Ciubotă, Viorel - Nicolescu, Gheorge - Ţucă, Cornel (szerk.): Jurnal de operaţiuni al Comandamentului Trupelor din Transilvania (1918-1921) 2. (Satu Mare, 1998)

Istorie şi Geografie Istorică / Geschichte und Landeskunde / Történelem és országismeret - Regiuni de frontieră şi zone de contact / Grenzreionen und Kontakträume / Határvidékek és kapcsolódási területek

Luca Calvi(Italy)

The events that followed the “velvet revolution” and the fall of the Wall in the Berlin led to a lot of changes in what up to that moment has been called Eastern Europe and that now we consider again, more precisely from a geographical and historical point of view, Central Europe (CROMPTON 1996). The map of Europe and of its different blocs changed, as well as the division of Europe, which is now determined not by ideological differences or juxtapositions, but rather by economical reasons.

This changes brought, as an heritage, the need of re-writing the history from new perspectives, sometimes free from censorship, but often submitted to a new, more dangerous control, i.e. the need of and the quest for a new ideologized re-writing of history following the needs of the nationalistic and ethnonational utopia of the past century, which burst out with tragic effects in the Balkan area and with less practical but not less evident sociological effects in Central Europe (BROWN 1993).

The Central European States of the former Warsaw Pact, after the withdrawal of the Soviet influence from the political map of Europe and the consequent very first moment of enthusiastic slogans for the re-gained freedom, looked for a completely new reorganization of their Statehood, as it happened with Poland, Czechia, Romania and Hungary, or had to face all the problems connected with the creation of a new State, which had to be “national”, as it happened with Slovakia and Ukraine (CONNOR 1994).

The way to get this statehood in the different above-mentioned new Central European States look very similar to each other, but we want to stress a particular that is, in our opinion, basical to understand the future development of the questions related to nationality, statehood and regionalism in these Countries: the approach to their history must be at the same time synchronical and diachronical, i. e. we must take into account the single developments of each particularity in the different historical periods and in their common historical perspective as well.

From this point of view, we shall also point out that the State- and Nation inheritances of this countries are substantially different, and we can divide them into three groups: the imperial, the national and the neo-national one.

To the first one belong Hungary and Poland, which have an inheritance that can trace its origins thanks to a particular tradition of statehood due to their past of the Empire or of the Kingdom; to the second one belong Czechia and Romania, which gained their statehood thanks to the nationalistic utopia of XIXth century with the beginning of XXth century; to the third one belong Slovakia and Ukraine, which gained a statehood, after a difficult history of different attempts, only in the last decade of this century, and are now experiencing, with doubtful results, the process of Statebuilding and Nation-building at the same time.

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Identity: Some Reflections For Going Beyond The Nations And

Looking For Regions In Future Central Europe