Transregional Connections in the History of East-Central Europe

Katja Castryck-Naumann, Katja Castryck-Naumann

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110680560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna

Transregional connections play a fundamental role in the history of East-Central Europe. This volume explores this connectivity by showing how people from eastern and central parts of Europe have positioned themselves within global processes while, in turn, also shaping them. The contributions examine different fields of action such as economy, arts, international regulations and law, development aid, and migration, focusing on the period between the middle of the nineteenth century and the end of the Cold War. The authors uncover spaces of interaction and emphasize that internal and external entanglements have established East-Central Europe as a distinct region. Understanding the connectedness of this subregion is stimulating for the historiography of East-Central Europe as it is for the field of global history.

1 Introduction: Moving from Transnational to Transregional Connections? East-Central Europe in Global Contexts

Katja Castryck-Naumann

This volume examines the history of East-Central Europe as perceived through the study of transregional connections; it introduces developments that embody region-transcending entanglements by demonstrating how people from the eastern and central parts of Europe positioned themselves in a world growing closer together since the middle of the nineteenth century and how they shaped this entangled world.¹ This volume follows how actors embraced global dynamics and challenges as well as how they expressed their concerns in these constellations, thus creating their own connectedness. The contributions sketch out how these entanglements changed over time and which reciprocal effects they had in the region as well as in sites, spaces, and regions to which actors in East-Central Europe were tied. We trace the space-making quality of these multidirectional interactions, among others, by showing how East-Central Europe became a distinct region in the process of transregional interaction. While the contributions offer conceptual reflections and critically discuss long-standing narratives about the region’s global positions, above all, they present original empirical work, with research findings that encourage enhancing the study of East-Central Europe’s connectivity by augmenting the transnational angle with a transregional stance.

Why transregional connections? The observations of three developments encouraged us to examine these. First, while exchange and interactions have been treated as subjects within research concerned with East-Central Europe, the focus here has been so far on links between single societies or countries and on entanglements within the region, while relations with other parts of the world and global contexts have sparked much less interest. Second, while world-wide relations and global processes are at the core of global history, and lately a distinctive transregional approach is being advanced, entanglements are explored, above all, for world regions, such as continents or major empires. Smaller regions, including East-Central Europe, and their specific connectivity have received little attention. Because global historical narratives are imbued with these imbalances, many regional formations, sub-national and supra-national, are not dealt with and thus appear disconnected and marginal. Third, within the field of transnational history, conceptual reflections have recently moved in new directions that differentiate between the various scales of entanglements, and which shift the attention away from connections across state borders, be they national or imperial, to the many other spaces and localities from which they unfolded. This offers inspiration for both histories about East-Central Europe and global histories.

This volume presents history, revealing dimensions of the past so far rarely seen, and it aims to show the potential of the analytical category “transregional” for understanding historical connections. Yet, the category is not restricted to the study of historical developments; it can also be used to better understand current processes. The realm of international politics is changing, as are politics in East-Central Europe, including politics of history. It seems that in research, connectivity is used to reach for more inclusive histories, while in politics a nationalistic backlash and the rise of populist movements occur, not only in East-Central Europe but globally. Nationalism does not reappear, however, in the form of cutting of all ties to the outside world. Rather, we see a revision of which historical connections are used as reference and legitimization of political agendas and which ones are filtered out. These processes are their own topics for future research, and we think that the study of transregional connections of East-Central Europe can contribute much to that research.

In the following, we will briefly review in greater detail the mentioned trends in historiography and explain how we, in this volume, understand “transregional”. The second part outlines the discussion about transregional connections in the field of global history and brings to light what can be gained when the study of sub-regions in general, and of East-Central Europe in particular, is integrated. The third part presents new works on the history of East-Central Europe that paves the way towards transregional inquiries, and the last part introduces the articles in this volume.

1 Three Historiographical Observations

Transnational History of East-Central Europe

The largest share of the historiography on East-Central Europe has been intimately associated with the nation(-state) and scholars who have moved away from the national paradigm have first of all explored the border-crossing biographies and dynamics for particular countries.² The primary goal has been a loosening of the fixation with the national framework³ by tracing concrete connections that cut across it. Many of the characteristics of East-Central Europe – multiethnicity, multilingualism, religious diversity, the meshing of cultures, and migrations, as well as shifting borders and the many border regions – have actually paved the way towards this transnational studies approach. The unpacking of these characteristics has yielded intriguing new knowledge and one should note that bringing the connected German-Polish and German-Czech histories to the fore was also tremendously important politically and in terms of reconciliation.⁴ Be that as it may, connectedness that stretches beyond the lands of the region has been addressed only in passing, including the questions of the region’s entangled position in global processes. So far, transnational histories of East-Central Europe have been mostly written from an inward-looking perspective; relations to the wider world remain neglected.

This transnational orientation, however, leads to some challenges. Earlier than other regional specialists, historians working on East-Central Europe reflected on the constructed character of their subject. After all, we are dealing with a space that is neither clearly bounded by natural demarcations nor defined by territory or institutions; instead, it is a space that in many ways is open, fluid, and changing. In particular, the various political and scientific contexts during the eighteenth to early twenty-first centuries, as well as the related widely differing interests and agendas that created East-Central Europe as a distinctive space, have contributed to a departure from essentializing notions.⁵ Yet by far, not all scholars share such constructivist methodologies. There are those who insist on stable entities, above all on the nation(-state) as the main framework for research, and not only in East-Central Europe. The debate goes on.⁶ A focus on border-transcending dynamics within Eastern Europe, reflections on the role of connections in the making and remaking of the entire region can be instructive here, and the term “transregional” – in the sense of transforming and transcending the region – can be of good use.

Second, transnational histories of East-Central Europe call into question narratives that make strong assumptions regarding the region’s fixed position in international relations and global processes, such as the notion of an area in-between “East” and “West” or of “Orient and Occident”. It has been described as rim-lands or bloodlands and as a buffer zone or semi-periphery, and as has been subsumed in a homogenous Eastern bloc during Soviet control in the post-1945 period.⁷ Notwithstanding the explanatory power of these descriptions, actor-centred transnational historiography has revealed spaces for manoeuvring that cut across cultural and geopolitical divides. The multitude of hitherto-unknown contacts, exchanges, and circulations destabilizes ideas about East-Central Europe as a region designated as belonging to formations imposed from the outside, leaving little room for self-directed developments and proactive participation in world affairs. Nevertheless, how can these two strands of research be linked, and how can the region’s position in the world be grasped in a way that recognizes both the global hierarchies to which people from East-Central Europe were persistently exposed as well as their capacity to deal with such conditions for their own sake and interests? It seems that we need an approach that is flexible enough to explore possibilities of action within specific fields of action, whether in the economy, culture, or in international settings, and from there to reconsider structuralist narratives. This calls for actor-centred studies that take as their starting point neither seemingly given spaces nor predetermined positions in global affairs, but which follow strategies of positioning in global processes. These studies include topics such as, among others, visions and practices of region-related politics: for example, the Little Entente; voting blocs in international organizations; or, more recently, the formation of the Visegrád Group. The development of distinct regionalisms can offer inspiration here,⁸ and there are many more aspects of regionalization that have led to the creation of smaller or larger spaces in East-Central Europe.

Without doubt, new research fields have emerged that take up such a perspective (which we will return to later). Ultimately, in many societies, political cultures seem to change, and colonial and imperial pasts – which even in the countries that were once major empires had vanished from the centre of concerns – are recalled.⁹ The history of colonialism and its attendant racism, however, can be less aptly discussed in the terminology of the transnational, which can be seen by the previous focus on transnational entanglements within each world region facing accusations for having marginalized colonial projects, ties, and related transregional entanglements for far too long.

Still, the focus of the transnationally oriented historiography on East-Central Europe is on one type of traversal – the trans-imperial, transnational, or transcultural – which blends out other simultaneous crossings. The study of the plurality of scales along which entanglements unfolded and the multiplicity of spaces established by interactions and exchanges is conceptually prepared; empirical works that explore these intricacies are still few in regard to East-Central Europe. Yet, the study of connections from a transregional perspective is instructive to understanding not only the historical trajectories in the region but in a wider sense: it enables a critical intervention into global history.

Global History and its Focus on World Regions

While regions and their interactions have already been central topics among world and global historians for a few decades, the focus is on a specific type of region, i.e., continental areas, such as Africa, South America, or Asia; hegemonic entities, like the major empires; and sometimes institutionalized spaces, including the Eastern bloc or the non-aligned states. World regions outside Europe and their interdependencies with Western European empires are intensively investigated, and the history of Russia and the Soviet Union in its global dimensions has also become an object of research. It is recognized in principle that regional spaces of action differ from each other, notably in terms of location and size, and that some are located within nation-states, that others emerged around borders, and that others are constellations within the so-called world regions, for example, sub-Saharan Africa or East Asia. The awareness of this variety, however, rarely translates into related research activities. The empirical study of the entire plurality of regional spaces beyond the local level is still an open task. All too often, the term “regi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Moving from Transnational to Transregional Connections? East-Central Europe in Global Contexts
• Part I: Positioning in Global Entanglements
• Part II: Partaking in International Politics
• Part III: Inter-Regional Connections
• Index