ABSTRACT
A construct of historians, East Central (or just Central) Europe is by now accepted as a reasonable starting point for comparative studies, both within the region and with the rest of Europe, or even the ‘world’. Several authors in this volume sketched the birth, the use (rarely the mis-use) and the limits of the term for study and research. It seems that all of them agree that it is not an a priori category and that its definition (if one insists on having one) is fluid. It has to be perceived in a diachronic way: the region was not the same in the early and late Middle Ages and, certainly, for historical study, not identical with the members of the Warsaw Pact (i.e. ‘behind the Iron Curtain’). This fact, while important to keep in mind, is often disregarded by practitioners of relevant studies – understandably so, as the term served obvious political purposes in the 1980s – but it is time to get away from that implication. Incidentally, the bibliographies of the studies in the present volume may very well be the best collection of reference to the discussions about the possibilities of comparative study of this region available.
