Rethinking Central Europe as a Migration Space: From the Ottoman Empire through the Cold War and the Refugee Crisis

Abstract

What is central Europe? As I write this article in 2021, three decades after the fall of communism, this question seems as salient as ever. I am not the only Central European History reader to think about this topic in recent years. In a 2018 CEH article, provocatively titled “Habsburg History, Eastern European History … Central European History?,” Chad Bryant argued that scholarship on these three nominally distinct fields had become blurred in the wake of the post-communist opening of archives and the transnational turn. It was time, Bryant insisted, not only for CEH readers to reconsider the category of “central Europe” itself, but also to engage with a new set of questions, ones that would move beyond the predominant emphasis on “how and why regimes collapsed.” Compellingly, he advocated for studies that would help us understand the post-1989 era, such as the long-term legacies of communism, the integration of individual countries into the European Union, and present-day migration to the region.