrate a Nation’s
Existence: the Bulgarian Case,” in Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary
Cultures, 3: 326.
109 Some English examples, are: Specimens of the Polish Poets: With Notes and Observations on the
Literature of Poland, trans. John Bowring (London: J. Bowring, 1827); Poetry of the Magyars,
Preceded by a Sketch of the Language and Literature of Hungary and Transylvania, trans. John
Bowring (London: R. Heward, 1830); Rouman Anthology: or, Selections of Rouman Poetry,
Ancient and Modern, Being a Collection of the National Ballads of Moldavia and Wallachia, ed.
H. Stanley (Hertford: Stephen Austin, 1856); Kossovo: An Attempt to Bring Serbian National
Songs About the Fall of the Serbian Empire at the Battle of Kossovo Into One Poem, ed. Elodie
Lawton Mijatovich (London: William Isbister, 1881). These editors and translators, far
from being obscure philologists, moved in high political and diplomatic circles.
110 Jiří Kořalka, “Revolutions in the Habsburg Monarchy,” in Dieter Dowe et al., eds., Europe in
1848: Revolution and Reform, trans. David Higgins (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 145–146, 156.
111 Lawrence Orton, The Prague Slav Congress of 1848 (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly,
1978), 71–72.
112 See Jianu, Circle of Friends, 36–40; Monica Spiridon, Agniezka Gutthy, and Katarzyna Jerzak,
“Paris as a Constitutive East-Central European Topos: The Case of Polish and Romanian
Literature,” in Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures, 2: 428–443;
and Lothar Maier, “The Revolution of 1848 in Moldavia and Wallachia,” in Dowe et al.,
eds., Europe in 1848, 191–192.
113 Jianu, Circle of Friends, 86–87. See also Lothar Maier, “Revolution,” 192–193.
114 Orton, Prague Slav Congress, passim.
115 Jianu, Circle of Friends, 81. According to Sorin Antohi, Civitas Imaginalis: Istorie şi utopie în
cultura română (Bucharest: Litera, 1994), 91, the revolutionaries in question were printers
by profession and the poem on the leaflet was against censorship.
116 Kořalka, “Revolutions,” 161–162.
117 Hans Henning Hahn, “The Polish Nation in the Revolution of 1846–49,” in Dowe et al.,
eds., Europe in 1848, 180; Orton, Prague Slav Congress, passim.
118 For the exalted register of nineteenth-century historians see Bonnie Smith, The Gender
of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998), 14–69. For case studies of the works and (symbolic) lives of East Central European
poets see Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures, 4: 11–132. On
Eminescu see Ioana Bot, ed., “Mihai Eminescu, Poet naţional român”: Istoria şi anatomia unui
mit cultural (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 2001). On Botev, see Botev, “Hristo Botev: Hadji Dimiter.”
119 Drace-Francis, Making, 106, 132–140, 144.
120 Barthelemy de Szemere, La question hongroise (1848–1860) (Paris: E. Dentu, 1860), 5–8.
121 František Palacký, “Letter,” trans. William Beardmore, Slavonic and East European Review 26
(1948): 303–308.
266
122 Burant, “January Uprising,” 146.

123 See Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and
Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Paperbacks, 2000), 218–231.
124 See Christophe Charle, “Patterns,” in Walter Rüegg, ed., A History of the University in Europe,
vol. 3: Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 40–44; and the annotated chronology by Walter Rüegg, ibid.,
673–706. Ilaria Porciani and Lutz Raphael, eds., The Atlas of European Historiography: The
Making of a Profession, 1800–2005 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) has excel-
lent data on the institutions of history teaching and research.
125 Pavel Kolář, “Czech Republic,” in Porciani and Raphael, eds., Atlas of European Historiography,
149; Nancy Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 81–83.
126 Details in Alex Drace-Francis, “Zur Geschichte des Südosteuropakonzepts bis 1914,” Wieser
Enzyklopädie des Europäischen Ostens, vol. 11: Europa und die Grenzen in der Kopf (Klagenfurt:
Wieser, 2003), 282–283.
127 See William Oldson, A Providential Antisemitism: Nationalism and Polity in Nineteenth-Century
Romania (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1991); Leon Volovici,
Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s, trans.
Charles Kormos (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991), 9–16; and Roland Clark, Holy Legionary
Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015),
14–15.
128 Wolff, The Idea of Galicia, 331–336; Okey, Habsburg Monarchy, 365.
129 Claire Nolte, “All For One! One For All! The Federation of Slavic Sokols and the Failure
of Neo-Slavism,” in Pieter Judson and Marsha Rozenblit, eds., Constructing Nationalities in
East Central Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 130. See also Nolte, The Sokol in
the Czech Lands to 1914: Training for the Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and
Sayer, Coasts, 105–106.
130 Romanian school statistics by gender, ca. 1890, in Drace-Francis, Making, 149–151.
131 Berend, History Derailed, 207–209; Keely Stauter-Halsted, “Education and the Shaping of a
Village Elite,” in The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian
Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Tanya Dunlap, “Astra and
the Appeal of the Nation: Power and Autonomy in Late-Nineteenth-Century Transylvania,”
Austrian History Yearbook 34 (2003): 232–235; and Diana Mishkova, “Literacy and Nation-
Building in Nineteenth-Century Bulgaria 1878–1912,” East European Quarterly 29, no. 1
(1994): 63–93. For coverage of newspaper culture in the Habsburg Monarchy see: Helmut
Rumpler and Anatol Schmied-Kowarzik, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918, Vol. 8:
Politische Öffentlichkeit und Zivilgesellschaft, 2 Parts (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006); Gary Cohen, “Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics
of State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914,” Central European History 40,
no. 2 (2007): 252; Domokos Kosáry, The Press During the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–
1849 (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs; Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research
and Social Publications), 373; and Lothar Höbelt, “Die deutsche Presselandschaft,” in
Rumpler and Schmied-Kowarzik, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, vol. 8, bk. 2,
Politische Öffentlichkeit, 1819.
132 Tamás Hofer, “The Creation of Ethnic Symbols from the Elements of Peasant Culture,”
in Peter Sugar, ed., Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe (Santa Barbara, CA:
ABC–Clio, 1980), 114–115; Marina Simić, “Displaying Nationality as Traditional Culture
in the Belgrade Ethnographic Museum: Exploration of a Museum Modernity Practice,”
Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SANU 54 (2006): 307.
133 Wolff, The Idea of Galicia, 288–289.
134 Marta Filipová, “Peasants on Display: The Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition of 1895,”
Journal of Design History 24, no. 1 (2011): 27; Sayer, Coasts, 124–127.
135 Marcel Cornis-Pope, “Shifting Perspectives and Voices in the Romanian Novel,” in Cornis-
Pope and Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures, 1: 442; Miłosz, Polish Literature,
283–285.
136 Beth Holmgren, Rewriting Capitalism: Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the
Kingdom of Poland (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 7–8, 55.
267
137 Cited in Miłosz, Polish Literature, 285. See also Holmgren, Rewriting Capitalism, 58.
138 For some translations of his travel journalism see Bracewell, ed., Orientations, 242–248.
139 Miłosz, Polish Literature, 283–298; and Holmgren, Rewriting Capitalism, 59–92; here 60.
140 For additional female authors in other national literatures in East Central Europe see:
Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and
Gender History 2 (2008): Women Writers and Intellectuals; Celia Hawkesworth, Voices in the
Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia (Budapest: CEU Press, 2000). On the
exclusivity of the literary canon in Bulgaria see Nadezhda Alexandrovna, “Canon-Building
and Popular Culture: Gender Trouble in Bulgarian Culture Today,” Aspasia: International
Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 5 (2011):
204–210.
141 Celia Hawkesworth, ed., A History of Central European Women’s Writing (New York:
Palgrave, 2001), 45; Ursula Phillips and Graż ina Borkowska, “Polish Women Writers in
the Nineteenth Century,” in Hawkesworth, ed., Central European Women’s Writing, 76; and
Miłosz, Polish Literature, 303–308.
142 Moldanová, “Czech Women Writers,” 61.
143 Miłosz, Polish Literature, 313; and Donald Sassoon, The Culture of the Europeans: From 1800 to
the Present (London: Harper Press, 2006), 639–640.
144 Egri csillagok was published in serial installments in Pesti Hírlap beginning in 1899, and in book
form in 1901. Ágnes Györke, “Nation and Gender in The Eclipse of the Crescent Moon,”
Neohelicon 32, no. 1 (2005): 129. See also Joseph Remenyi, “Géza Gárdonyi, Hungarian
Novelist and Playwright,” Slavonic and East European Review 33, no. 80 (1954): 17–24.
145 On British literary representations, see Vesna Goldsworthy’s classic Inventing Ruritania:
The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); on Russia
and Poland, see Thomas McLean, The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature:
Imagining Poland and the Russian Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); German
images are covered by Ritchie Robertson, “Zum deutschen Slawenbild von Herder bis
Musil,” in Urs Faes and Beatrice Ziegler, eds., Das Eigene und das Fremde: Festschrift für Urs
Bitterli (Zurich: NZZ, 2000), 116–144; Klaus Heitmann, Das Rumänenbild im deutschen
Sprachraum (Cologne: Böhlau, 1985). On French images see Pavle Sekeruš, Les slaves du
sud dans le miroir français, 1800–1850 (Belgrade: Zadužbina Andrejević, 2002).
146 See the articles in Manfred Beller and Joseph Leerssen, eds., Imagology: The Cultural
Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters: A Critical Survey (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2007); and Ludmilla Kostova, Tales of the Periphery (Veliko Turnovo: Universitetsko
izd-vo Sv. sv. Kiril i Metodii/Izd-vo PIK, 1997).
147 Bolesław Prus, “No Place Like Home” [1874–75] in Bracewell, ed., Orientations, 246. Prus
labels the province “Golicia,” a pun on goł – bare, naked – while Lodomeria is Głodomeria,
“hungry land.”
148 Nathaniel Wood, “Self-Identification in Central Europe before the Great War: The Case
of Cracow,” East-Central Europe 33, no. 1–2 (2006): 17; see also Nathaniel Wood, Becoming
Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois
149 John Lukacs, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (New York: Grove
Press, 1988), xiii, 14. See also Murat Gül, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul: Transformation
and Modernisation of a City (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009); Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna:
Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981); and Péter Hanák, “Urbanization and
Civilization: Vienna and Budapest in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Garden and the
Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
150 András Gerő, Modern Hungarian Society in the Making, trans. J. Patterson and E. Koncz
(Budapest: CEU Press, 1995), 203–222; John Cunningham, Hungarian Cinema from Coffee
House to Multiplex (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 5–15.
151 The Romanian literary critic and politician Titu Maiorescu (1840–1917) also insisted in
1872 on the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere. See Titu Maiorescu, Critice (Bucharest:
Editura pentru literatură, 1966), lxx, 93, 106.
268
152 “Česká Moderna,” Rozhledy 5, no. 1 (1895–1896): 1–4. For an English version of the
Manifesto see: “The Czech Modern,” in Ahmet Ersoy, Macej Górny, and Vangelis Kechriotis,
eds., Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945): Texts and
Commentaries, vol. 3, part 2 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2010), 260–265. See also Nicholas
Sawicki, “The View from Prague,” in Peter Brooker et al., eds., Modernist Magazines: A
Critical and Cultural History, vol. 3: Europe 1880–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), 1074–1075.
153 Wandycz, Partitioned Poland, 372–373.
154 Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna; and Hanák, The Garden and the Workshop.
155 For an excellent overview of this sharp divide in the Czech modernist movement, see
Katherine David-Fox, “Prague-Vienna, Prague-Berlin: The Hidden Geography of Czech
Modernism,” Slavic Review 59, no. 4 (2000): 735–760. Further complicating Hanák’s
model, David-Fox shows that whereas the more socially engaged modernists were ori-
ented toward Vienna, the more aesthetically inclined, withdrawn decadents were oriented
toward Berlin.
156 Mary Gluck, “The Modernist as Primitive: The Cultural Role of Endre Ady in Fin-de-Siècle
Hungary,” Austrian History Yearbook 33 (2002): 162.
157 Edith Balas, Brâncuşi and Rumanian Folk Traditions, 2nd ed. (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie
Mellon University Press, 2006).
158 Judit Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998), 104–109.
159 Ibid., 100–102.
160 Carmen Popescu, Le style national roumain. Construire une nation à travers l’architecture
1881–1945 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004); Shona Kallestrup, Art
and Design in Romania 1866–1927: Local and International Aspects of the Search for National
Expression (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2006).
161 Rostislav Švácha, “Architektura dvacátých let v Čechách,” in Vojtěch Lahoda et al., eds.,
Dějiny českého výtvarného umění (IV/2), 1890–1938 (Prague: Academia, 1998), 18–19.
162 Irina Livezeanu, “Generational Politics and the Philosophy of Culture: Lucian Blaga
between Tradition and Modernism,” Austrian History Yearbook 33 (2002): 226.
163 See Thomas Ort, Art and Life in Modernist Prague: Karel Čapek and His Generation, 1911–1938
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 42–49.
164 Spector, Prague Territories, x.
165 Ibid., 237. See also Scott Spector, “Beyond the Aesthetic Garden: Politics and Culture
on the Margins of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59, no. 4 (1998):
691–710. Another group of young Jewish intellectuals coalesced in Budapest in the
second decade of the twentieth century around Georg Lukács (1885–1971). Like the
Kafka group in Prague they too felt marginalized on several fronts: as East Europeans
from the West European mainstream, “as assimilated Jews . . . alienated from their Jewish
past; and as Hungarian nationals . . . increasingly shut out of an inward-looking and
increasingly antisemitic national community.” Members of the group had “a sense of
radical homelessness.” See Gluck, Georg Lukács, 8–9, 23.
166 Karel Čapek, Hovory s T.G. Masarykem (Prague: Ústav T. G. Masaryka and Masarykův ústav
a Archiv AV ČR, 2013), 125. Originally published in 1931.
167 See, for example, H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European
Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 392–431; Robert Wohl, The Generation
of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 203–237.
168 Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács, 13.
169 Karel Teige, “Novým směrem,” in Štěpán Vlašín, ed., Avantgarda známá i neznámá, vol. 1
(Prague: Svoboda, 1971), 92. Originally published in Kmen 4 (1921).
170 Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 7–8.
171 Ibid., 18.
172 Andrew Janos, “Modernization and Decay in Historical Perspective: The Case of Romania,”
in Kenneth Jowitt, ed., Social Change in Romania, 1860–1940: A Debate on Development in a
European Nation (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1978), 98, 108.
269
173 Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1974), 285.
174 Livezeanu, Cultural Politics, 11, and chs. 6 and 7, passim.
175 Vladimir Tismaneanu and Dan Pavel, “Romania’s Mystical Revolutionaries: The Generation
of Angst and Adventure Revisited,” East European Politics & Societies 8, no. 3 (October 1994);
and Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L’oubli du fascisme: Trois intellectuels
roumains dans la tourmente du siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002).
176 Emil Cioran, “Impresii din München. Hitler în conştiinţa germană,” Vremea, no. 346, 15
July 1934. Cited in Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology & Antisemitism, 78. See also: Volovici,
132–140; Marta Petreu, An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania,
trans. Bogdan Aldea (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), on the young generation’s embrace of
the fascist right in interwar Romania.
177 Maria Lupaş, “Early Resistance to Fascism in Eugène Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian
Journalism,” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 3 (2014); Irina Livezeanu, “‘From Dada
to Gaga’: The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism,” in Mihaï Dinu
Gheorghiu, with Lucia Dragomir, eds., Littératures et pouvoir symbolique (Bucharest: Paralela
45, 2005); and Petreu, An Infamous Past.
178 Rothschild, East Central Europe, 34–45.
179 Miłosz, History of Polish Literature, 385.
180 Cited in ibid.
181 Ibid.
182 Rothschild, East Central Europe, 389.
183 Aleksander Wat, My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, ed. and trans. Richard Lourie
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 4–5.
184 Ibid., 4, 21.
185 Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 368.
186 For an overview of avant-garde and modernist movements in Eastern Europe, see Timothy
Benson, ed., Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930 (Los
Angeles and Cambridge, MA: LACMA and MIT Press, 2002); Steven Mansbach, Modern
Art in Eastern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and the intro-
duction and chapters in Part VII “East-Central Europe” of Brooker et al., eds., Modernist
Magazines 3, 1059–1233.
187 Lee Congdon, “Budapest,” and Éva Forgács, “Between Cultures: Hungarian Concepts of
Constructivism,” in Benson, ed., Central European Avant-Gardes, 141–145 and 147–164.
188 See Esther Levinger, “Ljubomir Micić and Zenitist Utopia,” and Miško Šuvaković,
“Belgrade,” in Benson, ed., Central European Avant-Gardes, 260–278 and 280–282. See
also Irina Subotic, “Avant-Garde Tendencies in Yugoslavia,” Art Journal 49, no. 1 (1990):
21–27; Irina Subotic, “Zenit and Zenitism,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Art (Fall
1990): 15–24; and Laurel Seely Voloder and Tyrus Miller, “Avant-Garde Periodicals in the
Yugoslavian Crucible,” in Brooker et al., eds., Modernist Magazines 3, 1099–1127.
189 For more on Karel Teige and Devětsil, see Eric Dluhosch and Rostislav Švácha, eds., Karel
Teige, 1900–1951: L’Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1999). For an in-depth study of the Czech surrealist movement, see Derek Sayer,
Prague: Capital of the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
190 Thomas Ort, “Art and Life in Avant-Garde Prague, 1920–1924,” Modern Intellectual History 7,
no. 1 (2010): 63–73.
191 Vítězslav Nezval cited in Karel Honzík, Ze života avantgardy: zážitky architektovy (Prague:
Československý spisovatel, 1963), 71.
192 See Ort, “Art and Life in Avant-Garde Prague,” 63–92; Pavla Pečinková, “Generační
roztržka (Josef Čapek kontra Karel Teige),” Zpravodaj Společnosti bratři Čapků 34 (1995);
Karel Srp, “Tvrdošíjní a Devětsil,” Umění 35 (1987): 54–68; Ort, Art and Life in Modernist
Prague; and Sayer, Coasts, 154–248.
193 See, for example, Karel Čapek, “Poznámka,” in Štěpán Vlašín, ed., Avantgarda známá a
neznámá, vol. 1 (Prague: Svoboda, 1971), 104. Originally published in Musaion, spring
270
1921. See also Václav Nebeský, “Umělecký defétismus,” ibid., 115–119 (originally pub-
lished in Tribuna, March 27, 1921) and Václav Nebeský, “Umění trůnu zbavené,” Tribuna,
May 10, 1923.
194 Ort, “Art and Life in Avant-Garde Prague,” 70–71, 91–92.
195 Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1987), 37, 39.
196 Rothschild, East Central Europe, 385.
197 Sayer, Coasts, 173.
198 See, for example, Jan Sadlak, “The Use and Abuse of the University: Higher Education in
Romania, 1860–1990,” Minerva 29, no. 2 (1991): 195–225; and Livezeanu, Cultural Politics,
220–222, 224, 227, 231.
199 Borivoj Samoločvev, “Higher Education in Yugoslavia: A Historical Overview,” in Nikša Nikola
Šoljan, ed., Higher Education in Yugoslavia (Zagreb: Andragogical Center, 1989), 13–43.
200 Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe, 95; Mária Kovács, Liberal Professions and Illiberal
Politics: Hungary from the Habsburgs to the Holocaust (Washington, DC & New York: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press & Oxford University Press, 1994), 49–52.
201 Kovács, Liberal Professions, 42; Emanuel Melzer, “Antisemitism in the Last Years of the
Second Polish Republic,” in Yisrael Gutman et al., The Jews of Poland Between the Two World
Wars (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), 130.
202 Antony Polonsky, The Jews of Poland and Russia: A Short History (Oxford: The Littman
Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013), 235, 241–245; Sean Martin, Jewish Life in Cracow,
1918–1939 (London & Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), esp. ch. 3; and the dis-
cussion of Yung-Yidish (1919) and Tel-Awiw (1919–21) in Lidia Gluchowska, “Poznań and
Łódź: National Modernism and the International Avant-Garde,” in Brooker et al., eds.,
Modernist Magazines, 3: 1216–1233.
203 Jan Gross, “Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of the Imposition
of Communist Regimes in East Central Europe,” East European Politics & Societies 3, no.
2 (1989): 198–214; Bradley Abrams, “The Second World War and the East European
Revolution,” East European Politics & Societies 13, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 623–664.
204 William O’Keeffe, A Literary Occupation: Responses of German Writers in Service in Occupied
Europe (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013), 16; and Lucjan Dobroszycki, Reptile
Journalism: The Official Polish-language Press under the Nazis, 1939–1945, trans. Barbara
Harshav (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 11–12. German propaganda units
supplied troops with information and propaganda material, and strove to damage enemy
morale by using the press, radio, and leaflets.
205 Poles in the General Government had to relinquish their radios, although many kept
them hidden. Stefan Korbonski, The Polish Underground State: A Guide to the Underground,
1939–1945, trans. Marta Erdman (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1978), 48; Dobroszycki,
Reptile Journalism, 13–14. In Romania, radios were confiscated from Jews in April and May
1941. See Mihail Sebastian, Jurnal 1935–1944 (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1996), 330, and
Saşa Pană, Născut în ’02 (Bucharest: Minerva, 1973), 601.
206 Dobroszycki, Reptile Journalism, 3.
207 K.E. Fleming, Greece: A Jewish History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 51,
116; and Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950
(New York: Knopf, 2005), 392, 396. Mazower calls Nea Evropi a “quisling daily”; Fleming
calls it a “Nazi mouthpiece.”
208 Mazower, Salonica, 397–399.
209 Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, 85, 117–118.
210 Dabrowski, Poland, 409.
211 Ibid., 413–414.
212 Anna Cienciala, Natalia Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski, eds., Katyn: A Crime without
Punishment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 25–31.
213 Sayer, Coasts, 222.
214 While 50 percent of Czechs were seen as suitable for Germanization, only 3 percent of
Poles were. Tara Zahra argues that this difference was due not only to the occupiers’
271
economic and racial calculations, but also to the history of Czech–German relations in
Bohemia that rendered the Czechs “worthy nationalist foes.” Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls:
National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2008), 178–182.
215 John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher
Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2000), 80. See also Korbonski, Polish
Underground State, 49–50; Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission
to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 184.
216 Lucian Boia, Capcanele istoriei: Elita intelectuală românească între 1930 şi 1950 (Bucharest:
Humanitas, 2011), 170–175, 205–206; Israil Bercovici, O sută de ani de teatru evreiesc în
România, 2nd ed. (Bucharest: Editura Integral, 1998), 174–186. Mihail Sebastian, for
example, could no longer publish under his own signature. He taught Comparative
Literature at the College, and one of his plays was performed (not at the Baraşeum) under
an assumed name.
217 Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–2011 (New
York: Penguin, 2012), 486, 498–499; Emily Greble Balić, “When Croatia Needed Serbs:
Nationalism and Genocide in Sarajevo, 1941–1942,” Slavic Review 68, no. 1 (2009): 129,
133; and Nevenko Bartulin, The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia: Origins and
Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
218 Michele Cone, Artists under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1992), 104–105, 112, 120–124; Rosemary Sullivan, Villa Air-
Bel: The Second World War, Escape, and a House in France (London: John Murray, 2006); and
Terence Renaud, “The Genesis of the Emergency Rescue Committee, 1933–1942,” http://
terencerenaud.com/erc.htm.
219 Miłosz, History of Polish Literature, 445–446; and Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for
Self-Definition (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 212.
220 Jan Błoński, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” in Antony Polonsky, ed., My Brother’s
Keeper? Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 1990), 35–36, 40–42. The
two poems are translated on 49–51.
221 Celan’s parents were deported from Cernăuţi by the Romanian authorities in June 1942,
and died soon after, one of typhus, the other shot as “unfit for work” in a camp prob-
ably in Ukraine. Although born in 1920, Celan described himself as a “posthumously born
Kakanier.” John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1995), 3–21; and Jean Ancel, Transnistria vol. 2 (Bucharest: Editura Atlas, 1998), 226.
222 Károly Bari, “The Holocaust in Gypsy Folk Poetry,” in János Bársony and Ágnes Daróczi,
eds., Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma during the Holocaust (New York: International Debate
Education Association, 2008), 115–122.
223 Polonsky, The Jews of Poland and Russia, 367; and Bercovici, Teatru evreiesc, 186–187.
224 Jarka Burian, Modern Czech Theatre (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 62–66.
See also Eva Šormová, Divadlo v Terezíně (Ústí nad Labem: Severočeské nákladatelství,
1973).
225 See the excellent essay by John Eckhard, “Music and Concentration Camps: An
Approximation,” The Journal of Musicological Research 20, no. 4 (Jan 2001): 269–323.
226 Polonsky, The Jews of Poland and Russia, 367–368; and Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our
History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2008).
227 See Pană, Născut, 625–626, 633–636, 640–641, 644; quotation is on 644. The Romanian
Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian was not an avant-gardist, had been mostly apolitical, and he
had non-Jewish friends who joined the Iron Guard. Yet, he welcomed the Soviet soldiers
that liberated Romania, and even wrote briefly for România Liberă (Free Romania) along-
side communists in August 1944. Sebastian, Jurnal, 556–559.
228 Emil Cioran was appointed cultural attaché to France in January 1941, while the soci-
ologist Mircea Vulcănescu became Undersecretary of State in the Antonescu Ministry
of Finance. Lucian Boia, 197–245; Florin Ţurcanu, Mircea Eliade: Le prisonier de l’histoire
(Paris: La Découverte, 2003), 280–338; Laignel-Lavastine, Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco, 329–330,
272
338–343; and Mircea Vulcănescu, “Tînăra generaţie”: Crize vechi în haine noi. Cine sînt şi ce vor
tinerii români? (Bucharest: Compania, 2004), 32–33.
229 Shore, Caviar and Ashes, 253–255.
230 Connelly, Captive University, 143; György Péteri, “Science between Two Worlds: The Foreign
Relations of Hungary’s Academia, 1945–1949,” in Academia and State Socialism: Essays on the
Political History of Academic Life in Post-1945 Hungary and Eastern Europe (Boulder, CO: Social
Science Monographs; Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications, 1998),
9–27. Péteri writes about Hungary, but his conclusions apply equally to other Soviet bloc
countries.
231 Shore, Caviar and Ashes, 257.
232 Israel Chalfen, Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth, trans. Maximilian Bleyleben (New York:
Persea Books, 1991), 180–182.
233 Snyder, Reconstruction, 218–220; Włodzimierz Bolecki, “Kultura (1946–2000),” in John
Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, eds., The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central
Europe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 144–188. A Romanian Library was also established in
Freiburg in 1949, becoming a Research Institute a decade later. See www.rumänische-
bibliothek.de/prezentare.php.
234 Camelia Crăciun, “Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe,” in Neubauer and Török,
eds., Exile and Return, 276–303.
235 See Neubauer and Török, eds., Exile and Return, passim.
236 Nick Miller, The Nonconformists: Culture, Politics, and Nationalism in a Serbian Intellectual
Circle, 1944–1991 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007), 3, 12–13, 33 n. 10; Glenny, Balkans, 531;
and Jelena Vujić, “Svetislav Stefanović as a Translator of English Victorian Poetry: Early
Versions of Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ in Serbian,” Serbian Studies: Journal of the North
American Society for Serbian Studies 25, no. 2 (2011): 214–215.
237 Snyder, Sketches, 233, 250–252, and passim; and Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Filozofie şi
naţionalism: Paradoxul Noica (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1998), 9.
238 Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1990), 99. The
book, first published in 1953 by Kultura in Paris, is based on Miłosz’s experience of the war
and first postwar years. The characters, though not named, stand for actual persons. Alpha
for example “is” Jerzy Andrezejewski, the author of Ashes and Diamonds (1948). See Carl
Tighe, “Forward to Battle for the Six-Year Plan! Polish Writers 1945–56,” Journal of European
Studies 45, no. 3 (2015): 191; and Anneli Ute Gabanyi, Literatura şi politica în România după
1945 (Bucharest: Editura Fundaţiei Culturale Române, 2001), 12–15.
239 Radovan Zogović, Na poprištu, 190, cited in Miller, Nonconformists, 14.
240 Miller, Nonconformists, 14–20. The date and the very occurrence of the massacre are under
dispute. See Elizabeth Roberts, Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 132–135.
241 See Shore, Caviar and Ashes, 257–304; and Boia, Capcanele, 293–295.
242 Miłosz, Captive Mind, xi–xiii.
243 Nariman Skakov, “Introduction: Andrei Platonov, an Engineer of the Human Soul,” Slavic
Review 73, no. 4 (2014): 720; Robert Daniels, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 228–232.
244 Emily Lygo, Leningrad Poetry 1953–1975: The Thaw Generation (Brussels: Peter Lang,
2010), 2; Vilius Ivanauskas, “‘Engineers of the Human Spirit’ During Late Socialism:
The Lithuanian Union of Writers Between Soviet Duties and Local Interests,” Europe-Asia
Studies 66, no. 4 (2014): 649–651; and Petru Negură, Nici eroi, nici trădători: Scriitori moldo-
veni şi puterea sovietică în epoca stalinistă (Chişinău: Cartier, 2014), 180–181. Ivanauskas and
Negură also analyze the first, 1940, cultural Sovietizations in Lithuania and Moldova.
245 Marci Shore, “Engineering in the Age of Innocence: A Genealogy of Discourse Inside the
Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, 1949–67,” East European Politics & Societies 12, no. 3 (1998):
397–406.
246 Ibid., 410.
247 Miłosz, Captive Mind, 5 (and 3–24, passim); Carol Lilly, Power and Persuasion: Ideology and
Rhetoric in Communist Yugoslavia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), 9.
273
248 Miklos Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism (New York: Basic Books, 1987),
23–63; Cristian Vasile, Literatura şi artele în România comunistă, 1948–1953 (Bucharest:
Humanitas, 2010), 80–81, 104–108.
249 Maruška Svašek, “The Politics of Artistic Identity: The Czech Art World in the 1950s and
1960s,” in György Péteri, ed., Intellectual Life and the First Crisis of State Socialism in East
Central Europe, 1953–1956. Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures & Societies no. 6
(2001): 134–136; and Burian, Modern Czech Theatre, 73.
250 Miller, Nonconformists, 11, 27–30.
251 Burian, Modern Czech Theatre, 70–72. For Romania see Gabanyi, Literatura şi politica, 14–15.
252 Wachtel, Remaining Relevant, 32–34.
253 Lucia Dragomir, “L’Union des écrivains,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire 109, no. 1
(February 2011): 59–60; Carl Tighe, The Politics of Literature: Poland 1945–1989 (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 1999), 78–80. In Albania, there was no predecessor literary
organization. On the succession process in Yugoslavia see Miller, Nonconformists, 12–13.
254 Shore, Caviar and Ashes, 258; Vasile, Literatura şi artele, 38–70; Katherine Verdery, National
Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s Romania (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991), 110–111; Gabanyi, Literatura şi politica, 17–22; and
Lilly, Power and Persuasion, 35–48.
255 Lavinia Betea, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu: Moartea unui lider communist, 3rd ed. (Bucharest: Curtea
Veche, 2011), 86–89, 163; Georgescu, The Romanians, 240; and Vladimir Tismaneanu,
Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003), 104–106, 113–119. On Margolius, see Heda Margolius Kovaly,
Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 56–65,
78–80, 86–116, 138–143, 169–177. See also: Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and his TV: The
Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2010), 22–23.
256 Miller, Nonconformists, 12; Paul Robert Magocsi, “Education and Re-Education in the 20th
Century,” in Historical Atlas of Central Europe, rev. and expanded ed. (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2002), 208–209; Tighe, “Forward to Battle,” 193; and Guy Neave,
“Patterns,” in The History of the University in Europe: Universities since 1945 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 35–40.
257 Sassoon, Culture of the Europeans, 1250–1255.
258 Connelly, Captive University, 93–94, 99, 126–129, 187–196.
259 Ibid., 91–93.
260 Connelly shows that it was usually native Communist cultural functionaries who were respon-
sible for transferring Soviet models to their countries, thus the term “self-Sovietization.”
Ibid., 40–50, 95–99.
261 Árpád von Klimó, “The Sovietization of Hungarian Historiography: Attempts, Failures and
Modifications in the Early 1950s,” in Balázs Apor, Péter Apor, and E. A. Rees, eds., The
Sovietization of Eastern Europe (Washington, DC: New Academia, 2008), 237–248.
262 For example, the Romanian University of Cernăuţi (formerly Czernowitz), was Sovietized
twice in 1940 and again in 1944. Russian and Ukrainian replaced Romanian. See Chalfen,
Paul Celan, 111–115, 173; and Svetlana Frunchak, “Commemorating the Future in Post-
War Chernivtsi,” East European Politics & Societies 24, no. 3 (2010): 438–439.
263 This kind of student recruitment was least successful in Czechoslovakia. See Connelly,
Captive University, 244–248, 266, 272–279. For Ketman, see Miłosz, Captive Mind, 55–81. See
also Michael Shafir, Romania: Politics, Economics and Society (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner
Publishers, 1985), 146.
264 Herbert Eagle, “Andrzej Wajda: Film Language and the Artist’s Truth,” Cross Currents:
A Yearbook of Central European Culture 1 (1982): 339–343. See also Miłosz, Captive Mind,
82–110.
265 Burian, Modern Czech Theatre, 91–92.
266 Shore, Caviar and Ashes, 305; Stanisław Barańczak, “Before the Thaw: The Beginnings of
Dissent in Postwar Polish Literature (The Case of Adam Waż yk’s ‘A Poem for Adults,’” East
European Politics & Societies 3, no. 1 (1989): 3–21.
267 Shore, Caviar and Ashes, 343–347; Janina Falkowska, Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics, and
Nostalgia in Polish Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); John Orr and Elzż bieta
274
Ostrowska, eds., The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: the Art of Irony and Defiance (London:
Wallflower, 2003); Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth, and
Dissolution, 3 vols, trans. P.S. Falla (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978–1981); and
Miłosz, History of Polish Literature, 451, 457–532.
268 This discussion is based on András Hegedüs, “The Petőfi Circle: The Forum of Reform
in 1956,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 13, no. 2 (1997): 108–133. On
Lukács, see David Pike, “Georg Lukács on Stalinism and Democracy: Before and After
Prague, 1968,” East European Politics & Societies 2, no. 2 (1988): 253.
269 Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 1–2. According to the émigré writer and editor Joseph
Skvorecky the Thaw in Czechoslovakia began in the late 1950s. See Skvorecky’s interview
with John Glusman in Josef Skvorecky, “The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review no. 112 (Winter
1989), www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2392/the-art-of-fiction-no-112-josef-skvorecky.
270 Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 12–18.
271 Marci Shore, “Engineering in the Age of Innocence,” 397–441.
272 Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 16, 18–25; Shore, “Engineering in the Age of Innocence,”
430–433; Burian, Modern Czech Theatre, 119, and 93–136, passim; Peter Hames, The
Czechoslovak New Wave (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); and Jonathan
Owen, Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2011).
273 Miller, Nonconformists, 22–24.
274 Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism, 112, 261; Tismaneanu, Stalinism, 179–184, 308
n. 34.
275 Verdery, National Ideology, 126–134, 174–214.
276 Ibid., 310.
277 For a sense of what “dissidents” were, see Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the
Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press. 2012), 2–4.
278 Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (New York: Vintage Books, 1985),
17–18.
279 Adam Michnik, “On Resistance: A Letter from Białołeka 1982,” in Letters from Prison and
Other Essays, trans. Maya Latynski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 49. One
gets a good sense of this non-conspiratorial oppositional activity in Andrzej Wajda’s film
Man of Iron (1981).
280 Charter 77, “Declaration of Charter 77,” Making the History of 1989, Item # 628, https://
chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/628; Václav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless:
Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane (Armonk, NY: M.E.
Sharpe, 1985), 46–47; and Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, 115–146.
281 Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
282 See Chapter 8 in this volume for more on Havel and this essay.
283 Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, passim.
284 Havel, Power; and Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” trans. E. White, New
York Review of Books (April 26, 1984): 33–38.
285 Kenney, Carnival, 3, 9–10. Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, esp. ch 4, “Legends of the Underground.”
286 Ibid., 157–193.
287 Wachtel, Remaining Relevant, 12–15.
288 Marcel Cornis-Pope, “Mapping the Literary Interfaces of East-Central Europe,” in Cornis-
Pope and Neubauer, eds., History of the Literary Cultures, 2: 1–8.
289 Verdery, National Ideology, 3–4.
Further Reading
Anderson, Robert. European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914. Oxford, UK: Oxford
Baár, Monika. Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford:
275
Benson, Timothy, ed. Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930.
Los Angeles & Cambridge, MA: LACMA & MIT Press, 2002.
Bolton, Jonathan. Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture
under Communism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Bracewell, Wendy, and Alex, Drace-Francis, eds. Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to
East European Travel Writing on Europe. Budapest: CEU Press, 2008.
Brooker, Peter, et al., eds., Modernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History, vol. 3: Europe
1880–1940. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Connelly, John. Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher
Education, 1945–1956. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer, eds. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe:
Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. 4 vols. Amsterdam - Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 2004–2010.
Cracraft, James. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004.
Drace-Francis, Alex. The Making of Modern Romanian Culture. London: Tauris, 2006.
Eckhard, John. “Music and Concentration Camps: An Approximation.” The Journal of
Musicological Research 20, no. 4 (Jan 2001): 269–323.
Evans, Robert. Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs: Central Europe, 1683–1867. Oxford: Oxford
Frigyesi, Judit. Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998.
Gluck, Mary. Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1985.
Hanák, Péter. The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest.
Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, c1998.
Holmgren, Beth. Rewriting Capitalism: Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the
Kingdom of Poland. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
Livezeanu, Irina. Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic
Struggle, 1918–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Mishkova, Diana. “Literacy and Nation-Building in Bulgaria, 1878–1912.” East European Quarterly
29, no. 1 (1994): 63–93.
Nemes, Robert. The Once and Future Budapest. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press,
2005.
Neubauer, John, and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, eds. The Exile and Return of Writers from East-
Central Europe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009.
Ort, Thomas. Art and Life in Modernist Prague: Karel Capek and His Generation, 1911–1938. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Paces, Cynthia. Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.
Péteri, György. Academia and State Socialism: Essays on the Political History of Academic Life in Post-
1945 Hungary and Eastern Europe. Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs; Highland Lakes,
NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications, 1998.
Pynsent, Robert, with S. I. Kanikova, eds. Reader’s Encyclopedia of East European Literature. New
York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1998.
Sayer, Derek. Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Shore, Marci. Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
276
Spector, Scott. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de
Siècle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Ther, Philipp. Center Stage: Operatic Culture and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Central
Europe, translated from the German by Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmuller. West Lafayette, IN:
Purdue University Press, 2014.
Tóth, István. Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Central Europe. Budapest: CEU Press,
2000.
Vatulescu, Cristina. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Wood, Nathaniel. Becoming Metropolitan. Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow. DeKalb,
IL: Northern Illinois UP, 2010.
277
6
WOME N’S AND GE ND ER H I S T O R Y 1
Krassimira Daskalova and Susan Zimmermann
Since the 1980s, historians working on East Central Europe, as on other parts of the
world, have shown that historical experience has been deeply gendered. This chapter
focuses on the modern history of women, and on gender as a category of analysis
which helps to make visible and critically interrogate “the social organization of sexual
difference.”2 The new history of women and gender has established, as we hope to
demonstrate in this contribution, a number of key insights. First, gender relations are
intimately related to power relations. Gender, alongside dominant and non-dominant
sexualities, has been invoked persistently to produce or justify asymmetrical and
hierarchical arrangements in society and culture as a whole, to restrict the access of
women and people identifying with non-normative sexualities to material and cultural
goods, and to devalue and marginalize their ways of life. Second, throughout history
both equality and difference between women and men have typically resulted in dis
advantage for women. Men and women have generally engaged in different socio
cultural, political and economic activities, and this gender-based division of labor,
which has itself been subject to historical change, has tended to put women in an
inferior position. Even when women and men appeared as equals in one sphere of life,
this perceived equality often resulted in drawbacks or an increased burden for women
in another area and women’s contribution was still devalued as compared to men’s.
Third, women – and sometimes men – have resisted and challenged these
arrangements in myriad ways, with more or less success. As gender history has
developed these insights, it has generated scholarly interest in themes and fields of
inquiry that were previously considered marginal or secondary, or as anthropolog-
ical constants not subject to historical change. In this way, this relatively new field
has contributed enormously to the broadening of our understanding of East Central
European history as such. This chapter examines the history of women’s lives, status,
and experience. Wherever possible we do this in comparison to men’s lives, status,
and experience, so as to highlight historically changing gender norms and social
practices. The chapter also discusses differences among women and those with
marginalized gendered identities.
The insights of women’s and gender history have not always been incorporated
into the mainstream of East European historiography. However, while women’s and
gender history in Eastern Europe still lacks the institutional support of other histori-
cal subfields, the field as a whole has blossomed in the past few decades.3 This chapter
relies on this new body of research.
278
W omen ’ s and G ender H istory
To show key themes of gendered historical change and follow the primary con-
cerns of scholars in this field, and because we wish to call attention to the unavoidable
selectivity of the thematic choices of any historical overview, we focus on six major
themes in women’s and gender history in East Central Europe: education; work and
social politics; law and citizenship; empire, nation, ethnicity; gendered scripts of sex-
ualities and intimate relationships; women’s activism and movements. Historically,
women’s activism and movements have been instrumental in making hierarchical
and asymmetrical gender arrangements visible and in bringing about change in each
of the five other domains. The thematic structure of the chapter also provides a way
for those who have not considered the impact of gender on these large thematic areas
to easily see how a focus on gender changes established narratives. Thinking about
East Central European women’s and gender history allows us to interrogate critically
and alter inherited paradigms in both gender history and East Central European
history as a whole.
Education
Education in East Central Europe since 1700 has been highly gendered in terms
of both access and curricula. Looking at policies, practices, and debates over the
gendering of education allows us to investigate how gender norms developed and
were contested in society more generally. But gender was never a factor in isolation.
Social and class status, ethnic and religious competition, as well as nation-building
(both before and after the establishment of nation-states) and economic develop-
ment efforts have all affected the access women and girls had to education and
how that education was gendered. Access to the higher echelons of education in
particular was much more restricted for girls compared to boys and for girls from
more humble social backgrounds compared to the daughters of more privileged
parents. Elementary education was more accessible to girls, but compared to boys
they remained distinctly underrepresented even at the primary level until well into
the twentieth century.
In East Central Europe as a whole, the process of nation-building had a substantial
impact on the education of women and men. Within limits, patriotic modernization
and development efforts had positive effects on the state of women’s education.
Examples of this date from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when some
East Central European intellectuals supported the idea that schools for both boys and
girls should be established in each village and town. During the nineteenth century
both female and male authors from the Balkans published pamphlets and articles
on women’s right to education. They drew readers’ attention to women’s superf icial
and inadequate schooling, and presented this as the reason behind the lower status
of women and gender inequalities. Greek, Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian liter-
ary men and intellectuals supported women’s education, believing that overcoming
women’s ignorance and “barbarism” was an important step in their people’s national
development. Similarly, while within Greek society a specific Western Enlightenment-
inspired discourse on women’s education emerged only after the establishment of the
modern Greek state in 1832, among the Bulgarians and Albanians of Southeastern
Europe, discourses on women’s education paralleled nation-building processes and
279
K rassimira D askalova and S usan Z immermann
appeared already during the era of Ottoman rule.4 In the Habsburg Empire various
male Hungarian authors in the last two decades of the eighteenth and the very begin-
ning of the nineteenth century – at times parading under a female pseudonym or as
a women’s “advocate” – were keen to demand w omen’s educational improvement as
a contribution to building the (noble) Hungarian nation. When reform endeavors
came to an end soon thereafter, interest in educating Hungarian (noble) women
visibly decreased.5
Girls’ primary education was usually part and parcel of the introduction of com-
pulsory elementary schooling. The Greek government was a forerunner in 1834.
Compulsory education for both genders was mandated by the Romanian Constitution
of 1866, in the first Bulgarian Turnovo Constitution of 1879, and Serbian educational
law in 1882. These legal measures, however, were rather ineffective. As late as the
beginning of the twentieth century in some poor regions of the Balkans there was less
than 50 percent school attendance for both boys and girls. In addition, the predom-
inantly patriarchal culture in the region meant that no matter what was prescribed
by law, a much lower proportion of girls compared to boys attended schools.6 In
the Habsburg Monarchy compulsory primary education for both sexes came early in
the Dualist period and was closely related to the short-lived dominance of liberalism
in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy (1869) and of liberal nation-building in
Hungary (1868). While there was no gender difference in terms of curricula and the
number of years to be spent in elementary schooling in the Hungarian half of the
monarchy, gender was a factor at higher educational levels throughout the Habsburg
Monarchy. Girls’ education everywhere in East Central Europe was tailored to be
shorter than boys’ and focused on preparing them for a life at home among family,
while boys were being prepared for a working life.7
If primary education for both sexes, with all the limitations described above, was
an accepted standard in principle, higher education for the female sex was a bone of
contention. In Russian Poland girls’ education formed a battlefield between Russifiers
and Polish nationalists.8 In southern East Central Europe conservatives saw women’s
education as a principal agent of the evil caused by the Westernization of morals and
manners. They thought women’s higher education and immorality were synonymous.
Some Balkan modernizers supported Westernization or Europeanization in principle
but tended to reject Westernizing girls’ secondary education. While wide differences
existed between various regions, the most visible were those between the culturally
conservative, traditional, agricultural continental part of East Central Europe and
the more developed and urbanized administrative centers and ports. As elsewhere,
the majority of the rural population considered girls’ education absurd, while town
populations were more receptive to the model of separate girls’ education. At the
same time, the idea of a woman’s mission or vocation as a mother-educator spread-
ing national ideology reinforced views in support of a specifically gendered kind of
women’s education.9
In the Austrian lands in the later decades of the nineteenth and the early twen-
tieth century, Czech and Slovene nationalists supported expanding women’s
secondary education, albeit with explicitly gendered nationalist goals in mind. In
the 1860s, Czech-language secondary schools for girls were instituted in Prague
to reinforce the idea of motherhood and the family as central to Czech women’s
280
calling and to include educated women as mothers of the nation into the patri-
otic Czech community.10 Different nationalist factions competed to establish
secondary schools for women in their preferred language. Thus the first women’s
gymnasium (i.e. a university preparatory school rooted in Classical languages
and literature) in Austria was established in Prague in 1890, with Czech as the
teaching language, followed by competing German-language institutions. A Polish-
language Jewish gymnasium was founded in Lemberg/Lwów/L’viv in 1899 and a
Ukrainian-language gymnasium followed in 1906.11 In Estonia under Russian rule
the dominant German elites successfully pursued the expansion of socially conserv-
ative gendered German-language secondary education for girls.12
The first women’s high school in the Balkans was established in the Serbian cap-
ital of Belgrade in 1863. During the 1860s and particularly from the 1870s onwards
Balkan educational initiatives were subordinated to the national cause. They aimed
at indoctrinating Greeks, Serbians, Bulgarians, and Romanians, girls in particular,
with national ideals. In Greece between the 1860s and 1890s a number of women’s
“superior” private schools were established. Those run by the Society of Friends of
Education, known as Arsakeions after the generous donor Apostolos Arsakis, were
especially popular. Apart from providing formal secondary education to girls, the
Arsakeions were important institutions for the preparation of future women teachers
and as places for women’s socialization and identity building. In the 1870s several
new schools for Greek-speaking women were established thanks to the activity of the
Association in Favor of Women’s Education (founded in Constantinople/Istanbul
in 1871), the Association of the Ladies in Favor of Feminine Education (established
in Athens in 1872), and various other educational associations; financial support
came from rich Greeks from the diaspora. The first Greek public secondary schools
for girls, equivalent to those for boys, opened in 1917, but it was only in 1929, with
the educational reform of Eleutherious Venizelos, that girls’ secondary education
became comparable to that for boys.13
In Bulgaria after the establishment of the nation-state in 1878, various kinds
of secondary schools with different numbers of grades or “classes” called klasni
(class) schools, came into being. There were also incomplete and complete types of class
schools – i.e. schools offering some or all of the possible grade levels – called gym-
nasii, modeled after the German Gymnasien. These schools were both single-sex and
co-educational. Most were called narodni (people’s) schools and were sponsored by
the Bulgarian state. Private schools for ethnic minorities and religious groups were
not supported by the state. In 1885–86 there were seven complete gymnasii for boys
and two for girls. But women’s gymnasii had six grades while men’s had seven grades
and different curricula.14
As in other parts of the world, government officials in East Central European soci-
eties devoted many more resources to the education of boys than to co-educational or
girls’ schools. Women’s education in the region thus remained much less developed
and the number of educated women was far smaller than that of men. State-sanctioned
differences in the curricula of girls’ and boys’ high schools served as a pretext to block
women’s admission to the universities well into the twentieth century. Anywhere the
admission of women to university education had been or seemed likely to be intro-
duced, it met with fierce resistance from professors, politicians, and journalists, and
281
other members of the male intelligentsia. Opponents argued that women were phys-
ically unfit for higher education; some said, for example, that women’s more labile
sense of justice made them unfit for the study of law. Some claimed that politics and
economics were male spheres where women should not compete; one Hungarian
supporter of women’s higher education, summarizing this perspective, explained
that the study of law was especially “a question of empire and jurisdiction, and as long
as the state remains a man’s state, as has been the case for so many thousands of years,
the two will not easily be placed in women’s hands.”15
As a result, access to universities did not come easily to women anywhere in the
region. Hungary and Austria in particular were latecomers. Before 1895 and 1897,
respectively, at some universities women could attend lectures as guests, but other
universities did not even allow them guest status, with a few exceptions dating back
to earlier decades. In Hungary, universities admitted women to study the humani-
ties, medicine, and pharmacy beginning in 1895, but only on a case-by-case basis.
Other branches of study were opened to women in 1918, but this coincided with the
introduction of a numerus clausus for both female and Jewish students (even though
the legal basis for each was different).16 In the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy,
women holding Austrian citizenship could enroll in humanities curricula beginning
in 1897; three years later they were also allowed to study medicine and pharmacy.
For Serbian women it was theoretically possible to study at the University of Belgrade
from the time the university opened its doors in 1864. Only a handful, however, did
so. Female students, still few compared to men, were only fully integrated into the
Serbian university system in 1905. Both the University of Zagreb (established in 1874)
and Sofia University (in existence since 1888) admitted women first as auditors in
1895, and as full-time students in 1901. The two Romanian national universities – in
Iaşi and in Bucharest, both established in the 1860s – admitted women as auditors
in 1894. Ottoman women entered Istanbul University (established in 1846) in 1911,
while Albanian women were admitted to the University of Tirana immediately after
its establishment in 1957.17
State socialism quickly accomplished at least formal women’s equality in education
at all levels. Sooner or later, secondary education became compulsory for both women
and men across the region; women especially benefited from this. The proportion of
women among university students rose steadily over the course of the twentieth cen-
tury, but especially during state socialism. In Bulgaria, one-third of university students
were female in 1956–57. By 1970–71, this proportion had reached 50 percent, while
in the last year of the socialist regime (1988–89) 53.5 percent of university graduates
were women. Since the end of the 1970s sociological research has repeatedly shown
that in Bulgaria women are much more educated than men. In Hungary, the pro-
portion of female university graduates nearly doubled between 1949 and 1970, when
it reached 31 percent. In the early 1950s, quotas aimed at raising the proportion of
female students in technical and agrarian courses of study were instituted. Data on
the professional careers of Hungarian women in academic and high-ranking cultural
institutions suggests that, after hesitant beginnings in the interwar period, the state
socialist system enabled a number of women to climb the career ladder. But despite
these gains, educational discrimination, gendered patterns of educational perfor-
mance, and the phenomenon of the glass ceiling continued throughout the region
during state-socialist period.18
282
Work and social politics

Work has long formed one of the key preoccupations in gender historiography, includ-
ing that with a focus on East Central Europe. Most gender historians would agree
that there are at least four entangled fields of inquiry at the core of this research:
women’s involvement in the world of paid labor; the gendered relationship between
paid labor and the unpaid domestic work largely done by women (and generally
considered to be “women’s work”); the push to convert unpaid domestic or care-
work into paid work, and the class dimensions of this shift; and, last but not least,
the role of social and welfare policies in shaping the gender order in relation to
paid and unpaid work. Three themes have been of crucial importance in gendering
the division of labor in East Central European societies: women’s role in farming
and agriculture, the contested process of women’s initial entry into the paid labor
force in the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century, and the
politics of women’s mass entry into non-agricultural sectors of the labor market
under state socialism.
Well into the twentieth century, the majority of the East Central European pop-
ulation belonged to the peasantry or to the ranks of landless agricultural laborers.
Therefore, the dominant occupation of most women in East Central Europe, aside
from domestic and care-work, was farming and agricultural work, whether paid or
unpaid. In peasant households, work was performed according to a complementary
gendered and generational division of labor. In some regions and among certain
ethnic groups, male and female tasks were rigidly differentiated, while in others
tasks were divided somewhat more flexibly. Many chores were considered categor-
ically either “female” or “male.” Others were done jointly, but the woman’s part
was often defined as “auxiliary” even when it required greater strength or stam-
ina. Changing circumstances, such as the availability of paid labor opportunities for
either sex, or changes in the composition of the household after members died or
left, could bring changes in the gendered division of labor. As a rule, women had
to shoulder a heavy burden of work in and around the house, in addition to field
work. Until the late twentieth century, many peasants considered it improper to buy
something they could produce themselves, such as soap or bread; such purchases
signaled that a woman was a bad housekeeper. Visual sources as well as memories
indicate that while rural men had some free time, for instance when they sat down
to eat after work, women rarely had even a moment to themselves. Even at meals
women stood while the rest of the family sat to eat: they served the food and then
cleaned up afterwards.19
A large percentage of the population in the countryside did not fall under the
classical definition of peasants as a class of independent freeholders. Large numbers
of farmhands labored on medium or vast estates belonging to others, and millions of
landless rural dwellers, or those living on the tiniest plots pursued both unpaid and
gainful work in agriculture and in various small-scale trades, many of them caught in
dire poverty.20 Girls and women belonging to these landless strata performed a whole
variety of mostly gender-specific work, as did boys and men. In the Great Hungarian
Plain in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth cen-
turies, many girls under the age of ten worked for long months between April and
September as goose watchers in remote hamlets. By the late nineteenth century their
283
peasant mistresses, who themselves might own a house in the village and only lived in
these primitive facilities part of the time, hired these girls on the local market where
they were offered by their mothers. While some girls had positive experiences doing
this work, others suffered from solitude or experienced great fear when encounter-
ing strangers in the sequestered cottages where they typically did their summer work.
When such girls become older, they were often hired out as nursemaids; from the
age of 15 or 16 they might become servants, combining work in the house and in the
garden and fields. Until the late nineteenth century these girls’ wages were largely
paid in kind. In addition to their keep, they might get a pair of boots or slippers and
only very rarely money.
Whether adult women from among the landless agrarian population who lived
with their husbands or partners took on paid work in addition to their domestic labor
seems to have depended less on the financial situation of the family (which always
needed additional income) than the availability of work – which in many places
waxed and waned – and the age of their children. Women’s paid labor continually
adjusted to their changing opportunities. Married women in Hungarian hamlets and
villages did all kinds of casual labor. They might be hired by peasant or affluent Jewish
households for part-time work such as force-feeding or plucking geese (goose was a
particularly important part of the Hungarian Jewish diet). The force-feeding of the
geese (to enlarge the liver and create foie gras, considered a delicacy in Hungary as
in France) was done twice a day, in the morning and the afternoon. After three or
four weeks of force-feeding, the geese were sold and the women received a portion of
the proceeds from each goose. The plucking was done for a day-wage. In larger set-
tlements, widows and married women both worked as day-laborers doing all manner
of tasks, including hoeing, bundling sheaves of grain, shucking corn, mending sacks,
or making jam or soap; they took in washing or ironing, baked bread, and helped
out during the grape harvest or when a pig was slaughtered. Women who established
themselves in various branches of the (itinerant) retail trade, or as healers or mid-
wives (women who formally qualified for this profession became more frequent in
the 1880s), or those whose circumstances were such that they could take in foster
children, or professionally cook for others, tended to make a better living.21
State socialism brought a dramatic decrease in the agrarian population and
equally far-reaching changes in rural property relations and the structure and
organization of agricultural production. Yet there was also significant continuity in
the gendered division of labor within households and in the agrarian workforce.
Women tended to remain in unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. For instance, for
decades in Hungarian agricultural cooperatives, women made up approximately
40 percent of semi-skilled and unskilled agricultural workers, but only ten percent
of the skilled manual workforce. Women’s labor was also largely concentrated in
traditionally female occupations, such as planting; in 1980 two-thirds of the work-
force in this sector was female.22 Gendered hierarchies in rural life were aided by the
symbiosis between private plots and collective production, and the formal division
of collective farm residents into full members and “supporting family members.”
Between 1970 and 1980 only 30 percent of the total number of cooperative mem-
bers or cooperative employees were women, and many of them were engaged in
low-level work in administration. But 94 percent of economically active “supporting
284
family members” in 1970 were women, which rose to 98 percent in 1980. According
to one study, in 1962 these women spent only a very small part of their average work
time in paid labor, while nearly a third of their typical working day was devoted to
work on the so-called private plot, where rural families grew produce for their own
consumption and to sell privately. Thus, the internal structure of the cooperatives
continued to contradict the dominant trend toward the formally equal treatment
of women and men under socialism. In their daily lives, women found themselves,
once again, in a highly asymmetrical position within the household and the coop-
erative, and were kept in a particularly burdensome position combining paid and
unpaid work.23
Women’s growing integration into the paid labor force in the non-agrarian sector
in the nineteenth and early twentieth century forms the second important theme in
the gendered history of women’s work in East Central Europe. Women’s entry into
paid work was one root cause of important challenges to the dominant gender order.
It was, therefore, a constant source of social anxiety for both men and women. While
wage labor changed the lives of many women and their families, this process was not
simply emancipatory.
Domestic service was and remained an important feature of women’s paid work.
The large majority of domestic servants were women in many places in the late eight-
eenth century.24 Their social distance from the group of agricultural servants increased
throughout the nineteenth century. In 1910 in the Hungarian Kingdom domestic
servants comprised 40 percent of the non-agricultural female workforce, and the pro-
portion was the same even in the capital city, a fast growing industrial hub with close
to one million inhabitants. Budapest in the immediate postwar years also provides
the setting for the famous novel Anna Édes by Dezső Kosztolányi, first published in
1926. Translated into many languages, this novel masterfully memorializes the work
and life of this group of women. It illustrates how they coped with the incessant, hard
household work they performed for others, the danger of sexual assault many faced
in the households of their employers, and how their mistresses were obsessed with
controlling and intervening in all aspects of their lives. Kosztolányi also highlights
the cynical superciliousness of employer families that refused to acknowledge their
reliance on the hard labor of their servants. Anna’s employer, Mrs. Vizy, spoke as if
Anna rather than she was the privileged one:
Talking in monologue Mrs. Vizy lamented: “It is true, she works enough.
But tell me, please, what else should she do,” she irritably asked. “Here she
gets her board and lodging. She will also get clothing. She can put her wage
aside. What else does she want in these difficult times? What’s her problem?
She does not need to maintain this big flat, to rack her brains everyday about
what to cook . . . she just lives, lives untroubled, freely. I used to say often
times, nowadays it’s only the servants who thrive.” The ladies sighed.25
Statistical data about the growing presence of women in the paid labor force and
the changing gender composition of the workforce are available from the later
decades of the nineteenth century, illustrating the increase in women’s contribution
to the paid labor force. For example, by 1923, the proportion of women within the
285
Slovene working class had grown to 27 percent. Between 1909 and 1944 the share
of Bulgarian women among industrial workers in the country increased from 22 to
36 percent, while even in 1939 both female and male workers in all economic spheres
represented only 6.7 percent of the economically active population in the country.26
Yet such statistics can give us only a very partial picture of women’s economic con-
tribution and of the asymmetrically gendered pattern of women’s inclusion into the
various branches of paid labor. There was great variation, particularly in the case of
married women. Even as women’s participation in paid labor expanded, women con-
tinued to be almost exclusively responsible for domestic duties (which would remain
the case throughout the twentieth century).27 That married women felt many pres-
sures to stay at home is borne out by statistics. In Hungary the percentage of married
women involved in paid work decreased from 22 to 10 percent between 1900 and
1930. But during this same time period the share of single, divorced, and widowed
women in the female workforce increased. The proportion of the female labor force
working in the agricultural sector decreased by one-fourth during these years (but
was still 44 percent in 1930).28
Women’s experience in the world of paid labor was colored by, and contributed
to, their marginalized status in society more generally. Gendered patterns of exploita-
tion included women’s systematically lower wages and the threat of sexual harassment
or assault. Women’s growing involvement with commodified labor met fierce resist-
ance on a variety of levels, although the nature of this resistance varied substantially
by class. In Austria the exercise of a trade was supposed to be gender-neutral after
1859, but in practice women’s position was made even more difficult by the introduc-
tion of the separate category of qualified trades in 1883.29 Women who struggled to
establish some form of independent living by entering middle-class professions were
confronted with a persistent hostility that manifested itself in legal and cultural chal-
lenges; this can be seen as an extension of the resistance against secondary and higher
education discussed above. Teaching, the first and most widespread intellectual occu-
pation accessible to the “second sex” since the beginning of the nineteenth century
(and in some areas even earlier), can serve as one example. As long as women had no
access to regular university training, they were reduced to the lower, least respected,
and worst paid ranks of the teaching profession. As in other parts of Europe, laws in
some East Central European countries forbade female teachers from continuing to
work after they married, or introduced other discriminatory regulations that specifi-
cally targeted women.30
In addition, advances achieved by female employees and professionals were repeat-
edly challenged. There were constant attempts to exclude women from better-paying
jobs, particularly in education and the civil service. Bulgarian teachers, for instance,
after the interruptions caused by World War I, returned to the classroom only to
be dismissed again during economic crises in the 1920s and 1930s. In the new-
born Czechoslovak Republic, the celibát (which mandated that female teachers be
fired after marriage) was abolished in 1918, but gendered discrimination remained
pervasive in the civil service throughout the interwar period. Officials pondered
reintroducing the celibát only years after abolishing it; in 1926 gendered restrictions
were applied to lower-level office staff, and during the economic crisis of 1933, pay
cuts were introduced in both the state and the private sector for married employees
286
whose spouses also worked. In Hungary as well, an increase in the number of women
working in white-collar jobs provoked an intense debate, with oppositional voices
becoming predominant in the 1930s.31 Female professionals such as lawyers, doctors,
artists, writers, and architects faced numerous restrictions in many countries. The sit-
uation of women with law degrees was especially egregious; in Bulgaria, Albania, and
Hungary female lawyers were not allowed to practice their profession until after 1945.
In Hungary, additional restrictions on women in the legal profession were introduced
as late as 1937.32
In East Central Europe, these developments were accompanied by an ambig-
uous discourse on “modernization.” Modernizing elites in the Balkans in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries certainly understood that “modernization”
would inevitably transform gender relations, yet at the same time they were afraid
of shattering traditional life and the gendered status-quo. Liberal reformers who
aimed at modernizing their “imagined communities,” were also seemingly of two
minds. They campaigned for women’s economic activity while still defending tradi-
tional women’s roles as mothers and housewives. Many argued that the family was
the major institution of social stability and opposed the idea of women’s paid work
outside the household; they believed that traditional gendered patriarchal virtues
and values could preserve their nations from the subversive influence of Western
ideas and practices.33
At the same time, women who had managed to enter the professions in the
late nineteenth century developed their own professional cultures while initiating
political actions that often consciously aimed to counter the restrictive discourses
of male “modernizers.” Feminist journalists such as Callirhoe Parren in Greece and
Teodora Noeva, Ana Karima, and Vela Blagoeva in Bulgaria, for instance, made use
of their new means of self-expression, financial independence, and cultural visibility
to contest male ideas about women and to contrast male fantasies about women with
women’s lived reality. In the interwar period, professional women organized, nation-
ally and internationally, to represent and promote their interests. In 1924, educated
Bulgarian women established the Association of Bulgarian Women Graduates
(later renamed the Bulgarian Association of University Women) which joined the
International Federation of University Women (IFUW) in 1925. Yugoslav women
graduates established a branch of the same international organization in 1927 and
joined the IFUW in 1928.34
Women were also integrated into the sphere of paid labor through welfare and
social policy where the vexed relationship between equality and difference played a
pronounced role. On the one hand, social policy provisions contributed to increasing
the gender gap in the workplace even when strictly based on legal equality between
the sexes. Social insurance is a case in point. While women represented 24 percent
of the workforce in the Kingdom of Hungary in 1910 (35 percent in the capital
city of Budapest), their share among those covered by health insurance was only
13 percent in the capital and at the national level. This largely mirrored the fact that
women workers were concentrated in sectors such as domestic service, the informal
economy, and other areas considered marginal and “backward.” As a result, a sup-
posedly gender-neutral social policy deepened the cleavage between the male and
female labor force by prioritizing predominantly male occupations and leaving out
287
of the safety net predominantly female ones.35 Local social welfare policies similarly
built on supposedly gender-neutral norms when regulating access to (even minimal)
benefits; in practice these worked against supporting women in need. In Budapest
during the pre-1914 period single mothers and widows who asked for regular support
from the municipal poor relief authorities by arguing that they were “incapable of
work” because they were the sole caregiver for numerous children, were systemati-
cally rejected. In the eyes of the Budapest authorities, only applicants suffering from
chronic illnesses were entitled to social aid; domestic responsibilities that prevented
women from taking jobs entitled them to nothing. In this way a vision of social reality
that ignored the gendered division of care responsibilities in society translated into
sharply exclusionary gendered social welfare policies.36
On the other hand, poor relief and social policy measures also included strongly
gendered components, entertaining particular visions of what a proper gender
order looked or should look like. Labor protection on the national level is a key
example. From the beginning of the industrial era, and increasingly by the late
nineteenth century, labor law contained important gender-specific prohibitions
and stipulations. In the early twentieth century Hungary and Bulgaria were the first
East Central European countries, followed by Romania, Greece, and later Serbia, to
introduce restrictions on night work for female industrial workers, a common prac-
tice throughout Europe generally. In Austria traditions of gender-specific labor
protection, such as restrictions on night work, reached further back. In a num-
ber of countries, additional restrictions on working hours for female workers were
introduced in the interwar period. At the same time, some social guarantees and
benefits for working mothers were adopted, mostly within the framework of social
insurance policies.37
Many elements of these gender-specific policies had an ambiguous impact on
working women. Night work restrictions, while certainly a gain in terms of labor
protection, also aimed at preserving or re-creating the traditional gender order by
keeping women home at night; in addition, the effect of such legislation was often,
as in Hungary, to bar women from well-paid positions while still allowing them to
take low-paid night work, for example in industries requiring continuous operation
and therefore exempted from the women-specific prohibition of night work. In turn,
the history of maternal protection measures points to the fact that the integration of
women into the paid labor force did not necessarily make them “independent”; more
often than not their new roles replaced traditional forms of subordination to patri-
archal authority within the family by new forms of multiple dependency. Maternal
protection measures as a rule did little to substantially ease the burden of combining
care responsibilities, which rested largely on women, and paid work.
State socialism brought an enormous and forceful mobilization of women into
the world of paid labor. While earlier research tended to create a rather uniform
and monochrome picture of this process, more recent studies have foregrounded
the complexity and unevenness of these developments as well as change over time.
Women were a key focus of policies aimed at speeding up the inclusion of new
groups into formal employment. It was obvious to socialist planners that the mas-
sive industrial development they envisioned would not be possible without women’s
participation in the labor market. Accordingly, women’s labor force participation
288
rates rose sharply everywhere in the region. For example, in Yugoslavia, women’s
proportion of the labor force grew from 18 percent in 1940 to 23.7 percent in
1953. By 1978, 34.7 percent of the Yugoslav workforce was female, albeit with
huge differences between the regions (44 percent in Slovenia versus 20 percent
in Kosovo).38 In Hungary, women’s labor force participation rose from 35 percent
in 1949 to 64 percent in 1970, and 69 percent in 1990.39 Among the disadvantaged
Roma minority, however, this figure remained much lower than the average figures
for women as a whole. In 1970 only 30 percent of Hungarian Roma women of work-
ing age were formally employed; even in 1987 this figure did not exceed 49 percent,
and by 1993 it fell sharply to only 16 percent).40 In Bulgaria, by the late 1970s,
80 percent of all economically active women worked in the paid labor force, and in
1988 women represented 49.9 percent of the workforce in the country.41
The sustained employment of women during state socialism unmistakably, and in
some senses radically, altered women’s subjectivities and improved their social posi-
tion. Involvement in the world of work functioned as a source of self-respect not
based on traditional female roles in the family, it gave rise to new social relationships
and reciprocal commitment among women, and to some extent between women and
men, and it generated social and economic security on low, albeit improving, levels.42
A sociological study of Bulgarian working women from the late 1970s showed that
90 percent of those interviewed thought that women should be present in the labor
market (for women with university degrees the share was 98 percent).43 Yet at the
same time, paid work, once again, did not make women independent and equal.
Women’s work continued to be undervalued and most women worked at jobs that
had lower pay and status than men’s. The labor market remained largely segregated
and stratified by gender. Some feminist economists have argued that definitions of
“skill” itself are saturated by sexual bias; that is, the fact that a certain kind of work is
performed by women could mark it as unskilled and unimportant.44 In Budapest in
the early 1970s, 40 percent of male workers were classified as skilled, compared with
only 15 percent of female workers; women were heavily concentrated in low-paid,
“unskilled” sectors of the labor market. In 1980, women outnumbered men in lead-
ing positions in a few sectors, but they remained heavily underrepresented in others,
including national-level public administration, where only 16 percent of leadership
positions were occupied by women.45
Because the burden of domestic work continued to fall primarily on women, full-
time work in the factory and office meant continuous hardship for many women
(and their families), mainly because services to assist women in coping with the bur-
den of paid work (such as public transportation, day care facilities, readily available
processed food, etc.) were insufficient and their expansion was delayed unlike the
increasing proportion of women working in full-time jobs.46 The inherent tension
between women’s “emancipation” through their participation in the paid labor mar-
ket and pro-natalist policies formed another element of the ambiguous experience
of women with state socialism.47
Some historians have argued that women’s participation in paid labor under
socialism was not simply imposed by “the system,” but was actively negotiated by
women themselves. For example, a recent study of three different groups of female
workers in Poland demonstrates how one group mobilized both traditional notions
289
of family and their new identities as socialist workers to improve working condi-
tions and the circumstances of social reproduction, while in another city “regulated
work hours, leisure time, and relatively limited domestic tasks” allowed young
female migrants from the countryside “to explore the pleasures of being a woman
to a greater extent than in a rural setting.”48 Such research demonstrates working
women’s agency under state socialism, but it has not yet provoked a more general
re-conceptualization of that system, which still tends to be understood as having
been invariably ruled by an omnipotent state. Yet recent oral histories suggest that
the policies and institutions socialist states used to mobilize women into the labor
force played a role in shaping women workers’ agency and their relationship to
party and state.49
A second important question within the history of work under state socialism is
the vexed relationship between formal gender equality and persistent ideas of gender
difference in practice. Socialist governments officially proclaimed men and women
legally equal, but they continued to promulgate policies dependent on notions of
gender difference. Many historians agree that such policies worked to perpetuate
women’s inferiority in the paid labor force and their gender-specific exploitation as
unpaid labor.50 For example, generous maternity leave policies were introduced in
many East Central European state socialist countries beginning in the 1960s (e.g.
Hungary 1967, Bulgaria 1968, Poland 1968, Czechoslovakia 1970), followed by the
Soviet Union in the 1970s.51 On one hand, these policies eased women’s infamous
“double burden” of being expected to pursue full-time paid occupations while
discharging the full-time duties of raising a family. On the other hand, they also sup-
ported a traditionally gendered division of labor in the family in line with inherited
patriarchal or male interest, since generally only women took advantage of childcare
leave even after it was made legally available to men too. Yet at least in some countries
a discourse of more egalitarian gender relations remained strong. In Bulgaria, even
during the pro-natalist campaign of the 1980s, officials envisioned fathers, grand-
mothers, and grandfathers taking advantage of “maternity” leave.52
These kinds of policies did not affect all women in the same way. New forms
of maternity leave common in the 1980s enhanced differences among women. In
Hungary, Roma women, rural women, and women with low-skilled jobs were clearly
discriminated against in the new system of maternity leave because of their lower
level of integration into paid labor relative to other women.53 On the other hand, for
many Roma women in Hungary and Bulgaria (and other countries), bearing chil-
dren was often the only legal way to acquire the money necessary for mere survival.
But discrimination extended to pro-natalist policies as well. Measures introduced in
Bulgaria in the 1960s to increase the birthrate were explicitly directed toward the
ethnic Bulgarian population alone.54
Law and citizenship

Historians of legal and political history have generally described the period between
the eighteenth and twentieth centuries as gradually bringing more equality to the
citizens of a given nation or territory. However, this perspective has, implicitly or
(less often) explicitly, concentrated on men alone – so much so that until very
290
recently historians have talked about “universal suffrage” when they were really
referring only to universal male suffrage, to give but one example. Broadening our
perspective to include both women and men challenges the idea of a rocky, but
eventually successful road to legal equality. As compared to the eighteenth century,
in the nineteenth century legal differences between women and men became even
more pronounced in quite a number of areas. Campaigns to create more egalitar-
ian legal codes for both women and men were often fiercely resisted by supporters
of traditional patriarchal values well into the twentieth century. However, because
high-quality and comparative research into the gendered social-legal history of East
Central Europe remains rare, it is difficult to make any generalizing claims about
the region, either relative to the West or among the sub-regions or lands of East
Central Europe.
During the “long nineteenth century,” forms of gender inequality rooted in older
legal traditions often continued through a system of legal pluralism that is the exist-
ence of multiple legal systems within one state, governing different groups of people
and branches of law. The creation of new civil law codes solidified gender hierarchies
in new ways. In addition, the legal status of women varied widely among different
groups between and within states over long periods of time, and in the many different
areas of civil and criminal law.
Civil law in East Central Europe was influenced by various secular legal systems –
French, Italian, German, and Russian – as well as by the canon law of different
Christian denominations. In particular, the (in)famous French Code Civil of 1804,
referred to as the Code Napoléon from 1807, the Italian Codice civile, and the Swiss
Zivilgesetzbuch, greatly influenced the development of civil law in East Central Europe.
These new civil law codes did not always depart significantly from eighteenth-century
customary laws or traditions, but they did entrench and deepen a hierarchical con-
ception of the family within the law. The influential French Code Civil was greatly
informed by pre-revolutionary customary law, as well as based around a typically
bourgeois conception of the family, where the male head of household was the fam-
ily’s sole legal person and citizen. The legal regulations contained in it increasingly
functioned as a “bastion of relationships of authority and dependency that came
close to resembling the Middle Ages.”55 A similar legal vision of the family worked
its way into civil law codes around the region of East Central Europe. The Austrian
Allgemeine Bürgerliche Gesetzbuch (General Civil Code) of 1812 remained unchanged
in its gender regulations until 1914, when it finally became easier for women to
assume legal guardianship of their own children; this was imperative especially for
unwed mothers who wished to establish legal paternity and claim material support
for their child. Other discriminatory regulations from the 1812 civil code remained
intact in some Habsburg successor states even beyond 1914. According to these laws,
a husband (or father) had the right to make all decisions on behalf of his family; he
had absolute rights over all of the couple’s property, including all assets they had
acquired during marriage. When a marriage was dissolved, in many cases women
were deprived of the material status the family had enjoyed earlier.56 In a similar
vein, the Serbian civil code prescribed the far-reaching subordination of women
to men in family and marriage law, and deprived women of inheritance rights.57
Lacking legal and financial autonomy, a wife (especially one from the lower-middle
291
or middle classes) was dependent on her husband; thus women were, in effect,
chained to the institution of marriage.
The picture was somewhat different under Ottoman law. For the eighteenth cen-
tury some scholars have argued that women’s property rights were particularly strong
under Muslim law, and that in the Ottoman territories Christian and Jewish women
in considerable numbers sought recourse to Muslim courts for this reason. Strongly
cautioning against assuming any general legal advantage of women in the West over
women in the East, or the other way around, Margaret Hunt presents an extremely
complex picture of women’s property and inheritance rights, underlining differences
related to civil status, class status, and religion.58
These Ottoman-era traditions were often eroded as new Balkan nation-states cre-
ated their own legal systems, which emulated Western European (often French) legal
codes. Some recent studies argue that at the end of Ottoman rule, Greek women
had strong social and economic power within the family and community thanks to
their inalienable property in the form of their dowry. After the 1821–29 war of inde-
pendence, however, the Greek government introduced procedures that increased
the monetization of family property, and little by little diminished women’s inher-
ited social and economic status.59 Thus, although according to prevailing Roman
law, marriage did not prevent women from owning property and drawing income,
the ruling “principle of men’s supremacy” recognized men’s full authority over all
members and things in the household.60 In the neighboring Bulgarian nation-state,
women and men were not treated equally in several aspects of civil law: inheritance
laws favored male children, and wives could not engage in economic activity without
the approval of their husbands. Nor did wives have rights to the custody of their
children.61 The inheritance law passed in Bulgaria in 1890 stipulated the equal divi-
sion of landed property among both male and female children of the household,
seemingly an advance for women. De facto, however, this regulation was neglected
almost everywhere and women continued to be disinherited. A 1906 amendment to
the law privileged male heirs by allowing them to inherit twice as much as their sisters.
In reality up until the 1930s women in the countryside very often relinquished their
lawful shares “of their own free will.”62
Following the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, Hungary gained domestic legal
sovereignty and repudiated Austrian civil law. After this, its civil law was decided
through a complicated patchwork of pre-1848 law, case and customary law, and
some new reforms, including the introduction of civil marriage in 1895. Civil mar-
riage was not legalized elsewhere in the region before 1918 or even in some cases
before 1945, as was the case in Bulgaria.63 Because of this lack of uniform national
legislation, at least some Hungarian women, depending on social status and reli-
gious affiliation, were in a better position to make legal claims than their Austrian
counterparts.64
In a number of other countries, the interwar period brought some reform of
marriage and family law codes. The Romanian civil code, first issued in 1864, was
revised and made less discriminatory in 1932, although both the 1932 and the 1937
codes continued to prohibit the determination of paternity for illegitimate children
(except in the case of rape, seduction, or if the mother cohabited with the father of
the child).65 In the newly independent Czechoslovakia, modernizing marriage law
292
and equalizing the civil status of women was regarded as a symbol of the progres-
siveness of the young state. However, male anxiety and a policy that protected family
unity limited the progress made toward civil equality between women and men.66 In
independent Poland dominant political forces regarded the creation of a unified civil
law that included active citizenship for women as an instrument of nation-building,
uniting the Catholic Polish majority and ethnic and religious minorities under a com-
mon legal roof. In this context, the reform of 1921 allowed married women control
over their personal property and the right to appear in court. Yet further reform
aspirations foundered on a traditionalist defense of the patriarchal family unit and
the continued power of the Catholic Church, whose supporters blocked obligatory
civil marriage.67
In the arena of political rights, new gender asymmetries emerged during the
“long nineteenth century” after the model of the French Revolution where women
were excluded from citizenship at the very moment that political citizenship came
into being.68 This development stands in sharp tension with the findings of
masculinist scholarship, which has largely focused on the process of increasing male
political inclusion. In the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, women were denied
the right to form or belong to political organizations long after men had acquired
it; the same was true for the Polish lands under German rule, where women were
denied this right until 1908. In dualist Hungary and in various Southeastern
European states, however, women could participate in political organizations.69 The
development of suffrage laws in Austria in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury provides another example of how discrimination against women evolved in the
very course of expanding men’s political rights. There, wealthy, property-holding
or tax-paying women had long possessed voting rights at the local or crown-
land (region) level. But when the suffrage for Reichsrat elections was gradually
extended to middle- and lower-class men beginning in 1873, women were com-
pletely excluded on the grounds of their female sex. In parallel, in view of this new
“model,” wealthy women’s longstanding voting rights on crownland and local levels
were gradually abrogated so that by 1907, when (nearly) general male suffrage was
introduced, these previously enfranchised women had lost many of their traditional
voting rights, while at the same time being excluded from new political rights based
on their gender rather than their estate.70
World War I, a watershed in women’s suffrage, marked the end of the hermetic
exclusion of women from passive (i.e. right to be elected) as well as active (i.e. right to
vote) voting rights in many countries. However, this breakthrough was not universal.
Women gained suffrage rights in Estonia and Lithuania with the Russian Revolution
of 1917, and kept their voting rights after independence without further political
struggle. In Poland and Czechoslovakia women were granted general equal suffrage
in the constitutions of those newly independent nation-states. In Hungary, suffrage
was extended to women during the short-lived socialist republic of 1919; however,
an added gendered discrimination clause banned illiterate women (but not men)
from voting. During the 1920s new gendered suffrage regulations prevented many
more Hungarian women from voting. For example, the age limit for the active vote
was raised to 30 years for women (except those with a university degree), whereas for
men it was 24; and while for men four years of elementary schooling were required
293
for women it was six years (the latter did not apply to married women with at least
three children and to female heads of household living from their own income).71
Romanian women were granted voting rights in local elections in 1929, and in par-
liamentary elections with the new constitution of 1938, but with restrictions in both
cases. Only women above the age of 21, with secondary education or vocational train-
ing, employed by the state or leading civic organizations, those who were war widows,
and those who had received decorations were granted the right to vote and to be
elected in local elections. In parliamentary elections, only women above the age of
30 had the right to vote for the Chamber of Deputies, and only those above 40 could
stand for election or vote for the Senate.72 In 1937, legally married Bulgarian women
who were mothers achieved the right to participate in local elections. But while vot-
ing was obligatory for men, it was optional for women. With the restoration of the
constitution in 1938 (which had been suspended after a coup d’état in 1934), the new
electoral law defined “all Bulgarian subjects” above 21 years of age as potential vot-
ers, but women could exercise that right only “if married, divorced, or widowed.”
Nor could women, regardless of marital status, stand for election to national office.73
Although women had been promised voting rights within the new Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia), Yugoslav women did not gain access to the ballot
box before the end of World War II, despite several campaigns organized by the inter-
war women’s movement in support of female suffrage. In Albania, Bulgaria, Romania,
and Yugoslavia, general equal suffrage was implemented only as a consequence of
World War II and the political changes that followed.74
Finally, changes made to criminal codes in the pre-socialist era expanded the
state’s purview over female bodies. The secularization of criminal law in the nine-
teenth century typically resulted in the criminalization of abortion. In the Ottoman
Empire, the expansion of secular criminal law was associated with its complete prohi-
bition.75 In Austria, the Josephinian Criminal Code of 1787 introduced the draconian
punishment of up to five years imprisonment for abortion. This secular innovation
marked a change from earlier Catholic canon law, which had morally condemned
and punished abortion, but defined it in a more limited fashion. Under the Catholic
statutes, abortion was the termination of an “ensouled” fetus – this occurred 40 days
after conception if the fetus was male and 80 days if it was female. In Hungary, by con-
trast, continued legal pluralism in effect took precedence until after the Compromise
of 1867, over repeated endeavors to introduce Austrian criminal law. The Hungarian
Criminal Code of 1878 did include abortion, punishing married women with up to
three years in jail for terminating a pregnancy. However, abortion committed by an
unwed woman was considered a lesser crime, incurring a lighter punishment.76
If we consider the entire period up to 1945, it is still difficult to judge whether the
expansion of modern legal systems improved women’s legal position or whether it
created new disadvantages to surmount. In particular, historians need to consider the
variations in women’s legal status according to estate or other group differences in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and to examine how changes in legal
systems affected different groups of women. The continued relevance of legal plural-
ism also needs to be investigated more systematically.
The advent of socialism unquestionably brought the single most important histor-
ical rupture in women’s legal status. Socialism removed the props of women’s earlier
294
legal subordination and equalized the legal status of women and men throughout
Eastern Europe. All of the region’s post-1945 constitutions guaranteed economic,
social, and political gender equality. In the case of Yugoslavia, women had achieved
many elements of equality in practical terms already during the war, by means of their
participation in armed struggle.77 Other reforms were soon to follow. In Hungary, a
new law on marriage, family, and guardianship was introduced in 1952, establishing
the principle of “equal rights for women in marriage and family life,” and abolishing
the legal discrimination of children born out of wedlock.78 In all state socialist coun-
tries, all or nearly all professions and occupations were opened to women, the right
to identical labor conditions was declared, equality in suffrage was granted, and legal
barriers against the full integration of women in public life were removed. Women’s
full legal emancipation and equality was the slogan of the day and in many areas it
was indeed realized.
At the same time, state socialism was less of a rupture in terms of socio-legal
individualization than earlier research has often assumed. Laws did not challenge
women’s assumed roles as wives and mothers. Instead, socialist leaders wanted to
stabilize the family as a locus of social reproduction, and to use men’s and (espe-
cially) women’s reproductive and domestic labor to realize the state socialist
project of economic catching-up and modernization. With this came increased state
intervention and surveillance of the family.79 In addition, legal equality between
men and women was far from being an absolute socialist principle; some socialist
policies rested on or re-created gendered legal differences, as mentioned above.
Nevertheless, state socialism on the whole did much more to abolish the legal sub-
ordination of both married and single women than the contemporaneous pluralist
governments of Western Europe. Together with other elements of a rapidly chang-
ing gender regime, this legal progress contributed to growing tensions and struggles
in private, civil, and political realms of life over the desired development of gender
relations, to be discussed in the section on gendered scripts of sexualities and inti-
mate relationships below.
Empire, nation, ethnicity

The concepts and methods of gender history, which insist that gender itself is not a
natural given, but something that is historically constructed and changes over time
and place, are useful tools for considering the history of nationalism and nationalist
movements. They suggest that we need to also consider national identities as histori-
cally constructed and diverse. If malleable constructions of gender have been a signifi-
cant element of nationalisms in the region, then in turn these same nationalisms have
to be re-conceptualized as sociocultural and political constructs, subject to historical
circumstances, and shaped by diverse and at times conflicting agents. In East Central
Europe, these two categories of identity have been intimately intertwined and in many
cases rely on each other. Accordingly, gender historians have examined the intersec-
tion of gender with categories of national, ethnic, and religious belonging. Gender
historians have shown how women were co-opted into nationalist movements, how
gender was mobilized within and for various national and ethnic enterprises, and
how this engagement changed over time.80 Their work has also investigated the role
295
of gender in national struggle, war, and violent confrontation. This research has pro-
duced a number of fundamental insights, altering our vision of the history of empires,
nations, and ethnicity.
As mentioned in this chapter’s section on education, the impact of nationalist
ideologies on gender ideologies has been mixed. At times, nationalisms have helped
to produce social and cultural practices that at least partly mitigated existing gender
hierarchies or challenged gendered forms of political exclusion. An early example is
the famous 1790 pamphlet of the “Hungarian Mothers” – in fact penned by a man –
which demanded the right for Hungarian noble women to participate “as spectators”
in the revived Hungarian Diet, described in the text as the “temple of the homeland’s
felicity.” Arguing that women had a right and a duty to be involved in “the affairs
of the country,” this pamphlet forcefully argued that the revival of the Hungarian
nation (still conceived as natio, or “nation” of the noble estate) within the absolut-
ist Habsburg Empire needed to involve both women and men, albeit in a clearly
unequal manner.81 There are similar sentiments in Polish national historiography
and fiction from the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries.
These texts relied on notions of gender complementarity, which assigned men and
women essentially different, but equally necessary and active, roles in the national
community. In this way, nationalist ideology helped to construct a new sociocultural
and political space for women within Polish nationalism that transgressed the bound-
aries of a strictly circumscribed private sphere. While staying within the framework
of gender complementarity, this discourse recast traditional female roles in ways that
made it possible for women to be involved in the national struggle of divided Poland,
if in distinctly feminine ways.82
Typically, women were portrayed as the patriotic mothers and daughters of the
nation. They were supposed to support men in their struggles unselfishly, seek edu-
cation in order to educate their children or the community’s children for the good of
the nation, epitomize the appropriate national spirit through their dress and behav-
ior, and take part in various national cultural activities.83 It was to educate women to
be good mothers of the nation that the Czech national movement of the later nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries proudly promoted educational opportunities
for girls and women, resulting among other things in the establishment of the first
women’s gymnasium in Prague mentioned earlier.84 The largely German-speaking
Jewish population of Prague pursued highly gendered strategies of adapting the
community to changing circumstances. As Prague gradually became dominated by
Czech-speakers, this community began to favor Czech-language schooling for boys
and German-language schooling for girls.85 Jewish boys would thus learn the lan-
guage that would help them assimilate into the growing Czech-language public world
of business and politics, while the girls would serve as the bearers of tradition and
embody continuity within the Jewish community. In southern East Central Europe
as a whole, patriotic motherhood was seen as a woman’s form of citizenship and the
education of mothers was constructed here following the national obligation model
of eighteenth-century France, where the revolutionary notion of mother-educator
gave women a new and quasi-public role which not only helped them to receive a
more formal education but allowed female activists to enlarge women’s access to
public roles as well.86
296
As the political landscape changed, nationalist politics changed along with it. In
the late nineteenth century, insurgent nationalists fighting for autonomy might look
to women as additional resources for advancing the national cause. In trying to gain
superior numbers and distinguish themselves from their rivals, they often welcomed
women into the movement. So, they might even support women as equal political
actors, as some Czech nationalists did by electing the female nationalist Božena
Vitková-Kunětická to the Bohemian Diet in 1912 as a form of nationalist protest.
But once the nation-state was achieved, this was much less the case. In the case of
Czechoslovakia, enthusiasm for women’s equality waned during the interwar period.
Some Czech nationalists now argued that the real way to protect the nation was not by
guaranteeing gender equality, but by protecting the traditional family.87
In the twentieth century, nationalist platforms often lacked any emancipatory
dimension for women. Instead, they tended to reinforce oppressive hierarchical
or asymmetrical notions of gender relations, and some even served repressive and
reactionary purposes. This was especially true during moments when new forms of
national domination were imposed by force of arms, such as in Hungary in 1919,
when the short-lived Communist regime of Béla Kun (the “reds”) battled with nation-
alist counter-revolutionaries (or “whites”) for control of the country. Representatives
of both the red and the white camps tried to tar their opponents by accusing them of
promoting gender disorder. On “both sides of the political divide women were con-
sidered symbolic representations of their community: either the Christian National
cause or the emancipatory revolutionary movement.” For the white nationalists,
protecting the nation became synonymous with safeguarding the traditional gender
order. They identified women’s equality with their socialist opponents and saw it as
a threat to the nation. “Both sides . . . emphasized rapes committed by the enemy
in their rhetoric to highlight this general sexual pathology.”88 In interwar Romania,
nationalists influenced by eugenic discourse aggressively argued that the women’s
movement and feminism were based on selfish ideas about women’s individualism
that ignored women’s larger social and reproductive destiny and were harmful to
the interest of the nation.89 Such (neo)traditionalist, anti-individualist, and at times
eugenicist ideas about women existed in other East Central European societies, such
as Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, as well.90
It is tempting to want to see a general trend, where East Central European nation-
alist movements began as more supportive of women’s rights and became more
reactionary as they gained power. Yet, it is difficult to generalize. In many territories,
developments were highly complex. In Russian Estonia, for instance, the Estonian
national movement struggled against the local German-speaking elites to have at
least elementary schooling overseen by the more secular Russian public authorities.
This was achieved in the 1880s. The Estonian national interest in fostering girls’
education was clearly limited, but the Russification of schooling happened more
slowly for girls than for boys.91 In the Polish lands ruled by Russia and the Habsburg
Empire, and later in the independent Polish state, the access of some Jewish girls and
women to secular education was furthered through a complicated interplay of fac-
tors, including the exclusion of Jewish girls from traditional religious education and
the secondary role Jewish women had, compared to men, in maintaining religious
institutions and culture.92
297
Much of the literature on gender and nationalism focuses on national move-

ments aiming for more rights and autonomy within an imperial state, or for national
independence. But an area that deserves more attention is the connection between
gender and dominant or “state-owning” nations. Indeed, the historiography on gen-
der in East Central Europe (and in Western Europe, too) has been selective in its
attention to the connection between gender and nation. Historians have tended to
be much less interested in analyzing the link between the two categories in narra-
tives centered on the dominant national groups within empires and nation-states.
If, however, both historical actors and historians have been silent on the subject, it
is not because the nationalisms of dominant groups have not been gendered. It is
rather because historical narratives have naturalized, and thus made invisible, the
national element of these politics. Germans in Austria, Hungarians in the Kingdom
of Hungary after 1867 (or even in the People’s Republic of Hungary), Czechs in
interwar Czechoslovakia, or Bulgarians in independent Bulgaria clearly exerted dom-
inance over the other national or ethnic groups populating “their” states. Women’s
organizations representing “Hungary” or “Austria” in international organizations
before 1914 were clearly dominated by Hungarians and German-Austrians, respec-
tively, despite the fierce resistance of Czech women to this practice. Ethnic Bulgarian
women, within the bourgeois nation-state (1878–1944) and especially during state
socialism (1944–89), believed in their “cultural mission” among Muslim – both ethnic
Turkish and Pomak – women, and undertook state-orchestrated measures in order to
raise the “cultural level” of these Muslim women.93
Racialized practices of national identification and racialized policies of domination
became especially virulent in wartime and during periods of violent confrontation
between ethnic groups. World War II in particular brought extermination and radi-
calized population politics in which “race” took precedence over gender.94 But racist
ideologies and policies also relied on notions of gender relations and were enforced
and enacted in gendered ways. German women were sent to occupied Poland in the
service of the Nazi regime not only to enforce the social distance between Germans on
one hand, and Poles and Jews on the other, but indeed to destroy Polish nationhood.
Their task was both explicitly gendered – to mother the German community –
and racist – to exclude Poles and Jews from the German nation. Because their work
took place within a “womanly sphere of action,” it served to naturalize racial segre-
gation and violence, allowing those categorized as Germans to simply blot out any
awareness of the plight of the non-German population.95
Gendered scripts of sexualities and intimate relationships

Sexuality and intimate relationships are closely intertwined with the history of
gender and gender relations. The ways in which women and men experienced or
thought about sexuality varied by many factors, including class, race, and religion.
We can, however, identify some common assumptions and normative prescriptions
about male and female sexuality and intimate relationships that span the various
civilizations of East Central Europe. We refer to these common sets of assumptions
and prescriptions as gendered scripts of sexuality and intimate relationships. These
scripts have shaped society and culture throughout modernity in many ways. In this
298
section we highlight three important dimensions of these scripts: how reference

to sexuality, masculinity, and femininity contributed to creating the dominant cul-
tural imaginary; the ways in which women’s lives were sexualized in gender-specific
ways; and the hegemony of a “classically” gendered model of heterosexuality,
which was sustained by marginalizing and persecuting non-dominant sexualities
and sexual behaviors.
One of the fundamental precepts of gender history is that gender is a primary
way of signifying power relations. In any given cultural imaginary, gender provides
one way of understanding and symbolizing power and that is why political discourses
often rely on gendered and sexualized imagery. In East Central Europe, as elsewhere,
debates over what constituted “right,” “wrong,” “worthy,” or “unworthy” femininities
and masculinities lay at the heart of many political debates. One example comes from
political conflicts within the Jewish community in interwar Poland. Different political
philosophies were encapsulated in debates over what constituted a “good” or pow-
erful masculinity. Some Polish Zionists identified the Yiddish language and Yiddish
culture with weakness and femaleness. For them, male lifestyles rooted in traditional
Yiddish culture represented an effeminate masculinity; they even linked the Yiddish-
speaking labor organization, the Bund, with effeminacy. In contrast, Polish Zionists
identified the Hebrew language with a strong, “muscular,” male Jewishness. Some
Bundists in turn did not hesitate to mobilize a discourse which in masculinist terms
pointed to (their) Jewish socialist class identity as transgressing difference between
Jews and non-Jews, and ascribed a Jewish inferiority complex to the Zionists. At the
same time, the Jewish women’s journal Ewa advocated a highly modernist vision of
egalitarian and “rationalized” partnerships between women and men within an open-
ended Zionist horizon.96
Debates on female prostitution in Southeastern Europe, or male taxonomies of,
and stereotypes about, women in the Habsburg Empire were similarly multi-layered
and exemplify how the symbolic order was permeated by sexualized imaginary in
a highly gendered manner. At a time when there was a decline of the “collective
charisma of the West” (Oswald Spengler), debates over prostitution in south-
ern East Central Europe were simultaneously debates on the question of Balkan
natio nalism and modernization (Westernization, Europeanization). Bulgarian
discourse on prostitution in the early twentieth century associated “European civ-
ilization,” which was perceived as being a recent arrival in the country, with the
spread of prostitution: “dissolute life” escalated, “lewdness” increased, “people’s
morals” decayed and prostitution reached its apogee, especially in the capital and
other big cities. Thus the modern urban context and way of life – in principle a
diverse social space – was equated in peasant Bulgaria with the “reprobate” influ-
ence of Western modernity and civilization.97 In the Habsburg Empire, discourses
that mobilized sexual stereotypes about women and men of different nationalities
served to create or challenge national difference and superiority or to promote
interethnic cooperation. Hungarian women “who engage[d] in certain behaviors”
were “sanctioned as unpatriotic, not merely as vain coquettes”; “Czechs accepted
that Hungarian women were beautiful but sought to claim that this beauty was
‘really’ Slavic;” desiring “male subjects were frequently associated with political
agency and political structures, such as the Kingdom of Hungary,” and “the desire
299
to show respect to other members of the same ‘political nation’ informed the
descriptions of foreign sexuality, particularly the sexuality of foreign men.”98
The sexualized or sexualizing treatment of women in many, and often unexpected,
realms of life formed a second important element of the gendered scripts of sexual-
ity and intimate relationships. In many cases, women’s actual social situation and
needs were discussed and handled in a gender-specific sexualizing manner. Women’s
poverty was often viewed through such a sexualized lens. For instance, poor women
wandering the streets of pre-1914 Budapest or Prague were considered “prostitutes”
by default and accordingly treated as “fallen women” who did not deserve any support
due to their incurably weak morality. Their male peers, by contrast, were considered
“vagrants” and “beggars” and thus legitimate recipients of poor relief, which was
constructed with reference to social and criminal categories that did not refer to
sexuality at all.99 More well-known is the fact that the sociocultural norms governing
agrarian communities well into the twentieth century aimed to control the sexual-
ity of unmarried girls and young women by “protecting” them from sexual activity
before marriage. This “protection” was considered a means to preserve their female
sexual honor, the loss of which would destroy a young woman’s overall respectability
and status, whereas behavioral norms for young men did not contain such sexualized
restrictions. Daughters of the more wealthy strata were often more strictly monitored,
but the consequences of becoming pregnant could be more severe for poorer girls.
Behavioral norms for youth in Hungarian village society clearly expressed these
corresponding gender differences. “While the majority of the norms regarding the
girls focused on what they were not to do, from the young men the village expected
that their presence should be noticeable.”100 In Bulgarian pseudoscientific texts –
some of them published in authoritative “scholarly” journals such as Filosofski pregled
(Philosophical Review) in the 1930s – women were presented as entirely dominated
by their reproductive “functions” and their supposedly inferior, intuitive, irrational,
and impulsive “nature.”101 In these and other ways, women were described either as
having no history (with history constructed as the opposite of a “natural” state of
being), or their history was constructed as being entirely dominated by their “nature”
and sexuality. It can be argued, then, that the social history of women as a whole was
sexualized in a highly gender-specific manner.102
Third, dominant gendered scripts of intimate relations have consistently deval-
ued and thoroughly controlled heterosexual women for centuries, just as they
marginalized and discriminated against all individuals and groups whose gen-
dered life style and sexual practices did not conform to prescribed values and
norms. Male sexual control and domination of women has been a key feature of
this gender order. Within the framework of the classical sexual double standard,
heterosexual men enjoyed much more sexual liberty, and sexual agency was seen
as a fundamentally male prerogative. Among Christian populations women were
defined to a large extent by reference to rigid standards of monogamous hetero-
sexual behavior, while traditional Christian morality was far more tolerant toward
men’s sexual transgressions than those of women. Among Muslim populations in
southern East Central Europe during the Ottoman period, polygamy was a socially
recognized norm and (at least in the eighteenth century) practiced especially by
prosperous men.103
300
Throughout the modern period, including under state socialism, those who trans-
gressed accepted sexual norms were harshly persecuted. Instances of transgressive
female sexuality, such as same-sex relations, unwed motherhood, and prostitution,
were publicly condemned in East Central European societies, and w omen’s
“frivolous” behavior was denounced and persecuted for undermining the social
order. Many individual examples from different time periods illustrate the drive to
punish women and men who deviated from the dominant s exual standards. In the
eighteenth century, wives who were found to have committed adultery in Hungary
had to forfeit all their property. Male adultery faced no such punishment in any of
the Christian or Muslim regimes in the region.104 A study based on an analysis of
more than 3,500 court cases of “fornication” in eighteenth-century rural Greater
Hungary shows that maidservants in particular were sexually vulnerable. Their
attempts to bargain with their sexuality, to achieve, for example, marriage with
the son of their master, invariably failed. According to this study, the peasant
society of the time conceived of homosexuality as witchcraft or magic rather than
as an act concerned with sexual pleasure or fulfillment. In one exceptional case
of documented same-sex relationships between peasant women, a widow found
guilty of seducing a married woman (and said to have had other female partners
too) was whipped and banished from the county. Her partner, who on top of “for-
nication” was also found to be adulterous, received an even stricter punishment.
She was to be whipped and imprisoned for a year.105 In Slovak villages during the
era of mass male emigration, when men might be away from their homes for long
periods, married women with absent husbands were punished and condemned
by the community for giving birth to so-called “bastard children.” Unwed moth-
ers were similarly humiliated; in some cases they “were forced to walk around
the church draped in a black sheet.”106 Various Bulgarian texts asserted a double
moral standard for men and women in marital life; spinsters were regarded as
deviants from the norm, as women who possessed peculiar bodily qualities that
determined their social behavior. Prostitution was constructed as deriving from
women’s intrinsic qualities (“natural sinfulness”) so as to stigmatize female pros-
titutes as the source of evil.107
Sexual subordination and violence within the “classical” heterosexual relation-
ship is another element of how the dominant gendered script of intimate relations
controlled women. Legal records illuminate both accepted practices of sexual domi-
nation or gendered violence as well as strategies of resistance. In eighteenth-century
Wallachia, for example, the Orthodox Church was responsible for all civilian matters,
including the life and good morals of married couples. An analysis of the relevant
judicial sources reveals not only how marital contracts were negotiated, but also
the extent to which divorces were granted with reference to specific socio-sexual
practices: adultery, homosexuality, bigamy, promiscuity. Divorce was considered
the last solution to a family crisis and not easily granted.108 Divorce and separation
cases brought to ecclesiastical as well as secular courts by Lithuanian peasants in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrate how women successfully
resisted particular types of violent practices of their partners which both the women
themselves, and in many cases the responsible authorities, considered illegitimate. In
these cases, women managed to put an end to excessively unloving and unsatisfactory
301
marital relationships, whereas male strategies “were always based on seeking control
over women.”109
For a long time women did not have an openly political language to address sex-
ual subordination and heteronormativity critically. But they gradually developed
alternative strategies to raise their voices. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, the Polish authors Narcyza ˙Zmichowska (1819–76) and Eliza Orzeszkowa
(1841–1910); the Czech writers Eliška Krásnohorská (1847–1926), Božena Němcová
(1820?–62), Teréza Nováková (1853–1912), and Karolina Světla (1830–99); Hungarian
authors such as Emma Ritóok (1868–1945) and Anna Szederkényi (1882–1948);
Vela Blagoeva (1858–1921) and Anna Karima (1871–1949) in Bulgaria; and Jelena
Dimitrijević (1862–1945) in Serbia had developed a variety of literary strategies to
address male sexual violence as well as female heterosexual and homoerotic desire
and identity.110 Women’s and gender historians have recently studied this literary
production as well as women’s ego-documents, such as diaries or letters, in order
to restore to the historical record women’s own critique of the dominant gendered
script of sexuality and intimate relationships.
Women who resisted the monogamous heterosexual gendered social order of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found refuge in their own communities,
which ranged from the religious to the feminist. One example is the network of
female activists in Zagreb around 1900 which Natascha Vittorelli has (re-)constructed
using a specific computer software program. Analyzing around 70 articles in which
members of this group (it included women as diverse as a proponent of “national
needlework,” and the well-known writer and feminist Zofka Kveder), paid trib-
ute to each other, Vittorelli found that the central figure of the network, Jagoda
Truhelka, was most closely related to one “former teacher and later confidant,”
and to one other woman “with whom she ran a common household for 30 years.”
More generally, the network was strongly shaped by the relationships among the
teachers at the first public provisional secondary school for girls, and between teach-
ers and their former pupils. Missing links and absences allow for speculation about
past conflicts and ongoing loyalties in this community.111
Under state socialism, male sexual domination and heteronormative values seem
to have been largely preserved, although the extent of change is still being debated.
Some authors claim that male prerogatives, traditional masculine identities and
behavioral patterns, and practices of male domestic violence were barely challenged
under socialism, providing “a point of convergence between Western democratic and
state socialist systems.” Prosecutors in state socialist Poland, Hungary, and Romania
often declined to punish domestic violence cases, casting the offenses as “either an
act of male self-defense or an understandable loss of self-control in the face of a wife’s
‘provocation.’”112 There were, however, at least some efforts to adapt male behavior
into a more “modern” and partnership-like gender order. Slovenian sex-manuals,
for instance, called upon men to unlearn their inherited patriarchal attitudes and to
become more attentive to, among other things, women’s post-coital needs. But such
an attitude was not in evidence everywhere in the region. Romanian “sexperts” natu-
ralized and reified inherited insensitive masculinist sexual conduct.113 In Bulgaria,
sexual behavior that deviated from the norms of heterosexual relations and pro-
creation within marriage – as in the case of single m others – was characterized as
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“anomalous.” Abortion became an extremely widespread “method” of family plan-

ning in many Eastern European states during state socialism, a fact that speaks, among
other things, to the lack of sexual self-determination of women.114 During the 1960s,
however, with the explicitly felt demographic problems, restrictive anti-abortion mea-
sures were introduced by governments throughout the region, the most repressive,
Draconian reproductive policies being implemented by the Ceauşescu regime in
Romania.115
From the relatively limited research on the history of sexuality in East Central
Europe, it appears that the dominant gendered scripts of sexualities and intimate
relations had a significant influence on the region’s society and culture. However,
the field is too young for us to draw more far-reaching conclusions about how these
norms and expectations changed over time, how they shaped the experience of indi-
viduals in different times and places, or how sociocultural and legal mechanisms
worked to ensure conformity.
Women’s activism and women’s movements

Throughout the modern era, women in East Central Europe participated in activism
at local, national, regional, and international levels. In this section, we concentrate on
organizations created by and for women. While many women’s organizations had the
goal of improving women’s lives in some fashion, these groups were very diverse; they
sprang from a wide variety of political perspectives and were related to various other
political projects, including nationalism and socialism. It is therefore impossible to
speak of a single women’s movement during any period of the history of East Central
Europe. Instead, as was the case elsewhere, there were many women’s movements and
many forms of women’s public and political activism.
The history of women’s public activism in East Central Europe reaches back well
into the period before 1848. In Greater Hungary, the tradition of Protestant aris-
tocratic women publishing their own poetry dates back to the seventeenth century.
The first public debate on women’s proper role in public life in Hungary took
place in the columns of a monthly journal in the 1820s. Around this same time,
women from various denominational and ethnic backgrounds (Jews included)
established a number of charitable associations, most of which did philanthropic
and educational work. Women also played an important role in establishing the
first kindergartens in Hungary. Promoting Hungarianness became another key
area of women’s public engagement in the 1840s, especially and increasingly for
middle-class women. During this period, a few Slovak women also began to engage
in nationalist activism by promoting education in their mother-tongue, building
amateur theatres, and organizing temperance societies in the countryside. Women
belonging to the German-speaking Saxon community in Transylvania formed their
own organizations as well, in close connection with the Saxon Evangelic National
Church (of Transylvania).116
During the revolutionary year of 1848, women’s activism often became more
directly political. On April 6, 1848, a group of young girls studying in a private insti-
tute in Pest, Hungary, established by aristocrat Blanka Teleki (1806–62), wrote a
proclamation demanding access to higher education and female suffrage, both of
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which had been explicitly ruled out in the revolutionary “April laws” of 1848. These
laws eliminated the limited rights of political representation that noble women, espe-
cially widows, had possessed due to their noble status in the pre-1848 period.
After a hiatus during the neo-absolutist period of the 1850s, women’s associa-
tions in the Kingdom of Hungary began to proliferate with the liberalization of
the early 1860s. The next three decades saw the foundation of a whole range of
denominational and non-denominational philanthropic and social aid associa-
tions all over the country, with Jewish women’s organizations again prominent
among them. In the 1860s and 1870s, associations aimed at the promotion of
women’s education were established and began to publicly agitate for their cause;
several important women’s journals started publication. The strong focus on edu-
cation was not surprising, if we keep in mind that education functioned as a key
“gate-keeper” against women’s autonomy and upward mobility. Beginning in the
1890s, women’s organizations devoted more explicitly to women’s emancipation
were founded. Some of these espoused an ideology of gender equality, arguing
that men and women deserved equal rights and opportunities. Others insisted on
the value of gender difference, envisioning a future complementary gender order
where women’s difference would be socially and politically valued, rather than
deprecated and punished. All these organizations worked to improve the legal
status of women within and beyond the family, expand women’s educational and
professional opportunities and, especially for the equality-oriented organizations,
achieve women’s suffrage. Social-Democratic women established their own organ-
izations, insisting that while gender equality was important, class emancipation
was the real way to solve the so-called Woman Question i.e. the issue of women’s
proper role in society and politics. Catholic organizations carried out important
work as well. The Szociális Missziótársulat (Social Mission Society), built in 1908 as
a votive sisterhood midway between a religious order and a civil association, soon
developed into the most professional and advanced female social work organiza-
tion for women.117
Because these organizations were culturally Hungarian and thus implicitly associ-
ated with the dominant nationality in the Hungarian Kingdom, women belonging to
other ethnic or national groups often formed their own associations. The all-Romanian
organization Reuniunea Femeilor Române (Romanian Women’s Society) was established
in 1850 in Brassó/Braşov/Kronstadt. Beginning in the 1860s, it opened branches in
a number of Transylvanian cities, and in 1913 a federation named Uniunea tuturor
Reuniunilor femeilor române (The Union of all Romanian Women’s Societies) was esta
blished.118 Some Jewish women participated in Hungarian-language groups, especially
the egalitarian and socialist women’s organizations described above, and a few became
key leaders. Other Jewish women preferred to join specifically Jewish associations,
both mixed-sex and single-sex. In the Slovak territories, Živena, named after an ancient
Slavic Goddess of life, was established in 1869 at the initiative of male nationalists.
It became the organizational center for women in the Slovak national revival move-
ment. Its activists espoused the cause of women’s education and closely cooperated
with Czech women.119
Following World War I, the most important pre-war women’s associations
lost much of their influence. In the very different conditions in which Hungary
304
found itself in 1920, having been reduced to approximately 30 percent of its for-
mer territory, the political landscape was dominated by restrictive nationalism,
anti-egalitarian politics, and mounting authoritarianism. These currents caused a
substantial realignment of women’s organizations and a re-direction of women’s
activism. Even though women had made substantial gains in the aftermath of the
war, including suffrage, so-called “liberal-conservative” and progressive women’s
organizations lost much of their influence. While Catholic women’s organizations
continued to operate much as before, the new major umbrella organization for
women in interwar Hungary, Magyar Asszonyok Nemzeti Szövetsége (National Alliance
of Hungarian Women), was right-wing nationalist, revisionist, and, especially in the
early years, openly antisemitic. Over time, the group developed into a veritable mass
organization, focusing primarily on improving women’s position in higher and sec-
ondary education. In the 1930s, this organization’s activities broadened to include
championing the interests of working women and defending existing suffrage regu-
lations, an ultimately unsuccessful endeavor.120
Although before 1914, women’s activism in Austria developed along largely simi-
lar lines as in Hungary, but women’s activism here was more visibly divided along
national lines. In addition to those organizations which claimed to be “Austrian” and
were predominantly German-Austrian, there were many separate Czech, Slovenian,
Polish-Galician, and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) women’s societies. Non-German women,
especially Czechs, insisted that they could not find true representation under an
“Austrian” aegis (i.e. one dominated by Germans), and sought an independent place
in the international women’s movement. In the years before World War I, separate
Czech and Polish umbrella organizations or committees did gain separate represen-
tation in international women’s organizations.121 As Social Democracy was far more
influential in Austria than in Hungary, Social-Democratic women’s organizations
were also stronger and much more visible there.122
During the interwar period, women’s activism in the new states of Czechoslovakia
and Poland shared certain characteristics. The political culture of both countries,
which had just gained independent statehood and aimed to build their nations,
was, within limits, more conducive to liberal forms of female activism. In Poland,
although women gained equal political rights with men, women’s involvement in
politics remained very limited. Their engagement took place in “a large number
of frequently ephemeral women’s associations active in assorted fields of social
life. As a rule these were domains traditionally reserved for women . . . Only a
small group of such organizations described themselves as feminist.”123
The trajectory of women’s public activism in Southeastern Europe was similar
in many ways to that in the Habsburg and post-Habsburg territories, despite some
notable differences. The first benevolent, philanthropic, and educational women’s
organizations were established already in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The term “feminist,” was stigmatized in Greece as being “foreign” and an “apish
imitation” of the “a-social actions of unhinged women” from the developed but
degenerate West. The word first appeared in Greek translation in 1873 as gynaiko-
filai, almost contemporaneously with its first use in French in 1872. Greek women
activists of the late nineteenth century – Callirhoe Parren, for example – put a lot
of effort into Hellenizing the term and, in order to legitimize it, included it in
305
the national historical narrative. That is why Parren and her colleagues started to
call themselves feminists at a relatively late date.124 In Bulgarian socialist periodicals
the notion of “feminism” can be traced to the 1880s; it then appeared between
1893 and 1898 in a range of texts published in the first Bulgarian openly femi-
nist journal Zhenkii svijat (Women’s world), edited by Teodora Noeva.125 National
umbrella organizations of women started to appear at the end of the nineteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In Romania, the short-lived Liga Femeilor
(Women’s League) was formed in 1894. It was succeeded in 1910 by Emanciparea
Femeii (Women’s Emancipation), which evolved into the “first long-lived Romanian
women’s organization to undertake a sustained suffragist campaign.” Enosis ton
Ellinidon (the Union of Greek Women) was established in 1896 and the first all-Bul-
garian national women’s organization Bulgarski Zhenski Sujuz (Bulgarian Women’s
Union) in 1901. The largest Serbian organizations before World War I were Kolo
Srpskih Sestara (Circle of Serbian Sisters, 1903) and Srpski Ženski Savez (Serbian
Women’s Alliance, 1906). The latter was established to coordinate the activities of
all Serbian women’s organizations.126
The interwar period brought the formation of new organizations and the
restructuring of women’s movements across Southeastern Europe.127 While many
organizations considered women’s political emancipation a secondary goal, and
concentrated their activities on humanitarian projects and “social work,” others
continued to struggle for women’s suffrage and full political citizenship and even
saw some of their goals achieved. As already mentioned, in Bulgaria, Romania, and
Turkey, for example, some women – under certain conditions – obtained the right
to vote in both local and parliamentary elections; thanks to the work of feminist
organizations, women in Greece were also granted the right to vote at the municipal
level. Women’s social rights were at the core of interwar feminist struggles, as well.
Maternal and labor protection, the issue of “illegitimate” children and their rights,
abolition of state-regulated prostitution and penalization of clients, among others
were at stake.128
The question of class left distinctive marks on the history of Southeastern
European women’s activism. Influenced by the tensions within both interna-
tional women’s organizations and national men’s organizations, some women’s
movements in the Balkans in the period prior to World War I experienced strong
divisions along class lines. Countries with strong socialist parties and move-
ments, such as Bulgaria and Serbia, experienced the most visible confrontations
between “middle-class” feminist and socialist “proletarian” ideas. The more suc-
cessful socialist movements in the region tended to strongly favor feminism, while
the less successful, as in Romania and Greece, did not. Thus, while in Bulgaria
and Serbia the socialist movement also disseminated its own strand of femi-
nist critique (through activists like Vela Blagoeva, Anna Karima, Kina Konova,
Svetozar Marković, Milica and Anka Ninković, Angela Vode, and Vida Tomšić),
in Romania and Greece lacked a vibrant socialist feminism.129 At the same time,
many socialist women worked with “bourgeois” women’s organizations at both
national and international levels. Left-wingers, such as the Bulgarian socialist
feminist Zheni Bozhilova-Pateva, Slovenian feminist and social-democrat Angela
Vode, and the communist Vida Tomšič, participated in the work of the more
306
conservative international women’s organizations such as the International

Council of Women; Bulgarian socialist Kina Konova was affiliated with both
the socialist and “bourgeois” women’s movement in her country.130 While these
women were always between the two emancipatory currents and really nowhere at
home, their life trajectories and struggles demonstrate a human agency that goes
beyond political structures and simple political divisions.
The advent of state socialism had a tremendous effect on the character of
women’s activism around the entire region. There were three starting points com-
mon to most East Central European countries after the end of World War II. First,
women’s emancipation – in its socialist guise – became state doctrine, and transfor-
mations of the gender order were “expropriated” by the Communist regimes, which
played down the activities of the existing women’s organizations. Second, socialist
governments dismantled or “appropriated” non-socialist women’s organizations; in
many cases this happened before the actual establishment of the one-party state.131
Even in Yugoslavia – considered to be the most liberal East European country – the
Jugoslavenski Ženski Savez (Yugoslav women’s alliance), an interwar organization, was
banned by the government in 1961 and replaced by the Conference for Women’s
Social Work. After that, there was no longer any organization dedicated to changing
problematic elements in the existing gender order. Some activists from the interwar
period, such as the Slovenian Vida Tomšić, did continue to work after the war, but
their efforts to influence regulations on family planning and women’s reproductive
rights, and to create a state policy open to and tolerant of women’s issues were often
dismissed by their male comrades.132 Third, women’s organizations closely related to
the communist movement were established or gained in strength and importance
beginning in 1945.
These developments after World War II allow for the careful rethinking of the
relationship between the project of women’s emancipation, women’s organiza-
tions, and the political system. Women’s activism under state socialism repeatedly
underwent complex changes, and it was constituted by a number of interact-
ing and conflicting interests. Some of the old questions of socialist women’s
activism – such as the degree of organizational autonomy of women’s groups
within or alongside the Party structure which male functionaries were willing to
concede, or the relationship between grassroots activists, and central function-
aries – re-emerged in new guises. The core of these politics was characterized
by shifting networks comprising separate women’s organizations, communist
party departments focusing on women’s issues, and trade union women and
organizations. At the same time, the party itself had become a much more pow-
erful actor and was closely related to the state. In other sections of this study we
have discussed some of the characteristics, shortcomings, and shifts in the state
socialist project of women’s emancipation, and how these were furthered and
debated by the various actors involved in these networks. Many female activists
identified with the socialist state and aimed to get women more actively involved
with it. But they also aimed to alter its politics and policies by directing atten-
tion to ongoing gender inequalities, especially in the world of work. Women
activists and functionaries in multiple arenas developed various strategies for
supporting women’s interests, aiming to expand the state’s policies on women.133
307
The life trajectories, ideas, and struggles of activists such as the Slovenian
feminists Vida Tomšić and Angela Vode, or the Bulgarian communist function-
aries and women’s activists Tsola Dragoicheva and Elena Lagadinova, or even
Romania’s Communist foreign minister Ana Pauker – i.e. the women involved
with the party-state establishment and sensitive to gender inequality – similarly
invite us to think carefully and in complex terms about the history of women’s
activism under state socialism. All these women found it perfectly compatible to
simultaneously serve the socialist and the women’s cause, since both required an
awareness of social, economic, and political injustice. As members of the state
socialist “establishment,” they helped introduce emancipatory measures in their
respective national settings, following the international leftist feminist agenda
of the time as epitomized by the political program of the Women’s International
Democratic Federation (WIDF).
Women’s political organizing under state socialism demonstrates that the his-
tory of women’s activism extends well beyond middle-class dominated, non-socialist,
single-sex movements. Many East Central European female political actors through-
out the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had diverse, multi-layered agendas
that cannot be labeled simply liberal, socialist, philanthropic, feminist, nationalist,
or internationalist. Often, questions of class, religion, or nation were as impor-
tant to them as those of gender. As a result, many women chose to cooperate with
mixed-sex workers’ and national movements as a means of promoting female
emancipation, or otherwise divided their energy between women’s and other
political organizations. Whichever strategy they chose, they had to wrestle for the
recognition of their double or triple agendas in each of these contexts. Finding
their respective states to be unresponsive, Ukrainian women in the Russian and
Habsburg Empires organized within their own communities.134 In 1915, it was Polish
women who presented before the Women’s Peace Congress in the Hague a reso-
lution demanding “autonomy” for all peoples, insisting that the Congress engage
with the issue of national self-determination, a matter not specific to women.135
This move prefigured the well-known connection between national and women’s
liberation in the anticolonial struggles that unfolded later in the twentieth century.
The participation of Yugoslav women’s organizations in their country’s armed upris-
ing during World War II is another case in point; because of their participation,
women were accepted as equal in principle by the military forces and the new civic
administration of the new, postwar Yugoslavia.136
Some scholars have considered women’s activism in East Central Europe to be
“backward” or “belated” relative to Western Europe. But the problem with this
characterization is that it presents the history of one particular type of women’s
activism, the Western, as “the” women’s movement. If we broaden our perspective
to take in the entire rich panorama of women’s involvement in political and asso-
ciational life, this argument simply evaporates.137 The variety of experiences of the
150 East Central European women activists described in the Biographical Dictionary of
Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, 19th and
20th Centuries provides additional evidence on this point.138 Decentering the focus of
women’s activism away from purely women’s agendas, single-sex organizations, and
a focus on middle-class women helps us to see that East Central European women’s
308
activism appears to be derived from Western models only if it is considered along

criteria developed in Western contexts.139
While East Central European women’s activism should not be judged against a
Western yardstick, it developed in tandem with women’s movements all over the
globe and was influenced by global contexts. One example is how from the beginning
of the twentieth century East Central European women and their organizations par-
ticipated in the major international networks of women, the International Council
of Women (ICW), the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) and its suc-
cessor, the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship
(IAWSEC), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
Women from Eastern Europe gained representation in these organizations in part
due to the conscious efforts of leading international women’s activists from outside
the region. In turn, these big international organizations functioned as a space of
opportunity for East Central European women. Before 1945, they proactively used
their participation in these groups to lend weight to their domestic demands and to
promote, among other things, their national(ist) agendas internationally.140 In 1945,
leftist women from Eastern Europe were among the founding members of the WIDF
created in Paris with Eugénie Cotton as its president.141 They continued to play an
important role in this global organization. While almost all East European national
women’s organizations joined the WIDF after 1945, it should be noted that the
participation of Yugoslav women was marked by the tensions between the Stalinist
Soviet Union and Tito’s post-World War II Yugoslavia.142
In sum, the history of women’s activism in Eastern Europe forces us to rethink
the very meaning of “feminism” and “women’s movements.” We must consider
the relationship between feminist activism and the state, the animosity between
socialist and non-socialist feminist visions of women’s emancipation and gender
equity, and the relationship between women’s emancipation and other emancipa-
tory projects. The multiple history of women’s activism in Eastern Europe in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries has the potential to overcome the reproduc-
tion and reification of East–West (and North–South) divides that have served to
normalize Western histories of women’s activism while particularizing experiences
in East Central Europe.
Gendered histories of East Central Europe in perspective

East Central European historiography has tended to marginalize women and gender,
while gender history has tended to marginalize East Central Europe. We believe that
considering gendered histories of East Central Europe143 can help us rethink both
of these fields in productive ways and to develop a more inclusive form of historical
writing more generally. In dialogue with other scholars who have written on gender
in European history, and East Central European history in particular,144 we would like
to draw a few conclusions.
Within the field of East Central European history, women’s and gender history
has helped expand the very scope of historical inquiry, especially in the realms of
social and cultural history, the history of everyday life, and transnational history. It has
contributed to denaturalizing core categories of East Central European history such
309
as the nation and it has encouraged scholars to consider asymmetry, hierarchy, and
subordination in gender relations as a product of history rather than an ahistorical
given, and thus as the subject of change over time and as an object of intense social
and political struggle. And it has demonstrated that “even” political and diplomatic
history cannot be considered gender-free or merely the realm of male agency. Topics
such as war, Stalinism, the Cold War, or international politics cannot be adequately
understood without considering gender as a category. However, these insights have
not yet impacted on East Central European historiography in general to a degree
we would consider adequate in light of the richness of the findings of women’s and
gender history discussed throughout this chapter.
The impact of East Central European gender history on the broader field of gen-
der history has been more complicated. While gender historians dealing with East
Central Europe have productively challenged prevailing narratives within the history
of the region, they have been less successful, and probably less interested, in translat-
ing the (gendered) difference of East Central European history into a challenge of
false universalisms in Western (gender) historiography. The overall impact of schol-
arship about East Central Europe on gender history as a whole has been minimal,
notwithstanding the collaboration between scholars physically located inside and
outside the region working on the field of East Central European gender history
itself. Gender historians focusing on the West have been astonishingly reluctant to
consider how the findings of gender historians about experiences in East Central
Europe might affect their own work. We believe, however, that knowledge and ways
of knowing about women and gender in East Central Europe can contribute to the
decentering of our knowledge of gender history in a global perspective. We find in
them a productive critique of some of the implicit claims to universality so deeply
ingrained in Western historiography.
The work done by gender historians of this region suggests that we might rethink
some dominant narratives of historical change. First, if we put this research into a
global perspective, we find that what might be called gender-relevant change has
been related in many complex ways to other elements of historical change. For
example, political equality or an egalitarian civil law does not necessarily follow
national independence or the building of the liberal state. Rather than relying on
categories such as backwardness and advancement, it is more accurate to see the
diversity of historical experiences.
A second key to understanding the history of gender in East Central Europe is
considering the complicated effects of the entangled histories of Western and East
Central Europe, including the imbalance of power and other unequal relationships
between the regions. Certain gendered legal and socio-economic arrangements
and ideologies traveled from West to East in Europe and made a profound impact
on both regions. But this was not a one-dimensional exchange. Western gen-
der ideologies and practices met and intermingled with the varieties of the East
Central European gender order. They were shaped and remodeled by specifically
East Central European historical trajectories of change and by local resistance to
“modernization,” to “Westernization,” and domination. The invention of patriar-
chal “tradition” or “authenticity” played an important role in these struggles, as did
visions of radical, anti-capitalist change.
310
Finally, material scarcity has played a particularly important role in shaping the
gendered history of East Central Europe. The persistent poverty of the region is
related to intra-European domination and unequal economic integration, and it
constitutes a fundamental difference between East Central and Western Europe
that cannot be conflated merely with the unequal distribution of income and
wealth, i.e. the category of class. Material scarcity has shaped every aspect of
women’s experience in the region, including women’s integration into the paid
labor force, women’s struggle against male domination in the family, and many
other factors that have been identified as crucial in gendering in specific ways the
history of women and men. Considering this, we argue that gendered historical
writing in global perspective must systematically integrate an awareness of this dif-
ference into its conceptual framework. Scholarship on the gender history of East
Central Europe carries an enormous potential to promote such development.
Notes
1 We thank Melissa Feinberg for her comments on an earlier version of this chapter. We
gratefully accepted her generous offer to help finalize this text, an enormous investment
of time and work on her part.
2 Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999), 2.
3 About recent developments, including detailed country reports, see the Forum rubric
published in Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Women’s and
Gender History 6 (2012): 125–185; 7 (2013): 132–213. The most extensive overall bibli-
ography for the region is Mary Zirin et al., eds., for the Association for Women in Slavic
Studies, Women and Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia: A Comprehensive
Bibliography, vol. 1 Southeastern and East Central Europe, edited by Irina Livezeanu and June
Farris (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007).
4 Eleni Fournaraki, “Institutrice, femme et mère’: idées sur l’éducation des femmes
Grecques au XIème siècle (1830–1880),” 1992, vol. 1–2, Ph.D. thesis. Paris: Université
de Paris VII; Neda Božinović, Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX I XX veku (Belgrade: Devedeset
çetvrta, Žene u crnom, 1996); Latinka Perović, “Modernost I patriajarhalnost kroz prizmu
državnih ženskih institucija: Viša ženska škola, 1863–1913” , in Latinka Perović, ed., Srbija u
modernizacijskim procesima 19. i 20. Veku, vol. 2: Položaj žena kao merilo modernizacije (Belgrade:
Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 1998); Krassimira Daskalova, “Nation-building, Patriotism,
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Rogers, and James Albisetti, eds., Girls’ Secondary Education (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan,
2010), 149–164; Katerina Dalakoura, “The Moral and Nationalist Education of Girls in the
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1777–1865 (Budapest: Kortárs, 1999), 13–41.
6 Fournaraki, op. cit.; Božinović, op. cit., 57; Perović, op. cit., 55–72 and 163–173; Daskalova,
op. cit. (2010), 156–161.
7 Katalin Szegvári, A nők művelődési jogaiért folytatott harc hazánkban 1777–1918 (Budapest:
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Initiativen des Unterrichtsministeriums zur Mädchenbildung 1848–1914,” in Brigitte
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1995), 315–316; and Susan Zimmermann, Die bessere Hälfte? Frauenbewegungen und
Frauenbestrebungen im Ungarn der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1918 (Vienna and Budapest:
Promedia and Napvilág, 1999), 106–107; Daskalova, op. cit. (2010), 151–153, 157–160.
8 Adam Winiarz, “Girls’ Education in the Kingdom of Poland (1815–1915),” in Rudolf
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European Monographs, 1992), 91–111.
9 Fournaraki, op. cit.; Daskalova, op. cit. (2010).
10 Blanka Soukupová, “Die frühe Nationalbewegung und die Frauenfrage in Prag,” in Gerhard
Melinz and Susan Zimmermann, eds., Wien, Prag, Budapest. Blütezeit der Habsburgermetropolen.
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1996), 201–209, esp. 202–203.
11 Karen Johnson Freeze, “Medical Education for Women in Austria: A study in the Politics of
the Czech Women’s Movement in the 1890s,” in Sharon Wolchik and Alfred G. Meyer, eds.,
Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 51–63;
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First in Austria,’” Journal of Women’s History 3 (1991): 26–45; Friedrich, op. cit. (1995),
315–316; Svjatoslav Pacholkiv, Emanzipation durch Bildung: Entwicklung und gesellschaftliche
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Geschichte und Politik, 2002), 280–282.
12 Sirje Kivimäe, “Estnische Frauenbildung in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,”
Nordostarchiv. Zeitschrift für Regionalgeschichte. Neue Folge 1 (1992): 281–308 (special print)
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13 Sidēroula Ziogou-Karasterghiou, “‘Demoiselles sages et mères parfaites’: Les objectifs
des écoles pour filles et la politique de l’enseignement au 19ème siècle,” in Historicité de
l’enfance et de la jeunesse. Actes du colloque international (Athens: Archives historique de la
jeunesse grecque, 1986), 399–416.
14 Daskalova, op. cit. (2010).
15 Quoted in Szegvári, op. cit. (1969), 401, and also in I. Müller, “Nők a budapesti tudo-
mányegyetemen a századfordulón” [Women at the Budapest university at the turn of the
century], Ph.D. thesis, Eötvös Loránd University, 2001, in particular 92–110.
16 Victor Karády and Péter Tibor Nagy, eds., The Numerus Clausus in Hungary: Studies on the
First Anti-Jewish Law and Academic Antisemitism in Modern Central Europe (Budapest: Pasts,
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Law in Hungary,” AHEA: EJournal of the American Hungarian Educators Association 4
(2011): 1–15.
17 Krassimira Daskalova, Zheni, pol I modernizatsia v Bulgaria, 1878–1944 (Sofia: Sofia University
Press, 2012); Müller, op. cit.; Katalin N. Szegvári, Numerus clausus rendelkezések az ellenforrad-
almi Magyarországon. A zsidó és nőhallgatók főiskolai felvételéről (Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó,
1988); Waltraud Heindl and Marina Tichy, eds., “Durch Erkenntnis zu Freiheit und Glück . . . ”
Frauen an der Universität Wien (ab 1897) (Vienna: WUV-Universitätsverlag, 1990); Pacholkiv,
op. cit., ch. 7; Perović, op. cit., 141–161.
18 Fatmira Musaj, Fatmira Rama, and Enriketa Pandelejmoni, “Gender Relations in Albania
(1967–2009),” in Krassimira Daskalova, Caroline Hornstein-Tomic, Karl Kaser, and Filip
Radunovic, eds., Gendering Post-Socialist Transition. Studies of Changing Gender Perspectives
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Munkatárs? Vetélytárs? A női szerepek változása a 20. századi Magyarországon (Budapest:
Napvilág kiadó, 2005), 78–100, esp. 94; Ulf Brunnbauer, “Sotsialisticheskiat nachin na zhivot.”
Ideologia, obshtestvo, semeistvo i politika v Bulgaria (1944–1989) (Rousse: MD: Elias Kaneti,
2010), 220; Francisca De Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds., A Biographical
Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms. Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, 19th
and 20th Centuries (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2006); Marcela Linková, Dunja
Mladenić, Elżbieta H. Oleksy, Mária Palasik, Eszter Papp, Magdaléna Piscová, and Daniela
Velichová, Re-claiming a Political Voice: Women and Science in Central Europe (Prague: Institute
312
of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2008). Available at:
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19 Peter Gunst, Die bäuerliche Gesellschaft Ungarns in der Zeit zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen
(Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó, 1991), 148–149; Maria Molnár, “Társadalmi tagozódás,” in
Attila Paládi-Kovács, ed., Magyar néprajz. VIII. Társadalom (Budapest: Akadémai kiadó,
2000), 484–531, in particular 495; Khristina Mocheva, Selskoto zemedelsko domakinstvo v
Bulgaria prez 1935/36 godina (budjet, obstanovka I razhod na trud) (Sofia: Durzhavna pechat-
nitsa, 1938), 91.
20 For Hungary, Molnár, op. cit., 516–531.
21 Lajos Kiss, A szegény asszony élete (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1943), 7–298, 306–372; and Zoltán
Szabó, A tardi helyzet reprint of 3rd ed. (Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1937) (Budapest: Akadémiai
kiadó, Kossuth könyvkiadó, Magvető könyvkiadó, 1986), 102–106. See also Imre Katona,
“Átmeneti rétegek az agrártársadalomban,” in Paládi-Kovács, op. cit., 173–238; and Molnár
op. cit., 516–531.
22 Ildikó Asztalos Morell, Emancipation’s Dead-end Roads? Studies in the Formation and Development
of the Hungarian Model for Agriculture and Gender (1956–1989) (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis
Upsaliensis, 1999), 403, 410.
23 Ibid., 395–401, 422–445; Susan Zimmermann, “Gender Regime and Gender Struggle in
Hungarian State Socialism,” in Aspasia: International Yearbook for Women’s and Gender History
of Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe 4 (2010), 4.
24 Margaret Hunt, Women in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education
Limited, 2010), 173–174.
25 Dezső Kosztolányi, Édes Anna (Győr: Editorg kiadó, 1991/(Hungarian original, 1926)),
esp. 97; Gábor Gyáni, Women as Domestic Servants: The Case of Budapest, 1890–1940 (New
York: Institute on East Central Europe, Columbia University, 1989); Susan Zimmermann,
Divide, Provide and Rule: An Integrative History of Poverty Policy, Social Policy and Social Reform
in Hungary under the Habsburg Monarchy (Budapest: CEU Press, 2011), 133.
26 Vlasta Jalušič, “Women in Interwar Slovenia,” in Sabrina Ramet, ed., Gender Politics in the
Western Balkans (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 60;
Roumen Daskalov, Bŭlgarskoto obshtestvo, 1878–1939, vol. 2: Naselenie. Obstestvo. Kultura
[Bulgarian society, 1878–1939. People. Society. Culture] (Sofia: Guttenberg Publishing
house, 2005), 277.
27 Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work. 1700 to the Present (London:
Routledge, 1998), 182.
28 Gábor Gyáni, “Női munka és család Magyarországon (1900–1930),” Történelmi Szemle 3
(1987–1988), 366–378; Gábor Gyáni, “Patterns of Women’s Work in Hungary 1900–1930,”
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29 Ellinor Forster and Ursula Stanek, “Frauen zwischen gesetztem Recht und Rechtswirk
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Jahrhundert, am Beispiel Tirols und Vorarlbergs – ein Forschungsbericht,” L’Homme.
Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 14 (2003): 156–162.
30 Jovanka Kecman, Žene Jugoslavije u Radni ćkom Pokretu I Ženskim Organizacijama, 1918–1941
(Belgrade: Narodna Knjiga. Istitut za Savremenu Istoriju, 1978), 61; Ana Stolić, op. cit.,
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Grundzüge der Professionalisierung des weiblichen Lehrberufs im Primarschulbereich
in Österreich bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Brigitte Mazohl-Wallnig, ed., Bürgerliche
Frauenkultur im 19. Jahrhundert (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 1995), 343–400.
31 Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman, Women and Education, 1800–1980 (Houndmills, UK:
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(Belgrade: Udruzenje za društvenu istoriju, 2002), 55–90; Zsombor Bódy, “‘A női munka
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és női szervezetek állásfoglalásai a két világháború közötti középosztályban,” in Boglárka
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ban (Budapest: Nyitott könyvműhely, 2008), 93–112; Claudia Papp, “Die Kraft der weiblichen
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Legal Profession in Europe, cs. 1870–1925,” Journal of Social History 33 (2000): 825–857;
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33 Alexandra Bakalaki, “Gender-related Discourses and Representations of Cultural
Specificity in Nineteenth-century and Twentieth-century Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek
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34 Georgeta Nazŭrska, Universitetskoto obrazovanie i bŭlgarskite zheni, 1879–1944 (Sofia: IMIR,
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35 Zimmermann, op. cit. (2011), 121, 133–137 and also for details about the data.
36 Susan Zimmermann, “Das Geschlecht der Fürsorge. Wohlfahrtspolitik in Budapest und
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37 Zimmermann, op. cit. (2011), 81–88; Daskalov, op. cit. (2005), 301–302; Vlasta Jalušič,
“Women in Interwar Slovenia,” in Sabrina Ramet, ed., Gender Politics in the Western Balkans
(University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 60; Margarete
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Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis, eds., Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the
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38 Ramet, op. cit., 96.
39 Magyarország Statisztikai Évkönyve 1990 (Budapest: KSH, 1991); Magyarország Statisztikai
Évkönyve [Statistical Yearbook of Hungary 2007] (Budapest: KSH, 2008).
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Pongrácz, and István György Tóth, eds., Szerepváltozások. Jelentés a nők és férfiak helyzetéről
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41 Brunnbauer, op. cit. (2010), 418, 420.
42 Krassimira Daskalova, Voices of Their Own: Oral History Interviews of Women (Sofia: POLIS,
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43 Brunnbauer, op. cit. (2010), 418.
44 Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor, “Sex and Skill: Notes towards a Feminist Economics,” in
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45 Zimmermann, op. cit. (2010), 3–4; Beata Nagy, “Women in Leading Positions in Hungary,”
in Claudia Kraft, ed., Geschlechterbeziehungen in Ostmitteleuropa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg.
Soziale Praxis und Konstruktionen von Geschlechterbildern (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2008),
187–201, in particular 196. Thanks to Beata Nagy for drawing our attention to this article.
46 Eva Bicskei, “‘Our Greatest Treasure, the Child’: The Politics of Child Care in Hungary,
1945–1956,” Social Politics 13 (2006): 151–188; Zimmermann, op. cit. (2010).
47 Brunnbauer, op. cit. (2010), 490–519, 533–546.
48 Fidelis, op. cit., 16–17, and chs. 2 and 3.
314
49 Daskalova, op. cit. (2004); Daniela Koleva, “Mŭzhki raboti, zhenski istorii: Problematich
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(Blagoevgrad, 2001), 254–260.
50 Éva Fodor, Working Difference. Women’s Working Lives in Hungary and Austria, 1945–1995
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Fidelis, op. cit.
51 Brunnbauer, op. cit. (2010), 490–519; Jiøina Kocourkova, “Leave Arrangements and
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52 Ulf Brunnbauer, op. cit. (2010), 515; Zimmermann, op. cit. (2010).
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in State Socialist Employment and Welfare Politics, 1960–1980. The Issue of Women’s
Employment and the Introduction of the First Maternity Leave Regulation in Hungary,” in
Kurt Schilde and Dagmar Schulte, eds., Need and Care. Glimpses into the Beginnings of Eastern
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54 Brunnbauer, op. cit. (2010), 491, 493–494; Krassimira Daskalova, “Women’s Problems, Women’s
Discourses in Bulgaria,” in Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, eds., Reproducing Gender. Politics, Publics
and Everyday Life after Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 347.
55 Ursula Vogel, “Gleichheit und Herrschaft in der ehelichen Vertragsgesellschaft.
Widersprüche der Aufklärung,” in Ute Gerhard, ed., Frauen in der Geschichte des Rechts. Von
der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1997), 265–292.
56 Margret Friedrich, “Zur Genese der Stellung der Ehefrau im österreichischen Allgemeinen
Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuch,” L’Homme. Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 14 (2003):
97–109; Elisabeth Frysak, “Legale Kämpfe. Die petitionsrechtlichen Forderungen der öster-
reichischen bürgerlichen Frauenbewegung zur Änderung des Ehe- und Familienrechts um
die Jahrhundertwende,” L’Homme. Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 14 (2003):
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57 Marija Draškić and Olga Popović-Obradović, “Pravni položaj žene prema Srpskom
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58 Hunt, op. cit., 4, 60–64.
59 Evdoxios Doxiadis, The Shackles of Modernity: Women, Property, and the Transition from the
Ottoman Empire to the Greek State (1750–1850) (Cambridge, MA: Department of the Classics,
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60 Efi Avdela, “Between Duties and Rights: Gender and Citizenship in Greece, 1864–1952,” in
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61 Krassimira Daskalova, Ot siankata na istoriata: Zhenite v bŭlgarskoto obshtestvo i kultura (1840–
1940) (Sofia: Dom na naukite za choveka i obshtestvoto, 1998), 65–117.
62 Ulf Brunnbauer, “Descent or Territoriality: Inheritance and Family Forms in the Late
Ottoman and Early Post-Ottoman Balkans,” in Karl Kaser, ed., Household and Family in the
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63 Ulf Brunnbauer and Anelia Kassabova, “Socialism, Sexuality and Marriage – Family Policies
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Hungarian Family Law, 1880–1913,” in Edith Saurer, Margareth Lanzinger, and Elisabeth
Frysak, eds., Women’s Movements. Networks and Debates in Post-communist Countries in the 19th
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65 Roxana Cheşchebec, “Feminist ideologies and activism in Romania (approx. 1890s–1940s):
Nationalism and internationalism in Romanian projects for women’s emancipation,”
Ph.D. thesis, Central European University, 2005, 139, 175–176.
315
66 Feinberg, op. cit.

67 Claudia Kraft, “Das Eherecht in der Zweiten Polnischen Republik (1918–1939) und das
gescheiterte Ideal gleichberechtigter Staatsbürger,” in Johanna Gehmacher, Elizabeth
Harvey, and Sophia Kemlein, eds., Zwischen Kriegen. Nationen, Nationalismen und
Geschlechterverhältnisse in Mittel- und Osteuropa 1918–1939 (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2004), 63–82.
68 See for example Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), and Harriet Applewhite and Darline Levy,
eds., Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, c1990).
69 Brigitta Bader-Zaar, “Bürgerrechte und Geschlecht. Zur Frage der politischen
Gleichberechtigung von Frauen in Österreich, 1848–1918,” in Gerhard, op. cit., 547–562;
Kerstin Wolff, “1908 – eine Selbstverständlichkeit?” Available at: www.addf-kassel.de/
fileadmin/user_upload/Veranstaltungen/Volltext_100_Jahre_Frauen_Politik.pdf (accessed
October 17, 2016).
70 Bader-Zaar, op. cit.
71 For a summary of the secondary literature see Susan Zimmermann, “‘Ein kleiner
Tumult entstand.’ Der Kampf um das Frauenstimmrecht in Ungarn als inter/nationale
Auseinandersetzung und als Wegabschnitt,” in Bettina Bab, Gisela Notz, and Marianne
Pitzen, eds., Mit Macht zur Wahl, 100 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht in Europa (Frauenmuseum:
Bonn, 2006), 182–197, esp. 183.
72 Roxana Cheşchebec, “Documenting Women’s Suffrage in Romania. The Achievement
of Female Suffrage in Romania. A Historical Overview,” in Popova, Piskova, Lanzinger,
Langreiter, and Vodenicharov, op. cit., 156–169.
73 Krassimira Daskalova, “Women’s Suffrage in Bulgaria,” in Blanca Rodrígues-Ruiz and Ruth
Rubio-Marín, eds., The Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe. Voting to Become Citizens (Leiden:
Brill, 2012), 321–338.
74 Krassimira Daskalova, “Balkans,” in Bonnie Smith, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women
in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 185–195; Jalušić, op. cit.; and
Ramet, op. cit.
75 Ruth Miller, “Rights, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey,” Signs
32 (2007): 347–373.
76 Szilvia Bató, A magzatelhajtás tényállása az osztrák és a magyar jogtudományban a Theresianától
1848-ig (Szeged: Szegedi Tudományegyetem Állam- és Jogtudományi Karának tudo-
mányos bizottsága, 2003); Günter Jerouschek, “Die juristische Konstruktion des
Abtreibungsverbots,” in Gerhard, op. cit., 248–261; and Desző Márkus, ed., Corpus Juris
Hungarici. Magyar Törvénytár 1877–1878 (Budapest: Franklin-Társulat, 1907).
77 Ivana Pantelić, Partizanke kao gradjanke: drustvena emancipacija partizanki u Srbiji, 1945–1953
(Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 2011); Vesna Drapać, “Women, Resistance and the
Politics of Daily Life in Hitler’s Europe: The Case of Yugoslavia in Comparative Perspective,”
Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Women’s and Gender History
3 (2009): 55–78; Barbara Jancar-Webster, “Women in the Yugoslav National Liberation
Movement,” in Ramet, op. cit., 67–87.
78 Zimmermann, op. cit. (2010), 6.
79 Lynne Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2002); and Zimmermann, op. cit. (2010).
80 Sophia Kemlein, ed., Geschlecht und Nationalismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Osnabrück:
Fibre, 2000); Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations:
Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg 2000); Gehmacher,
Harvey, and Kemlein, op. cit.; and Waltraud Heindl, Edit Király, and Alexandra Millner,
eds., Frauenbilder, feministische Praxis und nationales Bewusstsein in Österreich-Ungarn 1867–
1918 (Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 2006).
81 Reprint [abbreviated] in Anna Fábri, op. cit., 29–33.
82 Claudia Kraft, “Gendering the Polish Historiography of the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries,” in Angelika Epple and Angelika Schaser, eds., Gendering Historiography: Beyond
National Canons (Frankfurt: Campus, 2009), 80–87; Bianca Pietrow-Ennker, “Frau und
Nation im geteilten Polen,” in Kemlein, op. cit., 125–143.
316
83 For various nationalization processes in Budapest in the nineteenth century, see Robert
Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press,
2005); for the Romanian national movement in Transylvania in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, see Oana Sînziana Păltineanu, “Calling the nation. Romanian
nationalism in a local context: Braşov during the Dual Monarchy,” Ph.D. thesis, Central
European University, 2013, 76–148. For the links between women’s education and patri-
otic nation-building, see Daskalova, op. cit. (2010); and Efi Avdela, “Between Duties and
Rights. Gender and Citizenship in Greece, 1864–1952,” in Birtek and Dragonas, op. cit.,
117–143.
84 David, op. cit.
85 Jan Havránek, “Das Prager Bildungswesen im Zeitalter nationaler und ethnischer Konflikte
1875 bis 1925,” in Melinz and Zimmermann, op. cit., 185–200.
86 Daskalova, op. cit. (2010); Dēmētra Tzanaki, Women and Nationalism in the Making of Modern
Greece: The Founding of the Kingdom to the Greco-Turkish War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009);
Krasimira Daskalova, “Women, Nationalism and Nation-state in Bulgaria (1800–1940),”
in Jovanovic and Naumovic, op. cit., 15–37; Efi Avdela, Le Genre entre classe et nation. Essai
d’historiographie Grecque (Paris: Syllepse, 2006); Efi Avdela and Angelika Psarra, “Engendering
‘Greekness’: Women’s Emancipation and Irredentist Politics in Nineteenth-century Greece,”
Mediterranean Historical Review 20 (2005): 67–79; Constantin Iordachi, “The Unyielding
Boundaries of Citizenship: The Emancipation of ‘Non-citizens’ in Romania, 1866–1918,”
European Review of History – Revue européenne d’Histoire 8 (2001): 157–186. For the French
case, see Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1959: A Political History (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2000), 47.
87 Feinberg, op. cit.
88 Eliza Ablovatski, “Between Red Army and White Guard: Women in Budapest, 1919,” in
Nancy Wingfield and Maria Bucur, eds., Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 70–92.
89 Maria Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 90–93.
90 Marius Turda and Paul Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism
in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007); Christian Promitzer,
Sevastē Trubeta, and Marius Turda, eds., Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe
to 1945 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2011).
91 Kivimäe, op. cit.
92 Rachel Manekin, “The Lost Generation: Education and Female Conversion in Fin-de-siècle
Kraków,” in ChaeRan Freeze, Paula Hyman, and Anthony Polonsky, eds., Jewish Women in
Eastern Europe (Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 18) (Portland, OR: The Littman Library
of Jewish Civilization, 2005), 189–219; Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and
Modernization in Nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish Society (Waltham, MA: Brandeis
University Press, 2004); Gertrud Pickhan, “‘Wo sind die Frauen?’ Zur Diskussion um
Weiblichkeit, Männlichkeit und Jüdischkeit im Allgemeinen Jüdischen Arbeiterbund
(‘Bund’) in Polen,” in Gehmacher, Harvey, and Kemlein, op. cit., 187–199.
93 Angelika Schaser, “Das Engagement des Bundes Deutscher Frauenvereine für das
‘Auslandsdeutschtum’. Weibliche ‘Kulturaufgabe’ und nationale Politik vom Ersten
Weltkrieg bis 1933,” in Ute Planert, ed., Nation, Politik und Geschlecht. Frauenbewegungen und
Nationalismus in der Moderne (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000), 254–274; Susan Zimmermann,
“The Challenge of Multinational Empire for the International Women’s Movement:
The Case of the Habsburg Monarchy,” in Karen Offen, ed., Globalizing Feminisms 1
789–1945 (London: Routledge, 2009), 153–169, 367–373; Susan Zimmermann, “Reich,
Nation, und Internationalismus. Konflikte und Kooperationen der Frauenbewegungen
der Habsburgermonarchie,” in Heindl, Király, and Millner, op. cit. (2006), 119–167; Eszter
Varsa, “Gender, “race”/ethnicity, class and the institution of child protection in Hungary,
1949–1956,” Ph.D. thesis, Central European University, 2011. Available at: http://goya.
ceu.hu/search~S0?/avarsa/avarsa/1%2C4%2C5%2CB/frameset&FF=avarsa+eszter&1%
2C%2C2 (accessed May 22, 2012); Mary Neuburger, “Veils, Shalvari, and Matters of Dress:
Unravelling the Fabric of Women’s Lives in Communist Bulgaria,” in David Crowley and
317
Susan Reid, eds., Style and Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe
(Oxford: Berg, 2000), 169–188, esp. 180; Brunnbauer, op. cit. (2010), 363–375.
94 Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauen
politik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), 2nd ed. (Münster: Verlag Monsenstein und
Vannedat, 2010).
95 Elizabeth Harvey, “‘We Forgot all Jews and Poles’: German Women and the ‘Ethnic
Struggle’ in Nazi-occupied Poland,” Contemporary European History 10 (2001): 447–461.
96 Pickhan, op. cit., 189–190; and Eva Plach, “Feminism and Nationalism on the Pages of
Ewa: Tygodnik, 1928–1933,” in Freeze, Hyman, and Polonsky, op. cit., 241–262.
97 Daskalova, op. cit. (2012), 453–454.
98 Alexander Maxwell, “Nationalizing Sexuality: Sexual Stereotypes in the Habsburg Empire,”
Journal of the History of Sexuality 14 (2005): 266–290.
99 Susan Zimmermann, “‘Making a Living from Disgrace’. The Politics of Prostitution, Female
Poverty and Urban Gender Codes in Budapest and Vienna, 1860s–1920s,” in Malcolm Gee,
Tim Kirk, and Jill Steward, eds., The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society in Central
Europe since 1800 (Brookfield, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 175–195.
100 Jávor, op. cit., 611–622, 657–663; Zsolt Bodán “Erkölcs, szerelem, szexualitás. A megesett lány
a régi falusi társadalmakban,” in Bakó and Tóth, op. cit., 316–337, in particular 326–332.
101 Daskalova, “Bulgarian Women in Movements, Laws, Discourses (1840s–1940s),” Bulgarian
Historical Review (1999): 180–196.
102 These ideas were very much influenced by Otto Weininger’s, Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine
prinzipielle Untersuchung (Vienna, Leipzig 1903).
103 Hunt, op. cit., 57–60.
104 Ibid., 76.
105 István György Tóth, “Peasant Sexuality in Eighteenth-century Hungary,” Continuity and
Change 6 (1991): 43–58, esp. 45–46, 55–56.
106 Danica Šimová, Eva Fordinálová, and Anna Štvrtecká, “From Husband’s Household to
National Activity: The Ambivalent Position of Slovak Women,” in Dirk Hoerder and Inge
Blank, eds., Roots of the Transplanted, vol. 1: Late 19th Century East Central and Southeastern
Europe (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1994), 349.
108 Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, In şalvari şi cu işlic. Biserica, sexualitate, căsătorie şi divorţ in
Ţara Românească a secolului al XVIII-lea (Bucharest: Editura Humanitas, 2004).
109 Vilana Pilinkaite-Sotirovic, “Family and Individual Strategies of Husband and Wife in Rural
Lithuania, 1864–1904,” L’Homme. Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 14 (2003):
55–64.
110 Agatha Schwartz, Shifting Voices. Feminist Thought and Women’s Writing in Fin-de-siècle Austria
and Hungary (Montreal: McGill and Queen’s University Press, 2008); Milena Kirova, Maja
Boyadzhievska, and Biljana Dojćinović-Nešić, eds., Glasove: Nova humanitaristika ot balkan-
ski avtorki (Sofia: SO, 2007); De Haan, Daskalova, Loutfi, op. cit.; Grazyna Borkowska,
Alienated Women. A Study on Polish Women’s Fiction, 1845–1918 (Budapest: CEU Press,
2001); Celia Hawkesworth, Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia
(Budapest: CEU Press, 2000).
111 Natascha Vittorelli, Frauenbewegung um 1900. Über Triest nach Zagreb (Vienna: Löcker, 2007),
137–145; De Haan, Daskalova, Loutfi, op. cit., various entries.
112 Isabel Marcus, “Wife Beating: Ideology and Practice under State Socialism in Hungary,
Poland, and Romania,” in Penn and Massino, op. cit., 115–132.
113 Milica Antić and Kseniija Vidmar, “The Construction of Women’s Identity in Socialism.
The Case of Slovenia,” in Saurer, Lanzinger, and Frysak, op. cit., 291–305, in particular
303–304; Erin Biebuyck, “The Collectivisation of Pleasure: Normative Sexuality in Post-
1966 Romania,” Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Women’s
and Gender History 4 (2010): 49–70; Jill Massino, “Something Old, Something New: Marital
Roles and Relations in State Socialist Romania,” Journal of Women’s History 22 (2010):
34–60; Fidelis, op. cit.
114 Anelia Kassabova-Dintcheva, “Neue alte Normen. Die versuchte Normierung der
Sexualität im sozialistischen Bulgarien,” Ethnologia Balkanica 8 (2004): 155–175; Anelia
318
Kassabova-Dintcheva,“‘Samotnata maika’ v Bulgaria – mezhdu stigmatizirane i geroizirane.

Protivorechivata politika na sotsialisticheskata dŭrzhava kŭm izvŭnbrachnata razhdaemost,”
in Kristina Popova and Milena Angelova, eds., Obshtestveno podpomagane i sotsialna rabota v
Bŭlgaria: Istoria, institutsii, ideologii, imena (Blagoevgrad: South Western University, 2005),
149–164; Ana Luleva,“‘Die Frauenfrage’ im sozialistischen Bulgarien – Ideologie, Politik,
Realität,” in Klaus Roth, ed., Sozialismus: Realitäten und Illusionen. Ethnologische Aspekte der
sozialistischen Alltagskultur (Vienna: Verlag des Instituts für Europäische Ethnologie, 2005),
129–155.
115 About the notorious Romanian case, see Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling
Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
116 See Susan Zimmermann, “Hungary,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia, op. cit., vol. 2, 509–513,
and the literature cited there.
117 Zimmermann, op. cit. (1999).
118 Cheşchebec, op. cit. (2005), 41–44.
119 Zimmermann, “Hungary,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia, op. cit., vol. 2, 509–513.
120 Papp, op. cit.
121 Feinberg, op. cit., 20–28; De Haan, Daskalova, Loutfi, op. cit.; Vitorelli, op. cit.; and
Zimmermann, op. cit. (2006), in particular 121–122, 160–165.
122 For the German-Austrian social democratic women’s movement and politics, see Gabriella
Hauch, “Der diskrete Charme des Nebenwiderspruchs. Zur sozialdemokratischen
Frauenbewegung vor 1918,” in Wolfgang Maderthaner, ed., Sozialdemokratie und
Habsburgerstaat (Sozialistische Bibliothek, section 1, vol. 1) (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1988),
101–118.
123 Feinberg, op. cit.; Anna ˙Zarnowska, “Women’s Political Participation in Inter-war Poland:
Opportunities and Limitations,” Women’s History Review 13, no. 1 (2009): 57–68, in particu-
lar 62. Thanks to Natali Stegmann for drawing our attention to this article.
124 Angelika Psarra, “A Gift from the New World: Greek Feminists between East and West
(1880–1930),” in Anna Frangoudaki and Caglar Keyder, eds., Ways to Modernity in Greece
and Turkey. Encounters with Europe, 1850–1950 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 150–175.
126 Cheşchebec op. cit. (2005), 48–57; Daskalova, op. cit. (2008), 185–195.
127 Daskalova, op. cit. (2008), 185–195.
128 Leskošek, op. cit.; Avdela, “Between Duties and Rights,” in Birtek and Dragonas, eds.,
Citizenship and the Nation-State, 117–143; Daskalova, op. cit. (2012), 181–197.
129 Augusta Dimou, Entangled Paths towards Modernity. Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism
in the Balkans (Budapest: CEU Press, 2005), 331.
130 De Haan, Daskalova, Loutfi, op. cit., 258–261; 575–579; 604–607.
131 Iliana Marcheva, “Za opekunskoto predstavitelstvo na zhenite v Bŭlgaria, 1944–1958,” in
Krassimira Daskalova and Tatyana Kmetova, eds., Pol i prehod: 1938–1958 (Sofia: Centur
za izledvania I politiki za zhenite, 2011), 203–221; Georgeta Nazŭrska, “The Bulgarian
Association of University Women, 1924–1950,” Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central,
Eastern, and Southeastern Women’s and Gender History 3 (2007): 153–175; Andrea Pető,
“Women’s Associations in Hungary. Mobilization and Demobilization, 1945–1951,” in
Claire Duchen and Irene Brandauer-Schöffmann, eds., When the War was Over. Women,
War, and Peace in Europe, 1940–1956 (London: Leicester Press, 2000), 132–146; Kristen
Ghodsee, “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organizations: The Committee of the
Bulgarian Women’s Movement and the United Nations Decade for Women, 1975–1985,”
Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 4 (2012): 49–73.
132 De Haan, Daskalova, Loutfi, op. cit., 575–579.
133 Rima Praspaliauskiene, “Women’s Activism in Lithuania: 1945–1985,” in Saurer, Lanzinger,
and Frysak, op. cit., 307–316; Basia Nowak, “Constant Conversations: Agitators in the
League of Women in Poland during the Stalinist Period,” Feminist Studies 31 (2005):
488–518; Basia Nowak, “‘Where Do You Think I Learned How to Style My Own Hair?’
Gender and Everyday Lives of Women Activists in Poland’s League of Women,” in Penn
and Massino, op. cit., 45–58; Raluca Popa, “Translating Equality between Women and Men
across Cold War Divides: Women Activists from Hungary and Romania and the Creation
319
of International Women’s Year,” in ibid., 59–74; Alexandra Ghit, “Mobilizing gender for
socialist modernity: The work of one Transylvanian chapter of the Union of antifascist
women of Romania and the Union of Democratic Women of Romania, 1945 to 1953,” M.A.
thesis, Central European University, 2011. Available at: http://goya.ceu.hu/search~S0?/
aghit/aghit/1%2C4%2C7%2CB/frameset&FF=aghit+alexandra+maria&1%2C1%2C
(accessed January 29, 2013).
134 Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Feminists Despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community
Life, 1884–1939 (Edmonton, Canada: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1988).
135 Susan Zimmermann, op. cit. (2009), 168, 372–373.
136 Pantelić, op. cit.; Drapać, op. cit.; Jancar-Webster, op. cit.
137 Susan Zimmermann, “Auf dem Weg zu einer Geschichte der vielen Geschichten des
Frauen-Aktivismus weltweit,” in Johanna Gehmacher and Natascha Vittorelli, eds., Wie
Frauenbewegung geschrieben wird. Historiographie, Dokumentation, Stellungnahmen, Bibliographien
(Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2009), 63–80.
138 De Haan, Daskalova, Loutfi, op. cit.
139 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’
pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 1–26.
140 Zimmermann, op. cit. (2006), 119–167; Zimmermann, op. cit. (2009), 153–169, 367–373;
Daskalova, op. cit. (2008), 194.
141 Francisca de Haan, “Hoffnungen auf eine bessere Welt: Die frühen Jahre der Internationalen
Demokratischen Frauenföderation (IDFF/WIDF) (1945–1950),” Feministische Studien 27
(2009): 241–257.
142 Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Cold War Internationalisms, Nationalisms and the Yugoslav-Soviet
Split: The Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia
before and after 1948,” in Francisca de Haan, Margaret Allen, June Purvis, and Krassimira
Daskalova, eds., Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (London:
Routledge, 2012), 59–73.
143 In recent years the field has achieved more visibility internationally. Countries from the
region have been integrated into wider professional networks such as the International
Federation for Promotion of Research into Women’s and Gender History, IFRWH. In addition,
joint European programs are emerging on the graduate level. At the end of the aca-
demic year 2009/2010 the first cohort of MA students graduated from MATILDA, the first
European Master’s Programme in Women’s and Gender History, which is run jointly by
universities located in Sofia, Budapest, Vienna, Nottingham, and Lyon (Matilda). Since
2007 Berghahn has been publishing Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and
Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History. Ten volumes have already appeared deal-
ing specifically with women’s and gender history of the region.
144 Carmen Scheide and Natali Stegmann, “Themen und Methoden der Frauen- und
Geschlechtergeschichte. Digitales Handbuch zur Geschichte und Kultur Russlands und
Osteuropas,” 2003. Available at: http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/578/1/scheidestegmann-
frauengeschichte.pdf (accessed June 6, 2012); Natali Stegmann, “Die osteuropäische
Frau im Korsett westlicher Denkmuster. Zum Verhältnis von Geschlechtergeschichte und
Osteuropäischer Geschichte,” Osteuropa 52 (2004): 932–944; Barbara Evans Clements,
“Continuities Amid Change: Gender Ideas and Arrangements in Twentieth-century Russia
and Eastern Europe,” in Teresa Meade and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, eds., A Companion
to Gender History (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 555–567; Claudia Kraft, “Die
Geschlechtergeschichte Osteuropas als doppelte Herausforderung für die ‘allgeme-
ine’ Geschichte,” in H-Soz-u-Kult 06.06.2006. Available at: www.hsozkult.de/article/
id/artikel-740 (accessed October 17, 2016); Maria Bucur, “An Archipelago of Stories:
Gender History in Eastern Europe,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1375–1389;
Dietlind Hüchtker, “Zweierlei Rückständigkeit? Geschlechtergeschichte und Geschichte
Osteuropas,” Osteuropa 58 (2008): 141–144; Jitka Malecková, “Gender, History, and ‘Small
Europe,’” European History Quarterly 40 (2010): 685–700; and Karen Offen, “Surveying
European Women’s History since the Millennium: A Comparative Review,” Journal of
Women’s History 22 (2010): 154–177.
320
Further reading
Avdela, Efi. “Between Duties and Rights: Gender and Citizenship in Greece, 1864–1952.”
In Citizenship and the Nation-State in Greece and Turkey, edited by Faruk Birtek and Thalia
Dragonas, 117–143. London: Routledge, 2005.
Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Martha. Feminists Despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community Life,
1884–1939, CIUS Press: Edmonton, 1988.
Daskalova, Krassimira, ed. “Forum: Clio on the Margins: Women’s and Gender History in
Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe.” Parts I and II. In Aspasia: International Yearbook
of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 6 (2012): 125–185,
and 7 (2013): 132–213.
De Haan, Francisca, ed. “Forum: Ten Years After. Communism and Feminism Revisited.”
Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender
History 10 (2016): 102–166.
De Haan, Francisca, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds. Biographical Dictionary of
Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th
Centuries. Budapest: CEU Press, 2006.
Doxiadis, Evdoxios. The Shackles of Modernity: Women, Property, and the Transition from the Ottoman
Empire to the Greek State (1750–1850). Cambridge, MA: Department of Classics, Harvard
University, 2011.
“Empires.” Theme section. In Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southeastern
European Women’s and Gender History 9 (2015).
Epple, Angelika, and Angelika Schaser. Gendering Historiography: Beyond National Canons.
Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2009.
Feinberg, Melissa. Elusive Equality. Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia,
1918–1950. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
Goodman, Joyce, Rebecca Rogers, and James Albisetti, eds. Girls’ Secondary Education in the
Western World from the 18th to the 20th Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Gyáni, Gábor. Women as Domestic Servants: The Case of Budapest, 1890–1940. Institute on East
Central Europe, Columbia University, 1989.
Havelkova, Hana, and Libora Oates-Indruchova, eds. The Politics of Gender Culture under State
Socialism: An Expropriated Voice. London: Routledge, 2014.
Hock, Beata. Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema, and Visual Arts in State-
Socialist and Post-Socialist Hungary. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013.
Kaser, Karl, ed. Household and Family in the Balkans: Two Decades of Historical Family Research at the
University of Graz. Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2012.
Kimble, Sarah, and Marion Röwekamp, eds. New Perspectives on European Women’s Legal History.
Milton Park: New York: Routledge, 2016.
Livezeanu, Irina, and June Pachuta Farris, eds. Women and Gender in Central and Eastern Europe,
Russia, and Eurasia: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Vol. 1 Southeastern and East Central Europe.
Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007.
Malecková, Jitka. “Gender, History, and ‘Small Europe’.” European History Quarterly 40 (2010): 685–700.
Maxwell, Alexander. “Nationalizing Sexuality: Sexual Stereotypes in the Habsburg Empire.”
Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 3 (2005): 266–290.
Paletschek, Sylvia, and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, eds. Women’s Emancipation Movements in the
Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Parush, Iris. Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern
European Jewish Society. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004.
Penn, Shana, and Jill Massino, eds. Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Central and
Eastern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
321
Promitzer, Christian, Sevasti Trubeta, and Marius Turda, eds. Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in
Southeastern Europe to 1945. Budapest: CEU Press, 2011.
Rodrígues-Ruiz, Blanka, and Ruth Rubio-Marín, eds. The Struggle for Female Suffrage in Europe:
Voting to Become Citizens. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Saurer, Edith, Margareth Lanzinger, and Elisabeth Frysak, eds. Women’s Movements: Networks
and Debates in Post-Communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Cologne: Böhlau, 2006.
Smith, Bonnie, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
Tzanaki, Dimitra. Women and Nationalism in the Making of Modern Greece: The Founding of the
Kingdom to the Greco-Turkish War. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2009.
Wingfield, Nancy, and Maria Bucur, eds. Gender and War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Sklar, Kathryn, and Thomas Dublin, eds. Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires since
1820. http://search.alexanderstreet.com/wasg.
˙Zarnowska, Anna. Workers, Women, and Social Change in Poland, 1870–1939. Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2004.
Zimmermann, Susan. “‘In and Out of the Cage?’ Hungarian Historical Writing on Women
and Gender, late 1940s to late 1980s.” In Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and
Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 8 (2014): 125–149.
322
7
POL ITICAL IDE O LO G I ES A ND
POL I TICAL MO VEM ENT S
Ulf Brunnbauer and Paul Hanebrink
From the turn of the nineteenth century onwards, Eastern Europeans dreamed of
transforming the world around them through sweeping visions, bold political action,
and determined political organization. These dreams linked them to their contem-
poraries elsewhere in Europe, and were evidence of transnational hopes for the cre-
ation and development of a modern society, transmitted through journals, debating
societies, and personal travel, among many other ways. But Eastern Europeans were
not simply mimics, taking ideas fully formed elsewhere as blueprints for their own
lives. Theirs was a creative appropriation, in which they adapted broader European
ideas and visions about popular sovereignty and modern society to particular social
circumstances and translated them into vernacular political idioms. In this way, they
produced creative, often novel responses to the rise of mass politics, the challenges of
industrialization, and the persistence of rural poverty.
Unlike their contemporaries to the West, Eastern Europeans had to confront fray-
ing empires and then the legacies of their collapse, as well as economies deeply rooted
in agriculture, which stubbornly persisted despite the grandest visions for their mod-
ernization. Nor could East Europeans develop their visions of modern life without
regard to external pressures. In the nineteenth century, the fragility of empires across
the region drew the attention and sometimes the interventions of the Great Powers
in the West; in the middle of the twentieth century, the imperial fantasies of the Nazi
regime crushed or distorted attempts by East Europeans to shape modern society for
themselves. But to invoke the horrors of World War II is to anticipate the end of an
era too quickly. Throughout the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth cen-
tury, East Europeans struggled to shape their societies according to a rich variety of
political visions and ideologies. This chapter will recount their successes and failures.
Conceptions of empire, monarchy, and the state

Three old dynasties – the Habsburgs in Austria, the Ottomans in the Balkans, and
the Romanovs in Russia – still shaped political order in eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Eastern Europe. They shared a long history of military (and peacetime)
entanglement in their quest for hegemony in the region. Austria and Russia made
major territorial gains to the disadvantage of the Ottoman Empire from the late sev-
enteenth century onwards, after the Ottomans had failed to take Vienna (for the
second time) in 1683. In the decades that followed, wars, the need to integrate newly
acquired territories or to accommodate the loss of territory, the dynamics of great
323
U lf B runnbauer and P aul H anebrink
power competition, and the influence of the French Revolution and Napoleonic
Wars all prompted the region’s imperial governments to reconsider and attempt to
reform the ideological and political foundations of their empires.
In eighteenth-century East Central Europe, such reflections were prompted by
the slow collapse of Poland-Lithuania as a great power and the contemporaneous
rise of Prussia as a military and political force, both of which inspired new visions
of the state. Although all rulers in the region continued to uphold the absolutist
ideal of divine right, they increasingly balanced this principle with a secular commit-
ment to state interest (raison d’état). This was especially true in the Austrian Empire,
where the Catholic Habsburg dynasty exercised very limited power over a heteroge-
neous collection of principalities, each with its own constitutional traditions that gave
considerable privilege to local estates of nobles.
In the Ottoman Empire, military defeats fueled ideas of reform even more directly.
When Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) acceded to the throne in 1808, the Ottoman
Empire appeared doomed. For more than a century, it had lost both wars and terri-
tory. Local notables had reduced the sultan’s authority to mere nominal sovereignty.
In addition, European powers increasingly interfered in the empire’s internal affairs,
often under the pretext of protecting its Christian subjects. At this crucial moment,
an increasing number of Ottoman officials and the sultan himself saw that radical
reforms were needed to maintain the empire. In particular, they realized that the
state needed stronger tax-collecting capabilities in order to finance a modernized
army. In Russia, the dramatic military defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56) also
spurred major reforms in the 1860s.1
Imperial reforms
Despite significant differences in context and policies, reforms in the three dynastic
empires had similar rationales. To assert centralized government more effectively,
imperial rulers sought to establish more direct relations with their subjects and to
limit the influence and privileges of nobles. To realize these aims, and also to hold off
the potential of rural revolt, serfs were liberated in the Habsburg Monarchy in 1848,
and in the Russian Empire in 1861; at the same time, the Ottoman Empire, where
most peasants were not enserfed, pushed to bring unruly local notables to heel. State
administration was gradually extended to the local level. Constitutions, a reflection of
liberal values even if they were usually the result of revolution or political expediency,
were another marker of this transformation from traditional to modern ideas of state-
hood. In addition, ruling elites in all three empires struggled with the linguistic and
confessional heterogeneity of their populations in a time of emerging nationalism, a
dilemma that set traditional forms of legitimation against increasingly vocal demands
for popular participation and sovereignty. The need to seek legitimacy in some kind
of popular support also affected foreign policy. Austria-Hungary, for example, jus-
tified its occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 by its civilizing mission, while
the Russian government – when politically opportune – promoted the idea of pan-
Slavism as foreign policy legitimation for internal and external audiences (although
it rarely really determined its foreign policies).2
The Habsburgs were the first to embark on an ambitious reform program.
Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, Maria Theresa (r. 1740–80)
324
POLITIC AL IDEOLOGIES AND POLITIC AL MOVEMENTS
tried to transform her holdings into a more cohesive entity. In Vienna, central agen-
cies (Hofstellen) – forerunners of modern ministries – were established. The empress
also created a provincial administration theoretically independent from local noble
elites. These efforts accelerated during the brief but crucial reign of her son Joseph II
(r. 1780–90), who had long wanted to train and promote a class of civil servants loyal
only to the state. Joseph introduced a series of further reforms, each designed to create
a state governed first and foremost by the idea of state utility. For example, he issued a
series of ordinances that promoted the toleration of Protestants and Jews, so that these
groups could make even greater contributions to the good of the state. He also pro-
posed a single language of state (German) to replace the multitude of languages that
prevailed in administration through the Habsburg lands. Needless to say, the noble
estates, and the Catholic Church, reacted furiously to what they saw as an open attack
on their traditional rights and privileges. Ultimately, they forced him to retract most of
his ambitious reforms shortly before his death.3
Despite this reversal, Joseph’s vision of a centralizing and modernizing bureaucracy
loyal only to the state endured long past his death. After the 1848 revolution nearly
shattered the Habsburg state, the new emperor, Francis Joseph I (r. 1848–1916),
embraced Joseph’s bureaucratic ethos once more. He and his advisors hoped that a
reformed and strengthened state administration could contain the nationalist politics
that had so dangerously erupted in 1848. Among the many reforms attempted during
the 1850s, none had more potential to transform the monarchy into a centralized state
than the reform of the civil administration and the expansion of imperial jurisdiction
into many areas previously controlled by local nobles. These reforms were especially
contentious in Hungary, as the monarchy sent a cadre of bureaucrats – known as “Bach
hussars” after the Minister of Interior, Alexander Bach (1813–93) – to the unruly king-
dom in order to unify the administration there and so bind it more effectively to the
Habsburg Crown.
Ottoman officials faced an even greater challenge than their Habsburg counter-
parts. In the Ottoman Empire, the old ways of justifying the sultan’s rule, through
ideas of divine legitimacy, paternalistic guardianship of subjects, and the granting of
local and confessional autonomies, had eroded over the course of many years. A tiny
elite and a slowly growing secular intelligentsia searched for new ways to legitimate the
sultan’s reign, but they were few in number. Most of the empire’s traditional elites –
Muslim clerics and notables – and also parts of the Muslim lower classes opposed
such innovations.4 Despite these challenges, reformers pressed forward with plans
to build modern state institutions. The army was a prime object of reform. The first
state-run schools were military academies established at the end of the eighteenth
century; among its graduates were many important reformers. Civilian intellectuals
and administrators as well as returned émigrés also contributed ideas, but they hardly
made up a broad constituency for change. Hence, Ottoman imperial reforms in the
nineteenth century, which were collectively known as the Tanzimat (“New Order”),
were mainly elite projects. Even so, they produced far-reaching changes. Institutions
of secular education were created and expanded, even if they never became compre-
hensive.5 A new ruling class of modern bureaucrats emerged; government became
more routinized and formalized; and the groundwork for a modern infrastructure
was laid. In this way, the Ottoman Empire was transformed. Abandoning its old
rationale for legitimacy, the central government expanded the scope of its powers.
325
All these innovations in the form and scope of governance raised a fundamental
issue: did the newly created state bureaucrats ultimately serve the monarch or did
they owe their allegiance to some notion of popular sovereignty? The liberal national-
ist revolutions of 1848–49 in the Habsburg lands posed this question most directly. In
Hungary, national political leaders continued to pursue reform of the Austrian state,
despite the failure of their revolution. Austria’s military defeat by Prussia in 1866
made these long-desired reforms possible. Under the new Compromise (Ausgleich),
Hungary became largely autonomous. But its status as the other half of the now
Dual Monarchy depended on a complex, corrupt, and deeply undemocratic elec-
toral system in which the civil service became a pillar of support for the ruling liberal
nationalist oligarchy.6 In the Austrian half of the monarchy, the Dualist constitution
allowed for the gradual expansion of participatory politics. Newly formed parties
made claims on the state and its civil servants, often for the benefit of particular
national communities.
Within the upper levels of the imperial administration, however, a different ethos
prevailed. Throughout this era, senior Austrian bureaucrats clung to their self-
appointed role as ethnic arbiters in contentious politics between the ethnic groups
arrayed against each other in various configurations around the imperial provinces.7
Their loyalty to the state and to the emperor they served, as well as their specific
administrative ethos, ensured the continued functioning of the machinery of state
even as the Austrian parliament became paralyzed by nationalist politics. During
the last years of the Dual Monarchy, there were numerous stalled or unsuccessful
attempts to reform the administration, either to make it more responsive to the
popular (ethnic) will, or to insulate it even more perfectly from the push and pull
of political life.8 This tension remained unresolved until 1918, when the Habsburg
Monarchy collapsed.
Ottoman reformers also transformed relations between state and imperial subjects.
On November 3, 1839, in the Rose Chamber Edict read by his foreign minister,
the sultan promised new laws that would guarantee the rights to life, security of pri-
vate property, just taxation, and due process to both Muslims and non-Muslims in
the empire.9 Subjects thus were gradually turned into citizens, and the regulation of
local affairs became more participatory. With rights came new duties, such as gen-
eral military conscription. The state also made an effort to integrate “lawless” tribal
areas more closely under its authority.10 Reform decrees in 1839 and 1856 promised
full equality to non-Muslims. In this way, the empire’s rulers hoped to secure the
loyalty of the Christian population and to impress the European powers, which had
used the legal discrimination of Christians in the empire as a pretext for interfer-
ence. The government-controlled press promoted Ottoman unity and patriotism,
comparing these with the mistreatment of Muslims and Jews in Christian states.11 In
some provinces, Muslim elites resisted these reforms, but their efforts were crushed
by the state.12
The 1876 Ottoman constitution was another important step in the creation of
a modern polity. Envisioning equality among citizens and the establishment of a
bi-cameral parliament, it represented the apex of efforts to create a pan-Ottoman
civic identity.13 But it was mainly the product of external expediency, even if it did
proclaim high ideals. Facing a possible war with Russia, the Ottomans hoped to
defuse domestic tensions by granting a constitution and calling for elections to a new
326
parliament. These were held on the eve of war with Russia. But when war broke out,
and was lost, Sultan Abdülhamid (r. 1876–1909) disbanded the parliament in the
spring of 1878. He believed that only autocracy could save the empire. The sultan
also stressed his role as caliph, in order to play to pan-Islamist sentiments, which
were fueled throughout the empire by the often tragic fate of Muslims in the newly
independent and officially Christian Balkan states. At the same time Abdülhamid II
continued to initiate modernizing measures especially in infrastructure and public
administration.14
In the Russian Empire, popular discontent accelerated by Russia’s defeat in the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 erupted into mass strikes, the formation of work-
ers’ councils or Soviets, and genuine revolutionary upheaval, in which the empire’s
nationalities were also active. In the October Manifesto (1905) the tsar was forced
to grant a constitution and accept the formation of an elected parliament (Duma).
For a brief moment, it seemed as if the long-standing aspirations for constitutional
government, coveted by free-thinking aristocrats and intellectuals, activists of the
non-Russian nationalities, the emerging bourgeoisie, and reform-minded civil
servants, might be fulfilled. Yet, just as in the 1860s, this period of reform gave way
to reaction and the autocracy remained largely intact. In 1907, Tsar Nicholas II
(r. 1894–1917), who was a convinced reactionary, backed by right-wing conservatives
and the radical antisemitic Black Hundreds regained the upper hand.15 He reneged
on many of the democratic promises made under duress during the 1905 Revolution
although his government continued to modernize the country’s economy and infra-
structure. However, political repression could not compensate for the far-reaching
erosion of the three ideological pillars of tsarist rule: “Orthodoxy” (Pravoslavvie),
“Autocracy” (Samoderzhavvie), and “Nationality” (Narodnost´). By the end of the
nineteenth century, Nationality was abandoned as too politically and ideologically
charged, and on their own, Orthodoxy and Autocracy were insufficient supports for
an imperial state at the dawn of the twentieth century. The seeds of nascent civil
society, organized in urban associations and in the organs of local self-government
(zemstva), which were established in 1864, could not be rooted out again.16
The end of empire

Nationalist agitation posed perhaps the greatest domestic challenge to the impe-
rial order (see the section on “Nationalism” in this chapter), forcing these govern-
ments’ attempts to reorganize their polities, to imagine new ideas to legitimate
the empire, and to develop new techniques of surveillance and repression. The
Ottoman Empire was least successful in responding to this challenge. By 1912, it
had lost almost all of its European possessions to the new Balkan national states.
As a reaction to the challenge of nationalist movements among the Christian pop-
ulations of the Balkans, Ottoman officials and intellectuals developed the idea of
“Ottomanism” as a supra-national identity that should unite all Ottoman citizens.17
In the heyday of the Young Turk revolution of 1908, when different nationalities
supported the reintroduction of the constitution and participated in the new par-
liament, the concept of an overall Ottoman identity gained some credence. Yet,
the strengthening Turkish national movement gave Ottomanism an increasingly
Turkish flavor, alienating the non-Turkish nationalities in the Balkans and the
327
Arab provinces.18 Although the sultan still enjoyed a high degree of respect among
the empire’s Muslim populations, the Ottomans utterly failed to build bonds of
political loyalty beyond traditional attachment to the ruler.
The tsarist government responded in a comparable way to the challenge of nation-
alism. Polish nationalists staged two major rebellions against Russian rule (in 1830
and 1863); by the end of the nineteenth century other national movements had also
formed in the European part of the Russian Empire. The government reacted with
a campaign of Russification, which went hand in hand with increased centralization
and the extension of government services and schooling, and ended the traditional
imperial strategy of co-opting local (non-Russian) elites and giving them considerable
leeway to run local affairs.19 The Poles in particular came to be seen by the govern-
ment in St. Petersburg as notorious rebels after their abortive uprisings.20 After 1863
the name “Poland” disappeared from the official maps of the Russian Empire, and
the Polish language was gradually eliminated from educational institutions. The west-
ern territories of the Russian Empire were forcibly integrated according to a strategy
of cultural assimilation. Printing in Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Lithuanian was
prohibited as well.21 These policies did nothing to forestall the eruption of national
discontent in 1905 and in 1917. After the collapse of the empire, national movements
established independent states in Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and –
only briefly – in Bessarabia and Ukraine.
The Habsburg Monarchy had long wrestled with ethnic tensions as well, a fact that
has led many historians to assume that the monarchy was doomed to extinction even
before 1914.22 Yet there were also surprising local initiatives in the Austrian half of
the monarchy to manage political conflict by assigning group rights to nations. In
1905, Czech and German nationalist leaders in Moravia concluded the “Moravian
compromise” that divided all eligible voters into national cadasters without separat-
ing them territorially. At the same time, Habsburg officials tried, with some success in
the years before 1914, to construct a cult around unifying symbols, such as the person
of Emperor Francis Joseph I.23 Other projects, such as the 24-volume Die österreichisch-
ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (colloquially known as the “Kronprinzenwerk”
after its initiator, Crown Prince Rudolph), were meant to project the image of a state
united in diversity.24 All this had some effect, as the peoples of the monarchy rallied
to the call of their monarch in 1914 and mobilized for war. But it was a war that the
Habsburg state was militarily, economically, and socially incapable of winning. Nor
could the loyalty that many felt for Francis Joseph be transferred, when he died in
1916, to his successor, Carl. As the war progressed, civil servants found themselves
working ever more closely with national activists on social welfare issues, in a desper-
ate attempt to feed people and care for children, the wounded, and the sick. In the
end, these efforts helped to solidify the position of nationalists as community leaders.
By 1918, the state simply could not feed its people, particularly those living in cities
such as Vienna.25 In large measure, the Habsburg Monarchy disintegrated because it
lost legitimacy as a state.
World War I marked the end of an international order in Europe, one founded
at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and built around the universally recognized legit-
imacy of Europe’s continental empires. The nineteenth-century wars had turned
Austria-Hungary and Russia into second-rate powers and relegated the Ottoman
Empire to the role of “sick man of Europe.” But all this changed radically with
328
World War I.26 If these three empires depended on each other for their survival
before 1914, then it must also be said that they were deeply entangled in each
other’s destruction.
Nationalism
Nationalism was a major challenge to imperial rule in the nineteenth century. Because
of the imperial framework and the linguistic and religious heterogeneity of the region,
local conditions shaped the form and content of nationalism in different settings,
even as it was also part of a broader historical shift.27 The development of nations
and national identities was not an organic process, despite the claims of nationalist
intellectuals. Legal and historical traditions dating to the early medieval era defined
the nobility as a nation under law in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, in
the historic Kingdom of Hungary, and throughout the Habsburg lands. But these
nations had nothing to do with modern ideas of nationhood, despite the best efforts
of latter-day historians to find continuities in national identity from the Middle Ages
to the modern era. In early modern East Central Europe, a nation (natio) excluded
all non-nobles (as well as women of any rank), no matter what language a commoner
might speak or what faith he might practice. Members of early modern nations were
bound together by their fierce defense of legal privilege and historic right. These
commitments regularly produced multiple loyalties that seem wildly contradictory
to modern observers, but which formed part of an entirely coherent worldview at
the time. For example, there were many Polish nobles who spoke both Polish and
Lithuanian, and who fiercely defended both the legal privileges of the Polish nobility
(szlachta) as well as the constitutional particularities of Lithuania within the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth.28 In the Ottoman Balkans, an important organization
of socio-political life during the reform era was the millet (the word today also means
“nation” in Turkish) comprising the people of a particular faith irrespective of lan-
guage and enjoying a certain level of internal autonomy. (For a fuller discussion of
the millet see Chapter 4 in this volume.)
By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, new
challenges had arisen to the political and social status of the region’s noble and confes-
sional elites. As the ideals associated with the Enlightenment spread in literary circles,
salons, and even at courts, it became possible to imagine society ordered according to
reason rather than historical privilege. Emerging circles of enlighteners-cum-patriots
embraced the ideals of scientific and cultural progress and combined them with an
emotional appeal to local patriotism. Many nobles, the Church hierarchy, as well as
other elite groups often saw these trends as a threat. Thus, these early “patriots” faced
not so much direct opposition from the emperor or sultan but from the traditional
elites of the peoples whom they imagined as a nation. For example, the Patriarch in
Constantinople, head of all Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, had no
interest in the linguistic segmentation of his flock; hence, the opposition of the most
powerful Christian institution in the Ottoman Empire against national movements,
even the Greek one.29
Yet, not all nobles and clergymen opposed the new historical force of nationalism.
In Bohemia, for example, aristocrats such as Count Kaspar Sternberg (1761–1838)
met in societies to create a National Museum for Bohemia (1818) and to promote
329
the spread of new ideas in agricultural and industrial science. In Hungary, Count
István Széchenyi (1791–1860) earned the sobriquet “the greatest Magyar” for his
unceasing devotion to the economic and cultural development of his native land,
financing the creation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, publishing a number
of important books attacking the institutions of feudalism, and supporting projects
such as the famous Chain Bridge in Budapest that built up the infrastructure of
the country.30 In the Balkans, the lower clergy was among the proponents of the
ideas of the Enlightenment and nationhood. The eminent Serbian educator, father
Dositej Obradović (1739–1811), who had studied in Vienna and Leipzig, is a case
in point. Similarly, the Bulgaro-Slavonic History written by the Bulgarian monk Paisij
Hilendarski (1722–73) in the early 1760s is today credited to be the birth moment of
Bulgarian nationalism.
Often influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder’s historicism and folklorism,
nationalist intellectuals, both noble and increasingly non-noble-born, emphasized
language and cultural achievement as the medium for the spiritual development
of a people.31 However technically accomplished a nation might be, it could not
attain its full potential if it did not have the cultural means to express its particu-
lar national genius. In Hungary, Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831) led efforts to renew
the Hungarian language, thrilling the Hungarian reading public with translations
of foreign works into a Hungarian enriched with material from ancient Hungarian
sources as well as classical foreign texts.32 In the Czech lands, a vigorous circle of
intellectuals transformed traditional Bohemian patriotism into a modern sense
of Czech nationhood using literature and history. In his monumental five-volume
History of the Czech Nation, František Palacký (1798–1876) glorified the period before
the battle of the White Mountain (1618), when Austrian armies destroyed the inde-
pendence of the Bohemian nobility, as an age that readers in his own time should
study in order to gain a consciousness of themselves as Czechs. Of necessity, the first
volume of this history, which appeared in 1836, was published first in German, the
language of the educated upper classes in Bohemia until well into the nineteenth
century. Nevertheless, Palacký and his colleagues continued to promote a Czech
reading public, able to imagine the national future with the tools of a particularly
national culture, as their highest goal. To achieve it, they created institutions like
the Matice česká, an association that published scholarly and popular books in Czech.
All this cultural invention was not seen as something new, but rather as a National
Revival.33 It was a powerful model, one that would inspire nationalist champions of
other vernaculars, spoken elsewhere by subaltern communities that were historically
poor, illiterate, and tied to the land. In 1861, for example, Slovak nationalist activists
formed a cultural organization called the Matica slovenská to promote education for
Slovak-speakers in the Slovak language. Similar associations such as the Matica srp-
ska (founded in Pest in 1826 and in 1864 relocated to Novi Sad/Neusatz/Újvidék)
emerged among the South Slavs.
Efforts at creating national languages were central to early patriotic efforts among
the South Slavs. The situation was often a difficult one: no clear language barriers
existed among them but rather a continuum of dialects from Klagenfurt/Celovec in
the north-west to Saloniki in the south. Some intellectuals, mainly from Dalmatia and
Croatia, such as the writer Ludevit Gaj (1809–72), therefore argued that all South
Slavs should form one nation (Jugoslovenstvo) and speak one language; accordingly,
330
they tried to establish a uniform South Slavic literary norm – an effort that resulted
in an agreement concluded in Vienna in 1850 between Croatian and Serbian intel-
lectuals to use a common standard with regional varieties and written either in
Cyrillic or Latin script.34 Furthermore, vernaculars often differed significantly from
archaic forms of the same language used mainly in the Church. The Serbian language
reformer Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864) had to overcome significant opposi-
tion from the Church hierarchy before his idea of “Write as you speak,” i.e. basing the
literary language on the spoken vernacular, was finally accepted.35 In the Bulgarian
case, the patriotic stirrings emerged first as a cultural movement, when Bulgarian
communities and intellectuals opposed the dominance of Greeks and the Greek lan-
guage in the Church. From the 1830s, the Bulgarian national movement for decades
focused on the establishment of a Bulgarian church (granted by the sultan in 1870)
and Bulgarian language schools.36
Strongly influenced by Romanticism but also the ideals of the Enlightenment,
many nationalist writers argued that cultural progress was not a zero-sum game. In
an Age of Nationalism, all mankind might achieve spiritual and political liberation.
Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), whose vision of Poland included all the lands of the
old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and was capacious enough to embrace all the
peoples of that older state, linked the demise and possible reconstruction of Poland
to the fate of European civilization. Similarly, the Hungarian nationalist poet and
political revolutionary, Sándor Petőfi (1823–49), imagined sacrificing his life for
Hungary as one act of a revolutionary apocalypse when “every enslaved people, tired
of its yoke, stepped onto the battlefield with glowing faces, with glowing red banners,
and on the banners this holy watchword: ‘World Freedom.’”37 Early Balkan nation-
alists, influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution, combined their hopes of
national emancipation with the idea of brotherhood between the Balkan peoples.
The Greek writers Adamantios Korais (1748–1833), who championed education
and language reform and the idea of a modern liberal Greek republic, and Rhigas
Velestinlis (1757–98), who had been in personal contact with French revolutionaries
in the Principality of Wallachia, harbored plans not only for an independent Greece
but for a union of free Balkan peoples.38 Similarly, Vasil Levski (1837–73) described
the final goal of the Bulgarian national revolution as “the consent, the brotherhood
and the perfect equality between Bulgarians, Turks, Jews, etc.”39
Of course, many nationalists found in their own hopes for cultural progress a
mission to bring civilization to less advanced societies. For example, it was common
among German intellectuals to imagine “German freedom” as an ethical ideal that
enabled them to act as “carriers of culture” (Kulturträger) to the benighted peo-
ples of Eastern Europe.40 Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872), the pre-eminent Austrian
poet of the pre-1848 era, probably spoke for many when he wrote in his diary in
1840 that “the Hungarian nation has never shown any talent in science or art. Had
Kant written his Critique of Pure Reason in Hungarian, he would have perhaps sold
three copies.”41 Similar examples of cultural arrogance can easily be found in works
published in many of the region’s languages. Despite these frictions, there was
nonetheless a widespread faith among nationalists in the region that revolution
would – somehow – usher in a true “Springtime of Peoples.”
The revolutions of 1848 shattered these hopes. As nationalists pushed for liberal
reforms in major political centers such as Pest-Buda, Vienna, Frankfurt, Prague,
331
Zagreb, Bucharest, and Iaşi, it soon became clear that the project of creating a
state governed by laws and parliaments in the name of one nation inevitably cre-
ated minority peoples uncertain of their legal and political rights. Lajos Kossuth’s
call for religious toleration, the abolition of serfdom, and equality before the law
inspired Hungarians in the spring of 1848; among Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, and
Romanians, the vision of a liberal Hungarian nation-state was far more alarming.
František Palacký’s bon mot about the Habsburg state – “if Austria did not exist, she
would have to be invented” – was very much to the point. Palacký himself promoted
pan-Slavism, i.e. an alliance of Europe’s Slavic peoples, as a cultural and political
counterweight to German nationalism. Yet, despite some Slavic solidarity and the
influence of Czech national thought on other Habsburg Slavs, pan-Slavism did not
become a major political force in Austria-Hungary. Frustrated by their lack of polit-
ical success, some Croat nationalists challenged the more inclusive idea of Yugoslav
unity and began to imagine an ethnic Croat nation independent of cooperation
with Serbs.42
In the Polish lands, too, revolution (in 1863) laid bare the impossibility of
Mickiewicz’s dream: the old Polish-Lithuanian state would not be resurrected as a
spiritual beacon to all Europe. Polish revolutionaries tried to rally the peoples of
the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth around a common dream of freedom
and emancipation. They failed, defeated by Russian arms, the unwillingness of
many nobles to free their serfs, and the refusal of peasants across the old Polish
lands to see much good in a revolution led by idealistic scions of the historic Polish
noble nation. In the Ottoman domain, the promises of the constitution of 1876
soon gave way to a campaign of retribution by the Ottoman state against national
revolutionaries, who had rebelled during the Eastern Crisis (1876–78). The Young
Turk revolution of 1908 also failed to transform the remains of the empire into a
state of free citizens under the rule of law. Various nationalities in the Ottoman
Balkans embraced the end of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s absolute rule and the rein-
troduction of the constitution in 1908. Yet their initial support for the Young Turks
soon turned into dissatisfaction and active opposition against their increasingly
nationalistic and authoritarian policies.
Despite these obstacles, nationalism remained an ideology filled with the potential
for collective liberation. Nothing reflects this promise better than the emergence of
Zionism as a program of modern Jewish nationalism. Such ideas were first formu-
lated by assimilationist Jews in the Russian Empire in the wake of the pogroms in
the Pale of Settlement in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Leon Pinsker
articulated the need for a territorial state in his pamphlet Self-Emancipation (1882).
Small groups of mostly young Russian Jews organized in the Lovers of Zion move-
ment then began emigrating and establishing agricultural communities in Palestine
during what is known as the First Aliya. But an internationally recognized political
Zionist movement was founded by the Budapest-born Viennese lawyer, playwright,
and journalist Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) who published The Jewish State: An Attempt
at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question in 1896. This too was a response to the rise of
antisemitism across Europe. Zionists envisioned Jews as a political nation like all the
others, one with its own territorial nation-state. After 1900 the promise of a Jewish
people remade through self-sacrifice, zealous commitment, and cultural innovation
drew a generation of radical youths eager to take on these challenges. Above all, their
332
work was cultural, as Zionists worked to transform Hebrew into a modern literary
language and to prepare a new generation of Jewish men and women for emigration
(aliya) to Palestine and the hard work of nation-state building that might await them
there. But this was only one aspect of an explosion of Jewish political movements, as
different Zionist factions competed with Yiddish-speaking socialists (Bundists), who
advocated for Jews to stay in Europe and maintain a cultural Jewish identity, and
with internationalist workers’ movements for the loyalties of Eastern European Jews,
embracing, adapting, or rejecting Jewish traditions in order to carve out spaces for
Jewish life in societies increasingly defined by ethnic politics.43
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, national activists encour-
aged potential members of their nations to look past their local social and economic
interests and to pledge their loyalty first and foremost to the nation. To do this,
the activists developed a variety of political tactics designed to “nationalize” people.
Where suffrage laws allowed it, nationalists established political parties that com-
peted for the loyalties of an expanding register of voters. Nationalist organizations
erected statues and monuments to heroes and historic deeds, marking public space
as national for every passing pedestrian. Language activists tried to create clear lin-
guistic borders and argued against multilingualism.44 Gymnastics and other sports
became manifestations of a healthy national body and of the ability of patriots to
rally the masses (e.g., in the Sokol movement in regions inhabited by Slavic speak-
ers). Economic nationalists promoted credit associations and self-help organizations
as a way to build up a truly national economy. Nationally minded entrepreneurs
in the Habsburg domain devised packaged tours for an expanding middle class to
enjoy leisure time in nationally significant settings among similarly inclined vaca-
tioners. Finally, educators redoubled their efforts to improve primary and secondary
schools, seeing in them a powerful vehicle to shape the minds and loyalties of the
next generation.45
Despite these well-documented efforts, many people across Eastern Europe
resisted declaring an absolute faith in one nation.46 According to nationalist ideol-
ogy, ethnic groups – Czechs, Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, etc. – existed, waiting for
national leaders to organize them politically. Yet, historians have begun to show that
ethnicity was not an unquestioned fact, but rather a social construction, an “event” –
to use the sociologist Rogers Brubaker’s term – in which the cultural and political
labors of national activists organized a community around a common ethnic iden-
tity at a given moment.47 At other times, however, nationalist rhetoric was so much
noise, unable to suppress alternate loyalties (to a religious faith, for example), or to
prevent people from making choices in their own and their families’ best social and
economic interests.48 For example, parents in Bohemia enrolled their children in
Czech- or German-language schools (or withdrew them from one school and sent
them to a different one) for a multitude of reasons, such as perceived quality of
instruction, the distance from home to school, and financial incentives offered by
the school director. Often, there were multiple national ideas at play, impossible to
categorize neatly by linguistic or religious affiliation. For example, Dalmatia in the
nineteenth century saw a variety of national ideologies (Italian, Croatian, Illyrian,
Yugoslav, Italo-Dalmatian, Slavo-Dalmatian, and Serbian) competing for people’s
loyalties.49 Advocates addressed speakers of the same language and people who went
to the same church.
333
In the Balkans, near-total illiteracy among peasants made it harder to implant

national sentiments in the nineteenth century. Faith, family, tribe, village, or
profession – not the nation – made up the most important layers of identification. It
would take the state and its institutions to disseminate national consciousness in the
countryside.50 In 1903, the British journalist H.N. Brailsford told a French consul in
Macedonia that
with a fund of a million francs he would undertake to make all Macedonia

French. He would preach that the Macedonians are the descendants of the
French crusaders who conquered Salonica in the twelfth century, and the
francs would do the rest.51
This alluded to the attempts by Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia to win over inhabitants
of Macedonia for their nation by funding schools and churches.52 The language of
nationalism was particularly lacking among the Muslim populations in the Balkans that
for centuries had been the ruling element in the Ottoman Empire. Turkish national-
ism was a product of the late nineteenth century and mainly a reaction to the various
other nationalisms in the empire. Albanian nation-building had to surmount strong
opposition by Albanian-speaking Muslims, especially those from the elite, who wanted
to maintain the community of all Muslims (Ummah) and who felt loyal to the sultan.53
Nationalism and the state

Once established, the nation-state transformed nation-building and nationalist
politics. The political elites of the new states, established in the Balkans in the
nineteenth century and in East Central Europe after World War I within borders
approved by the Great Powers, believed that they knew what nations were and
how they should be created. They increasingly made use of the coercive power
of the state to pin down uncertain national loyalties in their fight against ethnic
“side-switching” or “national indifference.” They typically defined the nation in
terms of shared ethnicity and common descent, a definition that also informed irre-
dentist policies, especially in the Balkans, where each national state felt that there
were “brethren” to be liberated.54 These expansionist national programs also served
as a means to foster internal coherence. Independent Greece pursued the Great
Idea (Megali Idea), aimed at the resurrection of a sort of modern Byzantine Empire
with Constantinople/Istanbul as the capital. Serbia acquired its expansionist blue-
print, Načertanije (Project), in 1844, authored by the minister of the interior, Ilija
Garašanin (1821–75), who was inspired by the pan-Slavic ideas of the Polish émigré
Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (1770–1861). It postulated the liberation of the South Slavs
in the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and their inclusion into a greater Serbian
state.55 Bulgarian politicians dreamed of incorporating Macedonia, which their
country went on to occupy in World Wars I and II.56
After 1918, nationalist lawmakers developed new measures to promote the
hegemony of one ethnic group or to define more clearly the identities of those
who lived in multi-ethnic communities. In newly created states, the act of replacing
imperial officials with new elites in Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and in the
previously Russian and/or Habsburg territories attached to Romania and to the
334
new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia
in 1929) amounted to an “affirmative action” hiring program for civil servants of
particular ethnic backgrounds. New language laws for schools and public ministries
followed, along with vigorous campaigns for replacing unwanted public mon-
uments and festivals with new holidays and statues to different national heroes.
(See Chapters 1 and 10 for more on these topics.) Finally, nationalist politicians
also imagined ways to manipulate welfare policy to the benefit of particular eth-
nic groups, by requiring recipients to register their national affiliation. In some
cases, this precipitated a new wave of “side-switching,” as in Czechoslovakia, where
the number of Germans in Bohemia mysteriously declined by 420,000 after 1918.57
In Greater Romania the government took measures to “nationalize” the busi-
ness sector and the educational system; the number of schools for minorities was
reduced and antisemitism became deeply entrenched in political and intellectual
life, eventually leading to anti-Jewish legislation.58 In Yugoslavia, the government
put pressure on the non-Slavic minorities (Albanians, Turks, Magyars, Germans) –
the so-called “anational elements” – to emigrate.59 Across the region, nationalism
gained an increasingly racial and antisemitic edge in the interwar period, often in
connection with discourses on eugenics.60
This is not to say that no one gave any thought to the rights of minorities. Diplomats
who met in Paris to create the borders of postwar East Central Europe imposed a
series of Minorities Protection Treaties on their new creations. In theory, minorities
could take their grievances to the League of Nations, where the Permanent Court of
International Justice could adjudicate disputes. The League of Nations offered less
assistance in practice, since it was powerless and could only exert rhetorical influ-
ence on minority affairs in the region.61 Still, leaders of ethnic minorities appealed
to the League for assistance throughout the interwar era.62 When their pleas fell on
deaf ears, they sometimes turned elsewhere for political support, contributing to the
erosion of the entire interwar state-system.63 There were also counter-examples of
more liberal state administration. For example, Henryk Józewski (1892–1981), artist,
politician, and, between 1928 and 1932, district governor (voivode) of Volhynia in
eastern Poland, tried during his time in office to offer autonomy and the possibility
of national development to the Ukrainian minority in his district, while also instilling
in them a sense of civic loyalty to the Polish state. That his vision ultimately failed did
not mean that his attempts were not sincere.64 But men like Józewski were too often
in the minority, and their position depended on the vicissitudes of domestic politics.
Ambitious attempts at nation-state building heightened fears about the separa-
tist ambitions of ethnic minorities. By the late 1930s, the Polish government reacted
to political assassinations carried out by members of the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN) by authorizing the arrest of Ukrainian political leaders, the
destruction of Ukrainian churches, and police raids of the offices of Ukrainian civic
organizations. Romanian, Yugoslav, and Czechoslovak officials were also exercised by
the connections that the government of (now much smaller) Hungary maintained
with Hungarian minorities abroad. Serb nationalist circles in Yugoslavia contem-
plated the deportation of Albanians, whom they suspected of harboring irredentist
aspirations and regarded as uncivilized.65 Among the ethnic German communities
(Volksdeutsche) in the region, radical nationalists would become dominant after 1933,
thanks to massive financial and political support from the Nazi regime.
335
These were ominous signs. But aggressive nationalist policies did not, in them-
selves, produce mass violence, nor did any but the most extreme nationalists propose
settling these questions once and for all by forcibly moving people from their homes.
Despite all these efforts, multi-ethnic communities remained across the region until
destroyed by war. When Nazi Germany unleashed total war on Europe in 1939, it
smashed political and legal order in many parts of Eastern Europe. Nowhere were
the consequences more horrible than in Poland, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia.66 The end
of the war brought one final wave of ethnic cleansing, as many governments expelled
their German minorities and many of the few returning or surviving Jews left Eastern
Europe.67 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was possible to believe that
nationalism would usher in an age of “world freedom.” In the middle of the twentieth
century, it seemed that nationalism had produced only death and devastation on an
unprecedented scale.
Liberalism
Like nationalism, liberalism took root in East Central and Southeastern Europe as
Enlightenment ideals spread into the region via intellectual networks organized
around literary circles, scholarly societies, and personal relationships nurtured by
travel to other parts of Europe.68 This was not simply an act of imitation. Liberals in
the region embraced the ideology within specific political settings, often adapting
or transforming liberal ideas according to their own requirements.69 Liberalism pro-
vided a powerful language to fuse ideas of progress with the critique of autocratic
rule. Among the historic nobilities of East Central Europe, older demands for noble
liberty seamlessly transformed into newer ideals of liberal freedom and individual
sovereignty. In both the Hungarian and the Polish contexts, nobles were the first
champions of liberalism. During the pre-1848 Reform Era in Hungary, liberal nobles
regularly used sessions of the Diet to proclaim their faith in self-determination and
personal liberty. Journalists covering these events became champions of a free press
and political figures in their own right, none more highly regarded than Lajos Kossuth
(1802–94), who later became the leading figure in Hungary’s 1848 revolution.70
Liberals throughout the region demanded the introduction of constitutions, be it
in the existing empires or in the new national states that emerged in the Balkans.
The constitutions that came into effect during the nineteenth century included many
of the basic principles of liberalism even if constitutional practice often looked very
different.71 In constitutional debates in independent Greece, for example, politicians
and intellectuals quoted from liberal thinkers such as Montesquieu, Bentham, and Mill,
and in 1864 Greece acquired one of the most liberal constitutions in Europe at that
time, based on the idea of popular sovereignty and individual freedoms.72 The repub-
licanism of the first generation of Greek liberal intellectuals such as Rhigas Velestinlis
and Adamantios Korais infused Greek political life with long-lasting anti-monarchic
sentiments.73 With the emergence of parliamentary politics, liberals became better
organized. In Serbia, for example, liberals under the guidance of Vladimir Jovanović
(1833–1922) formed the Liberal Party (Liberalna Stranka) in 1871. Under this party’s
rule in the 1870s, Serbia acquired a modern political system during the 1870s.74
The importance attributed to the state constitutes one of the peculiarities of lib-
eralism in Eastern and Central Europe. This reflected the weakness of a private
336
capitalist class, especially in the Balkans. Liberals were typically intellectual and pro-
fessional elites, who were largely dependent on the state for their employment.75
At the same time, liberal governments supported private enterprise and industri-
alization, in order to create a sound class base for liberal rule. They also tried to
modernize the state apparatus and use it for economic modernization.76 Eleftherios
Venizelos (1864–1936), the towering figure of Greek policies from 1910 to 1933, and
his progressive Liberal Party are a case in point.77 Their government reformed the
bureaucracy, extended schooling, reduced political influence on the judiciary, redis-
tributed land from great landholders to small-holding peasants, and m odernized the
tax system.78
The connection of state, modernization, and liberal thinking was evident also in
the fact that in both the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, many liberals came from
the ranks of the administration. In Austria, civil servants were the first champions
of a state governed by laws rather than privilege. Strongly influenced by Josephinist
principles, they retained their belief in the state as a motor of progress into the twen-
tieth century, in sharp contrast to Anglo-American liberals. Because liberals in Austria
faced a state ruled by a Catholic dynasty, while their counterparts in the Balkans faced
conservative Orthodox state churches or Sunni Muslim clerics, church–state issues
were especially complex across the region. On the one hand, liberals in the region
made their demands for parliamentary governance in strongly anti-clerical language.
In this way, debates about civil marriage, civil education, or – in Austria-Hungary –
diplomatic relations between the dynasty and the Vatican became explosive contests
about the source of political sovereignty itself. But liberals also imagined using state
power to contain and direct a state Church. For example, liberals in Austria rejected
an absolute separation of Church and state and called instead for more moderate
arrangements with the Roman Catholic Church.79
Another major feature of liberal politics across Eastern Europe was its social exclu-
sivity. There was a stark contrast between liberalism as an all-embracing oppositional
idea and as a governing practice. In opposition, liberals were defenders of liberty,
democracy, and constitutionalism. Once in power, they usually defended the inter-
ests of the urban elite. Liberals in particular feared peasants – the overwhelming
majority of most societies in the region – to whom they had little to offer. For this
reason, they often resorted to the same undemocratic practices that they had attacked
when in opposition. The National Liberal Party in Romania, ruling in the 1870s and
1880s, opposed direct and equal elections.80 In Bulgaria the leader of the Liberal
Party, Stefan Stambolov (1854–95), became infamous for his authoritarian policies
and the manipulation of elections during his tenure as prime minister (1887–94).81
In the German lands of the Dual Monarchy, liberals spoke a language of universalism
but were typically locally rooted bourgeois notables who socialized, politicked, and
cut business deals in exclusive clubs, completely marginalizing lower middle-class arti-
sans and the growing class of industrial workers.82 In Hungary the county courts and
administrative offices that were the location and source of the liberal lesser nobles’
social and political power were no less exclusive; neither Hungarian-speaking peasants
and workers nor the growing number of non-Hungarian middle-class professionals
had any hope of claiming a place in that insular world. Paschalis Kitromilides’ asser-
tion that “liberalism remained locked in a profound antinomy with the structures and
culture of Greek society” can be generalized for most of the region.83
337
Abandoning ideals of universality in their political practice, liberals across the

region often embraced more exclusive versions of nationalism. Facing intense
challenges to their traditional ethnic hegemony, liberals in provincial towns across
German-speaking Austria supported German-language schools and folk culture asso-
ciations with language that was often decidedly anti-Slavic and antisemitic.84 In many
towns and cities in Bohemia, Czech-speaking bourgeois were typically excluded from
the venues that made up the sites of German bourgeois sociability.85 Hungarian liber-
als, who remained in power until 1918, insisted that the unity of the state depended
on more aggressive policies toward national minorities. Some Polish intellectuals
came to similar conclusions. In the aftermath of the failed 1863 revolution, Polish
patriots adapted and transformed aspects of British liberalism, finding in it a means to
imagine their nation as a social collective that transcended the borders dividing Polish
speakers. But this also made possible the rise of a politician like Roman Dmowski
(1864–1939), who openly embraced an ethno-nationalist vision of the Polish nation
that excluded Jews and other minorities.86 Elsewhere anti-liberal political forces man-
aged to combine some liberal policies with populism and antisemitism. The mayor
of Vienna, Karl Lueger (1844–1910), and his newly formed Christian Social Party
masterfully co-opted elements of liberalism (and some of their representatives) in an
attempt to drive liberals from power.87 The growing polarization of the political land-
scape in Austria between a social democratic left and an antisemitic right – both of
which organized in modern mass parties – left little room for liberals, whose attempts
to form a unified party or association failed repeatedly because of regional disputes,
perpetual realignments, and petty personal squabbles.88 In Hungary, many lesser
nobles, once the backbone of Hungarian liberalism, reacted to economic disruptions
by embracing antisemitism.89
Did liberalism fail in Eastern Europe? Certainly, liberal politics faced many
pressures, especially during the interwar era. In postwar, post-revolution, and
post-partition Hungary, liberalism became discredited almost overnight, a tiny Liberal
Party reduced to obscurity in Budapest municipal politics. In Poland, Marshal Józef
Piłsudski (1867–1935) staged a coup d’état in 1926, creating an authoritarian regime
that promised to be above partisan politics. In Romania, the National Liberal Party,
which dominated governments in the 1920s and 1930s, was more concerned with
national homogenization and the support of ethnic Romanian industrialists than
with maintaining the rule of law and democracy. But this was not so everywhere. After
1918, Czech liberals found themselves in power in the newly created Czechoslovak
state. However, the Czechoslovak “democratic exception” also has its critics, who
rightly observe that Czech liberals generally preferred technocratic administration to
democratic transparency.90 It is also true that Czech–German and Czech–Slovak rela-
tions remained troubled throughout the life of the state, and that most Czechs easily
accepted so-called “authoritarian democracy” after the 1938 Munich Agreement gave
the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany and ended the First Republic.
The triumph in the late 1930s of illiberal politics should not obscure the very real
ways that the social practices and habits of bourgeois liberals continued to shape
East Central and, to a lesser extent, Southeastern European societies. For example,
liberal faith in the power of humanistic culture and reason remained the corner-
stone of elite education and self-identification across the region. Because it promoted
universal cultural values, many Jews in Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and elsewhere
338
continued to embrace liberalism even as antisemitism became more virulent. This

stance slid easily into nostalgia for a bygone age, when liberalism had been stronger.
But forms of bourgeois sociability like the summer holiday (Sommerfrische) did not
only produce nostalgic melancholy, nor were bourgeois Jews the only group who
found meaning in them. As Deborah Coen has recently shown in her study of three
generations of a bourgeois Viennese family, habits and practices like the summer
holiday made possible a remarkable cultural and scientific efflorescence, bringing
together artists, writers, lawyers, professors, political figures, and scientists in a net-
work of personal and professional relationships.91 As a political project, liberalism
may have been defeated in the middle of the twentieth century, the victim of its own
contradictions as well as political movements intent on destroying it. But the social
and cultural legacy of liberalism in East Central Europe cannot be denied. In the
Balkans, the cultural legacy of liberalism was more limited, mainly because of the
weakness of the social milieus that harbored liberal ideas. Urbanization remained
limited and the educated urban professional population was small.92 Yet, it was thanks
to liberal politicians that liberal constitutions had been put in place and that the con-
cepts of popular sovereignty, democracy, and individual liberty had entered political
rhetoric. Anti-liberal governments could make a mockery of liberal constitutions but
they could not make these ideas go away.
Workers, workers’ movements, and socialism

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Europe’s “social question” – the fate of work-
ers and the poor in an industrial age – had become an explosive issue in the industrial
regions of Eastern Europe. Socialism constituted an umbrella for a wide spectrum
of political ideas and social practices aiming at modernization without human costs
and at the emancipation of the lower classes. Socialists were among the pioneers of
the struggle for equality, justice, solidarity, and democracy in a socio-political envi-
ronment characterized by feudal remnants (such as aristocratic privileges), political
injustice, poverty, and social disruption. At the same time, alienated intellectuals saw
socialism as a powerful ideology for the radical critique of unrepresentative political
systems that dominated most of the region until World War I, and as an alterna-
tive path toward modernity.93 Political activists of marginalized national groups often
found socialism a viable vehicle for their own concerns as well, and several important
national activists had socialist leanings. Yet, the “national question” was also a major
challenge for social democratic parties which had to navigate between social and
national aspirations, between unity and (ethnic) fragmentation.
The emergence of workers’ parties

Already in 1848, workers in Vienna had called for a broader understanding of the rev-
olutionary ideals of freedom and equality. These words they insisted also included bet-
ter working conditions, shorter hours, and higher wages. Most liberal revolutionaries,
however, rejected these demands for a truly “social” revolution, a schism that played
no small role in the collapse of the revolution in the German lands. Nevertheless,
the appalling social conditions that had led workers to demonstrate for social rights
persisted and spread with the expansion of industrialization. By the late 1870s,
339
circles of workers and journeymen, as well as sympathetic intellectuals, discussed the

ideas of the most important European socialist theoreticians in educational societ-
ies and in the pages of pamphlets and newspapers. Most looked to Karl Marx for
guidance, although the writings of Ferdinand Lassalle were popular in some quar-
ters as well. International contacts also energized workers’ movements across Eastern
Europe. Those conversant in German looked to Germany and the newly created
Social Democratic Party there. The influence of the German socialists was also due
to their eminent role in the International.94 Polish intellectuals, many of whom were
subjects of the Russian tsar, commonly attended universities in the Russian Empire,
where they met, debated, and worked with socialists and other revolutionaries. Exiled
intellectuals in Western Europe formed political parties (the Polish Socialist Party
was founded in Paris in 1892) or published tracts that were then smuggled eastwards.
Others returned home to share their organizational experience. Such was the case of
the Paris Communard Leó Frankel (1844–96) who returned to Hungary after the fall
of the Commune to play an important role in the creation of the Hungarian Social
Democratic Party.95
These intellectual and organizational efforts culminated in the creation of mass
workers’ parties. The Austrian Social Democratic Party was founded in 1889, and
its Hungarian counterpart one year later. The first genuinely socialist party in the
Balkans, the Bulgarian Workers’ Social Democratic Party, was established in 1891.
There were multiple Polish socialist parties; Rosa Luxemburg and her colleagues
founded a rival to the Paris-born Polish Socialist Party in 1893. In other countries
it took longer: in the Ottoman Empire, the first socialist party that addressed the
Muslim population (the Ottoman Socialist Party) was founded in 1910, and in Greece
no socialist party appeared before World War I.
The political systems in which each of these parties formed shaped their devel-
opment and their tactics. In Austria, expanding suffrage rights (which culminated
in 1907 with universal male suffrage) allowed socialist leaders to build a mass party
that exercised real power in parliament (83 of 516 seats in 1907). In Hungary,
by contrast, highly restrictive suffrage laws left socialists dependent on the trade
union movement for their organizational power. Polish socialists, facing even more
repressive authorities in the Russian Empire, increasingly adopted conspiratorial
methods to keep their organizations intact in the face of police surveillance. Shared
experiences of distributing illegal newspapers, serving in prisons, and sometimes
escaping from them, shaped the political vision of men like Józef Piłsudski, a leader
of the Polish Socialist Party before World War I. As Head of State in the interwar
Polish Republic, Piłsudski drifted away from socialism but clung to the precautions
born of hard struggle, relying on “men of trust” who had shared his travails and
whom he could trust in positions of high responsibility.96 In Serbia and Bulgaria,
socialist ideas flourished because the political regimes of these countries failed to
integrate the growing intelligentsia (such as teachers) who came from a modest
social background. (In Greece, by contrast, the political system successfully accom-
modated left-leaning intellectuals, e.g., by providing them with well-paid state
jobs.)97 Cronyism, authoritarian government, frequent infringement of individual
rights, and the persistent poverty of these countries inspired some to look for even
more radical alternatives and to embrace anarchism.98 When perceived national
oppression, in the Ottoman Empire for example, was added to the equation,
340
powerful revolutionary movements that invoked vague socialist ideas emerged, as in

Macedonia or among the Ottoman Armenians.99
Before 1917, the revolutionary potential of Marxist ideology was still theoreti-
cal. For the Austro-Marxists who headed the Austrian Social Democratic Party, it
remained that way. Despite their heated class rhetoric, Austria’s socialist leaders con-
tinued to contest elections at the ballot box and marginalize those who called for
violent struggle. In the Russian Empire, however, Marxism fused more easily with
populist transformative revolutionary upheaval, producing a volatile mix that even-
tually led to revolution. Populist traditions and widespread discontent with the rule
of oligarchs and autocratic monarchs played an important role in the emergence
of socialist groups in Southeastern Europe as well. Balkan socialists in Bulgaria,
Romania, and Serbia, were strongly influenced by Russian socialists, since all oper-
ated in a largely rural setting with only small pockets of industrialization. In Romania
the flow of socialist materials and Marxist books ran across the River Prut, from
Bessarabia, the adjacent territory of the Russian Empire where many Romanian
speakers lived. Romanian socialism was practically founded by refugees from the
Russian Empire.100 Under these conditions, socialist ideology “functioned foremost
as a vehicle for social criticism and as an alternative to unfulfilled aspirations of polit-
ical emancipation, before it could and would become an ideology associated with the
labor movement.”101
The relationship to the peasants was crucial for Balkan socialists. Some, such
as the Bulgarian leader Dimitŭr Blagoev (1856–1924), took a dogmatic view and
opposed a coalition with peasants. Bulgarian social democrats developed a coherent
socialist ideology, albeit one at odds with the social realities of their predominantly
rural country.102 They even copied their Russian comrades by splitting their party in
1903 over questions of party tactics. The left wing of the “Narrows,” led by Blagoev,
stood for an avant-garde party of devoted revolutionaries, while the “Broads” pur-
sued a revisionist course and were open to cooperation with liberal and agrarian
forces.103 This split anticipated the division of the left into communists and social
democrats in Europe in the interwar period. Other socialists were more open to
peasant alliances. Serbian socialists, strongly influenced by the Russian populist
tradition (narodnichestvo), viewed the patriarchal peasant family (zadruga) as the
embodiment of Serbian democratic traditions. In 1881, radical intellectuals and
political activists in Serbia formed the Radical People’s Party (Radikalna Narodna
Stranka), which built the first modern party machinery in the country and embodied
“the original and successful adoption of populist socialism in the Serbian context.”104
They demanded equality and civil liberties, a decentralized people’s state without
checks and balances, the protection of peasants, and national expansion, while
opposing individualism and bureaucracy. They believed that there was a shortcut
to “progress” that avoided capitalism. Once they took power in 1889, little of their
socialist legacy became actual policy.
Socialism and nationalism

Nationalism, especially in the Habsburg Empire, was an even greater challenge to
socialist ambitions than the “peasant question.” Although the workers’ movement
was in theory international, the power of nationalist politics heavily influenced
341
the development of socialism in the region. Many who called themselves socialists
accepted the existence of nations as an established fact around which the workers’
movement must organize. Czech separatists forced the Austrian Social Democratic
Party to divide along national lines in 1897. The creation of a second socialist party,
the Czech National Socialist Party, which demanded social reforms within a strictly
national context, further widened the rift between Austro-German and Czech
socialists. The national question bitterly divided Polish socialists as well. Whereas
men like Józef Piłsudski saw in socialism the means to recreate an independent
Poland, Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) insisted that workers had
no country of their own. In other multi-ethnic contexts, the national question
was also salient in debates among socialists. In the rapidly growing port city of
Trieste, for instance, socialist activity blended with national cultural activism, and
socialists in the town organized in separate national organizations. Yet, both the
Italian and the Slovenian socialists stressed their commitment to internationalism,
and national differences did not preclude cooperation in matters important to the
workers.105
In response to the national fragmentation of their party and the national struggles
in Austria, a generation of “Austro-Marxist” theoreticians imagined a variety of inno-
vative theories for transforming the Habsburg Monarchy. Karl Renner (1870–1950)
called for Personalautonomie, which meant tying specifically national (cultural) rights
to the individual and not to the territory where he or she lived.106 But even the Austro-
Marxists could not imagine workers without specific national identities. Nor did
socialists in the Balkans question the idea of the nation as such. They were, however,
among the most ardent supporters of the idea of a Balkan federation. Prominent
Balkan socialists linked national liberation with the idea of creating a federation of all
Balkan peoples. At their 1912 congress, for example, Bulgarian socialists called upon
the workers to join the struggle for a socialist federative Balkan republic.107
For Jews, the tangled relationship between socialism and nationalism was espe-
cially vexing.108 For many, the appeal of socialism lay precisely in its internationalist
vision. In a world transformed by revolution, antisemitic prejudice and discrimina-
tion would vanish, allowing Jews and non-Jews to build a better future together.
Inspired by this dream, Jewish intellectuals made up a significant proportion of the
leading socialist figures. Indeed, this trend made it all too easy for anti-revolutionary
politicians in the twentieth century to denounce socialism and communism as pecu-
liarly “Jewish” ideologies. At the same time, not all Jews who embraced socialism
did so to escape their heritage. The Jewish Bund in Poland was both Marxist and
internationalist, yet it had only Jewish members and focused its activities on the
particular conditions of poor Jewish artisans, craftsmen, and journeymen in the
Pale of Settlement (the area of the Russian Empire where Jews were permitted to
reside permanently).109 The tension between internationalism and Jewish self-orga-
nization was also evident in one of the first socialist organizations in the Ottoman
Empire, the Socialist Workers’ Federation of Salonica, founded in 1908.110 Although
the majority of its members were Jewish, the federation made serious efforts to
include socialists of other ethnic backgrounds. Its weekly journal appeared in four
languages (Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, and Ladino).111 Yet, they could not expand
their stronghold beyond the Jewish craftsmen and laborers in the small industries
and the port of Salonica.
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Socialism in the interwar period

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 forced two choices on socialists across Eastern
Europe. First, should they try to replicate the Bolshevik Revolution in their own coun-
try, or be reformists? Certainly, many revolutionaries from Russian Poland embraced
the events in Russia. Feliks Dzieržyński (1877–1926) directed the Bolshevik security
force, the Cheka and Rosa Luxemburg fought and died for revolution in Berlin.
Similarly, many Hungarian socialists, surveying a country in crisis as neighboring states
laid claim to huge portions of Hungary, joined forces in March 1919 with Béla Kun
(1886–1939) and his Bolshevik colleagues, who had returned from Russia to lead a
revolution at home. The Hungarian Bolshevik regime collapsed after 133 days, forcing
the leaders to flee the country and provoking a vicious counter-revolutionary backlash.
In the aftermath of this White Terror, Hungary’s remaining socialists chose to become
a tolerated, legal, and politically irrelevant party. Kun’s short-lived regime as well as
Russia’s October Revolution stirred fears among East Central Europe’s political elites of
a communist takeover, and furthered their readiness to use state force against the left.
Against all odds, the most successful communists at the electoral booth were those
in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, where newly formed communist parties gathered signifi-
cant support in elections immediately after World War I, although in both countries
modern industry was weak. They built on the dissatisfaction of an increasingly asser-
tive lower class about the abominable living conditions, and they also managed to
draw the support of oppressed nationalities. Communist success was short-lived,
though: in Yugoslavia, communist activities were outlawed in 1920, and in Bulgaria in
1923, after an abortive armed rebellion by the communist party in September 1923.
The repression of communists by increasingly authoritarian regimes in the region
during the interwar period reduced communist parties to small, outlawed organi-
zations; but it also strengthened their revolutionary inclinations and distaste for the
political status quo. Czechoslovakia was the exception to the rule of anti-revolutionary
repression. There, social democratic parties operated in a more fortunate geo-po-
litical environment, and so could remain committed to constitutional governance.
Both the Czech Social Democrats and the National Socialist Party (no relation to the
German National Socialists) were mainstays of governing coalitions in Czechoslovakia
throughout the interwar era.
In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, socialists also had to decide whether
their social vision was best achieved within a national context, or whether they should
accept Moscow’s leadership. Nowhere was this choice starker than in the newly cre-
ated Polish state. Polish and Soviet armies waged a fierce war between 1919 and 1921
to determine first the survival of Poland and then the extent of its eastern frontier.
Thereafter, “the communist choice meant supporting the immediate partition of
Poland and the attachment of its eastern lands to the Soviet Union.”112 For most Poles
and certainly for the Polish government, this option was unthinkable; the Commu-
nist Party exercised little influence among Polish workers and the state police put a
number of party members in prison. They were the lucky ones. The Soviet leaders
summoned both party leaders and many rank-and-file members to Moscow in the late
1930s, where they became victims of Stalin’s hunt for traitors and spies. Other com-
munists from the region fell victim to the purges also; for example, the exiled Béla
Kun was accused of Trotskyist deviations and executed in the Soviet Union in 1938.
343
The policies of the Communist International (Comintern) did not do much good
for the Balkan communists either, despite the establishment of a Balkan Bureau of
the Comintern.113 The Fifth Comintern Congress in 1924 called for redrawing state
boundaries in the Balkans and the self-determination of “oppressed people.”114 This
implied the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the secession of large regions from
Greece and Romania. Under these circumstances, it was not difficult for government
propaganda to denounce the communists as unpatriotic.
Despite these setbacks and ominous signs from Moscow, Marxism continued to
exert a tremendous influence on interwar intellectual life.115 In the 1930s, during
the Great Depression, (semi-)legal social democratic and trade union organizations
also made some inroads among industrial workers. Communists, in the meantime,
learned to operate illegally. This proved a valuable experience during World War II,
when they organized potent resistance movements in Poland, Greece, and Yugoslavia.
Agrarianism, populism, and the mobilization of peasants

Given the social make-up of the East Central European societies prior to 1945, peasant
parties might have been expected to dominate political life in the region. For a variety
of reasons, ranging from political suppression to the difficulties of mobilizing peasants,
they did not. With the exception of a few years in the interwar period, peasant parties did
not enjoy the fruits of power.116 Yet, peasant parties greatly contributed to the politiciza-
tion of the countryside and generally displayed commitment to democratic government.
Across the region, nineteenth-century national activists idealized peasants as the
unpolluted source of ethnic identity. When Hungarian gentry wanted to show their
national zeal during the 1840s, they asked their tailors to fashion folk-inspired cloth-
ing for their patriotic balls.117 In the second half of the century, artists and intellectuals
devoted even greater attention to the peasantry. As Czech musicians tried to imagine
distinctly national musical forms, they turned to folk music motifs and stories set in
the countryside. One outstanding example is Bedřich Smetana’s comic opera, The
Bartered Bride, set in a village with music that was widely praised as being Czech in
spirit. Serbian intellectuals and politicians idealized the peasant joint family (zadruga)
as an icon of Serbian national values. Often, this appreciation for peasant virtue
was distinctly anti-modernist in tone. Conservatives contrasted the supposedly static
and hierarchical order of villages and agricultural estates to the fluidity of modern
social and cultural values, which they associated with the city. In part for this reason,
counter-revolutionaries in interwar Hungary sometimes referred to Budapest as the
“sinful city.” Similarly, provincial Austrians after 1918 celebrated rural values, which
they c ontrasted to the alien culture that socialists had developed in “Red Vienna.”118
None of this benefited the rural laborers and small farmers who made up the
majority of the region’s population. Most peasants remained desperately poor,
even after the abolition of serfdom, because they were tied to the land they worked
through debts they owed to their landlords, or (in some places, often Jewish) money-
lenders. For most of the nineteenth century, peasants were practically excluded from
official poltics; thus peasant protest was often articulated through violence. In 1846,
peasants in Galicia rebelled against Austrian authorities and massacred hundreds of
landlords. Riots and strikes by landless agricultural laborers took place throughout
the 1890s in the region of Hungary between the Tisza and Maros rivers, which earned
344
it the nickname “Storm Corner” (Viharsarok). Rural authorities used violence and
intimidation to ensure that efforts to build this discontent into an organized agrar-
ian movement amounted to very little in the end. The unwillingness of Polish and
Ukrainian peasants to support a noble-led revolution against the Russian Empire was
an important factor in the collapse of the 1863 Polish Insurrection. Serbian peasants
staged a huge rebellion in the Timok area in 1883, directed against the increasing
influence of the state in the village. In Romania, the situation of the peasantry was
especially poor; servitude was officially abolished in 1864 but large parts of the peas-
antry consisted of destitute share-croppers who owned only minute holdings and
depended on their landlords. Unrest exploded in a mass uprising in 1907, which was
crushed by the army at the cost of thousands of peasant lives.119 Nationalists might
imagine themselves leading the rural “people,” but so many remained deaf to the
voices of the agricultural laborers themselves.
Peasant activism
By the end of the nineteenth century, peasants, especially the more prosperous among
them, had begun to organize themselves politically and economically. Nationalist
claims about the unity of an ethnic people provided a blueprint. In Austrian Galicia,
activists formed a Polish Peasant Party that challenged the nobility’s paternalis-
tic vision of rural life. Instead, it promoted a specifically peasant national identity as
well as an economic and social agenda that served peasant interests.120 All too often,
this type of peasant nationalism had a decidedly antisemitic tone, as activists rallied
support by accusing Jewish moneylenders and tavern-owners of preying on the poor
rural Christian population. Elsewhere, grassroots networks of smallholders created a
variety of peasant associations and organizations, including credit cooperatives, self-
help associations, newspapers, and educational societies. These became the foundation
on which agrarian parties were formed. In 1903, for example, Czech activists, many
of them small and mid-sized sugar beet farmers, created the Czech Agrarian Party to
protect its constituents against the ravages of global capitalism. It remained a powerful
political force in interwar Czechoslovakia.121 In Bulgaria as well, the Bulgarian Agrarian
National Union, which was formed in 1899 and would come to power after World War
I, also grew from a network of peasant associations, self-help groups, and populist initi-
atives to improve the peasants’ lot. These had emerged in the 1890s as an expression of
peasant discontent about government neglect, an unfair tax system, and their generally
poor economic situation.122 These efforts, important though they were, did not sweep
away the real political and economic disadvantages that the p oorest peasants faced.
The mobilization of peasants into armies during World War I and the generally
revolutionary atmosphere in 1918 also gave peasants a new sense of entitlement.
Traditional elites in some countries of the region, frightened by the Bolshevik revo-
lutions in Russia and Hungary, reacted to more vocal peasant protest by introducing
sweeping land reforms. In Yugoslavia and Romania, large holdings were broken up
and land was redistributed to small peasant households. The land reforms also served
nationalist purposes, because landlords belonging to (new) national minorities
(Hungarians and Germans in Romania, Germans and Muslims in Yugoslavia) were
disproportionately affected as land reforms were particularly far-reaching in former
Habsburg and – in the case of Romania – also Russian territories.123
345
Land redistribution did indeed meet one of the peasants’ main demands, but it
did not fundamentally improve living conditions in the countryside. Peasant parties
articulated these grievances and mobilized peasants. The success of these parties
largely depended on the ability of their leaders, who usually had an intellectual
background, to connect with peasants and to build party machines reaching down to
the village level. The most notable example is Bulgaria, where the Agrarian National
Union under the charismatic leadership of Aleksandŭr Stamboliski (1879–1923)
won the first and second postwar elections (with 28 percent and 38 percent of the
vote, respectively). They formed a government from 1919 to 1923 and took concrete
measures to implement their far-reaching vision: Bulgaria was to become a coun-
try of prosperous smallholders, living in clean and bright villages, enjoying access
to credit and proper education, and forming associations for mutual support. The
government invested in village infrastructure, took measures to modernize farming,
and supported peasant cooperatives.124 The Agrarian Union was pacifist and anti-
nationalist, and it aimed at establishing good relations with Bulgaria’s neighbors.
This provoked fierce opposition from nationalist groups. In 1921 Stamboliski played
a central role in the establishment of the “Green International,” an association
of peasant parties in Eastern Europe with headquarters in Prague.125 However, in
June 1923, radical Bulgarian nationalists staged a bloody coup d’état together with
elements of the old elite, in which Stamboliski was murdered and his g overnment
brought down.
The Bulgarian peasant party was not the only one in Southeastern Europe to govern.
In Romania, the National Peasant Party scored an impressive victory (57 percent of
the vote) in November 1928 in what was one of the few fair elections in interwar
Romania.126 It formed a government under Iuliu Maniu (1873–1953), which lasted
until October 1930. Under its ideological umbrella of “peasantism” (ţă ră nism), the
government set out to implement measures in order to achieve the National Peasant
Party’s goal of nurturing a strong class of middle peasants.127 It supported the moder
nization of agriculture and reduced the high export duties for agricultural goods,
which had been introduced by the previous liberal government. In the specific
context of interwar Yugoslavia, the success of the Croatian Peasant Party, founded
in 1904 by the brothers Ante Radić (1868–1919) and Stjepan Radić (1871–1928),
resulted from its ability to merge social and national demands.128 During the inter-
war period, this party managed to become the most powerful political force of the
Croats, demanding Yugoslavia’s decentralization and autonomy for Croatia (which
was eventually achieved in 1939).129
Yet even in the Balkans, where peasant parties could rally considerable elec-
toral support, the political system remained biased against peasant concerns. This
was even more clear-cut in those countries of the region where no radical land
reform had been carried out after World War I. In Hungary, even during the short-
lived 1919 Bolshevik regime, advocates for socialist agrarian policies found that
the Budapest-based commissars too often ignored their pleas.130 After the counter-
revolution had triumphed, the interwar Hungarian regime drew significant political
support from landholders who owned vast estates, especially in Transdanubia. Until
1945, every attempt to introduce land reform or otherwise to improve the condi-
tion of the poorest rural workers resulted in token measures only.131 Voting laws
also ensured that agrarian parties, such as the Independent Smallholders Party,
346
remained marginal. In Poland, deteriorating economic conditions in the 1930s

inspired militant agrarian populists to engage in more active struggle against the
regime. There were several instances of strikes and disturbances, directed against
both high taxation and debt collection, culminating in a mass peasant strike in
1937 that involved several million people. Widely scattered, these strikes were bru-
tally repressed by the authorities. All over the region, therefore, peasant activism
increased during the interwar period. But dominant elites did not make a consist-
ent effort to improve peasants’ lives, which became even more difficult during the
Depression when agricultural prices collapsed.
Feminism
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, East Central Europe witnessed the
political mobilization of social groups excluded from political life. Feminism was
one such movement; women from different social strata challenged the patriar-
chal nature of their societies and demanded equal rights and opportunities.132 In
the second half of the nineteenth century, women’s associations formed in many
places, reflecting the extent to which women now could mobilize politically. These
were part of a wider and genuinely transnational political movement. Prior to World
War I, progressive women had already debated questions such as the relationship
between the social and the “woman” question, and between socialism and feminism;
these would occupy feminist thinkers throughout the twentieth century.
Different feminisms developed across the region in the nineteenth century, gener-
ally linked to one of the era’s other political ideologies. For example, women played
important roles in the creation and development of national movements. In Hungary
during the years before the 1848 revolution, aristocratic women organized fundrais-
ing balls and held parties at which national activists could meet and mingle.133 Women
writers also produced important works of nationalist literature. Božena Němcová’s
1855 novel Babička (Granny) was a classic in the nineteenth-century Czech national
literary canon.134 The Serbian writer and actor Draga Dejanović (1840–71) argued
that the liberation of the nation was not possible without the liberation of women.135
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century female activists were able to use the language
of nationalism to portray the empowerment of women as a crucial aspect of success-
ful nation-building. To be sure, images that portrayed the nation as a woman or that
stressed motherhood reproduced patriarchal power hierarchies, but they also had
the paradoxical effect of opening up discursive space for claims on behalf of women.
One of the aims of the League for Romanian Women’s Rights and Duties, for exam-
ple, was to “awaken women’s consciousness in regard to their responsibility for family
and nation.”136 While it is evident that such a program attributed a secondary role to
women, it also justified demands for a more equal participation of women, at least in
the field of education.
These nascent women’s movements formed within specifically national contexts.137
Feminist activists across the region argued that their nation would be stronger if
women could develop their talents freely and could vote alongside men. Indeed,
feminists from East Central Europe brought this national perspective to the interna-
tional feminist movement, pushing the International Woman Suffrage Organization
to admit sections from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy along national lines on an
347
equal basis, even if a particular section did not represent an actual state of its own.138
However, activists did not agree on how to conceive of the women’s role in national
communities.139 Most Czech leaders of the women’s movement insisted that politi-
cal, legal, and social equality between the sexes was a basic attribute of a (national)
democratic society. Prominent male political leaders supported them in this view.140
In other cases, however, leading figures within the women’s movement argued that
women should enjoy greater political and social status because they played a differ-
ent, but complementary, role to men within national life. According to this view,
political rights were a secondary question, to be tackled only after these more fun-
damental issues were addressed. (For further treatment of feminism and women’s
political activism see the last section of Chapter 6 in this volume.)
Women could not vote in national elections anywhere before 1918, nor could
they enroll in universities until the late nineteenth century. Thus, they were largely
excluded from those institutions that trained the political and social elite. Accordingly,
women could not typically take part in politically influential realms of public debate.
These issues therefore – the right to vote, and the opportunities to study and to play
a public role – became central to the rise of a women’s movement across the region
at the end of the nineteenth century.
In many places, the first efforts of organized women’s activism were directed
toward the field of education.141 In 1891, a Czech feminist founded a private gymna-
sium for women, the first in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Six years later, women
were admitted to universities. Similar developments in the traditionally more patri-
archal Balkans started even earlier. In 1863 a secondary school for women opened
in Belgrade and from the early 1890s, women enrolled in the High School, the
forerunner of the University of Belgrade. In the years before 1914 some ten per-
cent of university students in Serbia were female; female students from Serbia also
went to study abroad, where they often encountered radical ideas.142 An important
achievement for placing women’s issues in the public realm was also the establish-
ment of periodicals addressed to female readers, such as Zhenski glas (“The Women’s
Voice”) in Bulgaria, Efimeris ton Kyrion (“Ladies’ Newspaper”) in Greece, and Femeia
Română (“The Romanian Woman”) in Romania.143 The success of these periodicals
was dependent on, but also an indicator of, widening female literacy.
In more narrowly political terms, the fight for women’s suffrage was the most pow-
erful question stimulating organized female activism. In Serbia, the Serbian National
Women’s Union (Srpski Ženski Savez) formed in 1906 to demand women’s suffrage.
Such demands were articulated in pamphlets but also by street action: at the munic-
ipal elections in Belgrade in 1910, some 150 women went to polling stations and
demanded to cast a vote. Women’s organizations in other independent states, such
as the Bulgarian Women’s Union (established 1901) and the League for Romanian
Women’s Rights and Duties (established 1906), demanded full civic and political
equality for women as well. These organizations joined international f eminist organ-
izations such as the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.144
In some places, socialism played an important role in the emergence of feminism.
Early socialists, such as Svetozar Marković in Serbia, were among the first prominent
politicians to demand the emancipation of women, which they considered an essential
part of social progress. The socialist press regularly wrote about these issues and social-
ist organizations provided a space for women’s involvement. However, the relationship
348
between socialism and feminism was neither easy nor clear-cut. Feminists debated
whether the emancipation of women was part of larger social questions, and how fem-
inism related to class. In Bulgaria, for example, socialist women left the Bulgarian
Women’s Union in 1903 and created their own organization. Bourgeois feminists, on
the other hand, were eager to distance themselves from communism.145
The main issues raised by the feminist movements gained new urgency after World
War I. Imperial collapse, the creation of new states, the reconstruction of war-torn
societies, and economic turbulence provoked new responses to questions of political
and social participation. Postwar radicalism briefly widened the space for feminist
involvement. When the Bolshevik regime came to power in Hungary, a generation
of radical democratic feminists associated themselves with the revolution, believing
that socialist transformation would bring political and economic equality to women.
Elsewhere, the prospects for feminist politics also seemed promising, at least initially.
Czech feminists celebrated the new Czechoslovak constitution that declared “privi-
leges of sex . . . will not be recognized by law.”146 Nevertheless, the same constitution
protected “marriage, motherhood, and the family,” suggesting that women’s roles
as mothers and nurturers were somehow more essential. In the newly established
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, the National Women’s Alliance of the Serbs,
Croats, and Slovenes (established in 1919) shared the optimism of many, to turn the
new country into a modern and democratic state. In 1922, the Alliance counted more
than 200 member organizations with more than 50,000 members. A major demand of
these progressive women’s organizations in the region was the extension of full civil
and political rights to women, including suffrage.147 Activist women in East Central
Europe also continued to frame their national struggle as part of the larger political
context: in 1923, for instance, women activists from Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania,
Greece, Poland, and Czechoslovakia established the Little Entente of Women, which
was to provide mutual support.148
However, the region’s turn to the political right later in the 1920s put feminism
under severe pressure. The break was probably most radical in Hungary, where many
feminist activists went into exile after the collapse of the Béla Kun regime. In the years
that followed, conservative nationalists controlled Hungarian women’s organizations.
While continuing to defend women’s access to higher education, they insisted that
basic gender differences between men and women defined the “woman question” in
Hungary.149 The economic fallout of the Depression by the early 1930s put further
pressure on women. In Czechoslovakia, for example, a growing number of politicians
denounced women in the civil service as “double earners” who took jobs from more
deserving male breadwinners.150 Across East Central Europe, conservatives and fascists
condemned feminism as an anti-national ideology just like liberalism or socialism. By
the end of the 1930s, feminists found themselves marginalized nearly everywhere in
the region. But by then the “woman question” had been irremovably put on the political
agenda by female activists.
Conservatism, authoritarianism, fascism

Across Europe, modern conservatism developed as a response to the French Revolution
and to the Enlightenment ideals that inspired it. In the decades before 1848, advo-
cates for “progress” and defenders of “order” clashed most fiercely over the issue
349
of serfdom, the feudal system of landholding that bound peasants to noble-owned

estates. When liberal nationalists proposed abolishing serfdom, they cited free mar-
ket theories of economic growth and far-reaching ideals about the dignity of all
men familiar to them from their study of Western European Enlightenment phi-
losophy. In response, conservatives warned that the consequences of these reforms
were unknowable and very possibly catastrophic. Already Austrian and Hungarian
aristocrats had used this argument in the first days of the French Revolution, to
force Joseph II to renounce his more ambitious reforms. But conservatism on the
Western European model implied upholding both monarchy and traditional legal
and political privileges. For a British conservative like Edmund Burke, these were
hardly contradictory. In East Central Europe, matters were more complex: protect-
ing seigneurial rights often set Hungarian and Polish aristocrats against their impe-
rial rulers in Vienna or St. Petersburg, since they typically saw these rights as part of
a larger historical legal tradition dating from a time when both Hungary and Poland
were fully sovereign early modern states. For this reason, Hungarian conservatives
accepted some liberal demands, such as trial by jury or the abolition of capital pun-
ishment, but they supported only a voluntary redemption of serf labor service. The
perils of this position were made obvious in Galicia in 1846, when an uprising of
Polish nobility triggered revolts by peasants who demanded the abolition of serf-
dom. Some 1,000 nobles were killed and 500 estates were destroyed before Austrian
authorities restored imperial order.151
Conservatism was not simply a reaction to economic and social upheaval. It was
also an ideological reaction to the spread of cultural and moral norms that seemed
to threaten tradition. Often, conservatives found allies in religious authorities. For
centuries, religion had been one of the most important aspects of life in Eastern
Europe. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, liberal national-
ists began to criticize the traditional privileges of the Church. In answer, conservative
politicians attempted to construct political loyalties based on religious affiliation,
drawing heavily from the arsenal of religious thought. In all this, the churches and
the clergy were not passive objects. They responded with new ideas about the place
of the Church and of religion in social and political life. Given the confessional
heterogeneity of East Central Europe, the intersection of religion with politics was
negotiated in a variety of ways.
The most extensively documented case is the Catholic Church, which for much
of the nineteenth century rejected modern politics. From the Vatican, Pope Pius IX
issued the Syllabus of Errors in 1864, in which he denounced “progress,” “liberalism,”
and “modern civilization.” In the Habsburg Monarchy, the Church resumed its alli-
ance with the ruling dynasty in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, eager to help
the Austrian ruler contain the explosive potential of nationalism. Yet, it was this very
same defense of traditional, hierarchical, and ordered society that inspired Catholics
to take an active role in politics by the end of the nineteenth century. Especially in
Vienna, artisans and shopkeepers – the traditional middle classes – worried that dra-
matic economic changes were undermining their traditional socio-economic status.
At the same time, parish priests wondered how best to compete with the new growing
socialist movement for moral leadership among the urban working classes. Together,
these groups became the base on which a new Christian Social Party was founded.152
The party’s political success – in 1897 it won control of Vienna; it remained one of the
350
two important political camps in interwar Austria – inspired similar Christian Socialist
movements elsewhere.
Not all of them were equally successful.153 But even if the Christian Social Party in
Austria remained unique in many ways, it still inspired East Central European Catholics
who hoped to defend their social and cultural interests with similar modern and secu-
lar methods. As a young priest studying in Vienna, Józef Tiso (1887–1947), who would
become a leading figure of Slovak Catholic politics and then later head of the wartime
Slovak state, strongly admired the Christian Social Party and returned home from his
studies eager to imitate its successes in a Slovak context. Anton Korošec (1872–1940),
a theology student in Maribor and Graz who became leader of the Slovene People’s
Party, is another Habsburg-shaped exponent of political Catholicism who put this
experience in the service of national policies.
Church authorities saw the rise of political Catholicism as a mixed blessing. On
the one hand, Catholic parties opposed liberal ambitions to reduce the moral author-
ity of the Church in society. Christian Socialist and other Catholic parties were also
unambiguously anti-socialist and anti-communist. At the same time, both the Vatican
and leading figures in Catholic Episcopal benches across the region worried that
political Catholicism, however well-intentioned, would only contribute to the ulti-
mate secularization of society and the erosion of Church authority. Even in interwar
Czechoslovakia, where the leading Slovak political figure was a Catholic priest, Józef
Tiso’s Catholic Party devoted most of its energies to purely secular questions such as
Slovak autonomy from Prague.154 In interwar Yugoslavia the Slovene People’s Party
(originally founded as the Catholic National Party in 1905) had similar priorities,
campaigning for federalization and defending Slovenian interests.155
Authoritarianism and right-wing extremism in the interwar period

As political leaders and intellectuals across the region took stock of the possibilities
and dangers that modernity posed to their societies, they searched for new ways to
shape, regulate, and define society. Some, like the liberal-nationalist-turned-socialist
Victor Adler in Vienna and the Czech National Socialist Tomáš Masaryk in Bohemia,
adapted their nationalist convictions to the prescriptions of socialism. Other former
liberals, often responding to socio-economic transformation, embraced h arder-edged
forms of ethnic politics that included outright antisemitism. New political formations
on the left and right typically placed their hopes in the mass mobilization of society
and were often willing to give new powers to the state to achieve this end. All this left
traditional liberals increasingly troubled and, whether by temperament or intellectual
conviction, inclined toward a more conservative politics.
The aftermath of World War I fueled these developments. Indeed, the origins
of fascism in the region can be traced to the war and the revolutions that followed
it. When neighboring states began to occupy vast areas of Hungarian territory and
Bolsheviks came to power in Hungary in 1919, radical nationalists declared the
nation’s humiliation complete. In response, paramilitary units, led by ex-officers and
counter-revolutionary nobles, formed to scour the southern Hungarian countryside
for Communists, Communist sympathizers, and Jews. Paramilitary units were also
prominent in southern Austria at the end of World War I, as ethnic Germans formed
bands to fight a “war of self-defense” (Abwehrkampf) against claims on the province
351
of Carinthia made by the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In
the 1920s, veterans of these border skirmishes found their way into the anti-socialist
paramilitary army (the Heimwehr) backed by the Austrian Right.156
The peace settlements after World War I left many nationalists unhappy either
because their country had to cede territories (Bulgaria in 1919, Hungary in 1920,
and Greece in 1923), or because their newly formed or enlarged country included
large minorities (Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Poland and Greater
Romania). In addition, the Depression hit East Central Europe especially hard
because the prices for agricultural goods – their main export – collapsed when more
industrialized Western countries closed their markets to imports. Vast parts of the
populations experienced social disruption and pauperization. With the exception of
Czechoslovakia, authoritarian regimes became the norm in the region. Their use of
physical violence and frequent disregard for civil liberties and constitutional norms
intimidated their opponents, but also fueled radical discontent. Fascist movements
emerged in the 1930s from this explosive mixture of radical nationalism, authoritar-
ianism, and economic disruption.
East Central European fascists shared important features of their ideology and
political practice with fascist movements elsewhere. After 1933, extreme rightists
could look to Nazi Germany for example and support. Nazism was an attractive
model for three reasons. First, Nazi party leaders made no secret of their belief
that the borders imposed on the region after World War I were unjust and should
be changed. Second, many admired the way that the Nazi regime seemed to be
responding aggressively to the challenges of an economic depression, and this only
enhanced German influence. Third, the resurgence of German power seemed to
suggest that Nazi ideas – about the state, about the nation, and about Jews – would
define Europe’s “new order.” Fascist-inspired parties, with uniformed members,
mass salutes, and banners with some sort of cross on it, spread across the region.
In Hungary, the extreme right Arrow Cross party and several other smaller
national socialist parties got 25 per cent of the popular vote in 1939. Many more
voters among the “gentlemanly middle class” sympathized with Nazi ideals, even if
they thought that the Arrow Cross attracted an undesirable rabble.157 Among Slovak
nationalists, the Nazi influence had a similar effect. Rightists in Slovakia saw that
rising Nazi power would only weaken Czechoslovakia’s position, perhaps opening
the way for an independent Slovakia. When this came to pass in 1938–39, fascists
played a prominent role in the newly created Slovak state. Nazi diplomats also estab-
lished contact with the most radical Ukrainian nationalists, hoping to use them to
destabilize the interwar Polish state. After 1941, when German troops invaded the
Soviet Union and occupied the former eastern Poland (which had been under Soviet
occupation between 1939 and 1941), Nazi occupiers found willing collaborators
among Ukrainian radicals. In the Balkans, fascists were especially fascinated by the
Italian model, whereas German national-socialism had an impact especially on the
German minorities in Yugoslavia and Romania.158 Italy supported the Croatian fascist
organization Ustaša, which was founded in 1929. Its leader (poglavnik) Ante Pavelić
(1889–1959) dreamed of an ethnically homogeneous Greater Croatia. In April
1941, German and Italian occupiers put the group in power in the newly formed
“Independent State of Croatia,” which embarked on a policy of genocide against its
Jewish, Roma, and Serbian populations.159
352
Yet, despite German and Italian support, fascist movements remained a marginal
political option in the Balkans until 1941, with the exception of Romania. Holm
Sundhaussen concludes that “Southeastern European societies in the interwar
period were structurally not ready for fascism (faschismusunfähig).”160 The League
of the Archangel Michael in Romania, founded in 1927 by the lawyer and former
student leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) and better known under the
name of its political and paramilitary wing, the Iron Guard, was the exception.
Violent and deeply antisemitic, the Guardists unleashed such a fury of mass violence
against Jews and political opponents when they came to power in September 1940
that the Germans supported General Antonescu in suppressing them in January
1941. The Iron Guard attracted popular support by stressing religion and by using
entrenched cultural practices to mobilize the urban and rural masses.161 Other fas-
cist groups in Southeastern Europe, such as Zbor in Serbia, the Union of Bulgarian
Fascists and the Bulgarian National Socialist Party in Bulgaria wielded far less influ-
ence.162 In Greece, the “fascisizing” policies of the Metaxas regime ultimately failed
because the state lacked the administrative capacity and legitimacy to achieve mass
mobilization and Gleichschaltung, the “coordination” of society according to a clear
fascist political line.163
Fascism also had its opponents in interwar East Central Europe. These came from
the left and, politically even more decisively, from the right. In Czechoslovakia, fas-
cism was widely understood as a reflection of rising German influence in the region.
For this reason, both the voting public and the Czech political class rejected the tiny
Czech fascist party.164 For the very same reason, the only active Polish fascist group
attracted even less popular support and was easily dispersed by the police.165 Elsewhere,
conservatives continued to prefer authoritarian order to the potential instability of
mass political movements. In Hungary, conservatives successfully restored the prewar
political status quo after the upheavals of revolution and counter-revolution, creating
a government party that dominated the electoral process. Although the rise of fascism
in Hungary and the spread of Nazi influence pulled many Hungarian conservatives
in a radical direction – for example, most supported the introduction of anti-Jewish
laws in the late 1930s – they continued to resist a fascist seizure of power. Only after
Nazi Germany occupied Hungary (in March 1944), deposed the constitutional gov-
ernment (in October 1944), and began to make plans to defend Hungary against the
advancing Red Army was the Arrow Cross able to take power.
In Southeastern Europe as well, anti-revolutionary conservative elites – the bour-
geoisie, intellectuals, officers, and high bureaucrats – prevented fascists from taking
power, despite sharing a nationalistic worldview. In all countries of the region,
authoritarian regimes were established in the interwar period, most (with the nota-
ble exception of Greece) in the form of a royal dictatorship. Each of them claimed
to rise above the “squabbles” of party and parliamentary politics. Yet, it would be
simplistic to describe them as “reactionary.” All shared an idea of social renaissance
and economic development under the guidance of the state, akin to Marshal József
Pilsudski’s post-1926 authoritarian Sanacja regime in Poland. The main goals of the
royal dictators, and of General Metaxas, in Greece, were the consolidation of the
nation-state guarded by the vision of an ethnically homogeneous nation; the healing
of social cleavages in the name of national unity; and political and social renewal.
Their nationalism was pronounced but directed rather at internal nation-building
353
than at outward expansion. The authoritarian rulers deeply mistrusted party organi-
zations. Instead, these regimes were based on the institutions of the state: the police
for repression, the bureaucracy for modernization, the educational system for indoc-
trination. They borrowed ideas and symbols from fascism especially in its Italian
variant, but without going to the same extremes. Anti-capitalism, anti-elitism, and
(with the exception of Romania) also antisemitism played at most a minor role in their
ideology and policy. They also failed to achieve Gleichschaltung, that is, “coordinate”
society as the Nazis had done. In Bulgaria, for example, the press enjoyed some
leeway, and the king did not control all members of parliament.166 Finally, these
authoritarian dictators directed repression against not only the left opposition but
also against the fascists. King Carol I of Romania established his personal dictatorship
in 1938 mainly in order to prevent the Iron Guard, which had gained sixteen percent
of the votes in the general elections of December 1937, from taking power.167 In a
wave of repression, hundreds of Iron Guard activists, including their leader Corneliu
Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938), were killed.
After 1948, Communist regimes ignored crucial, if complex, distinctions among
fascists, authoritarians, and conservatives. Instead, they denounced conservatives, lib-
erals, and supporters of authoritarian movements as fascists, lumping them in with
the very political groups they had opposed. For decades, Communist politicians and
historians in Hungary, for example, referred to the years between 1919 and 1944 as
“Horthy-fascism,” obscuring the motives that inspired Hungary’s conservative estab-
lishment. Only toward the end of the communist period did historians begin to assess
these decades with more ideological nuance.
When the Red Army occupied Eastern Europe in 1944–45, it found a region that
had been devastated by war. Amid the rubble, some of the political visions discussed
in this chapter no longer had any meaning. The war had decisively altered the struc-
tures of East Central European societies, destroying old elites, altering patterns of
property ownership, and transforming demographic reality through murder and
ethnic cleansing. Those who dreamed of preserving society as it had been in the
nineteenth century now seemed to speak a foreign language. But others saw a new
dawn, and new possibilities to realize some of the modernizing visions surveyed
here. Soviet authorities might have been the decisive political power after 1945, but
they did not take control of a blank slate. The political ideologies and traditions that
took shape across East Central Europe before World War II persisted stubbornly. As
communist parties took power across Eastern Europe, their actions everywhere were
shaped by the legacy of these political ideologies.
Notes
1 Orlando Figes, The Crimean War: A History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011).
2 Astrid Tuminez, Russian Nationalism since 1856: Ideology and the Making of Foreign Policy
(Lanham, MD, Boulder CO, New York, & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
3 Waltraud Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen. Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich, 1780–1848 (Vienna:
Böhlau, 1991); and Waltraud Heindl, “Bureaucracy, Officials, and the State in the Austrian
Monarchy: Stages of Change since the Eighteenth Century,” Austrian History Yearbook, 37
(2006): 35–57.
4 Surajya Faroqhi, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reichs (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000), 86.
354
5 On education in the reform period, see Selçuk Akşin Somel, The Modernization of Public
Education in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1908: Islamization, Autocracy, and Discipline (Leiden:
Brill, 2001).
6 András Gerő, The Hungarian Parliament, 1867–1918: A Mirage of Power, trans. James
Patterson and Enikő Koncz (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1997).
7 On Habsburg civil servants and nationalist politics, see Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs
and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
8 John David Deak, “The Austrian Civil Service in an Age of Crisis: Power and the Politics of
Reform, 1848–1925” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2009).
9 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2008), 72–73. On the impact on the non-Muslim populations
of the Balkans see Benjamin Braude, ed., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013).
10 Maurus Reinkowski, Die Dinge der Ordnung. Eine vergleichende Untersuchung über die osmanis-
che Reformpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2005).
11 Alexander Vezenkov, “Reconciliation of the Spirits and Fusion of the Interests: ‘Ottomanism’
as an Identity Politics,” in Diana Mishkova, ed., We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity
in Southeastern Europe (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2002), 47–78, 51.
12 See Hannes Grandits, Herrschaft und Loyalität in der spätosmanischen Gesellschaft: das Beispiel
der multikonfessionellen Herzegowina (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008); and Halil Inalçik, “Application
of the Tanzimat and its Social Effects,” Archivum Ottomanicum, 5 (1973): 97–127.
13 Stanford Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. II:
Reform, Revolution, and Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 177.
14 Hanioğlu, Brief History, 116–126; and Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing
of Ottoman Muslims 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
15 Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2009). On Nicholas II see Sergei Firsov, Nikolai II: plennik samoderzhaviia
(Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2010).
16 Anton Fedyashin: Liberals under Autocracy: Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866–1904
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); Guido Hausmann, ed., Gesellschaft
als lokale Veranstaltung: Selbstverwaltung, Assoziierung und Geselligkeit in den Städten des
ausgehenden Zarenreiches (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002).
17 Alexander Vezenkov, “Formulating and Reformulating Ottomanism,” in Roumen Daskalov
and Tchavdar Marinov, eds., Entangled Histories of the Balkans, Vol. 1: National Ideologies and
Language Policies (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2013), 241–272.
18 Masami Arai, Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era (Leiden: Brill, 1992); and Feroz
Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics, 1908–1914
(New York: E. J. Brill, 2010).
19 Andreas Kappeler, Rußland als Vielvölkerreich. Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall, 2nd ed. (Munich:
C. H. Beck, 2001), 207–215.
20 Theodore Weeks, Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR, 1861–1945 (Chichester,
UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 92.
21 On Russification in the western provinces of the empire, see Theodore Weeks,
Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western
Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); Alexei Miller,
The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century
(Budapest: CEU Press, 2003); Edward Thaden, ed., Russification in the Baltic Provinces
and Finland, 1855–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); and Dariusza
Konstantynowa and Piotra Paszkiewicza, eds., Kultura i polityka: wpływ polityki rusyfikacyjnej
na kulturę zachodnich rubieży Imperium Rosyjskiego (1772–1915) (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki
Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1994).
22 A classic example is Oscar Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1929); for a critical discussion of this point, see Alan Sked, The
Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918 (London: Longman, 1989).
355
23 Laurence Cole and Daniel Unowsky, The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular
Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy (New York: Berghahn Books,
2007).
24 James Shedel, “The Elusive Fatherland: Dynasty, State, Identity and the Kronprinzenwerk,”
in Moritz Csáky and Klaus Zeyringer, eds., Inszenierungen des kollektiven Gedächtnisses:
Eigenbilder, Fremdbilder (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2002), 70–82.
25 Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian
Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 79–105; and Maureen
Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
26 Max Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires,
1908–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
27 Maria Todorova, “The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of
Eastern European Nationalism,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (2005): 150–164.
28 Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
29 Paschalis Kitromilides, “‘Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question
in the Balkans,” European History Quarterly 19 (1989): 149–194, esp. 177–185.
30 On Sternberg, see Rita Krueger, Czech, German, and Noble. Status and National Identity in
Habsburg Bohemia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). On Széchenyi see George
Barany, Stephen Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, 1791–1841 (Princeton,
31 Holm Sundhaussen, Der Einfluss der Herderschen Ideen auf die Nationsbildung bei den Völkern
der Habsburger Monarchie (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1973).
32 Gabor Vermes, “Eighteenth-Century Hungary: Traditionalism and the Dawn of Modernity,”
33 Hugh LeCaine Agnew, Origins of the Czech National Renascence (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1993).
34 Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics
in Yugoslavia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
35 Claudia Hopf, Sprachnationalismus in Serbien und Griechenland: theoretische Grundlagen sowie ein
Vergleich von Vuk Stefanović Karadžić und Adamantios Korais (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997).
36 Richard Crampton, Bulgaria (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), 63–80.
37 Sándor Petőfi, “Egy gondolat bánt engemet” (1846). Translation in David Mervyn Jones,
Five Hungarian Writers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 261.
38 Paschalis Kitromilides, “The Enlightenment East and West: A Comparative Perspective
on the Ideological Origins of the Balkan Political Traditions,” Canadian Review of Studies
in Nationalism 10, no. 1 (1983): 51–70. For biographical information see Mathias Bernath
and Karl Nehring, eds., Biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichte Südosteuropas (Munich:
R. Oldenbourg, 1981), 397–400. On Korais, see Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation:
Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford
39 Quoted in Vezenkov, “Reconciliation of the Spirits and Fusion of the Interests,” 71.
40 Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1957). More generally, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization
on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
41 Cited in Lendvai, The Hungarians (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 200.
Original in Grillparzer werke, vol. 5, 404.
42 Mirjana Gross, Povijest pravaške ideologije (Zagreb: Institut za Hrvatsku Povijest, 1973);
Nicholas Miller, Between Nation and State: Serbian Politics in Croatia before the First World War
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997).
43 See Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews,
1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); David Biale, “A Journey
between Worlds: East European Jewish Culture from the Partitions of Poland to the
Holocaust,” in David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York: Schocken,
2002), 799–862; Carl Schorske, “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Trio,” in Fin-de-Siècle
356
Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 116–180; David Vital, The
Origins of Zionism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); and Ritchie Robertson, ed., Theodor
Herzl and the Origins of Zionism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).
44 Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria
45 Nancy Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Catherine Albrecht, “The Rhetoric
of Economic Nationalism in the Boycott Campaigns of the Late Habsburg Monarchy,”
46 See Tara Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of
Analysis,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 93–119.
47 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
See also Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity,
University Press, 2001), 112–152; George W. White, Nationalism and Territory: Constructing
Group Identity in Southeastern Europe (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000).
48 In addition to Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, see also James Bjork, Neither German Nor Pole:
Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 2008).
49 Konrad Clewing, Staatlichkeit und nationale Identitätsbildung. Dalmatien in Vormärz und
Revolution (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2001).
50 Kitromilides, “‘Imagined Communities.’”
51 H.N. Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Races and its Future (London: Methuen and Co., 1906), 102.
52 Fikret Adanir, Die Makedonische Frage. Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung bis 1908 (Wiesbaden:
Steiner, 1979); Keith Brown, The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of
Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
53 On Albanian nation-building see Nathalie Clayer, Aux origines du nationalisme albanais. La
naissance d’une nation majoritairement musulmane en Europe (Paris: Éd. Karthala, 2007).
54 For a detailed analysis of the ethnicization of national belonging see: Ioannis Zelepos, Die
Ethnisierung griechischer Identität 1870–1912. Staat und private Akteure vor dem Hintergrund der
“Megali Idea” (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2002).
55 Holm Sundhaussen, Geschichte Serbiens. 19.–21. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau, 2007), 116–117.
56 Victor Roudometof, Collective Memory, National Identity, and Ethnic Conflict: Greece, Bulgaria,
and the Macedonian Question (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); and Tchavdar Marinov, “Famous
Macedonia, the Land of Alexander. Macedonian Identity at the Crossroads of Greek,
Bulgarian and Serbian Nationalism,” in Roumen Daskalov and Tchavdar Marinov, eds.,
Entangled Histories of the Balkans, Vol. 1: National Ideologies and Language Policies (Leiden,
Boston: Brill, 2013), 273–332.
57 Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, 119.
58 Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic
Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Mariana Hausleitner, Die
Rumänisierung der Bukowina. Die Durchsetzung des nationalstaatlichen Anspruchs Großrumäniens
1918–1944 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2001).
59 Aleksandar Miletić, Journey under Surveillance: The Overseas Emigration Policy of the Kingdom of
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in Global Context, 1918–1928 (Belgrade: LIT Verlag, 2009).
60 Marius Turda and Paul Weidling, eds., Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism
in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007); Christian
Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta, and Marius Turda, Health, Hygiene, and Eugenics in Southeastern
Europe to 1945 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2010); Maria Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization in
Interwar Romania (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).
61 On the League of Nations and minority rights, see, e.g.: Martin Scheuermann,
Minderheitenschutz contra Konfliktverhütung? Die Minderheitenpolitik des Völkerbundes in den zwan-
ziger Jahren (Marburg: Grin Verlag, 2000); Susan Pedersen, “Back to the League of Nations,”
The American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (2007): 1091–1117; and Mark Mazower, “Minorities
and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe,” Daedalus 126, no. 2 (1997): 47–64.
357
62 Eric Beckett Weaver, “‘Truly Devilish Material’: The Entanglement of Hungarian Histories
in the League of Nations,” in Anders Blomqvist, Constantin Iordachi, and Balázs Trencsényi,
eds., Comparisons and Entanglements: Hungary and Romania beyond National Narratives (Bern:
Peter Lang, 2013), 397–424.
63 But also creating the potential for a new state order. See Holly Case, Between States: The
Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford, CA: Stanford
64 Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), esp. 40–60.
65 Edvin Pezo, “‘Re-Conquering’ Space: Yugoslav Migration Policies and the Emigration of
Non-Slavic Muslims to Turkey (1918–1941),” in Ulf Brunnbauer, ed., Transnational Societies,
Transterritorial Politics: Migrations in the (Post-)Yugoslav Region, 19th–21st Century (Munich:
R. Oldenbourg, 2009), 71–92.
66 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2012).
67 Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 108–138; Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, eds., Redrawing
Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 2001).
68 For an illustrative discussion of the relationship between liberalism and nationalism, in the
Romanian case, see Cristina Matiuţa, Liberalismşi naţionalism în România modernă (Oradea:
Ed. Universitatea, 2005).
69 Kitromilides, “The Enlightenment East and West,” 51–70, 54; and Diana Mishkova, “Balkan
Liberalisms: Historical Routes of a Modern Ideology,” in Roumen Daskalov and Diana
Mishkova, eds., Entangled Histories of the Balkans, Vol. 2. Transfers of Political Ideologies and
Institutions (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 99–188.
70 On these Hungarian developments, see András Gerő, Modern Hungarian Society in the
Making: The Unfinished Experience, trans. James Patterson and Enikő Koncz (Budapest: CEU
Press, 1995), esp. 3–108; Robert Nemes, “Associations and Civil Society in Reform-Era
Hungary,” Austrian History Yearbook 32 (2001): 25–45.
71 Cf. Eddar Binder-Iijima and Ekkehard Kraft, “The Making of States: Constitutional
Monarchies in the Balkans,” in Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Wim van Meurs, eds., Ottomans
into Europeans: State and Institution Building in South-East Europe (London: Hurst, 2010),
1–30; and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, “Failed Institutional Transfer? Constraints on the Political
Modernization of the Balkans,” in ibid., 51–74.
72 Paschalis Kitromilides, “European Political Thought in the Making of Greek Liberalism:
The Second National Assembly of 1862–1864 and the Reception of John Stuart Mill’s Ideas
in Greece,” Parliaments, Estates and Representation 8, no. 1 (1988): 11–21.
73 Kitromilides, “The Enlightenment East and West,” 54.
74 Gale Stokes, Legitimacy through Liberalism: Vladimir Ivanović and the Transformation of Serbian
Politics (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1975), 183–184; and Stokes, Politics as
Development: The Emergence of Political Parties in Nineteenth-Century Serbia (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press Books, 1990), 2. For a more recent discussion of liberalism in Serbia in
the first half of the twentieth century see Nikola Žutić, Liberalizam i srbi u prvoj polovini XX
vijeka (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 2007).
75 See Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, Evgheniţi, Ciocoi, Mojici: Despre obrazele primei modernităţi
româneşti 1750–1860 (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2013), 225–272 for a discussion of the origins
of a modern bureaucracy in Wallachia and Moldova.
76 Mishkova, “Balkan Liberalisms: Historical Routes of a Modern Ideology.”
77 On Venizelos and his policies see Paschalis Kitromilides, ed., Eleftherios Venizelos: The Trials
of Statesmanship (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2006).
78 Fanny Maria Papoulia, “Griechenlands Weg in die Moderne? Die Reformen der Regierungen
Trikoupis und Venizelos, 1875–1935,” in Ulf Brunnbauer, Andreas Helmedach, and Stefan
Troebst, eds., Schnittstellen. Gesellschaft, Nation, Konflikt und Erinnerung in Südosteuropa:
Festschrift für Holm Sundhaussen zum 65. Geburtstag (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2007), 81–94.
79 John Boyer, “Religion and Political Development in Central Europe around 1900: A View
from Vienna,” Austrian History Yearbook 25 (1994): 13–57.
358
80 On the ambiguities of Romanian liberalism see Paul Blokker, Modernity in Romania: Nineteenth
Century Liberalism and its Discontents (Florence: European University Institute, 2003). Available
at http://cadmus.iue.it/dspace/retrieve/1755/sps2003–02.pdf, accessed July 9, 2013.
81 Duncan Perry, Stefan Stambolov and the Emergence of Modern Bulgaria: 1870–1895 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press Books, 1993).
82 On the political organization of Austrian liberals, see Lothar Höbelt, Kornblume und
Kaiseradler. Die deutschfreiheitlichen Parteien Altösterreichs, 1882–1918 (Vienna: Verlag für
Geshichte und Politik, 1993).
83 Kitromilides, “European Political Thought in the Making of Greek Liberalism,” 19.
84 Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity
in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
85 Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival. Germans in Prague, 1861–1914, 2nd ed., rev.
(West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006).
86 See Brian Porter, “The Social Nation and its Futures: English Liberalism and Polish
Nationalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Warsaw,” American Historical Review 101, no. 5
(1996): 1470–1492; and, more generally, on Dmowski in intellectual context: Brian Porter,
When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland
87 John Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement,
1848–1897 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
88 Höbelt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler.
89 Miklós Szabó, Az újkonzervativizmus és a jobboldali radikalizmus története, 1867–1918 (Budapest:
Új Mandátum Kiadó, 2003).
90 For some discussion of this problem, with references to further reading, see Hugh LeCaine
Agnew, The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute
Press, 2004), 198–202.
91 Deborah Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
92 Wolfgang Höpken, “Die ‘fehlende Klasse’? Bürgertum in Südosteuropa im 19. und frühen
20. Jahrhundert,” in Ulf Brunnbauer and Wolfgang Höpken, Transformationsprobleme
Bulgariens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Historische und ethnologische Perspektiven (Munich:
Sagner, 2007), 33–70.
93 Augusta Dimou, Entangled Paths towards Modernity: Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism
in the Balkans (Budapest: CEU Press, 2009).
94 E.g. Serbia’s social democrats were influenced also by the Germans (and not only by ideas
coming from Russia), Walter Daugsch, Internationalismus und Organisation. Studien zur
Entstehung und Entwicklung der serbischen Sozialdemokratie (Herne: Schäfer; 2008).
95 A new scholarly study of Frankel is a desideratum. For now, see Magda Aranyossi, Frankel
Leó (Budapest: Szikra, 1952); and János Jemnitz, “Leo Frankel,” International Review of
Social History 17, no. 1–2 (April 1972): 391–394.
96 Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War, 23–39.
97 Augusta Dimou, “Diverging Paths to Modernity: Socialism as an Intellectual Movement in
the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative Approach,” Social Movements in Southeast Europe.
Special issue of “Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen” 33 (2005): 12.
98 Stefan Troebst, “Anarchisten aus Bulgarien in der makedonischen national-revolutionären
Bewegung 1896–1912,” in Stefan Troebst, ed., Das makedonische Jahrhundert (Munich:
R. Oldenbourg, 2007), 45–60.
99 Keith Brown, Loyal unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2013).
100 Constantin Petrescu, Socialismul în Romania, 1835–6 Septembrie 1940 (Bucharest: Biblioteca
socialistă, 1940), 51–54.
101 Dimou, “Diverging Paths to Modernity.”
102 Dimou, Entangled Paths Towards Modernity, 160.
103 For party development see: John Bell, The Bulgarian Communist Party from Blagoev to Zhivkov
(Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute Press, 1986); Joseph Rothschild, The Communist Party of
Bulgaria: Origins and Development 1883–1936 (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1959).
359
104 Dimou, Entangled Paths Towards Modernity, 64.

105 Sabine Rutar, Kultur – Nation – Milieu. Sozialdemokratie in Triest vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg
(Essen: Klartext, 2004).
106 See Peter Riesbeck, Sozialdemokratie und Minderheitenrecht: der Beitrag der österreichischen
Sozialdemokraten Otto Bauer und Karl Renner zum internationalen Minderheitenrecht (Saarbrücken:
Verlag für Engtwicklungspolitik, 1996).
107 Ibrahim Yalimov, “The Bulgarian Community and the Development of the Socialist
Movement in the Ottoman Empire during the Period 1876–1923,” in Mete Tunçay and
Erik Jan Zürcher, eds., Socialism and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire (London, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 100.
108 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
109 See Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews,
1862–1917 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Ezra
Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: the Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’ Movement in
Tsarist Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
110 Paul Dumont, “A Jewish, Socialist and Ottoman Organisation: The Workers’ Federation of
Thessaloniki,” in Mete Tunçay and Erik Jan Zürcher, eds., Socialism and Nationalism in the
Ottoman Empire (London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 49–76; Gila Hadar, “Jewish
Tabacco Workers in Salonika: Gender and Family in the Context of Ethnic Strife,” in Amila
Butorović and Irvin Cemil Schick, eds., Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and
History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 127–152.
111 Dumont, “A Jewish, Socialist and Ottoman Organisation,” 64; Antoni Liakos, Hē Sosialistikē
Ergatikē Homospondia Thessalonikēs (Phenterasion) kai hē Sosialistikē Neolaia. Ta katastatika tus
(Salonica: Parate re te s, 1985).
112 Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War, 28.
113 Manfred Scharinger, “La Fédération Balkanique (1924–1931) – ein Zeitschriftenprojekt der
Komintern zur Umgruppierung auf dem Balkan,” in Balkanföderation und Arbeiterbewegung.
Teil 3: Projekte während und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (= Marxismus) 20 (Vienna: Wien AGM,
2002), 354–374.
114 Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 139.
115 Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
116 For overviews on these peasant parties see Andreas Moritsch, “Die Bauernparteien bei
den Kroaten, Serben und Slowenen,” in Heinz Gollwitzer, ed., Europäische Bauernparteien
im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Fischer Gustav Verlag, 1977), 359–402; Rudolph Otto Liess,
“Rumänische Bauernparteien,” in ibid., 437–465; Iwan Rankoff, “Bauerndemokratie in
Bulgarien,” in ibid., 466–506; Stanislawa Leblang, “Polnische Bauernparteien,” in ibid.,
271–322; Hans Lemberg, “Die agrarischen Parteien in den Böhmischen Ländern und in
der Tschechoslowakischen Republik,” in ibid., 323–358; Bela Király, “Democratic Peasant
Movements in Hungary in the Twentieth Century,” in ibid., 403–436.
117 Robert Nemes, “The Politics of the Dance Floor. Culture and Civil Society in Nineteenth-
Century Hungary,” Slavic Review 60, no. 4 (2001): 802–823.
118 See, e.g., the exhibition catalog: Wolfgang Kos, Kampf um die Stadt. Politik, Kunst und Alltag
um 1930 (Vienna: Czernin, 2010).
119 Philip Gabriel Eidelberg, The Great Rumanian Peasant Revolt of 1907: Origins of a Modern
Jacquerie (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974).
120 Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in
Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
121 Daniel Miller, Forging Political Compromise: Antonin Švehla and the Czechoslovak Republican
Party, 1918–1933 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).
122 John Douglas Bell, Peasants in Power: Alexander Stamboliski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National
Union, 1899–1923 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 3–21. See also the
author’s dissertation: John Douglas Bell, “The Agrarian Movement in Bulgaria, 1899–1918”
(Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. Microfilms, 1971).
123 Jelavich, History of the Balkans, vol. 2, 134 and 162.
360
124 Bell, Peasants in Power, 155.

125 On the Green International: Horst Haushofer, “Die Internationale Organisation der
Bauernparteien,” in Heinz Gollwitzer, ed., Europäische Bauernparteien im 20: Jahrhundert
(Stuttgart: Fischer Gustav Verlag, 1977), 668–690. Cf. George Jackson, The Green
International and the Red Peasant International: A Study of Comintern Policy Towards the
Peasant Political Movement in Eastern Europe, 1919–1930 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1961).
126 In 1924 the Peasant Party and the National Party of Transylvania merged to form the
National Peasant Party. For a modern treatment of the party, see Pamfil Şeicaru, Istoria
partidelor naţional, ţărănist şi naţional-ţărănist (Bucharest: Editura Victor Frunză, 2000).
127 See Vasile Niculae, ed., Doctrina ţărănistă în România: Antologie de texte (Bucharest: ISPRI,
1994).
128 For a fairly recent treatment of the party’s history in English see Mark Biondich, Stjepan
Radić, the Croat Peasant Party, and the Politics of Mass Mobilization, 1904–1928 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2000).
129 Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
130 Andrew Janos, “The Agrarian Opposition at the National Congress of Councils,” in Andrew
Janos and William Slottman, eds., Revolution in Perspective: Essays on the Hungarian Soviet
Republic (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 85–108.
131 Gyula Borbándi, Der ungarische Populismus (Mainz: Hase and Kohler, 1976).
132 For a comprehensive overview on eminent feminists see Francisca de Haan, Krassimira
Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and
Feminisms. Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe: 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest and
New York: CEU Press, 2006).
133 Robert Nemes, “Getting to the Source: Women in the 1848–1849 Hungarian Revolution,”
Journal of Women’s History 13, no. 3 (Fall, 2001): 193–207.
134 Jitka Malečková, “Nationalizing Women and Engendering the Nation: The Czech National
Movement,” in Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations:
Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford and New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), 293–310.
135 Ivana Pantelić, “Dejanović (Deianovich), Draga,” in Francisca de Haan, Krassimira
Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Womens’ Movements and
Feminisms: Central, Eastern, South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest: CEU
Press, 2006), 106–107.
136 Quoted in Roxana Cheşchebec, “Toward a Romanian Women’s Movement: An
Organizational History (1850–1940),” in Edith Saurer, Margareth Lanzinger, and Elisabeth
Frysak, eds., Women’s Movements: Networks and Debates in Post-communist Countries in the 19th
and 20th Centuries (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar, 2006), 445.
137 Generally, Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History, 213–250. See
also, Waltraud Heindl, Bela Király, and Alexandra Millner, eds., Frauenbilder, Feministische
Praxis, und Nationales Bewusstsein in Österreich-Ungarn, 1867–1918 (Tübingen: Francke
A. Verlag, 2006). For detailed portraits of individual activists, see de Haan, Daskalova, and
Loutfi, eds., Biographical Dictionary.
138 Susan Zimmermann, “The Challenge of Multinational Empire for the International
Women’s Movement: The Case of the Habsburg Monarchy,” Journal of Women’s History 17,
no. 2 (2005): 87–117.
139 See, e.g., Susan Zimmermann, Die bessere Hälfte. Frauenbewegungen und Frauenbestrebungen im
Ungarn der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna: Promedia Verlag, 1999).
140 Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship and the Limits of Democracy in
Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).
141 Feinberg, Elusive Equality, 20–28; Natali Stegmann, Die Töchter der geschlagenen Helden.
“Frauenfrage.” Feminismus, und Frauenbewegung in Polen, 1863–1919 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
2000), esp. 63–97.
142 The information on Serbia is mainly based on Neda Božinović, Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u XIX
i XX veku (Belgrade: Devedesetčetvrta, 1996).
361
143 Krassimira Daskalova, “Bulgarian Women’s Movement (1850–1940),” in Edith Saurer,

Margareth Lanzinger, and Elisabeth Frysak, eds., Women’s Movements, 413–438; Roxana
Cheşchebec, “Toward a Romanian Women’s Movement: An Organizational History
(1880s–1940),” in ibid., 439–456.
144 Cf. Daskalova, “Bulgarian Women’s Movement,” and Cheşchebec, “Toward a Romanian
Women’s Movement.”
145 Daskalova, “Bulgarian Women’s Movement,” 428.
146 Feinberg, Elusive Equality, 34ff.
147 For the 1920s, see Thomas Emmert, “Ženski Pokret: The Feminist Movement in Serbia in
the 1920s,” in Sabrina Ramet, ed., Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in
Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press,
1999), 33–49.
148 Roxana Cheşchebec, “Cantacuzino, Princess Alexandrina,” in de Haan, Daskalova, Loutfi,
Biographical Dictionary, 93.
149 Mária Kovács, “Ambiguities of Emancipation: Women and the Ethnic Question in
Hungary,” Women’s History Review 5, no. 4 (1996): 487–495; and Andrea Pető, “Kontinuität
und Wandel in der ungarischen Frauenbewegung der Zwischenkriegsperiode,” in Ute
Gerhard, ed., Feminismus und Demokratie: Europäische Frauenbewegungen der 1920er Jahre
(Königstein/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 2001), 138–158.
150 Feinberg, Elusive Equality, esp. 34–40.
151 Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 2012), 158–188.
152 John Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement,
1848–1897 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
153 Jenő Gergely, A keresztényszocializmus Magyarországon, 1903–1923 (Budapest: Akadémiai
Kiadó, 1977).
154 James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Józef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia
155 Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, 340–350; Andrej Rahten, Slovenska ljudska stranka
v beograjski skupščini: jugoslovanski klub v parlamentarnem življenju Kraljevine SHS 1919–1929
(Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, 2002).
156 Robert Gerwarth, “The Central European Counter-Revolution: Paramilitary Violence in
Germany, Austria, and Hungary after the Great War,” Past and Present 2008, no. 1 (August
2008): 175–209.
157 István Deák, “Hungary,” in Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, eds., The European Right
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965), 364–407; Margit Szöllösi-Janze, Die
Pfeilkreuzlerbewegung in Ungarn: Historischer Kontext, Entwicklung und Herrschaft (Munich:
R. Oldenbourg, 1989).
158 Mariana Hausleitner and Harald Roth, eds., Der Einfluss von Faschismus und Nationalso
zialismus auf Minderheiten in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa (Munich: IKGS Verlag, 2006).
159 For a recent discussion of the Ustaša and the Independent State of Croatia, see Sabrina
Ramet, ed., Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941–1945. Zbornik radova (Zagreb: Alinea, 2009).
160 Holm Sundhaussen, “Die Königsdiktaturen in Südosteuropa,” in Erwin Oberländer
et al., eds., Autoritäre Regime in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh
Verlag, 2001), 341–342.
161 On the Legion of the Archangel Michael and the Iron Guard see Michael Mann, Fascists
(Cambridge, UK, 2004), 237; Armin Heinen, Die Legion “Erzengel Michael” in Rumänien –
Soziale Bewegung und politische Organisation: Ein Beitrag zum Problem des internationalen Faschismus
(Munich: Oldernbourg, 1986); Constantin Iordachi, Charisma, Politics and Violence: The
Legion of the “Archangel Michael” in Inter-war Romania (Trondheim: Program on East European
Cultures and Societies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2004).
162 Milan Ristović, “General M. Nedić – Diktatur, Kollaboration und die patriarchalische
Gesellschaft Serbiens 1941–1944,” in Oberländer et al., eds., Autoritäre Regime, 633–688;
Milos Martic, “Dimitrije Lotic and the Yugoslav National Movement Zbor, 1935–1945,”
East European Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1980): 219–239; Nikolaj Poppetrov, “Flucht aus der
Demokratie: Autoritarismus und autoritäres Regime in Bulgarien 1919–1944,” in
Oberländer et al., eds., Autoritäre Regime, 379–402.
362
163 Susanne-Sophia Spiliotis, “Metaxas-Diktatur in Griechenland 1936–1941 – ein faschis-

toides Regime?” in Oberländer et al., eds., Autoritäre Regime, 422. See also Spiliotis,
Transterritorialität und nationale Abgrenzung: Konstitutionsprozesse der griechischen Gesellschaft
und Ansätze ihrer faschistoiden Transformation (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1998).
164 David Kelly, The Czech Fascist Movement, 1922–1942 (Boulder, CO: East European Mono
graphs, 1995).
165 For a fascinating study of the long-term trajectory of right-wing nationalist thought in
Poland, see Mikołaj Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red. Nationalism, Communism, and
Catholicism in Twentieth Century Poland – The Politics of Bolesław Piasecki (Athens, OH: Ohio
166 Nikolaj Poppetrov, “Flucht aus der Demokratie,” 379–402. Interestingly, historians questioned
the communist labeling of “fascist” of all right-wing groups in interwar Bulgaria already dur-
ing socialism; for these debates see: Rumen Daskalov, “Die Debatte über den Faschismus
in der bulgarischen Geschichtsschreibung,” in Brunnbauer, Helmedach, and Troebst, eds.,
Schnittstellen.Gesellschaft, Nation, Konflikt und Erinnerung in Südosteuropa, 507–520.
167 Arnd Bauerkämper, Der Faschismus in Europa 1918–1945 (Stuttgart: Phillip Reclam, 2006),
152–158.
Further reading
Ahmad, Feroz. The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics, 1908–1914.
New York: Brill, 2010.
Bell, John. Peasants in Power: Alexander Stamboliski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union,
1899–1923. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Biondich, Mark. Stjepan Radić, the Croat Peasant Party, and the Politics of Mass Mobilization, 1904–1928.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Bjork, James. Neither German Nor Pole. Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European
Borderland. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Brown, Keith. The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Bucur, Maria. Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University
Press, 2002.
Case, Holly. Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Clark, Roland. Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Cole, Laurence, and Daniel Unowsky. The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances,
and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.
Dimou, Augusta. Entangled Paths towards Modernity: Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism in
the Balkans. Budapest: CEU Press, 2009.
Tunçay, Mete, and Erik Zürcher, eds. Socialism and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire. London:
British Academic Press, 1994.
Gollwitzer, Heinz, ed. Europäische Bauernparteien im 20. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Fischer Gustav
Verlag, 1977.
Hausleitner, Mariana. Die Rumänisierung der Bukowina. Die Durchsetzung des nationalstaatlichen
Anspruchs Grossrumäniens 1918–1944. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2001.
Healy, Maureen. Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World
War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Judson, Pieter. Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Kelly, David. The Czech Fascist Movement, 1922–1942. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1995.
Krueger, Rita. Czech, German, and Noble: Status and National Identity in Habsburg Bohemia. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
363
Miller, Nicholas. Between Nation and State: Serbian Politics in Croatia before the First World War.
Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997.
Mishkova, Diana, ed. We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe. Budapest:
CEU Press
Nemes, Robert. Another Hungary: The Nineteenth-Century Provinces in Eight Lives. Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2016.
Porter, Brian. When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century
Poland. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Puttkamer, Joachim von. Schulalltag und nationale Integration in Ungarn: Slowaken, Rumänen,
und Siebenbürger Sachsen in der Auseinandersetzung mit der ungarischen Staatsidee, 1867–1914.
Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2003.
Schulze Wessel, Martin, ed. Nationalisierung der Religion und Sakralisierung der Nation im östlichen
Europa. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006.
Snyder, Timothy. The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
Stokes, Gale. Politics as Development: The Emergence of Political Parties in Nineteenth-Century Serbia.
Turda, Marius, and Paul Weindling, eds. Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in
Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940. Budapest: CEU Press, 2007.
Ward, James. Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Józef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2013.
Wingfield, Nancy. Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Zahra, Tara. Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands,
1900–1948. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Zimmermann, Susan. “The Challenge of Multinational Empire for the International Women’s
Movement. The Case of the Habsburg Monarchy.” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 2 (2005):
87–117.
364
8
C O MMU NI SM AND I T S LEG A C Y
Malgorzata Fidelis and Irina Gigova
Approaches to the history of communism

In many ways, Eastern Europe was a Cold War creation. More than anything else, it
was the post-World War II confrontation between the “free” and democratic West and
the “un-free” and communist East that gave rise to Eastern Europe as a specific “place”
on the geopolitical map and as a flourishing field of academic inquiry.1 The political
ascendance of Soviet communism prompted and legitimized Western scholarly stud-
ies of the region. The new field was supported by substantial governmental funds,
a network of institutions, and a sea of publications devoted to studying the Eastern
bloc.2 While providing opportunities for new knowledge and perspectives, the Cold
War also delineated the confines of this scholarship. For decades, Eastern European
studies waned under the weight of Russian studies, while the pre-communist history
of the region received significantly less attention than the post-1945 era. A considera-
ble part of Cold War scholarship was driven by émigré political scientists, who focused
on international relations, domestic political leaders, and a top-down suppression of
society. The postwar period came to be seen as a radically different and almost unnat-
ural stage in the longue-durée historic developments in the region. What is today’s leg-
acy of these Cold War approaches to shaping the historiography of Eastern European
communism? To what extent, if at all, have we departed from that politically driven
model of inquiry? Has recent scholarship normalized the communist period as an
integral part of the region’s history?
This chapter will briefly sketch historiographical trends in the scholarship on
postwar Eastern Europe, and then will move on to discuss several themes in light of
scholarly approaches that entered the field both shortly before, and after, the collapse
of communism. In an effort to position the communist period within the broader
history of Eastern Europe, we focus on four main topics: state- and nation-building;
social relations; East–West interaction; and the decline and fall of communism. Our
approach is inevitably limited. We build our analysis on the contributions of English-
language historical (and to some degree anthropological) works published in the
last three decades. This effort also involves our selection of trends and themes since
it is impossible to encompass the immense and multidisciplinary field of communist
studies within one chapter. Thus our primary goal is to highlight the ways in which
recent historical scholarship has complemented, enhanced, or challenged scholarly
and popular understandings of the impact of communism on the region.
365
M algorzata F idelis and I rina G igova
During the Cold War, the concept of totalitarianism as a modern mutation of

autocracy, articulated by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich in the 1950s, dom-
inated research directions.3 According to this model, the party-state, backed by the
Soviet military, extensive bureaucracy, propaganda, and violence, exercised an almost
unlimited power. Society found itself suppressed and atomized with little power to
act independently. Scholars thus focused on governmental institutions, party leaders,
and state-led terror as key elements to understanding the workings of the commu-
nist system. Yet the vast body of scholarship utilizing the totalitarian paradigm was
not uniform. Authors modified their approaches, often in tandem with the evolution
and diversification of the communist system after 1956. Eastern European communist
societies came to be analyzed in terms of long-term economic developments and the
applicability of Soviet-type modernization. Proponents of the modernization theory
sought to integrate postwar developments into a broader analytical framework that
recognized the region’s historical separateness from the Soviet Union. Many authors
accounted for the emergence of pluralism and national brands of communism across
the Soviet bloc.4 In fact, the very notion of a bloc came under attack as scholars
increasingly divided Eastern Europe into “northern” and “southern” tiers on the basis
of economic development, political reforms, and the degree of openness to the West.5
By the early 1980s, sociologists and political scientists offered nuanced studies of the
complexity of the post-Stalinist political world with special attention paid to “contests
within the party leadership, generational changes among party and state elites, emerg-
ing trends in Soviet and non-Soviet societies, and center–periphery struggles between
Moscow and its allies.”6 Yet the assumption that “Marxism-Leninism is an alien doc-
trine imposed on the region by an imperial power whose rule is culturally repugnant
to the dominated peoples” remained firmly entrenched in most of these studies.7
The conventional totalitarian model, although contested by some political scien-
tists in the 1960s and later by the “revisionist” school of Soviet social history, still
plays an important role in current historical debates.8 A number of researchers have
utilized aspects of traditional totalitarian theory to study Stalinist terror, international
history, and political decision-making in light of new documents emerging from party
archives.9 The top-down model of party control dominates scholarly and popular
approaches to the communist era within Eastern Europe. The trend, in part, stems
from post-communist political exigencies that make narratives of national victimiza-
tion particularly useful to current political leaders in mobilizing electoral support.10
More recently, the rethinking of the totalitarian model has prompted scholars to
study the Nazi and the Soviet regimes in a comparative perspective, often to underline
differences between the two systems and delineate the analytical limitations of the
totalitarian paradigm. While providing useful insights for many aspects of Eastern
European societies, this comparative scholarship usually specifically focuses on Nazi
Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union.11
The revised totalitarian theories as well as revisionist histories “from below” proved
to be fruitful building blocks of more nuanced studies of the complex relationship
between state and society in Eastern Europe. These two “schools” utilize fundamen-
tally different approaches, but converge in turning toward society as a critical agent in
shaping the communist system.12 Inspired by Hanna Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian-
ism as a system that stems from modern mass politics, which requires the extensive
participation of society, a new generation of scholars has explored the impact of
366
C ommunism and I ts L egacy
Stalinism on everyday life and social identity. Historians of the Soviet Union, such
as Martin Malia and Stephen Kotkin, have stressed the role of utopia and the idea of
the “conflict-free society” as central to understanding the workings of communism in
everyday life.13 At the same time, the revisionist school of Soviet social history gained
ground after the 1982 publication of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s seminal book on the Russian
Revolution, and the subsequent explosion of a variety of revisionist scholarship.
These works challenged the general overemphasis on state institutions in historical
studies by turning instead to the social and political agency of workers, peasants, and
women.14 Eventually, it was the social perspective, in conjunction with aspects of “par-
ticipatory totalitarianism” outlined by Arendt and others, that allowed scholars to
develop nuanced understandings of Eastern European communism, in which the
interaction between state and society emerged as a complex process of “negotiation.”
Oriented toward broadly conceived society and politics, this conceptual framework
dominates current scholarship.
The end of the Cold War contributed to de-politicizing and historicizing commu-
nism as a closed era in Western historiography. The opening of Eastern European
archives and the removal of censorship after 1989 provided opportunities for schol-
ars, both East and West, to formulate new questions, directions, and methods. Using
approaches from social and cultural history, anthropology, sociology, and literary
studies, historians have shifted attention from governmental institutions to everyday
life, consumption, leisure, physical space, and mental geography. Perspectives “from
below” informed by the revised totalitarian framework have been effectively applied,
in particular, to the rise of communism (1944–47) and to the Stalinist period
(1948–56). Rather than seeing communism as an imperial imposition from outside,
scholars such as Jan Gross, Bradley Abrams, Jerzy Tomaszewski, Mark Pittaway, and
Katherine Lebow have traced the impetus to implement radical solutions to unre-
solved interwar social and economic problems, and the “revolutionary” impact of
World War II. In this sense, the communist period can be seen as an integral chapter
of East Central European history rather than as a “black hole” of the social, political,
and cultural developments in the region.
State- and nation-building

The making of the Soviet bloc
At the end of World War II, Eastern Europe faced a postwar reconstruction that
involved a fundamental rearrangement of the international order. What this order
would be and how exactly it would affect specific areas remained an open question.
The Red Army was present on the territory east of Berlin, but the international
negotiations between the victorious Soviets and Western Allies did not seem final-
ized. When in April 1945 Stalin told Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas that
“this war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory imposes his own social
system as far as his army can reach,” he revealed a rather specific geopolitical view
of Europe’s postwar future.15 Did Stalin have a master plan to Sovietize Eastern
Europe as soon as the Red Army began its march westward? Or was the establish-
ment of communism a gradual and contingent process, in which the Great Powers
and domestic actors participated?
367
Map 8.1 Cold War Europe
Source: David Lowe and Tony Joel, Remembering the Cold War: Global Contests and National Stories (Routledge, 2014), xi.
Long after the war – partly due to ideological reasons as well as to limited sources –
Western analysts viewed postwar Eastern Europe through the prism of the Red Army
conquest and the forced imposition of the Stalinist totalitarian model to create a
uniform and obedient Soviet bloc.16 Although some historians of the Cold War, such
as John Lewis Gaddis, continue to see the arrival of communism in Eastern Europe as
a planned Soviet imposition, this view has been increasingly challenged by recent
studies that point to a complex combination of international and domestic forces in
paving the way for the communist takeover.17 These revisionist trends date back to
the late 1980s when Jan Gross urged scholars to rethink the early postwar period
in light of social history, to understand better how Nazi and Soviet policies, military
and economic needs, and violence against civilians restructured the social fabric and
prepared the ground for the radical postwar transformation. He argued that “the
Nazi-instigated war and the communist-driven revolution in East Central Europe con-
stituted one integral period.”18 The Nazi occupation, which centered on extensive
state control and extermination policies toward “undesirable” ethnic groups, pre-
pared the ground for a profound social, economic, and political transformation of
the region. But the Soviets were also active in the region at the onset of World War II.
Their occupation of parts of Poland and Romania (alongside that of the Baltic states)
in 1939–41 exposed millions of Eastern Europeans to the Soviet system, including its
terror machine.19 However different the Nazi and Soviet regimes were in their ideo-
logical principles and political aims, they converged in conquering and in enacting
systematic violence in Eastern Europe. This has led some scholars to suggest that
in the late 1930s and 1940s the “lands between” became a “colonial space” for Nazi
Germany and Soviet Russia to exploit (or kill) people and resources.20 In the course
of the war, for example, Poland lost more than 5 million (2.35–3 million of them
Polish Jews), approximately 15 per cent of its interwar population, while the material
destruction of Warsaw was staggering, with 80 percent of the city’s buildings leveled
by late 1944.21 With the exception of Bulgaria, the losses in Southeastern Europe
were nearly as extensive. Greece and Yugoslavia lost 10 percent of their prewar pop-
ulations and more than half of their existing infrastructure.22 As the Soviets pushed
westward in 1944–45, they continued the Nazi-initiated brutality against civilians and
the plundering of the local economy.
The opening of Soviet archives in the early 1990s did not dramatically alter the tra-
ditional argument that the post-1945 political map of Europe was decided by the Great
Powers with little input from Eastern Europeans. With the exception of Yugoslavia and
Albania, home communists, although quite powerful in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria,
had no chance of taking power without Soviet support. At Moscow’s direction, local
communists first formed “coalition governments” with traditional left-wing parties
in the region. Although the Soviets were instrumental in helping Eastern European
communists organize trade unions, youth groups, women’s organizations, and polit-
ical police as early as 1945, there seemed to be no urgency to force the Soviet model
to power and create friendly regimes. Some scholars have even suggested that Stalin
might have believed that the war had already created “democracies of a new type” in
Eastern Europe that were based on state capitalism and more amenable to an organic
transition to socialism.23
Hence, Stalin’s initial treatment of individual Eastern European countries depended
primarily on geopolitical circumstances and on the actions of the West. The Soviet
369
leadership insisted on “friendly” regimes in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and

Romania to protect the Soviet territory from a possible invasion from the West.24
In contrast, Moscow’s approach toward Southeastern Europe testified to Stalin’s
opportunism and shrewd diplomacy with the West. As late as the summer of 1944, for
instance, Stalin was ready to let his Western allies deal with Bulgaria. He seized the
opportunity to shape the country’s future only after a quick Romanian capitulation led
the Red Army to Bulgaria’s northern border in early September 1944. Furthermore,
Churchill actively encouraged Stalin’s influence in Romania and Bulgaria – leading
to the infamous “percentage agreement” of October 1944 – as the British prime min-
ister hoped to forestall the rising power of communists in Greece.25 In his efforts to
avoid an open conflict with the West, Stalin restrained the radical urges of commu-
nists in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, and until the introduction of the Marshall
Plan in 1947, he did not seek to establish a firm control over these countries.26
This tolerance of political diversity in some places has prompted scholars to ask
whether the eventual communist takeover in 1948 was not facilitated by the Western
recognition of the Soviet “sphere of influence” in Europe. For example, British
and American members of the Allied Control Commission stationed in Hungary
and Bulgaria protested against electoral abuses and limited freedom of the press
during the “free” elections of 1945, but did little more. As the West recognized all
communist-dominated governments in 1947, it de facto accepted Eastern Europe
as part of the Soviet zone. Western powers then shifted attention to areas they
could influence militarily.27 Stalin considered the Marshall Plan to be a particularly
threatening move on the part of the West, aimed at detaching Eastern European
neighbors from the Soviets, and at reviving the German economy.28 Under the
pressure of this “security dilemma,” Stalin pushed for the Sovietization of Eastern
Europe; yet, according to Norman Naimark, the Soviets “bolshevized the zone not
because there was a plan to do so, but because that was the only way they knew how
to organize society.”29
While Great Power politics and “betrayal” of Eastern Europe by the West have
been established themes in scholarly and popular debates, the fall of communism
impelled a number of scholars to ask “why significant elements within [Eastern
European] societies were susceptible to communist solutions and how the commu-
nist parties were able to transform themselves, often rapidly, from underground
cadre parties into mass parties.”30 They see postwar social and political developments
as closely intertwined with the violence, uncertainty, and the destruction of World
War II. Mindful as such works remain of the Great Power politics, they prioritize local
actors in an effort to understand the dynamic process of implementing communism
on the ground. Scholars have thus focused on the concerted efforts of communists
to win the public to their side by using “power and persuasion,” and on local con-
tingencies that helped consolidate communist power.31 The total war aggravated the
region’s long-standing problems such as rigid social stratification and widespread
poverty. After 1945, the economy of nearly all countries had to adjust to the lost
German market, limited exports, and shortages of raw materials. The war upturned
society and might have made it more prone to accept radical solutions that favored
the communists.32 Even before 1945, the population was already engaged in a redis-
tribution of property (mainly Jewish and German) by seizing abandoned homes and
businesses. Many took the law into their own hands by exacting postwar retribution
370
against real and perceived collaborators. As Mark Pittaway aptly noted, “The social
dynamics of war, occupation and ‘liberation,’ . . . set the context for the politics of
the region, defining the social background against which the region’s new rulers
sought to construct their new socialist political order.”33
Challenges of state-building
The impact of communism on the processes of state-building has been a subject
of debate and contention. On the surface, communism continued and accelerated
the trend toward etatism in economic planning, education, and infrastructure that
had marked the first half of the twentieth century. The nationalization of industry,
finance, and land, and placing all political power in the hands of one party all point
to the unprecedented strengthening of the state. Such understanding has been the
underpinning assumption of the conventional totalitarian model. More recently,
however, some scholars have viewed the centralization of power and resources in the
hands of one party as ultimately destructive to state structures. As Katherine Verdery
argued, the state monopoly on power inadvertently promoted “internal resistance and
hidden forms of sabotage at all system levels” (original emphasis).34 Likewise, Valerie
Bunce noted that the communist regime had a dual destabilizing effect on the state:
it promoted conservatism by merging political power and economic life; and it gen-
erated institutional instability by fostering a radical social and economic transforma-
tion. These unresolved tensions led to repeated crises, doomed reforms, and frictions
between the periphery and the center.35 So how effective was the consolidation of
political power into the hands of one party for building stable state structures? What
type of state did the communists really build?
The Stalinist state of the late 1940s and early 1950s has received the bulk of schol-
arly attention. According to classic interpretations, Stalinism relied on the extensive
use of the security apparatus aided by a network of secret informers; repression
of real and perceived “enemies;” periodic purges of the party; mass organizations
for the mobilization of non-party members; censorship; centralized economic
planning; rapid industrialization with the stress on armaments and heavy industry;
collectivization of agriculture; and the cult of the leader. For Eastern European
states, Stalinism also meant conformity to the Soviet-led foreign policy, and a hier-
archical relationship toward Moscow. As Zbigniew Brzezinski aptly put it, “ideology
and power must have the same, undisputed source.”36 Recent studies have compli-
cated this rigid view of the Stalinist era by introducing perspectives “from below.”
They have demonstrated that even in its Stalinist totalitarian form, the communist
state was not immune to influences from society or to power struggles within the
seemingly monolithic party leadership.37
The reassessment of the internal party purges in Eastern Europe is one such
instance that reveals fractures and tensions at the highest political levels. Scholars
have traditionally seen the purges as instrumental in forcing a unitary model of
Soviet-style communism on Eastern Europe. As in the USSR, the terror machine tar-
geted not only specific social groups such as well-to-do peasants or pre-communist
elites, but also high-ranking party officials. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Eastern
Europe was swept by a wave of show-trials triggered by the Tito–Stalin split of 1948.
The proclaimed goal of these elite purges was to uproot “Titoists” and “nationalist
371
deviationists” from the communist movement.38 Thus the party purge in Albania
in 1949 targeted Koci Xoxe, the former Albanian Minister of the Interior, who had
also been an advocate of close relations with Yugoslavia. The Czechoslovak leader-
ship was struck by the most extensive purge in the bloc, culminating in the infamous
Slansky Trial of 1952. The purge was openly antisemitic – the main defendant Rudolf
Slansky, Deputy Prime Minister and former Secretary of the Central Committee of
the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and eight of his 13 codefendants were Jewish.
In this sense, the trial paralleled contemporary Soviet purges that targeted Jewish
“speculators” and doctors.39 New studies have questioned, however, the conventional
view that purges were primarily instigated and shaped by Moscow. Instead, these elite
purges often reflected frictions and factions within domestic communist leaderships.
In Romania, for example, communist leaders Ana Pauker and Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu
were removed from power in 1952 primarily as a result of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s
political ambitions.40 At the same time, Polish communists were able to resist staging
show trials in the postwar period. They removed Władysław Gomułka, the advocate of
the “national road to socialism,” from power and put him under house arrest in 1951,
but did not execute him.41
Local conditions affected both elite purges and mass repression. New archival evi-
dence has revealed the diverse nature and extent of mass terror in the first postwar
decade. Arbitrary arrests, labor camps, and extrajudicial executions were all part of
constructing the Stalinist state in Eastern Europe, while the secret police grew in
power to become “a state within a state, feared by both the population and the party
membership.”42 Yet despite commonalities, the dynamics of “securing the communist
state” were local and historically rooted. For example, while the communists in the
Soviet zone of Germany could build on their past legitimacy to purge dramatically
the Nazi security services, the small Romanian party, which never enjoyed popular
support in the interwar years, had to compromise with former Romanian fascists, the
Iron Guard, in the process of building postwar institutions.43
Did the purges testify to the power of the communist state? Or did they point to
inherent weakness and lack of legitimacy that could only be amended through rad-
ical measures and violence? Here again, opinions differ. Liesbeth van de Grift, for
example, insists that the intensification of purges after 1948 in Romania should not
be seen as a sign of weakness but as an indication that the party “had secured a very
strong position of power. This enabled it to step up the selection of followers and
personnel, to verify more intensely their credentials and filter out unsuitable ele-
ments.” In other words, Romanian communists were able to achieve the radical break
with the past they had desired in 1944 or 1945 but had not been able to attain due
to Stalin’s cautious stance vis-à-vis the West in the immediate postwar years.44 Others
argue, however, that the Romanian party turned to purges because it was weak and
vulnerable. For example, it had to rely on local cadres in the implementation of the
unpopular policy of collectivization. These cadres balanced central demands with
their allegiances to local communities in diverse and often contradictory ways. One
consequence of this early state penetration of rural areas was the personalization of
local bureaucracy that defined the communist state until the end.45
Weakness and vulnerability could also be discerned in the ways in which the state
related to the individual. To this effect, Jan Gross has defined the Stalinist regime
as a “spoiler” state that created an institutional framework “unique in history,
372
devoted primarily to making sure that no one else can get things done.”46 The party-
state led to a “historically unprecedented waste of human potential,” he argued, “as its
very success was predicated on preventing individuals from forming associations,”
and thus on destroying human solidarity and traditional social bonds (original
emphasis). By denying power to others, the state could not accomplish constructive
tasks, and by trying to alter how humans related to each other, it became suscep-
tible to any expressions of freedom: “Precisely because totalitarianism depends for
its success on spoiling individuals – on sowing mistrust and demoralization, or by
outright killing – the refusal of a single individual to share these ways represents a
decisive challenge to the regime.”47
The vulnerability of the Stalinist state became especially visible after the death of
the Soviet leader in March 1953, when popular revolts against Sovietization and local
abuses of power engulfed East Central Europe.48 Reforms of de-Stalinization, initiated
by the Soviet leadership, enjoyed widespread support in the bloc. As early as 1953,
Soviet leaders began dismantling the Stalinist terror machine, put a halt to inter-
nal party purges, and curbed the powers of the Secret Police. In a clear break from
Stalinism, Soviet and Eastern European leaders introduced “collective leadership”
that formally separated party and state structures. The internal party frictions that
accompanied de-Stalinization undermined the monolithic character of the commu-
nist party by exposing interest groups (bureaucrats, lawyers, writers, the army, and the
state security services) as identifiable political agents who exerted pressure, bargained,
and ultimately influenced state policies. Eastern European scholars have explored
how factional struggles within the ruling party propelled or hindered reforms, shaped
specific policies, and affected the oppositional m ovements within society.49
The post-Stalinist era has generated debates regarding the nature of reforms and
the extent of departure from the Stalinist model. The process of de-Stalinization,
launched by the Soviet leadership after the death of Stalin in March 1953, funda-
mentally changed the relationship between communist regimes and their subjects.
Coercion was increasingly replaced by accommodation, and compromise with diverse
social actors and institutions. As we will discuss later, consumer policies and social
stability became fundamental elements of the new “social contract” that the regimes
offered to their populations in exchange for political quiescence. At the same time,
a number of observers have insisted on the enduring elements of the Stalinist sys-
tem: one-party dictatorship ensured the state monopoly on political power, while
central planning continued to dominate the economy. These studies were quick to
point out that Eastern European rebellions such as the Hungarian Uprising of 1956
or the Czechoslovak reform movement of 1967–68 were suppressed by Soviet-led
military invasions. In many countries, the security services in fact expanded in size
in response to perceived new threats to the communist system. To some, these were
indications that the system had changed little, and that the essential Stalinist formula
prevailed even as the Eastern bloc set the course on “liberalization.” In 1982, politi-
cal scientist Richard Staar still saw the party monopoly in Eastern Europe unshaken
regardless of the reforms.50
The nature of post-Stalinist regimes, however, needs to be considered in the
context of complex pressures Eastern European states encountered after 1956. In
addition to grappling with Stalinist domestic legacies, the regimes had to respond to a
variety of global challenges such as the slowing of the economy and the international
373
obligations during détente. Their reactions varied. While all engaged in some form
of the “social contract” based on social welfare and consumer policies as the domi-
nant way to relate to their citizens and the inclusion of specialists and technocrats
in positions of power, the implications of this arrangement for state institutions and
bureaucracies await more research. This issue is particularly relevant to the 1980s,
when the regimes’ policies and reactions became so diverse that they resist a clear-
cut categorization. Reactions to domestic and international pressures ranged from
policies aimed at austerity and political repression such as those in Romania, to an
increased economic and political liberalization as exemplified by Hungary. The late
socialist state thus remains a barely charted territory. We will return to the period
of late socialism, crucial to our understanding of the unmaking of the communist
system, in the closing parts of this chapter.
Nationalism for all seasons

At the war’s end, Marxism-Leninism could not muster sufficient popular support any-
where in the region. Despite proclaiming loyalty to internationalism and opposition
to fascism, most “coalition governments,” and later communist regimes, embarked
on ethnic homogenization and nationalist policies that were, to some extent, a con-
tinuation of interwar and wartime developments.51 The marriage of communism
and nationalism showcases an apparent theoretical contradiction in communist
state-building, as Karl Marx had rejected nationalism and capitalism equally. For
these reasons, historically socialism, and later communist parties, proved attractive
to national minorities and those who had grown disillusioned with interwar author-
itarian states. Why then did communist leaders, when faced with building their own
states, rely so heavily on the nation-state model?
Most scholars agree that the communist project in practice involved nation-
building that drew on local traditions and continuities. Roman Szporluk has argued
that the tension between nationalism and internationalism was resolved in practice
by Lenin and later by Stalin when they decided to build “socialism in one country.”
According to this logic, the Tito–Stalin split was not a conflict between internation-
alism and nationalism but rather between two cases of “national communism.”52
Szporluk provides historical and theoretical background for what many scholars of
Cold War Eastern Europe already knew: namely, that the “nationality problem” had
not disappeared in the communist bloc. The reconciliation between Belgrade and
Moscow after 1956 helped legitimize other “national roads” to socialism and ensured
that “the nation” remained central to communist concerns.53
A significant body of scholarship has focused on policies of ethnic and cultural
homogenization in the aftermath of World War II. Communist regimes enacted
unprecedented transfers of population alongside ethnic lines to create ethnically
homogeneous nation-states in East Central Europe. Comparative studies of the “dis-
entanglement of populations” have demonstrated that the Great Powers, domestic
communist parties, and local societies shared enthusiasm for ethnic unmixing.54
Population movements drastically affected the ethnic makeup of East Central Europe,
while the government-led redistribution of the property of Germans, Jews, and “fascist
collaborators” helped forge alliances between new rulers and the general population.
These measures also eased the process of nationalization of industry and later the
374
collectivization of agriculture.55 State reaction to popular violence against minori-

ties, including Holocaust survivors, was often ambivalent and indecisive. Focusing on
Poland, Michael Fleming depicted the manipulation of nationalism by Polish com-
munists as a “social anger regime” that helped society accept the new political order
by rechanneling the anger away from communist policies and repression:
The drive to national homogeneity provided space for social (and individual)
tensions to be legitimately expressed and, together with the lack of space
for the expression of alternative views of how society should be, sanctioned
the unleashing of various forms of violence against minority community
members.56
Efforts aimed at ethnic homogenization were not confined to the immediate postwar
period. A number of scholars have focused on the continuous, if often inconsistent,
initiatives by communist parties to eliminate ambiguous identities and ethnic diversity
long after World War II. For example, Romanian Transylvania with its considerable
Hungarian minority remained a thorn in the side of Romanian communists, whose
policies ranged from establishing a Hungarian Autonomous Region (1952–68) to
frequent administrative reorganizations and the resettlement of Romanian-speakers
to the area, to transform Transylvania’s physical and demographic landscapes.57 In
a similar way, the Bulgarian communist regime under Todor Zhivkov (1954–89)
continued to target Muslim communities, perceived as a hindrance to moderniza-
tion, the same policy that had been pursued by the early twentieth-century Bulgarian
monarchy. Communist measures included repeated assaults on the Muslim way of
life in the late 1950s; efforts to “modernize” body practices, clothing, and headwear
of the Turkish and Pomak (Slavic Muslim) men and women; forced renaming and
Christianizing of Muslims; and the expulsion of approximately 350,000 Turks to
Turkey in 1989.58
Communist leaders did not hesitate to exploit integral nationalism, antisemitism,
and alliances with interwar right-wing activists for political goals at different moments
of postwar history, and thus reinforced the “ethnic” definition of nationhood.59
Katherine Verdery’s magisterial National Ideology under Socialism has identified con-
tinuities in the nationalist discourse over the course of Romania’s twentieth-century
history, and has explored how these narratives interacted with party politics and the
economy of shortages under Ceauşescu.60 Historians of postwar Poland have analyzed
how the communist regime built on popular prejudices to recast Polish Jews in Cold
War terms – as allies of the country’s new ideological adversaries: the United States,
West Germany, and Israel. The antisemitic campaign that the party-state launched
after the student unrest in 1968 eventually resulted in the forced emigration of nearly
10,000 Jews, and a powerful official d iscourse reaffirming Polish ethnic solidarity and
“Zionist treason.”61
Such nationalist mobilization by communist governments was a double-edged
sword, however, and could bring unintended results. The communist version of
nationalism often generated negative images of foreigners, including citizens of
sister socialist countries. Walter Kemp has argued that communist-endorsed nation-
alism “significantly altered the way communist nations behaved towards each other,”
restoring prewar patterns of contentious regional diplomacy with arguments over
375
populations in such places as Macedonia or Transylvania.62 Thus national com-

munism undermined postwar efforts to overcome regional conflict and competition.63
National symbols, now legitimized by the state, could also be used to subvert the
official narrative and to mobilize public opposition against the ruling party on the
basis of a competing interpretation of national ideology. In Poland, “the organized
opposition and the Catholic Church developed and publicly disseminated a counter-
hegemonic discourse that allowed the populace to challenge and ultimately reject the
regime’s claims to legitimacy.” In a similar manner, the post-1960s nationalist turn
among Serbian intellectuals discredited “Titoism” as an “empty promise.”64
Did nationalist politics under communism strengthen ethnic identities? What hap-
pened to the fluidity of national identity in the region that had historically been a
crossroads for peoples and cultures? As Rogers Brubaker recently argued, ethnic identi-
ties retained fluidity in everyday life in 1990s Transylvania. Thus his study raises doubts
about the discursive hegemony of nationalism so powerfully articulated by Verdery.65
What enabled the Yugoslav multi-ethnic coexistence under Tito? And why did Romania,
a multi-ethnic state, not disintegrate after the fall of communism like Yugoslavia and
Czechoslovakia did? These and other questions cannot be answered without a thorough
consideration of the social context that emerged in the process of building communism.
A new society?
The social revolution and its limits
The goal of communism was to obliterate traditional social hierarchies and even-
tually create a classless society. Yugoslav dissident, Milovan Djilas lamented in the
mid-1950s: “No other revolution promised so much and accomplished so little.”66
The goal of communism was to obliterate traditional social hierarchies and even-
tually create a classless society. While the new regimes attempted to eradicate the
so-called “class enemies,” traditionally disadvantaged groups such as workers, peas-
ants, and women gained unprecedented opportunities to climb the social ladder.
The war was instrumental in creating this social revolution, which then was taken
to new and unprecedented levels by the Stalinist rapid industrialization. But as the
social landscape of Eastern Europe changed, new divisions emerged: those between
the party elite and ordinary people; and those based on material status associated
with the turn toward consumption in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus the communist
revolution left a lasting imprint on Eastern European societies, but it did not nec-
essarily make them genuinely egalitarian.
Wartime and postwar violence affected, in particular, the traditional urban pop-
ulation of Eastern Europe. The Holocaust and the expulsion of Germans created
vacancies in cities, which now could be taken by migrating peasants. In addition,
postwar retribution, legal and extralegal, carried significant social consequences.
Throughout the region, communist-led purges and People’s Courts established to
deal with “war criminals” and “fascist collaborators,” designations that were often
arbitrary and served political goals, affected interwar state bureaucracy, the army, and
the churches. While these purges contributed to the suffering and disenfranchise-
ment of sections of the population, they also opened opportunities for advancement
among people formerly excluded on social or political grounds.67
376
The radical social schemes of the Stalinist era had even more dramatic social
consequences. Exploring the social dimension of Stalinism is a relatively new trend
in the historiography of Eastern Europe, pioneered by scholars such as Padraic
Kenney and Mark Pittaway, who argued that the traditional totalitarian paradigm
had overshadowed the agency of society.68 As any system rooted in the logic of mod-
ern mass politics, Stalinism exerted popular participation not only through terror
and repression, but also through sharing and negotiating power with individuals
and groups. For example, Stalinist industrialization engendered a period of unprec-
edented migration from the countryside to the cities, opening up educational and
professional opportunities for lower classes. The Marxist belief in the emancipatory
power of industrial work meant that productive labor was now a basis for citizenship.
Communist leaders hoped to forge “new men” and “new women,” reformed human
beings motivated solely by the collective good. It was a period of dynamism particu-
larly for the youth, believed to have weaker ties to the interwar bourgeois culture.
From the beginning, communist parties successfully recruited among young people,
who were often radicalized by wartime experiences.69 Young villagers migrated to
build new industrial centers such as Nowa Huta in Poland, Sztálinváros in Hungary,
or Dimitrovgrad in Bulgaria. Uprooted from their traditional communities and
housed in workers’ dormitories, the youth could find new personal autonomy and
could become celebrated labor heroes or leaders of communist organizations. For
women, in particular, the experience of migration and equal rights in education
and employment (at least in principle), created opportunities to break free from
restrictive gender roles dominant in traditional peasant communities.
Yet the Stalinist social upheaval, however powerful, failed to homogenize the
region and to transform it sufficiently to prevent the post-Stalinist turn to “national
communisms.” Eastern European states adopted Stalinist principles, but the execu-
tion of specific policies was adjusted to national and local cultures.70 Some traditional
social distinctions proved especially resistant to changes. For example, local officials
often found it necessary to preserve, to varying degrees, hierarchies of age, skill,
and gender entrenched in working-class communities. These traditional divisions
were then actively reinforced by post-Stalinist policies and the increasingly national-
ist bent of Eastern European polities.71 Moreover, social advancement for the lower
classes did not necessarily mean the creation of a new working class loyal to the
communist state. On the contrary, the encounter with the powerful utopian vision of
equality and social justice inspired many to pursue their own definitions of socialism,
not necessarily congruent with the state’s model. In this sense, the Stalinist revolu-
tion resulted in unexpected outcomes. Some scholars have argued that in Poland,
the working class created during Stalinism became an autonomous entity that even-
tually proved to be instrumental to the process of dismantling communism.72 Others
have noted that the collectivist slogans of the Stalinist state often concealed practices
that promoted individualism and were “highly erosive of broader social identities
and solidarities.”73
Despite radical schemes of emancipation, the prestige and economic status of
the intelligentsia, educated professionals, and white-collar workers endured to an
amazing degree through the postwar period. Shortly after the war, prominent intel-
lectuals were co-opted into the project of building socialism, and actively engaged
in redefining the traditional political and social order through literature and art.74
377
But even those urban elites who were less politically active, or opposed to the new
system, managed to preserve a relatively high social status and access to economic
and cultural capital. In 1956 in Hungary, for example, an estimated 60–70 percent of
professionals held similar positions to those they did in the interwar period.75 In some
cases, interwar professional ties proved stronger than directives from Moscow. Polish
university professors, for example, successfully defended their distinct milieu against
intrusions from the state. This was not without consequences for students, the future
elite. Ultimately, as John Connelly has argued, Polish universities “proved unfit to
carry through an ideological transformation of that country’s elites.”76
Yet no social relations were left static or intact by the new political circumstances.
When peasants migrated to cities, they brought with them their traditional values
exemplified in religiosity, familial loyalties, or the rural interior design of their city
apartments. But at the same time, they absorbed urban ways of life, became familiar
with modern amenities such as flushing toilets and running water, and learned to
take advantage of modern leisure and entertainment. Young migrants often enthu-
siastically embraced new methods of work – labor competition and Stakhanovism –
thus affecting the traditional working-class environment in significant ways.77
The rapid nature of change, while benefiting many, alienated others. Eventually,
Stalinism was not successful in sustaining a radical social upheaval, much less the
monolithic Eastern bloc it sought to create. The mass terror alienated many of the
former supporters of the communist parties. The forceful attacks on tradition, such
as religion or established social hierarchies, also backfired and eventually prompted
the regime to seek accommodation and alliances with traditional local cultures at the
expense of ideological principles.
The new classes

While dismantling the traditional social order, communists created new divisions and
hierarchies. As early as 1957, prominent Yugoslav leader and then dissident Milovan
Djilas pointed to the division between the new political elites and ordinary people as
an important feature of social relations under communism. In his influential classic of
Marxist revisionism, The New Class, Djilas offered a profound critique of the new bureau-
cratic class that grew specifically from the ideology and practice of c ommunism.78 The
party elite increasingly marked their higher social status by access to the best availa-
ble goods and services. As György Péteri (himself the son of a high-ranking official
in the Hungarian party-state) has noted, cultivating luxurious lifestyles by the party
elite played an important “symbolic role in the social reproduction of status and class
position.”79 Observation of such lifestyles prompted Djilas to declare that social rela-
tions under communism “resemble state capitalism,” where the party elite replaced
capitalists “using the state machine as a cover and as an instrument.”80
While conspicuous consumption remained the prerogative of the well-connected,
public grievances over the gulf between the party elite and the population became
less pressing; starting in the late 1950s and 1960s the regimes turned to satisfying the
consumer aspirations of the general population. Social distinctions based on material
possessions and lifestyles became widespread in the post-Stalinist era, and were no
longer associated as much with the division between the political elite and ordinary
citizens as with the individual position within the expanding system of consumption.
378
Therefore, some scholars have identified a new “new class” in communist Eastern
Europe, which emerged as a result of the state-sponsored consumer culture.81 To this
effect, the concept of “alternative modernity” has provided a helpful way to analyze
social relations in the post-Stalinist era.82 Although industrial production was still the
centerpiece of the communist ideology and economy, Eastern Europeans increasingly
defined themselves through their position in “a modern style of mass consumption,
a complex of behaviors, tastes, and attitudes that in many respects resembled those
seen in the classic Western sites of contemporary consumer society.”83
Socialist Yugoslavia, which split from the Soviet Union in 1948, made the combi-
nation of free-market with central planning a critical element of a distinct Yugoslav
identity early on. But by the late 1960s, several countries in the Soviet bloc abandoned
ideological rigidity, and turned to mixed-economy solutions and Western credits
to enhance the standard of living for their populations. Hungary was a prominent
example of such change. In 1968, the Hungarian government implemented the New
Economic Mechanism, which allowed for a flexible approach to central planning
with plans serving “as indicators rather than directives,” opening of private enter-
prises, and introducing a degree of competition in labor and prices.84 As a result,
the consumer supply notably improved, and the new system in Hungary acquired a
name of “goulash communism,” a jocular reference to a mix of unlikely economic
and ideological ingredients.
Although few individuals could enrich themselves in significant ways and the
distinction between the haves and have-nots was never as severe as in the West, the
communist brand of consumer culture redefined social identities on many levels.
Consumption and leisure became an important element of socialist citizenship.
In the late socialist era, consumer grievances became a powerful tool to articulate
public identities and rights. They empowered women, in particular, by offering them
an effective vocabulary as mothers and household managers to represent needs and
desires shared by the wider population. At times, these concerns could lead to mass
protests such as during the Solidarity era in Poland.85 Consumption, however, was
more than a strategy of resistance. Rather, it reflected the broader identities of the
postwar era that were common to West and East. In Poland in 1981, experts and
professionals formed the independent organization the Federation of Consumers,
to represent citizens’ consumer rights: “Their concerns and interests were no longer
focused solely on improving consumer supply under a command economy, but were
adapted also from an emerging global discourse of consumer rights and protection
to which they, as educated professionals, had access.”86
The growing consumer expectations could not always be met by command econ-
omies. Communist leaders constantly struggled to sustain the consumer demand,
while individuals searched for alternative sources to satisfy their material needs.
Poland, for example, experienced endemic shortages through the postwar period,
with the exception of the early 1970s. Nearly all Polish rebellions, including the
massive strikes in August 1980, were triggered by price hikes and other economic
concerns. Shortages eventually prevailed in Romania when its communist-nationalist
leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu, put the country on the road to severe austerity in the
1980s. He ordered periodic blackouts and restricted private driving in an effort to pay
off Western debt. But even in countries like Yugoslavia and Hungary where consumer
policies were relatively successful, the variety and amount of goods did not match
379
the assortment available in the West. Thus in the context of relative scarcity, the new
social status often depended on the individual’s access to hard currency, opportuni-
ties to work or shop in the West, or the ability to navigate a complex network of social
and familial relations to obtain goods. Thus participation in “the second economy”
could be crucial in helping one achieve higher social status. In a way, consumer aspi-
rations helped “privatize” social relations in Eastern Europe. Successful consumers
tended to obtain goods through unofficial channels, and personal “resourcefulness,”
built and perfected in that way, could prove indispensable to surviving the chaos of
transition to free market economy after 1989.87
Reinventing gender difference

Gender difference remained one of the most enduring and complex social distinc-
tions under communism. It exemplified some of the most glaring contradictions of
the communist project to liberate traditionally disadvantaged groups. Rejecting the
bourgeois idea of the “separation of spheres” and women’s subordinate role in soci-
ety, Eastern European leaders (following the Soviet example) moved to implement
equal legal rights for both sexes for the first time in European history. Yet defini-
tions of manhood and womanhood still contained elements of the Enlightenment
notion of “natural” gender characteristics, which were believed to be independent
of political and social change. Women and men were still perceived as homogene-
ous groups essentially different from each other. The push for women to become
equal to male workers and citizens coexisted with more traditional assumptions of
female maternal and nurturing qualities. The latter often proved instrumental in cre-
ating and legitimizing new welfare and pronatalist policies. At the same time, models
of masculinity remained severely limited. If women were encouraged to enter the
male-dominated world of employment and politics, communists rarely encouraged
men to become “equal” by taking on some of the typically feminine tasks such as
childcare or household chores.88
Traditionally, scholars have focused on the extent of gender equality and the
effectiveness of state policy in this regard. The balance sheet was usually evaluated in
negative terms. While sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists acknowl-
edged the tremendous strides women had made in education and employment,
they criticized the gender segregation of the workforce, wage inequality, and the
double burden women faced while expected to work inside and outside the house-
hold.89 More recently, however, scholars have begun to ask new questions: How
was the gender difference conceived under communism? How did women experi-
ence new policies and how did they contest and negotiate their own position in the
system? Rather than applying the oversimplified dichotomy of “exploitation” and
“liberation,” new historical work is theoretically sophisticated, and focuses on the
cultural construction of gender roles at different points in communist history, the
diversity of women’s experiences, and the links between the new gender order and
political structures.90
The communist approach to gender equality evolved over time and was conditioned
by distinct national and local traditions. The short period of Stalinist industrializa-
tion in the early 1950s brought a revolutionary change.91 The state-led campaign
that encouraged women to enter jobs traditionally dominated by men gave some
380
women a chance to improve their social and economic standing, and to experience
the new and exciting world of skilled work, independence, and prestige. This radical
rearrangement of traditional hierarchies and professions, however, was greeted with
ambivalence or outright hostility by the traditional segments of society, including male
workers and managers. Dismantling Stalinism in the mid-1950s often entailed a quest
to return women to their “proper” roles as mothers and domestic beings. Although
the state never encouraged women to leave the workplace in favor of homemaking,
starting in the mid-1950s a strong division into women’s and men’s jobs became a
permanent and striking feature of the communist workplace. Women dominated
employment in the low-paid and less prestigious service sector, or in unskilled posi-
tions in industry. Men tended to occupy better-paid technical professional positions,
and perform skilled work on the factory floor. To consolidate this gendered structure
of production, communist leaders throughout the bloc openly argued for a redefini-
tion of the emancipation model, which would take into c onsideration the allegedly
“natural” inclinations of women for domesticity.92
The emphasis on the maternal identity of women remained a strong feature of com-
munist societies, one that combined national and peasant traditions with the state’s
need to foster stable families and a new generation of socialist citizens. Although the
socialist law granted women access to abortion as early as the mid-1950s (something
that was not available to women in the West until the early 1970s), pronatalist con-
cerns were omnipresent, and policies differed by region.93 Legal access to abortion was
not typically conceived as a reproductive right, but as part of an economic necessity
that often required verification and permission from medical and state authorities.94
Moreover, the nationalist bent of communism could result in restrictive reproduc-
tive policies that stressed the significance of the racialized “nation.” Romania under
Nicolae Ceauşescu, who combined nationalism with autarky and restrictive reproduc-
tive policies, including the ban on abortion and contraception, was a case in point.95
At the same time, it would be incorrect to look at women under communism only
through the prism of productive and reproductive roles. Starting in the mid-1950s,
as individual identity became less linked to production and more to consump-
tion and lifestyle, women were encouraged to become moderate consumers and
technologically savvy household managers. The stress on consumption resulted in
the development of beauty culture, in which women were expected to conform
to sexualized esthetic standards with the help of cosmetics, hygiene, and fashion.
A new wave of popular magazines for women promoted femininity centered not
only on nurturing roles in the family and society, but also on beauty culture and
educational leisure. New research has examined how socialist consumption and
the mass media empowered women and provided new ways of self-fashioning and
self-understanding.96
This does not mean, however, that gender roles became less politicized because
of the shift to consumption. The role of women as mothers and consumers was
critical to the post-Stalinist understanding of the “social contract” between the state
and society. In contrast to the Stalinist ideological mobilization, communist leaders
of the 1960s–1980s accepted the economic and cultural autonomy of society in the
domestic sphere in exchange for political compliance.97 For a long time, scholars
have attributed the persistence of traditional gender relations in Eastern Europe
to the voluntary expression of cultural “freedom” within one’s household and
381
family. Recently, however, Paulina Bren has suggested that promoting the female-
dominated private sphere in Czechoslovakia after 1968 served as an important tool
to contain the reform movement and foster “normalization.” The private home
played a crucial political role: the home with the sensible woman at its center was
depicted as a refuge from the alleged “hysteria” of the Prague Spring and from the
overindulgent Western-style consumerism.98 In this sense, the de-politicization of
the private sphere was only an illusion. As Bren argues, “Traditional roles became
a mode of resistance against the state, but they were simultaneously reinforced and
encouraged by the state.”99
Recent findings raise important questions regarding continuities between the
communist and post-communist periods. Feminist scholars have identified the transi-
tion from communism to the liberal-democratic system after 1989 as a decisive break
from communist policies of “equality,” contending that the shift was particularly
detrimental to women. This included repressive reproductive policies, the femini-
zation of poverty, sex trafficking, and renewed nationalist and religious movements
that delegated women to the confined roles of mothers and housewives.100 But
was the post-communist backlash against women indeed so different from gender
politics of the late socialist era? And did women tend to be less compatible with a free-
market economy than men, as many feminist observers seemed to suggest? Recently,
scholars such as Kristen Ghodsee have critically reevaluated both the paradigm of
the post-communist conservative backlash against women in Eastern Europe and the
traumatic impact of neoliberal economic policies on male workers. Examining the
Bulgarian tourist industry, Ghodsee has demonstrated that the transition to market
economy did not affect all women in the same way, and that in many cases the indi-
vidual adjustment to the new economic and political circumstances had more to do
with social class, access to cultural capital, and education, than with gender.101 Other
scholars have pointed to positive developments such as the rise of feminist move-
ments throughout Eastern Europe and a growing influence of gender perspectives
on political and social life.102
The social dimension of the physical landscape

As part of the project of re-making human identities, communist regimes sought a
large-scale transformation of physical surroundings. Efforts of post-communist poli-
ticians and societies to reorganize, and sometimes erase, the existing urban space
inspired scholars to look closely at how socialist architecture and design affected
the social environment. Katherine Verdery, for example, pointed to the ways post-
communist institutions and groups used bodies – real, or those in the form of statues
– to undo the spatial legacy of socialism and to symbolically excise the socialist period
from the national temporal order.103 The very passion of these spatial politics seemed
to be a reaction to the environmental determinism of Marxism-Leninism, which was
believed to penetrate all aspects of life after World War II: from urban planning and
interior design to attitudes toward leisure and nature. But as Susan Reid and David
Crowley suggested in their pioneering volume on Socialist Spaces, there was no uni-
form meaning attached to “sites” of socialism. Official versions and popular appro-
priations of the physical space were multiple and fluid.104 How successful then were
communist regimes in creating uniquely “socialist spaces”? In the end we might agree
382
with scholars who argue that the resulting “landscape was socialist mainly because of
the ideological texts attached to almost every project.”105 Our inability to capture a
socialist essence notwithstanding, one might still ask if the shared ideology and struc-
tural commonalities assured the emergence of similar, recognizable spaces across
regions and borders. How did this space affect social identities and state policies?
And what meaning was assigned to “socialist sites” in the course of postwar Eastern
European history?
Scholarly interest in the social life of Eastern European spaces has been influ-
enced by theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, who see the city as the primary locale of
the modern state. Thus authors have focused primarily on urban spaces, and have
emphasized the more urbanized post-communist landscapes.106 For many years, a
nearly stand-alone text on the socialist urban space was The Socialist City (1979), which
investigated how the Soviet conception of the socialist city (sotsgorod) interacted with
regional patterns of urbanization and urban planning to produce new forms.107 Since
then, scholars have identified common features and distinct stages in the urban devel-
opment of postwar Eastern Europe. The radical social engineering of the Stalinist
period was marked by the redistribution of existing housing in the 1940s and 1950s,
the rise of new industrial socialist cities such as Nowa Huta in Poland or Sztálinváros
in Hungary, and the redesign of old centers according to the principles of monumen-
tal Stalinist architecture. Capital city centers such as East Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest,
and Sofia followed the architectural pattern that served the “cult of personality.”108
Architects reproduced the party’s monopoly on power in the compact city centers
with monumental buildings, large boulevards, and ideologically infused sculptures.
De-Stalinization and the reform of the system were crucial to changing the
official approach to physical space. Starting in the 1960s, the pragmatic desire to
provide inexpensive housing to the population, and the interest in the modernist
International Style endorsed by the Khrushchev regime in the Soviet Union, led to
the bloc-wide acceptance of standardized and, later, prefabricated panel construc-
tion. These designs were first developed in Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s.109 Still,
the communist regimes’ emphasis on industrial use of land and underinvestment in
services and retail, which were usually confined to city centers and the cores of new
housing estates, left an indelible mark on most socialist cities.110
Whether the product of these contingencies and constraints produced an identifi-
able “socialist city” and how this formation fits the general history of urban modernity
has been a subject of much debate.111 It is not surprising then that historians have
preferred case studies of urban transformation over time to comparative analyses
of socialist urban spaces. Perhaps because of the central role of capitals in national
history, most recent texts have focused on the region’s urban hubs in an attempt
to position their buildings, symbols, and spatial organization in the national histor-
ical trajectory. Such an approach normalizes the socialist era by presenting it as yet
another period of urban restructuring and reform. Non-capital cities, in contrast,
have remained relatively neglected, thus obscuring one of the most important aspects
of socialist urban development: its decentralization in response to the deliberately
dispersed industrialization of the countryside.112
Yet the existing scholarship on provincial cities and towns, examined “from
below,” reveals important limits of communist social engineering. From the start,
socialist towns were much more receptive to ideological mobilization than established
383
urban centers; this process was especially marked in the borderland industrial areas
in western Poland and northern Bohemia, described by Padraic Kenney and Eagle
Glassheim, respectively.113 The communist emphasis on productivity in the context of
an “economy of shortage” assured that the promise of modern hygiene, a clean envi-
ronment, urban equality, and social justice remained unfulfilled and became a source
of social tension. Bolesław Dománski’s study of Polish industrial towns, for example,
demonstrated that the paternalistic attitude of industrial plant directors with signif-
icant political clout led to uneven allocation of services, housing, healthcare, and
consumer products; older residents were regularly excluded from the new opportu-
nities open to plant workers and managers’ families.114 These findings echoed Iván
Szelényi’s arguments from the late 1970s, based on case studies of Pécs and Szeged
in Hungary, where centralized allocation of housing did not reduce inequalities. On
the contrary, housing was used to reward individuals and groups, and led to new
stratification in status and wealth.115
Even if social equality remained beyond reach, the urbanization of the countryside,
in particular, had a transformative effect. The arrival of massive mining and industrial
complexes to rural areas brought higher incomes, ideological valorization of work-
ers’ labor, and modern living conditions that broke the hold of family and religion
on younger generations.116 At the same time, the new urban environment did not
produce automatically the desired new socialist men and women.117 Neither did the
uniform housing estates create common perceptions of private life or social relations.
Historians have only recently turned to the reputedly similar socialist spaces – “great”
and “ordinary” – to find a diversity of experiences and meanings that challenge the
notion of bloc-wide processes and all-powerful regimes.118 They have contrasted the
everyday use of the street, the department store, the TV-centered family living room,
the café and the park, to the intended significance of large-scale projects of social-
ist regimes – Warsaw’s Stalinist Palace of Culture, Stalin’s gigantic statue in Prague,
or Ceauşescu’s Palace of the People built atop razed homes and churches – that
conjured up images of megalomaniacal police states.
In contrast to the socialist urban realm, the transformation of the rural landscape
has generated limited scholarly attention, with anthropologists rather than histori-
ans leading the way in tracing the effects of the “rapid and directed social change
succeeding conditions of extreme underdevelopment.”119 Katherine Verdery and
Gail Kligman have called for a more systematic examination of Eastern European
agriculture, reminding us that in predominantly agrarian regions, collectivization
might have had far wider consequences than the construction of industrial sites.120
Their view of collectivization as a “modernizing technology” that aimed to create an
alternative modernity dovetails with Martha Lampland’s earlier observation that the
unique feature “in the social programs of many socialist states was the integration
of the collectivization of agricultural properties in the national project of industrial
modernization.”121 The efficient extraction of resources for industrialization, the
elimination of private property, and the amalgamation of small family-run holdings
(a symbol of backwardness) into large mechanized farms visually demarcated the
socialization of the Eastern European rural landscape and the political destruction
of the powerful indigenous peasant movements.122
In places such as Yugoslavia and Poland, where collectivization efforts were aban-
doned in the mid-1950s and private agriculture prevailed, the continuous mass
384
exodus of villagers to seek better economic opportunities in cities visibly affected the
rural landscape and the social conditions in the countryside. While many villages were
transformed physically by the construction of new homes, schools, cultural centers,
factories, and transportation, their ageing and declining populations contributed to
reduced productivity and lower tax revenues. This resulted in poorer social services
for rural inhabitants than those provided to their urban counterparts. Misha Glenny,
for example, saw the widening social gap and growing tensions between the country-
side and town in Yugoslavia as an important factor in the violent disintegration of the
state in the early 1990s.123
The rural physical and social spaces also bore the symptoms of the economic
reforms that defined and ultimately doomed the late communist era. The Bulgarian
government, for example, embraced private plots after the failed attempt to build
massive agro-industrial projects in the 1970s. By the early 1980s, these private plots
occupied 13 percent of arable land but accounted for as much as 25 percent of total
agricultural production. Such solutions secured the prominence of hybrid worker-
peasants, who kept ties to the countryside for extra income and food, and engaged in
“informal activities” that piggybacked on the formal state-owned sector.124 This pro-
cess was even more pronounced in Hungary, where the establishment of private plots
led to an “enbourgeoisement” of large segments of the population in the 1980s. Such
developments not only led to the “domestication” of communism in the countryside,
but also fed into the disintegration of the system.125
The contradictions inherent in the socialist organization of space were also visible
in the meaning and practice of domestic travel. A number of recent studies have
explored the critical role state-sponsored travel played in shaping ideal socialist citi-
zens. In the Stalinist period, domestic travel tended to be associated with the emphasis
on production and the brigadier movement, which engaged youth, in particular, in
mobility across the country with the goal of physically transforming the national land-
scape through constructing new industrial sites. Although in the post-Stalinist period
the communist regimes increasingly prioritized travel for leisure, organized travel
remained a primarily didactic endeavor, which aimed at promoting the love for father-
land, solidarity with other Soviet bloc citizens, and productivity-boosting r elaxation.126
Such travel cemented the link between nature and the lived environment, rural and
urban worlds, past and present, and work and leisure.
Organized travel also aimed to solidify the ties between the state and the citizen.
Cristofer Scarboro argued that the Bulgarian authorities saw state-run tourism as “an
important counter to the ‘idleness in body and mind’ brought on by unstructured
and unfocused leisure.” More importantly, in agreement with the nationalist turn of
the late socialist era, it “created a space for the tourist to connect with newly formed
ideas of sacrality, to understand the meaning of Bulgarian history, the trajectory of
the future and their own position in this order.”127 Two-day weekends, guaranteed
annual vacations, subsidized holiday centers, and state-run tourist associations made
mountain camps and seaside resorts affordable to many Eastern Europeans.128 The
expansion of tourism transformed sleepy villages and fishing communities along the
Adriatic and Black Sea coasts into busy, dynamic, and entrepreneurial centers that
serviced what a Time reporter called a “polyglot invasion” of socialist citizens and for-
eigners alike.129 Yet popular appropriations of socialist space and travel did not always
conform to the official visions. Travel increasingly became a private pleasure, not a
385
communal experience, and was often used for economic rather than educational
purposes. We will return to the complex meaning of socialist travel as we discuss the
East–West interaction in the next section.
The communist system failed to eradicate completely pre-communist social hier-
archies and identities. Projects aimed at transforming social relations tended to be
appropriated and often contradicted by the very subjects of those experiments, who
sought to accomplish their own diverse goals. The social “revolution” was a site of con-
testation, which was not limited to clearly defined “societies” and “regimes.” At the
same time, the communist effort to implement “equality” did make a lasting impact
on the social landscape. Millions of city dwellers today can trace their origins to the
postwar countryside; many acquired education that enabled them to become mem-
bers of the intellectual and professional elite. Some acquired apartments and built
houses, in which they still live, with the help of state subsidies. And women and men
developed their entrepreneurial skills and learned consumer strategies while trying
to outsmart the system through participation in the second economy.
Rethinking the East–West divide

Imagining the West
In the mid-1950s Milovan Djilas articulated the fears of many Eastern European
intellectuals, when he predicted dire consequences for a Soviet bloc cut off from
the world: “an isolated system can offer only a very modest living; it would be unable
to move forward and solve the problems brought about by modern techniques and
modern ideas.” 130 Three decades later, in the late 1980s, some observers were struck
by how widespread the penetration of Eastern Europe by Western consumer and
popular cultures had become. Looking at youth and its “obsession” with “jeans, chew-
ing gum, whiskey, drugs, walkmans and radios,” and with “matters such as the lat-
est Ford model, fashion, athletic stars, the most proclaimed actress, and other pop
news,” anthropologist Gabriel Bar-Haim suggested that Eastern Europeans fell victim
to “Westernmania.”131 Such different narratives reflect the changing face of the com-
munist system, but they also raise questions about the validity of both the totalitarian
paradigm and the post-1989 Western triumphalist accounts of the ubiquitous appeal
of the West to Eastern European citizens. Recently, scholars have made efforts to criti-
cally re-evaluate these opposing narratives and to analyze the East–West interaction
during the Cold War in more nuanced and complex ways.
Looking at social, cultural, and intellectual developments, historians have departed
from the idea that Eastern and Western Europe followed profoundly divergent paths
after World War II, and that there was little interaction or exchange between the
two. Tony Judt has argued for a distinctly “European way of life” in the post-1945 era
that transcended the Cold War division. Common trends, such the expansion of the
welfare state and the consumer turn, were present on both sides of the Iron Curtain,
albeit in different shapes and forms.132 György Péteri has used the metaphor of a
“nylon curtain,” which
was not only transparent but also yielded to strong osmotic tendencies
that . . . were not only fueling consumer desires and expectations of living
386
standards but they also promoted in both directions the spreading of visions of
“good society,” of “humanism,” as well as civil, political and social citizenship.133
Ironically, communist leaders played a critical role in exposing their citizens to

Western influences. In the post-Stalin era, they no longer perceived all Western trends
as a threat to the success of the socialist project. On the contrary, as David Crowley
and Susan Reid argued, reinventing the communist project after Stalin required a
more open attitude toward the outside world.134 Thus Eastern Europeans took part in
broader postwar European conversations from intellectual ideas and popular culture
to political and economic solutions. Rather than normalizing the West and stressing
the “abnormality” of the communist system, recent studies have treated the idea of
the “West” as an intellectually fluid construct and have searched for commonalities
across the Iron Curtain.
The “West” had historically been a powerful concept in Eastern Europe imbued
with multiple and ambivalent meanings. In different contexts, it denoted cultural
and economic advancement as well as political arrogance and moral decay.135
Under communism, the concept became even more complex and often mythol-
ogized, but its meaning continued to shift in accordance with time, place, and
subject matter. During the Stalinist period, the official propaganda turned the cap-
italist “West” into the ultimate “other” as communist leaders perceived all Western
political, cultural, and intellectual trends as decadent, subversive, and dangerous.136
As the Stalinist mobilization against the West faded into the past and “peaceful
coexistence” became the new slogan in the Eastern bloc in the mid-1950s, the
West became increasingly associated, in popular perceptions in particular, with the
“economic miracle” and consumer prosperity. The Eastern European party-states
recognized the potential danger of this perception, and often attempted to steer
the official discourse on the West away from consumption to moral and human-
istic values. In Poland in the 1960s, for example, official publications underlined
the moral superiority of socialist upbringing of youth that did not concentrate on
commodity culture.137 In a similar way, the Czechoslovak press of the 1970s and
1980s publicized personal accounts of disappointments with the Western model of
consumption by Czech émigré returnees. As Paulina Bren has aptly demonstrated,
under mature socialism,
realizing one’s “human essence” was to take priority over more concrete
economic concerns. The terms “self-actualization” (sebeaktualizace) and “self-
realization” (seberealizace) became favorite catchwords of the regime; both
indicated a person’s chance to develop his or her best self, and to indulge in
whatever activities that would require.138
Despite official efforts to construct socialist “modernity,” a competing project to the

Western one, popular attitudes in Eastern Europe still tended to associate modern
lifestyles with the West and to hold the West as the standard.139 This trend often
had to do with the older question of “cultural belonging,” which became especially
urgent in the context of Sovietization and “Eastern” domination of the countries that
tended to historically identify with Western Europe. In Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and
Poland, for example, the educated elite often saw the West not as an outside and
387
alien influence but rather as a lost world, from which the Soviets kidnapped Central
Europe.140 This self-promotion, often cast in the term of “Central Europe,” is debat-
able in light of complex historical experiences, but it did function as an important
myth and aspiration for those disillusioned with postwar developments. The ideal
West, understood as a set of cultural values and political freedoms, also served as an
important inspiration for the dissident movements across the bloc.141
Although direct and regular contact with the West was not available to many ordi-
nary Eastern Europeans, the opening to global trends during de-Stalinization marked
a new era in East–West interaction as new ways of experiencing the West became avail-
able. The spread of mass media enabled many to become “virtual tourists.” Popular
periodicals, radio (including tacitly tolerated foreign stations such as Radio Free
Europe or Radio Luxemburg), movie theaters, and television kept the public updated
on latest trends in fashion, rock music, and dance while at the same time blurring
Cold War divisions.142
Perspectives from below also suggest that Eastern Europeans did not always identify
the West only with capitalist countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain; rather,
the designation often depended on the specific country’s position within the wider
sphere of consumer culture. Thus Yugoslavia, due to its relative consumer successes,
was often identified as “the West” by Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians. Nearly all of
Eastern Europe could serve as “the West” for Soviet citizens. Although Eastern Europe
was politically dominated by the Soviet superpower, cultural influences tended to run
in the opposite direction: from the “periphery” to the “core.” Soviets borrowed the
design for houses and interior decoration from Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and the
Hotel Warszawa that opened in Moscow in July 1960 was based on designs produced
in Poland. The construction seemed to carry “an exotic charge at the heart of the
Soviet Empire. Poland, Russia’s Occident in a geographical sense, had become ‘the
West,’ in a metaphorical sense too.”143 In a similar way, the black market in border-
land cities such as L’viv in Western Ukraine became a regular supplier of Western
clothes, currency, and rock music records via Eastern Europe.144
Recent research has also demonstrated that Eastern Europeans might have par-
ticipated more actively in the global political culture than previously thought. For
example, scholars have begun to examine youth non-conformity and student protests
of the 1960s in Eastern Europe as a product of a global protest culture of the era.145
The “carnival of revolution” in the late 1980s, according to Padraic Kenney, was to an
even greater degree a result of transnational contacts and exchange of ideas within the
bloc and beyond.146 Although divergent political contexts could lead to difficulties in
mutual understanding and cooperation, Eastern European intellectual and cultural
trends served as inspiration for Western Europeans as much as the other way around.
One such illustration of Eastern European impact was the trial of Daniel Cohn-
Bendit, a leader of French students during the protest movement and the general
strike of May 1968. The defendant stated his name as “Kuroń Modzelewski,” the last
names of two intellectuals who inspired the “Marxist revisionist” student movement in
Poland.147 Likewise, the exodus of Polish and Czech intellectuals after 1968 and their
penetration of Western academia influenced Western European and American schol-
arship in ways that still need to be explored. Tony Judt, for example, attributed the
“central European perspective” of his analysis of French intellectuals – with emphasis
on civil society – to “Polish friends” such as Jan Gross and Irena Grudzinska-Gross.148
388
Others have noted that Eastern European activists and dissidents knowingly engaged
in transnational debates and shrewdly adapted their message to various Western audi-
ences for maximal resonance: Adam Michnik deliberately employed the concept
of “totalitarianism” in his addresses to West German politicians and intellectuals,
while Milan Kundera modified considerably (yet imperceptibly) his famous essay on
Central Europe for British, French, and American readers.149
The economic connection

Economic factors played an important role in opening the system to outside influ-
ences. Seeking cooperation with Western economies was a direct result of the cri-
sis of legitimacy faced by communist regimes after Stalin. The end of communist
autarky, as some scholars suggested, was indeed a necessity, if the system was to
sustain the growing material aspirations of its citizens.150 According to Katherine
Verdery, it was also a way for communist elites to “solve their structural problems
without major structural reform” and without jeopardizing their monopoly on politi-
cal power. Communist governments used Western credits and markets in a fashion
reminiscent of “a ‘plunder mentality’ that sees the external environment as a source
of booty to be used as needed in maintaining one’s own system, without thought
for the cost.”151 As a result, by the late 1960s, socialist economies became tightly
integrated with global capitalism, and then with its cyclical crisis that started in the
early 1970s. “In this way,” Verdery contends, “the internal cycles of two contrasting
systems suddenly meshed.”152
Opening to Western economy was not purely a defensive measure as trade exchange
could also serve to promote Eastern European products on the global stage. In 1958,
a number of Eastern European countries attended the Brussels Exposition to dis-
play the architectural and economic achievements of their societies side by side with
the technological marvel of the day, the Soviet Sputnik.153 International economic
cooperation allowed also for remarkable cases of Eastern European economic suc-
cess. In contrast to the dominant narratives centered on the unoriginality of Eastern
European design and low quality of consumer goods, Mary Neuburger’s fascinat-
ing book Balkan Smoke reveals how the Bulgarian tobacco industry took advantage
of American outreach to the bloc in the mid-1960s to renew its technological base,
speed up production, and develop sophisticated marketing techniques. All these
actions allowed the Bulgarian tobacco industry to dominate the Eastern European,
Soviet, and Middle Eastern markets until 1989.154
Economic openness and the exchange of commodities paved the road for the
movement of people. No longer the privilege of political and intellectual elites,
foreign travel became accessible to ordinary Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, or citizens
of Yugoslavia. Eastern European states opened their borders by liberalizing pass-
port policies and signing agreements with their neighbors for tourist exchange.155
After 1956, communist regimes actively promoted individual and organized tourism
to other communist countries as well as to Yugoslavia. Such travel could expose
Eastern Europeans not only to different cultures within the bloc, but also to Western
trends and visitors. The Bulgarian Black Sea coast or Yugoslav Dalmatia hosted
tourists from Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and other
European countries. While in Yugoslavia, travelers from Poland or Czechoslovakia
389
could experience not only a more advanced consumer culture, but also an oppor-
tunity to mix with “ordinary people from ‘the lands of developed capitalism’ and,
to some extent, bridge the Cold War divisions.”156 Interacting with these visitors
was also an eye-opening and useful experience for the locals. According to Kristen
Ghodsee, contacts with Western tourists helped the privileged employees of the
tourist industry in Bulgaria to not only know about everyday life in the West, but
also use that knowledge to build a social and cultural capital that proved indispens-
able during the post-1989 transition. Dora, a female hotel manager on the Black
Sea coast who regularly interacted with German tourists, learned a great deal about
Western lifestyles:
It was not as they [the communists] said it was. I knew that they were lying.
So when “the changes” happened, my eyes were already opened because of
my contacts with the tourists . . . We already knew how the West worked. We
knew how people lived. This helped me a lot.157
At the same time, more and more Eastern Europeans combined travel and leisure
with economic activity. Consumer travel that involved selling products from home and
shopping for goods elsewhere became an important feature of the communist experi-
ence, often facilitated by the regimes, which were acutely aware of consumer dissatisfac-
tion at home.158 Most consumer travel took place within the bloc, but the capitalist West
was also drawn into this orbit. Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, for example,
shopping trips by Yugoslavs to the Italian city of Trieste developed into “mass shop-
ping frenzy.” While in 1959, more than 1.5 million Yugoslav motor vehicles crossed the
border to Italy; by 1965 this number grew to more than 11 million.159 Transnational
contacts of an informal economic nature have become a new research area that sheds
light not only on the economic system in the Eastern bloc, but also on myriad other
issues, from social hierarchies to identities and mentalities formed as a result of cross-
cultural interactions.160
Was the West the fairest of them all?

To what extent did the exposure to the outside world undermine the legitimacy of
the communist system? Scholars have recently questioned the well-established view
that inhabitants of the Soviet bloc were, to some extent, seduced by Western-style
consumerism, and that the aspiration to be like the West eventually led to the col-
lapse of the system.161 According to Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, such perspec-
tive is overtly deterministic and positions the Eastern European relationship with the
West as “merely reactive.”162 Rather, new scholarship has begun to explore precisely
how the imagined West functioned in the everyday life of socialist citizens. Did it
indeed undermine the communist system? Or was it integrated into the everyday
life “without apparent ideological contradiction”?163 And, finally, were there conflict-
ing interpretations of the desirability of the West and its consumer society? Václav
Havel did not seem to be alone in rejecting consumer society on moral grounds in
both East and West. Evidence suggests that many ordinary citizens, while valuing
consumption, also preferred a more democratic form of socialism to an unrestrained
market economy.164
390
Yet most scholars find it difficult to deny that the inability of communist regimes
to meet economic and cultural challenges of the post-Stalinist era proved corrosive to
the system. The project of socialist modernity that Eastern European regimes began to
promote in various forms after 1956 was a response, to some extent, to the enormous
success of Western Europe and the United States, to provide economic betterment
for their citizens. But that project did not succeed ultimately. The socialist version of
modernity, according to György Péteri, “failed to assert its systemic exceptionalism by
offering viable alternatives for peoples’ everyday life.”165
Perhaps it was not the glitter of Western consumer goods, but rather the way in
which the communist regimes related to the West that proved most detrimental to
the project of socialist “alternative modernity.” In the context of Cold War competi-
tion, communist regimes themselves solidified the link between consumer supply and
political legitimacy. Moreover, by the 1970s and 1980s, the party elite, and especially
the young activists, found the Western economic model and lifestyle more appeal-
ing than the austere project of national communism.166 Drawing on his analysis of
East German policies toward West German currency and goods, Jonathan Zatlin has
argued for a self-induced erosion of communist legitimacy:
Not only did borrowing money from the class enemy constitute a tacit admis-
sion that capitalism was the superior system, but the official promotion of
West German money and merchandise supplanted the East German cur-
rency and commodities, reinforcing the sense of ordinary East Germans that
they were second-class citizens in a capitalist world.
In this way, the regimes’ “reliance on the West undermined the political authority
of socialism.”167 East Germany was probably the most extreme example of that rela-
tionship, but the pattern was illustrative of countries across the bloc, where everyone
knew that state-sponsored hard-currency stores offered superior merchandise and
that Western credits financed domestic consumption.
Dissolution
The breaking of the Soviet bloc
While during the last three decades scholars have brought more clarity to the com-
plex national and international dynamics of the process of the “making of the Soviet
bloc,” existing scholarship on the “breaking of the Soviet bloc” raises more questions
than it answers. It is by now a truism to say that the revolutions of 1989 and the sub-
sequent disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia caught Sovietologists and
area specialists by surprise. Supporters of the totalitarian model had believed in the
monolithic nature of the state, while those who espoused the modernization theory
had professed faith in the reformist potential of the system.168 The failure of both
groups to anticipate the collapse gave credence to the concept of “civil society,” that
suggested strong and varied societal resistance against the communist regime at the
grass-roots level. The term “civil society” entered circulation in the early 1980s. The
signing of Charter 77 by Czechoslovak dissidents, and then the rise of the Solidarity
movement in Poland, stimulated a boom in reports and analyses of Eastern European
391
samizdat, dissidence, and parallel societies.169 The prominent role of former opposi-
tion groups in the “negotiated” revolutions of 1989 seemed to confirm the centrality
of “civil society” to the disintegration of the communist system. The paradigm also val-
idated the triumph of Western liberal democracy, a sentiment powerfully expressed
by Francis Fukuyama in his famous 1989 essay, “The End of History?”170 By the early
1990s, most analyses of the collapse adopted a nearly deterministic position: the
system’s disintegration became inevitable as its ideological premises and economic
underpinnings contradicted human nature. Transitologists joined other scholars by
offering universal models for post-communist democratization and economic liberal-
ization, much to the chagrin of area specialists, who called for analyses and solutions
steeped in the region’s diversity and complex history.171
A decade after 1989, the mood was palpably more sober. Early expectation of causal
relationship between civil society, regime change, and democratization deflated in the
face of the unforeseen, sometimes grim, and occasionally violent, realities of the tran-
sition to liberal democracies. For example, a general unease with the meaning of 1989
permeated most contributions to the volume Between Past and Future: The Revolutions
of 1989 and Their Aftermath, edited by Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu. While
some contributors noted the economic success of “Central Europe,” others pointed
to the dark side of transition: from the brutal civil war in Yugoslavia to the wide-
spread disillusionment with privatization, post-communist politics, and the new
mental geographies of Europe that tended to exclude the former “southern tier” as
inherently violent and uncivilized.172 Hopeful voices were few and far between. Yet
Timothy Garton Ash, Norman Naimark, and Michael Kennedy reminded readers of
the remarkably peaceful nature of the transition. Defying expectations of widespread
turmoil and violence similar to those of 1918 or 1945, Yugoslavia’s breakup had been
the only “betrayal of negotiated and peaceful change.”173
In light of post-1989 developments, observers could not even agree on whether the
term “revolution” was appropriate for the end of communism in Eastern Europe. This
disagreement over terminology reflected a general lack of consensus on the causes
for collapse. With transitology increasingly out of favor, observers have struggled to
provide other explanatory models for the diverse exits from communism. Regardless
of Michael Kennedy’s cautionary remark that the collapse of communism, even in
Poland, was a product of “negotiation and contingency” rather than a historical and
cultural certainty,174 in the 1990s supporters of the allegedly inherent democratic tra-
dition of “Central Europe,” such as Jacques Rupnik, came to talk about “two models
of exit from communisms”: Central European and Balkan.175 While some schol-
ars have tried to problematize this division, others adopted the model in standard
accounts of post-communist developments, and thus contributed to the (re)creation
of a historical divide.176 This intellectual concept had direct political and economic
consequences as the “Central European” states received the bulk of international
economic investments in the first post-communist decade, and were more swiftly inte-
grated into the Western military, economic, and political structures, including NATO
and the European Union.
More than two decades after 1989, most scholars agree that any explanations for
the collapse “must be multi-causal.” Varying on the question of emphasis, they con-
cur that the road to collapse must account for the economic stagnation of the last
decade of communism, Gorbachev’s embracement of reform in the Soviet Union,
392
the relaxation of repression against dissidents, and the growth of opposition net-
works that put pressure on the ossified regimes.177 To this effect, Padraic Kenney
claimed that “if Soviet reform, economic collapse and dissent are each essential to
grasping some part of the complexity of 1989, they are altogether incomplete with-
out the story of the social movements of the 1980s.”178 Archie Brown, at the same
time, has stressed the key role of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms for the collapse of the
bloc. In his opinion, the willingness of the Soviet leadership to use military power in
Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 was the “single most important rea-
son why the east-central European communist states, in particular, had not collapsed
earlier.”179 While analyzing additional factors that led to the collapse of communism
as a system, Brown offers a lengthy list: social change, economic problems, nation-
alism, critical thinking within the party, transformational leadership, reform, free
flow of information, and the international context.180 Another group of scholars has
emphasized the opening of the communist economies to the West as the decisive
cause for the system’s implosion, as it exposed the structural problems of command
economies and the exhausted potential for reform within the conservative Eastern
European ruling parties.181 Others have made efforts to restore the importance of
human rights in the wake of the 1975 Helsinki agreement between the Soviet bloc,
Western Europe, and the United States in undermining the legal and ideological
base of the communist order.182
In a major departure from the tone of the discussion in the early 1990s, Stephen
Kotkin and Jan Gross dismissed the importance of civil society altogether and instead
interpreted 1989 as an implosion of the communist establishment, or of what they
termed Eastern European “uncivil society.” According to their analysis, “internal elite
dynamics” and geopolitics played a decisive role in shaping events, but the actual
revolution was unintended. Kotkin and Gross argued that, already in the early 1980s
the Soviet Union tried to untangle itself from its expensive and burdening “empire”
in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev – a 1968-er at heart – sought socialism with a human
face at home and hoped to “galvanize the reform-minded Gorbachevs of Eastern
Europe.” The problem was that by then such reformers were nowhere to be found;
reform communism in Eastern Europe had died with the Warsaw Pact invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968. Instead, Gorbachev’s attempts exposed a “bankrupt political
class in a system that was largely bereft of corrective mechanisms,” and had survived
only “by ever-new loans, Ponzi-scheme style.”183 It is important to note that the col-
lapse of communism in Eastern Europe exercised direct and indirect influences on
the fate of the Soviet Union. As Mark Kramer argued, “spillover” from the former
bloc played a crucial role in the disintegration of the Soviet monolith and in ending
the Cold War.184
The world of Solidarity?

Even if the explanatory power of the “civil society” paradigm has diminished in stat-
ure, scholarly inquiry into the role of opposition, dissidence, and parallel institutions
remains justified as it contributes to our understanding of both the longevity and the
vulnerability of the communist party-state. Challenges to the communist project have
been a permanent feature of the Eastern European political landscape. Open resist-
ance took place in the immediate postwar period, when anti-communist groups and
393
armed partisans fought doggedly but suffered defeat at the hands of the state sup-
ported by the Soviet superpower. Within the Eastern European communist circles, the
first “revisionist” was Tito, who refused to bow to Stalin’s hegemony and put Yugoslavia
on a separate socialist path in 1948. Since then, myriad ideas and movements for
“revisionism,” reforms, or the outright rejection of the system have been present
through the region and have influenced the evolution of the communist system.
The majority of scholarship has concentrated on the most obvious political rebel-
lions: the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 in Czechoslovakia,
and the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980–81. The fall of communism in 1989,
in particular the trailblazing role of Hungary and Poland in negotiating a peaceful
path toward political pluralism, prompted many to examine more closely the rela-
tionship between the repeated political crises in the “northern tier” and the rise of
opposition movements.185 For Grzegorz Ekiert, these political crises are central to
understanding the diverse experience of the region, and eventually the different
patterns of decline and collapse. In all cases, political crises were watersheds that
contributed to the clear polarization between the party-state and society, but only in
the Polish case the regime failed to “restore their institutions and party-state domina-
tion and stabilize their rule after a major institutional breakdown.” 186 This eventually
led the Polish regime to surrender power “and opened wide the process of radical
political change for the entire region.”187
Indeed, the “Polish exceptionalism” in producing the only mass movement in
the Soviet bloc outside the party-state structures capable of effectively challenging
the s ystem has attracted a considerable scholarly and journalistic attention.188 Some
authors have pointed to the weak social basis of Polish communists and argued
that the societal “distrust and enmity” pushed the regime to “negotiate with soci-
ety through political liberalization and populist economic policies.”189 These moves
resulted in a more pluralist society than in any other country of the Eastern bloc,
and a flourishing of diverse forms of resistance. Thus a significant body of literature
has focused on the role of Catholicism and Polish nationalism in the formation and
success of Solidarity in 1980–81.190 Others have insisted, however, that Solidarity was a
diverse movement with multiple goals. Some emphasized the crucial role of left-wing
intellectuals within Solidarity and their long-term efforts to combat the regime with
its very own language of social justice and workers’ democracy. David Ost has built on
the concept of anti-politics, first developed by Hungarian writer and dissident Győrgy
Konrád, to explain the success of Polish Solidarity. The movement offered a new
strategy that redefined politics from a state-oriented activity to a society-oriented one:
So “anti-politics” is not just the necessary rejection of the state but also the
deliberate rejection of the state, the belief that what is essential to a just order
is not a benign government and good people in power, but rather a vital,
active, aware, and self-governing creative society.191
Anti-politics, and in particular, the emphasis on egalitarian values also allowed for a
fruitful alliance between workers and the intelligentsia, the two main groups working
for change in Polish society.
The sophisticated scholarship on Solidarity as a trade union and a powerful social
movement can be instructive for understanding the situation of communist regimes
394
at the time as well as for studying the internal dynamics of dissident movements more
broadly. Although Solidarity was unique in the Eastern bloc, the rise of the move-
ment was indicative of problems that other Eastern European countries faced: the
failure of debt-ridden consumer policies; the growing gap between party and society;
and finally, tensions between intellectuals and workers.192 In a similar way, studies
of Solidarity revealed frictions and fault lines within opposition movements that
would define the post-communist political and social scene. Apart from the complex
interaction between workers and intellectuals, scholars have illuminated the intri-
cate part that gender roles played in shaping the movement, and in foreshadowing
the post-communist gender dynamics. According to Shana Penn’s compelling book
Solidarity’s Secret, women played a central role in the strike of August 1980 in Gdańsk
that gave birth to Solidarity, and then in running underground political structures
after the movement was suppressed by the communist regime in December 1981.193
Female underground activists were more likely than their male counterparts to
escape the attention of the police, who tended to subscribe to the idea that women
were fundamentally “domestic” rather than political. While the ethos of “Polish
Mother” – a heroic figure of the Polish national mythology devoted to the family and
nation – was instrumental in facilitating female underground activism, it eventually
worked against women as they remained in the shadows of male leaders. Despite
their dissident credentials, women rarely assumed political posts after the collapse
of communism, while their stories were marginalized in Solidarity’s public narratives
that celebrated its male heroes, symbolized by the “mustachioed working-class cham-
pion Lech Wałęsa.”194 Some assert that the post-communist backlash against women
had its roots, in part, in the internal gender dynamics within dissident movements
that tend to perceive women in stereotypical terms, interpret human rights as based
on the male experience (i.e. the definition did not include reproductive rights), and
generally yearn for the return to “natural” gender hierarchies.195
In harmony with broadening the scope of scholarly analysis, recent works have
questioned the definition of resistance and have accounted for less spectacular forms
of rebellious behavior, one not limited to street demonstrations and strikes. What
kind of resistance was possible under communist rule? Workers’ absenteeism, listen-
ing to foreign radio, non-compliant style of dress, rock music, subversive “texts” in
official literature and art, and private conversations critical of the state – all became
legitimate elements of the oppositional repertoire. Such focus on everyday forms of
resistance allowed scholars to challenge the traditional view of the near absence of
“civil society” in Southeastern Europe. Questioning the notion implicit in most anal-
yses of the 1980s and 1990s that civil society and liberal democracy are equivalent,
scholars such as Maria Todorova suggested that debates over national symbols and
goals also demonstrated the existence of a vibrant communist “public sphere” in
places such as Bulgaria.196
What were the goals of the anti-communist opposition? Surprisingly, recent schol-
arship offers no definite answers. First, opposition movements comprised of unlikely
bedfellows. Thus “resisters” could include a range of actors: religious groups, mem-
bers of the postwar anti-communist resistance, radical nationalists, environmentalists,
artists, students, and former and contemporary communists. Within these circles,
many people shifted allegiances over time or belonged to several categories at the
same time. The alliances of the late 1980s were pragmatic and aimed at challenging
395
the party-state. They did not survive the post-1989 turn to democratic politics.197
Second, scholars have warned us against assuming that the oppositional movements
were necessarily driven by Western concepts of liberal democracy and capitalism.
Organized and unorganized groups often employed strategies and visions that did
not necessarily comply with contemporary Western practices. As Győrgy Konrád
explained in the early 1980s:
I am neither a communist nor an anticommunist, neither a capitalist nor an

anticapitalist; if one must absolutely be for and against something, I consider
a permanently open democracy to be the greatest good, and the ideological
war that constantly casts the shadows of atomic war on the wall to be the
greatest evil.198
Paul Blokker noted the prominence of republican (e.g. the commitment to civic
autonomy, self-government) and communal ideas in Eastern European dissident
movements. He argues that these cases “cannot be understood purely in terms of a
convergence towards a singular, Western, liberal-representative type of democracy.”199
According to David Ost, the traditional Western division of the political orientation
into “left” and “right” applied little to Eastern European dissidents:
What they coveted was the social space for a free public life. To the extent
that capitalism provided for that space, they were “for capitalism.” To the
extent that capitalism limited social space according to market constraints,
they were “against capitalism.” And the same goes for “socialism.” To the
extent that it undercut market constraints on freedom, great; to the extent
that it undercut democratic freedoms themselves, down with it.200
In a similar way, Barbara Falk has cautioned against attempts to rigidly categorize
dissidents as they themselves recognized that “none of the existing labels seemed to fit”
(original emphasis).201 According to Jonathan Bolton, dissidents were “a commu-
nity of remarkable tolerance and heterogeneity,” which refused “to dissolve own
internal tensions and paradoxes.”202 The friction between nationalists, religious
groups, reform communists, and liberal intellectuals quickly came to the surface in
the newly formed democracies after 1989, and often resulted in bitter political and
personal struggles.
Yet it is clear that Western-style capitalism was hardly a goal for most dissident move-
ments, and few individuals ever advocated a full-fledged free market economy prior
to 1989. One of the major disappointments of the post-communist era came from the
implementation of free-market reforms and the dismantling of the communist econ-
omy based on industrial production. These developments shocked the population,
now affected by high unemployment rates, inadequate wages, and the lack of social
security mechanisms that were the norm under communism. Meanwhile, corruption
among new political classes and fraudulent investment schemes contributed to the
growing gap between the new political and economic elites on the one hand, and
ordinary citizens on the other. Václav Havel and other former dissidents were deeply
disappointed with how Western capitalism worked. Even in Poland, the country that
underwent the most rapid “shock therapy” after 1989, the turn toward capitalism was
396
a relatively late development. Polish journalist and dissident Jan Skórzyński writes that
the opposition “had been convinced for a long time that the socialist economy needed
only to be reformed and that to change the system it was enough to introduce political
democracy.” Only when the Solidarity elite came to power in 1989 did it acknowledge
“that between socialism and capitalism there is no third way and that it is not possible
to build a modern democracy without a free-market economy.”203
Revisiting late communism

While recent scholarship on dissidence and resistance has enhanced our under-
standing of the vulnerability of the late communist system, it has also brought to
the foreground how much we do not know about the last 20 years of the Soviet
bloc. It is this lacuna that has inspired some scholars to revisit the decades of “late
socialism,” to rescue them from the “‘backshadowing’ – narrating past behavior in
light of later events.”204 For example, Paulina Bren’s work on Czechoslovakia after
1968 – the so-called period of “normalization” – has purposefully turned on its
head Václav Havel’s memorable image of the greengrocer, who added a political
slogan to the window display of vegetables. In an effort to explain citizens’ docility
after 1968, Havel’s influential essay “The Power of the Powerless” described a “post-
totalitarian” system in which ideology provided citizens who had lost faith with the
means of “living within the lie.”205 He urged individuals (the “powerless”) to throw
off the mask, reject the ritual, and assert their collective power by “living in truth.”
Due to the power of Havel’s arguments, the notion of mask-wearing and life in
duplicity has often served scholars to conceptualize everyday life under oppressive
societies.206 However, the binary opposition between “us” and “them”, truth and
lie, reality and mask, private and public, that, according to Bren, was not in fact
applicable to the lives of ordinary citizens. While dissidents and political elites did
have reasons to fear, ordinary Czechs accepted the political system of late socialism,
“found solace in the depoliticized space of their homes,” and simply wanted com-
fortable lives. In other words, they were not unlike their Western counterparts in
the 1980s, who focused on their jobs and consumer satisfaction and largely ignored
ongoing political processes.207
But was Czechoslovakia representative of the late communist mode of existence
in the Eastern bloc? Bren’s arguments would probably not easily relate to Polish or
Romanian experiences of the 1980s, where the decade was anything but “normal,”
albeit for different reasons. Neither does the metaphor of “normalization” account
for the contemporaneous rise of nationalist rhetoric and ethnic tensions in Bulgaria
and Yugoslavia in the 1980s. A careful look at the everyday preoccupations of citizens,
however, does dispense with the entrenched stereotype that the last decades of the
system were marked by immobility and stagnation.
Bren was influenced by Alexei Yurchak’s discussion of the sudden yet unsur-
prising collapse of a seemingly timeless Soviet system. Yurchak’s subjects are urban
members of the last Soviet generation, who employed the official language and ritual
of the regime while engaging in creative, spontaneous, and uncontrolled patterns
of behavior, in the process increasingly depriving the “hypernormalized” Soviet dis-
course of meaning. Gorbachev’s “perestroika” ruptured this cycle, Yurchak argues,
while reforms unraveled the ideological glue that held the late socialist state together.
397
The “entrepreneurial” spirit of the last Soviet generation that allowed young peo-
ple a modicum of personal autonomy under communism – of circumventing
“the authoritative rules, texts, and assignments” and giving them new meaning –
also carried over into the post-Soviet state and has affected its ability to function
properly.208 This dynamic is not dissimilar to what Gerald Creed called “conflicting
complementarity.” The concept seeks to capture “the constant tension generated by
socialism’s totalizing logic.” Having taken on responsibility for all aspects of society,
the communist state’s efforts to fix problems created new difficulties elsewhere that
required new solutions and hence further intervention in the system. Examining
the experience of Bulgarian villagers in the late socialist era, Creed convincingly
argues that “ironically, then, the attempt of the socialist state to control everything
did not lead to total state control,” as the totalitarian model would have it, but “to
an uncontrollable system more in keeping with models of chaos theory.” Thus com-
munist planners and leaders, “in their attempt to build communism . . . unwittingly
constructed the very social complexity that rendered central planning and control
impossible.”209 Intertwined in this “conflicting complementarity,” society and state,
citizens and officials, faced a challenging and tumultuous adaptation to the different
rules of market democracy.
Conclusion: the unfinished search for a usable past

More than two decades after the collapse of communism, Eastern Europe has changed
in ways that would be difficult to imagine for political leaders who redrew the map
of Europe after World War II. The Cold War is over. The Soviet Union first with-
drew from Eastern Europe, and then collapsed and transmuted into many new states,
former Soviet republics, including the largest and the most powerful – the Russian
Federation. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia vanished as well, their places taken by the
successor states of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia,
Slovenia, Kosovo, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. East and West Germany reunited.
Other countries retained their Cold War borders, but all Eastern European coun-
tries transformed their economies and institutions to embrace to varying degrees the
Western model of liberal democracy and free market. In 2004, the Czech Republic,
Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia (along with Malta, Cyprus, and the for-
mer Soviet Baltic republics) entered the European Union, followed by Bulgaria
and Romania in 2007. It is the process of European integration and the politics of the
EU that shapes Europe today, to a far greater extent than the old division into East
and West. The post-communist transformation brought another social and politi-
cal “revolution” to the region and to the everyday lives of its inhabitants. Today, the
majority of the former Soviet satellites are functioning democracies, and vital partic-
ipants in Europe’s economic, social, and cultural life, even if populist authoritarian
politicians have gained power in Hungary, Poland, and and popularity throughout
much of Europe.
But the transformation also means that Eastern Europe has to confront new prob-
lems associated with the transition to market economy and building democratic
structures, sometimes from scratch. The triumphalist accounts of 1989 soon gave way
to the growing body of scholarship that focused on economic, social, and political
problems ranging from unemployment and poverty to gender discrimination and
398
political corruption.210 The ambivalent nature of the post-communist transition has

shaped, to a large degree, the collective memories and scholarly interpretations of the
communist past. Communism collapsed, but Eastern European political leaders and
ordinary people have been reworking their relationship to the recent past. The search
for a usable communist past has functioned in diverse and often contradictory ways.
On the one hand, nostalgia for the communist era has been an important feature of
the post-communist landscape. Studies based on oral interviews and other testimonies
from the region point to the widespread positive memories of communism as a time
of social stability, economic security, and collective sociability.211 On the other hand,
“communism” has also functioned as a bogeyman and a popular call to arms by right-
wing parties to garner popular support. Across Eastern Europe, for example, feminists
and gay rights activists found themselves accused of “Bolshevism,” while the much
publicized unmasking of “agents” of the communist security apparatus became a com-
mon tool to ruin reputations and political careers. Not surprisingly, the political and
emotional uses of communism have affected scholarship within the region: analytical
distance has been difficult to achieve in the politicized context of the transition.
To what extent have all of us as scholars departed from the Cold War model of
Eastern Europe? Are we closer to understanding the communist period as a polit-
ical system and as lived experience? There is no doubt that new sources and new
approaches have revealed important mechanisms of the communist political machine
and the complexity of the human experience in postwar Eastern Europe. The depar-
ture from the limiting totalitarian framework of omnipresent state control was critical
to this endeavor. There is still much, however, that historians have to uncover. For
example, we still know relatively little about everyday life in specific countries of the
Eastern bloc. What were the experiences of particular social, religious, or ethnic
groups? The recent turn to transnationalism raises vital questions about the inter-
action of Eastern Europeans with the outside world. How did the Cold War affect
everyday life? How did people of the Soviet bloc perceive one another? Thus, the
memory of communism in the region, and the place of communism in the broader
scholarship on Eastern Europe, remain a work in progress.
Notes
1 In this Chapter, we use the term “communism” rather than “socialism” or “state socialism”
to refer to the political and economic system of Cold War Eastern Europe based on Marxist-
Leninist principles. We follow the rationale outlined by Andrew Roberts, “The State of
Socialism: A Note on Terminology,” Slavic Review 63, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 349–366.
2 An important distinction could be made between American and Western European tra-
jectories regarding the development of scholarship about Eastern Europe. In Western
Europe, scholarly and popular interest in Eastern Europe was first stimulated by the rise
of nation-states after 1918 and efforts of Eastern European émigrés to draw attention to
the region. For example, the University College London School of Slavonic and Eastern
European Studies, the largest center for Eastern European and Russian studies in the UK,
was inaugurated in 1915 by Tomaš Masaryk, the future President of Czechoslovakia. Still
the Cold War was critical in sustaining and accelerating the scholarship on Eastern Europe
on both sides of the Atlantic. American institutions that emerged in the wake of the Cold
War included the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS);
the Wilson Center in Washington DC; and the Davis Center at Harvard University. These
were accompanied by the creation of new book series and academic journals such as
Problems of Communism and The Journal of Cold War Studies.
399
3 Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1956). A different interpretation of totalitarianism was put
forward by Hannah Arendt in the early 1950s, but it did not become influential in the his-
torical field until later. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Co., 1951).
4 See, for example, Charles Gati, ed., The Politics of Modernization in Eastern Europe:
Testing the Soviet Model (New York: Praeger, 1974); Mark Field, ed., Social Consequences of
Modernization in Communist Societies (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1976); Trond Gilberg, Modernization in Romania since World War II (New York: Praeger,
1975); and “Special Issue: Social Change in Socialist Societies,” Social Forces 57, no. 2
(December 1978): 361–546; Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, rev.
ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).
5 See, for example, James Brown, Eastern Europe and Communist Rule (Durham, NC: Duke
6 Charles King, Extreme Politics: Nationalism, Violence, and the End of Eastern Europe (Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 83.
7 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Scribner, 1989), 105.
8 Robert Burrowes, “Totalitarianism: The Revised Standard Version,” World Politics 21,
no. 2 (January 1969): 272–294. For more recent uses of the concept of totalitarianism
to account for the role of ideology and to assess the relationship between Stalinism and
other periods in communist history see, for example, Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the
Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997); Leszek Kołakowski, “Stalinism versus Marxism? Marxist
Roots of Stalinism,” in Robert Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 283–298. The seminal text of the revision-
ist school of Soviet history is Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), first published in 1982. On the revisionist impact, see
Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (December
2007): 77–91.
9 See, for example, John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997); Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism:
Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA:
10 See, for example, Roman David, Lustration and Transitional Justice: Personnel Systems in the
Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
11 See, for example, Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in
Comparison (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Michael Geyer and
Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Another strand of scholarship has focused on spe-
cific “modern” trends and policies in a comparative perspective that includes fascist, Nazi,
communist, and democratic regimes. See, for example, Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping
the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework
12 Astrid Hedin, “Stalinism as a Civilization: New Perspectives on Communist Regimes,”
Political Studies Review 2, no. 2 (2004): 166–184.
13 Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia (Berkeley, CA: Free Press,
1995); Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997). See also Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary
under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
14 See, for example, Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the
USSR, 1935–1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Sheila Fitzpatrick,
Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996); Lynne Viola, ed., Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power
and Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). For a criti-
cal assessment of these conceptual approaches see Stephen Kotkin, “1991 and the Russian
400
Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks,” Journal of Modern

History 70, no. 2 (June 1998): 384–425; and Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Retrospect:
A Personal View,” Slavic Review 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 682–704.
15 Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 114.
16 See, for example, Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution (New York: Praeger,
1951); Hugh Seton-Watson, The Pattern of Communist Revolution: A Historical Analysis
(London: Methuen, 1953); and Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, 3–64.
17 Melvyn Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?” American Historical Review 104,
no. 2 (April 1999): 501–524. For a critical assessment of historical perspectives on the Cold
War within the region see Michal Kopeček, “In search of ‘National Memory:’ The Politics
of History, Nostalgia and the Historiography of Communism in the Czech Republic and
East Central Europe,” in Michal Kopeček, ed., Past in the Making: Recent History Revisions and
Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989 (Budapest: Central European University
Press, 2007), 76–78; and Sorin Antohi, Balázs Trencsényi, and Péter Apor, eds., Narratives
Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (New York: Central European
18 Jan Gross, “Social Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of the Imposition of
Communist Regimes in East Central Europe,” East European Politics & Societies 3, no. 2
(1989): 198–214; and Jan Gross, “War as Revolution,” in Norman Naimark and Leonid
Gibianskii, eds., The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 17–34. For expanded and updated arguments on
the continuity between war-time and postwar developments in Eastern Europe see Bradley
Abrams, “The Second World War and the East European Revolution,” East European Politics
& Societies 13, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 623–664.
19 See, for example, Jan Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western
Ukraine and Western Belorussia, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002);
and Katherine Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II
(Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2002).
20 Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Books, 2009);
and Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books,
2010).
21 On Poland’s human losses, see Mateusz Gniazdowski, “Losses Inflicted on Poland by
Germany during World War II: Assessments and Estimates – an Outline,” The Polish
Quarterly of International Affairs no. 1 (2007): 94–126.
22 John Lampe, Balkans into Southeastern Europe: A Century of War and Transition (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 180. For a detailed discussion see Jozo Tomasevich, War and
Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2001); and Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation,
1941–1944 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
23 Alfred Rieber, “Popular Democracy: An Illusion?” in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., Stalinism
Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe (Budapest: Central
European University Press, 2009), 123.
24 Mark Kramer, “Stalin, Soviet Policy and Consolidation o f Soviet Bloc,” in Tismaneanu, ed.,
Stalinism Revisited, 71.
25 Vesselin Dimitrov, Stalin’s Cold War: Soviet Foreign Policy, Democracy and Communism in Bulgaria,
1941–48 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 42–68; and Robert Lee Wolff, The Balkans
in Our Time, rev. ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1974), 248–264.
26 Leffler, “The Cold War,” 518.
27 Eric Roman, Hungary and the Victor Powers, 1945–1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996);
Peter Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist Regime in
Hungary, 1944–1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Charles Gati, Hungary
and the Soviet Bloc (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985); Michael Boll, Cold War
in the Balkans: American Foreign Policy and the Emergence of Communist Bulgaria, 1943–1947
(Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), esp. 177–192.
28 Scott Parrish, “The Marshall Plan, Soviet-American Relations, and the Division of
Europe,” in Naimark and Gibianski, eds., The Establishment of Communist Regimes, 267–290;
401
Geoffrey Roberts, “Moscow and the Marshall Plan: Politics, Ideology, and the Onset of
the Cold War, 1947,” Europe-Asia Studies 46, no. 8 (1994): 1371–1386.
29 Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation,
1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995), 467.
30 Norman Naimark and Leonid Gibianski, “Introduction,” in The Establishment of Communist
Regimes, 9.
31 See, for example, Carol Lilly, Power and Persuasion: Ideology and Rhetoric in Communist
Yugoslavia, 1944–1953 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001); Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis
to the Soviets; Balázs Apor, Péter Apor, and E.A. Rees, eds., The Sovietization of Eastern Europe:
New Perspectives on the Postwar Period (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2008);
Mark Pittaway, Eastern Europe 1939–2000 (London: Bloomsbury, 2004); Bradley Abrams,
The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Emily Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–194: Muslims, Christians, and
Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); John Connelly, Captive
University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and György Péteri, Academia
and State Socialism: Essays on the Political History of Academic Life in Post-1945 Hungary and
Eastern Europe (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs; Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic
Research and Publications, 1998).
32 Jerzy Tomaszewski, The Socialist Regimes of East Central Europe: Their Establishment and
Consolidation, 1944–67, trans. Jolanta Krauze (London: Routledge, 1989), 282–283; and
Abrams, “The Second World War and the East European Revolution”; Wolff, The Balkans
in Our Time, 323–352; Melissa Bokovoy, Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the
Yugoslav Countryside, 1941–1953 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); and
Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
33 Pittaway, Eastern Europe, 33.
34 Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
35 Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 131.
36 Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc.
37 See, for example, Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish
Society, 1949–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Mark Pittaway, The Workers’
State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958 (Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism, and
Industrialization in Postwar Poland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
38 George Hodos, Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, 1948–1954 (New York: Praeger,
1987); and Ivo Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism
39 Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, 95. On popular reception of the Slansky trial and antisemitic
sentiments, see Kevin McDermott, “A ‘Polyphony of Voices’? Czech Popular Opinion and
the Slánský Affair,” Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 850–859.
40 Pătrăşcanu was tried and executed shortly after Stalin’s death; Pauker was forced out of power.
Geoffrey Swain and Nigel Swain, Eastern Europe since 1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009), 73–76. For further discussion see Hodos, Show Trials; Dennis Deletant, Communist Terror
in Romania: Gheorghiu-Dej and the Police State, 1948–1965 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999);
and Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley: California
University Press, 2001). In contrast, Vladimir Tismaneanu argues that Pauker was purged in
consultation with Stalin. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History
of Communism in Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 132.
41 See Lukasz Kaminski, “Stalinism in Poland, 1944–1956,” in Kevin McDermott and Matthew
Stibbe, eds., Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe: Elite Purges and Mass Repression (Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 2012). The resistance to postwar purges might have
been related to the extensive purge of Polish communists and the dissolution by Stalin of
the Polish Communist Party in the late 1930s.
402
42 Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, 91.

43 Liesbeth van de Grift, Securing the Communist State: The Reconstruction of Coercive Institutions
in the Soviet Zone of Germany and Romania, 1944–1948 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2012).
44 Ibid., 33–60, 135.
45 Cătalin Augustin Stoica, “One Step Back, Two Steps Forward: Institutionalizing the
Party-State and Collective Property in Two Romanian Villages (Galaţi Region),” in
Constantin Iordachi and Dorin Dobrincu, eds., Transforming Peasants, Property and Power:
The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1949–1962 (New York: Central European
University Press, 2009), 423–454, esp. 428.
46 Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 234.
47 Ibid., 236.
48 See, for example, Christian Ostermann, Uprising in East Germany 1953: The Cold War, the
German Question, and the First Major Upheaval Behind the Iron Curtain (Budapest: Central
European University Press, 2001); Csaba Békés, Malcolm Byrne, and János Rainer, eds.,
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents (Budapest: Central European
University Press, 2002); and Paweł Machcewicz, Rebellious Satellite: Poland 1956 (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
49 Jane Leftwich Curry, Poland’s Journalists: Professionalism and Politics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths,
eds., Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).
50 Richard Staar, Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 4th ed. (Stanford, CA: Hoover
Institution Press, 1982).
51 See, for example, Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania,
Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped
Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Theodora Dragostinova, Between Two
Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900–1949 (Ithaca,
52 Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx Versus Friedrich List (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 232.
53 Paul Lendvai, Eagles in Cobwebs: Nationalism and Communism in the Balkans (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1969); Robert King, Minorities under Communism: Nationalities as
a Source of Tension among Balkan Communist States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1973); Hugh Seton-Watson, The “Sick Heart” of Modern Europe: The Problem of the
Danubian Lands (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975); and Brown, Eastern
Europe and Communist Rule, in particular, 415–444. For an overview of the scholarship
on nationalism and communism see Martin Mevius, “Reappraising Communism and
Nationalism,” Nationalities Papers 37, no. 4 (July 2009): 377–400. For a recent analysis
of Soviet-Yugoslav relations see Svetozar Rajak, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the
Early Cold War: Reconciliation, Comradeship, Confrontation, 1953–1957 (Milton Park, UK:
Routledge, 2011).
54 Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, eds., Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central
Europe, 1944–1948 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Alfred Rieber, ed., Forced
Migration in Central and Eastern Europe 1939–1950 (London: F. Cass, 2000); Jessica Reinisch
and Elizabeth White, eds., The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsions and
Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–49 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Gregor
Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions (Princeton,
55 Philipp Ther, “A Century of Forced Migration: The Origins and Consequences of Ethnic
Cleansing,” in Redrawing Nations, 52–62; Bokovoy, Peasants and Partisans.
56 Michael Fleming, Communism, Nationalism, and Ethnicity in Poland, 1944–1950 (London:
57 Rogers Brubaker et al., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); and László Kürti, The Remote Borderland: Tran
sylvania in the Hungarian Imagination (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001).
403
Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Kristen Ghodsee, Muslim
Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), esp. 35–85.
59 See, for example, Mikołaj Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and
Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012); Maria
Bucur, Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), esp. 145–193; Jan Behrends, “Nation and Empire:
Dilemmas of Legitimacy during Stalinism in Poland (1941–1956),” Nationalities Papers 37,
no. 4 (July 2009): 443–466; Yannis Sygkelos, “The National Discourse of the Bulgarian
Communist Party on National Anniversaries and Commemorations (1944–1948),”
Nationalities Papers 37, no. 4 (July 2009): 425–442; and Sygkelos, Nationalism from the Left:
The Bulgarian Communist Party during the Second World War and the Early Post-War Years
(Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 2011); Dragos Petrescu, “Building the Nation,
Instrumentalizing Nationalism: Revisiting Romanian National-Communism, 1956–1989,”
Nationalities Papers 37, no. 4 (July 2009): 523–544; Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and
Bernd Fischer, eds., Albanian Identities: Myth and History (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2002); John Lampe and Mark Mazower, eds., Ideologies and National Identities: The
Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press,
2004); Maria Todorova, Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making
of Bulgaria’s National Hero (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009); John
Rodden, Textbook Reds: Schoolbooks, Ideology, and Eastern German Identity (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); and Alan Nothnagle, Building the East German
Myth: Historical Mythology and Youth Propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1989
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
60 Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s
Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
61 Dariusz Stola, “Fighting against the Shadows: The Anti-Zionist Campaign of 1968,” in
Robert Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005), 284–300; and Joanna Beata Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The
Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
62 Walter Kemp, Nationalism and Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: A Basic
Contradiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 128. See also Anna Saunders, Honecker’s
Children: Youth and Patriotism in Eastern Germany, 1979–2002 (Manchester, UK: Manchester
63 For recent scholarship on internationalism and cooperation in communist Eastern Europe,
see Austin Jersild, “The Soviet State as Imperial Scavenger: ‘Catch up and Surpass’ in the
Transnational Socialist Bloc, 1950–1960,” American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (February 2011):
109–132. The author, however, does not examine the period of “late communism,” which saw
the apex of nationalist revival.
64 Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall
of State Socialism in Poland (University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1994), 267;
Nick Miller, The Nonconformists: Culture, Politics and Nationalism in a Serbian Intellectual Circle,
1944–1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007); and Jasna Dragović-Soso,
“Saviors of the Nation”: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).
65 Brubaker, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity.
66 Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (San Diego: A Harvest/
HBJ Book, 1985), 31.
67 See, for example, Ekaterina Nikova, “Bulgarian Stalinism Revisited,” in Tismaneanu, ed.,
Stalinism Revisited, 289–292; Benjamin Frommer, “Retribution as Legitimation: The Uses
of Political Justice in Postwar Czechoslovakia,” Contemporary European History 13, no. 4
(November 2004): 477–492; László Karsai, “The People’s Courts and Revolutionary Justice
in Hungary,” in István Deák, Jan Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in
Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath, 1939–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2000), 233–251.
404
68 Kenney, Rebuilding Poland, esp. 2–3; Pittaway, Eastern Europe.

69 Eric Hanley, “A Party of Workers or a Party of Intellectuals? Recruitment into Eastern
European Communist Parties, 1845–1989,” Social Forces 81, no. 4 (June 2003): 1073–1105.
70 See, for example, John Connelly, Captive University; and Tismaneanu, Stalinism Revisited.
71 See, for example, Pittaway, The Workers’ State; Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industria
lization; and Lynne Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary
72 Kenney, Rebuilding Poland; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia.
73 Mark Pittaway, “Stalinism, Working-Class Housing and Individual Autonomy,” in Susan
Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War
Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 60. See also David Kideckel, The Solitude of Collectivism:
Romanian Villagers to the Revolution and Beyond (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
74 On the complex relationship between the communist state and Eastern European intel-
lectuals, see, for example, Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New
York: Vintage International, 1990); Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State
Socialism (New York: The Noonday Press, 1989); Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw
Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2009); and Irina Gigova, “Writers of the Nation: Intellectual Identity in Bulgaria, 1939–
1953” (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005).
75 Pittaway, Eastern Europe, 57.
76 Connelly, Captive University, 5. See also Aleksandra Witczak-Haugstad, “A Discipline
Divided: Polish Economists and the Communist Regime, 1945–1960” (PhD dissertation,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, 2008).
77 Kenney, Rebuilding Poland; Katherine Lebow, “Public Works, Private Lives: Youth Brigades
in Nowa Huta in the 1950s,” Contemporary European History 10, no. 2 (2001): 199–219;
Pittaway, The Workers’ State.
78 Djilas, The New Class, 3. According to Djilas, this new class could be traced back to Lenin
and his concept of “professional revolutionaries.” Djilas, The New Class, 29.
79 György Péteri, “Nomenklatura with Smoking Guns: Hunting in Communist Hungary’s
Party-State Elite,” in David Crowley and Susan Reid, eds., Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and
Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 311–343,
quotation 334.
80 Djilas, The New Class, 35.
81 Patrick Patterson, Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), esp. 294–319; and Paulina Bren and Mary
Neuburger, “Introduction,” in Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, eds., Communism
Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2012), 3–25, esp. 22.
82 For works that employ the concept of alternative modernity under socialism see Katherine
Pence and Paul Betts, eds., Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008); and Lewis Siegelbaum, ed., The Socialist
Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
83 Patterson, Bought and Sold, 294.
84 Richard Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century and After, 2nd ed. (London:
85 Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” American Historical
Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 399–425.
86 Malgorzata Mazurek and Matthew Hilton, “Consumerism, Solidarity and Communism:
Consumer Protection and the Consumer Movement in Poland,” Journal of Contemporary
History 42, no. 2 (2007): 315–343, esp. 318.
87 See, for example, Breda Luthar, “Remembering Socialism: On Desire, Consumption, and
Surveillance,” Journal of Consumer Culture 6, no. 2 (2006): 229–258, esp. 238; and Malgorzata
Mazurek, “Keeping It Close to Home: Resourcefulness and Scarcity in Late Socialist and
Postsocialist Poland,” in Communism Unwrapped, 298–320.
88 See, for example, Libora Oates-Indruchová, “The Beauty and the Loser: Cultural
Representations of Gender in Late State Socialism,” Signs 37, no. 2 (2011): 358–383;
405
and Eva Fodor, Working Difference: Women’s Working Lives in Hungary and Austria, 1945 to
1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). For a compelling analysis of continuities
in women’s political status and activism in interwar and postwar Czechoslovakia see Melissa
Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia,
1918–1950 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).
89 See, for example, Barbara Wolfe Jancar, Women under Communism (Baltimore, MD:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Barbara Łobodzińska, Family, Women, and
Employment in Central-Eastern Europe (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995); Hilda Scott,
Does Socialism Liberate Women? Experiences from Eastern Europe (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1974); Sharon Wolchik and Alfred Meyer, eds., Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985); and Tova Yedlin, ed., Women in Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1980).
90 Recent approaches to gender history in postwar Eastern Europe have been featured in
Shana Penn and Jill Massino, eds., Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern
and Central Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2009).
91 New work on the early Soviet Union has critically examined the more traditional view of
Stalinism as a “Great Retreat” on the Woman Question. See, for example, Elena Shulman,
Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of
Violence on the Eastern Front (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
92 See, for example, Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation
of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–1964 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002); Joanna Goven, “Gender and Modernism in a Stalinist State,”
Social Politics 9, no. 1 (2002): 3–28; and Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization,
esp. ch. 5 and 6.
93 After 1945, most Eastern European states retained their interwar anti-abortion laws. In
light of war-time and postwar rape, however, the procedure was often granted to women
in East Germany in the second half of the 1940s. See Donna Harsch, Revenge of the
Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 24. During the Stalinist era, in an effort to com-
ply with the contemporary Soviet legislation, Eastern European regimes restricted the
existing anti-abortion laws and limited the access to abortion only to narrowly defined
medical and eugenic reasons. Most states liberalized the Stalinist anti-abortion law in the
mid-1950s. In most cases, in addition to medical circumstances, abortion became avail-
able to women on broadly defined economic and social grounds. Reproductive policies,
however, were not uniform. For example, East German leaders gradually liberalized the
Stalinist law only in 1965 and finally legalized abortion on request in 1972. Romanian
leader Nicolae Ceauşescu banned the procedure again in 1966. For further discussion
see Henry David and Robert McIntyre, Reproductive Behavior: Central and Eastern European
Experiences (New York: Springer, 1981); Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling
Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and
Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
94 Alena Heitlinger, Reproduction, Medicine, and the Socialist State (London: Macmillan Press,
1987); and Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization, esp. 189–202.
95 Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity.
96 See, for example, Djurdja Bartlett, Fashion East: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism
(Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Malgorzata Fidelis, “Are You a Modern Girl? Consumer
Culture and Young Women in 1960s Poland,” in Gender Politics and Everyday Life,
171–184; Basia Nowak, “’Where Do You Think I Learned How to Style My Own Hair?’
Gender and Everyday Life of Women Activists in Poland’s League of Women,” in Gender
Politics and Everyday Life, 45–58; Wendy Bracewell, “Eating Up Yugoslavia: Cookbooks and
Consumption in Socialist Yugoslavia,” in Communism Unwrapped, 169–196; and Jill Massino,
“From Black Caviar to Blackouts: Gender, Consumption, and Lifestyle in Ceauşescu’s
Romania,” in Communism Unwrapped, 226–249.
97 Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance.”
406
98 For example, Czech television series of the 1970s such as The Woman behind the Counter
celebrated traditional gender roles and the life that focused on the family. The series’
heroine, Anna Holubová, functioned as “the superwoman of the late communist era,”
who successfully combined her demanding family role as a single mother with her work as
a sales clerk at one of Prague’s largest supermarkets. Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His
TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2010), 165.
99 Ibid., 170.
100 See, for example, Tanya Renne, ed., Ana’s Land: Sisterhood in Eastern Europe (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1996); Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and
Women’s Movements in East Central Europe (New York: Verso, 1993); and Nanette Funk and
Magda Mueller, eds., Gender Politics and Post-communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and
the Former Soviet Union (New York: Routledge, 1993).
101 Kristen Ghodsee, The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
102 See, for example, Magdalena Grabowska, “Bringing the Second World In: Conservative
Revolution(s), Socialist Legacies, and Transnational Silences in the Trajectories of Polish
Feminism,” Signs 37, no. 2 (2011): 385–411; and Shana Penn, Solidarity’s Secret: The Women
Who Defeated Communism in Poland (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
103 Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (New York: Columbia University Press,
2000).
104 David Crowley and Susan Reid, “Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern
Bloc,” in David Crowley and Susan Reid, eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the
Eastern Bloc (New York: Berg, 2002), 1–22.
105 Mariusz Czepczynski, Cultural Landscapes of Post-socialist Cities: Representation of Power and
Needs (Abingdon, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 107.
106 For longue durée histories of Eastern European cities see, for example, David Crowley,
Warsaw (London: Reaktion Books, 2004); Cynthia Paces, Prague Panoramas: National Memory
and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2009); Celia Hawkesworth, Zagreb: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008); Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); David Norris, Belgrade: A Cultural and
Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); John Czaplicka, L’viv: A City
in the Crosscurrents of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard
University, 2005); and John Czaplicka and Blair Ruble, eds., Composing Urban History and
the Constitution of Civic Identities (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003).
On post-communist spaces see Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe, and Iván Szelényi, eds.,
Cities after Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1996); special issue “Post-Socialist Urban Transition in Eastern and
Central Europe,” GeoJournal 49, no. 1 (1999); György Enyedi, ed., Social Change and Urban
Restructuring in Central Europe (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1998); Judit Bodnár, Fin de
Millénaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of Urban Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2001); F.E. Ian Hamilton, Kaliopa Dimitrovska Andrews, and Nataša Pichler-Mihailović,
eds., Transformation of Cities in Central and Eastern Europe: Towards Globalization (New York:
United Nations University, 2005); Kiril Stanilov, ed., The Post-Socialist City: Urban Form
and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe after Socialism (Dordrecht: Spinger,
2007); Sasha Tsenkova and Zorica Nedović-Budić, eds., The Urban Mosaic of Post-Socialist
Europe: Space, Institutions and Policy (Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag, 2006); and Sonia Hirt, Iron
Curtain: Gates, Suburbs, and Privatization of Space in the Post-Socialist City (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley
& Sons, 2012).
107 Richard French and F.E. Ian Hamilton, eds., The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy
(Chichester & New York: Wiley, 1979), esp. Hamilton’s essays “Urbanizations in Socialist
Eastern Europe,” 167–193, and “Spatial Structure in East European Cities,” 195–261.
108 See French and Hamilton, The Socialist City; David Smith, “The Socialist City,” in Cities After
Socialism, 70–99; Czepczynski, Cultural Landscapes, 73–81; and Anders Åman, Architecture
and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
407
109 Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia,

1945–1960 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).
110 Tsenkova and Nedović-Budić, The Urban Mosaic of Post-Socialist Europe, 9–10.
111 Judit Bodnár identifies three different approaches to this question in Fin de Millénaire
Budapest, 22–43.
112 Hamilton, Andrews, and Pichler-Mihailović, Transformation of Cities in Central and Eastern
Europe. For the widely cast net of architectural planning in the postwar decades, see
Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity.
113 Kenney, Rebuilding Poland; Eagle Glassheim, “Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, and
Environmental Devastation in Czechoslovakia’s Borderlands, 1945–1989,” Journal of
Modern History 78, no. 1 (March, 2006): 65–92.
114 Bolesław Dománski, Industrial Control over the Socialist Town: Benevolence or Exploitation
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997); and Kacper Pobłocki, “‘Knife in the Water’: The Struggle
over Collective Consumption in Urbanizing Poland,” in Communism Unwrapped, 68–86.
115 Iván Szelényi, Urban Inequalities under State Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1983).
116 Ghodsee, Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe, 43–65.
117 Joel Halpern and David Kideckel, “Anthropology of Eastern Europe,” Annual Review of
Anthropology 12 (1983): 377–402, esp. 391–392; French and Hamilton, The Socialist City.
118 Crowley and Reid, “Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc,” in Socialist Spaces, 4.
119 Halpern and Kideckel, “Anthropology of Eastern Europe,” 394.
120 Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian
Agriculture, 1949–1962 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 3–4.
121 Martha Lampland, The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4.
122 Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (New York: Penguin Books,
2001).
123 Ibid.
124 Gerald Creed, Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a
Bulgarian Village (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 73–79; and
Brown, Eastern Europe and Communist Rule, 135 and 184–218.
125 Iván Szélenyi et al., Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
126 See Diane Koenker and Anne Gorsuch, eds., Turizm: The Russian and East European
Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Hannes
Grandits and Karin Taylor, eds., Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010); Ghodsee, The Red Riviera; and
Cristofer Scarboro, The Late Socialist Good Life in Bulgaria: Meaning and Living in a Permanent
Present Tense (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2012), 117–172.
127 Scarboro, The Late Socialist Good Life, 117.
128 Igor Duda, “Adriatic for All: Summer Holidays in Croatia,” in Breda Luthar and
Maruša Pušnik, eds., Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia
(Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2010), 290.
129 See “Luring the Capitalists Eastward,” Time (September 5, 1969), 56. Grandits and Taylor,
Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side; and Ghodsee, The Red Riviera.
130 Djilas, The New Class, 202.
131 Gabriel Bar-Haim, “Action and Heroes: The Meaning of Western Pop Information for
Eastern European Youth,” The British Journal of Sociology 40, no. 1 (March 1989): 22–45,
esp. 22. See also Bar-Haim, “East European Youth Culture: The Westernization of a Social
Movement,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1988):
45–65. On young people in earlier periods, including their moderate fascination with the
West, see Paul Neuburg, The Hero’s Children: The Post-War Generation in Eastern Europe (New
York: William Morrow and Company, 1973); and Joseph Fishman, Revolution and Tradition
in People’s Poland: Education and Socialization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1972).
132 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
408
133 György Péteri, “Nylon Curtain – Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in the
Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe,” Slavonica 10, no. 2
(November 2004): 113–123, esp. 115.
134 David Crowley and Susan Reid, “Introduction,” in Style and Socialism, 12. See also Anne
Gorsuch and Diane Koenker, “Introduction,” in Turizm, 1–14.
135 For recent works on Eastern European images of the West see, for example, György Péteri,
ed., Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh
University Press, 2010); Wendy Bracewell, ed., Orientations: An Anthology of European Travel
Writing on Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009); Wendy Bracewell
and Alex Drace-Francis, eds., Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European
Travel Writing on Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008); and Jerzy
Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999).
136 See, for example, S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union,
1917–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Timothy Ryback, Rock around the
Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990); David Crowley, “Warsaw’s Shops, Stalinism and the Thaw,” in Style
and Socialism, 25–47.
137 Malgorzata Fidelis, “The Other Marxists: Making Sense of International Student Revolts in
Poland in the Global Sixties,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa Forschung 62 (2013): 441–443.
138 Paulina Bren, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All?
Czechoslovak Normalization and Its (Dis)Contents,” in Imagining the West, 172–193,
quotation, 185.
139 György Péteri, “Introduction: The Oblique Coordinate Systems of Modern Identity,” in
Imagining the West, 9.
140 Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” The New York Review of Books (April 26,
1984): 33–38; Kundera, “Reflections: Die Weltliteratur,” The New Yorker (January 8, 2007):
28–35; and Timothy Garton Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist?” The New York Review of Books
(October 9, 1990): 45–52. See also Karen Gammelgaard, “Were the Czechs More Western
than Slavic? Nineteenth-Century Travel Literature from Russia by Disillusioned Czechs,”
in Imagining the West, 13–35.
141 For a critical analysis of Czechoslovak self-promotion as a particularly democratic and
European nation see Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe
142 See, for example, Anne Gorsuch, “From Iron Curtain to Silver Screen: Imagining the West
in the Khrushchev Era,” in Imagining the West, 153–171; Fidelis, “Are you a Modern Girl?”;
and Karin Taylor, Let’s Twist Again: Youth and Leisure in Socialist Bulgaria (Vienna: LIT,
2006), esp. 71. Yugoslavia was exceptional in the extent to which ordinary citizens could
engage in Western European cultural events such as Eurovision. See, for example, Dean
Vuletić, “European Sounds, Yugoslav Visions: Performing Yugoslavia at the Eurovision
Song Contest,” in Remembering Utopia, 121–144. On foreign broadcasting, see A. Ross
Johnson and R. Eugene Parta, eds., Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe: A Collection of Studies and Documents (Budapest: Central European University
Press, 2010).
143 David Crowley, “Paris or Moscow? Warsaw Architects and the Image of the Modern City in
the 1950s,” in Imagining the West, 125; and Crowley and Reid, “Introduction,” in Style and
Socialism, 6–7.
144 See, for example, Sergei Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology
in Soviet Dnepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2010), 1; and William Risch, The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv
145 Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton, “Introduction,” in Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton,
eds., Between the Avant-garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the
Present (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), 1–8; Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., Promises of 1968:
Crisis, Illusion, Utopia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011); Annette
Vowinckel, Marcus Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Cold War Cultures: Perspectives
409
on Eastern and Western European Societies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012); and Padraic
Kenney and Gerd Rainer-Horn, eds., Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968,
1989 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004).
146 Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
147 Adam Michnik, Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives, edited by Irena
Grudzińska Gross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 46.
148 Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), esp. 195–248.
149 Robert Brier, “Adam Michnik’s Understanding of Totalitarianism and the West European
Left: A Historical and Transnational Approach to Dissident Political Thought,” East
European Politics & Societies 25, no. 2 (May 2011): 197–218; Charles Sabatos, “Shifting
Contexts: The Boundaries of Milan Kundera’s Central Europe,” in Brian James Baer, ed.,
Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011), 19–32.
150 Ivan Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1989: A Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Verdery, What Was Socialism? For an influ-
ential analysis of the communist economic system see János Kornai, The Socialist System: The
Political Economy of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
151 Verdery, What Was Socialism, 31.
152 Ibid., 32. See also Ivan Berend, From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union: The Economic
and Social Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe since 1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge
153 György Péteri, “Sites of Convergence: The USSR and Communist Eastern Europe at
International Fairs Abroad and at Home,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 1 ( January
2012): 3–12, and other articles in this thematic issue.
154 Mary Neuburger, Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2013), esp. 199–228.
155 Travel was more widely available to artistic, scientific, and intellectual elites. On travel
restrictions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Neuberg, The Hero’s Children, 88–89,
114–119.
156 Patrick Patterson, “Dangerous Liaisons: Soviet-Bloc Tourists and the Temptations of the
Yugoslav Good Life in the 1960s and 1970s,” in Philip Scranton and Janet Davidson, eds.,
The Business of Tourism: Place, Faith, and History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007), 208.
157 Quoted in Ghodsee, The Red Riviera, 100.
158 Luthar and Pušnik, Remembering Utopia; Patterson, Bought and Sold; and Alenka Švab
“Consuming Western Images of Well-Being – Shopping Tourism in Socialist Slovenia,”
Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2002): 63–79.
159 Luthar, “Remembering Socialism,” 230.
160 See, for example, Mark Keck-Szajbel, “Shop around the Bloc: Trade Tourism and Its
Discontents on the German-Polish Border,” in Communism Unwrapped, 374–392.
161 See, for example, Slavenka Draculić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New
York: HarperPerennial, 1993).
162 Bren and Neuburger, “Introduction,” in Communism Unwrapped, 5.
163 Ibid. For the Soviet Union, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More:
The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
164 Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965–1990
(New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 145; and Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter
77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2012). On attitudes in the 1970s, see Robin Okey, The Demise of
Communist Eastern Europe: 1989 in Context (London: Arnold, 2004), 29–30.
165 György Péteri, “Introduction,” in Imagining the West, 12.
166 Ibid., 11.
167 Jonathan Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3.
410
168 Seymour Martin Lipset and Gyorgy Bence, “Anticipations of the Failure of Communism,”
Theory and Society 23, no. 2, Special Issue on the Theoretical Implications of the Demise of
State Socialism (April 1994): 169–210.
169 For a review of publications before 1989, see Barbara Falk, “Resistance and Dissent in
Central and Eastern Europe: An Emerging Historiography,” East European Politics &
Societies 25, no. 2 (May 2011): 322–330.
170 Brier, “Michnik, Totalitarianism and the West European Left,” 214; Francis Fukuyama,
“The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18.
171 For an impassioned defense of regional expertise, see Valerie Bunce, “Should
Transitologists Be Grounded?” Slavic Review 54, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 111–127; and Bunce,
Subversive Institutions.
172 Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds., Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of
1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000). For addi-
tional perspectives, see “The EEPS Roundtable: The Revolutions of 1989: Lessons of the
First Post-Communist Decade,” East European Politics & Societies 13, no. 2 (Spring 1999):
231–363.
173 Michael Kennedy, “Contingencies and the Alternatives of 1989: Toward a Theory and
Practice of Negotiating Revolution,” East European Politics & Societies 13, no. 2 (Spring
1999): 302; Norman Naimark, “Ten Years After: Perspectives on 1989,” East European
Politics & Societies 13, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 326.
174 Kennedy, “Contingencies,” 293.
175 Jacques Rupnik, “On Two Models of Exit from Communism,” in Between Past and Future,
14–24.
176 Examples of books that employ this division include Swain and Swain, Eastern Europe Since
1945, and Okey, The Demise of Communist Eastern Europe. For critiques, see Maria Todorova,
Imagining the Balkans (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Sorin
Antohi, “Habits of the Mind: Europe’s Post-1989 Symbolic Geographies,” in Between Past
and Future, 61–77.
177 Okey, The Demise of Communist Eastern Europe, 74–75. For a recent overview of the collapse
of communism and its aftermath, see Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Collapse
and Rebirth in Eastern Europe, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
178 Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution, 12.
179 Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 26.
180 Ibid., 587–602.
181 Joseph Rothschild and Nancy Wingfield, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East
Central Europe since World War II, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
221; Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 222–232; and Berend, From the Soviet Bloc to the
European Union.
182 Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights and the Demise of
Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Oliver Bange and
Gottfried Niedhart, eds., Helsinki 1975 and the Transformation of Europe (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2008).
183 Stephen Kotkin and Jan Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist
Establishment (New York: The Modern Library, 2010), xvii; see also Stephen Kotkin,
Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
2008). Matthew Ouimet and other scholars have suggested that the end of the Brezhnev
doctrine occurred not in 1989 but at the start of the decade with Moscow’s decision not to
invade Poland in 1981. See Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign
Policy (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2001).
184 Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within
the Soviet Union (Part 1),” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 178–256; Kramer,
“The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet
Union (Part 2),” Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 3–64; and Kramer, “The
Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union
(Part 3),” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 3–96.
411
185 The literature on civil society is too vast to be cited here. Prominent examples include:
Jadwiga Staniszkis, The Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe: The Polish Experience,
trans. Chester Kisiel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Grzegorz Ekiert and
Jan Kubik, Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland,
1989–1993 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Jean Cohen and Andrew
Arato, eds., Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); John Keane,
ed., Civil Society and the State (London: Verso, 1988); and Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing
Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (Toronto: Free Press, 1992). For an excellent dis-
cussion of the literature on civil society in East Central Europe, see Falk, “Resistance and
Dissent in Central and Eastern Europe,” 318–360.
186 Grzegorz Ekiert, The State against Society: Political Crises and Their Aftermath in East Central
Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 34.
187 Ibid., xiv.
188 For influential journalistic accounts on the rise of Solidarity, see, for example, Timothy
Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2002); and Neil Ascherson, The Polish August: The Self-Limiting Revolution (New York:
Penguin Books, 1982).
189 Anna Grzymała-Busse, “The Organizational Strategies of Communist Parties in East Central
Europe, 1945–1989,” East European Politics & Societies 15, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 425, 437; and
Grzymała-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East
Central Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 19–68.
190 Kubik, The Power of Symbols; Maryjane Osa, Solidarity and Contention: Networks of Polish
Opposition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). A more traditional strand
of scholarship traces postwar Polish rebellions to the idealized democratic tradition of
“the noble republic” in the early modern period. See, for example, Daniel Stone, “An
Introduction to Polish Democratic Thought,” in M.B.B. Biskupski, James Pula, and Piotr
Wrobel, eds., The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy (Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press,
2010), 1–22.
191 David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 2. See also Győrgy Konrád, Antipolitics: An
Essay, trans. Richard Allen (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1984).
192 Okey, The Demise of Communist Eastern Europe, 33–34.
193 Penn, Solidarity’s Secret.
194 Ibid., 2 and 5.
195 See, for example, Joanna Goven, “Gender Politics in Hungary: Autonomy and Anti-
Feminism,” in Gender Politics and Post-Communism, 224–240.
196 Maria Todorova, Bones of Contention; Miller, The Nonconformists; Dragović-Soso, “Saviors of the
Nation”; and Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism.
197 See, for instance, Detlef Pollack and Jan Wielgohs, eds., Dissent and Opposition in Communist
Eastern Europe: Origins of Civil Society and Democratic Transition (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate,
2005); and Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe, eds., Revolution and Resistance in Eastern
Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule (Oxford: Berg, 2006).
198 Konrád, Antipolitics, 35.
199 Paul Blokker, “Dissidence, Republicanism, and Democratic Change,” East European Politics
& Societies 25, no. 2 (May 2011): 236–237.
200 Ost, The Politics of Antipolitics, 15.
201 Barbara Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe (Budapest: Central European
202 Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, 276.
203 Jan Skórzyński, “Polish Democratic Thought, 1968–1989: The Long March to Capitalism,”
in The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy, 238.
204 Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, 45.
205 In the mid-1950s, Czesław Miłosz used the concept of Ketman to describe performing the
ideological rituals of the system to the extent that reality and simulation converge in the
end. See Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 54–81.
412
206 See, for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times:
Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Kligman, The Politics
of Duplicity.
207 Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, 8.
208 Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 50, 282–298.
209 Creed, Domesticating Revolution, 9.
210 The literature on post-communism is too vast to be cited here. Recent works include
Anders Åslund, How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe,
Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012);
Sharon Wolchik and Jane Leftwich Curry, eds., Central and Eastern European Politics: From
Communism to Democracy, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010);
Sabrina Ramet, ed., Central and Southeast Politics since 1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010); Lavinia Stan, Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Romania: The
Politics of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
211 See, for example, Maria Todorova, ed., Remembering Communism: Genres of Representation
(New York: Social Science Research Council, 2010); and Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille,
eds., Post-Communist Nostalgia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).
Further reading
Abrams, Bradley. “The Second World War and the East European Revolution.” East European
Politics & Societies 13, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 623–664.
Apor, Balazs, Peter Apor, and E. A. Rees, eds. The Sovietization of Eastern Europe: New Perspectives
on the Postwar Period. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2008.
Aslund, Anders. How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe,
Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Bange, Oliver, and Gottfried Niedhart, eds. Helsinki 1975 and the Transformation of Europe. New
York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008.
Bren, Paulina. The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Deák, István, Jan Gross, and Tony Judt, eds. The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and
Its Aftermath, 1939–1948. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Falk, Barbara. The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe. Budapest: CEU Press, 2003.
Fehervary, Krisztina. Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in
Hungary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Fidelis, Malgorzata. Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland. New York:
Fodor, Éva. Working Difference: Women’s Working Lives in Hungary and Austria, 1945–1995.
Gal, Susan, and Gail Kligman, eds. Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after
Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Grzymała-Busse, Anna. Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East
Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Iordachi, Constantin, and Dorin Dobrincu, eds. Transforming Peasants, Property and Power: The
Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1949–1962. New York: CEU Press, 2009.
Kenney, Padraic. A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Kligman, Gail. The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998.
Kubik, Jan. The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State
Socialism in Poland. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1994.
413
Lebow, Katherine. Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–1956. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.
McDermott, Kevin, and Matthew Stibbe, eds. Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe:
Challenges to Communist Rule. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006.
Patterson, Patrick. Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2011.
Péteri, György, ed. Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Pittsburgh, PA:
Pittsburgh University Press, 2010.
Pittaway, Mark. The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958.
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
Siegelbaum, Lewis, ed. The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Verdery, Katherine. National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s
Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Verdery, Katherine. What was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1996.
Vowinckel, Annette, Marcus Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger. Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on
Eastern and Western European Societies. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012.
414
9
RET U RNI NG TO “ EUR O P E” A ND
THE RISE OF E U RO P R A G M A T I S M
Party politics and the European Union since 1989
Reinhard Heinisch
The transition process following the collapse of communism throughout East Central
Europe in 1989 has been described as a “return to Europe.” The project of “recon-
necting” with Europe reflected a desire on the part of elites and at least a significant
portion of the publics in East Central Europe to (re)claim a heritage that included
liberal democracy and a market economy. At the time of the fall of the Iron Curtain,
Western Europe itself was undergoing a transformation toward deeper integration.
This process, which had begun in the 1980s and would lead to the formal creation of
the European Union (EU) in 1994, initially did not include East Central Europe nor
did policymakers envision the possibility of a common system of governance stretch-
ing from Dublin to Bucharest. In fact, when the possibility of including the formerly
communist countries first arose, it was generally not a particularly welcome prospect
because it threatened to upset the carefully calibrated balance of power among the
twelve member states of the then European Community (EC).
Nonetheless, by 2007 most East Central European countries along with the Baltic
States had acceded to the EU. Only the western Balkans and most of the nations that
were former Soviet republics have been left outside the expanded Union, and even
for some of these, a road to future membership has been mapped out. The former
communist countries that became EU members have, despite some concern, gen-
erally developed into stable democracies (according to the Copenhagen Criteria)
and are now relatively open societies. Moreover, as the region was bolstered by for-
eign investment, the growth of East Central European economies outstripped that of
their Western counterparts for most of the two decades that followed the collapse of
communism. Wholesale modernization and numerous reforms have rendered these
countries wealthier, more efficient, and significantly better governed than at the
beginning of their transition from communism to democracy. Moreover, countries
like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Hungary that might once
have been viewed as too backward, too poor, or too “different” to belong to the mod-
ern European family of nations no longer bear this stigma. They have emerged as
equal and respected members of that family and carry their own weight in European
political affairs. Just as Southern Europe was transformed into “Western Europe”
when Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal underwent a successful accession to the EC,
415
Map 9.1 EU accession dates
R eturning to “ E urope ”
so too, East Central Europe benefited from a similar process of integration. At first
sight, the process of “returning to Europe” can therefore be considered an unmiti-
gated success.
At second glance a more complex image emerges. The road to EU membership
was longer and more arduous for the East Central European countries than it had
been for Southern Europe. In addition, accession to the EU was a broadly shared but
not a universal aspiration, so that arguments about pursuing alternatives to full mem-
bership resonated with important constituent groups. As the process dragged on, it
provided many opportunities to political entrepreneurs to take advantage of shifting
preferences and momentary setbacks. Finally, accession entailed economic modern-
ization and thus painful economic reforms that some groups felt more acutely than
others, and that affected the distribution of resources. Severe distributional con-
flicts ensued and sharpened the competition between political parties as different
societal groups could be mobilized against various aspects of the reform agenda. In
this dynamic and competitive environment, adopting a certain position on Europe
could provide important advantages. As the mainstream and governing parties in
East Central Europe saw little option but to support accession to the EU no mat-
ter the cost, a number of political groups and leaders emerged that became rather
outspoken in their criticism of European integration.
Generally speaking, the path to membership was complex, and overlapping devel-
opments could reinforce or neutralize one another. In addition, the countries of
East Central Europe varied significantly both in their final preparedness for EU
membership and in their willingness and ability to get ready for accession. This in
turn had consequences for the reception of different candidate countries into the
relevant European institutions and for the perception of the integration process in
the accession states themselves.
The “return to Europe” by the countries of East Central Europe was one that
confounded expectations. In the immediate post-1989 period, one would have
assumed that the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia with their greater his-
torical affinity with the West would have a rather effortless and highly successful
integration experience, whereas the European fate of Slovakia and Poland ini-
tially might have appeared to be in greater doubt. Now, some two decades after
the transition, Poland and Slovakia have become well-integrated and successful
member states and their populations on the whole supportive of the EU, while
the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia have turned out to be more compli-
cated cases involving ambivalent attitudes toward integration. All this suggests that
the relationship between “Europe” and the countries of East Central Europe has
been governed by a set of complex and unexpected factors and shifting condi-
tions. This chapter seeks to understand this process by analyzing the patterns that
have emerged and how we might best explain popular sentiments toward Europe,
specifically, the transformation of an initial “Euro enthusiasm” into what could be
characterized as “Euro realism” or, as critics claim, outright Euroskepticism that
subsequently developed across East Central Europe.1
For the citizens of East Central Europe after 1989 the impetus to integrate into
a system of European political and economic governance was based initially on a
profound need to belong to, and reconnect with “Europe.”2 Mainstream politicians
all over the region had little choice but to seek a quick affiliation with Western
417
R einhard H einisch
Europe. The EU was the only natural European “home” (to paraphrase the Czech
President Václav Havel) to which the East Central European countries could appeal
for integration.3 In post-communist societies, not supporting this step of “repatriation”
meant politically a close association with the old Communists; thus nearly all par-
ties except for the hard left and the most ardent nationalists favored accession to
the EU. Support at this stage was overwhelming but diffuse because people had
little idea about the implications of such a move. As negotiations proceeded and
the terms of accession became clearer, political parties began adopting different
positions on “Europe.” Nonetheless, most mainstream parties remained supportive
but did so generally for pragmatic reasons. In the context of this repositioning, new
political parties emerged, often with populist and/or nationalist agendas.
Taking a contrarian position on European integration was an obvious way for
parties to distinguish themselves from the establishment, particularly after some of
the hard leftist Euroskeptical parties had transformed themselves into moderate
left-of-center pro-European parties. Thus, “anti-Europeanism” was not necessarily a
position to which a party devoted much of its campaign resources and for which it
was elected. In fact, the decision to vote for protest parties, which generally presented
themselves also as Euroskeptical, was motivated often by discontent with corruption,
economic mismanagement, and political incompetence. This makes it very difficult
to assess the level of genuine Euroskepticism in East Central Europe. What can be
said is that despite a growing political convergence between the old and new member
states of the EU, the overall process of “returning to Europe” constituted a separate
und unique experience that further demarcated the post-communist states of Europe
from their Western counterparts.
The initial condition: confronting the “other” Europe

In the 1980s European industries and political leaders conceived of a process designed
to allow Europe to compete more effectively with rapidly growing Asian economies
and a resurgent United States. This initiative was dubbed the Single Market and would
lead to the establishment of an integrated internal market for more than 300 million
people. At the core of the market’s structure was the free movement of people, goods,
services, and capital within and between member states of the Community. Based on
the Single European Act signed in 1986, this massive overhaul of the three-decade-old
EC was fully implemented by 1992. It was in the middle of this development that the
unexpected collapse of communism presented European leaders with new political
opportunities, but also new potential threats. Although the President of the European
Commission and, thus, the de facto head of the EC at the time, Jacques Delors, referred
to events of 1989 as the “acceleration of history” alluding to the momentous histori-
cal opportunity that presented itself for the whole continent, other political leaders,
notably in France and the United Kingdom, were more apprehensive.4 It was clear
that East Central Europe’s emergence from under Soviet control would reopen the
so-called “German Question” and might conceivably threaten European integration
as a Western political and economic project.
The emergence of a reunited and more powerful Germany along with a “backyard”
of Central European nations closely tied to it threatened to move the political center
of gravity further east, away from Paris, London, and Brussels. After all, the EC and
418
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were created not only to keep the
Soviets out but also to prevent Germany from turning into a continental hegemon yet
again. As a result, the question of integrating the countries of East Central Europe
into Europe was vital not only for the post-communist nations but also for the EC’s
old member states.
Most importantly, the question of Germany and East Central Europe was the pri-
mary impetus for turning what had been predominantly an economic project of market
building into a full-fledged political endeavor by moving from the Single Market to
the European Union (EU). It began in earnest after the collapse of communism and
it quickly superseded the Single Market initiative with the launch of the Maastricht
Process. This defined a series of landmark political steps with the goal of achieving
a political union among initially twelve and later fifteen Western member states.
Whereas the British and French governments fretted about a resurgent Germany,
policymakers in Germany and the smaller social market economies such as Austria and
the Netherlands were concerned that the eagerness with which East Central European
countries appeared to be embracing free market capitalism would jeopardize a dis-
tinctly European economic model in which high labor standards, an extensive welfare
safety net, and a strong regulatory state played large roles. Countries like Germany and
Austria that shared borders with former Soviet bloc states were also alarmed at the pos-
sibility of a rapid influx of cheap labor and waves of immigrants, which in turn would
heighten already existing economic and social tensions. The prospect of low-wage com-
petition and of the relocation of industry to some less costly country to the east, along
with concerns about immigrant-related crime fueled a populist political backlash in
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and, at the regional level, in Germany.
The poorer EU member states such as Greece, Portugal, and Spain, which had
been receiving substantial financial transfer payments from the rest of the EC under
the so-called Cohesion Policy worried that having to compete with so many substan-
tially poorer countries for funding would entail great financial losses. Since about half
of the budget of the European Community/Union at the time was spent on agricul-
tural subsidies alone, member states such as Italy and France in which farming was of
key political importance were concerned that adding new countries such as Poland,
with a large number of small and inefficient farms, would either bankrupt the EU’s
budget or result in a dramatic reallocation of funds. Thus, while the countries of East
Central Europe were welcome to participate formally in European integration, the
positions of West European countries and of different political actors within these
countries varied considerably. As a result, the European Community (EC), as it was
called until 1994, was so apprehensive about new members from East Central Europe
that initial agreements with the “transition countries” did not recognize their right to
membership, but only their aspiration to membership in the EC.5 Brussels thus placed
its emphasis on developing alternative arrangements in the form of association agree-
ments, which provided positive reinforcement for transitioning to democracy and
developing a market economy but which did not commit the EC to anything more.
The EC launched technical assistance programs that in their political origin even
dated to before 1989. The so-called PHARE Democracy program provided EU assis-
tance to the countries that applied for membership to the EU. (The PHARE acronym
comes from Poland, Hungary Aid for Restructuring of the Economy). It was meant
to strengthen the social and political foundations of the democratic system for the
419
R einhard H einisch
East Central European and Baltic states. Russia and several Soviet successor states
were supported by the EC’s TACIS (Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of
Independent States) program, which also provided technical assistance in the tran-
sition process. At the time it was rather the outside impetus coming from various
international institutions such as the Group of 24 (G24) nations and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) that pushed the EC to adopt a more active role in managing
the transition process. International organizations were looking to the European
Commission and EC to coordinate international aid flows. The United States also
made it quite clear that it expected Europe to shoulder more of the security burden
in the region. Under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, post-Cold War
Washington signaled a willingness to disengage from Europe and let the Europeans
themselves settle regional disputes. Securing the emerging post-communist order
clearly involved relying heavily on civilian assets rather than military muscle, which
the EC had always prided itself in being able to provide. The capacity and expertise
Brussels could offer, allowed the EC to showcase itself on the world stage.
Eventually attitudes in Brussels began to change. The prospect of a larger,
more dynamic and ultimately more powerful EC started to gain on the sentiments
of Western elites. So did expressions of dissatisfaction on the part of East Central
European political leaders with what the EC had initially offered them. Yet, the very
hybrid nature of the European Union – being a system of governance rather than
a government – was as difficult to grasp for the future candidate countries as was
to assess the EU’s real power. Since its inception, European integration has largely
been a bureaucratic, methodical, and somewhat plodding process advancing by
incremental administrative steps. This approach to building a unified Europe, origi-
nally conceived by Jean Monnet, a senior French civil servant, was largely by design.
Rather than pursuing lofty supranational ambitions, the postwar EC in Monnet’s
vision would succeed precisely because it delivered tangible economic benefits that
mattered to people in terms of securing peace between traditional enemies and
allowing for economic growth through the effective use of available resources and
labor. The idea was to forge the “new Europe” through the convergence of regula-
tions and so-called “spillovers” in policy areas that member states were willing to
integrate. This means that the increasing economic interdependence between mem-
ber states as well as the adherence to the same regulatory framework was expected
to make member states on the whole more similar. To critics, however, this seemed
a wholly uninspiring and technocratic undertaking, ill-equipped to provide nations
with a genuine sense of purpose and direction, and thus failing to connect with the
populations it governed.
Given Brussels’ traditionally pragmatic and bureaucratic approach to integration,
the initial reaction to the breathtaking 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe was to pro-
vide technical and financial assistance through Trade and Cooperation Agreements.
These were part of the “standard repertoire of economic instruments used by the
EC in relation to third parties.”6 In short, when East Central European publics were
most enthusiastic about joining Europe, the reaction by Brussels was rather techno-
cratic and far from creating a sense of “homecoming.” Not surprisingly, observers of
East Central European developments have identified the rise of aggressive national-
ism and anti-liberal ideologies in the region as resulting from unfulfilled expectations
and thwarted illusions about their transition to democracy and a market economy.
420
This point was forcefully argued by Vladimir Tismăneanu in his analysis of the politi-
cal psychology of post-communism. Taking his argument that with the collapse of
the Leninist authoritarian order, East European societies became “atomized and
deprived of a political center able to articulate coherent visions of a common good”
a step further, we would have to conclude that European integration too, failed to
become a new political “axis mundi” by not providing a sufficient anchoring point for
the countries of East Central Europe.7
The post-transition period: East Central Europe

sees a place in the “New Europe”
It is no exaggeration to claim that when the “two Europes” first confronted each
other after 1989, they had fundamentally different assessments of themselves and
each other. For much of Western Europe, the countries behind the Iron Curtain had
been part of a Soviet-controlled monolithic bloc. Even if Western elites were willing
to concede that Budapest, Warsaw, and Prague as well as Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius
were once historically important European cities, and even if it had proved politically
expedient in Western propaganda to try to subdivide the Soviet-dominated bloc, all
the nations behind the Iron Curtain were summarily regarded as Eastern Europe,
Communist, or simply the Eastern bloc.
By comparison, the prevailing view in the transition countries themselves was that
their role lay in a common European destiny that had been (temporarily) thwarted
and denied to them by forces beyond their control. If anything, they had been made
to pay the price for others’ mistaken policies and now deserved support from those
who had been spared the fate of external domination by an accident of history.
Fundamentally, the East Central European countries saw themselves as members of
the European family and regarded accession to the EU as a homecoming rather than
a process involving application and admission.8 The former Czech President Václav
Havel in a speech to the European Parliament referred to Europe in this context as
the “homeland of our homelands.”9
Many Central European intellectuals from the Soviet bloc had used both histor-
ical and cultural arguments to show, like Milan Kundera in his well-known essay
on Central Europe, “that for a thousand years their nations [had] belonged to the
part of Europe rooted in Roman Christianity [and that] they [had] participated in
every period of its history.” For Kundera, “geographic Europe” from the Urals to
the Atlantic had always been split between the half bound to Rome and the Catholic
Church, and the other half tied to Byzantium and the Orthodox Church, the first
Western the latter Eastern. Thus, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary along with
the Baltic States were culturally Western nations that “woke up to discover [in 1945]
that they were now in the East.”10 Others conceived of the countries in the geographic
center of Europe as having been shaped by common historical forces as well as shared
cultural and administrative traditions because they had belonged for centuries to an
integrated political, cultural, and economic space ruled by the Habsburgs. However,
invoking this shared Central European ancestry all too openly risked being identified
with explicit or implicit German (or earlier Austrian) intentions to dominate the
region. Nonetheless, the countless similarities found on both sides of the (former)
Iron Curtain served as a constant reminder of its artificial nature. But, depending
421
R einhard H einisch
on the national or political perspective, there were, and still are, vehement disagree-
ments about whether the year that brought about a new division of Europe was 1918,
1939, or 1945. At the very least, one can define the nations in question as those “that
in August 1939 were the real or hypothetical object of a trade between the Soviet
Union and Germany.”11
Whereas there was little doubt among experts that the so-called Visegrád
Countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), the Baltic States,
and the Northern Balkans belonged to the West, the cases of Bulgaria and Romania
were more complicated. Bulgaria, in the Eastern Balkans, was largely Orthodox and
had close historical ties with Russia. While this does not make it any less European,
it renders claims to a Western heritage tenuous at best. The very notion of “the
Balkans” conjures up in the mind of many West Europeans the image of instabil-
ity, fragmentation, and political backwardness. Except for Greece, no other Balkan
country had at that time entered the EU. Romania too, differs from its former com-
munist neighbors to the West. It was long divided both culturally and politically
between Habsburg and Ottoman control, with Russian influence playing a major
role as well. More importantly, there were lingering doubts about the veracity of
the anti-communist uprising in 1989 that toppled the long-term dictator Nicolae
Ceauşescu. In fact, the National Salvation Front (NSF) that took control of the state
in 1990 stood accused of being made up of former Communists and members of
the Securitate, (secret police), which had orchestrated the violent transition to pre-
serve their political power and economic interests.12
In retrospect, it seems quite clear that Bulgaria and Romania benefited above all
from the way they were categorized by the West as post-communist transition coun-
tries located in Eastern Europe, regardless of the particulars.13 As such they were
swept up by the same accession momentum as their western and northern neighbors
once the EU essentially decided to grant admission to all East Central European
transition countries except for those that had actually been part of the Soviet Union.
Thus, accession excluded Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and the Caucasus region.
Being a part of the group of Baltic countries was equally advantageous whereas
being labeled a Balkan country turned out to be problematic, especially after the
wars in the former Yugoslavia. In fact, Croatia would have to wait until July 2013 to
join the EU.
Coping with the legacy of past regimes

The approaches that the different transition countries took toward Europe were
governed in part by differences that had existed among them before 1989 as well
as by discrepancies in the transition process. In general, we may distinguish the
period of regime transitions and its aftermath, a time of dramatic political and eco-
nomic change, relative instability, and initial consolidation, from the pre-accession
and accession process in which countries were preparing for, and engaged in, active
negotiations with the EU.
The regime legacies and patterns of political transition from communism were
not uniform across the region.14 The former communist countries not only were at
different points when they were incorporated into the Soviet bloc but they also had
rather different evolutions in terms of how the Communist regime was established
422
and consolidated. Today’s Czech Republic along with the former East Germany
represents a legacy dubbed “bureaucratic-authoritarian communism,” in which
a recalcitrant, orthodox ruling party exercised power by relying on a highly pro-
fessionalized bureaucracy.15 The goal of the repressive apparatus was to contain a
potentially strong civil society with political skills and memories derived in part from a
well-functioning interwar democracy and industrial capitalism. In the interwar period
Czechoslovakia prided itself as having the most successful democracy of any of the
Austro-Hungarian successor states. Facing substantial opposition, the Communists
in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Czechoslovakia maintained power
through heavy-handed repression. This precluded a regime change based on a nego-
tiated transition between the emerging civic opposition and reform elements in the
Communist regime, which might have been able to secure gains in the post-transition
environment. When the revolution came in 1989, the regimes in Czechoslovakia and
East Germany were swept aside rapidly and completely. The preceding period of
utter repression had left civil society without an institutional inventory to build on,
requiring the emerging parties to begin from a position of relative weakness.
In East Germany (a part of the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and the
Third Reich) and in Czechoslovakia (and before that Habsburg Bohemia), mod-
ernization and industrialization had occurred relatively early, so that religious and
gender-related issues were not significantly contested in the political arena, and
latent ethnic cleavages were not strong enough to be exploited for political gain.
Although ethnic issues led to the Velvet Divorce splitting Slovakia from the Czech
Republic, within the latter space differences among cultural groups did not trans-
late into sources of party-political conflict. Since sociocultural and nationalist vs.
cosmopolitan divisions were less apparent in Czech and East German societies,
the post-communist party system there formed principally around the economic
dimension. Given the highly skilled, urban professional workforce used to operat-
ing in an advanced industrial economy, the new parties took up positions ranging
from unfettered laissez-faire market competition at one extreme end of the spec-
trum to significant protections from unfavorable cuts in accustomed welfare
benefits and traditional economic privileges at the other. In such an environ-
ment, political entrepreneurs sought to offer clearly distinguishable programmatic
choices to voters but they nonetheless appealed to a rather homogeneous popu-
lation.16 In other words, the parties that emerged did not present themselves as
advocates of distinct societal subgroups such as small farmers or certain ethnicities
but rather offered a range of primarily economic policy alternatives ranging from
left to right. However, in time, the very aggressiveness of the reform proposals
provided elements of the discredited former Communists with a path back to polit-
ical respectability; they became the guardians of groups that saw themselves as the
losers of the transition. The best-known examples are the Czech Communist Party
of Bohemia and Moravia and the (East) German party “Die Linke” (the Left).
Because of the German reunification, the case of the GDR is so special that it might
not be useful for comparative purposes.
In the Czech political environment, the question of Europe was shaped ulti-
mately by an economic calculus rather than by a need to anchor the country in
“Europe.” There was no fear of spiraling out of the Western political orbit. Thus,
the self-assured Czech Republic displayed a surprisingly ambivalent trajectory in
423
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its approach to European integration. Whereas its fitness for EU membership

based on its political and economic record was questioned neither by interna-
tional observers nor by the Czechs themselves, the Czech Republic developed one
of the few genuinely Euroskeptic mainstream parties, the Civic Democratic Party
(ODS). This contradictory approach to Europe, according to which the Czech
Republic was at once considered readier for EU membership than the other tran-
sition societies and yet ended up with the poorest compliance record of all eight
applicant countries in terms of the EU accession requirements, is highlighted
nowhere more poignantly than by the country’s top two political leaders and inter
nationally most famous personalities.17 Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and
anti-Communist regime-critic-turned- president remained a forceful advocate of
European integration, ascribing to the European project a transcendental qual-
ity; he saw it as freeing people from “bondage to national collectivism, which had
been a fount of strife and enslaver of individuality.”18 Havel’s political nemesis,
Václav Klaus, the leader of the ODS and long-term prime minister under Havel’s
presidency, adopted a quasi-Thatcherite understanding of the EU, which he con-
sistently portrayed as a “dangerous socialist experiment” that threatened national
sovereignty.19 Although the ODS never went as far as rejecting EU membership
outright – that would have been too unpopular – the party continuously nurtured
Euroskepticism, culminating in a party program in 2002 that included a special
chapter on the EU in which two-thirds of the references made to European inte-
gration were negative.20 The ODS leader, Klaus, spoke out against the EU on
numerous occasions and, in 2009, after succeeding Havel as president, even tried
to delay signing the Treaty which was to provide a constitutional basis for the EU.
The Czech case shows that the relatively most economically advanced and sec-
ular society was not necessarily the most pro-European precisely because no one
seriously questioned its ability to go it alone if necessary. The Czech Republic
could “afford” to be complacent about meeting its obligations precisely because
nobody doubted its ability to gain membership if it so wanted. This recalls the cases
of Switzerland and Norway, two highly successful Western countries that had an
opportunity to join the EU but opted not to.
In Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, Macedonia, and to a lesser extent
Serbia and Slovakia, the regime legacy differed from that in the Czech Republic,
with important implications for the transition and post-transition periods. In these
countries, communism had been imposed on largely rural, agrarian societies, rely-
ing on a mixture of co-optation and repression.21 The Communists lacked a large
working-class base, and were forced to construct an industrial society almost from
scratch. They thus delivered an unprecedented level of economic change to an
agrarian society, largely by means of subsidizing heavy industry by exploiting the
peasantry. Large numbers of villagers moved to cities, finding work in the new indus-
tries. As a result, many people whose background would have excluded them from
social advancement in the previous economic order were now able to realize educa-
tional opportunities and join the ranks of the professional class. This policy allowed
communist rulers to co-opt and recruit groups that benefited most from the mate-
rial gains of modernization. This type of regime dubbed “patrimonial communism,”
tended to rely on vertical chains of personal dependence between state and party
leaders and their entourage.22 Chains of patronage ensured loyalty and political
424
reliability beyond the strictures of either ideology or repressive control, especially in

times of change. Rewards were handed out less on the basis of qualification, com-
petence, and achievement than for loyalty and political expediency, a system that
tended to secure the leaders in power while at the same time, undermining the
efficiency of the economy and political system as a whole. Patrimonial Communism
resulted in elaborate patronage schemes and clientelistic networks, whose power
revolved around the small coteries of individual rulers. As ruling elites sought to
exploit the system for their own economic and political gain, the development of
effective institutions remained stunted. And yet, in these overwhelmingly agrarian
polities, communism’s dramatic economic achievements, given the regimes’ point
of departure, created positive memories of genuine progress among large segments
of the population. It is this sentiment to which elements of the former commu-
nist establishment could appeal during and after the transition. By the same token,
the absence of either a successful pre-communist modernization or an urban mid-
dle-class removed political alternatives to a continued communist participation in
politics. Generally, such regimes sought either to stage their own preemptive reforms
or manage the transition process by engaging with the weak regime opposition.
As a result, the post-communist successor regime inherited a deeply corrupt and
unprofessional state bureaucracy penetrated by clientelistic networks. Moreover, the
emerging political system was characterized by a disorganized anti-communist oppo-
sition without much practical experience in government or any significant memory
of pre-communist social and economic development.23
Whereas former communist politicians continued to favor protectionist (and in
some cases nationalist) positions in the face of economic reforms during the tran-
sition, the anti-communist strategies pursued by other parties typically led them to
embrace the principal area they could claim for themselves, namely the exploitation
of latent national, ethnic, and sociocultural divides. In short, as economic issues were
largely unavailable for debate, because the former Communists could credibly pres-
ent themselves as protectors of the relative gains achieved under the previous regime
and a certain level of economic adjustment was simply unavoidable, other parties
utilized non-economic issues to mobilize.
It is not surprising that new political actors reached out to previously ignored
subgroups such as people in rural areas and traditionalist population segments. As
a consequence, authoritarian-collectivist and nationalist positions gained currency
as emerging political leaders appealed to traditionalism, religion, and nationalist
mythologies. Market-liberal, cosmopolitan, und universalistic-individualistic norms
often remained limited to smaller urban-based political groups which required
problematic political alliances with either centrist parties or the post-Communists.
In these types of regimes the old insider networks survived into the post-transition
period and the state apparatus was never fully purged of the corrupt officials of the
old regime. Clientelistic networks either changed allegiances in the new political
system or were well poised to exploit economic opportunities that availed them-
selves in the chaos of transition, resulting in groups of newly wealthy entrepreneurs,
who either went into politics or became the behind-the-scenes sponsors of new
political parties. Needless to say, this regime legacy frequently resulted in poor
performance in terms of good governance, transparency, openness, and the rule of
law all of which were required of candidate countries to the EU. This kind of l egacy
425
R einhard H einisch
temporarily threatened Slovakia’s timely accession, caused a two-year delay and

additional scrutiny for Bulgaria and Romania, and has thwarted the membership
aspirations of Macedonia, Bosnia, and Serbia for the foreseeable future.
Among the former Soviet bloc states that have acceded to the EU, Bulgaria and
Romania clearly exhibit this type of “patrimonial communism” regime legacy.
In Bulgaria, for example, the relatively stable long-term regime of Todor Zhivkov
reacted to the growing economic and political crisis in the Soviet bloc by shifting
increasingly to nationalist rhetoric and policies. Many ethnic Turks and Pomaks
(ethnic Bulgarians whose ancestors had converted to Islam in Ottoman times) fled
the country after confronting forced assimilation and expropriation. In 1990, seeing
one East European regime after another fall, Bulgaria’s Communist Party allowed
free elections to be held. This was a strategic move from which the Communists
emerged victorious as many Bulgarians were unwilling to renounce communism
completely. During the following few years, the political system was divided between
a confident Bulgarian Socialist Party (the former, renamed, Communist Party) and
a fairly weak and fragmented anti-communist opposition, the Union of Democratic
Forces. The conflict between the two political camps led to an incomplete and inco-
herent transformation to a market economy. Although the Socialist government had
to initiate some privatization policies and market reforms, their implementation
was plagued by delays and enormous corruption. Only in the wake of the financial
crisis of 1996–97 was the governing Socialist Party forced from power and replaced
by a government that adopted pro-Western and pro-market policies. Thus, Bulgaria
embarked on a course toward EU membership with considerable delay. Nonetheless,
ethnicity has remained an important issue in Bulgaria, and served as a basis for parti-
san mobilization.24 The formation of a party representing the Turkish minority (the
Movement for Rights and Freedom) is a case in point.25
Countries such as Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia, and to some extent also Poland,
have a still different regime legacy. There, communism was typically imposed from
without but also had roots in a domestic revolutionary labor movement. As a result,
the Communist Party merged with other workers’ parties, which planted the seeds
for later internal divisions. Prior to the establishment of the Communist regime,
middle-class parties and civil institutions were strong enough that their remnants
continued to play a role and served as a nucleus for anti-Communist opposition to
emerge. This was especially the case in Poland with its powerful Catholic Church,
which could provide civil opposition groups a measure of political autonomy from
state supervision that was unheard of elsewhere in East Central Europe.
In these countries, national communist leaders adopted an accommodationist
strategy – hence the term “national-accommodative Communism” – by allowing selec-
tive reforms designed to achieve a modicum of independence from Moscow and thus
some popular legitimacy. When the external support for the regime vanished, the
power structure fragmented along a reform agenda. The ensuing transition typically
took the route of negotiated agreements with the emerging civic opposition, which
allowed the reform Communists to secure some advantages for the post-transition
period. When faced with the uncertainties of economic reforms and the challenges
of the EU accession, the post-Communists rapidly changed their strategy toward pop-
ular appeal. This, together with their residual organizational strength enabled them
to “become serious democratic alternatives to the former dissidents’ parties.”26
426
Serbia, Slovakia, and the Baltic States represent hybrid legacies in which elements
of patrimonial Communism mix with others. In Slovakia, for example, the initial
regime opposition headed by Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar did not continue
along the Communist/anti-Communist cleavage but mobilized around national-
ist (Slovak independence) and the cosmopolitan-peripheral cleavages. Founded
in 1991, Mečiar’s new Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) managed to
attract support from both the workers in the neglected provincial industrial centers
and rural Catholics. Conservative Catholicism, market skepticism, and nationalism
all remained powerful forces, explaining Mečiar’s surge and his anti-liberal and
anti-Western p olitics; these initially delayed Slovakia’s status as a candidate for EU
membership.27
In all democratic transition countries, Euroskepticism was initially found almost
exclusively in “residual communist” parties and among hard-line communist groups
that had split from more reform-minded Communist successor parties. Exceptions to
this rule such as the League of Polish Families (LPR) and the Czech Civic Democratic
Party (ODS), will be discussed in greater detail below. In general, the pro-/anti-EU
conflict was largely congruent with the conflict between reform and unreconstructed
Communists. For reformers, endorsing European integration was an additional
means of distancing themselves from the former Communists, and it allowed them to
brand the latter as “Euroskeptics.” Applying such a label proved advantageous with
electorates for which a pro-European stance was the “political norm.”28
The analysis of regime transitions also sheds light on the kinds of cleavages
that emerged in East Central Europe after communism. Whereas in the Czech
Republic political divisions have revolved around socioeconomic questions, in
countries associated with patrimonial or accommodationist communist regime
legacies sociocultural fault lines became more prominent. While these divisions
did not immediately manifest themselves in terms of Euroskepticism, such lega-
cies eventually brought forth political parties for which questions of ethnicity,
national identity, and authoritarianism were central. Often, these new protest par-
ties adopted Euroskeptical positions for reasons of ideology, strategy, or both. In
short, regime legacy has mattered for creating conditions that were conducive for
or against anti-European sentiments rooted in questions of culture, identity, and
national autonomy.
Fear of outside domination and competing claims of victimhood

The specific legacies of communism in East Central Europe created not only par-
ticular political cleavages and a new political landscape, but also unique agendas
that the candidate countries sought to advance in their negotiations with the EU. A
particular problem for all East Central European countries in adapting their econ-
omies and societies for EU membership was that they had historically been domi-
nated by empires, not only by the Soviet Union, but by earlier dynastic states under
the Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, and Ottomans. As is discussed elsewhere
in this book, imperial domination not only delayed modern state-formation but it
structured industrial and economic development. Modernization and industrializa-
tion occurred unevenly and were shaped to some extent by imperial economic and
political interests. When the Soviet economic bloc collapsed, industries in Hungary,
427
R einhard H einisch
Slovakia, and the Czech Republic not only suddenly lost their principal markets and
sources of raw materials, they also were saddled with excessive capacity, an uncom-
petitive system of production, and inferior products. Subsequent restructuring, for-
eign takeovers, and plant closures impacted hundreds of thousands of workers (and
voters) whom national political leaders could not afford to ignore. In short, East
Central European negotiators were anxious to convey that their successful integra-
tion hinged on social and thus economic stability, which in turn depended on suffi-
cient inflows of foreign capital, full access to EU structural funds and programs, as
well as early and full access to labor markets in other EU countries.
Moreover, the long history of imperial domination had resulted in a strong pref-
erence among the political elites in East Central Europe for intergovernmental type
of European integration: elected national governments would act in concert with
each other on the model of international organizations like the United Nations. The
alternative view espoused by some older member states, such as Germany, was to
conceive of the EU as a form of government along the lines of a federal system in
which the powers are divided between national and supranational (European-level)
institutions, both directly responsible to the population. This kind of integration
would weaken not only the role of national governments in determining political
outcomes but also diminish the influence of any national population, which could be
outvoted by majorities elsewhere. Naturally, this is of greater concern to nations with
small populations. Being overruled in a binding policy matter based on a decision
taken outside the national borders implies a loss of national sovereignty. Since the
EU in its current form combines both supranational and intergovernmental elements
of decision-making in different policy areas, it is possible for individual states to be
outvoted.29 Generally speaking, the EC/EU has been characterized by an increas-
ing shift from intergovernmentalism to supranationalism, in response to which some
political actors in East Central Europe have promoted a “Europe of nations.” The
major Hungarian party Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Union (Fidesz-MPSz), for example,
has rejected the idea of a “European Super State.”30 Concerns about the transfer of
national sovereignty to yet another remote political center, Brussels, after decades of
subordination to Moscow, have been much more pronounced in East Central Europe
than in Western Europe.
External political and economic domination had not only structured national
economies but also created multiple ethnic narratives and competing historical claims
of victimhood.31 As discussed in previous chapters, the numerous unresolved ethnic
aspirations and nationalist claims and counterclaims dating back to the nineteenth
century remained in a sort of stasis during the communist period when intra-bloc
and inter-ethnic brotherhood and solidarity was enforced as the official policy. Thus,
the “return to Europe” was seen not only “as a way of definitively exiting from the
Soviet orbit, but also as a means of returning as quickly as possible to where the states
would have been if the communist takeovers of the 1940s had never happened.”32
Latent ethnic tensions rose to the surface in the 1990s, resulting in nationalist
policies that subsequently ran afoul of EU requirements concerning the rights of
minorities. As ethnic majorities such as those in Lithuania and Estonia rushed to
consolidate “their” still-fragile nation-states, they regarded the EU’s objections to the
treatment of minorities as unwelcome interference or, worse, as yet another attempt
by an external power to undermine long-held national aspirations. At the same time,
428
ethnic minorities recognized that Brussels’ power of sanctions was the best hope for
improving their own bargaining position vis-à-vis the ethnic majority.
Ethnic populist parties emerged in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and elsewhere in
post-communist Europe, mobilizing voters based on the politics of resentment and
pushing mainstream parties to the right. Among these were the Hungarian Justice
and Life Party (MIÉP) founded in 1993, the groups Self-Defense (Samoobrona) and
League of Polish Families (LPR) in Poland which emerged before the 2001 elections,
as well as the Slovak National Party (SNS) founded in 1989 and the Movement for
a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) established in 1991. This new breed of populists was
not necessarily anti-EU per se, but, as the subsequent analysis will show, they often
adopted positions critical of European integration to distinguish themselves from
the domestic political mainstream. Whenever these parties objected to “Europe,” the
EU represented liberalism and secularism seen as threats to the nationalist and exclu-
sivist projects on which radical groups such as the far right Hungarian party Jobbik
(the “Movement for a Better Hungary” founded in 2003) were embarking.33 In the
eyes of populists and nationalists, “Europe” represented a threat, whether this was lib-
eral secularism for the traditionalist right in Catholic Poland, or the sale of precious
“national soil” to wealthy foreigners in Hungary.
Despite apprehension about sovereignty and painful economic restructuring,
large parts of the public in East Central Europe remained highly “Euro-enthusiastic”
throughout the 1990s because they lacked any experience with the Maastricht Process
or European integration more generally.34 For most of the post-transition period,
accession to the EU was widely perceived as inevitable and thus broadly supported
across the political spectrum. Becoming part of the “elite club” of European states
was mainly motivated by the emotional need to be accepted as an inherent part of
Europe and to gain the recognition of one’s country’s status as a modern European
state. In addition, political elites used the economic benefits expected from EU mem-
bership (better access to markets, investments, and expertise) to justify the need
for EU accession. But economic considerations were nonetheless secondary moti-
vations for seeking EU membership during the post-transition period.35 In short,
the early discourse over Europe remained superficially characterized by a “positive,
if only romantic and illusory, consensus among the political elites and the public
alike to become part of Europe,” as Petr Kopecký describes the Czech argument for
European integration.36 As a consequence, in the initial post-transition period skep-
tical views on European integration and political competition over issues related to
Europe remained muted; this is in marked contrast to Western Europe, which in the
early 1990s saw a resurgence of critical attitudes toward the EU.37
Pre-accession: becoming EU candidate countries

For the East Central Europeans, the EU represented above all the “West,” so that
accession not only meant access to resources and the potential for prosperity, but also
membership in an elite club of nations. It confirmed once and for all that the past
was past and the former bloc countries had found a new anchoring place that would
ensure stability and prosperity. It is important to recall that this was not what the
EU represented for most of the old member states, especially not for the founding
members and the EU’s major powers with the exception of Italy.
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R einhard H einisch
The EU, an object of different aspirations

If we conceive of European integration as three interconnected processes – a largely
Franco-German peace and stability project, a market-building project, and a redistrib-
utive project from Europe’s core to its periphery – the late 1980s and early 1990s saw
the realization of several milestones. These developments, which comprised the crea-
tion of a Single Market for goods and services in the 1980s and the so-called Maastricht
Process toward establishing a political union in the 1990s, summarily excluded
input from the East Central European states. While this might have placed the West
Europeans in a privileged position, the prevailing sentiments were hardly as positive
as these developments suggest. The integrated European market created a more com-
petitive economic environment, thereby adding to existing global pressures toward
greater economic liberalization. In addition, the aftermath of German reunification
led to a continent-wide recession and currency instability. The collapse of the Warsaw
Pact and the United States’ adoption of an isolationist posture added to the percep-
tion of instability, especially as the Balkan conflict escalated after 1991. Absorbing
significantly poorer and less stable countries into the EC posed many risks and threat-
ened to disrupt the carefully calibrated internal power balances and resource tradeoffs
among the old member states. None of these issues was well understood at the time
even by the political elites in East Central Europe let alone the populace at large.
Whereas West European leaders recognized the need for providing East Central
European countries with a path to membership when they gathered at the Lisbon
European Council in 1992, West European publics were increasingly reticent. This
was new, because an understanding had existed since the 1950s that, on a fundamen-
tal level, member populations were in support of the overall objective of an “Ever
Closer Union” as specified in the original 1957 Treaty of Rome. Despite occasional
setbacks, there had been a so-called “permissive consensus” in favor of European inte-
gration that infused the process with broad legitimacy. After 1990, this general public
support was increasingly called into question, and the trend was reflected in grow-
ing levels of Euroskepticism both in public opinion and in the party politics of the
EU member states. This was largely the result of European-level decision-making
becoming more evident in citizens’ daily lives. As the Maastricht Process, which
turned the Single Market into a political union with much farther-reaching political
implications, pushed forward, West European publics became more and more aware
of the consequences of European integration.38 Yet the perception that pro-European
elites went ahead with deepening European integration despite growing popular
misgivings only increased anti-EU sentiments.
Besides the deeper institutional integration of political decision-making, the
EU also embarked on a strategy of widening its membership. In successive rounds
of enlargement, it took in new member states, adding to the complexity of the
Union. In 1995, Austria, Sweden, and Finland joined. However, once nearly all of
the prosperous West European nations had become members, future rounds of
enlargement threatened to bring in only poorer countries from Europe’s periphery.
These would subsequently not only have unfettered access to Western labor-markets
and draw away investments but also be entitled to significant transfers of resources
through the EU’s structural funds. The latter had been created under the auspices
of the a forementioned Cohesion Policy to reduce regional disparities across Europe.
430
The prospect of eastern enlargement and the possibility of the future accession of
Turkey naturally increased public apprehension about the EU, particularly in those
countries that saw themselves as having the most to lose from EU expansion.
The erosion of the permissive consensus in Western Europe coincided with the
emergence of a new type of populist protest party that did not fit into the conven-
tional left–right spectrum. Initially such parties mobilized voters against political
corruption, insider politics, and political elites that were allegedly too insulated
from popular demands. Invariably, parties such as the Austrian Freedom Party, the
French National Front, the Belgian Flemish Bloc, the Italian Northern League, and
the Danish People’s Party aimed their criticism at immigration in particular and glo-
balization in general. The emergence of a “politics of identity” asserting that nations
had an inherent right to cultural difference ran counter to the process and spirit
of European integration.39 A case in point is Switzerland, which suspended its can-
didacy to the European Economic Area after a campaign focused on Swiss national
identity orchestrated by the Swiss People’s Party. Following a referendum in 1992,
the Swiss decided not to pursue EU membership. Norway, another EU candidate
country, also opted to forgo accession to the EU in 1993 after a referendum in which
a close majority of the population rejected EU membership.
Across Western Europe, parties critical of the EU either tended to have traditional-
ist, authoritarian, and nationalist leanings and thus perceived integration as a threat
to national identity; or they rejected European integration on the grounds of their
opposition to the free market principle;40 this applied typically to parties of the socio-
economic left. In short, Euroskepticism became concentrated either in parties of the
far right or the hard left and, thus, remained relegated to protest and fringe groups.
The larger and more moderate parties of the socioeconomic left and right tended to
support the EU. Whereas conservative mainstream parties favored European integra-
tion because of their pro-business agenda and a desire to strengthen Europe globally,
the parties of the socioeconomic left regarded “Europe” as a form of modernization
and thus a means of overcoming traditionalist and nationalist politics. That is to say
that both sides of the West European party-political spectrum have been internally
divided over European issues. As a result, opposition to integration never became
really concentrated in Western Europe and Euroskepticism remained dispersed
despite the erosion of the permissive consensus.
A particularly sticky problem from the perspective of many West European coun-
tries was the issue of free labor mobility in the Single Market. The fall of the Iron
Curtain and the instability that followed had already resulted in waves of asylum seek-
ers, refugees, and the influx of people with claims to immigrant status, such as ethnic
Germans from the Eastern bloc to Germany. These groups added to a second and
third generation of labor migrants who had arrived in Western Europe from Turkey
and Yugoslavia under guest worker programs, or people who had moved to France,
Belgium, Britain, and the Netherlands from their former colonies. At a time when
European economies were in recession and welfare states were undergoing retrench-
ment, right-wing populist parties in France, Austria, Belgium, and Italy and later in
Denmark, the Netherlands, and even Sweden and Finland turned anti-immigration
messages and identity politics into what Kitschelt dubbed a “winning formula”41 that
attracted sizable portions of the electorate. In this climate, the added prospect of
the free movement of people in search of opportunities and work was a positively
431
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frightening issue for West Europeans even in mainstream parties and labor unions.
The proverbial “Polish plumber” became the symbol of this development, which
was a less explosive political topic in liberal market economies like the UK and in
growing economies like Ireland, the so-called “Celtic tiger.” However, in the organ-
ized market economies of Germany and Austria with their carefully calibrated social
partnership arrangements characterized by special training schemes, extensive job
protections, and complex wage bargaining, the appearance of a cheaper and rather
skilled workforce that exerted downward wage pressures was a major factor in mobiliz-
ing working-class voters for right-wing populist parties such as the Austrian Freedom
Party, the Belgium Flemish Bloc, and the French National Front.
Austria, which shared an unguarded 1,200 kilometer long border with communist
Czechoslovakia and Hungary, is a case in point. After the Iron Curtain came down,
Austrian officials were overwhelmed by large numbers of refugees and labor migrants
crossing the borders. In 1991, Austria mobilized its military and stationed thousands
of new recruits along its eastern border to intercept refugees from as far away as
Afghanistan, China, and Central Asia. Soldiers remained there for over two decades,
and between 1991 and 2007 they apprehended more than 90,000 people crossing the
border illegally.42 By 1993, the number of legal foreign residents in Austria rose to
625,000. This included some 74,000 Bosnian refugees. Estimates of the number of ille-
gal aliens present in Austria at the time varied widely, but credible accounts suggested
around 200,000.43 In short, the total foreign population was somewhere in excess of
750,000 or close to 10 percent of the population, one of the highest ratios in Europe.
In Vienna, a city of 1.6 million inhabitants, the number of foreign workers reached
100,000 in 1991. According to estimates by the Austrian labor inspection office, in
1992 the number of illegal workers and non-registered daily commuters from East
Central Europe was about 30,000 for the country’s eastern region alone.44 Overall, the
number of foreign laborers doubled between 1989 and 1992, representing 8.8 percent
of the total work force. Most asylum seekers and war refugees were concentrated in
certain urban neighborhoods, reinforcing a general perception that the number of
foreigners was actually higher than it was. While the causes for this increase of for-
eigners in Austria were complex, most ordinary Austrians held the changes sweeping
through Europe’s east responsible for the influx. Austria might have been an extreme
case because of its proximity to the transition countries, but similar effects were felt in
Germany and all over Western Europe. In France and Italy common linguistic roots
attracted especially Romanians and Romanian-speaking Sinti and Roma, who felt
discriminated against at home and looked for opportunities in the West.
The combination of rising social needs, greater economic competition, and
declining resources intensified both latent xenophobic feelings and material con-
cerns. Although cities like Vienna remained rather safe by global standards, the
popular press painted a dark picture of the metropolis, portraying it as being in
the grip of violent Romanian street gangs and burglary rings, the Russian Mafia,
and African drug dealers. Needless to say, in this climate, the issue of European
enlargement, integrated labor markets, and the free movement of people became
anathema to many. As a result, most far right and populist parties opposed eastern
enlargement and frequently put mainstream parties on the defensive. Thus, many
governments among the then 15 EU member states insisted on negotiating long
transition periods that allowed the older members to delay the free movement of
432
East Central European workers for up to seven years. Although many of the old
member countries actually suffered from a shortage of skilled labor and although
the eventual influx of labor migrants was not nearly as large as had been expected,
shortening this seven-year exemption remained politically very sensitive in countries
such as Austria and Germany.
Whereas “integration fatigue” and Euroskepticism were on the rise in Western
Europe in the early 1990s, the situation differed markedly in East Central Europe
where the two ideological sources of Euroskepticism – anti-market and anti-liberal
orientations – were frequently bundled together as a programmatic agenda for a
single political party. Karen Henderson explains this as follows: During the initial
stage of party development in post-communist countries, the main conflict was
between post-communist parties representing authoritarian sociocultural views and
anti-market attitudes on one hand, and culturally libertarian parties with pro-market
orientations on the other. The latter had emerged from the civic and political
opposition to the Communist regime and thus rejected what Communist succes-
sor parties advocated in terms of sociocultural and economic policies. In short, a
broad pro-integration consensus emerged across East Central Europe and remained
strong enough to propel these countries toward membership.45
With the European Union Treaty signed in Maastricht in 1993 the EC member
states finally resolved the crucial German Question. The Treaty also became the vehi-
cle for the later accession of new members; it mandated institutional arrangements
that supplemented the already existing economic integration with the harmonization
of foreign and security policy as well as domestic affairs and internal security. More
important, for most of East Central Europe, the newly formed EU included an offer
of full membership to all countries that fulfilled the Copenhagen Criteria. This set
of rules required potential member states to have institutions designed to preserve
democratic governance and human rights, have a functioning market economy, and
accept the obligations and intent of the EU. At the same time the EU also had to
modify its internal institutional arrangements to allow for the effective representation
of new member states in the European Commission, the European Council, and the
European Parliament.
In the Treaty of Nice concluded in 2001, the EU readied itself for the monumental
undertaking of accepting ten new members in 2004: Cyprus, the Czech Republic,
Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia, and Slovakia, of which
only two were not former communist countries. Bulgaria and Romania were to join
three years later. In addition to its institutional adaptation for enlargement, Brussels
had to change many of its internal policies and spending patterns to accommodate
the new member states. During the entire pre-accession period, the EU adopted a
series of programs and measures designed to prepare the candidate countries for
membership and to offer a political partnership of sorts to those that could not or
would not become outright member states, such as Ukraine.
The accession process: negotiating membership

The EU launched accession negotiations with the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary,
Poland, and Slovenia in 1998; and with Romania, the Slovak Republic, Latvia, Lithuania,
Bulgaria, and Malta a year later.46 With the opening of the talks, public debate over
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Europe shifted.47 The negotiations themselves consisted of an exceedingly complex

process in which the EU along with all its members represented by the European
Commission and the individual accession states had to find agreement on 35 policy
fields discussed chapter by chapter. The prospective member states had to accept and
incorporate the entire accumulated legal and regulatory framework as well as all court
decisions of the EU, called the Acquis Communautaire, into their own legal and political
systems. Because the implementation of many tens of thousands of pages of new legal
rules is a difficult process, requiring member states to make adaptations at the national
and sub-national level, candidate countries negotiated transition times and transition
rules designed to alleviate the pressure of adjusting.
Subject to the accession negotiations were, above all, agricultural and regional
subsidies, the sale of real estate to foreign investors, and the free movement of
labor. Negotiators from the candidate countries expressed worries about a loss of
(recently regained) national sovereignty and, in the case of Poland, about the sub-
version of Catholic values. In instances where economic reforms seemed particularly
painful, where candidate countries wanted to protect vulnerable economic sectors
from Western competition or financial takeover, and where the treatment of ethnic
minorities had run afoul of EU standards, the emerging disagreements with Brussels
could be exploited by domestic opposition parties for political advantage against the
government parties that ultimately had to agree to the EU terms.
In the final phase of the negotiations, the question of the institutional representa-
tion of smaller (and larger) states was up for debate.48 Because representation in
the European institutions takes population size into account but cannot be strictly
proportional due to the enormous differences in population size between member
states, there have been constant debates as to a country’s adequate share of influence
and voting power.49 Large countries claim that the system is biased in favor of small
countries, pointing to the fact that smaller states have relatively more voting power
on a per capita basis. In addition, they argue that if smaller member states were
to have even greater political influence so as to frequently thwart the will of much
larger populations then the overall legitimacy of European integration would suffer
and major European powers might decide to strike out on their own. The smaller
countries counter that de facto all key decisions are taken by the bigger member
states, often by shutting out the smaller ones through prior agreements among the
major players. Because most East Central European countries are small to mid-sized
countries, they were not only eager to have as much voting power as possible but also
anxious to preserve the perceived relative difference in political power between them.
For example, the Czech Republic with a population of over 10 million received 12
of 345 votes on the European Council, but Slovakia with about half that population
received seven. Slovenia, with about one-fifth of the Czech population, gained four
votes on the council, giving that government proportionally more influence than
the one in Prague. Poland, by far the largest of the East Central European accession
states, was particularly anxious not to be thrown in with the remaining applicants but
to be accorded the status of a major European power. Poland prevailed, gaining the
same voting power on the European Council as Spain despite having a population
that is smaller by seven million people.
The EU-imposed criteria measured the progress of candidate countries according
to an index of “conditionality,” which provided a rough gauge of the burden that
434
the national political systems would bear. The higher the conditionality, the greater
was the potential for political opponents of the government to exploit the accession
process.50 By contrast, the governing parties locked in intense negotiations with the
European Commission and the EU member states had rather little room to maneuver
and were largely unable to modify their positions with respect to accession, having
to absorb the brunt of criticism that came from the opposition and the public. In
those countries where conditionality was lower, political parties including those in
the government were freer to maneuver: the lower the cost of membership, the fewer
opportunities for political exploitation.
As EU membership drew nearer, the public and political elites became more aware
of the possible consequences of accession which increased the attention paid to the
European issue and moved the debate from generalities to specifics. What is more,
the exclusion of the East Central European states from the EU decision-making pro-
cess until their actual membership in 2004 and 2007, and the long pre-accession
periods also undermined initially strong pro-European sentiments in the candidate
countries. Although the formal accession process between application and member-
ship took about ten years for the former communist countries – not any longer than
the Southern European countries had – the time between the end of communism
and EU accession was much more drawn out (15–18 years). Whereas for Greece,
Portugal, and Spain, EU accession was closely connected in time with their demo-
cratic transition and consolidation (about 10 years), this was less the case for the East
Central European countries.51 As Leconte observes, where such processes are espe-
cially lengthy, the “perception of a link between the two processes can be eroded.”52
Besides the frustrations shared by all East Central European countries in the
negotiations with Brussels, each also faced accession conditions that touched upon
locally sensitive issues such as fear of wholesale foreign landownership in Hungary
and Slovenia, or the many Polish small farmers on unproductive plots, that threat-
ened to bankrupt the system of EU farm subsidies. These could lead to negative
reactions domestically and contributed to a growing perception that the negotia-
tion process was asymmetrical and protracted.53 As a result “accession fatigue” set
in across the EU and admission criteria were applied selectively so that the condi-
tions imposed on Bulgaria and Romania were more stringent.54 Across East Central
Europe people suspected West Europeans of manipulating the process for political
gain and the originally enthusiastic (if superficial) discourse about EU membership
shifted to a more nuanced discussion about specific aspects of the EU and the pros
and cons of accession.55
In terms of party competition, European issues gradually increased in importance.
Initially, when communism had failed and national isolation was the less appealing
option, all transition countries sought to anchor themselves in a “New Europe.”
The road to Brussels offered a seemingly obvious promise of economic and political
advancement. Naturally, diffuse support for Europe was high as long as the cost of
integration was perceived to be lower than the potential gains. Therefore, party com-
petition in the early post-transition phase did not turn on the question of whether
or not “Europe” should be the goal but focused on the speed and extent of the eco-
nomic reforms needed for eventual accession. However, just as had happened in
Western Europe, apprehension toward EU membership grew when “Europe” turned
from an abstract goal into concrete policies and requirements with real political costs.
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At the juncture when “Europe” was transformed from a diffuse into a concrete issue,
political actors had to adopt positions vis-à-vis the specific conditions imposed for
accession, as candidate countries were reviewed regularly on their progress by the
European Commission. To the extent that political parties represented an agenda
that overlapped with the EU requirements, party elites were supportive; but when
snags arose in the negotiations with Brussels, a political space for party competition
opened up.
Accession could serve as a rallying cry for overcoming a legacy of obstacles to
national modernization. Western EU members had similarly found it difficult to
initiate certain homegrown modernization processes because of the opposition of
domestic groups with vested interests in maintaining old arrangements. As in coun-
tries like Austria, opting for accession to the EU largely absolved national political
elites from taking responsibility for painful economic adjustments such as implement-
ing privatization and deregulation measures to boost economic competitiveness and
rein in public spending. The blame could now either be passed on to Brussels or
defended as the inevitable consequence of membership.56 Political leaders in transi-
tion societies could shirk liability by pointing to the EU’s demands when faced with
implementing difficult reform measures.
This shift in the national debates on “Europe” made it easier for politicians to
criticize the entire process and the particular way the accession negotiations were
conducted. Opposition parties, in particular, took aim at the “weakness of the govern-
ment in defending national interests.”57 Moreover, completely autonomous national
decision-making was a new experience in most of East Central Europe, and it appeared
to be in jeopardy once countries had opted for membership in a supranational sys-
tem of governance like the EU dominated by powerful Western European states. It is
easy to understand the fear of someone like the Czech politician Václav Klaus, who
concluded that his country risked replacing one remote center of d omination in the
form of Moscow with another called Brussels.58
The earlier standard pro-European stance was replaced by a pragmatic “yes-but”
toward accession. In order to avoid being perceived as too Euroskeptical, politi-
cians in East Central Europe introduced the term “Eurorealism,” i.e., “support for
the principle of European integration and disapproval of the accession conditions
offered to the CEECs [Central and East European Countries].”59 These develop-
ments were accompanied by a realignment of political parties counter to the initial
assumptions that the political conflict in East Central Europe would be fought
between pro-market/libertarian and anti-market/authoritarian political forces.
Parties on the economic right, such as Fidesz in Hungary and the Solidarity Electoral
Action (AWS) in Poland became increasingly less libertarian and more traditional
and nationalist. The subsequent emergence of a Polish populist mainstream party,
the Law and Justice Party (PiS), with a similarly traditionalist orientation and con-
siderable Euroskeptical leanings further underscores this transformation in the East
Central European party systems.60 It is difficult to say whether, or to what extent,
European integration was the cause or merely the catalyst for otherwise internal
political developments. In marked contrast to Western and Southern Europe’s
experience, in Hungary, Poland, and (to a lesser extent) Slovakia, a political right
emerged with a strong illiberal and market-skeptical streak, alongside a moderate
left, which adopted more liberal and pro-European positions. Conservative parties
436
in Germany, Italy, France, and elsewhere had been the initial architects of European
integration at a time when the political left was still largely skeptical of the project.
Not surprisingly, East Central European polities with their national-accommodative
or patrimonial communist roots – to draw on our previous analysis of regime legacies –
were more prone to develop traditionalist, authoritarian, and nationalist parties.61
National protest parties that formed around cultural, religious, and ethnic cleav-
ages often included a degree of Euroskepticism in their programmatic mix. This
was often little more than a strategic move intended to secure a momentary advan-
tage in the political marketplace. In other instances, such parties’ Euroskepticism
was ideological and cultural in that they perceived the EU as inimical to national
identity and tradition. Examples include the Self-Defense of the Republic of Poland
(Samoobrona), the League of Polish Families (LPR), Jobbik in Hungary, and Ataka
in Bulgaria. In the Polish case, the potential threat posed by secular and liberal
European values to the religious fabric of society was a major concern. Collectively
these parties sought to mobilize people along sociocultural fault lines so that
questions of ethnicity, traditional values, and national identity coupled with law-and-
order ideas became central to their program and campaigning while excluding, in
their vision, significant portions of the population from the national political future.
To the extent that accession imposed limits on the ability of these parties to pursue
their radical exclusivist goals, the EU came into the political crosshairs of politi-
cal activists because the program of these parties conflicted with the Copenhagen
Criteria and other norms.
Among all accession countries, Romania may be a special case. It has been
described as tricking Brussels during membership negotiations so that European
officials were outwitted by the determined Romanian team that, according to crit-
ics, called the Europeans’ bluff about transforming local practices. Tom Gallagher
has shown that unscrupulous politicians promised substantial reforms in exchange
for accession, while disguising their actual intransigence and making a mockery
of the EU’s much-vaunted “soft power.” Instead of enforcing strict conditions in
the areas of justice, administration, and agricultural reforms, Brussels allowed
Romania to slide back.62 A 2012 European Commission Report scathingly criti-
cized Romania for failing to root out corruption and political influence in its state
institutions. Romania remains profoundly affected by its regime legacy and by the
transition, which created conditions that have been allowed to persist despite and
after EU membership.63
By the late 1990s a number of conservative parties in East Central Europe became
more Euroskeptical and new right-wing anti-European parties emerged, but the
majority of the Communist successor parties, which had been expected to oppose
accession, moderated their anti-market attitudes which became increasingly unpop-
ular with the electorate. Many of the ex-Communist parties transformed themselves
into social democratic ones and adopted moderate pro-market positions. This devel-
opment came as a surprise to scholars who had expected that unreformed Communist
successor parties would reject European integration, thus forcing other parties to
adopt a Euroskeptical stance.64 However, as these ex-Communist parties frequently
moderated their views on Europe, new parties rushed in to fill the Euroskeptical gap.
Furthermore, the political climate had changed since the early transition years. The
overlapping cleavage between pro-/anti-EU and non-communist/communist that
437
R einhard H einisch
characterized politics in the 1990s had eroded by 2004, making it easier for non-
communist parties to adopt critical attitudes toward the EU.
Simply put, the moderation of the old leftist parties allowed for a host of new,
often radical, parties to establish themselves. Similarly, as communist successor par-
ties were no longer Euroskeptical or Europhobic but became, paradoxically, rather
Europhile, conservative ones were freed to move in the opposite direction. Catholic
parties like the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) in Slovakia, which previ-
ously did not wish to be identified with a position also shared by the Communists and
therefore was part of an alliance with pro-EU parties, changed course. As a result,
they became increasingly critical of the secularism and cultural liberalism associated
with European integration.65 Overall, the European issue was now of limited use for
non-communist parties to differentiate themselves from former communist parties.
At the same time, “Europe” was increasingly used to draw a clear line between main-
stream and protest parties, reflected by the difference between “Eurorealism” and
“Euroskepticism.” In addition, mainstream politicians employed the two labels to
blame each other for jeopardizing a country’s successful integration and to present
themselves as supporters of EU membership while also delivering on questions of
national interest.66
These developments led to some bridging of the gap between East Central Europe
and Western Europe in terms of their publics’ debates over “Europe.” Whereas
in Western Europe the permissive consensus had begun to erode with Maastricht
(if not before), the experience of accession negotiations was diminishing the
“Euroenthusiasm” in East Central Europe. Euroskeptical forces were no longer con-
centrated at a unitary authoritarian/anti-market pole of the political spectrum but
became more dispersed. By the same token, some formerly pro-European parties of
the economic right increasingly adopted critical positions toward Europe, thus mim-
icking developments already seen on the far right in Western Europe. Unique to
East Central Europe, however, was the conversion of the political mainstream from
“Euroenthusiasm” to “Eurorealism” and “Europragmatism” within a relatively short
time period as a result of the perceived power asymmetry of accession negotiations
with the EU.67
The gender dimension

The accession process of the East Central European countries to the EU has often
been compared to that of the Southern European member states as both were eco-
nomically less developed and had undergone a similar transition from authoritarian
rule to democracy. From a gender perspective, this comparison is somewhat skewed
because the situation of women in Southern Europe with its parochial culture was
different from that of the former Socialist societies in Eastern Europe. Whereas in
Europe’s Mediterranean South, accession implied a clear improvement in the situa-
tion of women and contributed to an increase in political representation, a change in
gender roles, and greater economic opportunities, the consequences of enlargement
in East Central Europe were more mixed.68 The inclusion of gender equality and gen-
der mainstreaming in the Amsterdam Treaty, one of the EU’s key foundational docu-
ments, clearly reflects at least the formal commitment by European political leaders
not only to equality of treatment but also outcome, which in turn implied corollary
438
strategies and action. Despite this favorable legal framework, women here might have
lost out in the transition and accession process.69
In East Central Europe, the Socialist governments had considered women’s active
participation in the labor market as a form of liberation and, as a result, it was nor-
mal for women to enter the workforce even in occupations that were rather atypical
in Western countries, especially in the traditional Southern European societies.70 In
fact, labor force participation rates of women in Eastern Europe were nearly equal
to those of men and generally much higher than in most Western countries. To be
sure, female inclusion in the East European workforce did not mean that women
were emancipated in other respects and it often implied a triple burden consist-
ing of work, household, and compulsory political participation. Women were still
considered the primary caretakers as well as producers, and reproducers so that the
patriarchal family along with gender discrimination and stereotypes persisted until
the end of communism.71 Nonetheless, women’s ability to work represented a mea-
sure of economic independence that was threatened by economic restructuring in
conjunction with the accession process. For this reason, women became the “losers”
of this process.72
As the Gross National Products dropped and the state bureaucracies shrank across
transition countries, women were disproportionally affected by unemployment
because of their significantly greater presence in the public sector economy.73 When
they turned to the private sector, social security benefits were frequently far worse
than in the old state enterprises, and they confronted attitudes that were often more
parochial than in West European societies.
During the accession process women tried to use enlargement to put pressure on
national governments and tried to draw attention to their situation. Nonetheless,
one would have to conclude that the EU gave at best scant attention to gender
issues as both the European Commission and the government negotiators placed
other matters far higher on their list of priorities. As a result, the accession coun-
tries failed to adopt the most expansive scope of the legal instruments and policies
available under the EU’s framework, and there is little noticeable difference in
pre- and post-accession compliance in terms of enforcing gender equality in the
work place.74 Studies also show that there have been important differences as to
how standards have been implemented across the region. In part this depended
on specific political conditions such as the role played by leftist governments in
conjunction with the involvement of NGOs with expertise in EU gender equality
legislation.75
Despite the problems associated with the economic transition, EU enlargement
has also had positive effects for women in East Central Europe. For one, the discus-
sion drew public attention to the issue of gender equality and thus enabled a national
debate. Especially pro-European interests and elites regarded this matter at least to
some extent as a necessary part of modernization and supported the underlying prin-
ciple. Accession also meant adopting a range of new laws on the equal treatment of
men and women at work and establishing the concept of parental leave as opposed
to just maternal leave. It is thus difficult to isolate any negative effects of enlargement
on women that were not the result of the overall economic change of the transition.
It is reasonable to assume that similar economic pressures would have likely shaped
the development of the countries in the region but that in the absence of uniform
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minimum European standards the outcomes might in fact have been worse. It is also
apparent, however, that once accession was completed, the EU lost influence in shap-
ing domestic developments in new member states in this and other areas.
The foreign policy dimension

One particular area of disagreement between East Central European and most West
European member states of the EU has been foreign policy, especially in the rela-
tionship with Washington. Accession meant that countries such as Poland and the
Czech Republic joined a “Western project” dominated by a Franco-German part-
nership and the German economy. The importance of German power in Europe at
the end of the twentieth century could give some people pause, particularly Poles
and Czechs. Memories of German atrocities in World War II linger throughout the
region and can be readily inserted into day-to-day politics as the former Polish Prime
Minister Jarosław Kaczyński did in 2011 when warning his electorate of Germany’s
“imperial ambitions.”76
Before accession, the new EU member states had looked toward the US for protec-
tion and tended to support a more hawkish posture when dealing with international
threats, especially those perceived to be emanating from Russia. They all sought to
join NATO, to which many of the Western EU states already belonged. Poland, the
Czech Republic and Hungary had become NATO members five years before joining
the EU. The rest of East Central Europe along with the Baltic countries and Slovenia
joined the Western defense alliance in 2004. Foreign policy orientation is deeply
rooted in historical experiences. East Central Europeans saw their liberation from
communism in part as the result of US foreign policy, especially under President
Ronald Reagan, which confronted Soviet expansionism aggressively. By contrast,
many West Europeans, especially the Germans and the French, tended to credit
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for the changes in the Eastern bloc, while regard-
ing Reagan as a dangerous warmonger.77 Many distrusted the cozy ties that some
West European countries had maintained with Communist regimes in the Soviet
Union and elsewhere in the name of trade and détente. Following the 1989 revo-
lutions, East Central Europeans watched how helpless the major European powers
seemed in dealing with the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Likewise, the rela-
tive eagerness with which West European countries, notably France and Germany,
embarked on a policy toward Russia in which strategic security concerns took a
back seat to efforts of securing access to Russian gas and raw materials was cause
for alarm – justifiably, it turns out – throughout East Central Europe. Germany
especially stood accused of pursuing “economic nationalism” and of undermining
the common European energy policy through bilateral deals with Moscow and its
gas industry.78
In Western Europe many had begun to reject traditional power politics and sought
to project the image of Europe as a civilian superpower.79 Large sections of the public
in Germany, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, had adopted an out-
right pacifist orientation. French and German elites were especially horrified when
hearing US conservatives talk about American unilateralism and the use of military
force to deal with global threats.80 The confrontation between Americans and West
Europeans (with some notable exceptions) came to a head when Germany and France
440
openly broke with Washington over the buildup for war in Iraq in 2003.81 It was an
extraordinary development when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany – the
EU’s (arguably) most important country and, since 1945, one of America’s staunch-
est allies – distanced his country from the US and the policies of President George
W. Bush.82 In return, ten East Central European countries, known as the Vilnius 10,
signed an open letter backing the US and in turn criticizing the West European critics
of the Bush policy of intervention in Iraq.83 This had followed a similar declaration
by eight European supporters of the US which called on the UN Security Council
to take measures against the threat posed by Iraq.84 US Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld added further fuel to the fire by conjuring a new schism between “old” and
“new Europe.” Referring to West European allies that opposed going to war with Iraq
he told a reporter, “You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think
that’s old Europe.”85 In response, French President Jacques Chirac called the letters
“infantile” and “dangerous,” adding that the East Central Europeans had “missed a
great opportunity to be silent.”86 Those leaders subsequently supported the so-called
“coalition of the willing” by deploying mostly small troop contingents to Iraq. Poland
was the only “new European” country to participate in the invasion itself. Whereas
Romania maintained its small forces in Iraq the longest, withdrawing only in 2009,
the Hungarians pulled their troops out in 2005. The failure to find weapons of mass
destruction, the enormous toll it took to stabilize Iraq, and the decline in prestige of
the Bush presidency in its second term all served to mitigate the rift between “old”
and “new” Europe and old and new EU member states.
Struggling with two wars, the US and its British ally were keen to enlist all the
help they could to assist with institution-building, political stabilization, and policing
the vast territories under their control in Afghanistan and Iraq. The EU as a whole
and the wealthier and larger Western European powers were better equipped to do
this. As a result, Washington had little interest in continuing to play off one part of
Europe against the other. As other issues, notably the global economic crisis and
European financial crisis, took center stage, and as Washington shifted its strategic
focus to Asia, differences over foreign policy among EU member states drifted into
the background. A change in the political leadership of the US, France, and Germany
also contributed to an improvement in transatlantic relations. The deployment of
a NATO missile shield network based in different East Central European countries
did not produce a rift, although Russian opposition to the project might have easily
driven another wedge between Western and East Central Europe.87
EU-membership: the rise of Europragmatism

For East Central Europeans, the accession process turned the EU from an elusive
goal into a reality, but once accession was achieved, the EU was also bound to disap-
point, given expectations and the difficult conditions of membership. Polls track-
ing the populations of EU member states about their support for integration reveal
that by 2011 overall support for membership among East Central Europeans (includ-
ing the Baltic States) was lower (46 per cent) than in the old 15 EU member states
(57.6 percent) (see Figure 9.1). Yet, if we discount the extreme case of Latvia (an out-
lier with only 23 percent approval), average support between old and new member
states is rather similar.
441
R einhard H einisch
80
Percentage of those who consider EU
membership as a “good thing” 70 68
64 62 61
60 57.6
54 51 50
50 45
40
40
34
30
23
20
10
0
5
ia
ia
nd
ia
ia
ic
ry
ia
C
-1
ni
ni
bl
ak
an
en
tv
ar
ga
la
EE
to
ua
EU
pu
La
lg
ov
ov
m
Po
un
Es
Bu
th
C
Re
Ro
Sl
Sl
H
Li
ch
ze
C
Figure 9.1 Support for EU membership among Central and East Central European member
states, 2011
Source: Own calculations based on data provided by Eurobarometer 75.1 “EP: Women in the European Union,
February–March 2011” (ICPSR 34594), at www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/34594?q=euro
barometer+75+1
In Latvia, the EU’s pressure to grant full citizenship rights and minority protections
to the ethnic Russian population clearly irritated the majority Latvian population,
thus the popularity of membership plummeted. Another exception is Hungary with
43 percent support for EU membership. While it had once been among the most
Euroenthusiastic East Central European countries, with an approval of member-
ship of almost 70 percent, support fell precipitously after accession. This happened
in the context of the growing economic crisis first under the Socialist government
of Ferenc Gyurcsány (2006–09) and then under the conservative Fidesz Party. As a
result, Hungary’s enthusiasm about EU membership was the second lowest in East
Central Europe whose combined average was some 53 percent in 2011.88
Although support for membership has been declining across the EU, three
East Central European countries are notable exceptions. A comparison of recent
Eurobarometer surveys shows that in 2010 more Slovaks, Bulgarians, and Estonians
thought EU membership was “a good thing” than only two years earlier.89 Overall,
Slovakia (68 percent), Poland (61 percent), and Romania (64 percent) have remained
the most enthusiastic East Central European member states in the EU.
The seemingly growing Euroskepticism among East Central European publics
needs to be put into perspective by contrasting what people think about European
political institutions with their respective national ones. Figure 9.2 shows that “trust
in European institutions” is generally higher than in the national governments.90
More strikingly, there has been a clear difference in the patterns between Eastern
and Western EU member states when it comes to citizens trusting the EU versus their
national government. In East Central European countries, the public places on aver-
age considerably more trust in EU institutions than people do in their own national
442
political system, whereas among the old member states the trust in the EU and in
their own governments is about equal with 43.9 percent and 42.7 percent, respectively
(see Figure 9.2).
When people were asked about the benefit of EU membership, a slightly higher
ratio of East Central Europeans agreed that “their country has on average bene-
fited from membership” (see Figure 9.3) than West European respondents. Even in
extremely Euroskeptical Latvia, some 47 percent of the people conceded that their
nation had benefited from membership. Among the East Central European states,
Poland and Slovakia expressed the most satisfaction with 73 percent and 72 percent,
respectively, sharing the view that their countries had benefited from accession.
While this is not surprising given the economic support and foreign investment East
Central European countries received as a result of EU accession, it seems clear that
people distinguish between the benefit of membership on one hand, which even the
skeptical voices acknowledge, and more complex general feelings about the effect of
membership on the other. The latter may reflect the perception of not being treated
as fully equal to Western member states or possible resentment about European inter-
ference in domestic matters.
It is surprising perhaps that, despite these common trends, there has been such
a significant variation in the evolution of sentiments about EU membership. Even
if we allow for the different regime legacies and the varying conditions that have
shaped the accession process, it is nonetheless startling to see the range of responses
by both the party systems and the publics in East Central Europe to the integration
process. When we compare the trend lines of support for EU membership from 2001
to 2010, we notice that only the Czech Republic and Slovenia started with levels of
support below 50 percent (see Figure 9.4). In the Czech case, it was the mainstream
trust the national government/the EU
70
Percentage of those who tend to
62
61
61
60
53.3
56
60
54
52
52
43.9
42.7
50
45
44
36
36
40
30
25.6
29
30
20
14
14
13
13
10
0
5
ia
ia
ia
ry
lic
ia
C
-1
ni
ni
an
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ub
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EE
to
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ov
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ov
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ep
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th
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R
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Trust in National Government Trust in the EU
Figure 9.2 Trust in the national government versus trust in the EU among member states, 2011
Source: Own calculations based on data provided by Eurobarometer 75.1 (op. cit.).
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R einhard H einisch
80
Percentage of those who assume that their
country on balance has benefited from EU
73 72
70 68 67
61
60 56.6 58.1
54 53
50 47
membership
46
40
40
30
20
10
0
5
ia
ia
ic
ia
ia
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ry
C
-1
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ar
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to
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EU
pu
La
lg
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ov
ov
Po
un
Es
Bu
th
C
Re
Ro
Sl
Sl
H
Li
ch
ze
C
Figure 9.3 Perceived benefit of membership of the EU, 2011

party ODS with first Prime Minister and later President Václav Klaus that pursued
a Euroskeptical direction. From Brussels’ vantage point, it was probably fortuitous
that the ODS did not return to power until after Czech accession. Nonetheless, its
stance absorbed most of the anti-accession sentiments, making it difficult for right-
wing Euroskeptical protest parties to emerge. On the left, the Communist Party
of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) had originally also opposed EU membership
but for reasons diametrically opposed to those of the ODS. However, in time, the
Euroskepticism of KSČM evolved from an ideologically motivated antagonism to
free market ideas to a more moderate type of protest-based Euroskepticism.91 Until
the emergence of new protest parties in the 2010 elections, the ODS and KSČM
split the Euroskeptic vote, allowing the relatively pro-European Social Democrats
(ČSSD) to govern during the sensitive time of accession. Subsequently, when the
ODS returned to government, it was not under the fierce Euroskeptic Klaus but
rather the more pragmatic Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek. Thus, support for EU
membership actually grew with accession, declining only after 2006 when the ODS
returned to power. However, the Czech Republic is no longer the Central European
country with the lowest levels of public support for EU membership; it has since
been surpassed by Hungary.
In Slovenia concerns about real estate acquisition by German, Italian, and Austrian
investors, protectionist fears about local businesses being taken over by foreign inter-
ests, and the recent and hard-fought struggle for national independence were all
factors in the public debate about EU membership. This may explain the relatively
low levels of support in the run-up to accession. Subsequently, Slovenia saw a steep
increase in pro-EU sentiments prior to accession. In turn, this was followed by a
444
90
Percentage of those who consider EU
80
membership as a “good thing”
70
60
50
40
30
20
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Romania, 64 Bulgaria, 54 Hungary, 34 Slovakia, 68

Poland, 61 Czech Republic, 40 Lithuania, 51 Slovenia, 50
Latvia, 23 Estonia, 62
Figure 9.4 Trends in support for EU membership among East Central European countries
decline and yet another upswing before dropping off and increasing again. Despite
such swings in the support for membership, public approval of membership was
higher in 2010 than in 2001 (see Figure 9.4). One may assume therefore that as the
Slovenes’ fear about their role in the EU eased, membership support stabilized and
even picked up.
In Poland and Slovakia, initial support for the EU was very high, but it declined
somewhat over the course of the decade. In Poland, this coincided with the gov-
ernment of the Euroskeptical Law and Justice Party (PiS) and its junior partners in
government, Self-Defense and the League of Polish Families (LPR). Nonetheless, by
2010 support had rebounded in both states. In Slovakia the upswing resulted in levels
of support even higher than at the beginning of the decade.
Hungary has been a clear outlier. In 2001 support for EU accession here was
the highest (59 percent) among the Visegrád Group of countries that also includes
Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Subsequently, support rose higher still
only to plummet in two stages, after accession in 2004, and then again after 2006.
By 2010, support for EU membership was less than half what it had been a dec-
ade earlier (see Figure 9.4). The decline seems to be linked to a protracted crisis
in Hungary’s economic and political system, which resulted in a dramatic rise in
authoritarian, anti-international, and illiberal sentiments, and fostering radical
ultra-nationalist forces such as Jobbik while handing a series of political victories
to the former liberal-turned-nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. His party
(Fidesz) has moved to the right and introduced some features into the political
system that many Western observers regard as incompatible with the norms of
445
R einhard H einisch
Western-style democracy. While Orbán never campaigned against Europe the way
Václav Klaus and the ODS did in the Czech Republic, he has constantly provoked
his European partners and the EU. In turn, the European Commission and various
EU leaders have criticized Budapest, to which Orbán has responded by defending
Hungary’s sovereignty: “We will not allow Brussels dictating us their terms! [sic]
We have never let Vienna or Moscow guide us in our history, and now we won’t let
Brussels do this! Hungary should have its own corner interests!”92 It is not surpris-
ing that both the growing nationalism and the confrontations with Europe under
the Orbán government have also left their mark on how Hungarians assess their
country’s EU membership.
The “late-comers” Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the EU in 2007, exhib-
ited extremely high levels of membership support early on with 80 percent and
74 percent, respectively, followed by a precipitous decline, around the time when the
more successful East Central European countries first entered the EU. Nonetheless,
support for the EU recovered, settling above 50 percent for Bulgaria and 60 percent
for Romania (see Figure 9.4).
The considerable spread in levels of Euroskepticism among East Central European
member states in the early 2000s reflected the divergent conditions of applicant
countries. In Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, populations remained fairly
optimistic as they typically expected political and especially economic improvements
from accession. Optimism was tempered in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia
by fears that membership might result in the imposition of economic reforms or
political changes that were controversial; here the initial levels of support were there-
fore only about average. In the Baltic States, concerns about national sovereignty and
European interference ran high, depressing popular support for membership. But
as the accession process continued, the trend lines in EU-support in different areas
converged around the middle of the 2000s only to diverge once more toward the end
of the decade, when a new trend toward Eurorealism became overt. Among the more
skeptical countries, support for membership picked up, once both the inevitability of
the accession became obvious and the worst fears spread by anti-accession advocates
were recognized as exaggerations. By contrast, in formerly Euro-enthusiastic coun-
tries, pro-EU sentiments declined somewhat when people realized that expectations
may have been unrealistic, and that the necessary reforms might prove more painful
than anticipated.
Following the accession and immediate post-accession stage, the countries of East
Central Europe diverged in their levels of support once again in part due to domes-
tic factors such as the ascent of more Euroskeptical parties in Poland and the Czech
Republic in the middle, and in Hungary toward the end of the decade. The impact
of the economic and financial crisis resulting in massive capital outflows, a decline
in exports, and mounting instability in the banking system was another increas-
ingly important factor in the decline of support for the EU(see the fuller discussion
below). Coping with rising unemployment and tremendous fiscal pressures chal-
lenged national policymakers while fueling domestic discontent. Austerity programs
were highly unpopular, so naturally policymakers tended to deflect political pressures
by pointing to external causes of both the financial crisis and the pressures toward
austerity. Nonetheless, the crisis also exposed structural vulnerabilities particularly in
Slovakia and Slovenia that had introduced the euro as their currency.
446
Even before accession, Slovakia had distinguished itself from the remaining East
Central European countries by launching a series of landmark economic reforms
that limited government and transferred social and economic risk to individuals.
The goal of the center-right governing coalition of Mikuláš Dzurinda that drafted
Slovakia’s “neoliberal turn” was to create unrivaled conditions for foreign investors.
Most famously, the country introduced a 19 percent flat tax on corporate, personal
income, and VAT in 2004. Although the subsequent Slovak government under
the Social Democratic Prime Minister Robert Fico had campaigned on addressing
some of the inequities of these neoliberal policies, no fundamental course correc-
tion occurred between 2006 and 2008. In fact, the country appeared to cope well
with the global financial crisis and introduced the euro in 2009, which at the time
appeared to provide added safety to a small exposed economy at the mercy of inter-
national market forces. The world had just witnessed the implosion of Iceland,
another small previously booming liberal economy built on cheap credit and foreign
investment. Nonetheless, the Slovak economy contracted by almost five percent in
2009. Subsequently in 2011, the country had to contribute to Europe’s main bail-
out fund for the struggling Southern Eurozone economies, particularly Greece, a
“Western” country traditionally much wealthier than the emerging markets in East
Central Europe. Following a public uproar, Slovakia voted “no” to expanding the
powers of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), thus forcing the center-
right government led by Iveta Radičová to resign after a vote of no-confidence. In this
instance, Slovakia exemplified a shift in the perception of “center” and “periphery”
in Europe from West–East to North–South during this period. In the end, the EFSF
was approved with the backing of the Social Democratic opposition under Fico who
returned to power as prime minister in 2012. The Slovak experience and the trans-
formation of what had been a global financial and economic crisis into a crisis of the
euro and the eurozone in particular, gave other East Central European countries
pause about introducing the European currency. Eurozone countries could no longer
set monetary policy on their own or devalue their currencies to boost exports; they
were expected to contribute to the various stability mechanisms and they were more
beholden to pressures from the powerful eurozone economies such as Germany.
Slovenia, with its highly skilled labor force, powerful export economy, and its
adoption of the euro in 2004, represents another early economic success. Having
the Balkans as its backyard but relying on close economic ties to Germany, Italy,
and Austria, it had always appeared more “Western” than any of the East Central
European economies. Yet, the introduction of the euro led to higher prices and
decline in productivity relative to other East Central European countries. Giving in to
nationalist inclinations, the country was nonetheless slow to divest itself of inefficient
enterprises and sought to maintain protectionist practices where it could. At the same
time, cheaper euro-denominated loans fueled a real estate investment bubble that
eventually left Slovenian banks with such enormous debt that it threatened the finan-
cial stability of the country. Following massive budget cuts in 2013, Slovenia came
close to asking the EU for financial assistance.
Euroskepticism in the Czech Republic had appeared to decline during acces-
sion, but it increased after 2008 when Europe was struggling with the financial crisis.
Subsequently, the idea of introducing the European Single Currency was off the
table for Czech politicians. Poles also appeared glad to have held on to their national
447
R einhard H einisch
c urrency. However, there, as the economy was somewhat buffered by the country’s
large domestic market, and given Poland’s relatively greater influence in European
affairs, public support for EU membership remained strong. The same is true of
Romania and Bulgaria, although this is not due to their economic success or lever-
age, but is rather the result of the fact that “Europe” still remains the best hope for
economic and political advancement.
In most instances the external pressures of the economic crisis were mediated
through the prism of domestic politics. As surveys we conducted in Hungary and
Slovakia in 2012 and 2013 show, the public blamed national politicians for the crisis
first, and the European decision-makers second.93 What made the economic crunch
worse in most countries was a growing crisis of confidence that left people profoundly
frustrated with the political establishment. Violent clashes and large-scale demonstra-
tions first in 2006 in Hungary, and later in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and
Slovenia, attest to this discontent. The chief disillusionment with EU accession is its
seeming inability to bring about fundamental domestic change.
Domestic politics as the driver of protest parties and anti-EU sentiments

Paradoxically, domestic political dissatisfaction could be the reason for the emer-
gence of so many Euroskeptical parties in East Central Europe despite generally
high levels of popular support for the EU. After all, a solid majority of nearly
60 percent in the new member states believed that their countries had benefited
from accession. Trust in European institutions also remains higher among East
Central European publics than in the old member states.94 How then can we
account for the fact that overall support for Euroskeptical parties in East Central
Europe has been substantial and often higher than in Western Europe? We note
that these sentiments were driven mainly by preferences for “soft” Euroskeptical
parties and not, as in Western Europe, for “hard” Euroskepticism. The latter
refers to those groups who not only show some qualified objection to European
integration but pursue a clear opposition to membership or reject the EU.95 East
Central European publics place little trust in their own governments and political
institutions. As Figure 9.2 shows, the people of East Central Europe responded in
2011 that they trusted their national governments only about half as much as they
trusted the EU (cf. 25.6 percent vs. 53.3 percent). Further evidence of an appar-
ent disconnect between genuine anti-EU sentiments and voting for self-proclaimed
Euroskeptical parties is revealed by the slight correlation between the vote share for
such parties and the actual level of popular Euroskepticism. Figure 9.5 shows, for
example, that in relatively Euroskeptical Slovenia, Euroskeptical parties have made
no significant gains whereas in Europhile Poland, Euroskeptical parties have done
rather well.96 Similarly, in extremely Euroskeptical Hungary and Latvia, there is
comparatively little evidence of voting for hard Euroskeptical parties compared, for
example, with Denmark or France, where anti-EU sentiments correlate positively
with voting for parties critical of European integration. Successful nationalist and
staunchly conservative parties, such as Fidesz in Hungary, might have their con-
flicts with Europe, and might posture that way to the base, but they have not been
explicitly Euroskeptical in the same way as their Western counterparts – the Front
National in France, the Danish People’s Party, and the Austrian Freedom Party.
448
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
0
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
Poland Slovakia Czech Republic
Estonia Hungary Lithuania
Slovenia
Figure 9.5 Cumulative vote share of Euroskeptic parties in East Central European countries.
Note that neither Romania nor Latvia had any Euroskeptic parties.
Source: Own calculations based on data provided by Parties and Elections in Europe. Available online at
www.parties-and-elections.eu (accessed 1 June 2013).
Likewise, it would be wrong to conclude that any party promoting national over
European interests is anti-European per se. The same has to be said for those voting
for such parties.
Thus, a likely explanation for the incongruence between the trends in public
Euroskepticism and the success of anti-European parties could be the anger and
discontent people feel about domestic politics. Let us approach this argument by
examining what political scientists call salience, which represents the amount of
attention an issue receives in party politics. In political competition, a party must
carefully weigh its options when deciding the campaign issues to which it will allocate
scarce resources. It stands to reasons that parties only spend time and money on
themes that genuinely matter to them and their voters. Drawing on available expert
survey data on the nature of parties across the region, one finds little evidence that
the success of Euroskeptical parties is driven by hard opposition to “Europe.”97 Most
such parties devote less salience to “Europe” and more to domestic protest. Thus,
when comparing how important the EU position is to a given party and depicting
the results (see Figure 9.6), we notice that very few parties appear to be genuinely
Euroskeptical at their core.98
449
R einhard H einisch
0.8
Euroskepticism
more salient
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
populism more salient
−0.2
Nationalist
0.4
0.6
0.8
−1
ik
S
ER
S
ES
D
D
Pi
KS
SN
ZD
bb
LP
KD
C
M
O
KD
SM
KS
Jo
D
H
FI
-
LS
Figure 9.6 Protest parties in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia
Source: Own calculation based on Chapel Hill Expert Survey 2006 (CHES Data 2006).
Upon close examination of radical opposition parties that mix domestic elements
with Euroskepticism, we found only three instances in which Euroskeptical attitudes
seemed more salient to protest parties than “nationalist populist” issues. Only the
Czech Civic Democratic Party (ODS) was exclusively devoted to a Euroskeptical
agenda. By contrast, for the Polish party Self-Defense (S) and the Communist Party of
Slovakia (KSS), the Euroskeptical position was only slightly more important than their
stance on domestic protest. Other radical protest parties such as the Polish parties
Law and Justice (PiS) and the League of Polish Families (LPR), the Communist Party
of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM), and the Hungarian party Jobbik turned out to be
mixed protest parties, meaning that they direct their criticism at both the national
and the European levels. Finally, seven parties that are frequently considered anti-
European should be reclassified as nationalist protest parties. These include Fidesz,
the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP), and the Hungarian Democratic
Forum (MDF) in Hungary; and the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), the
Slovak People’s Party–Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (ĽS-HZDS), the Slovak
National Party (SNS), and the party “Direction” (SMER) in Slovakia.
Euroskepticism appears to represent only one element within an overall protest
strategy that aims to attract voters dissatisfied with domestic politics. Especially for
new parties in a volatile political landscape such as the one in East Central Europe,
adopting a position that deviates from the pro-Europe mainstream can communicate
450
“difference” and say “we are not corrupt like the rest” – sending an additional signal
to parts of the alienated electorate that the party stands apart from and can correct
the faults of previous governments. The cause for much of the dissatisfaction with
domestic politics may be rooted, in part, in the widespread perception of corrup-
tion and influence peddling. In the Corruption Perception Index (CPI), compiled by
the NGO Transparency International, all East Central European countries (with the
exception of Estonia) score relatively low compared to most West European states.99
Figure 9.7 provides an overview of average CPI scores for East Central European
countries from 2001 to 2011. Among the Visegrád Group, only Poland has seen a sig-
nificant improvement in recent years, with a smaller one in Slovakia; the performance
of Hungary and the Czech Republic has suffered.
Europe’s financial crisis may result in the further politicization of the “Europe ques-
tion” throughout Europe. How might the people of East Central Europe in particular
feel about their situation following the crisis? New data provided by the Standard
Eurobarometer 83 and 84 of 2015 largely confirm previous results.100 In all, new mem-
ber states, support for the EU has declined, and in most countries respondents felt
that their economic outlook had worsened; they expressed concern for the future
of the EU. However, in most cases, the national situation was perceived as being in
worse shape than the EU’s, and in all countries, immigration, the economy, and ter-
rorism topped the list of worries. Respondents generally trusted European institutions
7
6.1
6
5.08 5.2
4.96
5 4.59
4.4
4.14
4 3.71
3.23 3.3
3
0
a
ry
ic
nd
ia
ia
ia
ia
a
i
ni
i
bl
en
ak
an
tv
ar
ga
la
to
ua
pu
La
lg
ov
ov
Po
m
un
Es
Bu
th
Re
Ro
Sl
Sl
Li
ch
ze
C
Figure 9.7 Average corruption scores 2001–11, based on Corruption Perception Index (0–0.9 =
highly corrupt, 9–10 = very clean)
Source: Own calculation based on corruption Perception Index. Available online at http://cpi.transparency.
org/cpi2011/results/.
Note: Average scores in 2011: Estonia (6.4), Slovenia (5.9), Poland (5.5), Lithuania (4.8), Hungary (4.6), Czech
Republic (4.4), Slovakia (4.3), Latvia (4.2), Bulgaria (3.3), Romania (3.6) – cf. Nigeria (2.4), Russia (2.4.),
US (7.1), Germany (8), Sweden (9.3) – Source Transparency International (2011).
451
R einhard H einisch
more than domestic ones, although the gap has narrowed over time. On big ques-
tions like common defense and security policy, foreign policy, economic governance,
or the free movement of citizens, goods, and services, people are preferring more,
rather than less EU involvement and European cooperation. Support for the EU is
strongest where the economic outlook is bleakest, in countries such as Romania and
Bulgaria. The picture that emerges is one of realism and guarded optimism, with peo-
ple c ontinuing to aspire for “Europe” to solve the big questions.
Where does Europe go from here?

The years following enlargement have been, to put it mildly, difficult ones for
the EU. Even a normally joyous occasion such as the accession of another Central
European country, Croatia, in 2013 was not met by much enthusiasm, either on
the part of the EU or the Croatians themselves.101 Both enlargement fatigue – the
growing unwillingness to accept countries with political and economic liabilities
from Europe’s periphery – and a backlash against the perceived concentration
of decision-making power in Brussels have undermined the general appeal that
“Europe,” in the sense of a grand continental project, once held. The permissive
consensus, i.e. the tacit approval by the peoples of Europe to pursue further inte-
gration, has been replaced by a constraining “dissensus.”102 In short, Europe can
agree on less and less but rather than flying apart, it is held together by a corset of
institutions that does little more than ensure a lowest common denominator solu-
tion to problems. When given the choice of voting in referendums on European
decisions, people often chose to oppose this further transfer of national sovereignty
to the European level. The Treaty to establish a Constitution for the EU (TCE), was
rejected by the Netherlands and France in national referendums in 2005 and the
less ambitious Treaty of Lisbon was launched in 2007.103 Its ratification also proved
difficult; Ireland first rejected it in 2008 and had to vote again in a second referen-
dum to “get it right.” In Germany, the treaty faced a challenge before the constitu-
tional court and, in the Czech Republic President Václav Klaus refused to sign the
document until late in 2009, delaying its implementation by a year according to the
original schedule.
No sooner were the protracted battles over the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty
over, when Europe was hit by the worst economic and financial crisis it had encoun-
tered since integration began. What started as a real-estate and banking crisis in some
countries quickly became a continent-wide recession and then a sovereign debt cri-
sis, with the effect that highly indebted member states such as Greece and Cyprus
could no longer raise enough capital in the financial market to service their debts,
thus requiring the support of fellow eurozone countries to remain solvent.104 When
this support was not readily forthcoming, investors lost confidence in the euro. In
fact, Europe’s initial inability to respond flexibly and effectively to these challenges
exposed structural flaws in the European financial system as well as the rules govern-
ing the single currency. The euro crisis undermined confidence in the entire banking
system and cast doubt on the ability of so many governments to take meaningful joint
action to contain the problem. The resulting insecurity very nearly led to the collapse
of the single currency, raising the specter of the disintegration of the EU or at least
the exodus of several member states. This scenario was averted mainly because the
452
only central institution, the European Central Bank, took decisive and, according to
its critics, unorthodox steps.
The crisis was especially painful for the new member states although they were nei-
ther profligate big spenders nor guilty of incurring a speculative real estate bubble.
Nonetheless, they depended on investments from the richer West European econ-
omies and ended up in recession once these stopped, and capital was repatriated
by cash-starved Western corporations and banks. Domestic economic problems and
political mismanagement aggravated the situation in countries such as Hungary and
Slovenia.105 The consequences in East Central Europe were twofold. First, the precari-
ous situation forced political actors to take a position on “Europe” often in the context
of bad economic news. Second, the crisis undermined the principal raison d’être for
membership in the EU, i.e., economic opportunity and political stability. The prob-
lems of the eurozone were almost welcomed by some policymakers who could use
them to divert attention from homegrown economic problems and mismanagement,
as illustrated by the Hungarian government.106
The complex measures adopted to deal with the crisis were controversial and cre-
ated new fault lines in the EU. They pitted the weaker and highly indebted Southern
European economies – Greece, Cyprus, and Italy – against the stronger northern
economies, especially Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and the Scandinavian
countries. Various measures staved off a complete collapse of the eurozone, but
these represented the minimum necessary that the economically strong states were
able or willing to offer without alienating their domestic voters. At the same time,
the emergency austerity programs weaker countries were forced to accept pushed
them into severe recession causing mass unemployment and sparking large-scale
protests. The dilemma of how to respond to the crisis brought the more power-
ful and wealthier “old” member states into conflict with each other, while the East
Central European countries watched from the sidelines, hoping for the recession to
end and for the flow of investments to resume. As people across the EU lost confi-
dence in “Europe,” resenting either the aid offered to states in crisis, or the austerity
measures adopted (depending on their perspective), in the 2014 elections to the
European Parliament, support for anti-European and Euroskeptical parties grew sig-
nificantly.107 New radical parties of the right and left such as Golden Dawn and Syriza
in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and the Five-Star Movement in Italy were launched as a
result, and a radical-left anti-austerity government came to power in Greece in 2015.
During the acrimonious debt negotiations with Greece the possibility of Greece’s
ouster or departure from the eurozone – “Grexit” – became a very real possibility.108
The loss of any member would, of course, test the Union’s strength and cohesion.
The euro crisis added to the expanding list of polarizing issues inside the EU.109
Conflicting visions of the EU’s role as a strategic actor capable of projecting political
and possibly military force constitute another. The new EU members cannot relate
to European integration as a continent-wide peace project in quite the same way
as the older members. For East Central Europeans the question of Russia and the
potential threat it represents to their security, remains a central concern. Threats
to Ukraine’s sovereignty by Russian President Vladimir Putin have also endangered
EU unity. Tensions in Ukraine began when President Yanukovich – under Russian
pressure – abandoned a trade treaty that was in the works with the EU, and, instead,
reinvigorated economic cooperation with Russia in November 2013. This produced
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R einhard H einisch
an escalating wave of demonstrations in Kiev’s Maidan Square, which met with gov-
ernment reprisals. The crisis deepened, leading to Yanukovich’s flight to Russia in
February 2014. The same month, incognito Russian troops, often referred to as “little
green men,” began the annexation of Crimea. Putin ignored Western demands to
stop meddling in Ukraine, and after Crimea’s annexation, Russian agents instigated
and supported militarily a separatist pro-Russian insurgency in Eastern Ukraine as
well. While the US expressed outrage and imposed harsh and escalating economic
sanctions on Russia, some European countries showed a more conciliatory attitude
toward Putin for various reasons. Some depended on Russian gas; others had impor-
tant trade and business interests to protect. Many Europeans, shaped by the trauma of
past wars, were wary of any military action on Europe’s soil. Of the new EU member
states, only the Baltic States and Poland, states sharing borders with Russia, voiced
harsh criticism viewing Putin’s policies in light of past, but fairly recent, Soviet aggres-
sion which they knew first hand.110 However, Putin’s unwillingness to respond to soft
diplomacy created greater unity and resolve among the EU countries. In the fall of
2014 the EU introduced harsher sanctions in line with Washington. NATO stopped
short of arming Ukraine but it has gradually strengthened its presence in the coun-
tries close to Russia and Ukraine and on the Black Sea. Military exercises in Poland
and the Baltic States in the summer of 2016 were the largest in Eastern Europe since
the Cold War, according to The Washington Post.111 In parallel to this robust defense
response on NATO’s part, Germany has taken the lead in coaxing Moscow into the
“Minsk Process,” i.e. negotiations to de-escalate the stand-off in Donbas. Moscow will
likely keep trying to manipulate this frozen conflict on Europe’s margins to divide the
EU against itself, and to keep at least part of what Russian politicians have called after
the fall of the Soviet Union “the near abroad”, as near as possible, and as far from
the EU and NATO as possible.112 It remains to be seen how much success this kind of
old-fashioned power politics will have in the post-communist age.
European integration has been a long and arduous journey for the East Central
European and Baltic states domestically as well. Early on, the public debate in East
Central Europe was generally dominated by the desire to “return to Europe,” a
slogan that not only expressed the region’s historic aspirations but cast the EU in
the role of savior from the communist past. Sweeping pro-integration sentiments
prevailed in East Central Europe until the end of the 1990s. The perception of
the EU took a turn for the worse during the accession negotiations as candidate
countries found themselves confronted with conditions that were politically unpop-
ular and undermined domestic support for the process. Although sentiments about
“Europe” became less favorable over time, they did not translate into outright rejec-
tion. EU membership held out important rewards and resources that the poorer
East Central European countries could not do without, in contrast to some old
member states such as the United Kingdom, where the discussion about devolving
some political competencies from Brussels back to the national level, led to a ref-
erendum on leaving the EU altogether. The success of the leave campaign in the
UK and “Brexit” are likely to further strengthen the Euroskeptical voices across
Eastern Europe.
Despite successful accession to the EU and impressive economic growth, the
countries of East Central Europe are still highly dependent on outside investments,
knowhow, and access to an integrated labor and export market. In many places,
454
institutional development and governance remain seriously marred by corruption

and inefficiency, which in turn alienates large sections of the public from the state,
undermining citizen loyalty and civic engagement. Political parties have frequently
failed to develop genuine grassroots support and all too often prefer to mobilize
voters through a populist discourse with shrill messages and sweeping promises.
Historic revisionism, ultra-nationalism, antisemitism, and anti-minority activism have
at times become diversionary issues and electoral devices offered in place of convinc-
ing political programs.
The latest challenge confronting the EU are the hundreds of thousands of ref-
ugees fleeing war and economic destitution to reach Europe. Already before 2014
large numbers of people running from the upheavals and conflicts in the Middle
East, Central Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa were arriving in Europe along the
Mediterranean route.113 However, the sudden influx of large numbers of Syrian
refugees into Greece in 2015 opened another, so-called Balkan, route to Northern
Europe, involving East Central Europe directly in the migrant crisis. When large
numbers of refugees became trapped along the Balkan route, Chancellor Merkel
signaled Germany’s willingness to admit an undetermined number of asylum seek-
ers. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán sharply criticized Germany’s policy for
needlessly attracting more refugees, and closed Hungary’s borders. The countries
of East Central Europe had no recent experience with large-scale immigration espe-
cially from outside Europe. Questions of identity and xenophobia had already gained
salience following the economic crisis, so governments throughout the region, egged
on by conservative and right-wing activists, refused to cooperate with the EU plans
to distribute asylum seekers across Europe, instead supporting tougher border con-
trols and the erection of fences. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary
coordinated their actions through the Visegrád Group.
Austria, which had been following Germany’s lead, also changed its policy. At
an impromptu summit in Vienna in 2016 the Austrians orchestrated a shutdown of
the Balkan route by coordinating with the countries of the Western Balkans against
the objections of Berlin and Brussels.114 Overall, the refugee crisis brought the new
member states of the EU closer together in the sense that they synchronized their
actions and became more aware of their common historical, political, and social
differences from their neighbors to the West. The experience has also dented the
reputation of Berlin which had previously emerged as the new European power
center. As Brussels and Berlin appear weakened, the new member states have
become more assertive although it is not clear to what end. With none of the three
crises – the euro crisis, the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and the refugee crisis – fully
resolved and the EU fraying around the edges, the future of European integration
looks uncertain. In this context, the Visegrád countries have emerged as a signifi-
cant force among the member states whose vision of the EU departs markedly from
the long dominant liberal and pro-integration regime pursued by founding mem-
bers, especially Germany. Instead, the goal is to revert to policies strongly oriented
at national priorities and designed to protect illiberal political changes from outside
interference. However, each protracted problem facing the EU has also shown the
inability of any single country to deal with matters of such complexity and magni-
tude on its own. Thus further Europragmatism could be the likely course of action
for the East Central Europeans.
455
R einhard H einisch
Nonetheless, the new EU member countries in East Central Europe have come a
long way from their status as poor petitioners in the anteroom of EU membership. A
report by the High Level Reflection Group of the Central European Policy Institute
on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of accession found that “central Europe
has never in its history been more free, secure and prosperous” and called on the
countries of the region to speak more assertively across the full range of European
issues.115 Others have also commented on the remarkable economic success of the
former Soviet bloc countries that joined the EU.116
Above and beyond the level of economics and “high” politics, the (re)integration
of Western and Eastern Europe has long become a reality for millions of ordinary
Europeans. Every year Europe’s tourist Meccas are crowded and its freeways clogged
by travelers from both “Europes.” The major cities all across Europe now resemble
one another with their pedestrian zones, boulevards, cafés, international brand-name
retailers, and entertainment venues. Particularly the post-communist generation has
taken full advantage of the freedom of mobility the new unified Europe offers. Thus,
many have flocked in search of work and opportunity to London, Berlin, Rome, and
countless other places. Most significant perhaps have been the educational opportu-
nities offered to a young generation that were simply unimaginable to their parents
trapped behind the Iron Curtain.
The integration of Western and Eastern Europe remains a work in progress. What
seems to be emerging is neither the fulfillment of the grand optimistic vision of a
united Europe of the post-transition period, nor the dystopian image of the European
super-state that skeptics painted. Rather we see a general sense of Eurorealism among
elites based on the recognition that without a minimal measure of common European
action, the old continent’s influence in the world will not only wane but that Europe’s
rather comfortable existence is unlikely to endure. Europe’s soft power, that is the
promise of personal freedom, economic opportunity, and rule of law, is extraordi-
narily compelling within the Union, along Europe’s periphery, and well beyond it.
This appeal was on display during the mass protests on Kiev’s Maidan Square, when
demonstrators waved EU flags and chanted “Ukraine in the EU.” Hundreds of thou-
sands, if not millions are drawn to Europe’s shores and its prosperity as proven by the
refugees making the sea crossing or land trek to reach the continent from the Middle
East, Asia, and Africa during the wars in Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, and Syria. It
is in fact Europe’s great allure that has become also its principal problem. Ukrainians’
and Syrians’ attempts to join, reach, or settle in Europe bear a certain resemblance
to the aspirations a quarter century ago of the newly de-communized peoples of East
Central Europe to “return to Europe.” And the new EU member states, now inside
the fortress, can either welcome them or urge raising the drawbridge.
Notes
1 Political science often distinguishes between so-called “hard” and “soft” euroskepticism.
Paul Taggart and Aleks Sczcerbiak, “Parties, Positions and Europe: Euroscepticism in the
EU Candidate States of Central and Eastern Europe,” SEI Working Paper no. 46, 7, 2001.
In our analysis, euroskepticism will be used as an umbrella term referring to any kind of
sustained negative sentiments toward, or opposition to European integration. If further
differentiation is warranted, additional qualifications will be introduced. For example,
Catharina Sørensen distinguishes between utilitarian, sovereignty-based, democratic,
456
and social euroskepticism. Cf. Catharina Sørensen, “Love Me, Love Me Not: A Typology
of Public Euroscepticism,” SEI Working Paper no. 101/EPERN Working Paper No. 19
(Sussex European Institute, 2008). In a similar vein, Cécile Leconte makes a distinc-
tion between utilitarian, political, and value-based, and cultural euroskepticism. Cécile
Leconte, Understanding Euroscepticism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Furthermore,
concepts of euroskepticism developed to capture different forms of opposition to
European integration in public opinion are quite sophisticated but have little to offer
with regard to our analysis here. The argument is that it makes sense to differentiate
between those who reject European integration outright and those who express qualified
opposition. Cf. André Krouwel and Koen Abts, “Varieties of Euroscepticism and Populist
Mobilization: Transforming Attitudes from Mild Euroscepticism to Harsh Eurocynicism,”
Acta Politica 42, no. 2 (2007): 252–270. Other scholars have rejected the latter notion of
soft Euroskepticism altogether because it is said to be indistinguishable from one that
merely promises to bargain hard on behalf of the national interest. Cf. Petr Kopecký and
Cas Mudde, “The Two Sides of Euroscepticism Party Positions on European Integration in
East Central Europe,” European Union Politics 3, no. 3 (2002): 297–326.
2 For further discussion see Heather Grabbe and Kirsty Hughes, “Central and East European
views on EU enlargement,” in Karen Henderson, ed., Back to Europe: Central and Eastern
Europe and the European Union (London: UCL Press, 1999), 185–202, esp. 185–190 for
public opinion, and 190–195 for political debates. See also Vladimir Tismăneanu, “The
Moving Ruins,” Journal of Democracy 25, no. 1 (2014): 59–70, esp. 61. The concept of the
“Return to Europe” was the central theme in Petr Kopecky and Peter Učeň, “Return to
Europe? Patterns of Euroscepticism among the Czech and Slovak Political Parties,” in
Jacques Rupnik and Jan Zielonka, eds., The Road to the European Union: The Czech and Slovak
Republics (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 166–167. In this connec-
tion, see also Pontes Resende and Tanasoiu Cosima, “The Change of Fate of a Political
Symbol: ‘Europe’ in Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe,” paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of the Political Studies Association, April 10–12, 2001, Manchester, UK.
3 Václav Havel (2009) Speech of Václav Havel, European Parliament, Brussels, November 11,
at www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=projevy&val=1290_aj_projevy.html&typ=HTML
(accessed December 8, 2016).
4 Desmond Dinan, Ever Closer Union? An Introduction to European Integration (Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 128.
5 James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will. International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (London:
C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1997), 33.
6 Jackie Gower, “EU Policy to Central and Eastern Europe,” in Karen Henderson, ed., Back
to Europe: Central and Eastern Europe and the European Union (London: UCL Press, 1999), 4.
7 Vladimir Tismăneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-
communist Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 14.
8 Petr Kopecký, “An Awkward Newcomer? EU Enlargement and Euroscepticism in the
Czech Republic,” in Robert Harmsen and Menno Spiering, eds., Euroscepticism: Party
Politics, National Identity and European Integration, European Studies 20 (Amsterdam & New
York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2004), 225–245.
9 Havel’s Speech to the European Parliament in European Partnership for Democracy (2009).
www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=projevy&val=1290_aj_projevy.html&typ=HTML
(accessed October 12, 2012).
10 Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” The New York Review of Books 31, no. 7
(1984): 1.
11 Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, Towards a History of the Literary Cultures in East-
Central Europe: Theoretical Reflections, ACLS Occasional Paper no. 52, American Council of
Learned Societies (2002): 2.
12 Peter Siani-Davies, The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2005); and Tom Gallagher, Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished
the Strong (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009).
13 Including Romania and Bulgaria in EU accession could be rationalized also in terms of the
need to stabilize these important countries wedged between Russia and the West.
457
R einhard H einisch
14 Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, and Gabor Tóka, Post-Communist
Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
15 Ibid., 70.
16 Ibid.
17 Bernard Steunenberg, and Antoaneta Dimitrova, “Compliance in the EU Enlargement
Process: The Limits of Conditionality,” European Integration online Papers (EIoP) 11, no. 5
(2007).
18 Václav Havel, Europe as a Spiritual Task, Project Syndicate, December 27, 1996, at www.project-
syndicate.org/commentary/europe-as-a-spiritual-task (accessed December 8, 2016).
19 Milada Vachudova, “Tempered by the EU? Political Parties and Party Systems Before and
After Accession,” Journal of European Public Policy 15, no. 6 (2008): 861–879.
20 Vít Hloušek and Pavel Pšjea, “Europeanization of Political Parties and the Party System in
the Czech Republic,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 25, no. 4 (2009):
513–539.
21 Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems, 23.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Rossen Vassilev, “Post-Communist Bulgaria’s Ethnopolitics,” The Global Review of Ethnopolitics 1,
no. 2 (2001): 37–53.
25 Remarkably, the Bulgarian Constitution forbids the formation of parties on an ethnic,
religious or racial basis. Yet, the constitutionality of the MRF survived a court challenge in
1992 and has since served as a frequent coalition partner of different mainstream parties
of the left and right at the national level.
26 Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems, 30.
27 Marek Rybář, “Old Parties and New: Changing Patterns of Party Politics in Slovakia,” in
Susanne Jungerstam-Mulders, ed., Post-Communist EU Member States: Parties and Party Systems
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 147–175, 150.
28 Laure Neumayer, “Euroscepticism as a Political Label: The Use of European Union Issues
in Political Competition in the New Member States,” European Journal of Political Research
47, no. 2 (2008): 135.
29 For example, trade policy, economic policy, and competition policy (all aspects pertain-
ing to the Single Market) are determined through supranational and intergovernmental
decision-making in which European-level institutions play a key role, other areas such as
common foreign and security policy are handled by inter-governmental decision-making.
30 Agnes Batory, The Politics of EU Accession: Ideology, Party Strategy and the European Question in
Hungary (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008), 56.
31 Richard Frucht, Eastern Europe: An Introduction to the People, Lands, and Culture, vol. 1 (Santa
Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 359–360.
32 Karen Henderson, “Exceptionalism or Convergence? Euroscepticism and Party Systems in
Central and Eastern Europe, 2008,” in Aleks Szczerbiak and Paul Taggart, eds., Opposing
Europe? The Comparative Party Politics of Euroscepticism, vol. 2: Comparative and Theoretical
Perspectives (Oxford & New York: Oxford University, 2008), 121.
33 The name Jobbik comes from the Hungarian “job” (right) and is a play on words signifying
“more to the right” but also “better” (i.e., the better right).
34 Søren Riishøj, “Europeanisation and Euroscepticism: Experiences from Poland and the
Czech Republic,” Středoevropské politické studie/Central European Political Studies Review 4,
no. 4, online at www.cepsr.com/clanek.php?ID=211 (accessed December 8, 2016).
35 Heather Grabbe and Kirsty Hughes, Central and East European Views on EU Enlargement:
Political Debates and Public Opinion, in Karen Henderson, Back to Europe: Central and Eastern
Europe and the European Union (London & Philadelphia, PA: UCL Press, 1999), 188.
36 Petr Kopecký, “An Awkward Newcomer? EU Enlargement and Euroscepticism in the
Czech Republic,” European Studies 20 (2004): 226.
37 Robert Harmsen and Menno Spiering, “Euroscepticism and the Evolution of European
Political Debate,” European Studies: A Journal of European Culture, History and Politics
458
20 (2004): 225–245. Issue on “Euroscepticism: Party Politics, National Identity and European
Integration” edited by Robert Harmsen and Menno Spiering.
38 Richard Eichenberg and Russell Dalton, “Post-Maastricht Blues: The Transformation of
Citizen Support for European Integration, 1973–2004,” Acta Politica 42 (2007): 128–152.
39 Hans-George Betz, “The New Politics of Resentment, Radical Right-Wing Parties in
Western Europe,” Comparative Politics 25, no. 4 (1993): 413–427. In some member coun-
tries slogans such as “Denmark for the Danes” advocated by the Danish People’s Party
or warnings against “Umvolkung” [re-ethnification of the population] advocated by the
Austrian Freedom Party appeared.
40 Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, “A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration:
From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus,” British Journal of Political Science 39,
no. 1 (2008): 1–23.
41 Herbert Kitschelt, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis (Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
42 Manfred Roth, “902 Wochen und ein Tag” Austrian Armed Forces (2009), at www.bmlv.gv.at/
truppendienst/ausgaben/artikel.php?id=788 (accessed December 8, 2016).
43 Heinz Faßmann and Anna Babette Wils, “Stocks and Flows: Bestand und Veränderung
der ausländischen Wohnbevölkerung in Österreich (1993) – Stocks and Flows: Current
Position and Change Regarding the Resident Foreign Population in Austria (1993),”
Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 23, no. 3 (1994): 342, 344.
44 BfWuS – Beirat für Wirtschafts- und Soziafragen, Ostöffnung (Vienna: Überreuther, 1992).
45 Henderson, Exceptionalism or Convergence? 121.
46 Ibid., 122; Neumayer, “Euroscepticism,” 125.
47 Stephen Whitefield and Robert Rohrschneider, “Forum Section. Political Parties, Public
Opinion and European Integration in Post-Communist Countries. The State of the Art.”
European Union Politics 7, no. 1 (2006): 143.
49 For example, in the European Council Germany has 29 of 345 votes whereas Malta has 3.
50 Steunenberg and Dimitrova, “Compliance.”
51 Juan Diez-Medrano, Framing Europe: Attitudes toward European Integration in Germany, Spain
and the United Kingdom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
52 Leconte, Understanding Euroscepticism, 73.
53 Robert Harmsen and Menno Spiering, eds., Euroscepticism: Party Politics, National Identity
and European Integration (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), 28.
54 Heather Grabbe, “European Union Conditionality and the Acquis Communautaire,”
International Political Science Review 23, no. 3 (2002); Milada Vachudova, Europe Undivided:
Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
55 Riishøj, Europeanisation and Euroscepticism, 7.
56 Reinhard Heinisch, Populism, Proporz, Pariah: Austria Turns Right, Austrian Political Change,
its Causes and Repercussions (Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers Inc., 2002).
57 Harmsen and Spiering, Euroscepticism, 29.
58 Vachudova, “Tempered by the EU?”
59 Neumayer, “Euroscepticism,” 136.
60 Henderson, Exceptionalism or Convergence? 122–123.
61 Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems.
62 Gallagher, Romania and the European Union.
63 Tom Gallagher, Modern Romania: The End of Communism, the Failure of Democratic Reform, and
the Theft of a Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008). See also Siani-Davies, The
Romanian Revolution.
64 Milada Vachudova and Liesbet Hooghe, “Postcommunist Politics in a Magnetic Field:
How Transition and EU Accession Structure Party Competition on European Integration,”
Comparative European Politics 7, no. 2 (2009): 190.
66 Neumayer, “Euroscepticism,” 155.
459
R einhard H einisch

68 Celia Valiente, “Pushing for Equality Reforms: The European Union and Gender
Discourse in Post-Authoritarian Spain,” in Ulrike Liebert, ed., Gendering Europeanisation.
(Brussels: Peter Lang, 2003), 187–222. See also European Union – Directorate General
for Internal Policies. Policy Department C: Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs:
“Gender Equality Gender Equality in Portugal” Note (2013).
69 For an overview of gender politics in the EU see Silke Roth, ed., Gender Politics in the
Expanding European Union: Mobilization, Inclusion (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), pas-
sim, and p. 5.
70 Rossitsa Rangelova, “Gender Labour Relations and EU Enlargement,” in Anca Pusca, et al.,
eds., European Union: Challenges and Promises of a New Enlargement (New York: International
Debate Education Association, 2004), 284–312.
71 Ibid.
72 Kristen Ghodsee, “Feminism-by-Design: Emerging Capitalisms, Cultural Feminism, and
Women’s Nongovernmental Organizations in Postsocialist Eastern Europe,” Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 29 (2004): 727–753.
73 Charlotte Bretherton, “Gender Mainstreaming and EU Enlargement: Swimming against
the Tide?” Journal of European Public Policy 8, no. 1 (2001): 60–81.
74 Ulrich Sedelmeier, “Post-accession Compliance with EU Gender Equality Legislation in
Post-communist New Member States,” in Frank Schimmelfennig and Florian Trauner,
eds., Post-accession Compliance in the EU’s New Member States: European Integration online
Papers (EIoP), Special Issue 2, vol. 13, no. 23 (2009).
75 Ibid.
76 Der Spiegel Online, Kaczynski Warns of Germany’s “Imperial” Ambitions, May 10, 2011, at www.
spiegel.de/international/europe/polish-opposition-leader-kaczynski-warns-of-germany-s-
imperial-ambitions-a-790034.html (accessed December 8, 2016).
77 Michael Howard, “European Perspective on the Reagan Years,” Foreign Affairs (1987).
78 Henry Helén, “The EU’s Energy Security Dilemma with Russia,” POLIS 4 (2010): 12; see also
Francis McGowan, “Can the European Union’s Market Liberalism Ensure Energy Security
in a Time of ‘Economic Nationalism?’” Journal of Contemporary European Research 4, no. 2
(2008): 90–106; Lisa Pick, “EU-Russia Energy Relations: A Critical Analysis,” POLIS Journal
7 (Summer 2012): 322–365; Marek Neumen, “EU–Russian Energy Relations after the
2004/2007 EU Enlargement: An EU Perspective,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies
18, no. 3 (2010): 341–360; Andreas Goldthau, “Rhetoric Versus Reality: Russian Threats to
European Energy Supply,” Energy Policy, no. 36 (2008): 686–693; Dimo Böhme EU–Russia
Energy Relations: What Chance for Solutions?: A Focus on the National Gas Sector (Potsdam:
Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2010); and Ralf Huisinga, Das Problem des Bilateralismus in den
EU – Russland – Energiebeziehungen (Jena: GRIN Verlag 2007).
79 Andrew Moravcsik, “Europe: The Quiet Superpower,” French Politics 7, no. 3/4 (2009): 403–422.
80 Elizabeth Pond, Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance (Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution Press, 2010).
81 The exceptions in the early 2000s consisted of the UK and the conservative governments
of Denmark, Spain, and Portugal.
82 Anand Menon and Jonathan Lipkin, “European Attitudes toward Transatlantic Relations
2000–2003: An Analytical Survey,” Survey Prepared for the Informal Meeting of EU Foreign
Ministers. Research and European Issues, no. 26 (May 2003), at www.eu2003.gr/multimedia/
pdf/2003_5/917.pdf (accessed October 18, 2016).
83 The Vilnius letter was signed by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia,
Albania, Republic of Macedonia, Romania, and the then-member of the UN Security
Council, Bulgaria. It made a more explicit statement of support for the policy of the US.
84 The Letter of the Eight, from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal,
Spain, and the United Kingdom, accused Saddam Hussein of developing weapons of mass
destruction and demanded the UN Security Council to take action against that threat.
85 US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made the remark at a press briefing on January 22,
2003. See BBC World Edition, January 23, 2003, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/
2687403.stm.
460
86 CNN.com. “Chirac Lashes Out at ‘New Europe’,” February 18, 2003, at http://edition.cnn.
com/2003/WORLD/europe/02/18/sprj.irq.chirac/ (accessed December 8, 2016).
87 At the same time, there was significant opposition by the Czechs to the deployment of a
radar system component of the missile defense shield, reflected both in public protests
and polling data. See “Rice unlikely to visit Poland to discuss missile shield,” The New York
Times, July 8, 2008.
88 Eurobarometer 75.1 EP: Women in the European Union, February–March 2011 (ICPSR
34594), at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/34594?q=eurobarome
ter+75+1
89 Eurobarometer 69.1: Discrimination, Radioactive Waste, and Purchasing in the European
Union, February–March 2008 (ICPSR 25163), at www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/
series/00026/studies/25163?archive=ICPSR&sortBy=7&permit%5B0%5D=AVAILABLE
&paging.startRow=26 (accessed June 1, 2013); Eurobarometer 75.1 EP: Women in the
European Union, February–March 2011 (ICPSR 34594).
90 Eurobarometer 70.1: Globalization, European Parliament and Elections, Building
Europe, Georgian Conflict, Mobility, European Union Budget, and Public Authorities in
the EU, October–November 2008 (ICPSR 28182), at www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/
ICPSR/series/00026/studies/28182?archive=ICPSR&sortBy=7&permit%5B0%5D=AVA
ILABLE&paging.startRow=26; Eurobarometer 71.2: European Employment and Social
Policy, Discrimination, Development Aid, and Air Transport Services, May–June 2009
(ICPSR 28183), at www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/series/00026/studies/28183?
archive=ICPSR&sortBy=7&permit%5B0%5D=AVAILABLE&paging.startRow=1 (accessed
December 8, 2016).
91 Ronald Linden and Lisa Pohlman, “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Anti-EU Politics in
Central and Southeast Europe,” European Integration 25, no. 4 (2003): 311–334.
92 Viktor Orbán quoted in Gabor Stier, “Prime Minister Orbán: ‘We will not allow Brussels
dictating us their terms,’” European Dialogue, April 2011, at www.eurodialogue.eu/
eastern-partnership/Prime-Minister-Orb%C3%A0n-We-Will-Not-Allow-Brussels-Dictating-
Us-Their-Terms (accessed December 8, 2016).
93 Reinhard Heinisch and Bernd Schlipphak, “Wenn Europa zum Problem wird: Die
Effekte der Finanzkrise auf Euroskeptizismus und nationales Wahlverhalten in Mittel-
und Osteuropa,” Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 8 (2014): 177–196;
Reinhard Heinisch and Kristina Hauser, “Main Right Party Responses to Radical
Populist and Extremist Party Voting in Central Europe,” paper presented at the ECPR
Joint Sessions Workshop, April 10–15, 2014, Salamanca, Spain; Reinhard Heinisch
and Monika Mühlböck, “The Eurosceptical Voter: Attitudes and Electoral Behavior in
Central and Eastern Europe,” paper presented at the 4th Annual General Conference of
the European Political Science Association, June 19–21, 2014, Edinburgh; and Reinhard
Heinisch and Monika Mühlböck, “Perceiving the EU – Problem or Solution? Reacting
to the Financial Crisis in Eastern Central Europe,” paper presented at the 4th Annual
General Conference of the European Political Science Association, June 19–21, 2014,
Edinburgh.
94 Eurobarometer 75 at http://ec.europa.eu/COMMFrontOffice/PublicOpinion/index.
cfm/Survey/index#p=1&instruments=STANDARD (accessed December 8, 2016).
95 Taggart and Sczcerbiak, Parties, Positions and Europe, 7.
96 Euroskeptic parties are classified according to experts’ judgments on the general position
to European integration the leadership of a party holds. The values on the scale range
from 1 (= strongly opposed to European integration) to 7 (= strongly in favor of European
integration). Values below 3.5 are seen as indicating a Euroskeptical position.
97 The Chapel Hill Expert Survey 2006 data set features information on the parties’ positions
as well as on the salience parties attach to these positions. Using straightforward compu-
tational techniques, we simplified the position by only differentiating between parties not
adopting Euroskeptical or Nationalist Populist positions (–1), adopting such positions (1),
or being undecided about it (= 0). In a second step we multiplied the respective position mea-
sures by the salience measures (that is (Euroskepticism_pos)*(Euroskepticism_sal), etc.).
Finally, we calculated the degree of salience attributed to one issue dimension in relation
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R einhard H einisch
to the other dimension. The formula used here follows conventional methods of repre-
senting relative values:
Sal EU − Sal NatPop

Salrel = ,
Sal EU + SALNatPop

where SalEU is the amount of salience attributed to the Euroskepticism-dimension and
SalNatPop is the amount of salience attributed to the Nationalist Populism dimension.
98 The resulting coefficient for Salience (Salrel) ranges from +1 (only EU-dimension is salient
to party) to –1 (only Nationalist Populist-dimension is salient to party) while equaling 0 if
both dimensions are equally salient to a party.
99 Cf. CPI score for 2009 (= 5) and 2011 (= 5.5) with CPI scores ranging from 0 (= worst) to
10 (= best/cleanest).
100 For Eurobarometer Standard Report see http://ec.europa.eu/COMMFrontOffice/Public
Opinion/index.cfm/Survey/index#p=1&instruments=STANDARD (accessed December 8,
2016).
101 Der Spiegel Online “‘Late for the Party’: No Joy in Croatia’s EU Accession,” June 26,
2013, at www.spiegel.de/international/europe/grim-future-for-croatia-as-eu-accession-
approaches-a-907551.html (accessed December 8, 2016).
102 Ian Down and Carole Wilson, “From ‘Permissive Consensus’ to ‘Constraining Dissensus’:
A Polarizing Union?” Acta Politica, no. 43 (2008): 26–49.
103 It carefully avoided allusion to being a European Constitution. Instead it sought to pre-
serve many of the organizational and legal reforms of the rejected TCE, which had been
intended to increase governability and political effectiveness by subjecting more decision-
making to majority rule.
104 This is because unlike countries with their own currency, EU member states who share the
euro cannot devalue their currency and simply print more money to meet their obligations.
105 For an overview and data see Portfolio Online at www.portfolio.hu/en/economy/hungary_
advances_in_global_competitiveness_index_yet_makes_no_progress.28305.html
106 See Landon Thomas, Jr., “Hungary Lays Blame for a Fiscal Crisis on Its Central Bank,” The New
York Times, August 2, 2010; “Hungary Blames Economic Problems on Eurozone,” EUbusiness,
November 21, 2011, at www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/finance-economy-imf.dmh; Agence
France-Presse “Hungarian PM Blames EU for Economic Crisis,” July 28, 2012, at www.
rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/28/hungarian-pm-blames-eu-for-economic-crisis; and Michael
Birnbaum, “Anti-EU Forces Make Gains in Hungary,” Washington Post, January 31, 2012.
107 BBC, “Eurosceptic ‘Earthquake’ Rocks EU Elections,” May 26, 2014, at www.bbc.com/
news/world-europe-27559714 (accessed December 8, 2016).
108 John Henley, “Greece Elections: Anti-austerity Syriza Party Sweeps to Stunning Victory,”
The Guardian, January 25, 2015; and Paul Kirby, “Greece Debt Crisis: Has Grexit Been
Avoided?” BBC News, July 20, 2015 at www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32332221
109 Famous were the clashes between bigger and smaller member states over the size of repre-
sentation in the EU’s institution or the conflict between net payers to, and net recipients
from the EU budget.
110 Anthony Faiola, “Europe Divided Over Russia as NATO Meets on Ukraine Crisis,” The
Washington Post, March 4, 2014; “New Europe Is as Divided about Russia as Old Europe –
And That’s Bad for Everyone,” The Economist, May 18, 2014; and Frank Markovic, “What
Lies behind Visegrád Four’s Different Positions towards Ukraine and Russia?” European
Public Affairs, September 5, 2014, at http://www.europeanpublicaffairs.eu/what-lies-
behind-visegrad-fours-different-positions-towards-ukraine-and-russia (accessed December
8, 2016).
111 Daniel Treisman, “Why Putin Took Crimea: The Gambler in the Kremlin,” Foreign Affairs 95,
no. 3 (May/June 2016): 49; and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “U.S., NATO Countries Begin Largest
Military Exercise in Eastern Europe since Cold War,” The Washington Post, June 7, 2016.
462
112 Peter Beaumont, “Russia Makes Latest High-risk Move to Keep Pieces of its ‘Near Abroad’
in Check,” The Guardian, March 1, 2014; and William Bodie, “Moscow’s Near Abroad:
Security Policy in Post-Soviet Europe,” McNair Paper 16, Institute for National Strategic
Studies (June 1993).
113 For statistical information on refugees, see CDOB, “The Refugee Crisis in Figures
(2015),” at www.cidob.org/en/publications/documentation/dossiers/dossier_refugiados/
dossier_refugee_crisis/the_refugee_crisis_in_figures2 (accessed October 18, 2016). For
information on EU policy governing migration and refugees, see CDOB, “European
Legislation on International Protection (2015),” at http://www.cidob.org/en/publications/
documentation/dossiers/dossier_refugiados/dossier_refugee_crisis/european_legislation_
on_international_protection (accessed May 4, 2016).
114 The countries present at the summit included Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo,
Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
115 Central European Policy Institute, “Central Europe Fit For the Future: Visegrad Group Ten
Years after EU Accession,” A Report by the High Level Reflection Group ( January 2014)
at http://pdc.ceu.hu/archive/00007102/01/CEPI_central_europe_fit_for_the_future_
2014.pdf.
116 “New Europe Is As Divided about Russia as Old Europe,” op. cit.
Further reading
Batory, Agnes. The Politics of EU Accession: Ideology, Party Strategy and the European Question in
Hungary. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008.
Bretherton, Charlotte. “Gender Mainstreaming and EU Enlargement: Swimming Against the
Tide?” Journal of European Public Policy 8, no. 1 (2001): 60–81.
Dinan, Desmond. Ever Closer Union? An Introduction to European Integration. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
Eichenberg, Richard, and Russell Dalton. “Post-Maastricht Blues: The Transformation of Citizen
Support for European Integration, 1973–2004,” Acta Politica 42, no. 2 (2007): 128–152.
Gallagher, Tom. Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong. Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 2009.
Henderson, Karen, ed. Back to Europe: Central and Eastern Europe and the European Union. London:
UCL Press, 1999.
Harmsen, Robert, and Menno Spiering, eds. Euroscepticism: Party Politics, National Identity and
European Integration. Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2004.
Heinisch, Reinhard. Populism, Proporz, Pariah: Austria Turns Right, Austrian Political Change, Its
Causes and Repercussions. Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers Inc., 2002.
Hloušek, Vít, and Pavel Pšjea. “Europeanization of Political Parties and the Party System in the
Czech Republic.” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 25, no. 4 (2009): 513–539.
Hooghe, Liesbet, and Gary Marks. “A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From
Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus.” British Journal of Political Science 39, no. 1
(2008): 1–23.
Jungerstam-Mulders, Susanne, ed. Post-Communist EU Member States: Parties and Party Systems.
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006.
Kitschelt, Herbert, et al. Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party
Cooperation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Leconte, Cécile. Understanding Euroscepticism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Linden, Ronald, and Lisa Pohlman. “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Anti-EU Politics in
Central and Southeast Europe.” European Integration 25, no. 4 (2003): 311–334.
Moravcsik, Andrew. “Europe: The quiet superpower.” French Politics 7, no. 3/4 (2009):
403–422.
463
R einhard H einisch
Neumayer, Laure. “Euroscepticism as a Political Label: The Use of European Union Issues in
Political Competition in the New Member States.” European Journal of Political Research 47,
no. 2 (2008): 135–160.
Siani-Davies, Peter. The Romanian Revolution of December 1989. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2005.
Steunenberg, Bernard, and Antoaneta Dimitrova. “Compliance in the EU Enlargement Process:
The Limits of Conditionality.” European Integration online Papers (EIoP) 11, no. 5 (2007).
Szczerbiak, Aleks, and Paul Taggart, eds. Opposing Europe? The Comparative Party Politics of
Euroscepticism, Vol. 2: Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-communist
Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Vachudova, Milada Anna. Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Vachudova, Milada Anna, and Liesbet Hooghe. “Postcommunist Politics in a Magnetic Field:
How Transition and EU Accession Structure Party Competition on European Integration.”
Comparative European Politics 7, no. 2 (2009): 179–212.
Vassilev, Rossen. “Post-Communist Bulgaria’s Ethnopolitics.” The Global Review of Ethnopolitics
1, no. 2 (2001): 37–53.
Whitefield, Stephen, and Robert Rohrschneider. “Forum Section. Political Parties, Public
Opinion and European Integration in Post-Communist Countries. The State of the Art.”
European Union Politics 7, no. 1 (2006): 141–160.
464
10
USE S AND ABU SE S O F T H E P A S T
Patrice M. Dabrowski and Stefan Troebst
The past has been used and abused by those wielding power as well as by the
powerless – both for the purpose of producing legitimacy and collective identity and
in order to secure power or to mobilize against it. Since Howard Zinn’s seminal book
The Politics of History of 1970 and the German Historikerstreit of the 1980s, political
scientists, sociologists, and historians have called this concept-cum-strategy of making
pointed use of history in the public sphere the “politics of history.”1 The practice
has, of course, much older roots. After the medieval doctrine of the divine right of
kings, dynastic rights legitimized political rule in the early modern period. In the
nineteenth century, in the realm of politics as well as in the public sphere, the idea
of “historical rights” was originally developed and utilized primarily for the purpose
of nation-building and state-building (including territorial demands); subsequently
it was used to rally political support and mobilize the population. Tsars, emperors,
sultans, kings, presidents, prime ministers, and other governmental actors, as well as
political parties, religious institutions, trade unions, civic organizations, and protag-
onists of culture have formulated and pursued the “politics of history” in order to
reach their aims. Monuments, holidays, anniversaries, celebrations, historical sites,
museums, exhibitions, plays, and operas, not to mention national, religious, regional
and cultural symbols, and cults of saints, heroes, or battles have all been thus instru-
mentalized. The results of such activities on the political level – in combination with
family memories, private recollections, and individual memory as well as with the
products of oral epic, folklore, literature, art, and scholarship – form the culture of
remembrance of larger human collectives. This holds true, first of all, for national
societies, but also for ethnic groups, speakers of one and the same language, regions
and their inhabitants, and of course for social, professional, religious, cultural, and
other communities. In Central and Eastern Europe, the categories of religion and
denomination, and later of nation and language, and finally that of state have framed
both the “politics of history” and the culture of remembrance.
That the empires of the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs
lasted well into the twentieth century and that autochthonous state-building started
relatively late explains the close connection between the concepts of nation and
religion in the region. In the absence of nation-states having sovereign statehood,
for long periods national church organizations functioned in their place. In other
words, before the state housed and protected the nation, the Church was the nation’s
guardian, as the cases of Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Croatia, and (to a
lesser extent) Poland demonstrate. One regional exception to this rule has been
465
P atrice M . D abrowski and S tefan T roebst
ultidenominational Albania where “Albanianness is the religion of the Albanian,”

m
as the Albanian writer and politician Pashko Vasa asserted in 1880.2
That said, historians concerned with issues of memory and history have empha-
sized the creative and constructed nature of the beast. Perhaps the first major work
dealing with this topic was Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of
Tradition.3 The title reflects the book’s truly novel argument at the time: that many
state rituals (including British coronations) and national symbols (for example,
the Scottish clan kilts) often thought of as hoary traditions were actually shaped
in the nineteenth century. While there is a large literature on commemorations,
of particular relevance to the realm of Central Europe is the collection Staging the
Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present.4
Among other things, its authors avail themselves of such useful concepts as lieux
de mémoire (realms of memory), coined by Pierre Nora.5 Concerning Southeastern
Europe one might start with Claudia Weber’s seminal study of Bulgaria’s govern-
mental “politics of history” and its partly congruent, partly contradictory societal
culture of remembrance from the founding of the Principality in 1878 to the com-
munist takeover in 1944.6 These and other works lead us to conclude that, while
historical memory may be constructed, it is not built out of thin air but often has a
real (physical or historical) basis.7
Clearly, by now, the memory boom has reached the areas of the humanities and
social sciences concerned with East Central Europe. Jan Assmann’s 1997 observa-
tion, “it looks as if a new paradigm in cultural studies is emerging centering on
the term ‘memory,’” is becoming increasingly true for historians, social anthro-
pologists, sociologists, and others in the region from Estonia to Montenegro.8 The
primary focus is on the exploration of the memory of the communist period, while
in methodological terms oral history prevails.9 What Gavriel Rosenfeld has termed
the “memory industry” has also spilled over from academia into the public realm –
into novels, movies, television series, and, in particular, in the proliferation of his-
torical museums.10 Poland provides an extreme, yet regionally typical, example
for the founding of new history museums intended to function as “identity facto-
ries.”11 The Museum of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 opened in 2004; the Museum
of the History of Polish Jews and the European Solidarity Center commemorating
Solidarność opened in 2014 in Warsaw and Gdańsk, respectively. Still under con-
struction are the Museum of the History of Poland in Warsaw and the World War II
Museum in Gdańsk. A new type of contemporary history museum has emerged:
museums of occupation(s), genocide(s), or totalitarianism(s), such as the Museum
of Occupations in Tallinn devoted to the two Soviet occupations of 1940–41 and
1944–91, and to the Nazi one of 1941–44. Similarly the House of Terror in Budapest
combines exhibits devoted to the short fascist Arrow Cross Party rule in 1944–45
with ones dedicated to the decades of communism from 1945 to 1989. By contrast,
the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius is devoted exclusively to the victims of
the post-1944 Soviet period, not to the Jews, Lithuanians, Roma, Poles, and others
exterminated during the occupation by Nazi Germany during the years 1941–44 –
this despite the fact that the building that houses the museum was used not only
by the KGB but also by the Gestapo. To use again Rosenfeld’s terminology: there
will be no “soft landing” of the memory boom in Eastern Europe in the foreseeable
future, not to mention any “looming crash.”12 Here the climb has just begun.
466
U ses and A buses of the P ast
This chapter presents the abuses and uses of history from the eighteenth century
to 1989 as witnessed in both Central and Southeastern Europe, each with its own
peculiarities. The period has been divided into three parts. The first part consists of
commemorations and representations of the past prior to World War I, presented
first for the lands under German, Habsburg (Austrian), and Russian rule, then under
the Ottoman Empire and in its European successor states. The second part repre-
sents what for the countries of the northern tier of this region was a watershed: newly
gained independence after 1918. For much of the southern tier, however, the crucial
caesura proved to be the war itself. In the newly created country of the South Slavs
(eventually named Yugoslavia), attempts to design a new “Yugoslav” narrative – albeit
with Serbian heroes – proved to be unsuccessful. Instead Croatian, Montenegrin,
Slovenian, Serbian, and other ethno-national perceptions persisted. Many of these
narratives and heroes remain part of the fabric of remembrance in the region to this
day. The third part deals with the communist period; it is followed by a conclusion,
which brings the story up to the present.
Before World War I

Cries of “Long live the king! Long live the constitution!” followed the solemn swearing
of obedience to the newly acclaimed constitution in Warsaw’s Church of St. John on
May 3, 1791. The rejoicing crowds carried the Polish king through the streets of the
capital. Those behind Europe’s first constitution recognized the significance of this
historic attempt at reform, which they hoped would spare the country further foreign
interference as well as domestic disorder. In a Declaration of the Assembled Estates,
the Polish Diet resolved to hold an annual celebration of the constitution, “which we
and our descendants will commemorate,” and to construct a Temple of Providence
in the capital in remembrance of this deed.
Even while history was being made, the desire that future generations remem-
ber the deed loomed large. In resolving to commemorate their constitution, Poles
appeared to be following the advice of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his Considerations
on the Government of Poland – penned in 1772, the same year that the first partition
of Poland-Lithuania took place – Rousseau wrote that the Poles needed “to estab-
lish the Republic so firmly in the hearts of Poles that she will maintain her existence
there in spite of all the efforts of her oppressors.” One way of doing this was through
public commemorations of past deeds; that is, by bringing history alive to further
generations of Poles, who would treasure the memories and not only identify with
their national heroes but also seek to emulate them. About the nation’s oppressors,
Rousseau added presciently: “You may not prevent them from swallowing you up; see
to it at least that they will not be able to digest you.”13 Indeed, the first annual com-
memoration of the May 3 Constitution (held on May 3, 1792) would be the last to take
place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Within three years the country was
partitioned into nonexistence by its neighbors, and its inhabitants found themselves –
like so many other peoples in East Central Europe – under foreign rule.
The rulers of this large swath of territory were not inclined to allow their new sub-
jects to cherish collectively memories of a pre-partition, pre-imperial past. Catherine
the Great boasted that she had reclaimed lands that had been unjustly torn away from
Russia – even having a commemorative medal struck to that effect. Frederick the
467
Great claimed territories once ruled by the Teutonic Knights (and thus considered
Prussian). And Maria Theresa created a new fiction: the Habsburgs labeled their new
landholdings the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, justifying the “revindication” of
this territory with a medieval Hungarian claim to those two Ruthenian lands (whose
territories hardly matched Maria Theresa’s gains).14 The three powers even secretly
resolved to suppress the very name of Poland.
Our story of the uses and abuses of history does not end with the imperial manipu-
lation of a formerly Polish past; it only begins here. The great empires of East Central
Europe ruled over many other peoples, whose pasts were recast to fit into a larger
imperial narrative. Yet we can rightly say that the period under investigation in this
book was marked by a proliferation of narratives. While the Enlightenment witnessed
the beginnings of modern, source-based historical accounts in the region, more sig-
nificant developments came on the heels of the French Revolution. Romantic visions
of a bright future for the Slavic peoples, inspired by the East Prussian writer Johann
Gottfried Herder, likewise made a career in East Central Europe; Herder’s writings
influenced prominent historians such as the Pole Joachim Lelewel and the Czech
František Palacký.15
Many of the above-mentioned narratives were national in nature. The potential
for the “indigestion” posited by Rousseau was one of the hallmarks of East Central
Europe during this period of imperial rule, which happens to overlap with the rise
of the modern nation. Given the ultimate outcome following World War I – the
disintegration of the great empires of the region and the creation of smaller entities
aspiring to be modern nation-states – national narratives often evolved into trium-
phalist tales of national persistence from “time immemorial” despite setbacks or
adversity: a given nation was shown to possess qualities that would allow it finally to
triumph over its enemies, (in many instances) after a process of national “awakening”
had taken place.
Yet the rise of modern nations in the region was more complex than that.
Constructivists have acknowledged this, arguing that nations are a modern invention.
Nationalist activists who were once considered (by earlier generations of national
historians) to be simply “awakening” their respective peoples to national conscious-
ness are now generally recognized as nation-builders, not nation-awakeners. Nor
were these “ethno-national entrepreneurs,” as Rogers Brubaker, in the footsteps of
Max Weber and Joseph Rothschild, has labeled them, initially numerous, let alone
well represented across the social spectrum.16 Many villagers, for example, consid-
ered themselves “Christians,” “villagers,” “one of us,” “local people,” or, perhaps, “the
emperor’s people” until quite late in our period, eschewing national identity as such.17
Indeed, nation-building is not the only story here. Vying with allegiance to nation
were numerous other loyalties: to dynastic empires (with or without a sense of national
underpinning), to various religious denominations, even to transnational ideologies
such as pan-Slavism, the international workers’ movement, and the like. As Jeremy
King reminds us, one can easily slice and dice the population of East Central Europe
into “multiple sets of often overlapping and loose linguistic and cultural groups.”18
Furthermore, despite what ethno-national entrepreneurs would have us think, no sin-
gle identity necessarily predominated, nor were individuals in the region destined to
place one such identity over the rest. For example, much recent research has empha-
sized how speakers of German could become members of the Czech nation, or the
468
reverse; that any of them might give preference to a supranational allegiance (such as
to the Habsburg dynasty); and that one and the same person could vacillate between,
accommodate within his or her own self-identification, or express indifference to a
number of allegiances.19 An extreme case is that of the Armenians of Galicia and
Transylvania, who by the end of nineteenth century had “switched” in terms of lan-
guage, denomination, and even ethno-cultural self-identification to Polishness and
Magyardom, respectively; only their native cuisine and family coats-of-arms remained.
All of this complicates who might use history, and for what purposes. Groups or
individuals might seek to avail themselves of the past in order to buttress their own
position within a given state or province, within society, or within the world at large.
Furthermore, it was in their interest to suggest that allegiance to (or membership in) a
given group was firm, not fluid – indeed, predestined (as in the metaphor of “awaken-
ing”). While nation-builders took solace in the Herderian vision of nations as eternal
entities, dynasties strove to integrate the histories of their respective peoples into
seamless narratives that emphasized their right to rule these multinational empires.
Proponents of other ideologies, likewise, used, and abused, history to demonstrate
the correctness of their own positions and buttress their own views of the world.
Lest we criticize too easily the popularization of a given interpretation of history, it
is worth reminding ourselves that there is no perfect account of the past. Historians
are by necessity selective in what they present or emphasize, and the writers or dissem-
inators of popular history even more so (and often more ideologically motivated).
There are questions worth asking of any interpretation. First, whose history is being
presented? And whose, by necessity – and extension – is thus excluded (a key question
in a multiethnic, multidenominational, stratified heterogeneous environment)? One
can write the history of a territorial unit (for example, of a province or country), of a
nation or ethnic group, or of an estate, class, religious denomination, or other entity.
We likewise need to ask what exactly was being recalled: what view of history was being
propagated, to whom, and how?
Let us apply these criteria to the Polish case described above. The May 3 Consti
tution was of statewide importance, yet it was promulgated by the Polish nobility, the
“noble nation,” essentially for itself. Burghers were included as full-fledged citizens
only insofar as they were property owners; the peasants still not, finding themselves
only “under the protection” of the constitution. And what was remembered in com-
memoration, in the festivities held the following year, was not some hoary event from
the medieval period, the period of history in which nation-makers in East Central
Europe tended to take special interest as they sought to emphasize the existence of
their nation from “time immemorial.”20 Rather, in 1792 Poles turned their attention
to a completely recent innovation – a break with the past. They were celebrating the
fact that, despite the threats to the Commonwealth from within and without that
would ultimately be its undoing, the nation had demonstrated that it was capable of
reforming itself.
With the commemoration of the May 3 Constitution in 1792, the Poles were estab-
lishing what they hoped would be a new tradition – and, in the process, establishing
the reformed republic in the hearts of Poles, just like Rousseau had exhorted them
to do. That they chose to do so by both celebrating the anniversary and building
a permanent monument, the Temple of Providence (note the religious inflection
here), suggests that there were many ways that this aspect of the Polish past could
469
be remembered.21 These two ways may have been particularly important in a society
that was only in part literate (hence the preference for visual and public memorial-
izing, which had a greater reach than would published historical accounts) but was
traditionally pious.
Such spectacles were used likewise by the ruling houses of the empires in East
Central Europe. Monuments were erected such as Catherine the Great’s famous 1782
tribute to Peter the Great, Russia’s famous “Westernizer,” or the monument to Joseph
II erected in Vienna in 1807 by his nephew, Francis II; various imperial and/or royal
celebrations – birthdays and marriages, coronations and jubilees – were staged with
greater or lesser pomp (greater in the case of the Russian tsars, known for their lav-
ishness, and reaching new heights with Nicholas II; lesser in the case of the Prussian/
German Hohenzollerns, at least until the reign of Wilhelm II).22 Ceremonies often
had a religious element, the involvement of the state Church lending a stamp of
approval to the divine right of kings. But not all ceremonies were of ancient vintage.
Many were, in the term Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger popularized, “invented
traditions.”23 Thus, perhaps of greatest interest are not the continuities, but rather
the discontinuities, the reasons for resuming or developing imperial rituals that were
meant to inculcate a certain vision of the past.
This can be seen in the example provided by the House of Habsburg. Neither
Maria Theresa nor her son and successor Joseph II was enamored of court pomp and
ceremony, much of which was eliminated during their reigns. Nor did their string of
successors reclaim the old traditions. By the mid-nineteenth century, only a handful
of imperial celebrations made it to the public sphere, and only with the reluctance of
the imperial house. Such was the situation, according to historian Daniel Unowsky,
until Francis Joseph assumed the imperial throne. The young Habsburg emperor,
installed under shaky circumstances in the midst of the revolutions of 1848–49 sought
to reassert the Habsburgs’ claim to rule over this vast multiethnic realm by the grace
of God. In the wake of the revolutions of 1848–49, he reconnected to the traditional
religiosity of the House of Habsburg, the so-called Pietas Austriaca. Francis Joseph
demonstrated this claim not through the long since abandoned religious festivals,
pilgrimages, and other ceremonies but rather in several choice moments when he
ventured into the public sphere in tightly choreographed rituals. The most notable
of these rituals was the Corpus Christi procession. James Shedel writes, “Short of a
coronation, no other public ceremony underscored the continuity and sanctification
of Habsburg rule so successfully.”24 The House of Habsburg reclaimed the proces-
sion, after the people commandeered it during the revolution and in 1848 usurped
the roles earlier filled by dynasty, court, and army. In 1849, Francis Joseph left no
room for doubt that the revolution had been defeated and “legitimate dynastic rule”
restored. Pillars of the monarchy, the Catholic Church hierarchy, and the army came
out to support the monarch in full force. The court, highest aristocrats, and extended
royal family took part in the procession with the young emperor, who followed the
Archbishop of Vienna (carrying the Eucharist). In this way, Francis Joseph connected
his own person with the thirteenth-century emperor Rudolf I and his legendary piety,
as Rudolf had demonstrated a particular veneration of the Eucharist. (Of course, the
Habsburg family saga of a unique connection with the Eucharist actually dated from
the Counter-Reformation and Baroque era; thus the direct line connecting Rudolf
with Francis Joseph was yet another historical invention.)
470
One can surely speak of an “invention of tradition” (or at least a reinvention)

under Francis Joseph. Ceremony and ritual were reinvigorated during his rule, and
both Church and army rallied behind him. Francis Joseph’s incredible longevity
allowed later observers to conclude that this and other dignified imperial ceremonies
such as the celebrations of anniversaries of birthdays, weddings, and rule that prolif-
erated across the empire were ancient, unchanging Habsburg rituals. No matter that
there had been a hiatus of sorts for much of the previous century. The soon to be
ubiquitous Austrian hymn, Gott erhalte (God Save . . . [the Emperor]), composed by
Joseph Haydn in 1797, was not updated until 1854, when it was sung at the emper-
or’s wedding. Yet, as we shall see, such elements were emblematic of the imperial
patriotism that persisted well nigh to the end of the empire.
These manifestations of imperial patriotism and of devotion to the emperor found
their way not only to church and street but also to classrooms. Each elementary
school textbook in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy ended with the text of
the Austrian hymn. Yet after 1867 the hymn was in many cases not in German but,
rather, translated into the students’ mother tongue. Historian Ernst Bruckmüller
relates that, in the same textbooks, one could find a fascinating integration of ele-
ments of a given nationality’s history with that of the empire. Prehistoric legends and
medieval tidbits of, say, Czech history were folded into the history of the Habsburg
dynasty, which in turn was presented in heroic terms (the focus being on rulers and
great battles). A Slovenian textbook contained the stereotype of freedom-loving Slavs
who tended toward disorder; unable to rule themselves effectively, they were subju-
gated by their neighbors. Sensitive issues and conflicts that arose within the empire
(such as the Hussite Wars) were not dealt with in these texts, the purpose of which
was to inspire imperial patriotism and harmony between the peoples. Even in Galicia,
which had a degree of autonomy after 1868, national (here: Polish) history received
little attention: that course was an elective, and, as late as the 1890s, the textbooks
for regular medieval and Habsburg history were but slightly modified translations of
German-language ones.25
Poles were much more successful in shaping collective memory of past deeds
and heroes through commemorations. Indeed, one can speak of the last third of
the nineteenth century as a commemorative age in East Central Europe. This was
most visible in the Habsburg lands (celebrations organized by national minorities
were much more circumspect under German and Russian rule, where they simply
were not allowed or had to take place behind closed doors). According to Article
19 of the Austrian Constitution of 1867, the various peoples of the empire had the
right to nurture their nationality and language. Polish and other national activ-
ists agitated for various historic moments to be celebrated. Some of these fit into
the scheme of Habsburg history, such as the 1683 relief of Vienna from Turkish
onslaught by Polish king Jan III Sobieski, the 200th anniversary of which was feted
in 1883.26 Others were more controversial, such as the 400th anniversary of the
birth of Copernicus in 1873. The man who taught the world that the earth revolved
around the sun was claimed by both German and Polish nations.27 He was also con-
sidered a Slav by Jan Kollár, a Slovak poet of pan-Slavic leanings who immortalized
him in one of the sonnets of Slávy dcera, and he was broadly celebrated in 1873
by the Czechs, who saw “Kopernik” as having roots in their lands.28 Copernicus’s
identity cannot be reduced to Pole or German, Slav or Teuton, since he lived in a
471
pre-national age; yet elements of his biography provided fodder for activists of vari-
ous nations and ideological persuasions to claim him as their own.
One could enumerate all kinds of other uses and abuses of history made manifest
in commemorations during the period of imperial rule. Particularly notable was the
year 1898, which proliferated in anniversaries that could conceivably be commemo-
rated in East Central Europe. Many of them reverberated in the public sphere, making
this year a perfect case study to consider here. Dates connected to the “Springtime
of Peoples” or to the “turning point that failed to turn” (that is, to the revolutions of
1848–49) represent but one (albeit important) set of collective memories.29 Let us
survey what was commemorated, by whom, and with what purpose.
1848 and all that . . .

Many historians of the 1848–49 revolutions have focused their attention on events in
the German lands, which at the time were not yet united under Prussian aegis, and
whose residents still considered at least part of the Austrian Empire to be German.
And let us not forget that 1848 marked the publication of a document that would
prove influential in the decades and years to come: the Communist Manifesto, written
by an obscure Rhenish journalist named Karl Marx.
Yet one looks in vain for official public commemorations in the German Empire.
In the united Germany of 1898, there was no room for memories of the revolution
that took place 50 years earlier. The events of 1848–49 could be seen as a dead end,
given that it took the “white revolutionary,” Otto von Bismarck, to effect the ultimate
integration of most of the lands of the former Holy Roman Empire under Prussia, in
the creation of the German Reich in 1871.30
To be sure, by 1898, the first chancellor of the united Germany was out of power,
although beginning to be memorialized across the country by a proliferation of
“Bismarck Towers.” These, interestingly, were a popular counter-response to the
promotion of statues honoring Emperor Wilhelm I, the first emperor of a united
Germany, by his grandson, Wilhelm II. Unlike his grandfather, who steadfastly refused
to meld Prussian dynastic ritual with German national ones, Wilhelm II loved pomp
and ceremony and sought to imbue the entire German nation with Hohenzollern
dynastic patriotism. The German emperor encouraged a surfeit of commemorations
that would allow him occasion to travel, give speeches, and otherwise win mass sup-
port for the dynasty – to the extent that a number of Germans thought the amount
of time spent on such things to be excessive.31 Yet Wilhelm II did not want the revolu-
tionary events of 1848 to be remembered – certainly not in a public way. Indeed, all
public commemorations of 1848 were forbidden.
Did this outlawing of commemorations mean that no one remembered the events
of 1848 in the German lands? Certainly not. The fighting at the barricades in Berlin
on March 18 had already become an anniversary to be commemorated annually
by workers and Social Democrats in the city at least as of the 1860s. They would
parade (in small groups) to the cemetery of the fallen in Friedrichshain. There, in
this quasi-religious way – perhaps not what one would associate with the workers’
movement – they laid wreaths in silence. Only the texts written on the ribbons of the
wreaths broadcast their revolutionary message, at least until they were confiscated by
the police. The cult of the dead, thus, could be “politically provocative.”32
472
One imagines that at least some German Liberals might well have chosen to attend
church services or otherwise visit St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt in memory of the
year when it seemed that they would manage to create a united Germany. Yet many
had long since chosen to ally themselves with the new regime and instead encouraged
annual public celebrations of the 1871 victory against France, so-called Sedanstag –
Sedan Day, emphasizing “Kleindeutschland patriotism, the empire, emperor, [and]
Bismarck.”33 As Alon Confino has shown, this holiday of the National Liberals was
not successful everywhere, lacking official support as well as being considered in its
appeal to Catholics, Democrats, and Social Democrats, not “German” enough. (That
said, the broadly celebrated 25th anniversary of the foundation of the empire did
take place in 1896.34)
Remembering the Springtime of Peoples under Habsburg rule

The year 1898 brought many more commemorations in the lands of Austria-Hungary.
Not only Liberals and Social Democrats chose to remember the events that took place
some 50 years earlier – although, as we will see, various centennial commemorations
were organized that year as well. Important dates were celebrated across the empire,
dates that reflected the differing experiences and memories of various segments of
the population of the Habsburg lands.35
To be sure, both Liberals and Social Democrats sought to avail themselves of the
revolutionary past in Vienna. An obelisk had been erected to the city’s martyrs in
1864, although it took another three years before an inscription was approved.36
Political groups that chose to celebrate this anniversary with a pilgrimage to the mon-
ument included not only the numerous Social Democrats but also members of the
“Progressive Union” in the city council, Austro-German nationalists, and even anar-
chists. Demonstrating the malleability of memory, each group, whether advocating
revolution or a more complete German national unification, positioned itself as the
heir to the Vienna martyrs.37 Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Austrian-
born Hitler would choose to avail himself of the symbolism of March 13 by sending
his Nazi troops into Vienna in the Anschluss 40 years later.
In 1898, memories of the 1848 revolution reverberated elsewhere in Austria-
Hungary. Social Democrats in the Galician capital of Lemberg (Lwów, L’viv) behaved
similarly to their German-speaking counterparts in Vienna, choosing the date of
March 14 for their anti-government rally. Yet other Galicians bemoaned aspects of
1848 that had particular regional/provincial resonance demonstrated primarily by
the commemorations on November 3, in memory of the bombing of Lemberg by the
Habsburg forces on November 2, 1848.
Yet at least some Galician Poles chose to put a positive spin on the events of 1848.
Witness the commemoration of March 17 by the Lemberg city council, which recast
the contribution of two prominent Polish politicians who had penned and delivered an
address to the emperor that revolutionary year. Although at the time their address had
brought no results – indeed, it was essentially ignored – in retrospect the pair’s call for
increased rights was depicted as having come to fruition during the period of autonomy.38
In sum, Galician subjects of the emperor found various ways to reinterpret the events of
1848: they could be seen as harbingers of the revolution yet to come, mourned for their
destructiveness, or recast as seeds planted for a better, and now achieved, future.
473
These events can be thought of as alternative commemorations within Austria-

Hungary. As in the case of the German Empire, the idea of commemorating the
revolutions of 1848–49 did not sit well with the imperial and royal authorities. If
anything, Emperor Francis Joseph preferred to recall the successful ending of the
revolution, which had been the work of the Habsburg army – that is, with the help of
tsarist forces (although the latter’s efforts do not seem to have been recalled in 1898).
The sacrifices of the Habsburg military were commemorated at the Heldenberg
(Heroes’ Mountain) in Lower Austria, “dedicated to the heroic Royal and Imperial
Italian and Hungarian Armies for their unwavering allegiance and unconquerable
bravery in 1848 and 1849.”39 No matter that Italians and Hungarians also sought
independence from the Austrian Empire at that time! Yet the loyal multinational
Habsburg army was to become one of the pillars of the empire under Francis Joseph,
a fact that the emperor would never forget.
Redirecting memories: The Kaiser Jubilee

In 1898, even the defense of the empire did not receive much press. Instead, the
Habsburg authorities focused their attentions, as well as those of the population, on
another event from those revolutionary years, one that they could cast in a more posi-
tive light. For 1898 also marked the jubilee of Emperor Francis Joseph, who, as a young
man of 18, had assumed the reins of power in the much shaken Austrian Empire on
December 2, 1848. The 50th anniversary of his ascension to the throne was anything
but a celebration of revolution. Indeed, it was rather a salute to the return to absolut-
ism, to a counter-revolution, that was encouraged during the Great Jubilee Year in
Austria-Hungary – certainly in the Austrian half of the empire. (The Hungarians did
not join in Francis Joseph’s jubilee, preferring instead to celebrate his 1867 c oronation
as king of Hungary.)
Habsburg officials planned a variety of events to celebrate the 50th anniversary of
Francis Joseph’s rule. The entire calendar year was designated as a jubilee year. The
celebration of the emperor was to trump any memory of the brief yet violent period
of revolutions that took place a half-century earlier. The Kaiser Jubilee Exhibition,
which opened on May 7, 1898, in the Viennese Prater, suggested that the empire be
cast in modernizing terms, something that other exhibitions held in the empire dur-
ing that decade likewise sought to do.40 A parade was planned for Vienna during the
warm summer months, and both the emperor’s birthday (August 18) and the actual
date of his ascension to the throne were celebrated.
Narrating the House of Habsburg

A commemorative play written on the occasion of the 1898 jubilee is particularly
instructive. Although not performed until much later, due to the mourning period
commencing with the assassination of the Empress Elisabeth that autumn, it none-
theless sheds special light on the uses and abuses of history – as well as a degree of
self-censorship – by those in high places in the Austro-Hungarian government.41 The
play consisted of a series of tableaux vivants presenting episodes from the monarchy’s
history. While that might seem simple enough, the devil lay in the details: what to
include, and what to exclude? The careful vetting process started with suggestions of
474
istoric moments for inclusion (by historian Joseph Alexander von Helfert and August
h
Freiherr Plappart von Lennheer, the head of the court theaters), from which two
imperial officials, Foreign Minister Agenor Gołuchowski and Austrian Minister Franz
Graf von Thun and Hohenstein, selected a half dozen thought to reflect the gravitas
of the occasion but not offend the sensibilities of any of the empire’s nationalities.42
So what scenes passed muster? The first to be featured in the play dated from
1282, the year Rudolf, the first Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, invested his sons
with the Austrian lands. The second scene depicted the 1515 double wedding of the
grandchildren of Maximilian I in St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna, bringing to mind
the method by which the Habsburgs ultimately gained control over Bohemia and
Hungary: through marriage. The officials chose for the third scene the 1683 rescue
of Vienna from the Turkish onslaught by an international army (led by Polish king
Jan III Sobieski); that is, the rescue of the capital of the Holy Roman Empire from the
infidel. (One imagines that this scene suited the Pole Gołuchowski.) The two officials
chose for the fourth scene the Pragmatic Sanction, an agreement that led to dynastic
continuity in the person of Empress Maria Theresa, who, together with her son and
successor Joseph II, was featured in Scene Five. Last but not least, Emperor Francis I
acting as host at the Congress of Vienna of 1815 contributed a scene of international
significance, one that recalled the victory of conservative forces over revolutionary
ones. The crowning scene was to be of Francis Joseph, depicted as benevolent father
of his people and patron of culture, art, and industry, as well as an apotheosis that
appeared designed to encapsulate the jubilee motto of viribus unitis (“with united
strength”), complete with allegorical figures (Bohemia, Hungaria, Galicia) represent-
ing the empire as a harmonious mosaic.43
What was omitted is as telling as what was included. Although the play was to
commemorate the golden jubilee of Francis Joseph as emperor, not a single scene
represented any moment from his 50-year reign. No scene, for example, of the
Compromise of 1867, which created Austria-Hungary; no reference to the empire
as a constitutional monarchy. Rather, the scenes for the most part buttressed Francis
Joseph’s traditionally conceived legitimacy as Habsburg ruler over diverse lands.
Defeat into victory? Hungarian transmogrifications

A real test of collective memory of the events of 1848–49 would take place in the other
half of the Dual Monarchy: Hungary. As Alice Freifeld has noted, for the Hungarians,
this had truly been a “total revolution” – and a “total defeat.”44 Inspired by Sándor
Petőfi’s poetic declamation, people had taken to the streets on March 15, producing
a list of 12 demands. Hungarian national patriots formed a national army (Honvéd),
which fought against the Austrian army and tsarist troops, only to be brought to their
knees in 1849.
Of course, by the late 1890s much had changed. The Dual Monarchy, which
allowed Hungarians to rule over half of Austria-Hungary, had been in existence
for some 30 years. The millennium of the Hungarian presence in East Central
Europe had been triumphantly celebrated in 1896. A commemorative panorama
(a gigantic painting-in-the-round) depicted the Magyar conquest and defeat of the
Slavs, thus establishing for all to see the hierarchy of peoples within the Hungarian
half of the empire. Yet both in (ephemeral) celebration and in (permanent)
475
onumental form, the Hungarian Millennium cast Francis Joseph (who had not
m
been crowned king of Hungary until 1867) as a “new Árpád,” after the great medi-
eval Hungarian chieftain.45
Still, 1848 had not been forgotten. The date that would seem most promising,
insofar as commemorating the events of that year, remained problematic for the
Dual Monarchy as a whole. This date was March 15, recognized among patriotic
Magyars as the beginning of their national revolution, and a prime choice for a
national holiday, had it not carried connotations of Hungarian separatism. The
prime minister in 1898, the Hungarian Liberal and Habsburg loyalist Dezső Bánffy,
sought to establish not March 15 but April 11 as the national holiday. His ration-
ale: the April Laws (sanctioned by Francis Joseph’s predecessor, Ferdinand V, on
April 11, 1848) were the basis for the Compromise of 1867, the foundation of the
Dual Monarchy. Thus April 11 was a “safe” date for a Hungarian national holiday
in the Dual Monarchy. As in the case of the Poles in the Lemberg city council,
Habsburg loyalists in Hungary sought to fold the revolutionary events of 1848 into
the larger picture of Hungarian political advancement since 1867. They interpreted
the revolution as a first step on the way to the Dual Monarchy, which was seen as
giving Hungarians (nearly) all the rights they had clamored for 50 years earlier.
Furthermore, a royal declaration on that day interpreted the events of April 11
as the basis upon which the Dual Monarchy was built, implying that there were
aspects to the revolutions of 1848 that could indeed be commemorated – even
celebrated – in Austria-Hungary.46
Various segments of Hungarian society nonetheless chose to commemorate the date
that Petőfi and his friends immortalized. Thus, on March 15, 1898, non-governmental
buildings flew the Hungarian tricolor, women donned national dress, and stores
closed. Students, pupils, burghers, even peasants seemed to prefer to commemorate
this date. Likewise visible were many Social Democrats, wearing red insignia. They
organized a procession to the Petőfi statue, where they competed for attention with
the Liberals at the latter’s own public rally (their singing of the “Internationale” threat-
ened to drown out songs from the musical repertoire of the Liberals). In other words,
both groups saw themselves as the heirs apparent to the revolution.47
Yet not only the Hungarians in Hungary commemorated 1848. People of various
nationalities living under Hungarian rule availed themselves of the anniversary of
1848 for their own, national, protests. For the Transylvanian Romanians, the date
May 15 was a potent symbol – one of their own national strivings for independence,
begun 50 years earlier. Once again, we see the malleability of commemorations, the
ways in which they can undermine as well as shore up political legitimacy.48
The so-called Hentzi monument represents another dimension of the contentious-
ness of the events of 1848. The neo-Gothic monument, until 1898 found in the center
of Buda(pest), commemorated the loyal Habsburg general Heinrich Hentzi, who
died fighting the Honvéd. His bombardment of Pest is thought to have allowed Tsar
Nicholas of Russia to come to Austria’s aid, leading to the defeat of the Hungarian
Revolution. A hero to Francis Joseph (in addition to the monument, unveiled in
1852, Francis Joseph commissioned and hung a painting of the scene of the gener-
al’s death in his bedroom in Vienna), Hentzi was considered a traitor by Hungarian
revolutionaries, for he had promised Lajos Kossuth that he would never fire upon
his Hungarian compatriots. The monument, as Michael Miller notes, was intended
476
to “reassert Habsburg legitimacy and authority after the revolution of 1848.”49

But it rankled Hungarian national patriots. There were periodic protests and even
an attempt to blow it up. Finally in 1898, the monument was moved to the private
garden of a military academy (to serve as a controversial example for Hungarian
cadets), in this way freeing up the centrally located site for a monument to the
recently assassinated Empress Elisabeth, whom the Hungarians loved.50
1898, continued: the pan-Slavic dimension

In the Bohemian lands, a different anniversary was celebrated in 1898: the cen-
tenary of the birth of one of the Czech nation’s most illustrious sons, František
Palacký. The historian and politician is often called the father of the Czech nation.
Friedrich Engels termed him a “learned German gone mad” – because he consid-
ered himself to be Czech and made that clear in his famous letter to the German
pre-parliament in the spring of 1848. Palacký authored a monumental history of
Bohemia, the first version of which was written in German, the second (retitled The
History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia) in Czech. Note that this history
went no further than 1526, the year Bohemia came under Habsburg rule, as if to
emphasize another famous statement of his, “We were here before Austria, we will
be here even after it.”51
The Palacký commemoration took place in Prague from June 12–20. This was the
first time since the Prague Slav Congress of 1848 that representatives of all the Slavic
nations were present in the Bohemian capital.52 The occasion led to much use, and
abuse, of history, as well as contributing to a worsening of relations between Austria-
Hungary and Russia, on account of a certain pan-Slavic thrust to part of the festivities.
Given the broad Slavic representation, perhaps it should come as no surprise that
toasts were made to the all-Slavic brotherhood, although Palacký had been an early
advocate of Austro-Slavism, a movement that feared the domination of Slavs by the
tsarist empire. (Palacký was famous for having claimed that if the Habsburg Empire
had not existed it would have had to be invented.)
Among those making toasts was the editor-in-chief of the Russian newspaper
Svet, Vissarion Vissarionovich Komarov. In his speech, Komarov chose to recall a
moment from the distant past: the 1410 Battle of Grunwald/Tannenberg/Žalgiris.
What did a fifteenth-century battle have to do with the friendship of Slavic peo-
ples? It was a victory of joint Polish-Lithuanian forces and their allies (including
some Czechs and Moravians) over the formidable army of the Teutonic Knights.53
While the Knights are often thought of in Prussian and/or German national terms,
they were actually a multinational religious order. Komarov nonetheless claimed
that, at Grunwald, Poles, Czechs, and Russians fighting together had vanquished
a German knightly order when the latter threatened the Slavic world. That there
were no Russian (Muscovite) forces at Grunwald but only Ruthenian (Belarusian
and Ukrainian) forces from the Polish-Lithuanian state did not faze the Russian
editor, who clearly lumped together these East Slavic peoples with their later
Russian overlords. Nor did it matter that Lithuanians – not a Slavic people – played
an important role in the “Slavic” army; they had also been the main targets of the
crusading Teutonic Knights, who converted the pagan peoples of the Baltic region
by the sword.
477
Such nuances were lost on those present at the anniversary celebration in 1898,
which, according to Marija Wakounig, resulted in renewed tensions between Austria-
Hungary and Russia.54 Around the fin de siècle, the medieval battle lines were
redrawn, Slavs versus Teutons, and the descendants of both parties to the conflict
availed themselves of this imagery. Witness the renovation at this time of the former
stronghold of the Teutonic Knights at Marienburg/Malbork by the German Kaiser
Wilhelm II, not to mention the rhetoric that flew from both sides in the first decade
of the twentieth century, at the 500th anniversary of the battle.55
1898: Mickiewicz contra Muraviev

That 1910 celebration of the Battle of Grunwald was the largest public commemora-
tion to take place in the Galician city (and medieval Polish capital) of Cracow before
World War I. However, Cracovians, Galician Poles, and Poles from across the for-
mer Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth celebrated a different anniversary in 1898:
the centennial of the birth of the great Romantic bard and national activist, Adam
Mickiewicz. Already earlier that decade the remains of Mickiewicz, who had died in
exile, were brought to Cracow and buried alongside the remains of Poland’s kings
and great military leaders in the crypt of Wawel Cathedral. Mickiewicz spoke with
the frustratingly (and/or conveniently) vague eloquence of ashes; dead men can-
not defend themselves against misinterpretations of either their words or deeds. His
mantle was claimed by Poles across the political spectrum as well as by Lithuanians
and Belarusians: all sought to profit from his charisma in this age of mass politics.56
In 1898, two bronze monuments to Mickiewicz were erected, one in Cracow and
one in Warsaw, neither sites that Mickiewicz, hailing from the eastern borderlands,
had ever even visited. While Cracow had been the site of many a Polish national
commemoration, due to the greater freedom accorded Galician Poles since the late
1860s, for Warsaw this was a novelty. Miraculously, the new Russian tsar, Nicholas II,
had granted permission for his Polish subjects to honor their poet in this way. (Other
commemorations, such as that of the centenary of the May 3 Constitution in 1891,
had been outlawed by his predecessors, and those Poles intent upon remembering
such events publicly were punished by the tsarist regime.) That ultimately the unveil-
ing of the Warsaw monument was conducted in silence, on account of the Poles’
refusal to begin the ceremony with the tsarist anthem Bozhe tsaria chrani (“God Save
the Tsar”), only indicates the tensions that arose from this unprecedented permission
to commemorate a national hero.57
Ruing their tsar’s decision, Russian patriots in the Russian Empire pressed for a
counter-commemoration of sorts to take place at the same time. Its focus was Mikhail
Nikolaevich Muraviev, known in Polish circles as “The Hangman” because of the bru-
tality with which he subdued the Polish population in the region of Vilna (Wilno,
Vilnius), which together with Poles elsewhere in the empire rose up against tsarist rule
in 1863. While Russians hailed him as a hero, Muraviev was hated by the Poles, for he
not only hanged, shot, and exiled insurrectionists, he also endeavored to remove all
public traces of the Catholic religion and Polish culture from the Northwest Provinces
of the Russian Empire.58
Among those supportive of the Muraviev monument was none other than the
pan-Slavic editor V. V. Komarov, who nonetheless insisted that the monument was
478
directed not against the Poles – just against the insurrectionists, whom Muraviev, a
loyal servant of the tsar, had fought justly. Interestingly, many other patriotic Russians
joined him in the false claim that Muraviev’s policies had not been targeted against
the Poles, when they clearly were.59 Tsar Nicholas II, who approved the Mickiewicz
monument for Warsaw, sent a telegram on the occasion of the unveiling, praising
the commemoration and its subject. According to historian Theodore Weeks, the
festive unveiling of the Muraviev monument and concomitant celebrations served to
impress upon the multiethnic inhabitants of the empire that Vilna was a Russian city,
although many more Poles and Jews than Russians lived in the city that Lithuanians
claimed as their capital.
This sprinkling of anniversaries represents only a selection of historical commemo-
rations in East Central Europe in 1898. Let us not forget that there were peasants
in Austria-Hungary who saw fit to celebrate their emancipation half a century ear-
lier, and surely some readers of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto who recalled the
50th anniversary of the fiery pamphlet’s initial publication as well.60
The Late Ottoman dimension

While Richard Wortman, Daniel Unowsky, and others have impressively portrayed the
“scenarios of power” as well as the “pomp and politics of patriotism” in tsarist Russia
and the Habsburg Monarchy, no such study has been undertaken for the Ottoman
Empire, for at least three reasons.61 First, the cultural turn has just begun to reach the
highly specialized field of Ottoman Studies. Second, in the realm of the Padishah,
power, pomp, and politics for a long time took place behind high palace walls. Third,
due to Islamic prescriptions, the Ottoman Empire until its waning decades did not
know figurative representation, not even of its own heroes. However, the fundamen-
tal political changes and reform processes of the nineteenth century brought about a
significant historicization of Ottoman political culture.
In earlier centuries, historical narratives produced by generations of court his-
torians flourished but were not made public. Up to the early nineteenth century,
sultans, grand viziers, and the bureaucratic elite indulged in the building of fairytale
palaces and gardens, in the production of poems, art, and architecture, and in the
European lifestyle, yet they remained completely secluded from the rest of society,
Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Even sultans’ coronation ceremonies, marriages, and
funerals were non-public events. The Padishah showed himself to limited numbers
of his subjects only on few occasions such as the Friday prayer in a mosque near
his palace, or at receptions in the palace (selamlık). The face of the empire was
predominantly bureaucratic, military, feudal, and religious. Historical justification
for Ottoman rule was not an element of governmental practice, because the caliph-
sultan had a mandate from God, a dynastic legitimacy as well as a religious one as a
fighter for and a protector of (Sunni) Islam.62
A dramatic change occurred with the ascension of Mahmud II (1808–39) to the
throne. His ambitious reform policy was, as Darin Stephanov notes, “the first shift in
(modern) ruler visibility.”63 Now public ceremonies on the occasions of royal birth-
days and accession days were orchestrated in Istanbul, in provincial centers, and
abroad, and portraits of the sultan began to be displayed in public places.64 Also, in
1854, a high-ranking conservative official, Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, published a modern,
479
monumental, and multi-volume history of the empire.65 Sultan Abdülaziz (1861–76)

even broke an ironclad Ottoman rule by traveling abroad to visit the World Exhibition
in Paris in 1867, representing the Islamic Empire of the Three Continents for the
first time personally before the world public.66
In the last quarter of the century – when the European parts of the empire succes-
sively seceded, Egypt broke away, military defeats and international interventions
increased, and the state’s finances collapsed – Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1909)
ultimately introduced the “politics of history” into Ottoman political culture. He
tried to copy the examples of St. Petersburg, Vienna, and, in particular, London by
publicly staging the House of Osman and its glorious past. When in his first year of
rule he was forced by public unrest and external pressure to agree to a constitution
and a parliament, the latter was officially opened with a lavish public ceremony in
the Sultan’s Dolmabahçe Palace.67 Abdülhamid soon engaged in the “invention of
tradition,” as M. Şükrü Hanioğlu notes in his seminal history of the late Ottoman
Empire:
As part of an attempt to re-mythologize the establishment of the state, the

tombs of comrades of Ertuğrul Bey (the father of Osman I, the founding
father of the Ottoman dynasty) were uncovered, named, and lavishly ren-
ovated [in 1886]. The 600th anniversary of the foundation of the state [in
1904] was celebrated with enormous pomp and ceremony, and a new tradi-
tion inaugurated, which even the sultan’s political rivals, the Young Turks,
could not help but observe in exile. In classrooms throughout the empire,
new maps featuring the empire in its entirety broke an age-old Ottoman
tradition of showing each continent separately and inspired youngsters to
imagine an enormous transcontinental community.68
Subsequently, Abdülhamid developed a personality cult based on Ottoman tradition

combined with European models. According to Hanioğlu, “the twenty-fifth anniver-
sary of Abdülhamid II’s rule in 1901 was marked in a way unmistakably reminiscent of
the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887 – down to the erection of clock towers
in the main squares of a host of provincial towns.”69
Abdülhamid, however, forbade the display of his portrait and the use of figurative
monuments in general, and turned instead to symbols such as the imperial coat of
arms and written slogans such as “Long live the Sultan!” In Istanbul even monuments
to non-political personalities – writers or philosophers – were prohibited. As Klaus
Kreiser shows, this was not an Islamic but an Ottoman policy, as by the end of the
nineteenth century monuments of rulers on horseback stood in Muslim cities such
as Teheran and the formerly Ottoman Alexandria and Cairo.70 But non-figurative
commemorations of Ottoman history and hero worship were likewise impeded by
the fact that written Ottoman Turkish was not a language accessible to most of the
sultan’s subjects, because even many of those who could read the Arabic script were
not able to understand the complicated Ottoman literary style. Therefore, knowl-
edge of the past was passed on almost exclusively orally, via everyday communication,
family memory, story-telling, singing, and folk songs. Thus almost until its end, the
culture of remembrance of the transcontinental empire was predominantly religious
and popular, not official.
480
However, Abdülhamid’s attempts at imperial representation coincided with and

were considerably influenced by a visual revolution in the very last years of the century,
namely by the triumphal march of photography and film.71 Now urban dwellers could
buy and send postcards and watch movies showing the sultan at historical sites, or con-
sorting with guests like German Emperor Wilhelm II, who visited Istanbul in 1898. Yet
film and postcards were utilized not only by the government but also by other polit-
ical players such as the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress which staged
a coup d’état against the sultan in 1908. The Young Turk movement, comprised
of nationalist-minded army officers, state-servants, intellectuals, and students –
was particularly popular among Muslims and Christians in the Balkan parts of the
empire. In Monastır (Bitola, today in Macedonia), Yanaki and Milton Manaki, two
film pioneers, showed footage of prominent Young Turks in order to support them.72
During the empire’s last decades, its political elite was divided into Islamist con-
servatives and an emerging Turkish-nationalist opposition. Interestingly enough, the
historical doctrine of pan-Turkism was based on the writings of foreign scholars as
well as on the intellectual input by Turkic-speaking immigrants from the Crimea, the
Caucasus, and, particularly, the Volga region in tsarist Russia.73 In 1908, the Young
Turks took over power from the sultan and started to implement a Turkification pro-
gram directed first against Christians (Greeks, Armenians, and South Slavs), and then
also against Muslim Arabs. A series of wars from 1912 to 1918 enabled the Young
Turks to push through their nationalizing and Westernizing reform project in ruth-
less fashion, via emergency measures. The military collapse of the empire on the
side of the Central Powers in 1918 ended their rule. Yet, it was a former Young Turk,
Mustafa Kemal Paşa, known as Atatürk, or “Father of the Turks,” who on the ruins
of Ottoman rule formed the modern autocratic Turkish nation-state, a state whose
vast Balkan possessions had shrunk to a small territory around the city of Edirne and
whose Arab and African provinces had split away. In order to promote his vision of
transforming Turkey into a modern, secular, “European” nation-state, Atatürk dis-
posed of the Ottoman legacy, among other things, by radically reducing the political
role of Islam and by portraying the Turks of pre-Islamic times as harbingers of a
secular and thus truly Turkish civilization.74
Balkan national societies

The Christian-Orthodox ethnic communities of Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians,
Serbs, and the Albanians in the Epirus Mountains were characterized by specifi-
cally ethno-religious cultures of remembrance with strong political connotations.
Stefan Rohdewald calls the lieux de mémoire of a “Serbian heavenly empire” and a
“Bulgarian God” (plus a “Macedonian God”) prototypical for the region and high-
lights the longue durée phenomena of the cult of national saints such as St. Sava for the
Serbs or Saints Cyril and Methodius and their pupil St. Kliment for the Bulgarians
(and Macedonians).75 According to Rohdewald, “political reign,” “religious memoria,”
and “national memory” are inextricably intertwined, resulting in a high degree of
homogeneity of a given culture of remembrance, and the possibility of swift societal
mobilization. At the same time Rohdewald points out that both Orthodoxy and the
Slavic idea contain strong transnational features that on occasion transcended dif-
ferences in language and social status, and he stresses that Serbs and Bulgarians had
481
the relative advantage of being in a position to evoke the memory of their medieval
empires. Romanians countered with a reference to their “ancient” Romanité, Greeks
constructed direct connections to the Byzantine Empire as well as to antiquity, while
Albanians traced back their origins to the ancient tribes of Illyrians and Dardanians.
As János Bak aptly observed, this “medievalization of politics” was not just a Balkan
phenomenon but typical for East Central Europe in general, and for Hungary and
the Hungarians in particular.76
As Melissa Bokovoy, Claudia Weber, Maria Bucur, and Martina Baleva have
demonstrated in recent seminal studies, vernacular Balkan Christian cultures of
remembrance and a government-driven “politics of history” in the Balkan states
focused strongly on military events such as anti-Ottoman uprisings, the Balkan Wars,
and World War I.77 In their research they highlight the gender dimension of coming
to terms with the past, particularly the death of tens of thousands of co-nationals.
They distinguish between “civic” rituals (female commemoration practices such as
mourning, wailing, and other religious ceremonies) and “official” rituals (male com-
memoration practices tending to concentrate on hero worship, national pride, and
formal ceremonies).
Kosovo and Vidovdan: the Serbs

Although at the time of the Serbian Uprisings of 1805 and 1815 against Ottoman
rule, the reminiscences of a medieval “golden age” (before “the Turkish yoke”)
among ordinary Serbs and their elites were few and confined to oral epic, from its
very foundation in 1830 the newly semi-independent Principality of Serbia embarked
on an active policy of enforcing national coherence through historical remembrance
with the school system, the army, and historiography as the main vehicles of the pol-
icy. From the beginning, the focus was on the medieval kingdom in general, and
the Kosovo myth in particular – which were also dominant topics in popular litera-
ture and fine arts. Independence achieved in 1878 brought an intensification of this
national program, especially via a fixed set of symbols and celebrations. The most
important of these was St. Vitus’ Day (Vidovdan), June 28, the day of the Battle on
the Field of Blackbirds (Kosovo Polje) in 1389, which on its 500th anniversary in 1889
was turned into a state holiday and was celebrated patriotically nation-wide as well
as in “Serbian” territories outside Serbia. The Kosovo myth combined the religious
cult of St. Lazar (Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović, the leader of the Christian armies who
died after losing the battle against the Ottomans) with hero worship of Miloš Obilić,
who allegedly killed Sultan Murad I during the battle. Accordingly, “Kosovo!” became
the rallying cry on the eve of the First Balkan War of 1912–13 against the Ottoman
Empire as well as after the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918.78
Another important Serbian lieu de mémoire was the figure of the national saint Sava,
the founding father of the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1219. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, his image functioned as a role model in Serbian education, literature, and the
fine arts, and he became the focus of a religious as well as national cult (Svetosavlje).79
In a thorough analysis of the names of the 223 streets of late nineteenth-century
Belgrade, Dubravka Stojanović has shown that, with the exception of political person-
alities of Serbian medieval history (the most common choices), most streets had been
named after towns, mountains, and landscapes belonging to the medieval Serbian
482
kingdom. She also noted that, in sharp contrast to this “patriotic” street naming pat-
tern, the 330 bars and pubs in Belgrade at that time had predominantly non-Serbian
names like “America,” “Little Paris,” and “Siberia,” and also “Garibaldi,” “Emperor of
China,” and even “Albania.”80 Obviously, national and municipal “politics of history”
did not permeate the everyday life of the inhabitants, entrepreneurs, and customers
of the Serbian capital.
From Cyril and Methodius to San Stefano: the Bulgarians

In 1844, a book published in Bulgarian in Habsburg Buda contained the first printed
version of a manuscript entitled Slavo-Bulgarian History, written in 1762 by a monk
called Paissii of the Chilandar monastery on Mt. Athos. Paissii called on his fellow
countrymen to not be ashamed of being Bulgarians, and to use their vernacular
language with pride. In particular, he reminded them that, among the Slavs, it was
the Bulgarians who were first to proclaim a tsar, have their own patriarch, adopt
Christianity, codify their language (with their own alphabet[s]), and that they also had
possessed a vast early medieval empire. In particular, Paissii reminded the Bulgarians
of the fact that the Saints Cyril and Methodius, the “Apostles to the Slavs,” and their
five pupils (St. Kliment of Ohrid the most prominent) were ethnic Bulgarians.
Paissii’s book had an enormous impact on the Bulgarian national movement in
the Ottoman Empire. As a consequence, from the mid-nineteenth century on, a cult
of Saints Cyril and Methodius emerged, with May 11 (May 24 according to the new
Gregorian calendar, which replaced the Julian one in Bulgaria in 1914) as its focal
point. After the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which from 1870 had its own Exarch,
the most important instrument for the new message of Bulgarian superiority over
neighboring nations was the institution of the chitalishta, a network of reading rooms
financed and set up by patriotic and charitably disposed chorbadzhii, or well-to-do
town-dwellers such as merchants and proto-industrialists, all over the region. Soon
a Bulgarian national-revolutionary movement emerged, striving for independence
from the Sublime Porte.
In the summer of 1877, tsarist Russia took advantage of the cruel suppression of
a regional Bulgarian uprising by regular and irregular Ottoman forces the previous
year to intervene militarily; after several months of heavy fighting with catastrophic
results for the Ottoman army, the sultan had to sign a preliminary peace treaty in San
Stefano near Istanbul on February 19 (March 3) 1878. The proposal foresaw the crea-
tion of a Greater Bulgaria reaching from the Danube to the Aegean Sea, and from the
Black Sea to Lake Ohrid, that is, almost to the Adriatic coast. However, the plan was
reworked at the Congress of Berlin in the summer of 1878. At that time, only a small
Principality of Bulgaria was established, plus an even smaller autonomous unit of
Eastern Rumelia under the sultan’s suzerainty; all of Macedonia and most of Thrace
remained Ottoman.
The new Bulgarian state, that is, prince, government, and parliament, developed
its “politics of history” based on two pillars. First, the glory of the Second Bulgarian
Empire was evoked by using the medieval capital of (Veliko) Tîrnovo as a second capi-
tal next to the new one of Sofia, and by Prince Ferdinand I of Saxony-Coburg-Koháry,
the country’s German ruler, naming his first son Boris, Prince of Tîrnovo, after the
medieval Tsars Boris I and Boris II. Secondly, the two decisive years between what
483
was termed the April Uprising of 1876 against Ottoman rule, and full Russian victory
over the sultan in 1878 according to the Preliminary Peace Treaty of San Stefano,
were enshrined in a national master narrative with Bulgarian heroes (Khristo Botev,
Georgi Benkovski, Vasil Levski et al.), Bulgarian historic places (Oborishte, the loca-
tion of the decision to start the uprising; Batak, as the Ottoman massacre against
Bulgarian civilians), and Russian-cum-Bulgarian victories (the Siege of Plevna and the
Battle on the Shipka mountain pass of 1877). The fact that the military contribution
by Bulgarians was only of minor importance in the Russian-Ottoman War of 1877–78
was deliberately downplayed. Accordingly, not only the celebrations on the occasion
of the 25th anniversary of the April Uprising in 1901, but also those 25 years after the
Battle on the Shipka Pass in 1902, were the first large-scale public events commemo-
rating Bulgaria’s contemporary history in a primarily national and patriotic, much less
Slavic or Christian-Orthodox tone. Previously, a number of “Russianate” monuments
and memorial churches served as stone symbols of Bulgarian gratitude to Russia and
its tsars, including the gigantic patriarchal Aleksandar Nevski Cathedral in downtown
Sofia (constructed 1882–1912), and the equestrian statue of Alexander II of Russia,
the “Tsar-Liberator” (designed by the Italian sculptor Arnoldo Zocchi and inaugu-
rated in 1907). Now “mixed” monuments, such as the Memorial Church on the Shipka
mountain pass commemorating the death of Russians and Bulgarians, were built. The
first genuinely Bulgarian memorial site was the church of St. Nedelja in Batak, where
in 1876 irregular Ottoman forces had massacred thousands of Bulgarians. From the
mid-1890s, elementary and secondary school textbooks contained sections on history
beginning with the arrival of the Proto-Bulgarians, and Saints Cyril and Methodius in
the medieval empires, and ending with San Stefano. In addition, patriotic organiza-
tions of veterans, invalids, reservists, war widows, and refugees from the “unredeemed
territories” in Macedonia and Thrace, not to mention writers, theater directors, and
historians, propagated the new national narrative in the public realm.81
In this context, Saints Cyril and Methodius have been the most important longue
durée feature of the Bulgarian culture of remembrance, beginning in the early nine-
teenth century and the first decades of renewed statehood, through the interwar
period and communism up to the democratic present. As Vasil Drumev, Bulgaria’s
prime minister from 1879–80 and Metropolitan of Tîrnovo after 1884, remarked in
1885 on the occasion of the 1,000th anniversary of Methodius’ death, the two broth-
ers and saints secured for the Bulgarians status “as an historical people [and an]
honoured place in human history.”82 According to Stefan Rohdewald, “one can dis-
tinguish more or less clearly a secularisation of the saints in the nineteenth century,
within the context of historicism and nationalism; while during the 1930s and World
War II they served the sacralisation of nationalism.”83 In the Bulgarian perception, the
Apostles to the Slavs stood, and stand till the present day, for the cultural, intellectual,
and historical superiority of the Bulgarians over all other Slavic(-speaking) nations
and states, including Russia and later, the Soviet Union.
From Moldavia and Wallachia to Romania

Another German on a Balkan throne, Prussian army officer Karl Eitel-Friedrich
Zephyrinus of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, ruling as Carol I, Prince of Romania
(1866–81) and then as King of Romania (1881–1914), successfully modernized his
484
country militarily and politically. Albeit personally modest, he used symbolic ele-
ments to present himself as a genuinely “Romanian” monarch. For his coronation in
May 1881, a crown was manufactured from the metal of Ottoman cannons captured
by Romanian troops (as allies of Russia against the sultan) in the Battle of Plevna
in 1877; the 50th anniversary of his rule in 1906 was likewise celebrated with great
pomp.84 Under Carol’s rule a large number of monuments were erected, most of
them honoring medieval rulers such as Stefan the Great or Michael the Brave; how-
ever, his most prominent project was the construction of the railroad bridge over
the Danube near Cernavodă, which linked Wallachia with Dobrudja. The bridge,
which was named after Carol, was supposed to symbolize the integration of the highly
differentiated parts of the kingdom.85
Antemurale christianitatis and Slavdom: the Croats

Till the end of Habsburg rule (which in the case of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia
meant Hungarian rule), their perception of acting as a triple bulwark – of Christendom
against Islam, of Catholicism against Orthodoxy, and of the West against the (Near)
East – shaped the collective remembrance of the Croats and the “politics of history”
of the Croatian national movement. Due to its overwhelmingly anti-Magyar orien-
tation, this movement was also partly pan-South Slav and Yugoslavist (aiming at a
(re-)unification with the Orthodox Serbs) as well as partly Austroslavist; that is, striv-
ing for a reconstruction of the Dual Monarchy into a triple one, with Croats, Slovenes,
Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenes, and Poles as a third constituent element along with the
Germans and Magyars.
“The central figure of the myth about Croatia as a border region or a bulwark,”
writes the Zagreb historian Ivo Žanić, “is the heroic Defender-of-the-castle-who-died-
under-its-walls, Ban Nikola Šubić Zrinski, the ‘Croatian Leonidas,’ who perished in
1566 defending the ‘Croatian Thermopylae,’ Siget.”86 Accordingly, streets, parks,
and societies were named after him, and the 300th anniversary of the Siege of Siget
inspired dozens of Croatian painters, composers, writers, theater directors, and others
to portray Zrinski as the incarnation of the Croatian antemurale christianitatis (bulwark
of Christianity). In 1866, a monument to the Habsburg general of Croatian descent,
Josip Jelačić, who in 1848 stood up against the Hungarian Revolution, was erected
in Zagreb on the initiative of Croatian mayor Janko Kamauf and paid for by wealthy
citizens.87 In addition to its anti-Islamic (Zrinski) and anti-Magyar (Jelačić) dimen-
sions, Croatian “politics of history” under Habsburg rule likewise contained a maritime
one: Oton Iveković’s famous painting “Dolazak Hrvata na Jadran” (“The Arrival of the
Croats on the Adriatic Coast”) of 1905 presented the advance of the Croats as the first
Slavs to the Mediterranean as early as the sixth century – three centuries before the
Magyars made it to Europe, and six centuries before the Ottomans.
During the first decade of the twentieth century, when Austria-Hungary tried
to crush Serbia economically in the so-called Pig War and annexed Bosnia and
Herzegovina, a kind of neo-Yugoslavism became vibrant among Croatian intellectuals.
In 1907 the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović designed a “Kosovo Temple” to be built
on the site of the Battle on the Field of Blackbirds of 1389, to symbolize a common
Croato-Serbian and “Yugoslav” historical identity, and in 1913 his Victory Monument
commemorating Serbia’s performance in the Balkan Wars was built in Kalemegdan
485
Park in Belgrade.88 By that date, Austro-Slavism had been replaced by South-Slavism,

yet only for the war years. After 1918 it soon became clear that, due to Serbians striv-
ing for hegemony in the new common Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes,
Meštrović’s pan-Yugoslavism was a minority faith among Croats and most other Slavic-
speaking non-Serbs, not to mention non-Slavs (Hungarians, Albanians, Turks, Jews,
Germans, Roma, Aromanians, Romanians, and others).
Interwar castings and recastings

The outcome of war and revolution – the demise of empires and the emergence of
putative nation-states in the Balkans – gave free rein to national reinterpretations of
the past in East Central Europe. A proliferation of tombs of the unknown soldier in
the new countries of the region suggested a perceived need to incorporate the most
recent experience of war into national historical narratives. Clearly that came off
best in the newly established countries of the region that could be cast as the prod-
ucts of the fight for independence. The notable exception was Hungary. Although
constructed adjacent to the (only just completed) Millennial Monument, with its
parade of a thousand national heroes, Hungary’s symbolic tomb specifically com-
memorated the war heroes of 1914–18. A second inscription that read “Dedicated
to the thousand-year-old national boundaries” nonetheless seemed ironic, in that
World War I had led to the country losing precisely those historic borders. This pain-
ful juxtaposition of former millennial greatness and recent war losses fed the fires of
Hungarian irredentism in the ensuing decades.89 Interwar Hungary’s preoccupation
with its historic borders, encompassed by the so-called Crown of St. Stephen, could
likewise be seen in a resurgence of the cult of that medieval saint, complete with the
potent state and religious symbolism of two “relics:” his crown and the mummified
Holy Right Hand.90
Many new countries of the region sought to ground their historical narratives
in a national hero, one who might be seen as personifying the nation and under-
scoring specific aspects of a given history around which the nation could rally. This
process was neither easy nor uncontested, as the following examples indicate. The
Balkan Wars of 1912–13 and, in particular, the “Third Balkan War,” that is, World
War I of 1914–18, with their huge numbers of fallen combatants, civilian casualties
and, above all, millions of refugees and expellees, soon became a focal point of the
Balkan governments’ “politics of history,” as well as of the civic culture of remem-
brance. As was the case in Central Europe, in Southeastern Europe hundreds of
war monuments, statues, and memorial complexes were built; reservist, veteran, and
widow associations were founded; and new anniversaries of military operations and
war heroes were celebrated. Thus, the self-perception of the national societies of the
Balkans as a perennial battlefield and each individual nation-state as a target of end-
less attempts at invasion, occupation, and annihilation by hostile archenemies and
genocidal “others” was fostered.
“The truth shall prevail”? Competing Czechoslovak narratives

That there were different visions of the Czechoslovak past should come as no sur-
prise, given the varied experience of Czechs and Slovaks within the two halves of
486
Austria-Hungary. While Czechs had long matched swords with Germans, the Slovaks
and Ruthenes had been subjected to Magyarization under Hungarian rule. It would
be a challenge to forge a new Czechoslovak identity and create a Czechoslovak mas-
ter narrative out of these disparate experiences and historical trajectories, ones fur-
ther colored by denominational heterogeneity. Germans had already been offended
by Czech monument-bashing: witness the removal of Habsburg imperial emblems
as well as the toppling of numerous statues of Joseph II – which, Nancy Wingfield
noted, in the preceding decades had become symbols of German nationalism –
throughout Bohemia immediately following independence. Furthermore, due to
the mistaken notion that the Marian Column in Prague had been erected by the
Habsburgs to commemorate the Battle of White Mountain, that baroque monument
was likewise destroyed.91
But even within ethnic Czech society there were different views of national
heroes and important events in history. As Cynthia Paces says, not all citizens of
the new Czechoslovak state were enamored of the historical figure of Jan Hus, this
despite the fact that the historian Palacký as well as the Czechoslovak president
Tomáš Masaryk championed him as the national hero.92 While Czech Protestants
sought to honor Hus with a monument (which was unveiled in silence in 1915, the
500th anniversary of his death) and commemorations (once those were possible
in the interwar period), devout Catholic Czechs and Slovaks objected to a here-
tic burned at the stake as the central figure in the Czechoslovak master narrative.
Mounting national and international tensions surrounding the establishment of
the anniversary of Hus’s death as a state holiday and its festive commemoration
in 1925 ultimately led to the less controversial figure of St. Wenceslas (who had
brought Christianity to Bohemia) also being royally feted by the state in 1929, the
year of his millennium.93
Establishing a Lithuanian national hero

Such divisiveness characterized Czechoslovakia, the country that historically was
considered the one true success story in interwar East Central Europe.94 Other new
states set about establishing certain individuals, or certain historical moments, as key
to their national existence. Medieval heroes once again proved attractive, as is seen
by the Lithuanians’ focus on Grand Duke Vytautas, whose claim to European fame
came as one of the victors at the Battle of Grunwald/Tannenberg/Žalgiris of 1410.
Medieval Lithuania was a grand duchy and not a kingdom; furthermore, the fate of
the country ultimately became intertwined for centuries with that of the Polish king-
dom. Vytautas’s predecessor, his cousin Jagiełło (Jogaila) became king of Poland, but
in modern times he was considered a traitor by Lithuanian nationalists for having
accepted that crown, despite the fact that it took the combined Polish and Lithuanian
forces to defeat the Teutonic Knights in 1410. Some 500 years later, Lithuanian activ-
ists favored Vytautas over Jogaila precisely because he had long been a thorn in the
side of Polish-Lithuanian union; they needed to emerge out of the long shadow cast
by the Poles, thanks to whom the Lithuanians had joined Western Christendom as
well as Poland-Lithuania.95
That did not mean that the interwar period was the first time that Lithuanians had
seized upon Vytautas as a national hero. According to Linas Eriksonas, Lithuanians
487
began to call him Vytautas the Great in the early twentieth century, while they were
still subjects of imperial Russia. It had taken the 1904 erection of a monument to
Catherine the Great of Russia in Vilnius – yet another instance in which an imperial
imprint was being placed on the historic capital of Lithuania – to raise interest among
Lithuanians in their own national hero. All the same, the process of popularizing
Vytautas was slow. Only after Antanas Smetona’s coup d’état in 1926 was the medi-
eval Grand Duke Vytautas officially established as hero and symbol of Lithuania. By
1930, over a third of newborn males were given the name Vytautas (the name borne,
incidentally, by the first president of the post-communist state).96
Piłsudski’s Poland
The downgrading of democracy in the region was often accompanied by a surge in
the use, and abuse, of history. This certainly held true for interwar Poland. While the
country recognized May 3 as a national holiday already in 1919, commemorations of
various kinds truly began to proliferate only after the coup d’état of Marshal Józef
Piłsudski in May 1926. His followers sought to propagate a historical narrative that
would render Piłsudski’s services in creating and defending interwar Poland as the
culmination of the nineteenth-century Polish insurrectionary fight for national libera-
tion, an interpretation long suggested by the Marshal himself, but they also connected
him to great deeds and heroes from the deeper Polish past such as Sobieski.97 Devoid
of other sources of legitimacy after Piłsudski’s death in 1935, his successors rode the
coat-tails of the emergent Piłsudski cult, which, although grounded in interpretations
of the recent historical past, fawningly focused on the person of the leader.98 This
could be seen most visibly in the lavish nameday celebrations of Piłsudski’s successor,
Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły. As Piotr Osęka observed, in certain respects the nation-
alist commemorations of the late 1930s were not so far removed from the “rituals of
Stalinism” that were to come.99
World War I memory and interethnic conflict: Yugoslavia

Yugoslavism as a political concept was the result of the division of the early mod-
ern South Slavs between the Ottoman Empire on the one hand and the Habsburg
Monarchy on the other. In theory, the concept stood for the unification of all South
Slavs, including the Bulgarians. In fact, however, it resulted in Serbian domination –
even with the tactical cooperation of the Serbian and Croatian political elites – over
the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes with its large Albanian, Hungarian,
Bosnian Muslim, German, Turkish, and other minorities.
In December 1918, in the wake of World War I, a common South Slav state was
founded. The three titular nations of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes were supposed to
form “one people with three names” (troimeni narod), under the Serbian Karadjordjević
dynasty, taking Belgrade as their capital and centralism-cum-unitarianism as political
principles.100
Given its four Christian denominations, two scripts, two and a half languages,
plus non-Slavic and/or non-Christian minorities, this multi-layered setting made
any truly “Yugoslav,” pan-South Slav “politics of history” too complicated to be imple
mented immediately.
488
Accordingly, the traditional Serbian culture of remembrance prevailed in the

south, not only in Serbia proper, but also in Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo,
Sandjak, and Bosnia, while Croats and Slovenes developed theirs in the north.
Things changed temporarily in 1929 when King Aleksandar I Karadjordjević pro-
claimed authoritarian rule and rechristened the country the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
While the project of transforming “the people with three names” by governmental
means into an ethnically homogeneous Yugoslav nation was not seriously pursued due
to lack of funds and fierce resistance anticipated in most parts of the country, the king
now energetically embarked on “creating a synthetic Yugoslav culture.”101 According to
Wolfgang Höpken, by that time it was too late for this project for two reasons: first, the
Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes already possessed elaborated national cultures of remem-
brance; second, because cultural and political “Yugoslavism” was perceived by non-Serbs
as heavily Serbian. For example, the Serbian St. Vitus’ Day (June 28) was introduced
as a national holiday in 1919, only to be abolished a decade later. This amounted to
a significant downgrading of the explicitly Serbian (not South Slav) Kosovo myth and
despite the promotion of World War I as an all-South Slav lieu de mémoire and thus as
a founding myth of Yugoslavia, royal Serbian identity management did not work out.
Belgrade’s “politics of history” of the 1920s – according to which Serbs had won the war
as allies of the Entente while Croats and Slovenes who had fought on the “wrong” side
of the Central Powers had “lost” it – had left a deep impact.102
Attesting to this Serbo-centric interpretation was the feverish erection of more than
200 monuments initiated by the state, all with Cyrillic inscriptions, and the king’s
frequent participation in commemorations of Serbian victories and defeats ranging
from medieval times to World War I.103 Next to its Yugoslav dimension, Aleksandar I’s
Serbian “politics of history” also had a European dimension, referring to Serbia’s role
as an ally of the Entente during the war, and in particular, Serbia’s initially successful
resistance against the attack of the Central Powers in 1914 and 1915, as well as the
Serbian contribution to first holding and then breaking through the Salonika front
of 1916–18. On the initiative of the king, the Zejtinlik War Cemetery in the western
outskirts of Thessaloniki in neighboring Greece, where more than 7,000 Serbian sol-
diers were buried, was turned into a huge and decidedly Serbian-Orthodox memorial
complex in 1936.104 The message of the Karadjordjevićs and the Serbian political elite
was clear: Yugoslavia existed due to Serbian sacrifice during the Wars of National
Liberation in 1912–18.
There was very little room for parallel, let alone divergent or competing, national
cultures of remembrance in interwar Yugoslavia. Yet, due to his strong Yugoslav ori-
entation already demonstrated before 1918, the Croatian artist Ivan Meštrović was
able to create decidedly Croatian monuments in the interwar period. These included
a monument to Josip Juraj Strossmayer, the nineteenth-century Croatian politician
and bishop, on Strossmayer Square in Zagreb (1926); another one to Strossmayer’s
medieval predecessor Grgur Ninski in Split (1932); a bronze statue of a sitting woman
resembling the artist’s mother and enigmatically entitled “The History of the Croats,”
located in front of the University of Split; and finally the House of Visual Arts in
Zagreb, built in 1934–38 in honor of Serbian King Petar I Karadjordjević on King
Petar I Square.105
The attempt in August 1939 to bridge the rift between Serbs and Croats by grant-
ing increased autonomy to Croatia within Yugoslavia (sporazum) came too late.
489
In April 1941, the country was occupied by German troops and divided among
Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, and Germany. The pro-German government of the Serbian
ultranationalist and anti-Semite Milan Nedić in what remained of Serbia was too
dependent on Berlin to develop its own “politics of history,” and the Ustasha lead-
ership in the short-lived German-Italian condominium of the (only nominally)
“Independent State of Croatia” from 1941 to 1944 completely broke with any pan-
Slav, Yugoslavist, or even Slavic traditions. Instead, an Aryan myth of descent was
constructed by the regime’s ideologists, and an ethnocentrist Croatian project with
racist and eliminatory elements was designed and put into practice. Since that time
a seemingly minimal change in the red–white chessboard of the Croatian coat of
arms (Šahovnica) has come to symbolize the Ustasha ideology: the upper left field is
white, in contrast to the medieval original and that of the post-1991 state, in which
this field is red. More bizarre (as well as more visible) was the decision of Croatia’s
Führer (poglavnik), Ante Pavelić, in 1941 to turn Meštrović’s House of Visual Arts into
a mosque by adding three minarets to it – a move meant to demonstrate the allegedly
harmonious incorporation of the Muslims of now-Croatian Bosnia into the Ustasha’s
short-lived Greater Croatia and into the regime’s self-representation.
After Kosovo in 1918, two other core parts of the Balkans were the object of an
all-Serbian “politics of history” – Bosnia and Macedonia. In 1924 the Serb-inhabited
Bosnian town of Varcar(ev) Vakuf was renamed Mrkonjić Grad: “Mrkonjić” was the
nom de guerre of Petar Karadjordjević, who later became King Petar I of Serbia during
the uprising in Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s.
In 1938, a church-like monument to the “Heroes of Vidovdan” (the Serbian assassins
of the Habsburg Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914) was erected in Sarajevo, while
around the same time equestrian statues of King Aleksandar I Karadjordjević were set
up in the Bosnian towns of Tuzla and Uglević.
Despite the predominantly pro-Bulgarian and thus anti-Serbian and anti-Yugoslav
orientation of the population of Vardar Macedonia, now called Southern Serbia,
Belgrade pursued a policy of forced Serbianization. From October 31 to November 1,
1937, Prince-Regent Paul, Prime Minister Milan Stojadinović, and other members
of the Yugoslav government celebrated with great pomp the 25th anniversary of the
“liberation” of Skopje and its environs from Ottoman rule, and its incorporation
into Serbia. A monument for King Petar I Karadjordjević, “the great liberator,”
was unveiled in the city; another monument, this one for King Aleksandar I
Karadjordjević, “the unifier,” was not ready in time. A 1,000-page commemorative
volume was published, documenting the region’s progress under Karadjordjević
rule and the Serbian civilizing mission.106
Although improvements in the economy, infrastructure, and educational sec-
tor were undoubtedly made, the politics of Serbianization in Vardar Macedonia
ultimately failed since its main instrument was also its main obstacle. The Bulgarian-
speaking peasants and the small groups of entrepreneurs and intelligentsia of the
region resisted vehemently the Serbian language. By 1944 Josip Broz-Tito, leader of
the “second Yugoslavia,” had learned this lesson. The Serbianization of the Vardar
region ended and Yugoslavization was not introduced either; rather, a policy of
cultural, linguistic, and “historical” Macedonization by de-Bulgarianization was imple-
mented, with immediate success. Along with a new national language (Macedonian),
a national literature, and an autocephalous national church, a newly constructed and
490
written national history tracing the origins of the new nation back to the advance of
capitalism into the Balkans in the early nineteenth century (if not to the medieval
empire of “Macedonian” Tsar Samuil in the eleventh century) formed the backbone
of Tito’s Macedonization project. St. Kliment of Ohrid, the anti-Ottoman uprising of
St. Elia’s Day on August 2, 1903, and the World War II partisan parliament ASNOM
(Anti-Fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia) became the most
important lieux de mémoire. To this day, they are constituent parts of both the “politics
of history” and the culture of remembrance of the new Republic of Macedonia.107
Phantom pain: Bulgaria

Although Bulgaria emerged from the war period of 1912 to 1918 with a territory
enlarged by 10 percent, the simultaneous loss of temporarily occupied Western
Thrace and Vardar Macedonia (a result of the country’s defeat in World War I) was
perceived by the country’s political and intellectual elites as a national catastrophe.
Still, the three wars (two of them lost) were perceived as a period of glory for the
nation due to the years of occupation of Western Thrace and Vardar Macedonia.108
Isolated from virtually all its neighbors after 1918, the country developed a cult of
martyrdom based on the phantom pain of having been unjustly deprived, for a sec-
ond time after San Stefano, of large parts of its ethnic and historical territory. This
process was promoted less by the state than by a nationalist civil society dominated
by associations of refugees from Macedonia, Thrace, and Dobrudja, the most prom-
inent one being the terrorist International Macedonian Revolutionary Organization
(IMRO), by right-wing organizations such as the All-Bulgarian Union “Father Paissii,”
named after the eighteenth-century Mt. Athos monk, and by associations close to the
military. These associations sprang up in the 1920s when governments comprised of
the leftist Bulgarian National Agrarian Union and moderates in conservative parties
tried to cope with the new realities determined by the Peace Treaty of Neuilly of
1919, by pursuing a “peaceful revisionism” based on cooperation with the League of
Nations and Great Britain. Bulgarian politicians of the interwar period placed particu-
lar emphasis on the 50th anniversary of independence in 1928 while not forgetting
the medieval past.109
In 1941 the program of “peaceful revisionism” pursued by most interwar gov-
ernments in Sofia was replaced by a military alliance with Germany in order to
“regain” Macedonia and Thrace. Already in April 1941 Bulgarian troops occupied
most of Yugoslav Macedonia and Greek Thrace. The following years saw a thorough
re-Bulgarization by de-Serbianizing the former South Serbia, yet in August 1944
Tito’s partisan movement and the swift advance of the Red Army forced Bulgaria,
for the second time since 1918, out of Macedonia, and the communist coup d’état
in Sofia in September that year resulted in a voluntary withdrawal from Greece. In
1946, when as the result of a referendum Bulgaria changed constitutionally from a
monarchy to a republic, the national holiday of March 3 (San Stefano) was replaced
by September 9 – the date of the 1944 communist takeover. It took two decades
before the Bulgarian Communist Party embraced the “bourgeois” Bulgarian lieux de
mémoire of Paissii, Saints Cyril and Methodius, the April Uprising, and San Stefano,
and in its “politics of history” replaced step by step “proletarian internationalism”
with traditional Bulgarian nationalism.
491
Cult of heroes: Romania

In September 1919, King Ferdinand founded a public–private partnership orga-
nization called the Heroes Cult (Cultul Eroilor), which was “to commemorate each
year the heroes of this nation who, just like those who have survived . . . contrib-
uted in large part to the unification of our nation.”110 The new tradition of celebrat-
ing an annual Heroes Day with religious as well as secular rituals was initiated on
May 20, 1920. Nation-wide meetings, services, and processions aimed at convert-
ing the entire population into patriotically minded citizens, an aim that was only
partly achieved, since the decidedly Christian-Orthodox bent of the holiday did
not appeal either to the Protestants and Catholics of Transylvania (whether of
Magyar, German, Slovak, or other descent) or to the country’s Muslims and Jews.111
Moreover, due to the different Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman histories of the
Wallachian, Moldavian, Bessarabian, Dobrudjan, Bukovinian, and Transylvanian
parts of Greater Romania, official holidays such as January 24 (commemorating
the unification of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859) or May 10 (commemorating the
proclamation of independence of the United Principalities from the sultan) meant
rather little to a Jewish shopkeeper in Bessarabian Chişinău or a Hungarian-speaking
artisan in Transylvanian Braşov. Nor did December 1, the day of the Transylvanian
referendum on joining Romania in 1918, have any significance whatsoever for a
Tatar shepherd in Dobrudja.112
It was, interestingly enough, not a national but an informal holiday that over-
came the conglomerate character of the country’s various territories. August 6, 1917,
marked the beginning of the Battle of Mărăşeşti on the eastern slope of the Carpathian
mountain range, pitting Romanians and Russians against Germans and Austrians – a
battle in which 27,000 Romanian soldiers had lost their lives. The annual celebra-
tions at Mărăşeşti were a joint venture of the Heroes Cult and the National Orthodox
Society of Women. The village also became the site of a huge mausoleum, opened on
September 18, 1938, containing the remains of 5,000 Romanian soldiers.113
Skanderbeg rides on: Albania

The culture of remembrance of the Albanian state founded in 1912 was overwhelm-
ingly focused on the image of the medieval Christian nobleman Gjerg Kastrioti, called
Skanderbeg, who had resisted the Ottoman advance into the Balkans. Skanderbeg
was a popular figure among the Albanians until the eighteenth century; however,
the close alliance of the Albanian elite with the Sublime Porte resulted in him fall-
ing into oblivion in the nineteenth century. This changed with the emergence of an
Albanian national movement, then independent statehood and, in particular, with
the ascent of Ahmet Zogu to the Albanian throne in 1928. Not only did he adopt the
title Emperor of the Albanians; he also added the subtitle “Skanderbeg III” and initi-
ated a bizarre cult of the medieval hero. Since the Republic of Austria refused to hand
over the real Skanderbeg’s sword and helmet to Albania, King Zog I wore a crown
made in the shape of the helmet, engraved with the letters AZ (for “Ahmet Zogu”).
This crown was seized and worn by the Italian king Victor Emmanuel III after the
annexation of Albania by fascist Italy in 1939. Nazi Germany also adopted the use of
the Skanderbeg myth when a Waffen-SS division of Kosovar Albanians was founded.
492
Skanderbeg remained the quintessential Albanian hero under communism as well as

in the transition period.114
The communist period

On May 3, 1946, the 155th anniversary of the Polish Constitution (with which this
chapter began) was commemorated in the old Polish capital of Cracow. It was a far cry
from the triumphant celebration of the first anniversary in 1792, let alone the annual
festivities of May 3 during the interwar period, but crowds of people did gather in
the streets. The former national holiday had not been outlawed outright although
the reaction of the new communist authorities to the spontaneous celebration would
suggest otherwise. Some members of the public were fired upon by the secret police
and their henchmen, who arrested many others. A number of students were likewise
repressed after this debacle (the memory of which was also repressed), which some
historians consider the result of a communist provocation.115 However one cares to
interpret it, one thing is clear: the new secret police let the Poles know that what
could be commemorated, and how, was to be determined by the communist regime,
not by the people.
As Nancy Wingfield noted about Czechoslovakia (but her observations could
equally apply to other Eastern bloc countries), the communist leadership “used
socially organized forgetting – exclusion, suppression, and repression – on the one
hand, and socially organized remembering – the deliberate invention, emphasis,
and popularization of elements of consciousness – on the other.” For example, the
Czechoslovak Communists rushed to obscure the former presence of the recently
expelled Germans by renaming anything – streets, buildings, districts, towns – that
smacked of Germanness.116 The removal of the Germans was thus completed by the
scrubbing of the Czechoslovak landscape of any physical and symbolic reminders of
a German presence.
Another prominent case where the landscape of memory was laundered and rein-
scribed is Polish Wrocław, formerly Habsburg, Prussian, and German Breslau, where
the statue of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm II on the main square was replaced
by a monument to the writer Aleksander Fredro, “the Polish Molière.” This monu-
ment was originally erected in 1897 in Lemberg (Lwów), then the capital of Habsburg
Galicia, and was transferred from the now Soviet Ukrainian L’viv/L’vov to Wrocław in
1956.117 The replacement of a Prussian king by a Polish writer carried a double mes-
sage: Polish culture ultimately triumphs over German barbarism, and the Galician
cultural tradition destroyed by Hitler and Stalin lives on in Lower Silesia.
The communists of the region established a series of holidays approved (and
also celebrated) by the Soviet Union: May 1 (the traditional workers’ holiday), the
anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7, and the unconditional sur-
render of Nazi Germany, celebrated on May 9 as “Victory Day.”118 Cults of Lenin
and Stalin were fostered, the two Soviet leaders lending their name to streets, enter-
prises, buildings, even cities (for example, Katowice, that is, former German Kattowitz
in the new Poland, became Stalinogród, Braşov in Romania became Oraşul Stalin,
and Dunaújváros in Hungary became Sztálinváros) as well as appearing in the form
of monuments. National holidays commemorated liberation by the Red Army, the
formation of communist-led provisional governments, or else were linked to those
493
events. This last was true of Hungary, whose March 15 anniversary of Hungary’s brief
victory in 1848 (still celebrated in the interwar period) continued to be a state hol-
iday. The communists, however, associated the revolutionary date of March 15 with
the Soviet expulsion of fascism in 1945, the latter event depicted as the realization of
Kossuth and Petőfi’s dream. The communist regime made much of the centennial of
March 15 in 1948, and a plethora of Petőfi statues was erected at that time.119
Such palimpsestic holidays could nonetheless backfire. In 1956, the Petőfi Circle of
the Hungarian intellectuals and the students’ new “Fifteenth of March Circle” recast
the spirit of the original 1848 as an anti-Stalinist revolution. On October 23 they laid
a wreath at the foot of the Bem statue (commemorating a Polish general who fought
in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–49), then provocatively proceeded to topple
Budapest’s bronze statue of Stalin.120
Other monuments to Stalin in Eastern Europe were taken down at a later date.
The Czechoslovak leadership was instructed by the Soviets to dynamite their enor-
mous marble Stalin monument, on the hilltop above Staré Mesto, in 1962. The body
of the country’s “Baby Stalin,” the Czechoslovak communist Klement Gottwald, suf-
fered the same fate as Stalin’s: each was removed from his respective mausoleum.
Monuments predating the communist regime were occasionally instrumentalized. In
the Prague Spring of 1968, for example, both the Hus and St. Wenceslas monuments,
which once represented different segments of Czechoslovak society, served as “back-
drops for public forums.”121 Stalin statues survived only in Albania, at least until the
early 1990s. During the Ukraine crisis in 2013–14, remaining Lenin statues became
stakes in the struggle between pro-Russian separatists and pro-Western protesters.
The communists’ interpretations of other historic events were at times challenged.
In Poland, the year 966 recalled both the birth of Polish statehood and the baptism of
the formerly pagan Poles. Polish primate Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński craftily organized
a novena (a nine-year-long celebration) of Poland’s entrance into the Christian world
leading up to the millennium celebration of 1966, in this way highlighting and even
fostering the Poles’ Catholicism.122 Committed atheists, the communists countered
by promising to build a thousand schools for the thousand years since the birth of
the Polish state; their main festivities were scheduled for July 22, the anniversary of
People’s Poland commemorating the Communist Manifesto of Lublin of 1944, not
the May 3 date chosen by the Church authorities to coincide with the anniversary of
the first Polish constitution.123
Religious iconography would continue to complement the national in Poland.
During the Solidarity period, when Poles were allowed to erect monuments to their
compatriots who had perished in the upheavals of 1956 and 1970, the massive monu-
ments in Poznań and Gdańsk were built in the shape of crosses.124 Likewise Solidarity
leader Lech Wałęsa notably wore a lapel pin depicting Our Lady of Częstochowa, the
famous Polish icon of the Madonna; she had been revered as Queen of Poland since
the seventeenth century.
“Three times in little more than ten years,” according to Anders Åman, in his sem-
inal book on architecture and ideology in Eastern Europe under Stalin, “everything
had begun all over again: at the end of the war, in 1949, and in 1956.”125 He had
in mind, of course, the arrival of the Red Army and the beginning of Sovietization;
the implementation of the Stalinist model in its extreme form four years later;
and the abrupt change to de-Stalinization with Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power.
494
Due to its short duration, the Stalinist period left little imprint on national cul-
tures of remembrance, Albania’s being the exception to the rule. There, the Stalin
cult survived the shift of allegiance from the Soviet Union to Mao’s China in 1961,
and also the split with Beijing in 1978, and flourished until 1991. After Nikita
Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th CPSU Party Congress in 1956, Soviet-type
de-Stalinization led to the removal of Stalin monuments from Poland to Bulgaria
and to the renaming of cities and towns previously named after Stalin. The new space
for maneuvering granted to the people’s republics and their communist leaderships
by Khrushchev led to a revival of national (and pseudo-national) topoi. Romania
was an extreme case, where heads of state and party such as Gheorghe Gheorghiu-
Dej and, in particular, his successor from 1965, Nicolae Ceauşescu, constructed a
Dacian past dating from the fifth century BC and stressed the civilizational impact
of the Roman Empire on its northeasternmost outpost against the barbarians, the
provinces Dacia Superior and Dacia Inferior. On the order of Ceauşescu and his
co-ruling wife Elena, Romanian historians, archeologists, linguists, onomasts, and
others now had to argue that the romanité of the Romanians proved the continu-
ity of their settlement on both sides of the Carpathian mountain range and thus
the historical antiquity of their state(s) and the cultural superiority of their nation
over Magyars and Slavs, including Russians and Ukrainians in the USSR.126 A visible
sign of this was the renaming in 1974 of the Transylvanian capital Cluj (Koloszvár)
to Cluj-Napoca (“Napoca” being the Roman name of a Dacian settlement). As the
official historian Ştefan Pascu wrote in his 1974 History of Cluj and more popularly
in a local periodical, in antiquity the city was called “Napoca and it was inhabited
by Dacians, men with hair waving in the wind and women with beautiful faces and
clean clothes. And it remained Napoca when Roman colonists settled next to the
Dacians.” The ethnic balance in the city had steadily shifted and was no longer pre-
dominantly Hungarian by 1974.127
In a similar vein, Bulgarian communists also tried to “lengthen” the presence of
the Bulgarians in the Balkans by referring not only to the arrival of Slavs south of the
Danube in the sixth century AD but also to the Thracians of the seventh century BC
as their ancestors. Lyudmila Zhivkova, daughter of the head of party and state Todor
Zhivkov and from 1970 on in charge of cultural policy, promoted the Thracian tradi-
tion through exhibitions, excavations, and publications not only inside the People’s
Republic of Bulgaria but also abroad, particularly in West Germany, France, the
Netherlands, and other Western countries.128
The “politics of history” of pre-communist Bulgaria were revived in the 1960s.
The common denominator of the pre- and post-1944 periods was “revolution” – a
“national-revolutionary movement” in the third quarter of the nineteenth century
and a “national-democratic revolution” at the end of World War II. While refer-
ences to the anti-Ottoman “April Uprising” of 1876 or to the decisive contribution
of tsarist Russia to the independence of the country were uncontroversial in ideolog-
ical terms,129 a public discussion among intellectuals about the nineteenth-century
national hero Vasil Levski (and his remains) that was not moderated by the party was
not.130 Also, party officials and historians ran into trouble not only with their Balkan
neighbors but also with their Soviet master over the Macedonian Question, namely
the Bulgarian claims that “historically” not only Pirin Macedonia in the southwest of
Bulgaria was a constituent part of Bulgarian national history, but also Yugoslav Vardar
495
Macedonia and probably Greek Aegean Macedonia. While Moscow forbade open
attacks on Bulgaria’s NATO neighbor to the south, from 1967 on prominent com-
munist politicians and top representatives of Bulgarian historiography, archeology,
linguistics, ethnography, and other disciplines embarked on bitter polemics against
their counterparts in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in general, and
against this federation’s southernmost subject, the Socialist Republic of Macedonia,
in particular. Up to 1944, thus ran the argument of Sofia, Vardar Macedonia had
been populated by Bulgarians speaking Bulgarian; a nation of Macedonians speak-
ing Macedonian was in this view a recent, post-1944 (and artificial) development
engineered by Yugoslav communism. This clashed with views propagated by politi-
cians and historians in Belgrade and Skopje who claimed that the emergence of the
Macedonian nation and its language in all three historical parts of Macedonia, includ-
ing the Pirin Mountains within Bulgaria, dated to around the year 1900, if not already
to the 1830s, when “the capitalist mode of production” arrived in the region.131 Until
1989, Bulgarian-Yugoslav relations were severely strained due to debates over the
past of Macedonia and the Macedonians – debates that did not always stop short of
questions of the present and of territory.
In communist Yugoslavia, the “politics of history” was usually left to the repub-
lics, as was the case with Skopje. From the 1960s on, the concept of Yugoslavism was
watered down to “brotherhood and unity” of the country’s six constituent nations
of Slovenes, Croats, “Bosnians and Herzegovinians,” Montenegrins, Serbs, and
Macedonians; also some 20 nationalities out of which two, Hungarians and Albanians,
as of 1966 enjoyed autonomous status within the Socialist Republic of Serbia. While
the League of Communists of Yugoslavia consisted of six republican leagues, the
Yugoslav National Army was virtually the only all-Yugoslav institution left to spread
the message of Yugoslavism.
Another all-Yugoslav factor was the head of state and party, Josip Broz Tito, around
whom a personality cult was fostered from the very end of World War II in 1945 up
to his death in May 1980 and beyond. Until 1988, an annual Relay of Youth race
started in Tito’s birthplace, Kumrovec in the Slovene–Croat border region, and
ended after passing through all republic capitals, in Belgrade on May 25, Tito’s
birthday.132 The Tito cult was closely connected to the 1944 liberation of divided and
occupied Yugoslavia by the communist partisans; non-communist partisans fighting
German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian occupiers as well as Croat, Serbian, and
Slovenian quislings had no place in this cult.133 As with the other party dictatorships
in the Balkans, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, the first (bourgeois) Yugoslavia of the interwar
period was not a point of reference for the regime’s “politics of history.” The same
followed (officially at least) for nineteenth-century states such as the principalities
and kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro (although historians in the Serbian and
Montenegrin republics did not always obey this rule).
Conclusion
The cultures of remembrance of the East Central European states since 1989, and
the specific uses and abuses of history by their governments, have been largely
determined by the long nineteenth century, the interwar period, and World War II.
The national liberation movements, the wars of 1912/14–1918, the founding of new
496
states in 1918–19, the turn to authoritarian rule in the 1920s, and the war years of
1939–41 and 1944–45 (and to a lesser degree the legacy of communism and medieval
myths) continue to shape the collective memory of contemporary Poles, Hungarians,
Slovaks, Czechs, Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Serbs, Macedonians, Croats,
and others.
The making of the past in people’s minds happened in three ways. First, the indi-
vidual memories of people who lived through World War II, the interwar period, and
the three Balkan Wars still live on; they differ substantially depending on ethnicity,
political affiliation during the period in question, and present-day political needs.
For example, the victims of attempted ethnic cleansings remember significantly dif-
ferent things than those who persecuted them. Floods of memoirs have been written
about the recent past throughout the region. Second, in these (until rather recently)
non-literate but “oral” societies, family memory continues to play an important role,
one strengthened considerably under the decades of communism when memories
not compatible with the official master narrative were repressed. Third, and probably
most important, the post-1989/91 governments’ uses and abuses of the past are pri-
marily an iteration of the “politics of history” propagated by regimes of the interwar
and earlier periods.
In 1990, de-communized Bulgaria reinstituted as its national holiday March 3, the
same holiday celebrated during the years 1879–1944 commemorating the San Stefano
treaty of 1878 (and thus symbolizing a program of Bulgaria’s territorial expansion
into today’s Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, and Romania). That
same year, Poland reintroduced as its national holiday May 3, the day commemorating
the adoption of the 1791 Constitution, thus stressing its continuity as an independent
state and a democratic republic. In Serbia, St. Vitus’ Day (June 28) has become a
true palimpsest. In the now partly democratic, partly still authoritarian Serbia, it offi-
cially commemorates the Battle on the Field of the Blackbirds (Kosovo Polje) in 1389,
while unofficially invoking the assassination of the Habsburg crown prince Francis
Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. And it is no coincidence that, soon after the
proclamation of independence by the parliament of the new Republic of Kosovo in
February 2008, a counter-parliament set up by Kosovar Serbs in the town of Mitrovica,
the “Assembly of the Community of Municipalities of the Autonomous Province of
Kosovo and Metohija,” was constituted precisely on St. Vitus’ Day. As William Faulkner
said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” – and thus conveniently can be used
and abused in the present as well as in the future.
Notes
1 Howard Zinn, The Politics of History (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1970); Alexei Miller and Maria Lipman, eds., The Convolutions of Historical Politics
(Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2012); Stefan Troebst,
“Geschichtspolitik,” in Etienne François, Kornelia Kończal, Robert Traba, and Stefan
Troebst, eds., Geschichtspolitik in Europa seit 1989: Deutschland, Frankreich und Polen im inter-
nationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 15–34.
2 Quoted by Fatos Lubonja, “Between the Glory of a Virtual World and the Misery of a Real
World,” in Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd J. Fischer, eds., Albanian Identities:
Myth and History (London: Hurst, 2002), 92.
3 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
497
4 Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration
in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press,
2001). More generally, see John Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
5 See his multivolume work, published in French but with parts translated into English:
Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996–98).
6 Claudia Weber, Auf der Suche nach der Nation: Erinnerungskultur in Bulgarien von 1878–1944
(Berlin: LIT, 2006).
7 For a similar observation on “the nation and national consciousness (or national iden-
tity of ‘nationalism’),” see Miroslav Hroch, “Real and Constructed: The Nature of the
Nation,” in John Hall, ed., The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 104.
8 Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen
Hochkulturen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997), 11.
9 Two prominent examples re: Poland and Bulgaria: Pawel Śpiewak, Pamięć po komunizmie
(Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2005); Daniela Koleva, Vîrkhu khrastite ne padat mîlnii.
Komunizmît – zhiteiski sîdbi (Sofia: Institut za izuchavane na blizkoto minalo, 2007).
10 Gavriel Rosenfeld, “A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the
Memory ‘Industry’,” The Journal of Modern History, 81 (2009), 122–158.
11 Gottfried Korff and Martin Roth, eds., Das historische Museum: Labor. Schaubühne.
Identitätsfabrik (Frankfurt: Campus, 1990).
12 Rosenfeld, “A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing?” 122.
13 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland, trans. Willmoore Kendall (Indianapolis
and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), 10.
14 Cited in Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 15.
15 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Slavische Völker,” 1791, in idem, Ideen zur Philosophie der
Geschichte der Menschheit (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002), 640–643.
16 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004), 2 and passim.
17 Tara Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,”
Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 93–119.
18 Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East-Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and
Beyond,” in Bucur and Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past, 126.
19 Ibid.; and (for example) Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History
of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Pieter
Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National
Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
20 See, for example, Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania,
Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
21 A sign of the Poles’ rocky past: the Temple of Providence, the cornerstone for which was
laid in 1792, was officially opened in 2016 – some 225 years after it was first planned.
22 Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Isabel Hull, “Prussian Dynastic Ritual
and the End of Monarchy,” in Carole Fink, Isabel V. Hull, and MacGregor Knox, eds.,
German Nationalism and the European Response, 1890–1945 (Norman, OK: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1985), 13–41.
23 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
24 James Shedel, “Emperor, Church, and People: Religion and Dynastic Loyalty during the
Golden Jubilee of Francis Joseph,” Catholic Historical Review 76, no. 1 (1990): 78.
25 Ernst Bruckmüller, “Patriotic and National Myths: National Consciousness and Elementary
School Education in Imperial Austria,” in Laurence Cole and Daniel Unowsky, eds.,
498
The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the
Late Habsburg Monarchy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 11–35; re: the Polish case,
see Jerzy Maternicki, Dydaktyka historii w Polsce, 1773–1918 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa
Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1974), 90–108; re: the empire’s other half, see Joachim von
Puttkamer, Schulalltag und nationale Integration in Ungarn. Slowaken, Rumänen und Sieben
bürger Sachsen in Auseinandersetzung mit der ungarischen Staatsidee, 1867–1914 (Munich:
26 See Patrice Dabrowski, Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (Bloomington and
Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004).
27 Owen Gingerich, “The Copernican Quinquecentennial and its Predecessors: Historical
Insights and National Agendas,” Osiris 14 (1999): 37–60.
28 Andělin Grobelný, “Rola uroczystości kopernikowskich w 1873 r. w czeskim ruchu nar-
odowym,” Śląski Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobótka 28, no. 2 (1973): 195–201.
29 A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of Germany Since 1815
(New York: Coward-McCann, 1946), 68.
30 Lothar Gall, Bismarck, the White Revolutionary (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
31 Hull, “Prussian Dynastic Ritual,” 25 and passim.
32 Manfred Hettling, “Shattered Mirror: German Memory of 1848: From Spectacle to Event,”
in Charlotte Tacke, ed., 1848: Memory and Oblivion in Europe (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2000),
79–80.
33 Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National
Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 46.
34 Ibid., 89–90.
35 For a comparable comparative analysis of the commemorations of 1848 a hundred
years later, see Rogers Brubaker and Margit Feischmidt, “1848 in 1998: The Politics of
Commemoration in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia,” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 44, no. 4 (October 2002): 700–744.
36 James Kaye and Isabella Matauschek, “A Problematic Obligation: Commemorating the
1848 Revolution in Austria,” in Tacke, ed., 1848: Memory and Oblivion, 106.
37 Daniel Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria,
1848–1916 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), 150.
38 Czeslaw Majorek and Henryk Zalinski, “The Revolution of 1848 in Polish Historical
Consciousness: Remarks on Three Anniversary Celebrations (1898, 1948, 1998),” in Tacke,
ed., 1848. Memory and Oblivion, 123–152.
39 Cited in Kaye and Matauschek, “A Problematic Obligation,” in Tacke, ed., 1848: Memory
and Oblivion, 105.
40 Unowsky, Pomp, 164. For information on the exhibitions of 1891 in Prague, 1894 in
Lemberg, and 1896 in Hungary, see, respectively, Catherine Albrecht, “Pride in Production:
The Jubilee Exhibition of 1891 and Economic Competition Between Czechs and Germans
in Bohemia,” Austrian History Yearbook 24 (1993): 101–118; Dabrowski, Commemorations, ch.
4, esp. 118–129; and András Gerö, Imagined History: Chapters from Nineteenth and Twentieth
Century Hungarian Symbolic Politics, trans. Mario Fenyo (Boulder, CO: East European
Monographs 2006), ch. 8, esp. 159–162.
41 For an account of the 1908 performance, see Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince: The Secret
Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 7–14.
42 Unowsky, Pomp, 84–89.
43 Ibid., 83–88.
44 Alice Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848–1914 (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 1.
45 Árpád von Klimó, Nation, Konfession, Geschichte: Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im
europäischen Kontext (1860–1948) (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2003), 152–157.
46 Alice Freifeld, “The Cult of March 15: Sustaining the Hungarian Myth of Revolution,
1849–1999,” in Bucur and Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past, 268. Re: this anniversary, see
also Pétér Hanák, “Die Parallelaktion von 1898: Fünfzig Jahre ungarische Revolution und
fünfzigjähriges Regierungsjubilaüm Franz Josephs,” Österreichische Osthefte 27, no. 3 (1985):
366–380.
499
47 Freifeld, “The Cult of March 15,” 267.

48 Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd, 69–70, 283.
49 Michael Laurence Miller, “A Monumental Debate in Budapest: The Hentzi Statue and
the Limits of Austro-Hungarian Reconciliation, 1852–1918,” Austrian History Yearbook 40
(2009): 220.
50 For more on the role of Elisabeth in Hungarian consciousness, see Gerö, Imagined History,
96–103.
51 For example, see Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 68, 76, 108, 127–129, 136–137. For more on the his-
torian, see Monika Baár, Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 29–35, esp. 32–34.
52 Marija Wakounig, “Palacký-Feiern (1898) als bilaterales Problem zwischen Österreich-
Ungarn und Russland,” Slovanské štúdie 1 (2004): 67–68.
53 Sven Ekdahl, Die Schlacht bei Tannenberg 1410. Quellenkritische Untersuchungen, vol. 1:
Einführung und Quellenlage (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1982); Werner Paravinci,
Rimvydas Petrauskas, and Grischa Vercamer, eds., Tannenberg – Grunwald – Žalgiris 1410.
Krieg und Frieden im späten Mittelalter (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012).
54 Wakounig, “Palacký-Feiern (1898),” 67–68.
55 Dabrowski, Commemorations, ch. 6, esp. 161.
56 Ibid., chs. 3 and 5; re: Lithuanian and Belarusian translations of Mickiewicz, see Snyder,
Reconstruction, esp. ch. 2.
57 Dabrowski, Commemorations, 148–154 and 109–112.
58 This section is based on Theodore Weeks, “Monuments and Memory: Immortalizing
Count M. N. Muraviev in Vilna, 1898,” Nationalities Papers 27, no. 4 (1999): 551–564.
59 Ibid., 558.
60 Re: earlier events organized by Ruthenian Galicians to commemorate the end of personal
servitude (the work of Emperor Joseph II), see Daniel L. Unowsky, “Celebrating Two
Emperors and a Revolution: The Public Contest to Represent the Polish and Ruthenian
Nations in 1880,” in Cole and Unowsky, eds., The Limits of Loyalty, 113–137.
61 Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. From Peter I the
Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (abridged version of the two volumes of 1994 and 1999)
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Unowsky, Pomp.
62 Hakan T. Karateke and Maurus Reinkowski, eds., Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric
of State Power (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005).
63 Darin Stephanov, “Minorities, Majorities, and the Monarch: Nationalizing Effects of the
Late Ottoman Royal Public Ceremonies, 1808–1908,” PhD Thesis, University of Memphis,
Department of History, 2011, ch. 1.
64 Hakan Karateke, Padi şahım Çok Yaşa! Osmanlı Devletinin Son Yüzyılında Merasimle (İstanbul:
Kitap Yayınevi, 2004); Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation
of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998).
65 Christoph K. Neumann, Das indirekte Argument. Ein Plädoyer für die Tanz˙ īmāt vermittels der
Historie: Die geschichtliche Bedeutung von Ahmed Cevdet Pa şas Ta’rīh (Münster, Hamburg:
Periplus Parerga, 1994).
66 Klaus Kreiser, Der Osmanische Staat 1300–1922, 2nd ed. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2008),
42; Gülden Canol, Agency and Representation: Ottoman Participation in Nineteenth Century
International Fairs (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010).
67 Stanford Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey,
vol. II: Reforms, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975 (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 181–182.
68 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008), 128. See also Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 31–32.
69 Hanioğlu, A Brief History, 126.
70 Klaus Kreiser, “Public Monuments in Turkey and Egypt, 1840–1916,” in Muqarnas. An
Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World 14 (1997): 103–117; idem, “Denkmäler für
Heroen des Geistes. Materialien zu einer osmanischen Obsession,” in Konrad Clewing
500
and Oliver Jens Schmitt, eds., Südosteuropa: Von vormodernen Vielfalt und nationalstaatlicher
Vereinheitlichung; Festschrift für Edgar Hösch (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2005), 303–314;
Klaus Kreiser, “Midhat Paşa zwischen Sofia und Basra: K(l)eine Denkmäler für einen
großen Mann,” in Ulf Brunnbauer, Andreas Helmedach, and Stefan Troebst, eds.,
Schnittstellen. Gesellschaft, Nation, Konflikt und Erinnerung in Südosteuropa: Festschrift für Holm
Sundhaussen zum 65. Geburtstag (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2007), 421–433.
71 Wendy Shaw, “Ottoman Photography of the Late Nineteenth Century: An ‘Innocent’
Modernism?,” History of Photography 33, no. 1 (2009): 80–93; Adnan Genç et al., Sultan II:
Abdülhamid ar şivi İstanbul fotograflari (Istanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür A.Ş.
Yayınları, 2008); Carney E.S. Gavin, ed., Imperial Self-portrait: The Ottoman Empire as Revealed
in the Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s Photographic Albums Presented as Gifts to the Libr. of Congress (1893)
and the British Museum (1894) (Duxbury, MA: Journal, 1988); Engin Çizgen, Photography in
the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1919 (İstanbul: Haşet Kitabevi, 1987).
72 Mustafa Özen, “Visual Representation and Propaganda: Early Films and Postcards in the
Ottoman Empire, 1895–1914,” Early Popular Visual Culture 5, no. 2 (2008): 149.
73 Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 260–263.
74 Etienne Copeaux, Une vision turque du monde à travers les cartes, de 1931 à nos jours (Paris:
CNRS, 2000); Fikret Adanır, “Zum Geschichtsbild der nationalen Erziehung in der
Türkei,” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 10 (1988): 7–40.
75 Stefan Rohdewald, “Sava, Ivan von Rila und Kliment von Ohrid: Heilige in nationalen
Diensten Serbiens, Bulgariens und Makedoniens,” in Stefan Samerski, ed., Die Renaissance
der Nationalpatrone: Erinnerungskulturen in Ostmitteleuropa im 20./21. Jahrhundert (Cologne,
Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2007), 181–216.
76 János Bak, “Die Mediävisierung der Politik im Ungarn im 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,” in
Petra Bock and Edgar Wolfrum, eds., Umkämpfte Vergangenheit. Geschichtsbild, Erinnerung
und Vergangenheitspolitik im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1999), 103–113.
77 Melissa Bokovoy, “Scattered Graves, Ordered Cemeteries: Commemorating Serbia’s
Wars of National Liberation, 1912–1918,” in Bucur and Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past,
236–254; Melissa Bokovoy, “Kosovo Maiden(s): Serbian Women Commemorate the Wars
of National Liberation, 1912–1918,” in Nancy Wingfield and Maria Bucur, eds., Gender and
War in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 2006,
157–171; Weber, Auf der Suche nach der Nation; Maria Bucur, Heroes and Victims: Remembering
War in Twentieth-Century Romania (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009);
Martina Baleva, Bulgarien im Bild: Die Erfindung von Nationen auf dem Balkan in der Kunst des
19. Jahrhunderts (Cologne, Vienna, Weimar: Böhlau, 2012).
78 Wolfgang Höpken, “Zwischen nationaler Sinnstiftung, Jugoslawismus und
‘Erinnerungschaos’: Geschichtswissenschaft und Geschichtskultur in Serbien im 19. und
20. Jahrhundert,” in Walter Lukan, Ljubinka Trgovčević, and Dragan Vukčević, eds., Serbien
und Montenegro: Raum und Bevölkerung – Geschichte – Sprache und Literatur – Kultur – Politik –
Gesellschaft – Wirtschaft – Recht (Vienna, Berlin: LIT, 2006), 346–358 (=, Österreichische
Osthefte. Sonderband 18); Thomas Emmert, Serbian Golgotha Kosovo, 1389 (Boulder, CO:
East European Monographs, 1990); Wayne Vucinich and Thomas Emmert, eds., Kosovo:
The Legacy of a Medieval Battle (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991);
Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (New York and London: New
York University Press, 1999).
79 Klaus Buchenau,“Svetosavlje und Pravoslavlje, Nationales und Universales in der ser-
bischen Orthodoxie,” in Martin Schulze Wessel, ed., Nationalisierung der Religion und
Sakralisierung der Nation im östlichen Europa (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2006), 203–232.
80 Dubravka Stojanović, “Orte der Veränderung und Orte der Erinnerung: Die Straßen
Belgrads 1885–1914,” in Brunnbauer, Helmedach, and Troebst, eds., Schnittstellen,
75–77.
81 The sections on Bulgaria are based on Weber, Auf der Suche nach der Nation, 37–164. See
also Maria Todorova, Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of
Bulgaria’s National Hero (Budapest: CEU Press, 2009), 203–235; Bernard Lory, “Cent lieux de
501
mémoire pour la Bulgarie,” in idem, Les Balkans: De la transition post-ottomane a la transition

post-communiste (Istanbul: Isis, 2005), 340–354.
82 Quoted from Stefan Rohdewald, “Figures of (Trans-)National Religious Memory of the
Orthodox Southern Slavs before 1945: An Outline on the Examples of SS. Cyril and
Methodius,” Trames 12, no. 3 (2008): 291 (URL www.eap.ee/public/trames_pdf/2008/
issue_3/trames-2008-3-287-298.pdf).
83 Ibid., 287.
84 Krista Zach, “Karl I,” in M. Bernath and F. von Schroeder, eds., Biographisches Lexikon zur
Geschichte Südosteuropas, vol. II: G-K (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1976), 367–369.
85 Krista Zach, “Stefan der Große: Landesfürst, Nationalheld und Heiliger in Rumänien,”
in Samerski, ed., Die Renaissance der Nationalpatrone, 157–158; Wim Van Meurs, “Die
Entdeckung Stefans des Großen,” in Edda Binder Iijima and Vasile Dumbrava, eds.,
Stefan der Große – Fürst der Moldau: Symbolfunktion und Bedeutungswandel eines mittelalterlichen
Herrschers (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2005), 79–92; re: the bridge, see Bucur,
Heroes and Victims, 24–31.
86 Ivo Žanić, “The Symbolic Identity of Croatia in the Triangle Crossroads-Bulwark-Bridge,” in
Pål Kolstø, ed., Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe (London: Hurst, 2005), 35.
87 The statue was demolished in 1947 in Josip Broz-Tito’s Yugoslavia and resurrected in
1990 in Franjo Tudjman’s (pre-)independent Croatia. See Dunja Rihtman-Auguštin, “The
Monument in the Main City Square: Constructing and Erasing Memory in Contemporary
Croatia,” in Maria Todorova, ed., Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (London: Hurst,
2004), 180–196.
88 Höpken, “Zwischen nationaler Sinnstiftung, Jugoslawismus und ‘Erinnerungschaos’,” 358;
re: the victory monument, see Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation:
Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998),
114–116; Dejan Djokić, ed., Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992 (London:
Hurst, 2003).
89 Gerö, Imagined History, 204 and passim.
90 Klimó, Nation, Konfession, Geschichte, esp. ch. 8; for the earlier history of the cult, see ch. 3.
91 Nancy Wingfield, “Statues of Emperor Joseph II as Sites of German Identity,” in Bucur
and Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past, 178–208; Wingfield, Flag Wars, ch. 1; re: the Marian
Columns, see Wingfield, Flag Wars, 145–147; Cynthia Paces, Prague Panoramas: National
Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2009), 87–99.
92 Re: Masaryk’s views and use of Hus, see Sayer, Coasts, 138.
93 Even the Vatican expressed its outrage in 1925. See Cynthia Paces, “Religious Heroes for
a Secular State: Commemorating Jan Hus and Saint Wenceslas in 1920s Czechoslovakia,”
in Bucur and Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past, 209–235, especially 217–221; Paces, Prague
Panoramas, 74–84 and 131–138.
94 Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle, WA: University of
Washington Press, 1977), 100, 124–125, 134–135.
95 Snyder, Reconstruction, passim.
96 Linas Eriksonas, National Heroes and National Identities: Scotland, Norway and Lithuania
(Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004), 280.
97 Patrice M. Dabrowski, “The Uses and Abuses of the Polish Past by Józef Piłsudski and
Roman Dmowski,” The Polish Review 56, no. 1–2 (2011): 73–109; Heidi Hein-Kircher,
Kult Piłsudskiego i jego znaczenie dla państwa polskiego 1926–1939 (Warsaw: Neriton, 2008),
269 ff.
98 Hein-Kircher, op. cit.
99 Piotr Osęka, Rituały stalinizmu: Oficjalne święta i uroczystości rocznicowe w Polsce 1944–1956
(Warsaw: Trio, 2007), 204–218.
100 Dejan Djokić, Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia (London: Hurst, 2007).
101 Thus the title of ch. 2 “Creating a Synthetic Yugoslav Culture” of Wachtel’s book, Making a
Nation, 67–127.
102 Höpken, “Zwischen nationaler Sinnstiftung, Jugoslawismus und ‘Erinnerungschaos’,”
358–365.
502
103 Bokovoy, “Scattered Graves,” 251. See also Slobodan Zečević, Kult mrtvih kod Srba (Beograd:
Etnografski muzej, 1982).
104 Bokovoy, “Scattered Graves,” 250–251. Re: visualizations of Serbian war remembrance in
the two Yugoslavias, see Radovan Blagojević, Spomenici i groblja iz ratova Srbije 1912–1918
(Beograd: Beogradski izdavačko-grafički zavod, 1976); Rista Marjanović, Ratni Album,
1912–1915 (Beograd: Arhiv Srbije, 1987); Andra Popović, Ratni Album, 1914–1918
(Beograd: Uredništvo Ratnog Albuma, 1924).
105 Wachtel, Making a Nation, 108–117.
106 Aleksandar Jovanović, ed., Spomenica dvadesetpetgodišnjice oslobođenja Južne Srbije 1912–1937
(Skoplje: Štamparija Južna Srbija, 1937); Nada Boškovska, Das jugoslawische Makedonien
1918–1941: Eine Randregion zwischen Repression und Integration (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar:
Böhlau, 2009), 123–124.
107 Stefan Troebst, “Yugoslav Macedonia, 1943–1953: Building the Party, the State and the
Nation,” in Melissa K. Bokovoy, Jill A. Irvine, and Carol Lilly, eds., State-Society Relations in
Yugoslavia, 1945–1992 (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1997), 243–266; and idem, Das makedo-
nische Jahrhundert: Von den Anfängen nationalrevolutionärer Bewegung zum Abkommen von Ohrid
1893–2001 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2007).
108 Claudia Weber, “Europäische Kriege – eine europäische Erinnerung. Kriegsmythen im
nationalen Gedächtnis Bulgariens,” in Nikolaus Buschmann and Dieter Langewiesche,
eds., Der Krieg in den Gründungsmythen europäischer Nationen und der USA (Frankfurt:
Campus, 2003), 372–397; Rumjana Koneva, Golyamata sreshta na bîlgarskiia narod. Kulturata
i predizvikatelstvata na voynite 1912–1918 (Sofia: Marin Drinov, 1995).
109 Weber, Auf der Suche, 205–383; Stefan Troebst, “The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization and Bulgarian Revisionism, 1923–1944,” in Marina Cattarruzza, Stefan Dyroff,
and Dieter Langewiesche, eds., Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second
World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 161–172.
110 Quoted from Bucur, Heroes and Victims, 100.
111 Ibid., 103–109.
112 Maria Bucur, “Birth of a Nation: Commemorations of December 1st, 1918 and the
Construction of National Identity in Communist Romania,” in Bucur and Wingfield, eds.,
Staging the Past, 286–325.
113 Bucur, Heroes and Victims, 98–99, 114–118, and 125–132.
114 Oliver Jens Schmitt, “Skanderbeg reitet wieder: Die Wiedererfindung und Erfindung
eines (National-)Helden im balkanischen und gesamteuropäischen Kontext (15.-21.
Jahrhundert),” in Brunnbauer, Helmedach, and Troebst, eds., Schnittstellen, 401–419; and,
Skanderbeg: Der neue Alexander auf dem Balkan (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2009).
115 See Czesław Brzoza, 3 maja 1946 w Krakowie: Przebieg wydarzeń i dokumenty (Cracow:
Księgarnia akademicka, 1996).
116 Wingfield, Flag Wars, 262, 277.
117 Gregor Thum, Uprooted. How Breslau became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). See also Norman Davies and Roger
Moorhouse, Microcosm. Portrait of a Central European City (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002).
118 See Osęka, Rytuały stalinizmu. May Day was a national holiday in Poland from 1950. See
Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall
of State Socialism in Poland (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press,
1994), 59.
119 Freifeld, “The Cult of March 15,” 274–275. Re: red-letter days in Eastern Europe under
communism and post-communism, see Liljana Šarić, Karen Gammelgaard, and Kjetil Rå
Hauge, eds., Transforming National Holidays. Identity Discourse in the West and South Slavic
Countries, 1985–2010 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2012).
120 Freifeld, “The Cult of March 15,” 274–276.
121 Paces, Prague Panoramas, 212.
122 Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 110–117.
123 Ibid., 113–114.
124 Re: the Gdańsk monument, see ibid., 196–206; Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity: A Political
Sociology of Poland’s Working-Class Democratization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
503
1991), 135–138; re: the Poznań monument, see Kubik, The Power of Symbols, 214–216; Laba,
The Roots of Solidarity, 139–140.
125 Anders Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era. An Aspect of Cold
War History (New York: The Architectural History Foundation and MIT Press, 1992), vii.
126 For the communist interpretation, see Ştefan Pascu and Ştefan Ştefănescu, eds., The Dangerous
Game of Falsifying History. Studies and Articles (Bucharest: Editura ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică,
1987). For a critique, see Karl Strobel, “Die Frage der rumänischen Ethnogenese. Kontinuität –
Diskontinuität im unteren Donauraum in Antike und Frühmittelalter,” Balkan-Archiv 30/32
(2005–2007): 59–166; in particular, see Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism:
Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1995).
127 Rogers Brubaker et al., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), ch. 3 passim, and 110–111.
128 Lyudmila Zhivkova, The Kazanluk Tomb (Recklinghausen: Aurel Bongers, 1975); Yordan
Kerov, “Lyudmila Zhivkova – Fragments of a Portrait,” in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Research. RAD Background Report, Bulgaria, 253 (27 October 1980).
129 Wolfgang-Uwe Friedrich, “Die bulgarische Geschichtswissenschaft im Spannungsverhältnis
zwischen ideologischem Anspruch und historischer Realität. Die Geschichtsschreibung
der Befreiungsbewegung und der Anfänge des Nationalstaates,” in Jahrbücher für Geschichte
Osteuropas 29 (1981): 412–435; Hans-Joachim Hoppe, “Politik und Geschichtswissenschaft
in Bulgarien 1968–1978,” in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 28 (1980): 243–286.
130 Todorova, Bones of Contention.
131 Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, The Macedonian Question: Historical and Political Information
(Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1968); Stephen Palmer, Jr. and Robert King,
Yugoslav Communism and the Macedonian Question (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1971); and
Stefan Troebst, Die bulgarisch-jugoslawische Kontroverse um Makedonien 1967–1982 (Munich:
132 Marc Halder, Der Titokult. Charismatische Herrschaft im sozialistischen Jugoslawien (Munich:
R.Oldenbourg, 2013).
133 For a summary, see Vlado Strugar, Der jugoslawische Volksbefreiungskrieg 1941–1945 (Berlin/
GDR: Deutscher Militärverlag, 1969).
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Albrecht, Catherine. “Pride in Production: The Jubilee Exhibition of 1891 and Economic
Competition Between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia,” Austrian History Yearbook 24
(1993): 101–118.
Åman, Anders. Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold
War History. New York & Cambridge, MA: The Architectural History Foundation & MIT
Press, 1992.
Anzulovic, Branimir. Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide. New York: New York University
Press, 1999.
Bak, János. “Die Mediävisierung der Politik im Ungarn im 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts.” In Petra
Bock and Edgar Wolfrum, eds., Umkämpfte Vergangenheit. Geschichtsbild, Erinnerung und Vergan
genheitspolitik im internationalen Vergleich, 103–113. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999.
Baleva, Martina. Bulgarien im Bild: Die Erfindung von Nationen auf dem Balkan in der Kunst des 19.
Jahrhunderts. Cologne: Böhlau, 2012.
Brunnbauer, Ulf, Andreas Helmedach, and Stefan Troebst, eds. Schnittstellen. Gesellschaft,
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Geburtstag. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2007.
Bucur, Maria. Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.
504
Bucur, Maria, and Nancy Wingfield, eds. Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in
Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001.
Canol, Gülden. Agency and Representation: Ottoman Participation in Nineteenth Century International
Fairs. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010.
Cole, Laurence, and Daniel Unowsky, eds. The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular
Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. New York: Berghahn Boks,
2007.
Dabrowski, Patrice. Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
Dabrowski, Patrice. “The Uses and Abuses of the Polish Past by Józef Piłsudski and Roman
Dmowski.” The Polish Review 56, no. 1–2 (2011): 73–109.
Djokić, Dejan, ed. Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992. London: Hurst, 2003.
Freifeld, Alice. Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848–1914. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Halder, Marc. Der Titokult. Charismatische Herrschaft im sozialistischen Jugoslawien. Munich:
R. Oldenbourg, 2013.
Hroch, Miroslav. “Real and Constructed: The Nature of the Nation.” In John Hall, ed., The
State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, 91–106. Cambridge: Cambridge
Karateke, Hakan, and Maurus Reinkowski, eds. Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of
State Power. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
King, Jeremy. Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Miller, Alexei, and Maria Lipman, eds. The Convolutions of Historical Politics. Budapest: CEU
Press, 2012.
Miller, Michael. “A Monumental Debate in Budapest: The Hentzi Statue and the Limits
of Austro-Hungarian Reconciliation, 1852–1918.” Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009):
215–237.
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Šarić, Liljana, Karen Gammelgaard, and Kjetil Rå Hauge, eds. Transforming National Holidays:
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Snyder, Timothy. The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke. New York: Basic Books,
2008.
Tacke, Charlotte, ed. 1848: Memory and Oblivion in Europe. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2000.
Todorova, Maria. Bones of Contention: The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of Bulgaria’s
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Troebst, Stefan. “Yugoslav Macedonia, 1943–1953: Building the Party, the State and the
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Vucinich, Wayne, and Thomas Emmert, eds. Kosovo: The Legacy of a Medieval Battle. Minneapolis,
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Wachtel, Andrew Baruch. Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in
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Weeks, Theodore. “Monuments and Memory: Immortalizing Count M. N. Muraviev in Vilna,
1898.” Nationalities Papers 27, no. 4 (1999): 551–564.
506
I NDEX
Page numbers followed by ‘t’, ‘f’, ‘n’ or ‘m’ refer to tables, figures, notes or maps respectively.
Abdülaziz, Sultan 480 Alecsandri, Vasile 231, 233

Abdülhamid II, Sultan181, 327, 332, Aleksandar (Alexander) I (Karadjordjević),
480–1, 481 King 55, 489, 490
abortion 159, 294, 303, 381 Alexander I (Obrenović), King 49
absolute space 30 Andrić, Ivo 143–4, 251
absolutism 30, 36, 45, 226, 324, 474 Andrzejewski, Jerzy (Ashes and Diamonds) 254
absolutist regime of territoriality: according Anna Édes (Kosztolányi) 285
to Maier 30; and eighteenth century Annales School 11
mercantilism 35–6; German dualism antisemitism: and authoritarianism 351,
(1740s–1800s) 37–9; Napoleonic Wars 353, 354; and clerical fascism (interwar
(1792–1815) 43–5; Ottoman decline period) 198–9; and the Great Depression
37, 42–3, 44–5; Polish-Lithuanian 101; education 245, 247; historiography
partitioning 27, 30, 32, 35–6, 39–42; 12, 16; Holocaust 16, 76 n153, 101,
Ukraine crisis (2013–14) 63 151, 153–4, 158, 246–248, 376; late
accommodative communism 426, 427 nineteenth century 4, 91, 97; modern vs.
Adolphe (Constants) 236 religious antisemitism 199; nationalism
Ady, Endre 238 99, 335; peasant activism 345 post-
Age of Innocence (Wharton) 236 communist governments 1; post World
agrarianism 98, 344–7 War II 156, 158; and rise of Zionism 332;
agriculture: communist era 103, 384; Czechoslovakia 372; Polish lands (Galicia)
interwar period 100; and migration 137, 145; Poland 156–158, 201, 375; Romania
138–41, 156; modernization (eighteenth 101, 234, 247, 335, 353; Russian Empire
and nineteenth century) 86, 87, 89, 145, 147; Soviet Union 372
92–6; post World War I 98, 149; post- Antonescu Regime (Romania) 248, 249, 353
communist economic transformation 109; archives 10, 14–15, 16, 200, 367, 369
and post World War II industrialization Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzejewski) 254
159–60; Nazi policies 152; women’s labor Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal Paşa) 43, 481
95, 138, 283; see also collectivization Austria: boundaries (post World War II) 60;
Albania: communist era 60, 107f, 369, 372, commemoration 471, 473, 474–5; and EU
494, 495, 496; cultures of remembrance membership 419, 430, 431, 432, 436, 448,
481, 482, 488, 492–3, 494, 495, 496, 497; 453, 455; independence 53; migration
economic performance 100t, 107f, 111, 149, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 432; right-
112f; migration 144, 146; national identity wing extremism (interwar period) 351–2;
466; politics of history 492–3, 495; post- rural virtues 344; state-building (interwar
communist historiography 11, 16; religion period) 98, 334, 338
and nationalism 144, 180, 191, 334; Austria-Hungary 5, 49, 53–4, 91, 94, 96,
territoriality 43, 51, 60, 66; urbanization 119n61, 140t, 140–1, 149, 191, 196-7,
160; women’s equality 279, 282, 287, 294 21n113, 235, 324, 328, 332, 337, 471-8,
Albright, Madeleine 7 485–7; see also Habsburg Empire
507
INDEX
Austrian Empire see Habsburg Empire 432; politics of history 485, 488–9,
Austrian Monarchy see Habsburg Empire 490, 496; post-communist GDP 112f;
Austrian Succession, War of (1740–48) territoriality 49, 51, 53, 64, 66, 324, 398
35, 39 Bosnian War (1992–95) 64, 163–4
Botev, Hristo (Khristo) 233, 484
backwardness 6, 8, 9, 17, 49, 81–3, 112, Brâncuşi (Brancusi), Constantin 238
114, 415 Brandenburg-Prussia 27, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40,
Bade, Klaus 129, 142, 162 42, 65
Balkan pastoralists 136 Brauner, Victor 241, 247, 250
Balkan Wars (1912–13) 49, 51, 53, 145, 147, Bren, Paulina 255, 382, 387, 390, 397
482, 486 Breslau/Wrocław 33, 137, 493
Baltic States: and the EU 398, 415, 440, 441, Brexit 454
446, 454; Nazi Lebensraum 151; regime Bridge on the Drina (Andrić) 143–4
legacy 427; regional identity 55; Soviet Britain 1, 39, 44, 48, 93, 151, 162, 454, 491;
rule 59, 156, 369; Western and Central see also United Kingdom
European identification 19n8, 421, 422 Brown, Kate 6
Banat (of Temeswar) 53–4, 56, 133, 186 Brubaker, Rogers 12, 150, 177, 178, 184,
Bánffy, Dezső 476 333, 376, 468
Bar, Confederation of 39–40, 187 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 366, 371
Bartók, Béla 239 Bucharest: city 13, 90, 96, 220, 224, 232, 233,
Bartov, Omer 6, 59 247, 250, 282, 383; Treaty of (1812) 44
Belgrade, Peace of (1739) 37 Buda 220, 225, 226, 227, 228
Berend, Ivan 8, 45, 84, 106 Budapest 93, 96, 237, 238, 239, 285, 287,
Berlin: city 2, 137, 218, 220, 383, 472; 288, 289, 344, 383, 466, 476, 494
Congress and Treaty of (1878) 49, 143, Bukovina 4, 48, 53, 59, 60, 97, 154, 233, 248
144, 483 Bulgaria: agrarian party 345, 346; “Bulgarian
Berman, Jakub 250, 254 Massacres” 49; civil law 292; communist
Bessarabia 4, 44, 48, 53, 60, 97, 134, 154, collapse 108; culture 217, 230, 231,
248, 328 330, 331, 354; culture of remembrance
Bessenyei, György 224, 254 466, 481–6, 483–4, 491, 495–6, 497;
birth rates 135, 137, 158–9 demographic change 139, 140, 141t, 142,
Bisani, Alessandro 183 146, 150, 159, 160, 162, 165; economic
Bismarck, Otto von 4, 472 performance 98, 99t, 100, 101, 103, 107f,
Blaga, Lucian 239 111, 112f, 113t, 385, 389; education
Blagoeva, Vela 287, 302, 306 279, 280, 281, 282; ethnicity 61, 143,
Blagoev, Dimitŭr 341 144, 147–8, 149–50, 152, 160–1, 365;
Bohemia (Czech lands): competing EU membership 63, 422, 424–6, 435,
nationalisms 34, 51, 55, 193, 333, 338; 442, 443f, 445f, 446, 448, 451f, 452;
cultural nationalism 234, 236, 329–30; fascist regimes 199, 353, 354; feminist
demographic change 132, 133, 137, activism 306, 348, 349; liberalism 337;
138, 141t, 151; education 234, 246, 281, Muslim populations 61, 144, 149–50,
333; Enlightenment reform projects 297, 298, 375; religion 180, 183, 190,
219; ethnicity 34, 47, 51, 193, 234, 197–8, 200, 465; sexuality and intimate
235, 236, 238, 338, 487; historians 229; relationships 299, 300, 301, 302; suffrage
industrialization 93, 138; language 133, 294; territoriality 49, 53, 60, 66; tourism
184, 223, 229, 236, 330; nationalism and 385, 389; under communism 61, 108, 343,
socialism 333, 351, 384; Nazi Protectorate 369, 370, 375; urbanization 95, 101, 160;
151, 246; public commemoration 477–8; women and labor 286, 287, 288, 289, 290;
religion 185 workers’ social democratic parties 230,
Bolesław Piasecki 201 340, 341
border controls 33, 56, 111, 129, 136, 139, Bund 299, 333, 342
142, 143, 158, 389, 455 bureaucratic-authoritarian communism 423
Bosnia-Herzegovina: cultural nationalism
230, 234; ethno-religious identity 176, Cantemir, Dimitrie 218, 222
180, 181, 191; EU membership 426; Čapek, Karel 244, 246
migration 134, 141t, 143–4, 145, 163–4, Carol I (of Romania) 48–9, 249, 354, 484–5
508
INDEX
Catherine II (the Great, Russian Tsarina) (1863) 31, 42, 89, 96, 235, 328, 332, 338,
43, 82, 187, 188, 220, 224, 467, 470, 488 345, 478; culture 220, 235–6, 238, 280,
Ceauşescu, Nicolae 108, 256, 303, 375, 379, 331; forced deportations (World War I)
381, 384, 422, 495 147; industry 92, 93, 94; liberalism 336;
Celan, Paul 248, 250 migration 138, 139, 140, 141t, 142;
Central Europe: concept of 3–7, 12, 32, peasant ownership rights 89; reaction to
388, 421 the Bolshevik revolution 343; socialist
Charter 77 movement (Czechoslovakia) 108, parties 340, 342; student activism 227;
257, 391 territoriality 32, 35, 45
Churchill, Winston 4, 60, 126, 370 Constantinople see Istanbul/Constantinople
Cincars 136 Constant, Benjamin 236
Cioran, Emil 241, 250, 272n228 constructivism (ethnicity and national
cities 33, 90, 96, 129, 137–8, 159–60, 217–20, identity) 177–8, 295, 333, 468–9
237, 382–4, 456; see also urbanization consumerism 103–4, 107, 373, 379, 381,
civil law codes 291–2 386, 390
civil society 227, 391–2, 393, 395 corruption 110, 396, 451
clerical fascism 198–9, 200, 201 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
Cluj (-Napoca)/Koloszvár/Klausenburg 495 (COMECON) 61, 63, 66
Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea 241, 353, 354 Counter-Reformation (Catholic
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 388 Reformation) see religion
Cold War era: class and social status Cracow 33, 54, 129, 192, 220, 232, 235, 237,
376–80; culture 249–58, 259, 377, 478, 493
388; dissident activities 62, 108, 255, Crimean Peninsula 37, 43, 63, 134, 454
256–8, 257, 259, 391–2, 393–7, 399; Crimean War (1853–56) 35, 43, 48, 66,
economic development 101–8, 371; 89, 324
end of territoriality 35, 60–2, 66; ethnic Croatia: Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001) 64,
homogenization and nationalism 249, 202; cultural nationalism 228, 230,
374–6; historiography 10, 12, 14, 83, 245, 247, 489–90; EU membership 63,
84, 365, 366, 369, 397–8; making of the 422, 452; migration 132, 133–4, 140t,
Soviet bloc 101–2, 367–71; migration 141t, 146t, 147, 152, 164, 196, 197, 201;
127, 158–62, 374–5; party purges 371–2, national-accommodative communism
373, 376; post-Stalin thaw 62, 103–4, 105, 426; national languages 222, 228, 330–1;
217, 254–8, 373–4, 383, 494–5; religion, peasant activism 346; politics of history
nationalism and communism 199–202; 485–6; post-communist GDP 112f, 113t;
rethinking the East-West divide 386–91; religion and nationalism 109, 185, 191,
rural landscapes 384–5; sexuality and 196, 198, 199, 202; territoriality 47, 53, 64;
intimate relationships 302; totalitarian Ustasha (Ustaša) regime 55, 59, 60, 247,
(top down) vs. revisionist (bottom up) 248, 352, 490; women’s suffrage 294
models 14, 366, 369, 371, 386, 398, 399; cross-Atlantic migration see transatlantic
urban spaces 382–4; uses and abuses of migration
the past 201, 493–6; women 282, 284–5, culture: age of revolution 216, 225–33;
288–90, 294–5, 306–7, 377, 380–2 cities (eighteenth century) 217–20;
collectivization (of agriculture) 21n50; Cold War era 249–58, 259, 377, 378,
102–3, 105,107, 371–2, 375, 384; see also 388; comparative study 217; education
agriculture (girls and women) 279–82, 286, 295–6,
commemoration see uses and abuses of 303, 348, 349, 377; Enlightenment 218,
the past 221–5, 329, 330, 331; ethnography 228,
communism (ideology of): avant-garde 229, 231, 235, 496; imperial agenda 216,
intellectuals (interwar period) 240, 241, 224, 225; institution building (1848–90)
243–4, 249; and consumerism 107; legacy 233–7; liberal values 338–9; meanings
regimes 422–7; and nationalism 374; of 215; militarization of (World War II)
socialist feminism 307, 348 245–9, 473; Modernist turn (1890–1918)
communist era see Cold War era 216, 237–40, 247; political ideology (post
Confederation of Bar (1768) 39–40, 187 World War I) 216, 240–5; post-communist
Congress Poland (1815–1918): agricultural 217, 259; women’s literature 236, 302, 303,
modernization 95; anti-Russian uprising 347; see also uses and abuses of the past
509
INDEX
Cuza, Alexandru Ioan 48 Dubnow, Simon 11

Cyril, Saint 483, 484, 491 Duchy of Warsaw 32, 45, 89, 91, 226
Czartoryski, Adam Jerzy 227, 334 Dzieržyński, Feliks 343
Czech lands: agrarianism 345; culture
217–18, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 235, East Central Europe: defined 3
236, 238, 330, 344; politics of history Eastern Europe: concept of 3–4, 6, 32, 49,
471, 477–8; religion 184; women 65, 365
280–1, 296, 301, 305, 347, 348; see also East Germany (German Democratic
Bohemia; Moravia Republic): communist collapse 108, 391;
Czechoslovakia: communist collapse 108; communist purges 372; cultural
economic performance 98, 99, 100, 103, Sovietization 253; economic performance
104, 107, 112f; ethnic minorities 101, 129, 103, 107f; German reunification 64, 398,
149, 150, 154–5, 156, 158, 161, 163, 334, 418–19, 430; Kundera’s central Europe 3;
493; and fascism 352, 353; historiography migration 160, 161, 162, 163; regime legacy
12, 84; immigrant labor 160; liberalism and the EU 423; uprising (1953) 62, 103
338; normalization period (1969–1989) economic development: communist
257, 258, 382, 387, 393, 397; politics industrialization 102–3, 159–60, 377,
of history 486–7, 493, 494; population 380–1; East-West comparison 84–7, 106,
growth 159; Prague Spring (1968) 62, 114; Eurozone crisis 446; historiography
105, 107, 162, 255, 382, 394; religion 184, 8, 83–4; institutional discontinuities
200, 351; social democratic parties 343; 87–91, 96–7, 114–15; interwar period
Soviet party purges and anti-Semitism 97–101; market socialism (Cold War
201, 372; territoriality 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, era) 105, 389–90, 393; migration
59, 60, 62, 64; transatlantic nationalist 136–7; modernization 91–7, 101–8;
agitation 196–7; urbanization 160; Velvet post-communist transition 108–12, 113t,
Divorce 64, 423; Western roots 3, 421; 392, 396–7, 398, 423, 427–8; relative
women 286, 290, 292, 293, 296, 297, 298, backwardness 17, 81–3, 112, 114; Single
304–5, 349, 382 Market 418, 430; World-System economic
Czech Republic: discrimination against theory 82–3, 84
Roma people 163; economic performance education: in the European Union 456;
111, 112f, 113t; EU integration 417; expansion (eighteenth century) 221,
EU membership 2, 398, 433, 434; 224–5; and gender 279–82, 295–6, 303,
Euroskepticism/EU support 423–4, 427, 348, 377; increasing human capital 83;
436, 442f, 443–4, 445f, 446, 447, 449f, Jesuit control 216; and language 61, 222,
450, 451; post-communist economic 224, 227, 244; nationalization projects
transformation 110, 111, 112f, 113t; 61, 241, 244; nineteenth century 96, 234;
regime legacy 423; Velvet Divorce 64, 423 pre-Communist elites 106, 107; primary
education 224, 280; reforms of Peter the
Dayton Peace Agreement (1995) 64, 163 Great 218; schools and the politics of
death rates 86, 98, 99, 135, 137, 142 history 471, 484; under communism 106,
defection 161–2, 250 253; see also universities
de-globalization period 85, 94 Eliade, Mircea 241, 249, 250
demographic transition 86, 137, 140, 158 ESF see European Science Foundation
demography see migration and population Estonia: EU membership 2, 433, 442, 443f,
change 444f, 445f, 449f, 451; Euro crisis 16;
de-Stalinization 62, 103–4, 105, 217, 254–8, girls’ education 281, 297; post-imperial
373–4, 494–5 nationalism 328; territoriality 60, 63;
Devětsil artists 243–4 women’s suffrage 293
Djilas, Milovan 376, 378, 386 ethnicity: Cold War era homogenization and
Dmowski, Roman 338 nationalism 374–6; constructivist theory
Dobrudja 53, 60, 134, 138, 139, 152, 485, of 177–8, 295, 333, 468–9; diversity 33,
491, 492 127, 130–5, 143, 182–4; emergence of
Dojćić, Stjepan 196, 197 nationalism 33; ethnography 228, 229,
Drumev, Vasil 484 231, 235, 496; and Euroskepticism 427,
Dualism, German (1740–1866) 37 429; nationalism and religion 176, 179,
Dubček, Alexander 255 182, 184, 188–94, 197–202, 202, 329, 333,
510
INDEX
334–6; post-empire nationalism 334–6, fashion (dress) 86, 107, 122n123, 182, 190,
338; and territoriality following World 206n41, 217, 218, 219, 344, 375, 381, 386,
War I 53, 54–5; see also ethnic unmixing/ 406n96,
homogenization; Jews; religion Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) 62, 64,
ethnic unmixing/homogenization 127, 129; 160, 163, 398, 495
Balkans (nineteenth century) 143–4, feminism: activism/resistance 278, 279,
334, 335; Balkan Wars and World War I 302–8, 347–9; historiography 15–16
127, 145–7; communist era 160–1, 374–5; fertility rates 137, 158–9
Croatia (1941) 352; ethnic cleansing Fico, Robert 447
(post World War II) 61, 101–2, 126, 127, Film (or cinema) 24n80, 215, 237, 245, 248,
128–9, 142–3, 154–8, 336, 376; Germany 253, 254, 255, 260n8, 268n150, 274n264,
(following unification 1871) 144–5; 275n267, 272 & 279, 296, 317n93, 395,
minority populations (interwar period) 476, 481, 501n72,
149–51, 335–6; Nazism 59, 151–4; political “first globalization” 85
elites 334–5; population exchange treaties First World War see World War I
142, 147–8, 151–2, 156; post-Cold War Fitzpatrick, Sheila 367
era 162–4; pre-World War I 143; refugee Fleming, Michael 375
settlement (interwar period) 126, 148–9; Fondane, Benjamin 241, 247
Russian pogroms 145, 151 France: Code Civil (of 1804) 291; Crimean War
ethnography 228, 229, 231, 235, 496 48; and European Union 1, 418, 419, 431,
ethnosymbolism 177–8 432, 437, 440, 448, 452; intellectual imigrés
euro crisis 446–8, 451, 452–3 230, 232; Iraq War (2003) 239–40; key
European Science Foundation (ESF) 11 eighteenth century conflicts 39; migration
European Union: accession dates 2, 63, 398, to 1, 135, 160, 431, 432; modernism 247;
415, 416map, 433, 436; economic benefits patriotic motherhood 296; Revolution
429; economic pre-conditions 63, 417, 30, 87, 89, 225, 226–7, 324, 331, 349, 350,
419–20, 433; ethnic minorities 428–9, 468; Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
442; foreign policy dimension 440–1; (1792–1815) 43–4, 45, 48, 89, 226–7
gender dimension 438–40; German Francis II (Habsburg Monarchy) 226, 470
question 418–19, 433, 440; governance Francis Joseph I (Habsburg Monarchy) 325,
and sovereignty 428; immigration/ 328, 470–1, 474, 475, 476–7
migrant influx 1, 2, 419, 431–2, 455; Frederick II (the Great, Of Prussia) 35, 37,
Lisbon Treaty (2009) 424, 452; Maastricht 39, 40, 467–8
process 419, 429, 430, 433; negotiation FRG see Federal Republic of Germany
process 433–8, 454; potential to end
institutional volatility 115; pre-accession Galicia: commemoration of 1848 revolutions
process 429–33; regime transitions 422–7; 473; educated peasants 234; emigration
research funding 11, 13; and Russian 135, 138, 145, 152; end of 54; Habsburg
aggression in Ukraine 453–4; Single acquisition 40, 42, 54, 188; nationalism
Market 418, 430; subsidies 110, 112, 419, 145, 192, 193; oil industry 93; peasant
430, 434; success 456; and sustainable activism 96, 344, 350; university of
development 115; see also Euroskepticism Lemberg 225, 227, 234, 235
Eurorealism 436, 438, 446, 456 Gárdonyi, Géza 236
Euroskepticism: domestic political GDR (German Democratic Republic) see
dissatisfaction 448–52; and Eurorealism East Germany
417, 436; financial crisis 446–8, 451, 452– gender: history 15, 278–9, 283, 295, 298,
3; old member states 419, 429, 430, 431, 301, 309–10; and remembrance 482;
432, 433, 453, 454; party politics 427, 429, transatlantic migration 141; see also
431, 432, 437, 442, 444, 445, 448–52, 455; women
public trend-party success incongruence genocide 6, 34, 66, 164, 352, 466; see also
448–9; statistics 441–6 Holocaust
Eurozone crisis 446–8, 452, 453 German Democratic Republic (GDR) see
East Germany
farming see agriculture German Dualism (1740–1866) 37
fascism 198–9, 200, 201, 240–1, 250, 351–4, Germany: absolutist regime of territoriality
372; see also Nazis 44; colonization policies 144–5;
511
INDEX
commemoration 467–8, 470, 472–3; 149, 197, 328–9; education 188, 204n11,
communist era immigration 160; and 279, 280, 281, 282, 303; ethnic mixing
concepts of Central Europe 4, 8; cultural 130, 13-5; historiography 128; ideological
arrogance 331; displaced persons 156, basis 323–4; imperial culture 22-5;
158; economic labor migration 138, imperialism 4–5, 8; industrialization
139, 142, 151, 160, 162, 431, 432, 433; 93, 138; international relations 32, 35,
and the European Union 419, 432, 440, 37, 39, 40, 42, 65, 133, 144, 324; liberal
447, 453, 454, 455; Federal Republic of nationalism 329–32, 333, 336, 337–8, 350;
Germany (FRG) 62, 64, 160, 163, 398, literacy rates 119n76; literature 235, 236,
495; German Confederation (1815) 44, 331; military organization 91; modernist
47, 337, 339, 472; Marshall Plan (1948) movement 237–40; Muslim migrations
370; post-Cold War migration 111, 162–3; 144; national consciousness 188–9, 191–4,
post World War I 53, 149; protectionism 196; nationalist activism 47–8, 331–2, 333;
94; reunification 61, 64, 398, 418–19, politics of history 468, 470–1, 473, 474–8,
430; Social Democratic Party 340; stance 485–6; postwar border settlement 133–4;
on Iraq War (2003) 239–40; transatlantic religion 132, 134–5, 184–8, 188–9, 225,
migration 140, 141t; see also Brandenburg- 350–1; sexualized treatment of women
Prussia; East Germany; Nazis 299–300; social and administrative reform
Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe 372, 495 89, 224, 324–5, 326, 350; social order
Gleichschaltung 250, 353, 354 (nobles and peasants) 87–8, 89, 96, 136,
Gluck, Mary 238, 239 234, 324, 329, 336, 344–5, 350; suffrage
Gočár, Josef 239 293, 303; transatlantic migration 140,
Golescu, Dinicu 230 141, 142, 196; women and civil law 291,
Gomułka, Władysław 254, 372 292; women’s activism 305; women and
Gorbachev, Mikhail 62, 108, 393, 397, 440 work 286, 288, 303; workers’ movements
Gottwald, Klement 252, 494 and socialism 340, 341–2; World War I
Great Northern War (1700–1721) 27, 35, 36 migration 147
Great War see World War I Halecki, Oskar 5, 7, 11
Greco-Turkish War (1921–22) 142, 148 Hanák, Péter 238
Greece: Bulgarian expansion 491, 497; Havel, Václav 255, 257, 259, 390, 396, 397,
education 228, 281, 334; EU membership 418, 421, 424
422, 447, 453, 455; fascism 353; Havliček Borovsky, Karel 231
independence 43, 92, 189, 228, 352; Helsinki Agreement (1975) 62, 108,
liberalism 336; nationalist writers 331; 257, 393
NATO membership 2; Nazi occupation Hentzi, Heinrich 476–7
59, 245, 246, 247, 369; population Herder, Johann Gottfried (and Herderian
movement 34, 129, 136, 144t, 146, 147, vision) 5, 45, 330, 468, 469
148–9, 152, 154, 155t, 162; religion and heterosexuality 298, 300, 301
ethnicity 176, 189, 190, 191; socialism higher education see universities
306, 340, 370; urbanization 138, 160; Hilendarski, Paisij 330
women and feminism 281, 287, 288, 305, historiography 9–16, 365–6
306, 348, 349 history, politics of see uses and abuses of the
Grillparzer, Franz 331 past
Gross, Jan 16, 367, 369, 372–3, 388, 393 history writing 228–30, 236, 330, 465,
Grunwald, Battle of (1410), 469, 495
commemoration of 477–8 Hitler, Adolf 59, 241, 246
gulag camps 16, 154 holidays see tourism and travel
gymnasia 224, 225, 281, 296 Holocaust 16, 59, 101, 151, 153–4, 158,
gymnastics 234, 333 248, 376
homosexuality 301
Habsburg Empire: abortion 294; Ausgleich Horthy, Miklós 55
(Compromise of 1867) 48, 188, 192, 326; Hroch, Miroslav 228
Cold War and post-communist migration Hungary: abortion 294; agrarianism 344–5,
158, 160-3; cultural nationalism 225-8, 346; Bessenyei/Petőfi Circle 254–5;
232-4, 329–30, 331, 333; demographic Bolshevik regime 343, 346, 349, 351;
structure 137; dismantling of 5, 53, 54, civil law 292; communism, end of 108;
512
INDEX
conservativism, authoritarianism and 102–3, 159–60, 377, 380–1; of East Central

fascism 101, 198, 349, 350, 351, 352, 353; Europe 91, 92–3; and the East-West
cultural elite and communism (interwar wealth gap 83, 85; and the emergence
period) 243, 378; cultural nation-building of workers’ parties 339; interwar period
(1848–90) 234, 235, 236; cultural setting 99–100; and living standards 86; and
(eighteenth century) 220; culture in migration 103, 136, 137, 138, 159–60,
the age of revolution (1789–1845) 227, 377; second industrial divide’ 106; and
228, 230–1, 233, 330, 331; economic women workers 102, 105, 288–9
performance 98, 99, 100, 103, 107, 111, Industrial Revolution 83, 85, 87, 95
112f, 113t, 379; education 231, 233, Ingrao, Charles 184, 185
245, 282; ethnic mixing 132, 133; EU internationalism 11, 61, 160, 161, 342,
membership 63, 437, 442, 443f, 444f, 445, 374, 491
446, 448, 449f, 450, 451f; housing (Cold interwar period: culture 240–5; economic
War era) 383, 384; imperial reform 325, development 97–101; rise of fascism
326, 350; language 221–2, 223, 224, 330; 197–9, 240–1, 351–4; territoriality 31,
liberalism 332, 337, 338, 350; migration 53–6, 57; transnationality 34; women 287,
and population movement 133, 141, 292, 296–7, 304, 305–6; Workers’ social
142, 146–7, 149, 152, 154, 155–6, 161, democratic parties 343–4
162, 164; Modernism and modernization Ionesco, Eugène (Eugen Ionescu) 241,
97, 237, 238, 239; natio 33, 296, 329; 250, 255
nationalism (interwar) 244, 245, 335; Iraq, invasion of (2003) 441
politics of history 16, 474, 475–7, 494; Iron Guard 241, 249, 353, 354, 372; see also
population growth 159; religion and League of the Archangel Michael, the
ethnicity 131, 132, 149, 150t, 184, 185, Islam see Muslim populations
186, 188, 192, 193, 194, 196; revolution Israel 11, 158, 161, 375
(1848) 47, 48, 326, 332; revolution Istanbul/Constantinople 90, 139; cultural
(1956) 62, 107, 255, 373, 394; sexuality influence 217, 219; education 219, 224,
and intimate relationships 299–301, 302; 281, 282; ethno-religious diversity 131,
economic and social historiography 84; 183; labor migration 139; name 219;
Soviet take-over 370; suffrage 293, 340; Orthodox Church 182, 190, 222; political
territoriality 47, 48, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, role 90; public commemoration 479, 480;
59, 60, 61, 63–4, 192, 197; transatlantic size (1870) 137
migration 141, 142, 196; women’s Izetbegović, Alija 64
activism 303–4, 347, 349; women’s labor
283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290; Janák, Pavel 239
women’s legal status 294–5; women’s Janković-Mirijevski, Teodor 218
national role 296, 298, 347; workers’ Jeffries, Ian 7–8
movement 340 Jelačić, Josip 485
Hus, Jan 487 Jesuit Order 184, 185, 186, 187, 216,
224, 225
Iaşi 220, 224, 233, 282, 332 Jewishness 178
ideology: agrarianism 344–7; artistic Jews: commercial activities 97, 220; and
agendas (interwar years) 216, 240–4, 249; economic growth 97; education 296, 297;
Conservatism 349–51; empire, monarchy in interwar Poland 150, 245; language
and state 323–9; fascism 198–9, 200, 201, 223; and liberalism 338–9; migration
240–1, 250, 351–4, 372; feminism 278, and population movement 90–1, 126,
279, 302–8, 347–9; French revolution and 131, 135, 140t, 141t, 145, 161, 194;
Napoleonic era 225–6; impact of World Polish World War II casualties 369; social
War II 354; internationalism 61, 160, democratic parties and nationalism
161, 342, 374, 491; liberalism 336–9, 350, 342; and Soviet Union culture 251;
351; nationalism 329–36, 374–6; social statelessness following World War I 54;
democracy 339–40; socialism 97, 100, 243, women’s activism in nineteenth century
302, 339–344, 348, 351, 374 Hungary 303, 304; World War II/part
Illyrian Provinces 44, 226, 227 of right-sizing trend 59; Zionism 298–9,
industrialization: changing class 332–3; see also antisemitism
structure 86; communist programmes Johnson, Lonnie 8
513
INDEX
Joseph II (Habsburg Monarchy): Leopold II (Habsburg Monarchy) 188,

commemoration 470, 475, 487; death 225, 226
226; German language 188, 222, 223, 325; lesbianism 301
legacy 227, 325, 350; religious tolerance Levski, Vasil 331, 484, 495
135, 186, 188, 225, 325; social reform 89, Lhéritier, Michel 5
224, 325, 350 liberalism 336–9, 350, 351
Jovanović, Vladimir 336 Lisbon Treaty (2009) 424, 452
Józewski, Henryk 250, 335 List, Friedrich 4, 94
Judson, Pieter 5, 33 literacy 220–1, 234, 334, 348
literature 235–7, 244, 251, 285, 302, 303,
Kaczyñski, Jarosław 1, 440 331, 347
Kafka, Franz 239 Lithuania: administrative nation-building
Kaiser Jubilee (1898) 474–5 (post 1918) 334; end of empire 328;
Kaliningrad enclave 63 establishing a national hero 487–8; EU
Karadžić, Vuk 191, 222, 231, 331 accession 2, 433; EU, attitude towards
Kardelj, Edvard 255–6 442f, 443f, 444f, 445f, 449f, 451f;
Karima, Anna 287, 302, 306 territoriality 35, 59, 60, 63; transatlantic
Kassák, Lajos 243 migration 141t; women’s rights 293, 301
Katyn Forest Massacre (1940) 246 Little Entente 56
Kazinczy, Ferenc 231, 330 living standards 86, 103–4, 108, 112, 383,
Kenney, Padraic 257, 377, 384, 388, 399 384, 386
Khmel’nits’kyi, Bohdan 187 Łódź 93, 96, 97, 242
Khrushchev, Nikita 107, 494, 495 Longworth, Philip 7
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes see Lovinescu, Monica 250
Yugoslavia Lucassen, Leo 129
King, Jeremy 34, 177, 468 Lueger, Karl 338
Klaus, Václav 424, 436, 444, 446, 452 Lukács, György 243, 254–5
Kogălniceanu, Mihail 229, 232, 233 Luxemburg, Rosa 340, 342, 343
Koliyivshchyna 187–8 L’viv/Lwów/Lemberg 225, 227, 234, 235,
Kollár, Ján 229, 231, 471 281, 473, 476, 493
Komarov, Vissarion Vissarionovich 477,
478–9 Maastricht process 419, 429, 430, 433
Konova, Kina 306 Macedonia: economic performance 112f,
Korais, Adamantios 230, 331, 336 113t; EU membership 424, 426; politics
Korošec, Anton 351 of history 490–1, 495–6; population
Kościuszko, Tadeusz 42, 226 movements 136, 139, 140, 144, 145, 146,
Kosovo 64, 144, 145, 146, 288 147; religion and ethnicity 176, 180, 183,
Kosovo myth 482, 485, 489, 497 190, 334; revolutionary movements 341;
Kossuth, Lajos 332, 336, 476, 494 territoriality 51, 64, 149, 334, 398
Kosztolányi, Dezső (Anna Édes) 285 Magocsi, Paul Robert 7
Kotkin, Stephen 367, 393 Mahmud II (Ottoman Empire) 324, 479
Kun, Béla 243, 245, 297, 343, 349 Maier, Charles 30, 31, 34, 45
Kundera, Milan 3–4, 5, 251, 255, 257, 389, 421 Margolius, Rudolf 253, 255
Kveder, Zofka 302 Maria Theresa (Habsburg Monarchy) 39,
185–6, 223, 224, 324–5, 468, 470, 475
Lagarde, Paul de 4 Marković, Ante 64
Latin 188, 219, 221–2, 223 Marković, Svetozar 306, 348
Latvia 2, 60, 63, 328, 442, 443, 444f, 445f, Marshall Plan (1947) 61, 370
448, 449f, 451f Marx, Karl 340, 374, 472, 479
Lausanne, treaty of (1923) 43, 148 Masaryk, Tomáš (Thomas Garrigue) 4–5,
League of the Archangel Michael, the 195; 57, 197, 240, 351, 399n2, 487
see also Iron Guard May, Arthur 192
Lechner, Ödön 239 Mazower, Mark 8, 57, 129, 182, 183
Lechón, Jan 242 Mažuranić, Matija 230
Lemberg/L’viv/Lwów 225, 227, 234, 235, memory industry 466
281, 473, 476, 493 mercantilism 35–6, 43
514
INDEX
Meštrović, Ivan 485, 486, 489 143–4, 148; language 223; nationalism
Methodius, Saint 483, 484, 491 334; Ottoman Empire 131, 180–1, 182–3,
Michelet, Jules 229, 232 189–90, 292, 325, 326, 327, 340; polygamy
Michnik, Adam 256–7, 389 300; Soviet Bulgaria 61, 149–50, 375; war-
Mickiewicz, Adam 227, 229, 230, 232, 331, time flight 145–6; see also religion
478, 479
migration and population change: border Napoleonic and French Revolutionary Wars
controls 33, 56, 111, 129, 136, 139, 142, 143, (1792–1815) 6, 35, 43–5, 48, 89, 225,
158, 389, 455; Cold War era 127, 158–62, 226–7, 293, 324
374–5, 384–5; economic development national-accommodative communism 426,
136–7; and the European Union 1, 427, 437
2, 419, 431–2, 455; historiography nationalism: alternate loyalties 333;
128–30; imperial ethnic mixing 130–5; Enlightenment intellectuals 329–31;
industrialization and urbanization 95, ethnicity and religion 176, 179, 182,
103, 135–6, 137–8, 159–60, 377; migration 184, 188–94, 197–202; EU accession
types 126–7; Muslim populations 126, 418, 431, 436, 437, 445–6, 447, 448–9,
143–4, 148; post-communist era 111, 126, 450, 455; historiography 6, 9, 10, 11, 12,
127, 162–5; quarantine system 95; rural 14, 16, 177; imperial reform 182, 324,
overpopulation 96, 98, 103; seasonal 325, 326, 327; and language 33, 61, 192,
migration 127, 128, 135, 136, 138–9, 141, 193, 222–3, 228, 229, 330–1, 333; and
142, 147, 151, 162, 165; transatlantic liberalism 338; modernist-constructivist
migration 96, 136, 137, 140–2, 145, 158, theory 177–8, 295, 468; post-communist
194–7, 201; Western European settlement transition 110, 425, 426, 427, 428–9;
37, 90; see also ethnic unmixing/ regime of territoriality see right-sizing;
homogenization and right-wing ideology (interwar period)
Military Frontier (Vojna Krajina) 5 198–9, 336, 351–2; role of women 279,
military organization 91–2 280–1, 295–8, 299, 303, 304, 347, 349; and
millet system 181–2, 191, 329 socialism 199–202, 251, 252, 254, 256,
Milošević, Slobodan 64 341–2, 351, 374–6; Zionism 298–9, 332–3;
Miłosz, Czesław 242, 248, 251–2, 254, 257 see also ethnic unmixing/homogenization;
Mincu, Ion 239 nationalism and culture; right-sizing; uses
Minority Protection Treaties 54, 101, 144, and abuses of the past
244, 335 nationalism and culture: education
mitteleuropa 4–5, 8, 27 227–8, 233–4, 241, 244–5, 280–1, 295;
modernist-constructivist theory 177–8, 295 ethnography 228, 229, 231, 235, 496;
modernist movement 216, 237–40, 247 history-writing 10, 201, 228–30; literature
Moldavia 44, 48, 88, 134, 218, 219, 222, 231, 226, 235–7, 238, 239, 251, 254, 258; and
232, 233; see also Wallachia-Moldavia the Modernist turn 237–40; museums and
Moldova 63, 162, 178, 220, 248, 422, 424 exhibitions 233, 234–5, 329; newspapers
Monnet, Jean 420 and journals 226, 228, 232; political
Montenegro: migration 140t, 141, ideology (interwar years) 241, 242; in
142, 164; national culture 231, 251; revolutionary age 216, 225–33; Soviet era
nationalist activism 191; territoriality 251, 252, 256; travel writing 230–1
49, 53, 64, 66, 92; uses and abuses of the NATO see North Atlantic Treaty
past 467, 489, 496; wealth of 92, 112f; Organization
and Yugoslavian heterogeneity 163t Naumann, Friedrich 4
Moravia 47, 51, 64, 132, 137, 138, 141t, 151, Nazis: attack on Poland (1939) 57, 59, 151,
234, 246, 328 336; and East Central European fascism
mortality rates 86, 98, 99, 135, 137, 142 241, 352, 353; economic exploitation of
Munich Agreement (1938) 57, 246, 338 occupied territories 101; EU legacy 440;
Muraviev, Mikhail Nikolaevich 478–9 historiography 12, 366, 369; Holocaust
music 84, 107, 190, 216, 239, 245, 247, 248, 16, 101, 151, 153–4, 158, 248, 376;
250, 251, 252, 257, 258–9, 272n225, 344, interwar trade 99; Lebensraum 57, 151–2;
388, 395, 409n136, 465, 476 militarization of culture 245–9, 473;
Muslim populations: and EU membership 2; recruitment of foreign workers 152–3;
and forced migration/displacement 126, Red Army defeat of (1943–45) 102;
515
INDEX
territory of (1942) 58map, 59; use and Pest 47, 220, 228, 233, 303, 331, 476
abuse of the past 466, 473, 490, 492; Peter I (the Great, Russian empire) 36, 43,
women in Poland 298 134, 218, 223, 470
Nĕmcová, Božena 236, 302, 347 Petőfi Circle 254, 255, 494
neo-classical economic theory 83, 84 Petőfi, Sándor 233, 331, 475, 476, 494
neo-Marxist World-System theory 82–3, 96 Phanariots 44, 190, 219, 222
Neuburger, Mary 183, 190, 389, 390 PHARE (Poland, Hungary Aid for
Nezval, Vítězslav 243, 244 Restructuring of the Economy)
Nicholas II (Tsar of Russia) 327, 470, 478, 479 Democracy program 419–20
Nicholas I (Tsar of Russia) 227 Piłsudski, Józef 338, 340, 342, 353, 488
Njegoš (Petar Petrovic) 191, 231, 251 Pittsburgh Agreement (Dohoda, 1918)
Noeva, Teodora 287, 305 196–7
Noica, Constantin 241, 250, 256 Plastic People of the Universe, The 257
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Pleşu, Andrei 259
2, 61, 66, 108, 392, 419, 440, 441, 454 Poland: anti-Russian uprising (1863) 31,
Nováková, Teréza 236, 302 42, 89, 96, 235, 328, 332, 338, 345, 478;
Catholicism (communist era) 200–1,
Obilić, Miloš 482 376; communism, end of 108; culture
Obradović, Dositej 230, 330 (communist era) 249, 250, 253, 254, 256,
Okey, Robin 7 258, 259; culture (Congress Poland) 220,
Orbán, Viktor 1, 445–6, 455 235–6, 238, 280, 331; culture (interwar
Orientalism 4, 15–16, 49, 189–90, 219 period) 242–3, 244, 245, 378; culture
Orzeszkowa, Eliza 235, 236, 302 (post-communist era) 259; culture (pre
Ottoman Empire: culture 190, 219, 220; 1918) 220, 227, 235–6, 238; economic
decline of 37, 42–3, 44–5, 49, 189–90, 222, performance 95, 98, 99, 100, 107, 109,
327–8, 481; ethnicity 130, 131–2, 133, 134, 111, 112f, 113t; EU membership 63,
142, 143–4, 145–7, 148; liberalism and the 417, 426, 434, 437, 442, 443, 444f, 445,
civil service 337; military organization 91; 446, 447–8, 449f, 450, 451f; forced
millet system 181–2, 191, 329; peasants 87, deportations (World War I) 147; gender
88, 136, 189; religion 179–84, 190; social history 280, 289, 290, 293, 296, 297,
reform 325, 326–7; territoriality 32, 36, 299, 302, 304–5; historiography 16, 31,
37, 40, 43, 48, 65, 185, 189, 323, 327; uses 84; industry and urbanization 92, 93,
and abuses of the past 479–81; women 94, 103, 159, 160, 384; liberalism 336;
and the law 292, 294; workers’ parties migration (communist era) 111, 154,
340–1; Young Turk revolution (1908) 49, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 162, 336, 384–5;
327, 332, 481 migration (Congress Poland) 138, 139,
140, 141t, 142; migration (interwar) 141t,
Palacký, František 229, 232, 234, 330, 332, 147, 150–1; migration (post-communist)
468, 477, 487 162, 164, 432; migration (transatlantic)
Palamas, Kostas (funeral) 246 140, 141t, 142; minority populations
pan-Slavism 230, 234, 324, 332, 334, 468, (interwar period) 147, 150–1, 242, 245;
471, 477–8 occupation (World War II) 246, 247,
Paris Peace Conference (1919–21) 53, 54 248, 369; peasant activism (interwar
Paris, Treaty of (1947) 60 period) 347; political activism (Congress
Parren, Callirhoe 287, 305–6 Poland) 89, 227, 340, 342, 343; politics of
passport and border controls 33, 56, 111, history 466, 488, 493, 494, 497; Solidarity
129, 136, 139, 142, 143, 158, 389, 455 movement 62, 108, 162, 379, 391, 394–5,
pastoralists 136 397, 466, 494; Soviet party purges 372;
Pătrăşcanu, Lucreţiu 253, 372 state-building (interwar period) 97, 334;
patrimonial communism 424–6, 427, 437 territoriality 32, 35, 45, 53, 54, 57, 59,
patriotism and womanhood 280, 296, 299 60, 156, 328; see also Polish-Lithuanian
Pauker, Ana 308, 372 Commonwealth
Pavelić, Ante 247, 352, 490 Polish Kingdom see Congress Poland
Pavlowitch, Stevan 8 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: culture
pečalbari 139, 142, 162 219–20, 224–5; economic activity 88,
periodization 30–2, 253 91; eighteenth century partitioning 27,
516
INDEX
30, 32, 35–6, 39–42, 65, 134, 135, 323, regimes of territoriality see territoriality,
467–8; French revolutionary influence regimes of
226; language 223; nobility 36, 39–40, religion: and communism 179, 199–202,
42, 88–9, 329; as political epicenter 32, 203; and the concept of Central Europe
48; political system 88–9; religion 132–3, 3–4; Conservatism (nineteenth century)
184, 186, 187–8; urban sector 90; uses and 350–1; ethno-religious politics (interwar)
abuses of the past 467–8, 469–70, 478 197–9, 203; Counter-Reformation 4, 128,
Polish Succession, War of (1733–38) 36 166n9, 185–6, 216, 470, 58n207; Eastern
politics of history see uses and abuses of Orthodox Church 4, 49, 144, 148, 176,
the past 180–2, 186–7, 188–93, 196, 198, 200–202,
Pomaks 144, 148, 180, 426 218–20, 222–3, 233, 241, 247, 301, 329,
Popović, Miodrag 252 421–2, 481–3, 489; Habsburg Monarchy
population change see migration and 132, 135, 184–5, 188, 202, 225, 325;
population change historical instrumentalization 202–3, 465,
positivism 235–6 481, 482, 483–4, 486, 491; Islam 1, 2, 61,
post-communism: culture 217, 259; 64, 68n23, 72n100, 77n166, 88, 126, 128,
economic development 108–12, 113t, 131, 133, 143–4, 144t3.3, 145, 147–8, 149–
392, 396; historiography 9–16, 386, 50, 164, 165n3, 166n8, 167n26, 168n43,
398–9; migration 162–5; overview 1–2; 170n107, 108 & 116, 171n141, 176, 178–
religion 202; territoriality 62–5, 65–6, 398; 83, 184, 185, 189–91, 201–2, 205n25, 26
triumphalist accounts 386, 398; see also & 29, 206n38, 42–46, 207n48–51, 208n81,
European Union 209n84, 222, 223, 231, 251, 260n17,
post-industrialism 86, 106 271n207, 292, 298, 300, 301, 325–7, 334,
Potocki, Jan 229 337, 340, 345, 355n5 & 14, 358n65, 375,
Potocki, Seweryn 227 402n31, 404n58, 408n116, 426, 479–81,
Poznań monument 494 485, 488, 490, 492, 500n70; Judaism
Prague: Agrarian organizations 346; 22n55, 178, 183, 199, language 222;
commemoration 384, 477, 487, 494; and liberalism 337; link with ethnicity
cultural history 217–18, 219, 228, 232, 176; migration 127, 130, 131, 132,
234, 235, 239, 255; gendered education 134–5, 143, 148, 194, 195–6, 201, 426; in
280–1, 296; gendered social and criminal modernist-constructivist theory 177–8;
categories 299; modernization and and nationalism (nineteenth century) 43,
growth 96, 137; national movements 194 188–94, 202–3; nation-building (interwar
Prague Slav Congress (1848) 47, 232 period) 197–202; Ottoman Empire 131,
Prague Spring (1968) 62, 105, 107, 162, 255, 179–84, 202; persecution 132, 185; Polish-
382, 393, 394, 494 Lithuanian Commonwealth 184, 186,
propaganda 77n158, 216, 245, 246, 248, 250, 187–8; politics of history 481, 482, 483–4,
252, 254, 258, 263n62, 271n204, 344, 366, 494; Polish National Catholic Church 196;
387, 404n60, 421, 501n72, Protestantism (Calvinism) 88, 132, 134,
prostitution 299, 300, 301, 305 184–6, 187, 188, 196, 218, 219, 303, 325,
Protestantism (or Calvinism) see relgion 487, 492; popular/lived and institutional
Prus, Bolesław 236 178, 182, 202; Roman Catholicism (also
Prussia: absolutist regime of territoriality Roman Christianity or Catholicism) 3–4,
27, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 65, 73n109, 90, 132, 166n9, 167n26, 176, 180,
324; free burghers 90; influential 184–8, 191, 196, 198, 200–1 202, 204n17,
educational reform 224; migration 130, 205n23, 207n58, 208n66 & 67, 211n125 &
134, 138, 139, 140, 142, 145, 151, 154; 131, 212n135 & 139, 216, 218, 221–2, 224,
Mitteleuropa 4; peasant reform 89; public 226, 247, 259, 292, 294, 303–4, 324, 325,
commemoration 470, 472, 493 337, 350, 351, 357n48, 363n165, 376, 394,
Przybyszewski, Stanisław 238 404n59, 421, 426, 427, 429, 434, 438, 470,
Putin, Vladimir 1, 453, 454 473, 478, 485, 487, 492, 494; Uniatism
(Greek Catholicism) 132, 176, 186–7,
Radić, Ante 346 193–4, 196, 198–9
Radić, Stjepan 196, 346 remembrance, culture of see uses and abuses
Reagan, Ronald 440 of the past
Reformation, the 132, 184 Renner, Karl 56, 342
517
INDEX
revisionist (bottom up) model of Soviet and 91; nobility 88; Peter I (the Great) 36, 43,
communism studies 14, 366, 367, 369, 133, 218, 223, 470; and Polish socialism
371, 386 340; Polish uprising (1863) 31, 42, 89, 96,
revolutions (1848–1849) 45, 47–8, 188, 192, 235, 328, 332, 338, 345, 478; population
326, 331–2, 472–3, 474, 475–7 movement 134, 138, 139, 140; right-sizing
right-sizing: end of territoriality 60–5, 66; space (era of nationalism) 48, 49, 53,
external borders (interwar years) 31, 483; social reform 89, 324, 327; territorial
53–6, 57; external borders (pre 1914) acquisition (seventeenth century) 323;
31, 48–51, 483; golden age of 31–2, 45; uses and abuses of the past 467–8,
internal nation-building 34, 51–3, 66; 470, 471, 477–8, 478–9, 484, 488, 495;
population transfer and genocide 34, 66; vernacular language 223; War of Polish
revolutions (1848–1849) 45, 47–8; World Succession/Polish-Lithuanian partition
War II 57–60, 66 36, 40, 42; women’s activism 307; workers’
Ristić, Marko 250 parties 341
Romania: agrarianism and peasant unrest Russian language 222, 223
345, 346; agricultural modernization Russian Poland see Congress Poland
95–6; communist disillusionment and Russo, Alecu 230
collapse 107, 108; culture 217, 230, Russo-Ottoman War (1768–74) 40, 44
234, 240–1, 247, 250, 251, 255–6, 259; Russo-Turkish War (1735–39) 36–7, 134
economic performance (communist era) Russo-Turkish War (1806–12) 44
105, 107, 108; economic transformation Russo-Turkish War (1877–78) 49, 134, 144,
(post-communist era) 109, 111, 112f, 483–4
113t; education 61, 241, 279, 280; ethnic Rusyns (Ruthenians, Little Russians,
minorities 97, 149, 150t, 152, 158, 161, Ukrainians, Łemkos) 55, 187, 193, 234,
162, 240–1, 334–5; EU membership 2, 63, 304, 477
422, 426, 435, 437, 442, 443f, 444f, 445f,
446, 448, 451f, 452; fascism 198, 240–1, St. Petersburg 36, 217, 218, 227, 480
250, 353, 372; industry 93, 99t, 100, same-sex relationships 301
101, 103, 256; Jewish opportunities 97; San Stefano, Treaty of (1878) 49, 483–4,
liberalism 337, 338; nationalist discourse 491, 497
(communist-era) 375; nationalist role Schorske, Carl 238, 239
of women 297; Orthodox Church- Second World War see World War II
communist accommodations 200; politics Serbo-Croatian language 228, 330–1
of history 492, 495; population growth Serbia: Balkan Wars (1991–2001) 64, 164t,
(1974) 159; rural overpopulation 98; 202; cultural nationalism 217, 233, 250,
sexuality and intimate relationships 334; EU membership 426; fascism 353;
302, 381; Soviet purges 372; Stalin 370; gender history 280, 281, 288, 291, 306,
territoriality 43, 47, 48–9, 53, 55, 56, 348; independence 43, 45, 49, 95, 189;
59, 60, 61, 63–4, 97, 152; transatlantic liberalism 336; population movement
migration 140t, 141t; women’s activism 138, 142, 143, 144t, 146, 152t, 164t;
304, 305, 306, 347, 348; women’s suffrage regime legacy 424, 427; religion 180, 191;
294, 348; women’s work 288, 289; rural values 344; uprisings (1804–15)
workers’ activism 108, 341 189; uses and abuses of the past 203, 481,
Roma people 55, 59, 161, 163, 223, 248, 482–3, 485, 488, 489, 490, 497; wealth of
288, 352 92, 112f; workers’ parties 340, 341
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 467 Serbian (language) 230, 247
Russia: prestige 1; and territoriality 63; serfdom 40, 87–8, 89, 136, 324, 332, 344,
Ukraine crisis (2013–14) 63, 453–4, 494 349, 350
Russian empire: absolutist regime of sexuality 278, 279, 298–302, 381
territoriality 32, 35, 36–7, 39, 40, 42, 43, Sienkiewicz, Henryk 236
44, 45, 65; Bolshevic Revolution 343; Silesia 35, 39, 54, 134, 138, 151, 185, 223,
border controls 139–40; Catherine II 234, 493
(the Great) 43, 48, 63, 82, 187, 188, 220, Skamander 242
224, 467, 470; commemorative politics of Skanderbeg 492–3
history 468, 478–9; culture 218, 227, 235, Slánský trial 201, 255, 372
328; end of 54, 57; military organization Slav Congress (1848) 47
518
INDEX
Slovakia: communism and the church Springtime of Nations (or Peoples) see
200; culture 220, 244, 246, 247, 330; EU revolutions (1848–1849)
membership 417, 426, 427, 440, 442, Stadion, Franz 192
443, 444f, 445, 446, 448, 449f, 450, 451f; Stalin, Joseph: death of see thaw and dissent;
and fascism 198–9, 246, 247, 352; gender making the Soviet bloc 4, 59, 60, 367–70;
history 299, 303; population transfer monuments to 255, 384, 493, 494, 495
155, 156, 161, 163; post-communist Stamboliyski, Aleksandar (Stamboliski,
westernization 111, 113t; territoriality 57, Aleksandŭr) 197–8, 346
60, 63, 64; uses and abuses of the past Stambolov, Stefan 337
485, 486–7, 497 Stanisław August Poniatowski (King of
Slovenia: economic performance 111, Poland-Lithuania) 39, 40, 187, 224, 225
112f, 113t; education 245, 280; ethno- Strossmayer, Josip Juraj 191, 234, 489
religious identity 184, 185, 201, 202, student agitation 101, 227, 234, 241, 388
467, 488; EU membership 2, 398, 442f, subsidies (European Union) 419, 430, 434
443f, 444–5, 448, 449f, 451f; gender suffrage 290–1, 293–4, 303, 304, 305, 309,
history 280, 285–6, 288, 294, 302, 304, 340, 348
306, 308; nationalism 335, 342, 349, 351, Svetlá, Karolina 236, 302
467; population growth 159; population Sweden 27, 36, 37, 160, 164, 430, 431
movements 132, 140t, 141t, 147, 150t, syncretism 183–4
152t, 163t, 164t, 201; post-communist Széchenyi, István 230, 330
Westernization 111, 112f, 113t, 447;
territoriality 53, 64, 97, 352, 488; uses and TACIS (Technical Assistance to the
abuses of the past 467, 471, 485, 489, 496 Commonwealth of Independent States)
Słowacki, Julius 230, 233 program 420
Smith, Anthony 177–8 Terezín (Theresienstadt) Camp 248
Snyder, Timothy 6, 34, 101, 177, 187, 250 territoriality, regimes of: absolutist see
Social Democratic parties and organizations absolutist regime of territoriality; borders
304, 338, 339–44, 437 and peoples 32–5, 323; nationalism
socialism (ideology of): and feminism 307, see right-sizing; periodization 30–2;
348–9; and workers’ movements 339–44 post-territoriality 30, 35, 60–5, 66;
Socialist Realism 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, transnational perspective 31, 65
256, 257 thaw and dissent 62, 103–4, 105, 217, 254–8,
social welfare policies 287–8, 299, 328, 373–4, 494–5
335, 439 theatre 215, 225, 228, 245, 247, 248, 250,
Sofia 13, 131, 183, 282, 383, 484, 491 252, 254, 255, 388, 475, 484
Sokol movement 234, 333 Theresienstadt (Terezín) Camp 248
Solidarity movement 62, 108, 162, 379, 391, “Third Balkan War” (1991–2001) see
394–5, 397, 466, 494 Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001)
Şora, Mihai 259 Tiso, Josef 199, 200, 351
Southern Dobrudja 53, 60, 152 Tito, Josip Broz 491, 496
Soviet Union: collapse 62–3, 162, 391–8, Todorova, Maria 6–7, 9, 128, 179, 189, 395
427–8, 440; communist modernization Tomšiç, Vida 306, 308
102–8, 159–60; culture 243, 246, 247, Torpey, John 129
249–58, 259; de-Stalinization 62, 103–4, totalitarian (top down) model of Soviet and
105, 217, 254–8, 373–4, 494–5; East-West communism studies 14, 366, 369, 371,
divide 386–91, 421–2; ideological legacy 386, 398, 399
354; making the Soviet bloc 367–76; tourism and travel 104, 230–1, 333, 339, 385,
maternity policies 290; population 389–90
movements 151–2, 154–8, 159–60, trade liberalization 93–4
161–2, 374; religion 199–201; right-wing transatlantic migration 96, 136, 137, 140–2,
extremism (interwar) period 352; social 145, 158, 194–7, 201
impact 376–86; socialism in the interwar transnational history 11–12, 31, 34, 65
period 343–4; territoriality 5, 54, 59–60, Transnistria 63, 78n181, 154, 248, 272n221
61–2; totalitarian paradigm 14, 366, 369, Transylvania: avant-garde intellectuals
371, 386, 398, 399; uses and abuses of the (interwar period) 241; Communist era
past 201, 255, 493–6 nationalism 61, 375, 376; demographic
519
INDEX
changes 133, 135, 146t, 147, 149, 152; uses and abuses of the past: Balkan national
economic development (interwar societies 481–6; commemoration of 1848
period) 97; religion 132, 135, 185, 187; revolutions 472–3, 474, 475–7; communist
territoriality 47, 48, 53, 55, 57, 60, 63–4, period 201, 255, 493–6; European
133; women’s activism 303 heritage narratives 4, 421; historical
travel and tourism 104, 230–1, 333, 339, 385, interest and the memory industry 466;
389–90 imperial narratives of legitimacy 467–8,
Trianon, Treaty of (1920) 54, 55, 57, 470–1, 474–5, 476–7; interwar castings and
149, 245 recasting 486–93; late Ottoman dimension
Trieste/Trst 4, 60, 128, 220, 342, 390 479–81; Mickiewicz contra Muraviev
Truhelka, Jagoda 302 478–9; pan-Slavic dimension 477–8;
Tsarist Russia see Russian Empire Polish nationalism 467, 469–70, 471;
Tuðman, Franjo 64 post-communist transition 398–9; Serbian
Turkey: Lauanne Treaty (1923) 43, 148; nationalists (1991) 202; since 1989 496–7
migration (post-communist) 158, 162, Ustasha (Ustaša) Party 55, 59, 60, 247, 248,
165; NATO and EU membership 2, 352, 491
431; population transfers (interwar
period) 34, 128, 142, 145, 146t, 147, 148; vacations see tourism and travel
urbanization 160; uses and abuses of the Vaculík, Ludvík 251, 255
past 481; women’s suffrage 305 Velestinlis, Rhigas 226, 331, 336
Turkish-Greek War (1921–22) 142, 148 Velimirović, Nikolaj 199, 201–2
Turkish language 222, 223 Venice 3, 27, 217, 219, 221
Two-Plus-Four Agreement/Treaty on the Venizelos, Eleftherios 337
Final Settlement with Respect to Germany Verdery, Katherine 256, 371, 375, 376, 382,
(1990) 61 384, 395
Tzara, Tristan 241, 247 Vienna 90; cultural influence 217, 218, 224,
225, 228, 232, 237, 238; ethno-religious
Ukraine: as borderland region 5, 388; composition 184, 220; foreign population
communist regime legacy 424; crisis (1990s) 432; government administration
(2013–2014) 63, 453–4, 455, 494; EU 325; liberalism 338–9; modernism 238;
membership 422, 433, 456; minority population growth 137, 139, 218, 237;
populations 55; Polish export possibilities Romanian nation-building 97; and rural
94; territoriality 40, 42, 44; uses and values 344; uses and abuses of the past
abuses of the past 16 470, 473, 474, 475
Uniatism see religion Vienna Awards (1938 and 1940) 57, 59, 60
United Kingdom 99; see also Britain Vienna, Congress and Treaty of (1815) 44,
United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief 45, 227, 328
Administration (UNRRA) 156, 158 Vienna, Siege of (1683) 43, 185
United States of America: foreign policy Villa Air Bel 247–8
440–1, 454; see also transatlantic Vilnius: Museum of Genocide Victims 466
migration Vilnius letter 441
universities: Communist era 253–4, Visegrád states 7, 111, 422, 445, 451, 455
378; imperial 224, 225, 227–8, 230; Vittorelli, Natascha 302
nationalism 227–8, 233–4, 241, 244–5; Vlachs 131, 136
student agitation 101, 227, 234, 241, Vode, Angela 306, 308
388; under Nazi occupation 246–7, 249; Vogorides, Stephanos 190
women’s access to 279, 280, 281–2, 286, Vojna Krajina (Military Frontier) 5
303, 348, 349 Voulgaris, Eugenios 218
UNRRA see United Nations Rehabilitation Vulcănescu, Mircea 241, 272n228
and Relief Administration Vytautas (the Great) 487–8
urbanization: and culture 219–20; and
economic development 86, 90, 92, 94, Wajda, Andrzej 254, 274n264, 275n267
96, 159–60, 377; and liberalism 339; and & 279
migration 95, 136, 137–8, 159–60; and Wałesa, Lech 395, 494
Western morality 299 Wallachia 37, 44, 48, 88, 134, 219, 220, 222,
U.S. see United States of America 232, 301
520
INDEX
Wallachia-Moldavia 48, 133, 233, 484–5, 492 290–5; literature 236, 302, 303, 347;
Wallerstein, Immanuel 83 “Manifesto of Czech Modernism, ” (1895)
Wandycz, Piotr 7 238; marriage and pregnancy 158–9, 294,
War of Austrian Succession (1740–48) 35, 302; Muslim veil 61, 375; national roles
39, 134 of women 279, 280–1, 295–8, 299, 303,
War of the Polish Succession (1733–38) 36 304, 347, 349; political dissidents 395;
Warsaw: capital city status 90; cultural post-communist era 382; sexuality and
centre 219–20; cultural institutions 224, intimate relationships 278, 279, 298–302,
225, 227, 233, 235; ethnic minorities 381; work 102, 139, 279, 283–90, 377, 379,
242; industry 93; minority populations 380–1, 439
(interwar period) 242; modernization 96; Women’s International Democratic
monuments 466, 478; Nazi occupation Federation (WIDF) 308, 309
248; population growth 137; Soviet workers: communist modernization 102,
liberation 249; territoriality of 32; war 103, 104, 106, 108, 160, 426; migration
damage 249, 369; World War II damage 111, 135–42, 151, 152–3, 156, 160,
249, 369 237, 431, 432–3; post-communist
Warsaw, Duchy of 32, 45, 89, 91, 226 westernization 109, 110; resistance 62,
Warsaw Pact 2, 61, 62, 63, 66, 162, 393, 430 108, 256, 327, 394; social democratic
Wat, Aleksander 242–3, 251 parties 339–44, 472; social revolution 376,
“Weimar Russia” 1 377, 378, 380, 381, 382, 384, 385; urban
welfare policies 287–8, 299, 328, 335, 439 working-class (interwar period) 100–1;
Western Europe: and Central European women 102, 139, 279, 282–90, 377, 379,
heritage 389, 421–2; Churchill’s 380–1, 439
percentages agreement 4, 60, 370; World-System economic theory 82–3, 84
cultural influences of 218, 221, 225–7, World War I: aftermath see interwar
230, 249–50, 299, 388; definition of period; displaced populations/
progress 82; and the eastern ‘other’ 6–7, ethnic unmixing 142, 145, 146–7; war
8, 13, 45, 81–2; economic development memorials 486
83, 85, 87, 90, 95; education and work World War II: economic impact 86, 101–2;
for women 280, 287; EU subsidies 110, ideological impact 354; militarization
112, 419, 430, 434; gender historiography of culture 245–9, 473; and nineteenth
309–10; Industrial Revolution 83, 85, 87, century nationalism 336; postwar
95; novels 236–7; perspectives from below ethnic cleansing 61, 101–2, 126, 127,
(Cold War era) 386–7; politics of identity 128–9, 142–3, 154–8, 336, 376; postwar
431; refugees and labor migration 111, retribution 155, 158, 370; right-sizing in
163–5, 431–2, 455; and Soviet control the run up to 57; territorial impact 34,
in East Central Europe 370; women’s 57–60, 66; see also Nazis
activism 308; see also France; United Wrocław/Breslau 33, 137, 493
Kingdom; West Germany Wyspiański, Stanisław 238
West Germany 62, 64, 160, 163, 398, 495 Wyszyński, Stefan 201, 494
Wharton, Edith 236
White Mountain, Battle of (1620) 132, 219, Xoxe, Koci 372
330, 487
WIDF see Women’s International Yiddish 223, 245, 248, 299, 333
Democratic Federation Young Bosnia movement 51, 234
Wilhelm I (German Empire) 472 Young Turk revolution (1908) 49, 327,
Wilhelm II (German Empire) 472, 478 332, 481
Wolff, Larry 6, 7, 81–2, 112 Yugoslavia (formerly Kingdom of Serbs,
women: activism/resistance 278, 279, 302–8, Croats, and Slovenes): agrarianism
347–9; and capitalism 110; civil law and and peasant mobilization 345, 346;
property rights 291–2; and communism communism 343, 369, 370, 374; culture
regimes 284–5, 288–90, 294–5, 296–7, 243, 244, 251, 252, 255–6; demographic
306–7, 377, 380–2; education 279–82, change 140, 149, 150t, 154, 159, 160,
286, 295–6, 303, 348, 349, 377; EU 162, 335; economic performance 98,
accession process 438–40; historiography 99, 100t, 103, 105, 107f, 111, 112f, 379;
15–16, 309–10; law and citizenship 279, gender equality 288, 294, 297, 306, 308,
521
INDEX
349; nation-building (interwar period) Zadar group 252

335; political Catholicism 201–2, Załuski brothers (Andrzej Stanisław and
351; politics of history 467, 485–6, Józef Andrzej) 225, 227
488–91, 495–6; rural landscape (post- Zatkovich, Gregory 197
communist) 384–5; territoriality 53, 55, Zhdanov, Andrei 251
59, 60, 64; World War II losses 336, 369; Zhivkov, Todor 375, 426, 495
see also Balkan Wars (1991–2001) Zionism 299, 332–3
Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001) 8, 13, 64, 163–4, Zogović, Radovan 251, 252
202, 392, 422, 432, 440 Zrinski, Nikola Šubić (Miklós Zrínyi) 485
522

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T H E RO U TL E DGE HIS TORY OF

Irina Livezeanu is Associate Professor of modern European history at the University of

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTOR Y THE ROUTLEDGE HISTOR Y

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTOR Y THE ROUTLEDGE HISTOR Y

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTOR Y THE ROUTLEDGE HISTOR Y OF

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTOR Y OF THE ROUTLEDGE HISTOR Y

Edited by Irina Livezeanu

ISBN: 978-0-415-58433-3 (hbk)

Typeset in New Baskerville Std

List of maps vii

1 Space: empires, nations, borders 27

2 Rural and urban worlds: between economic modernization

3 Demography and population movements 126

4 Religion and ethnicity: conflicting and

5 The cultures of East Central Europe: imperial,

6 Women’s and gender history 278

7 Political ideologies and political movements 323

8 Communism and its legacy 365

9 Returning to “Europe” and the rise of Europragmatism:

10 Uses and abuses of the past 465

1.1 East Central Europe, 2000 28

2.1 Per capita GDP of European socialist countries (1950–89) 107

Joel Brady is Teaching Consultant and Coordinator of Teaching Assistant Services at

Edin Hajdarpasic is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University, Chicago. His

focuses on international and interethnic relations in modern Eastern Europe and

Irina Livezeanu and Árpád von Klimó

Definitions of time and space

Central Europe, Mitteleuropa, Eastern Europe

constructed in the discourse and imagination of Westerners. In fact she devoted a

The problem of “backwardness”

Trends in the historiography of East Central Europe since 1700

publics by well-published dissidents. The debate also promoted the “emancipation”

James Koranyi and Bernhard Struck1

Regimes of territoriality and the problem of periodization

Here, we simplify Charles Maier’s complex periodization of regimes of territori-

Borders and peoples

The age of empires, ca. 1700–1860s: the

German dualism and the power shift in Central Europe, c. 1740s–1800s

The partitions of Poland-Lithuania

Polish nobles, tried to re-assert an independence vis-à-vis Tsarist influence begin-

last – to agree to Romanov and Hohenzollern territorial demands.65 In the partition of

The solution of Balkan and Ottoman problems was infinitely complicated by

Despite two decades of warfare and an unprecedented expansion of the French

Right-sizing space in the era of nationalism, ca. 1860–1960

In the aftermath of 1848–49 the Hungarian independence movement was sup-

Borders and the great-power game

Suppressed provinces, forgotten places

National self-determination and its discontents

successes radically transformed East Central European space into an unrecognizable

The end of territoriality?

remained a strong rhetorical element in Hungarian politics, but in Romania, ­autonomy

territoriality was no longer at the forefront of politics, nationalism was by no means

9 Maier, “Transformations of Territoriality,” 44, and 44 fn. 19.

62 See Chapter 5 of this volume.

ungarischen Juden 1944–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, c2002). On Latvia see

Jacek Kochanowicz and Bogdan Murgescu

theory, presented by the American historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein.6 The

East vs. West

Region 1500–1820 1820–70 1870–1913 1913–50 1950–73 1973–2001

World 0.32 0.93 2.11 1.82 4.90 3.50

The Old Order

Romanian Principalities, peasants were part of a larger “feudal” economy. Land

go well beyond war-making. Modern militaries demanded effective taxation, and,

List of maps vii

1 Space: empires, nations, borders 27

3 Demography and population movements 126

6 Women’s and gender history 278

7 Political ideologies and political movements 323

8 Communism and its legacy 365

10 Uses and abuses of the past 465

1.1 East Central Europe, 2000 28

2.1 Per capita GDP of European socialist countries (1950–89) 107

remained a strong rhetorical element in Hungarian politics, but in Romania, autonomy

Table 3.11 Internally displaced persons in the former