DEFINITION

Where is Eastern Europe? Does the term have any meaning at all, now that the cold war has ended and the literally physical division of Europe between East and West has disappeared? The premise of this book is that the answer to the latter question must still be 'yes'. Why that is so, however, depends on how one answers the first question, on the definition of Eastern Europe.

For the purposes of this book, Eastern Europe is defined as the area stretching from the present-day Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania south to Greece. This includes, on an east-west axis, present-day Poland, Belarus and Ukraine; Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania; and Albania, Bulgaria and the states of the former Yugoslavia. It excludes, largely on grounds of space and practicality, Finland and those parts of Russia inhabited mainly by ethnic Russians.1

In terms of today's political boundaries, the above definition is a geographical one only. The governments of some of the states listed above, not to mention their inhabitants, would object bitterly to being classified as part of Eastern Europe. Put differently, therefore, the present work is a 'pre-history' of those states which emerged in this region by, or since, 1918 and of their peoples.

It was only in the twentieth century that the concept of Eastern Europe was formulated, when it was generally perceived that this area was different from Western, and to some extent Central, Europe. This was not just because of the foundation or expansion of states on territory formerly subsumed within the much larger empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. It was also because, in economic and social terms, Eastern Europe was increasingly perceived as backward, less industrialised and hence less modern than much of Western and Central Europe. In strategic and political terms, Eastern Europe in the twentieth century was an area no longer belonging formally to any regional great power, whatever the fluctuating hegemony of Germany, the Soviet Union or the West. In the phrase used by one scholar for a title, Eastern Europe has been, and remains, 'the lands between'.2

The rationale for the present work is that this East European difference was forged in the century and a half preceding 1918, in a period when, conceptually at least, Eastern Europe did not exist. Instead, the area was originally divided between conglomerate, multinational empires. Yet throughout the period in question, all these empires - and the nation-states and nationalities which with time emerged from them - had to come to terms with their backwardness as powers as well as their own rivalries and the way in which the nationalism of their constituent peoples complicated both internal affairs and international relations.

It is perfectly reasonable to point out that this perception of Eastern Europe as backward was to some extent the 'invention' of West Europeans who, from the eighteenth century, were happy to see the region as the 'complementary other half' of their own 'enlightened' civilisation.3 At the very least, students should be aware that the very idea of 'Eastern Europe' is a contested concept; as Robin Okey wittily put it, 'Central/Eastern Europe is no place for the tidy-minded.'4 Nevertheless, the perception that the region was somehow different was endorsed by an increasing number of East Europeans themselves. Long before the idea of Eastern Europe became common, in other words, Eastern Europe had a certain historical reality as a region with certain shared characteristics, as 'a space of intersecting historical legacies'.5 It is the identifiability of those characteristics which sets Eastern Europe apart in the period from the mideighteenth century to the end of the First World War, just as it sets the region apart in the main twentieth century.