The Routledge Companion to Central and Eastern Europe since 1919

Dividing history into periods is notoriously artificial, but by any historical standard, 1919 marked a new beginning in central and eastern Europe. Politically, it had been largely divided for at least two centuries, and in many areas for much longer, between the competing empires of Austria, Germany, Russia and Turkey. In 1917, however, the Russian Empire had been defeated by Germany. That German victory was overtaken the following year by the defeat of Austria–Hungary, Germany and Turkey, which marked the end of the First World War in November 1918. This defeat of all the imperial powers created a vacuum unparallelled before or since in which the political system could be completely reordered in accordance with the nationality principle. Poland and Lithuania returned to the map of Europe as sovereign states. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia appeared for the first time, Estonia and Latvia for the first time as independent entities. Further east, Georgia and the Ukraine briefly enjoyed autonomy.

If the timescale of this book is easy to justify, its geographical limits are very much harder. This is to no small degree because the terms ‘Central’ and particularly ‘Eastern’ Europe have been used to describe subjective perceptions rather than objective geographical realities. Before 1919, Central Europe was broadly understood as the territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled from Vienna, and Eastern Europe as the territory of the Russian Empire ruled from Saint Petersburg. The Balkans, comprising the independent states of Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia, together with substantial tracts of the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires, formed a third grouping. The new and enlarged states established in 1919 sought to give themselves a more western orientation, but their ambitions enjoyed a mixed response. For their German-speaking neighbours, most of them remained essentially subordinate, colonial peoples, and under Hitler, they could be swept aside in the creation of a new German Lebensraum in the east stretching far into what had become the Ukrainian and Caucasian Republics of the Soviet Union. For the British and the French, Eastern Europe comprised the states between Germany and the Soviet Union, whose prime interest, particularly for the French, was their presumed role as allies in the event of another German attack in the west. Embarassing as it may be to recall now, they were identified primarily with romantic revolutionaries, Ruritanian monarchs with colourful mistresses, and ‘being troublesome’. Chamberlain was merely being truthful when he declared that ‘Czechoslovakia is a far away country of which we know nothing’. After 1945, ‘Eastern Europe’ was the term adopted virtually universally to describe the Soviet bloc until its demise in 1990. The term, however, normally excluded the Soviet Union itself. It also ignored the anomaly that Prague is west of Vienna. This new ‘Eastern Europe’ was again as much a theatre as a real place, with Berlin at centre stage. Few of its governments recognised any responsibility for national actions taken during the Second World War. Even the Austrians, who had contributed Hitler, had been the victims of Nazism. It was now the scene of the struggle between east
and west, between good and evil, between light and darkness, between Communism and democracy: the assessment depending on the standpoint of the speaker. It was appreciated only slowly that the bloc was far from monolithic.

Its dissolution in 1990 permitted the restoration of a more diversified image. Some  definitions became easier, others harder. German unification effectively moved East Germany from ‘East’ to ‘West’. The ‘Visegrad’ group of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland emerged as the nucleus of a new ‘Central Europe’, associated in varying degrees with both Austria and the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia. ‘Eastern Europe’ came increasingly to mean the Balkans, really south-eastern Europe, while Eastern Europe in the geographical sense implicitly meant the states which had emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and which, with the exception of the Baltic states, are now grouped in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

In order to give this book some coherence against such shifting sands, it has been  decided to focus on an ‘Eastern Europe’ defined as the 1945–90 Soviet bloc, including Albania and also Yugoslavia with whose history it was intimately involved, together with the Baltic States, Moldova and Ukraine during their periods of independence, in view of their increased western orientation. (Readers particularly interested in East Germany are referred to the present author’s Companion to Germany since 1945.) That focus is complemented by considerable attention to Austria whose history between 1919 and 1938, and to some extent since 1990, is an integral part of the history of central and eastern Europe. Reference to Greece is restricted to the limited number of occasions when it directly affected developments in its northern neighbours. That is not to imply that Greece is unimportant, merely that its inclusion would introduce so many considerations particular to itself, notably Cyprus and tension with Turkey, that this book might become unwieldy.
 
Other countries now independent but formerly part of the Soviet Union are largely  excluded in view of their very different history. It is appreciated that their exclusion  creates some anomalies, but history is never tidy, and they are accordingly covered in outline in section 4.3 in an attempt to meet this difficulty.