Understanding Central Europe

Marcin Moskalewicz, Wojciech Przybylski, Marcin Moskalewicz, Wojciech Przybylski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780415791595
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351654517
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Central Europe" is a vague and ambiguous term, more to do with outlook and a state of mind than with a firmly defined geographical region. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Central Europeans considered themselves to be culturally part of the West, which had been politically handicapped by the Eastern Soviet bloc. More recently, and with European Union membership, Central Europeans are increasingly thinking of themselves as politically part of the West, but culturally part of the East. This book, with contributions from a large number of scholars from the region, explores the concept of "Central Europe" and a number of other political concepts from an openly Central European perspective. It considers a wide range of issues including politics, nationalism, democracy, and the impact of culture, art and history. Overall, the book casts a great deal of light on the complex nature of "Central Europe".

Part I

Positioning Central Europe

1 Positioning in global hierarchies

The case of Central Europe

Attila Melegh

Introduction

The regional understanding of the concept of Central Europe is in itself the product of geo-cultural and geopolitical positioning in perceived global hierarchies by local and emigrant intellectuals in the 20th and early 21st century. This positioning has been multifaceted, and it has served various purposes in different historical epochs and in various countries in the region

Historical origins: hierarchical/colonial imaginations coming from outside

Around three hundred years ago, a massive mental structure appeared in Europe, which promoted a hierarchical understanding of global social change based on colonial imagination (Amin 1989;Thornton 2005; Said 1978; Mignolo 2000; Böröcz 2004, 2009; Wallerstein 1979, 1991, 1997; Hobsbawm, 1987: chapter 1 and 6; Wolff 1994). The key element of this hierarchical imagination is to see different parts and people of the world as being hierarchically ordered regarding development. It was also understood temporarily. Less developed people represented the past of the most developed ones. Following the analysis of Larry Wolff, we can term this complex framework as an idea of civilizational slope (Wolff 1994). In this structure, almost all political and social actors in the “East” and “West” identify themselves on a descending scale from “civilization to barbarism”, from “developed to non-developed” status. (Melegh 2006; Wolff 1994).

This institutionalized cognitive framework is of course thoroughly linked to hierarchical tendencies in the world economy in two ways: There would not have been a European expansion without this colonial, hierarchical mental framework (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992), or the other way round this identity would have collapsed, if there had had not been tendencies of unequal development. The fact that some Western nations could detach from the rest of the world was not based on an overall superiority of Western European economic development but on special geopolitical techniques to counterbalance European disadvantages in the world economy (Böröcz 2009; Melegh 2012; Pomeranz 2000). This combination of hierarchical colonial imagination and new techniques of European colonization (settler colonization, colonization based on companies, the construction of a network of small European colonizing nations, etc.) proved to be a potent mix, which led to the unquestioned dominance of the West in the world.

Local positioning and local use: methodological issues

The joint analysis of identities and world hierarchies has not been worked out properly yet. Either we find careful analysis of economic regimes and immediate political concerns, like in the world system analysis or interpretation of cognitive structures, or identities, like in postcolonial studies (see among others: Wallerstein 1991, 1997; Böröcz 2000, 2004; Chakrabarty 2000). This hiatus between cognitive and non-cognitive structures needs to be solved with careful reflections on the various mechanisms linking individual and collective identities to macroeconomic structures (Böröcz 2009).

Better understanding of its dynamics can be expected if global interplay is taken into consideration; this type of analysis would incorporate the following analytical techniques:

• The simultaneous analysis of the complex, global system of subordination and superiorities at least on a cognitive level of identities. In such an analysis we can ask: who imagines where the relevant reference groups are in the “developmental” hierarchy.
• The investigation of the structurally possible perspectives in this hierarchy (catching up, imitating superiors, vertical escape, chains of subordination as perspectives on a “slope”).
• The analysis of the interplay, i.e., the “interfaces” between these perspectives.

The rebirth and collapse of the concept “Central Europe”¹

The geopolitical construction of the concept of Central Europe first appeared during the First World War, and it served German geostrategic interests. Central Europe was seen as a hinterland of German claims toward a better position among the leading nations at the end of the period of imperialism (Ash 1986; Schopflin-Wood 1989; Trencsényi 2017). At that time, the concept was not elaborated as a sophisticated strategy in the hierarchical world order, and Europe was the key object of geopolitical discussions. Occasionally East/West distinctions were created within, and the concept collapsed during the Second World War.

It appears that with the advancement of globalization, around the late 1970s, an old/new civilizational discourse replaced a modernization discourse. This old/new discourse presented the world less as a competition between military powers fighting about quantitative economic and military capabilities, but more as a descending slope of regional cultures. Civilizational quality and culture have become key perspectives in the emerging debates. In this change, Eastern and Central Europe was thus vastly reconstructed as a category of the dominant discourses, and this shift in the discourses and in the power relations had a definite role in the “decomposition” of Eastern Europe.

This new conversation, combining new objects, subjects, and styles, demonstrated the emptiness of previous social and political categories, most notably the so-called “socialist block” and its contingent “cold world order”, dividing Europe into two parts, It also (re)introduced new categories, such as the “West”, as opposed to the whole world in which Eastern Europe was just an area of transition.

This can be very well demonstrated if we look at the reconceptualization of demographic regions, when in historical demographic debates, the previous borderline concerning distinct regions of demographic neighborhood, set between Danzig and Trieste, was replaced by a line between Trieste and St. Petersburg, allowing the emergence of a region close to the West, but not exactly of the same “quality” (see the debates stirred by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett in Melegh 2017). Also, in the early 1980s, scholars like Emmanuel Todd revitalized the tripartite division of Europe by the conservative moralist and empirical sociologist of the mid-19th century, Frederic Le Play. He also claimed that family systems and socio-demographic structures were directly linked to ideologies. Central Europe (Germany and the surrounding regions to the southwest, east, and the south) were authoritarian and egalitarian family systems with direct implications of political behavior (Todd 1985). These attempts were related to various other attempts to redefine Europe and Central Europe as a related concept at the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s (see the whole genre of various histories of Europe by scholars like Jenő Szűcs, Eric Jones, Norman Davies, Tony Judt, etc.). Interestingly, the concept and idea of Central Europe was born again when the West and “Europe” (i.e., the EU) made new (unsuccessful) bids to regain hegemony and supremacy in the world (Ash 1986; Schopflin and Wood 1989; Kuczi 1992; Csizmadia 2001; Bozóki 1999; Karnoouh 2003). Thus, the concept of Central Europe was a definite claim on behalf of some intellectuals to get their countries into the privileged club (or the one imagined to be a privileged one), which continued its struggle maintain its global weight, as opposed to American and Asian competitors (Böröcz 2009: 151–180)

The emergence of the idea of Central Europe also reveals the discursive transition process itself, which was related to the collapse of state socialism and that of the “Eastern Bloc”. First, Central Europe was a critical discourse with a strong sense of historical references back to the prewar period. In his seminal essay on the tragedy of Central Europe, Kundera spoke about Central Europe as hijacked “West” forced into the alien category of “East” when communism was established in the late 1940s. At that time, Central Europe was forced into a subordinate eastern structure. Second, the idea of Central Europe was a category that came to life like Sleeping Beauty. Ash, Schopflin and all the major authors of the debate repeated the “fact” that they did not hear about the idea of Central Europe for decades, either due to historical sins or political censorship (Ash 1986; Schopflin and Wood 1989). Accordingly “Central Europe” first disappeared from political, historical and cultural discussions after the Second World War when it was politically awkward and then it reappeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This sense of awkwardness has disappeared ever since, and it seems that none of the post-Second World War taboos could be maintained.

This ambiguity toward morally challenging historical epochs and scenarios was probably a critical factor in this discursive “transition” process in which finally the concept of Central Europe also disappeared. Central Europe had to identify itself in contrast to some historical moral sins (e.g., the Holocaust, but also communism and totalitarianism) in which it offered a middle ground between rejecting and accepting a historical period full of sins. It remembered and promoted the move back to history, but it claimed that it had nothing to do with Nazism, bloodthirsty nationalism, and especially early communism. Timothy Garton Ash for instance, after a reference to the nonexistence of Central Europe in the present tense, argued that it suffered the fate of Nineveh and Tyre, two morally corrupt cities, one destroyed and one forgiven by God (Ash 1986). This moral handicap could be located in the task of “whitening” Central Europe (losing the colors of red and brown) before it could be publicly accepted and then fixing the region in a distinctly inferior position. Central Europe was seen as kind of a released prisoner on probation. Looking backward, we can see that most probably some of the upcoming nationalist political groups in the region later escaped from the “probation”, and they now look for more or less untamed “freedom” not seen after the Second World War. It is important to note that later these groups rejected or forgot the idea of Central Europe in the name of clear “white” European nationalisms (Böröcz 2013)

An ambiguity toward history was apparent in portrayals of Central Europe as an ambiguous ghost-like character. Central Europe at the border of existence, on a mythological level, suggested a twilight zone. In this arena, there were semi-human creatures, which were, to some extent like us, but on the other hand, they were morally and physically corrupted, presenting a danger to “normal” individuals. Ash openly spoke about a dark forest full of wizards and witches.

an endlessly intriguing forest to be sure, a territory where peoples, cultures, languages are fantastically intertwined, where every place has several names and men change their citizenship as often as their shoes, an enchanted wood full of wizards and witches, but one which bears over its entrance the words: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, of ever again seeing the wood for the trees.”

(Ash 1986)

The last crucial point in this emerging discourse was that the borders of Europe and Central Europe could not be fixed (Antohi 2000: 66). In the 1980s, Danilo Kiš, the Yugoslavian writer, was very clear about this, arguing that it is hard to speak about Central Europe as a “homogenous geopolitical and cultural phenomenon”.

With no precise borders, with no Center or rather with several centers, “Central Europe” looks today more and more like the dragon of Alca in the second book of Anatol France’s Penguin Island to which the symbolist movement was compared: no one who claimed to have seen it could say what it looked like. To speak about Central Europe as a homogenous geopolitical and cultural phenomenon entails risks. Even if we might agree with Jacques Morin’s affirmation that Europe is “a concept without borders”, the facts oblige us to remove from this concept the part of the European continent, with the exception of Austria, that under the name of Mittel-Europa organically belonged to it.

(Neumann quotes Danilo Kiš’s Variation on the Theme of Central Europe: Neumann 1999: 144–145)

This territorial ambiguity was first seen toward countries of the “East”, but later after the actual inclusion of the region into the European, a fight also started about the West. With the evaporation of previous controls, politicians like Klaus, Orbán, and Kaczynski’s brothers made various attempts to distance themselves from the West, which was being morally decadent or behaving in an “imperialist way” toward the “truly European” nations in Central Europe, in which discourse about Central Europe existed as a the terrain of national resurrections. Central Europe with its liberal character and its ghost-like existence was already dead. The wizards revoked during the debate about Central Europe have appeared in full strength.

Conclusion

The idea of Central Europe was linked all the time to the fight over the hierarchal position of Central Europe in various directions, both locally (communists, socialist structures, etc.) and of course globally. It was a concept of transition, and it mainly played the role of destroying the “Eastern” pole of Europe. Just to withdraw after making the first steps toward revoking historical ghosts and memories, it has been pushed aside in the name of white European nations that are in an absolute decline in global significance, which look for full sovereignty to regain past glories. This can be a very strange and unintended consequence of the idea of Central Europe.

Note

1This part contains the revision of some arguments put forward in Melegh (2006: 42–48).

References

Amin, S. (1989) Eurocentrism. London: Zed Books.

Antohi, S. (2000) “Habits of Mind: Europe’s Post – 1989 Symbolic Geographies”, in Antohi, S. and Tismenau, V. (eds.) Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath. Budapest: CEU Press, pp. 61–77.

Ash, T. G. (1986) “Does Central Europe Exist?” New York Review of Books, 15 October, [Online] www.nybooks.com/articles/4998, Available 15 December 2003.

Böröcz, J. (2000) “The Fox and the Raven: The European Union and Hungary Renegotiate the Margins of ‘Europe’ ”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 42, no. 4 (October), pp. 847–875.

Böröcz, J. (2004) Social Change by Fusion: Understanding Institutional Creativity: Academic Doctoral Dissertation Submitted to the Academy, Defended January 6, 2004. Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Böröcz, J. (2009) The European Union and Global Social Change: A Critical Geopolitical-Economic Analysis. London and New York: Routledge.

Böröcz, J. (2013) “Whitened Histories: Reaction, Revision and Race in the Post-Sate-Socialist Politics of History in Hungary”, under review as part of a collection of Post-Socialist Cult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Making sense of Central Europe: political concepts of the region
• Part I Positioning Central Europe
• Part II Orientalism
• Part III Geopolitics
• Part IV Nationalism
• Part V Federalism
• Part VI Liberalism
• Part VII Civil society
• Part VIII Participatory democracy
• Part IX Information society
• Part X Lustration
• Part XI Power
• Part XII Solidarity
• Part XIII Politics of health
• Part XIV Cities
• Part XV Languages of art
• Index