Regionalism and Integration in Eastern Europe

Abstract

Few regions of the world have been prey to such protracted tension and alternation between centrifugal and centripetal forces as has Eastern Europe, a geopolitical configuration that in contemporary parlance encompasses the states of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Rumania with the occasional addition of the contiguous but politically separate countries of Yugoslavia and Albania. The hegemonic rivalry of great powers and dynasties, of Berlin, Vienna, St Petersburg, and Constantinople, the territorial tinkering and political conservatism of the nineteenth-century balance of power system, the concurrently emerging pressures of nationalism and bourgeois liberalism within both imperial and subject societies, all conspired to produce an instability that contributed in no small measure to the outbreak of World War i. In muted counterpoint to these dominant antagonisms the occasional integrative scheme was flown - Kossuth's Danubian confederation, Palacky's panSlavism, Naumann's Mitteleuropa - but the war ended with the triumph of nationalism and the fragmentation of Eastern Europe into sovereign states of varying ethnic homogeneity.1 Following fruitful exploitation of East European rivalries by Hitler and Mussolini, the region emerged from World War n in the stifling embrace of a Pax sovietica more pervasive and totalitarian than