What is Central and Eastern Europe?

Abstract

The historical trajectory of Central and Eastern Europe differed significantly from that of the West. The region became the periphery of a transforming West during the early modern centuries. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were characterized by repeated attempts to catch up with the West. Romanticism brought in Western ideas and generated struggles for national independence and modernization. Failures paved the way for desperate revolts in the inter-war years. Left- and right-wing revolutions engulfed the region. Authoritarian, Fascist and Communist regimes looked for short cuts to finish nation-building and industrialization. In the end, all versions of state-run modernization failed, and the region revolted against them. At least its western rim seems to be successfully returning to Europe at the turn of the millennium.

The limited effect of increasing educational attainment on childlessness trends in twentieth-century Europe, women born 1916–65

“…The socialist countries in Europe did not experience as much prosperity as Western Europe, but they did experience major economic growth (Berend 2005). While the Western democracies experienced the beginning of great social changes in the late 1960s with the spread of individualism (Inglehart 1971; Van de Kaa 1996, 2004), these were less visible in state-socialist countries.…”

Foreword

“…Moreover, the long term co-existence of 'modern' and 'traditional' within CEE societies shaped political discourses and ideologies in which 'progress', 'modernity' (mostly, related to West European models of industrialization and state building) and national identity were interlinked ambiguously and often conflictually -leading to the alternative interpretations of 'western' political categories and the rise of tribal nationalism and political extremes during the crises of capitalism from the late 19 th century (Berend, 2005;Boatca, 2006;Balogh, 2015) .…”

“…However, in-betweenness emerged also as a more practical term in academic and public discourses, such as a particular geopolitical context within Europe that made political processes and institutions of CEE dependent on external power(s) and produced economic vulnerability and political instability repeatedly within the region . Thus, 'in-betweenness' was associated with shifting cultural and political boundaries within Europe that separated various models (agencies and trajectories) of modernity, with unsettled national borders and related conflicts, as well as major geopolitical concepts that considered the region as a 'frontier' (Soviet bloc/transition countries) up until now (Gerschenkron, 1959;Szűcs, 1986;Bibó, 1991;Böröcz, 1999;Berend, 2005).…”

“…While the macro-focus highlighted the rise of CEE as a semiperiphery (between the 'West' and the 'East'/ Russia) and the variety of institutional arrangements across long durées (see e .g . Berend, 2005;Kochanowitz, 1989;Bohle and Greskovits, 2007), recent critical readings of peripheralisation and peripherality drove the attention toward regional and local processes within the periphery in the context of CEE modern history (Boatca, 2006;Zarycki, 2011;Düzgün, 2013;Fischer-Tahir and Naumann, 2013) . They linked grand historical time to 'internal time of spatial systems' (Braudel, 1992;Massey, 2008) and opened up the way to understand peripheralisation from the periphery .…”

“…This turbulent period heated the debates on national and European histories as a context of actual modernization concepts -such as the interpretations of state socialism as a 'detour' vs . an alternative non-capitalist modernization model (Berend, 2005;Böröcz, 1999) . Such discourses were shaped by earlier debates related to CEE history, in which the region was considered (implicitly or explicitly) as a peripheral modernization model, a specific trajectory emerging in relation to the European core -that was perceived in CEE as economic peripherality and being the immediate 'other' to the West .…”