A History of Eastern Europe by Robert Bideleux

” Mazower sees the period after World War I as the heyday of nationalism. Readers will notice echoes of Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1999), which considers Europe’s last century as an “unremitting struggle” among “liberal democracy, communism, and fascism. A double-edged sword, nationalism preserved the distinctiveness of this space and its plurality of peoples but also provoked constant violence and undermined consensus-based polities. In his eyes, the key to understanding the region’s identity is the durability of nationalist thinking-despite the encroachment of multiple external and internal imperial projects. Moving from personage to personage and crisis to crisis, he links disparate societies and events together under the umbrella of nationalism. Digesting a formidable library of interpretations in English, German, French, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish, his synthesis will define the field from this point forward. In From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, John Connelly offers a sweeping, elegantly written new narrative of modern eastern European history from the nineteenth century to the present. Reviewed by Jadwiga Biskupska (Sam Houston State University)Ĭommissioned by Anna Muller (University of Michigan - Dearborn) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe.

A History of Eastern Europe by Robert Bideleux