Historical Regions

8/16/2019 Historical Regions

1/54

East Central Europe/ECE, vol. 32, 2005, part 1–2, pp. 5–58.

RESEARCH DOSSIER: SYMBOLIC GEOGRAPHIES

Maciej Janowski,Constantin Iordachi and Balázs Trencsényi

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 CentralEurope and related regional classifications were instrumentalized in historical re-search in Hungary, Poland and Romania. While Hungarian and Polish historians em-ployed the discourse of Central Europe as a central means to contextualizeand of-ten relativizeestablished national historical narratives, their geographical frame-works of comparison were nevertheless fairly divergent, the Hungarian one relating tothe former Habsburg and Austro-Hungarian lands while the Polish one revolvingaround the tradition of the Polish–Lithuanian commonwealth. Romanian historiansapproached the issue from the perspective of local history, debating two alternativeregional frameworks: the Old Kingdom, treated as part of the Byzantine and Ottomanlegacies, and Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat that were shaped by the Habs-

burg project of modernity. In the Romanian context the debate on Central Europereached its peak at a time when it lost relevance in the Polish and Hungarian con-texts. While conceding to recent critiques on the constructed and often exclusivist na-ture of symbolic geographical categories, the authors maintain the heuristic value ofregional frameworks of interpretation as models of historical explanation transcend-ing the nation-state at sub-national or trans-national level.

It should be noted that Hungarians prefer to becalled ‘Central’ rather than ‘Eastern’ Europeans.∗

Why bother about historical regions? The flash of interest in Central Europein the wake of the annus mirabilis of 1989 has since then long waned. Even the

European Union’s Eastern enlargement does not seem to revive the interest in thelands ‘between Germany and Russia.’ It would not be too much of an overstate-ment to argue that East-Central European history continues to linger as a special-ized sub-discipline, not much better off than, for example, railway history: a shelterfor innocent hobbyists and local patriots. Similarly, the fascination with the post-

∗ ‘Social Customs,’ in Budapest Phonebook (2004–2005), no publisher given, 16 (In-

formation pages in English).


2/54

6 Maciej Janowski, Constantin Iordachi and Balázs Trencsényi

Habsburg Mitteleuropa notwithstanding, Central Europe has never had its triumphas an analytical concept. For a modernist historian it seemed too loose and arbi-trary, at once too huge for a national (or state) history and too small for a Braude-lian or Wallersteinian synthesis of global mega-trends. True, the concept of back-wardness and the dichotomy between center and periphery stimulated interest incertain aspects of the region’s history. These concepts, however, came under attackin the last decades of the twentieth century as swift over-generalizations and toolsof domination by the center. The reaction against modernist perspectives did notleave the notion of ‘historical region’ untouched: regions, like states and nations,came to be considered ‘reifications’ that defy the complex nature of the past. Assuch, they were ‘deconstructed’ in view of the vested interests, hidden agendas,

cultural bias and structures of political power that were instrumental in creatingand popularizing them. After the ‘linguistic turn’ highlighted the importance of vocabulary, histori-

ans pointed out that labels such as ‘Central,’ ‘Eastern’ or ‘East-Central Europe’ arerelatively recent terms, barely two hundred years old. The never-ending debate onthe limits of the legitimate use of ‘external’ analytical terms was revived, those criti-cizing the use of ‘anachronistic’ terms clearly gaining the upper hand. Scholarsstudying the earlier history of ‘the region’ thus became guilty of anachronism. Atthe same time, the interrelation of national units of analysis became a crucialtheme of research, offering various models of overcoming nation-centered narra-tives and focusing instead on ‘regional’ contextualization. Recent theoretical andmethodological innovations stemming from the tradition of comparative historysuch as ‘shared,’ ‘connected,’ or ‘relational’ history, the history of transfers andhistoire croisée, attempt to shift the analytical emphasis to the multiple levels ofinteraction among actors—rather than on the actors themselves—at various sub-national or supra-national levels.1

The current article argues that regions provide a huge analytical potential forhistorical research. Seeking to re-evaluate the academic tradition of thinking interms of historical regions, the article focuses on historiographical debates oversymbolic geographies in three East-Central European countries: Hungary, Polandand Romania. The first reason behind this choice is obvious: these countries hap-

1 For the theoretical framework of histoire croisée, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte

Zimmermann, ‘Penser l’histoire croisée: entre empirie et réflecivité,’ in Michael Werner and

Bénédicte Zimmermann, eds., De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 15–52.For a first application of histoire croisée, see Bénédicte Zimmermann, Claude Didry and Mi-chael Werner, Histoire croisée de la France et de l’Allemagne (Paris: MSH, 1999). For the his-tory of ‘transfers’ see mainly Johannes Paulmann, ‘Internationaler Vergleich und interkulturel-ler Transfer. Zwei Forschungsansäntze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20 Jahrhun-derts,’ Historische Zeitschrift, (1998) 3, 649–685; Hartmut Kaelble, Der historische Vergleich. Eine Einführung zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999). On the potentialagenda of transnational history, see Michael McGerr, ‘The Price of the ‘New TransnationalHistory,’’ The American Historical Review, 96 (October 1991) 4, 1056–1067.


3/54

WHY BOTHER ABOUT HISTORICAL REGIONS? 7

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 theconcept of Central Europe. The Central European paradigm was essential in theself-understanding of Hungarian historical thinking in the twentieth century. It alsohad a huge impact in Poland, although in the Polish context it carried a fairly dif-ferent message and referred to a divergent territorial framework. In Romania, thecultural and historical legacy of Central Europe was traditionally contrasted to analternative 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 Czecho-slovakia during the 1980s.

The article is made up of three main parts, corresponding to the three casestudies. To date, chronologies of the debate on Central Europe took into accountalmost exclusively articles published abroad. From this perspective, Milan Kun-dera’s article ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe,’ originally written in 1983 in Frenchand published in English in 1984 by the New York Review of Books, is generallytaken as the starting point of the rich international debate that followed. Whileprevious surveys of the concept of Central Europe have often focused on Diasporaintellectuals and the impact of their writings in Western European and Americancontexts, the current article adds an essential internal dimension, underscoringdomestic points of political and intellectual reference in local debates. Given theidiosyncrasies and the particular dynamism of each case analyzed here (reinforcedby the authors’ forcefully subjective selection), the time span and internal logic ofthe three parts is to a certain extent divergent, stressing continuities with the inter-war years, the communist period, or focusing mainly on the last decades respec-tively. The comparison between these three cases enables us to grasp the astonish-ing variety of regional narratives in historical thought and to shed light on the in-terpretative 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 considerablehistorical tradition in Hungary. As in the entire Habsburg Monarchy, it emerged—

after several nineteenth-century antecedents—as a keyword in politics duringWorld War I, with the reception of the famous Mitteleuropa conception formulatedby the German liberal nationalist Friedrich Naumann.2 The strongest responsecame from the civic radicals around Oszkár Jászi, who read Naumann’s proposal

2 Peter M. Stirk, ed., Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni- versity Press, 1994).


4/54


not in its original context, promoting a socio-political integration of Germany andthe small nations in the zone of Austrian and German influence, but as a frame-work capable of resolving the ardent nationality conflicts by incorporating thesenations into a federal scheme.

While the federalist plans failed in the storms of the Great War and the ensu-ing revolutions and counter-revolutions, the concept of Central Europe remainedpresent, albeit in a less politicized form. In the interwar period it was mainly con-nected to left-wing or liberal sub-cultures, which cultivated the heritage of the civicradicals. However, due to the right-wing authoritarian tendencies of the regimewhich labeled Jászi’s circle as one of the main culprits of the dissolution of histori-cal Hungary, these authors had to restrict themselves to cultivating high culture.

The most important example of this trend was the cultural periodical Apollo, editedby István Gál, which defined itself as the herald of mutual understanding of Cen-tral European peoples, fusing liberal and populist intellectual inspirations.

Far from being in a dominant position, this Central European narrative waschallenged from different directions. Predictably, integral nationalists were stickingto a geographical conceptualization (such as the ‘Carpathian Basin’) which wasstressing the concentric nature of the broader region around ‘Rump Hungary,’ thusaccentuating the natural supremacy of the Hungarians over the ‘peripheral’ na-tions.3 At the same time, the populists, who were extremely critical of the ‘state-nationalism’ of the pre-1918 period, and also rejected the irredentist nationalism ofthe Horthy-regime, generally preferred the concept of Eastern Europe, with theunderlying assumption that the real place of the Hungarian people (occasionallycontrasted to the urban ‘others’) is among the Eastern European ‘peasant nations,’whose intertwining destiny was witnessed by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály’smusicological research as well.4

While conceptually these visions were hardly compatible, on the practicaland personal level there were many possible links and combinations. For instance,in historiography proper, the Central European context provided a comparativeframework for the conservative legal historian Ferenc Eckhart, tracing the historyof 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 Szekfű. See his Ál- lam és nemzet. Tanulmányok a nemzetiségi kérdésről [State and Nation: Studies on the na-

tionality question] (Budapest: Magyar Szemle Társaság, 1942).4 The populist perspective of ‘Eastern European peasant nations’ had many faces. Itcould catalyze the somewhat confused but definitely conciliatory vision of László Németh,but it could also intersect with the paradigm of Volksgeschichte, which fed into a new versionof radical ethno-politics. See Elemér Mályusz, Magyar történettudomány [Hungarian histori-ography] (Budapest: Bolyai Akadémia, 1942) and Népiségtörténet [Ethnic history] (Buda-pest: MTA Történettudományi Intézet, 1994).

5 Ferenc Eckhart, A szentkorona-eszme története [The history of the idea of the HolyCrown] (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1941).


5/54


the late thirties was rooted in the populist discourse, but it also appropriated someremnants from the Central European federalist heritage, while retaining a certaindose of the traditional Hungarian state-nationalist discourse, which stressed themultiethnic character of historical Hungary and looked forward to some form ofrestoration 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 historyof neighboring peoples in the late 1930s, most of whom reached maturity in theshort democratic period after World War II.

Between 1945 and 1948, historical research in the Central European contexthad a short but unprecedented flourishing.6 This was partly due to extra-scientificreasons, 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 researcherswere trained in the culture and history of the neighboring countries to provide aresponse to the successful historical propaganda of the ‘Little Entente’ (such asworks by Nicolae Iorga, Gheorghe I. Brătianu, etc.) began to pay off. Some ofthese scholars actually stemmed from the Hungarian minority of the successor-states, others were close to the populist tradition that had an open sympathy withthe ‘Eastern European peasant nations,’ while again others were raised in the spiritof Gyula Szekfű’s historicist perspective, combining an apologetic interest in de-fending the ‘Hungarian position’ with a real scientific effort to actually competewith the historians of ‘the neighbors’ on the battlefields of the shared past. Thegeneration of Domokos Kosáry, Zoltán I. Tóth,7 László Makkai, and László Had-rovics, to mention but a few, wrote a series of important works in this short pe-riod.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). Péter Gunst’s A magyar történetírás története [Thehistory of Hungarian historiography] (Budapest: Csokonai Kiadó, 2002) is very sketchy. Mostrecently, see Arpad von Klimo’s broad-ranging interpretation: Nation, Konfession, Geschichte. Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im europäischen Ausland (1860–1948) (Munich:Oldenburg, 2003), which, however, concentrates more on ‘historical culture’ than historiogra-phy proper. This historical overview follows the argument of a longer article on post-1989Hungarian historiography, written by Balázs Trencsényi and Péter Apor, to be published in the volume edited by Sorin Antohi, Narratives Unbound: Historical Studies in Post-Communist East- ern Europe (forthcoming, Budapest–New York: CEU Press).

7 The least known of this group, Zoltán I. Tóth, was an eminent scholar of Romaniannational ideology, who was accidentally shot dead at a demonstration during the 1956 Revo-lution. His most important work was re-edited recently: Az erdélyi román nacionalizmus elsőévszázada [The first century of Romanian nationalism in Transylvania] (Csíkszereda: Pro-Print, 2000).

8 This implied a genuine interest in transgressing the nationalist framework of pre-1945 historiography. See, for example, the books on Hungarian–Slovak and Hungarian–Romanian ‘common pasts’: István Borsody, Magyar-szlovák kiegyezés [The Hungarian-Slovak compromise] (Budapest: Officina 1945); László Makkai, ed., Magyar-román közös


6/54


ultimately destroyed, and some of them were temporarily marginalized in the fif-ties, these scholars had a remarkable long-term impact on Hungarian historiogra-phy.9 The legacy of this generation opened up the Hungarian historiography of the1960–70s to a more genuine comparative perspective than the imposed frameworkof the ‘brotherly Socialist nations,’ to which many of the historians paid lip-servicethroughout 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 revertto a myopic nationalism but retained a strong interest in the broader region andsought 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 comple-mented by the work of a group of historians that emerged in the fifties, rooted inthe Marxist paradigm. Significantly, they tended to use the term ‘Eastern Europe’rather than Central Europe, implying a number of common features in the dis-torted socio-economic development of these countries ranging from Russia toGermany ‘east of the Elbe,’ at least until the advent of Socialism, when all of asudden they were supposed to have emerged as the vanguard of modernity. Thefirst serious historical model justifying this perspective was developed by ZsigmondPál Pach, who focused on early-modern agrarian history and sought to documentthe moment of ‘divergence’ between East and West, in view of the Engelsian con-cept of ‘second serfdom.’10 The most sophisticated formulation of this theory ofEast European backwardness can be found in the works of economic history byGyörgy Ránki and Iván 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 Palotás, Emil Niederhauser, Dániel Csatári, György Spira,

————— múlt [The Hungarian–Romanian common past] (Budapest, Teleki Pál Tudományos Intézet,1948).

09 See Domokos Kosáry, ‘The Idea of a Comparative History of East CentralEurope: A Story of a Venture,’ in Dennis Deletant and Harry Hanak, eds., Historians as

Nation-Builders: Central and South-East Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 124–138.10 Zsigmond Pál Pach, Nyugat-európai és magyarországi agrárfejlődés a XV–XVII. században [Western-European and Hungarian agrarian development in the 16–17th centu-ries] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1963).

11 See, for instance, Iván T. Berend, György Ránki, Közép-Kelet-Európa gazdasági fej-lődése a 19–20. században [The economic development of East-Central Europe in the 19–20th centuries] (Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1969); Iván T. Berend, Vál- ságos évtizedek: Közép- és Kelet-Európa a két világháború között [Decades of crisis. Centraland Eastern Europe between the two world wars] (Budapest: Gondolat, 1982).


7/54


Endre Arató and Endre Kovács, set to work on the history of the nationality ques-tion in Hungary in view of the broader Eastern European regional context. Theirregional narrative was also influenced by the fact that many of them had the op-portunity to cooperate with historians from the other socialist countries, such asBulgaria, which were previously outside of the horizons of Hungarian historiogra-phy. Of them, the oeuvre of Niederhauser , focusing on the comparative history ofnational awakenings in Eastern Europe, is the most important. Although the cli-max of this generation was in the seventies, Niederhauser published syntheticworks on the history of Eastern European historiography and that of EasternEurope writ large even after 1989.12 Niederhauser’s main works on the emergenceof nationalism in the region, written mainly in the 1970s, went in a similar direc-

tion to that of Miroslav Hroch, seeking to grasp the social determinants of nationalmovements. These works show both the strong points and the weaknesses of post-1956 Hungarian research on Eastern Europe. They display a sincere empathy to-wards all the nations in the region, devoid of farfetched generalizations at the ex-pense of countries and cultures historically in conflict with Hungary, and also fea-turing remarkable positivist efforts to collect and organize source materials. At thesame time, they are characterized by a rather schematic model of development,rooted in the Marxist vision of the relationship of socio-economic basis and ideo-logical 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 marginalizedin Hungarian historical production and remained alive only in the works of émigrépoliticians and historians, who sought to appeal to Western solidarity on the basisof 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 Europeanfederation serving as a neutral buffer-zone between the Soviet Union and the An-glo-American sphere of interest.13 However, with the increasing participation ofHungarian scientific institutions in the European academic ‘joint ventures’ and theemerging political program of harmonizing Hungary with the ‘Western democra-cies,’ the concept of Central Europe once again came to the fore and shaped re-search projects which were previously at the margins of official cultural politics.

12 Emil Niederhauser, Nemzetek születése Kelet-Európában [The birth of nations in

Eastern Europe] (Budapest: Kossuth, 1976); A nemzeti megújulási mozgalmak Kelet-Euró- pában [The movements of national revival in Eastern Europe] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó,1977); A történetírás története Kelet-Európában [The history of historiography in EasternEurope] (Budapest: História–MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 1995); see also his morerecent overview, Kelet-Európa története [History of Eastern Europe] (Budapest: História–MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 2001); in English: Emil Niederhauser, A History of East- ern Europe since the Middle Ages (Boulder–New York: Social Science Monographs, 2003).

13 Francis S. Wagner, ed., Toward a New Central Europe: A Symposium on the Prob- lems of the Danubian Nations (Astor Park, Flo.: Danubian Press, 1971).


8/54


This was the case with the work of Péter Hanák, whose fascination with theeveryday 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 theseventies, dealing with Austria lost its original political overtones connected to theanti-Habsburg component of the national discourse and came to place Hungary ina symbolic neighborhood that was more ‘respectable’ than the Eastern Bloc. Inaddition, Hanák was at the forefront of the rediscovery of Oszkár Jászi,14 whosepre-1918 oeuvre, especially his works on the nationality question, was gradually re-edited and became part of an ‘alternative canon’ of Hungarian progressive (butnon-Communist) thought.15 Hanák’s main contribution was to reintegrate theHungarian half of the Habsburg Monarchy in its post-1867 form into its original

cultural, political and economical setting, documenting the breath-taking processof socio-cultural modernization at the turn of the century and thus challenging thelatent nationalist presumptions of post-Stalinist historiography, which asserted thesemi-colonial position of Hungary in the Monarchy.16

Once again, while conceptually the visions of the semi-peripheral backward-ness of Eastern Europe and the rather nostalgic exaltation of the symbolic dualismof the ‘Garden’ and the ‘Workshop’ in the context of fin-de-siècle Central Europewere hardly compatible, there were many fine threads that connected the two.From the mid-1960s onwards, the Kádár-regime came to be considered a kind of

Ausgleich by a wide segment of the intelligentsia, and this created a context for thereconsideration of 1867, too. In many ways, the school of social history emergingin the sixties, focusing on the modernization attempts in Hungary in the late 19thcentury, fit into this perspective— very much in line with the Western ‘social his-tory’ of the time, concentrating on the uneven territorial distribution of wealth,‘sheltered modernization’ projects, etc. Giving up the political pretensions to inde-pendence, Hungarian society concentrated on its material well-being, and the sup-porters of the Socialist embourgeoisement of the 1960s and 1970s could look backwith sympathy to the rise of the bourgeoisie in fin-de-siècle Hungary. The picture ofbelated, but nevertheless powerful socio-economic development in a peripheralsociety could be interpreted as an apology for the eternal realist drive of Hungarianpolitics—in the shadow of vast uncontrollable forces, trying to do ‘whatever couldbe done.’ This perspective was obviously permeating the liberal Kádárist version ofsocial history that earned international prestige for Ránki and Berend, but it wasunderlying the politically more ambivalent vision of Hanák, too.

14 Péter Hanák, Jászi Oszkár dunai patriotizmusa [The Danubian patriotism of Osz-kár Jászi] (Budapest: Magvető, 1985).

15 The most important exegete of Jászi was György Litván. See his Magyar gondolat, szabad gondolat [Hungarian thought, free thought] (Budapest: Magvető, 1978).

16 Péter Hanák, A Kert és a Műhely [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).


9/54


Nevertheless, the gradual rediscovery of many intellectual paradigms of thepre-Communist periods created a plurality of approaches and discourses andloaded the issue of historical regions with immediate relevance.17 It is not surpris-ing that from the mid-1970s onwards the question of Hungary’s symbolic geo-graphical self-positioning became an important issue in the intellectual debates.18 The most well-known product of this atmosphere is of course Jenő Szűcs’s ‘Sketchon the three regions of Europe.’19 Since its appearance, the essay was hailed as aCentral Europeanist manifesto along the lines of Milan Kundera or CzesławMiłosz, even though actually it was rooted rather in the local debates on back-wardness and the ‘national contents’ of history, the so-called Erik Molnár-debate.20 Szűcs was consciously turning back to the cultural atmosphere of the 1945–1948

period—as it is well known, the original version of the text was written for the Festschrift of István Bibó, whose ideas about the ‘misery of East European smallstates’ provided the starting-point for Szűcs. Besides re-launching Bibó’s ideas,Szűcs’s main intellectual aim was to take issue with the re-emerging discourse ofnational peculiarity. At the same time, he challenged the geographical frameworkof Marxist economic history which divided Europe categorically between East andWest and thus implied that there was no significant difference between the histori-cal development of the Russian Empire and the Habsburg Empire. Both of theseempires, Marxists would claim, were characterized by the protracted presence ofparticularly oppressive feudal institutions, a socio-economic modernization comingfrom some sort of Enlightened Absolutism, a belated industrialization and the cor-responding social tensions in the late 19th century and, finally, the Socialist trans-formation. While Szűcs accepted the hypothesis of a profound structural differencebetween Western Europe in the traditional sense and Hungary, Bohemia or Po-land, he challenged the binary opposition of East and West, suggesting the exis-tence of a transitional zone, which featured the Western social and cultural phe-

17 Péter Gunst, ‘Kelet-Európa gazdasági-társadalmi fejlődésének néhány kérdése,’

[Some prolems of the socio-economic development of Eastern Europe] Valóság , (1974) 2,16–31; and Emil Niederhauser, ‘Kelet-Európa a magyar történettudományban,’ [EasternEurope in Hungarian historiography] Magyar Tudomány, (1978) 7–8, 500–504.

18 The topical nature of the issue is documented by the appearance of the importantcollection, edited by Éva Ring, ed., Helyünk Európában. Nézetek és koncepciók a 20. századi Magyarországon [Our place in Europe. Views and conceptions in twentieth-century Hun-

gary] 2 vols., (Budapest: Magvető, 1986); see also Iván T. Berend, ‘Magyarország helyeEurópában,’ [The place of Hungary in Europe], Valóság, (1982) 12, 1–22.19 Vázlat Európa három történeti régiójáról [Sketch on the three regions of Europe]

(Budapest: Magvető, 1983); in English: ‘The three historical regions of Europe: an outline,’ Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungariae, 29 (1983), 131–184.

20 The key texts of Szűcs are in his Nemzet és történelem [Nation and history] (Bu-dapest: Gondolat, 1974), see especially ‘A nemzet historikuma és a történetszemléletnemzeti látószöge,’ [The historical aspect of the nation and the national perspective of his-tory], 11–188.


10/54


nomena in a more superficial manner, but which can be still clearly distinguishedfrom the ‘Eastern’ patterns of development.

Szűcs’s essay had an enormous impact in Hungary, launching a public de-bate on the place of Hungary in Europe which reverberated until the early 1990s.In the historical profession the most interesting exchange of ideas on this issuetook place between Péter Hanák and Szűcs himself.21 Arguing mainly from theperspective of cultural history, Hanák proposed a triangular model in which Cen-tral Europe, including Austria and Switzerland, would have been equidistant fromEast and West. In turn, Szűcs insisted that East-Central Europe, i.e. historical Bo-hemia, 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 ‘wester-nizer’ narratives. Hanák’s conception distanced the Center from the West but itweaved together the destiny of Budapest and Vienna—while Szűcs stressed thedivergence of the traditional Central European polities from Germany, but eventu-ally asserted the compatibility of the Central European historical experience withthat of the Occident. The real impact of these discussions, however, reached be-

yond professional historians, introducing to the general public the idea of histori-cal divergence between Hungary and the Soviet-dominated Eastern camp.

Moreover, the reception of Szűcs’s work had a broader cultural–politicalcontext. Literary studies also contributed to the growth of awareness of the cultureof Central Europe. As everywhere in Europe, comparative literature enjoyed hugeprestige in the 1970–1980s.23 Due mainly to the efforts of Tibor Klaniczay, alreadyin the 1960–1970s early-modern literary historians began to formulate comparativeprojects with their regional counterparts, developing a vivid interaction especiallywith Polish scholars. Beyond early modern literary history, Polish culture was al-ways popular in Hungary, but in the 1960–1970s it acquired even stronger prestigedue to the relative liberty of expression and its vivid art scene.24 Although in differ-

21 Jenő Szűcs and Péter Hanák, Európa régiói a történelemben [The regions of

Europe in History] (Előadások a Történettudományi Intézetben 3.) (Budapest: MTA,1986).

22 For a contemporary critical overview of the main points, see Gábor Gyáni, ‘Törté-nészviták hazánk Európán belüli hovatartozásáról,’ [Historical debates on the place of ourcountry within Europe], Valóság, (1988) 4, 76–83; for the repercussions of the debate after

1989, see the writings by Zsigmond Pál Pach, Gábor Gyáni and Péter Hanák in BUKSZ, (1991) 3, 351–361; (1991) 4, 406–409; (1992) 1, 6–10; (1992) 2, 145–154.23 István Fried and Mihály György Vajda were the protagonists of this perspective.

See, for instance, István Fried, Kelet- és Közép-Európa között: Irodalmi párhuzamok és szem- besítések a kelet-közép-európai irodalmak köréből [Between East and Central Europe: Literaryparallels and confrontations in the literatures of East-Central Europe] (Budapest: Gondolat,1986).

24 The writer and literary historian György Spiró published an important volume ondrama in nineteenth-century Central Europe: A közép-kelet-európai dráma: A felvilágosodástól


11/54


ent spheres, Czech influence was also considerable in scholarship, especially interms of mediating a sort of Central European structuralism (going back to thePrague circle, i.e., Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukařovský), gradually opening up toa more complex cultural history paradigm as well. An important author in this veinis Endre Bojtár, whose main field of interest is Baltic studies, but he also madecontributions to the literary history of Central Europe on the whole.25 Last but notleast, the intellectual history of the Habsburg monarchy also became an object ofstudy.26

All this provided a context for the more directly political uses of the CentralEuropean myth in the works of György Konrád or Mihály Vajda, whose texts had acomparable agenda to those of Kundera, namely, creating a new symbolic frame-

work for the de-Sovietization of the region and also evoking some sense of respon-sibility in the Western intellectual and political elites for ‘l’Europe kidnappée.’27 Allthis reached its peak around 1989, when the discourse of Central Europe, whichwas until then fulfilling a meta-political function, came to the fore and became animportant ingredient of the discursive arsenal of the (re-)emerging democratic re-gimes in the region.28

————— Wyspiański szintéziséig [East-Central European drama: From the Enlightenment to the syn-thesis of Wyspiański] (Budapest: Magvető, 1986)—and also wrote important novels anddramas, evoking various Polish cultural references.

25 Endre Bojtár, ‘Az ember feljő...’: A felvilágosodás és a romantika a közép- és kelet-

európai irodalmakban [‘The man rises’: Enlightenment and Romanticism in the literatures ofCentral and Eastern Europe] (Budapest, Magvető, 1986); Endre Bojtár, Kelet-Európa vagy Közép-Európa? [Eastern Europe or Central Europe?] (Budapest: Századvég, 1993). Thesecond volume contains his essays from the 1980s.

26 Nyíri Kristóf, A Monarchia szellemi életéről [On the intellectual life of the Monar-chy] (Budapest, Gondolat, 1980); Európa szélén [On the edge of Europe] (Budapest: Kos-suth, 1986).

27 György Konrád, Európa köldökén [On the navel of Europe] (Budapest: Magvető,1990); Mihály Vajda, Orosz szocializmus Közép-Európában [Russian socialism in CentralEurope] (Budapest: Századvég, 1989).

28 For the debates of the turn of the decade, see Attila Ágh, ‘Közép-Európa ‘felfe-dezése’,’ [The ‘discovery’ of Central Europe], Tiszatáj, (1988) 11; Péter Hanák, ‘Közép-Európa keresi önmagát,’ [Central Europe in search of itself], Liget , 1 (1988) 1, 3–11; Emil

Niederhauser, ‘A kelet-európai fejlődés egysége és különbözősége,’ [The unity and differ-ences of Eastern-European development], Magyar Tudomány, (1989) 9, 668–681; PéterHanák, ‘Közép-Európa: az imaginárius régió,’ [Central Europe: The imaginary region], Liget , (1989) 3, 20–31; János Gyurgyák, ed., Kell-e nekünk Közép-Európa? A Századvégkülönkiadása [Do we need Central Europe? Special issue of the journal Századvég ] (Buda-pest, 1989); Károly Halmos, ‘Keresztszélen körös-körül: Közép-Európa,’ [On the margins allaround: Central Europe], Tér és Társadalom, (1990) 2, 86–96; György Gyarmati, ‘Magyar-ország közép-európaisága. Történelmi adottságok — jelenkori konzekvenciák,’ [The Central-Europeanness of Hungary. Historical conditions—contemporary consequences] in János


12/54


Challenges to the Central European paradigmin post-Communist Hungary

In the 1990s the Central European framework provided a natural horizon ofregional comparison for a number of highly divergent historical ventures.29 Thisframework, especially in the early-modern context, seemed to resolve a number ofproblems isolated ‘national historiographies’ had been facing for long. Placing theirfindings in a Central European context offered a way out of the retrospective na-tionalization of the region, positing a cross-cultural context where the historicalphenomena could be discussed in view of their multiple ethnic, linguistic, culturaland 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 culturaland political phenomena were often studied without their Czech or Hungariancounterparts.

Many Hungarian historians and literary scholars thus eagerly appropriatedthe Central European symbolic framework to contextualize their findings on me-dieval history,30 humanism,31 military history,32 or the history of mentalities.33 As

————— Mazsu, ed., Iparosodás és modernizáció. Tanulmányok Ránki György emlékére (Debrecen:KLTE, 1991), 101–124.

29 On the 1989 turn and its historiographical impact the first assessments in foreignlanguages were by Csaba Sasfi, ‘Die politische Wende und die Geschichtswissenschaften in

Ungarn,’ Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 1 (1991), 103–108; andIstvan Deak, ‘Hungary,’ The American Historical Review, 97 (Oct. 1992) 4, 1041–1063.Gábor Gyáni published a number of polemic texts on the state of affairs of Hungarian histo-riography: see his Történészdiskurzusok [Historians’ discourses] (Budapest: L’Harmattan,2002) and ‘Történetírásunk az évezred fordulóján,’ [Our historical scholarship at the turn ofthe Millenium], Századvég , Új folyam, 18 (2000), 117–140.

30 Gábor Klaniczay, ‘Medieval Origins of Central Europe. An Invention or a Discov-ery?’ in Lord Dahrendorf, Yehuda Elkana, Aryeh Neier, William Newton-Smith and IstvánRév eds., The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences (Budapest— New York: CEU Press,2000), 251–264. See also his Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in MedievalCentral Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

31 József Jankovics, ed., Matthias Corvinus and the Humanism in Central Europe (Bu-dapest: Balassi, 1994). See also Marianna D. Birnbaum’s Humanists in a Shattered World:

Croatian and Hungarian Latinity in the Sixteenth Century

(Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publish-ers, 1986), and Sándor Bene’s Egy kanonok három királysága. Ráttkay György horváthistóriája [The Three Kingdoms of one Prebend. The Croatian History by György Ráttkay](Budapest: Argumentum, 2000), which were the first serious attempts at reconstructing thecommon horizons of Hungarian and Croatian early-modern intellectual history.

32 Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor, eds., Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe. The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest [The Ottoman Empire and itsheritage, politics, society and economy], vol. 20., (Leiden: Brill Academic Publisher, 2000).Géza Pálffy also made remarkable efforts to reintegrate Hungarian political and military


13/54


for more modern contexts, the Central European perspective was evoked espe-cially in works dealing with pre-national or cross-national phenomena, such as thehistory of Central European Jewry.34 The attempts at creating a Central Europeanfederation during the Second World War also became an object of archival re-search.35 After 1989, Central Europe also became an important heuristic tool fornarrating the history of Hungary. Drawing also on examples from the 1970-1980s,such as the works by Domokos Kosáry and Ervin Pamlényi, who used the CentralEuropean comparative framework implicitly, the most important new synthesesaiming at a foreign audience made explicit claims of interpreting Hungarian historyin a Central European cultural and political context. 36 Finally, certain authorssought 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 flour-ishing to the Central European paradigm of historiography in Hungary, but thecase is much more ambiguous. With the passing of the first euphoria and the ap-pearance of serious political cracks among the countries, the utopian image ofCentral Europe also became untenable. Interestingly, there is a certain tendency ofde-ideologization of symbolic geographical references on the whole (going againstthe general trend of re-ideologization in the entire craft), which seems to turn thework on the region into a ‘normal science,’ gradually getting rid of the normativeimages of Central Europe so prominent in the 1980s. It is indicative that in the1990s only very few books were translated from the Western canon dealing withCentral Europe as a historical region (the works of Claudio Magris can be consid-ered an exception). While Oskar Halecki’s Borderlands of Western Civilization,37

————— history into its Central-European/Habsburg context: for instance, in A tizenhatodik századtörténete [The history of the sixteenth century] (Budapest: Pannonica, 2000).

33 István György Tóth, Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Central Europe (Budapest– New York: CEU Press, 2000).

34 Victor Karády and Yehuda Don, eds., A Social and Economic History of Central European Jewry (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1990); Anikó Prepuk, A zsidóság Közép- és Kelet-Európában a 19–20. században [Jews in Central and Eastern Europe in the19–20th centuries] (Debrecen: Csokonai, 1997); Tamás Kende, ‘The Language of BloodLibels in Central and East European History,’ in László Kontler, ed., Pride and Prejudice (Budapest: History Department of the Central European University, 1994), 91–104.

35 András Bán D., Pax Britannica: Wartime Foreign Office Documents Regarding Plans for a Postbellum East Central Europe (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, New York:1997).

36 Miklós Molnár, A Concise History of Hungary (Cambridge: Cambride UniversityPress, 2001); László Kontler, Millenium in Central Europe. History of Hungary (Budapest: Atlantisz, 1999). See also László Kontler, ‘Introduction: Reflections on Symbolic Geogra-phy,’ European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’Histoire, 6 (Spring 1999) 1, 9–14.

37 Oskar Halecki, A nyugati civilizáció peremén: Kelet-Közép-Európa története (Buda-pest: Osiris–Századvég, 1995).


14/54


and more recently Piotr Wandycz’s The Price of Freedom38 were eventually trans-lated into Hungarian, curiously enough most of the classic works on the region(Jacques Rupnik, Jacques Le Rider, Timothy Garton Ash, etc.) remained inacces-sible for the Hungarian audience. Finally, while the history of the idea of CentralEurope earned its first Hungarian monograph, locating the rise of this regionalnarrative in the geopolitical debates of the turn of the century, the attempt re-mained rather isolated and was not followed by other works analyzing various re-gional narratives of Hungarian intellectual history.39

At the same time, the drive towards regional paradigms in the works of IvánT. Berend,40 or Ignác Romsics41 did not result in the emergence of a Central Euro-peanist 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 frame-works (from Danubian Basin to East-Central Europe) signalizing the multiplicityof perspectives. He also made important efforts to ‘historicize’ and thus to ‘relativ-ize’ 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 andpolitical assumptions of these conceptions, and thus challenging the unreflectiveuse of these terms.42

By the mid-1990s, the Hungarian public also became more sensitive to thecriticism targeting the discourse of Central Europe as an exclusivist paradigm. Asit is well-known, this criticism was based on the repercussions of the Orientalismdebate, pointing out the political instrumentalization of symbolic geographicalreferences. Not surprisingly, the focus of these arguments turned out to be the Bal-kans, and many of the authors, such as Maria Todorova or Milica Bakić-Haydenchallenged the Central Europeanist discourse as a conscious tool of symbolic mar-ginalization.

38 Piotr S. Wandycz, A szabadság ára. Kelet-Közép-Európa története a középkortól máig (Budapest: Osiris, 2004).

39 Ferenc L. Lendvai, Közép-Európa koncepciók [Conceptions of Central Europe](Budapest: Áron Kiadó, 1997).

40 Iván T. Berend, Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery

to the Periphery. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).41 Ignác Romsics, Helyünk és sorsunk a Duna-medencében [Our place and destiny inthe Danubian Basin] (Budapest: Osiris, 1996); Ignác Romsics, ed., Integrációs törekvések Közép- és Kelet-Európában a 19–20. században [Ambitions of integration in Central andEastern Europe in the 19–20th centuries] (Budapest: Teleki László Alapítvány, 1997); Nemzet, nemzetiség és állam Kelet-Közép- és Délkelet-Európában a 19. és 20. században [Na-tion, nationality and the state in East-Central and Southeast Europe in the 19–20th centu-ries] (Budapest: Napvilág, 1998).

42 Romsics, Nemzet, nemzetiség és állam, 17–31.


15/54


While some of these debates became fairly well-known in the most interna-tionally connected public (although, conspicuously, Todorova’s book still awaits itsHungarian translator), they did not succeed in undermining the cultural prestige ofthe Central European discourse in its entirety. This is due mainly to the one-sidedness of the argument, which in the heat of the polemic tended to disregardthe local context of the Central Europeanist discourse and focused only on its pos-sible political implications in terms of the ‘marginalization’ of the other post-Communist countries beyond the borders of the erstwhile Habsburg Monarchy.This went against the ‘local knowledge’ that the classic models, such as that ofSzűcs, were not consciously ‘othering’ Southeast Europe, they rather disregarded itcompletely, as the thrust of their argument was to accentuate the distinction be-

tween the East of the Russian Empire and the Central European countries.To blame this literature for consciously ‘excluding’ the Balkans and thusconfirming some kind of ideology of national superiority meant to disregard thecomplicated ideological composition of nationalism in the region. For instance,the cult of Czech culture in Hungary from the 1960s onwards, which was one ofthe focal points of the emerging fashion of Central Europeanism, was far frombeing a natural extension of some kind of K.u.K. nostalgia, but meant a veritablebreakthrough, going against an established stereotyping where the Czechs wereconsidered the most perfidious adversaries of Hungarian interests. In this sense,the emergence of pro-Czech cultural and political sensitivities was fundamentallychallenging the Hungarian national(ist) canon, both in its nineteenth-century ro-mantic and post-Trianon versions, and could not be described as a natural projec-tion of a micro-regional suprematism. The growing interest in Czech history,43 which was traditionally neglected by Hungarian historians, was thus naturally go-ing hand in hand with the growth of interest in other countries (such as Yugoslaviaor Bulgaria) which were marginalized by the traditional Hungarian nationalist per-spective.

At the same time, it is to be admitted that in the early 1990s the political useof the Central European discourse had a certain exclusivist tinge, as it corre-sponded to the attempt of smuggling the ‘Visegrád countries’ into the EuropeanUnion, while creating a strong distinction with the ‘less-European’ post-socialistregions—Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and former Soviet republics—which weredeemed much more dangerous and ravaged by potential or actual conflicts. Even-tually, the whole distinction turned out to be untenable and by the mid-1990s allpolitical 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 Monarchy —LászlóSzarka, ed., Csehország a Habsburg-Monarchiában [Bohemia in the Habsburg Monarchy](Budapest: Gondolat, 1989)—, and also resulted in a number of other important works,among them Tamás Berkes’ pioneering attempt to narrate modern Czech intellectual historyfor the Hungarian audience: A cseh eszmetörténet antinómiái [The antinomies of Czech intel-lectual history] (Budapest: Balassi, 2003).


16/54


where even the former strategic partners of the envisioned Central European re-gion could be potential obstacles to each other’s aspirations to a smooth integra-tion. While the Hungarian political elite did not develop a similar irritation to aregional approach as for instance Václav Klaus did, it became obvious that, at leastin the short run, this discourse lost its political expedience.

All this also can be documented in the field of historiography. The interest inPolish or Czech past notwithstanding, Romania and Slovakia emerged in the nine-ties as the regionally most important objects of research, a fact that obviously hasto do with the overlapping pasts and the presence of ethnic Hungarians (both asobjects and subjects of research) in the two countries. Even if truly regional com-parative frameworks are missing both from the scholarship and the educational

curriculum, there is a relatively large number (at least compared to the regionalaverage) of translations from the historiographical output of these countries. Someof the key works by, for example, Dušan Kováč , L’ubomír Lipták and Lucian Boia,are also available in Hungarian, though it is to be added that these editions wereoften produced by Hungarian editing houses in Slovakia or Romania.44 At thesame 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 CentralEuropean paradigm. First of all, the attempt to expand the Central European sym-bolic umbrella to Romania was extremely problematic. Although it opened up thecooperation between Hungarian scholars and regionalist intellectuals from Tran-sylvania and the Banat, it also became clear that, since the entire Romanian cul-tural and political tradition can hardly be assimilated to the post- K.u.K. world, onthe whole the Central European paradigm does not offer a comprehensive frame-work for coming to terms with the past shared by Hungarians and Romanians.

44 Lucian Boia, Történelem és mítosz a román köztudatban [History and myth in Ro-manian consciousness] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1999); Dušan Kováč, Szlovákia története [His-tory of Slovakia] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2001); L’ubomír Lipták, Száz évnél hosszabb év- század: a történelemről és a történetírásról [A century longer than hundred years: On historyand historiography] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2000). In addition, various publications focusedon the fundamental texts of the Romanian intellectual tradition. See, for example, the seriesedited by Ambrus Miskolczy, entitled Encyclopaedia Transylvanica; and also Imre Pászka,

ed., Román eszmetörténet, 1866–1945. Önismeret és modernizáció a román gondolkodásban[Romanian intellectual history, 1866–1945: Self-knowledge and modernization in Roma-nian thought] (Budapest: Aetas–Századvég, 1994); Lajos Kántor, ed., Szegényeknek palota: XX. századi román esszék [Palace for the poor: Romanian essays from the 20th century](Budapest: Balassi, 1998); Constantin Iordachi and Balázs Trencsényi, ‘A román törté-netírás kihívásai’ [Challenges of Romanian historiography], Replika, 40–41 (November2000), 165–264. Most recently, see Andor Horváth, ed., Tanúskodni jöttem. Válogatás a kétvilág-háború közötti román emlékirat- és naplóirodalomból [I came to witness: Selection fromthe memoir and diary literature of interwar Romania] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 2003).


17/54


In a different sense, while nobody questioned the Central European nature of theSlovak historical tradition, the references to a common Central European heri-tage did not preclude the escalation of conflicts over the contested historicalspace.

It is not by chance, then, that most of the researchers (such as LászlóSzarka45 in the Slovak case, or Ambrus Miskolczy 46 and Béla Borsi-Kálmán47 in theRomanian) returned to a bilateral comparative model, relegating the broader re-gional framework to the background. This shift also marked the geographic orien-

45 László Szarka, Szlovák nemzeti fejlődés – Magyar nemzetiségi politika 1867–1918 [Slovak national development—Hungary’s nationality policy, 1867–1918] (Bratislava: Kal-ligram, 1995); Kisebbségi léthelyzetek – közösségi alternatívák: az etnikai csoportok helyea kelet-közép-európai nemzetállamokban [Minority life conditions—community alternatives:The place of ethnic groups in East-Central European nation states] (Budapest: Lucidus,2004); Duna-táji dilemmák: nemzetiségi kisebbségek – kisebbségi politika a 20. századi Kelet-Közép-Európában [Danubian dilemmas: National minorities and minority politics in20th-century East-Central Europe] (Budapest: Ister Kiadó és Kulturális Szolgáltató Iroda,1998).

46 Ambrus Miskolczy, Eszmék és téveszmék. Kritikai esszék a román múlt és jelen vitáskérdéseit tárgyaló könyvekről [Ideas and misunderstandings. Critical essays on books discuss-ing the debated issues of Romanian past and present] (Budapest: ELTE BTK RománFilológiai Tanszék, 1994); Lélek és titok. A ‘mioritikus tér’ mítosza, avagy Lucian Blaga esz-

mevilágáról [Soul and Secret: The myth of ‘Mioritic Space’ or essay on the ideas of LucianBlaga] (Budapest: Közép-Európa Intézet–Kortárs Kiadó, 1994); Ambrus Miskolczy, ed., Tündérkert: Az erdélyi fejedelmi kor magyar és román szemmel. Két tanulmány: Gheorghe I. Brătianu, Makkai László [The Fairy Garden: The age of Transylvanian princes from Hungar-ian and Romanian points of view. Two studies by Gheorghe I. Brătianu and László Makkai](Budapest: ELTE BTK Román Filológiai Tanszék, 1994); Ambrus Miskolczy, Határjárás aromán-magyar közös múltban [Roaming about the borders in the Romanian-Hungariancommon past] (Budapest: Lucidus, 2004).

47 Béla Borsi-Kálmán, A békétlenség stádiumai: Fejezetek a román-magyar kapcsolatoktörténetéből [The stages of restlessness: Chapters from the history of Romanian-Hungarianrelations] (Budapest: Osiris, 1999); Kihívás és eretnekség : Adalékok a román-magyar viszonytörténetéhez [Challenge and heresy: Contributions to the history of Romanian-Hungarianrelations] (Sepsiszentgyörgy: H-Press, 1996); Kockázatos viszonyok: Írások a román irodalom,

művelődéstörténet és nemzeti önszemlélet tárgyköréből [Hazardous relations: Writings onRomanian literature, cultural history and national self-perception] (Pécs: Jelenkor, 1997),translated into French as Liaisons risquées: Hongrois et Roumains aux XIXe et XXe siècles.Consciences nationales, interférences et relations délicates (Pécs: Jelenkor, 1999); Illúzióker- getés vagy ismétléskényszer? Román-magyar nemzetpolitikai elgondolások és megegyezési kísér- letek a XIX. században [Chasing illusions or complexes of repetition? Romanian-Hungariannational ideas and attempts at reconciliation in the 19th century] (Bukarest–Budapest:Kriterion–Balassi, 1995); Hungarian Exiles and the Romanian National Movement, 1849–1867 (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1991).


18/54


tation of research institutions. While functioning mainly as a minority-policy think-tank, the Teleki László Institute also had an impact on the reconsideration ofHungary’s geopolitical position and the history of Hungarian minorities inneighboring countries, retaining Central Europe as one of its reference points, butseeking to abandon its strong normative connotations. It is indicative of this devel-opment that the periodical Regio, published by the Institute, transcends the tradi-tional 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 conceptualsolutions. One of the most popular is ‘in-between Europe’ (Köztes-Európa), which

was obviously rooted in an attempt to emancipate the geographical terminology ofits 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 isthat it is—most probably unwittingly —evoking the German Zwischen-Europa ofGieselher Wiersing, which was compromised by Nazi geopolitics, thus it is unlikelyto become an internationally acceptable solution. A tentative return to the lessloaded ‘East-Central Europe,’48 which was common in the 1980s, or even to theambiguous ‘Danubian region’ (Dunatáj) can be detected. Finally, the re-emergenceof an outspokenly nationalistic historiographical canon brought back the moreHungaro-centric terminology, grasping the region in concentric circles around theCarpathian Basin.

On the whole, as we could see, the regional scope of historiography wentthrough a paradoxical transformation in post-1989 Hungary. While the 1980sbrought unprecedented prestige for the Central European paradigm, the 1990switnessed a gradual dissolution of this discourse and the emergence of a number ofcompeting narratives. This transformation did not imply the decline of interest inthe broader region, but the accents definitely shifted. Central Europe as a conceptlost much of its appeal, while the natural thrust for locating their findings in a re-gional setting drove historians to different directions, within and beyond the classicgeographical 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 sub-disciplines developed their own comparative frameworks, implicit or explicit,symmetric or asymmetric. For instance, while the ‘new social history’ of the 1990soften placed its vision of bourgeois modernity into a post-Habsburg context, those

who worked on the emergence of national ideologies were pushed to accentuatethe similarities between various East-Central European cases that eventually turnedout to be much less different than usually presumed. Recently, all this became col-

48 András Bán D., ed., A híd túlsó oldalán: tanulmányok Kelet-Közép-Európáról [Onthe other side of the bridge: Studies on East-Central Europe] (Budapest: Osiris, 2000).


19/54


ored by the increasing awareness of the collapse of traditional paradigms of com-parative history-writing and the emergence of more reflective new methodologicaloffers 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 theevolution of the political and cultural unification of Europe, whether the new gen-eration of historians, raised by the trans-European institutions of academic sociali-zation and knowledge-transfer, will feel the need of reformulating some kind ofregional narrative to accentuate their relative otherness within the Europeanframework, or they will be taken away by the challenge of coining a new, all-European regional typology, which will make any Central European or East-Central European otherness insignificant in the face of the radical or radicalized

non-European otherness.

POLISH HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE CONCEPTS

OF (EAST-)CENTRAL EUROPE

Although the question of Central Europe was never crucial for Polish re-searchers, a closer look at Polish historiography reveals a huge number of books,conferences, institutions focusing on the problems of our region. This output is fartoo big to embrace, let alone analyze, for a single reviewer, but some general re-marks may be, perhaps, risked.

What is (East-)Central Europe?

The 1980s, as well known, were a period of fashionable debates on CentralEurope. It seems, however, that in Polish cultural life their role was less prominentthan among Czech and Hungarian intellectuals. The reason lies perhaps in theunclear character of the concept—even more unclear for Poles than for Czechs orHungarians, as the simple equation of Central Europe with more or less the formerHabsburg monarchy never found support among Poles (it would mean dividingPoland into two different zones, with most of the country, including Warsaw, outof the Central Europe so understood). Thus, if the concept were to be accepted inPoland, it would have to be reformulated. This could happen in two ways: onecould accept the ‘Habsburg vision’ plus the whole of Poland (what Poland means

territorially for a historian is another matter), which in practice would mean limit-ing the region to the history of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, seen as three ‘his-torical’ nations with more or less comparable centuries-old traditions of statehood.

Alternatively, one could accept the political history of the 19th and 20th centuriesas 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 after1989, the vision of a ‘Polish–Czech–Hungarian’ East Central Europe dominates


20/54


the well known book of Piotr Wandycz,49 whereas Jerzy Kłoczowski seems to bethe supporter of the second view.50 The important element of Kłoczowski’s ap-proach is that he includes Byzantine tradition as a fully-fledged component of theregion’s culture (indeed, he compares the ‘Occidentalization’ and ‘Byzantinization’of various Slavonic lands as two parallel ways of the diffusion of European cul-ture).51

These two attitudes share an important implicit consequence. The secondone seems to perceive East-Central Europe as a cross-cultural territory with variousinfluences counterbalancing each other—the first one, more in line with the argu-ment 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 civiliza-tions, remaining, however, an integral part of the first one.’52

The two visions outlined above are rarely professed openly, and the confu-sion of terminology makes clear systematization even more difficult. All thosewho, for various reasons, profess interest in the supranational, regional view ofhistory that would encompass both Poland and the neighboring territories, have

various terminological possibilities at their disposal. They can speak about Centralor East-Central Europe, or even about ‘the Eastern part of Central Europe’ (asJózef Chlebowczyk did); they can, however, use still different terminology andmean somewhat similar things. Central Europe for both Czechs and Hungarianshas, among others, an important function of restoring their countries to their po-litical and cultural context that was peculiar to them for the most part of their his-tory. It is not (or not mainly) for the sake of curiosity, nor out of passion for com-parative history, that Czech or Hungarian researchers tend to dig into the past ofthe Habsburg Monarchy: doing so, they try to find themselves in a universe towhich their countries belonged for centuries. From this point of view, it is clearthat for the Poles the lands of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth play thesame role as the Habsburg Monarchy does for Czechs and Hungarians.

Numerous historians seem to agree that, in order to properly understandPolish 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 bookbelongs, strictly speaking, to American rather than Polish historiography. As the authorplays an important part in Polish intellectual life and is usually considered by Polish histori-ans as one of themselves, his work should nevertheless be included here.

50 Jerzy Kłoczowski, Europa słowiańska w XIV–XV wieku [Slavonic Europe in the14–15th centuries] (Warsaw: PIW, 1984), 9.

51 Kłoczowski, Europa słowiańska, 196–197.52 Tadeusz Kisielewski, Europa Środkowa. Zakres pojęcia [Central Europe. The scope

of a concept] (Lublin: 1992), 31.


21/54


cal Grand Duchy of Lithuania as well as the Ruthenian lands, that also at somemoments partially belonged to the Grand Duchy. These territories, of present dayLithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, have been connected to Polish history since theMiddle Ages. Research into what was until 1989 part of the Soviet Union was ofcourse strongly discouraged (if not altogether forbidden) before 1989; this onlycontributed to its popularity after the fall of the Communist regime. Some of thoseinterested in the history of Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian lands do use theterm (East-)Central Europe; others do not. It seems, however, that the terminologyis not that important as it may seem. True, the choice of terminology may some-times betray the ‘historiosophical’ option: those using the term ‘Central Europe’may be closer to the ‘post-Habsburg’ tradition, while those speaking of ‘East-

Central Europe’ usually sympathize with a territorially broader option, which, inturn, may also mean two things: either the historical interest for the eastern landsof the former Commonwealth or the focus on socio-economic history.

Historians of this latest persuasion, often inspired by Marxism in one way oranother, adopted the idea of the river Elbe as a border between two different socio-economic systems in Europe. This division, as Anna Sosnowska points out in heressay further in this issue, had the additional merit of being almost equal with thepost-World War II division between the West and the Soviet bloc; therefore, theterm 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 in-cluding Russia into the picture, thus making the whole vision substantially differ-ent from those presented above. References to the Slavonic cultural area were alsoto be found, although their popularity waned after 1989. It seems, however, that allthese distinctions are usually very blurred and these terms are often used inter-changeably, denoting a vague territory of Poland’s neighbors to the East and to theSouth. Intuition rather than precise definition is the basis of these conceptions.Witold Kula, to take a distinguished example, writing about the genesis of capital-ism in Eastern Europe,53 aims at putting Poland’s experience into the broader per-spective of Europe’s backward periphery. What territories should be included intothe Eastern Europe he writes about, does not bother him in the least—and rightlyso, as the nature of his model is not affected by its territorial scope. If such is thecase 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 streamsof research irrespectively of the terminology used by various researchers. It is con-tent rather than phrases that interests us here.

53 Witold Kula, ‘Some Observations on the Industrial Revolution in Eastern Euro-pean Countries,’ Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej, (1958) 1–2, 239–248.


22/54


The two most important authors of synthetic works on the subject, PiotrWandycz and Jerzy Kłoczowski, have already been mentioned. The main thesis ofWandycz’s Price of freedom (together with an accompanying, more theoreticallyoriented, volume in German, Die Freiheit und ihre Preiss) is that the long periods ofoppression made Central European nations particularly sensitive to the value ofliberty. While this view seems a little too optimistic for the present author, there isno doubt that Wandycz’s book belongs to the most serious attempts at providing asynthesis of the region’s past.54 Jerzy Kłoczowski, fifteen years after his ‘SlavonicEurope,’ published another attempt at synthesis, entitled ‘Younger Europe.’55 Likeits predecessor, it stays very close to the Annales paradigm, with its interest in thestructures of society and of mentality and its longue durée attitude.

The Central European debate has always been an attractive subject for essay-ists not less than for ‘real’ historians. The most important person here is probablythe poet, Czeław Miłosz, who did much to revive the interest in the multi-ethnicand multicultural world of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Miłosz, an original andpenetrating thinker, was far from being a sentimental re-caller of the forlorn tradi-tion (although many of his readers in the 1980s tended to see him in this way). Onthe 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 theformer Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Another good instance of historical essayism isan outline of the history of the Roman Catholic Church in East Central Europe byBohdan Cywiński. Cywiński gained his position in Polish intellectual life with anexcellent book published (heavily censored) in 1971 dealing with the attitudes ofthe intelligentsia in the early 20th century. The book was widely discussed andgave rise to a broader debate about the relations between the intelligentsia and theCatholic Church. The new work, entitled Ogniem próbowane, did not repeat thesuccess of its predecessor; nevertheless, it belongs to the most serious books onEast 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 onewith 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 (London–New York: Routledge, 1992). The Polish translationappeared in 1995. Idem, Die Freiheit und ihr Preis. IWM-Vorlesungen zur modernen Geschich-

te Mitteleuropas (Vienna: Passagen Verlag 1993).55 Jerzy Kłoczowski, Młodsza Europa. Europa środkowo-wschodnia w kręgu cywilizacjichrześcijańskiej średniowiecza [The younger Europe. East Central Europe within the medieval Christian civilization] (Warsaw: PIW, 1998).

56 Czesław Miłosz, Szukanie ojczyzny [Looking for homeland] (Cracow: Znak, 1992).57 Bohdan Cywiński, Ogniem próbowane. Z dziejów najnowszych Kościoła Katolickiego

w Europie środkowo-wschodniej [Tried by fire. From the recent history of the CatholicChurch in East-Central Europe], vol. 1 (Rome: Papieski Instytut Studiów Kościelnych,1982); vol. 2 (Lublin: Redakcja Wydawnictw KUL, 1990).


23/54


Much less known generally, but equally interesting, is the essayism of AntoniKroh, dealing especially with Polish–Czech–Slovak contacts and parallels. In spiteof its journalistic title and colloquial style, his book O Szwejku i o nas (About Švejkand about us), using the title character of the famous novel by Jaroslav Hašek as astarting point for reflections, provides an excellent and thought-provoking com-parison of various elements of Polish and Czech culture.58

Looking beyond the world of professional academics, we should not omitone important milieu, whose contribution to the research of the Central Europeanregion is too often overlooked. The Polish tourist movement had a long traditiondating from the last decades of the 19th century. It was, first and foremost, amountain tourism, which was an obvious consequence both of physical geography

and of political history: the Carpathians happen to be the most attractive part ofPoland touristically, and they happened also to belong to the Habsburg Galicia,with its relatively high degree of political freedom. This made it possible for thetourist movement to develop various organizing and editorial activities. The Polishtourists soon ‘expanded’ from the Galician part of the Carpathians to the wholerange and so did their publications. Even in the Communist times, with much lim-ited tourist opportunities in the ‘fraternal’ countries of the Soviet Bloc, the year-book Wierchy (Peaks) provided its readers with plenty of reliable information onthe ethnography, history and economics (as well as the nature, geology and animallife, which is not our concern here) of the mountain regions. This sort of ‘para-tourist’ literature abounded after 1989. Among the new periodicals the half-yearly

Płaj , published by the Towarzystwo Karpackie (Carpathian Association) deserves tobe mentioned; the guide-books to various Carpathian regions, written by enthusi-asts and abounding in historical, art historical and ethnological details are too nu-merous to be analyzed here. All this production, as may well be expected, is un-even in quality and it is permeated by various ideological trends. The reader, how-ever, can easily find here plenty of highly valuable popular texts as well as someserious research papers. The historian of (East-)Central Europe would do well toremember about this branch of literature which is often unnoticed by the profes-sionals.

Having dealt with the terminology, with syntheses and with the contributionof the essayists, let us—at last—come to the presentation of the more detailedhistorical works produced by professional historiography. By and large, it seemsthat the research on East-Central Europe in Poland concentrated mainly on twoareas: the genesis of economic dualism in late medieval–early modern Europe and

nation-building processes in the 19th century.

58 Antoni Kroh, O Szwejku i o nas (Warsaw: Prószyński i ska, 2002), 2nd ed.


24/54


Explaining economic backwardness

Research in both spheres had a respectable pedigree, going back to two im-portant scholars from the inter-war period: in the first case to Jan Rutkowski inPoznań, 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 ofthe 19th century, advocating the opinion about the decisive role of the 15th cen-tury as a starting moment of rift between Polish and Western historical develop-ment (Józef Szujski). We could also quote studies in the nationality question bysome authors close to the social democratic movement such as Kazimierz Kelles-

Krauz and Leon Wasilewski. We could also mention some Polish publicationsconnected with the German idea of Mitteleuropa during World War I (albeit deal-ing with future economic perspectives rather than with history).59 This, however, isprehistory. Returning to the inter-war period, Rutkowski’s works on the genesis ofmanorial system,60 although unfinished, have proven very influential. Rutkowski, toput it shortly, analyzed the growth of manorial economy as a result of the growinglegal privileges of the noble estate on the one hand, and of the demand for grain inWestern Europe on the other. Equally important from our point of view was theresearch of Handelsman and his school. Handelsman published numerous shortstudies on the Balkans and Central European nation-building61 (on the margins ofhis opus magnum on Prince Adam Czartoryski that eventually appeared posthu-mously only in 1948–1950). Somehow apart from both these streams (but closerto Handelsman’s) stood Oskar Halecki, whose research on the Polish–LithuanianUnion and the Church Union with Rome could not, for obvious reasons, be con-tinued in Communist Poland. Already after the war, Halecki wrote a theoreticalwork on ‘The Limits and Divisions of European History,’ trying to establish thetheoretical grounds for the concept of East-Central Europe. The book won somerenown abroad, but its impact on the Polish historiography seems to be marginal.

59 See especially Zofia Daszyńska-Golińska, ‘Środkowo-Europejski związek gospo-darczy a Polska,’ [Central European economic union and Poland], in Środkowo-Europejski związek gospodarczy a Polska. Studia ekonomiczne (Cracow: Nakładem Centralnego BiuraWydawnictw NKN, 1916), 1–33.

60 Especially Jan Rutkowski, ‘Geneza ustroju folwarczno-pańszczyźnianego w Eu-ropie Środkowej od końca średniowiecza,’ in his Wieś europejska późnego feudalizmu (XVI – XVIII wiek) [European village of the late feudalism (16th–18th centuries)] (Warsaw: PIW,1986), 216–224. The French original version was published in La Pologne au VIe Congrés International des Sciences Historiques, Oslo 1928 (Warsaw, 1930), 211–217. The manuscriptof Rutkowski’s book on the same subject was burnt during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

61 E.g. Marceli Handelsman, Le développement des nationalités dans l’Europe centrale- orientale (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1930). (Offprint from L’Esprit International. The Inter- national Mind , 6e année, No. 24.)


25/54


Contrary to its rhetoric, the Communist leadership was not interested in cul-tivating any research that would suggest close ties between the Poles and othernations of the Soviet block. Nevertheless, somehow paradoxically, the research onthe genesis of economic dualism and the 19th-century nationality question wascontinued 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 stress-ing the mass social phenomena rather than the ‘great events’ of political–militaryhistory. The fact that the idea of the agrarian dual division of Europe was pro-moted hundred years earlier by Friedrich Engels also helped to direct the focus ofresearch to at least some fields of comparative study. The first of these fields borefruit in the works of historians like Jerzy Topolski, Andrzej Wyczański, but espe-

cially Marian Małowist and Witold Kula. Małowist’s main work in our field is hisstudy of the genesis of economic dualism in late medieval–early modern Europe, 62 whereas the most important contribution of Witold Kula is his Teoria ekonomicznaustroju feudalnego. This work, dealing immediately with the manorial system inPoland in the 16th–18th centuries, but rich in references to other backward re-gions of Europe, is perhaps one of the most important works of Polish historiogra-phy in general. It aims at the theoretical analysis of the decision-making of the ac-tors engaged in manorial economy —basically, the landlord and the serf. The capi-talist categories of ‘rational’ economic decision-making, argues Kula, do not helpus understand the logic of feudal economy: a separate theoretical framework isneeded, and Kula sets forth to provide it.63

Although both Kula and (especially) Małowist have bred a strong group ofdisciples, 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 in1978, culminating with the first period of Solidarity, 1980–1981, and the collapseof Communism in 1989) made the recent political developments the most popularsubject of research, replacing economic history, that was generally —if unjustly —seen as most influenced by the Communist propaganda. Nevertheless, some con-tinuations of the ‘classical’ interest in the second serfdom can be traced further,until the 21st century. Antoni Mączak, one of the leading disciples of Małowist,left economic history for the highly theoretical socio-political history, and tried todiscern the specificity of the belated political system of the Polish–LithuanianCommonwealth using the concept of clientelism and providing the most interest-

62 Marian Małowist, Wschód a Zachód Europy w XIII–XVI wieku. Konfrontacja struk- tur społeczno-gospodarczych [East and west of Europe in 13th–15th centuries. The confronta-tion of socio-economic structures] (Warsaw: PWN, 1973).

63 It is perhaps proper to add here that the same stream has been treated at length ina highly theoretical form by a philosopher from Poznań, Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Odrębnośćhistoryczna Europy Środkowej. Studium metodologiczne [Historical distinctiveness of CentralEurope. A methodological study] (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Fundacji Humaniora, 1998).Brzechczyn uses the empirical material found in the works of economic and social histori-ans in order to propose some historiosophical tenets of his own.


26/54


ing attempt to re-conceptualize the view of the political system. Although he didnot explicitly use his theories for Central-European comparative studies, his worksseem to offer so much explanatory potential in this respect that they deserve to bementioned here.64

Speaking of early modern history, it is interesting to note an importantstream that did not, in spite of some attempts, materialize: the one comparing theearly modern political systems and cultures of (East)-Central Europe. While thepossibilities of comparing the development of the Polish, Bohemian and Hungar-ian estate/parliamentary systems were noted by Józef Szujski already in the secondhalf of the 19th century, the only historian who took the problem seriously in the1970s seems to be Stanisław Russocki.65 It would seem that even such a fascinating

research project as the comparison between the Polish and Hungarian Baroquenobility cultures (touched many years ago by Endre Angyal in his studies of Sla- vonic Baroque) found only very few students.66

Returning to the socio-economic comparisons, we can say that no other ep-och was so well investigated in this respect as the late medieval–early modern pe-riod discussed above. One should, perhaps, mention the studies on Czech, Hungar-ian, Polish and Ruthenian state-building between the 9th and 11th centuries. Here,however, the virtue is made out of necessity: historians interested in early Polishhistory and having but extremely scarce sources at their disposal, have no otherchoice but to turn to comparative history as a methodological device to understandPolish history better. Almost all Polish leading medievalists contributed to thecomparative history thus understood: Aleksander Gieysztor, Gerard Labuda, Hen-ryk Łowmiański and Stanisław Trawkowski can be mentioned as examples, andtheir disciples are numerous.67 The authors at this text lacks the competence for

64 Antoni Mączak, Rządzący ir ządzeni. Władza a społeczeństwo w Europie wczes- nonowozytnej [Rulers and ruled. Power and society in early modern Europe] (Warsaw: Sem-per 2002), 2nd ed.; Nierówna przyjaźń,. Układy klientalne w perspektywie historycznej [Un-equal friendship. Cliental systems in historical perspective] (Wrocław: Fundacja na rzecz Nauki Polskiej, 2003).

65 Among his studies in Western languages, see Stanisław Russocki, ‘The Parliamen-tary system in 15th century Central Europe,’ in Poland at the 1

Historical Regions

Documents

Transcript of Historical Regions