Et in Arcadia ego… Central Europe and the post-war world. Some considerations
(abstract)
The new world order established after the WW II produced major changes on European civilization. The transformation of the continent touched all compartments of the „old society”, becoming radical in what will henceforth be called Eastern Europe. The phrase loaded with historical equivocation was easily insinuated into the new political language of the East and the West; moreover, it did not bring with it only a simple semantic modification.
By „inventing” Eastern Europe, it was established the division of the continent based on ideological criteria, defining, in the following decades, another geopolitical dimension: the democratic West and the totalitarian East. Eastern Europe was built on the simplification of what is called the perception of geographical space as a civilizational vector, which tends to acquire features that confer a certain homogeneity.
The new Eastern Europe dissipated the old historical aggregation of Central Europe (a.k.a. Mitteleuropa) into a mixture of nations, societies and cultural spaces whose destinies have crossed by chance in the centuries of modernity. Post-war Eastern Europe did not bring with it any significant progress, but only a supposedly „leveled” area of civilization in the name of communism imposed by the Soviet Union.
It became a construct of totalitarianism.
Cuvinte cheie: Europa Centrală, Mitteleuropa, Europa de Est, Occident, URSS
Keywords: Central Europe, Mitteleuropa, Eastern Europe, Western world, USSR