ABSTRACT
In the cultural baggage of the West, Central Europe has long been an optional extra. Europe's military and political center of gravity shifted eastward, and the unresolved conflicts of empires and nations moved in concordance, with Central Europe describing the lands between Germany and the Russian empire, focused on Vienna. The reemergence of Poland, the creation of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, together with the reduction of Austria and Hungary to small states, all combined to give the prewar idea of a unified Central Europe a quite new meaning. In one important French study of 1931, the countries taken to comprise Central Europe were Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Italy. The presence of Russia in such a Europe, the exclusion of the United States, and the disarmament of the Western allies strikes Socialist bloc dissidents, however sympathetic, as being monumentally naive.
