György Granasztói
Central Europe:
Myth and Reality

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The Realities of the Central Europe Myth

The term "Central Europe" cropped up first around 1849/1850 when, basically for customs policy reasons, all German states along with those German speaking areas of the Austrian Empire which did not belong to the German Customs Union were meant to be combined into a single, large economic area. This Central European grouping would have had seventy million inhabitants. The idea was effectively blocked in its realization by the resistance of Prussia. It kept turning up, though, time and again, for example in 1879 when Bismarck showed a marked interest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or during the First World War between 1914 and 1918. Friedrich Naumann’s much-debated book Mitteleuropa interpreted the term as a Central European Union which would have included the Western part of the Russian Empire, Poland and the Baltic states. A feature of his concept was that it was aimed at establishing a supranational political order in which the various nations and ethnic groups would have been permitted to live according to their own legal systems.

During the the First World War, however, this concept came to be identified with the Central Powers, and was thus seen as an ideological expression of continental imperialism by the future victors. Consequently, following the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian and the German Empire, the concept lost its significance, indeed was forgotten. Under the impact of the post-war peace settlements, however, a new concept arose, that of an Eastern Central Europe, which—because of Germany’s territorial losses, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the crisis of the Russian Empire—was understood as a special new zone consisting of sovereign nation states. Thus East Central Europe emerged in a peculiar power vacuum originating from the weakness of the three Great Powers in the region. This zone, stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans and consisting of small and medium-size states, received the special attention of French security policy by being given the role of cordon sanitaire. From the aspect of intentions (although not the means) some of today’s questions were raised at that time.

By creating a security zone of this kind, the French meant to counterbalance the German and Russian threat and to ensure that the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was final and irreversible. Clémenceau’s security zone, however, relied not on French military presence but on the desire of the Quai d’Orsay to use its influence to create and render effective such a counterbalance by political means. In reality, this kind of equilibrium could be brought about by provoking disputes between the parties involved. This system of alliances could not really be regarded as Central European, if only because of the related German policies and the memory of them, nor could it be East European because in that case it would have involved Russia and have the shadow of Russian influence cast over it.

That was how the term East Central Europe began to gain prominence, and came to be used by politicians and journalists with increasing frequency. Then, in the 1930s, another new term emerged, intended to be free of political bias. In between Europe (Zwischen-Europa). The agricultural scientist Max Schering, Albrecht Penck the geographer or Giselher Wirsing, in the title of whose book the term was employed for the first time, made every effort to use it mainly in a geographical sense, free of political implications. By Zwischen-Europa, they meant the long belt of territory reaching from the Baltic to the Balkans. This was actually the same zone as that of the cordon sanitaire but the users of the term wanted to rid it of any belligerent overtones.

After 1939, East Central Europe as Zwischen-Europa lost its significance. First it was made irrelevant by the Nazi conquests, then, under the impact of the events of the Second World War, either as Central Europe or as East Central Europe it ceased to have any role as a geographical concept with a political content. It had no relevance any more. When the Iron Curtain came down, a new border was established, which did not conform to any earlier concept. However, it was precisely at the time when East–West confrontation was growing—roughly when the need to create a Western system of alliance after the war was raised for the first time—that the Central Europe issue emerged in a new form among the East European exiles who had fled from Communism to the West, mainly to the United States. The birth of the highly influential Journal of Central European Affairs was also due to this.

In the first issue of the journal, in 1941, a political programme was published under the title A New Central Europe by Eduard BenesŠ, the Prime Minister of the Czech government-in-exile. BenesŠ wanted both to establish a federation between the old and new states of the region and to include more East Central European states. Learning the lessons of the two World Wars, in order to prevent more catastrophes, he wanted to create a new political order for East Central Europe by uniting the nation states in the region into a federation. However, that illusion, a Federation of the Free Peoples of East Central Europe, lost its meaning in a few years after 1944/1945 due to the power relations and political events. After 1945 it soon became clear that the Western world, and mainly the United States, did not possess the military strength to guarantee even a neutral zone in the region vis à vis the Soviet Union. The political reality, effective also in 1956, made raising the Central European idea impossible, since the two worlds divided by an Iron Curtain were incompatible with the existence either of a Central Europe or a Zwischen-Europa.

It must be clear from the above that the concept of Central Europe should be regarded as a modern idea which, willingly or not, is extended by its user to a politically defined region. Consequently, anyone wishing to put this modern concept into a wider historical context, and attempting to explain past structures and relationships through a concept suited to describing the current situation, faces a difficult task.

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As a historian, I am convinced that the safest starting-point for such an approach to Central European history is offered by regional history. The first historian to call attention to this was Werner Conze, whose book on East Central Europe was first published in 1993 (Ostmitteleuropa. Von der Spätantike bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. München, Beck).

The key importance of regional history in understanding Central Europe lies in its capacity to take account of the beginnings while also placing the processes of the past into an integrated perspective.

In Central Europe, unlike, for instance, in the Rhineland, there was no Roman continuity, or at most a continuity of ruins. Another important factor is that the Slavs were present already around the year 800 in this region, in which the settlement in the 9th and 14th centuries of Hungarians, Germans and Jews played a crucial part since these ethnic groups, bearers of widely different cultures, all exerted a major influence on social and political structures. These structures can also be studied in terms of the system and history of settlements, whether they be villages or towns.

The Magyar conquest or the Drang nach Osten of the Germans are relatively well known elements of this history, but much less emphasis is laid on the role of the Jews, even though they, too, played a decisive role. The Jewish migration became especially intense between the 13th and 15th centuries in the wake of persecutions that pushed large numbers of them eastwards. Jews found especially favourable conditions for commerce and trade in Poland, where they were allowed to settle by Casimir the Great who, in 1364, granted them privileges over the entire territory of Poland. From that time on, they constituted an ethnic minority of their own in Poland, Lithuania and, to a lesser extent, Bohemia and Hungary, where they enjoyed special privileges in cities and market towns, paid special taxes, and kept their cultural autonomy as they performed tasks vital for the country.

By the end of the Middle Ages, as the result of a long process, Central Europe had become a multi-ethnic region owing to the presence of Slavs, Hungarians, Germans, Jews and others. In the forms of settlement as well as the political, legal and economic organization of the settlement system, the region was dominated by European-type rationalism. The same goes for the technological innovations that, from mining to handicrafts and from urban manufacturing to agriculture, had also been taken over from Western Europe by the inhabitants of the region, and disseminated in similar forms all over the area. Trade and manufacturing developed a little later but in ways astonishingly similar to those in Western Europe, consequently parallel processes took place in the various national kingdoms. The cultural role of the various larger ethnic groups resulted in a peculiar convergence which was independent of national frontiers and, indeed, cut across them.

That is the reason why the settlement conditions prevalent in the Western parts of historical Hungary clearly showed the same features as those in the Vienna Basin, whereas settlement conditions in adjacent Northern Hungary were much more reminiscent of conditions in Southern Poland or Bohemia. There are many more examples. There are marked differences regarding the settlement structure between Transylvania, the Great Hungarian Plain or Southern Hungary despite the fact that these regions fell under the same government authority, and did not undergo the regional development of neighbouring Austria. These regional differences in the settlement structure naturally also extended toward the Balkans and the Mediterranean areas.

Despite these marked differences it can be safely said that in Central Europe, up to the Carpathians, the same European-type communal organization was predominant. This was characterized by a high degree of similarity not only in the forms of urban and rural autonomy but also in space utilization, legal forms, techniques of administration and exercise of authority, and a similarity could even be seen in the ground plan of village houses. The antecedents can all be found in Western Europe. The political order of the region, on the other hand, was characterized by the fact that in the eastern part of Central Europe, only the Poles and Hungarians became nobility-based nations and both remained ethnically mixed.

The end of the early Modern Era was a period of dilemma for the great new empires. The question was, how should Prussia and Austria divide Central Europe between them, and what should be the role of the Russian Empire in the East?

In fact, Central Europe became visible only when Europe itself did. This fact has to do mainly with Christianity, since the dividing line between East and Central Europe was the border between the Roman and Greek Church mission zones. This line carries major cultural differences up to this day. Another highly important factor was the establishment of Polish and Hungarian bishoprics independent of the German bishoprics, and this can be regarded as a special phenomenon in Christian Central Europe. This resulted in the emergence of two kingdoms, Poland and Hungary.

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In the seventies, two theories aroused great interest within a relatively short time. One was Milan Kundera’s who, in an influential essay, written at a time when the Central Europe issue was still in a state of what may be called suspended animation, called attention in a very powerful manner to the special yet deeply European roots of the region’s culture. Denying political uniformity, Kundera put the emphasis on cultural similarities, on sensitivities and coincidences so subtle as to be grasped only by the arts, features that, in one way or another, have a peculiar effect on every visitor who has a genuine interest in Central Europe. Such features included the prominent part played by music, receptivity to and the ability to swiftly adapt to European models. Kundera’s study provoked much discussion, mainly behind the Iron Curtain, and especially in samizdat-publishing circles in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary.

The other theory, published roughly at the same time, met with a rather different reception. This was most markedly formulated by Immanuel Wallerstein, and, in a simplified form, came to be called the "centre versus periphery theory". Wallerstein made an attempt to describe the operation of the world economy in a way that created great interest among Marxists. Kundera did not but Wallerstein did become a part of "official" scholarship.

According to Wallerstein, ever since the 16th century, the world economy has had a centre and a periphery, where capitalization differed in both extent and in character. The difference originated from the fact that the profits of capitalist growth in the periphery served as a source of accumulation for the centre. It must be added that Wallerstein saw Central Europe as a kind of intermediate zone and termed it "semi-periphery" (a definition which he was unable to support either theoretically or empirically). Even his Marxist critics heavily censured him for this.

The determinist view of Central Europe suggested by Wallerstein conforms to earlier concepts which, from the 1910s onwards, were widely held especially in Germany, and would later be adopted by Marxist historians. These ranged basically from the theory of Gutsherrschaft—Grundsherrschaft to the so-called "second serfdom". The Hungarian historian Jenoý Szuýcs started out from different premises when discussing what he called "the three regions of Europe", including our own, but his attitude was no less deterministic. His work was one of the most influential expressions of the pessimism of the intellectuals in the period of the changeover from "Socialism" to a market economy and political democracy. Without undertaking to refute Wallerstein or Szuýcs here, I would like to point out that a historical interpretation of the Central European region may also be attempted in a non-deterministic manner, by an open, hermeneutic approach.

The two complementary socio-geographic models may be described briefly as follows: they developed roughly at the same time in Europe from the beginning of the Middle Ages, and their co-existence does not necessarily mean that one was "developed" and the other "undeveloped", as determinist interpretations maintain. The one characterizes the conditions of Central Europe completely, the other the opposite pole, and by doing so, helps an understanding of the special character of the Central European model. In a geographical sense, this means that the centre of the region defined by earlier views as East-Central Europe or Zwischen-Europa constitutes the part of the continent farthest from the sea and therefore from shipping. That region covers Bohemia, Slovakia, South Poland, Austria and South Germany as well as Hungary.

Shipping, whether by sea or river, played a relatively minor part here. This is obviously not a characteristic exclusive to Central Europe but here it was most marked. Shipping was most characteristic of the Atlantic and Mediterranean regions, connected to each other by the Rhine. That makes it easy to understand why such a huge role was played in world trade by England, the Netherlands, the Rhineland and Northern Italy with Genoa and Venice as its centres.

The difference between the two models consisted in the fact that one was based mainly on long-distance trade, the other on local markets. As far as Central Europe is concerned, in a historical sense this means—and the effects are present up to this day—that the settlement system and settlement structure is one of centres with a hierarchy of their own, that is of towns of varying importance and size, and by settlements situated in rings around them, making up empires or nation states. In contrast to this, the other model, the region describable by shipping, features a network-like structure. The order of settlements here plays a different role and it has a different form. It is also typical that no large continental empires were able to develop in this region.

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The problem of Central Europe today is what stage civil society has reached and what opportunities exist for it. The citizen, as a moral being, accepts the existence of relationships based on mutuality, and cares about the fate of others. He or she is always sensitive to the problems of minorities, weaker communities and underprivileged individuals. That concept of the citizen originates in Western Europe, and is also specific to what may be called European civilization, which also means that it is antagonistic to the traditional nation-state or Soviet-socialist type concept of the subject and the state.

The intensifying discussions over the terms "bourgeois", "citizen" and "civil society" have been connected with the great social changes of the 1990s. These have included the so-called "citizenship debate" and the discovery of multi-culturalism in Western Europe. An additional feature that has appeared in Eastern Europe to conjoin these not entirely thought through problems is something which has been stronger here than in Western Europe: a general hostility to the state and, along with that, a rather special interpretation of civil society. A common feature of these new approaches to the problem has been that they study the relationship of the community and the individual. It must be pointed out, however, that two extremes, mutually excluding each other, have already been surpassed in these debates. According to one traditional extremist view, the individual realizes his civil rights in the "social field", and does it to the maximum. According to a well-known saying by a famous Hungarian personality: "I am a guest here (i.e. in Hungary) which means I am entitled to the best part of the meal." This view can be described best by the metaphor of the jungle. The other extreme views the citizen as a member of a holistic community, a being acting for the common good, best likened to an ant. In East Europe these two may be identified with the traditional Left (the ant) and its opposite, Neo-liberalism (the jungle).

What is interesting in these new debates is that the young taking part in the political disputes involved have already gone beyond these extremes. There is a greater sensitivity today regarding moral principles and their observation than was present earlier. Today’s young are opposed to traditional authoritarianism, and they insist on a number of post-materialistic values, such as environmental protection, human rights or sexual autonomy. All this has, in Central Europe, led to a re-thinking of the notions of a community and of society, and to a new emphasis on related ideas.

In such a sense it may be said that the citizen today is a moral being, not a sociological or class category. Anybody can be a citizen who is able to reconcile his or her individual, group or cultural and ethnic interests with those of the state as the realizer of the common good. The civilizing of society is, in this sense, equal to the progress toward democracy, based on the tradition of European culture, on rationalism. The relationship of citizen and state is determined by the fact that the state is seen as the bearer of the nation’s interests, but the concept of "nation" is in sharp opposition to the nationalistic view.

That terms like citizen, bourgeois, civilization or civil society can be discussed in Central Europe at all is explained mainly by historical tradition, by culture. Thus the Hungarian word polgár is of German origin, and was taken over by Hungarian in the 13th century. From the very beginning it meant an inhabitant of a town with full rights, just like the German word Bürger or the French bourgeois. The process of embourgeoisement was delayed to a greater or lesser extent all over Central Europe, as compared to the West. Still, backwardness in this sense is hard to speak of since European embourgeoisement has no universal formula. Every country has had its own road in one way or another. That special route was very much dependent on the ratio and even more on the relationship between the nobility and the bourgeoisie in the country in question. This resulted in different roles. The so-called Sonderweg (special road) of German embourgeoisement or evolution of civil society was characterized by the relatively high number and power of doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, teachers and highly qualified bureaucrats, as opposed to the merchants, factory owners, industrial magnates, entrepreneurs and managers. On the Hungarian road, the strong European traditions of community organization are clearly discernible, including the role of the nobility in the counties. The latter was also characteristic of the marked efforts related to a nascent bourgeois society in 1848–1849. This was the background of the development Hungary’s parliamentary structures, lending, in certain respects, a somewhat German character to Hungarian embourgeoisement, but also to that of all Central Europe.

The most important feature of bourgeois development in Hungary is not the previously overemphasized backwardness, but certain elements, observable over the long term, that enabled Hungarian society to rapidly adopt the novel, especially as regards institutions. There have been numerous examples of this ability to adjust and catch up ever since the foundation of the state in Hungary, just as there are for Poland and Bohemia. One of these examples, from the aspect of the long process of embourgeoisement, was the development of communal organizations and local autonomy, originating from the Middle Ages, which survived up to the recent past, and then the series of reforms carried out in 1848–1849. Another peculiar feature of the history of Central Europe, however, is that the evolution of civil society was broken by the decades of the one-party state. Another, and by no means negligible, factor is that the Marxists had a very different vision of globalism, which they intended to bring into being, and that they treated the nation with a great degree of suspicion.

A special feature of the region is—as I pointed out above—that, from the 1970s on, civil society took on a special meaning, different from that usual in traditional democracies. Civil society turned into a form of civil disobedience, the expression of a societal alternative distinct from, and opposed to, the one-party state, which led directly to an opposition to all kinds of state authority. The human rights objectives of civil society, when viewed in this manner, constitute an important tradition in the Hungarian democratic transition. Still, the same means, when employed today, in business life as well as in certain communal effects, intensify the tendency to fragmentation or disintegration with respect to the nation and to the state.

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Finally, the deficit of national consciousness is another typical Central European problem. These deficits—shortages or hiatuses—today involve tragic or horrible social catastrophes. One of these in Hungary is that the Holocaust in this country has never been properly discussed or understood, nor has its place in the nation’s memory ever been clarified. The victims of the Second World War or of Communist terror have not been properly buried, and the Revolution of 1956 has not been accorded its place in the nation’s history. The tragedies of the recent past barely constitute a part of collective consciousness today, and worse, these tragedies still often turn people against each other because they have not been understood within a national framework. One of the typical absurdities of the situation, one that is also connected with the large number of problems left without clarification, is that the terms nation and nationalism ring the same to many ears: they are regarded as variations on the same dangerous, destructive, populist slogan.

I have made an attempt to put in a historical perspective all that can be regarded as characteristic of Central Europe and which is in no way in conflict with European traditions. The current chances of the evolution of a society of citizens have to be viewed in terms of these perspectives.

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György Granasztói
is the director of the Teleki László Institute, Budapest, a think-tank for foreign policy and Central European Studies. He is a medievalist who has published widely on medieval urban life in Hungary. As Hungarian Ambassador in Brussels in 1990–94, he was also accredited to NATO and to the European Union.