Between Empire and Nation-State: Comments on the Pathology of State Formation in Eastern Europe during the ‘Short Twentieth Century’

Abstract

This essay considers the basic differences between the development of the modern nation-state in west and east European contexts. It suggests that, because the foundations of state formation in the latter in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were ethnonationalist, a long road lies ahead in eastern Europe before the region can free itself from its lengthy captivity between the bad extremes of Empire on the one hand and the ethnonational Nation-State on the other. It disputes the idea that ethnocultural homogeneity within the borders of the nation-state provides a viable solution, even if the way to the creation of such homogeneity may be painful, and claims that policies which aim to create this ethnocultural homogeneity tend to prolong the swing of the region's political organisation between Empire and Nation-State. The only way out of the dilemma would appear to be the inclusion of these states in the processes of voluntary (non-imperial) regional and European supranational integration.