Negotiating Modernity in Interwar East Central Europe

Open class with Balázs Trencsényi about the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe, from a comparative intellectual history viewpoint.

 
"Negotiating Modernity in Interwar East Central Europe: Political Languages and Transnational Transfers"
Balázs Trencsényi (Central European University - Budapest)


The presentation draws on the experience gathered while working on the project “Negotiating Modernity” by the European Research Council, resulting in the co-authored multi-volume A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe by Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, Mónika Baár, Maria Falina, Michal Kopeček, and Luka Lisjak-Gabrijelčić (Oxford University Press, 2016, 2018). A pioneering venture of regionally comparative intellectual history, the Project aimed at producing a synthetic volume on the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe, providing a basis of intra- and extra-regional comparison. A key feature of our efforts is the “negotiation” of analytical categories in view of the broader European intellectual framework of the times and pointing out long-term structural and ideological continuities. The presentation will focus on the interwar period, taking into account the dynamics of Westernizing and anti-Westernist ideological shifts in the region since the Enlightenment, mapped by our project.

Focusing on the ideological debates on collective identity one can formulate the hypothesis of a “second Sattelzeit,” starting in East Central Europe roughly around 1900, but reaching its climax in the interwar years. Similar to the early 19th-century transformation memorably described by Reinhart Koselleck and his colleagues, this “second Sattelzeit” was also characterized by a radical conceptual transformation, linked to the shift of the underlying temporal perspective of political concepts, framing the language of politics in a way that impacts us until now. Most importantly, this
transformation was rooted in the collapse of the liberal evolutionary vision of history, which reached a previously unattained position of dominance in the last decades of the 19th century.

A key factor related to this shift was the transformation of nationalism starting at the turn of the century, leading to the abandonment of its emancipatory and civic components and turning its vision of the relationship of different national projects into a “zero-sum game,” being rooted in the Social Darwinist vision of the survival of the fittest among nations as well. Rather than local products, these ideas were forming part of a
transnational market of ideas, leading to the seemingly paradoxical situation of radical nationalist discourses rooted in a radically international epistemic framework.

These constructions became central to the political discourse in the interwar period with the coming of fully-fledged anti-modernist discourses. In Koselleckian terms, here the shift of the inherent temporality of concepts can be grasped in terms of an “anti-historical” turn, which implied the abandonment of belief in progress and the redescription of the national community as a metaphysical entity, which cannot be empirically analysed, nor rationally grasped, but requires a specific mental tuning, a sort of national anamnesis, recovering in one’s self the hidden truth of the national Being. Importantly, while these discourses of national uniqueness were rooted in a moral particularism, they were also entangled with an urge of catching up, but now not with the liberal democratic norms of the West but exactly the other way round, with the anti-modernist radicalism of the seemingly most dynamic European powers of the time, i.e. Italy and Germany.

Remarkably, while these interwar modalities were often concretized in genocidal policies during World War II, their ideological identification with the radical right-wing regimes did not make them completely non grata in the post-war period either, especially in the context of the pressing need for a nationalist legitimization of the regional communist parties, an idea also promoted by Stalin in 1944-45. While national communism had different phases with different political implications—the early phase had more liberalizing elements, later on it became more anti-reformist— nevertheless, in both manifestations it had an ethnocultural component, contrasting the national path to an „alien” imposition. Consequently, as attested also by the reactions to the 2015 migration crisis, the reflexes of East Central European societies were conditioned and to a certain extent remain shaped by a sequence of radically homogenizing regimes and ideologies in the 20th century.

 

About the speaker:
Balázs Trencsényi is Professor at the History Department of Central European University, Budapest, and co-director of Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies. His main field of interest is the his­tory of modern political thought. Between 2008 and 2013, he was Principal Investigator of the ERC project, “Negotiating Modernity”: History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. Among others, he is the author of the monograph, The Politics of ‘National Character’: A Study in Interwar East European Thought (Routledge, 2012); co-author of A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, vols. I-II (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016, 2018); as well as co-editor of Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1775–1945), vols. I–II, IV (Budapest-New York: CEU Press, 2006–7, 2014) and European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History (Berghahn, 2017).