The Use of the Middle:Mitteleuropavs.Strední Evropa

The history of the dichotomy of civic Western and ethnic Eastern nationalism

“…'Sooner or later,' Norman Davies, the renowned historian of Poland, wrote in his ambitious attempt to reconceptualise European history without western-centric bias, 'a convincing new picture of Europe's past will have to be composed to accompany the new aspirations for Europe's future ' (1996, p. 45). Others sought, often through idealised invocations of a quintessentially European 'Central Europe' kidnapped by the Russian East, not to discard the idea of a deep civilizational caesura in Europe, but to relocate it further to the East (examples in Bugge, 1999). Samuel Huntington's 1996 bestseller, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, was a welcome endorsement of this view.…”

Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe?

“…30 as Peter Bugge has demonstrated, this controversy not only reflected competing visions of the historical nature of the region but itself had a deep history, drawing upon older discourses mapping out europe, the east, and the idea of a "virtuous middle." 31 although the Central european question opened up the possibility of an ambiguous "betwixt and between" space between east and West, in practice the claim to a Central european identity usually served less as a regional variant of non-alignment than as a strategy for "reclaiming" a Western european heritage and a denial of easternness (through a projection of it onto the ostensible imperial power, Russia/the Soviet Union). In 1986, Timothy garton ash, an early and important figure in the literature on the east/West symbolic axis that would flourish in the 1990s, concluded, "We are to understand that what was truly 'Central european' was always Western, rational, humanistic, democratic, skeptical, and tolerant."…”

Resonant Topographies: Central Europe’s Paradoxical Middle

“…This is how, for instance, the socio-political blueprints for Mitteleuropa gain prominence. The dynamic history of this construct has been treated extensively in the burgeoning literature on the topic (see Bugge, 1999; Chiantera-Stutte, 2008; Delanty, 1996; Le Rider 2008; Stråth, 2008). It will be enough to remind ourselves that the deliberately designed discourse of the middle of Europe gathers momentum in the 19th century, only to become fully crystallized as a political and economic plan of action more or less on the eve of the First World War.…”

“…The idea of the ‘middle’ as the virtuous and authentic embodiment of space captured the imagination of an entire generation of intellectuals and scholars, although it did not originate at the turn of the 20th century. 1 Johan Gottfried Herder had already used such a language at the end of the 18th century, referring to der Mittelstrich der Erde or the central zone of the earth (Bugge, 1999: 19). Even though Herder was neutral as to who inhabited this ‘middle-earth’ (he spoke only of ‘well-built peoples’), this sort of designation was later firmly connected to das Deutsche Volk as the indigenous population of this swath of geography.…”