ABSTRACT
This book offers a largely thematic historical survey and analysis of the processes of political, social, cultural and economic change that have shaped the lands which lie between Germany, Italy and the former Tsarist and Soviet empires. German writers used to refer to this area as Zwischeneuropa. Unfortunately, this apt term has no such neat equivalent in English. The closest approximation is ‘the lands between’, as used in the titles of several major books and articles on the region (e.g. Palmer 1970 and Croan 1989). It has the virtue of encapsulating the region’s essential misfortune in modern times, that of being sandwiched between overwhelmingly powerful empires: Germanic on the one side and Ottoman, Tsarist or Soviet on the other. In the words of the Czechoslovak dissident Milan Simecka: ‘We live in the awareness that our unhappy situation on the borders of two civilizations absolves us from the outset from any responsibility for the nation’s fate. Try as we may, there is nothing we can do to help ourselves’ (Simecka 1985:159). Indeed, as relatively small and vulnerable ‘latecomers’ to a Europe of sovereign nation-states, the peoples of East Central and South-eastern Europe acquired their modern national identities, territories and statehood at least partly through the grace and favour of Europe’s Great Powers. Acute awareness of this uncomfortable predicament has helped to perpetuate widespread ‘national insecurity’. It has also encouraged fatalistic assumptions that the peoples of the region would usually be acted upon, rather than act, and that external powers would make territorial dispositions to suit themselves, as indeed they did (most notably through the peace treaties of 1648, 1713, 1815, 1878 and 1918-19, the successive partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39 and the Yalta and Potsdam agreements of 1945). These were self-fulfilling expectations.
