ABSTRACT
From the turn of the nineteenth century onwards, Eastern Europeans dreamed of transforming the world around them through sweeping visions, bold political action, and determined political organization. Throughout the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century, East Europeans struggled to shape their societies according to a rich variety of political visions and ideologies. Three old dynasties – the Habsburgs in Austria, the Ottomans in the Balkans, and the Romanovs in Russia – shaped political order in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. In eighteenth-century East Central Europe, reflections were prompted by the slow collapse of Poland-Lithuania as a great power and the contemporaneous rise of Prussia as a military and political force, both of which inspired new visions of the state. Constitutions, a reflection of liberal values even if they were usually the result of revolution or political expediency, were another marker of this transformation from traditional to modern ideas of statehood.
