We can now turn to those general developments which effected the most striking change during the eighteenth century.
The most obvious motors of change throughout the century were war and the underlying shifts in the state system which brought war about. Before the 1790s, conflict in Eastern Europe occurred for reasons not perceptibly different from those which had occasioned it in the past: dynastic ambition, territorial aggrandisement and the economic self-interest of states.
A general development more difficult to assess was what is called, for want of a better term, the Enlightenment. In its most widely accepted usage, Enlightenment has been taken to mean the spread of a more rational way of thinking, to begin with in the sciences and other scholarly fields but gradually extending to all spheres of human endeavour, including the organisation of government and the beginnings of social reform. In Eastern Europe as elsewhere, it is important to distinguish between the efforts of rulers and public figures to promote more rational and hence more efficient government — efforts which were not necessarily dependent on enlightened thinking — and the spread of ideas and attitudes later in the century, which clearly did derive from an accepted model of Enlightenment.
A third development which was in part a product of the Enlightenment, but also a reaction to it, was nationalism. Nationalism as an ideology was very clearly imported into Eastern Europe from the West, and it was not consciously adopted by more than a handful of people in the region until late in the century. However, the nature of nationalism in Eastern Europe was quite distinct from that of Western Europe, and national consciousness expressed itself to begin with in cultural rather than political forms in most cases.
Finally, both Enlightenment thinking and the new consciousness of the nation contributed at the end of the century to the French Revolution, which marked a radical departure from everything which went before it. The revolutionary wars of the 1790s not only caused a major upheaval in the international order but also introduced the disruptive new element of ideological conflict and political radicalism, even in far-off Eastern Europe. Even more explosively, the example of the French nation in arms gave a long-term impetus to East European nationalism, which is impossible to underestimate, even if its immediate effects must not be exaggerated.
World History
