The Historical Regions of Europe: Civilizational Backgrounds and Multiple Routes to Modernity

Abstract

The objective of this chapter is to examine the historical regional diversity of Europe as a product of both civilizational backgrounds and the trajectories of modernity. This will entail in part a forward perspective to the twentieth century, since the shape of these routes was altered in the course of that century with the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the creation and expansion of the European Union. The notion of a historical region, despite the problems of definition, offers a fruitful approach to the analysis of the idea of Europe and an alternative to purely national histories. The regions in question are historical regions and do not necessarily coincide with present-day transnational regions that are of a later origin. A broad definition of Europe’s historical regions would identify three, namely Western, Central and Eastern Europe, to follow Jeno Szücs (1988) classification in his famous essay ‘The Three Historical Regions of Europe’ in which he argued for three historical regions: Western, East Central and Eastern Europe. In an earlier classic work, Oskar Halecki (1950) identified four historical regions: Western, West-central, East-central and Eastern. However, a more differentiated and systematic approach is needed given the especially complicated nature of Central Europe and the post-1989 context which led to a major reconfiguration of Central and Eastern Europe and the system of states established in 1919. A systematic typology or comparative analysis does not exist, and there is relatively little literature on the topic. The proposal in this chapter is that a sixfold classification is needed to capture the diversity of routes to modernity without reducing all such routes and models of modernity to national trajectories or collapsing them into more general civilizational categories. The forms of modernity that constitute Europe as a world historical region correspond to North-western Europe, Mediterranean Europe, Central Europe, East Central Europe, South-eastern Europe and North-eastern Europe. The notion of a historical region implies that there is a common historical experience that can be discerned in the longue durée and that common features of the region’s history are more significant than the differences. The general rationale in this chapter for a differentiated approach to Europe’s historical regions is, first, each must correspond to a distinctive route to modernity and which is a variant of the more general form that European modernity took; second, there should be a broad background in civilizational contexts. Together civilizational background and routes to modernity define the identity of a historical region and give to it a certain unity which in turn is the basis of a ‘mental map’.