NATIONALIST POPULISM AND POST-COMMUNISM

of the statehood. 62 According to his findings, Poland and present day Slovakia belonged to two different Central European subregions. Szűcs argued that Central Europe, which lies between Western and Eastern Europe, crossed the threshold of modern times amidst newly developing “Eastern European” conditions, but with defective “Western-like” structures. Precisely because of that duality, in early modern times a number of variant models were produced in this middle region instead of one unified model, as if all the permutations and possible combinations were being experimented with. 63 Nevertheless, such a distinction among the different subregions in Central Europe was primarily made in order to stress the different character of all three regions, when compared either to the West or to the East. During the period of communism, the concept of Central Europe was used by some leading opposition intellectuals, e.g. Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, György Konrád or Adam Michnik, in order to distinguish these countries from the “proper” Eastern Europe dominated by Soviet rule. Although these intellectuals stressed historical parallels among the “Central European” 63 In order to explain Szűcs’s arguments, I will use the following quotations: “The northern half of the region of Central Europe was historically dominated by the area the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom, in which Polish nobility established a kind of res publica (Rzeczpospolita). The attempt to have a ‘Western-type’ noble society running the state on a kind of ‘anti-absolutist’ basis ran into hopeless impasses in every direction. A radical rejection of the dynastic principle, subordination of the elected ruler to the Estate Assembly (the Sejm ), and the extreme noble freedom of feudal parliamentarism ( liberum veto ) not only paralysed the state, but also excluded the noble state from the ‘military revolution’ of the period. The attempt of the Polish nobility to preserve a medieval Western structure when Eastern European conditions were more and more predominant resulted in complete failure. All this led to a series of partitions (in 1772, 1793 and 1795), after which Poland disappeared from the European map.” J. Szűcs, “Three Historical Regions of Europe”, J. Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State . (New York, London: Verso, 1998), p. 322. “On the other hand, the Austrian Empire differed from the Polish (and also the Prussian state, which was denoted by Szűcs as the third historical region of Central Europe) in its lack of the nation-forming ethnic unity. The Habsburg house managed to squeeze the whole southern part of East-Central Europe into a single imperial conglomerate. The Habsburg dynasty was marked for almost four centuries by a specific and even ambiguous position between the Western and Eastern prototypes of the developing system of European states. The state formula was of an Eastern type, in that its imperial character linked it to the Russian formula, but as for the rhythm of development of Habsburg absolutism, it showed a definite similarity to that of the West. However, this absolutism was by nature unsuited to making its peoples into modern nations – either clearly defined nation-states or linguistic nations – although in both the West and the East that was one of the fundamental historic tasks of absolutism.” J. Szűcs, “Three Historical Regions of Europe”, J. Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State . (New York, London: Verso, 1998), p. 325. 62 J. Szűcs, “Three Historical Regions of Europe”, J. Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State . (New York, London: Verso, 1998).

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