ABSTRACT
The states which emerged – or re-emerged – in Central and Eastern Europe
(CEE) after the First World War from the empires of the nineteenth century had
varying degrees of success in setting up cohesive political communities. This was
because some of the nations involved, far from being ‘solid communities moving
steadily down . . . history’ (Anderson 1991: 26), had been subjected to many
divisions and reorganizations. They entered the Second World War largely as
independent states, but the advent of the Cold War left them part of a new
empire, whose internal borders became closed and militarized, the whole region
at once both compartmentalized and also stifled by a Soviet blanket. The border
between this closed world and ‘the West’ became both a physical barrier and a
symbol of the political division between the two. Since the revolutions of
1989-90, a patchwork of contrasting interfaces has now emerged, each with its
different meaning, determined by previous and changing historical, political,
cultural and other relationships.
