Free The New Old World by Perry Anderson Page B

Poland—let alone Lithuania—is really in the centre of Europe, what is the east? Logically, one would imagine, the answer must be Russia. But since many of the same writers—Milan Kundera is another example—deny that Russia has ever belonged to European civilization at all, 40 we are left with the conundrum of a space proclaiming itself centre and border at the same time.
    Perhaps sensing such difficulties, an American sympathizer, the
Spectator
’s foreign editor Anne Applebaum, has tacitly upgraded Poland to full occidental status, entitling her—predictably disobliging—inspection of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine
Between East and West
. 41 Another way out of them is offered by Miklós Haraszti, who argues that while current usage of the idea of Central Europe may make little geographical sense, it does convey the political unity of those—Poles, Czechs, Magyars—who fought against Communism, as distinct from their neighbours who did not. More Romanians, of course, died in 1989 than in the resistance of all three countries combined for many years. Today, however, the point of the construct is not so much retrospective as stipulative: originally fashioned to repudiate any connexion with Russian experience during the Cold War, it now serves to demarcate superior from inferior—i.e., Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, etc.—candidates for entry into the EU.
    But geopolitical concepts rarely escape their origins altogether. The idea of
Mitteleuropa
was a German invention, famously theorized by Max Weber’s friend Friedrich Naumann during the First World War. Naumann’s conception remains arrestingly topical. The Central Europe he envisaged was to be organized around a Germanic nucleus, combining Prussian industrial efficiency and Austrian cultural glamour, capable of attracting satellite nations to it in a vast customs community—
Zollgemeinschaft
—and militarycompact, extending ‘from the Vistula to the Vosges’. 42 Such a unified
Mitteleuropa
would be what he called an
Oberstaat
, a ‘super-state’ able to rival the Anglo-American and Russian empires. A Lutheran pastor himself, he noted regretfully that it would be predominantly Catholic—a necessary price to pay—but a tolerant order, making room for Jews and minority nationalities. The Union it created would not be federal—Naumann was an early prophet of today’s doctrine of subsidiarity too. All forms of sovereignty other than economic and military would be retained by member-states preserving their separate political identities, and there would be no one all-purpose capital, but rather different cities—Hamburg, Prague, Vienna—would be the seat of particular executive functions, rather like Strasbourg, Brussels and Frankfurt today. 43 Against the background of a blue-print like this, it is not difficult to see how the ideological demand for a vision of Central Europe in the Visegrád countries could find political supply in the Federal Republic.
    But given that widening of some kind to the East is now enshrined as official—if still nebulous—policy in the Union, is it probable that the process
could
be limited to a select handful of former Communist states? Applications for admission are multiplying, and there is no obvious boundary at which they can be halted. Europe, as J.G.A. Pocock once forcibly observed, is not a continent, but an unenclosed sub-continent on a continuous land mass stretching to the Bering Strait. Its only natural frontier with Asia is a strip of water, at the Hellespont, once swum by Leander and Lord Byron. To the north, plain and steppe unroll without break into Turkestan. Cultural borders are no more clearly marked than geographical: Muslim Albania and Bosnia lie a thousand miles west of Christian Georgia and Armenia, where the ancients set the dividing-line between Europe and Asia. No wonder Herodotus himself, the first historian to