This book is an attempt to reinterpret the history of the region by including the impact of global forces. Written concisely by political scientists, it covers a wide range of countries over three centuries. Rather than retelling the region’s history as a whole, the authors aim to reflect on long-term trends, patterns, and mechanisms. The main question they ask is how major historical forces – epitomized by the titular triad of globalization, nationalism, and imperialism – have played out in Eastern Europe. Jacek Lubecki and James W. Peterson point to nationalism, the territorial self-determination of a culturally defined community, as the crucial factor in Eastern European history. They add that there is no inherent contradiction between nationalism and globalization in the region. To demonstrate these theses, they point to recurring historical waves between the 19th and 21st centuries: the emergence of nation-states and their subjugation to larger imperial projects. Much of the book is devoted to the post-1989 period. Within these patterns, major contingency existed between individual countries and eras. “Differences and similarities of historical dialectics are precisely what our book seeks to illuminate” (p. 9), the authors declare. The book, as this review will show, especially in its later parts, tends to depart from these themes and offers a loose discussion of different, often loosely connected topics.

The arguments are developed over the course of five chapters, mostly through a very broad discussion of the respective national cases with states, political parties, and large movements as the major actors, as well as through comparative hypothesizing and reasoning. The first two chapters are written by Jacek Lubecki: Chapter 2 develops the main argument of the book. Chapter 3, devoted to the post-1989 period, is narrated through the concepts of liberalism and illiberalism. This is followed by sections written by James W. Peterson: Chapter 4 on ethnic challenges and migration, Chapter 5 on security and terrorism, and finally (Chapter 6) on the Covid pandemic.

By pointing to the non-contradictory relationship between nationalism and globalization, without citing them directly, the authors draw on scholarship on internationalism inspired by classic works by Mark Mazower 1 or Glenda Sluga.2 Chapter 2 makes many interesting observations, for instance about the similarities between the Western-led international settlements in the region after 1918 and 1989, which other authors have independently pointed out.3 At times, however, the interpretation of the main terms, such as nationalism, lacks coherence. Is nationalism in the region a constant structural factor or just a bad habit that could be overcome with the help of the Enlightenment, Western-led modernization or liberalism? Or perhaps both? The authors, following John Connelly,4 tend towards the former. At the same time, they present an optimistic vision of the post-First World War period, contrasting it with the “populist and authoritarian” 21st century. Recent scholarship shows how violent this period actually was, incomparable to any excesses of current Eastern European populists.5 The authors blame Serbian nationalism for the lack of material development and modernization of the country (p. 23). If nationalism as territorial self-determination is the main preoccupation of political elites in the region – including communists – how could the post-1945 regimes have managed to eradicate it in the Yugoslav or Czechoslovak federation (p. 60, 62)?

Following the theme of late twentieth-century globalization, Chapter 2 asks about the factors leading to the embrace or rejection of liberalism and EU policies in the mid-2010s, and can be seen as an intervention in the larger debate on populist and illiberal politics in Eastern Europe. The first factor discussed is the economic performance. “There is no one-to-one correlation between economic and political variables in the region”, summarizes Lubecki. “Rather, countries followed their own political paths as defined by their political cultures, institutions, and contingencies” (p. 80). To answer the question of why some countries accommodated EU policies and others rejected them under the banner of illiberalism, Lubecki suggests looking at the elite in-fighting within the respective national political scenes. Political figures and forces that are now identified as illiberal or populist, Lubecki observes, have been part of the respective national political establishment for decades (p. 84). Populism in the region is the effect of existing political parties adapting to the changing circumstances and expectations, rather than an actual social movement from below. In the early 1990s, it was none other than Viktor Orbán and the young democrats of Fidesz who represented the coveted ‘pro-Western’ orientation against post-communists and nationalists in Hungary. Only slowly did he move to occupy the nationalist, anti-Western pole of the political spectrum. This line of reasoning, supported by evidence from the whole region, is compelling in itself, but it is hard to see how it relates to the general themes of the book.

Chapter 4 proceeds with cases of ethnic conflict in the respective countries, understood as a negative effect of the prominence of the national distinction. James W. Petersen connects Eastern European policies towards the wave of migrants from the Middle East in 2015 to the book’s core themes as an example of the “tension between globalization and nationalism” (p. 107). It seems, however, that at this particular moment the contradiction between the two was very much present, at least in the eyes of Eastern Europe’s governing elites. The book concludes with chapters on domestic and global security challenges and the COVID-19 pandemic. Both are seen as external threats (globalization) that states in the region must deal with to maintain power and the support of their electoral bases (nationalism). Chapter 5 may be useful to scholars for its succinct description of Russian actions against Ukraine between 2014 and 2022 from a liberal, Atlantic perspective. The discussion of the COVID pandemic is based on press and NGO reports from the ground, and focuses on highlighting the failures of the immediate responses and the on instrumentalization of the pandemic for political gain. Without a thorough comparison with other regions of the world, the claim that political leaders in the region “were completely unprepared for what political decisions should look like in such a new and tumultuous situation” (p. 142) remains tentative at best.

This is at times an interesting and thought-provoking book, and its attempts to bridge different countries and historical periods are commendable. However, the competition between global histories of Eastern Europe is strong.6 The generalizing manner in which individual countries are discussed, the exclusive focus on states and political movements, and almost no mention of the non-Western world leave much to be desired. References to various theories (always capitalized), such as the “Legacy Theory”, according to which past events influence subsequent developments (p. 146), or the reliance on various international rankings, may convince political scientists, but leave historians of the region rather indifferent.

Notes
1 Mark Mazower, Governing the World. The History of an Idea, London 2013.
2 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, Philadelphia 2013.
3 Maciej Górny, Secondary Shocks. Poland’s Two Transformations, in: Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 67 (2018) 2, pp. 231–38.
4 John Connelly, From Peoples into Nations. A History of Eastern Europe, Princeton 2020; John Connelly, Nation as Tragedy. The Stories of Central Europe, in: Journal of Modern History 96 (2024) 2, pp. 402–42, https://doi.org/10.1086/730020.
5 Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923, London 2016; Jochen Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe, 1918-1921. The Reconstruction of Poland (The Greater War, 1912-1923), Oxford 2018; Mark Jones, Violent Reconstruction as Shatterzones, in: Ute Planert / James N. Retallack (eds.), Decades of Reconstruction. Postwar Societies, State-Building, and International Relations from the Seven Years’ War to the Cold War, Cambridge 2017, pp. 256–72.
6 James Mark / Paul Betts, Socialism Goes Global. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation, Oxford 2022; James Mark et al., 1989. A Global History of Eastern Europe, New Approaches to European History, Cambridge 2019s.