Historical Regions

RESEARCH DOSSIER: SYMBOLIC GEOGRAPHIES
Maciej Janowski,
Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi
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 contextualizeand often relativizeestablished 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 PolishLithuanian commonwealth. Romanian historians
approached the issue from the perspective of local history, debating two alternative
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 debate 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 constructed and often exclusivist nature of symbolic geographical categories, the authors 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 of the annus mirabilis of 1989 has since then long waned. Even the
European Unions 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 continues to linger as a specialized sub-discipline, not much better off than, for example, railway history: a shelter
for innocent hobbyists and local patriots. Similarly, the fascination with the post
Social Customs, in Budapest Phonebook (20042005), no publisher given, 16 (Information pages in English).
East Central Europe/ECE, vol. 32, 2005, part 12, pp. 558.
Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi
Habsburg Mitteleuropa notwithstanding, 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 regions 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 of political power that were instrumental in creating
and popularizing them.
After the linguistic turn highlighted the importance of vocabulary, historians 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 national 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 innovations stemming from the tradition of comparative history
such as shared, connected, or relational history, the history of transfers and
histoire croise, attempt to shift the analytical emphasis to the multiple levels of
interaction among actorsrather than on the actors themselvesat 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 thinking in
terms of historical regions, the article focuses on historiographical debates over
symbolic geographies in three East-Central European countries: Hungary, Poland
and Romania. The first reason behind this choice is obvious: these countries hap-
1 For the theoretical framework of histoire croise, see Michael Werner and Bndicte
Zimmermann, Penser lhistoire croise: entre empirie et rflecivit, in Michael Werner and
Bndicte Zimmermann, eds., De la comparaison lhistoire croise (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 1552.
For a first application of histoire croise, see Bndicte Zimmermann, Claude Didry and Michael Werner, Histoire croise de la France et de lAllemagne (Paris: MSH, 1999). For the history of transfers see mainly Johannes Paulmann, Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer. Zwei Forschungsansntze zur europischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20 Jahrhunderts, Historische Zeitschrift, (1998) 3, 649685; Hartmut Kaelble, Der historische Vergleich.
Eine Einfhrung zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999). On the potential
agenda of transnational history, see Michael McGerr, The Price of the New Transnational
History, The American Historical Review, 96 (October 1991) 4, 10561067.
WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?
pen to be the native lands of the editors of this journal. 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 of Hungarian historical 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 referred to a divergent territorial framework. In Romania, the
cultural and historical legacy of Central Europe was traditionally contrasted to an
alternative Southeast European framework of 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 account
almost exclusively articles published abroad. From this perspective, Milan Kunderas article The Tragedy of Central Europe, originally written in 1983 in French
and published in English in 1984 by the New York Review of Books, is generally
taken as the starting point of the rich international debate that followed. While
previous surveys of the concept of Central Europe have often focused on Diaspora
intellectuals and the impact of their writings in Western 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 dynamism of each case analyzed here (reinforced
by the authors forcefully subjective 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 variety of regional narratives in historical thought and to shed light on the interpretative potentials of the paradigm of Central Europe.
THE CONCEPT OF (EAST-)CENTRAL EUROPE IN HUNGARY
The emergence of the Central European historiographical paradigm
The concept of Central Europe has high cultural prestige and a considerable
historical tradition in Hungary. As in the entire Habsburg Monarchy, it emerged
after several nineteenth-century antecedentsas 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 Oszkr Jszi, who read Naumanns proposal
2 Peter M. Stirk, ed., Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994).
not in its original context, promoting a socio-political integration of Germany and

the small nations in the zone of Austrian and German influence, but as a framework capable of resolving the ardent nationality conflicts by incorporating these
nations into a federal scheme.
While the federalist plans failed in the storms of the Great War and the ensuing revolutions and counter-revolutions, the concept of Central Europe remained
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
which labeled Jszis circle as one of the main culprits of the dissolution of historical Hungary, these authors had to restrict themselves to cultivating high culture.
The most important example of this trend was the cultural periodical Apollo, edited
by Istvn Gl, 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 of Eastern Europe, with the
underlying assumption that the real place of the Hungarian people (occasionally
contrasted to the urban others) is among the Eastern European peasant nations,
whose intertwining destiny was witnessed by Bla Bartk and Zoltn Kodlys
musicological research as well.4
While conceptually these visions were hardly compatible, on the practical
and personal level there were many possible links and combinations. For instance,
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 modern constitutional doctrine around the Crown of St.
Stephen.5 In broader ideological terms, the emerging new reformist cultural elite of
3 The most sophisticated version of this narrative is that of Gyula Szekf. See his llam s nemzet. Tanulmnyok a nemzetisgi krdsrl [State and Nation: Studies on the nationality question] (Budapest: Magyar Szemle Trsasg, 1942).
4 The populist perspective of Eastern European peasant nations had many faces. It
could catalyze the somewhat confused but definitely conciliatory vision of Lszl Nmeth,
but it could also intersect with the paradigm of Volksgeschichte, which fed into a new version
of radical ethno-politics. See Elemr Mlyusz, Magyar trtnettudomny [Hungarian historiography] (Budapest: Bolyai Akadmia, 1942) and Npisgtrtnet [Ethnic history] (Budapest: MTA Trtnettudomnyi Intzet, 1994).
5 Ferenc Eckhart, A szentkorona-eszme trtnete [The history of the idea of the Holy
Crown] (Budapest: Magyar Tudomnyos Akadmia, 1941).
the late thirties was rooted in the populist discourse, but it also appropriated some
remnants from the Central European federalist heritage, while retaining a certain
dose of the traditional Hungarian state-nationalist discourse, which stressed the
multiethnic character of historical Hungary and looked forward to some form of
restoration of this framework, although not necessarily in its full pre-1918 shape.
This ambiguity marked many of the young historians who set to study the history
of neighboring peoples in the late 1930s, most of whom reached maturity in the
short democratic period after World War II.
Between 1945 and 1948, historical research in the Central European context
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 neighboring countries to provide a
response to the successful historical propaganda of the Little Entente (such as
works by Nicolae Iorga, Gheorghe I. Brtianu, 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 Eastern European peasant nations, while again others were raised in the spirit
of Gyula Szekfs historicist perspective, combining an apologetic interest in defending the Hungarian position with a real scientific effort to actually compete
with the historians of the neighbors on the battlefields of the shared past. The
generation of Domokos Kosry, Zoltn I. Tth,7 Lszl Makkai, and Lszl Hadrovics, to mention but a few, wrote a series of important works in this short period.8 Even though the loci of their co-operation (like the Teleki Institute) were
6 Not much has been written on the history of modern Hungarian historiography.
Probably the best overview is still Steven Bela Vardy, Modern Hungarian Historiography (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1976). Pter Gunsts A magyar trtnetrs trtnete [The
history of Hungarian historiography] (Budapest: Csokonai Kiad, 2002) is very sketchy. Most
recently, see Arpad von Klimos broad-ranging interpretation: Nation, Konfession, Geschichte.
Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im europischen Ausland (18601948) (Munich:
Oldenburg, 2003), which, however, concentrates more on historical culture than historiography proper. This historical overview follows the argument of a longer article on post-1989
Hungarian historiography, written by Balzs Trencsnyi and Pter Apor, to be published in the
volume edited by Sorin Antohi, Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (forthcoming, BudapestNew York: CEU Press).
7 The least known of this group, Zoltn I. Tth, was an eminent scholar of Romanian
national ideology, who was accidentally shot dead at a demonstration during the 1956 Revolution. His most important work was re-edited recently: Az erdlyi romn nacionalizmus els
vszzada [The first century of Romanian nationalism in Transylvania] (Cskszereda: ProPrint, 2000).
8 This implied a genuine interest in transgressing the nationalist framework of pre1945 historiography. See, for example, the books on HungarianSlovak and Hungarian
Romanian common pasts: Istvn Borsody, Magyar-szlovk kiegyezs [The HungarianSlovak compromise] (Budapest: Officina 1945); Lszl Makkai, ed., Magyar-romn kzs
10
ultimately destroyed, and some of them were temporarily marginalized in the fifties, these scholars had a remarkable long-term impact on Hungarian historiography.9 The legacy of this generation opened up the Hungarian historiography of the
196070s 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 asserting the specificity of the given nation.
This meant that the Hungarian anti-Stalinist turn in historiography did not revert
to a myopic nationalism but retained a strong interest in the broader region and
sought to place the Hungarian historical phenomena into a wider regional context.
Eastern-European backwardness and/or Central European nostalgia

The efforts of the above-mentioned historians were in some sense complemented by 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 ranging from Russia to
Germany east of 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 perspective was developed by Zsigmond
Pl Pach, who focused on early-modern agrarian history and sought to document
the moment of divergence between East and West, in view of the Engelsian concept of second serfdom.10 The most sophisticated formulation of this theory of
East European backwardness can be found in the works of economic history by
Gyrgy Rnki and Ivn 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 Palots, Emil Niederhauser, Dniel Csatri, Gyrgy Spira,
mlt [The HungarianRomanian common past] (Budapest, Teleki Pl Tudomnyos Intzet,

1948).
09 See Domokos Kosry, 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: Central and South-East Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 124138.
10 Zsigmond Pl Pach, Nyugat-eurpai s magyarorszgi agrrfejlds a XVXVII.
szzadban [Western-European and Hungarian agrarian development in the 1617th centuries] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1963).
11 See, for instance, Ivn T. Berend, Gyrgy Rnki, Kzp-Kelet-Eurpa gazdasgi fejldse a 1920. szzadban [The economic development of East-Central Europe in the 19
20th centuries] (Budapest: Kzgazdasgi s Jogi Knyvkiad, 1969); Ivn T. Berend, Vlsgos vtizedek: Kzp- s Kelet-Eurpa a kt vilghbor kztt [Decades of crisis. Central
and Eastern Europe between the two world wars] (Budapest: Gondolat, 1982).
11
Endre Arat and Endre Kovcs, set to work on the history of the nationality question in Hungary in view of the broader Eastern European regional context. Their
regional narrative was also influenced by the fact that many of 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 Eastern European historiography and that of Eastern
Europe writ large even after 1989.12 Niederhausers 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 post1956 Hungarian research on Eastern Europe. They display a sincere empathy towards all the nations in the region, devoid of farfetched generalizations at the expense of countries and cultures historically in conflict with Hungary, and also featuring remarkable positivist efforts to collect and organize source materials. At the
same time, they are characterized by a rather schematic model of development,
rooted in the Marxist vision of the relationship of socio-economic basis and ideological superstructure. When turning to historiographical narratives, 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 marginalized
in Hungarian historical production and remained alive only in the works of migr
politicians and historians, who sought to appeal to Western solidarity on the basis
of the purported regional otherness of some of the countries of the Soviet Bloc,
and also nourished some sort of sympathy for the plans of a Central European
federation serving as a neutral buffer-zone between the Soviet Union and the Anglo-American sphere of interest.13 However, with the increasing participation of
Hungarian scientific institutions in the European academic joint ventures and the
emerging political program of harmonizing Hungary with the Western democracies, the concept of Central Europe once again came to the fore and shaped research projects which were previously at the margins of official cultural politics.
12 Emil Niederhauser, Nemzetek szletse Kelet-Eurpban [The birth of nations in
Eastern Europe] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1976); A nemzeti megjulsi mozgalmak Kelet-Eurpban [The movements of national revival in Eastern Europe] (Budapest: Akadmiai Kiad,
1977); A trtnetrs trtnete Kelet-Eurpban [The history of historiography in Eastern
Europe] (Budapest: HistriaMTA Trtnettudomnyi Intzete, 1995); see also his more
recent overview, Kelet-Eurpa trtnete [History of Eastern Europe] (Budapest: Histria
MTA Trtnettudomnyi Intzete, 2001); in English: Emil Niederhauser, A History of Eastern Europe since the Middle Ages (BoulderNew York: Social Science Monographs, 2003).
13 Francis S. Wagner, ed., Toward a New Central Europe: A Symposium on the Problems of the Danubian Nations (Astor Park, Flo.: Danubian Press, 1971).
12
This was the case with the work of Pter Hank, whose fascination with the
everyday life and high culture of turn-of-the-century Budapest was revalorized in
view of the growing respect for the common Austro-Hungarian heritage. By the
seventies, dealing with Austria lost its original political overtones connected to the
anti-Habsburg component of the national discourse and came to place Hungary in
a symbolic neighborhood that was more respectable than the Eastern Bloc. In
addition, Hank was at the forefront of the rediscovery of Oszkr Jszi,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.15 Hanks main contribution was to reintegrate the
Hungarian half of the Habsburg Monarchy in its post-1867 form into its original
cultural, political and economical setting, documenting the breath-taking process
of socio-cultural modernization at the turn of the century and thus challenging the
latent 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 backwardness of Eastern Europe and the rather nostalgic exaltation of the symbolic dualism
of the Garden and the Workshop in the context of fin-de-sicle Central Europe
were hardly compatible, there were many fine threads that connected the two.
From the mid-1960s onwards, the Kdr-regime came to be considered a kind of
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 modernization attempts in Hungary in the late 19th
century, fit into this perspectivevery 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 independence, Hungarian society concentrated on its material well-being, and the supporters of the Socialist embourgeoisement of the 1960s and 1970s could look back
with sympathy to the rise of the bourgeoisie in fin-de-sicle Hungary. The picture of
belated, but nevertheless powerful socio-economic development in a peripheral
society could be interpreted as an apology for the eternal realist drive of Hungarian
politicsin the shadow of vast uncontrollable forces, trying to do whatever could
be done. This perspective was obviously permeating the liberal Kdrist version of
social history that earned international prestige for Rnki and Berend, but it was
underlying the politically more ambivalent vision of Hank, too.
14 Pter Hank, Jszi Oszkr dunai patriotizmusa [The Danubian patriotism of Oszkr Jszi] (Budapest: Magvet, 1985).
15 The most important exegete of Jszi was Gyrgy Litvn. See his Magyar gondolat,
szabad gondolat [Hungarian thought, free thought] (Budapest: Magvet, 1978).
16 Pter Hank, A Kert s a Mhely [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: Princeton University Press, 1998).
13
Nevertheless, the gradual rediscovery of many intellectual paradigms of the

pre-Communist periods created a plurality of approaches and discourses and
loaded the issue of historical regions with immediate relevance.17 It is not surprising that from the mid-1970s onwards the question of Hungarys symbolic geographical self-positioning became an important issue in the intellectual debates.18
The most well-known product of this atmosphere is of course Jen Szcss Sketch
on the three regions of Europe.19 Since its appearance, the essay was hailed as a
Central Europeanist manifesto along the lines of Milan Kundera or Czesaw
Miosz, even though actually it was rooted rather in the local debates on backwardness and the national contents of history, the so-called Erik Molnr-debate.20
Szcs was consciously turning back to the cultural atmosphere of the 19451948
periodas it is well known, the original version of the text was written for the
Festschrift of Istvn Bib, whose ideas about the misery of East European small
states provided the starting-point for Szcs. Besides re-launching Bibs ideas,
Szcss main intellectual 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 protracted 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 19th century and, finally, the Socialist transformation. While Szcs accepted the hypothesis of a profound structural difference
between Western Europe in the traditional sense and Hungary, Bohemia or Poland, he challenged the binary opposition of East and West, suggesting the existence of a transitional zone, which featured the Western social and cultural phe-
17 Pter Gunst, Kelet-Eurpa gazdasgi-trsadalmi fejldsnek nhny krdse,

[Some prolems of the socio-economic development of Eastern Europe] Valsg, (1974) 2,
1631; and Emil Niederhauser, Kelet-Eurpa a magyar trtnettudomnyban, [Eastern
Europe in Hungarian historiography] Magyar Tudomny, (1978) 78, 500504.
18 The topical nature of the issue is documented by the appearance of the important
collection, edited by va Ring, ed., Helynk Eurpban. Nzetek s koncepcik a 20. szzadi
Magyarorszgon [Our place in Europe. Views and conceptions in twentieth-century Hungary] 2 vols., (Budapest: Magvet, 1986); see also Ivn T. Berend, Magyarorszg helye
Eurpban, [The place of Hungary in Europe], Valsg, (1982) 12, 122.
19 Vzlat Eurpa hrom trtneti rgijrl [Sketch on the three regions of Europe]
(Budapest: Magvet, 1983); in English: The three historical regions of Europe: an outline,
Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungariae, 29 (1983), 131184.
20 The key texts of Szcs are in his Nemzet s trtnelem [Nation and history] (Budapest: Gondolat, 1974), see especially A nemzet historikuma s a trtnetszemllet
nemzeti ltszge, [The historical aspect of the nation and the national perspective of history], 11188.
14
nomena in a more superficial manner, but which can be still clearly distinguished
from the Eastern patterns of development.
Szcss essay had an enormous impact in Hungary, launching a public debate 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 Pter Hank and Szcs himself.21 Arguing mainly from the
perspective of cultural history, Hank proposed a triangular model in which Central Europe, including Austria and Switzerland, would have been equidistant from
East and West. In turn, Szcs insisted that East-Central Europe, i.e. historical Bohemia, Hungary and the Polish Commonwealth were peripheries of the West.22
Obviously, the clash of these two conceptions 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. Hanks conception distanced the Center from the West but it
weaved together the destiny of Budapest and Viennawhile Szcs stressed the
divergence of the traditional Central European polities from Germany, but eventually asserted the compatibility of 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 Szcss work had a broader culturalpolitical
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 19701980s.23 Due mainly to the efforts of Tibor Klaniczay, already
in the 19601970s early-modern literary historians began to formulate comparative
projects with their regional counterparts, developing a vivid interaction especially
with Polish scholars. Beyond early modern literary history, Polish culture was always popular in Hungary, but in the 19601970s it acquired even stronger prestige
due to the relative liberty of expression and its vivid art scene.24 Although in differ-
21 Jen Szcs and Pter Hank, Eurpa rgii a trtnelemben [The regions of
Europe in History] (Eladsok a Trtnettudomnyi Intzetben 3.) (Budapest: MTA,
1986).
22 For a contemporary critical overview of the main points, see Gbor Gyni, Trtnszvitk haznk Eurpn belli hovatartozsrl, [Historical debates on the place of our
country within Europe], Valsg, (1988) 4, 7683; for the repercussions of the debate after
1989, see the writings by Zsigmond Pl Pach, Gbor Gyni and Pter Hank in BUKSZ,
(1991) 3, 351361; (1991) 4, 406409; (1992) 1, 610; (1992) 2, 145154.
23 Istvn Fried and Mihly Gyrgy Vajda were the protagonists of this perspective.
See, for instance, Istvn Fried, Kelet- s Kzp-Eurpa kztt: Irodalmi prhuzamok s szembestsek a kelet-kzp-eurpai irodalmak krbl [Between East and Central Europe: Literary
parallels and confrontations in the literatures of East-Central Europe] (Budapest: Gondolat,
1986).
24 The writer and literary historian Gyrgy Spir published an important volume on
drama in nineteenth-century Central Europe: A kzp-kelet-eurpai drma: A felvilgosodstl
15
ent spheres, Czech influence 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 Mukaovsk), gradually opening up to
a more complex cultural history paradigm as well. An important author in this vein
is Endre Bojtr, 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 object of
study.26
All this provided a context for the more directly political uses of the Central
European myth in the works of Gyrgy Konrd or Mihly Vajda, whose texts had a
comparable agenda to those of Kundera, namely, creating a new symbolic framework for the de-Sovietization of the region and also evoking some sense of responsibility in the Western intellectual and political elites for lEurope kidnappe.27 All
this reached its peak around 1989, when the discourse of Central Europe, which
was until then fulfilling a meta-political function, came to the fore and became an
important ingredient of the discursive arsenal of the (re-)emerging democratic regimes in the region.28
Wyspiaski szintzisig [East-Central European drama: From the Enlightenment to the synthesis of Wyspiaski] (Budapest: Magvet, 1986)and also wrote important novels and
dramas, evoking various Polish cultural references.
25 Endre Bojtr, Az ember felj...: A felvilgosods s a romantika a kzp- s keleteurpai irodalmakban [The man rises: Enlightenment and Romanticism in the literatures of
Central and Eastern Europe] (Budapest, Magvet, 1986); Endre Bojtr, Kelet-Eurpa vagy
Kzp-Eurpa? [Eastern Europe or Central Europe?] (Budapest: Szzadvg, 1993). The
second volume contains his essays from the 1980s.
26 Nyri Kristf, A Monarchia szellemi letrl [On the intellectual life of the Monarchy] (Budapest, Gondolat, 1980); Eurpa szln [On the edge of Europe] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1986).
27 Gyrgy Konrd, Eurpa kldkn [On the navel of Europe] (Budapest: Magvet,
1990); Mihly Vajda, Orosz szocializmus Kzp-Eurpban [Russian socialism in Central
Europe] (Budapest: Szzadvg, 1989).
28 For the debates of the turn of the decade, see Attila gh, Kzp-Eurpa felfedezse, [The discovery of Central Europe], Tiszatj, (1988) 11; Pter Hank, KzpEurpa keresi nmagt, [Central Europe in search of itself], Liget, 1 (1988) 1, 311; Emil
Niederhauser, A kelet-eurpai fejlds egysge s klnbzsge, [The unity and differences of Eastern-European development], Magyar Tudomny, (1989) 9, 668681; Pter
Hank, Kzp-Eurpa: az imaginrius rgi, [Central Europe: The imaginary region],
Liget, (1989) 3, 2031; Jnos Gyurgyk, ed., Kell-e neknk Kzp-Eurpa? A Szzadvg
klnkiadsa [Do we need Central Europe? Special issue of the journal Szzadvg] (Budapest, 1989); Kroly Halmos, Keresztszlen krs-krl: Kzp-Eurpa, [On the margins all
around: Central Europe], Tr s Trsadalom, (1990) 2, 8696; Gyrgy Gyarmati, Magyarorszg kzp-eurpaisga. Trtnelmi adottsgokjelenkori konzekvencik, [The CentralEuropeanness of Hungary. Historical conditionscontemporary consequences] in Jnos
16
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
findings 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 history,30 humanism,31 military history,32 or the history of mentalities.33 As
Mazsu, ed., Iparosods s modernizci. Tanulmnyok Rnki Gyrgy emlkre (Debrecen:

KLTE, 1991), 101124.
29 On the 1989 turn and its historiographical impact the first assessments in foreign
languages were by Csaba Sasfi, Die politische Wende und die Geschichtswissenschaften in
Ungarn, sterreichische Zeitschrift fr Geschichtswissenschaften, 1 (1991), 103108; and
Istvan Deak, Hungary, The American Historical Review, 97 (Oct. 1992) 4, 10411063.
Gbor Gyni published a number of polemic texts on the state of affairs of Hungarian historiography: see his Trtnszdiskurzusok [Historians discourses] (Budapest: LHarmattan,
2002) and Trtnetrsunk az vezred forduljn, [Our historical scholarship at the turn of
the Millenium], Szzadvg, j folyam, 18 (2000), 117140.
30 Gbor Klaniczay, Medieval Origins of Central Europe. An Invention or a Discovery? in Lord Dahrendorf, Yehuda Elkana, Aryeh Neier, William Newton-Smith and Istvn
Rv eds., The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences (BudapestNew York: CEU Press,
2000), 251264. See also his Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval
Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
31 Jzsef Jankovics, ed., Matthias Corvinus and the Humanism in Central Europe (Budapest: Balassi, 1994). See also Marianna D. Birnbaums Humanists in a Shattered World:
Croatian and Hungarian Latinity in the Sixteenth Century (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 1986), and Sndor Benes Egy kanonok hrom kirlysga. Rttkay Gyrgy horvt
histrija [The Three Kingdoms of one Prebend. The Croatian History by Gyrgy Rttkay]
(Budapest: Argumentum, 2000), which were the first serious attempts at reconstructing the
common horizons of Hungarian and Croatian early-modern intellectual history.
32 Gza Dvid and Pl Fodor, eds., Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central
Europe. The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest [The Ottoman Empire and its
heritage, politics, society and economy], vol. 20., (Leiden: Brill Academic Publisher, 2000).
Gza Plffy also made remarkable efforts to reintegrate Hungarian political and military
17
for more modern contexts, the Central European perspective was evoked especially in works dealing with pre-national or cross-national phenomena, 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 became an important heuristic tool for
narrating the history of Hungary. Drawing also on examples from the 1970-1980s,
such as the works by Domokos Kosry and Ervin Pamlnyi, 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 of nationalism.
One would expect that the events of 1989 brought an unprecedented flourishing 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 of serious political cracks among the countries, the utopian image of
Central Europe also became untenable. Interestingly, there is a certain 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 of the normative
images of Central Europe so prominent in the 1980s. It is indicative that in the
1990s only very few books were translated from the Western canon dealing with
Central Europe as a historical region (the works of Claudio Magris can be considered an exception). While Oskar Haleckis Borderlands of Western Civilization,37
history into its Central-European/Habsburg context: for instance, in A tizenhatodik szzad

trtnete [The history of the sixteenth century] (Budapest: Pannonica, 2000).
33 Istvn Gyrgy Tth, Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Central Europe
(BudapestNew York: CEU Press, 2000).
34 Victor Kardy and Yehuda Don, eds., A Social and Economic History of Central
European Jewry (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1990); Anik Prepuk, A zsidsg
Kzp- s Kelet-Eurpban a 1920. szzadban [Jews in Central and Eastern Europe in the
1920th centuries] (Debrecen: Csokonai, 1997); Tams Kende, The Language of Blood
Libels in Central and East European History, in Lszl Kontler, ed., Pride and Prejudice
(Budapest: History Department of the Central European University, 1994), 91104.
35 Andrs Bn D., Pax Britannica: Wartime Foreign Office Documents Regarding Plans
for a Postbellum East Central Europe (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, New York:
1997).
36 Mikls Molnr, A Concise History of Hungary (Cambridge: Cambride University
Press, 2001); Lszl Kontler, Millenium in Central Europe. History of Hungary (Budapest:
Atlantisz, 1999). See also Lszl Kontler, Introduction: Reflections on Symbolic Geography, European Review of History/Revue Europenne dHistoire, 6 (Spring 1999) 1, 914.
37 Oskar Halecki, A nyugati civilizci peremn: Kelet-Kzp-Eurpa trtnete (Budapest: OsirisSzzadvg, 1995).
18
and more recently Piotr Wandyczs The Price of Freedom38 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 inaccessible for the Hungarian audience. Finally, while the history of the idea of Central
Europe earned its first Hungarian monograph, locating the rise of 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.39
At the same time, the drive towards regional paradigms in the works of Ivn
T. Berend,40 or Ignc Romsics41 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
of 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, and thus challenging the unreflective
use of these terms.42
By the mid-1990s, the Hungarian public also became more sensitive to the
criticism targeting the discourse of Central Europe as an exclusivist paradigm. As
it is well-known, this criticism was based on the repercussions of the Orientalism
debate, pointing out the political instrumentalization of symbolic geographical
references. Not surprisingly, the focus of these arguments turned out to be the Balkans, and many of the authors, such as Maria Todorova or Milica Baki-Hayden
challenged the Central Europeanist discourse as a conscious tool of symbolic marginalization.
38 Piotr S. Wandycz, A szabadsg ra. Kelet-Kzp-Eurpa trtnete a kzpkortl mig

(Budapest: Osiris, 2004).
39 Ferenc L. Lendvai, Kzp-Eurpa koncepcik [Conceptions of Central Europe]
(Budapest: ron Kiad, 1997).
40 Ivn T. Berend, Central and Eastern Europe 19441993: Detour from the Periphery
to the Periphery. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
41 Ignc Romsics, Helynk s sorsunk a Duna-medencben [Our place and destiny in
the Danubian Basin] (Budapest: Osiris, 1996); Ignc Romsics, ed., Integrcis trekvsek
Kzp- s Kelet-Eurpban a 1920. szzadban [Ambitions of integration in Central and
Eastern Europe in the 1920th centuries] (Budapest: Teleki Lszl Alaptvny, 1997);
Nemzet, nemzetisg s llam Kelet-Kzp- s Dlkelet-Eurpban a 19. s 20. szzadban [Nation, nationality and the state in East-Central and Southeast Europe in the 1920th centuries] (Budapest: Napvilg, 1998).
42 Romsics, Nemzet, nemzetisg s llam, 1731.
19
While some of these debates became fairly well-known in the most internationally connected public (although, conspicuously, Todorovas book still awaits its
Hungarian translator), they did not succeed in undermining the cultural prestige of
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 marginalization of the other postCommunist countries beyond the borders of the erstwhile Habsburg Monarchy.
This went against the local knowledge that the classic models, such as that of
Szcs, were not consciously othering Southeast Europe, they rather disregarded it
completely, as the thrust of their argument was to accentuate the distinction between the East of the Russian 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 instance,
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 Hungarian interests. In this sense,
the emergence of pro-Czech cultural and political 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 suprematism. The growing interest in Czech history,43
which was traditionally neglected 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
of the Central European discourse had a certain exclusivist tinge, as it corresponded to the attempt of smuggling the Visegrd countries into the European
Union, while creating a strong distinction with the less-European post-socialist
regionsSerbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and former Soviet republicswhich 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,
43 It was signalized by the volume on Czechs in the Habsburg MonarchyLszl

Szarka, ed., Csehorszg a Habsburg-Monarchiban [Bohemia in the Habsburg Monarchy]
(Budapest: Gondolat, 1989), and also resulted in a number of other important works,
among them Tams Berkes pioneering attempt to narrate modern Czech intellectual history
for the Hungarian audience: A cseh eszmetrtnet antinmii [The antinomies of Czech intellectual history] (Budapest: Balassi, 2003).
20
where even the former strategic partners of the envisioned Central European region could be potential obstacles to each others aspirations to a smooth integration. While the Hungarian political elite did not develop a similar irritation to a
regional approach as for instance Vclav Klaus did, it became obvious that, at least
in the short run, this discourse 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 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) of translations from the historiographical output of these countries. Some
of the key works by, for example, Duan Kov, Lubomr Liptk 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 of 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 intellectuals 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.
44 Lucian Boia, Trtnelem s mtosz a romn kztudatban [History and myth in Romanian consciousness] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1999); Duan Kov, Szlovkia trtnete [History of Slovakia] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2001); Lubomr Liptk, Szz vnl hosszabb vszzad: a trtnelemrl s a trtnetrsrl [A century longer than hundred years: On history
and historiography] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2000). In addition, various publications focused
on the fundamental texts of the Romanian intellectual tradition. See, for example, the series
edited by Ambrus Miskolczy, entitled Encyclopaedia Transylvanica; and also Imre Pszka,
ed., Romn eszmetrtnet, 18661945. nismeret s modernizci a romn gondolkodsban
[Romanian intellectual history, 18661945: Self-knowledge and modernization in Romanian thought] (Budapest: AetasSzzadvg, 1994); Lajos Kntor, ed., Szegnyeknek palota:
XX. szzadi romn esszk [Palace for the poor: Romanian essays from the 20th century]
(Budapest: Balassi, 1998); Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi, A romn trtnetrs kihvsai [Challenges of Romanian historiography], Replika, 4041 (November
2000), 165264. Most recently, see Andor Horvth, ed., Tanskodni jttem. Vlogats a kt
vilg-hbor kztti romn emlkirat- s naplirodalombl [I came to witness: Selection from
the memoir and diary literature of interwar Romania] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 2003).
21
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 Lszl
Szarka45 in the Slovak case, or Ambrus Miskolczy46 and Bla Borsi-Klmn47 in the
Romanian) returned to a bilateral comparative model, relegating the broader regional framework to the background. This shift also marked the geographic orien-
45 Lszl Szarka, Szlovk nemzeti fejlds Magyar nemzetisgi politika 18671918

[Slovak national developmentHungarys nationality policy, 18671918] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 1995); Kisebbsgi lthelyzetek kzssgi alternatvk: az etnikai csoportok helye
a kelet-kzp-eurpai nemzetllamokban [Minority life conditionscommunity alternatives:
The place of ethnic groups in East-Central European nation states] (Budapest: Lucidus,
2004); Duna-tji dilemmk: nemzetisgi kisebbsgek kisebbsgi politika a 20. szzadi
Kelet-Kzp-Eurpban [Danubian dilemmas: National minorities and minority politics in
20th-century East-Central Europe] (Budapest: Ister Kiad s Kulturlis Szolgltat Iroda,
1998).
46 Ambrus Miskolczy, Eszmk s tveszmk. Kritikai esszk a romn mlt s jelen vits
krdseit trgyal knyvekrl [Ideas and misunderstandings. Critical essays on books discussing the debated issues of Romanian past and present] (Budapest: ELTE BTK Romn
Filolgiai Tanszk, 1994); Llek s titok. A mioritikus tr mtosza, avagy Lucian Blaga eszmevilgrl [Soul and Secret: The myth of Mioritic Space or essay on the ideas of Lucian
Blaga] (Budapest: Kzp-Eurpa IntzetKortrs Kiad, 1994); Ambrus Miskolczy, ed.,
Tndrkert: Az erdlyi fejedelmi kor magyar s romn szemmel. Kt tanulmny: Gheorghe I.
Brtianu, Makkai Lszl [The Fairy Garden: The age of Transylvanian princes from Hungarian and Romanian points of view. Two studies by Gheorghe I. Brtianu and Lszl Makkai]
(Budapest: ELTE BTK Romn Filolgiai Tanszk, 1994); Ambrus Miskolczy, Hatrjrs a
romn-magyar kzs mltban [Roaming about the borders in the Romanian-Hungarian
common past] (Budapest: Lucidus, 2004).
47 Bla Borsi-Klmn, A bktlensg stdiumai: Fejezetek a romn-magyar kapcsolatok
trtnetbl [The stages of restlessness: Chapters from the history of Romanian-Hungarian
relations] (Budapest: Osiris, 1999); Kihvs s eretneksg: Adalkok a romn-magyar viszony
trtnethez [Challenge and heresy: Contributions to the history of Romanian-Hungarian
relations] (Sepsiszentgyrgy: H-Press, 1996); Kockzatos viszonyok: rsok a romn irodalom,
mveldstrtnet s nemzeti nszemllet trgykrbl [Hazardous relations: Writings on
Romanian literature, cultural history and national self-perception] (Pcs: Jelenkor, 1997),
translated into French as Liaisons risques: Hongrois et Roumains aux XIXe et XXe sicles.
Consciences nationales, interfrences et relations dlicates (Pcs: Jelenkor, 1999); Illzikergets vagy ismtlsknyszer? Romn-magyar nemzetpolitikai elgondolsok s megegyezsi ksrletek a XIX. szzadban [Chasing illusions or complexes of repetition? Romanian-Hungarian
national ideas and attempts at reconciliation in the 19th century] (BukarestBudapest:
KriterionBalassi, 1995); Hungarian Exiles and the Romanian National Movement, 1849
1867 (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1991).
22
tation of research institutions. While functioning mainly as a minority-policy thinktank, the Teleki Lszl Institute also had an impact on the reconsideration of
Hungarys 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 connotations. It is indicative of this development that the periodical Regio, published 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 normative
connotations of the Central European paradigm led to a number of conceptual
solutions. One of the most popular is in-between Europe (Kztes-Eurpa), which
was obviously rooted in an attempt to emancipate the geographical terminology of
its pathos, but to retain its reference to a regional entity between the two (i.e.,
German and Russian) geopolitical zones of influence. The problem of course is
that it ismost probably unwittinglyevoking the German Zwischen-Europa of
Gieselher Wiersing, which was compromised by Nazi geopolitics, thus it is unlikely
to become an internationally acceptable solution. A tentative return to the less
loaded East-Central Europe,48 which was common in the 1980s, or even to the
ambiguous Danubian region (Dunatj) can be detected. Finally, the re-emergence
of 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 decline of interest in
the broader region, but the accents definitely shifted. Central 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 directions, within and beyond the classic
geographical understanding of Central Europe in terms of the zone of the three
historical kingdoms of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary.
One could say that different historiographical sub-cultures and subdisciplines 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 presumed. Recently, all this became col-
48 Andrs Bn D., ed., A hd tls oldaln: tanulmnyok Kelet-Kzp-Eurprl [On

the other side of the bridge: Studies on East-Central Europe] (Budapest: Osiris, 2000).
23
ored 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 entangled histories, multiple modernities or cross-histories.
It remains to be seen, and probably depends on the future ups and downs of the
evolution of the political and cultural unification of Europe, whether the new generation of historians, raised by the trans-European institutions of academic socialization 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, allEuropean regional typology, which will make any Central European or EastCentral European otherness insignificant in the face of the radical or radicalized
non-European otherness.
POLISH HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE CONCEPTS
OF (EAST-)CENTRAL EUROPE
Although the question of Central Europe was never crucial for Polish researchers, a closer look at Polish historiography reveals a huge number of books,
conferences, institutions focusing on the problems of our region. This 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 Central
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 concepteven 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 reformulated. This could happen in two ways: one
could accept the Habsburg vision plus the whole of Poland (what Poland means
territorially for a historian is another matter), which in practice would mean limiting the region to the history of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, seen as three historical nations with more or less comparable centuries-old traditions of statehood.
Alternatively, one could accept the political history of the 19th and 20th 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 PolishCzechHungarian East Central Europe dominates
24
the well known book of Piotr Wandycz,49 whereas Jerzy Koczowski seems to be
the supporter of the second view.50 The important element of Koczowskis approach is that he includes Byzantine tradition as a fully-fledged component of the
regions culture (indeed, he compares the Occidentalization and Byzantinization
of various Slavonic lands as two parallel ways of the diffusion of 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 otherthe first one, more in line with the argument of Milan Kundera, sees the region as an outpost of Western civilization.
Some of the exponents of this view (not Wandycz himself) seem to come close to
the Huntingtonian vision of conflicting civilizations, claiming that Central Europe
[...] forms [...] an intermediary territory between 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 confusion 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 territories, 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
Jzef 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 restoring 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 Hungarian 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 of the old PolishLithuanian 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 histori-
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 of themselves, his work should nevertheless be included here.
50 Jerzy Koczowski, Europa sowiaska w XIVXV wieku [Slavonic Europe in the
1415th centuries] (Warsaw: PIW, 1984), 9.
51 Koczowski, Europa sowiaska, 196197.
52 Tadeusz Kisielewski, Europa rodkowa. Zakres pojcia [Central Europe. The scope
of a concept] (Lublin: 1992), 31.
25
cal 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 Communist regime. Some of those
interested in the history of Lithuanian, Belarusian 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 of terminology may sometimes betray the historiosophical option: those using the term Central Europe
may be closer to the post-Habsburg tradition, while those speaking of EastCentral 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 different socioeconomic systems in Europe. This division, as Anna Sosnowska points out in her
essay further in this issue, had the additional merit of being 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, although their popularity waned after 1989. It seems, however, that all
these distinctions are usually very blurred and these terms are often used interchangeably, denoting a vague territory of Polands neighbors to the East and to the
South. Intuition rather than precise definition is the basis of these conceptions.
Witold Kula, to take a distinguished example, writing about the genesis of capitalism in Eastern Europe,53 aims at putting Polands experience into the broader perspective of Europes backward periphery. What territories should be included into
the Eastern Europe he writes about, does not bother him in the leastand rightly
so, as the nature of his model is not affected 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
of research irrespectively of the terminology used by various researchers. It is content rather than phrases that interests us here.
53 Witold Kula, Some Observations on the Industrial Revolution in Eastern European Countries, Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej, (1958) 12, 239248.
26
The two most important authors of synthetic works on the subject, Piotr
Wandycz and Jerzy Koczowski, have already been mentioned. The main thesis of
Wandyczs 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 particularly sensitive to the value of
liberty. While this view seems a little too optimistic for the present author, there is
no doubt that Wandyczs book belongs to the most serious attempts at providing a
synthesis of the regions past.54 Jerzy Koczowski, 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 society and of mentality and its longue dure attitude.
The Central European debate has always been an attractive subject for essayists not less than for real historians. The most important person here is probably
the poet, Czeaw Miosz, who did much to revive the interest in the multi-ethnic
and multicultural world of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Miosz, 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 of historical essayism is
an outline of the history of the Roman Catholic Church in East Central Europe by
Bohdan Cywiski. Cywiski gained his position in Polish intellectual life with an
excellent book published (heavily censored) in 1971 dealing with the attitudes of
the intelligentsia in the early 20th 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 prbowane, did not repeat the
success of its predecessor; nevertheless, it belongs to the most serious books on
East Central Europe addressed to the general public. The book has two volumes:
the first volume deals with the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the second one
with the period of Communism.57
54 Piotr S. Wandycz, The Price of Freedom. A History of East-Central Europe from the
Middle Ages to the Present (LondonNew York: Routledge, 1992). The Polish translation
appeared in 1995. Idem, Die Freiheit und ihr Preis. IWM-Vorlesungen zur modernen Geschichte Mitteleuropas (Vienna: Passagen Verlag 1993).
55 Jerzy Koczowski, Modsza Europa. Europa rodkowo-wschodnia w krgu cywilizacji
chrzecijaskiej redniowiecza [The younger Europe. East Central Europe within the medieval Christian civilization] (Warsaw: PIW, 1998).
56 Czesaw Miosz, Szukanie ojczyzny [Looking for homeland] (Cracow: Znak, 1992).
57 Bohdan Cywiski, Ogniem prbowane. Z dziejw najnowszych Kocioa Katolickiego
w Europie rodkowo-wschodniej [Tried by fire. From the recent history of the Catholic
Church in East-Central Europe], vol. 1 (Rome: Papieski Instytut Studiw Kocielnych,
1982); vol. 2 (Lublin: Redakcja Wydawnictw KUL, 1990).
27
Much less known generally, but equally interesting, is the essayism of Antoni
Kroh, dealing especially with PolishCzechSlovak contacts and parallels. In spite
of its journalistic title and colloquial style, his book O Szwejku i o nas (About vejk
and about us), using the title character of the famous novel by Jaroslav Haek as a
starting point for reflections, provides an excellent and thought-provoking comparison of various elements of Polish and Czech culture.58
Looking beyond the world of professional academics, we should not omit
one important milieu, whose contribution to the research of the Central European
region is too often overlooked. The Polish tourist movement had a long tradition
dating from the last decades of the 19th 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 belong to the Habsburg Galicia,
with its relatively high degree of political freedom. This made it possible for the
tourist movement to develop various organizing and editorial activities. The Polish
tourists soon expanded from the Galician part of the Carpathians to the whole
range and so did their publications. 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 of reliable information on
the ethnography, history and economics (as well as the nature, geology and animal
life, which is not our concern here) of the mountain regions. This sort of paratourist literature abounded after 1989. Among the new periodicals the half-yearly
Paj, published by the Towarzystwo Karpackie (Carpathian Association) deserves to
be mentioned; the guide-books to various Carpathian regions, written 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 of literature which is often unnoticed by the professionals.
Having dealt with the terminology, with syntheses and with the contribution
of the essayists, let usat lastcome to the presentation of the more detailed
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 medievalearly modern Europe and
nation-building processes in the 19th century.
58 Antoni Kroh, O Szwejku i o nas (Warsaw: Prszyski i ska, 2002), 2nd ed.
28
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 Rutkowski in
Pozna, 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 Cracow historical school from the second half of
the 19th century, advocating the opinion about the decisive role of the 15th century as a starting moment of rift between Polish and Western historical development (Jzef Szujski). We could also quote studies in the nationality question by
some authors close to the social democratic movement such as Kazimierz KellesKrauz and Leon Wasilewski. 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
prehistory. Returning to the inter-war period, Rutkowskis works on the genesis of
manorial system,60 although unfinished, have proven very influential. Rutkowski, 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 nation-building61 (on the margins of
his opus magnum on Prince Adam Czartoryski that eventually appeared posthumously only in 19481950). Somehow apart from both these streams (but closer
to Handelsmans) stood Oskar Halecki, whose research on the PolishLithuanian
Union and the Church Union with Rome could not, for obvious reasons, be continued in Communist Poland. 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 of East-Central Europe. The book won some
renown abroad, but its impact on the Polish historiography seems to be marginal.
59 See especially Zofia Daszyska-Goliska, rodkowo-Europejski zwizek gospodarczy a Polska, [Central European economic union and Poland], in rodkowo-Europejski
zwizek gospodarczy a Polska. Studia ekonomiczne (Cracow: Nakadem Centralnego Biura
Wydawnictw NKN, 1916), 133.
60 Especially Jan Rutkowski, Geneza ustroju folwarczno-paszczynianego w Europie rodkowej od koca redniowiecza, in his Wie europejska pnego feudalizmu (XVI
XVIII wiek) [European village of the late feudalism (16th18th centuries)] (Warsaw: PIW,
1986), 216224. The French original version was published in La Pologne au VIe Congrs
International des Sciences Historiques, Oslo 1928 (Warsaw, 1930), 211217. The manuscript
of Rutkowskis book on the same subject was burnt during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.
61 E.g. Marceli Handelsman, Le dveloppement des nationalits dans lEurope centraleorientale (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1930). (Offprint from LEsprit International. The International Mind, 6e anne, No. 24.)
29
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 block. Nevertheless, somehow paradoxically, the research on
the genesis of economic dualism and the 19th-century nationality question was
continued in Communist Poland and, in fact, soon exceeded 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 politicalmilitary
history. The fact that the idea of the agrarian dual division of Europe was promoted hundred years earlier by Friedrich Engels also helped to direct the focus of
research to at least some fields of comparative study. The first of these fields bore
fruit in the works of historians like Jerzy Topolski, Andrzej Wyczaski, but especially Marian Maowist and Witold Kula. Maowists main work in our field is his
study of the genesis of economic dualism in late medievalearly modern Europe,62
whereas the most important contribution of Witold Kula is his Teoria ekonomiczna
ustroju feudalnego. This work, dealing immediately with the manorial system in
Poland in the 16th18th centuries, but rich in references to other backward regions of Europe, is perhaps one of the most important works of Polish historiography in general. It aims at the theoretical analysis of the decision-making of the actors engaged in manorial economybasically, the landlord and the serf. The capitalist categories of rational economic decision-making, argues Kula, do not help
us understand the logic of feudal economy: a separate theoretical framework is
needed, and Kula sets forth to provide it.63
Although both Kula and (especially) Maowist have bred a strong group of
disciples, economic history in Poland has seemed to decline since the late 1970s.
The acceleration of political history (starting with the election of a Polish Pope in
1978, culminating with the first period of Solidarity, 19801981, and the collapse
of Communism in 1989) made the recent political developments the most popular
subject of research, replacing economic history, that was generallyif 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 21st century. Antoni Mczak, one of the leading disciples of Maowist,
left economic history for the highly theoretical socio-political history, and tried to
discern the specificity of the belated political system of the PolishLithuanian
Commonwealth using the concept of clientelism and providing the most interest62 Marian Maowist, Wschd a Zachd Europy w XIIIXVI wieku. Konfrontacja struktur spoeczno-gospodarczych [East and west of Europe in 13th15th centuries. The confrontation of socio-economic structures] (Warsaw: PWN, 1973).
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 Pozna, Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Odrbno
historyczna Europy rodkowej. Studium metodologiczne [Historical distinctiveness of Central
Europe. A methodological study] (Pozna: 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.
30
ing attempt 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.64
Speaking of early modern 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 of comparing the development of the Polish, Bohemian and Hungarian estate/parliamentary systems were noted by Jzef Szujski already in the second
half of the 19th century, the only historian who took the problem seriously in the
1970s seems to be Stanisaw Russocki.65 It would seem that even such a fascinating
research project as the comparison between the Polish and Hungarian Baroque
nobility cultures (touched many years ago by Endre Angyal in his studies of Slavonic Baroque) 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 medievalearly modern period discussed above. One should, perhaps, mention the studies on Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Ruthenian state-building between the 9th and 11th centuries. Here,
however, the virtue is made out of necessity: historians interested in early Polish
history and having but extremely scarce sources at their disposal, have no other
choice but to turn to comparative history 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 owmiaski and Stanisaw Trawkowski can be mentioned as examples, and
their disciples are numerous.67 The authors at this text lacks the competence for
64 Antoni Mczak, Rzdzcy ir zdzeni. Wadza a spoeczestwo w Europie wczesnonowozytnej [Rulers and ruled. Power and society in early modern Europe] (Warsaw: Semper 2002), 2nd ed.; Nierwna przyja,. Ukady klientalne w perspektywie historycznej [Unequal friendship. Cliental systems in historical perspective] (Wrocaw: Fundacja na rzecz
Nauki Polskiej, 2003).
65 Among his studies in Western languages, see Stanisaw Russocki, The Parliamentary system in 15th century Central Europe, in Poland at the 14th International Congress of
Historical Sciences in San Francisco (Wrocaw: Ossolineum, 1975), 721. For a later continuation of similar interests, see Adam Fiakowski, redniowieczne koronacje krlewskie
na Wgrzech i w Polsce, [Medieval royal coronations in Hungary and in Poland], Przegld
Historyczny LXXXVII, (1996) 713735.
66 For a short attempt at comparison, see Jerzy Snopek, Wgry. Zarys dziejw i kultury [Hungary. Outline of history and culture] (Warsaw: Rytm, 2002), 127153.
67 For a concise and clear example of this genre, which is accessible even for a nonMedievalist, see Aleksander Gieysztor, Religia Sowian [Religion of the Slavs] (Warsaw:
Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1983); for an instance of a recent work on early medieval East Central Europe, see Jacek Adamczyk, Pacida w Europie rodkowej i Wschodniej
w redniowieczu. Formy, funkcjonowanie, ewolucja [The primitive money in medieval Central
31
evaluation of their works, usually imposing with methodological finesse and innovative ideas as regards the interpretation of the scarce 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 epkowski, worked on various themes of Polish and Latin American history, and these
two fields of interest made him appreciate the problems of political dependency
and economic backwardness. Active in the Solidarity movement in 19801981, in
the eighties, in texts published mainly abroad, epkowski could analyze freely the
phenomenon of political dependency: while not disclaiming the Marxist influence
and his Latin American professional experience, he tried to apply the conceptual
apparatus of Latin American dependency theories to 19th-century Polish history.69
epkowski, as Kula two decades earlier, introduced the concept of dependent capitalism to characterize the Polish economy of the late 19thearly 20th centuries and
tried to put the 19th-century Polish experience against the background of other
Central European states. Unfortunately, his untimely death did not permit epkowski to transform his ideas into a book, as was his intent.
A recent work of Sawomir 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 of 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 Monarchy. While some of his
conclusions may seem one-sided (especially when he seems to imply that economic factors suffice to interpret the phenomenon of anti-Semitism), the book
provides probably the most mature attempt at depicting the characteristics of backward economies that came from a Polish historian in recent years.
and Eastern Europe. Formsfunctionsevolution] (Warsaw: NeritonInstytut 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 Maowist, whose wide range of interest included the society of pre-colonial Sudan; for a relatively recent instance of this trend, see
Micha Tymowski, Wczesne pastwo a dojrzae pastwo w historii Wschodniej i Centralnej
Europy oraz zachodniego Sudanu. Porwnanie powstawania pastw oraz barier ich rozwoju, [Early state and developed 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], Przegld Historyczny, LXXX (1989) 4, 673687.
69 See a collection of his late essays Tadeusz epkowski, Rozwaania o losach polskich [Reflections on the Polish fates] (London: Puls, 1987).
70 Sawomir Tokarski, Ethnic Conflict and Economic Development: Jews in Galician Agriculture 18681914 (Warsaw: Trio, 2003).
32
Comparing national movements

The works of epkowski and Tokarski bring us close to the second broad
field of Central-European comparisons: that of 19th-century nation-building. This
stream of research found its best representatives in Jzef Chlebowczyk and Henryk
Wereszycki. Chlebowczyk constructed a huge and complicated model of nationformation that can be counted among the most interesting works in the field on
international scale. Most of his life a professor 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 applause they deserve. The general scheme of Chlebowczyks work is rather similar to the well-known one by Miroslav Hroch, with
more or less analogous 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
nation-building process. Chlebowczyk seeks to discern various types of ethnic borderlands and various possibilities of mutual relations of the groups inhabiting 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 responsible). Then he
proceeds to enumerate the factors that influence an individuals 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 of emotions in nationalism is now a commonplace, but in the 1970s
marked by a stress on economic causation, Chlebowczyks 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 of the ethnic conflict in the early 20th-century Habsburg Monarchy was quite
often more the invention of patriotic publicists than economic reality. Thus Chlebowczyk, although starting with Marxist premises (with a clear influence of Otto
Bauers 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 (as producer of words) as the leading force in the nation-building process.71
71 Jzef Chlebowczyk, On Small and Young Nations in Europe: Nation-forming Processes in Ethnic Borderlands in East-Central Europe (Wrocaw: Ossolineum, 1980); Midzy
dyktatem, realiami a prawem do samostanowienia. Prawo do samookrelenia i problem granic
we wschodniej Europie rodkowej w pierwszej wojnie wiatowej oraz po jej zakoczeniu [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] (Warsaw: PWN, 1988).
33
Chlebowczyks 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 19th-century nationalisms, Henryk Wereszycki, writes elegantly and almost essayistically, 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 generalizations, but his books are the effect of an
equally conscious and coherent, if less openly displayed, vision of the Central
European past, as it is the case with Chlebowczyk. Wereszyckis most important
works are the three volumes on the development and decline of the Three Emperors Alliance in the second half of the 19th century72 and, most importantly, a synthetic presentation of the nationality question in the Habsburg Monarchy.
Wereszycki shows both social processes and intellectual developments, with a
clear sympathy 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 Palack, the ideas of the Austrian Social Democrats and
of Oszkr Jszi in Hungary. He is, however, very skeptical about the multi-ethnic
states 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 independence, there was more liberty in
Francis Josephs Galicia than in the Poland of Pisudski.73 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 persecution 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 Wacaw Felczak and Antoni
Cetnarowicz in Cracow. Skowronek, disciple of Stefan Kieniewicz and thus, so to
say, a late representative of Marceli Handelsmans historical school, as if continuing Handelsmans research, published numerous studies on various aspects of the
politics of Adam Czartoryski, and in the early 1980s broadened the scope of his
72 Henryk Wereszycki, Sojusz trzech cesarzy [Three emperors alliance] (Warsaw:
PWN, 1965); Walka o pokj europejski 18721878 [Struggle for the European Peace, 1872
1878] (Warsaw: PWN, 1971) Koniec sojuszu trzech cesarzy [End of the three emperors
alliance] (Warsaw: PWN, 1977).
73 Henryk Wereszycki, yczymy ci, towarzyszu Limanowski, wolnej Warszawy,
[We wish you, comrade Limanowski, free Warsaw], in Niewygasa przeszo. Refleksje i polemiki [Unextinguished Past. Reflections and Polemics] (Cracow: Znak, 1987), 234246.
74 Henryk Wereszycki, Pod berem Habsburgw. Zagadnienia narodowociowe [Under
the scepter of the Habsburgs. Nationality questions] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie,
1986), 2nd ed., 339.
34
interests by publishing a wider monograph on Polish political contacts with the

Balkan peoples in the 1840s and 1850s.75 Wacaw Felczak, one of Wereszyckis
collaborators, who was famous for his radical anti-Communist stance and who
spent many years as a political prisoner 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 19th-century
Hungary, and he covered the 19th- and 20th-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, continues the threads developed by his master, also concentrating on the southern Slavs (stressing, like so
many Polish historians before, the activities of Czartoryski in the region).77 Important contributions to the history of the 19th and 20th centuries along these lines
were also made by Henryk Batowski and Jerzy Tomaszewski, the first mostly on
the field of politics, the second on the economy of Eastern and Central Europe.
Their research has discovered numerous interesting connections and serves as a
mine of information. 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 19th century,
the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania were a field as interesting as the
Habsburg Monarchy. This subject, however, was almost completely banned in
Communist times; the most notable exception was to be found in some writings of
an eminent 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 literary
studies as well as art history. An outline of the history of Western-Slavic languages
75 Jerzy Skowronek, Sprzymierzecy narodw bakaskich [Allies of the Balkan nations] (Warsaw: PWN, 1983).
76 Wacaw Felczak, Tadeusz Wasilewski, Historia Jugosawii (Wrocaw: Ossolineum,
1985); Wacaw Felczak, Historia Wgier (Wrocaw: Ossolineum, 1983), 2nd ed; Wgierska
polityka narodowociowa przed wybuchem powstania 1848 roku [Hungarian nationality politics before the 1848 insurrection] (Wrocaw: Ossolineum, 1964).
77 E.g. Antoni Cetnarowicz, Odrodzenie narodowe w Dalmacji. Od Slavenstva do
nowoczesnej chorwackiej i serbskiej idei narodowej [National revival in Dalmatia. From
Slavenstvo to the modern Croatian and Serbian national idea] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu Jagielloskiego, 2002).
78 Juliusz Bardach, O dawnej i niedawnej Litwie [On ancient and modern Lithuania]
(Pozna: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza, 1988).
35
by Ewa Siatkowska79 is a very clear book for a non-linguist, avoiding a professional

slang that makes, alas, most of the studies on language history unreadable for a
normal historian. Apart from this general introduction, three specialists on Slavic
literary history should be mentioned here: Halina Janaszek-Ivanikov has published, in the late 1970s, an excellent biography of the Slovak national leader
Ludovt tr, 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 tr as a paradigmatic example of an
(East-)Central European 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 subject. 81
The last question she answers mainly in the negative: the very concept of
Slavic culture is an ideological construct of the 19th-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 titleThe narcotic of a
myth.82 This narcotizing myth is the illusion of the existence of a Slavic culture
grounded in (mostly invented) folklore. This illusion seduced the Slavic national
movements in the 19th century, and condemned them to provincialism and barren
anti-Occidentalism. In the eyes of Bobrownicka the biggest merit of the well-known
essay of Milan Kundera is precisely the attempt at destroying this Slavic illusion,
still presentaccording to Bobrownickaamong many Czech intellectuals.
Art historians are another group whose activities may have proven important for our subject. In spite of numerous detailed works in various subjects, few
major comparative works appeared in the last decades. Marian Kornecki, Tadeusz Chrzanowski and Ryszard Brykowski, three eminent art historians from
Cracow, published in 1979 a synthetic history of art in Romania. Not being
79 Ewa Siatkowska, Rodzina jzykw zachodniowowiaskich. Zarys historyczny [Family of western-Slavonic languages. Historical outline] (Warsaw: PWN, 1992)
80 Halina Janaszek-Ivanikov, Kochanek sawy. Studium o Ludovcie trze [Lover
of Fame. Study on Ludovt tr] (Katowice: 1978); H. Janaszek- Ivanikov, ed., Ludovt
tr, Wybr pism (Wrocaw: Ossolineum, 1983).
81 Joanna Rapacka, Barok chorwacki midzy rdziemnomorzem a Europa rodkow, [The Croatian Baroque between the Mediterranean and Central Europe] [2000], in
her rdziemnomorze, Europa rodkowa, Bakany. Studia z literatur poudniowosowiaskich
[Mediterranean, Central Europe, Balkans. Studies on south Slavonic literatures] (Cracow:
Universitas, 2002), 209218; Czy istnieje literaturoznawstwo sowiaskie, [Does Slavonic
literary science exist?] [2001], rdziemnomorze, 460464.
82 Maria Bobrownicka, Narkotyk mitu. Szkice o wiadomoci narodowej i kulturalnej
Sowian zachodnich i poudniowych [The narcotic of a myth. Essays on the national and cultural consciousness of Western and Southern Slavs] (Cracow: Universitas, 1995).
36
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 connections 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. Micha Janocha can be mentioned concerning the evolution of
Ukrainian and Belarusian religious painting in the early modern period. The
problem is set against the background of the evolution 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 contained 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 of the socalled Niedzica Seminars proved very inspiring in this respect.
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 historians working
at various universities and research institutes. Nevertheless, the role of institutions
should not be underestimated, as they influence, by publications, conferences, etc.
the historians focus of interest. Without aiming at a full list, we should not omit
the importance of the Lublin Institute of East Central Europe, organized and led
by Jerzy Koczowski. Koczowskis institute 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 conference volumes, the Lublin institute published a collective
history of East-Central Europe,86 and arranged a collective undertaking of publishing the synthetic histories of 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
83 Ryszard Brykowski, Tadeusz Chrzanowski, Marian Kornecki, Sztuka Rumunii

[Art of Romania] (Wrocaw: Ossolineum, 1979).
84 Micha Janocha, Ukraiskie i biaoruskie ikony witeczne w dawnej Rzeczypospolitej. Problem kanonu [Ukrainian and Belarusian festive icons in the old Commonwealth.
The problem of canon] (Warsaw: Neriton, 2001).
85 The Institute [...] considers itself a heir to Haleckis ideasJerzy Koczowski,
Hubert aszkiewicz, Od Redakcji. [From the Editors] Rocznik Instytutu Europy rodkowoWschodniej, 1 (2003) 8.
86 J. Koczowski, ed., Historia Europy rodkowo-Wschodniej [History of East-Central
Europe], 2 vols., (Lublin: Instytut Europy rodkowo-Wschodniej, 2000).
37
remaining ones in two volumes each. The importance of the undertaking for Polish
historiography cannot be overstated. The Polish historian is provided not only with
competent outlines of the neighboring countries histories, 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 find its way to
the Polish reader. In 2003 the Institute also started to publish a yearbook (Rocznik
Instytutu Europy rodkowo-Wschodniej).
The Cracow-based International Cultural Centre led by Jacek Purchla has
various activities; from our point of view the most important is the publication of
interesting conference volumes. They deal mainly with the problems of 19th- and
early 20th-century art, demonstrating the enormous intellectual possibilities of
research into the territory that was neglected until some thirty years ago. In Warsaw, the Osrodek Bada Tradycji Antycznej w Europie rodkowo-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 Orodek Studiw
Wschodnich (Center for Eastern Studies) publishes an important quarterly Przegld
Wschodni edited by Jan Malicki. Both above institutions are affiliated with the
Warsaw University. Among the non-academic institutions, the association and
publishing house Borussia in Olsztyn does much to bring together Poles and Germans (including 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 European
problems may look broad and serious. Indeed, the terminology did find its way to
the general handbooks and monographs of various subjects, thus assuming the
aura of professional respectability while losing most of its analytical 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 historiography 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 as 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 preoccupationindeed a genuine obsessionwith defining the countrys symbolic place in the world has been organically linked to the avatars of the process of modernization, which entailed a recon-
38
figuration of Romanians collective identity and a symbolic repositioning vis--vis

Western Europe.87
These debates have been also amplified by Romanias complex regional
composition, and the timing of the process of nation- and state-building. Greater
Romania (19181940) came into being in successive stages, as an aggregate 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 (18121918),
the Austrian province of Bukovina (17751918), and territories that were part of
the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Monarchy: Transylvania, the Banat, Maramure, and the Partium. While sharing many common features, these provinces
were nevertheless shaped by divergent regional contexts. An integral part of the
Eastern Christian Orthodox religious commonwealth, the principalities of 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 century 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 Romanians, Hungarians and Germans in direct connection, since the end of the seventeenth century, with the Habsburg-dominated
Central European space.
This mosaic of regions and historical legacies accounts for the acute debates over Romanias place in regional symbolic geographies. At the beginning of
the nineteenth century, the process of modernization in the principalities was
legitimized by political integration into Western Europe, which transgressed regional affiliations in favor of a symbolic affiliation to Latin Europe, having
France as leader and role-model. Starting with the third quarter 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 debates over Romanias regional ties
have been largely suppressed by Romanias forceful integration into the Soviet
dominated Eastern block and the nationalist policy of the regime, postCommunist Romania witnessed the revival of regional paradigms of identification, revolving mostly around the Central European identity. Although belated,
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 Balzs Trencsnyi, In Search of a Usable Past: The Question of National Identity
in Romanian Studies, 19902000, East European Politics and Society, 17 (Summer 2003) 3,
415454.
39
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
Romanian intellectuals as late-comers to the Central European club

The international debate triggered by Milan Kunderas 1983 essay The
Tragedy of Central Europe89 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 intellectuals could not
directly participate in the elaboration of the concept. Individual contributions to
the debate were made nevertheless by Diaspora thinkers, most notably playwright
Eugne Ionesco and philosopher Emil Cioran, Romanian intellectuals thus being
among the few advocates of Central Europe originating outside it core locus
(Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland).90 Eugne Ionesco confessed that his writing belongs intellectually to France, but culturally to the vast mental space of the
[European] Center. For Ionesco, Mitteleuropa was a space of intellectual syncretism and convergence: this mental space, this culture, this civilization were not
only Austrian or Hungarian; from a spiritual point of view, they were also Polish,
Romanian, 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 Kunderas view, Ionesco 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 Russia and its spirit of
conquest.92
88 On this point, see Maria Todorova, Between Classification and Politics: The Balkans and the Myth of Central Europe, in her Imagining the Balkans (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), 140160.
89 Milan Kundera, Un Occident kidnapp ou la tragdie de lEurope Centrale, Le
Dbat, 27 November 1983, reprinted as The Tragedy of Central Europe, The New York
Review of Books, 26 April 1984.
90 See Eugne Ionesco, Imperiul Austro-Ungar, precursor al Confederaiei Europei
Centrale? [The Austro-Hungarian Empire, precursor of the Central European Confederation?], in Adriana Babei and Cornel Ungureanu, eds., Europa Central: Nevroze, dileme,
utopii [Central Europe. Neurosis, dilemmas, and utopias] (Iai: Polirom, 1997), 251256.
Originally published in Cross Currents. A Yearbook of Central European Culture, 4 (New HavenLondon: Yale University Press, 1985); and Emil M. Cioran and Franois Fejt, Despre revoluii i istorie, [About revolutions and history], in Babei and Ungureanu, eds.,
Europa Central, 301311. Originally published in Agora 2 (1990).
91 Ionesco, Imperiul Austro-Ungar, 252.
92 Radu Stern and Vladimir Tismneanu, LEurope centrale: Nostalgies culturelles
et ralits politiques, Cadmos 39 (1987), 4244; and Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 149.
40
Although Romanian intellectuals regarded the concept of Central Europe as

an attractive cultural and political paradigm legitimizing their countrys secession
from the Soviet block, they nevertheless found themselves symbolically excluded
from it by the most prominent proponents of Central Europe, if not explicitly at
least implicitly so, by omission.93 The reaction of Romanian intellectuals to their
countrys symbolic exclusion from the Central Europe of the 1980s was very diverse, being shaped by their particular geographical origins, political options and
the actual political context. By and large, one can identify four main positions vis-vis the concept of Central Europe that can be summarized as following: 1) acceptance and internalization of Romanias symbolic exclusion from Central Europe as
a failure to break with the Communist past; 2) adoption and active promotion of
the Central 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 Romanias devolution and federalization; and 4) critical rejection of regional symbolic geographies as ideologicallycharged mental maps, accompanied by the affirmation of Romanias European
identity.
First, during the period 1990-1996, at a time when the process of economic
reforms and political democratization largely stagnated, numerous intellectuals
assumed Romanias 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
Mihie bitterly deplored the fact that in the past two years, a huge distance has
divided Czechoslovakia and Romania.94 He eloquently pleaded for an internalization of the distinction between Central Europe (made up of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland), seen as a space of democracy and civil society, and a
Kafkaesque Romania, symbolically placed at the Asian border of Europe.95 Mihies attitude was not simply meant to denounce the hesitations of the political
leadership to irreversibly break up with the Communist past. The author also distanced himself from the political position taken by the majority of Romanias 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 regions sharing
a Habsburg legacy, such as Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat. The ambitious
cultural program of the interdisciplinary study group suggestively entitled A Treia
93 On the relationship between the Balkans and the concept of Central Europe, see
Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 140160.
94 Mircea Mihie, The neighbors of Kafka. Intellectuals note from the underground, Partisan Review 59 (1992) 4, 711717; reprinted in Vladimir Tismneanu, ed., The
Revolutions of 1989 (London: Routledge, 1999), 252257.
95 Mihie, The neighborn of Kafka, 256, 257.
41
Europ, (The Third Europe), based in Timioara, the Banata multi-ethnic city
that enjoyed considerable cultural and political prestige in post-Communist Romania for initiating the 1989 revolutionis representative in this respect. The group
had two main declarative goals. First, it aimed at systematically studying Central
Europe as concomitantly 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
Romanian public with the debates on Central Europe that took place in the previous two decades.
To this end, the group initiated a book series also entitled The Third
Europe translated works by emblematic Central European writers and political
thinkers, organized conferences, authored books and compiled anthologies on
Central Europe.97 According to Cornel Ungureanu and Adriana Babei, the main
editors of the book series, the collection attempted to document Central Europes
absolutely fascinating state of mind, characterized by its ambiguous, nonconformist and controversial nature, an effort regarded as a European gesture of
recovering ones national identity.98 In addition to the book series, the group also
founded a periodical, inviting contributions in the fields of literature, politics, history, arts and sciences.99
For the intellectuals affiliated to the Third Europe, to be Central European
meant to actively participate to the revival of a common European spirit. Their
096 Adriana Babei, Europa Central, un concept cu geografie variabil, [Central
Europe: A concept with a variable geography], in Babei and Ungureanu, eds., Europa
Central, 12.
097 The books translated in Romanian and published in this book series by the Polirom Publishing House in Iai are illustrative for the cultural agenda of the Third Europe:
Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-sicle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1998); Jacques Le Rider, La
Mitteleuropa (1997); Tony Judt, A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (2000); Jacques Le
Rider, Modernit viennoise et crises didentit (2001); William M. Johnston, The Austrian
Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938 (2000); and Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The
Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2002), to list but a few. Other
books were the result of research projects or debates initiated by the group: Nicolae Bocan,
Valeriu Leu, eds., Cronologia istoric a Europei Centrale (18481989) [The Historical Chronology of Central Europe, 18481989] (2001); and Vladimir Tismaneanu, Spectrele Europei
Centrale [The Spectrums of Central Europe] (2001).
098 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 define 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 Europ, 1 (1997); 2 (1998); Special Issue on Poland, 34 (2000); Special Issue on Hungary, 5 (2001). The latter issue contains dossiers on contemporary Hungarian writers, such as Pter Esterhzy, Gyrgy Konrd and Pter Ndas.
42
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 concomitantly liberating it not only
from the dominance of outside hegemonies (most importantly the German and the
Soviet ones) but also from that of former imperial centers (such as Vienna and
Budapest). To this end, Romanian intellectuals redefined Central Europe as meaning not only the spirit of imperial metropolis, but also the spirit of the multi-ethnic
and multi-religious imperial margins, of provincial towns and boroughs which
bore the stamp of the Central European cultural matrix. Their project was to reactivate abandoned 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 convergences.
This project had primarly a literary dimension. It sought to provide an alternative history of the Central European literature by rescuing writers of the imperial margins. In Mitteleuropa Periferiilor [Mitteleuropa of the peripheries] (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 Mitteleuropean 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 1990s, the circles project of affirming Romanias Central European identity coincided nevertheless with the decline of the interest in Central
Europe in its space of origin, that of the Visegrd countries. 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 of 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 exoticitizing 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 cultural
cleavages in the Romanian national ideology in order to plead for the countrys
political federalization. Claiming that Romanias former Habsburg provinces
would integrate faster into the European Union, due to their historical legacy and
their traditions of multi-ethnic cohabitation and religious tolerance, the Budapestbased, Transylvanian Hungarian political scientist Gusztv Molnr argued for the
existence of historically-determined civilizational cleavages in Romania. Adopting
the Huntingtonian paradigm of the clash of civilizations, Molnr claimed that
Transylvania and the Banat belong to a different civilizationthat of Central
Europewhere civil society and political pluralism have stronger traditions than
43
in other zones of Romania, putatively associated with the Balkans.100 Since, according to Molnrs 1996 prediction, NATOs and EUs Eastern enlargement
would be solely confined 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 allow Romania to capitalize on Transylvanias European identity and to thus politically
elevate the status of the entire country.
Molnrs controversial thesis stirred an intriguing intellectual debate in Romania, which reputed historians, political scientists and sociologists contributed 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 historical regions was not a realistic alternative.101 In one of the most articulated reactions to Molnrs thesis, historian Sorin
Mitu pointed out the weak social and economic basis of regionalism in Transylvania.
Although it historically preceded the national state, Transylvanias medieval tradition
of political autonomy, multi-ethnic cohabitation and religious tolerance has been
irremediably lost in favor of the homogenizing and rival nationalist projects promoted by Romanians and Hungarians in the modern period.102 After decades of
Communist homogenization, nothing has remained from Transylvanias medieval or
Habsburg legacy, except for a bunch of memories, regrets and nostalgias without
support, and an old urban landscape populated today by a heterogeneous population,
largely indifferent to, and alien of, the cultural identity of that milieu. Mitus unequivocal conclusion is that despite regional 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. However, since Transylvanias local specificity is not grounded in social or
political 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
100 See Gusztv Molnr, Problema transilvan [The Transylvanian Problem], in
Gabriel Andreescu and Gusztv Molnr, eds., Problema transilvan (Iai: Polirom, 1999),
1237.
101 For the debate surrounding Molnrs thesis, see articles signed by Gabriel Andreescu, Renate Weber, Liviu Antonesei, Mikls Bakk, etc., in Andreescu and Molnr, eds.,
Problema transilvan.
102 Sorin Mitu, Iluzii i realiti transilvane, in Andreescu and Molnr, eds., Problema transilvan, 6679.
103 Mitu, Iluzii.
44
ground for institutional autonomy.104 In his view, the same holds true for Romanias province of Moldova where, despite initial success, the regionalist Party of
Moldavians established in 1997 by the mayor of Iai, 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 Bucharestbased centralization, he failed to reconcile local interest groups and to unite them
around a well-defined regionalist program.105
The debate over devolution and federalization reached its peak with the publication, in September 1998, of Sabin Ghermans provocative article entitled I am
fed up with Romania, in which the Banatian author criticized the Bucharest-led
centralized system of government, blaming it for Balkanizing Transylvania, whose
character is genuinely Central European. The article generated a virulent press
debate. Encouraged by the inflated public reaction to his article, Gherman established the Pro-Transylvania Foundation, animated by a regionalist political platform, including demands for institutional devolution and administrative autonomy
for Transylvania and the Banat.106 The controversy was soon carried out in the
parliament, where opposition parties denounced plans of 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
regionalist 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
of rejecting it as an exclusivist ideological construction, based not on a positive
affirmation of a common regional identity and shared values, but on the exclusion
and exoticization of Russia and the Balkan countries. Regarding Central Europe as
a snobbish club of lost imperial illusions, critical Romanian 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
Romanias European vocation. It occasioned nevertheless a deeper discussion of
Romanias regional integration and affiliations.
In this context, theoretically-minded intellectuals initiated a scholarly project
of comprehensively analyzing symbolic geographies and mental maps. In an article
focusing on Romanians ambiguous relationship to the Balkans, Sorin Antohi iden104 Tom Gallagher, O critic a centralismului euat i a egotismului regional n
Romnia, [A critique of failed centralism and regional egotism in Romania], in Andreescu
and Molnr, eds., Problema transilvan, 100114.
105 Gallagher, O critic a centralismului euat, 109.
106 Sabin Gherman, M-am sturat de Romnia [I am fed up with Romania] (Cluj:
Erdlyi Hrad, 1999).
107 For the controversy surrounding Ghermans book, see M-am sturat de RomniaFenomenul Sabin Gherman n viziunea presei [I am fed up with Romania: The Sabin
Gherman phenomenon seen by the press] (Cluj: Erdlyi Hrad, 1999).
45
tifies several strategies serving Romanias imaginary escape from the Balkans,
namely: discourses of inclusion, affinity, and sublimation presenting the Old
Kingdom as a part of the Balkans; a horizontal escape towards Western Europe,
suggestively called geocultural Bovarism; and a vertical escape from the Balkans,
as part of autochthonist ideologies 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 of 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 the
nationalism of the autochthonists, and to renounce the wide range or negative
clichs, stereotypes and symbolic exclusions at regional level, Romanian intellectuals need to firmly situate Romanias history into Central and South-East European
contexts and to recover the strategic importance of their contacts with their former and present Western neighbors such as the Hungarians. Situating Romanian
culture into a broader regional comparative framework would lead to the abandonment of the thesis of Romanians incomparable 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, critically distancing it from traditional attitudes informing Romanian
regional affiliation and cultural self-interpretation.111
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 discourse
allowed Romanian historians to rediscover regional history leading to competing
108 Sorin Antohi, Romania and the Balkans. From Geocultural Bovarism to Ethnic
Ontology, Transit. Tr@nsit-Virtuelles Forum, 21 (February 2002), available on the site of the
Institute fr die Wissenschaftern vom Menschen, at http://www.iwm.at.
109 Sorin Antohi Habits of the Mind. Europes Post-1989 Symbolic Geographies, in
Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds., Between Past and Future. The Revolutions of
1989 and their Aftermath (BudapestNew York: CEU Press, 2000), 6465.
110 For the term metonymic Orientalism, see Sorin Antohi, Civitas Imaginalis. Istorie si utopie n cultura romn [Civitas Imaginalis. History and utopia in the Romanian culture] (Bucharest: Editura Litera, 1994), 23436, 28384.
111 Sorin Antohi, Romnii n anii 90: geografie simbolic i identitate social, in
Exerciiul distanei. Discursuri, societi, metode [Taking distance. Discourses, societies,
methods] (Bucharest: Nemira, 1997), 292316. French version published in Transitions,
XXXIX (1998) 1, 111134.
46
narratives on the process of nation- and state-building, connected either with Central European or South-East European studies. The institutional infrastructure of
historical research has also undergone a profound transformation. New research
institutes and journals have been established, many of them focusing preponderantly on local history and being linked to various regional frameworks of reference.
The University of Bucharest has continued its long and prestigious tradition of
South-East European and Byzantine studies, to which it has added new components focusing on Ottoman studies. The Department of History at the University of
Iai has focused mainly on the history of Moldova and its traditional links with
Poland and the Polish-dominated Central European space, and more recently on
the history of the Habsburg Bukovina. Research at the university and institutes of
Cluj has focused on the history of Transylvania andin connection with this provinceon the history of the Habsburg-dominated Central Europe. The University
of West in Timioara 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 of 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 South-East Europe. In Romania, South-East European
studies have a long tradition, being initiated by the prolific historian Nicolae
Iorga. Having at its core the organic development of the Romanian people,
Iorgas research progressed in concentric geographical circles composed of the
history of Central and South-East Europe, and that of the world.112 In 1914,
Iorga established the Institute of South-East European Studies, publishing the
Bulletin de LInstitut pour ltude de lEurope sud-orientale (19141924). Iorga
also promoted Byzantine studies, establishing the Institute of Byzantine Studies
and co-organizing the first Congress of Byzantine Studies in 1932 in Bucharest.
After Iorgas tragic death (1940), his research agenda was continued by Gheorghe Brtianu, who assumed leadership of the Institute of Universal History,
founded by Iorga in 1936 in Bucharest, publishing the Revue historique de sud-est
europen. Brtianu was a medievalist with main research interest in the Byzantine world and its commercial 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 of the Annales school.113
During the Communist regime, research on South-East Europe was resumed
in 1963 with the establishment of the Institute for South-East European Studies, in
Bucharest. Having sections on history, archeology, art history, sociology and language, the institute promoted the interdisciplinary study of the region. Research
112 See Nicolas M. Nagy-Talavera, Nicolae Iorga. A Biography (Iai, Portland, Oxford:
The Center for Romanian Studies, 1998), 2nd ed., 110.
113 Gheorghe Brtianu, La mer Noire, des origines la conqute ottomane (Monachii:
Societas academica Dacoromana, 1969).
47
results have been disseminated by the journal Revue des tudes sud-est europennes,
and more recently, also by Sud-Estul i contextul european.
Historians specializing on the medieval history of Moldova and Wallachia
pointed out that the socio-political organization of the two principalities emulated
the Byzantine political tradition, a process suggestively called by the Romanian
historian Nicolae Iorga Byzance aprs 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 provided by Andrei Pippidi in Tradiia
politic bizantin n rile romne. Pippidi 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 Enlightenment
and the emergence of political modernity in South-Eastern Europe. The leading
cultural historian Alexandru Duu placed the issue of the formation 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, Duu
emphasized the local modification of Western doctrines, arguing that the ideological answers of South-East European societies to the pressure of modernity
attempted to harmonize social and cultural Westernization with local social realities, which he described in terms of communitarian patterns (Gemeinschaft).116
Research on South-Eastern Europe and related fields, such as Ottoman and
Byzantine studies, has been also conducted at the University of Bucharest.117 The
Center for Turkish and Ottoman Studies established in 1986, publishing the jour-
114 Nicolae Iorga, Byzance aprs Byzance. Continuation de lHistoire de la vie byzantine (Bucharest: Editions de lInstitut dtudes byzantines, 1935).
115 Andrei Pippidi, Tradiia politic bizantin n rile romne n secolele XVIXVIII
[The Byzantine political tradition in the Romanian principalities in the 16th18th centuries]
(Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1983), 6.
116 See Alexandru Duus works: Sud-Estul i contextul European. Buletin V: mentalitate i politic [South Eastern Europe and the European Context. Bulletin V: mentality and
politics] (Bucharest: Academia Romn, Institutul de Studii Sud-Est Europene, 1994); SudEstul european n vremea Revoluiei Franceze: Stri de spirit, reacii, confluene [South-Eastern
Europe during the French Revolution: States of mind, reactions, and confluences] (Bucharest: Academia Romn, 1994); Political models and national identities in Orthodox Europe
(Bucharest: Babel, 1998); and Ideea de Europa i evoluia contiinei europene [The idea of
Europe and the evolution of the European consciousness] (Bucharest: All, 1999).
117 On the role of South-East European studies in Romanian historiography, see
Andrei Pippidi, Reform sau declin, a doua perioad a studiilor sud-est europene in
Romnia, [Reform or decline, the second period of south-east European studies in Romania], Revista Istoric, 2 (1991) 1112, 641649. See also the debate organized in 1996 by
the journal Sud-Estul i contextul european, 6 (1996).
48
nal Romano-Turcica since 2003, promoted comparative research on the history of

the Ottoman Empire and RomanianTurkish relations. The regional framework of
this research was provided by the Lower Danube basin, regarded as the locus of a
joint history of the Turkik (sic!) and Romanian people.118 The tradition of Byzantine studies has been resumed by the Center for Byzantine and East European
Studies, established in 2000 within the Department of History, with the aims of
studying the dissemination of the Byzantine model in South-East Europe, and the
resulting forms of identities and solidarities in the regions.119 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 of multiple cultural influences.
Other regional centers of excellence in South-East European studies, including the Byzantine and Ottoman sub-fields, are represented by the Department of
History, University of Iai and the Institute of History A. D. Xenopol. These research centers have focused preponderantly on the local history of Moldavia, its
relations with medieval Poland and the creation of a genuine PolishMoldavian
commonwealth, the history of Bukovina, the Jewish question in East-Central
Europe and Northern Moldavia in the nineteenth century.120
The history of Transylvania has remained the main focus of historical research 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 quantitatively still
the dominant one, continues the romanticnationalist canon of historiography and
the triumphant accounts written in the 1920s and 1930s, following 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
118 Halil nalck, Foreword, Romano-Turcica (Istanbul: Isis, 2003), 9.
119 See also works Stelian Brezeanu, the initiator of the center, mainly O istorie a Bizanului [A History of the Byzantium] (Bucureti: Meronia, 2004); and by erban Tanaoca,
especially Bizanul i romnii. Eseuri, studii, articole [The Byzantium and the Romanians.
Essays, studies, articles] (Bucharest: Editura Fundaiei PRO, 2003).
120 On PolishMoldovan relations, see Veniamin Ciobanu, Relaiile romno-polone
ntre 1699 i 1848 [RomanianPolish relations between 16991848] (Bucharest: Editura
Academiei, 1980); and Romnii n politica est-central european, 16481711 [Romanians in
East-Central European politics 16481711] (Iai, 1997). On the history of Bukovina see
works by Mihai-tefan Ceauu, such as Bucovina Habsburgic de la anexare la Congresul de
la Viena. Iosefinism i postiosefinism (17741815) [Habsburg Bukovina from annexation to
the Congress of Vienna. Josephism and post-Josephism, 17741815] (Iai, 1998). On the
Jewish question see the new journal Studia et Acta Historiae Judaerum Romaniae (1995).
121 On these historiographical trends on the history of Transylvania, see Constantin
Iordachi and Marius Turda, Politikai megbkls versus trtneti diskurzus: az 19891999
kztti romn trtnetrs Magyarorszg-percepcija, [Political reconciliation versus historical discourse: The image of Hungarians in Romanian historiography, 19891999], Regio,
11 (September 2000) 2, 129159.
122 Iordachi, Turda, Politikai megbkls, 136.
49
history as well123, in the inter-war 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 of 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, Iorga 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 of the three
Romanian countries developed by Iorga, proponents of this first historiographical
approach, represented mostly by research at the Institute of National History created in Cluj in 1920 and its yearbook, Anuarul Institutului de Istorie Cluj,125 focused
on the establishment of Greater Romania, regarded as the natural end result of an
objective historical development. The regional historical narrative on Transylvania
is thus subsumed to the national history, and is dominated by resentments against
the policies of denationalization of Romanians in AustriaHungary and the irrendentist policies pursued by interwar Hungary, two themes that were central to
the Communist historiography and continues to dominate parts of the contemporary Romanian historiography, as well.126
The second approach is what can be called the classical narration about
Transylvania as a distinct geo-political space in Central Europe.127 The proponents
of this trend try to relativize the nationalist canon and to enrich historical research
by tackling previously neglected or avoided topics, such as competing nationalist
or federalist projects, religious or socio-demographic aspects, inter-ethnic relations,
123 Nicolae Iorga, Istorie a romnilor din Ardeal si Ungaria, 2 vols. (Bucharest,
1915); and Istorie a romnilor din Peninsula Balcanic (Bucharest, 1919).
124 Nicolae Iorga, O istorie a Basarabiei? [A history of Bessarabia?] Neamul Romnesc, XXXII (2 October 1937) 215, 1, quoted in Victor Spinei, Reprezentani de seam ai
istoriografiei i filologiei romneti i mondiale [Prominent representatives of Romanian historiography and philology] (Brila: Istros, 1996), 13.
125 The statistical analysis of the contributions to the yearbook in the period 1982
1995 is illustrative for the regional outlook of the institute. An overwhelming majority of the
published articles are written by historians from Transylvania and regard the history of the
province within national context. The few outside collaborators included historians from
Bucharest and Iai, and more rarely, from Hungary and Germany. Contributions on regional
or European history were minimal, ammounting only to 13 authors and 14 articles for the
entire period. See Stelian Mndru, Cercetarea istoric actual (19821995) [Current historical research (19821995), Anuarul Institutului de Istorie Cluj, XXXIV (1995), 1523,
here 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 Romniei. Transilvania, 2 vols. (Cluj-Napoca: Gheorghe Bariiu, 19971999). Note the double title of the book
that firmly situates local history of Transylvania within the national history of the Romanians.
50
the history of regionalism and patterns of Transylvanias post-1867 integration into

Hungary and post-1918 integration into Romania.128
The thirdrevisionistapproach 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 Babe-Bolyai University in
Cluj, and new journals such as Transylvanian 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 Transylvanias 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 living in Romania (and especially in Transylvania), and the
cultural and artistic life of Transylvania. Since 1992, the center publishes the quarterly Transylvanian Review and a collection of books, grouped in five thematic series.130
Nowadays, revisionist historians examine critically the empirical orientation
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 interaction of all ethnic groups living
in Transylvania and favoring common elements 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, the history of regionalism, and the image of the
other.131
128 See Camil Mureanu, Transilvania ntre medieval i modern [Transylvania,
between medieval and modern] (Cluj-Napoca: Fundaia Cultural Romn 1996); Liviu
Maior, 18481849. Romni i unguri n revoluie [18481849. Romanians and Hungarians in
the revolution] (Bucureti: Editura Enciclopedic, 1998); tefania Mihilescu, Transilvania
n lupta de idei. Controverse privind statutul Transilvaniei [Transylvania in the disputes of
ideas. Controversies over the status of Transylvania], 3 Parts (Bucharest: Silex, 1996, 1997);
Gheorghe Iancu, The Ruling Council. The Integration of Transilvania into Romania, 1918
1920 (Cluj-Napoca: Fundaia Cultural Romn, 1995).
130 The Center for Transylvanian Studies published to date 26 books, with a total
circulation of roughly 100,000 copies (in French, German and English). Its thematic series
are: the Bibliotheca Rerum Transsilvaniae (with 28 volumes), Documenta (5 volumes),
Oameni care au fost (4 volumes), Interferene (6 volumes) and Punct/Contrapunct (2 volumes).
131 See Florin Goglan and Sorin Mitu, eds., Studii de istorie a Transilvaniei. Specific
regional i deschidere european [Studies on the history of Transylvania: Regional character
and European openness] (Cluj: Asociaia istoricilor din Transilvania i Banat, 1994); Florin
Goglan and Sorin Mitu, Viaa privat, mentaliti colective i imaginar social n Transilvania
[Private life, collective mentalities, and social imaginary in Transylvania] (Cluj: Asociaia
istoricilor din Transilvania i Banat, 19951996).
51
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 image in
the Romanian public consciousness.132 For example, Toader Nicoar explores
collective mentalities and social imaginary of Transylvanian Romanians during the
long eighteenth century, a period marked by the transition from the old regime to
the Habsburg type of modernity.133 The latter, Nicoar argues, decisively shaped
Transylvanias 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 combination of late humanism, Baroque and the Enlightenment.
Nicoar 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 add the
variants added by reformation and counter-reformation.134 He highlights 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. Nicoar also identifies collective visions of time and space common to Transylvanian 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
Transylvanians as their homeland.
Continuing in many ways Nicoars analysis, Sorin Mitu135 maps the mechanisms of constructing the modern collective identity of the Romanian elites in
132 Mitu, Iluzii i realiti transilvane, 77. The research agenda of young historians
on Transylvania was influenced by the work of their mentor, the eminent early modernist
cultural historian Pompiliu 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 nineteenth century, placing Transylvanian history into a Central European perspective. On Pompiliu Teodors 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 historiographical discourse], Xenopoliana, I (1994) 14, 5963;
and Istorie romneascistorie european [Romanian historyEuropean history], Vatra,
23 (1993) 262, 1214.
133 Toader Nicoar, Transilvania la nceputurile timpurilor moderne 16801800. Societate rural i mentaliti colective [Transylvania at the beginning of the modern period:
16801800. Rural society and collective mentalities] (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1997).
134 Nicoar, Transilvania, 16.
135 Sorin Mitu, Geneza identitii naionale la romnii ardeleni (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1997). Translated into English as: National identity of Romanians in Transylvania (BudapestNew York: CEU Press, 2001), 4.
52
Transylvania during the long first half of the nineteenth century, at the beginning
of the modern era. Mitu explores the formation of national stereotypes of Romanianness in relation to other ethnic groupsJews, Germans, Hungarians, and
Gypsiesand 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 Transilvania, the history of the Banat has emerged as one of
the main focuses of regional historical research in post-Communist Romania, the
province being seen as a repository of Central European traditions.136 Among the
few historians who studied the history of the Banat from a regional perspective,
one should mention Nicolae Bocan, Valeriu Leu and Victor Neumann, who provided overviews of the Enlightenment in East-Central Europe and studied the
mechanisms of identity formation and the transfer of political ideas in the early
modern and modern period.137 In Ideologie i fantasmagorie, Neumann underscored the cleavage between two traditions: 1, the Habsburg tradition of political
thought, that of cosmopolitanism developed in the 18th and the 19th centuries,
which was instrumental in successfully avoiding inter-ethnic and inter-confessional
conflicts within the empire, and 2, national ideologies elaborated in the revolutionary Romantic period by intellectual elites of various ethnic groups within the empire, which opposed Austrian cosmopolitanism.138
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-
136 For overviews, see Nicolae Bocan and Stelian Mndru. Istoriografia regional
ntre anii 19901995: Cazul Transilvaniei i al Banatului, [Regional historiography between
1990 and 1995: The case of Transylvania and the Banat], Transilvanica, I (1999) 1, 744;
and Nicolae Bocan, Istoriografia bnean ntre multiculturalism i identitate naional,
[Historiography from the Banat between multiculturalism and national identity], Banatica,
14 (1996), 265282.
137 Nicolae Bocan, Ideea de naiune la romnii din Transilvania i Banat: secolul al
XIX-lea [The idea of the nation at the Romanians in Transylavania and the Banat: The nineteenth century] (Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitar Clujan, 1997); See Valeriu Leu, Modernizare i imobilism. Sate i oameni din Banat la nceputul veacului XX n documente memorialistice [Modernization and immobilism: Villages and people of the Banat at the beginning of
the twentieth century in Memorial documents] (Reia: Banatica, 1998); and Victor Neumann, The Temptation of Homo Europaeus: The Genesis of the modern spirit in Central and
Southeastern Europe (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1993); and Multicultural identities in a Europe of regions: The case of Banat County (Budapest: Collegium Budapest, 1996).
138 Victor Neumann, Ideologie i fantasmagorie. Perspective comparative asupra
gndirii politice n Europa Est-Central [Ideology and phantasmagoria. Comparative perspectives on political thought in East-Central Europe] (Iai: Polirom, 2001), 199.
53
ethnic cohabitation, mainly during the 19th and the 20th centuries.139 Works on
the Communist period point out the instrumentalization of ethnic and social differences by the Communist regime, dramas of deportation and repression experienced by various ethnic groups in the province (mostly Germans and Serbs), and
their responses and strategies of accommodation 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 studies is
the history of Bukovina. Part of the Habsburg Empire from 1774 to 1918, Bukovina was an imperial borderland where three different projects of nation- and statebuilding, namely the Austrian, the Romanian and the Ukrainian, were overlapping.
Before 1918, the province was nevertheless an example of multi-ethnic coexistencepolitical 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 compositions in the empire, but none of its ethnic communities held an absolute majority.
During the Communist period and the first post-Communist years, national
historiographies focused almost unilaterally on the history of their respective ethnic groups in the province.142 In late 1990s, this narrow historiographical perspective has begun 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.143
139 See, for example the research dossier Frontiere identitare in Banat, [Identity
frontier in the Banat], A Treia Europ, 1 (1998) 2, 203333.
140 On oral history research on mechanisms of ethnic and social identity-formation
in a deportee village during the early Communist regime, see Smaranda Vultur, Istorie trait,
istorie povestit: Deportarea n Brgan (19511956) [Stories lived and retold: The deportation in the Brgan plain, 19511956] (Timioara: Amarcord, 1997).
141 See Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romnia: Regionalism, Nation
Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 19181930 (IthacaLondon: Cornell University Press, 1995),
56.
142 See works by Israeli, German and Romanian authors: Franz Lang, ed., Buchenland: 150 Jahre Deutschtum in der Bukowina (Munich: Verlag des Sdostdeutschen Kulturwerks, 1961); Rudolf Wagner, Deutsches Kulturleben in der Bukowina (Vienna: Eckart-schriften, 1981); Hugo Gold, Geschichte der Juden in der Bukowina, 2 vols, (Tel Aviv: Olamenu,
1958, 1962); Nicolae Ciachir, Din istoria Bucovinei 17751944 (Bucharest: Editura Didactic i Pedagogic, 1993); and Mircea Grigorovi, Din istoria colonizrii Bucovinei (Bucharest: Editura Didactic i Pedagogic, 1996).
143 Emanuel Turczynski, Geschichte der Bukowina in der Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993); Hildrun Glass, Zerbrochene Nachbarschaft. Das deutschjdische Verhltnis in
Rumnien 19181938 (Mnchen: Oldenbourg, 1996); Andrei CorbeaHoisie, ed., Jdisches
Stdtebild Czernowitz (Frankfurt: Jdischer Verlag, 1998); Isabel RskauRydel, ed.,
Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas. Galizien, Bukowina, Moldau (Berlin: Siedler, 1999);
54
Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, professor of German literature at the University of Iai,

explored the rich cultural life of the Austrian-ruled Czernowitz at the beginning of
the twentieth century, focusing mainly on the work and biography of Paul Celan
(1920-1970).144 In a solid monograph on the province entitled Die Rumnisierung
der Bukowina, Marianne Hausleitner explored the politics of ethnic homogenization conducted in Bukovina between 19181944, culminating with the extermination of Jews during World War Two.145
Post-1989 historiographycal debates over issues of symbolic geographies and
multiple imperial legacies in Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat have thus been
greatly stimulated by the rediscovery of local and regional history. While writing
within the framework of national history, historians specializing in regional history
underscored local specificities, placing them within the larger Central European
context.
To sum up, Romanian intellectuals differentiate between two main historical
zones: the Old Kingdom, composed of the principalities of Moldova and Wallachia
whose history is treated as part of the Byzantine and Ottoman legacy, followed by
political modernization emulating the French political and institutional model in
the modern period; and territories that were part of the Habsburg Empire and later
AustriaHungary, that were shaped by the Habsburg project of modernity. There
have been passionate debates in Romanian culture over which legacy has prevailed
in the longue dure: the Central European one in Transylvania, the Banat and
Bukovina, or the ByzantineOttoman one in Wallachia and Moldova.
The survey initiated by the journal A Treia Europ asking leading Romanian
intellectuals to position themselves in relation to Central Europe is illustrative of
Romanians mixed attitudes toward the Central European space.146 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 of
Central Europe. But in Transylvania, the Banat and Bukovina this link is more
pronounced, not necessarily due to several personalities, 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 affiliated with the research group of the Third Europe capi
and Harald Heppner, ed., Czernowitz. Die Geschichte einer ungewhnlichen Stadt (Cologne:
Bhlau, 2000).
144 See Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, Paul Celan i meridianul su [Paul Celan and his
meridian] (Iai: Polirom, 1998); Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, Paul Celan: Biographie und Interpretation/Biographie et interpretation (Iai: Polirom, 2000); Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, Jacques
Le Rider, eds., Metropole und Provinzen in Altsterreich (1880-1918) (Iai: Polirom, 1996).
145 Mariana Hausleitner, Die Rumnisierung der Bukowina. Die Durchsetzung des nationalstaatlichen Anspruchs Grossrumniens 19181944 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001).
146 A Treia Europ, 1 (1997) and 2 (1998).
147 A Treia Europ, 1 (1997) 1, 23.
55
talized almost invariably on the distinct cultural identity of the Banat, investing it
with a leading 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 Timioara, the capital of the Banat, is the best and most
representative part of the Central European spirit and way of 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 (17191739). The writer
Eugen Uricaru argued that more than 75 percent of the Romanian territory can be
put under the umbrella of [.] Central Europes cultural influence.150
Other intellectuals attempt to reconcile Romanias South-Eastern and Central 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 relation to the Balkan
realm, a bridge linking the European and the Byzantine spaces. In view of multiple convergences, one should thus speak of a syncretic imperial legacy in Romania,
combining Austrian, Ottoman and Russian influences, treated from a relational
perspective.
Despite the wide range of attitudes toward the Central European space,
these passionate debates have had a strong impact on post-Communist cultural
and political life: nowadays, general country presentations included in textbooks
and official websites of state institutions (re)locate Romania preponderantly in
Central Europe rather than in South-East Europe, as had been the established customary tradition.151
CONCLUSIONS
On the whole, even though the three cases are divergent in many respects,
we can establish a number of common traits in the treatment of (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 confer148 A Treia Europ, 1 (1997) 1, 31.
149 A Treia Europ, 1 (1997) 1, 18.
150 A Treia Europ, 1 (1997) 2, 39.
151 See the official site of the Romanian presidency, at http://www.presidency.ro/,
which places Romania in the center of Europe and in the northern part of the Balkan Peninsula, and respectively in the south-eastern 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/guvern/istoria.html.
56
ences 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 regional
narratives were often exposed to political contingencies and sometimes 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 of interpretation, trying to make sense of the distinctions
and similarities of cultures which often 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
hopelessexercise of defining 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
plurality 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 of 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 rgime in this part of the word; the common or comparable
structures caused by the co-existence and often clash of empires and consequently
of imperial legacies (Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman); the common patterns of
nation-formation and ensuing national identity discourses; and, finally, the shared
cultural traditions, most often imported from the West but acquiring strong local
coloring, ranging from Gothic sculpture to constructivism, or from the lives of
saints to magic realism.
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 themselves as
insulated from their geographical context and treat the West as their only point of
reference. While arguably the broader cultural and political consequences of a
Westernizing attitude may be beneficial, in historical sciences dismissing the regional context makes the understanding of important processes impossible. It may
lead historians to overstate the allegedly exceptional stance of ones own nation
57
and even to indulge in national self-glorification, making ones 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 chronology
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 proposed by Czechs and Hungarians. Hence Poles and Romanians sought to reformulate 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 favorite
fields. The Poles in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the socio-economic debates
about second serfdom, the Hungarians in the 1980s embraced the Schorskean
discourse of specific features of the Central European fin-de-sicle 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 culturalintellectual heritage. Such incompatibilities may well stem
from objective historical differences (after all, Central European fin-de-sicle 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 countries, and thus, indirectly, they might be conditioned by the inherent
dynamism of each historiographical tradition.
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 introduction, most historians tend to intuitively adopt empirical attitudes when dealing 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 CentralEuropean paradigm was often rejected on the basis of its purported Orientalism,
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, religion, state, family, liberalism, modernity, revolution,
58
etc. These concepts are equally laden with value judgments, but nobody seriously
considers banning them from the historians vocabulary. Why should the case of
East-Central Europe be different?
This concept, we believe, has a strong potential to break the mental isolation
and ignorance as regards the neighbors, to include the adjacent nations and territories into the narrative about ones own nation. Without denying the very existence of this exclusivist element (usually directed by various authors 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.
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 of the region, nor to engage in
futile discussions about two, three, or four historical 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-Europeanness 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.

Historical Regions

Transféré par

Informations du document

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Historical Regions

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

RESEARCH DOSSIER: SYMBOLIC GEOGRAPHIES

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL

It should be noted that Hungarians prefer to be

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

not in its original context, promoting a socio-political integration of Germany and

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

Eastern-European backwardness and/or Central European nostalgia

mlt [The HungarianRomanian common past] (Budapest, Teleki Pl Tudomnyos Intzet,

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

Nevertheless, the gradual rediscovery of many intellectual paradigms of the

17 Pter Gunst, Kelet-Eurpa gazdasgi-trsadalmi fejldsnek nhny krdse,

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

ent spheres, Czech influence was also considerable in scholarship, especially in

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

Challenges to the Central European paradigm

Mazsu, ed., Iparosods s modernizci. Tanulmnyok Rnki Gyrgy emlkre (Debrecen:

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

history into its Central-European/Habsburg context: for instance, in A tizenhatodik szzad

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

38 Piotr S. Wandycz, A szabadsg ra. Kelet-Kzp-Eurpa trtnete a kzpkortl mig

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

43 It was signalized by the volume on Czechs in the Habsburg MonarchyLszl

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

45 Lszl Szarka, Szlovk nemzeti fejlds Magyar nemzetisgi politika 18671918

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

48 Andrs Bn D., ed., A hd tls oldaln: tanulmnyok Kelet-Kzp-Eurprl [On

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

What is (East-)Central Europe?

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

Explaining economic backwardness

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

and Eastern Europe. Formsfunctionsevolution] (Warsaw: NeritonInstytut Historii PAN,

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

Comparing national movements

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

Chlebowczyks work, extremely conscious theoretically and furnished by an

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

interests by publishing a wider monograph on Polish political contacts with the

Contributions from art historians and literary historians

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

by Ewa Siatkowska79 is a very clear book for a non-linguist, avoiding a professional

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

specialists in Romanian problems, but possessing a wide knowledge of Polish

83 Ryszard Brykowski, Tadeusz Chrzanowski, Marian Kornecki, Sztuka Rumunii

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi

figuration of Romanians collective identity and a symbolic repositioning vis--vis

87 For a recent historiographical survey of debates over national identity in Romania,

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS?

Romanian intellectuals as late-comers to the Central European club

Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balzs Trencsnyi