Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends

"This is relevant to the first book I want to mention, which is Central Europe by Lonnie Johnson. It’s an excellent book, and its subtitle gives the game away: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends . For centuries, these countries that we principally think about when we think of Central Europe—although, as I say, it’s more an idea than a real geographical concept—were under the hegemony of the Habsburgs, as the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire is even more difficult to define. Whole books have been written about what it was. Voltaire once said that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire (he was inclined to say things like that, to be a gadfly). It was the successor of the Western Roman Empire, which began to exist in rather a numinous form after Constantine split the empire between Rome and Constantinople. The first Holy Roman emperor was actually Charlemagne , crowned in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800. The whole concept, therefore, stems from him, and that means that there is a significant political and cultural divide between the Orthodox countries and the Western Catholic (until the Reformation) Christian countries. We incorporated so much of the Greco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian civilisation, and the absolute lynchpin of it was the central European countries ruled from the middle of the 15th century by a Habsburg emperor. Now, when I say ruled, there is a concept in the Roman church, ’subsidiarity’, which was local autonomy (The EU also pretended to adopt this, but nothing happened: quite the reverse). The emperor was owed a personal loyalty as emperor and also as the mainstay of the Catholic Church. He was a symbolic figure, but he did have certain legislative powers over individual countries or ‘lands’, which also had their own Diets. This later was a source of problems, because many of the diets became Protestant, and that was one of the big struggles in the Counter-Reformation, to try and stop the drift towards Protestantism. Also important to mention about Lonnie Johnson’s book, Central Europe, is that it has a very good description of how the idea of modern national identity arose. Remember that it didn’t exist as such in the Middle Ages. There was serfdom. Territories were exchanged from one ruler to another just by sitting down and making a treaty. This situation is generally conceived of as having undergone what the historians irritatingly call a paradigm shift at the end of the 30 Years War (Possibly the worst war ever in Europe: more than 8 million people died, either of famine or in the warfare). Johnson’s book looks at the nurturing of a national cultural identity in the late 18th century, partly as a product of the Enlightenment and partly as a product of late Romanticism. The person behind it, intellectually, was an extraordinary Lutheran pastor, a German, called Johann Gottfried von Herder. He had this mystical idea of the spirit of an individual people residing chiefly in its language. People began to think, ‘Why are we subservient to this empire? We are individual nations, and we have a great culture behind us!’ That really boomed in the 19th century, up to the revolutions of 1848, which were the first violent political expression of it. I want to read a little bit, if I may, from the book: “It would be difficult to underestimate the breadth and depth of Herder’s impact. Isaiah Berlin , the famous British historian of ideas, maintained that all regionalists, all defenders of the local against the universal, all champions of deeply rooted forms of life, both reactionary and progressive, both genuine humanists and obscurantist opponents of scientific progress owe something, whether they know it or not, to the doctrines of Herder, who introduced this into European thought.” “It is important to distinguish between Herder’s intentions and the consequences of his work, because he was the sort of genius whose insights could easily be misinterpreted. Hence, there is a theory in history of the Herder-to-Hitler progress.” He uncovered this mare’s nest of nationalism, which went on to national populism and so on, and unleashed a Pandora’s box. It’s not really fair. “Herder was a Protestant minister, a Christian humanist, and a pacifist who thought that a natural harmony among all peoples and cultures based on empathy and understanding was possible. He was the first modern champion of cultural pluralism or diversity and a forerunner of contemporary multiculturalism . The critique of the white European and Eurocentric version of civilisation by contemporary multiculturalists is based to a considerable extent on the early 19th century German Romantic concept of culture and roots.” Now, if you’re looking at the history of this area, and Austria in particular, it was actually an Archduchy, not a kingdom, but the Emperor’s seat was there (with only two historical exceptions.) His aegis extended over a huge area. It began to crumble as a result of Herder’s ideas mingling with liberalism and the quest for freedom. The revolutions of 1848 were suppressed, but these ideas were now firmly in the respective national psyches and were eventually to come to fruition with the collapse of the Empire in 1919. The ‘Holy Roman Empire’ itself was actually dissolved at the time of Napoleon because he was of the opinion that there was only room for one emperor in Europe, and that would be him. So the Empire was dissolved in 1806, a move anticipated by the last Habsburg Emperor in 1804 when he redesignated himself simply as ‘Emperor of Austria.’ The territories merged into the Austrian Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867, which ended in 1919. So this book gives a wonderful survey of the underlying inspirations and cultural ideas that give us the history of Central Europe, whose center definitely is not Minsk. The Habsburg history is still very much alive. The coat of arms for the Austrian Republic is actually partially based on the old icon of a double-headed eagle. That’s because, far from being simply a rapidly declining empire as so often depicted, it was in many ways successful at modernising. As a result, when Austria became a republic, there was an element of modernisation already there. Austria is extremely adept at diplomacy. After World War II , it was occupied until 1955 by the four victorious Allied Powers, which eventually prevented it from falling into the Russian sphere during the Cold War, even though its eastern border was with the Soviet Union and its satraps. This enabled it to get Marshall Plan funds, and as a result, it developed rather quickly. The Austrians even managed to make a deal to get the Russians to withdraw from Austria, the former being not very keen to give up the Austrian oil. A deal on oil deliveries to the Soviet Union was accompanied with a guarantee of the neutrality of the Austrian state, something which has even survived Austria’s entry into the EU in 1995. It is now a little problematic because of the Russian aggression in the Ukraine which has forced formerly neutral states like Sweden and Finland to join NATO, of which Austria is not a member. Austria also became a very important center for diplomatic exchange, as it still is, and for spying. After the war, Bruno Kreisky, the socialist chancellor in the 1970s and 80s, put Austria well and truly on the map. It is, for example, now the fourth United Nations city, hosting the United Nations Development Organization (UNIDO). It also hosts OPEC. It was the first country in Europe to open an office for the PLO. It also has a long historical tradition of being an entrepôt, an east-west, north-south trading centre. For example, the amber trade, which was absolutely crucial in the early Middle Ages, went very close to Vienna, up to a place called Carnuntum (you can still see the museum there), and down to Aquileia. Crucially, Austria was geostrategically always a kind of Drehpunkt , and it still is, to some extent. You had the meeting between Khrushchev and Kennedy in Vienna, and other significant meetings have occurred there in our times. There was a saying— tu felix Austria nube— that they built their power through marriage diplomacy. It was a gigantic marriage brokerage, and that’s how they spread their wings. At one stage, they were related to half, if not more, of all the royal houses in Europe. Again, there was a paradigm shift (a phrase I don’t like, but I can’t think of a better one) with Charles V. He was the first Habsburg who had to confront the Reformation , and he tried to curb it. He ruled over an empire “on which the sun never set,” because, being Emperor also in Spain, he had the South American territories obtained by the conquistadors. He felt that one man just couldn’t rule such a big territory, and he initially divided the Habsburg patrimony between himself and his younger brother Ferdinand, before eventually retiring to a Spanish monastery in 1556 (his son, Philip II, inherited the Habsburg Spanish Empire.) Besides Spain, Philip ruled the territories in Southern Italy (which the Habsburgs kept until their Spanish line became extinct), while Ferdinand and his successors ruled in Central Europe. Ferdinand also succeeded Charles as Holy Roman Emperor. He acquired Hungary and Bohemia through a marriage contract that dated back to the reign of Maximilian I. The acquisition followed the 1526 disaster of the Battle of Mohács in southern Hungary, when the Hungarians were massacred by an Ottoman army and the young Hungarian king, Louis II of the Jagiello dynasty but married to a Habsburg, died by drowning while trying to escape. The Habsburgs had two main missions. One was to protect the Catholic Church against the rising tide of Protestantism, a struggle which became very violent at one stage. The other was to protect the Christian West from Ottoman invasions, in which Austria had a pivotal function. These incursions started as early as the 14th century and got steadily worse. The next book I want to mention is, in fact, about the high-water mark of the Ottoman invasions."