Where is Central Europe now?
Russia's war on Ukraine revives a debate kick-started by Milan Kundera 40 years ago
History of the Present (fortnight ending 22 June 2024)
Nine Central Europes in Search of an Other
One of the most influential political interventions made by a novelist in our time, Milan Kundera’s essay on Central Europe, appeared four decades ago. The fact that it was republished in book form last year speaks to its enduring influence.
Writing from Paris, the exiled Czech novelist argued that countries such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland were part of a cultural and historical West that had found itself imprisoned since 1945 in a political East, under Soviet–Russian domination. Together with fellow writers, such as the Hungarian essayist György Konrád and the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, he insisted that this region should be called Central – not Eastern – Europe.
Kundera’s intervention came at a moment when opposition movements such as Poland’s Solidarity and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia were about to gain new hope through the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin in 1985, followed by the end of communism in those countries just four years later, in 1989. Soon, the foreign ministries of the West would be rebranding their East European departments as Central European ones.
His essay provoked a passionate response from Russian writers such as Joseph Brodsky, furious at what they saw as Russian culture being consigned to a semi-barbaric, non-European East. This debate has acquired a new topicality in the light of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Ukrainian intellectuals today, like their Czech, Polish and Hungarian colleagues four decades ago, define their country as everything that Russia is not. And people have started talking of Ukraine as … Central Europe.
Central Europe is thus a moveable feast. When you look carefully, you find multiple different versions. Most of them are defined, as identities often are, by reference to an Other. So here are nine Central Europes in search of an Other. My notes explore both the extraordinary impact of Kundera’s essay and the pitfalls into which this still influential idea can lead us.
Central Europe versus Politics
Kundera asserts the primacy of culture. His essay was originally published as “Un Occident kidnappé, ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale” in Le Débat in 1983. Two English-language versions followed in spring 1984, in the New York Review of Books, titled “The Tragedy of Central Europe”, and in Granta, where it appeared as “A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out”. () Kundera starts by saying that Europe was “always” divided into two halves, the Roman and Catholic West versus the Byzantine and Orthodox East. Central Europe was the West that, after 1945, “woke up to discover” that it was now in the East. Kundera’s argument carries a strong hint of cultural determinism: your cultural past is your political future. “Western”? Aha, your natural political condition is liberal democracy. “Orthodox”? It’s authoritarianism for you, my lad. Exceptions are to prove the rule.
Then Kundera argues, quite rightly, that writers, thinkers and artists played an extraordinary part in keeping alive a distinctive, multicultural and original Central European culture in the twentieth century. But it was precisely through the long history of political domination by neighbouring empires (Russian, German, Austrian, Ottoman), including the Russian Empire’s latest manifestation as the Soviet bloc, that the intelligentsia came to play the exceptional role that Kundera finds lacking in the West. The writer as hero, intellectuals as a “spiritual government”, the playwright–president, the poet–liberator – these are not needed in the same way in well-established liberal democracies. As Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo retorts to his disappointed disciple: “Unhappy the land that has need of heroes.”
Finally, Kundera laments the state of culture in the West. This, according to him, is where culture has “bowed out”. For here, in the West, there are no literary and cultural reviews of the kind he describes in a footnote as “run not by journalists but by writers, historians and philosophers”. Yet his own essay was published in two English-language reviews of the highest quality, Granta and the New York Review of Books, not to mention Le Débat in France and similar journals in many other European languages, thus furnishing what philosophers might call an ostensive refutation of his own claim.
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Central Europe versus the Present
One of the most frequently encountered and superficially charming Central Europes is that of nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kundera calls that empire “irreplaceable”.
Thus, for example, the former Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel sits genially face-to-face with Hungary’s authoritarian ruler Viktor Orbán, in the latter’s book-lined office in Budapest, to interview him for the first issue of European Voices, an interesting Vienna-based journal launched this year. Schüssel quotes the Czech historian and politician František Palacký writing in 1848 to the Frankfurt Parliament, in defence of the Habsburg Empire: whereas Russia sought the minimum plurality in the maximum space, the Habsburg Empire guaranteed maximum plurality in the minimum space. Austro-Hungarian self-satisfaction fills the room like a cloud of cigar smoke.
What one might call the Blue Danube version of Central Europe has lots of charm but only limited utility. This variation helpfully reminds us that the outlines of old European empires, not just Austro-Hungarian but also German, Russian and Ottoman, are still clearly visible under today’s political map of Europe, re-emerging in patterns of electoral behaviour or attitudes to the war in Ukraine. And yes, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is the only one for which, across more than a century since its dissolution, there has been significant nostalgia in some of its previously colonized parts. We might even, as the Dutch journalist Caroline de Gruyter suggests in her book Beter wordt het niet: Een reis door het Habsburgse Rijk en de Europese Unie (It Doesn’t Get Any Better: A journey through the Habsburg Empire and the European Union, 2021), learn some lessons from that empire’s history for today’s European Union. But that’s about it.
Central Europe versus the Big
Another familiar trope is Central Europe as a region of small nations, each fearing for its identity and even survival as it is squeezed or crushed by neighbouring empires. The notion is there already in the writings of the early twentieth-century founding president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who identified “a peculiar zone of small nations extending from the North Cape to Cape Matapan” – but including neither Germans nor Austrians nor Russians.
Kundera plays this tune too. But noticing that Poland is actually a rather large country, he offers this definition: “the small nation is one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear and it knows it”. And he points to the first line of Poland’s national anthem, “Poland has not yet perished”. In an interview in the same issue of Granta he tells the English novelist Ian McEwan, “you see, if you’re English, you never question the immortality of your nation...”. (Maybe England has become a bit more Central European in the meantime.)
Interestingly, from today’s perspective, Kundera has a footnote on Ukraine: “One of the great European nations (there are nearly forty million Ukrainians) is slowly disappearing. And this enormous event, which is almost unbelievable, is something Europe doesn’t realize!” If anything, at that time Ukraine was rather reappearing than disappearing, as its intellectuals and dissidents insisted on its distinct national identity. To be sure, Ukraine’s national anthem, echoing Poland’s, declares that “Ukraine’s glory has not yet perished, nor her will to freedom (volia)” – and the nation’s very existence is again threatened by Russian aggression today. But small it isn’t.
Central Europe versus Eastern Europe
In aiming to liberate countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary from the “Eastern Europe” label, the political-intellectual enterprise of “Central Europe” in the 1980s (in which I was also very much engaged) was directed against the continued acceptance of the Cold War division. At the same time, it targeted much older stereotypes of what may be called intra-European Orientalism: the long-standing tendency of West Europeans to regard the lands to their east as backward, chaotic, congenitally authoritarian and vaguely barbaric. The origins of these stereotypes are brilliantly dissected in the historian Larry Wolff’s book Inventing Eastern Europe: The map of civilization on the mind of the Enlightenment (1994).
In contemporary West European discourse about nationalist populism in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, that intra-European Orientalism is back in force. Superficial observers make sweeping observations about “Eastern Europe”, failing to notice that the nationalist populist politics of France’s Marine le Pen would be completely at home in Poland’s Law and Justice Party, and those of Spain’s Vox party in Hungary, while England’s Nigel Farage would make a perfect recruit to the East German wing of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
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Central Europe versus Russia
Behind Eastern Europe, of course, is Russia, the single most salient constitutive Other for identity statements about Central Europe, which, in this version, is the Europe that not only defines itself against Russia but also wants to get away from it as fast as possible. Shortly before he died last year, Henry Kissinger declared: “Ukraine has become a major state in Central Europe for the first time in modern history”. The oracle had spoken. Ukraine had arrived. As with Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and Slovenia in the 1980s and 1990s, so now again, the shift in external, geopolitical perception both reflects and reinforces the push from the nations concerned – not just Ukraine but also Moldova, the pro-European demonstrators on the streets of Georgia and the anti-Lukashenko opposition in Belarus – to get out from under the Russian yoke. Ukrainians, like Poles, Czechs and Hungarians in Kundera’s time, first demanded full recognition as belonging to the West and subsequently, thanks to a major geopolitical shift – in 1989, the end of the Cold War; in 2022, the beginning of a hot war – belatedly received it, even from Kissinger, the ultimate Realpolitiker.
Now, as then, a key question is the relationship between Russia’s culture and its politics. When Kundera identified deep roots of the Soviet oppression of his native land in the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brodsky tartly retorted that “the political system that put Mr. Kundera out of commission [i.e. communism] is as much a product of Western rationalism as it is of Eastern emotional radicalism”. At an electrifying writers’ debate in Lisbon in 1988, the Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya expressed wonderment at being confronted for the first time with the concept of Central Europe, while György Konrád raised the issue of Russian tanks still being in Prague, Warsaw and Budapest. “Is that the question? When I will take my tanks out of Central Europe?” responded a visibly distressed Tolstaya.
Today, I hear echoes of Kundera and Konrád in Kyiv and Lviv. A decade of Russian aggression, occupation and brutality since Putin began the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014 has generated an utter rejection of everything Russian. Pushkin Street in Kyiv has been renamed. Students write “russia” with a small r. In an essay entitled “No Guilty People in the World? Reading Russian literature after Bucha” (TLS, April 22, 2022), the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko approvingly quoted Kundera against Brodsky on Russian literature. She even connected the brutality of Russian forces in Ukraine to the disloyal behaviour of Natasha Rostova towards her fiancé in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The fury of an assaulted people is more than understandable, but to associate poor, foolish Natasha with the atrocities in Bucha is to take an essentializing discourse about Russia beyond parody. Yes, traces of imperialism run through much Russian literature, including Pushkin – witness his poem “To the Slanderers of Russia” (1831), denouncing Westerners for daring to support a Polish rising against the Russian Empire. And it is a significant fact that Putin’s forces have put Pushkin’s face on posters justifying the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine. But it doesn’t follow that Pushkin is to blame for Putin.
Central Europe versus the Balkans
Jacques Rupnik, France’s leading specialist on Central Europe, recalls a headline in the Czech weekly Respekt in June 1992, shortly before the “velvet divorce” between the two halves of Czechoslovakia which, on January 1, 1993, would become the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Czech headline read: “Alone to Europe or together to the Balkans”. The Balkans – or rather “the Balkans” – are yet another Other against which Central Europe is defined. As Maria Todorova demonstrates in her book Imagining the Balkans (2009), this counterpoint, too, is irradiated with intra-European Orientalism. Fluid, complex and often small differences between Slovenia or Croatia on the one hand, and Serbia or North Macedonia on the other, are elevated into a simplistic dichotomy, with all the countervailing similarities and historical commonalities implausibly brushed under a threadbare carpet of cultural determinism.
Central Europe versus Western Europe
The Hungarian prime minister and Putinesque amateur historian Viktor Orbán loves talking about Central Europe, but his version is the precise opposite of that embraced by the Hungarian intellectuals at whose feet he sat thirty-five years ago. Extending a metaphor used by the early twentieth-century Hungarian poet Endre Ady, they saw it as a kind of ferry to carry Hungary from the Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe to a liberal democratic Western Europe. Orbán, by contrast, defines Central Europe as a bastion of traditional Christian, conservative, national values against today’s liberal Western Europe.
In a 2021 speech that he subsequently presented in his personal blog (outrageously called Samizdat) as a riposte to my criticism of his illiberal regime, Orbán told students at the Mathias Corvinus College in Budapest that Western Europe is sinking under a “Muslim demographic, political and economic flood”. It is “rich and weak”, swamped not just by migration but by atheism and perverse, decadent ideas about gender. Turning back to Central Europe, he wrote, “My advice to those who are more intrigued by this question – which I also advise to my Western colleagues – is this: Read Kundera, or perhaps [Sándor] Márai”. Kundera, who died last year, must be turning in his grave.
Central Europe versus Mitteleuropa
What about another historic counterpoint, Germany? Whereas Russians have never articulated their own imperial ambitions in the name of Central Europe, it was the German version of Mitteleuropa elaborated by the liberal imperialist Friedrich Naumann, in his 1915 book of that name, that provoked Masaryk to spell out his competing East Central European vision of “a zone of small nations”, not including Germany or Russia.
Obviously most people today utterly reject both German imperialist and anti-German visions, since countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are close partners of Germany in the EU and NATO. Yet there is just the ghost of a question lurking here. Naumann’s idea was not a formal colonial occupation but a German and Austrian-led common economic area rising from the ashes of the First World War. What has emerged after the end of the Cold War is a Central Europe in which German (and, on a much smaller scale, Austrian) investments and trade play a leading role in the economies of their eastern neighbours. At a seminar I attended in Kraków a few years ago, a Polish economist remarked, as if it were self-evident, that “of course the Polish economy is part of the German economy”. Much the same might be said in the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Hungary.
This economic Mitteleuropa has been achieved by consent, in a non-hegemonic EU framework, and it has largely been to mutual advantage. But there is one catch. Orbán has demolished democracy in Hungary, yet the German car industry is happy to go on investing billions of euros there, knowing that it can always be sure of favourable treatment from Orbán’s regime – more sure than it could be if Hungary were really a democracy. That German business should be so comfortable with an electoral authoritarian regime just next door is at least a faint echo of that old tension between an interest-based German Mitteleuropa and the values-based Central Europe of East Central European intellectuals.
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Central Europe versus Central Europe
Forty years ago, Central Europe was an idea that brought together Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks. They shared a common purpose of leaving the geopolitical East to rejoin the West, but also of overcoming the petty nationalist differences that had been the region’s curse before 1945. Russian writers such as Tolstaya were surprised, and American politicians such as Kissinger delighted, by this unity of purpose. Its most concrete political product was the so-called Visegrád group of Central European states, created as already as 1991, even before the final disintegration of the Soviet Union.
But today the dividing lines run as much between and within those Visegrád states as between them and anyone else. There are profound differences between the Poland of the liberal, pro-European prime minister Donald Tusk and the Hungary of the nationalist, Trump-supporting Orbán, between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The Visegrád group could not be less united over military support for Ukraine. It's Central Europe against Central Europe now.
Envoi
“I’m confused, but at a higher level”: the old end-of-seminar quip applies here too. Geopolitically, “Central Europe” is a ferry that has taken countries such as Poland and Slovakia, but also Slovenia and Lithuania, from the geopolitical East to the West. Now Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia are embarking on that ferry, perhaps one day to be joined by Armenia and Belarus. This is, with all due caveats, one of the more inspiring stories in recent European history.
As the geopolitical sense of Central Europe goes east, it becomes increasingly detached from any geographical, historical or cultural – above all, Austro-Hungarian – core. Yet Ukrainians, Moldovans and Georgians, like those who have gone before them, use historical and cultural claims about their European belonging to bolster their geopolitical ones. This brings with it some of the dangers that have accompanied the debate about Central Europe for the past forty years: cultural determinism; essentialism; explicit or implicit assumptions of civilizational superiority over some Other. Can we keep the positive while shedding the negative? Or should this concept, which promotes a transition, itself be transitional?
Of course we will continue to use all sorts of regional subdivisions, each of them generating interesting and sometimes valuable discussion, not least because of the inherent oversimplification. Yet our overarching objective as Europeans should be that, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Kundera’s essay, we will have one Europe, whole, free and at peace. Along that path, we must recognize that the dangers that have accompanied the debate about Central Europe apply also to our discourse about Europe itself, as it relates to the rest of the world.
This essay first appeared in the TLS, 24 May 2024. Please use this link if reposting. It was originally written for a multi-author volume to be published in Polish by Pogranicze this autumn.
Recently, all authors of articles have become torturers - huge text is written in light gray font, only the headings are black.
Magnificent and true! Glad to see it here as my institution for some reason no longer subscribes to the TLS.