(18763308 - East Central Europe) WHY BOTHER - ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS - DEBATES - OVER CENTRAL - EUROPE IN HUNGARY, POLAND - AND - ROMANIA PDF

RESEARCH DOSSIER: SYMBOLIC GEOGRAPHIES
MACIEJ JANOWSKI, CONSTANTIN IORDACHI

and BALAZS TRENCSENYI
WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL

REGIONS?: DEBATES OVER CENTRAL
EUROPE IN HUNGARY, POLAND AND ROMANIA
Abstract: The article analyzes the ways in which the concept of Central Europe
and related regional classifications were instrumentalized in historical research in
Hungary, Poland and Romania. While Hungarian and Polish historians employed
the discourse of Central Europe as a central means to contextualize and often re-
lativize established national historical narratives, their geographical frameworks
of comparison were nevertheless fairly divergent, the Hungarian one relating to
the former Habsburg and Austro-Hungarian lands while the Polish one revolving
around the tradition of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Romanian histori-
ans approached the issue from the perspective of local history, debating two al-
ternative regional frameworks: the Old Kingdom, treated as part of the Byzantine
and Ottoman legacies, and Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat that were
shaped by the Habsburg project of modernity. In the Romanian context the de-
bate on Central Europe reached its peak at a time when it lost relevance in the
Polish and Hungarian contexts. While conceding to recent critiques on the con-
structed and often exclusivist nature of symbolic geographical categories, the au-
thors maintain the heuristic value of regional frameworks of interpretation as
models of historical explanation transcending the nation-state at sub-national or
trans-national level.
It should be noted that Hungarians prefer to be

called "Central" rather than "Eastern" Europeans.*
Why bother about historical regions? The flash of interest in Central

Europe in the wake o f the annus mirabilis of 1989 has since then long waned.
Even the European Union's Eastern enlargement does not seem to revive the
interest in the lands "between Germany and Russia;" It would not be too
much of an overstatement to argue that East Central European history contin-
ues to linger as a specialized sub-discipline, not much better off than, for 홢x-
* "Social Customs," in Budapest Phonebook (2004-2005), no publisher given, p. 16 (Infor-

mation pages in English).
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via Central European University
sample, railway history: a shelter for innocent hobbyists and local patriots.
Similarly, the fascination with the post-Habsburg Mitteleuropa notwithstand-
ing, Central Europe has never had its triumph as an analytical concept. For a
modernist historian it seemed too loose and arbitrary, at once too huge for a
national (or state) history and too small for a Braudelian or Wallersteinian
synthesis of global mega-trends. True, the concept of backwardness and the
dichotomy between center and periphery stimulated interest in certain aspects
of the region's history. These concepts, however, came under attack in the
last decades of the twentieth century as swift over-generalizations and tools
of domination by the center. The reaction against modernist perspectives did
not leave the notion of "historical region" untouched: regions, like states and
nations, came to be considered "reifications" that defy the complex nature of
the past. As such, they were "deconstructed" in view of the vested interests,
hidden agendas, cultural bias and structures o f political power that were in-
strumental in creating and popularizing them.
After the "linguistic turn" highlighted the importance of vocabulary, histo-
rians pointed out that labels such as "Central," "Eastern" or "East Central
Europe" are relatively recent terms, barely two hundred years old. The never-
ending debate on the limits of the legitimate use of "external" analytical
terms was revived, those criticizing the use of "anachronistic" terms clearly
gaining the upper hand. Scholars studying the earlier history of "the region"
thus became guilty of anachronism. At the same time, the interrelation of na-
tional units of analysis became a crucial theme of research, offering various
models of overcoming nation-centered narratives and focusing instead on
"regional" contextualization. Recent theoretical and methodological innova-
tions stemming from the tradition of comparative history such as "shared,"
"connected," or "relational" history, the history of transfers and histoire
croisee, attempt to shift the analytical emphasis to the multiple levels of in-
teraction among actors - rather than on the actors themselves - at various
subnational or supra-national levels.'1
The current article argues that regions provide a huge analytical potential
for historical research. Seeking to re-evaluate the academic tradition of think-
ing in terms o f historical regions, the article focuses on historiographical de-
1. For the theoretical framework o f histoire croisge, see Michael Werner and Benedicte
Zimniermann, "Penser 1'histoire crois6e: entre empirie et r6flecivit6," in Michael Werner and
Bdn6dicte Zimmermann, eds., De la comparaison à l'hlsloire croisee (Paris: Seuil, 2004), pp.
15-52. For a first application of histoire croisée, see Bdnddicte Zimmermann, Claude Didry and
Michael Wemer, Histoire croisee de la F r a n c e et de l'Allemagne (Paris: MSH, 1999). For the
history of "transfers," see mainly Johannes Paulmann, "Intemationaler Vergleich und interkul-
tureller Transfer. Zwei Forschungsansantze zur europaischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20 Jahrhun-
derts," Historische Zeitschrif3, no. 3 (1998), pp. 649-85; Hartmut Kaelble, D e r hi.storische Ver-
gle.ich. Eine Einftihriing zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999). On the poten-
tial agenda of transnational history, see Michael McGerr, "The Price of the 'New Transnational
History'," The American Historical Review, 96, no. 4 (Oct. 1991), 1056-67. ' .

bates over symbolic geographies in three East Central European countries:
Hungary, Poland and Romania. The first reason behind this choice is obvi-
ous: these countries happen to be the native lands of the editors of this jour-
nal. Another, more substantial, reason is that they represent complementary
case studies for the history of the concept of Central Europe. The Central
European paradigm was essential in the self-understanding o f Hungarian his-
torical thinking in the twentieth century. It also had a huge impact in Poland,
although in the Polish context it carried a fairly different message and re-
ferred to a divergent territorial framework. In Romania, the cultural and his-
torical legacy of Central Europe was traditionally contrasted to an alternative
Southeast European framework o f symbolic geography. Nevertheless, the
concept of Central Europe witnessed a remarkable upsurge in the late 1990s,
directly linked to similar debates that took place in Hungary, Poland and
Czechoslovakia during the 1980s.
The article is made up of three main parts, corresponding to the three case
studies. To date, chronologies of the debate on Central Europe took into ac-
count almost exclusively articles published abroad. From this perspective,
Milan Kundera's article "The Tragedy of Central Europe," originally written
in 1983 in French and published in English in 1984 by The New York Review
o f Books, is generally taken as the starting point of the rich international de-
bate that followed. While previous surveys of the concept o f Central Europe
have often focused on Diaspora intellectuals and the impact of their writings
in West European and American contexts, the current article adds an essential
internal dimension, underscoring domestic points of political and intellectual
reference in local debates. Given the idiosyncrasies and the particular dyna-
mism o f each case analyzed here (reinforced by the authors' forcefully sub-
jective selection), the time span and internal logic of the three parts is to a
certain extent divergent, stressing continuities with the interwar years, the
communist period, or focusing mainly on the last decades respectively. The
comparison between these three cases enables us to grasp the astonishing va-
riety of regional narratives in historical thought and to shed light on the inter-
pretative potentials of the paradigm of Central Europe.
The concept of (East) Central Europe in Hungary

The ernergence of the Central European historiographical paradigm
The concept o f Central Europe has high cultural prestige and a consider-
able historical tradition in Hungary. As in the entire Habsburg Monarchy, it
emerged - after several nineteenth-century antecedents - as a keyword in
politics during World War I, with the reception of the famous Mitteleuropa
conception formulated by the German liberal nationalist Friedrich Naumann.2
The strongest response came from the civic radicals around Oszkar Jaszi,
2. Peter M. Stirk, ed., Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ.
Press, 1994).

who read Naumann's proposal not in its original context, promoting a socio-
political integration o f Germany and the small nations in the zone of Austrian
and German influence, but as a framework capable o f resolving the ardent na-
tionality conflicts by incorporating these nations into a federal scheme.
While the federalist plans failed in the storms of the Great War and the en-
suing revolutions and counter-revolutions, the concept of Central Europe re-
mained present, albeit in a less politicized form. In the interwar period it was
mainly connected to left-wing or liberal sub-cultures, which cultivated the
heritage of the civic radicals. However, due to the right-wing authoritarian
tendencies of the regime that labeled Jaszi's circle as one of the main culprits
of the dissolution of historical Hungary, these authors had to restrict them-
selves to cultivating high culture. The most important example of this trend
was the cultural periodical Apollo, edited by Istvan Gal, which defined itself
as the herald of mutual understanding of Central European peoples, fusing
liberal and populist intellectual inspirations.
Far from being in a dominant position, this Central European narrative
was challenged from different directions. Predictably, integral nationalists
were sticking to a geographical conceptualization (such as the "Carpathian
Basin") which was stressing the concentric nature of the broader region
around "Rump Hungary," thus accentuating the natural supremacy of the
Hungarians over the "peripheral" nations.3 At the same time, the populists,
who were extremely critical of the "statenationalism" of the pre-1918 period,
and also rejected the irredentist nationalism of the Horthy-regime, generally
preferred the concept o f Eastern Europe, with the underlying assumption that
the real place of the Hungarian people (occasionally contrasted to the urban
'others') is among the East European "peasant nations," whose intertwining
destiny was witnessed by Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodály's musicological re-
s e a r c h a s w e l l . 44
While conceptually these visions were hardly compatible, on the practical

and personal level there were many possible links and combinations. For in-
stance, in historiography proper, the Central European context provided a
comparative framework for the conservative legal historian Ferenc Eckhart,
tracing the history of the medieval and early modem constitutional doctrine
3: The most sophisticated version of this narrative is that of Gyula Szekfii. See his 411am es
nemzet. 7`anulmknyok a nenuetisegi kerdisrol [State and Nation: Studies on the nationality ques-
tion] (Budapest: Magyar Szemle Tarsasag, 1942).
4. The populist perspective of "East European peasant nations" had many faces. It could cata-
lyze the somewhat confused but definitely conciliatory vision of Laszlo Nemeth, but it could also
intersect with the'paradigm of Volksgeschichte, which fed into a new version of radical ethno-
politics. See Elemer M61yusz, Magyar 15rtineltudomciny [Hungarian historiography] (Budapest:
Bolyai Academia, 1942) and Nepisegtortenet [Ethnic history] (Budapest: MTA Tortenettu-
domanyi Int6zet, 1994). '

around the Crown of St. Stephen.5 In broader ideological terms, the emerging
new reformist cultural elite o f the late thirties was rooted in the populist dis-
course, but it also appropriated some remnants from the Central European
federalist heritage, while retaining a certain dose o f the traditional Hungarian
state-nationalist discourse, which stressed the multiethnic character of his-
torical Hungary and looked forward to some form o f restoration of this
framework, although not necessarily in its full pre-1918 shape. This ambigu-
ity marked many of the young historians who set to study the history of
neighboring peoples in the late 1930s, most o f whom reached maturity in the
short democratic period after World War II.
Between 1945 and 1948, historical research in the Central European con-
text had a short but unprecedented flourishing.6 This was partly due to extra-
scientific reasons, like the preparation for the peace treaty, and this was also
the short period in which the infrastructural investments of the thirties, when
a series of researchers were trained in the culture and history of the neighbor-
ing countries to provide a response to the successful historical propaganda o f
the 'Little Entente' (such as works by Nicolae lorga, Gheorghe 1. Bratianu,
etc.) began to pay off. Some of these scholars actually stemmed from the
Hungarian minority of the successorstates, others were close to the populist
tradition that had an open sympathy with the "East European peasant na-
tions," while again others were raised in the spirit of Gyula Szekfu's histori-
cist perspective, combining an apologetic interest in defending the "Hungar-
ian position" with a real scientific effort to actually compete with the histori-
ans of "the neighbors" on the battlefields of the shared past. The generation
of Domokos Kosary, Zoltan I. T6th,7 Laszlo Makkai, and Laszlo Hadrovics,
to mention but a few, wrote a series of important works in this short period.8
5. Ferenc Eckhart, A szenrkorona-eszme tdrtenete [The history of the idea of the Holy
Crown] (Budapest: Magyar Tudomanyos Academia, 1941).
6. Not much has been written on the history of modern Hungarian historiography. Probably
the best overview is still Steven Bela Vardy, Modern Hungarian Iiivtoriography (New York:
Colombia Univ. Press, 1976). Peter Gunst's A magyar tortenetirris t6riinele [The history of Hun-
garian historiography] (Budapest: Csokonai Kiado, 2002) is very sketchy. Most recently, see Ar-
pad von Klimo's broad-ranging interpretation: Notion, Konfession, Geschichte. Zur nationalen
Geschichtskultur Ungarns im europdischen Ausland (l860-1948) (Munchen: Oldenburg, 2003),
which, however, concentrates more on "historical culture" than historiography proper. This his-
torical overview follows the argument of a longer article on post-1989 Hungarian historiography,
written by Balizs Trencsenyi and Peter Apor, to be published in the volume edited by Sorin An-
tohi, "Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe" (forthcoming,
Budapest-New York! CEU Press).
7. The least known of this group, Zoltan I. T6th, was an eminent scholar of Romanian na-
tional ideology, who was accidentally shot dead at a demonstration during the 1956 Revolution.
His most important work was re-edited recently: Az erdelyi roman nacionalizmus elsõ ivsztdada '
[The first century of Romanian nationalism in Transylvania] (Csikszereda: Pro-Print, 2000).
8. This implied a genuine interest in transgressing the nationalist framework of pre-1945 his-
toriography. See, for example, the books on Hungarian-Slovak and Hungarian-Romanian "com-
mon pasts": Istvan Borsody, Magyar-szlovcik kiegyeres [The Hungarian-Slovak compromise]

Even though the loci o f their co-operation (like the Teleki Institute) were
ultimately destroyed, and some of them were temporarily marginalized in the
fifties, these scholars had a remarkable long-term impact on Hungarian histo-
riography.9 The legacy o f this generation opened up the Hungarian historiog-
raphy of the 1960-70s to a more genuine comparative perspective than the
imposed framework of the "brotherly Socialist nations," to which many of
the historians paid lip-service throughout the region in the 1950s, later giving
vent to a post-romantic nationalist (or national Communist) narrative assert-
ing the specificity o f the given nation. This meant that the Hungarian anti-
Stalinist turn in historiography did not revert to a myopic nationalism but re-
tained a strong interest in the broader region and sought to place the Hungar-
ian historical phenomena into a wider regional context.
East European backwarclness undlor Central European nostalgia

The efforts of the above-mentioned historians were in some sense com-
plemented y the work of a group of historians that emerged in the fifties,
rooted in the Marxist paradigm. Significantly, they tended to use the term
"Eastern Europe" rather than Central Europe, implying a number of common
features in the distorted socio-economic development of these countries rang-
ing from Russia to Germany "east o f the Elbe," at least until the advent of
Socialism, when all of a sudden they were supposed to have emerged as the
vanguard of modernity. The first serious historical model justifying this per-
spective was developed by Zsigmond Pal Pach, who focused on early-modem
agrarian history and sought to document the moment of "divergence" be-
tween East and West, in view o f the Engelsian concept of "second serf-
dom."10 The most sophisticated formulation of this theory of East European
backwardness can be found in the works of economic history by Gyorgy
Ranki and Ivan T. Berend, who worked in close intellectual contact with
Alexander Gerschenkron and Immanuel Wallerstein. 11
Other members of this cohort of mainstream Marxist historians in the
1960-1970s,, such as Emil Palotas, Emil Niederhauser, Daniel Csatari, Gyor-
gy Spira, Endre Arato and Endre Kovacs, set to work on the history of the na-
(Budapest: Officina 1945); LAszl6 Makkai, ed., Magyar-romdn kozos mult [The Hungarian-
Romanian common past] (Budapest, Teleki Pal Tudomanyos Intezet, 1948).
9. See Domokos Kosary, "The Idea of a Comparative History of East Central Europe: A
Story of a Venture," in Dennis Deletant and Harry Hanak, eds., Historians as Nation-Builders:
Centtal and South-East Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 124-38.,
10. Zsigmond Pal Pach, Nyugat-eur6pai es magyarorszagi agrdrfejlodes a 홢T홢-홢홢 ' /'. szazad-
ban [West-European and Hungarian agrarian development in the 1G-l7th centuries] (Budapest:
Kossuth,19G3).
i 1. See, for instance, Ivan T. Berend, Gyorgy Ranki, K홢z홢p-Kelet-Eur6pa gaadasagi fe-
jlodese a /9-20. jzozo홢홢OM [The economic development of East-Central Europe in the 19-20th
centuries] (Budapest: Közgazdasági es Jogi K6nyvkiad6, 1969); Ivan T. Berend, Viilsagos ev-
tizedek: Kazep- is Kelet-Europa a kit vilhghtibor7i kozott [Decades of crisis. Central and Eastern
Europe between the two world wars] (Budapest: Gondolat, 1982). , .

tionality question in Hungary in view o f the broader East European regional
context. Their regional narrative was also influenced by the fact that many o f
them had the opportunity to cooperate with historians from the other socialist
countries, such as Bulgaria, which were previously outside of the horizons of
Hungarian historiography. Of them, the oeuvre of Niederhauser, focusing on
the comparative history of national awakenings in Eastern Europe, is the
most important. Although the climax of this generation was in the seventies,
Niederhauser published synthetic works on the history of East European his-
toriography and that of Eastern Europe writ large even after 1989.12 Nieder-
hauser's main works on the emergence of nationalism in the region, written
mainly in the 1970s, went in a similar direction to that of Miroslav Hroch,
seeking to grasp the social determinants of national movements. These works
show both the strong points and the weaknesses of post-1956 Hungarian re-
search on Eastern Europe. They display a sincere empathy towards all the na-
tions in the region, devoid o f farfetched generalizations at the expense o f
countries and cultures historically in conflict with Hungary, and also featur-
ing remarkable positivist efforts to collect and organize source materials. At
the same time, they are characterized by a rather schematic model of devel-
opment, rooted in the Marxist vision of the relationship of socio-economic
basis and ideological superstructure. When turning to historiographical narra-
tives, for instance, they are marked by an almost total lack of interest in the
theory of narrativity, which in the last thirty years re-shaped historiographical
research in the West.
Up to the 1970s, Central Europe as a historical region was thus marginal-
ized in Hungarian historical production and remained alive only in the works
of emigre politicians and historians, who sought to appeal to Western solidar-
ity on the basis o f the purported regional otherness o f some of the countries
of the Soviet Bloc, and also nourished some sort of sympathy for the plans o f
a Central European federation serving as a neutral buffer-zone between the
Soviet Union and the Anglo- American sphere of interest.'3 However, with
the increasing participation o f Hungarian scientific institutions in the Euro-
pean academic "joint ventures" and the emerging political program o f har-
monizing Hungary with the "Western democracies," the' concept of Central
12. Emil Niederhauser, Nemzetek szirletese Kelet-Eur6pLiban [The birth of nations in Eastern
Europe] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1976); A nemzeti megujuldsi mozgalmak Kelet-Europaban [The
movements of national revival in Eastern Europe] (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1977); A t6ri홢-
netirks tdrt홢nele Kelet-Európában [The history of historiography in Eastern Europe] (Budapest:
Histbria-MTA Tortenettudomanyi Int6zete, 1995); see also his more recent overview, Kelet-
Eur6pa tortenete [History of Eastern Europe] (Budapest: Historia-MTA Tortenettudomanyi Ante- ,
zete, 2001); in English: Emil Niederhauser, A History of Eastern Europe since the Middle Ages
(Boulder, CO, New York: Social Science Monographs, 2003).
13. Francis S. Wagner, ed., Toward a New Central Europe: A S'yrnposium on the Problem of
the Danubian Nations (Astor Park, FL: Danubian Press, 197 1).).

Europe once again came to the fore and shaped research projects which were
previously at the margins o f official cultural politics.
This was the case with the work of Peter Hanak, whose fascination with
the everyday life and high culture of turn-of-the-century Budapest was reval-
orized in view of the growing respect for the common Austro-Hungarian
heritage. By the seventies, dealing with Austria lost its original political over-
tones connected to the anti-Habsburg component of the national discourse
and came to place Hungary in a symbolic neighborhood that was more "re-
spectable" than the Eastern Bloc. In addition, Hanak was at the forefront of
the rediscovery of Oszkar jASZi,14 whose pre-1918 oeuvre, especially his
works on the nationality question, was gradually reedited and became part of
an "alternative canon" of Hungarian progressive (but non-Communist)
thought.'5 Hanak's main contribution was to reintegrate the Hungarian half of
the Habsburg Monarchy in its post-1867 form into its original cultural, politi-
cal and economical setting, documenting the breath-taking process of socio-
cultural modernization at the turn of the century and thus challenging the la-
tent nationalist presumptions of post-Stalinist historiography, which asserted
the semi-colonial position of Hungary in the Monarchy. 16 ,
Once again, while conceptually the visions of the semi-peripheral back-
wardness of Eastern Europe and the rather nostalgic exaltation of the sym-
bolic dualism of the "Garden" and the "Workshop" in the context offin-de-
siecle Central Europe were hardly compatible, there were many fine threads
that connected the two. From the mid-1960s onwards, the Kadar regime came
to be considered a kind o f Ausgleich by a wide segment of the intelligentsia,
and this created a context for the reconsideration of 1867, too. In many ways,
the school of social history emerging in the sixties, focusing on the moderni-
zation attempts in Hungary in the late nineteenth century, fit into this per-
spective - very much in line with the Western "social history" of the time,
concentrating on the uneven territorial distribution of wealth, "sheltered
modernization" projects, etc. Giving up the political pretensions to independ-
ence, Hungarian society concentrated on its material well-being, and the sup-
porters of the Socialist embourgeoisement of the 1960s and 1970s could look
back with sympathy to the rise of the bourgeoisie in fin-de-siecle Hungary.
The picture of belated,, but nevertheless powerful socio-economic develop-
ment in a peripheral society could be interpreted as an apology for the eternal
realist drive of Hungarian politics - in the shadow of vast uncontrollable
forces, trying to do "whatever could be done." This perspective was obvi-
14. Peter Hanak, J4iszi Oszkar dunai patriotizmusa [The Danubian patriotism of Oszkar
Jhszil (Budapest: Magveto, 1985).
15. The most important exegete of Jaszi was Gyorgy Litvan. See his Magyar gondolai, sza-
bad gondolat [Hungarian thought, free thought] (Budapest: Magv,-t6, 1978).
16. Peter Hanak, A Kert i s a Muhely (The Garden and the Workshop] (Budapest: Gondolat,
1988);. English version: The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna
and Budapest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998). 1 1
ously permeating the liberal Kadarist version of social history that earned in-
ternational prestige for RAnki and Berend, but it was underlying the politi-
cally more ambivalent vision of Hanak, too.
Nevertheless, the gradual rediscovery of many intellectual paradigms of
the pre-Communist periods created a plurality of approaches and discourses
and loaded the issue o f historical regions with immediate relevance. 17 It is not
surprising that from the mid-1970s onwards the question of Hungary's sym-
bolic geographical self-positioning became an important issue in the intellec-
tual debates.18 The most well-known product of this atmosphere is of course
Jeno Szucs's "Sketch on the three regions of Europe."19 Since its appearance,
the essay was hailed as a Central Europeanist manifesto along the lines o f
Milan Kundera or Czestaw Milosz, even though actually it was rooted rather
in the local debates on backwardness and the "national contents" of history,
the so-called Erik Molnar-debate.20 Szucs was consciously turning back to
the cultural atmosphere of the 1945-1948 period - as it is well known, the
original version of the text was written for the Festschrift of Istvan Bibo,
whose ideas about the "misery of East European small states" provided the
starting-point for Szucs. Besides re-launching Bibo's ideas, Szucs's main in-
tellectual aim was to take issue with the re-emerging discourse of national
peculiarity. At the same time, he challenged the geographical framework of
Marxist economic history which divided Europe categorically between East
and West and thus implied that there was no significant difference between
the historical development of the Russian Empire and the Habsburg Empire.
Both of these empires, Marxists would claim, were characterized by the pro-
tracted presence of particularly oppressive feudal institutions, a socio-
economic modernization coming from some sort of Enlightened Absolutism,
a belated industrialization and the corresponding social tensions in the late
nineteenth century and, finally, the Socialist transformation. While Sziics ac-
cepted the hypothesis o f a profound structural difference between Western
Europe in the traditional sense and Hungary, Bohemia or Poland, he chal-
17. Peter Gunst, "Kelet-Eur6pa gazdasigi-t6xsadalmi fejtodesenek nehany kerdese" [Some

prolems of the socio-economic development of Eastern Europe], Valdskg, no. 2 (1974), pp. 16-
31; and Emil Niederhauser, "Kelet-Eur6pa a magyar tortenettudom5nyban" [Eastern Europe in
Hungarian historiography], Magyar Tudom6ny, no. 7-8 (1978), pp. 500-04.
18. The topical nature of the issue is documented by the appearance of the important collec-
tion, edited by Eva Ring, Helyiink Eur6p6ban. N6zetek es koncepcidk a 20. szazadi Magyaror-
szagon [Our place in Europe. Views and conceptions in twentieth-century Hungary], 2 vols.
(Budapest: Magvet6, 1986); see also Ivan T. Berend, "Magyarorszag helye Eur6p6ban" [The
place of Hungary in Europe], Val6siig, no. 12 (1982), pp. 1-22.
l9. vazlat Eur6pa hirom tarteneti regidjkrol [Sketch on the three regions of Europe] (Buda-
pest: Magvet6, 1983); in English: "The three historical regions of Europe: an outline," Acta flis-
torica Acadeinine Scien(iarum Hungarille. 29 (1983), 131-84.
20. The key texts of Szücs are in his Nemzet es tor.tenelem [Nation and history] (Budapest:
Gondolat, 1974); see especially "A nemzet historikuma es a tÖrlénetszemlélet nemzeti ]At6szoge"
[The historical aspect of the nation and the national perspective of history], pp. 11-188.

lenged the binary opposition of East and West, suggesting the existence of a
transitional zone, which featured the Western social and cultural phenomena
in a more superficial manner, but which can be still clearly distinguished
from the "Eastern" patterns of development. -
Szucs's essay had an enormous impact in Hungary, launching a public de-
bate on the place of Hungary in Europe which reverberated until the early
1990s. In the historical profession the most interesting exchange of ideas on
this issue took place between Peter Hanak and Szucs hiMSelf.21 Arguing
mainly from the perspective of cultural history, Hanak proposed a triangular
model in which Central Europe, including Austria and Switzerland, would
have been equidistant from East and West. In turn, Szucs insisted that East
Central Europe, i.e. historical Bohemia, Hungary and the Polish Common-
wealth were peripheries o f the West.22 Obviously, the clash o f these two con-
ceptions was not about placing Hungary more to the East or more to the
West. In a way, both of them can be considered "Westernizer" narratives.
H a n a k ' conception distanced the Center from the West but it weaved to-
gether the destiny o f Budapest and Vienna - while Szucs stressed the diver-
gence of the traditional Central European polities from Germany, but eventu-
ally asserted the compatibility o f the Central European historical experience
with that of the Occident. The real impact of these discussions, however,
reached beyond professional historians, introducing to the general public the
idea of historical divergence between Hungary and the Soviet-dominated
Eastern camp.
Moreover, the reception of Szucs's work had a broader cultural-political
context. Literary studies also contributed to the growth of awareness of the
culture of Central Europe. As everywhere in Europe, comparative literature
enjoyed huge prestige in the 1970-1980s.23 Due mainly to the efforts of Tibor
Klaniczay, already in the 1960-1970s early-modern literary historians began
to formulate comparative projects with their regional counterparts, develop-
ing a vivid interaction especially with Polish scholars. Beyond early modern
literary history, Polish culture was always popular in Hungary, but in the
1960-1970s it acquired even stronger prestige due to the relative liberty o f
21. Jeno Szucs and Peter Hanak, Europa rigi6i a tortenelemben [The regions of Europe in
History] (Elöadások a Tort6nettudomimyi lntézetben 3.) (Budapest MTA, 1986).
22. 22 For a contemporary critical overview of the main points, see Gabor Gyani, "Torte-
neszvitak hazank Europan beliili hovatailoz홢s홢r6l" [Historical debates on the place of our coun-
try within Europe], Valosag, no. 4 (1988), pp. 76-83; for the repercussions of the debate after
1989, see the writings by Zsigmond Pal Pach, Gabor Gyani and Peter Hanak in BUKSZ, no. 3
(1991), pp. 351-61; no. 4 (1991), pp. 406-09; no. I (1992), pp. 6-10; no. 2 (1992), pp. 145-54.
, 23. 23 Istvan Fried and Mihaly Gyorgy Vajda were the protagonists of this perspective. See,
for instance, Istvan Fried, Kelet- es KBzep-Eur6pa kozott: Irodalmi pdrhuzamok es szembesitesek
a kelet-kozep-eur6pai irodalmak kdrebol [Between East and Central Europe: Literary parallels
and confrontations in the literatures of East Central Europe] (Budapest Gondolat, 1986).

expression and its vivid art scene. 24 Although in different spheres, Czech in-
fluence was also considerable in scholarship, especially in terms of mediating
a sort of Central European structuralism (going back to the Prague circle, i.e.,
Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukafovsk홢), gradually opening up to a more
complex cultural history paradigm as well. An important author in this vein is
Endre Bojtar, whose main field of interest is Baltic studies, but he also made
contributions to the literary history of Central Europe on the whole.25 Last but
not least, the intellectual history of the Habsburg monarchy also became an
o b j e c t o f Study.26
All this provided a context for the more directly political uses of the Cen-
tral European myth in the works of Gyorgy Konrad or Mihaly Vajda, whose
texts had a comparable agenda to those of Kundera, namely, creating a new
symbolic framework for the de-Sovietization o f the region and also evoking
some sense of responsibility in the Western intellectual and political elites for
"1'Europe kidnappare."2' All this reached its peak around 1989, when the dis-
course of Central Europe, which was until then fulfilling a meta-political
function, came to the fore and became an important ingredient of the discur-
sive arsenal of the (re-)emerging democratic regimes in the r e g i o n
24. The writer and literary historian Gyorgy Spiro published an important volume on drama
in nineteenth-century Central Europe: A kozep-kelet-eurdpai drama: A felvil6gosodbst6l Wyspi-
ariski szinteziseig [East Central European drama: From the Enlightenment to the synthesis o f
Wyspiatiski] (Budapest: Magveto, 1986) - and also wrote important novels and dramas, evoking
various Polish cultural references.
25. Endre Bojtar, "Az ember feljo . . . " : A felvilagosodds gs a romcrntika a k6zip- es
keleteuropai irodalmakban ["The man rises": Enlightenment and Romanticism in the literatures
of Central and Eastern Europe] (Budapest, Magveto, 1986); Endre Bojtar, Kelet-Európa vagy
Kozep-Eurdpa? [Eastern Europe or Central Europe?] (Budapest: Szazadveg, 1993). The second
volume contains his essays from the 1980s.
26. Nyiri Krist6f, A Monarchia szellemi eleter8l [On the intellectual life of the Monarchy]
(Budapest, Gondolat, 1980); Europa szelen [On the edge o f Europe] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1986).
27. Gyorgy Konrad, Eur6pa koldoken [On the navel o f Europe] (Budapest: Magvet6, 1990);
Mihaly Vajda, Orosz szocializmus Kozep-Europaban [Russian socialism in Central Europe]
(Budapest: Szazadveg, 1989).
28. For the debates o f the turn of the decade, see Attila Agh, "Kozep-Europa 'felfe(lez6se...
[The "discovery" of Central Europe], 7'Mzoto/, no. 11 (1988); Peter Hanak, "KtSz6p-Europa
keresi onmagat" [Central Europe in search o f itself], Liget, no. 1 (1988), pp. 3-11; Emil Nieder-
hauser, "A kelet-cur6pai fejl6d6s egys홢ge 6s ktilBnbtSz6s6ge" [The unity and differences of East
European development], Magyar Tudom6ny, no. 9 (1989), pp. 668-81; Pdter Hanak, "Közép-
Eur6pa: az imaginarius region" [Central Europe: The imaginary region], Liget, no. 3 (1989), 20-
31; Janos Gyurgyak, ed., Kell-e nekiink K6zip-Eur6pa? A Sztizadveg kulonkiad6sa [Do we need
Central Europe? Special issue o f the journal Szazadveg] (Budapest, 1989); Karoly 'Halmos,
"Keresztszé1en koros-korul: Kozep-Europa" [On the margins all around: Central Europe], T6r es
Tkrsadalnm, no. 2 (1990), pp. 86-96; Gyorgy Gyarmati, "Magyarorszag kozep-europaisaga.
Tortenelmi adottságok - jelenkori konzekvenciak" [The Central-Europeanness of Hungary. His-
torical conditions - contemporary consequences], in Janos Mazsu, ed., Iparosodas es mod-
eralzkeia. Tanulmrinyok Phnki Gyorgy emlekere (Debrecen: KLTE, 1991), pp. 101-24.

Challenges to the Central European paradigm in post-Communist Hungary
In the 1990s the Central European framework provided a natural horizon
of regional comparison for a number of highly divergent historical ventures.29
This framework, especially in the early-modern context, seemed to resolve a
number of problems isolated "national historiographies" had been facing for
long. Placing their fmdings in a Central European context offered a way out
of the retrospective nationalization of the region, positing a cross-cultural
context where the historical phenomena could be discussed in view of their
multiple ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious settings. Along these lines,
Central Europe also seemed to bridge the gap left by the iron curtain, which
meant that for four decades Austrian cultural and political phenomena were
often studied'without their Czech or Hungarian counterparts. '
Many Hungarian historians and literary scholars thus eagerly appropriated
the Central European symbolic framework to contextualize their findings on
medieval h i s t o r y humanism,31 military history,32 or the history of mentali-
ties.33 As for more modem contexts, the Central European perspective was
evoked especially in works dealing with pre-national or cross-national phe-
29. On the 1989 turn and its historiographical impact, the first assessments in foreign lan-
guages were by Csaba Sasfi, "Die politische Wende und die Geschichtswisscnschaften in Un-
gam," Osterreichische Zeitschriftftir Geschichtsvvissenschaften, 1 (1991), 103-08; and Istvan
Deak, "Hungary," The American Hisiorical Review, 97, no. 4 (Oct. 1992), 1041-63. Gabor
Gyani published a number of polemic texts on the state of affairs of Hungarian historiography:
see his Tortenesadiskutzusok [Historians' discourses] (Budapest: L'Harmattan, 2002) and
"Tortenetirasunk az evezred fordul6jAn" [Our historical scholarship at the turn of the Millenium],
Szazadveg, Ojfolyam, 18 (2000), 117-40.
30. Gabor Klaniczay, "Medieval Origins of Central Europe. An Invention or a Discovery?,"
in Lord Dahrendorf, Yehuda Elkana, Aryeh Neier, William Newton-Smith and Istvin Rev eds.,
The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences (Budapest-New York: CEU Press, 2000), pp. 251-
64. See also his Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesse.s: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002).
31. Jozsef Jankovics, ed., Matthias Corvinus and the Humanism in Central Europe (Buda-
pest: Balassi, 1994). See also Marianna D. Bimbaum's Humanists in a Shattered W orld: Croa-
tian and Hungarian Latinity in the Sixteenth Century (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1986),
and Sandor Bene's E홢 kanonok hcirom királysága R6ttkay Gyorgy horvbt historikja [The Three
Kingdoms of one Prebend. The Croatian History by Gyorgy Rattkay] (Budapest: Argumentum,
2000), which were the first serious attempts at reconstructing the common horizons of Hungarian
and Croatian early-modern intellectual history. history into its Central-European/Habsburg con-
text: for instance, in A tizenhatodik sz6zad tdrtenete [The history of the sixteenth century] (Bu-
dapest: Pannonica, 2000).
32. Geza David and Pal Fodor, eds., Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburg in Central
Europe: The Military Confnes in the Era of Ottoman Conquest [The Ottoman Empire and its
heritage, politics, society and economy], vol. 20 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publisher, 2000). Geza
Palffy also made remarkable efforts to reintegrate Hungarian political and military history into
its Central European/Habsburg context: for instance, in A tizenhatodik szizad tortenete [The his-
tory of the sixteenth century] (Budapest: Pannonica, 2000).
' 33. Istvan Gyorgy Toth, Literary and Written Culture in Early Modern Central Europe (Bu-
dapest-New York: CEU Press, 2000). , ;

nomena, such as the history of Central European Jewry.34 The attempts at
creating a Central European federation during the Second World War also
became an object of archival research.35 After 1989, Central Europe also be-
came an important heuristic tool for narrating the history of Hungary. Draw-
ing also on examples from the 1970-1980s, such as the works by Domokos
Kosary and Ervin Pamlenyi, who used the Central European comparative
framework implicitly, the most important new syntheses aiming at a foreign
audience made explicit claims of interpreting Hungarian history in a Central
European cultural and political context.36 Finally, certain authors sought to
devise a broader regional narrative, especially in view of the common traits
of the emergence o f nationalism.
One would expect that the events of 1989 brought an unprecedented flour-
ishing to the Central European paradigm of historiography in Hungary, but
the case is much more ambiguous. With the passing of the first euphoria and
the appearance o f serious political cracks among the countries, the utopian
image of Central Europe also became untenable. Interestingly, there is a cer-
tain tendency of de-ideologization of symbolic geographical references on the
whole (going against the general trend of re-ideologization in the entire
craft), which seems to turn the work on the region into a "normal science,"
gradually getting rid o f the normative images of Central Europe so prominent
in the 1980s. It is indicative that in the 1990s only very few books were trans-
lated from the Western canon dealing with Central Europe as a historical re-
gion (the works of Claudio Magris can be considered an exception). While
Oskar Halecki's Borderlands o f Western Civilization?1 and more recently
Piotr Wandycz's The Price o f Freedom 38 were eventually translated into
Hungarian, curiously enough most of the classic works on the region
(Jacques Rupnik, Jacques Le Rider, Timothy Garton Ash, etc.) remained in-
accessible for the Hungarian audience. Finally, while the history of the idea
of Central Europe earned its first Hungarian monograph, locating the rise o f
34. Victor Karady and Yehuda Don, eds., A Social and Economic History of Central Euro-
pean Jewry (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990); An홢iko Prcpuk, A zsid6sig
K6zep- M Kelet-Európában a 19-20. szkzadban [Jews in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19-
20th centuries] (Debrecen: Csokonai, 1997); Tames Kende, "The Language of Blood Libels in
Central and East European History," in Laszlo Kontler, ed., Pride and Prejudice (Budapest: His-
tory Department of the Central European University, 1994), pp. 91-104.
35. Andras Ban D., Pax Britannica: Wartime Foreign Offce Documents Regarding Plans jor
a Postbellum East Central Europe (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1.997).
36. Miklos Molnar, A Concise History o f Hungary (Cambridge, Cambride University Press,
2001); Laszlo Kontler, Millenium in Central Europe. History o f Hungary (Budapest: Atiantisz,
1999). See also L4szl6 Koqtler, "Introduction: Reflections on Symbolic Geography," European,
Review of HestorylRevue Europeenne d'fiistoire, 6, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 9 - 1 4 . ) .
37. Oskar Halecki, A nyugati civiliz6cio peremén: Kelet-Kozep-Eur6pa tortenete (Budapest:
Osiris-Szazadveg, 1995). -
38. Piotr S. Wandycz, A szabadsag ára. Kelet-K6z홢p-Eur6pa tortenete a kozepkortol mdig
(Budapest: Osiris, 2004).
this regional narrative in the geopolitical debates of the turn of the century,
the attempt remained rather isolated and was not followed by other works
analyzing various regional narratives of Hungarian intellectual history.'9
At the same time, the drive towards regional paradigms in the works of
Ivan T. Berend,4° or Ignac Romsics4' did not result in the 'emergence of a
Central Europeanist narrative, as the authors were rather careful not to over-
stress a normative regional typology. While Berend kept a conceptual balance
between his previous visions of Eastern Europe and Central Europe, Romsics
used a number of frameworks (from Danubian Basin to East Central Europe)
signalizing the multiplicity o f perspectives. He also made important efforts to
"historicize" and thus to "relativize" these concepts: thus, in the first chapter
of his synthetic volume on the region, he provided a pertinent analysis of the
history of the notions of Eastern Europe, Central Europe and East Central
Europe, pointing at the underlying cultural and political assumptions of these
conceptions, a n d thus challenging the unreflective use o f these t e r m s
By the mid-1990s, the Hungarian public also became more sensitive to the
criticism targeting the discourse of Central Europe as an exclusivist para-
digm. As it is well-known, this criticism was based on the repercussions of
the Orientalism debate, pointing out the political instrumentalization of sym-
bolic geographical references. Not surprisingly, the focus of these arguments
turned out to be the Balkans, and many of the authors, such as Maria To-
dorova or Milica Baki6-Hayden challenged the Central Europeanist discourse
as a conscious tool of symbolic marginalization.
While some of these debates became fairly well-known in the most inter-
nationally connected public (although, conspicuously, Todorova's book still
awaits its Hungarian translator), they did not succeed in undermining the cul-
tural prestige o f the Central European discourse in its entirety. This is due
mainly to the onesidedness of the argument, which in the heat of the polemic
tended to disregard the local context of the Central Europeanist discourse and
focused only on its possible political implications in terms of the "marginali-
zation" of the other post-Communist countries beyond the borders o f the
erstwhile Habsburg Monarchy. This went against the "local knowledge" that
the classic models, such as that of Szucs, were not consciously "othering"
39. Ferenc L. Lendvai, Kozep-Europa koncepciok [Conceptions of Central Europe] (Buda-

pest: Aron Kiado, 1997).
40. Ivan T. Berend, Central a n d Eastern Europe 1944-1993: Detour from the Periphery to
the Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
all. Ignic Romsics, Helyunk es sorsunk a Duna-medenceben tOur place and destiny in the
Danubian Basin] (Budapest: Osiris, 1996); Igndc Romsics, ed., Integracios torekvesek Közép- es
Kelet-Europaban a 19-20. században [Ambitions of integration in Central and Eastern Europe in
the 19-20th centuries] (Budapest: Teleki Laszlo Alapitviny, 1997); Nemzet, nemzetiseg es allam
Kelet-Kdzep- es Delkelet-Eur6p66an a 19. es 20. szdzadbun [Nation, nationality and the state in
East-Central and Southeast Europe in the 19-20th centuries] (Budapest: Napvilag, 1998).
42. Romsics, Nemzet, nemzetiség gs allam, pp. 17-31.
1. , '

Southeastern Europe, they rather disregarded it completely, as the thrust of
their argument was to accentuate the' distinction between the East of the Rus-
sian Empire and the Central European countries.
To blame this literature for consciously "excluding" the Balkans and thus
confirming some kind of ideology of national superiority meant to disregard
the complicated ideological composition of nationalism in the region. For in-
stance, the cult of Czech culture in Hungary from the 1960s onwards, which
was one of the focal points of the emerging fashion of Central Europeanism,
was far from being a natural extension of some kind of K.u.K. nostalgia, but
meant a veritable breakthrough, going against an established stereotyping
where the Czechs were considered the most perfidious adversaries of Hun-
garian interests. In this sense, the emergence o f pro-Czech cultural and politi-
cal sensitivities was fundamentally challenging the Hungarian national(ist)
canon, both in its nineteenth-century romantic and post-Trianon versions, and
could not be described as a natural projection of a micro-regional suprema-
tism. The growing interest in Czech history,43 which was traditionally ne-
glected by Hungarian historians, was thus naturally going hand in hand with
the growth of interest in other countries (such as Yugoslavia or Bulgaria)
which were marginalized by the traditional Hungarian nationalist perspective.
At the same time, it is to be admitted that in the early 1990s the political
use o f the Central European discourse had a certain exclusivist tinge, as it
corresponded to the attempt o f smuggling the "Visegrad countries" into the
European Union, while creating a strong distinction with the "less-European"
post-socialist regions - Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and former Soviet repub-
lics - which were deemed much more dangerous and ravaged by potential or
actual conflicts. Eventually, the whole distinction turned out to be untenable
and by the mid-1990s all political and cultural elites in the region shifted to a
more self-centered perspective, where even the former strategic partners of
the envisioned Central European region could be potential obstacles to each
other's aspirations to a smooth integration. While the Hungarian political
elite did not develop a similar irritation to a regional approach as for instance
Vaclav Klaus did, it became obvious that, at least in the short run, this dis-
course lost its political expedience. ;
All this also can be documented in the field of historiography. The interest
in Polish or Czech past notwithstanding, Romania and Slovakia emerged in
the nineties as the regionally most important objects of research, a fact that
obviously has to do with the overlapping pasts and the presence of ethnic
43. It was signalized by the volume on Czechs in the Habsburg Monarchy -- Laszlo Szarka,
ed., Csehorszkg a Nabsburg-Monarchikban [Bohemia in the Habsburg Monarchy] (Budapest:
Gondolat, 1989) - and also resulted in a number of other important works, among them Tames
Berkes' pioneering attempt to narrate modem Czech intellectual history for the Hungarian audi-
ence: A cseh eszmeiortenet antindmiai [The antinomies of Czech intellectual history] (Budapest:
Balassi, 2003).

Hungarians (both as objects and subjects of research) in the two countries.
Even if truly regional comparative frameworks are missing both from the
scholarship and the educational curriculum, there is a relatively large number
(at least compared to the regional average) o f translations from the histo-
riographical output of these countries. Some of the key works by, for exam-
ple, Dušan Ková홢, L'ubomir Liptak and Lucian Boia, are also available in
Hungarian, though it is to be added that these editions were often produced
by Hungarian editing houses in Slovakia or Romania. 44 At the same time,
there is a clear upsurge of interest in a certain nationalist genre of the "lieux
de memoire" that seeks to shape the ethno-national narrative in terms of a
"historical" contest with the neighbors.
This development posed a series of challenges to the use of the Central
European paradigm. First o f all, the attempt to expand the Central European
symbolic umbrella to Romania was extremely problematic. Although it
opened up the cooperation between Hungarian scholars and regionalist intel-
lectuals from Transylvania and the Banat, it also became clear that, since the
entire Romanian cultural and political tradition can hardly be assimilated to
the post-K.u.K. world, on the whole the Central European paradigm does not
offer a comprehensive framework for coming to terms with the past shared
by Hungarians and Romanians. In a different sense, while nobody questioned
the Central European nature of the Slovak historical tradition, the references
to a common Central European heritage did not preclude the escalation of
conflicts over the contested historical space.
It is not by chance, then, that most of the researchers (such as Laszlo
Szarka45 in the Slovak case, or Ambrus Miskolczy°6 and Bela Borsi-Kalman47
44. Lucian Boia, Tortenelem es mitosz a roman kozludatban [History and myth in Romanian
consciousness] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1999); Susan Kovaf, 5zlovala'a t6rtenete [History of Slo-
vakia] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2001); L'ubomir Liptak, Száz 홢vn6l hosszabb evszazad: a torte-
nelemrol es a tortenetirasr6l [A century longer than hundred years: On history and historiogra-
phy] (Bratislav홢: Kalligram, 2000). In addition, various publications focused on the fundamental
texts of the Romanian intellectual tradition. See, for example, the series edited by Ambrus Mi-
skolczy, entitled Encyclopaedia Transylvanica; and also Imre Paszka, ed., Roman eszmetortenet,
I861r1945. Onismeret es modernizici6 a roman gondolkod6sban [Romanian intellectual his-
tory, 1866-1945: Self-knowledge and modernization in Romanian thought] (Budapest: Aetas-
Szazadv,홢g, 1994); Lajos Kantor, ed., Szegenyeknek palota: XX. sziizadi roman esszek [Palace for
the poor: Romanian essays from the 20th century] (Budapest: Balassi, 1998); Constantin lorda-
chi and Balazs Trencs6nyi, "A roman tortenetiras kihivasai" [Challenges of Romanian historiog-
raphy], Replika, 40-41 (Nov. 2000), pp. 165-264. Most recently, see Andor Horvath, ed.,
Tanúskodnijöttem. V6logatiu a k6t vilag-h6boru kozotti romin emlgkirat- 홢s napiciirodaloinb6l
[I came to witness: Selection from the memoir and diary literature of interwar Romania] (Bucha-
rest: Kriterion, 2003). '
45. Laszlo Szarka, Szlovkk nemzeti fejlodes - Maayar nemzetiségi politika /867-19/8 [Slo-
vak national development - Hungary's nationality policy, 1867-1918] (Bratislava: Kalligram,
1995); Kisebbsegi léthelyzetek - fdjzösségi alternativtik.홢 az etnikai csoportok helye a kelet-koz홢p-
eurqpai nemzetdllamokban [Minority life conditions - community alternatives: The place of eth-
nic groups in East-Central European nation states] (Budapest: Lucidus, 2004); Duna-tbji dilem-

in the Romanian) returned to a bilateral comparative model, relegating the
broader regional framework to the background. This shift also marked the
geographic orientation of research institutions. While functioning mainly as a
minority-policy think-tank, the Teleki Laszlo Institute also had an impact on
the reconsideration of Hungary's geopolitical position and the history of
Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries, retaining Central Europe as
one of its reference points, but seeking to abandon its strong normative con-
notations. It is indicative of this development that the periodical Regio, pub-
lished by the Institute, transcends the traditional Central European narrative,
and publishes articles on Romania, the former Yugoslavia, the Baltic, etc.
The intention to disentangle the geographical reference from the norma-
tive connotations of the Central European paradigm led to a number of con-
ceptual solutions. One o f the most popular is "in-between Europe" (Koztes-
Europa), which was obviously rooted in an attempt to emancipate the geo-
graphical terminology o f its pathos, but to retain its reference to a regional
entity between the two (i.e., German and Russian) geopolitical zones o f in-
fluency. The problem o f course is that it i s - most probably unwittingly -
evoking the German Zwischen-Europa of Gieselher Wiersing, which was
compromised by Nazi geopolitics, thus it is unlikely to become an interna-
tionally acceptable solution. A tentative return to the less loaded "East Cen-
make nemzetisegi kisebbsegek - kisebbségi politika a 20. sz6zadi Kelet-Kozep-Europ6ban [Da-

nubian dilemmas: National minorities and minority politics in 20th-century East-Central Europe]
(Budapest: Ister Kiado es Kulturilis Szolgiltat6 Iroda, 1998).
46. Ambrus Miskolczy, Eszmek es teveszmek Kritikai esszek a roman mult es jelen vitas
kerdeseil tdrgyalo konyvekrol [Ideas and misunderstandings. Critical essays on books discussing
the debated issues of Romanian past and present] (Budapest: ELTE BTK Roman Filol6giai Tan-
szek, 1994); Lelek es titok. A "mioritikus t e r " mitosza, avagy Lucian Blaga eszmevilbgkrol [Soul
and Secret: The myth o f "Mioritic Space" or essay on the ideas of Lucian Blaga] (Budapest:
Kozep-Europa Intezet-Kortars Kiado, 1994); Ambrus Miskolczy, ed., Tunderkert: Az erdelyi fe-
jedelmi kor magyar es roman szemmel. Ket tanulmkny: Gheorghe 1. Brtltianu, Makkai Ldszl6
[The Fairy Garden: The age o f Transylvanian princes from Hungarian and Romanian points of
view. Two studies by Gheorghe I. Bratianu and Laszlo Makkai] (Budapest: ELTE BTK Roman
Filol6giai Tanszek, 1994); Ambrus Miskolczy, Hatkrjkr6s a romdn-magyar kozos multban
[Roaming about the borders in the Romanian-Hungarian common past] (Budapest: Lucidus,
2004).
47. Ambrus Miskolczy, Eszmek es teveszmek. Kritikai esszek a roman mult es jelen vitas
kerdeseit tdrgyalo konyvekrol [Ideas and misunderstandings. Critical essays on books discussing
the debated issues of Romanian past and present] (Budapest: ELTE BTK Roman Filol6giai Tan-
szek, 1994); Lelek es litok. A "mioritikus t e r " mitosza, avagy Lucian Blaga eszmevil6gardl [Soul
and Secret: The myth of "Mioritic Space" or essay on the ideas of Lucian Blaga] (Budapest:
Kozep-Europa Int6zet-Kortdrs Kiado, 1994); Ambrus Miskoiczy, ed., Tunderkert: Az erdelyi fe-
jedelmi kor magyar,gs rornbn szemmel Kit tanulmany: Gheorghe I Bt,6tianu,,홢fakkai L4szl6,(
[The Fairy Garden: The age of Transylvanian princes from Hungarian and Romanian points of
view. Two studies by Gheorghe 1. Bratianu and Ldszl6 Makkai] (Budapest: ELTE BTK Roman
FiJol6giai Tanszek, 1994); Ambrus Miskolczy; Natkrjkrks a romin-magyar kozos m o t b a n
[Roaming about the borders in the Romanian-Hungarian common past] (Budapest: Lucidus,
2004).

tral Europe,"48 which was common in the 1980s, or even to the ambiguous
"Danubian region" (Dunataj) can be detected. Finally, the re-emergence o f an
outspokenly nationalistic historiographical canon brought back the more
Hungaro-centric terminology, grasping the region' in concentric circles
around the Carpathian Basin.
On the whole, as we could see, the regional scope of historiography went
through a paradoxical transformation in post-1989 Hungary. While the 1980s
brought unprecedented prestige for the Central European paradigm, the 1990s
witnessed a gradual dissolution of this discourse and the emergence of a
number of competing narratives. This transformation did not imply the de-
cline of interest in the broader region, but the accents definitely shifted. Cen-
tral Europe as a concept lost much of its appeal, while the natural thrust for
locating their findings in a regional setting drove historians to different direc-
tions, within and beyond the classic geographical understanding of Central
Europe in terms of the zone of the three "historical kingdoms" o f Bohemia,
Poland and Hungary.
One could say that different historiographical sub-cultures and sub disci-
plines developed their own comparative frameworks, implicit or explicit,
symmetric or asymmetric. For instance, while the "new social history" of the
1990s often placed its vision of bourgeois modernity into a post-Habsburg
context, those who worked on the emergence of national ideologies were
pushed to accentuate the similarities between various East Central European
cases that eventually turned out to be much less different than usually pre-
sumed. Recently, all this became colored by the increasing awareness of the
collapse of traditional paradigms of comparative history-writing and the
emergence of more reflective new methodological offers to deal with "entan-
gled histories," "multiple modernities" or "cross-histories." It remains to be
seen, and probably depends on the future ups and downs o f the evolution of
the political and cultural unification of Europe, whether the new generation
of historians, raised by the trans-European institutions o f academic socializa-
tion and knowledge-transfer, will feel the need of reformulating some kind of
regional narrative to accentuate their relative otherness within the European
framework, or they will be taken away by the challenge of coining a new, all-
European regional typology, which will make any Central European or East
Central European otherness insignificant in the face of the radical or radical-
ized,non-European otherness.
Polish historiography and the concepts of (East) Central Europe ,

Although the question of Central Europe was never crucial for Polish re-
searchers, a closer look at Polish historiography reveals a huge number of
books, conferences, institutions focusing on the problems of our region. This
y 48. Andras Ban D., ed., A hid /úlsó oldalkn: tanulmbnyok Kelet-Kozep-Eur6pkrol [On the
other side of the bridge: Studies on East Central Europe] (Budapest: Osiris, 2000).

output is far too big to embrace, let alone analyze, for a single reviewer, but
some general remarks may be, perhaps, risked.
What is (East) Central Europe?

The 1980s, as well known, were a period of fashionable debates on Cen-
tral Europe. It seems, however, that in Polish cultural life their role was less
prominent than among Czech and Hungarian intellectuals. The reason lies
perhaps in the unclear character of the concept - even more unclear for Poles
than for Czechs or Hungarians, as the simple equation of Central Europe with
more or less the former Habsburg monarchy never found support among
Poles (it would mean dividing Poland into two different zones, with most of
the country, including Warsaw, out of the Central Europe so understood).
Thus, if the concept were to be accepted in Poland, it would have to be re-
formulated. This could happen in two ways: one could accept the "Habsburg
vision" plus the whole of Poland (what Poland means territorially for a histo-
rian is another matter), which in practice would mean limiting the region to
the history of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, seen as three "historical" na-
tions with more or less comparable centuries-old traditions of statehood. Al-
ternatively, one could accept the political history of the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries as the starting point and conceive of the region as embracing
the nations living "between Germany and Russia."
Among the two historians who wrote synthetic works on the subject after
1989, the vision of a "Polish-Czech-Hungarian" East Central Europe domi-
nates the well known book of Piotr Wandycz,49 whereas Jerzy Kloczowski
seems to be the supporter of the second view. 50 The important element of
Kloczowski's approach is that he includes Byzantine tradition as a fully-
fledged component of the region's culture (indeed, he compares the "Occi-
dentalization" and "Byzantinization" of various Slavonic lands as two paral-
lel ways of the diffusion o f European culture).51
These two attitudes share an important implicit consequence. The second
one seems to perceive East Central Europe as a cross-cultural territory with
various influences counterbalancing each other - the first one, more in line
with the argument of Milan Kundera, sees the region as an outpost of West-
ern civilization. Some of the exponents of this view (not Wandycz himself)
seem to come close to the Huntingtonian vision of conflicting civilizations,
49. Although he wrote that "Bohemia, Hungary, Poland and the state of the Teutonic Knights
at the shores of the Baltic," form, in the late Middle Ages, "East-Central Europe in the strict
sense of the term." Written in English by an author living in the USA, this book belongs, strictly
speaking, to American rather than Polish historiography. As the author plays an important part in
Polish intellectual life and is usually considered by Polish historians as one o f themselves홢 his
work should nevertheless be included here.
50. Jerzy Kloczowski, Europa siowianska w X l v X V wdeku [Slavonic Europe in the 14-l5th
centuries] (Warszawa: PIW, 1984), p. 9.
51. Ibid., pp. 196-97.

claiming that "Central Europe [...] forms [ . . . ] a n intermediary territory be-
tween the Latin and Byzantine civilizations, remaining, however, an integral
part of the first one."52
The two visions outlined above are rarely professed openly, and the confu-
sion of terminology makes clear systematization even more difficult. All
those who, for various reasons, profess interest in the supranational, regional
view of history that would encompass both Poland and the neighboring terri-
tories, have various terminological possibilities at their disposal. They can
speak about Central or East Central Europe, or even about "the Eastern part
of Central Europe" (as Jozef Chlebowczyk did); they can, however, use still
different terminology and mean somewhat similar things. Central Europe for
both Czechs' and Hungarians has, among others, an important function of re-
storing their countries to their political and cultural context that was peculiar
to them for the most part of their history. It is not (or not mainly) for the sake
of curiosity, nor out of passion for comparative history, that Czech or Hun-
garian researchers tend to dig into the past of the Habsburg Monarchy: doing
so, they try to find themselves in a universe to which their countries belonged
for centuries. From this point of view, it is clear that for the Poles the lands o f
the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth play the same role as the Habsburg
Monarchy does for Czechs and Hungarians.
Numerous historians seem to agree that, in order to properly understand
Polish history itself, it is indispensable to take into account the lands of the .
historical Grand Duchy of Lithuania as well as the Ruthenian lands, that also
at some moments partially belonged to the Grand Duchy. These territories, of
present day Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, have been connected to Polish
history since the Middle Ages. Research into what was until 1989 part of the
Soviet Union was of course strongly discouraged (if not altogether forbidden)
before 1989; this only contributed to its popularity after the fall of the Com-
munist regime. Some of those interested in the history of Lithuanian, Belaru-
sian and Ukrainian lands do use the term (East)Central Europe; others do not.
It seems, however, that the terminology is not that important as it may seem.
True, the choice o f terminology may sometimes betray the "historiosophical"
option: those using the term "Central Europe" may be closer to the "post-
Habsburg" tradition, while those speaking o f "East Central Europe" usually
sympathize with a territorially broader option, which, in turn, may also mean
two things: either the historical interest for the eastern lands of the former
Commonwealth or the focus on socio-economic history.
Historians of this latest persuasion, often inspired by Marxism in one way
or another, adopted the idea of the river Elbe as a border between two differ-
ent socioeconomic systems in Europe. This division, as Anna Sosnowska
points out in her essay further in this issue, had the additional merit of being
52. Tadeusz Kisielewski, Europa SSrodkowa. Zakres pojqcia [Central Europe. The scope of a
concept] (Lublin: 1992), p. 3 1. 1

almost equal with the post-World War II division between the West and the
Soviet bloc; therefore, the term could be used for recent history as well.
Sometimes the term "Eastern Europe" was used, implying a binary division
of Europe. This last concept would mean including Russia into the picture,
thus making the whole vision substantially different from those presented
above. References to the Slavonic cultural area were also to be found, al-
though their popularity waned after 1989. It seems, however, that all these
distinctions are usually very blurred and these terms are often used inter-
changeably, denoting a vague territory of Poland's neighbors to the East and
to the South. Intuition rather than precise definition is the basis of these con-
ceptions. Witold Kula, to take a distinguished example, writing about the
genesis of capitalism in Eastern Europe,53 aims at putting Poland's experi-
ence into the broader perspective of Europe's backward periphery. What ter-
ritories should be included into the Eastern Europe he writes about, does not
bother him in the least - and rightly so, as the nature of his model is not af-
fected by its territorial scope. If such is the case with a historian so extremely
conscious methodologically as Witold Kula was, it is even more so with less
theoretically oriented authors.
Thus, we may speak of a certain conversion of various theoretical points:
however different the original assumptions, the practice of research tends to
bring the positions closer to one another. It is possible, therefore, to present
the streams o f research irrespectively of the terminology used by various re-
searchers. It is content rather than phrases that interests us here.
The two most important authors o f synthetic works on the subject, Piotr
Wandycz and Jerzy Kloczowski, have already been mentioned. The main
thesis of Wandycz's Price of freedom (together with an accompanying, more
theoretically oriented, volume in German, Die Freiheit und ihre Preiss) is
that the long periods of oppression made Central European nations particu-
larly sensitive to the value of liberty. While this view seems a little too opti-
mistic for the present author, there is no doubt that Wandycz's book belongs
t o t h e m o s t s e r i o u s a t t e m p t s a t p r o v i d i n g a s y n t h e s i s o f t h e r e g i o n ' s past. 54
Jerzy Kloczowski, fifteen years after his Slavonic Europe, published another
attempt at synthesis, entitled Younger Europe.55 Like its predecessor, it stays
very close to the Annales paradigm, with its interest in the structures of soci-
ety and of mentality and its longue duree attitude.
53. Witold Kula, "Some Observations on the Industrial Revolution in Eastern European
Countries," Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej, 1-2 (1958), 239-48.
54. Piotr S. Wandycz. The Price of Freedom: A History o f East-Central Europe from the
Miridle Ages to the Present (London-New York: Routledge, 1992). The Polish translation ap-
peared in 1995. Idem, Die Freiheit und ihr Prei.s. IWM-Vorlesungen zur modernen Gesch홢chle ,
Mitteleuropa (Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1993).
55. Jerzy Kloczowski, Miodsza Europa. Europa srodkowo-wschodnia w krqgu cywilizacji
chrzescijanskiej sredniowiecza [The younger Europe. East Central Europe within the medieval
Christian civilization] (Warszawa: PIW, 1998).

The Central European debate has always been an attractive subject for es-
sayists not less than for "real" historians. The most important person here is
probably the poet, Czelaw Milosz, who did much to revive the interest in the
multi-ethnic and multicultural world of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Milosz, an original and penetrating thinker, was far from being a sentimental
re-caller of the forlorn tradition (although many of his readers in the 1980s
tended to see him in this way). On the contrary, he attempted to question the
tradition of Polish ethnic nationalism. His most important contribution to this
field is his volume Szukanie ojczyzny,56 dealing with the entangled forms of
national and regional consciousness in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Another good instance o f historical essayism is an outline of the history of
the Roman Catholic Church in East Central Europe by Bohdan Cywinski.
Cywiriski gained his position in Polish intellectual life with an excellent book
published (heavily censored) in 1971 dealing with the attitudes of the intelli-
gentsia in the early twentieth century. The book was widely discussed and
gave rise to a broader debate about the relations between the intelligentsia
and the Catholic Church. The new work, entitled Ogniem probowane, did not
repeat the success of its predecessor; nevertheless, it belongs to the most seri-
ous books on East Central Europe addressed to the general public. The book
has two volumes: the first volume deals with the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, a n d the s e c o n d one with the period o f C o m m u n i s m s .
Much less known generally, but equally interesting, is the essayism of An-
toni Kroh, dealing especially with Polish-Czech-Slovak contacts and paral-
lels. In spite of its journalistic title and colloquial style, his book 0 Szwejku i
o nas (About Svejk and about us), using the title character of the famous
novel by Jaroslav Hasek as a starting point for reflections, provides an excel-
lent and thought-provoking comparison of various elements of Polish and
Czech culture. 58
Looking beyond the world o f professional academics, we should not omit
one important milieu, whose contribution to the research of the Central Euro-
pean region is too often overlooked. The Polish tourist movement had a long
tradition dating from the last decades of the nineteenth century. It was, first
and foremost, a mountain tourism, which was an obvious consequence both
of physical geography and of political history: the Carpathians happen to be
the most attractive part of Poland touristically, and they happened also to be-
long to the Habsburg Galicia, with its relatively high degree of political free-
d o . This made it possible for the tourist movement to develop various orga-
56. Czeslaw Milosz, Szukanie ojczyzny [Looking for homeland] (Krak6w: Znak, 1992).
57. Bohdan Cywinski, l7gniem pr6bowane. Z dziejdw najnow.72ych Kosciola Katolickiego w
Europie srodkowd-wschodniej [Tried by fire. From the recent history of the Catholic Church in
East-Central Europe], vol. 1 (Rome: Papicski Instytut Studi6w Koscielnych, 1982); vol. 2 (Lub-
lin: Redakcja Wydawnictw KUL, 1990).
58. Antoni Kroh, 0 Szwejku i o nas, 2nd ed. (Warszawa: Prbszyitski i ska, 2002).

nizing and editorial activities. The Polish tourists soon "expanded" from the
Galician part of the Carpathians to the whole range and so did their publica-
tions. Even in the Communist times, with much limited tourist opportunities
in the "fraternal" countries of the Soviet Bloc, the yearbook Wierchy (Peaks)
provided its readers with plenty o f reliable information on the ethnography,
history and economics (as well as the nature, geology and animal life, which
is not our concern here) o f the mountain regions. This sort of "paratourist"
literature abounded after 1989. Among the new periodicals the half-yearly
Plaj, published by the Towarzystwo Karpackie (Carpathian Association) de-
serves to be mentioned; the guide-books to various Carpathian regions, writ-
ten by enthusiasts and abounding in historical, art historical and ethnological
details are too numerous to be analyzed here. All this production, as may well
be expected, is uneven in quality and it is permeated by various ideological
trends. The reader, however, can easily find here plenty of highly valuable
popular texts as well as some serious research papers. The historian of (East)
Central Europe would do well to remember about this branch o f literature
which is often unnoticed by the professionals.
Having dealt with the terminology, with syntheses and with the contribu-
tion of the essayists, let us - at last - come to the presentation of the more de-
tailed historical works produced by professional historiography. By and large,
it seems that the research on East Central Europe in Poland concentrated
mainly on two areas: the genesis of economic dualism in late medieval-early
modem Europe and nation-building processes in the nineteenth century.
Explaining economic backwardness .

Research in both spheres had a respectable pedigree, going back to two
important scholars from the inter-war period: in the first case to Jan Rut-
kowski in Poznan, in the second one to Marceli Handelsman and his disciples
in Warsaw. We could, perhaps, trace an intellectual pedigree ever further
back, quoting e.g., some works from the so-called Krakow historical school
from the second half o f the nineteenth century, advocating the opinion about
the decisive role of the fifteenth century as a starting moment o f rift between
Polish and Western historical development (Jozef Szujski). We could also
quote studies in the nationality question by some authors close to the social
democratic movement such as Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz and Leon Wasilew-
ski. We could also mention some Polish publications connected with the
German idea of Mitteleuropa during World War I (albeit dealing with future
economic perspectives rather than with history).59 This, however, is prehis-
tory. Returning to the inter-war period, Rutkowski's works on the genesis of
59. See especially Zofia Daszyóska-Golióska, "Srodkowo-Europejski zwiazek gospodarczy a

Polska" [Central European economic union and Poland], in Srodkowo-Europejski nvic홢;ek go-
spodarry a Polska. Studia ekonomi홢ne (Krak6w: Nakladem Centralnego Biura Wydawnictw
NKN, 1916), pp. 1-33.

manorial system, 60 although unfmished, have proven very influential. Rut-
kowski, to put it shortly, analyzed the growth of manorial economy as a result
of the growing legal privileges of the noble estate on the one hand, and of the
demand for grain in Western Europe on the other. Equally important from our
point of view was the research of Handelsman and his school. Handelsman
published numerous short studies on the Balkans and Central European na-
tion-building6l (on the margins o f his opus magnum on Prince Adam Czar-
toryski that eventually appeared posthumously only in 1948-1950). Somehow
apart from both these streams (but closer to Handelsman's) stood Oskar Hal-
ecki, whose research on the Polish-Lithuanian Union and the Church Union
with Rome could not, for obvious reasons, be continued in Communist Po-
land. Already after the war, Halecki wrote a theoretical work on "The Limits
and Divisions of European History," trying to establish the theoretical
grounds for the concept o f East Central Europe. The book won some renown
abroad, but its impact on the Polish historiography seems to be marginal.
Contrary to its rhetoric, the Communist leadership was not interested in
cultivating any research that would suggest close ties between the Poles and
other nations of the Soviet bloc. Nevertheless, somehow paradoxically, the
research on the genesis of economic dualism and the nineteenth-century na-
tionality question was continued in Communist Poland and, in fact, soon ex-
ceeded the pre-war output. Both above-mentioned fields were attractive to the
Marxists in virtue of their stressing the mass social phenomena rather than
the "great events" of political-military history. The fact that the idea o f the
agrarian dual division of Europe was promoted hundred years earlier by Frie-
drich Engels also helped to direct the focus of research to at least some fields
of comparative study. The first o f these fields bore fruit in the works o f histo-
rians like Jerzy Topolski, Andrzej Wyczanski, but especially Marian Malo-
wist and Witold Kula. Malowist's main work in our field is his study o f the
genesis of economic dualism in late medieval-early modern Europe,62 where-
as the most important contribution of Witold Kula is his Teoria ekonomiczna
ustrojufeudalnego. This work, dealing immediately with the manorial system
in Poland in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries, but rich in references to other
60. Especially Jan Rutkowski, "Geneza ustroju folwarczno-panszczyznianego w Europie

Srodkowej od konca 홢redniowiecza," in his Wies europejska poinego feudalizmu (XVI-XVIII
wiek) [European village of the late feudalism (16th-18th centuries)] (Warszawa: PIW, 1986), pp.
216-2k. The French original version was published in La Pologne au VIe Congres International
des Sciences Historiques, Oslo 1928 (Warsaw, 1930), pp. 211-17. The manuscript of Rut-
kowski's.book on the same subject was burnt during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.
61. E.g., Marceli Handelsman, Le devetoppement des nationalitgs dans I'Europe centraleori-
entale (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1930). (Offprint from L'Esprit International. The International
Mind, 6e ann6e, No. 24.)
62. Marian Malowist, Wsch6d a Zachdd Europy w XIII-XVI wieku. Konfrontacja struktur
spoleczno-gospodarczych [East and west o f Europe in 13th-16th centuries. The confrontation of
socio-economic structures] (Warszawa: PWN, 1 9 7 3 ) . , '

backward regions of Europe, is perhaps one of the most important works o f
Polish historiography in general. It aims at the theoretical analysis of the de-
cision-making of the actors engaged in manorial economy - basically, the
landlord and the serf. The capitalist categories o f "rational" economic deci-
sion-making, argues Kula, do not help us understand the logic o f feudal
economy: a separate theoretical framework is needed, and Kula sets forth to
p r o v i d e it.61 I
Although both Kula and (especially) Malowist have bred a strong group of
disciples, economic history in Poland has seemed to decline since the late
1970s. The acceleration o f political history (starting with the election o f a
Polish Pope in 1978, culminating with the first period of Solidarity, 1980-
1981, and the collapse of Communism in 1989) made the recent political de-
velopments the most popular subject of research, replacing economic history,
that was generally - if unjustly - seen as most influenced by the Communist
propaganda. Nevertheless, some continuations of the "classical" interest in
the second serfdom can be traced further, until the twenty-first century. An-
toni M4czak, one of the leading disciples of Malowist, left economic history
for the highly theoretical socio-political history, and tried to discern the
specificity of the belated political system of the Polish-Lithuanian Common-
wealth using the concept of clientelism and providing the most interesting at-
tempt to re-conceptualize the view of the political system. Although he did
not explicitly use his theories for Central European comparative studies, his
works seem to offer so much explanatory potential in this respect that they
deserve to be mentioned here ba
Speaking o f early modem history, it is interesting to note an important
stream that did not, in spite of some attempts, materialize: the one comparing
the early modern political systems and cultures of (East)Central Europe.
While the possibilities o f comparing the development of the Polish, Bohe-
n i a n and Hungarian estate/parliamentary systems were noted by Jozef Szu-
jski already in the second half o f the nineteenth century, the only historian
who took the problem seriously in the 1970s seems to be Stanislaw Rus-
socks. 61 It would seem that even such a fascinating research project as the
63. It is perhaps proper to add here that the same stream has been treated at length in a highly
theoretical form by a philosopher from Poznan, Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Odrqbno!6 historyczna
Europy Srodkowej. Studium metodologiczne [Historical distinctiveness of Central Europe. A
methodological study] (Poznai1: Wydawnictwo Fundacji Humaniora, 1998). Brzechczyn uses the
empirical material found in the works of economic and social historians in order to propose some
historiosophical tenets of his own.
64. Antoni Maczak, Rzqdzqcy ir zqdzeni. GYladza a spoleczetisfwo w Europie wczes-
nonowozytnej [Rulers and ruled. Power and society in early modem Europe], 2nd ed. (War-
szawa: Semper 2002).; Nie홢6wna przyjailí.. Uklady klientalne w perspektywie hislorycinej 홢Un- ■•
equal friendship. Cliental systems in historical perspective] (Wroclaw: Fundacja na rzecz Nauki
Polskiej, 2003).. '
65. Among his studies in Western languages, see Stanislaw Russocki, "The Parliamentary
system in 15th century Central Europe," in Poland at the 14th International Congress of Histori-

comparison between the Polish and Hungarian Baroque nobility cultures
(touched many years ago by Endre Angyal in his studies of Slavonic Ba-
roque) found only very few students. 66
Returning to the socio-economic comparisons, we can say that no other
epoch was so well investigated in this respect as the late medieval-early mod-
em period discussed above. One should, perhaps, mention the studies on
Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Ruthenian state-building between the ninth and
eleventh centuries. Here, however, the virtue is made out of necessity: histo-
rians interested in early Polish history and having but extremely scarce
sources at their disposal, have no other choice but to turn to comparative his-
tory as a methodological device to understand Polish history better. Almost
all Polish leading medievalists contributed to the comparative history thus
understood: Aleksander Gieysztor, Gerard Labuda, Henryk Lowmianski and
Stanislaw Trawkowski can be mentioned as examples, and their disciples are
numerous.67 The authors at this text lacks the competence for evaluation of
their works, usually imposing with methodological finesse and innovative
i d e a s a s r e g a r d s t h e i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f t h e s c a r c e sources. 68
Some historians tried to analyze the specificity of Polish capitalism on a

comparative basis. Apart from Kula himself, one of his disciples, Tadeusz
w Lepkowski, worked on various themes o f Polish and Latin American history,
and these two fields of interest made him appreciate the problems o f political
dependency and economic backwardness. Active in the Solidarity movement
in 1980-1981, in the eighties, in texts published mainly abroad, Lepkowski
could analyze, freely the phenomenon of political dependency: while not dis-
claiming the Marxist influence and his Latin American professional experi-
cal Sciences in San Francisco (Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1975), pp. 7-21. For a later continuation
of similar interests, see Adam Fialkowski, "Sredniowieczne koronacje kr6lewskic na Wçgrzech i
w Polsce" [Medieval royal coronations in Hungary and in Poland], Przeglqd Historyczny,
LXXXVII (1996), 713-35.
' 66. For a short attempt at comparison, see Jerzy Snopek, Wggry. Zarys dziej6w i kultury
[Hungary. Outline of history and culture] (Warszawa: Rytm, 2002), pp. 127-53.
67. For a concise and clear example of this genre, which is accessible even for a non-
Medievalist, see Aleksander Gieysztor, Religia Slowian [Religion of the Slavs] (Warszawa: Wy-
dawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1983); for an instance of a recent work on early medieval
East Central Europe, see Jacek Adamczyk, Placidla w Europie Srodkowej i Wschodniej w sred-
niowieczu. Formy, funkcjonowanic, ewolucja (The "primitive" money in medieval Central and
Eastern Europe.. Forms-functions-evolution] (Warszawa: Neriton-Instytut Historii PAN, 2004).
68. It is worth mentioning that the studies of early Polish and Central-European state building
gave birth to some interesting attempts to compare our region with pre-colonial Black Africa.
; The first impulse was given by Malowist, whose wide range of interest included the society of
pre-colonial Sudan, for a relatively recent instance of this trend, see Michal Tymowski,
"Wczesne panstwo a dojrzale panstwo w historii Wschodniej i Centralnej Europy oraz zachod-
niego Sudanu. Porownanie powstawania panstw oraz barier ich rozwoju" [Early state and devel-
oped state in the history of Eastern and Central Europe and of Western Sudan. Comparison of the
state-building processes and of the barriers of their development], Przeglqd Historyczny, LXXX,
n o . 4 ( 1 9 8 9 ) , 6 7 3 - 8 7 .
ence, he tried to apply the conceptual apparatus of Latin American depend-
ency theories to nineteenth-century Polish history.69 Lepkowski, as Kula two
decades earlier, introduced the concept o f dependent capitalism to character-
ize the Polish economy o f the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries and
tried to put the nineteenth-century Polish experience against the background
of other Central European states. Unfortunately, his untimely death did not..
permit Lepkowski to transform his ideas into a book, as was his intent. :
A recent work of Slawomir Tokarski deserves mentioning as remaining. , ,.
very strongly in the 1970s tradition of the socio-economic research of the
backward regions. In his book on the economics of Galician Jewry70 he offers
the reader a case study o f a backward agrarian economy, taking examples
from all over the world, from Latin America to Indochina, but very strongly ,
contextualizing his theme within the economic life of the Habsburg Monar-
chy. While some of his conclusions may seem one-sided (especially when h e _,
seems to imply that economic factors suffice to interpret the phenomenon of ,
anti-Semitism), the book provides probably the most mature attempt at de-
picting the characteristics of backward economies that came from a:Polish,
historian in recent y e a r s . . . ,
Comparing national movements

The works of Lepkowski and Tokarski bring us close to the second broad
field of Central European comparisons: that of nineteenth-century nation-
building. This stream of research found its best representatives in Jozef Chle-
bowczyk and Henryk Wereszycki. Chlebowczyk constructed a huge and
complicated model o f nationformation that can be counted among the most
interesting works in the field on international scale. Most o f his life a profes-
sor in a provincial high school at Cieszyn, Chlebowczyk never gained wider
influence in Poland, let alone abroad, and the extremely unclear style and
chaotic composition of his books surely did not help earning them the ap-
plause they deserve. The general scheme of Chlebowczyk's work is rather
similar to the well-known one by Miroslav Hroch, with more or less analo-
gous phases of national development. Of importance, however, is the content
that fills the scheme, and especially two problems: the attempt to analyze the
possibilities of national self-identification that stay open before an individual
living.in an ethnically mixed area and the role of irrational factors in the na-
tion-building process. Chlebowczyk seeks to discern various types of ethnic
borderlands and various possibilities of mutual relations of the groups inhab-
iting them (trying to avoid both the stereotype of exploited vs. exploiters and
the opposite stereotype that sees all sides of the ethnic conflict as equally re-
69. See a collection of his late essays: Tadeusz Lepkowski, Rozwazania o losach polskich
[Retlections on the Polish fates] (London: Puls, 1987)..
70. Slawomir Tokarski, Ethnic J o z e f and Economic Development: Jews in Galician Agri-
culture 1868-1974 (Warszawa: Trio, 2003).
sponsible). Then he proceeds to enumerate the factors that influence an indi-
vidual's acceptance of a given language and national identity. This thread of
reasoning still invites the followers to proceed along the same line of thought.
The role o f emotions in nationalism is now a commonplace, but in the
1970s marked by a stress on economic causation, Chlebowczyk's approach
was innovative. Chlebowczyk stressed that, contrary to many theoreticians of
nationalism, the alleged economic gains from an independent nation-state
(that made, according to many theories, the "national bourgeoisie" the natural
leader of various national movements) are usually more imagined than real.
Especially the economic character o f the ethnic conflict in the early twenti-
eth-century Habsburg Monarchy was quite often more the invention of patri-
otic publicists than economic reality. Thus Chlebowczyk, although starting
with Marxist premises (with a clear influence o f Otto Bauer's theoretical
works), and always very attentive to the economic dimension of political life,
came to very non-Marxist conclusions, stressing the role of the intelligentsia
( a s p r o d u c e r o f w o r d s ) a s t h e l e a d i n g f o r c e i n t h e n a t i o n - b u i l d i n g process. 71
Chlebowczyk's work, extremely conscious theoretically and furnished by
an imposing array of footnotes and bibliographical references from various
fields, makes a very heavy reading. The second great scholar of nineteenth-
century nationalisms, Henryk Wereszycki, writes elegantly and almost essay-
istically, incrusting his presentation with ad hoc reflections on the nature of
politics and society, and reducing his footnotes almost exclusively to the
identification of quotations. Distrusting theory, he shuns wider generaliza-
tions, but his books are the effect o f an equally conscious and coherent, if less
openly displayed, vision of the Central European past, as it is the case with
Chlebowczyk. Wereszycki's most important works are the three volumes on
the development and decline of the Three Emperors' Alliance in the second
half of the nineteenth century72 and, most importantly, a synthetic presenta-
tion of the nationality question in the Habsburg Monarchy. Wereszycki
shows both social processes and intellectual developments, with a clear sym-
. pathy for all those who tried to save the Monarchy by transforming it into a
conglomerate of equal nationalities. Thus, he presents sympathetically the
Austro-Slavic thought of Palacky, the ideas of the Austrian Social Democrats
71. Jozef Chlebowczyk, On Small and Young Nations in Europe: Nation-forming Processes
in Ethnic Borderlands in East-Central Europe (Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1980); A9igdzy dyktatem,
realiarni a prawem do samostanowienia. Prawo do samookrdlenia i problem granic we
wschodniej Europie Srodkowej w pierwszej wojnie 홢wiatowej oraz po jej zakOlíczeníu [Between
; dictate, realities and right to self-determination. Right to self-determination and the question of
frontiers in Eastern Central Europe during and after the First World War] (Warszawa: PWN,
1 9 8 8 ) . .,
72. Henryk WCTeszycki, Sojusz trzech cesarzy [Three emperors' alliance] (Warszawa: PWN,
1965); Walka o pokoj europejski 1871-1878 [Struggle for the European Peace, 1872-1878]
(Warszawa: PWN, 1971) Koniec sojuszu trzech cesarry [End of the three emperors' alliance]
(Warszawa: PWN, 1977). , , '

and of Oszkar Jaszi in Hungary. He is, however, very skeptical about the _.
multi-ethnic state's chances .of survival. He was far from idealizing the new
states that appeared on the map after 1918; one of his late essays contrasts
Galicia from 1910 with independent Poland of 1935, stating that, much to the
chagrin of Polish democrats and socialists who fought for national independ-
ence, there was more liberty in Francis Joseph's Galicia than in the Poland of
Pifsudski.'3 Nevertheless, the last sentence of his best book must have
sounded a very actual political declaration in Poland in the 1970s: "As the
personal well-being will never make the individual accept slavery, so no per-
secution and sufferings will make nations renounce the striving for their free ..
and independent states. ,,74 ..
Chlebowczyk and Wereszycki mark the highest point of Central European
studies in Poland between the late sixties and early eighties. Similar themes
were undertaken by Jerzy Skowronek in Warsaw and by Waclaw Felczak and
Antoni Cetnarowicz in Krakow. Skowronek, disciple of Stefan Kieniewicz
and thus, so to say, a late representative of Marceli Handelsman's historical
school, as if continuing Handelsman's research, published numerous studies
on various aspects o f the politics o f Adam Czartoryski, and in the early 1 9 8 0 s
broadened the scope o f his interests by publishing a wider monograph on Pol-
ish political contacts with the Balkan peoples in the 1840s and 1850s.홢 Wa-
claw Felczak, one of Wereszycki's collaborators, who was famous for his
radical anti-Communist stance and who spent many years as a political pris-
oner under Stalinism, was an excellent specialist in Hungarian (and partially
also southern-Slavic) matters. He wrote a very good handbook of Hungarian
history, two books on the ethnic problems in nineteenth-century Hungary,
and he covered the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of southern
Slavs (in a handbook of the history of Yugoslavia, written together with an
eminent medievalist, Tadeusz Wasilewski)76 . His disciple, Cetnarowicz, con-
tinues the threads developed by his master, also concentrating on the southern
Slavs (stressing, like so many Polish historians before, the activities of Czar-
toryski in the region).77 Important contributions to the history of the nine-
73. Henryk Wereszycki, "Zyczymy ci, towarzyszu Limanowski, wolnej Warszawy" [We
wish you, comrade Limanowski, free Warsaw], in Niewygasfa przeszfosc. ReJleksje i polemiki
[Unextinguished Past. Reflections and Polemics] (KTak6w: Znak,1987), pp. 234-46.
74. Henryk Wereszycki, Pod berfem Habsburg6w. 7.agadnienia narodowosciowe [Under the
scepter of the Habsburgs. Nationality questions], 2nd ed. (Krak6w: Wydawnictwo Literackie,
1986), p. 339. -
75. Jerzy Skowronek, Sprzymierzeircy narod6w balkaf1skich [Allies of the Balkan nations]
(Warszawa: PWN, 1983).
76. Waclawa fekczalc Tadeusz Wasilewski, Ifistoria Jugoslawii (Wroclaw: Ossolineum,
1985); Waclaw Fetezak, /7t홢oy-M Wggier, 2nd ed. (Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1983); W¡¡gil!1"ska.poi- '
ityka naradowoiciowaprzed wybuchem powstania 1848 roku [Hungarian nationality politics be-
fore the 1848 insurrection] (Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1964).
77. E.g., Antoni Cetnarowicz, Odrodzenie narodowe w Dalmacji. Od "Stavenstva" do
nowoczesnej chorwackiej i serbskiej idei narodowej [National revival in Dalmatia. From
teenth,and twentieth centuries along these lines were also made by H e n r y
Batowski and Jerzy Tomaszewski, the first mostly on the field of politics, the
second on the economy o f Eastern and Central Europe. Their research has
discovered numerous interesting connections and serves as a mine of infor-
mation. One could, however, raise the question, whether the -whole direction
of research, a generation after the path-breaking works of Chlebowczyk and
Wereszycki, does not need a breath-pause for a new theoretical reflection that
would help to draw new research goals. '
For any historian dealing with the nationality question in the nineteenth
century, the lands of the former Grand Duchy o f Lithuania were a field as in-
teresting as the Habsburg Monarchy. This subject, however, was almost
completely banned in Communist times; the most notable exception was to
b e f o u n d in s o m e w r i t i n g s o f a n e m i n e n t legal historian, Juliusz Bardach. 78
Contributions from art historians and literary historians

Apart from historiography proper, two other academic disciplines seem to
contribute much to the topic that interests us here: Slavic philology and liter-
ary studies as well as art history. An outline o f the history of Western-Slavic
languages by Ewa Siatkowska홢9 is a very clear book for a non-linguist, avoid-
ing a professional slang that makes, alas, most o f the studies on language his-
tory unreadable for a "normal" historian. Apart from this general introduc-
tion, three specialists on Slavic literary history should be mentioned here:
Halina Janaszek-lvani홢ková has published, in the late 1970s, an excellent bi-
ography of the Slovak national leader L'udovit Štúr, accompanied few years
later by the annotated selection of his writings in the Polish translation. 80
Written with a critical sympathy that avoids both apology and hypercriticism,
the book exposes Stur as a paradigmatic example of an (East)Central Euro-
pean intellectual. The late Joanna Rapacka, a specialist on South Slav history
and culture, published numerous books and essays on the subject, dealing
among others with important theoretical problems, such as the delimitation
between the Central European and the Mediterranean cultural regions, or the
possibility of "Slavic literature" as a research snbject.8l
"Slavenstvo" to the modern Croatian and Serbian national idea] (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Uni-
wersytetu Jagiellonskiego, 2002).
78. Juliusz Bardach, 0 dawnej i niedawnej Lirwie [On ancient and modern Lithuania]
(PozI1aÍl: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza, 1988).
79. Ewa Siatkowska, RodzinajQzyk6w zac/!o홢홢!M홢oM'!aM)c/!. Zarys historyczny [Family of
- western-Slavonic languages. Historical outline] (Warszawa: PWN, 1992) ,
80. Halina Janaszek-Ivaniirkova, K x h a n e k slawy. Stadium o L'udovicie Štúrze [Lover of
Fame. Study on L'udovft Stur] (Katowice: 1978); H. Janaszek- Ivani홢kov5, ed., L'udovit Štúr.
Wybor pism (Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1983).
81. Joanna Rapacka, "Barok chorwacki miçdzy 홢r6dziemnomorzem a Europa Srodkow¡{'
[The Croatian Baroque between the Mediterranean and Central Europe] [2000], in her Srodziem-
' nomorze, Europa S홢rodkawa, Balkany. Studia z literatur potudniowoslowiariskich [Mediterra-
nean, Central Europe, Balkans. Studies on south Slavonic literatures] (Krak6w: Universitas,

The last question she answers mainly in the negative: the very concept o f
"Slavic culture" is an ideological construct o f the nineteenth-century Pan-
Slavists. This problem is dealt with at more length by another literary scholar,
Maria Bobrownicka, whose book on the subject bears a telling title - "The
narcotic of a myth."82 This narcotizing myth is the illusion of the existence o f
a Slavic culture grounded in (mostly invented) folklore. This illusion seduced
the Slavic national movements in the nineteenth century, and condemned
them to provincialism and barren anti-Occidentalism. In the eyes o f Bo-
brownicka the biggest merit of the well-known essay of Milan Kundera is
precisely the attempt at destroying this Slavic illusion, still present - accord-
ing to Bobrownicka - among many Czech intellectuals.
Art historians are another group whose activities may have proven impor-
tant for our subject. In spite of numerous detailed works in various subjects,
few major comparative works appeared in the last decades. Marian Komecki,
Tadeusz Chrzanowski and Ryszard Brykowski, three eminent art historians
from Krakow, published in 1979 a synthetic history of art in Romania. Not
being specialists in Romanian problems, but possessing a wide knowledge of
Polish and general art history, they managed to treat the Romanian case on a
broad comparative basis, providing many clues for a history of artistic con-
nections and parallelisms within the region that stretches from the southern
shores of the Baltic Sea to the Danube Delta.83 Research into the history of
Byzantine art has been growing in the last decades, and so is the interest in
Baroque art and culture, but no synthetic or comparative studies on the wider
scale are appearing, although some works seem to hint at such possibilities.
Just as an example, a book by Rev. Michal Janocha can be mentioned con-
cerning the evolution o f Ukrainian and Belarusian religious painting in the
early modem period. The problem is set against the background of the evolu-
tion of late Byzantine art broadly conceived, and the author illustrates the
evolution of the eastern Christian aesthetic cannon under the influence of the
Western Baroque painting.84 Most comparative material, however, is con-
tained in the collective volumes that cover, as usually in such cases, various
case studies with some occasional attempts at partial synthesis. In the 1980s
and early 1990s the series o f the socalled Niedzica Seminars proved very in-
spiring in this respect.
2002), pp. 209-18; "Czy istnieje literaturoznawstwo slowiafiskie" [Does Slavonic literary science
exist?] [2001], ], Sr6dziemnomorze, pp. 460-64.
82. Maria Bobrownicka, Narkotyk mitu. Szkice o fwiadomoici narodowej i kulturainei
Slowian zoclrodnich i poludniowych [The narcotic of a myth. Essays on the national and cultural
consciousness o f Western and Southern Slavs] (Krakow: Universitas, 1995). '
: 83. Ryszard Brykowski, Tadeusz Chrzanowski, Marian Komecki, Sztuka Rumunii [Art o f
Romania] (Wrocfac홢° E7Ssolineum, 1979).
84. Michal Janocha, Ukraiitskie i bialoruskie ikory swiqteczne w dawnej Rzeczypospolitej.
Problem k,anonu [Ukrainian and Belarusian festive icons in the old Commonwealth. The prob-
lem of canon] (Warszawa: Neritoti, 2001).
Before finishing, let us have a short look at the institutions dealing with
(East)Central European historical studies. The bulk of interest in the region,
so it seems, comes from outside these institutions, from the "general" histori-
ans working at various universities and research institutes. Nevertheless, the
role of institutions should not be underestimated, as they influence, by publi-
cations, conferences, etc. the historians' focus of interest. Without aiming at a
full list, we should not omit the importance o f the Lublin Institute of East ,
Central Europe, organized and led by Jerzy Kloczowski. K홢toczowski's insti-
tute aims at developing collaboration especially with Ukrainians, Lithuanians
and Belarusians, and thus, to a degree, revives the research tradition started
by Halecki three quarters of a century ago.85 Apart from numerous confer-
ence volumes, the Lublin institute published a collective history of East Cen-
tral E u r o p e and arranged a collective undertaking of publishing the syn-
thetic histories o f Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. These historical
works were published in Polish and each was written by a native author of
the respective nations. The book on Polish history appeared in three volumes,
the remaining ones in two volumes each. The importance of the undertaking
for Polish historiography cannot be overstated. The Polish historian is pro-
vided not only with competent outlines of the neighboring countries' histo-
ries, but at the same time is given the opportunity to get acquainted with
specimens of the neighboring countries' historiographies which rarely, if
ever, would have a chance to fmd its way to the Polish reader. In 2003 the I n -
stitute also started to publish a yearbook (Rocznik Instytutu Europy Srod-
kowo-Wschodniej).
The Krakow-based International Cultural Centre led by Jacek Purchla has
various activities; from our point of view the most important is the publica-
tion of interesting conference volumes. They deal mainly with the problems
of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art, demonstrating the enormous
intellectual possibilities o f research into the territory that was neglected until
some thirty years ago. In Warsaw, the Osrodek Badan Tradycji Antycznej w
' Europie Srodkowo-Wschodniej (Center for Research on Ancient Tradition in
East Central Europe), led by Jerzy Axer, is active in more fields than its name
would suggest, while the Osrodek Studi6w Wschodnich (Center for Eastern
Studies) publishes an important quarterly Pr홢egl홢d Wschodni edited by Jan
Malicki. Both above institutions are affiliated with the Warsaw University.
, A m o n g the non-academic institutions, the association and publishing house
Borussia in Olsztyn does much to bring together Poles and Germans (includ-
85. "The Institute [...] considers itself a heir to Halecki's ideas" - Jerzy Kloczowski, Hubert
Laszkiewicz, "O,d Redakcji" [From the Editors], Rocznik 7M홢M홢M Europy 홢rodkowo-
6Vschodniej, 1 (2003), p. 8.
홢
홢
,l 86. J. Kloczowski, ed., Historia Europy Srodkowo-Wscfiodniej [History of East-Central
Europe], 2 vols- (Lublin: Instytut Europy Srodkowo- Wschodniej, 2000).

ing historians) interested in the past and present of East Prussia and other
formerly German and now Polish territories.
Summarized in a short essay, the Polish interests in (East) Central Euro-
pean problems may look broad and serious. Indeed, the terminology did find
its way to the general handbooks and monographs o f various subjects, thus
assuming the aura of professional respectability while losing most of its ana-
lytical potential. The relatively broad use of the concept, however, should not
conceal the fact that serious research in comparative regional history remains
a domain for only a small number of scholars. In general, Polish historiogra-
phy remains Western-oriented, presenting Polish historical phenomena
against the background of "the West." What is more, even those historians
who turn to the neighboring countries, display interest mostly in the regions
and subjects connected with the history of Polish presence beyond the current
eastern frontier. The task of contextualizing Polish history within a regional
framework is rarely heard as a postulate, and even more rarely undertaken a s '
a research topic.
Multiple imperial legacies and symbolic geographies in post-Communist

Romania ,
Debates over symbolic geographies in Romanian cultural and political life
have a long and established tradition. The preoccupation - indeed a genuine
obsession - with defming the country's symbolic place in the world has been
organically linked to the avatars of the process o f modernization, which en-
tailed a reconfiguration o f Romanians' collective identity and a symbolic re-
positioning vis-a-vis Western Europe.8홢
These debates have been also amplified by Romania's complex regional
composition, and the timing of the process of nation- and state-building.
Greater Romania (1918-1940) came into being in successive stages, as an ag-
gregate of several historical provinces linked with different imperial contexts:
the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (unified in 1859), the Ottoman
province of Dobrudja (annexed in 1878), the Tsarist province of Bessarabia
(1812-1918), the Austrian province of Bukovina (1775-1918), and territories
that were part of the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Monarchy: Transylva-
nia, the Banat, Maramure홢, and the Partium. While sharing many common
features, these provinces were nevertheless shaped by divergent regional con-
texts. An integral part of the Eastern Christian Orthodox religious common-
wealth, the principalities o f Wallachia and Moldova emulated the Byzantine
political tradition and were, from the sixteenth century on, integrated into the
political sphere of the Ottoman Empire, up to the end of the nineteenth cen-
87. For a recent historiographical survey of debates over national identity in Romania, in
view of the dichotomy between "autochthonists" and ."Europeanists," see Constantin Iordachi
and Balazs Trencsenyi, "In Search of a Usable Past: The Question of National Identity in Roma-
nian Studies, 1990-2000," East European Politics and Society, 17, no. 3 (Summer 2003), 415-54.

" }...,.., , .
tury when they united into a single state (hereby called the Old Kingdom or
the Regat). In their turn, Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat were zones of
multi-ethnic and multi-religious contacts and interactions mainly of Romani-
ans, Hungarians and Germans in direct connection, since the end of the sev-
enteenth century, with the Habsburg-dominated Central European space.
This mosaic of regions and historical legacies accounts for the acute de-
bates over Romania's place in regional symbolic geographies. At the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century, the process of modernization in the principali-
ties was legitimized by political integration into Western Europe, which
transgressed regional affiliations in favor o f a symbolic affiliation to "Latin"
Europe, having France as leader and role-model. Starting with the third quar-
ter of the nineteenth century, the establishment of the Romanian nation-state
and its territorial expansion led to a confrontation between its Balkan versus
Central European "regional vocations." Following the creation of inter-war
Greater Romania, Romanians assumed both a Central European and a South-
east European regional affiliation. While during the Communist period de-
bates over Romania's regional ties have been largely suppressed by Roma-
nia's forceful integration into the Soviet dominated Eastern bloc and.the na-
tionalist policy of the regime, post-Communist Romania witnessed the re-
vival of regional paradigms of identification, revolving mostly around the
Central European identity. Although belated, debates over "Central Europe"
in Romania followed the same route as in the case of other countries in the
region, from literary studies to academia and then to (domestic) politics.88
Rontanian intellectuals as "late-comers " io the Central European club

The international debate triggered by Milan Kundera's 1983 essay "The
Tragedy of Central Europe"89 and the articulation of a regional discourse on
Central Europe in the 1980s had a significant if belated cultural impact in
Romania. Due to political interdictions, in the late 1980s Romanian intellec-
. tuals could not directly participate in the elaboration of the concept. Individ-
ual contributions to the debate were made nevertheless by Diaspora thinkers,
most notably playwright Eugene lonesco and philosopher Emil Cioran, Ro-
manian intellectuals thus being among the iew advocates of Central Europe
originating outside it core locus (Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland).90
88. On this point, see Maria Todorova, "Between Classification and Politics: The Balkans
and the Myth of Central Europe," in her Imagining the BuI'mnji (London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1997), pp. 140-60. ' '
, 89. Milan Kundera, "Un Occident kidnappe ou la t(-ag6-홢ii.- 홢ic 홢
' ".;_홢r홢;홢: Centrale," Le Dibat,
Nov. 27, 1983, reprinted as "The Tragedy "i* Ccntrai C홢rope." ';7:" AVw )'홢 Review of Books,
April 26,1984. ;
90. See Eugen lonesco, "Imperiui Austro-Ungar pitojuor :,; Cotuederatiei Europei Cen-
tral홢?" [The Austro-Hungarian Enpire, precursor of Lfe ;.'■- .fnv 'iisropcan Confeùt;1àtion?], in
Adriana Babep and Comel Ungureanu, eds., Europa Centra,',!: Nevroze, dileme, utopii [Central
Europe. Neurosis, dilemma and r`a홢piasi (!a홢.i: Pofiroez. 1`-'홢%j, PI'. 홢!-56. Originally 홢u'3lished

Eugene lonesco confessed that his writing belongs "intellectually to France,
but culturally to the vast mental space of the [European] Center." For
lonesco, Mitteleuropa, was a space of intellectual syncretism and conver-
gence: "this mental space, this culture, this civilization were not only Aus-
trian or Hungarian; from a spiritual point of view, they were also Polish, Rio-
manian, Czech and Croat."91 He dreamt of a Central European federation
made up of the former Habsburg lands of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Croatia, and Romania. In line with Kundera's view, lonesco defined Central
Europe in opposition to Russia, regarding the center of the continent as "the
only European and human defense against the pseudo-ideological barbarity of
R u s s i a a n d its spirit o f c o n q u e s t . " 9 2 .
Although Romanian intellectuals regarded the concept of Central Europe

as an attractive cultural and political paradigm legitimizing their country's
secession from the Soviet bloc, they nevertheless found themselves symboli-
cally excluded from it by the most prominent proponents o f Central Europe,
if not explicitly at least implicitly so, by omission.93 The reaction of Roma-
nian intellectuals to their country's symbolic exclusion from "the Central
Europe of the 1980s" was very diverse, being shaped by their particular geo-
graphical origins, political options and the actual political context. By and
large, one can identify four main positions vis-a-vis the concept of Central
Europe that can be summarized as following: 1) acceptance and internaliza-
tion of Romania's symbolic exclusion from Central Europe as a failure to
break with the Communist past; 2) adoption and active promotion of the Cen-
tral European identity, especially in former Habsburg provinces; 3) political
manipulation of "cultural differences" between former Habsburg provinces
and the Old Kingdom, in order to legitimize plans for Romania's devolution
and federalization; and 4) critical rejection of regional symbolic geographies
as ideologically charged mental maps, accompanied by the affirmation o f
Romania's European identity. ,
First, during the period 1990-1996, at a time when the process o f eco-
nomic reforms and political democratization largely stagnated, numerous in-
tellectuals assumed Romania's exclusion from Central Europe as a self-
exclusion. In an essay written under the impression of the crashing victory
obtained by the Front of National Salvation led by Ion Iliescu in the national
elections held in 1992, Mircea Mihaies bitterly deplored the fact that "in the
in Cross Currents: A Yearbook of CentraT European Culture, 4 (New Haven-London: Yale Univ.
Press, 1985); and Emil M. Cioran and François Fejtfl, "Despre revolutii si istorie" [About revolu-
tions and history], in Babeli and Ungureanu, eds., "Europa Centrala, pp. 301-11. Originally pub-
lished in Agora, 2 (1990), ' , 1
91. Ionesco, "Imperiul Austro-Ungar," p. 252. \ '
92. Radu Stem and Vladimir l'ismaneanti, "L'Europe centrale: Nostalgies culturelles et réali-
j! tds politiques," C"admos, 39 (1987), pp. 42-44; and Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 149.
.. 93. On the relationship between the Balkans and the concept of Central Europe, see To- .
■
'' doroya, Imagining the Bnlkans,.pp. 140-60. ■. :, '. ■.
I.', Brill.com01/20/2019 02:24:28PM
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past t o o years, a huge distance has divided Czechoslovakia and Romania."94
He eloquently pleaded for an internalization of the distinction between Cen-
tral Europe (made up of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland), seen as a
space of democracy and civil society, and "a Kafkaesque Romania," sym-
bolically placed "at the Asian border of Europe."95 Mihaies's attitude was not
simply meant to denounce the hesitations of the political leadership to irre-
versibly break up with the Communist past. The author also distanced him-
self from the political position taken by the majority of Romania's electorate,
who opted for a "sheltered" transition.
A second reaction to the myth of Central Europe, which became more
pronounced after the 1996 electoral victory of the center-right coalition, was
to actively assume and revive a Central European identity, especially in re-
gions sharing a Habsburg legacy, such as Transylvania, Bukovina and the
Banat. The ambitious cultural program of the interdisciplinary study group
suggestively entitled "A Treia Europa' [The Third Europe], based in Timi-
홢oara, the Banat - a multi-ethnic city that enjoyed considerable cultural and
political prestige in post-Communist Romania for initiating the 1989 revolu-
tion - is representative in this respect. The group had two main declarative
goals. First, it aimed at systematically studying Central Europe as concomi-
tantly "a geo-political topos, a mental-affective matrix and a cultural model,"
paying attention to "literary-artistic styles in the zone of inter-ethnic contacts,
intersection, cohabitation and confrontation, from the perspective of relations
between and periphery."96 Second, the group aimed at familiarizing the Ro-
manian public with the debates on Central Europe that took place in the pre-
vious two decades.
To this end, the group initiated a book series also entitled "The Third
Europe" translated works by emblematic Central European writers and politi-
cal thinkers, organized conferences, authored books and compiled antholo-
gies on Central Europe'.97 According to Cornel Ungureanu and Adriana Ba-
94. Mircea Mihäie홢, "The neighbors of Kafka: Intellectual's note from the underground,"
Parrisan Review, 59, no. 4 (1992), 711-17; reprinted in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolu-
tions of 1989 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 252-57.
95. Mihäie홢, "The neighbors of Kafka," pp. 256, 257.
96. Adriana Babcti, "Europa Central i, un concept cu geografie variabila," [Central Europe: A
concept with a variable geography], in Babeli and Ungureanu, eds., Europa Centrald, p. 12.
97. The books translated into Romanian and published in this book series by the Polirom
Publishing House in la홢i are illustrative for the cultural agenda of the "Third Europe": Carl E.
Schorske, Fin-de-siecle Yienna: Politics and Culture (1998); Jacques Le Rider, La Mitteleuropa
(1997); Tony Judt, A Grand Rlusion? An Essay on Europe (2000); Jacques Le Rider, Modernite
viennoise et crises d'idenlite (2001); William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: Art Intellectual
and Social History, 1848-193홢 (2000); and Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jew-
ish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2002), to list but a few. Other books were the result of re-
. search projects or debates initiated by the group: Nicolae Boc홢홢n, Valeriu Leu, eds., Cronologia
istoxicir a Europei Centrale (1848-1989) [The Historical Chronology of Central Europe, 1848-

!'Jim
beti, the main editors of the book series, the collection attempted to document
Central Europe's "absolutely fascinating state of mind, characterized by its
ambiguous, nonconformist and controversial nature," an effort regarded as "a
European gesture of recovering one's national identity."98 In addition to the
book series, the group also founded a periodical, inviting contributions in the
f i e l d s o f l i t e r a t u r e , p o l i t i c s , h i s t o r y , a r t s a n d sciences. 991 p " . . . I
For the intellectuals affiliated to the "Third Europe," to be Central Euro-
pean meant to actively participate to the revival o f a common European spirit.
Their cultural program did not simply attempt to connect Romanian cultural
life to the international debate on Central Europe, but also to redefine the
concept of Central Europe from within and from the margins, by concomi-
tantly liberating it not only from the dominance of outside hegemonies (most
importantly the German and the Soviet ones) but also from that of former im-
perial centers (such as Vienna and Budapest). To this end, Romanian intellec-
tuals redefined Central Europe as meaning not only the spirit of imperial me-
tropolis, but also the spirit o f the multi-ethnic and multi-religious " i m p e r i a l ,
margins," of provincial towns and boroughs which bore the stamp of the Cen- :
tral European cultural matrix. Their project was to "reactivate" a b a n d o n e d
"peripheral" cultural spaces and literary zones, such as the former Habsburg ` ,
provinces of Bukovina and the Banat, defined as "ideal spaces" for analyzing , „
typical Central European zones of ethnic contact and multi-lingual cultural d«
convergences.
This project had primarly a literary dimension. It sought to provide an al-
ternative history of the Central European literature by rescuing "writers of the ..
imperial margins." In Mifteleuropa Periferiilor [Mitteleurapa of the peripher-
ies] (2002) Cornel Ungureanu redefined the periphery as a cultural center. He
regarded the cultural spaces of the margins as central to the Central European
literary spirit, in an attempt to liberate peripheries from the centers' "Mit-
teleuropean dictate." .
The "Third Europe" managed to stir fruitful debates over the meaning of
the concept of Central Europe in the Romanian intellectual life. Judged in the
regional context of the late 1990's, the circle's project of affirming Roma-
nia's Central European identity coincided nevertheless with the decline o f the
interest in Central Europe in its space of origin, that o f the Visegrad coun-
1989] (2001); and Vladimir Tismaneanu, Spectrele Europei Centrale [The Spectrums of Central
Europe] (2001).
98. See the presentation on the web-site of the Polirom Publishing House, at
http//www.polirom.ro. `
99. The first two issues of the magazine asked Romanian intellectuals to defines Central /
Europe and to position Romanian culture in relation to that space. The following ones discussed .
the contribution of Poland and Hungary to the Central European history and culture. See A Treia
Europa, 1 (19홢3i}; 2 (1998); Special Issue on Poland, 3-4 (2000); Special Issue on Hungary, 5
(2001). The 1홢;,4r issue contains "dossiers" on contemporary Hungarian writers, such as Peter
., Esterhazy, i홢v6i gy Konrad and P홢ter N5das. ¡í

tries. ironically, Romanian intellectuals from Transylvania and the Banat.
were late-comers to the Central European "club," at a time when that club
was rapidly dissolving, while intellectual and political interest in building a
common Central European identity was fading away. -*
The discourse o f the "Third Europe" in Romania had notable domestic
implications, reviving debates about political regionalism. Similar to its
original counterpart, the Romanian variant of Central Europe was an exercise
in "nestling Orientalism," the recovery of the Central European identity in the
former Habsburg provinces going hand in hand with the exclusion and ex-
oticitizing of the Old Kingdom as "Balkanic."
The third reaction to the myth of Central Europe in Romania thus belongs
to what has been called "egoistic regionalism," manipulating symbolic cul-
tural cleavages in the Romanian national ideology in order to plead for the
country's political federalization. Claiming that Romania's former Habsburg
provinces would integrate faster into the European Union, due to their his-
torical legacy and their traditions of multi-ethnic cohabitation and religious
tolerance, the Budapest-based, Transylvanian Hungarian political scientist
Gusztav Molnar argued for the existence of historically-determined civiliza-
tional cleavages in Romania. Adopting the Huntingtonian paradigm o f "the
clash of civilizations," Molnar claimed that Transylvania and the Banat be-
long to a different civilization - that o f Central Europe - where civil society
and political pluralism have stronger traditions than in other zones of Roma-
nia, putatively associated with the Balkans.100 Since, according to Molnar's
1996 prediction, NATO's and EU's Eastern enlargement would be solely
confmed to Westernized and Catholic/Protestant areas, Romanian politicians
had two available options: either to perpetuate the traditional institutions of
the nation-state, marked by extreme centralization, with the result that the
country would slip into the gray zone of post-Communist "failed states"; or
to firmly engage on the road to federalization and devolution that would al-
low Romania to capitalize on Transylvania's European identity and to thus
- politically elevate the status of the entire country.
Molnar's controversial thesis stirred an intriguing intellectual debate in
Romania, which reputed historians, political scientists and sociologists con-
tributed to. While most respondents regarded decentralization and local
autonomy as positive and largely desirable political aims to be achieved in
Romania., they pointed out that a federal reorganization of the country in his-
topical regions was not a realistic alternative.101 In one of the most articulated
reactions to Molnar's thesis, historian Sorin Mitu pointed out the weak social
and economic basis of regionalism in Transylvania. Although it historically
1 0 0 . See Gusztav Moln4r, "Problema transilvana" [The Transylvanian Problem], in Gabriel

Mdreescu and Gusztav Molnar, eds., Problema transilvana (Ia,si: Polirom, 1999), pp. 12-37.
, 101. For the debate surrounding Molnar's thesis, see articles signed by Gabriel Andreescu,
Renate Weber, Liviu Antonesei, Mikl6s Bakk, etc., ibid. i '

preceded the national state, Transylvania's medieval tradition of political
autonomy, multi-ethnic cohabitation and religious tolerance has been irreme-
diably lost in favor of the homogenizing and rival nationalist projects pro-
moted by Romanians and Hungarians in the modern period. 102 After decades
of Communist homogenization, nothing has remained from Transylvania's
medieval or Habsburg legacy, "except for a bunch of memories, regrets and
nostalgias without support, and an eld urban landscape populated today by a
heterogeneous population, largely indifferent to, and alien of, the cultural
identity of that milieu." Mitu's unequivocal conclusion is that "despite re-
gional stereotypes, contemporary Transylvania does not differ at all from the
rest of Romania.,,103 Surely, the idea of regional specificity can be in itself a
positive driving-force toward decentralization and political reforms. How-
ever, since Transylvania's local specificity is not grounded in social or politi-
cal realities but exists merely at the level of "collective memory," it can only
serve as a symbolic political compensation for current problems and not as a
firm basis for a federal reorganization of Romania.
The British political scientist Tom Gallagher reached similar conclusions, '
pointing out that the public support for regionalism in Transylvania is quite
weak, since it is not firmly based on economic or social realities that can
serve as a ground for institutional autonomy.104 In his view, the same holds
true for Romania's province of Moldova where, despite initial success, the
regionalist "Party o f Moldavians" established in 1997 by the mayor of Ia,홢i,
Constantin Simirad, could nor rally significant local support and soon fell
into oblivion. Although Simirad appealed to a sense of shared local identity
and resentments against Bucharest-based centralization, he failed to reconcile
local interest groups and to unite them around a well-defined regionalist pro-
gram. 105
The debate over devolution and federalization reached its peak with the
publication, in September 1998, of Sabin Gherman's provocative article enti-
tled "I am fed up with Romania," in which the Banatian author criticized the
Bucharest-led centralized system o f government, blaming it for "Balkaniz-
ing" Transylvania, whose character is "genuinely" Central European. The ar-
ticle generated a virulent press debate. Encouraged by the inflated public re-
action to his article, Gherman established the Pro-Transylvania Foundation,
animated by a regionalist political platform, including demands for institu-
tional devolution and administrative autonomy for Transylvania and the Ba-
nat. 106 The controversy was soon carried out in the parliament, where opposi-
102. Sorin Mitu, "Iluzii 홢irealitati transilvane," ibid., pp. 66-79.

103. Ibid. I
104. Tom Gallagher, " 0 critica a centralismului e홢uat *i a egotismului regional In Romania" '
[A critique of failed centralism and regional egotism in Romania], ibid., pp. 100-14.
]05./M.,p.)09.
106. Sabin Ghemian, M-am satural de Ramdnia 11 am fed up with Romania] (Cluj: ETd6lyi
Hirad6, 1999). •■'■':

tion parties denounced plans o f political federalization of Romania as a step
toward territorial dismemberment, and accused Gherman of high treason. 107
Despite dominating the front page of the press for many weeks, the regional-
ist trend failed to evolve from a press scandal into a significant political
movement, due to minimal public response.
Finally, the fourth reaction to the cultural myth of Central Europe was that
o f rejecting it as an exclusivist ideological construction, based not on a posi-
tive affirmation of a common regional identity arid shared values, but on the
exclusion and exoticization o f Russia and the Balkan countries. Regarding
Central Europe as "a snobbish club" of lost imperial illusions, critical Roma-
nian intellectuals pleaded for the affirmation of a pan-European integration
and identity. In terms of academic writing, this reaction was rather implicit,
since Romanian intellectuals did not write explicit "anti-Central European"
manifestos, focusing instead on proving Romania's European vocation. It oc-
casioned nevertheless a deeper discussion of Romania's regional integration
and affiliations.
In this context, theoretically-minded intellectuals initiated a scholarly pro-
ject of comprehensively analyzing symbolic geographies and mental maps. In
an article focusing on Romanians' ambiguous relationship to the Balkans,
Sorin Antohi identifies several strategies serving "Romania's imaginary es-
cape from the Balkans," namely: "discourses of inclusion, affinity, and sub-
limation" presenting the Old Kingdom as a part of the Balkans; a "horizontal
escape towards Western Europe," suggestively called "geocultural Bova-
rism"; and a "vertical escape from the Balkans," as part of autochthonist ide-
ologies called "ethnic ontologies.,,108 Undoubtedly, it has an emancipatory
potential, yet the discourse on Mitteleuropa is ultimately a similar attempt at
imaginary escape, no more than "a cultural mythology" a "regressive Utopian
fantasy [ . . . ] routed in K.u.K. bliss."109 The migration o f this discourse from
the Visegrad countries to Romania and the Western Ukraine thus appears as
an exercise in "metonymic Orientalism." 110
. According to Antohi, in order to transgress the continuous dilemmas of
Romanian elites between the "geocultural Bovarism" of the Westernizers and
107. For the controversy surrounding Gherman's book, see M-am s6turat de Romania -
Fennmeiiul Satin Ghermnn in vizfunea presei [I am fed up with Romania: The Sabin Gherman
phenomenon seen by the press] (Cluj: Frd6lyi Hirado, 1999).
108. Sorin Antohi, "Romania and the Balkans. From Geocultural Bovarism to Ethnic Ontol-
ogy," Transit. Tr@nsit-Yirtuelles Forum, 21 (Febr. 2002), available on the site of the Institute
fur die Wissenschaftem vom Menschen, at http://www.iwm.at.
109. Sorin Antohi "Habits of the Mind. Europe's Post-1989 Symbolic Geographies," in Sorin
Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds., Between Past and Future. The Revolutions of 1989 and
their Aftermath (Budapest-New York: CEU Press, 2000), pp. 64-65.
110. For the term "metonymic Orientalism," see Sorin Antohi, Civitas Imaginalis. Istorie si
utopie in cultura romdni [Civitas Imaginalis. History and utopia in the Romanian culture] (Bu-
cure;ti Editura Litera, 1994), pp. 234-36, 283-84. , . ' •

the nationalism of the "autochthonists," and to renounce the wide range or
negative cliches, stereotypes, and symbolic exclusions at regional level, Ro-
manian intellectuals need to firmly situate Romania's history into Central and
Southeast European contexts and to recover the "strategic importance of their
contacts with their former and present Western neighbors" such as the Hun-
garians. Situating Romanian culture into a broader regional comparative
framework would lead to the abandonment of the thesis of Romanians' "in-
comparable uniqueness" advocated by authochthonist ideologies and of the
Orientalist connotations inherent in the concept of Mitteleuropa. Antohi
named the political implications of his analysis "the third discourse," criti-
cally distancing it from traditional attitudes informing Romanian regional af-
filiation and cultural self-interpretation.1111
Debates over historical regions in post-Communist historiography

Ideological debates over symbolic geographies have been reflected in the -: .
writing of history, as well. The post-1989 liberalization of the historical disk ':
course allowed Romanian historians to rediscover regional history leading to
competing narratives on the process of nation- and state-building, connected
either with Central European or Southeast European studies. The institutional
infrastructure of historical research has also undergone a profound transfor-
mation. New research institutes and journals have been established, many o f
them focusing preponderantly on local history and being linked to various re-
gional frameworks o f reference. The University o f Bucharest has continued
its long and prestigious tradition of Southeast European and Byzantine stud-
ies, to which it has added new components focusing on Ottoman studies. 1'he
Department of History at the University of Ia홢i has focused mainly on the his-
tory of Moldova and its traditional links with Poland and the Polish-
dominated Central European space, and more recently on the history o f the
Habsburg Bukovina. Research at the university and institutes of Cluj has fo-
cused on the history of Transylvania and - in connection with this province -
on the history of the Habsburg-dominated Central Europe. The University o f
West in Timi홢oara is specializing in the history of the multi-ethnic Banat. The
following analysis provides a brief overview of the recent historiography on
the historical provinces o f the Moldova and Wallachia (the Old Kingdom),
the Banat,, Bukovina, and Transylvania.
Historical research in Bucharest-based institutions has mostly focused on
the comparative history of Southeastern Europe. In Romania, Southeast
European studies have a long tradition, being initiated by the prolific histo-
rian Nicolae lorga. Having at its core the "organic" development of the Ro-
1 . ;
I 11. Sorin Antohi, "RomAnii In anii '90: geografie simbolic.1 identitate sociala," in Exer-
ciliul distanlei. Discursuri, societdli, metode [Taking distance. Discourses, societies, methods]
(Bucure*ti: Nemira, 1997), pp. 292-316. French version published in Transitions, XXXIX, no. 1
(i998), 111-34. tI
I from Brill.com01/20/2019 02:24:28PM

Downloaded
manian people, Iorga's research progressed in "concentric" geographical cir-
cles composed of the history of Central and Southeastern Europe, and that of
the world."2 In 1914, lorga established the Institute of Southeastern Euro-
pean Studies, publishing the Bulletin de L'Institut pour l'étude de d'Europe.
sud-orientale (1914-1924). lorga also promoted Byzantine studies, establish-
ing the Institute o f Byzantine Studies and co-organizing the first Congress o f
Byzantine Studies in 1932 in Bucharest. After Iorga's tragic death (1940), his
research agenda was continued by Gheorghe Bratianu, who assumed leader-
ship of the Institute o f Universal History, founded by Iorga in 1936 in Bucha-
rest, publishing the Revue historique de sud-est europeen. Bratianu was a
medievalist with main research interest in the Byzantine world and its com-
' mercial relations with Italian city states. His masterpiece offered a fascinating
account of the history of the Black Sea and its surrounding communities, in
the spirit o f the A n n a l e s school. "3
During the Communist regime, research on Southeastern Europe was re-

sumed in 1963 with the establishment of the Institute for South-East Euro-
pean Studies, in Bucharest. Having sections on history, archeology, art his-
tory, sociology and language, the institute promoted the interdisciplinary
study of the region. Research results have been disseminated by the journal
Revue des etudes sud-est europeennes, and more recently, also by Sud-Estul
홢'coM홢.!홢M/ european.
Historians specializing on the medieval history of Moldova and Wallachia
pointed out that the socio-political organization o f the two principalities emu-
lated the Byzantine political tradition, a process suggestively called by the
Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga Byzance apris Byzance. 114 This tradition
was adapted to local conditions and combined, in the post-Byzantine period,
with Ottoman and Central European influences, ultimately resulting into an
original political synthesis. One of the most comprehensive accounts of the
Byzantine political tradition in the Principalities, published in 1983, was pro-
vided by Andrei Pippidi in Tradiliu politici bizantina in 홢/'홢/e rom6ne. Pip-
. pidi defined the political tradition as "principles of state leadership evolving
into a consistent doctrine due to their large acceptance by the dominant class
over several generations."115
An important direction of study was the relationship between the Enlight-
enment and the emergence o f political modernity in Southeastern Europe.
U 2. See Nicolas M. Nagy-Talavera, Nicolae lorga. A Biography, 2nd ed; (14i-Portiand, OR-
Oxford: The Center for Romanian Studies, 1998), p. 110..
It 13. Gheorghe Bratianu, La mer Noire, des origines a la conquete ottomane (Monachii: So-
cietas academica Dacoromana, 1969).
114. Nicolae Iorga, Byzance apres Byzance. Continuation de I'Histoire de la vie Byzantine
(Bucharest; Editions de l'Institut d'etudes byzantines, 1935).
115. Andrei Pippidi, Tradifia politicii bizantina in fiirile romr홢ne in secolele XVI-XVIII [The
Byzantine political tradition in the Romanian principalities in the l6th-18th centuries] (Bucur-
qti: Editura Academiei, 1983), p. 6. I

The leading cultural historian Alexandru Du홢u placed the issue of the forma-
tion of the Romanian national identity within the historical context of South-
eastern Europe. Focusing on the question of institutional and ideological
transfers to the region, D u o emphasized the "local modification" of "West-
ern" doctrines, arguing that the ideological "answers" of Southeast European
societies to the pressure of modernity attempted to harmonize social and cul-
tural Westernization with local social realities, which he described in terms of
communitarian patterns (Gemeinschaft)."6
Research on Southeastern Europe and related fields, such as Ottoman and
Byzantine studies, has been also conducted at the University o f Bucharest."7
The Center for Turkish and Ottoman Studies established in 1986, publishing
the journal Romano-Turcica since 2003, promoted comparative research on
the history o f the Ottoman Empire and Romanian-Turkish relations. The re-
gional framework of this research was provided by the Lower Danube basin,
regarded as the locus o f "a joint history of the Turkik (sic!) and Romanian
people."1 18 The tradition of Byzantine studies has been resumed by the Center
for Byzantine and East European Studies, established in 2000 within the De-
partment o f History, with the aims of studying the dissemination o f the Byz-
antine model in Southeastern Europe, and the resulting forms of identities
and solidarities in the regions."9 Stimulated by contemporary Turkish as well
as Romanian geopolitical interests, Byzantine and Ottoman studies have
found a common ground in the history of the Black Sea, regarded as a zone
of convergence and confluence o f multiple cultural influences.
Other regional centers of excellence in Southeast European studies, in-
cluding the Byzantine and Ottoman sub-fields, are represented by the De-
partment o f History, University of Ia홢i and the Institute of History "A. D.
Xenopol." These research centers have focused preponderantly on the local
116. See Alexandru Du(u's works: Sud-Estul si contextul European. Buletin V: mentalitate si
politica [Southeastern Europe and the European Context. Bulletin V: mentality and politics]
(Bucuresti: Academia Romans, Institutul de Studii Sud-Est Europene, 1994); Sud-Estut euro-
pean in vremea Revohuliei Franceze: Stari de spirit, reacfii, confluence [Southeastern Europe
during the French Revolution: States of mind, reactions, and confluences] (Bucure홢ti: Academia
Romana, 1994); Political models and national identities in "Orthodox Europe" (Bucure홢ti: Ba-
bel, 1998); and Ideea de Europa $i evolufia conltiinfei europene [The idea of Europe and the
evolution of the European consciousness] (Bucwe$ti: All, 1999).
117. On the role of Southeast European studies in Romanian historiography, see Andrei Pip-
pidi, "Reform sau declin, a doua perioadä a studiilor sud-est europene in Romania" [Reform or
decline, the second period of south-east European studies in Romania], Revista Istorica, 2
(1991), pp. 1 I-l2, 641-49. See also the debate organized in 1996 by the joumal Sud-Estul si con-
textul european, 6 (1996).
118. Halil inalclk, "Foreword," Romano-Turcica (Istanbul: Isis, 2003), p. 9. ' ! '
119. See also the works of Stelian Brezeanu, the initiator of the center, mainly 0 istorie a Bi-
zan;ului [A History of Byzantium] (Bucure홢ti: Meronia, 2004); and by Serban Tanasoca, espe-
cially Bizan/ul si rom6nii. Eseuri, studii, articole [The Byzantium and the Romanians. Essays,
studies, articles] (Bucure홢ti: Editura Fundalici PRO, 2003).
history o f Moldavia, its relations with medieval Poland and the creation of a
genuine Polish-Moldavian "commonwealth," the history of Bukovina, the
"Jewish question" in East Central Europe and Northern Moldavia in the nine-
teenth c e n t u r y .
The history of Transylvania has remained the main focus of historical re-
search on regional history in Romania. By and large, one can identify three
main approaches to the history of the province. 121 The first one, and quantita-
tively still the dominant one, continues the romantic-nationalist canon o f his-
toriography and the triumphant accounts written in the 1920s and 1930s, fol-
lowing the creation of Greater Romania, represented mainly by Nicolae
Iorga,.122 Although, in his works written prior to the establishment of Greater
Romania, Iorga focused on regional history as well,123 in the interwar period
he criticized attempts of writing the separate history of various historical
provinces, arguing that "there is only a single history for the Romanians: the
history o f the Romanians, the others [types of history writing] being in the
foreigners' interest." 124 Author of several massive syntheses on the history of
the Romanians, lorga argued that, although subject to different multiethnic
empires, Transylvania, Moldova and Wallachia experienced throughout their
history a unitary historical development. In the spirit of the myth o f the "three
Romanian countries" developed by Iorga, proponents of this first histo-
riographical approach, represented mostly by research at the Institute o f Na-
tional History created in Cluj in 1920 and its yearbook, 홢tnuai-ul Institutului
de Istorie C/M/,홢 focused on the establishment of Greater Romania, regarded
120. On Polish-Moldovan relations, see Veniamin Ciobanu, Relafiile romdno-polone intre

1699 qi 1848 [Romanian-Polish relations between 1699-1848] (Bucuregti: Editura Academiei,
1980); and Romanii in politica est-central europeana, 1648-1711 [Romanians in East Central
European politics 1648-1711] (la홢i, 1997). On the history of Bukovina, see works by Mihai-
$tefan Ceausu, such as Bucovina Habsburgica de la anexare la Congresul de la Vienna. losefin-
ism Iii postiosefinism (1774-1815) (Habsburg Bukovina from annexation to the Congress of Vi-
. enna. Josephism and post-Josephism, 1774-1815] (Iasi, 1998). On the "Jewish question," see the
new joumal Stu(iia et Acta Historiae Judaerum Romaniae (1995-).
121. On these historiographical trends on the history of Transylvania, see Constantin Iordachi
and Marius Turda, "Politikai megbekeles versus torteneti diskurzus: az 1989-1999 kozotti roman
t6rtenetiras Magyarorszag-percepci6ja" [Political reconciliation versus historical discourse: The
image of Hungarians in Romanian historiography, 1989-1999], Regio, 11, no. 2 (Sept. 2000),
129-59.
122. Ibid., p. 136.
123. Nicolae lorga, Istorie a românilor din Ardeal si Ungaria, 2 vols. (Bucuresti, 1915); and
Istorie a romdnilor din Peninsula Balcanica (Bucure홢ti, 1919).
124. Nicolae Iorga, " 0 istorie a Basarabiei?" [A history of Bessarabia?], Neamul Romdnesc,
XXXII, no. 1, Oct. 2, 1937), 215, quoted in Victor Spinei, Reprezentanli de seama ai isto-
riografrei sifilologiei românelili Iii mondiale [Prominent representatives of Romanian historiog-
raphy and philology] (Dräila: Istros, 1996), p. 13.
125. The statistical analysis o f the contributions to the yearbook in the period 1982-1995 is
illustrative for the regional outlook o f the institute. An overwhelming majority of the published
articles are written by historians from Transylvania and regard the history of the province within

as the "natural" end result of an objective historical development. The re-
gional historical narrative on Transylvania is thus subsumed to the national
history, and is dominated by resentments against the policies of "denationali-
zation" of Romanians in Austria-Hungary and the irrendentist policies pur-
sued by interwar Hungary, two themes that were central to the Communist
historiography and continues to dominate parts of the contemporary Roma-
n i a n h i s t o r i o g r a p h y , a s well. 126 '
The second approach is what can be called the classical narration about
Transylvania as a distinct geo-political space in Central Europe. 12' The pro-
ponents of this trend try to relativize the nationalist canon and to enrich his-
torical research by tackling previously neglected or avoided topics, such as
competing nationalist or federalist projects, religious or socio-demographic
aspects, inter-ethnic relations, the history of regionalism and patterns o f
Transylvania's post-1867 integration into Hungary and post-1918 integration
into Romania. 128
The third - "revisionist" - approach has emerged more recently, and is
represented by historians, sociologists, and anthologist grouped around the
Center for Transylvanian Studies, the Department of History at the Babe홢-
Bolyai University in Cluj, and new journals such as Transylvania Review,
Altera and Echinox.129 The Center for Transylvanian Studies was established
in 1991 in Cluj as a branch of the Romanian Cultural Institute. The Center
devotes its research activity to "the understanding of Transylvania's past and
present" by focusing mainly on "historical demography, family and society,
the role of the Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church, the emergence of Communist
regimes in Europe, the history and the current situation of the minorities liv-
ing in Romania (and especially in Transylvania), and the cultural and artistic
national context. The few outside collaborators included historians from Bucharest and last, and
more rarely, from Hungary and Germany. Contributions on regional or European history were
minimal, amounting only to 13 authors and 14 articles for the entire period. See Stelian Mdndrut,
"Cercetarea istorica actua]A (1982-1995)" [Current historical research (1982-1995), Anuarul In-
stitutului de Istorie Cluj, XXXIV (1995), pp. 15-23, here p. 21. ,
126. The most representative work of this trend is a book sponsored by the former nationalist
mayor of Cluj, Gheorghe Funar: Anton Dragoescu, ed., Istoria Romaniei. Transilvania, 2 vols.
(Cluj-Napoca: Gheorghe Bariliu, 1997-99). Note the double title of the book that firmly situates
local history of Transylvania within the national history of the Romanians.
127. Iordachi, Turda, "Politikai megb홢k6l6s," p. 137.
128. See Camil Mure5anu, Transilvania intre medieval $i modern [Transylvania, between
medieval and modern] (Cluj-Napoca: Fundatia Cultural Romana 1996); Liviu Maior, 1848-
18A9: Romdni si unguri in revolulie [1848-1849. Romanians and Hungarians in the revolution]
(Bucuresti: Editura Enciclppedica, 1998); 홢tefania MihAilcscu, Transilvania in lupta' de idei.
Conrroverse privind statutut Transilvaniei [Transylvania in the disputes of ideas. Conirovetsies
over the status of Transylvania], 3 Parts (Bucuresti: Silex, 1996, 1997); Gheorghe lancu, She
Ruling Council. The Integration of Transilvania into Romania, 1918-1920 (Cluj-Napoca: Fun-
da(ia CulturalA Românä, 1995).
129. lordachi, Turda, "Politikai megbekeles," p. 138. '
life of Transylvania." Since 1992, the center publishes the quarterly Transyl-
vanian Review and a collection o f books, grouped in five thematic series. 130
Nowadays, "revisionist" historians examine critically the empirical orien-
tation of Romanian historiography and the lack 'of dialogue with the
neighboring historiographies. They expose the limitation of the nationalist
canon of history-writing and propose a pluralist view, focusing on the inter-
action of all ethnic groups living in Transylvania and favoring common ele-
ments of their shared history. They approach the problems of nation- and
state-building with the specific tools and methods of social and intellectual
history, by concentrating on the study of regional patterns of elite formation,
t h e h i s t o r y o f r e g i o n a l i s m , a n d t h e i m a g e o f t h e "other." 131 '
A major dimension of the new 'revisionist' approach was to "de-mystify

Transylvania" by engaging in a "critical analysis of its identity and of its im-
age in the Romanian public consciousness."'32 For example, Toader Nicoara
explores collective mentalities and social imaginary of Transylvanian Roma-
nians during the long eighteenth century, a period marked by the transition
from the old regime to the Habsburg type of modernity.133 The latter, Nicoara
argues, decisively shaped Transylvania's historical experience. "Although not
very different form the Western one," the Habsburg project of modernity
was, nevertheless, "another type of modernity" based on a peculiar combina-
tion of late humanism, Baroque and the Enlightenment. '
Nicoara defines Transylvania as "a melting pot of various populations and
historical and ethno-linguistic traditions, with different origins and dialects,
with traditional confessions of the Orient and Occident, to which one should
130. The Center for Transylvanian Studies published to date 26 books, with a total circula-
tion of roughly 100,000 copies (in French, German and English). Its thematic series are: the Bib-
liotheca Rerum Transsilvaniae (with 28 volumes), Documenta (5 volumes), Oameni care au fost
(4 volumes), Interference (6 volumes) and Punct/Contrapunct (2 volumes).
131. See Florin Gogalxan and Sorin Mitu, eds., Studii de istorie a Transilvaniei. Specific re-
' gional I! deschidere europeand [Studies on the history of Transylvania: Regional character and
European openriess] (Cluj: Asociapia istoricilordin Transilvania 홢iBanat, 1994); Florin Gogâlfan
and Sorin Mitu, Viafa privatd, mentalitðli colective si imaginar social In Transilvania [Private
life, collective mentalities, and social imaginary in Transylvania] (Cluj: Asociafia istoricilor din
Transilvania B a n a t , 1995-96).
132. Mitu, "Iluzii 홢i realit홢(i transilvane," p. 77. The research agenda of young historians on
Transylvania was influenced by the work of their mentor, the eminent early modernist cultural
historian Pompiiiu Teodor, who was specializing in the cultural life of Transylvanian Romanians
and the history of ideas in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nine-
, 홢 teenth century, placing Transylvanian history into a Central European perspective. On Punipiliu
Teodor's vision on the place of Transylvania in the history of the wider Central European space,
see "Transilvania spre un nou discurs istoriografic" [Transylvania toward a new historiographi-
cal discourse], Xenopoliana, I, nos. 1-4 (1994), 59-63; and "Istorie româneascà - istorie euro-
peana" [Romanian history-European history], Vatra, 23, no. 262 (1993), 12-14.
133. 'Toader Nicoara, Transilvania la inceputurile timpurilor moderne 1680-1800. Societate
rural6 qi mentatitafi colective [Transylvania at the beginning of the modem period: 1680-1800.
Rural society and collective mentalities] (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1997). ,I .

add the variants added by reformation and counter-reformation."13 He high-
lights the Romanians' experience of social marginality and political exclusion
and their struggle to achieve social and political emancipation, pointing out
the "deficit of cohabitation" among Romanians, Hungarians and Germans.
Nicoara also identifies collective visions of time and space common to Tran-
sylvanian Romanians, describing their symbolic geographies as concentric
circles made up of the autarchic world of the village; the mythical world of
the antiquity represented mainly by the legendary Egypt and the Orient; the
vision of Christian Europe having as main reference points Byzantium, Rome
and Moscow; and the "concrete" Central European space revolving around
the Danubian space of the Habsburg Monarchy and regarded by Transylva-
nians as their homeland.
Continuing in many ways Nicoara's analysis, Sorin Mitu'35 maps the
mechanisms of constructing the modern collective identity of the Romanian
elites in Transylvania during the "long first half of the nineteenth century," at
the beginning of the modem era. Mitu explores the formation of national
stereotypes o f "Romanianness" in relation to other ethnic groups - Jews,
Germans, Hungarians, and Gypsies - and analyses pejorative and positive
self-stereotypes concerning the moral, linguistic and religious qualities of
Romanians. While noting that Transylvanian Romanians regarded themselves
as an integral part of a pan-Romanian national community, Mitu identifies
nevertheless the existence of a "Transylvanian specificity," shaped by local
issues and expressed by long-lasting regional stereotypes.
In addition to Transylvania, the history of the Banat has emerged as one of
the main focuses o f regional historical research in post-Communist Romania,
the province being seen as a repository of Central European traditions.'36
Among the few historians who studied the history of the Banat from a re-
gional perspective, one should mention Nicolae Bocsan, Valeriu Leu and
Victor Neumann, who provided overviews of the Enlightenment in East Cen-
tral Europe and studied the mechanisms of identity formation and the transfer
of political ideas in the early modem and modern period. 137 In Ideologie 홢i
134. Nicoara, Transilvania, p. 16.

135. Sorin Mitu, Geneza identitafii na/ionale la romanii ardeleni (Bucure홢ti: Humanitas,
1997). Translated into English as: National idenrity of Romanians in Transylvania (Budapest-
New York: CEU Press, 2001), p. 4.
136. For overviews, see Nicolae Bocsan and Stelian Mdndrul. "Istoriografia regionald intre
anii 1990-1995: Cazul Transilvaniei 홢ial Banatului" [Regional historiography between 1990 and
1995: The case of'rransylvania and the Banat], Transilvanica, 1, no. 1 (1999), 7-44; and Nicolae
Bocsan, "Istoriografia banateana lntre multiculturalism 홢i identitate nationals" [Historiography
from the Banat between multiculturalism and national identity], Banatica, 14 (1996), pp: 265-82.
137. Nicolae Boc홢an, Ideea de naliune la romanii din Transilvania qi Banat: secolill al 11'IX '
lea [The idea of the nation at the Romanians in Transylavania and the Banat: The nineteenth cen-
tury] (Cluj-Napoca: Presa UniversitarA Clujana, 1997}; See Valeriu Leu, Modernizare si imo-
bilism. Sate si oameni din Banat la inceputul teacului XX in documente memorialistice [Mod-
ernization and immobilism: Villages and people of the Banat at the beginning of the twentieth

fantasmagorie, Neumann underscored the cleavage between two traditions:
1) the Habsburg tradition o f political thought, that of cosmopolitanism devel-
oped in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, which was instrumental
in successfully avoiding inter-ethnic and inter-confessional conflicts within
the empire, and 2) national ideologies elaborated in the revolutionary Roman-
tic period by intellectual elites of various ethnic groups within the empire,
w h i c h o p p o s e d A u s t r i a n c o s m o p o l i t a n i s m . 13S
Historians, anthropologists and sociologists have also explored forms of
multiple identities, mechanisms of constructing ethnic identities, mentalities,
urban culture and urban landscape in the Banat, regarded as a frontier region
of inter-ethnic cohabitation, mainly during the nineteenth and the twentieth
centuries. 139 Works on the Communist period point out the instrumentaliza-
tion of ethnic and social differences by the Communist regime, dramas of de-
portation and repression experienced by various ethnic groups in the province
(mostly Germans and Serbs), and their responses and strategies of accommo-
dation to official policies. 140
Together with the Banat, another relevant case study for the manner in
which the Habsburg legacy is interpreted in post-Communist Romanian stud-
ies is the history of Bukovina. Part of the Habsburg Empire from 1774 to
1918, Bukovina was an imperial borderland where three different projects o f
nation- and state-building, namely the Austrian, the Romanian and the
Ukrainian, were overlapping. Before 1918, the province was nevertheless an
example of multi-ethnic coexistence - political elites of various ethnic groups
collaborating in the Viennese parliament. 141 The key to the success of the
Bukovinean "experiment" seemed to be the numerical equilibrium among
major ethnic groups. The province had one of the most diverse ethnic compo-
sitions in the empire, but none of its ethnic communities held an absolute ma-
jority.
During the Communist period and the first post-Communist years, na-
tional historiographies focused almost unilaterally on the history of their re-
century in Memorial documents] (Re홢ita. Banatica, 1998); and Victor Neumann, The Temptation
o f Homo Europaeus: The Genesis o f the modern spirit in Central and Southeastern Europe
(Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1993); and Multicultural idenfities in a Europe o f
r e g i o n s The case o f Banat County (Budapest: Collegium Budapest, 1996).
138. Victor Neumann, Ideologie ,홢i fanlusmagorte. Perspective comparative asupra gdndirii
politice in Europa Est-Centrala [Ideology and phantasmagoria. Comparative perspectives on po-
litical thought iri East-Central Europe] (Iagi: Polirom, 2001), p. 199.
139. See, for example the research dossier "Frontiere identitare in Banat," [Identity frontier
in the Banat], A Treia Europa, 1, no. 2 (1998), 203-333.
'140. Qn oral history research on mechanisms o f ethnic and social identity-formation in a de-
portee village during the early Communist regime, see Smaranda Vultur, Istorie traita; istorie
povestiia:홢 Deportarea in Baragan (19.51-1956j (Stories lived and retold: The deportation in the
Baragan plain, 1951-1956] (Timi홢oara: Amarcord, 1997).
. 141. See Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater România: Regionalism, Nation Build-
ing, a n d Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca, NY-London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995), p. 56.

spective ethnic groups in the province.'4z In the late 1990s, this narrow histo-
riographical perspective began to gradually change, Romanian and foreign
historians exploring the Habsburg legacy in the province, and engaging in
explicit relational comparisons between the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural
imperial order and the ethnic and cultural homogenization that occurred in
the inter-war period under Romanian rule.'43 Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, professor
of German literature at the University of last, explored the rich cultural life of
the Austrian-ruled Czernowitz at the beginning of the twentieth century, fo-
cusing mainly on the work and biography of Paul Celan (1920-1970).144 In a
solid monograph on the province entitled Die Rumclnisierung der Bukowina,
Marianne Hausleitner explored the politics of ethnic homogenization con-
ducted in Bukovina between 1918-1944, culminating with the extermination
of Jews during World War Two. 145
Post-1989 historiographical debates over issues of symbolic geographies
and multiple imperial legacies in Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat have
thus been greatly stimulated by the "rediscovery" o f local and regional his-
tory/ While writing within the framework of national history, historians spe-
cializing in regional history underscored local specificities, placing them
within the larger Central European context.
To sum up, Romanian intellectuals differentiate between two main histori-
cal zones: the Old Kingdom, composed of the principalities of Moldova and
Wallachia whose history is treated as part of the Byzantine and Ottoman leg-
acy, followed by political modernization emulating the French political and
institutional model in the modem period; and territories that were part of the
Habsburg Empire and later Austria-Hungary, that were shaped by the Habs-
burg project of modernity. There have been passionate debates in Romanian
culture over which legacy has prevailed in the longue duree: the Central
142. See works by Israeli, German and Romanian authors: Franz Lang, ed., Buchenland: 150
Jahre Deutschtum in d e r Bukowina (Munchen: Verlag des Sudostdeutschen Kulturwerks, 1 9 6 1);
Rudolf Wagner, Deutsches Kulturleben in d e r Bukowina (Wien: Eckart-schriften, 1981); Hugo
Gold, Geschichte der Juden in d e r Bukowina, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Olamenu, 1958, 1962); Nicolae
Ciachir, Din istoria Bucovinei 1775-1944 (Bucure§ti: Editura Didactica 4i Pedagogica, 1993);
and Mircea Grigorovita, Din istoria colonizàrii Bucovinei (Bucure§fi: Editura Didactica 4i Peda-
logics, 1996).
143. Emanuel Turczynski, Geschichte d e r 8ukowina in d e r Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: Harris-
sowitz, 1993); Hildrun Glass, Zerbrochene Nachbarschaft. Das deutsch7jiidische Verhaltnis in
Rumanien l918-193홢 (Miinchen: Oldenbourg, 1996); Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, ed., Judisches
St6dtebild Czernowitz (Frankfurt: Jüdischer Verlag, 1998); Isabel ROskau-Rydel, ed., Deutsche
Geschichte im Osten Europas. Galiz ien, Bukowina, Moldau (Berlin: Siedler, 1999); and Harald
Hepprer, ed., Czernowitz. Die Geschichte einer ungew6hniiehen Stadt ( k i l n : B6h]au, 2000).
144. See Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, Paul Celan $i " m e r i d i a n u l " sau [Paul Celan and hi5 "merid-
ian"] (I홢j: Polirom, 1998); Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, Paul Celan: Biographie unrl 7)rMfp)teM- "
tionlBiographie et interpretation (lasi: Polirom, 2000), Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, Jacques Le Rider,
eds., Metropole und Provinzen in Altosrerreich (1880-1918) (Iasi: Polirom, 1996).
145. Mariana Hausleitner, Die Rumanislerung der Bukowina. Die Durchsetzung des nation-
alstaatlichen Ansprucls Grossrumaniens I918-1944 (Munchen: Oldenbourg, 2001). ,
European one in Transylvania, the Banat and Bukovina, or the Byzantine-
Ottoman one in Wallachia and Moldova.
The survey initiated by the journal A Treia Europa asking leading Roma-
nian intellectuals to position themselves in relation to Central Europe is illus-
trative of Romanians' mixed attitudes toward the Central European s p a c e s
Few intellectuals tended to restrict Central European influences to the former
Habsburg provinces, such as Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat. For the
historian Ion Bulei, "the Old Kingdom is to a lesser extent linked to what can
be called the spirit o f Central Europe. But in Transylvania, the Banat and
Bukovina this link is more pronounced, not necessarily due to several per-
sonalities, but to certain cultural mentalities. [ . . . ] In Transylvania and the
Banat, the relation to Europe is stronger than in Bucharest, in the sense that
there is no artificial effort to embrace Western forms."147 Intellectuals affili-
ated with the research group of the "Third Europe" capitalized almost in-
variably on the distinct cultural identity of the Banat, investing it with a lead-
ing role in disseminating Central European values in the Romanian space.
The writer Monica Spiridon argued that "the only region of Romania with a
sure monolithic Central European character is the Banat."148 The writer
Mircea Anghelescu claimed that Timi§oara, the capital of the Banat, is "the
best and most representative part" of the Central European spirit and way o f
life. 149 .
A majority of Romanian intellectuals argued, nevertheless, that Central
European culture has a generic relevance for Romania, pointing out that, in
terms of size,, the area of Habsburg influence is larger, mostly if one also
takes into account the temporary Austrian penetration in Oltenia (1719-
1739). The writer Eugen Uricaru argued that "more than 75 percent of the
Romanian territory can be put under the umbrella of [...] Central Europe's
cultural influence."150
Other intellectuals attempt to reconcile Romania's Southeastern and Cen-
tral European components, arguing that, given its geographical position and
. historical legacies., Romania merged Balkan and Central European cultures
into an original syncretism, ironically called "Central European Balkanism."
Victor Ivanovici defined the Romanian culture as "Central European in rela-
tion to the Balkan realm," a bridge linking "the European and the Byzantine
spaces." In view of multiple convergences, one should thus speak of a syn-
cretic imperial legacy in Romania, combining Austrian, Ottoman and Russian
influences, treated from a relational perspective.
146. A Treia Europa, 1 (1997) and 2 (1998).

147. Ibid., 1, p. 23. '
148. Ibid.,I, no. 1 (1997), 31.
1 149.1bid., p. 18.
150./forf.,l,no.2(1997),39. 1 i .
. Despite the wide range o f attitudes toward the Central European space,
these passionate debates have had a strong impact on post-Communist cul-
tural and political life: nowadays, general country presentations included in
textbooks and official websites of state institutions (re)locate Romania pre-
ponderantly in Central Europe rather than in Southeastern Europe, as had
b e e n t h e e s t a b l i s h e d c u s t o m a r y tradition. 151 .
Conclusion ,
On the whole, even though the three cases are divergent in many respects,
we can establish a number of common traits in the treatment o f (East) Central
Europe as a historical region. Were we to look for any proof of the vitality of
the concept of (East)Central Europe, we would find it in the huge number of
conferences dealing with the region. While conference volumes abound, they
contain, as a rule, case studies from various countries rather than genuine
comparisons. Thus, although there is a huge potential in comparative and
transnational perspectives on the history of regions, the interest in the field is
still a promise rather than fulfillment.
Analyzing the complex debates and alternative visions of Central Europe
in the three cases, one can get a more balanced picture of the uses and abuses
of symbolic geographical categories. While it remains uncontestable that re-
gional narratives were often exposed to political contingencies and some-
times were even overtly ideological, we cannot discard all these ideas as
merely buttressing political projects. The arguments constructing some kind
of common regional space often served as genuine models o f interpretation,
trying to make sense o f the distinctions and similarities of cultures which of-
ten compete among each other, although they feature common historical
legacies. As the three case studies highlighted, the heuristic value of talking
about (East) Central Europe does not stem from the - hopeless - exercise o f
defming the exact shape of the historical region based on any "objective"
marker. What one can gain, however, from thinking in terms of a Central
European framework of interpretation is the drive for historical comparison, a
permanent challenge to retain the complexity of the units of analysis, the plu-
rality of scales as well as the fuzziness of the very categories of comparison.
As hopefully attested by our overviews, such a comparative framework is
especially fruitful for discussing a wide range at problems: the politics o f the
estates existing in composite state-structures, the creation of a framework of
identification (in terms of "political nationhood," for instance) that reaches
well beyond the collapse of the "ancien regime" in this part of the word; the
151. See the official site of the Romanian presidency, at littp://www.presidenc홢.ro twhich'
places Romania in "the center of Europe and in the northern part of the Balkan Peninsula," and
respectively "in the southeastern part of Central Europe and in the northern part of the Balkan
peninsula, on the Lower Danube." See also the site of the Romanian government, at
http://domino.kappa.ro/guvem/istoria.html.
common or comparable structures caused by the co-existence and often clash
of empires and consequently of imperial legacies (Habsburg, Russian and Ot-
toman); the common patterns of nation-formation and ensuing national iden-
tity discourses; and, finally, the shared cultural traditions, most often "im-
ported" from "the West" but acquiring strong local coloring, ranging from
Gothic sculpture to constructivism, or from the lives o f saints to magic real-
ism.
The short reviews of Polish, Hungarian and Romanian historical literature
on the (East)Central European region allow tentative conclusions that may be
conveniently organized around such categories as "Ignorance," "Confusion,"
"Incompatibility," "Convergence" and "Inclusivism." .
1. Starting with ignorance: the historical cultures of all the East Central
European countries tend to overlook their neighbors. They imagine them-
selves as insulated from their geographical context and treat the "West" as
their only point o f reference. While arguably the broader cultural and politi-
cal consequences of a Westernizing attitude may be beneficial, in historical
sciences dismissing the regional context makes the understanding of impor-
tant processes impossible. It may lead historians to overstate the allegedly
exceptional stance of one's own nation and even to indulge in national self-
glorification, making one's nation "more Western" than the others.
2. Coming to confusion: the rhythm of development of interest in Central
European problems is clearly different in all three countries. While in chro-
nology and thematic orientation the Hungarian and the Polish debates were
parallel, it is worth noting that discussions in Poland and in Romania also
bear some resemblance. Both countries are outsiders to the Habsburg "core"
and have to define their attitude towards the idea of "Central Europe" as pro-
posed by Czechs and Hungarians. Hence Poles and Romanians sought to re-
formulate the idea, the Poles by broadening its scope to embrace Lithuania,
Belarus and Ukraine, and the Romanians by trying to re-define it from the
. perspective of the post-imperial "margins."
3. The incompatibility of results may be, to a certain degree, due to the
above-mentioned confusion. Each of the analyzed historiographies has its fa-
vorite fields. The Poles in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the socio-
economic debates about second serfdom, the Hungarians in the 1980s em-
braced the "Schorskean" discourse of specific features of the Central Euro-
pean fin-de-siecle urban culture, whereas Romanian historiography, rooted in
various symbolic geographical narratives, turned to Central Europe in the
1990s to push for the (re-)Europeanization of Romanian cultural-intellectual
heritage. Such incompatibilities may well stem from "objective" historical
differences (after all, Central European fin-de-siecle urban culture had a
greater impact on Budapest than on Warsaw or Bucharest). Incompatibilities
may, however, also result from the divergent research interests in these coun-
tries, and thus, indirectly, they might be conditioned by the inherent dyna-
mism o f each historiographical t r a d i t i o n . ,

4. Confusion and incompatibility, however, are matched by convergence.
Our case studies stress the practical convergence of attitudes of historians
who started with various (indeed, competing) theoretical assumptions of the
(East) Central European region. This, it may be argued, is normally the case
with historical research: whatever the methodological axioms in the introduc-
tion, most historians tend to intuitively adopt empirical attitudes when deal-
ing with concrete primary sources. This is encouraging: it gives hope that the
complicated picture of numerous contradictory definitions is much simpler
than it seems at first glance, and that definitions are not the most important
problem.
5. Finally, especially in view of the debates of the 1990s, when the Central
European paradigm was often rejected on the basis of its purported "Oriental-
ism," the question of the inclusivist/exclusivist character of the concept of
Central Europe demands some explanation. Surely, the terms denoting the
eastern and central parts of our continent are not innocent but charged with
political connotations. We realize the imperialist tinge of some of them, as
well as their exclusivist potential towards the territories or peoples that were
not conceptualized as belonging to "our" region. Yet, this is not the whole
story. We do not consider the phrase that forms the title of the present journal
to be so hopelessly politicized as to make any analytical use impossible; not
more, at least, than any other concept historians use, as e.g., class, nation, re-
ligion, state, family, liberalism, modernity, revolution, etc. These concepts
are equally laden with value judgments, but nobody seriously considers ban-
ning them from the historians' vocabulary. Why should the case of East Cen-
tral Europe be different?
This concept, we believe, has a strong potential to break the mental isola-
tion and ignorance as regards the neighbors, to "include" the adjacent nations
and territories into the narrative about one's own nation. Without denying the
very existence of this "exclusivist" element (usually directed by various au-
thors against Germany or Russia), we argue that the "inclusivist" potential is
infinitely stronger. Indeed, the regional approach might be one of the best
remedies against national exclusivism and prejudice. i
Our principal aim, however, is not to fight prejudices but to contribute to
historical knowledge. We do not want to state any "hard" methodological
credo since we seriously believe that in this case too sharp methodological
preferences might be pernicious to interesting and innovative research. For
the same reason, we do not propose to delineate clearly the frontiers o f the
region, nor to engage in futile discussions about "two," "three," or "four" his-
torical regions of Europe, or the relative merits of the concepts of "Eastern,"
"Central" or "East Central" Europe. This terminological confusion is an asset ,
rather than a handicap, as such clear-cut frontiers do not exist: they should be
delineated differently for each direction of research.
The regional attitude does not exclude any other methodological approach
but rather resounds with them: it is, so to say, a formal device that blocks no
way of research. Far from believing that some mythical "Central European-
ness" pervades the culture and consciousness of the inhabitants of the region,
what we dare to propose modestly is only that there are some subjects in
which the regional outlook does make sense. For these, we hope to open the
pages of this journal.


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RESEARCH DOSSIER: SYMBOLIC GEOGRAPHIES

MACIEJ JANOWSKI, CONSTANTIN IORDACHI

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL

It should be noted that Hungarians prefer to be

Why bother about historical regions? The flash of interest in Central

* "Social Customs," in Budapest Phonebook (2004-2005), no publisher given, p. 16 (Infor-

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The concept of (East) Central Europe in Hungary

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While conceptually these visions were hardly compatible, on the practical

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East European backwarclness undlor Central European nostalgia

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17. Peter Gunst, "Kelet-Eur6pa gazdasigi-t6xsadalmi fejtodesenek nehany kerdese" [Some

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39. Ferenc L. Lendvai, Kozep-Europa koncepciok [Conceptions of Central Europe] (Buda-

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make nemzetisegi kisebbsegek - kisebbségi politika a 20. sz6zadi Kelet-Kozep-Europ6ban [Da-

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Polish historiography and the concepts of (East) Central Europe ,

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What is (East) Central Europe?

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Explaining economic backwardness .

59. See especially Zofia Daszyóska-Golióska, "Srodkowo-Europejski zwiazek gospodarczy a

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60. Especially Jan Rutkowski, "Geneza ustroju folwarczno-panszczyznianego w Europie

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Some historians tried to analyze the specificity of Polish capitalism on a

Comparing national movements

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Contributions from art historians and literary historians

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Multiple imperial legacies and symbolic geographies in post-Communist

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Rontanian intellectuals as "late-comers " io the Central European club

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Although Romanian intellectuals regarded the concept of Central Europe

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., Esterhazy, i홢v6i gy Konrad and P홢ter N5das. ¡í

1 0 0 . See Gusztav Moln4r, "Problema transilvana" [The Transylvanian Problem], in Gabriel

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102. Sorin Mitu, "Iluzii 홢irealitati transilvane," ibid., pp. 66-79.

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Debates over historical regions in post-Communist historiography

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During the Communist regime, research on Southeastern Europe was re-

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120. On Polish-Moldovan relations, see Veniamin Ciobanu, Relafiile romdno-polone intre