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As the old world was crumbling to pieces with the end of the Great War, the new shape of Central Europe was emerging. There had already been discussion of what the region might look like when the empires fell. However, no one was able to predict the exact contours of the borders and, in many cases, the political system of the newly formed and reborn states.

This unpredictability did not discourage contemporaries; on the contrary, it provoked new questions. In the midst of conflicts over territory, borders, and native populations under the rule of a neighboring country, could the region be thought of in terms of a larger whole? The ideas that cropped up in the years and decades that followed took many different forms: from multilateral treaties, sometimes signed in fear of one of the neighbors, to bilateral agreements.

In addition, there were broader concepts of regions capable of resisting great political storms – when empires were reborn in ominous ideological shapes – as well as economic storms, such as a global financial crisis. Another great war did not interrupt these ideas, although it did bury the chances of them materializing...

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Central and Eastern Europe |the search for coexistence in the Lithuanian–Polish conflict |the possibilities of anti-Bolshevik cooperation in 1919–1920 |Lithuania’s geopolitical position in Europe

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Lithuanian historiography leads one to believe that the country’s interwar conflict with neighbouring Poland was the darkest page in the history of the countries that once formed the Commonwealth of the Two Nations. Indeed, the wounds of mutual hostility healed during the bloody tragedies of World War II and the half-century-long occupation of Lithuania by the USSR and the imposition of its communist state model on Poland. After both countries succeeded in getting rid of the invasive communism that had hindered their national development, relations between them began to thaw, reaching the status of “strategic partners”. Russia’s war against Ukraine has become particularly important for the unity of Lithuania and Poland, as well as for other countries in Central-Eastern Europe, as Russia still harbours imperial and aggressive ambitions towards its western neighbours, significantly stepping up its aggression in 2022. This article examines the possibilities for cooperation between Lithuania and Poland at the height of the conflict between the two countries in 1919–1920, which even at the time reflected a common regional identity and could have been the basis for a joint anti-Bolshevik front. Despite the fact that this was not achieved during this period, and the conflict over the ownership of Vilnius complicated relations between the neighbouring countries for a long time, there was still a certain mental perception of belonging to the same space, which helps to explain why in 1939 Lithuania, despite calls from Germany to occupy Poland, did not take advantage of the tragedy of its neighbouring country and did not try to reclaim Vilnius by military force. Lithuania did not let itself be dragged into the war, and half a century after the countries regained independence and the USSR collapsed, the former countries of the Commonwealth of the Two Nations have again strengthened their partnership and are ardent supporters of Ukraine, which is fighting Russian aggression and thereby strengthening the security of CEE.

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Second Polish Republic |struggle for borders |Jozef Pilsudski |Roman Dmowski |Treaty of Versailles |Treaty of Riga

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The end of World War I brought the collapse of three multinational monarchies, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany, in Central and Eastern Europe, which offered the societies living in the region a chance to organize their own state structures. In Poland, the political elites agreed that the western border would be demarcated at the Paris Peace Conference, while chances for a more independent resolution were seen in the east. There were two competing notions of the Polish presence in this area: the incorporationist view, promoted by nationalists and advocating the division of the so-called partitioned territories between Poland and Russia, and the federal view, under which socialists and Pilsudski supporters championed the establishment of independent Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus, which were bound to it by alliances, on the eastern fringes of the Republic. Although the final decisions at Riga were closer to the former, the territory of Poland that was outlined in both concepts raised objections from Ukrainians and Lithuanians. Germany reacted similarly to demands that Pomerania, Greater Poland and Upper Silesia be annexed to Poland, and Czechs opposed the annexation of Cieszyn to Silesia. These demands were only moderately strengthened by the ethnic predominance of Poles in these areas, but the final decisions were influenced by the pressure of uprisings and the goodwill of France. The borders postulated by the nationalists and the Pilsudskiites corresponded with their vision of policy toward national minorities. The nationalists believed that Slavic minorities, who were denied the right to a separate state, should be assimilated. The Pilsudskiites, on the other hand, advocated state assimilation: they allowed religious, cultural and linguistic separateness of national minorities on condition of loyalty to the Polish state. Ultimately, however, the Second Republic failed to develop a long-term and consistent policy towards national minorities, as well as towards Poles living abroad.

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Austria |Czechoslovakia |Austria-Hungary |independence |sovereignty

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The study focuses on the dynamics of the formation of the inde- pendent Czechoslovak Republic in the context of the Great War and the immediately following post-war period. Emphasis is placed on identifying the concepts on which Czechoslova- kia’s territorial claims to the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian and German empire were based and their formative influence on the subsequent political and economic orientation of the new state formation in the web of newly constructed rela- tions in the Versailles-era geographic and geopolitical config- uration of the wider Central European area.

An important context for this paper is that the period under study represents a paradigmatic shift for Central Europe with the dramatic disintegration of integrated state entities into a number of independent states in accordance with the right to self-determination of nations advocated by American president Woodrow Wilson.

In connection with the right to self-determination, the author of the article mentions that the Czechoslovak state was granted this right in full, despite some fabrications concerning the concept of a Czechoslovak nation of two “branches” speaking the Czechoslovak language and Edvard Beneš’s “inaccuracies” about the number and other socio-geographical character- istics of the German population in the territory claimed by Czechoslovakia at the Paris Peace Conference. Moreover, it was rather peculiar that the new state with a republican order insisted on the historical raison d’etre, i.e. on the full consid- eration of the historical rights of the Crown of the Kingdom of Bohemia in the Czech lands, and conversely, on the break- ing of the millennial union of Slovakia with the Crown of St. Stephen’s lands on the basis of the natural right of the “imagined” Czechoslovak nation to its state. Last but not least, the paper addresses the question of whether this fragmentation, or Balkanisation in the contemporary sense of the term, helped to stabilize the overall post-war situation in Central Europe, or whether it created a rather undesirable and dangerous power vacuum in this vital area for European security.

In this context, the paper elucidates the genesis of the idea of state independence from the declaration of loyalty to Emperor Charles I by the domestic political representation during the war to the leaning towards the position of the Czech emigre and the disintegration of the century-old union of territories of the Habsburg monarchy after the final reversal of the war events in the summer of 1918. The author of the study also raises the question of whether this programme was implemented with the consent of the Diets of particular crown lands or German popula- tion prior to the proclamation or after the proclamation of inde- pendent Czechoslovakia on 28 October 1918, or only through the unelected Czechoslovak National Committee or the Revolutionary National Assembly from Prague. The question of the role of the emperor, or his dethronement, as well as Czechoslovakia’s attitude to the continuity of Austro-Hungarian statehood in contrast to the reception of the Austro-Hungarian legal order, is also considered. The author of the study also emphasizes the fact that Czechoslovakia, like other successor states, was emerging in a completely new reality and that Czechoslovakia in particular lacked the essential element of statehood, sovereignty, in much of the territory it claimed, especially in the German-speaking border areas and Slovakia; therefore, trade and political relations played a key role in this situation as one of the main surrogate instruments of state sovereignty. The article also deals with the use of the more robust resource and industrial base and the privileged position of a member of the Entente to promote Czechoslovak political interests with neighbouring states, especially Austria, particularly in the context of the recognition of Czechoslovak control over the parts of Czech lands inhabited by the German-speaking population that had come under Czechoslovak administration before the signing of the Treaty of Saint-Germain. Some attention is also paid to the complicated issue of Teschen (Cieszyn) in the context of relations with Poland.

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First World War |Ukraine |Ukrainian question |National Revolution

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The article analyzes the development of the “Ukrainian question” during the First World War and its aftermath – a period when a new world order was emerging along with new nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe. Born in the mid-nineteenth century, the Ukrainian “national project” evolved from cultural to socio-political demands. It culminated in the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921/1923, when an independent Ukrainian state emerged. Unlike Poland and the Baltic states, Ukrainian statehood did not last long. In March 1921, the western part of Volyn was ceded to Poland. Virtually all of Greater (Dnipro) Ukraine became part of the communist USSR. In 1923, the Entente Council of Ambassadors recognized the sovereignty of the Second Polish Republic over Eastern Galicia. In addition, after the First World War, Carpathian Ruthenia was ceded to Czechoslovakia, Bukovyna to Romania, and Ukrainians, as historian Stanislav Kulchytskij aptly noted, became “the only large nation of Austria-Hungary that did not achieve its own statehood after its collapse”. At the same time, the experience of state-building in 1917–1921/1923 became crucial for the Ukrainian national movement in the twentieth century.

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World War i |Romania’s neutrality |Bessarabia |Greater Romania

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The focus of the article is Romania during the last part of the World War I (January– November 1918), when, after the demise of the Tsarist Empire, and shortly after the Bolshevik coup, Bessarabia proclaimed independence from Russia (24 January 1918), followed shortly by a union with Romania on 27 March. Based on documents of the time, we describe the circumstances of the Union, the difficulties that arose in the process of the integration of Bessarabia (proclaimed a republic) with the Kingdom of Romania, as well as the various opinions on the constitution of Greater Romania (through the later union of Bukovina and Transylvania).

After the end of the World War I and after the establishment of Greater Romania, the state and society faced various challenges, which they overcame (some successfully, others less so). The important figures of the time, some of whom were actively involved both in the Union and in subsequent political life, wrote about the emerging problems. For instance, Dr Petre Cazacu, a member of the Country Council (the Parliament of Bessarabia, 1917–1918), outlined a number of difficulties faced by the Bessarabian population in the first decade after the Union in his book Zece ani de la Unire: Moldova dintre Prut şi Nistru (1918–1928) [Ten years after the Union: Moldova between the Prut and the Dniester (1918–1928)].

The publisher and politician Onisifor Ghibu expressed his views on this issue even more forcefully, and voiced his strong conviction that the Union of Bessarabia with Romania had been hasty. “Things would have turned out very differently in Bessarabia,” stated Ghibu, “if the union had not been forced and if it had occurred naturally, in the autumn of 1918, at the same time as that of Transylvania and Bukovina, in an atmosphere of triumphant Romanianism. Shielded by the Romanian army, Bessarabia, guided by its national culture and by the idea of the union of all Romanians, supported by people imbued with the holy feeling of love for the nation, would have made such progress during the eight months (March–November 1918) [of] favourable development, like in the past, that it could no longer have fallen prey to the ambitions of some, or to the poison of others”. We do not share Ghibu’s views. We believe that by the end of World War II Romanian historians (from both Romania and the Republic of Moldova) had already objectively presented the history of Romanians after World War I.

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Bessarabia |Greater Romania |Bukovina |Paris Peace Conference |borders/România Mare |Bucovina |Basarabia |Conferința de Pace de la Paris |granițe

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The Kremlin’s statements on the alleged territorial claims of Poland and Romania against Ukraine, statements issued in the aftermath of Russia’s large-scale invasion of the neighbouring country, have prompted us to investigate the evolution of Romanian-Ukrainian relations between 1918 and 1922. Based on Ukrainian, Romanian and Western sources, archive documents and articles published in the press of the time, we provide an overview of the most important aspects in the common history of the two peoples during the above-mentioned period in Bessarabia and Bukovina, as well as of the diplomatic negotiations and territorial disputes between Bucharest and Kiev. Although in the early years of its existence, the Ukrainian People’s Republic expressed interest in these two regions, during the Directorate – in the hope of an anti-Bolshevik alliance with Romania – it adopted a pragmatic attitude and even offered to acknowledge the border on the Dniester (which meant recognition of the union of Bessarabia with Romania). Nothing was said, however, about the future of Bukovina. The Paris Conference officially assigned the former Habsburg province to Romania, which triggered resentment among the Ukrainian population towards Romania throughout the interwar period. The Treaty on Good Neighbourliness and Cooperation, signed in 1997, is currently in force between the two neighbouring countries.

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Hungary |nationalism |Czechoslovakia |World War i |Treaty of Trianon |Romania |imagined national spaces

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Even though more than a hundred years have passed since the end of the First World War, the Hungarian historical consciousness has still not been able to fully come to terms with the lost war and its consequences, namely the Treaty of Trianon. One important reason for this phenomenon, which many authors consider to be a „cultural trauma”, is that the „Hungarian national space” imagined by Hungarian national activists at the time of the unfolding of Modern Nationalisms collapsed in 1918, as recorded in the 1920 peace treaty and reaffirmed in the 1947 one. From the outset, the space considered by the Hungarian elites as Hungarian overlapped with the similar visions of neighbouring non-Hungarian national movements, and at the end of the First World War the latter’s concepts were realised – at the expense of the Hungarian. The present essay traces the process of the emergence, competition and reorganisation of Hungarian and rival “national spaces” from the 19th century to the present day.

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the Great War |Lithuanian nationalism |pre-war culture |activities of intellectuals |state projects |post-war literature

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The article is dedicated to the developments in Lithuanian literature and history that led to the establishment of an independent modern state in the 20th century. The article analyses the historical context of Lithuanian literature in the 19th and early 20th centuries; the path of Lithuanian nationalism towards maturity, the panorama  of  literature  and  literary life at the end of the 19th century and on the eve of the Great War (WWI); the potential visions of the state emerging at the time of war in the political and power centres; and the new impetus within the literature in the  aftermath  of  the  war and through the fight for independence. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relationship between contemporary collective memory and  the  perceptions  of  the  significance of the Great War and the fight for independence (1914–1920). The Lithuanian nation-state was established in 1918–1920 and went down in history as the First Republic.1 On the other hand, Poles refer to inter-war Poland as the Second Republic, the first one being the Rzeczpospolita. There is the logic behind it: never before 1918 had there been a nation-state, i.e., a state with a Lithuanian-language governmental structure, educational system, and Lithuanian culture. Thus, for Lithuanians, unlike for Poles, the independence achieved after the Great War was not a return to a former statehood, but a more significant step: the first ever establishment of a nation-state.

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Stefan Żeromski |Tadeusz Miciński |Roman Dmowski |Literature of Criticism vs Aestheticism |Positivism in Polish literature |Stanislaw Wyspiański |Stanisław Brzozowski |Edward Abramowski |Adolf Nowaczyński |Polish discourse

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The article describes the critical trends in literature and in socio-political thought known as the Polish Literature of Criticism (New Critical Order), which is part of the cultural heritage of the period from 1890 to 1914 that opposed decadent moods, the catastrophism of the end of the century, the cult of the individual and the modernist idea of art for art’s sake. Literature of Criticism was a multifaceted movement that produced programs for national revival and the reconstruction of  a  conscious,  multi-class  Polish  society.  Playing a fundamental role in this process, the Literature of Criticism consisted of various phenomena, the most important of which included (using selected examples): 1/ literary works and views depicting non-institutional civilizationism, taking into account the emergence of increasingly moral and sophisticated forms of the state through the sacrifice of individuals and groups for higher spiritual values (Henryk Sienkiewicz and Boleslaw Prus); 2/ works depicting the intelligentsia ethos of work and service to society (active patriotism of labour) as well as advancing the need to create a new collective ethic that respects the rights of the most vulnerable; works showing the struggle against imposed orientalisation (stereotypes) and national uprooting (Stefan Żeromski, Stanisław Brzozowski, and Edward Abramowski); 3/ works in which history and national myths are revised in the name of conquering the weakness of uncritical nostalgia for the heroic past (Wyspiański, Miciński, and Żeromski); 4/ writings showing various aspects of  national and social solidarity or lack thereof, and postulating ethnic activism (Roman Dmowski, Adolf Nowaczyński, and Tadeusz Miciński), demanding a change in subaltern attitudes and, most importantly, self-improvement for the sake of the national future; 5/ literary attitudes demonstrating anti-passive, active attitude to the direct, soldierly struggle for a free homeland (Edward Słoński and Władysław Broniewski). The Literature of Criticism, which integrated these literary and philosophical trends, was a vibrant phenomenon in terms of artistic and social and political values, as well as a coherent current if we look at the general principle of its existence. It stirred up internal debate on submissiveness to historical processes and social languor, held in the name of the free Poland as a supreme value. It was a platform where both a socialist and a nationalist, a representative of landed conservatism and a supporter of progress, a critic of a conciliatory political stance and a revisionist, a former civil servant and a fighting soldier-legionary could meet. After years of national crisis, writers, columnists, philosophers and the intelligentsia and other strata that followed them outlined and pursued a program of action that led to an active stance towards the challenges of history. Anticolonial and pointing out directions for reconsidering the foundations of collective existence, including art in its broadest sense, and propagating an active attitude towards social and moral problems, the Literature of Criticism (New Critical Order) prepared several generations of Poles capable of shaping and fighting for state.

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National revival |model of the evolution of literary currents |Czech modernism |generational stratification |dichotomies in Czech interwar literature |coexistence of the avant-garde and Catholic modernism |“Protectorate” literature |contrastive poetics

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The contexts of Czech literature are related to the crisis and revolutionary situation which gradually built up towards the end of the 19th century and reached its peak in the years of World War I and during the attempts at the world revolution. This was manifested by a certain dichotomy of Czech literature after 1918 when Czechoslovakia came into existence as a relatively large state and a strong parliamentary democracy amidst more or less authoritarian countries, a state with the first-rate Czechoslovak legions tested in the battles of World War I, with strong industry and agriculture which had been the nucleus of Austria-Hungary in the past. On the one hand, there was a majority and influential left, on the other were conservative groups often connected with Catholic Church, and in the middle — liberal currents linked with the official policy of the so-called Prague Castle represented by the first president T. G. Masaryk (e g. Karel Čapek). Nevertheless, Czech literature as a whole helped create national and state consciousness, with the currents differing from each other only in their preference for traditions and political and economic systems. The problems of the new state were, of course, not only social, but also national, ethnic and religious and were also reflected in the international arena. Unlike in the other Central European countries, Czech literature exhibited radical leftist tendencies which were realised in the Czech modernist avant-garde, the apex of which was Czech poetism and surrealism (with the corresponding current in Slovakia) and their authors, such as Vítězslav Nezval, František Halas, Josef Hora, Jaroslav Seifert (1984 Nobel Prize winner), and Konstantin Biebl etc., but also the Catholic current which was very impressive from the artistic point of view (Jakub Deml, Jaroslav Durych, Jan Zahradníiek, Jan Čep and others). Both of these tendencies were surprisingly and paradoxically linked with each other, as were their representatives. The drama and the novel (the Brothers Čapek, and Vladislav Vaniura etc.) occupied a prominent place alongside poetry. What shows the mutual relationship between “the building of the state“ (the title of a very important book by the famous Czech journalist and politician Ferdinand Peroutka) and Czech literature is the fact that between 1918 and 1938 Czech literature reached a world level for the first time in modern history. The author defends the thesis that Czech literature connected with the rise of the independent Czechoslovak state regardless of all these problems and idealistic constructs (“Czechoslovakism”), created a specific, original model of the co-existence of various currents of thought and of the relationships between culture in its widest sense and practical politics. This enabled radical artistic innovations anticipating the evolutionary tendencies of world literature (surrealism, anti-utopia/dystopia, baroquizing prose, and experimental novel).

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Ivan Franko’s poetry |Ukrainian statehood |national liberation |neo-romanticism |biblical intertext

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This paper is based on the political, philosophical, and journalistic poetry of the Ukrainian writer, thinker, and public and political figure Ivan Franko (1856–1916), on top of the evolution of his views on the problems of national unity of eastern and western Ukrainians, the achievement of Ukrainian statehood, and the ways and means of the liberation struggle is highlighted. The poet and thinker expressed these views in poems of various genres (sonnet, epistle, manifesto, duma, dedication – posviata, apostrophe, “fairy tale,” obituary, pomennyk, “prologue,” “march,” etc.) and lyrical epics. In Franko’s early poetry, the future social and national liberation of Ukraine is linked to a universal and socialist perspectives, while the Ukrainian people play a messianic role in liberating peoples from the yoke of Russian tsarism. In the mature Franko, the messianic emphasis changes from universal to national. It is noteworthy that in Franko’s poetry of 1875–1905 the image of the national (native/our/our own) home appears regularly. At the beginning of the twentieth century, his poetry shows an awakening neo-romantic current. Franko’s state-building poetic discourse is characterized by prophesying freedom, relentless therapeutic exposure and scourging of the inert slave mentality of the oppressed nation. In his state-building pathos, Franko refers to the historical duchies, resorts to poetic allegory, and originally processes biblical (Old Testament) plots, images, and motifs, actualizing them and projecting them onto his contemporary Ukraine; he weighs the priorities between humanism and militant nationalism, and reflects on the rationale of numerous Ukrainian sacrifices in the bloody liberation struggle. Reflecting on the problem of power in history, the poet came to the conclusion that national will is measured by the degree of struggle to gain it (and the degree of its defense).

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history |allegory |Romania |nation |dramaturgy

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This study investigates the way in which Romanian theatre before World War I contributed to the formation of Romanian national consciousness and to the articulation of the ideal of a unitary national state. My analysis addresses the historical drama and dramatic allegories of the nation, with special focus on the drama of the early 20th century (and on the works of playwrights such as Alexandru Davila, Barbu Ștefănescu Delavrancea, Nicolae Iorga, Zaharia Bârsan, Ștefan Octavian Iosif and Victor Eftimiu). As a related topic, I address the rise of extremist nationalism in pre-war Romanian society. Mainly resorting to discourse analysis and close reading, I demonstrate the importance of theatre in the crystallisation of the Romanians’ national-identity assertiveness, which culminated, politically speaking, in the achievement of the Great Union of 1918.

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multiculturalism |Oriental |mirage |Dobruja |Nastratin

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Starting from Mihail Sadoveanu’s (1880–1961) novel Ostrovul lupilor [Wolves’ Island/Wolves’ Nest] from 1941, with a Turkish Dobrujan setting, the aim of the paper is to reveal how the imag- inary of a specific Oriental spirituality is constructed around the figure of the popular sage Nastratin. The multi-ethnic image of pre-World War I Dobruja, with its interethnic tensions, thus becomes the vehicle for a humanist message of tolerance within a convoluted, complex narrative.

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symbolism |Jacek Malczewski |Polish art |painting |Young Poland |Heritage

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Jacek Malczewski was a painter who, in his monumental artistic output, left works revolving around the problems of homeland, freedom and lost identity, life and death, spanning between romantic visions and metaphysics. He was inspired by the art of antiquity, Polish Romanticism, but also tapped into folklore, complicating the meaning of his paintings with  symbolism that was not always easy to understand. It was a multi-layered oeuvre, a testament to his great erudition, but also to the imagination and sensitivity of a refined humanist.

In his paintings, he also asked about the essence of being an artist, the artist’s responsibility, and was interested in the problem of whether artists are really only masters of themselves, or whether they have a responsibility for the artistic tasks they take on.

During the seventy-five years of the artist’s life, the history of Europe and Poland changed profoundly. His creative personality was mainly influenced by Poland’s loss of independence which entailed an identity crisis. Throughout his artistic path, Malczewski subscribed to the inherent mission of art to build national identity through creative exploration of various myths. He illustrated the dream of freedom and independence, showed the suffering of the nation and its sacrifice, and recalled the idea of the homeland which was to be both a homeland, a home, but also the foundation of national culture.