FROM BOSNIA TO BAGHDAD - The Revenge of Geography - page 5

sturdy recall of Bohemia, prior to World War II, as having enjoyed a higher level of in-
dustrialization than Belgium. It meant, with all of its decadence and moral imperfections,
a zone of relative multiethnic tolerance under the umbrella of a benign if increasingly dys-
functional Habsburg Empire. In the last phase of the Cold War, Central Europe was suc-
cinctly captured by Princeton professor Carl E. Schorske in his troubling, icy-eyed clas-
sic Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture , and by the Italian writer Claudio Magris in
his sumptuous travelogue Danube . For Magris, Mitteleuropa is a sensibility that “means
the defence of the particular against any totalitarian programme.” For the Hungarian writer
György Konrád and the Czech writer Milan Kundera, Mitteleuropa is something “noble,”
a “master-key” for liberalizing political aspirations. 4
To speak of “Central Europe” in the 1980s and 1990s was to say that a culture in and
of itself comprised a geography every bit as much as a mountain range did, or every bit as
much as Soviet tanks did. For the idea of Central Europe was a rebuke to the geography
of the Cold War, which had thrown up the term “Eastern Europe” to denote the half of
Europe that was communist and controlled from Moscow. East Germany, Czechoslovakia,
Poland, and Hungary had all been part of Central Europe, it was rightly argued, and there-
fore should not have been consigned to the prison of nations that was communism and the
Warsaw Pact. A few years later, ironically, when ethnic war broke out in Yugoslavia, “Cen-
tral Europe,” rather than a term of unification, would also become one of division; with
“the Balkans” dismembered in people's minds from Central Europe, and becoming, in ef-
fect, part of the new/old Near East.
The Balkans were synonymous with the old Turkish and Byzantine empires, with unruly
mountain ranges that had hindered development, and with a generally lower standard of
living going back decades and centuries compared to the lands of the former Habsburg and
Prussian empires in the heart of Europe. During the monochrome decades of communist
domination, Balkan countries such as Romania and Bulgaria did, in fact, suffer a degree
of poverty and repression unknown to the northern, “Central European” half of the Soviet
Empire. The situation was complicated, of course. East Germany was the most truly oc-
cupied of the satellite states, and consequently its communist system was among the most
rigid, even as Yugoslavia—not formally a member of the Warsaw Pact—allowed a degree
of freedom, particularly in its cities, that was unknown in Czechoslovakia, for example.
And yet, overall, the nations of former Turkish and Byzantine southeastern Europe suffered
in their communist regimes nothing less than a version of oriental despotism, as though
a second Mongol invasion, whereas those nations of former Catholic Habsburg Europe
mainly suffered something less malignant: a dreary mix in varying degrees of radical so-
cialist populism. In this regard traveling from relatively liberal, albeit communist, Hungary
under János Kádár to Romania under the totalitarianism of Nicolae Ceausescu was typical
in this regard. I made the trip often in the 1980s: as my train passed into Romania from