The “longue durée” of political history

The emergence of the nation-state appeared as a political process of “longue durée” in the political history of East-Central Europe and the Balkans. Alongside this, the multinational states constituted by the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, seem to have taken historical detours, lasting seventy-four years for the Soviet Union (1917–91), seventy-five years for Czechoslovakia (1918–93), and seventy-three years for Yugoslavia (1918–91). Much as the division of politics into two camps (left and right) harkens back to the French Revolution and represents the “longue durée” of European political history, the appearance of civic nationalism in France and ethnic nationalism in Germany, more or less at the same time (the nineteenth century), represents the ideological source that nourished the creation of new states of East-Central Europe. In this sense, I consider the formation of these nation-states, spread over several centuries, to be of the “longue durée,” even if this concept is rarely used in political history.

At this point in time it is somewhat surprising that the emergence of nation-states in East-Central Europe and the Balkans, after the fall of the communist regimes, appeared as both extraordinary and undesirable to Western democracies, despite the fact that the nation-state, as François Furet has justly noted, “is the principal form within which modern societies live and the basis upon which they think they should evolve.” Jean-Baptiste Duroselle says the same in writing that, in the twentieth century, “every political entity seeks to become a nation-state.”