Wandycz’s Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (1992). Only a few syntheses exist in English: Robert Bideleux’s History of Eastern Europe (2007), which begins with the Greco-Roman period, and Piotr S. Most tell a coherent tale only by letting one nationality dominate, but Connelly refuses to do this.
Connelly, too, emphasizes the interwar but grounds nationalism much earlier and sees in it an explanation for the successes and failures of democracy, communism, and fascism in the East: nationalism is cause, not effect.Įastern Europe’s human complexity makes national and state histories contentious to construct and a regional narrative a formidable project indeed. ” Mazower sees the period after World War I as the heyday of nationalism. Readers will notice echoes of Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1999), which considers Europe’s last century as an “unremitting struggle” among “liberal democracy, communism, and fascism.
A double-edged sword, nationalism preserved the distinctiveness of this space and its plurality of peoples but also provoked constant violence and undermined consensus-based polities. In his eyes, the key to understanding the region’s identity is the durability of nationalist thinking-despite the encroachment of multiple external and internal imperial projects. Moving from personage to personage and crisis to crisis, he links disparate societies and events together under the umbrella of nationalism. Digesting a formidable library of interpretations in English, German, French, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish, his synthesis will define the field from this point forward. In From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, John Connelly offers a sweeping, elegantly written new narrative of modern eastern European history from the nineteenth century to the present. Reviewed by Jadwiga Biskupska (Sam Houston State University)Ĭommissioned by Anna Muller (University of Michigan - Dearborn) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe.
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