John Connelly, From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 968 pp., $35.00.

IF ONE had to come up with a single sentence to sum up all of the brutality, folly, tragedy, chaos, villainy, and occasional moments of heroism that John Connelly surveys in his superb study of the emergence of modern Eastern European nation-states, you could boil it all down to this: Too much history and not enough real estate.

Put another way, the defining borders of most of today’s relatively young Eastern European nations were drawn on very ancient, multi-layered soil. Tilling that soil since antiquity were permanent, deep-rooted peasant populations that remained isolated, illiterate, and bound in servitude for thousands of years. For the most part they were ruled, and sometimes owned, by feudal landowners—some of local origin, others part of repeated waves of outside conquerors incorporating them into empires. Some were short-lived, others long-lasting. In both cases, the native tillers of the earth knew little and cared less about their masters, as long as they were allowed to scrape out a bare subsistence.

To cite a single example, Dacia, which later became modern Romania, was once an outlying province of the Roman Empire. While the Roman presence was transient, it lasted long enough to make Romanian a Romance language and to prompt educated Romanians to declare themselves, to this day, “a Latin island in a sea of Slavs.” By late medieval times, German colonists, generally referred to as “Saxons,” were building cities and establishing commercial networks in regions like Transylvania that still left the vast majority of local peasantry untouched. Peasants and “Saxons” were ruled by a small but powerful land-owning class of native boyars and a new layer of Magyar nobility that dominated Transylvania as part of the late medieval Kingdom of Hungary. That kingdom, in its turn, was destroyed by the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Mohács in 1526. On the fatal field of Mohács, once called the burial ground of the Hungarian nation, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent wiped out much of Hungary’s nobility and clergy and, along the way, added another layer of conquerors to what would ultimately become modern Romania.

Yet another wave of conquest, this time emanating from Austria, would gradually drive back the Turks, acquiring Hungary as part of the Hapsburg dominium, ultimately extending control to Transylvania. Hapsburg dominance would last for two centuries, ending only in the ruins of World War I. The rest of what would become modern Romania—then called Wallachia and Moldavia—remained tributary to the Ottomans and was governed by wealthy, corrupt Greek “Phanariots” from Constantinople, who procured their posts through bribery into the first half of the nineteenth century.

While the Phanariot masters shared a religion (Eastern Orthodox Christianity) with their Romanian subjects, that was about all they had in common. The Phanariots were there to recover the costs of the bribes they paid to get their posts, squeezing as much additional revenue out of the locals as they could before their own replacement or execution by the Ottoman authorities.

When a thin layer of educated natives—and some members of the Phanariot ascendancy that had settled in and “went native”—launched the modern, “nationalist” cause for a Romanian nation state in the nineteenth century, the vast majority of the population was still mainly comprised of illiterate, impoverished, and oppressed peasants with no political power and almost no political awareness. The very concept of nationhood, or anything beyond a tribal identity and a sense of communal hierarchy ingrained by time, was an alien concept outside of a small circle of educated landowners, city dwellers, and an embryonic intelligentsia.

Similar conditions, with obvious local variations on the theme, applied in other soon-to-be Eastern European nation-states like Serbia and Bulgaria, and Slavic territories like Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and, later, Bosnia, all of which became part of the Hapsburg domains (afterwards the Austro-Hungarian Empire) over time.

Finally, closer to the heart of Europe, culturally as well as geographically, there were countries like the kingdoms of Poland and Bohemia, which both had long histories as independent powers before being consumed by one or more of the three great European states that dominated modern Europe until World War I: Prussia (which morphed into Bismarck’s German Reich), Imperial Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian “Dual Monarchy.”

IN ALL of these Eastern European entities, whether they were former nations or not, tribal, ethnic, and religious identities ran deep. Yet there were always substantial minority populations differing in language, culture, religion and geographical origins—e.g., Turks, Jews, “Saxon” Germans, Gypsies, Greeks, and even Armenians—who resided side-by-side (but unassimilated) with the “locals” for generations, even centuries.

This on-the-ground reality was very much at odds with the idealistic visions of early nineteenth-century Pan-Slavic nationalists, like the poet Ján Kollár and the Croatian theologian Ljudevit Gaj, who,

had become aware that people from Croatia could understand people living in Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. In fact, there was no border in language going from what we now call Slovenia all the way to the Black Sea. He [Ljudevit Gaj] concluded that the individuals living in this great space were one people, but they had to be awakened to their identity. That became his personal calling.

Gaj named his newly imagined “nationality” Illyrians, later to be known as Yugoslavs. Kollár envisioned a similar linguistic “nationhood” shared by Slavic speakers in parts of Germany, Slovakia, and Bohemia. He and his followers called them “Czecho-Slavs,” from which the concept of Czechoslovakia would arise. Gaj and Kollár became friends when they both resided in the old city of Pest, across the river from Buda in Hungary. Referring to Benedict Anderson’s influential 1991 work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Connelly strikes a rather poignant note:

An influential book [Anderson’s] tells us that nations are imagined communities. Here we have two men who liked to discuss deep questions on paths in the hills above the Danube in the 1830s, who imagined two nations that politicians in Paris, including Woodrow Wilson, brought to life as states in 1919. We also know that neither state survived the twentieth century. Humans imagine nations, but not all the nations that they imagine have the coherence to stay together. Like unstable chemical compounds, some come apart; occasionally they explode.

This brings us back to the problem of too much history and not enough real estate. While Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were both linguistically homogeneous, their linguistic sameness was countered by deep cultural, historical, economic, and sometimes religious differences. Unfortunately, the statesmen and officials responsible for redrawing the map of Europe after World War I were blind to this reality:

The East European states fashioned in Paris after World War I had problems that Wilson, a political scientist from Virginia, understood poorly. He and the peacemakers intended Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to be national states ... but they ended up becoming miniature Habsburg empires, with numerous peoples within their boundaries. Before he arrived in France in December 1918, Wilson imagined that the “peoples” of Austria-Hungary might be easily separated. But by the time he left, he despaired of the new peoples visiting him “every day,” demanding the very same real estate.

In the case of Czechoslovakia, a common language was just about all the two component groups shared. The Czechs had been part of the western, “Austrian” half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—an industrial and economic powerhouse with a strong middle class, a skilled labor force, and a rich intellectual and cultural life driven by Prague as well as Vienna. Slovakia was part of the Hungarian half of the Empire—economically backward, with a poor, rural majority of peasants living in near feudal conditions, governed by Magyar chauvinists whose determined efforts to forcefully replace the Slovakian mother tongue with the Hungarian language were even more heavy-handed than the Austrian efforts to impose the German language on the Czechs. And although Czechs and Slovaks were both Slavic peoples within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they occupied, as it were, separate wings of the same building, run by different ruling classes and formed into different social institutions.

IF CZECHOSLOVAKIA suffered from a split personality, Yugoslavia was plagued by multiple personalities. Although almost all of the freshly-minted Yugoslavs spoke essentially the same mother tongue and shared many of the same chromosomes, their histories could not have been more clashing. Because Serbia sided with the winning Allies while Croatia and Slovenia had fought on the side of the Central Powers as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia was, from the start, not so much a country as a Greater Serbian Empire.

It was ruled by the reigning Serbian dynasty, the Karageorgeviches, from their capital in Belgrade, with Serbs dominating the bureaucracy, military, and security establishments. This Serbian dominance was all the more galling since, while Serbia was a pitiable agricultural state—a nation of pig farmers in the eyes of many of their newly-conscripted fellow citizens—and had been ruled by the decaying Ottoman Empire, both Croatia and Slovenia, from the beginning of the eighteenth century onward, had been part of a major, westward-looking European power, albeit on its rather backward fringe. Croats and Slovenes were also Catholic and religiously westward-looking whereas the Serbs were Eastern Orthodox. In addition, ever since the latter half of the eighteenth-century, Slovenians and Croatians had belonged to a sophisticated, modern administrative state that was relatively free of corruption and governed by an established body of laws and authorities. They were also part of a large economic and cultural enterprise, radiating out from Vienna, that offered educational, artistic, and career opportunities on a vast scale, even to its non-Austrian, non-Magyar “subject” races. All this came to a swift terminus with the death of the Dual Monarchy and the division of spoils at the Paris peace negotiations.

While Connelly singles out Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia as case illustrations, he considers the individual paths followed from the eighteenth century to the present day by Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and the eastern regions of Bismarckian Germany, which were subsequently lost to a reborn Poland after World War I, regained by the Nazis, and then lost again at the end of World War II, although partially reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Some of his most acute—and amusing—analysis deals with the Soviet-created satellite state of East Germany. If ever there was a caricature of an ideology-driven state riddled with self-contradictions, it was the German Democratic Republic, starting with its very name: democratic it was not, and only a republic by the broadest possible definition. Depending on how you looked at it, East Germany was either the worst-case scenario for post-Nazi German reconstruction—keeping the goosestep and the secret police, but getting rid of prosperity and prestige—or a shining example of how much more efficient a Stalinist police state run by Prussians and Saxons could be than one run by Russians.

Compared to Russia, East Germany’s senior communist apparatchiks were “more catholic than the pope.” Erich Honecker and his fellow gerontocrats even kept on towing the militant party line long after Gorbachev’s ussr and most other Soviet satellites tried to salvage what they could of a bankrupt system through radical reforms.

CONNELLY HAS assembled a remarkable amount of detailed information and analysis on a vast and fascinating subject. His lengthy introduction is particularly well-written and summarizes many of the most important lessons to be gleaned from his tour-de-force study of a part of the world that has played a pivotal role in modern history. He divides his book into five sections: The Emergence of National Movements, The Decline of Empire and the Rise of Modern Politics, Independent Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe as Part of the Nazi and Soviet Empires, and From Communism to Illiberalism. This is followed by a clear, forceful, terminal essay which, along with the introduction, is crisp, concise, and convincing historical writing at its best. 

In between the introduction and the conclusion, there are a few passages that read as if they were pulled together by graduate student research assistants, sometimes from hastily translated foreign sources. Thus, in one passage, victims of ethnic cleansing atrocities are described as being “shot into” rivers—certainly not an English idiom—to cite one of many small examples which, while mildly annoying, do not detract from a generally excellent narrative.

From Peoples into Nations is a big book on an even bigger subject, and the author is not exaggerating when he asserts that:

[It] is not a simple heroic story of self-assertion: the anti-imperial struggle often made national movements imperialist, and the fight against oblivion involved driving others—during World War II, the region’s Jews—into oblivion. Nationalism asserted itself beyond innumerable obstacles, from the wars of 1849 to the compromise between the Habsburgs and Hungary in 1867 and the sudden proliferation of new states in 1918. Up to and beyond 1945, it swallowed liberalism whole, sidetracked socialism, begat fascism, colonized Communism, and is currently doing things to democracy for which the word “populism” may be a weak placeholder waiting for some more chilling descriptor. If the region has produced indelible works of literature—the writings of Kundera and Milosz are examples—that have given witness to suffering that is not exclusive to Eastern Europe, it still belongs to an experience that defies the imaginations of people in the West.

There are more villains than heroes in this long and winding saga, but there is a heroic leitmotif that rises, fades, and rises again through all the Sturm und Drang of this gripping tale in which even many of the heroes assume varying shades of gray. I myself recall a meeting that a few other writers and I had with Gyula Horn in November of 1989 in Budapest. Hungary was still a communist state at the time, but the handwriting was already on the wall. Horn was then foreign minister, but in our conversation, he laid more stress on internal than diplomatic affairs. A soft-spoken and dignified man, he emphasized the fact that, in Hungary, there really had been a strong, post-1956 tradition of trying to make the best of a very painful, vulnerable position. Figures such as Horn devoted their lives to trying to humanize what, unfortunately for them, was an essentially inhumane system of government—one based on a distorted view of human nature and a total misreading of the laws of economics.

Happily, in Horn’s case, there was even a final curtain call when he headed a makeshift government dominated by former communists that came to power democratically at a particularly difficult moment in the transition from a Marxist to a market economy. Far from trying to unravel the reforms and restore the bad old days, the Horn government did its best to work within a parliamentary, democratic framework to continue the transition to free institutions while also combating corruption. 

Poland’s Wladyslaw Gomulka, and Hungary’s Janos Kadar, and, even more so, Czechoslovakia’s Alexander Dubcek were earlier examples of such “gray heroes” who did their best to make things livable for their fellow citizens while being forced to work within the failed framework of Marxist-Leninism. But, without a doubt, the brightest heroes were ordinary people like the Polish students and workers who, while still facing the very real danger of Soviet intervention, poured into the streets “singing patriotic songs and waving flags, including the powerful image of a red and white banner [Poland’s historic national colors] besmirched with blood.”

In the eyes of Western intellectuals of a Marxist bent, that sort of thing was not supposed to happen in a workers’ paradise. Connelly pokes a bit of well-deserved fun at scholars to whom “these workers carrying national flags” seemed exotic and were “poorly understood”:

Well-known treatments, even of authors from Central Europe—like Ernst Gellner or Eric Hobsbawm—whittle down the specificity of the region’s nationalism beyond recognition as they shave off edges to fit it into a global definition of the term. Hobsbawm’s idea of the nation was to apply to every corner of the earth, but in this book, we have paid attention to what people in one corner meant by this word. In that corner, the coordinates of the global story as told in Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism are either irrelevant or secondary: for example, John Stuart Mills’s idea that a national state had to be “feasible,” or that nationalism required a particular threshold of size before it could be properly launched. Czechs or Slovenes knew nothing of such parameters and made their history without and against them.

As for Hobsbawm, his

idea that language and history were not decisive criteria would have struck virtually everyone in East Central Europe as nonsensical—though it may very well apply to the phenomenon of nationalism as observed from a satellite high above the earth.

Language alone cannot make a nation, but having a shared one is a highly desirable—if not downright necessary—component of most smoothly functioning nation states. Words, and the language in which they are spoken, really do matter in the extended social fabric where family is woven into community and community is woven into state. A shared language makes it easier to shape shared laws, articulate a shared sense of the past, and build a shared future. It certainly offers a preferred alternative to the Tower of Babel or an artificially imposed multiculturalism that seeks to replace rather than complement the core values of any nation.

ONE OF Connelly’s strengths as a historian is his ability to recognize both the similarities and dissimilarities of parallel historical developments, rather than trying to totally isolate them or make them all fit into a pet theory. A good example of this is his evaluation of the “Prague Spring” of 1968, that led to a severe, Russian-imposed crackdown in Czechoslovakia after Alexander Dubcek’s short-lived attempt at “Communism with a Human Face.” “Was the Prague Spring part of the democratic mobilization that swept across Europe? Like students in Paris and West Berlin, Czechs and Slovaks rose up against multiple alienations of modern society, challenging the presumptions of bureaucrats and administrative machines that controlled their lives.” But there was this important difference:

...Czechs and Slovaks also agitated for things the French or West Germans had come to take for granted: the right to form one’s views without fear, to read and write books of one’s choosing, to travel, and to be able to hold rulers accountable to the laws of their country. Such basic rights, gained by earlier generations under Habsburg rule, had been lost under the Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat imported by Moscow. This was something that Czech intellectuals increasingly recognized and regretted in the 1970s, part of a growing appreciation of “civic” and “human rights,” which had been smothered and compromised in a regime that claimed to enforce social rights—the rights of the working class as the embodiment of History—above all others.

The triumph of nationalism over collectivist internationalism in Eastern Europe is a messy story, differing in specifics in each of the nations in the region. Plenty of hazards remain, and there are bound to be many more bumps along the road. But the restoration of true national sovereignty and genuinely representative government to so many long-suffering people denied a decent material existence and the right to live their lives—and to retain their language, culture, and values—is perhaps the crowning achievement of the last years of a twentieth century more noteworthy for bloody nightmares than dreams come true. 

Membership in the European Union has opened up a free flow of goods, opportunities, and ideas that cannot be stopped—and will ultimately mitigate—any retrograde measures taken by individual Eastern European nations over-zealously defending their borders, languages, and identities. Imperfect as it still is, this is probably the best of all possible worlds for the people and nations Connelly writes about with such empathy and conviction.

Aram Bakshian, Jr. served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, and has written extensively on politics, history, gastronomy, and the arts for American and overseas publications.

Image: Wikipedia.