Princeton University Press 2020. Hard cover with dust jacket, 968 pp
A sweeping narrative history of Eastern Europe from the late eighteenth century to today
In
the 1780s, the Habsburg monarch Joseph II decreed that henceforth
German would be the language of his realm. His intention was to forge a
unified state from his vast and disparate possessions, but his action
had the opposite effect, catalyzing the emergence of competing
nationalisms among his Hungarian, Czech, and other subjects, who feared
that their languages and cultures would be lost. In this sweeping
narrative history of Eastern Europe since the late eighteenth century,
John Connelly connects the stories of the region's diverse peoples,
telling how, at a profound level, they have a shared understanding of
the past. An ancient history of invasion and migration made the
region into a cultural landscape of extraordinary variety, a patchwork
in which Slovaks, Bosnians, and countless others live shoulder to
shoulder and where calls for national autonomy often have had bloody
effects among the interwoven ethnicities. Connelly traces the rise of
nationalism in Polish, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman lands; the creation
of new states after the First World War and their later absorption by
the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Bloc; the reemergence of democracy and
separatist movements after the collapse of communism; and the recent
surge of populist politics throughout the region. Because of this
common experience of upheaval, East Europeans are people with an acute
feeling for the precariousness of history: they know that nations are
not eternal, but come and go; sometimes they disappear. From Peoples
into Nations tells their story.