“Double transformations:” nation formation and democratization in interwar East Central Europe

Abstract

Following the collapse of empires and the subsequent founding of self-determined nation-states, East Central Europe experienced a turning point after World War I. The new states had to transform themselves from branches of a multi-ethnic empire to independent nation-states, as well as from a system of monarchy to democracy at the same time. We argue that one cannot really understand why democracy failed in almost all East Central European states after World War I if one does not take into account the extreme challenges of this “double transformation” consisting of the interactions of the two tightly interwoven processes of nation formation and democratization. Therefore, we deem it necessary to develop a broader research program that addresses the complex interlacement of these two fundamental transformations of politics and society.

Keywords:

• nation formation
• democratization
• East Central Europe

Acknowledgements

The author workshop and panel held during the Annual Conference of the Council for European Studies (Philadelphia, April 2016) were co-financed and the proofreading of this paper was wholly financed by the DFG collaborative project “SFB/TRR 138: Dynamics of Security.” We thank the participants of the author workshop for their detailed comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Heidi Hein-Kircher http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3455-5410

Steffen Kailitz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7251-3265

Notes

1 Our approach is inspired by the ongoing debate in political science about whether the transitions in post-Communist states were double (Elster 1990), triple (Offe 1991), or even quadruple (Kuzio 2001). The phrase “double transformation” was originally coined by Jon Elster to address the simultaneous transition from a Communist regime to democracy, and from a planned economy to a market economy. He was the first to address the fact that, during a simultaneous political and economic transition, tensions, and contradictions between these two processes could block each other under the conditions of transformation crisis (Elster 1990).

2 See the attempts of the Polish National Democrats in the early 1920s (Zloch 2010, 35–76; Hein-Kircher 2015, 110–111), whereas Haslinger (2010, 289) shows that minorities’ parties were excluded in the early stages of the Czechoslovak state as well. A similar phenomenon after 1989 became the focus of more research on “ethnic democracy” (Smooha and Järve 2005; Haklai 2013).

3 The term “East Central Europe” has been somewhat intensely and controversially discussed in recent historiography. Even so, one can find a kind of consensus, which we are following in this special issue. Thus, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary form the core of East Central Europe, while the three Baltic States, as well as Romania, Croatia, and Slovenia, belong to its border and overlapping (with Northeast or Southeast European) areas. The distinction between East Central Europe and East Europe (mainly Russia) follows the criterion of the Roman Catholic influence on this area (in contrast to the Orthodox influence in Eastern European areas) as well as the tradition of Oskar Haleckis’ common traits, structuring the region via specific characteristics of multi-ethnicity and cooperative liberty and the belonging to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Habsburg Empire in early modern times (Augustinowicz 2014, 9–32; Hackmann 2015; von Puttkamer 2015). In contrast to historiography, social sciences subsume, almost indisputably, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania under the term “Central East Europe,” while more disputes arise when it comes to the classification of Germany, Austria, and Finland.

4 The historiography was influenced by the findings on German development and by the concentration on failing parliamentary systems and the extreme fragmentation of their parties.

5 Especially in Poland’s eastern territories (“kresy”) and in the Carpathian Basin, the “locals” only started to develop a national consciousness through political mobilization processes at the end of the nineteenth century (see, e.g. Ackermann 2010, 91–92).

6 Further research on this topic will be conducted in the framework of a new project by Steffen Kailitz and the contributors Angelique Leszczawski-Schwerk and Sebastian Paul (2018–2020). It will explore the “double transformation” of Central Europe using the example of the transnational border triangle between Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia after World War I (1918–1923), with a focus on developments in rural areas. It will highlight the interrelations between top-down and bottom-up processes of democratization and nationalization.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by DFG collaborative project “SFB/TRR 138: Dynamics of Security” [grant number SFB/TRR 138].