ABSTRACT
The foreword to this book has suggested how the eastward expansion of the EU and NATO is a logical sequel to the aberration of communism. Yet the accession states have historically comprised a backward area – part of Western Europe’s periphery – which the communist system was, in some respects, intended to reinvigorate through the creation of a world region where the spatial logic of capitalism would be overridden by central planning and artificial pricing in the interest of regional equality. It will be shown how this socialist dream was tarnished by Soviet self-interest and a failure to adjust as the population born after the Second World War inevitably came to form the majority. But if the West is to succeed with its recipe for redistribution moderated by the EU it is worth remembering that the politics of the shatter zone – the region’s historic status – are still within living memory. While medieval feudal states emerged on the basis of prehistoric tribal organisation and Dark Age migrations, these did not fairly reflect ethnicity (given the enormous variations in identity and organisation) and they were in any case swamped by imperialism of the Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg and Prussian empires. Independent East Central Europe (ECE) disappeared, apart from a few limited instances where imperial power was exerted indirectly through suzerainty. Instead there was colonialism with much instability and ethnic diversity where imperial frontiers were in a state of flux. As East (1961: 14) explains, the individuality of the shatter zone derives from the existence of many national groups as well as ‘the persistence there of politico-territorial organisations essentially multinational and imperialist in character’. However, it is worth adding that German influence was particularly strong in terms of settlement, culture and trade: traditional links that underpinned the notion of Central Europe or ‘Mitteleuropa’ as an informal German commonwealth.
