9.1 Introduction

‘[C]an we build a community of states and peoples with a liberal-legalist constitutional imaginary?’ – this is the question Jan Komárek puts in his essay on Joseph Weiler’s masterpiece The Transformation of Europe.Footnote ¹ Although, the fundamental problematique of Komárek’s study concerns community building by various forms of constitutional imagination at the European level, it is of utmost importance to investigate the same question on a national level since it might have several implications concerning building a European community of states and peoples. Beyond the liberal–legalist way of community building, there are at least two other approaches to how this goal could be achieved. While both are moving away from the highly rationalistic strategy of legal constitutionalism, they differ on what the society’s fundament should be: one finds material solidarity (i.e., class solidarity), the other one spiritual solidarity (i.e., national solidarity) as a crucial starting point for any community building project. While challenging the ‘liberal-legalist constitutional imaginary’ from the point of view of this spiritual solidarity shows several similarities with the challenge inspired by the idea of a social Europe, there are, of course, several points where the spiritual project diverges from the solidarity project.

Notwithstanding, it should be stressed that the present undertaking is a rather cautious one: it won’t argue that it is advised under any circumstances to build a community on emotional ties connected to the idea of nation. This chapter is going to weigh arguments and counter-arguments and does not unambiguously defend one position. It will rather consider the dilemmas whether it is useful and desirable to reach back to the idea of the historical constitution and national emotions to create a sense of community. This chapter clearly goes against the ‘liberal-legalist constitutional imaginary’ and builds on the assumption that constitutional references to the historical constitution can contribute to the community building process in Hungary. While this assumption itself might be contended, this chapter puts aside the question of whether the Hungarian historical constitution could be revived in legal terms or whether it could have legally binding force in any way. Instead, it will approach the question from a non-legalistic point of view and consider the dilemmas whether references to the Hungarian historical constitution might be useful and desirable from the perspective of community building. To put it briefly: this chapter contends that it might be useful and desirable but only under certain circumstances. Unfortunately, whether these conditions prevail can only be established retrospectively.Footnote ²

In what follows, this chapter starts with a brief literature overview on the role and functions of history and historical narratives in the constitutions. Next, it highlights the ahistorical character of constitutionalism in Hungary after the democratic transformation process in 1989/1990 to continue with outlining the historical turn in constitutional thinking after 2010. Afterwards, it presents the main argument of the chapter, contending that references to the historical constitution in the new Fundamental Law of Hungary might be useful and desirable from the perspective of community building. Nevertheless, the conclusion stresses that evaluation of the usefulness of the references to the historical constitution remains a task for future generations.

9.2 Constitutional Memories and Historical Constitution

Studying constitutional memory is an emerging research field with a growing theoretical and empirical literature which should be clearly distinguished from constitutional history. While the latter is a more or less linear narrative of the constitutional developments of a political community, the former refers to the manifestations of historical narratives and references to historical facts and symbols in present-day constitutional documents with a special focus on their implications for the current political communities. Surely, its subjects are mainly legal documents, but research on constitutional memories is less legalistic and takes inspirations mainly from the humanities and social sciences. While constitutionalized memory laws might have direct implications on how a society deals with its past, and regulations of transitional justice on the constitutional level have legally binding force, most of the constitutional manifestations of the past contribute rather to a (usually highly controversial) interpretation of the common past of the political community without having a direct legal effect on the everyday life of its citizens.Footnote ³ Nevertheless, the constitutionalized past might have a legitimacy function, an ideological function or an imaginary incitement function, which are clearly beyond its legal-regulatory function.Footnote ⁴

This chapter contributes to this literature, by exploring whether the references to the Hungarian historical constitution in the new Fundamental Law of Hungary might be useful and desirable in the community building processes. It should be stressed that the chapter does not analyse the use of history in constitutional documents in general. While constitutional documents might contain explicit and implicit historical narratives, and, consequently, constitutional memory is a complex phenomenon, this chapter deliberately narrows down its focus only on one element of a complex phenomenon. To be more precise, it abandons to analyse the grand historical narratives as manifested mainly in the preamble (National Avowal) of the new Fundamental Law of Hungary and disregards explicit and implicit references to historical events and symbols abounding in the new constitution adopted in 2011.Footnote ⁵ This is an inevitable and necessary limitation, since references to the history of the political community in constitutional documents might take various forms: they might include (a) explicit historical narratives which determine a rather unambiguous interpretation of historical facts and events (constitutional master narratives); (b) implicit references to historical events without clearly determining the master narrative of the national history (open-ended constitutional narratives); (c) explicit references to national symbols embedded in national history with an unambiguously determined semantic field (predefined historical references)Footnote ⁶; and (d) references to phenomena and objects without a clearly defined semantic field (open-ended historical references). References to the historical constitution, if approached from a non-legalistic point of view, belong to this latter group.

The vagueness of the term ‘historical constitution’ triggered heavy debates in legal terms, mainly concentrating on the questions of formal and material indeterminacy of the term historical constitution or, alternatively, on the practical impossibility of the revival of the historical constitution in a legally binding way due to the incompatibility of its provisions with modern societies’ circumstances or due to the disrupted constitutional traditions caused by the Soviet occupation of Hungary. While the theoretical and practical questions of the revival of the historical constitution in a legally binding form are intellectually highly appealing, here we are focusing only on the utility and desirability of the references to the Hungarian historical constitution from the extra-legal perspective of a community building process.

9.3 Background: Ahistorical and Legal Constitutionalism in Hungary, 1990–2010

History is a pervasive element of the Hungarian constitutional culture. Culture wars inspired by diverging and contradicting historical narratives were being waged as soon as in the early 1990s, that is, directly after the democratic transformation process. Debates on the state symbols or the potential re-emergence or re-establishment of the semi-authoritarian political system of the interwar period, restitution of property relations to post-WWII conditions and other questions of transitional justice were major topics of political and constitutional struggles in the 1990s.

Nevertheless, the past found no way into the emerging body of the new Hungarian constitution. Obviously, missing consensus on how to interpret Hungarian constitutional history (a quite long and rich one) and time pressure were major factors why, at the end of the day, no historical references have been included into the amended 1949 Communist constitution – which has been considered as a provisional constitution until a new one will be enacted. Members of the democratic opposition parties were firmly convinced that a completely new constitution should be adopted after the first democratic elections, since the new parliament will have a clear democratic mandate to shape the new political system. The only way history manifested itself in this provisional document is a negative one: it is a clear demarcation from the not-so-distant Communist past.

While Western liberal constitutional theory (based mainly on Dworkin’s ideas) along with some innovation (like the theory of invisible constitution) became a dominant pattern of constitutional interpretation on the benches of the HCC (and even beyond that),Footnote ⁷ the quite long history of Hungarian constitutional thinking and practice was simply neglected or even declared as reactionary, feudal and outdated.Footnote ⁸ Undoubtedly, one can find reactionary, feudal and outdated elements in the writings and speeches of the protagonists of the Hungarian constitutional tradition – as in constitutional traditions of all other countries. The question is rather whether such references should prevent any linkage with the past and the constitutional history of the country and whether it is useful and desirable to bring back historical references into the constitutional thinking in order to promote community building.

This ahistorical and liberal approach to constitutionalism dominated the Hungarian constitutional imagination for approximately 20 years.Footnote ⁹ In the early 1990s, what is now termed ‘legal constitutionalism’ became the dominant view in the Hungarian legal scholarship, which almost unanimously supported the activist approach of the Hungarian Constitutional Court (HCC) concerning the first generation of fundamental rights.Footnote ¹⁰ The ‘crown jewel’ of legal constitutionalism emerged surprisingly rapidly as a key institution of the new Hungarian democracy: there was no public debate on the adequate role of constitutional courts in a young democracy and on questions like who should have the final word in political and social debates.Footnote ¹¹ Politicians have never challenged its legitimacy, not even in situations when the HCC declared some parts of the austerity measures of the left-wing-liberal constitutional majority unconstitutional in the mid-1990s.Footnote ¹² This fact is even more striking since empirically oriented normative democratic theories rarely prefer an institution separated from popular involvement. Democratic theories which stress the consensual, deliberative, egalitarian, participatory or the majoritarian dimension of democracy are rather hostile to the liberal democratic theory, which is based on the idea of judicial supremacy.Footnote ¹³ In Hungary, as in other Central and Eastern European countries, this lack of debates on what kind of democracy we really want implied that any challenge to the legal constitutionalist imagination has been identified as a danger to the democracy itself. Legal constitutionalism (identified with the concept of democracy) became the only game in the town.Footnote ¹⁴

Given the controversial character of the Hungarian constitutional history and historical references to the past, along with the normative bias of the dominant perception of constitutionalism and the HCC’s explicit adherence to the Dworkinian type of constitutional adjudication, no surprise that historical rhetoric and historical references were completely absent from Hungarian constitutionalism after 1990. But history (along with heavy controversies on how to interpret the Hungarian constitutional history and historical constitution) came back after the landslide victory of the Fidesz party in 2010. Viktor Orbán indicated during the election campaign in 2010 that if his party obtained a landslide victory it would enact a new constitution. This constitution would, he asserted, complete the unfinished task of the regime change which had begun in 1989 and help solve the economic and social problems that afflicted the country.Footnote ¹⁵ During the election campaign, however, no drafts of a new constitution were circulated, and the constitution-making process did not produce a new constitutional text until 2011, when it was adopted by the two-thirds right-wing majority of the parliament. The legitimacy of the new constitution was, however, challenged by the opposition parties which refused to participate in the drafting process and encouraged popular demonstrations against the new Fundamental Law.Footnote ¹⁶ One of the major objections of the left-wing and liberal parties against the Fundamental Law concerned the references to the historical constitution of Hungary, which was denounced as an anachronistic reference to an ancient undemocratic tradition and which had legitimized and empowered a semi-authoritarian regime in the interwar period and paved the way for the horrors which afflicted Hungary in WWII.Footnote ¹⁷

9.4 The Historical Turn and the Fundamental Law after 2010

Although the concept of the historical constitution was heavily criticized in the public sphere at the time of the adoption of the Fundamental Law, legal scholarship has shown rather moderate interest in it. Among those few studies engaging with the phenomenon of the historical constitution, one might equally find highly critical comments, analyses completely neglecting the references to the historical constitution and some endorsing the revival of the historical constitution.Footnote ¹⁸ Debates in the legal scholarship focused mainly on questions of formal and material indeterminacy of the term ‘historical constitution’ or, alternatively, on the practical impossibility of the revival of the historical constitution with a legally binding force (due to incompatibility with modern society’s circumstances or disruption of the constitutional traditions). In contrast to these studies, this essay does not reflect on the feasibility of reviving the historical constitution from a legal-dogmatic point of view but rather from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences by focusing on the utility and desirability of the references to the historical constitution in the community building process.

The term ‘historical constitution’ appears four times in the Fundamental Law: three times in the preamble (National Avowal), and once in the core text of the constitution:

In the legal scholarship, these references have been heavily criticized and/or considered as irrelevant for constitutional interpretation. Several renowned legal scholars have proposed that they should be simply ignored and that the focus should be solely on the written text of the Fundamental Law.Footnote ²⁰ By contrast, a significantly smaller group of scholars evaluated these references more positively.Footnote ²¹ Since there is no general agreement on the question which parliamentary acts and/or unwritten constitutional norms should be considered as part of the historical constitution, the majority of legal scholars rejected the idea of the revival of the historical constitution.

Nevertheless, these references exhibit their utmost relevance not from the perspective of their legalistic-dogmatic interpretation, but rather as part of a certainly vague and undetermined historical narrative. Surely, Article R, paragraph 3 gives an unambiguous command for the Hungarian Constitutional Court on how to interpret the Fundamental Law, and it has a legally binding force concerning constitutional interpretation. Nevertheless, the practice of constitutional adjudication of the HCC shows that this command has been neglected most of the time.Footnote ²² Apart from this instruction, which, at the end of the day, has been almost systematically disregarded by the HCC, all other references are included into the preamble of the constitution, which has typically extra-legal, non-binding or declarative character, thus it usually serves the aim to put the constitution into context and create a master narrative of the political community.Footnote ²³ Besides the location of these references in the preamble, the wording of the text is also telling: terms like we ‘honour’, ‘hold’ or ‘recognize’ indicate the disposition of the community towards the historical constitution however it may be defined. Such dispositional expressions are intended to create a sense of attachment to the constitutional past of the political community and imply that the symbolic-integrative function of these references prevail over their legal character. Given that references to the historical constitution functions as a leeway for community building, the question arises as to whether it is a useful and desirable tool for promoting social integration.

9.5 Community Building by References to the Historical Constitution

Setting aside the question of whether the ‘historical’ narrative will prevail or simply disappear from the Hungarian political arena, one might be interested in to what extent such a project would be useful for both the Hungarian and the European political community. Furthermore, even if the project seems to be useful, it is less than obvious why such a project would be desirable. Therefore, we must consider the normative arguments which underpin or delegitimize the desirability of the community building by references to the Hungarian historical constitution.

The dominant view in the legal scholarship is that the most important functions of a constitution are to constitute, legitimate and limit state power, defend the rights of the citizens and secure the rule of law (including legal certainty and calculability).Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, this dominant view has been challenged by several scholars. Other functions, like expressing fundamental values of the political community or being a symbolic focal point of debates on divergent visions of political and social order, might also be crucial functions. Constitutions might reflect the power struggle and power relations of the daily politics during the constitution-making process. In more fortunate cases they can also express the fundamental values of the political community. But they are even more than that since they also possess a symbolic dimension. They serve as a focal point for various social and political practices, interpretations, constitutional myths, memorial days and political debates over the correct form of social order.Footnote ²⁵

Thus, they are symbolic expressions of divergent visions of political and social order. They can serve as symbolic tools for social integration, as the example of the US constitution or the constitution of the German Federal Republic after WWII demonstrate.Footnote ²⁶ Constitutions may acquire a totemic or symbolic importance and therefore contribute to social cohesion. It should be admitted that this integrative function might be performed by different means. In France, for example, it is not the constitution which serves as a dew point of the integration process but the idea of the nation. In Germany, for many years following the Bismarck-era, it was the abstract concept of the state which served as a focal point of social integration.Footnote ²⁷ With some reservations, we could also argue that, in Hungary, the idea of the historical constitution and the ever changing idea of the Holy Crown were the central loci of this imaginative process.Footnote ²⁸

A constitutional practice based on this extended meaning of the term ‘constitution’ generates emotional ties that promote the process of social integration, even if the concepts of political order symbolized by constitutions vary heavily over time and/or within one and the same political community in a given period.Footnote ²⁹ Constitutions necessarily contain highly general and often stylistically elevated abstract terms and phrases, and, as a consequence, they cannot help but to induce different interpretations or visions of political order.Footnote ³⁰ Surely, silence or explicit unanimity on constitutional issues produces social cohesion, but social cohesion will rarely be created by judicial interpretation. Social cohesion and community building need more emotion and less rigid logic and rationality.Footnote ³¹ Here politics is once again at the forefront: a political community cannot be governed in the long run without constructing a sense of community that appeals to the emotional dispositions of its members. And, for this reason, the most important functions of the constitutions do not exhaust in constituting or constraining political power and maintaining legal certainty. It seems inevitable that modern constitutions stand at the focal point of social integration processes that presuppose some kind of emotional engagement. Whether constitutions can fulfil this function in an appropriate manner might be evaluated on an individual basis, and, unfortunately, only retrospectively. Whether the new Fundamental Law of Hungary and its references to the historical constitution will achieve these goals at any time in the future remains an open question to be answered in the decades to come. But it is undeniable that constitutions, including the Fundamental Law of Hungary, play a highly important role in social integration that extends well beyond the formal functions of the constitutions.

Given the fact that fostering social integration seems to be a crucial function of constitutions, the question emerges how can constitutions best serve this purpose? How can they establish social integration? Here constitutional imagination might have a decisive role. As Martin Loughlin argues, constitutional imagination is an important element of the collective self-representation of a political community created by a fruitful tension between ideology and utopia. While ideology is a technique of social integration which conceals the gap in legitimacy claims, utopian thought exposes this gap. Both have positive and negative attributes.

Furthermore, constitutional imagination can ‘harness the power of narrative, symbol, ritual and myth to project an account of political existence in ways that shape – and re-shape – political reality. The phrase draws our attention to the capacity of constitutions to offer alternative perceptions of reality, revealing new ways of conceiving the boundaries of practical political action.’Footnote ³³ Komárek adds that constitutional imaginaries are ‘necessary fictions’ of nationhood, common identity or shared history which integrate individual subjects and their beliefs into a common whole.Footnote ³⁴

By accepting these assessments and putting aside the question of utopian thinking for another study, we are focusing here deliberately on the ideological side of constitutional imaginaries and argue that constitutions are capable to produce social cohesion by historical references. Historical master narratives and open-ended historical references excite emotional reactions which can be transformed into a powerful tool of building social cohesion. Common narrative and shared history are certainly the most important elements of community building. They can create emotional commitments. Most recently even legal scholars begun to argue that emotions could not be neglected in constitutionalism, community building and establishing social integration. Contemporary constitutional systems are typically presented as if they were operating according to rationality. It is believed that this is achieved by successfully exiling emotions. But, in Sajó’s view, ‘emotions are the heroes of constitutional institution building’.Footnote ³⁵ To be sure, these studies argue that enthusiastic commitment to human rights has its origin in a desperate resistance against the tyrants in seventeenth century Britain, late eighteenth century American colonies and in France. Emotional engagement for liberating the individuals from the tyranny should be considered as a crucial factor in the success story of human rights regimes as we know them today.Footnote ³⁶

The lesson we can learn from these studies is that emotional ties shaped by constitutional references to crucial historical moments are necessary factors of successful community building processes. Thus, we can rightly argue that historical master narratives and open-ended historical references on the constitutional level may strengthen the emotional ties among the members of the political community. Nevertheless, it should be admitted that they can also have the opposite effect. Historical narratives might divide society, strengthen polarization and, consequently, impede social integration. In the Hungarian context, László Péter argued that:

To be more concrete and give an example of how historical narratives and historical references might divide but, at the end of the day, even strengthen the emotional ties among the members of the political community, let’s briefly summarize the story of the Holy Crown after the democratic transformation process of 1989/1990. After a highly adventurous journey from Budapest to Mattsee, the Holy Crown has been seized by the US Army in 1945 and the US government has preserved it at Fort Knox for two decades. As part of his new foreign policy of appeasement, Jimmy Carter decided that the masterpiece should be transferred back to Hungary. In 1978 the Holy Crown returned to Hungary and it has been exhibited as an artefact and as a historical object in the National Museum in Budapest. Nevertheless, the return of the Holy Crown generated wider public resonance and inspired even authors of the highly popular rock-opera Stephen, the King (István, a király) which became part of the cultural DNA of all Hungarians as early as in the early 1980s (i.e., well before the fall of Communism).Footnote ³⁸

The Holy Crown got once again into the forefront of political debates directly after the democratic transformation process of 1989/1990. Lengthy and passionate parliamentary and public debates on whether the Holy Crown should be included into the coat of arms of the new democratic state showed that the Holy Crown could still stimulate political emotions. Left-wing and liberal MPs and public intellectuals argued that the Hungarian coat of arms should not depict the Holy Crown because it belonged to the feudal era of the Hungarian history – they opted rather for the so-called Kossuth-címer, a coat with clear allusions to the short-lived republican past of Hungary. Nevertheless, the right-wing parliamentary majority decided to adopt a law which made the coat of arms with the Holy Crown official. Even though the left-wing and liberal parties won the next parliamentary elections in 1994 with a two-thirds (constitutional) majority, they haven’t changed the official coat of arms of Hungary. The issue was settled, and the new government did not open the file again.Footnote ³⁹

The next episode of the story started in 2000 as the first Orbán-government decided to transfer the Holy Crown from the National Museum to the Parliament as a symbolic event of the thousand years old foundation of the Hungarian state by King Saint Stephen in 1000 AD. Once again, heavy debates dominated the political life because left-wing and liberal parties opposed the idea to move the Holy Crown, a symbol of feudal monarchy in their view, to the Parliament which, in turn, has been generally considered as the temple of the republican idea. Nevertheless, the right-wing government transferred the Holy Crown to the Parliament in 2001 even though the issue seemed to increase political polarization. But, once again, after the left-wing and liberal parties came into power in 2002 there was no initiative to transfer the Holy Crown back to the National Museum, which has been regarded by the left-wing and liberal politicians and intellectuals as the most appropriate place for preserving a historically important but currently irrelevant artefact.Footnote ⁴⁰ Nowadays, thousands of Hungarians are visiting the Holy Crown by guided tours all year round and especially on 20 August, the day when the Parliament opens its door during the national holiday commemorating the state foundation of Hungary in 1000 AD.

Once highly divisive and polarizing, the Holy Crown now attracts thousands of visitors in the Parliament and there is no debate or initiative to transfer it back to the National Museum. In that sense, the story of the Holy Crown might be an instructive example as far as the central question of this chapter is concerned: whether it is useful to rely on constitutional memory and historical references in the constitution while trying to promote social integration of the political community. Surely, the Holy Crown is only one example and there might be several differences between the Holy Crown and the references to the historical constitution in the Fundamental Law. Nevertheless, it shows that it is not unconceivable that historical narratives really promote social cohesion even if they were once highly divisive issues.

9.6 Conclusions

This chapter considered the dilemmas of whether it is useful and desirable to reach back to the idea of the historical constitution and national emotions to create a sense of community. It approached the question from a non-legalistic point of view and contended that it might be useful and desirable but only under certain circumstances. It also stressed that whether these conditions prevail can only be established retrospectively. Since 2010, several right-wing voters have supported the historicization of politics and politically less committed voters have become aware of the importance of the history of the political community, but several opponents of the government have considered (and are still considering) the references to the historical constitution as an anachronistic effort which turns the attention towards the (less glorious) past instead of the future.

Thus, historical reminiscences, including the references to the historical constitution, might serve the cause of peaceful community building – but they can easily be focal points of intensive social conflicts as well. Counter-narratives which challenge the historical narrative of the new Fundamental Law or the usefulness of any historical narratives on a constitutional level in community building are flourishing in Hungary.Footnote ⁴¹ Consequently, as for now, we can’t estimate whether community building by historical narratives and by references to the historical constitution will be a successful attempt. Even if social integration based on historical references has been launched on a rocky way, its polarizing effect might be chilled and transformed into an integrative power. Time will tell us whether constitutional references to the historical constitution will be successful in promoting social cohesion or it will fail due to the insurmountable gap existing between the two camps of the political community.

10.1 Introduction

Starting from the last part of the nineteenth century but especially after the coming into force of the Fundamental Law (2012, FL),Footnote ¹ various scholarly definitions have emerged about what the historical constitution of Hungary means, what its importance in the life of the nation is and how it had been able to change over time. The historical constitution was always a concept used in many different and conflicting waysFootnote ² and it has retained this quality in recent years.

Hungary did not have a long-lasting written constitution until the adoption of the communist constitution in 1949, which ended the era of the millennium-old uncodified Hungarian historical constitution that governed the eras of the kingdom until 1918Footnote ³ and monarchy without a monarch (1920–1945). Hungary’s post-communist (liberal) Constitution (Act XX of 1949 on the Constitution of the Republic of Hungary, hereinafter: Constitution)Footnote ⁴ did not contain any reference to the historical constitution, nor did the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court (CC). The text, however, included specific provisions about the principle of democracy and the rule of law and had a chapter on fundamental rights. These provisions, and the entire substantially amended Constitution (1989–1990), along with membership of the CoE, NATO and the EU, set Hungary on a special, Western-oriented path instead of the former Eastern one (with the Warsaw Pact, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and socialist ideology on society, state and law). Since 2012, the historical constitution has become a constitutional concept after decades of justified abandonment. It appeared in the Fundamental Law of Hungary (FL), the illiberal constitution replacing the post-communist one, and the jurisprudence of the CC – both link it to the concept of constitutional identity. The FL requires that the constitution must be interpreted in accordance with the achievements of the historical constitution and that the constitutional identity of Hungary rooted in the historical constitution must be protected.

Against this background, this chapter claims that the narrative of the Hungarian historical constitution as a constitutional concept that has been becoming predominant in legal texts and scholarly works is conducive to illiberalism.Footnote ⁵ It is so because, instead of leaving it in the domain of historical studies, it has been used by political and constitutional actors to oppose liberal values. Two arguments are presented to justify this claim.

First, the contemporary narratives on the two most important constitutive components of the historical constitution, that is, continuity and rights expansion, are contrasted with legal measures introduced in the second part of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. The documented history of Hungarian suffrage, minority rights protection under the realm of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the changes in the form of state after WWI support the view that contemporary claims on rights expansion and continuity cannot be verified. It is suggested that the situation would be contrary: legal changes of that time rather imply exclusion and rights restriction and support the view of the discontinuity of the historical constitution. Second, the relevant jurisprudence of the Hungarian Constitutional Court suggests that the finality of introducing the historical constitution into the constitutional text, and their subsequent linking to the concept of constitutional identity, was to secure the traditional Westphalian understanding of ethnic-national sovereignty, mainly against the rule of law, that is, EU obligations and globalization.

In this light, the chapter is structured as follows: Section 10.2 gives a brief overview of how the term historical constitution has appeared in the constitutional text and the Hungarian literature. Section 10.3 will contrast views emerging in the literature about the two components of historical constitution, that is, rights expansion and continuity, and the legal and social reality of that era when the related reforms were introduced. Section 10.4 analyses the CC’s relevant jurisprudence to show how judges got inspired by the scholarly narratives of the historical constitution and includes concluding remarks.

10.2 Appearance of the Term ‘Historical Constitution’

After the adoption of the FL, which is a complete opposite of the post-communist Constitution in terms of expressis verbis value statements and historical references,Footnote ⁶ scholars immediately started to analyse the original version and, later on, its amendments. The term ‘historical constitution’ has been used, again, for different purposes, which is traceable not only in scholarly works but in the case law of the CC, due to the vagueness of the term and the fact that the constitutional text uses a concept that implies the lack of a codified constitution. It brings about a sense of anachronism instead of a forward-looking perspective and attempts to justify the Hungarian illiberalism, from both a scholarly and legal perspective.

10.3 The Contrast

10.4 Conclusion

This chapter claims that the narrative of the Hungarian historical constitution as a constitutional concept is conducive to illiberalism. It relies on, first, the contemporary narratives of continuity and rights expansion, which are the two most important constitutive components of the historical constitution. These narratives then have been contrasted with legal measures introduced in the second part of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries and the changes in the form of government until 1949. Second, it considers the jurisprudence of the CC on linking two newly emerged concepts of the Hungarian constitutional law: the historical constitution and constitutional identity.

In connection to the narrative on the expansion of the right, as explored through the examples of the right to vote and the right of nationalities, it was found that neither of them represented any inclusive attitude. However, their regulation and, thus, the will of the political decision-maker, focused on maintaining the status quo and expressed an exclusive understanding of sovereignty. It should be noted that this understanding, not including the right to vote issues, certainly was one of the legitimate options open for them at that time.

It could be seen that continuity refers to the permanence of the historical constitution and implicitly its fundamental constituent element, the Holy Crown. The idea of the historical constitution, including the doctrine of the Holy Crown, was disrupted already in 1946. The lawmaker of the interwar period considered the governor as a substitute for the king; the form of state was a monarchy without a monarch. Even if statehood has continuously existed, it does not necessarily mean that its historical symbol, as a public law institution (the Holy Crown), needs to exist as well. In fact, it was not present in the public law arena after the end of WWII for decades. Therefore, no continuity can be claimed in which the FL could fit.

In relation to the jurisprudence of the CC, two main points deserve to be made. The first is that the CC cannot really and meaningfully apply the relevant historical constitution-related provisions of the FL. As research shows, it mostly selects the (ineffective) rules of the historical constitution to establish that this rule is in harmony with the FL but does not make any genuine interpretation in this regard.

The second is that, when it does apply it (more ‘meaningfully’), due to the text of the FL, the CC necessarily links the term historical constitution with history, constitutional identity and sovereignty. This interpretation then could potentially be used against the collective entity to which Hungary belongs (i.e., the EU). Finally, it seems now that the overall finality of introducing the historical constitution and its achievements into the FL, and its subsequent linking to the concept of constitutional identity, was to use it for securing the traditional Westfalian understanding of ethnic-national sovereignty, mainly against EU obligations. It does not seem to offer, neither in the practice nor in the text of the CC rulings, anything that resembles inclusion, protection of rights, unity in diversity, constitutional dialogue and collaboration or a liberal approach towards constitutionalism and democracy. Moreover, it seems to be relying on one of the narratives of the concept of the ‘historical constitution’, which asserts that its main focus has always been the defence of statehood against ‘empires’.

Thus, the historical constitution has been used by political and constitutional actors to jointly oppose liberal values making this constitutional concept conducive to illiberalism.

11.1 Introduction: From the West of the East, to the East of the West

On 12 June 1992, Edgar Savisaar, by then already the former head of Estonia’s 1990–1992 transitional government,Footnote ¹ gave a speech entitled Eesti – Euroopa – maailm: geopoliitiline etüüd [Estonia – Europe – The World: A Geopolitical étude].Footnote ² Savisaar opens his talk by posing Estonia’s integration to Europe as an ‘inescapable imperative’. ‘Our geopolitical situation over the last year has changed substantially’, explains Savisaar.

It is hardly surprising that economists and politicians of the ‘times of transition’ thought of Estonia’s new geopolitical position and Estonia’s aims and possibilities in relation to the recent past of the Soviet era. Savisaar’s juxtaposition between Soviet Estonia (‘a generator of ideas’) and the newly independent Estonia (which is ‘lagging behind’) is greatly simplifying,Footnote ⁴ yet it is hard to disagree with his basic observation of Estonia’s substantially changed geopolitical position – from the West of the Soviet Union to the East of Europe. Like many others before and since, Savisaar links ‘the East’ with passivity and ‘the West’ with leadership, as if this combination was a geopolitical inevitability rather than a cultural construct.

This chapter is interested in the ways that Estonia’s self-perception has changed in relation to Estonians’ European imaginaries. More specifically, the focus is on co-articulating the ‘Soviet question’ in relation to the ‘European question’: in what ways did the decades of Soviet rule impact the understanding of Europe and Europeanness in Estonian national imaginaries? In such an analysis, different factors have to be taken into account: the understanding of Europeanness before the Soviet era; the matter of the Soviet colonial matrix of power; changes within the USSR over the decades in question; the long-rooted orientalization of Eastern Europe in West-European imaginaries; and the role of Soviet state-promoted ideologies on local cultural imaginaries. The ‘Soviet question’, as this exploration will show, was never solely a question about the Soviet impact, but rather about how the intertwining of Soviet era sociopolitical realities with pre-Soviet value-systems produced complex and to some extent competing geographies of belonging.

In order to address this complex set of problems, it is useful to proceed from a multi-scalar understanding of social phenomena. From this perspective, Estonia’s geopolitical ‘relocation’ from the Soviet West to the European East, occasioned by the re-establishment of the Estonian republic, can be articulated as a shift in the geopolitical scale-system. In more general terms, attention to scale as a ‘tool for bounding space at different geographical resolutions’Footnote ⁵ enables us to perceive historical conditions as complexly multiscalar. A multiscalar approach reveals how meaning-making unfolds through interaction across different scales of sociopolitical realities and imaginaries, and how in the Soviet-era Estonian SSR, local, regional and global scales formed complex and dynamic systems of inter-dependency.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-establishment of the Estonian Republic brought about substantial changes at all levels of social and political existence. During the decades of the Estonian SSR, the general category of ‘the West’ (not ‘Europe’) had provided a cultural counterpoint to ‘Sovietness’, and the scale of Europeanness was significantly deactivated. At the same time, analysis does reveal the hazy category of a tacit, internalized Europeanness, something perceivable mostly in contrast with certain imaginaries of Russianness. This tacit Europeanness included class and cultural competency and knowledge of European cultural traditions, yet it was only weakly (if at all) connected to then-current cultural developments in Europe. It lacked a dialogical dimension. In the early post-Soviet years, the newly rescaled relationship to Europe relied on longstanding imaginaries, yet it also – as Edgar Savisaar’s 1992 speech attests – went through the shock of Estonia ‘becoming the East’. The new situation (re)activated the concept of Europe as an imperative category and a point of reference for both political and cultural frameworks.

This chapter will first articulate the theoretical framework of cultural imaginaries and multiscalar thinking and then proceed to analyse the scalar cultural logic of the Soviet era, with a focus on the ‘question of Europe’. The last section will summarize the consequences following from the re-establishment of Estonian independence. The complexities of the Soviet decades are, of course, considerable; the present essay will concentrate on the late Soviet period, from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. The chapter will focus on the Estonian-speaking cultural zone: while such a choice is necessitated by the scarcity of data concerning European imaginaries among other population groups in Soviet and early post-Soviet Estonia, it also conveys the logic of the present project. By the 2020s, Russophone populations have become to a significant extent integrated within Estonia’s political and cultural sphere, yet, during the early post-Soviet period, when Estonia’s policies of integration with Europe were formulated, Russophone populations participated in this process only marginally.

11.2 Theoretical Framework: Cultural Imaginaries and Their Role in Identity-Production

To understand sociocultural processes during periods of (semi-)authoritarian rule, the distinction between state policies and cultural imaginaries helps to avoid simplifying arguments about mass-level ‘ideological brain-washing’ or an organized state-production of certain kinds of personality-types, leading to uncritical categorizations such as homo sovieticus.Footnote ⁶ State ideology and state policies are one factor, but not the only factor, contributing to people’s views and behaviours – while this premise is taken for granted in analyses of democratic societies, it is too often overlooked in writings about the former Socialist bloc. Soviet rule was firmly established in the Baltics only at the end of the 1940sFootnote ⁷ and its heyday lasted barely forty years. During these decades, people’s thoughts and value-systems continued to include ideas, values and beliefs from the pre-Soviet era. These became mixed with state-imposed ideologies and were additionally impacted by a large variety of images and narratives from cultural zones beyond the Soviet sphere – existentialist writings by Albert Camus were widely read, popular North-American TV serials (Dallas, for example) were available in northern Estonia by way of Finnish broadcasting and Eastern religious thought and global environmental discussions made their mark. The notion of ‘cultural imaginaries’ is useful in keeping a distinction between the ideological networks of institutionalized power and the popular circulation of ideas. This distinction is, of course, partial, as both are hazy and shifting categories which necessarily also influence each other. Nevertheless, identifiable kernels remain: a canonical speech by Lenin and the textbook of the Communist Party share little in common with Beatles’ songs, Disney comics, nineteenth-century Estonian patriotic poetry and a grandmother’s stories about life in the times of an independent Estonia – but they all circulated and comingled together in the Estonian cultural space.

I use the term ‘cultural imaginaries’ to designate diverse, multiscalar, hazy, ever-changing sets of images, ideas, and values that are accepted by the general population in any given period and thus form a tacit self-knowledge of that society. In this field, communal identity is produced metonymically, foregrounding certain parts at the expense of others – not everyone’s voice is heard at every moment.Footnote ⁸ Us–them figurations function as important formal categories that condition cultural imaginaries – thus one of the questions in this investigation is whether and under what conditions Europe was considered as ‘us’. Imaginaries form thematic clusters, which occasionally get condensed into core images that attain symbolic value and start to function metaphorically. Such core images become kernels for the signification of national identity – in Estonia, these have included the pillars of Tartu University, the medieval towers of Tallinn, junipers on the island of Saaremaa, Haapsalu castle, imagery from nineteenth-century romantic poetry and much more. Notably, these core images have historic depth – they carry the sense of ‘having been there’ for centuries, if not for thousands of years. Presentist imaginaries about social existence in any given era are bound together with a pre-existing fabric of interconnected values, ideas and images.

The concept of cultural imaginaries is related to Charles Taylor’s concept of the ‘social imaginary’, which Taylor articulated as ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’.Footnote ⁹ Cultural and social imaginaries are to a significant extent overlapping concepts and the ‘political imaginary’ – including ‘constitutional imaginary’ – belongs to the same set. For Taylor, ‘social imaginary’ describes the common ground of a particular moment in the existence of a society; as Jiří Přibáň notes, this concept puts an emphasis on ‘the symbolic system of images and normative self-descriptions of society as the moral and meaningful unit’.Footnote ¹⁰ My own use of ‘cultural imaginaries’ includes both the present-era social and political imaginaries in a given culture and an emphasis on cultural continuity; this term also allows scholars to take account of the role of cultural artefacts – in architecture, visual arts, literature, film – in shaping and preserving shared imaginaries. I have elsewhere articulated the threefold temporality of cultural imaginaries: ‘Cultural imaginaries consist of the shared images and narratives of the past, patterns of behavior for the present, and visions for the national future that together shape the self-conception of the community.’Footnote ¹¹ In historical terms, the logic of shared imaginaries reflects larger global processes of growing diversification: over the last decades, the role of nationally shared imaginaries has shrunk substantially yet in the Soviet era, and during the first post-Soviet decade, their role was considerable.

Accessing something that is not fixed and not even fully articulated in a given culture will, of course, pose a challenge for scholars. Cultural imaginaries can be traced in life stories, diaries, memoirs and through performing interviews – all of which raise questions about the unreliability of memory, selective remembering techniques and narrative strategies. The lack of ‘eventness’ of the shared cultural common ground poses additional problems: the common cultural elements might be taken for granted to such an extent that they are not thematized in life stories. Media, fiction and film thus become valuable gateways to era-specific imaginaries, partly due to the sheer volume of such sources, which makes it possible to detect repeating patterns. However, reliable research into era-specific imaginaries is perhaps best achieved through comparative methods which combine and compare the aforementioned sources.

Cultural imaginaries – like any other cultural phenomenon – can be analysed at different levels of generalization and focus. Imaginaries can be analysed across different scales – we might talk of imaginaries with a transnational spread or focus on national imaginaries, imaginaries that can typically be found within a nation-state. National imaginaries may well internalize transcultural ideas and practices – and reimagine them as specific to a given national culture.

In analysing the constitution of shared imaginaries, a pluriscalar approach allows us to observe the multiplicity of processes involved in meaning-making. Section 11.3 will offer a short introduction to scalar analysis and then delineate the basic outline of this threefold cultural logic, in order to then locate the European imaginaries within this network of constitutive power-relations.

11.3 Pluriscalarity in the Sociopolitical Context of the Soviet Union as the Ground for European Imaginaries

In principle, there are countless ways to scale reality: in world-systems theory, the global world functions as the dominant scale; in phenomenological approaches, the human body and its experience provides the primary access to the world. Political geographers have held debates about the ontological status of scales, asking if scale is ‘a material thing’ or else an arbitrary, socially produced ‘mental device which allows us to make sense of our existence’.Footnote ¹² Scale-systems have been envisioned in different ways, as forming nested systems, or concentric ones, or ladder-type hierarchies or, following Bruno Latour, as networks without clear structure and subordinations.Footnote ¹³ A ‘trilogy of geographical scales’ is often used: a three-scale analysis distinguishes between international or global, national or state-scale and intra-national scales.Footnote ¹⁴

In sociohistorical analyses, the nation-state or a particular region is often taken as the central focus, leading to classification of scales as ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ with respect to the nation-state.Footnote ¹⁵ For a nation-state, the state-level forms the ‘here and now’ of the world, with other layers forming hierarchical constellations and standing in relation to this primary ground. Edgar Savisaar’s 1992 speech, introduced at the start of this chapter, chose an international relations approach, in which three basic scales – Estonia, Europe and the world – were used to analyse smaller national and regional units, including different European countries, the Baltic states, Russia, China and more.

For the present purposes it is necessary to distinguish between cultural imaginaries and sociopolitical conditions. While scalar hierarchies tend to be dominated by sociopolitical facts (such as belonging to a union of states of being a part of an empire), cultural imaginaries question and complicate such sociopolitical realities and create alternative geographies of belonging. Our questions include: to what extent were European imaginaries in the Soviet era tied to pre-existing culture-specific imaginaries and to what extent did they reflect specific sociopolitical conditions? Which scales become foregrounded and which ones recede? How do scalar hierarchies organize the cultural distribution of meanings and values? Even when one limits the main focus to just a single scale – the nation-scale and its European imaginaries in the present case – this scale assumes its full meaning only in the context of the other scalar hierarchies of the era.

11.4 The Changing Location of Europe

In the all-Soviet scale of the post-war era, Europe as a relatively coherent entity disappeared; instead, Europe was split into the Soviet zone of influence and capitalist Western Europe. Eastern Europe, subject to guidance from Moscow, functioned as an extension of the Soviet sphere, while Western Europe became inaccessible to the general Soviet citizenry.

It is worth noting that the early Soviet Union had been significantly better connected to Europe: figures like Vladimir Mayakovsky could spend extended periods in Paris, Ilya Ehrenburg would actively contribute to Soviet press while living in Paris, Soviet scientists published in Western journals and interacted with Western colleagues. Germany, of course, was an important partner for the USSR in the interwar period, with many major German companies maintaining some presence there.Footnote ²¹ This sustained connectedness was partially due to weaknesses in the state of the USSR in its early history; it was only later on that scientific and military collaboration with the Germans and with the rest of the world came to be regarded with great suspicion by Stalin, inspiring trials and persecutions.

In the Khrushchev era, networks of interaction were developed anew – delegations of architects, for example, travelled to Scandinavia and to Western Europe, to learn about mass-scale urban planning in line with new factory-assembled construction methods.Footnote ²² Yet westward travel from the Socialist bloc remained open only for a limited number of political, cultural and scientific or economic elites and was a complex undertaking with onerous limitations.

11.5 The Location of Europe from the Estonian Perspective: Sociopolitical Realities

For Estonians, Soviet-era sociopolitical realities differed vastly from those in pre-Soviet times. The pre-war Estonian Republic had been situated in what retrospectively looked like a clearly defined system of nested sociopolitical scalarity: Estonia – Europe – the world. This system was interwoven by various political, economic and cultural networks.

The Soviet colonial matrix of power dismantled historical ties that had organized the Baltic sea region and had linked Estonia with other European countries. Colonial-style centre–periphery relations made it nearly impossible for the Soviet borderlands (including the Estonian SSR) to sustain or develop direct connections with institutions or businesses outside the USSR. Prior to the Soviet annexation, geographical and linguistic proximity with Finland had facilitated close, even intimate relations between Estonians and Finns – connections included business and politics, of course, but also ties of love and friendship.Footnote ²⁷ With the new era, political, economic and cultural interactions with the world outside the USSR had to be routed through Moscow; in such instances, republic-level interests were secondary and personal connections unsustainable. This was a particularly suggestive example of the colonial matrix of control exerted by the USSR, as regards the Estonian SSR: the disruption and rerouting of former economic and cultural ties that had formerly bound Estonia closely with Finland and other European countries.Footnote ²⁸ As a result, not only did Estonia cease to be a political and economic entity which could interact with the rest of the world in pursuit of its own interests, the whole sociocultural sphere was permeated with such limitations: only on rare occasions could Estonian musicians participate in major international competitions outside the Soviet UnionFootnote ²⁹ and foreign films reached Estonian audiences only after being selected, cut, censored and dubbed in Russia, with Estonian subtitles composed according to the Russian dubbing, and without access to the original.Footnote ³⁰ Cultural exchanges of the late Soviet years, such as Estonian theatre performances in Finland and Finnish theatre troupes’ visits to Estonia could not bypass Moscow.Footnote ³¹ Soviet tourist groups did occasionally include members of the Estonian Soviet elite, but the company as a whole would in such cases be identified as Soviet.Footnote ³² The ‘iron curtain’ hid the borderlands more profoundly than it hid the Soviet centre: for most of the rest of the world, the Soviet Union became equated with Russia.

Given the structural hindrance suffered by Estonian scientists and artists seeking contact with the outside world, it was, paradoxically, Leningrad and (to a lesser extent) Moscow that started to function as access points to Europe – these were the cities one could visit to gain access to information, knowledge and high art.Footnote ³³ In the Russian centres, a certain limited openness was restored after the period of Stalinist excess and research budgets were by far more generous than those disbursed in the borderlands. Leading Russian academic centres could order scientific journals published in the West and thus open up access to global knowledge production. Estonian scholars and intellectuals would visit libraries in Leningrad and Moscow to browse through Western scholarly and cultural journals that were indispensable for their work: the library at the Hermitage, for example, included exhibition catalogues and art journals that never reached Estonian libraries.Footnote ³⁴ International artists would more likely visit Moscow and Leningrad than Tallinn; similarly, the occasional exhibitions of Western art (such as the Picasso exhibition in 1956) were shown in Moscow and Leningrad and nowhere else.Footnote ³⁵ The Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow 1957, which included many Western participants, gave many visiting Estonians inspiring encounters with the contemporary Western cultural sphere.Footnote ³⁶ There were historical roots to this phenomenon: St Petersburg, historically Estonia’s closest major European city, had long functioned for Estonians as an access point to Europe. During the late Tsarist era, this city functioned for many cultural figures (Johann Köler, Miina Härma) as a place to acquire (typically German-style) education or to find fulfilling employment.Footnote ³⁷

The Europeanness of Russia more broadly, however, had also been repeatedly contested over different periods by Russian cultural elites themselves – most famously by Pyotr Chaadayev in his First Philosophical Letter (1829): the author argued that Russians had ‘bestowed not even a single idea upon the fund of human ideas, contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit’.Footnote ³⁸ Madina Tlostanova has used the notion of the ‘quasi-Western subaltern Russian Empire’ (Tlostanova)Footnote ³⁹ to describe Russia’s historical struggle with its subalternity or its feeling of secondariness with regard to other major European powers.Footnote ⁴⁰ For visiting Estonians, similarly, the experience of visiting Leningrad and Moscow often included a high degree of ambivalence.

11.6 The Aesthetics of Europeanness: Continuities in Cultural Imaginaries across Political Regime Changes

The double dispersal of Europe – its split into two and its subsumption within the larger category of the ‘West’ – could not erase Europe from Estonian cultural imaginaries. The slowness, inertia and multiplicity of cultural processes guarantees the preservation of traces of ‘what used to be’ throughout periods increasingly dominated by new sets of values and ideas. An annexation or a revolution can change the sociopolitical order of a state or a territory within a period of a few years, yet the process of changing collectively shared cultural understandings might well take decades and may only ever be partially successful. At a personal and regional level, continuity is also sustained by material culture and by natural environment: the same physical items, similar architectural structures and kindred topographical features support the sense of continuity or permanence.

After the Soviet takeover, the new regime contended against earlier cultural traditions and values and created new hybrid imaginaries, yet supposedly displaced images and values and tropes persisted. Key cultural works and events of various kind, notably those attached to school curricula, continued to function as resources for cultural continuity.Footnote ⁴¹ The Soviet state could not impose a wholesale rejection of major cultural developments before the Soviet era, so much of the pre-Soviet Estonian cultural canon was appropriated into the Soviet ideological framework and continued its cultural circulation. During the Soviet era, Estonian school curricula included nineteenth-century patriotic songs and poems, but also classic twentieth-century novels that had defined a pre-Soviet national consciousness.Footnote ⁴² For the imaginaries about Estonia’s situatedness vis-à-vis Europe, the early twentieth-century Noor-Eesti (Young Estonia) movement played a special role.

The Noor-Eesti movement, founded in 1905, earned its place in the Estonian cultural canon for its Nietzschean programme of radical cultural innovation.Footnote ⁴³ Its young members decisively rejected the German and Russian influences that had been dominant in nineteenth-century Estonian culture, instead they valorised Scandinavian and Romance cultures.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such nuances became lost in popular imaginaries, however, and Noor-Eesti became synonymous with the aspiration towards Europeanness in general. In its 1905 manifesto Noorte püüded [The Strivings of Young People], the movement declared that its mission was ‘to seek those aims and forms, to which we are guided, from one direction, by the spirit of our nation and the natural capacities and requirements of our nation, and, from the other direction, by European culture’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The same text also supplied the slogan ‘Let’s be Estonians, but let’s also become Europeans!’ and the short catch-phrase ‘More culture! More European-style culture!’Footnote ⁴⁶ The formulaic structure of these proclamations made their dissemination all the easier.

The Noor-Eesti movement was treated critically during the period of high Stalinism,Footnote ⁴⁷ but the Khrushchev era re-established its cultural importance. Somewhat paradoxically, the Noor-Eesti slogan found its way into Soviet school curricula: it was helpful that Noor-Eesti leaders had been excited about the 1905 revolution, since this positioned them on the ‘right’ side of history.Footnote ⁴⁸ Voldemar Miller wrote in the weekly Sirp ja Vasar, in 1970: ‘The Noor-Eesti movement developed under the direct impact of the 1905–1906 revolution, their slogan was “Let’s be Estonians, but let’s also become Europeans!” The Noor-Eesti movement turned into an important landmark (verstapost) in the development of the aesthetic view of Estonians, in their Europeanization.’Footnote ⁴⁹ And Mai Levin, in 1979, stressed in the same weekly newspaper the role of Noor-Eesti in the context of its era, while pointing to the combination of the European and the national: ‘at this stage of the development of national culture, a deeper investment in European culture was both unavoidable and necessary, much as the demand for a national subject matter in art was objectively conditioned’.Footnote ⁵⁰

For Noor-Eesti, Europeanness was an aesthetic, not a political category – this was an important precondition for the adoption of their slogan in the Soviet era. In cultural circulation, the Noor-Eesti declaration acquired a life of its own, however, partly independent of its original historical context. A colourful example is provided in Herbert Vainu’s vulgar-Soviet lampoon of a typical member of Soviet Estonia’s economic elite:

Such an easy appropriation suggests that, by the late Soviet era, the Noor-Eesti dictum had become a commonplace in Estonia’s cultural self-identification. It had engraved itself as a cultural imaginary with historic depth, one of those core ideas with a special symbolic value that play a significant role in building and sustaining national identity. Notably, this imaginary figured the future of Estonian culture as securely bound together with that of Europe.

Yet, even as Noor-Eesti foregrounded the necessity of close relations with Scandinavian and Romance cultural spheres, its central statement is directed elsewhere: it is the acknowledgement of a lack. For Noor-Eesti, Estonian Europeanness was not a given, but rather an aim and a direction. Noor-Eesti’s leading voices coupled their European aspirations with criticism of the ‘overly Germanic’ Estonian culture of their era. In its original context, the slogan hardly offered an easy positive identification with Europe, yet, in the Soviet context, it nevertheless served to affirm Estonia’s imaginary affiliation with Europe – Noor-Eesti members had, after all, freely travelled all over Europe. The temporal distance from Noor-Eesti times was necessary for their call to crystallize into a symbolic gesture and the historic distance was further accentuated by the cultural rupture of the Soviet annexation. I have elsewhere described such a situation through the double dialectics of nostalgia and colonial rupture: ‘first, the colonial split initiated a discourse of national nostalgia; and second, the nostalgic lens further intensified the colonial conflict’.Footnote ⁵³ The mere fact of the Soviet annexation guaranteed the Noor-Eesti slogan a special place in national imaginaries.

11.7 Binarisms in Everyday Cultural Imaginaries: Europe and Russia

In addition to the persistence and deepening of various pre-Soviet cultural aspirations, era-specific factors – especially those linked to the Soviet-era colonial conflict – also contributed to the cultural imaginary of Estonia’s Europeanness. The ‘Soviet gaze’ classed the Pribaltika as the ‘Soviet West’ and thus supported local self-understandings as being more Western than the rest of the USSR. Examples abound: Elena Zubkova even opens her monograph Pribaltika i Kreml’ (The Baltics and the Kremlin) with a recollection of the Soviet Pribaltika enjoying a special significance for those living in the USSR.Footnote ⁵⁴ Art curator Alla Rosenfeld remembers: ‘I traveled to Tallinn to see art exhibitions, which seemed so Western-like and avant-garde for us in Leningrad, where it was almost impossible to exhibit openly what they were showing in Estonia’.Footnote ⁵⁵ While the common rhetoric labelled the Balts as ‘Western’, in this context, the semantic difference between ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ was irrelevant: Estonia as ‘Western’ could only signify Western in European terms.

Estonians, for their part, shored up their national pride together with their European difference by juxtaposing themselves against the new Soviet-era settlers, whom they homogenized into a coherent entity they referred to as ‘Russians’. Estonian manners and habits were deemed superior, starting from the everyday basics: eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells carelessly about was held in disdain, the use of low-quality, strongly smelling cooking oil (as compared to relatively odourless margarine) was considered an inferior cultural practice. ‘Tuck your shirt in, son – you are not some kind of a Russian’, a man interviewed in 1993 remembers his grandmother saying. ‘At home it was always important to behave like a proper Estonian and not to shame oneself with behaving like a Russian’, this informant added.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such everyday oppositions functioned as a decolonial reaction, a strategy for supporting communal self-respect.

Even during the era of Soviet censorship, oppositional motifs found their way into fiction, often through passing remarks or marginal characters. Characters such as Georgi Nikanorov in Teet Kallas’s Eiseni tänav (Eisen Street, 1979) or Bobrin in Mats Traat’s Rippsild (Suspension Bridge, 1980) are presented as simpletons compared to Estonians with their complex inner dilemmas. Bobrin gives a young Estonian couple an embarrassingly banal speech about the importance of making children: ‘Down with the pants and skirts, off with the bras and undershirts, out with the fake modesty – and then go at it!’Footnote ⁵⁷ Nikanorov, the father of five children, encourages his former colleague Rein to follow a similar path: to beget children in order to get a new apartment with all the modern comforts in a Soviet suburb. Both Bobrin and Nikanorov are loud, robust and simpleminded, not to be taken seriously. In Rippsild there is also a passing reference to an open conflict between different nationalities: when Kaida, a young Estonian woman, starts a relationship with a Russian-speaking man from Ukraine, Kaida’s mother refuses to acknowledge their marriage and takes her daughter’s child away to live with herself.

In Lilli Promet’s novel Primavera (1971), the Estonian–Russian juxtaposition is developed in considerable detail. The main character, Saskia, an actress, provides a lengthy description of her everyday circumstances:

Greasy food, onions, cabbage, noisy parties sliding into destructive behaviour, non-participation in cultural life, primitive modes of gender relations – one finds here a suggestive list of era-specific attributions externalized onto the image of the cultural Other: the unwanted, unwelcome new settler, whose growing presence was a continual marker of the colonial-style disregard for local interests.Footnote ⁵⁸

Promet’s Primavera offers a nearly perfect setting for considering the Europeanness of Estonians: the novel accompanies an Estonian actress on a Soviet tourist trip to Italy, where Saskia shares a hotel room with Fevronia, a woman from Russia.Footnote ⁵⁹ Slender Saskia enjoys the trip fully, orients herself easily in art museums, drinks wine in local cafes, attracts the interest of several male companions and is mistaken for a German. Full-figured Fevronia, in contrast to Saskia, is clearly out of place in Italy: she displays ignorance and chauvinistic attitudes and is demanding and pretentious. Like the Italians, Saskia relies on strong coffee for energy, whereas Fevronia is upset when tea is unavailable. While Saskia and her attentive male companions enjoy Italian street life until late in the night, Fevronia gets lost because she is unable to read the Latin alphabet. In short, the novel emphasizes the Europeanness of the Estonian woman through her contrast with her markedly ‘less cultured’ Russian roommate. The contrast between Saskia and Fevronia is so extreme that the Finnish reviewer Pekka Lilja had to cautiously admit, in his review of the Finnish translation in 1977, that Fevronia’s character is presented in a such a grotesque light that it could ‘almost be considered racist’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Pekka Lilja proposed that Promet’s novel escaped serious imputation of racism by introducing another Russian, Konstantin, an intelligent and knowledgeable Russian professor, a researcher of classical culture.Footnote ⁶¹ Saskia’s new Russian-speaking friends – a Jewish writer and the Russian professor – also accommodate themselves to the Italian setting with easy elegance and they share Saskia’s irritation with plump, ignorant Fevronia. In short, these two men, coming from Russia, are as European as Saskia is. Europeanness thus turns out to be correlated to categories of class and education: a Russian intellectual turns out to be no less European than his Estonian counterpart. The motif appears similarly in the novel Rippsild, where Dr Levin, whom an Estonian couple visits for treatment in Leningrad, is presented as both knowledgeable and desirable.

In a way, this corresponds to the Noor-Eesti mode of thinking: one becomes European by attuning oneself to European culture, through study and research, through choosing certain modes of creative self-expression. Europeanness is here understood as a category of aesthetics and knowledge. At the same time, the novel pokes fun of Fevronia’s diligent note-taking – the assumption is that the necessary knowledge should always already have been acquired and acquired somehow effortlessly and playfully. According to this formula, being European implies lightness, pleasure and enjoyment, instead of a wrong-spirited scribbling of a guide’s already oversimplified explanations – being European is characterized by a certain aesthetics of being, which the novel elaborates as an ontological positioning towards the surrounding world.

Promet’s novel Primavera follows characters in exceptional circumstances – only very few from Soviet Estonia could enjoy leisure trips to Italy. The actress Saskia, likewise, has an exceptional profile: how many in the Estonian SSR would have displayed similar ease in recognizing and appreciating classical works of art? Yet thousands read Promet’s novel, laughed at Fevronia and enjoyed the admiration that Saskia attracted on her fictional travels. The passive, non-dialogic Europeanness of a reader of fiction who faces not actual people in Italian streets and cafes, but instead follows words on the printed page and travels in an imaginary Europe from his or her cosy armchair – such armchair-Europeanness was secure from threats of Orientalization and excluded the least hint of cultural discomfort. The novel’s ambition, however, met with some indignities in its Finnish translation: the editor was obliged to correct many mistakes about Italy and its classical heritage.Footnote ⁶² But, since rumours of Finnish editorial corrections would hardly reach Soviet Estonian audiences, Saskia’s European success could be enjoyed domestically without critical disturbance.

In one of the 1976 issues of the cultural weekly Sirp ja Vasar, a group of Estonian elites shared their travel impressions after the trip to Canada and the United States. Among other general commentaries, the writer Enn Vetemaa observed casually: ‘For the European, Canada feels homier, both in terms of architecture and even in interpersonal relations. The United States feels inadvertently more foreign.’Footnote ⁶³ In the context of North America, Vetemaa easily identified with Europe. Even as the scale of Europe was in Soviet era significantly deactivated, the identification with Europe clearly survived in national imaginaries as embedded within the category of Estonianness.

11.8 From Soviet to Post-Soviet: Changes and Continuities

The armchair-Europeanness that had been part of the Estonian self-image in the Soviet era was shaken up in the early 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about a rescaling of geopolitical realities and accompanying imaginaries. Transition-era political rhetoric foregrounded the vocabulary of a return: the emphasis was on the re-establishment of the independent state and re-connecting Estonia politically and economically with the rest of Europe and the world.Footnote ⁶⁴ The discourse of restoration also implied a return to the nested scalar system ‘Estonia – Europe – the world’ or, in the more detailed version, ‘Estonia – the Baltic sea region – Europe – the world’. Yet, in the 1990s, the dream of such safely nested belongingness could be realized only partially: the Soviet Union, albeit now dissolved, continued to loom over the new era with its continuing presence in global political imaginaries. What used to be the Soviet Union was now commonly referred to as ‘the former Soviet sphere’ and what used to be the Socialist bloc or the Soviet sphere of influence now became the so-called post-socialist countries.

From the late 1980s onward, Estonians and other non-Russian nationalities of the USSR had to struggle against the cultural erasure that had taken place during the past half century, when one geopolitical label – the Soviet Union – had obscured the great diversity within its imperial borders. Notes taken at the European Student Forum 1989 in Bologna are telling. Jüri Luik, who later made a name for himself as a distinguished politician, was then one of the two participating Estonian students and commented on how Estonians had to contend with the perspective of the students from the EEC countries:

As Luik observes, the renewal of actual, two-way encounters led to the realization that there was a clear and uncomfortable mismatch between the Estonians’ sense of Europeanness and the EEC-countries’ more exclusive vision of Europe. Such a mismatch continued to be produced by way of labels such as ‘post-Soviet’ or ‘post-socialist’ – both implying a significant difference from ‘real Europe’. The post-Soviet-era geographical imagination, like its Cold War predecessor, reinforced the historical orientalization of eastern Europe – the division of Europe into East and West – and judging the West as superior to the EastFootnote ⁶⁶ – but this was now newly strengthened by the dire need for Western investment in these societies undergoing transition.Footnote ⁶⁷ While the rarity of direct interaction with countries outside the state-socialist bloc had neutralized the relevance of orientalising visions during the Soviet Era, now new encounters with the orientalising gaze of the ‘West’ threatened Estonians’ internalized sense of Europeanness and created existential discomfort. The humiliating poverty of the years of transition exacerbated this unhappy situation.Footnote ⁶⁸

For Estonia and other ‘post-Soviet’ countries, the two simultaneous imaginary geographies – the aspirational ‘nested Europe’ and the orientalising binary judgement ‘post-Soviet East versus more advanced West’ – clashed and intermingled in disconcerting ways. The imaginary of Europe, now again very concretely tied to geopolitical realities, also became divided into different institutional entities – in political terms, it was generally not ‘Europe’, but NATO, the Schengen area, the EEC and later the EU that was the locus of Estonia’s aspirational belonging. In the Soviet era, Europeanness had survived as a cultural marker of imaginary belongingness – now, for Estonian political elites, Europeanness became understood in terms of economy, politics and, importantly, national security. Marju Lauristin and Peeter Vihalemm summarize the priorities set at the beginning of Estonian transition as ‘economic competitiveness coupled with national security’ – a combination that Lauristin and Vihalemm attested to be still in place in 2009, regardless of the deepening global economic crisis.Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus, the former Soviet empire continued its presence in political imaginaries as a reminder of military threat, lending special urgency to Estonia’s ambition to join European institutional and security frameworks.Footnote ⁷⁰

In cultural imaginaries of the transition period, regained independence raised new questions about belonging – exactly how European are we? Actual encounters with the world outside the former Eastern bloc diminished the role played by Russia and Estonia’s Russophone populations as cultural others – the role that formerly gave impetus to Estonians’ imaginary sense of Europeanness during the Soviet era. The Noor-Eesti slogan ‘Let’s be Estonians, but let’s also become Europeans!’ continued to be taught in schools, but, in a strongly future-oriented cultural era, its cultural relevance diminished. While in the Soviet-era the slogan had significant performative power, it now became part of national pedagogy, outside the active repertoire of cultural imagery.

The most widely discussed literary work of the 1990s period, the novel Piiririik (The Border State, 1993) by Emil Tode (a pen name for Tõnu Õnnepalu) was strongly marked by a sense of East-European Otherness. The main character of the novel, a gay man in Paris, feels both attraction and revulsion towards his new surroundings, with their Western consumer culture and sterile functionability. The main character’s sense of non-belonging in Paris and yet his unwillingness to return lead him to an indefinable, liminal, border-state existence and also to the realization that it is impossible to shake off one’s past: past moods, colours and landscapes continue to re-emerge in his thoughts regardless of geographic distance. While Piiririik was able to capture something important about its era, the 1990s cultural ferment escapes simple delineation – this era was characterized by great multiplicity, by a variety of hopes and aspirations, as a well as by bitter disappointments.

In Estonia, the economic crisis of the transition period was relatively short-lived: the national currency was successfully introduced in June 1992 and the economic situation started to improve in early 1993. By September 1993, the president of the Estonian Bank judged the crisis to be over.Footnote ⁷¹ In Lauristin’s and Vihalemm’s report, ‘[a]ccording to World Bank analysis, Estonia in 1994 belonged to a group of countries that had … reached high levels of political freedom and economic stabilization’.Footnote ⁷² Yet the restoration of national self-esteem and the feeling of collective agency vis-à-vis newly scaled geopolitical structures of the world required more time to develop. As with other former Eastern bloc countries, the judgemental, orientalising ‘Western gaze’ complicated this process.

In time, Estonia’s early 1990s crisis of collective agency developed into a story of collective success. By the 2010s, what had been an unstable post-colonial identity, defined by its struggle to come to terms with its Soviet heritage, had become overwritten by a new narrative gradually emerging: that of Estonia as the eco-digital nation,Footnote ⁷³ a country and culture that cherishes and cares for its well-preserved natural habitats, while also moving at the forefront in digital technology.Footnote ⁷⁴ Importantly, the ecodigital national narrative replaced the transition-era mismatch between the country’s self-image as European and the orientalising gaze of the old imperial centres of the European West: the new narrative promoted the local sense of being, in certain respects, among the most successful in Europe and being appreciated as such. The culminating point in the new national narrative might be considered the 2017 EU digital summit in Tallinn, when, according to the The New Yorker, a speech by the President of Estonia Kersti Kaljulaid earned praise from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel: ‘You’re so much further than we are’.Footnote ⁷⁵

In the 2010s, being European had become a basic condition of life, the normal paradigm for being an Estonian. The formula for achieving this had already been articulated by Jüri Luik in 1989: ‘In order to be equal, you have to be a little bit better’.

11.9 Conclusion

As we have seen, Europeanness is a relational category, its role and its function in Estonian imaginaries are dependent on other identificatory categories active at the same period. ‘Europe’ as an imaginary and as part of era-specific sociopolitical scalarity plays a different role in different eras: each era creates its own scalar logics, while activating certain geopolitical scales at the expense of others; in each era, cultural imaginaries rewrite geopolitical parameters through the lens of prior cultural experiences, thus forming competing imaginary geographies. These processes are accompanied by normative value-judgements which unavoidably enforce scalar hierarchies of higher and lower standings; secondary effects variously include feelings of superiority or otherness and processes of orientalization.

In the Soviet-era Estonia, the Soviet colonial matrix of power disabled nation-level political agency and severed economic agency. However, while the Soviet leadership was able, within a period of a few years, to reorganize Estonian governmental structures, economy and trade networks, the conservatism or inertia of processes of cultural identification made it impossible to switch the country into a full ‘Soviet’ mode of cultural self-identification. The pre-Soviet decades of cultural development, including the Noor-Eesti, call ‘Let’s be Estonians, but let’s also become Europeans!’ continued to support Estonians’ sense of Europeanness. The rather insubstantial imaginary construction of such a mental framework could, however, find support in the continuing and visible presence of pre-Soviet material culture, architecture, natural environments, specific forms of cultural self-expression and more. Continuing European standing on the cultural scale, however, gave some compensation for the enforced separation from Europe on the socioeconomic scale. Even as the Soviet colonial matrix of power worked to deactivate and downgrade the sociopolitical category of Europe, Europe continued its existence as an imagined, implicit quality Estonians could claim for themselves. The rarity of direct encounters neutralized the typically orientalising gaze of Western Europeans towards East-Europeans; instead, Estonia’s position as ‘the Soviet West’ within the USSR affirmed its imaginary belonging with Europe. As Savisaar’s speech suggested, the intense generation of new ideas in the perestroika era heightened the local sense of agency – and to such an extent that Estonians could during this period self-identify as the avant-garde of the USSR.

Estonia emerged from the USSR with a strong sense of national agency and with a determined commitment to Europe. This strong, unquestioned sense of belonging to Europe, together with the continuing threat that Russia posed to national security, inspired the political leadership of the 1990s to prioritize an agenda of joining ‘all possible clubs’:Footnote ⁷⁶ NATO, the Schengen area, the EEC and later the EU – an agenda that operated under the ‘logic of securitization’Footnote ⁷⁷ to proceed with radical reforms that led to growing levels of inequality within the state, but that indeed found success in providing both security guarantees and a flourishing economic climate. The imaginary of Europe itself had changed substantially during this process and changed from a predominantly aesthetic category to a predominantly geopolitical one.

In his 1992 speech Estonia – Europe – the World, Edgar Savisaar reflected on global future scenarios – among others, on the possibility of a Europe that has integrated Russia to become a global entity that stretched ‘from Gibraltar to the Urals’ – a scenario that in the early 1990s did not sound utterly implausible.Footnote ⁷⁸ Thirty years later, Russia’s new wave of imperial warfare has effaced such visions from Estonian imaginaries, and Estonia’s belongingness to Europe has emerged as an existential imperative, not simply one imaginary among others.

Czechoslovakia, a state which first came into being on 28 October 1918 and ceased to exist at midnight on 31 December 1992, lasted less long than an average human lifespan. During these years, the newly imagined polity underwent a bewildering number of constitutional changes. Not only was it federalized, centralized, dissolved, reconstituted, re-centralized and re-federalized; it also went through a wide variety of political regimes, from military dictatorship to parliamentary democracy; from authoritarian democracy to Nazi colony; from people’s democracy to Soviet satellite; and from Communist dictatorship and command economy to democracy and the free market.

It was because the case of Czechoslovakia offers, as it were, a compressed history of twentieth-century Europe, of many ways that the modern state has been imagined, that it first captured my interest. It is not often that one is privileged, as a historian, to see the entire history of a state, from its planned creation to its pre-meditated extinction. Themes familiar to those of us who grew up in the West during the Cold War – the failures of democracy and rise of authoritarianism in the 1930s, the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust in the 1940s, the spread of Stalinist terror in the 1950s, the height of Cold War anxiety in the 1960s, détente in the 1970s, the reform and eventual overthrow of Communism in the 1980s – seemed neatly pre-packaged, as if into so many teaching segments, in the compact history of this modern European state.

To live in Prague, in that first decade after the overthrow of the Communist regime was, unsurprisingly, to discover that Czechoslovak history was remembered, packaged and imagined differently there. Czech historiography, Czech documentaries, Czech museums, Czech monuments, Czech films, Czech exhibitions, Czech newspapers, in those years of what was termed post-Communist ‘transition’, were as striking to a Westerner for their unspoken assumptions – especially about the salience of nationality – as for what they said explicitly. There were patterns which at first seemed curious to an outsider: the ‘othering’ of Communists, for example, who were invariably described as ‘they’ despite the proportion of local Communist Party members having been proportionately larger, per head of population, than that of any other political party at any time anywhere in the world.Footnote ¹ Or the ubiquitous characterization of Czechoslovakia as a ‘small’ European nation, despite being of average size in both land mass and population. And there were the absences and silences: the repurposed synagogues and formerly Jewish quarters in provincial towns; the abandoned German businesses and neglected cemeteries in the Bohemian and Moravian borderlands; the invisibility of Roma and Vietnamese in official narratives; the way that the suffering of some groups was downplayed or ignored, while that of others was heightened. As throughout the rest of Central Europe, both official and popular memory emphasized the antiquity of the dominant ‘nation’ and its repeated martyrdoms, betrayals and victimhood at the hands of foreigners. Whereas, in the West, nations competed as to which was supposed to be the greatest, in Central Europe the competition seemed to turn on which had suffered the most.

My aim in researching and writing a new history of Czechoslovakia was to try to understand, in as objective a way as possible, how a state which ceased to exist in 1993 had been imagined, created and reimagined as it went through a succession of political incarnations before finally being dissolved. I wanted to provide what it seemed impossible at the time to find in libraries and bookshops: a clear, accessible account of the whole history of the state which did not present the story from the perspective of one nationality at the expense of all the rest, which did not ignore alternative readings and counter-narratives, and which looked at people as having agency and individual responsibility. The first step to enable me to try to do this – learning Czech – took three years of formal university study followed by two years of immersion. The second step was to use the grant which I won from the Leverhulme Trust to travel throughout the whole of the former Czechoslovak state and to read as wide a range of primary source materials (both published and manuscript) as time would permit. Since it is not possible to do everything, I tried to focus particular attention on under-researched times and places: to sample security files from the years which fell between the landmark years 1918 (independence), 1938 (Munich Crisis), 1968 (Prague Spring) and 1989 (Velvet Revolution), for example; or to look closely at the experiences of a city like Užgorod (Uzhhorod, Ungvár, Ужгород), to see how things might look from that lesser-known perspective.

The fact that Czechoslovakia was a multinational state whose history could be examined right from birth to death, so to speak, made it a fascinating object of study to me. I had no previous association with Czechoslovakia, no Czechoslovak ancestry, no skin in the game. When I began researching the topic, I had no idea what the overall thesis of the book would turn out to be. I went where the evidence took me. My work included extensive research, over a period of eight months, in the Czechoslovak Ministry of Interior (StB/ŠtB, the state security or secret police) archives; several months spent in the Czech National Library, where I read the entire Sbírka zákonů (Collection of Laws and Ordinances) from 1918 to 1992; months looking at materials from the German-controlled Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia and the Communist Central Archives; further weeks in the collections of Czechoslovak presidents Beneš and Masaryk’s private papers; and time spent in the Slovak National Library, as well as a number of regional archives. I tried, wherever possible, to favour primary sources over secondary works. Apart from the manuscript sources to be found in the archives, I also read through hundreds of published primary sources, published mainly in Czech, Slovak, English and French. Sometimes, as with Ukrainian and Hungarian sources, I needed to rely on the help of professional translators.

The themes which began to emerge from my developing understanding of Czechoslovak history were not those which I had been led to expect from such heroic characterizations as the ‘land of an unconquerable ideal’Footnote ² which had been publicised from the 1920s, but with particular vigour after the Munich Crisis in 1938 and again after Czechoslovakia was invaded by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops in 1968. The state which was so often characterized, especially in the English-language literature, as humane and tolerant, and whose propaganda made much of it being a naturally democratic island set in an authoritarian sea, turned out (unsurprisingly) to be much more like its Central European neighbours than its Western Allies in its ways of perceiving the world. (The Western Allies, of course, had their own distortions and self-illusions; the point is that they were different ones). Again, like its neighbours, the Czechoslovak state, too, was sometimes responsible for the persecution of ethno-linguistic, racial and religious minorities. The importance of what I was beginning to uncover about the experiences of the non-Czech minorities in the state – from the moves taken against Jews before the establishment of the German Protectorate (1939–1945) and Tiso’s fascistic Slovak Republic (1939–1945) to the fine detail of the post-war treatment of Germans and forcible ‘Slovakization’ of Hungarians; and from the treatment of Czech Roma during the post-Munich, pre-War Second Czecho-Slovak Republic (1938–1939) to the workings of the Tiso regime in Slovakia, both when it was autonomous (1938–1939) and independent (1939–1944), for example, made me feel that it was important to write the book for as wide a potential readership as would be consistent with intellectual and scholarly integrity. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that we ignore the ugly, xenophobic side of nationalism in Europe at our peril: that Europe will be a safer, more humane and tolerant place only after its nations and states recognize their own part as sometimes perpetrators, as well as sometimes victims, of extreme intolerance. I wanted, in short, to write for the General Reader. The risk was always that the resulting book would fall between two stools: too populist for academics and too scholarly for non-specialists.

The book, which was originally to be called The Czechoslovak Experiment (a title which turned out to have been used before), was first published with Yale University Press in 2009 as Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed. The title, which followed the cadence of a well-known short story by Saki,Footnote ³ and whose inclusion of the word ‘failed’ was provocative, was intended to signal three different things at once. First, the use of the terms ‘Czechoslovakia’ and ‘state’ was supposed to make clear that the book’s subject matter was a state, a polity, rather than a people or peoples: what was being offered was a history of Czechoslovakia, not the Czech and Slovak nations. Second, the subtitle ‘The State that Failed’ signalled that the book was not going to be structured as a simple chronology of selected political events but had an overarching argument or thesis. Finally, the use of the term ‘failed’ warned the reader that the book’s interpretation of the Czechoslovak state was not going to be the Czech-centred narrative of Czechoslovak exceptionalism with which the world was already familiar, but instead a sharply revisionist critique of that consensus.

The inclusion of the word ‘failed’ in the book’s title was risky. In English, the word ‘failed’ has a number of associations which make it difficult to translate into Czech without making the word sound either too gentle (neúspěl) or too harsh (selhal). The eminent Czech translator Zdeněk Hron’s choice of ‘zklamal’ in the Czech version of the book which was eventually brought out by Petrkov publishers in 2020, is probably the best compromise: but inevitably, as is the case with any translation, some associations are lost. In a very obvious and literal way, the Czechoslovak state ‘failed’, did not succeed, in that it ceased to exist (propadl), not just once, but twice, in the space of just 74 years. The primary sense in which I meant to suggest that the state ‘failed’, however, was in the sense of a scientific experiment which does not result in the intended or expected outcome. Czechoslovakia was a ‘failed experiment’ (neúspěšný experiment) in this fundamental sense: the Czechoslovak state was explicitly set up to be a multinational, liberal and democratic state, ‘a sort of Switzerland’, as Foreign Minister Edvard Beneš promised at Versailles, in which Germans and other minorities would benefit from something like the Swiss canton system; Slovaks would be treated as equals; and Subcarpathian Ruthenia would be fully autonomous. These promises were either broken – as in the case of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, whose formal autonomy was not implemented but eventually seized in 1938, following the Munich disaster – or else not felt to be honoured, as in the case of both Slovakia and the German, Hungarian and Polish minorities.

The second way in which the state did not succeed was in its intended geopolitical function. Czechoslovakia’s creation at the end of WWI, as a predominantly Slav multinational state in the midst of majority German-speaking territory, was commended to the peacemakers at Paris, and to all who dreamed of a ‘New Europe’, as a means of promoting stability and keeping the balance of power in Central Europe by containing Germany, protecting France, and preventing the possibility of another European war to follow the Great War. Although it was of course Germany which was most responsible for destabilizing Europe, and then launching the unspeakably brutal WWII, Czechoslovak foreign and domestic policy in the 1920s and early 1930s did itself few favours. By promoting the interests of Czechs over other nationalities within the state, speaking on behalf of peoples it had little or no mandate to represent, running roughshod over the sensibilities of most of the state’s minorities and treating its easternmost province like a virtual colony, by the mid-1930s Czechoslovakia had lost the support of most of its domestic non-Czech populations at the same time that its foreign policy was alienating nearly all of its neighbours. This put the state in an exceptionally vulnerable position, especially once it became apparent that the largest threat to its liberty came from Germany, by then under Nazi control, rather than – as had been expected initially – from a revanchist Hungary or Austria. None of this is to downplay the aggressive nationalism and intolerance towards minorities which was shown by Czechoslovakia’s neighbours – above all, Germany – but rather to suggest that Czechoslovakia was not, as is usually claimed, an exception which fit better into a Western than a Central European model. Rather, Czechoslovakia offered variations on common contemporary themes of nationalist, ethnic, religious and racial intolerance which were at the time a striking part of the European, and especially Central European, zeitgeist.

Czechoslovakia’s failures to remain a liberal, democratic and stabilizing force in Central Europe came about because of a complex series of interactions between external pressures, which are well known, and internal decisions, which are not. The ultimate results, as the book details, were that Czechoslovakia ceased to be liberal, with regard to its non-Czech citizens, during the First Czechoslovak Republic of 1918–1938; ceased to be democratic, in all but name, during the Second Czecho-Slovak Republic of 1938–1939; and, over the course of WWII (1939–1945) and the Third Czechoslovak Republic (1945–1948), lost most of its claim to be either multinational or tolerant of minorities. After a further forty-one years of Communist Party rule, followed by three years of rapid reorientation towards democracy and the free market, Czechoslovakia divided into Czech and Slovak halves, ceasing to be a unitary Czechoslovak state at all. None of this made the Czechoslovak state out to be worse than any other: but it returned the notion of agency and individual responsibility to a country which was too often presented as a passive victim, the plaything of Great Powers, a stalwart nation which had the misfortune to be stuck between Russia and Germany, and to whom political misfortunes fell like so many natural disasters.

The Czechoslovak state may have failed, but the Czech and Slovak nations succeeded, and spectacularly, in creating separate, seemingly durable, largely homogenous nation-states by the end of the twentieth century. It is easy to overlook how remarkable these Czech and Slovak successes were. That the old Bohemian Crown Lands, today’s Czech Republic or Czechia, and the old Hungarian highlands, today’s Slovak Republic or Slovakia, exist as separate European Union partners and NATO members could not have been confidently predicted even as recently as a generation ago. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Czech (as opposed to Bohemian) and Slovak independence were equally unthinkable. The very scale and improbability of this success makes it sometimes difficult for Czechs and Slovaks to comprehend that the multinational Czechoslovak state, for all its initial support from France, Britain and the United States, and for all its subsequent economic, industrial, literary, cultural, artistic and other successes, contained within itself the seeds of its own failure.

In making these arguments, a number of which had not been heard before, and comprehensively challenging the narrative that had dominated both Czechoslovak exile and Western Cold War propaganda, back in 2009 the book sharply divided opinion. Today, over a century after the Czechoslovak state was brought into being, thirty years since the collapse of the Communist regime and after a generation of further scholarship, the book’s arguments are no longer new, and no longer threatening, in the way that they seemed to many at the time. Czechoslovak historiography, once so uniform in its interpretations, has become an infinitely more varied and complex field, one characterized by orthodoxies, reinterpretations and properly historical debates. Old nationalist and state-serving narratives die hard, however, and one can still see the familiar lines of the old Czech-centred view implicit in what is included, and what is left out, of Kroniky, Dějiny v datech, museum guidebooks, tour guide examinations, school textbooks, government websites, plaques, memorials, television programmes, radio documentaries, block-buster films, public commemorations and much else besides. The book may, therefore, still serve a purpose in offering a corrective, or at least an alternative, to what remains the popular version of Czech, and by extension Czechoslovak, history in these and other places.

While it was clear to my generation of American and British historians that the story we had grown up with about Central Europe was ripe for revision, the newly independent Czech and Slovak republics were naturally more sensitive about their public image. When, on 28 October 2009, Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed was first published, in English, by Yale University Press, the book was immediately denounced in a public speech by the Czech Consul-General in Los Angeles, as a ‘step away’ from a ‘crime against humanity’.Footnote ⁴ At the same time, the book was effusively welcomed by Literární noviny, albeit with a warning that it held up a ‘shocking mirror’ in which Czech society might not recognize itself.Footnote ⁵ The current affairs magazine Respekt included on its glossy front cover the news item: ‘female historian from the USA provokes the Czechs’ (Historička z USA provokuje Čechy).Footnote ⁶ Lidové noviny’s Saturday Arts supplement took a more humorous angle, reproducing the image of David Černý’s St Wenceslas riding an upside-down horse with the caption: ‘Mary Heimann turns twentieth-century Czech history on its head’ (Mary Heimannová staví české dějiny 20. století na hlavu).Footnote ⁷ The editor of The Prague Post reported that ‘Central European history did a somersault’ with the release of a book that ‘upended almost every conventional view of the country’ and ‘shattered the traditional perception of Czechoslovakia as a victim’.Footnote ⁸ The Times Literary Supplement welcomed the book as ‘truly a history of Czechoslovakia not just Czechs and Slovaks’ which did well to remind readers that ‘this vanished country was home to Germans, Hungarians, Ruthenes, Roma and Poles, to Lutherans, Uniates and Jews as well as Roman Catholics and atheists’. The book, it judged, was ‘astonishing not so much for revealing new facts’ although it had ‘done its share of archival sleuthing’, but for ‘bringing into relief a narrative that was hiding in plain sight during the Cold War’, one of ‘Czech ruthlessness’ with regard to minorities and non-Czech nationalities in the now defunct Czechoslovak state.Footnote ⁹

People who grew up in the former Czechoslovakia reacted strongly to the book: they loved it or hated it. For some, the book’s title was enough. The Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák attacked the book at length in Literární noviny while at the same time frankly admitting that he had not actually read it.Footnote ¹⁰ Madeleine Albright, who was known as the daughter of Czechoslovak diplomat, politician and historian Josef Korbel long before she became US Secretary of State, told me that her advisor had warned her not to read the book because she ‘wouldn’t like it’. A retired civil servant, intrigued by the debate, began collecting press cuttings from around the world, marking with an asterisk those reviews in which the reviewer acknowledged that he or she had not actually read the book. This turned out to be 50 per cent. ‘Good for you for stirring things up!’ wrote a Balkans journalist who told me that his editor had been angrily instructed by the Czech ambassador not to publish a favourable review of the book. ‘Are they sending you death threats?’ he asked. The Economist, which featured the book on its Books and Arts (Culture) page, praised the ‘archival research and attention to detail’ as ‘exemplary’ but considered its tone ‘vinegary’ and ‘spiteful’.Footnote ¹¹ The ‘venom of many of the reviewers’, countered an elderly Austrian scholar who spoke Czech, Slovak, German, Hungarian, French and English, ‘just confirms your thesis about Czech nesnášenlivost and šovinismus’ (intolerance and chauvinism).

Emails, letters and phone calls from journalists followed. The most surprising private communications included a congratulatory letter from a former head of a Western intelligence service who had served in Prague during the Cold War; purportedly leaked documents from the Czech Foreign Ministry; and a request for help from a displaced Bohemian princess seeking restitution of her family’s property. Some correspondents were hurt or angry, stung by what they saw as attacks on their national identity. Others were grateful to have their own sense of injustice or hurt acknowledged. Perhaps the most humbling letter I received was from a circle of Czech engineers in Prague who explained that, because they had grown up under Communism and knew only the official version of Czechoslovak history, they had been meeting, week by week, to discuss each chapter of the book through a series of informal seminars. Further surprises – including being asked to take part in a debate with the former Czech Prime Minister Petr Pithart in the Czech Senate as part of the Prague Writers’ Festival in 2013, to make policy recommendations to a NATO Partnership for Peace workshop held in Kyiv in 2015 and to spend an evening discussing the book with members of the Prague Business Club in 2019 – followed.

Apart from the controversy that took place in public, in full view, there was also another story which went on in the background. This was in itself an education. I knew that journalists, critics and reviewers could hype up or undermine a book; but I had not previously realized that academic publishers, in a free country, would go so far as to break legally binding contracts – in effect to censor themselves – in response to real or imagined political pressure. In 1945, the English writer George Orwell wrote an essay, intended to serve as a preface to his forthcoming novel Animal Farm, entitled ‘The Freedom of the Press’. In this little-known piece, which was not published during his lifetime, Orwell set out the difficulty he had had in finding a publisher for the book for which, along with the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, he was ultimately to be best remembered. When publisher after publisher refused to bring out Animal Farm, Orwell slowly came to realize that he was being censored: not overtly, since post-war Britain was, after all, a free country; but unofficially, indirectly and voluntarily.

The publishers who rejected Orwell’s manuscript did not do so because they found his political allegory poorly written, dull to read or unlikely to sell well: on the contrary, the new manuscript’s clarity and popular appeal were immediately apparent. The problem with Orwell’s short allegorical novel was not that it was a bad book but that it implicitly criticized Stalin and the Soviet Union; and this at a time when the Soviet Union was Britain’s ally, Socialism seemed to many to represent the future and Stalin’s achievements were widely admired, including in British literary, governmental and intellectual circles. Only one of the publishers who rejected Orwell’s Animal Farm did so for overtly party-political reasons. The others had no clear political stance and one publisher, as Orwell tells us, ‘actually started by accepting the book’, even ‘making preliminary arrangements to bring it out’ only to change his mind after consulting the Ministry of Information who ‘warned him, or at any rate strongly advised him, against publishing it’. As the editor of the publishing house explained to Orwell in a letter, the ‘reaction’ he had had ‘from an important official in the Ministry of Information’ led him to see that Orwell’s political fable ‘might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time’, given that it ‘so completely [followed] the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators’ and especially given the offensive ‘choice of pigs as the ruling caste’ since this would ‘no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are’.

Orwell’s Animal Farm, in short, was repeatedly refused publication, not because it was thought to be substandard; or unlikely to sell; or even libellous; but rather because it was critical of the contemporary Soviet system in general, and of Stalin in particular, at a time when influential people did not wish Stalin or the Soviet Union to be criticized. What disturbed Orwell most about the widespread ignoring or downplaying of inconvenient facts about the Soviet Union under Stalin was that the conspiracy of silence was largely self-imposed and voluntary. ‘Unpopular ideas’, as Orwell pointed out, ‘can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban’. At any given moment, Orwell went on,

Although George Orwell was describing the situation that existed in post-war Great Britain, not the Czech Republic in the first decades after Communism, the phenomenon of the voluntary censorship that he described soon became all-too recognizable to me. In those days in the Czech Republic, of course, it was not Stalin’s atrocities that were ignored or downplayed (quite the reverse) but rather such sensitive topics as the post-war treatment of ethnic Germans, the degree of Czech collaboration in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, the degree of local responsibility for Fascist and Communist authoritarian regimes, the place of the Roma in Czech society and the extent to which Slovak and Rusyn nationalism were suppressed. Other topics were not so much ignored as genuinely forgotten: the role of the Prague government in bringing about the March 1939 crisis which led to Slovak independence and to the establishment of the Protectorate, for example; the initial welcome being prepared for the Warsaw Pact armies by both Rudé právo and the Slovak branch of the Communist Party in the first, confused hours on 21 August 1968; the extent to which authoritarianism, fascism and antisemitism characterized all parts of the Second Czecho-Slovak Republic of 1938–1939; the extent to which the Czechoslovak Communist Party was involved in what turned into the 1989 anti-regime revolution, and other such episodes which suggest a more complex picture than the traditional division into villains and heroes, victims and perpetrators, and which have since been scrutinized in more depth by Jan Tesář, Michal Pullmann, Muriel Blaive, David Green and various other scholars.

Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed, which evidently transgressed against the unwritten rules as to how it was permissible to evaluate the Czechoslovak state’s political record, went through precisely the same kind of voluntary censorship that Orwell described in his essay on the freedom of the press (an essay which itself remained unpublished until after his death).Footnote ¹² Within weeks of the book first appearing in English, five separate Czech publishers approached me with offers to bring out a Czech translation. I decided to go with the most prestigious of the academic publishers which had approached me; the book underwent the usual anonymous peer-review process and a contract was signed for an initial print run of 1,500–3,000 copies, publication within 18 months, and 8 per cent of the retail price, which the publisher estimated at 350 kč, suggesting that the book was expected to sell. The book was contracted, the translator chosen, my university informed and the information that the book was to be published included on some public websites.

All continued as normal, with the usual number of emails back and forth, until suddenly everything went mysteriously quiet from the publisher’s end, when an innocuous query about some aspect or other of the book went unanswered; and remained unanswered after a first reminder; then a second; then a third. After several weeks of this unexplained silence, which came at the height of a negative campaign in the Czech press, I eventually emailed to ask directly whether everything was still all right with the contract or whether there was some problem. Floods of reassurances followed: yes, of course, everything was fine; there were no problems, everything was still working to schedule and the translated version of the book would be ready and published on time. Then, just days after receiving these reassurances, came an agonised email from my editor, attaching a copy of an anonymous letter from someone – not a peer reviewer and not, judging by the tone and wording of the letter, an academic – asserting his or her view that the book ought not to be published. It seemed clear from the wording of the letter that the motives were political: my guess is that it came from whichever Ministry is the modern Czech equivalent of George Orwell’s Ministry for Propaganda. Whoever wrote it must have had a good deal of clout, because even a university publisher with standing was evidently so anxious to please, or so afraid to offend, that it was willing to break its own rules – indeed, to break the law – and go back on its own decision and contractual obligation to publish.

Unsure what to do, I phoned Yale University Press to ask for their assessment of what had just happened. My editor at Yale, after discussion with the press’s lawyer, explained that the Czech academic publisher was in clear breach of contract; that I would be within my rights to sue them; and that Yale would ‘back me all the way’ if I decided to take this route. The notion of forcing a publisher to honour its contractual agreement seemed a very distasteful proposition to me: presuming that the court case won, which Yale seemed to feel confident that it would, what would it be like to work with a publisher against its will?

I did not go public with what had happened at the time, partly because I did not want to put my editor, who was already stressed, under yet more pressure; and partly because I was finding the whole affair exhausting. I confined myself to writing a private letter to the head of the university press. It was only when, a couple of years later, I was invited to speak at the twenty-third Prague Writers’ Festival and the organizers wanted to get hold of the Czech version of my book, that I had to explain why my book had not yet appeared in Czech. To my surprise, the organizer of the Prague Writers’ Festival went public with the news by mentioning it in his introduction to a live discussion about the book that took place in the Czech Senate, on 18 April 2013, between myself, former Prime Minister Petr Pithart and the Czech historian Jan Rychlík. Towards the end of the discussion, which was filmed and livestreamed, Petr Pithart mentioned his hope that the book, which he judged important and necessary, though painful, would appear in Czech soon.Footnote ¹³

Within a few days of the Prague Writers’ Festival on ‘The Birth of Nations’ at which there was a panel presentation about my book in the Czech Senate, another reputable publisher, this time a private one, expressed their wish to publish a Czech translation of the book. ‘We would be very honoured to have the opportunity to be your Czech publisher’, wrote the editor. ‘The book would suit our publishing profile very well and we would dedicate all our resources to promote it.Footnote ¹⁴ This second contract with a Czech publisher, and third publishing contract for the book, was agreed and signed by both parties and dated 15 April 2013 though not in fact sent until June 2013. The publisher paid an advance, agreed to a relatively large initial print run of 2,000 copies, and, after some discussion, to 8 per cent royalties. At my request, my previous experience having made me a little cautious, it was required by the terms of the publishing contract that the book be published within 18 months, by the end of the year 2014, or else the rights would revert to the author.

Once again, everything seemed to be proceeding normally at first: terms were agreed, two copies of the contract signed. A translator was selected and, at least according to what I was told by the publishers, got to work on the manuscript straightaway. It was only when, nearly a year after signing the contract, and the translator still had no questions for me, that I began to wonder. When I asked my editor, the same editor who had been answering emails immediately, whether everything was still OK with the contract – exactly as had happened before with the academic publisher – there was a sudden, inexplicable silence. When I pressed, I got the same flood of reassurances: of course there was no problem, my dear Mrs Heimann; the translator was very busy working on the manuscript and it would be ready by April 2014 at the earliest. As for the translator’s email address, should I wish to contact him directly? Unfortunately, I was told, the translator does not use email, the only way to contact him would be via the publishers, via the editor himself. I felt a sickening sense of recognition when the junior editor I had been dealing with, and who had always been so straightforward and helpful, suddenly began to show the same signs of stress the junior editor at the first academic publisher had shown. This time, presumably because this particular junior editor was too honest to play along with a charade, I received an email to explain that the junior editor ‘frankly, no longer knew what was happening’ with my book, and suggested that I speak directly to the director of the publishing house.

Just as the deadline of 18 months was coming up, and under pressure to answer, the director of the publishing company emailed me to state baldly that he had decided not to publish the book. No explanation, not even the pretence that there was a legitimate reason to suddenly pull the plug, just as we were coming to the end of the 18-month period specified in the contract and despite having sent me a cash advance. Either this commercial publisher had, like the university publisher, begun with honest intentions and been suddenly warned by someone influential not to proceed to publish; or perhaps the cash advance had, all along, been intended not as an advance on sales but rather as the price for preventing the book from being made accessible to Czech readers for at least a further few years. Either way, it did not seem a very good sign for freedom of the press.

At the same time that Czech publishers were apparently being pressured not to bring out a Czech edition of my book, there were other indications of interference in the normal reviewing process for a new book. From the very first there had been some signs to suggest that the book was not going to be treated simply as a routine work of revisionist history. On the day of publication, as already mentioned, the book was denounced by a Czech diplomat in a public speech.Footnote ¹⁵ On 17 March 2010, a Senate committee of the Czech Parliament was apparently alerted to the displeasure felt by some émigrés about the book. After a ‘lively discussion’, according to the report, the Senators agreed to ‘deal with’ the book through the committee for Education and Culture. It was further noted that Czech world service (Český rozhlas) would make a programme about the book, which would also be discussed at a conference to take place in Tábor between 27 June and 3 July 2010.Footnote ¹⁶ Meanwhile, in February 2010, a journalist who had just published a positive review of my book, and who I had never met, emailed to let me know that the Czech ambassador in his country had demanded a face-to-face meeting with his editor-in-chief at which he ‘tried to extract some kind of apology’. ‘He didn’t get it’, reported the journalist, ‘but he did write to me, sending me a stack of hostile reviews of your book and suggesting I read them’.Footnote ¹⁷

In September 2010, during the ‘Ties that Bind’ conference held at the Czech and Slovak embassies in London, to which I was invited by the then Czech Ambassador, and at which former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright took a prominent part, a good five minutes were spent denouncing passages from my book, which were read aloud, before the ambassador moved on to denounce the work of historian Muriel Blaive, who was also in attendance and who was clearly shaken by the experience. Next came phone calls from journalists working for the Czech state, most of whom were especially interested in one thing: was I of Sudeten German ancestry? It was lucky for me that I wasn’t. Otherwise the book – even though it had been researched and written by a professional historian, drawing on evidence – presumably would have been dismissed out of hand. The book sold, and was widely reviewed, but was still only available in English.

In 2015, I received an invitation to speak at the annual Czech journalism summer school run by Milan Pilař in Havlíčkův Brod. Trying to think of what, as an historian, I might usefully find to say to an audience of aspiring journalists, I decided to talk about the importance of acknowledging the dark passages in one’s own national history and to examine the sometimes subtle ways in which censorship can operate. One of the examples I drew on, together with George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, involved explaining, since this was the case I knew best, why there was still no Czech-language edition of my own Czechoslovakia book.Footnote ¹⁸ The Czech journalism students at the Summer School gave my talk a sympathetic hearing, and Milan Pilař afterwards took up the cause of bringing out a Czech edition of the book as a matter of honour. It was thanks to his perseverance that an excellent new translator and publisher were found. Interested to know more, Luboš Drobík invited me to speak at the Prague Business Club in 2019.Footnote ¹⁹ After a welcoming evening of food, drink and discussion in Wenceslas Square, a majority of members of the Prague Business Club, themselves divided between those who hated and those who loved the book, decided to crowdfund the costs of translation and publication in order to bring out a Czech-language edition. Zdeněk Hron, the translator, and Petrkov, the publisher, took on the task and the book was translated, copy-edited and printed. The final version included generous endorsements by the former dissident, and later Czech Prime Minister, Petr Pithart, who wrote both an introduction and a jacket blurb; by the former dissident and Charter 77 spokesman Jan Urban; and by the famous Slovak actress, diplomat and politician Magdaléna Vášáryová, whose career included being the first post-Communist Czechoslovak Ambassador to Austria; Slovak ambassador to Poland; and Secretary of State for Slovakia. The book launch, with speeches by Petr Pithart and Jan Urban and with HE the British Ambassador Nick Archer and other dignitaries in attendance, was again hosted by the Prague Business Club. I was lucky: within a few weeks, COVID-19 restrictions were imposed and travel between the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic would no longer have been possible.

The story, once might say, ended well in that it is now possible for Czech readers, should they so wish, to read a book which presents Czechoslovak history in a very different light from the version which has long been officially favoured and promoted. The fact that it took ten years for this to happen and that it was evidently deemed necessary by some to seek to prevent, delay or discredit a book which was critical of Czech and Slovak nationalism, should nevertheless cause us to reflect a little on the role of history and its troubled relationship with nationalism, not just in the former Czechoslovakia but throughout Europe, including the United Kingdom. It is not difficult to understand why a book which is sharply critical of the dangers inherent in nationalism, in this case principally Czech and Slovak nationalism, should have received some hurt, angry or indignant responses. My motives were not, however, anti-Czech or anti-Slovak; nor was the book written out of spite or vinegar. My purpose in showing the darker side of nationalism was not to single out Czechoslovakia as better or worse than other states, still less to discredit Czechs, among whom I count many friends and (through marriage) family, as a people. Rather, it was to illustrate for the general reader – of whatever ethnic, linguistic, national or religious background – the inherent danger in perpetuating nationalist myths in which one’s own side is presented as the righteous victim and the injury done to others ignored or downplayed.

It is one thing to disapprove of or dislike a book and quite another to seek to prevent others from being able to read it. I can only assume from the actions of those who sought to prevent the book from being read, from being reviewed impartially or from being translated into Czech, that those who sought to silence it knew themselves that the content of the book is true. This is not to say that there are no mistakes in the book (of course there are, as with any published book: some 14 errors were brought to my attention for correction in the second edition; as it happens, this is an unusually low number of typos and other minor errors for a 400-page book). But, just to state the obvious for a moment: if the book were fundamentally unsound, laughable, riddled with mistakes and based on poor research, as a concerted effort by internet trolls sought to persuade the world, it would hardly have been contracted even by one serious university press, let alone two. It would not have passed the scrutiny of six expert peer-reviewers (two apiece for each of the academic presses, including Yale University Press, which sent the unpublished manuscript out for anonymous assessment, and two for the commercial press). Nor would it have been viewed as worth silencing. As Orwell pointed out: one does not feel the need to prevent the publication of a bad book.

My generation grew up steeped in knowledge about the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany. Far less well known was the extent to which the persecution of minorities came to be justified in the name of nationalism and codified in legal statutes, right across Central Europe. It seemed to me especially important, a decade after the ‘end’ of the Cold War, to advertise the fact that this could happen even in a democratic country, even in one which held up France, Britain and the United States as political models, even in one which suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany, even in a state which was widely described as humane, tolerant and progressive. If we in the so-called democratic West were to avoid repeating the injustices and cruelties which characterized Central Europe in the twentieth century, it seemed to me that we needed to face the dark parts of that past squarely. Everyone already knew about the evil of Hitler’s Germany. The lesson of the Czechoslovak state’s seventy-four-year history, as I saw it, was the extent to which people like us were culpable, through intolerance of other minority, ethnic and national groups, of bringing about precisely the sorts of injustices to which we object when practised by others. It is perfectly possible for a nation to be both a victim and a perpetrator. To divide the world mentally into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nations is not only misleading; it is also potentially dangerous.

The warning which I sounded in 2009 – about the limits and fragility of democracy and liberalism and the dangers of ethnic stereotyping and generalization – may have seemed far-fetched in those far-off days before Orbán, Trump, Johnson, Brexit, Erdoğan, Zeman and the many promoters of hate and scapegoating who have been crowding the international political stage more recently. In today’s political climate across Europe, so reminiscent of the 1930s, in which populist xenophobia and protectionism are back, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other forms of racial hatred actively exploited by political leaders, a war which may well prove to be a Third World War being waged by Russia against Ukraine and refugees (including children) once again dehumanized, locked up, turned away or threatened with forcible relocation to Africa, the example of how the Czechoslovak state – a country which prided itself on its decency – descended from liberal democracy into authoritarianism and various iterations of police state is more politically salient than ever. Today, it is Britain’s increasingly questionable attitude to human rights which worry me far more than those of the Czech or Slovak Republics. But this could change again: the point is precisely that no country, no people, is immune from such dangers.

As historians, it is our job to struggle as best we can against the assumptions and prejudices of our times, our outlook, our century, our nationality: to swim against the current, to refuse to accept the fashionable view of the moment. It is most emphatically not, in my opinion, the historian’s job to begin with any established, fixed set of beliefs – whether that Communism was evil or the Germans warmongers or the Czechs innately democratic – and then ‘select’ those facts that seem to support that belief (or prejudice). And here I think that the Central European penchant for the Kronika – selected events to promote particular political outlooks and/or to support any particular regime – needs to be questioned.

History can challenge our own assumptions and prejudices and teach us to empathize with others and to understand the complexity – moral and otherwise – of the real world. One reviewer claimed that my Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed ‘changed forever’ the historiography of Czechoslovak history. Another, writing for the Communist Party’s The Morning Star, predicted (no doubt accurately) that Julius Fučík’s Notes from the Gallows will ‘remain evergreen long after this book is consigned to the university bookshops’ bargain bins’. My hope was, and remains, that presenting the history of Czechoslovakia from a fresh, non-nationalist, perspective will encourage some – whether Czech, Slovak, British, American, Hungarian, whatever – to consider the arbitrariness of nationality, the often unconscious chauvinism to which groups of human beings are prone and the degree to which each of us contributes, for good or for ill, to the regimes under which we live.

13.1 Introduction

Every constitution is accompanied by imaginaries: ideas about how and why it emerged and what it is for.Footnote ¹ Constitutional imaginaries are supported by narratives: stories that help to make sense of the text and the reality of a given constitutional order. Some of these stories are part of a country’s national identity, as the American Founding Fathers’ drafting of the Constitution in Philadelphia, or the French Revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Other such narratives are confined to the ranks of constitutional lawyers. But they, too, need a set of background stories to guide their work.

This chapter seeks to explore and to contextualise three of these background stories of Austrian constitutional law. Those basic narratives are:

1. 1. The Austrian constitution is in ruins.

2. 2. The Austrian constitution is value-neutral and formalist.

3. 3. The Austrian constitution is a role model for European integration and it gave the world judicial review.

These three narratives are deliberately arranged in reverse chronological order. The ‘ruins’ metaphor has its origin in the flood of legislation after 1945. It was coined to denote the poor state of constitutional law after a myriad of amendments allegedly made its text an incomprehensible mess. The narrative of value neutrality and formalism can be traced back to Austria’s constitutional founding in 1920. Buttressed by Hans Kelsen’s pure theory of law and his procedural theory of democracy, it is supposed to capture the constitution’s essence as being a historical compromise between hostile political forces, which is, because of that, devoid of any substantial values. Both these narratives have made it hard to promote something like constitutional patriotism or at least surround the constitution with an aura of respect. The third narrative, however, compensates for this, as it showcases the achievements of the rule of law, constitutional adjudication and a unique openness towards European integration, which have their roots in 1867 and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The years of 1867, 1920 and 1945 mark the three defining constitutional moments in recent Austrian history. Each symbolises a moment of defeat that was only later reinterpreted as a new beginning. Like all such narratives, each contains some truth but glosses over the details.

Each one of the Austrian constitutional stories seems to be in flux. The ‘ruins’ narrative has recently been challenged by Austria’s president, who admiringly spoke of the constitution’s ‘elegance and beauty’. The neutrality narrative begins to crumble as human rights and value-laden constitutional amendments demand a more purposive interpretive approach. The ‘model for Europe’ narrative is the youngest and is more and more promoted. Its future looks bright. Taken together, these three narratives about Austrian constitutional law provide insight into the ways that Austrian lawyers think. But they also have something to offer for the project of European integration; they can act as a warning or present a path worth emulating. They may have their basis in various constitutional provisions but, more than anything, they are stories.Footnote ² Stories are important. No constitutional project has ever been successful without one.

13.2 Narrative 1: Ruins and Beauty

13.3 Narrative 2: Form and Substance

13.4 Narrative 3: Empire and Europe

13.5 Conclusion

What is there to learn from these constitutional narratives? The ‘ruins’ dictum and its belated refutation teach us that Austrian constitutional law scholars should be more careful with the words they use. They self-identify as guardians of the constitution. As such, they have a responsibility to show the constitution its due respect. Because, why should the public if even constitutional lawyers do not? Apart from that, it is true that accessible and easily comprehensible constitutions are important. Constitutional aesthetics should be upheld in the face of ever growing legislative and regulatory activity. Constitutions should not be abused to entrench whatever the current government wants in order to tie the hands of future governments. Democracy needs room for manoeuvre and meaningful choices. German constitutional court justice and professor, Dieter Grimm, has famously argued that the European Union is over-constitutionalised. Its treaties contain too many policy decisions that should be left to the political process.Footnote ¹⁵³ This is not to say that the European Constitution is in ruins, no more so than the Austrian one. But they share a common trait that should not be the basis of pride in either case: they seem bloated. However, derision, even if directed at obvious flaws, is not the way to go. It can easily miss its target and hit the innocent. A European constitutional patriotism, extravagant as this concept might be,Footnote ¹⁵⁴ needs a constitution that is appreciated by the people closest to it: judges, public officials, constitutional scholars and their students.

This does not mean that we need a more formal, neutral style in European treaty making, at least if formality and neutrality are taken as ends in themselves. As shown, imagining the constitution as a purely formal set of rules of the game has never captured what a constitution is all about. A formalist approach to constitutional interpretation makes sense when delineating competences, jurisdictions and powers. These constitutional contents normally do not inspire great devotion. But every constitution is built on certain assumptions and certain values. If democracy, human rights and the rule of law are to be Europe’s treasured principles, they require us to presuppose a certain notion of freedom and equality that must be defended when necessary, such as via militant democracy or in regard to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Austrian approach can teach us, though, that a constitution need not be treated as an article of faith in order to flourish.

Loyalty towards institutions, such as constitutional courts, requires a reason and motivation for it that everyone can grasp. In other words, it needs a persuasive story. In Austria, the Constitutional Court is perceived as a uniquely Austrian invention by constitutional superhero Hans Kelsen. That makes for a good foundation. The idea of judicial review remains unchallenged. I would suggest that, out of all the different constitutional features, it is the one most easily recalled by the public. The Constitutional Court’s judgements are publicly discussed and often widely celebrated, in particular when they are seen as dealing a blow to the government. Not every court can tell such tales; not every court is as self-confident; not every court is as widely acclaimed. Founding stories cannot be generated out of a void. But they can be told more or less convincingly; they can be spun strategically; they can be directed at the public or at the experts.

The constitutional narratives presented here do not form an exhaustive list of the many ways the Austrian constitution has been thought of. I endeavoured to showcase three main currents of Austrian constitutional law scholarship. Some convey a feeling of malaise, such as the ‘ruins’ metaphor. Others are based on historical origin stories and theoretical reflection, such as the myth of the value-neutral constitution. Others still are told in retrospect because they are about something that has become seen as a great achievement, such as the ‘invention’ of constitutional adjudication. As the Austrian constitution embarks on its 105th year, some narratives will fade and others will arise. Old stories will be forgotten and new stories will be told. A constitution without narratives about it would be like a constitution without qualities: a curious object of study, but not fit for use.