Quite a bit in the genesis of the modern use of the term if you look at the debates in the seventies and eighties. Quite prominent a theme in fact in the contributions of your co-national, Gyorgy Konrad. To be fair this part of the argument was at least as much intended to counter anti-East European prejudices among Westerners as an expression of anti-Russian prejudice. But the latter is a real factor.
I must admit I had no clue. Intrigued, I started off for a search; and so far I find there was apparently a so-called "Central Europe Debate", in which Konrád participated; kicked off by Milan Kundera's 1984 essay "The Tragedy of Central Europe", positing that in Central Europe is a part of the West kidnapped by the East, where intellectuals fight for European values against Soviet-Russian "de-Europeanisation", and that Central European intellectualism was the real center of European civilisation. That's strong tobacco indeed. Apparently, his strongest critic in the ensuing debate was emigrant Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. I am still reading.
(At any rate, while I may have absorbed Cewntral Europe myths created by the eighties dissident movement, I doubt my geography class curriculum was influenced by Konrád & co.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
On the Central Europe Debate, this article both connects and separates it from a debate among historians about Central Europe as separate cultural region, which started in the seventies.. E.g. the intellectuals were really for the re-joining of the two sides of the Iron Curtain, not an identity separate also from the West (but a purer essence of it if we look at Kundera).
Hm, maybe I should write a diary.
Or maybe you are already better-read for that :-)
At any rate, thanks for sending me on this search. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
That must have been muddled up with the German factor at least since the rise of Prussia in the Seven Years' War. If my source is right, the Central Europe idea got traction in the West in the form of the German Threat (and in Prussia/Germany Mitteleuropa became popular in the form of natural hegemonic area for regional dominance). Then again, it also claims that the East-West division idea finally supplanted the North-South idea (in which Russia was the Giant of the North) only with the Crimean War. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Apparently, a central theme in the historians' debate on Central Europe from the seventies was the development of feudalism as something separating out such a region, in particular the second serfdom. Which brings me to thing about an earlier era. Catholics contend that what connects Europe historically above all is its common Christian past. But the spread of Christianity was just as much the spread of the then modern society model of feudalism. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
