Michal Kopecek

Historical revisionism, far from being restricted to small groups of ‘negationists,’ has galvanized debates in the realm of recent history. The studies in this book range from general accounts of the background of recent historical revisionism to focused analyses of particular debates or social-cultural phenomena in individual Central European countries, from Germany to Ukraine and Estonia. Where is the borderline between legitimate re-examination of historical interpretations and attempts to rewrite history in a politically motivated way that downgrades or denies essential historical facts? How do the traditional ‘national historical narratives’ react to the ‘spill-over’ of international and political controversies into their ‘sphere of influence’? Technological progress, along with the overall social and cultural decentralization shatters the old hierarchies of academic historical knowledge under the banner of culture of memory, and breeds an unequalled democratization in historical representation. This book offers a unique approach based on the provocative and instigating intersection of scholarly research, its political appropriations, and social reflection from a representative sample of Central and East European countries.

Historical revisionism in Central Europe after 1989

Past in the Making

Balazs Trencsenyi

This is the second in a series of four volumes, presenting the most important texts that triggered and shaped the processes of nation-building in Central and Southeast Europe. The series aims to integrate the history of these cultures with that of general European civilization. Thus it counteracts the habit whereby European intellectual phenomena and historical movements are generally analyzed where they originated and experienced their earliest and most intensive development, while the peculiar manifestations of these currents in the 'Other Europe' are neglected.

Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770?1945

National Romanticism: The Formation of National Movements

Balázs Trencsényi

Maciej Janowski

Monika Baar

Maria Falina

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a two-volume project, authored by an international team of researchers, and offering the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Covering twenty national cultures and languages, the ensuing work goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narrative and offers a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural entanglement of discourses. Devising a regional perspective, the authors avoid projecting the Western European analytical and conceptual schemes on the whole continent, and develop instead new concepts, patterns of periodization and interpretative models. At the same time, they also reject the self-enclosing Eastern or Central European regionalist narratives and instead emphasize the multifarious dialogue of the region with the rest of the world. Along these lines, the two volumes are intended to make these cultures available for the global 'market of ideas' and also help rethinking some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought, and modernity as such. The first volume deals with the period ranging from the Late Enlightenment to the First World War. It is structured along four broader chronological and thematic units: Enlightenment reformism, Romanticism and the national revivals, late nineteenth-century institutionalization of the national and state-building projects, and the new ideologies of the fin-de-siècle facing the rise of mass politics. Along these lines, the authors trace the continuities and ruptures of political discourses. They focus especially on the ways East Central European political thinkers sought to bridge the gap between the idealized Western type of modernity and their own societies challenged by overlapping national projects, social and cultural fragmentation, and the lack of institutional continuity.

Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century'

A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe

Michal Kopecek

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