Mity i symbole polityczne Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej [The political myths and symbols of East Central Europe]

Michał Masłowski is a professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris where together with Chantal Delsol and Joanna Nowicki he coedited the book Mythes et symboles politique en Europe centrale (2002). He was also a visiting professor at the Center for East European Studies at the University of Warsaw. It is there that he rewrote and in 2022 published the book in Polish as Mity i symbole polityczne Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej [Myths and symbols of East Central Europe]. In the preface he calls the French version the primary source for the Polish book, but overall takes credit for the authorship of the new version, although in most of the subchapters, or rather essays, he acknowledges his indebtedness to the original authors of those pieces. It would seem that since the French book is almost twice as long as the Polish version the latter is a fairly free and edited translation together with personal commentary, which is why the authorship is considered basically singular. Moreover, the title has a subtle difference since the overall geographic topography of the study is termed East Central Europe, rather than Central Europe as in the original. The author uses this distinction, initiated by Oskar Halecki, to differentiate it from the term that intellectuals of the region would associate with Friedrich Nauman's term Mitteleuropa of 1915, for whom the region was subordinate to Germany.The book forms a temporal bridge between historical and mythical time and the present. Right at the onset Masłowski claims: “National myths belong to an ethical symbolism, reconstructed intellectually they can confirm the existence of a basic ethical universalism, which enables both maintaining the idiom of one's own culture and participation in a broad discourse of universals” (p. 11). Within such a spacious notional palette “one's own culture” is East Central Europe which the author places in a broad historical imaginarium. This imaginarium geographically pertains to the countries between Eastern and Western Europe. Primarily this concerns the historical and current national communities of the Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Poles, as well as the Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Croatians, and Romanians, which, as Masłowski notes: “All of these [national communities] experienced a long period of political non-existence after the Second World War through periods of oppression: Nazi and Soviet occupations; all of them leaned toward the West” (p. 15).Over the centuries East Central Europe gained its own identity and, most forcefully in the twentieth century, constantly created its own myths. The author presents this quite emphatically right from the chapter of origin myths, which he connects to the myths of the settling of the nations in their lands as well as their baptisms. Early on the latter also were the source of the fundamental division within the continent: “The schism of eastern Orthodox Christianity from Roman Catholicism in 1054 strengthened the fundamental civilizational differences which are present to this day” (p. 18). Masłowski is referring to when the leaders of the two religious communities excommunicated each other, which formally lasted until the last quarter of the twentieth century. The author is more concerned with the long term socio-political and cultural consequences in Europe. The geographical demarcation line that was created was one upon which the historic nations in question balanced, at times quite uneasily, over the centuries.Throughout the book, sometimes in chapters, sometimes interlaced throughout them, Masłowski discusses the various myths of the region, such as, for instance, Poland and Hungary as bulwarks of Christendom, the heroes of the Reformation such as Jan Hus, the creation of national identities through cultural, political, and religious processes that gain mythical status—even the role of contrarians such as Sławomir Mrożek, Jaroslav Hašek, or Péter Esterházy are examined in this context. In each case the geographical topography of the given question and specific national case is made clear. The author even goes so far as to list the references in the bibliography along these lines. In his examination Masłowski also looks at myths which lead to divisions, such as in the chapter “Us and Them.”Toward the end of his analysis the author examines the role of myths in recovering from the “cracked identity” incurred during the domination of communist totalitarian states. After 1989 all manner of myths and counter myths mix in the struggle to recover a sense of identity necessary to bolster the cultural foundations of the newly recovered sovereignty of the nations.Finally, Masłowski draws on the concluding remarks of Chantal Delsol from the French version. He thus notes that his part of Europe gazes to the West, while the West gazes at its navel and has a deficit of myths, along with an illusion of rationality. The primary myth of western Europe at the time of writing was that of progress, that, it could be added, was buttressed by the myth of the end of history, which Eastern Europe, read Russia, was soon to violently bring to an end. This greatly surprised Western Europe, less so East Central Europe, among other things through an awareness of the dangerous imperialist myths of their eastern neighbor.Delsol's own words, which act as an endorsement of the book on its cover, succinctly convey the study's main message: Contrary to what has long been accepted, the continent of myths and symbols is not archaic nor dated, but a vital source of being. Myths of golden ages, lost battles, the wandering Jew, the bulwark of Christendom enable understanding societies more profoundly than do economic statistics. Our dreams are a key to understanding us

Ancient history · East-Central Europe · Economic history · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Central European Literary Studies · Classics · History · Language and Culture · Law · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies