THEMES

Such a claim might seem far-fetched, given the vast diversity of Eastern Europe's peoples, economic and social conditions, political systems and so on. Yet the things that East European states and societies had in common, for all their differences, offer a thematic unity which this introduction aims to emphasise. A summary of these main themes will also serve to explain the chronological span chosen for this history.

The first main theme and in some respects the dominant one is that of modernisation or, conversely, backwardness and the stratagems chosen to overcome it. Throughout the period in question, starting with the initial attempts at reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, rulers and leaders of all descriptions in Eastern Europe were aware that their states compared increasingly ill with certain competitors.6 Early in the eighteenth century the perceived disparities were not all that great. Prussia's superiority over Austria in the 1740s, for instance, was more a matter of organisational flair, concentrated military power and individual genius than one of an innately better socioeconomic or political 'system'. In the same way, the enlightened reforms of the last Polish king later in the century were a response to the obvious threat posed by huge standing armies on Poland's borders; in other respects Poland was not markedly inferior to its predators.

I n this initial stage, modernisation was essentially about becoming more efficient, about rationalising the financial resources of government and in other ways making polities 'enlightened'. By the end of the century, however, modernity was acquiring other attributes. The French Revolution spread the concepts of individual liberty and civil rights, giving rise to the conviction, on the part of some, that the truly modern state was also a liberal, constitutional one. Even more explosive a legacy of the French Revolution was the ideology known as nationalism, to which further space will be devoted shortly. Later still, the gradual spread of industrialisation from Britain to the European continent, in the nineteenth century, created the ultimate template for modernity, against which Eastern Europe has been measured ever since. Modernisation now meant an industrialised economy, an efficient bureaucratic structure for managing the fruits of that economy and, if not a liberal then, at the very least a constitutional political system which was able to maintain order within society and ensure that its energies could be directed at goals deemed appropriate by the country's political leadership.

The efforts to modernise made by rulers and elites in Eastern Europe ran into increasing difficulties as the societies in question became more complex. At the outset of our period the assumption of the so-called enlightened absolutist rulers was that modernisation could be ordained. Precisely because it was so rational an agenda, modernisation did not require the consent of the governed and indeed might have to be imposed against their will. Yet even in the eighteenth century a moderniser like Joseph II encountered the vested interests of historic classes such as the Hungarian nobility. The effect of the French Revolution was to complicate this picture by introducing demands for political representation which went far beyond those of the earlier period. In addition, what modernisation was achieved in Eastern Europe, in economic terms, gradually contributed to a greater social diversity in the areas affected. The rise of a native merchant class and the slow growth of towns made possible in turn the emergence of political opposition to East European rulers. It is characteristic of the gap between Eastern and Western Europe that this potential liberal class was everywhere tiny. Nevertheless it constituted both an impediment to and an argument for further modernisation.

Equally tiny, to begin with, but nevertheless a growing presence in different parts of Eastern Europe from at least the early nineteenth century, was an industrial proletariat, or factory working class, which often coexisted uneasily with the declining class of artisans or handicraft workers. The spread of industrialisation meant that the artisans were increasingly marginalised and impoverished, and in Eastern Europe, as elsewhere, it was largely artisans who provided the shock troops of violent revolutions in 1848—49 and the voting-fodder for radical political movements, either of the Left or the Right, later in the century. The industrial working class, by contrast, concentrated in Eastern Europe's few big cities and certain other pockets of industry such as the Bohemian Sudetenland, or Silesia, or in late tsarist Russia, the Ukraine and the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, proved fertile recruiting ground for revolutionary socialism and anarchism, ideologies dedicated to a violent overthrowing of the entire social and political order. In response to this phenomenon, small though it still was, governments and socio-economic elites had two options: repress or accommodate. Rarely did they get it right, and as a result working-class radical movements sprang up across the region, despite its prevailing 'backwardness'.

Modernisation also triggered ructions among the majority of Eastern Europe's inhabitants, the peasant masses. By the late nineteenth century what is often misleadingly termed 'populism', but is more accurately called 'peasantism', consisted of political movements dedicated to empowering peasants, on the ground that they constituted the only important class in society as a whole, the true producers on whom all else depended. Peasantism also identified readily with the new ideology of nationalism; indeed peasantist leaders habitually stressed that the peasants were the nation.

This raises our second major theme in Eastern Europe, the phenomenon of nationalism. It would be fair to say that this concept, which most historians agree emerged only in the late eighteenth century, played as little a role in the history of Eastern Europe, in this early period, as it did elsewhere. Nevertheless, the eighteenth century is very much the period of incubation for the idea of the nation, an idea which takes shape, in the writings of some European thinkers, with specific reference to the peoples of Eastern Europe. Once formulated, nationalism in the nineteenth century increasingly took centre stage in the affairs of East European states and societies, to the point where the unwary student might be pardoned for thinking that the whole of this period can be explained as the story of successive 'national' uprisings, 'national' struggles for recognition and 'national liberations' achieved through the formation of 'nation-states', a process broadly completed, according to this scenario, by 1918. No such interpretation could be less satisfactory as an account of historical events; yet there can be no denying that the nineteenth century was a period of increasingly visible nationalism.7

If we define nationalism, with some crudity, as loyalty to one's nation, and the strongly held conviction that membership in one's nation is a fundamental aspect of human identity, we are still left with the crucial question of what constitutes a nation. It is essential to the understanding of nationalism that the answer to this question is to be found to a large extent in artificial factors and depends on a good deal of subjectivity. In other words, nations have been identified according to a variety of criteria, and the decision as to whether a nation exists has always depended on how many people subscribe to the view that it exists. Historians and social scientists are also divided as to how far back one can date nationalism as an identifiably political ideology, or national consciousness as a form of group identity shared by significant numbers of people.8

Most so-called 'modernists' among theorists of nationalism argue that, in Western Europe from about 1500, it was relatively easy for the view to emerge that the peoples living in the unitary, centralised monarchies of this region — states with on the whole stable territorial boundaries like England, Scotland, Portugal, Spain and France — could be identified as nations. 'Nation' in this context meant the people living within a particular state; in short, it was a political definition. As a concept to which people expressed loyalty, however, the nation in this early modern period is still hard to identify. People's allegiance was still primarily to their monarch, or their religion, or to some narrower, more regional definition of identity than the nation. It was only in the late eighteenth century that the first conscious appeals are made for loyalty to the idea of the nation. One sees this most strikingly in two commonly cited examples of early nationalism. One is the formation of the United States of America: a new entirely artificial state to which the inhabitants of the former British colonies agreed to owe allegiance. The other is the French Republic, which emerged from the French Revolution by 1792. For the first time in Europe, a deliberate attempt was made by the leaders of the new Republic to mobilise the entire population of France, all citizens of the Republic, in defence of the nation against foreign invaders. This was still a political definition of the nation, in that it equated the nation with the state: all loyal inhabitants of France were deemed members of the French nation. In both cases, the point at which significant numbers of Americans and Frenchmen started to think of themselves collectively as a nation was a key stage in the formation of what has been called the 'imagined community' of the nation.9

The applicability of this political definition of the word 'nation' to Eastern Europe, in the eighteenth century, and indeed to many other parts of the world, is much more difficult. What constituted a nation in the East European context had no obvious political units of reference, in other words states, by which nations could be identified. The peoples of Eastern Europe were scattered across, and among, the huge dynastic empires into which the region was divided: the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire. None of these institutions was clearly identified with a single people, even if the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth, at least, was often wrongly referred to even in the eighteenth century as being exclusively 'Polish', and the Ottoman Empire was commonly, if inaccurately, described as 'Turkish'. Within the Habsburg Monarchy, it is true, the formerly independent Kingdom of Hungary, and within it the sub-kingdom of Croatia, retained a separate constitutional identity, and the representatives of these units undoubtedly thought of themselves as Hungarians and Croatians. This, however, was a national consciousness almost entirely confined to a single social class, the nobility. In most of Eastern Europe, by contrast, nations could not be equated with states as they were in Western Europe, because any such potential nation-states had been extinguished in previous centuries or had never existed.

Yet the peoples of Eastern Europe were clearly many and varied, even to the most superficial observer; the multiplicity of spoken languages alone was ample testimony to this diversity. As a consequence, the first attempts to categorise the inhabitants of the region were made according to cultural criteria, like language, rather than political criteria. The most renowned exponent of this cultural definition of the nation was the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder who, precisely because he was German, was aware that the sources of a specific German identity were not to be sought in political terms, since Germans lived in a wide variety of states. For Herder, language was the most important identifier of nationality: it was something that made all speakers of that language different from other peoples, and because language itself went back to the earliest origins of a community, it was also inextricably bound up with that people's history.10 Herder, one of the first systematic linguistic philosophers, was an enthusiastic collector of German folk songs, as proof of this historical cultural identity of the German nation. He also, however, extended his principle of linguistic cultural identity to the other peoples of Eastern Europe. On the basis of language alone, Eastern Europe could no longer be seen as simply the territory of four huge states; it was also a kaleidoscope of nations.

The implications of this central insight — the multinational nature of Eastern Europe — were explosive, even if they were long-term. For clearly, if the members of individual nations were encouraged to see themselves as separate, even in a purely cultural sense, then this self-perception was likely to have political consequences, and not just in the internal affairs of the multinational states of the region. Herder was in fact the first person to use the term 'nationalism', in 1774, to describe the concept of loyalty to the nation, the 'conscious cherishing' of the nation's language, its cultural roots, its 'soul'.11 With time, nationalism came to mean something else: the right of the nation to self-determination, in other words to a state of its own. The world, especially Eastern Europe, is still living with the murderous fallout from this ideology.

How nationalism developed in Eastern Europe will be charted below. Here it is enough merely to foreshadow this process, but with the important caveat that nationalism as an ideology, the idea of the nation in our modern sense, is not even thought of at the beginning of our period. Even in the late eighteenth century, after a decade of upheaval caused by the French Revolutionary Wars, nationalism in Eastern Europe, and arguably even in Western Europe, was very much a minority preoccupation.12 It was a phenomenon observable, in the main, among some members of the educated elite of individual peoples — Hungarians, Poles, some scattered thinkers among the other Slav peoples and the Greeks — but it was not a mass movement. Nor could it be given the economic and hence social condition of the vast majority of people in the region.13

The third main theme of this study is directly related to the question of nationalism and could be regarded as nationalism's antithesis. This is the persistence throughout the whole period of multinational or multiethnic states. The Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth disappeared before the end of the eighteenth century, partitioned among its neighbours Russia, Prussia and Austria. The other conglomerate empires, however, survived right down to 1918; indeed, most of them augmented their territory in Eastern Europe. Only the Ottoman Empire suffered a progressive rolling back of its territory in the Balkans, and even this process was not completed until the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.

Apart from their mere physical survival, however, there are other considerations which make the continued existence of such empires a matter of thematic importance. These were hardly moribund concerns. Whatever the internal problems and international weaknesses of both Russia and the Habsburg Monarchy — and these were often severe — both states continued to play the role of great powers and were regarded by most of their subjects as permanent and solidly established authorities. Prussia's control over its Polish population was made all the more secure by its development into the German Empire in 1871. The Ottoman Empire was frequently referred to as 'the sick man' of Europe, where throughout the nineteenth century at least a series of revolts and breakaways succeeded in whittling down Ottoman sovereignty in the Balkans.14 But even here the 'sick man' epithet was misleading: not only was the Ottoman imperium a long time dying, but repeated efforts were made to reform it and gave it a vitality which continued to take its foes by surprise, and which ensured that the so-called 'Eastern question', of how to manage this long decline, was one of the most enduring problems of the entire period down to 1918.

The tendency to see the nineteenth century as an 'age of nationalism' has perhaps obscured this persistence of multinational empires and reinforced the view of them as ramshackle, unviable and doomed to disintegration, history's losers. Without in any way succumbing to an unhistorical nostalgia for such states, however, we should accept that it took the cataclysm of the First World War to overthrow them entirely. Moreover, until the war, which not only strained the resources of these states to the utmost but also opened up the hitherto almost unimaginable prospect of their possible destruction, very few inhabitants of Eastern Europe, with the exception of the Ottoman Empire's Christian subjects, thought in such apocalyptic terms. On the contrary, most people in the Habsburg Monarchy, the German Empire and Russia were resigned to living in them, indeed could probably imagine no alternative. Nationalism by the end of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly a greater force than ever before, but most peoples were not striving for independence from the empire in which they found themselves. Rather, their political aspirations, where they existed at all, were committed to achieving autonomy or some other form of self-determination within the framework of the existing state. Only a very few uncompromising nationalists were dedicated to what they fondly referred to as 'national' revolution and complete independence. In addition, the focus on nationalism has until recently obscured the persistence of what might be called residual loyalty to the state and the dynasty; recent research suggests that, at least in the Habsburg Monarchy, significant numbers of subjects were proud to exhibit such 'state patriotism'.15 Even larger numbers, it now appears, stubbornly resisted being categorised as anything at all: in the words of Jeremy King, 'National indifference was an inconvenient fact that national leaders denied and minimized.'16

Not only was the degree of popular discontent with multinational empires relative, but the rulers of these empires, and the political and social elites whom the rulers increasingly co-opted to advise them, did what they could to reinforce loyalty to the state. Often this did not amount to much and we should not exaggerate its effects. A good deal depended on the will of rulers and elites to promote such loyalty or even to admit that there was a problem. When Emperor Francis I of Austria was told that a certain individual was an Austrian patriot, he allegedly replied, 'But is he a patriot for me?' Francis felt he should be able to take his subjects' loyalty for granted; it was the first duty of any subject.17 Other dynasts, however, were not so egotistic, and in their attempts to bind together their diverse realms they deployed a number of stratagems.

The most obvious of these was to inculcate loyalty, to the dynasty personally but also, by implication, to the concept of empire itself. This had mixed results and was arguably most successful in the Habsburg Monarchy, where Habsburgtreue, or loyalty to the Habsburgs, was not confined to Austrian Germans (the original base of the dynasty) but was also discernible in other nationalities, at least among certain classes and professions like the military and the bureaucracy. In the Russian Empire and in Prussia dynastic loyalty was much less likely among non-Russian or non-German minorities, although Baltic Germans at least were traditionally loyal subjects of the tsar. In the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire fealty to the sultan could not be taken for granted even in Muslims, whether of Turkish or non-Turkish ethnic origin, and was even more problematical among Christians.

In the course of the nineteenth century we can see the development of what has been termed 'official nationalism'. This was the attempt by the empires to promote loyalty specifically to the state, regardless of the subject's nationality. The most ambitious example of this state nationalism is the so-called 'Russification' campaign of the tsarist government in Russia in the late nineteenth century, but which was preceded by the proclamation of an 'official nationality' as early as the 1830s. Similar attempts were made by the Prussian government and by Hungarian governments after 1867, and by the reformist but also incipiently Turkish nationalist Young Turk movement in the Ottoman Empire after 1908. By and large this coercive approach was a failure and merely stirred up nationalist resentment among the subject peoples against whom it was directed. A notable side effect, however, was the creation of a modern nationalism among Russians, Germans, Hungarians and Turks.

The final stratagem to which the rulers of multinational empires resorted was to promote economic development. This was generally undertaken for the primary purpose of strengthening the state and, only secondarily, if at all, with an eye to averting social or nationalist unrest. Nevertheless, where modernisation was even partially achieved it had two seemingly contradictory effects. On the one hand, the greater social variegation which came in the wake of economic development made the emergence of nationalism all the more likely. On the other hand, greater prosperity gave all those classes, and nationalities, who shared in it a greater reason for regarding the status quo, in other words the preservation of the multinational state, as acceptable, not to say inevitable. Which of the two, nationalism or loyalty to the state, was likely, if at all, to come out uppermost remained a moot point short of some geopolitical upheaval, but, on balance, circumstances favoured the status quo.