The Vanishing Idea of Central Europe 

The fall of the communist regimes in 1989 was seen by many as a chance to revive the concept of Central Europe as a distinct space within Europe. The common cultural heritage of Central Europe, as it had been shaped during the late Habsburg monarchy, came under renewed debate, with Milan Kundera's famous 1983 essay The Abduction of the West or The Tragedy of Central Europe taking centre stage.

Kundera argued that Central Europe, while having developed a unique cultural and intellectual heritage of its own, was part of Western civilisation. Its “abduction” to the East in the form of the incorporation of Central European states into the Soviet empire after World War II was a tragedy. 

Central European intellectuals, who collaborated with each other in dissent during the late communist era, wanted to build on the idea of Central Europe as a distinct space belonging to the West after 1989. This is why the idea of creating a political grouping within Europe consisting of post-communist Central European states was born, which materialised in the form of the Visegrad Group.

In its early days, the Visegrad Group actually helped its members – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – in their ‘journey to the West’ in the form of a relatively rapid achievement of membership of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Later, however, it began to stumble as nationalist and Eurosceptic parties and politicians came to power in the individual V4 countries.

The idea of recreating a common cultural space also encountered various obstacles. Although various mechanisms and institutions for cultural cooperation have been established within the V4, it has become clear that the public in all V4 countries, especially young people, look more towards Western cultural production than towards a common cultural heritage. The citizens of any Visegrad country follow cultural and intellectual developments in the other V4 countries more as a complement to the cultural production of the West, if at all.

Political differences that became irritants 

In politics, the historical heritage has begun to materialise differently from the future imagined by those who wanted to create a common political space with a distinctly Western orientation, following Kundera's idea of Central Europe as a specific piece of the West. Shared experiences of the communist era may have played an important role at the outset, but the past gradually began to surface in other ways, often in pathological ways.

The 1991 Visegrád Group signing ceremony. Photo: Péter Antall - Antall-család archívum [Antall family's archives], CC BY-SA 3.0.

Thus, Hungarian chauvinism, fed by the conviction that Hungary had unjustly lost vast territories after World War I, or Polish national conservatism, fed by the strong role of the Catholic Church, returned to the scene. 

The Czechs, for their part, faced a complicated legacy of relations with Germany. The question of the removal of Sudeten Germans distorted the country's political operations. And in Slovakia, political currents gradually emerged that sought inspiration in Slovak fascism from the time of the first Czechoslovak Republic and the Slovak State during the war.

In other words, it has gradually become clear that the political heritage of the individual V4 countries reflects more differences than what productively unites them. Hungary and Poland, in particular, have begun to slide - even under the influence of their historical legacies - towards anti-liberal tendencies and the lure of authoritarian governance.

The Visegrad grouping continues to function to this day, but it has shown that if anything unites the four countries politically at certain times, it is more a kind of political backwardness – fed by provincialism. Besides, the troubled political legacy denies an easy affiliation to the West that Kundera contemplated in his essay. This is also why the V4 brand has gradually acquired a reputation in the EU as a problematic region that is not aligned with the rest of the EU.

After the arrival of the pro-Western Petr Fiala government in the Czech Republic, the V4 was briefly optically divided into two blocs: Orban’s Hungary and Poland of Jarosław Kacynski on the one hand, and the successor states of the former Czechoslovakia on the other. After the elections in Poland and Slovakia last year, this political constellation has changed: the pro-European bloc is now Poland and the Czech Republic, while Hungary and Slovakia now act as European troublemakers, sabotaging common European positions on Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Central Europe is disappearing

Central Europe as a cultural and political concept is gradually disappearing. The change of political circumstances in Poland following the Russian invasion of Ukraine has accentuated political asymmetry within V4. The current pro-European Poland wants to emerge as a European power; cooperation within the V4 is not a priority for it. The country has a larger population than the other three V4 countries combined, and culturally it was once only marginally part of Habsburg Central Europe.

Attempts to revive Central Europe politically in other ways, for example by drawing Austria into Central European cooperation have not worked very well. And the Three-Seas project, in which the Central European states stretching from the Baltic to the Black and Adriatic Seas participate, is also running into problems because of Poland's efforts to act as a leader in the project.

The war in Ukraine has illuminated Central Europe in a new way. It has now split it into countries that are clearly aligned with the rest of the EU in their efforts to stop Russia, namely Poland and the Czech Republic. And countries, namely Hungary and Slovakia, which want to position themselves as a kind of bridge between the West and Russia, while at times openly sabotaging joint European efforts to stop Russia. 

The Czech Republic, meanwhile, is teetering on the edge in this regard, with party preference polls suggesting that it could head next to the Slovak-Hungarian camp after its elections in the fall of 2025. Should that happen, it would complete the ironic denial of Kundera's thesis that Central Europe is a piece of the West that the Soviet Union brutally hijacked eastward. 

Austria is also struggling with ambivalent attitudes towards Russian aggression in Ukraine. In fact, all  countries of Central Europe, which once belonged to the Habpsburg Empire, are now experiencing the strengthening of national-populist forces that are sceptical of the EU or outright question liberal democracy.

If Central Europe as a specific region and cultural-political concept can still be discussed at all today, it is unfortunately only possible in the context of the aforementioned problems of some countries with liberal democracy and ambivalent attitudes towards Russia. Even in culture, Central Europe after 1989 has produced almost nothing that can be clearly identified as “Central European”. Except perhaps for the works of a few Austrian and Polish writers awarded international prizes, including the Nobel Prizes, and a few outstanding film productions in various countries of the region.

Returning to Kundera's central thesis, according to which Central Europe was the “hijacked West”, contemporary developments rather contradict it. Some Central European countries are voluntarily distancing themselves from the West in the form of their governments' policies. 

Others, such as the Czech Republic, Poland, and even Austria, may currently be ruled by pro-Western governments that cherish the principles of liberal democracy, but there are influential political forces that are ambivalent about such an orientation. What is certain is that the Central Europe of which Kundera dreamed, and which the politicians of the first generation after 1989 wanted to revive politically, is disappearing before our eyes.

Jiří Pehe is a political analyst and writer. He is the director of the New York University's academic centre at Prague.

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