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Broad generational, social, and attitudinal changes swept West Germany during the 1960s, posing challenges to established patterns and assumptions in many fields of public life, including Eastern policy. As these changes in the domestic and international context became increasingly obvious during the latter half of the 1960s, politicians reacted by gradually modifying their Ostpolitik positions. This chapter follows the slow adaptation of West Germany's political elites to these shifting conditions, particularly during the three-year period defined by the rule of the so-called Grand Coalition — composed of the CDU/CSU and the SPD — between late 1966 and 1969. Complicated manoeuvring during these years culminated in the collapse of the pattern that had characterized the interaction between the expellee activists and the political elites since the founding of the Federal Republic.

The introductory chapter defines the book's major aim, which lies in investigating the life‐work of five historians in comparative and transnational perspective and ascertaining their place in the intellectual landscape of nineteenth‐century historiography. They are: Joachim Lelewel (Polish, 1786–1861), Simonas Daukantas (Lithuanian, 1793–1864), František Palacký (Czech, 1798–1876), Mihály Horváth (Hungarian, 1804–78), Mihail Kogălniceanu (Romanian, 1818–91). The chapter surveys existing literature and identifies a gap in historiographical literature that exists between large‐scale general accounts and individual case studies and defines the book's scope between these two categories. It takes issue with the widely held view that smaller and marginal historical traditions were necessarily ‘backward’ and thus incapable of producing worthwhile contributions. It also challenges other established perceptions regarding the differences between nationalism in Western and Eastern Europe, especially with the view that intense political engagement was a trait peculiar to historians of Eastern Europe. It then goes on to address the methodological difficulties inherent in transnational comparison and, finally, introduces the major themes of the book.

The year that saw the survival of the revolution in France saw its extinction in Poland. The same months in which it became clear that structural changes would spread to Belgium and Holland saw the stamping out of “Jacobinism” in Austria and in Hungary. This chapter describes—not the failure of revolution in Eastern Europe, since, except in Poland, no revolution was attempted—but the triumph and strengthening of counter-revolutionary forces in Eastern Europe at this time. These were the forces, agrarian and conservatively aristocratic, which had already largely destroyed the work of Joseph II in the Hapsburg Empire and combined to annihilate the Polish constitution of 1791.

This chapter traces key moments in the interaction between the expellee groups and West German political elites from the start of the new Ostpolitik in 1970 to German reunification two decades later. The period was characterized by the continued decline of the expellee lobby's power. The backward-looking organizations found themselves increasingly isolated in West German public life, with ever more tenuous links to most of the political elites, the media establishment, and the general public, including the majority of rank-and-file expellees. The end of the road for the expellee lobby came in 1990, when Helmut Kohl's government finally abandoned its tactical manoeuvring and accepted a long-awaited reunification settlement, as a part of which Germany formally gave up all territorial claims towards Eastern Europe.

This introductory chapter demonstrates the centrality of the expellee problem for West Germany's political development. As a means to that end, it provides a long-term case study of a policy field in which the expellee issue's contribution was particularly significant: the Federal Republic's Ostpolitik — or policy toward Eastern Europe. The goal is to untangle a paradox that characterized West German Ostpolitik particularly until the early 1970s and, on a lesser scale, all the way to German reunification in 1990. The focus is on the complex interactions among expellee organizations, the main political parties, and Bonn's federal government. It examines the expellee lobby's efforts to pursue its revisionist agenda, highlighting the various channels through which the expellee activists exerted pressure on the country's political elites and the degree to which the latter responded to such pressure.

This chapter discusses the Soviet blueprint, which established the technology of collectivization that East European leaders followed, with variations, during the 1950s. As the first country in the world to be founded on Marxist–Leninist principles, the Soviet Union had myriad problems to solve. The leaders' ambitious program of social engineering required developing a variety of techniques for carrying out specific tasks, such as obtaining food requisitions, collectivizing agriculture, and so on. These techniques formed the basis for creating “replica” regimes in Eastern Europe following World War II, in a process of technology transfer of almost unparalleled scope. This technological package may be called “the Soviet blueprint,” of which collectivization was a major part. Although the results varied considerably, each East European country was pressed into adopting more or less the same package. Nowhere, however, did the blueprint fully succeed against recalcitrant local realities—not even in the Soviet Union itself.

Eastern Europe was the most common destination for the Soviet international tourist. Chapter Three uses the typical touristic practices of sightseeing and shopping to explore the contested relationship between Soviet center and east European periphery. The chapter explores the application process for travel abroad, sites seen and photographed, the "infiltration" of local guides who sometimes openly challenged Soviet narratives of socialist fraternalism, efforts to “sell” the Soviet Union, and shopping. For travelers to eastern Europe, experiencing the relative ideological freedoms and material superiorities of east European countries firsthand led some to question the supposed superiority of the Soviet Union. If, in theory, the material advantages of east European countries could be taken positively as evidence that socialism and consumerism could co-exist, in practice, it was hard to explain why the socialist "younger brother" was so much better off than his elder sibling.

This chapter considers how the remapping of Central Europe after the Second World War was radical not so much in terms of changes in national borders, as in the broadscale shifting of settlement boundaries. The borders had already been altered after the First World War and new countries created upon the ruins of the fallen Central and Eastern European empires. Prolonged mass migrations also ensued at that time. Many people did not want to live in the countries they found themselves in after the political map was redrawn, or they fled growing discrimination against ethnic minorities. After the Second World War, the Allied powers abandoned the principles to which they committed themselves in 1918. They wanted the territory between Germany and the Soviet Union to be made up of homogeneous nation-states that were no longer burdened by the existence of ethnic minorities.

Like all historical events, German reunification had its winners and losers. The winners included most Germans, at least in the initial euphoria, and even most other Europeans, given the liberation of the Eastern bloc and the general relaxation of tensions that accompanied the end of the cold war. Among the losers were the expellee activists, whose organizations suffered a long road to political decline following reunification. The first harbingers of change had been various public intellectuals who began to pose systematic challenges to the expellee groups and the Ostpolitik dogmas associated with them from the early 1960s on. In the course of that decade, these challenges gained growing public support, thanks in large part to broader generational, social, and attitudinal changes in West German society.

This chapter takes a longue durée approach that embraces an even longer period by comparing the different historical paths of Western and Central and Eastern Europe from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Unlike Holland and Britain, absolutist France established its economy by state interventionism and became the model mercantilist state. A widespread new concept of human society and the universe, a new value system and a new way of thinking, emerged in the West. When the centralized Ottoman system began to decline, the situation worsened. The revolutionary ideas of the West began to infiltrate the “sleeping” countries of the European periphery, albeit only among the relatively small group of enlightened nobility. A modern Western Europe emerged and became the world's first highly industrialized zone. Reform and modernization became the leitmotivs of the region's history in the nineteenth century.

This chapter describes romanticism, which came from Western Europe via Germany and brought the Western European zeitgeist of freedom and nationalism. Romanticism was primarily responsible for introducing the Western values of freedom, liberty, and nation. It became a paramount nation-building movement in the East: a newly created literary language fueled romantic arts, poetry, and drama, which joined forces with music, architecture, and history writing in the struggle for nationhood. The national movement of Central and Eastern Europe began with romantic folklorizing by a handful of intellectuals. Central and Eastern Europe gave birth to new national literatures, music, and art, whose cultural-political impact was almost independent of their international standing. Central and Eastern Europe became a hotbed of various kinds of extremism, wrong political decisions, and internal and international conflicts. Modern journals, coffeehouses, various urban clubs, and aristocratic and bourgeois private salons helped spread the national gospel.

This chapter describes the social changes in Central and Eastern Europe. “Dual” and “incomplete” societies represented both the dominant traditional characteristics and the new elements of a rather sluggishly modernizing society. Coexistence of the old and new elites under the unquestioned political and social leadership of the old elite was a hallmark of the dual society. The “Jewish question” arose in Austria and to some extent in Bohemia as well. The duality of the society in its upper layers was also clearly visible in the lower strata. The separation of the traditional and the modern, and the beginning of real social change, occurred first in the newly emerging, rapidly growing cities. Central and Eastern Europe might have begun social modernization but, on the eve of World War I, they stood at the beginning of a long, rough historical road toward Western European modernity.

This chapter analyses the responses and policies of West Germany's three main political parties — the CDU/CSU, the SPD, and the FDP — toward the expellee problem. By May 1955, a clear pattern had emerged in the interaction among the three main parties and the expellee organizations over foreign policy in general and policy towards Eastern Europe in particular. As a part of a concerted, multifaceted effort to court the expellees, all three political parties had all committed themselves to advocating the main foreign-policy demands of the expellee groups. Aware that these demands were unlikely to be fulfilled, party leaders championed them primarily as an electoral strategy, aimed at soliciting expellee votes. At the same time, however, the leaders were careful to keep expellee representatives out of key positions within the parties.

This chapter addresses the economic modernization of Central and Eastern Europe. Central and Eastern Europe became a part of a “globalized” European economic system. Free trade, an internationalized monetary system, and internationalized economic connections became dominant in the period when modernization of Central and Eastern Europe actually began in the 1860s. Foreign capital played a decisive role in building a modern infrastructure and banking system and major elements of economic modernization. Agricultural modernization encouraged important export sectors, mostly a cereal monoculture. Impressive increases in agricultural and raw materials exports generated higher imports, growth rates, and incomes but had little effect on the transformation and structural changes of the Balkan economies. Economic modernization experienced significant successes in Central and Eastern Europe.

In the mid-16th century, the two most powerful states of Eastern Europe, the Tsardom of Muscovy and the Kingdom of Poland, set out almost simultaneously for the east. In the brief period between 1552 and 1556, the Muscovite forces managed not only to defeat and subjugate the two largest Tatar khanates on the Volga, those of Kazan and Astrakhan, but also to subordinate the Siberian khanate and the Circassian and Kabardian princes. The steppe expanses of southern Ukraine were not fully controlled by any of the states bordering on them. From the time of the Mongol invasion, the steppe became an area of nomadic wandering and foraging, subject to no official regulation, by bands of fishermen, hunters, and freebooters who began to be called Cossacks. Cossackdom would later be recognised as a distinct corporate order with privileges, liberties, and prerogatives of its own. Religion, especially Orthodoxy, played a key role in the history of the Cossack movement.

This chapter examines the process of the formation of Disraeli's initial understandings of the East and the Eastern Question. The social and political context within which the young Disraeli grew up is scrutinized, as well as the influence of his Jewish origins and the personality of his father, Isaac D'Israeli. The influence of the liberal Toryism of Canning and the romanticism of Lord Byron on the shaping of Disraeli's understanding of the Eastern Question are equally stressed. Finally, the influence of Gibbon's pessimistic view of the 'slavic races' of Eastern Europe as examples of ‘barbarism’ and ‘backwardness’ is also highlighted.

This chapter illustrates that arising out of the region's legacy of autocratic regimes, authoritarian systems became the rule in Central and Eastern Europe. Fundamental nationalism penetrated politics and became the leitmotiv of foreign policy. Central and Eastern Europe became a hotbed of hostile, fundamental nationalism. Ottoman rule in the Balkans remained autocratic right to the end: notwithstanding efforts to recentralize the empire and transform its superstructure, it remained essentially unchanged, and the decline became unstoppable. Authoritarian power, fundamental, violent nationalism, and the expansion of the nation-state at the expense of its neighbors characterized the politics of the Balkans. Autocratic Russian rule had a strong impact on Central and Eastern Europe. Nationalism was a leading concept even for Polish socialism. Nationalism was the triumphant political mainstream that legitimized authoritarian regimes. The workers' struggle for political rights and better working conditions established them as an important political force.