Central and Eastern Europe

“ GREATER RUMANIA We have three groups of minor nations in Central and Eastern Europe: those whose emancipation or extension of frontiers is at the expense of the Central Empires; those whose emancipation or extension of frontiers is at the expense of Russia; and the Balkan States, completing their emancipation from Turkey and establishing new frontiers at the expense of each other. Czechoslovakia belongs to the first category; Poland and Lithuania to the first and second categories; Finland and the Baltic States to the second category ”

“ Thanks to the yearning for freedom of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe the unnatural division of Europe is now consigned to the past. European integration shows that we have learnt the painful lessons of a history marked by bloody conflict. Today we live together as was never possible before. ”

“ South-eastern and central Europe are complementary economic areas in a special degree. The industries of central Europe will draw upon the raw products of the south-east to an increasing extent, and the south-east will absorb in turn increasing quantities of manufactured plant from central Europe for the development of its own natural resources. ”

“ The Central Empires held the land routes of South-Eastern Europe and Turkey was their vassal State, whereas the Allies disposed of precarious sea communications, which linked them with no more than the periphery of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans at three widely separated points. ”

“ Although it is now relatively easy for East German citizens to travel in Eastern Europe and millions have taken advantage of this opportunity, there is little likelihood that the tight controls on travel to the West will be relaxed in the near future. ”

“ While Western Europe was shielded, in the later Middle Ages, from the inroads of alien races, Eastern Europe felt the impact of the last migratory movements emanating from Central Asia and the Moslem lands. In the thirteenth century the advance guards of the Mongol Empire destroyed the medieval kingdom of Poland, and reduced the Russian princes to dependence upon the rulers of the Golden Horde. ”

“ Once one of the wealthiest of the Yugoslav republics, Croatia's economy suffered badly during the 1991-95 war as output collapsed and the country missed the early waves of investment in Central and Eastern Europe that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. ”

“ Taking the great range of mountains which divides southern from central Europe as the northern boundary of the eastern or Greek peninsula, it may be said to take in the lands which are cut off from the central mass by the Dalmatian Alps and the range of Haimos or Balkan. It is washed to the east, west, or south, by various parts of the Mediterranean and its great gulf the Euxine. ”

“ Osteuropaeische Zukunft ("The Future of Eastern Europe") , first appeared in January 1916, and the Wirtschaftszeitung der Zentralmächte ("Economic Journal of the Central Powers") on February 11th. whole press has been full of elaborate discussions of economic problems in their bearing upon the war and future reconstruction. ”

“ It is when we come into south-eastern Europe, that is, in a large part of the Austro-Hungarian and in the whole of the Ottoman dominions, that we come to those phenomena of geography, race, and language, which stand out in marked contrast with anything to which we are used in western Europe. We may perhaps better understand what those phenomena are, if we suppose a state of things which sounds absurd in the West, but which has its exact parallel in many parts of the East. ”

“ CENTRAL AND NORTHERN EUROPE The almost unbroken mountain chain formed by the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Balkans, sharply separates the central land mass of Europe from the regions to the south. Central Europe consists, in general, of lowlands, which widen eastward into the vast Russian plain. Northern Europe includes the British Isles, physically an extension of Europe, and the peninsulas of Scandinavia and Finland, between the Baltic Sea and the Arctic Ocean. Twenty centuries ago central and northern Europe was a land of forests and marshes, of desolate steppes and icebound hills. ”

“ It is not, however, only when comparison is made with England that geography appears so conspicuously as a factor in shaping the fundamental character of Russian development. Thus eastern Europe is organized into one single political unit, while western Europe, that is the smaller half of the continent, is divided into nineteen separate and independent states. The causes are manifest if we glance at the map. ”

“ In the East there are the Russians, a big, indeed the biggest, nation of Europe. It is a peculiar circumstance that the outskirts of this nation are non-Russian: on its West side there are some small nations of the Central Zone, while in the North, in the Caucasus and on its Asiatic frontiers, there are also several small nations and fragments of nations. ”

“ Although I had had the opportunity, for some years past, of studying the contrast between European and Asiatic modes of life, and the critical position in which I found myself made it incumbent upon me ever to be strictly on my guard, nevertheless, I could not avoid committing many glaring mistakes. The difference between Eastern and Western society does not consist merely in language, physiognomy, and dress. We Europeans eat, drink, sleep, sit, and stand, nay, I feel inclined to say, laugh, weep, sigh, and gesticulate otherwise than Eastern people. ”

“ The East of Europe offers quite a different spectacle. There we have one great nation—in fact the largest nation in Europe, the rest are all smaller and small nations, some few possessing independent states of their own. But in Eastern Europe—and this applies especially to Russia—we have a very great variety of national and racial fragments. ”

“ The net result was an unprecedented Polish commitment to the inflexible demands of East Germany, with the prospect that this virtual identification of Polish with East German interests would lead to their joint isolation in Eastern Europe. It is significant, therefore, that the invasion of Czechoslovakia, a move supported for many of the same reasons not strongly by Poland and East Germany, should have ultimately resulted in a deterioration of relations between the two regimes. ”

“ The fate of the Czechoslovak heresy, which was rooted in the sin of political spontaneity, is an ever-present lesson. More recently, the Soviet criticism of Hungarian economic reforms must also make the Poles wary. Moscow's concern that the gradual Western acceptance of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe will weaken the ideological justification for it may be another reason why any meaningful overhaul of the political system in Poland is unlikely. An ancillary factor inhibiting change in this area is the very success of the Gierek leadership in gaining its present degree of stability. ”

“ We say no longer vaguely and poetically Ex Oriente Lux, but we know that all the most vital elements of our knowledge and civilization,—our languages, our alphabets, our figures, our weights and measures, our art, our religion, our traditions, our very nursery stories, come to us from the East; and we must confess that but for the rays of Eastern light, whether Aryan or Semitic or Hamitic, that called forth the hidden germs of the dark and dreary West, Europe, now the very light of the world, might 326 have remained forever a barren and forgotten promontory of the primeval Asiatic continent. ”

“ In particular, East Germany relies on the other Eastern European countries to support the regime's drive to gain membership in various international organizations and to encourage other nations to establish official relations. The Communist nations of Eastern Europe have been willing up to a point to support the GDR in attaining these objectives because they clearly regard the existence of a separate East German state to be essential to their own security arrangements. ”

“ If you wish to know what the West has gained from contact with the East, even when they met sword in hand, look around you; most of the fruit trees that enrich your fields, the vine which gladdens the heart, the silk and cotton that adorn your houses and your persons, these are the spoils of your Eastern wars; sugar and coffee, the cultivation of which has changed the political balance of the world, were brought into Europe from the East, the one by yourselves, the other by the Arabs, when they made themselves masters of Spain. ”

“ Above all, Gierek's approachability, pragmatism, and stated dedication to a just reward for hard work are the same qualities that earned him the respect of Silesia's industrial workers during his 13-year tenure there.
As a group, the new Polish leadership is the only one in Eastern Europe in which the postwar generation predominates. Most of the new leaders are not products of the "revolutionary" tradition, the resistance movement, or Soviet training, but rather of the universities and educational institutions of Communist Poland. ”

“ Among historians and anthropogeographers it is a much used commonplace that the northern peoples always appear as conquerors who subjugate the southern peoples, and that they are always the founders of states in their particular climatic zones. The Germans overthrew the Roman Empire, the Northern Frenchmen founded the French state, the Northern Spaniards the Spanish, the Northern Italians, the Italian state, and the North Germans united Germany. It is natural, therefore, that this commonplace should be applied also in Eastern Europe. ”

“ The Slav branch of the Central race was making its way into Europe long before the Neolithic phase of culture there. It passed north of the Black Sea via Poland. But at the end of the Neolithic phase there were two streams of other branches of the race—the true Alpine subdivision passing from Anatolia into the Carpathians and the Alps, to Switzerland, Bavaria, Savoy, and Brittany, and the Maritime division passing round the coasts to the Iberian Peninsula, the British Isles, and Western Europe. ”

“ But in eastern Europe, generally speaking, and on the confines between eastern Europe and Asia, there is no political sun in the heavens. It is all an arctic zone of political life. The luminary, that enlightens the world in general, seldom rises there above the horizon. ”

“ We notice first of all the commonness or community of Neolithic feeling and life, its almost monotonous uniformity, over Europe, eastern [Pg 273] Asia, and probably even far wider areas. We may easily exaggerate this. The cultures of the Mediterranean basin, of Spain and France, of the Danube valley, of northern Germany and Scandinavia, not to mention smaller, more isolated provinces, showed well-marked differences. ”

“ Bonn's Ostpolitik was proving to be attractive to other bloc countries in addition to Romania, and the East German regime feared eventual isolation if West German initiatives succeeded. The prospect of a liberal, Western-oriented Czechoslovakia posed the most serious and immediate threat. As a result, the Ulbricht regime launched a vitriolic attack on the Dubcek leadership with the purpose of raising doubt about the ideological loyalties of the government in Prague and reversing the trend toward liberalization in Eastern Europe. ”

“ Poland's membership in the Warsaw Pact also underscores its military ties to and dependence on the Soviet Union, as well as the consequent absence of an indigenous defense policy. The Polish armed forces constitute the largest military establishment in Eastern Europe after that of the Soviet Union, and they are well organized and well trained, and are equipped with Soviet and domestically produced weapons. ”

“ Professor Freeman defines European society as progressive, legal, monogamous, and, for the last fifteen hundred years, a Christian society; the East he defines as stationary, arbitrary, polygamous, and Mahometan.719 The dominant note of Oriental history is sameness; a monotony which enables us to read in the story of to-day that which took place amongst Eastern peoples a thousand years ago. The history of a single city of Europe is of infinitely greater interest to the student of humanity and the history of civilization than that of a whole nation of the East. ”

“ Western Europe, so jagged in its contour, is no less broken in its surface. Without speaking of the vast central mass of the Alps, there is not one European land which does not possess, either in its length or breadth, a great mountain system forming the scaffolding or the backbone of the country. ”

“ Throughout this long epoch western Europe is to be viewed as a peninsula, surrounded on all sides by the sea and stretching westward from the great land mass of eastern Europe and of Asia, which was the chief theatre of evolution both of animal and human life. ”

“ During the four hundred years between the division of the Empires and the Frank conquest of the East, the geographical history of the Eastern Empire has mainly to deal with the shiftings of its frontier towards the Slavonic powers. ♦Three Slavonic groups.♦ These fall into three main groups. ♦Servia and Croatia.♦ First, in the north-western corner of the Empire, are the Croatian and Servian settlements, whose history is closely connected with that of the kingdom of Hungary and the commonwealth of Venice. ♦Macedonia and Greece.♦ Secondly, there are the Slaves of Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece. ”

“ Germany itself might well be content to suffer a temporary blow to her prestige if in fact her scheme of Central Europe were established and her corridor to the East kept open. The Austro-Hungarian scheme is a will-o’-the-wisp and a snare. ”

“ The ground of West Europe is treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it—and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far-away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets! We select a single bit of ground as the natural centre of the historical system, and make it the central sun. From it all the events of history receive their real light, from it their importance is judged in perspective. ”