Regions and Eastern Europe Regionalism

There are at least two histories of the concept of Eastern Europe, both holding important implications for the broader concepts of regions and regionalism. The first imposes on Europe a regional division that is modern in design but that attempts to describe a historical reality dating back many centuries. The other recounts the emergence and development of the consciousness of Eastern Europe as a region.

The first history was told originally by the Hungarian historian and social theorist István Bibó in an article titled "The Distress of East European Small States" (1946). More recently, in 1983, the historian Jenő Szűcs revised his compatriot's ideas and wrote a revised account in "Three Historical Regions of Europe: An Outline." Szűcs's implicit view of regions is devoid of ethnic or national considerations, resting instead on an observation concerning attitudes toward political power and its application in Europe. Western Europe, in Szűcs's view, has been characterized for almost a millennium by the "structural—and theoretical—separation of 'society' from the 'state.'" Despite what we are commonly taught, the notions of natural law, the social contract, and popular sovereignty first appear some five centuries before Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), and they derive, surprisingly, from western European feudalism and the Roman Catholic Church. By the twelfth century, a distinctive political and social culture had set apart a region known as Europa Occidens, whose eastern boundary runs from the lower Danube through the Eastern Carpathians and into the Baltics. West of this line, Szűcs says, society was subordinated to the secular state (that is, the secular state asserted power over society but left it with some measure of freedom); east of the line, society was nationalized (in the sense in which modern totalitarian regimes nationalized industries by incorporating them into the state). In this formulation, what makes a region is primarily the relationship between governing power and the governed, and though religion and social mores clearly have something to do with this relationship, Szűcs treats these factors as mere data and is reluctant to use them as a basis for broad judgments of ethnic or national groups.

The second history is far more complicated because it involves popular attitudes—at various educational and social strata—toward cultures and toward categories (ethnic, national, religious) of people. Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994) approaches the topic of regionalism in Europe from a postcolonial perspective heavily indebted to the work of such theorists as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said. Gramsci and Foucault gave Wolff his understanding of power hierarchies; Said (who drew heavily on the first two) gave him his understanding of the cultural myth called "Orientalism," by which the West (in its broadest sense, not confined to Europe) has allegedly investigated, classified, and subjugated any number of regions—either inside or outside Europe and generally but not always lying literally to the east—that it regards as other.

Whatever one might think of the charge that the West's attitude toward what it has regarded as the East has been founded on domination or a desire to dominate, Wolff offers a compelling account of the emergence and subsequent history of Eastern Europe as a regional concept. In his view, the emergence takes place in the Enlightenment. The north–south axis, separating Europe into a culturally superior West and a culturally inferior East, Wolff says, replaced the Renaissance's east–west axis, which separated Europe into a culturally superior South and a culturally inferior North.

The "invention" of Eastern Europe may well have been the work of Voltaire (1694–1778). His History of Charles XII (1731) gives an account of the Swedish monarch's wars with the Russian tsar Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. As Wolff sees it, Voltaire's contribution to regionalism was to emphasize Russia's position astride Europe and Asia. It would become increasingly clear during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Asia was primarily the source of Eastern Europe's "easternness" and that the two poles of Asia in Europe were Russia and the Ottoman Empire (together, at any given moment in history, with the Ottoman Empire's former and then-current territorial possessions in Europe). To the extent that Orientalism in Europe was associated with the Ottoman Empire, it gave rise to a fascination with Islam and with the exotica connected in the western European mind with that religion. Such fascination tended to focus on the Balkan Peninsula. The enormous complexity of the Balkans as a regional construct is the subject of Maria Todorova's Imagining the Balkans (1997). Todorova places particular emphasis on the Ottoman Empire as a source of Eastern cultural elements that, in the minds of western Europeans, characterize the Balkan region. To the extent that Orientalism was associated with Russia, it gave rise to a fascination with things Slavic, encouraging some adventurous and moneyed western Europeans to travel to points east (and northeast) and other less adventurous souls (Voltaire, for example, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1712–1778]), who wrote an important book on the Polish constitution) to write about eastern lands without ever bothering to visit them.

In the early to mid-eighteenth century, a trend arose in European thought that would develop side by side with the trend toward regionalism. It began with the scientific classification of living things, developed into the concept of race, and culminated in the nineteenth-century geopolitical theory of nationalism. By 1735, Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) had recognized the existence of physical and mental variations within the human species, though he attributed such variations to environmental factors rather than to heredity. In midcentury, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707–1788) defined species as the smallest groups whose individual members could produce offspring and subdivided the human species into smaller groups to which he applied the word race.

It was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) who introduced scientific rigor into the subclassification of species. In three articles published between 1775 and 1788, he provided a definition of race that recognized the principle of interfertility among members of various races, he offered a division of the human species into four original races, and he asserted that racial characteristics are hereditary, not acquired. Though Kant regarded skin color as the most reliable indicator of racial origin, he did not hesitate to describe the four races according to their moral characteristics.

Kant's taxonomy was necessarily broad and classed all Europeans in a single race (the "whites"). Not until later in the nineteenth century, with the advent of Darwin's theory of natural selection and a rudimentary theory of genetics, was racial thinking given the elaborate scientific (some would say pseudoscientific) basis that led to the detailed classification of groups within Europe's borders. But even as Kant was publishing the last of his three essays on race, his countryman Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), in Ideas Toward a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784–1791), was explicitly rejecting the category of race, proposing instead a classification of peoples (Völker) by nation, a concept based on spiritual rather than on physical heredity. In Herder's eyes, the dominant factors in the formation of nationhood are "national formation" (National-bildung) and language (which he describes as "the peculiar means for the formation [ Bildung ] of man").

All that remained was to link nation in this spiritual sense to nation in the political sense. This fell to Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), who in 1807 and 1808 delivered his Addresses to the German Nation in French-occupied Berlin, describing to his beleaguered compatriots the nation as the ultimate expression of the character of a people (Volk) and pointing to the features of the German people that set it apart from—and above—the other peoples of Europe, particularly the French. These addresses firmly established the basis for European nationalism, defined by Ernest Gellner in 1983 as "a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state … should not separate the power holders from the rest" (p. 1). It was not until much later in the century, of course, that this concept arose with such consequential force in lands to the east and south of where Fichte stood as he rallied his countrymen.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries thus show an oddly split attitude on the classification of people and places in Europe. As Wolff shows, when western European writers turned their attention eastward in the eighteenth century, they had a marked tendency to see ethnic and even linguistic homogeneity spread out over broad areas where the more discriminating outlook of nineteenth-century nationalism would judge that such homogeneity did not exist—thus regions rather than nations. A case in point is the common use of the proper adjective Slavic (Sclavic, Slavonic, Sclavonic) to designate the people and languages in Russia and virtually all European territories east of present-day Germany and Austria, including the Balkans (but not Greece). Visitors to Poland, Bohemia, Russia, and even Hungary commonly referred indifferently to the languages spoken there as Slavic, as if they were all identical. At the same time, however, writers in the West had discovered two criteria, inherited physical traits and common language, that would increasingly encourage the division and narrower classification of people within broad regions—thus nations.