Twilight in the Shatter-Zone

Why the West Always Gets Eastern Europe Wrong

There was a time when ‘Eastern’ or ‘Central’ Europe was something of an unknown quantity in the Western imagination, when almost any country in the region could have been the inspiration for Anthony Hope’s fantasy country of ‘Ruritania’ in The Prisoner of Zenda.

For much of the Cold War ‘Eastern Europe’ might just as well have been one place in terms of the way it was seen in the ‘free world’ – a single area of darkness defined by Churchill’s image of an Iron Curtain stretching ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’.

Within that subjugated world, little flashes of difference occasionally emerged: the Hungarian uprising; Tito’s Yugoslavia; the Prague Spring; Solidarity.  Even Nicolae Ceaușescu seemed different enough - for a while - to be allowed to meet the Queen. Long after Milan Kundera made the idea of Central Europe seem cool and sexy, there was still a tendency in the West to see Eastern Europe as an amorphous space that was shrouded in the same aura of inscrutability and Otherness.

As the director Eli Roth once said, justifying his decision to set his shlock-horror film Hostel in Slovakia:

When I told people I was going to film in Prague, they said 'Oh, Czechoslovakia - bring toilet paper'. They still think it's some communist country from the 1950s. So when I said Slovakia I knew that Americans do not know the difference between the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Czechoslovakia, it's just one big Eastern bloc where there's always a war going on.

To Slovaks who were concerned about the cinematic depiction of their country as a maniacal torture garden, Roth pointed out that

The people that are doing the torturing and killing are Americans, Japanese, Dutch, Germans and even the people running the organisation are speaking Russian. So the people of Slovakia, they're just letting it happen there.

I doubt many Slovaks would have been consoled by this analysis, but Slovakia was not the only country in Eastern Europe to find itself at the receiving end of a reductionist Western gaze.

In the 1990s the wars in the former Yugoslavia were often attributed to the mysterious re-emergence of ‘ancestral hatreds’ - a pseudo-explanation for ethnic conflict that tended to recycle older historical imagery of Eastern Europe as a zone of barbarism that was both part of Europe and yet not fully incorporated into European civilisation.

Such stereotyping ignored the complexities of a region that was always more complicated than we generally knew, and whose complexities have repeatedly exploded in our faces with devastating consequences.

Twice last century, the countries that made up the Eastern European ‘shatter-zone’ became the flashpoints for world wars. And now here we are again in 2022, on the brink of yet another devastating conflict in the same region.

Some might conclude that world history is cursed by Europe’s eastern borderlands, but it would be more accurate to say that the reverse is true. Theoretician of the ‘shatter-zone’ borrowed the term from geology, to describe the fragility of Europe’s eastern borderland states, crushed between rival empires and spheres of influence, and this concept is easiest to grasp through maps.

Here is Eastern or Central Europe before World War I, which makes these imperial configurations clear:

And here is the same space, with new national delineations, following the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918, when independent Ukraine came into existence for the first time (Ukraine is in green):

And again, following World War 1, new national boundaries supplant the old imperial borders, with the creation of new states out of the ruins of the German, Russian, Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires, and the integration of Ukraine into the USSR in 1922:

In less than two decades the boundaries have changed again, following the German-Soviet Pact in 1939:

Who remembers the Ruthenian state of Carpatho-Ukraine, which declared itself independent on 15 March 1939 and lost its independence to Hungary by the end of the same day?

Most of us will be familiar with the ‘Iron Curtain’ divisions that accompanied the Cold War:

And the new map of Europe that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany:

This constant drawing and re-drawing of borders during the twentieth century coincided with - and to some extent caused - the bloodiest period in the region’s history.  Colonial borders in Africa and the Middle East became recipes for instability, war, and ethnic violence. Eastern Europe’s attempts to establish ethnically homogeneous nation-states from the ruins of empire have also become the occasion for wars, massacres, the persecution of minorities, and forced population displacement aimed at ethnic or racial ‘simplification’ with national borders.

The explosion of violence in Europe’s eastern borderlands in the twentieth century cannot be reduced to the ‘ancestral hatreds’ of the populations concerned. Violence was also imported and exported from outside, interrupting long periods of coexistence, as successive empires attempted to impose their own versions of racial, ethnic, or ideological homogeneity on countries that were de facto multicultural societies even if they didn’t necessarily accept multiculturalism as a defining feature of the state.

Consider the case of Ukraine. Today Ukraine’s minorities include ethnic Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Bulgarians, Crimean Tatars, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Moldovans, Rusyns or Ruthenians, Slovaks, and Jews, not to mention more than eight million Russians.

Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and the Czech Republic are – or were – similarly heterogeneous.  These are the multi-ethnic borderlands that Joseph Roth wrote about and travelled through.

Today there are Ukrainians and Poles who have been citizens of Ukraine and Poland and the Soviet Union. In Eastern Slovakia there are Slovaks who have been citizens of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and an independent Slovakia.

This diversity has not always been easy to incorporate within the boundaries of the nation-states that came into being after World War 1. Such management has often required political skills that it would be an understatement to say have frequently been lacking.

Again and again states have embarked on lethal attempts to carve out monolithic national identities by removing the minorities that seemed to contradict them.

Even in the nineteenth century Bismarck adopted a policy of ‘Germanisation’ in an attempt to reduce the large numbers of Poles in its eastern provinces - and these aspirations were later repeated with genocidal fury during the racist massacres of World War II.

Nor were such actions limited to Nazis. Lithuanians killed Jews with an enthusiasm that shocked even the SS, and Romanian fascists needed no prompting from Hitler to massacre Jews with impunity. In the course of the war Ukrainian nationalists massacred tens of thousands of Poles, and Polish nationalists often responded in kind. 

At times the rise and fall of states within the shatter-zone has resembled a bloody geopolitical game of musical chairs, in which the collapse of one empire or centre of power transforms powerful majorities into minorities, isolated within new national borders.

This was what happened with the Sudetanland Germans, and the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, and the ethnic Russians scattered across the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union.

Putin’s Imaginary Ukraine

Given these precedents, it is startling how often Western governments have been taken by surprise, by developments that should not have been unforeseeable. In the former Yugoslavia, the West appeared entirely indifferent to the potential for ethnic violence in their haste to strip away the vestiges of a communist state, and such indifference helped lay the ground for Slobodan Milosovic’s Greater Serbia project.

For more than thirty years the West has largely ignored the similar potential for a similar revanchism in the Russian Federation. In July last year Vladimir Putin wrote a long article on ‘The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, which received little attention amongst the governments that are now opposing Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

In it, Putin described Russians and Ukrainians as ‘ one people – a single whole’ and described what he called ‘the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space’ as ‘our great common misfortune and tragedy.’

Much of Putin’s essay was devoted to proving this thesis.

In a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of Russian and Ukrainian history that very few world leaders could offer about their own countries, let alone anyone else’s, the ex-KGB streetfighter-turned-autocrat traced the historical origins of what he called Ukraine’s current ‘anti-Russia concept’ back to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and onwards through the Polish national movement of the nineteenth century, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In Putin’s view, Ukraine’s current attempts to ‘play on the “national question”’ were intended to ‘sow discord among people, the overarching goal being to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people against one another’ - this ‘single people’ being Russians and Ukrainians:

Today the “right” patriot of Ukraine is only the one who hates Russia. Moreover, the entire Ukrainian statehood, as we understand it, is proposed to be built exclusively on this idea. Hate and anger, as world history has repeatedly proved this, are a very shaky foundation for sovereignty, fraught with many serious risks and dire consequences.

Though Putin insisted that ‘what Ukraine will be – it is up for its citizens to decide’ he also declared unequivocally that ‘true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia’.

His analysis made it clear that he regarded Ukraine as an inauthentic and imaginary country that had no right to exist except as an extension of Russia.

In a subsequent question-and-answer session on this essay, Putin spoke of the ‘interdependent and interwoven destinies of millions of people living in contemporary Ukraine and contemporary Russia’ and the ‘the historical and spiritual interweaving of our peoples that took centuries to evolve’.

Once again he reiterated his support for self-determination, with reservations:

Every country has the right to choose its own way, no question. But you know, it is the same as with every person. He is free but there is a well-known formula: the freedom of each person is limited by the freedom of another person…The same applies to countries.  If we see that certain threats are being created, especially in security, we must certainly decide what to do about it

The world now knows to its cost, what Putin had decided to ‘do about it’.

Apart from the outright lies and distortions, the flaws in his arguments are obvious, not the least of which is Putin’s total refusal to even recognise that Ukraine has as much right as Russia to choose its affiliations, its identity and its future, and last, but by no means least, its security.

Putin’s insistence that Ukraine is a ‘fictional’ country is undoubtedly a reflection of the Greater Russia chauvinism that repeatedly leaks through Russia’s security fears regarding NATO’s eastward expansion.

But Putin’s arguments about self-determination, national rights and national borders, and the ‘forced assimilation’ of Ukraine’s eight million ethnic Russians cannot be reduced to the ‘mad dictator’ stereotype that is now being offered up by his opponents as an explanation for what Russia is doing in Ukraine.

On the contrary, Putin’s neo-imperialism echoes debates about nationalism, self-determination, and spheres of influence that have been repeated again and again in the ‘shatter-zone’, where states and peoples have been broken up and rearranged according to the competing hegemonic claims of rival empires.

When Putin points out that the countries that make up this region ‘have always changed their borders’ he neglected to say that this was not always done by choice. 

Now Russia has joined these predecessors, in its bloody attempt to rearrange Ukraine’s borders in accordance with its own interests. Once again the world contemplates the prospect of a deadly conflict and a new Cold War that has the potential to be even more destructive than its predecessors.

This should not have happened. The West could have acknowledged Russia’s security concerns and worked harder to develop arrangements that would also take account of the security needs of the countries that Putin now describes as a ‘real threat not just to our interests, but to the very existence of our state, its sovereignty.’

These fears are certainly exaggerated, and Putin is clearly using them as a pretext, but he should never have given the opportunity to do this.

The West could have called his bluff. It could have listened to his 2007 Munich speech and responded to it. But it was too busy trying to carve out its own global ‘empire’ through various manifestations of humanitarian violence - none of which have come to anything at all.

It couldn’t, for the most part, be bothered with Russia or with Eastern Europe. It encouraged Ukraine to think that it could become part of NATO and the European Union and ignored Russian protests. Now it faces an openly fascistic Russia intent on carving out yet another empire in the shatter-zone that it believes belongs to it historically and ‘spiritually’.

That effort will almost certainly go the same way as its predecessors. But it should never have been allowed to get this far. Now the question must be how to defeat Putin’s attempt to destroy Ukraine and limit the violence and destruction, whilst also preventing outcomes that are worse than any of us can imagine.

And perhaps if our leaders had used our imaginations in the first place, and thought through the consequences of decisions that were taken or not taken a long time ago, we might not be in this mess right now.