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Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea
What is ‘Central Europe’? Where do its borders lie? Does it even exist? Attempts to define it usually yield more questions than answers. But perhaps the wrong questions are being asked.
Luka Ivan Jukic disentangles the enigma of Central Europe through its history of birth, death and rebirth. Countries like Poland, Croatia and even Ukraine proudly proclaim themselves part of this region, and so part of Western civilisation. But the term originally described an unrecognisably different world—one formed in the eighteenth century by the unique inheritance of the House of Habsburg across a decentralised Germany and a sprawling Danubian realm; by the rise of standard High German; and by an intermediate position within a continent defined by the ‘advanced West’ and ‘backwards East’.
Amid the displacement and destruction of the world wars and their aftermath, this extraordinary civilisation was shattered, reduced to the frontline of a global Cold War. Its unexpected reincarnation in the 1980s, as an ideological antidote to the Soviet East, spawned myths and polemics, but little clarity. Yet ‘Central Europe’ still seems to feature in every crisis today, from Russian aggression to European disunity. Why does it remain such a powerful political idea in our times?
Luka Ivan Jukic disentangles the enigma of Central Europe through its history of birth, death and rebirth. Countries like Poland, Croatia and even Ukraine proudly proclaim themselves part of this region, and so part of Western civilisation. But the term originally described an unrecognisably different world—one formed in the eighteenth century by the unique inheritance of the House of Habsburg across a decentralised Germany and a sprawling Danubian realm; by the rise of standard High German; and by an intermediate position within a continent defined by the ‘advanced West’ and ‘backwards East’.
Amid the displacement and destruction of the world wars and their aftermath, this extraordinary civilisation was shattered, reduced to the frontline of a global Cold War. Its unexpected reincarnation in the 1980s, as an ideological antidote to the Soviet East, spawned myths and polemics, but little clarity. Yet ‘Central Europe’ still seems to feature in every crisis today, from Russian aggression to European disunity. Why does it remain such a powerful political idea in our times?
406 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 14, 2025
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About the author
Luka Ivan Jukić
1 book1 followerLuka Ivan Jukić is a journalist and historian based in London. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Financial Times, New Lines Magazine, Engelsberg Ideas, Foreign Policy, History Today, and other publications.
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September 1, 2025Historians of central Europe typically expend considerable effort trying to locate it on the map. Some place it where the Holy Roman Empire used to be. Others draw a line from the German-speaking lands to include some, or all, of the lands west of Russia. When the Iron Curtain disintegrated in 1989, the former Soviet satellites of what was then called ‘Eastern Europe’ rushed to assert their belonging to a seemingly more Western ‘Central Europe’. Today, many Ukrainians make similar claims.
In his provocative and enjoyable new book, Luka Ivan Jukic argues that central Europe should be understood less as a specific place than as a specific time, one that was irreversibly lost in the cataclysms of the 20th century. It first emerged as a geographic designation and potential political identity in the early 19th century when, in the wake of the Holy Roman Empire’s 1806 dissolution, it came to signify the lands between expansionist France and an increasingly menacing Russia. Jukic credits the German geographer Georg Hassel with coining the term in a statistical study that appeared in the same year as the old Reich’s demise. There was no prior need for such a neologism: the lands in question simply belonged to a universalist Christian empire founded by Charlemagne and presided over for centuries by the Habsburgs. Yet even before Napoleon smashed his way through the thousand-year-old institution, its lingering prestige suffered demotion with the spread of Enlightenment ideas, which, among other things, led to the elevation of the German vernacular as a literary language on a par with French, inspiring non-Germans across the Habsburg realm to modernise their own languages.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Jakub Beneš is Associate Professor in Central European History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
In his provocative and enjoyable new book, Luka Ivan Jukic argues that central Europe should be understood less as a specific place than as a specific time, one that was irreversibly lost in the cataclysms of the 20th century. It first emerged as a geographic designation and potential political identity in the early 19th century when, in the wake of the Holy Roman Empire’s 1806 dissolution, it came to signify the lands between expansionist France and an increasingly menacing Russia. Jukic credits the German geographer Georg Hassel with coining the term in a statistical study that appeared in the same year as the old Reich’s demise. There was no prior need for such a neologism: the lands in question simply belonged to a universalist Christian empire founded by Charlemagne and presided over for centuries by the Habsburgs. Yet even before Napoleon smashed his way through the thousand-year-old institution, its lingering prestige suffered demotion with the spread of Enlightenment ideas, which, among other things, led to the elevation of the German vernacular as a literary language on a par with French, inspiring non-Germans across the Habsburg realm to modernise their own languages.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Jakub Beneš is Associate Professor in Central European History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
September 14, 2025
Central Europe opens with an account of Leopold II's crowning as Holy Roman Emperor in 1790. Jukic paints a vivid image of the Empire's dazzling splendour and diversity. Clergymen, nobles, burghers, and knights of varying languages and nationalities from the hundreds of distinct imperial territories, clad in gold and silver and bright colours gathered on the streets of Frankfurt to celebrate the ascension of their new overlord.
Jukic returns to Frankfurt towards the end of his book, after the end of WWII. He finds the city changed, rendered unrecognizable by Allied bombing, the glory of the old imperial capital buried under bloody rubble. The fate of Frankfurt mirrored the fate of Central Europe at large. The nationalistic frenzy and cataclysmic wars of the 20th century put an end to this remarkable civilization that was once the axis around which the whole continent turned. Jukic's book is a chronicle of its rise and fall and its peculiar survival as an ideal.
For Jukic, Central Europe is broadly identified with the two great states that had emerged between Russia and France after the Napoleonic Wars – Germany and Austria-Hungary. However, the region, although largely encompassed by these two states, was not defined by them. Jukic deliberately avoids framing Central Europe in clear geographic terms; he views it as a civilization — a contentious word in current historical discourse, but one that accurately captures the shifting, amorphous collection of identities, allegiances, and personal ties which comprised the region.
In many ways, the story of Central Europe's downfall is a story of the victory of geography as a historical force — a victory of a desire to impose firm boundaries upon the world and to forcefully exclude those who fall outside them. The various nationalisms which gradually coalesced in the region since the 19th century worked to reorder political and social life around distinct, homogeneous national communities, almost invariably at the cost of war, genocide, and violent population transfers.
Jukic cites the example of Franz Kafka – a German Jew, residing in the old Bohemian capital of Prague – as an example of a type of figure who could only emerge in Central Europe and whose existence was rendered impossible by its disappearance. The communist regime that had emerged in Czechoslovakia after 1948 drew legitimacy from rejecting Central European cosmopolitanism, cast as a veil for German domination. In the eyes of the Communists, Kafka was an unsavoury figure, wiped from the history of the homogenized Czechoslovak nation.
The book does not portray the nation states that had come to define Central Europe as inevitable. Jukic traces the variety of political visions swirling around in the region’s parliaments, clubs, or coffeehouses — pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, various forms of federal and confederate organization. He effectively captures the often-artificial nature of national boundaries, whose formation required the destruction of more complex and layered identities.
Nevertheless, the book's implication is clear: Central Europe as a diverse, multi-national civilization was never going to survive the advent of mass politics and new technologies in the 19th and 20th century. The exact shape of the region was subject to contingency, but the overall direction of its development was set. Indeed, it was perhaps already set when Leopold II rode out in Frankfurt to assume the Crown of his Empire — an Empire that seemed like an unshakeable fixture of European politics but would be undone in just fifteen years by Napoleon's revolutionary onslaught.
For Jukic, Central Europe as a civilization died in 1945. The iron frontier between capitalist West and communist East left no space for a middle. The legacy of the two great dynastic realms that had once formed Central Europe’s core – Hohenzollern Germany and Habsburg Austria – had been extinguished once and for all.
Central Europe was killed and reborn in the Cold War. Dissident intellectuals from the Eastern Bloc, the Czech Milan Kundera foremost among them, came to see it as a symbol of their nations’ rightful place at the heart of the continent – temporarily “kidnapped” by Communist tyranny, they would eventually resume their historical links with the West.
Central Europe, entirely liberated from any political or geographic constraints, has transformed into an ideal. Somewhat counterintuitively, it has become a rallying point for those on Europe’s frontiers, who face the threat of occupation or extinction. By any stretch of the definition most of today’s Ukraine lay outside the boundaries of the 18th and 19th century Central European civilization. Nevertheless, Central Europe is alive more than anywhere else in the embattled country – a symbol of hope, prosperity, and membership in the Free World.
Jukic returns to Frankfurt towards the end of his book, after the end of WWII. He finds the city changed, rendered unrecognizable by Allied bombing, the glory of the old imperial capital buried under bloody rubble. The fate of Frankfurt mirrored the fate of Central Europe at large. The nationalistic frenzy and cataclysmic wars of the 20th century put an end to this remarkable civilization that was once the axis around which the whole continent turned. Jukic's book is a chronicle of its rise and fall and its peculiar survival as an ideal.
For Jukic, Central Europe is broadly identified with the two great states that had emerged between Russia and France after the Napoleonic Wars – Germany and Austria-Hungary. However, the region, although largely encompassed by these two states, was not defined by them. Jukic deliberately avoids framing Central Europe in clear geographic terms; he views it as a civilization — a contentious word in current historical discourse, but one that accurately captures the shifting, amorphous collection of identities, allegiances, and personal ties which comprised the region.
In many ways, the story of Central Europe's downfall is a story of the victory of geography as a historical force — a victory of a desire to impose firm boundaries upon the world and to forcefully exclude those who fall outside them. The various nationalisms which gradually coalesced in the region since the 19th century worked to reorder political and social life around distinct, homogeneous national communities, almost invariably at the cost of war, genocide, and violent population transfers.
Jukic cites the example of Franz Kafka – a German Jew, residing in the old Bohemian capital of Prague – as an example of a type of figure who could only emerge in Central Europe and whose existence was rendered impossible by its disappearance. The communist regime that had emerged in Czechoslovakia after 1948 drew legitimacy from rejecting Central European cosmopolitanism, cast as a veil for German domination. In the eyes of the Communists, Kafka was an unsavoury figure, wiped from the history of the homogenized Czechoslovak nation.
The book does not portray the nation states that had come to define Central Europe as inevitable. Jukic traces the variety of political visions swirling around in the region’s parliaments, clubs, or coffeehouses — pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, various forms of federal and confederate organization. He effectively captures the often-artificial nature of national boundaries, whose formation required the destruction of more complex and layered identities.
Nevertheless, the book's implication is clear: Central Europe as a diverse, multi-national civilization was never going to survive the advent of mass politics and new technologies in the 19th and 20th century. The exact shape of the region was subject to contingency, but the overall direction of its development was set. Indeed, it was perhaps already set when Leopold II rode out in Frankfurt to assume the Crown of his Empire — an Empire that seemed like an unshakeable fixture of European politics but would be undone in just fifteen years by Napoleon's revolutionary onslaught.
For Jukic, Central Europe as a civilization died in 1945. The iron frontier between capitalist West and communist East left no space for a middle. The legacy of the two great dynastic realms that had once formed Central Europe’s core – Hohenzollern Germany and Habsburg Austria – had been extinguished once and for all.
Central Europe was killed and reborn in the Cold War. Dissident intellectuals from the Eastern Bloc, the Czech Milan Kundera foremost among them, came to see it as a symbol of their nations’ rightful place at the heart of the continent – temporarily “kidnapped” by Communist tyranny, they would eventually resume their historical links with the West.
Central Europe, entirely liberated from any political or geographic constraints, has transformed into an ideal. Somewhat counterintuitively, it has become a rallying point for those on Europe’s frontiers, who face the threat of occupation or extinction. By any stretch of the definition most of today’s Ukraine lay outside the boundaries of the 18th and 19th century Central European civilization. Nevertheless, Central Europe is alive more than anywhere else in the embattled country – a symbol of hope, prosperity, and membership in the Free World.
September 10, 2025
What is Central Europe and where is it going?
I was captivated by the idea of Central Europe in the 1980’s, mainly through the work of Kundera. Then visiting the Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian capitals in the 90’s, after the fall of the wall, together with further reading, my interest grew. In the first decade of this century a project to visit every European capital further deepened this interest in the area. A move to South East Asia and finding out about here pushed it to the back a bit, but the cause was kept alight by the fight of Ukraine for independence and, more recently, the resurgence of anti-Semitism. This is a welcome book giving a historical background, including about the Holy Roman Empire, which we learnt nothing about during school history, for shame, and, famously was none of them. If people really want to understand how Europe got where it is, what Central Europe is, and ideas on where it is going, this book is indispensable.
I was captivated by the idea of Central Europe in the 1980’s, mainly through the work of Kundera. Then visiting the Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian capitals in the 90’s, after the fall of the wall, together with further reading, my interest grew. In the first decade of this century a project to visit every European capital further deepened this interest in the area. A move to South East Asia and finding out about here pushed it to the back a bit, but the cause was kept alight by the fight of Ukraine for independence and, more recently, the resurgence of anti-Semitism. This is a welcome book giving a historical background, including about the Holy Roman Empire, which we learnt nothing about during school history, for shame, and, famously was none of them. If people really want to understand how Europe got where it is, what Central Europe is, and ideas on where it is going, this book is indispensable.
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