FULL REVIEW

Comprehensively and concisely, Leon Marc’s book presents readers with vital insights into the different dimensions of our common European history and culture.

Prof Dr Jaap W. de Zwaan, Director of the Nederlands Institute of International Relations

FULL REVIEW

It is obvious that Eastern Europe has been influenced by its recent past. It is the great merit of Leon Marc's book however that he delves behind the brief and inglorious communist half-century to uncover the deep traditions of a region which he demonstrates - with clarity, erudition and passion - to be not in any sense a qualified or lesser Europe but an essential and necessary part of our continent's cultural unity and common destiny.

Enda O'Doherty

Dublin Review of Books

FULL REVIEW

This spirited, erudite polemic against the ignorant stereotyping and arbitrary lumping together of the former communist-ruled countries in Europe under the label of ‘Eastern Europe’ is most timely. Drawing on a wealth of relevant historical data, the author, currently Slovene ambassador to the Netherlands, demonstrates that this particular piece of mislabelling never made any geographical or historical sense. In ad 285, the then Emperor Diocletian moved the centre of the Roman Empire to the east and divided it in two. The dividing line was drawn right across the province of Illyricum, following the course of the Drina River, which is today the border between Bosnia and Serbia. But when he did this, Diocletian was not creating Eastern Europe. Nor did he at all think of East and West in those terms. His sole aim was to improve the management of his great empire and to strengthen its defences against (mostly Germanic) barbarian tribes. In any case, the division concerned only Mediterranean Europe and left the vast areas to the north unmapped, though his choice of division line was not purely arbitrary: he drew it where Latin influence faded and Greek influence started to predominate.

In fact, the notion of ‘Eastern Europe’ as a geographical and political entity is of very recent origin. It took hold during the Cold War when it reflected the newly created reality of a post-1945 Europe forcibly partitioned into two mutually hostile power blocs. But, as the author explains, two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the notion of an Eastern Europe that takes in the Czech Republic—situated in the continent’s middle—while placing Greece—a country at its south-eastern fringe—in Western Europe, is obsolete and misleading. The definition ignores the very different ways the formerly communist-ruled European countries have developed since the end of the Cold War, and can actually be harmful, as was demonstrated during the recent economic downturn.

The banking crisis in financially overexposed Latvia in early 2009 led to fears of a contagion that raised premium risk rates in Poland and the Czech Republic. Those fears proved unfounded because those countries’ solid economies withstood the crisis well. Ironically, as was at the time pointed out in the financial media, the biggest financial upheaval took place in Iceland, and the biggest financial deficits in 2010 were predicted, not in some badly managed state in the ex-communist East, but in Britain and Greece. Unfortunately, to many outsiders, labelling states ‘East European’ not only alludes to their common fate under totalitarian rule but also suggests present ills, such as social backwardness, bad government and inefficient economic management. And yet two of the European Union’s newcomers—the Czech Republic and the author’s own homeland, Slovenia—can boast higher living standards than that much older EU member, Portugal. Also, Estonia’s reputation as the EU’s least corrupt country puts one of its founder members, Italy, to shame.

This short book succeeds in its aim of exposing as misleading the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ as a strange and problematic area quite apart from the rest of the continent. But it does much more. Written in an accessible way, it provides a concise but informative account of the political, economic, social and cultural history of the historic region between Germany and Russia that stretches from the Baltic to the Adriatic; of the nature of the changes that have taken place there; and of the main issues at stake in the political and economic transition. It also manages to place the region in the broader framework of European history. The narrative is enlivened by illuminating personal stories from the author’s family’s very different experiences of life, first until 1918 as part of the Habsburg Empire and then, until independence in 1991, as part of two Yugoslavias, with a traumatic and bloody 1941–5 interval of civil war under German and Italian occupation. Refreshingly, unlike several recent western, heavily doom-laden accounts, the book is not only up to date but also reasonably upbeat about the region’s future prospects.

Christopher Cviic

Royal Institute of International Affairs Journal