Eastern European Studies: History
Author: Tomasz Blusiewicz
PhD Candidate, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA
, 773 724 0862
Keywords: Area Studies; Communism; Stalinism; Nazism; Holocaust; Iron Curtain; Eastern Europe; Empire; Soviet Union; Nationalism; World Wars; Cold War; 1989; Memory; Politics; Totalitarianism; Imperialism
Abstract: This article is a brief survey of the current state of and trends in academic historical scholarship on Eastern Europe, mainly in North America, but also in Europe. It presents several traditional methods of defining Eastern Europe, discusses main features of its historiography and some of its recent research directions. The article offers both a chronological and thematic narratives concerning the field’s origins, its major developments and shifts as well as a reference guide for further research and reading.
The field of Eastern European historical scholarship has undergone dramatic changes since the collapse of communist regimes in 1989. Eastern Europe as a distinct geopolitical region has never been more sharply delineated than between the late 1940s and 1989, when its primary reference was essentially synonymous with the non-Soviet, European part of the ‘Soviet Block’. In the West, ‘Eastern Europe’ as an intellectual concept had its origins in the Enlightenment vision of the world; it referred to a transitory space between the civilized ‘West’ and the exotic ‘Orient’ (Wolff, 1994). As a scholarly discipline it began to emerge only in the interwar period – it dealt with the newly-organized space that appeared on the map as a result of the fall of four empires: Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman and Russian. It was the Cold War and its geopolitical pressures, however, that led to the emergence of ‘Eastern European studies’ as an institution well-established in the academic world. Many historians of the region were émigrés and not infrequently - as they were collectively labeled in the West - ‘dissidents’, who through their research, writing, teaching and government advising were involved in the process of ‘liberating’ Eastern Europe from the Soviet domination (Brzezinski, 1956; Pipes, 1976). Contributing to the Cold War confrontation was not the only preoccupation of historians of Eastern Europe, but nonetheless the field has been faced with a need to reinvent its basic framework after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Many scholars, including the author of the previous article in this encyclopedia (Blackwood, 2001), predicted that such a redefinition would be extremely difficult and the field would eventually dissolve and/or integrate with the broader European narrative. This process is far from complete and while the field has been shifting in that direction, it still retains its specificity and can be approached as a separate unit. This article focuses on two related themes. First, it examines what criteria are used by historians to define what counts and what does not count as ‘Eastern European history’. Secondly, it surveys new work in the field, outlines how it is related to older historiography and how it communicates with new trends in historical scholarship. In conclusion, it offers several reflections on what kind of light some of recent geopolitical shifts such as the EU enlargement (in the 2000s) and the Ukrainian crisis (2013-2014) shed on Eastern Europe as a concept and what they portend about its future.
The chief difficulty facing historians who insist on the validity of Eastern Europe as a historical term is the lack of Eastern European identity among the peoples of the region. This obstacle is much less pronounced for nation-state (German, Polish, Hungarian, etc.) or imperial (British, Soviet, Habsburg, etc.) historians where the domain of study is much more clearly defined through subjective identities and/or political boundaries. Eastern Europeans rarely think of themselves as Eastern Europeans per se; all studies show that this identity is either non-existent or insignificant in comparison with national, religious or pan-European identities. In this sense, the field of Eastern European historical studies can be seen as ‘inorganic’ – its origins are rooted in global conditions largely beyond Eastern Europe’s control (imperial rivalries, World Wars, the Cold War, etc.). In other words, the field owes its existence largely thanks to an outsider ‘gaze’ cast upon the region.
One of the most authoritative surveys of the region’s twentieth century history (Rothschild and Wingfield, 2007) is entitled Return to Diversity. The title unequivocally implies that the region has returned to its historical ‘norm’ (diversity) after half a century of ‘forced’ convergence in the Soviet Block. Eastern European ‘return to diversity’ is tied with one of the original lenses through which the region has been perceived – the allegory of a bridge between East and West, a place where cultures meet and give birth to numerous mixed formations. The validity of the ‘return to diversity’ thesis is implicitly confirmed by recent developments in political science and in the new sub-field of ‘transitology’ in particular; one of transitology’s chief aims is to explain the diverging trajectories of states that seemed so similar politically prior to 1989. Many scholars search for deeper historical causes such as early modern democratic experiences to account for this phenomenon. What are the main features amidst this newly reconstituted diversity that form the common denominators large enough to validate speaking of a common regional history?
Perhaps the oldest division line separating ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Europe is of religious nature. Starting with the split of the Roman Empire into two halves, through Byzantine-Greek Christianization of much of the Balkans or the Kievan Rus, the Great Schism of 1054 or the Muscovite ‘Third Rome’ ambitions, the rift between Latin and Greek Europe has always been noticeable and usually deep. In 1983, the Hungarian historian Jenő Szűcs suggested that parts of what was then known as ‘Eastern Europe’ (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary) were miscategorized. These areas have always been, he argued, a part of the ‘Western civilizational sphere’ since their adoption of Christianity from Rome and not from Constantinople. The Orthodox faith and administration, the Cyrillic alphabet or the absence/weakness of Protestant Reformation are thus posited as the original and decisive factors explaining the differences between the two parts of the continent. In Poland and Hungary, the image of these two countries being the ‘bulwarks of Christian faith’ containing the Orthodox and (more typically) Islamic element has become a part of national consciousness in the Early Modern period. In general, this basic distinction is rarely questioned, but there is little new scholarship that would operate within religiously defined frameworks, especially after the ‘atheistic’ communism cast aside what had been earlier perceived as a defining feature of Russianness – Orthodox religiosity.
Another frequently drawn and almost as old a distinction is of economic character. The ‘Iron Curtain’ ultimately did not fall between the ports of Stettin and Trieste as Winston Churchill announced in 1946, but closer to the ports of Lübeck in Germany and Burgas in Bulgaria. This seemingly incidental detail of geography must have intrigued many historians. The border between West and East Germany eventually materialized very close to the Elbe River – one of the major fault lines drawn by economic historians. It separates the world of nascent commercialization of agriculture in Western and the second wave of feudalism in Eastern early modern Europe. Naturally, the final course of the border between East and West Germany had nothing to do with economic history and a lot to do with where the Allied and Red Armies met in 1945. Still, the next four decades made the Elbe River divide, already bleak in 1945, plainly visible again. Eastern Europe, besides being popularly and somewhat stereotypically viewed as Western Europe’s poor relative, is understood by some economic historians to be a region where the second wave of feudalization and de-urbanization took place just when Western Europe began to urbanize and ready itself for the industrial revolution. Both the forced Soviet-style industrialization and the current EU-integration are sometimes framed as attempts to close this old gap. The initial advancements achieved by the Soviet Block economies between 1945 and mid-1970s have been interpreted by an historian of the region, Ivan Berend, as the region’s temporary ‘detour from periphery’, a detour brief in its promise since the region returned to its point of departure after the stagnation and collapse of the 1980s (Berend, 1996).
Jenő Szűcs has also pointed to the spread of civil and municipal liberties in the late Middle Ages, exemplified, for instance, by urban settlement based on the German (Magdeburg) law as a factor with momentous political consequences for where the border between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Europe eventually crystallized in political terms. The substantial experience with (qualified) democracy, civil rights and the rule of law in, e.g., the early modern Habsburg Empire or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, were occasionally cited by cold war era historians as features distinguishing ‘democratic’ and ‘Central European’ parts of the Soviet Block from the ‘despotic’ territories traditionally administered from Moscow and Istanbul. In this context, the stable Czechoslovak democracy of the interwar period was frequently seen as evidence that this state was firmly in the ‘Western’ sphere while all the other ‘children of Versailles’, who eventually drifted toward various forms of authoritarianism, were truly in ‘Eastern Europe’ (Seton-Watson, 1945). This way of viewing Europe became more popular especially after the suppressed ‘pro-democratic’ unrest in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland (1956, 1968, 1970, 1980) and after the ‘successful’ democratization in those countries and ‘problematic’ democratization in Belarus, Ukraine or Russia after 1989/91.
Religious, economic or political are merely three among numerous other ‘macro’ lines according to which the map of Europe can be divided. As Larry Wolff points out, before Peter the Great’s introduction of Russia onto the European diplomatic scene, the division of Europe into ‘north and south of the Alps’ had been much more firmly embedded in the European mind. All lines of this type are of course arbitrary and depend on the kinds of questions asked and the historical period studied; no serious historian argues that one can define what Eastern Europe is and what its borders are precisely and conclusively. Nevertheless, the region’s entanglement with communism in the twentieth century is a part of its heritage of that cannot be overestimated. Judging by volume alone, the twentieth century communist experience, with all of its extensive and complex tropes, is currently the main subject of study for historians of the region. This experience is strongly intertwined with more pan-European topics such as totalitarianism, World Wars and superpower confrontation. If one adds the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, forced population transfers and all other ‘terrible things that happened in the twentieth century’, what emerges is singlehandedly the most extensive subject of the region’s historical research and the cornerstone of its historical memory.
Before surveying some of the major trends in historiography, it is worth mentioning that Eastern Europe borders with several well-established regions of historical scholarship: Russian/Soviet, Ottoman/Middle Eastern, German, Italian, Scandinavian, etc. The borders between them will never be rigid and the very impossibility of drawing even tentative lines in some areas lead to a new sub-field of scholarship which focuses precisely on these mixed, ambiguous and contradictory areas often called ‘borderlands’. This field is of course not limited to Eastern Europe, but some of its provinces such as Galicia (Frank-Johnson 2005), Transylvania (Case, 2009) and towns such as Lvov (Amar, 2008) or Salonica (Mazower, 2006), due to their ethnic, religious or cultural diversity, have by now become recognized as exemplary cases demonstrating just how immensely complex and difficult to disentangle borderland territories can be. It has to be kept in mind, however, that what might be described as a ‘typical’ Eastern European borderland by an outsider might be considered to be an integral element of a core ethnic area by a local nationalist (Transylvania for some Hungarians or Romanians, Galicia for Poles and Ukrainians).
While historians rarely argue about whether a given region or topic belongs to, for example, Eastern European or Russian studies, what did emerge as an important contender for Eastern European studies is the idea of Central Europe and the scholarly movement it inspired. This term has its roots in the imperial German concept of Mitteleuropa, but it reemerged in a different context half a century later. It was re-invented and re-fashioned by anti-communist dissidents such as Milan Kundera, Czesław Miłosz and Danilo Kiš. Kundera’s essay ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ (1984) is often perceived as the moment when the idea was reborn. In essence, the argument was that Central Europe (by which Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary were usually meant) has always belonged to Western Europe in civilizational terms, but has been ‘kidnapped’ and politically imprisoned in the Eastern European sphere by the Soviet power. While the political implications of this intellectual movement became largely irrelevant after 1989 and certainly after the EU extension in 2004 and 2007, a new wave of scholarship inspired by them emerged and found institutionalization in, e.g., the Central European History Journal.
This new ‘Central European wave’ is located in an intermediate position between the old German and the dissident ideas; the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its cosmopolitan and culturally vibrant cities of Vienna, Prague, Budapest or Cracow, are painted as ‘archetypically’ Central European sites. Scholars who identify themselves as Central Europeanists come from various backgrounds; not infrequently they are historians of German-speaking lands who reach out to areas that had a rich record of contact with German culture and administration. While this field does not compete with Eastern Europe in any direct sense, its position has been steadily ascending vis-à-vis its neighbor for several reasons. The late Habsburg Empire has enjoyed a remarkable reputational renaissance, largely because its many imperfections do not stand a comparison with all the tragic events that befell the region after the Empire disintegrated. The Empire has been portrayed as a kind of a proto-EU project where many ethnicities and languages coexisted relatively peacefully within one political unit for centuries (Oscar Jászi, 1929). Furthermore, fin-de-siècle Vienna or Prague with world-class artists and intellectuals such as Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein or Kafka, are commonly seen as manifestations of European cultural vibrancy at its best (Schorske, 1979). But most importantly, the inhabitants of Prague or Cracow virtually universally prefer being spoken of as Central Europeans rather than Eastern Europeans. The success of the Central European University in Budapest shows that there is plenty of willingness to cooperate and produce knowledge under a common Central European banner.