Tomek E. Jankowski's Blog
January 11, 2014
Ukraine in the News
So, what the heck is going on with Ukraine? On November 21, a delegation of European Union headed up by Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, met in Lithuania's capital, Vilnius, to welcome Ukraine into a new partnership program that would open up relations between the EU and Ukraine. To everyone's astonishment, however, Ukraine's president, Viktor Yanukovych, announced in Vilnius that contrary to all expectations - including his own promises - he would not be signing the partnership agreement with the EU. Yanukovych hinted that Russian pressure had changed his mind, and he flew home leaving Merkel standing like a stilted bride at the altar in Vilnius.
Instantly, demonstrations erupted in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv (known in Soviet times by its Russian name, "Kiev"), and demonstrators have had an on-and-off rolling confrontation with police as Yanukovych figures out what to do. Russia's president Vladimir Putin is infamously nostalgic for Soviet times and countered the EU offer with a proposed Eurasian Union of former Soviet states - Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and others. Ukraine's economy is still very strongly tied to Russia's despite twenty-some years of independence, in part because of corruption and political paralysis in Kyiv that has made reforms almost impossible. As of this writing, the police have failed to dislodge protesters in Kyiv, and pressure is mounting against Yanukovych to change his mind (again). One irony in all this is that Yanukovych had his predecessor, Yulia Tymoshenko, imprisoned because she signed a natural gas deal with Russia that included such disadvantageous prices for Ukraine that Yanukovych had Tymoshenko convicted of treason – but now Yanukovych is himself giving in to Russian blackmail which included hiked natural gas prices.
How did things get to this point?
By design: In part, this was all supposed to happen. Ukraine briefly broke from Russia and achieved its independence during World War I, but the eastern half was reconquered by Lenin by 1921. (The western half was taken over by Poland.) When he achieved power in the later 1920s, Stalin took a dim view of Ukrainians who had tried to break from Moscow's control and in 1932-1933 he created a man-made famine in Ukraine that killed an estimated 3-5 million people by artificial starvation. This also conveniently killed off many Ukrainian nationalists, and eastern Ukraine reverted submissively to (Russian) Soviet rule. After World War II Stalin was able to seize western Ukraine from Poland, but he did more than just reunite the two Ukrainian halves; he created a much larger Ukraine that included many Russian regions such as Crimea. This was on purpose. Stalin designed Ukraine so that it would always be balanced precariously between the Ukrainian nationalists who looked to Europe and eastern Ukrainians and ethnic Russians who looked more to Russia. While Ukraine was in the Soviet Union this was all a moot point, but Stalin was making sure that if Ukraine ever did try to leave the Soviet Union - which it did in 1991 as the Soviet empire imploded - it would be weighed down by strong pro-Russian elements and would always be divided between nationalists and Russophiles. Modern Ukraine is twisting itself into pretzels to try to figure out whether to look westward or eastward, exactly as Stalin designed it to do. Old Uncle Joe must be smiling from the bottom of his grave.
This is a fundamental conflict which has paralyzed Ukrainian governments since 1991. In part because of this paralysis, Ukraine today is listed by Transparency International as one of the most corrupt countries in the world – even moreso than Russia – and its economy, which has inherited some important industrial assets from Soviet times, is rusting into irrelevance in desperate need of reforms. President Yanukovych himself is from Ukraine's eastern, more Russian-oriented half, and his family has strong economic ties to Russia. (It is alleged that Putin offered Yanukovych's family some nice business incentives to abandon the EU partnership.) Years ago in 2004, Yanukovych won reelection in a heavily rigged election, provoking a popular revolt known as the Orange Revolution which forced Yanukovych to bow down and accept a new election, which rival Yulia Tymoshenko won. However, despite this seeming victory for democracy over cronyism, Ukraine could not overcome its East-West divide and Tymoshenko wasted her time in power mired in petty political squabbles while the Ukrainian economy sank. Banking analyst John Mauldin recently reported during his first trip to Ukraine that most of the young, educated Ukrainians he met wanted to escape Ukraine. He said that for them the distant Polish capital Warsaw – which is in the heart of a Polish economic miracle at the moment – was more real to these young Ukrainians than their own capital, Kyiv, because Warsaw offered opportunity and freedom while Kyiv only offered stalemate, corruption and poverty.
We know what Putin wants; he wants a Russian zone of control so that he can pretend Russia is a great power again. (Russia likely will be a great power again, but probably only after Putin is gone and it will be through economic, rather than political or military means.) Ukraine was ruled by Russia from the 18th century until about twenty years ago, and many Russians (including especially Putin) just can’t imagine a Ukraine not ruled by Moscow – much less a pro-Western one. The European Union was aware of this, of course, but naïvely believed that by offering Ukraine only some half-measures such as economic and political cooperation, that Putin wouldn’t feel threatened. They were wrong. Putin saw any cooperation between Ukraine and the West as a threat to his sphere of influence, and acted swiftly by both threatening Kyiv and offering Ukraine counter-measures such as more aid than what Brussels offered. In the end, Putin won not only because President Yanukovych crumbled and did what Putin wanted, but also because Putin was able to make this situation appear as if the West had tried a Cold War-style intrusion into Russia’s backyard, and was out-foxed by that slick Putin. The EU had bent over backwards exactly not to provoke Moscow, hoping to nudge a deeply corrupt and troubled state on the EU’s borders into making some critical reforms, but Putin had made it seem as if Brussels had a lost a Cold War-style political joust.
And that is the crux of the problem; Ukraine is caught between East and West, balanced on an artificial divide between two sides in a contest that no longer exists… for some, at least. It’s sort of like if modern Malta was caught up in modern Italian and Tunisian political squabbles dating back to the Roman-Carthaginian wars. For the West, the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and most Western political and economic policies since have been based on current needs or issues. Western European governments have slashed their military budgets from the days of the 1980s, and if you talk about an “eastern threat” in Paris, London or Berlin nowadays, they’ll assume you’re talking about China. Putin, however, a former KGB colonel from the Soviet Union’s glory days in the 1960s, can’t seem to imagine Russian greatness in any form other than the old Soviet model, and that requires an enemy, a bogeyman: the West. Putin likes to behave as if NATO has massive tank divisions poised on Russia’s western borders. (At its height in 1986 NATO comprised some 2 million troops, but today it has barely 112,000 active duty, about 70% of which are tied up in Afghanistan now. Keep in mind that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 with more than 3 million troops…and his invasion ultimately failed.)
What does this all mean for Ukraine? Ukraine is going to have to find a way to balance between East and West. There is no reason that Ukraine cannot have good relations with both Moscow and Brussels. Kyiv somehow has to reconcile its two component parts and find a way to build a modern country without being torn apart by the legacy of a conflict that has, in reality, faded into history. Ukraine needs to somehow carve out its own identity, one that transcends its shared heritage with both Russia and the West and allows the country to modernize and develop strong political institutions. When Kyiv can do all this and help build a Ukrainian economy that attracts Ukrainians home rather than driving them abroad, then you’ll know that they’re finally doing something right and the kind of political nonsense playing out on Kyiv’s streets today will fade away, as it should.
Instantly, demonstrations erupted in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv (known in Soviet times by its Russian name, "Kiev"), and demonstrators have had an on-and-off rolling confrontation with police as Yanukovych figures out what to do. Russia's president Vladimir Putin is infamously nostalgic for Soviet times and countered the EU offer with a proposed Eurasian Union of former Soviet states - Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and others. Ukraine's economy is still very strongly tied to Russia's despite twenty-some years of independence, in part because of corruption and political paralysis in Kyiv that has made reforms almost impossible. As of this writing, the police have failed to dislodge protesters in Kyiv, and pressure is mounting against Yanukovych to change his mind (again). One irony in all this is that Yanukovych had his predecessor, Yulia Tymoshenko, imprisoned because she signed a natural gas deal with Russia that included such disadvantageous prices for Ukraine that Yanukovych had Tymoshenko convicted of treason – but now Yanukovych is himself giving in to Russian blackmail which included hiked natural gas prices.
How did things get to this point?
By design: In part, this was all supposed to happen. Ukraine briefly broke from Russia and achieved its independence during World War I, but the eastern half was reconquered by Lenin by 1921. (The western half was taken over by Poland.) When he achieved power in the later 1920s, Stalin took a dim view of Ukrainians who had tried to break from Moscow's control and in 1932-1933 he created a man-made famine in Ukraine that killed an estimated 3-5 million people by artificial starvation. This also conveniently killed off many Ukrainian nationalists, and eastern Ukraine reverted submissively to (Russian) Soviet rule. After World War II Stalin was able to seize western Ukraine from Poland, but he did more than just reunite the two Ukrainian halves; he created a much larger Ukraine that included many Russian regions such as Crimea. This was on purpose. Stalin designed Ukraine so that it would always be balanced precariously between the Ukrainian nationalists who looked to Europe and eastern Ukrainians and ethnic Russians who looked more to Russia. While Ukraine was in the Soviet Union this was all a moot point, but Stalin was making sure that if Ukraine ever did try to leave the Soviet Union - which it did in 1991 as the Soviet empire imploded - it would be weighed down by strong pro-Russian elements and would always be divided between nationalists and Russophiles. Modern Ukraine is twisting itself into pretzels to try to figure out whether to look westward or eastward, exactly as Stalin designed it to do. Old Uncle Joe must be smiling from the bottom of his grave.
This is a fundamental conflict which has paralyzed Ukrainian governments since 1991. In part because of this paralysis, Ukraine today is listed by Transparency International as one of the most corrupt countries in the world – even moreso than Russia – and its economy, which has inherited some important industrial assets from Soviet times, is rusting into irrelevance in desperate need of reforms. President Yanukovych himself is from Ukraine's eastern, more Russian-oriented half, and his family has strong economic ties to Russia. (It is alleged that Putin offered Yanukovych's family some nice business incentives to abandon the EU partnership.) Years ago in 2004, Yanukovych won reelection in a heavily rigged election, provoking a popular revolt known as the Orange Revolution which forced Yanukovych to bow down and accept a new election, which rival Yulia Tymoshenko won. However, despite this seeming victory for democracy over cronyism, Ukraine could not overcome its East-West divide and Tymoshenko wasted her time in power mired in petty political squabbles while the Ukrainian economy sank. Banking analyst John Mauldin recently reported during his first trip to Ukraine that most of the young, educated Ukrainians he met wanted to escape Ukraine. He said that for them the distant Polish capital Warsaw – which is in the heart of a Polish economic miracle at the moment – was more real to these young Ukrainians than their own capital, Kyiv, because Warsaw offered opportunity and freedom while Kyiv only offered stalemate, corruption and poverty.
We know what Putin wants; he wants a Russian zone of control so that he can pretend Russia is a great power again. (Russia likely will be a great power again, but probably only after Putin is gone and it will be through economic, rather than political or military means.) Ukraine was ruled by Russia from the 18th century until about twenty years ago, and many Russians (including especially Putin) just can’t imagine a Ukraine not ruled by Moscow – much less a pro-Western one. The European Union was aware of this, of course, but naïvely believed that by offering Ukraine only some half-measures such as economic and political cooperation, that Putin wouldn’t feel threatened. They were wrong. Putin saw any cooperation between Ukraine and the West as a threat to his sphere of influence, and acted swiftly by both threatening Kyiv and offering Ukraine counter-measures such as more aid than what Brussels offered. In the end, Putin won not only because President Yanukovych crumbled and did what Putin wanted, but also because Putin was able to make this situation appear as if the West had tried a Cold War-style intrusion into Russia’s backyard, and was out-foxed by that slick Putin. The EU had bent over backwards exactly not to provoke Moscow, hoping to nudge a deeply corrupt and troubled state on the EU’s borders into making some critical reforms, but Putin had made it seem as if Brussels had a lost a Cold War-style political joust.
And that is the crux of the problem; Ukraine is caught between East and West, balanced on an artificial divide between two sides in a contest that no longer exists… for some, at least. It’s sort of like if modern Malta was caught up in modern Italian and Tunisian political squabbles dating back to the Roman-Carthaginian wars. For the West, the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and most Western political and economic policies since have been based on current needs or issues. Western European governments have slashed their military budgets from the days of the 1980s, and if you talk about an “eastern threat” in Paris, London or Berlin nowadays, they’ll assume you’re talking about China. Putin, however, a former KGB colonel from the Soviet Union’s glory days in the 1960s, can’t seem to imagine Russian greatness in any form other than the old Soviet model, and that requires an enemy, a bogeyman: the West. Putin likes to behave as if NATO has massive tank divisions poised on Russia’s western borders. (At its height in 1986 NATO comprised some 2 million troops, but today it has barely 112,000 active duty, about 70% of which are tied up in Afghanistan now. Keep in mind that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 with more than 3 million troops…and his invasion ultimately failed.)
What does this all mean for Ukraine? Ukraine is going to have to find a way to balance between East and West. There is no reason that Ukraine cannot have good relations with both Moscow and Brussels. Kyiv somehow has to reconcile its two component parts and find a way to build a modern country without being torn apart by the legacy of a conflict that has, in reality, faded into history. Ukraine needs to somehow carve out its own identity, one that transcends its shared heritage with both Russia and the West and allows the country to modernize and develop strong political institutions. When Kyiv can do all this and help build a Ukrainian economy that attracts Ukrainians home rather than driving them abroad, then you’ll know that they’re finally doing something right and the kind of political nonsense playing out on Kyiv’s streets today will fade away, as it should.
November 28, 2013
What is Eastern Europe?
It may sound like a strange question, but what exactly is this Eastern Europe thingy? When I was born in the 1960s...although somehow, amazingly, I'm still only in my mid-twenties, but enough about me... but when I was born, there was a very definite line that separated Eastern from Western Europe. We called that line the Iron Curtain, the heavily militarized frontier border of the Soviet empire which literally cut Europe in half. How much easier could it be? You had a Western half, and an Eastern half. If you had Jordache jeans and Coca Cola, you were probably in Western Europe. If you had Soviet soldiers, Trabants and Chinese-made fake Jordache jeans, then you were probably on the Eastern side. Simple.
The problem is we often have a habit of assuming that the way things are today is the way they've always been. The Eastern Europe we know today is really the result of World War II, and the coincidence of where Soviet and Western armies ended up by the time Germany surrendered in 1945. There were some overlap areas; Western armies penetrated into East Germany and Czechoslovakia, but withdrew when the shooting stopped per military arrangements with the Soviets. But that arbitrary accident of history determined, when the Cold War began in 1946-1947, what was "Western" and what was "Eastern."
Germany and Austria in the first half of the 20th century were not really considered "Western;" they were seen as "Central European," a name they had invented for themselves in the 19th century to distinguish German-dominated Europe from Britain and France - the "West" - and Eastern Europe. Both Germany and Austria were cut in half in 1945, including their capital cities. Austria and Vienna were saved from inclusion in Eastern Europe by a Soviet scheme to neutralize American participation in European affairs in 1955 by offering for both the Soviets and Western Allies to pull out of Austria, reuniting it, and allow it to exist independently so long as it remained neutral. Germany, of course, remained cut in half until the end of the Cold War in 1990.
But in 1900, if you traveled in eastern Germany or Austria, you would have seen that there was (then) little difference economically between these lands and the Polish, Czech and Hungarian lands to the immediate east. We have today anecdotes of western German travelers expressing shock and dismay at the economic and social backwardness of Prussia in the early 20th century. In the post-World War II era, there was a huge economic expansion in Western Europe that dramatically heightened the differences in living standards between West and East but before World War II, those differences were far less dramatic and in the border areas between what we now think of as "East" and "West," between the German-speaking lands and Poland, the Czech peoples, Hungarians, Italians, Slovenes and Croats, that differences was almost non-existent.
But let's go further back in history. The term "Eastern Europe" (as opposed to simply "eastern Europe") was invented by Western Europe in the late 1700s at a time when Western Civilization was growing gangbusters, when the West's economies and militaries clearly had outpaced and outperformed everybody else's in the world. The very notion of a "Western" civilization in Europe was gaining credence - but of course, it didn't include all of Europe -- hence, Eastern Europe.
"Eastern Europe" became everything outside the West in Europe, everything between Western Europe and l'Orient - the East, which meant the Turks, Arabs, Indians and Chinese: Asia. So Eastern Europe was a grab-bag term that meant "Europe-but-not-Western-Europe." This put Albanians, Slovaks and Estonians all in the same category though historically, linguistically, socially, politically and economically, these peoples have had almost nothing to do with one another. No matter - they were now Eastern Europeans! Voltaire dismissively described them as medieval relics who desperately needed to be ruled by more civilized peoples - say, Western Europeans, or, short of that, then the Russians whose ruler, Tsarina Catherine "the Great" had brought (Western) civilization to Russia, making it an honorary Western country (according to Voltaire).
But just a century before, things had been different. Combined Poland and Lithuania were an important regional power with whom Western Europeans happily traded and cut political deals. In the late 1600s, the Scottish Stuart dynasty made an alliance with the ruling Polish royal family, the Sobieskis, and nobody was shocked by this. ("Bonnie Prince Charlie," who tried to reclaim his father's throne in 1745, was half-Polish through his mother, Clementina Sobieska.) Decades earlier, Prague had been a major scientific and cultural center for Europe, and medieval Westerners lined up eagerly to ally themselves with Hungary to fight the Turks.
But even further back, when medieval Europe called itself "Christendom," large parts of what are today Eastern Europe were considered part and parcel to (Christian) Europe, with no distinction between West and East, while some parts of what are today Western Europe - eastern Germany (including Berlin) and Scandinavia, for instance - were considered "Eastern" and "barbarian."
In Roman Europe, all of Germany was considered barbarian, and even Britain was considered kind of borderline, while the Roman Balkans were considered almost the heart of Roman civilization. Let me repeat that: the Romans considered places like what are today Croatia, Hungary and Bulgaria home turf, while those areas north of the Alps, including the Roman-ruled areas like Gaul (i.e., France) and Britain, to be barbarian borderlands. Outside of Italy itself, more Roman emperors were born in the Roman Balkans than anywhere else. And yet today we look at Romania or Serbia as if they're newcomers to "Western" civilization.
It gets even more confusing the further back you go in history. In the blurb for my book, I note that Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second-largest city today, was already thousands of years old when the city of Rome was founded in 753 BCE. Plovdiv is one of the oldest continuously-inhabited cities in Europe, and in fact, Bulgaria hosts most of the oldest human settlements in Europe, and was also the place for the first metallurgical revolution in prehistoric Europe.
So what does this all mean for us today? It says a lot about what "Eastern" really means. Today, many Poles, Czechs or Hungarians will angrily correct you if you call them "Eastern Europeans" -- nobody wants to be Eastern European, because that implies you're poorer, less educated and probably a nationalist or religious fanatic and a mass murderer to boot. Unfortunately, most businesses with global operations still put these peoples into an "Eastern Europe" region, but some Westerners are beginning to think a little differently about the region.
When countries like Poland, Latvia and Romania joined the European Union and NATO in the 1990s or early 2000s, many Westerners thought of these countries as poor cousins who likely were looking for free hand-outs. (And, well, in many respects, they were.) Remember during the debates about the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 when French president Jacques Chirac angrily referred to the Eastern European countries as children who should just shut up while the adults in Western Europe debated the war? But with Europe's economy faltering today and the EU's political structures facing important growing pains at home, now some in Western Europe are beginning to see Eastern Europe as a region that can contribute to the European project and European economic development rather than its tradition role of just destabilizing European power politics and seeking welfare handouts. A British EU MP recently quipped that for decades after the war, the European project has been led by people who grew up in midst of the West's economic miracle, but now as Europe struggles, it may be time for those whose experience was primarily struggling for freedom and a decent life under Soviet imperial rule to take over.
So stay-tuned. "Eastern Europe" may be undergoing yet another definitional change soon. If so, it's just the latest in a long line of definition changes, of who was (or wasn't) Eastern European, and what exactly that means.
The problem is we often have a habit of assuming that the way things are today is the way they've always been. The Eastern Europe we know today is really the result of World War II, and the coincidence of where Soviet and Western armies ended up by the time Germany surrendered in 1945. There were some overlap areas; Western armies penetrated into East Germany and Czechoslovakia, but withdrew when the shooting stopped per military arrangements with the Soviets. But that arbitrary accident of history determined, when the Cold War began in 1946-1947, what was "Western" and what was "Eastern."
Germany and Austria in the first half of the 20th century were not really considered "Western;" they were seen as "Central European," a name they had invented for themselves in the 19th century to distinguish German-dominated Europe from Britain and France - the "West" - and Eastern Europe. Both Germany and Austria were cut in half in 1945, including their capital cities. Austria and Vienna were saved from inclusion in Eastern Europe by a Soviet scheme to neutralize American participation in European affairs in 1955 by offering for both the Soviets and Western Allies to pull out of Austria, reuniting it, and allow it to exist independently so long as it remained neutral. Germany, of course, remained cut in half until the end of the Cold War in 1990.
But in 1900, if you traveled in eastern Germany or Austria, you would have seen that there was (then) little difference economically between these lands and the Polish, Czech and Hungarian lands to the immediate east. We have today anecdotes of western German travelers expressing shock and dismay at the economic and social backwardness of Prussia in the early 20th century. In the post-World War II era, there was a huge economic expansion in Western Europe that dramatically heightened the differences in living standards between West and East but before World War II, those differences were far less dramatic and in the border areas between what we now think of as "East" and "West," between the German-speaking lands and Poland, the Czech peoples, Hungarians, Italians, Slovenes and Croats, that differences was almost non-existent.
But let's go further back in history. The term "Eastern Europe" (as opposed to simply "eastern Europe") was invented by Western Europe in the late 1700s at a time when Western Civilization was growing gangbusters, when the West's economies and militaries clearly had outpaced and outperformed everybody else's in the world. The very notion of a "Western" civilization in Europe was gaining credence - but of course, it didn't include all of Europe -- hence, Eastern Europe.
"Eastern Europe" became everything outside the West in Europe, everything between Western Europe and l'Orient - the East, which meant the Turks, Arabs, Indians and Chinese: Asia. So Eastern Europe was a grab-bag term that meant "Europe-but-not-Western-Europe." This put Albanians, Slovaks and Estonians all in the same category though historically, linguistically, socially, politically and economically, these peoples have had almost nothing to do with one another. No matter - they were now Eastern Europeans! Voltaire dismissively described them as medieval relics who desperately needed to be ruled by more civilized peoples - say, Western Europeans, or, short of that, then the Russians whose ruler, Tsarina Catherine "the Great" had brought (Western) civilization to Russia, making it an honorary Western country (according to Voltaire).
But just a century before, things had been different. Combined Poland and Lithuania were an important regional power with whom Western Europeans happily traded and cut political deals. In the late 1600s, the Scottish Stuart dynasty made an alliance with the ruling Polish royal family, the Sobieskis, and nobody was shocked by this. ("Bonnie Prince Charlie," who tried to reclaim his father's throne in 1745, was half-Polish through his mother, Clementina Sobieska.) Decades earlier, Prague had been a major scientific and cultural center for Europe, and medieval Westerners lined up eagerly to ally themselves with Hungary to fight the Turks.
But even further back, when medieval Europe called itself "Christendom," large parts of what are today Eastern Europe were considered part and parcel to (Christian) Europe, with no distinction between West and East, while some parts of what are today Western Europe - eastern Germany (including Berlin) and Scandinavia, for instance - were considered "Eastern" and "barbarian."
In Roman Europe, all of Germany was considered barbarian, and even Britain was considered kind of borderline, while the Roman Balkans were considered almost the heart of Roman civilization. Let me repeat that: the Romans considered places like what are today Croatia, Hungary and Bulgaria home turf, while those areas north of the Alps, including the Roman-ruled areas like Gaul (i.e., France) and Britain, to be barbarian borderlands. Outside of Italy itself, more Roman emperors were born in the Roman Balkans than anywhere else. And yet today we look at Romania or Serbia as if they're newcomers to "Western" civilization.
It gets even more confusing the further back you go in history. In the blurb for my book, I note that Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second-largest city today, was already thousands of years old when the city of Rome was founded in 753 BCE. Plovdiv is one of the oldest continuously-inhabited cities in Europe, and in fact, Bulgaria hosts most of the oldest human settlements in Europe, and was also the place for the first metallurgical revolution in prehistoric Europe.
So what does this all mean for us today? It says a lot about what "Eastern" really means. Today, many Poles, Czechs or Hungarians will angrily correct you if you call them "Eastern Europeans" -- nobody wants to be Eastern European, because that implies you're poorer, less educated and probably a nationalist or religious fanatic and a mass murderer to boot. Unfortunately, most businesses with global operations still put these peoples into an "Eastern Europe" region, but some Westerners are beginning to think a little differently about the region.
When countries like Poland, Latvia and Romania joined the European Union and NATO in the 1990s or early 2000s, many Westerners thought of these countries as poor cousins who likely were looking for free hand-outs. (And, well, in many respects, they were.) Remember during the debates about the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 when French president Jacques Chirac angrily referred to the Eastern European countries as children who should just shut up while the adults in Western Europe debated the war? But with Europe's economy faltering today and the EU's political structures facing important growing pains at home, now some in Western Europe are beginning to see Eastern Europe as a region that can contribute to the European project and European economic development rather than its tradition role of just destabilizing European power politics and seeking welfare handouts. A British EU MP recently quipped that for decades after the war, the European project has been led by people who grew up in midst of the West's economic miracle, but now as Europe struggles, it may be time for those whose experience was primarily struggling for freedom and a decent life under Soviet imperial rule to take over.
So stay-tuned. "Eastern Europe" may be undergoing yet another definitional change soon. If so, it's just the latest in a long line of definition changes, of who was (or wasn't) Eastern European, and what exactly that means.
November 18, 2013
Why I Wrote Eastern Europe!
Why did I write this book? Why does anybody write a book? Because they’re idiots. I am an idiot. I have to admit that when I started this project, my thoughts were somewhere along the lines of, “This will probably take some weeks. Who am I kidding? It’ll take a month. Maybe even two.”
Ten years later, the Beast neared a state where it could finally be considered by a publisher. I was lucky to find a gracious and accommodating publisher in New Europe Books, and am eternally grateful for their patience in dealing with my hyper-sensitivity about how my baby was handled. And this experience of being published has also confirmed a sneaking suspicion I’ve had for years, which is that I have absolutely no future as a graphic artist. Next time, hire the professionals, and nobody gets hurt. Also, I’ve been a professional writer for years in the corporate world and already knew that a sort of adversarial relationship exists between writers on the one hand, and editors and production people on the other, but I may have put some folks on the New Europe Books team into advanced trauma therapy for years to come. If it’s any consolation to them, I am grateful for their work and the final product. Really.
So, to the point: Why does this book exist? Years ago, sometime in the 1980s, I was in JFK airport and waiting for a flight. I decided to buy some juice while waiting, and, happening upon an attractive lass at the juice stand, struck up a conversation. (I was single back then, in shape and actually had hair, so this wasn’t a preposterous idea then. Nowadays I would be arrested for that kind of behavior.) To my pleasant surprise, the lass did not slap me or summon security, so we chatted along until she asked me where I was going. I had mentioned earlier that I was on my way to Europe, but responded more specifically that I was flying to Poland. Her face went blank, and she said, with a slightly accusatory tone to her voice, “Poland? I thought you said you were going to Europe.” I slinked away, but not before swearing a vow then and there that someday I would write a definitive book describing Eastern Europe for those who think China borders Austria.
OK, the latter part of that statement wasn’t true. I did slink away, but only after accumulating similar experiences over the years did I finally decide to put pen to paper – or fingertips to keyboard, as we do nowadays. I once had a colleague who, upon visiting Eastern Europe for the first time in the early 2000s, reported back to me his astonishment that they had modern buildings, cars and phones. An English history professor once asked me in Hungary if “we were in the Soviet Union now.” But above and beyond misconceptions, I also found a lot of people who were interested in Eastern Europe – some for business reasons, some for personal ancestry reasons, others just because it seemed new and exotic to them – and so I decided about ten years ago to research and write this book.
Eastern Europe for a surprising many today is mysterious, remote, dark and dangerous. The number of those who think this way is shrinking – by now, thousands of Americans have lived a year or more in Prague, and Danube River cruises have become a common European vacation staple – but still, the very name ‘Eastern Europe’ evokes visions of mystery, misery or adventure. For many Americans, Eastern Europe looks like the Transylvania in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, where people walk around in 19th century garb and it’s always night with constant lightning flashing in the background. (And a young Teri Garr beckons you to “Roll, roll, roll in ze hay!” I’d better change the subject before this gets sidetracked on some old pipe dreams.) Anyway, in ze…I mean “the” Harry Potter series, dragons were trained off in Romania. In Bram Stoker’s original 1897 Dracula, Eastern Europe is the deep, dark, remote – medieval, in fact – past, reaching out to terrorize the bright, modern future (i.e., London). In the 2009 horror film The Orphan directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, the adoptive parents recoil in horror when they discover their little murderous adoptee, the film’s antagonist, is actually from …Eastern Europe. Why didn’t the adoption people tell them this?
This would all be academic, except that Eastern Europe is a real place filled with real people, and they generally don’t wear 19th century garb unless tourists are around. They drive cars, try to get the latest apps on their smart phones, work often boring jobs in offices or shops, and also wonder why Kim Kardashian has a TV show. Eastern Europe has been around for a couple thousand years, about as long as Western Europe has, in fact. In fact, some parts of Eastern Europe are older than Western Europe – much older. It only occurred to Western Europeans to begin make a distinction between themselves and Eastern Europe at the end of the 18th century, as a way to sort of lay the tracks for being able to point to Eastern Europe as “the other side of the tracks.”
In this book I introduce you to Eastern Europe through its languages, religious past and geography, and describe its history briefly – very briefly, I promise. My goal is to put Eastern Europe in some context for you, to show both its contradictions – Eastern Europe is a huge region that includes countries and peoples whose only relationship to one another is that they are not Western European – and its commonalities too. This is kind of obvious but strangely worth saying: Europe is a peninsula, with Western Europe at its very tip. That peninsula is the western-most tip of the huge Eurasian landmass, which stretches from Portugal on the Atlantic to China on the Pacific. That’s a lot of dirt. What this means is that Western Europe is connected to Central Asia, the Middle East and, by proxy, to North Africa by…Eastern Europe. That, in turn, means that Eastern Europe has been criss-crossed throughout its history by traders, merchants, diplomats, scholars, religious zealots and soldiers from the Celts, Romans, Huns, Goths, Germanic peoples, Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Vikings, countless Iranian Steppe peoples, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, Turks, Jews, Gypsies/ Romany, Baltic peoples, Finnic peoples, of course Slavic peoples, Mongols, Uzbeks, ancient Turkic peoples like the Avars and Khazars, the occasional Englishman, and many, many, many more. Eastern Europe’s history is far more eclectic than Western Europe’s, and this is reflected in the region’s architecture, food and other traditions which often bear traces of Paris and Istanbul, Bremen and Baghdad, Rome and Cairo.
But my goal is not to make you an expert in Eastern Europe’s long and messy (but very interesting!) history; it is to show you in part why Eastern Europe is the way it is today. Because that history is very present in most Eastern Europeans’ minds and plays a big role in how they view the world, I try to present that history from both an emic and an etic point of view – how Eastern Europeans see their history, as opposed to how the professional historians see it.
To give you an example of why this is important, I explore in this book a concept I call “The Overlapping Regions.” These are areas where the ethnic, social or political histories of different peoples and countries overlap, but which each nation whose past is somehow connected to that region wants to claim it exclusively for their own. They ignore the reality that other peoples or countries have also been involved with that region. This, of course, has made modern history in the region very exciting, far more exciting than many Eastern Europeans would have liked, but the good news is that nowadays awareness that the cultural exclusivity of these regions may not be quite so exclusive is spreading. Mind you, this problem exists in Western Europe as well, in places like Alsace-Lorraine, Catalonia, the Basque lands, Northern Ireland, Southern Tyrol, etc., but in general there are fewer of these problematic areas in the West than in the East.
To keep things interesting, I also include little inserts which interrupt the narrative a bit which I call “Useless Trivia.” These inserts very briefly explore some interesting historical or cultural tidbits, usually related to the surrounding text, which are designed to entertain as well as inform. These inserts discuss things like why Roman merchants were hacking their way through the dense forests of what are today Poland and Lithuania, or how Captain John Smith of Jamestown, Virginia fame got his start in Hungary, or why a medieval glass revolution in Central Europe meant that centuries later, American Indians got most of their glass beads from the Czech lands. You’ll meet an Albanian in Egypt who influenced the outcome of the American Civil War (without setting foot in America), an English king who was half Polish, and why, at the height of the Cold War, the United States kept the medieval Hungarian royal crown locked up in Fort Knox. I’ll admit that these inserts were also in part designed to show some of the connections between Eastern Europe throughout history and the rest of the world; Eastern Europe seems a little less remote or secluded when I ask you to consider whether Cairo, the capital of the modern Egyptian Republic, was founded by a Croat. Ha! Bet you didn’t see that one coming. For added marketing value, I of course had to throw in some vampires and other gory stories like Elisabeth Báthory. Hey, I gotta make a living too.
Of course, utterly shameless in my quest to get you to buy my book, I also added another inducement in the form of my wife’s pierogi recipe, which is included in Section III. Really. My wife, a native Pole, shared a basic (and easy!) recipe she uses for pierogis.
So go ahead and take the book for a spin. It’s written in very accessible language, and is organized so that you can read it through or pick a thread (like Bulgarian history, or Muslims in Eastern Europe) and follow that. Even if you have no personal connection to Eastern Europe, it’s just an amazingly interesting region and this book is a great place to start to better understand a part of the world that has been both a wellspring of hope as well as a graveyard of empires – and with great food to boot!Eastern Europe!: Everything You Need to Know About the History (and More) of a Region that Shaped Our World and Still Does
Ten years later, the Beast neared a state where it could finally be considered by a publisher. I was lucky to find a gracious and accommodating publisher in New Europe Books, and am eternally grateful for their patience in dealing with my hyper-sensitivity about how my baby was handled. And this experience of being published has also confirmed a sneaking suspicion I’ve had for years, which is that I have absolutely no future as a graphic artist. Next time, hire the professionals, and nobody gets hurt. Also, I’ve been a professional writer for years in the corporate world and already knew that a sort of adversarial relationship exists between writers on the one hand, and editors and production people on the other, but I may have put some folks on the New Europe Books team into advanced trauma therapy for years to come. If it’s any consolation to them, I am grateful for their work and the final product. Really.
So, to the point: Why does this book exist? Years ago, sometime in the 1980s, I was in JFK airport and waiting for a flight. I decided to buy some juice while waiting, and, happening upon an attractive lass at the juice stand, struck up a conversation. (I was single back then, in shape and actually had hair, so this wasn’t a preposterous idea then. Nowadays I would be arrested for that kind of behavior.) To my pleasant surprise, the lass did not slap me or summon security, so we chatted along until she asked me where I was going. I had mentioned earlier that I was on my way to Europe, but responded more specifically that I was flying to Poland. Her face went blank, and she said, with a slightly accusatory tone to her voice, “Poland? I thought you said you were going to Europe.” I slinked away, but not before swearing a vow then and there that someday I would write a definitive book describing Eastern Europe for those who think China borders Austria.
OK, the latter part of that statement wasn’t true. I did slink away, but only after accumulating similar experiences over the years did I finally decide to put pen to paper – or fingertips to keyboard, as we do nowadays. I once had a colleague who, upon visiting Eastern Europe for the first time in the early 2000s, reported back to me his astonishment that they had modern buildings, cars and phones. An English history professor once asked me in Hungary if “we were in the Soviet Union now.” But above and beyond misconceptions, I also found a lot of people who were interested in Eastern Europe – some for business reasons, some for personal ancestry reasons, others just because it seemed new and exotic to them – and so I decided about ten years ago to research and write this book.
Eastern Europe for a surprising many today is mysterious, remote, dark and dangerous. The number of those who think this way is shrinking – by now, thousands of Americans have lived a year or more in Prague, and Danube River cruises have become a common European vacation staple – but still, the very name ‘Eastern Europe’ evokes visions of mystery, misery or adventure. For many Americans, Eastern Europe looks like the Transylvania in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, where people walk around in 19th century garb and it’s always night with constant lightning flashing in the background. (And a young Teri Garr beckons you to “Roll, roll, roll in ze hay!” I’d better change the subject before this gets sidetracked on some old pipe dreams.) Anyway, in ze…I mean “the” Harry Potter series, dragons were trained off in Romania. In Bram Stoker’s original 1897 Dracula, Eastern Europe is the deep, dark, remote – medieval, in fact – past, reaching out to terrorize the bright, modern future (i.e., London). In the 2009 horror film The Orphan directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, the adoptive parents recoil in horror when they discover their little murderous adoptee, the film’s antagonist, is actually from …Eastern Europe. Why didn’t the adoption people tell them this?
This would all be academic, except that Eastern Europe is a real place filled with real people, and they generally don’t wear 19th century garb unless tourists are around. They drive cars, try to get the latest apps on their smart phones, work often boring jobs in offices or shops, and also wonder why Kim Kardashian has a TV show. Eastern Europe has been around for a couple thousand years, about as long as Western Europe has, in fact. In fact, some parts of Eastern Europe are older than Western Europe – much older. It only occurred to Western Europeans to begin make a distinction between themselves and Eastern Europe at the end of the 18th century, as a way to sort of lay the tracks for being able to point to Eastern Europe as “the other side of the tracks.”
In this book I introduce you to Eastern Europe through its languages, religious past and geography, and describe its history briefly – very briefly, I promise. My goal is to put Eastern Europe in some context for you, to show both its contradictions – Eastern Europe is a huge region that includes countries and peoples whose only relationship to one another is that they are not Western European – and its commonalities too. This is kind of obvious but strangely worth saying: Europe is a peninsula, with Western Europe at its very tip. That peninsula is the western-most tip of the huge Eurasian landmass, which stretches from Portugal on the Atlantic to China on the Pacific. That’s a lot of dirt. What this means is that Western Europe is connected to Central Asia, the Middle East and, by proxy, to North Africa by…Eastern Europe. That, in turn, means that Eastern Europe has been criss-crossed throughout its history by traders, merchants, diplomats, scholars, religious zealots and soldiers from the Celts, Romans, Huns, Goths, Germanic peoples, Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Vikings, countless Iranian Steppe peoples, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, Turks, Jews, Gypsies/ Romany, Baltic peoples, Finnic peoples, of course Slavic peoples, Mongols, Uzbeks, ancient Turkic peoples like the Avars and Khazars, the occasional Englishman, and many, many, many more. Eastern Europe’s history is far more eclectic than Western Europe’s, and this is reflected in the region’s architecture, food and other traditions which often bear traces of Paris and Istanbul, Bremen and Baghdad, Rome and Cairo.
But my goal is not to make you an expert in Eastern Europe’s long and messy (but very interesting!) history; it is to show you in part why Eastern Europe is the way it is today. Because that history is very present in most Eastern Europeans’ minds and plays a big role in how they view the world, I try to present that history from both an emic and an etic point of view – how Eastern Europeans see their history, as opposed to how the professional historians see it.
To give you an example of why this is important, I explore in this book a concept I call “The Overlapping Regions.” These are areas where the ethnic, social or political histories of different peoples and countries overlap, but which each nation whose past is somehow connected to that region wants to claim it exclusively for their own. They ignore the reality that other peoples or countries have also been involved with that region. This, of course, has made modern history in the region very exciting, far more exciting than many Eastern Europeans would have liked, but the good news is that nowadays awareness that the cultural exclusivity of these regions may not be quite so exclusive is spreading. Mind you, this problem exists in Western Europe as well, in places like Alsace-Lorraine, Catalonia, the Basque lands, Northern Ireland, Southern Tyrol, etc., but in general there are fewer of these problematic areas in the West than in the East.
To keep things interesting, I also include little inserts which interrupt the narrative a bit which I call “Useless Trivia.” These inserts very briefly explore some interesting historical or cultural tidbits, usually related to the surrounding text, which are designed to entertain as well as inform. These inserts discuss things like why Roman merchants were hacking their way through the dense forests of what are today Poland and Lithuania, or how Captain John Smith of Jamestown, Virginia fame got his start in Hungary, or why a medieval glass revolution in Central Europe meant that centuries later, American Indians got most of their glass beads from the Czech lands. You’ll meet an Albanian in Egypt who influenced the outcome of the American Civil War (without setting foot in America), an English king who was half Polish, and why, at the height of the Cold War, the United States kept the medieval Hungarian royal crown locked up in Fort Knox. I’ll admit that these inserts were also in part designed to show some of the connections between Eastern Europe throughout history and the rest of the world; Eastern Europe seems a little less remote or secluded when I ask you to consider whether Cairo, the capital of the modern Egyptian Republic, was founded by a Croat. Ha! Bet you didn’t see that one coming. For added marketing value, I of course had to throw in some vampires and other gory stories like Elisabeth Báthory. Hey, I gotta make a living too.
Of course, utterly shameless in my quest to get you to buy my book, I also added another inducement in the form of my wife’s pierogi recipe, which is included in Section III. Really. My wife, a native Pole, shared a basic (and easy!) recipe she uses for pierogis.
So go ahead and take the book for a spin. It’s written in very accessible language, and is organized so that you can read it through or pick a thread (like Bulgarian history, or Muslims in Eastern Europe) and follow that. Even if you have no personal connection to Eastern Europe, it’s just an amazingly interesting region and this book is a great place to start to better understand a part of the world that has been both a wellspring of hope as well as a graveyard of empires – and with great food to boot!Eastern Europe!: Everything You Need to Know About the History (and More) of a Region that Shaped Our World and Still Does
