Abstract
In the last seventy years East Central Europe has undergone fundamental political reconstruction more frequently than any other part of Europe. From the birth of the ‘successor states’ in 1918 to the emergence of the post-Warsaw-pact states after 1989, East Central Europe has been a place where ‘no peace settlement is ever final, no frontiers are secure and each generation must begin its work anew’.1 For the nations of the region, finding a secure place in Europe has been the elusive ambition of the twentieth century. For the liberal Western powers — Britain, France and the United States — manoeuvering the small and middle-sized states into the European political puzzle has been a frustrating process.
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Notes and References
Jerzy Jedlicki, ‘The Revolution of 1989: The Unbearable Burden of History’, Problems of Communism, vol. xxxiv (July–August 1990), p. 40.
Hubert Ripka, Eastern Europe in the Post-War World (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 31.
The verb ‘Balkanise’ means to divide (a region) into a number of smaller and often mutually hostile units, as was done in the Balkan Peninsula in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. See J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (eds), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd. ed., vol. i (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 903.
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: The Gathering Storm, vol. i (London: Cassell 1948), p. 9.
Tony Barber, ‘Wandering into a Balkan Blunderland’, The Independent on Sunday, 30 May 1993.
Quoted from Walter Kolarz, Myths and Realities in Eastern Europe (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1946), p. 9. Regarding East Central European nationalism, see Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London: Methuen, 1977), and Peter F. Sugar and Ivo J. Lederer (eds), Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969).
Essay on ‘Nationality’ in J. Rufus Fears (ed.), Essays in the History of Liberty: Selected Writings of Lord Acton, vol. i (Indianapolis: Liberty, 1985), p. 429.
E. H. Carr makes an important distinction between the concept of self-determination that grew out of the French Revolution and the subsequent merger of this concept with doctrinaire nationalism producing the idea of ‘national self determination’. See E. H. Carr, Conditions of Peace (London: Macmillan, 1942), pp. 37–50.
See Peter Alter, Nationalism (London: Edward Arnold, 1991).
Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, The Making of A State: Memories and Observations 1914–1918 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927), p. 412.
David Stevenson, The First World War and international Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 192–8.
See Piotr S. Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies 1919–1925 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962).
David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 200.
C. A. Macartney and A. W. Palmer, Independent Eastern Europe: A History (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 143. See also C. A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) for a detailed study of the Minority Treaties.
Alfred Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law 1918–1935 (London: Macmillan, 1936), p. 450.
‘Protocol of the Proceedings of the Berlin Conference, Part xii — Orderly Transfer of German Populations’, in Rohan Butler (ed.), Documents on British Policy Overseas (London: HMSO, 1984), p. 1275.
See Winston S. Churchill, Closing the Ring (New York: Bantam, 1974), p. 340; W. W. Kulski, Germany and Poland: From War to Peaceful Relations (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1976).
See Geir Lundsted, The American Non-Policy towards Eastern Europe (Tromso: Universitetsforlaget, 1978).
The Yalta Declaration called for ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’. See Gale Stokes (ed.), From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 15.
Stokes, pp. 31–2.
Article 3 of the ‘Statute of the Council of Europe’ requires each member state to ‘accept the principles of the rule of law and the enjoyment by all persons within its jurisdiction of human rights and fundamental freedoms’. See ‘Statute of the Council of Europe’, 5 May 1949, in J. A. S. Grenville, The Major-International Treaties 1914–1973: A History and Guide with Texts (New York: Stein and Day, 1975), p. 402.
George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1950–1963, vol. ii (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), p. 259.
‘United States National Security Policy vis-à-vis Eastern Europe’, Hearings before the Subcommittee on International Security and Scientific Affairs of the Committee on International Relations House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, Second Session, 12 April 1976, p. 2.
See for example Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 440.
See for example Dale R. Herspring and Ivan Volgyes, ‘Toward a Conceptualisation of Political Reliability in the East European Warsaw Pact Armies’, Armed Forces and Society, vol. vi (winter 1980), pp. 270–96; Daniel N. Nelson, Soviet Allies: The Warsaw Pact and the Issue of Reliability (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984); Jeffrey Simon and Trond Gilberg (eds), Security Implications of Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Carlisle Barracks: US Army War College, 1985).
Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘Post Communist Nationalism’ Foreign Affairs, vol. lxviii (winter 1989/90), p. 1.
Barber, ‘Wandering into a Balkan Blunderland’.
See: Paul Lendvai, ‘Yugoslavia without Yugoslavs: the roots of the Crisis’, International Affairs, vol. lxvii (1992), pp. 251–61.
Robert Fisk, ‘The Rapes Went on Day and Night’, The Independent, 8 February 1993; Patrick Moore, ‘Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia: Outrage but Little Action’, RFE/RL Research Report, 28 august 1992.
Quoted in Annika Savill, Davis Usborne, Anthony Bevins and Robert Block, ‘Owen Begs US to Hold its Fire in Bosnia’, The Independent, 3 May 1993.
Jonathan Eyal, ‘Peace, or Myth Wrapped in Folly?’, The Independent, 4 May 1993.
Jonathan Eyal offers a scathing critique of European policy toward the crisis in Yugoslavia in his Europe and Yugoslavia: Lessons From a Failure, Whitehall Paper Series 1993.
For the range of possible international approaches to the problem of protection of national minorities, see Stephen Kux, ‘International Approaches to the National Minorities Problem’, The Polish Quarterly of International Affairs, vol. i (summer/autumn 1992), pp. 7–26. For possible solutions tailored to East Central Europe, see Jonathan Eyal, ‘Eastern Europe: What About the Minorities’, The World Today, December 1984, pp. 205–8. The problems in devising a new system of protection for national minorities can be seen in the Council of Europe’s attempts to adapt its statute to the problems in Eastern Europe. See Andrew Marshall, ‘Britain Obstructs Action on Minority Rights’, The Independent, 13 July 1993.
Kux, pp. 18–22. For a detailed review of CSCE and human rights, see Jerzy Menkes and Alina Prystrom, ‘Institutionalisation of Human Rights Protection within the CSCE System’, The Polish Quarterly of International Affairs, vol. i (summer/autumn 1992), pp. 27–46.
Joseph B. Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfers in Europe 1945–1955 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 1962), pp. 22–3.
Brzezinski, ‘Post-Communist Nationalism’, p. 18.
Alter, pp. 50–4.
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© 1995 Paul Latawski
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Latawski, P. (1995). What To Do About Nationalism? The Recurring Dilemma of Western Policy in East Central Europe. In: Latawski, P. (eds) Contemporary Nationalism in East Central Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23809-5_10
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