This timely volume charts the discussions and debates which have led to the rediscovery of "Central Europe" within the political cultures of Eastern and Western Europe alike. From various historical, economic, cultural and political perspectives, the volume's contributors offer an appraisal of the distinctive features of a Central European identity and its relevance to contemporary European thought and politics. Contents: Central Europe: Definitions Old and New; What is Europe, Where is Europe? From Mystique to Politique; The Meaning of the Social Evolution of Europe; Central Europe: A Historical Region in Modern Times: A Contribution to the Debate About the Regions of Europe; Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change; We, Central-European East Europeans; The European Ideal: Reality or Wishful Thinking in Eastern-Central Europe?; Central European Attitudes; Central European Writers About Central Europe: Introduction to a Non-Existent Book of Readings; Milan Kundera's Lament; ; Central Europe: What It Is and What It Is Not; Another Civilization? An Other Civilization?; Is the Russian Intelligentsia European?; Who Excluded Russia From Europe?; Which Way Back to Europe?; Central Europe Seen From the East of Europe; Does Central Europe Exist?

While there are still occasional uses of it today, the term "Central Europe" carries little of the charge that it did in the 1980s and early 1990s, and as a political and intellectual project it has receded from the horizon. Proponents of a distinct cultural profile of these countries—all involved now in the process of Transatlantic integration—used "Central European", as a contestation with the geo-political label of Eastern Europe. This book discusses the transnational set of practices connecting journals with other media in the mid-1980s, disseminating the idea of Central Europe simultaneously in East and West. A range of new methodologies, including GIS-mapping visualization, is used, repositing the political-cultural journal as one central node of a much larger cultural system. What has happened to the liberal humanist philosophy that "Central Europe" once evoked? In the early years of the transition era, the liberal humanist perspective shared by Havel, Konrád, Kundera, and Michnik was quickly replaced by an economic liberalism that evolved into neoliberal policies and practices. The author follows the trajectories of the concept into the present day, reading its material and intellectual traces in the postcommunist landscape. She explores how the current use of transnational, web-based media follows the logic and practice of an earlier, 'dissident' generation of writers.

Throughout the ages, small nations struggled valiantly against a series of imperial powers - Ottoman Turkey, Habsburg Austria, imperial Germany, czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union - and they lost regularly. Johnson's account is present-minded in the best sense: in describing actual historical events, he illustrates the ways they have been remembered, and how they contribute to the national assumptions that still drive European politics today.

A daring literary masterpiece and winner of the National Book Award In this magnificent work of fiction, acclaimed author William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye on the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century to render a mesmerizing perspective on human experience during wartime. Through interwoven narratives that paint a composite portrait of these two battling leviathans and the monstrous age they defined, Europe Central captures a chorus of voices both real and fictional— a young German who joins the SS to fight its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the Stalinist assaults upon his work and life.

This volume is now the eighth in the annual series sponsored by BBVA as part of its OpenMind initiative, which is devoted to disseminating knowledge on key issues of our time. The Search for Europe analyses the present and future of the old continent and its integration project, surely the most ambitious political and economic integration project ever attempted in history, a benchmark for similar processes in other regions. The book is divided into three main sections: "The economic foundations of the European project", "Europe and its nations: Politics, society and culture", and "The unresolved Limits of Europe and the new global powers". It features pieces written by international experts such as Javier Solana, Barry Eichengreen, Philip Cooke, Bichara Khader, Vivien Ann Schmidt, John Peet and Thomas Christiansen, among others.

"The hundred years between the revolutions of 1848 and the population transfers of the mid-twentieth century saw the nationalization of culturally complex societies in East Central Europe. This fact has variously been explained in terms of modernization, state building, and nation-building theories, each of which treats the process of nationalization as something inexorable, a necessary component of modernity. Although more recently social scientists gesture to the contingencies that may shape these larger developments, this structural approach makes scholars far less attentive to the "hard work" (ideological, political, social) undertaken by individuals and groups at every level of society who tried themselves to build "national" societies." "The essays in this volume make us aware of how complex, multi-dimensional and often contradictory this nationalization process in East Central Europe actually was. The authors document attempts and failures by nationalist politicians, organizations, activists, and regimes from 1848 through 1948 to give East-Central Europeans a strong sense of national self-identification. They remind us that only the use of dictatorial powers in the 20th century could actually transform the fantasy of nationalization into a reality, albeit a brutal one."--BOOK JACKET.

A groundbreaking comparative history of the formation of Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, from their origins in the eleventh century.