Note: This proposal is being submitted by Diane Brooks and Alice Lewis who will coordinate it together.
What makes Western Europe different from Eastern Central Europe? That’s a hard question to answer easily. However, anyone who has studied the events leading to World War I and the Versailles Peace Conference, or who knows the region’s history between the world wars, or who followed in the conflicts in the 1990s is aware that much of the drama and tragedy of the 20th century took place in the region of Eastern Central Europe.
John Connolly, in From Peoples into Nations, A History of Eastern Europe, focuses on the power of nationalism, an idea introduced during the 18th and 19th centuries. The four multinational empires controlling the region had no adequate response to the national question; as they sought to unify their diverse populations, the movements struggling to realize nationhood found themselves facing the possibility that their languages and cultures would become extinct.
We will follow Connolly’s chronological approach as we consider the impact of nationalism on a variety of ethnic groups, including Serbs, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Romanians within the context of existing and emerging political systems and ideologies: imperialism, liberalism, fascism, socialism, communism, democracy and neo-liberalism.
He shows us how imperial reform in the late eighteenth century triggered emerging national resistance through the national revolutions of 1848-49 and 1875-78, the aftermath of WWI, the totalitarian regimes of Nazism and Communism, and the collapse of Soviet Communism. The analysis in this book shows why nationalism was not contingent but rather situational: its strength depending above all on the level of perceived threat to – and sometimes from - a particular ethnicity.
The weekly reading averages about 70 pages.
1. Peoples of East Central Europe
2. Ethnicity on the Edge of Extinction and Linguistic Nationalism
3. Nationality Struggles: From Idea to Movement to nationalist revolutions in Serbia and Poland
4. 1848 in East Central Europe and the 1867 Compromise
5. The 1878 Berlin Congress and Europe’s New Ethno-Nation-States; Fin de Siècle Hungary and Bohemia and the origins of a new Rightist nationalism
6. Liberalism’s Heirs and Enemies: Socialism versus Nationalism; Peasant Utopias: Villages of Yesterday and Societies of Tomorrow
7. 1919: A New Europe and Its Old Problems and The Failure of National Self-Determination
8. Fascism Takes Root in the Iron Guard and Arrow Cross; Eastern Europe’s Anti-fascism
9. Hitler’s War and Its East European Enemies; The Holocaust in Eastern Europe
10. People’s Democracy: Early Postwar Eastern Europe; The Cold War and Stalinism
11. De-Stalinization: Hungary’s Revolution; National Paths to Communism: The 1960s
12. 1968 and the Soviet Bloc: Reform Communism; Life in the Soviet Bloc
13. The Unraveling of Communism and the year 1989
14. Eastern Europe Explodes: The Wars of Yugoslav Succession; Eastern Europe Joins Europe; conclusion at the turn of the century
John Connolly, From Peoples into Nations, A History of Eastern Europe, 2022.