TY - JOUR
T1 - Why bother about historical regions?
T2 - Debates over central Europe in Hungary, Poland and Romania
AU - Janowski, Maciej
AU - Iordachi, Constantin
AU - Trencsényi, Balázs
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2005 Copyright 2005 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
PY - 2005
Y1 - 2005
N2 - The article analyzes the ways in which the concept of Central Europe and related regional classifications were instrumentalized in historical research in Hungary, Poland and Romania. While Hungarian and Polish historians employed the discourse of Central Europe as a central means to contextualize and often relativize established national historical narratives, their geographical frameworks of comparison were nevertheless fairly divergent. the Hungarian one relating to the former Habsburg and Austro-Hungarian lands while the Polish one revolving around the tradition of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Romanian historians approached the issue from the perspective of local history, debating two alternative regional frameworks: the Old Kingdom, treated as part of the Byzantine and Ottoman legacies, and Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat that were shaped by the Habsburg project of modemity. In the Romanian context the debate on Central Europe reached its peak at a time when it lost re1evance in the Polish and Hungarian contexts. While conceding to recent critiques on the constructed and often exclusivist nature of symbolic geographical catcgories, the authors maintain the heuristic valuc of regional frameworks of interpretation as models of historical explanation transcending the nation-state at sub-national or trans-national level.
AB - The article analyzes the ways in which the concept of Central Europe and related regional classifications were instrumentalized in historical research in Hungary, Poland and Romania. While Hungarian and Polish historians employed the discourse of Central Europe as a central means to contextualize and often relativize established national historical narratives, their geographical frameworks of comparison were nevertheless fairly divergent. the Hungarian one relating to the former Habsburg and Austro-Hungarian lands while the Polish one revolving around the tradition of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Romanian historians approached the issue from the perspective of local history, debating two alternative regional frameworks: the Old Kingdom, treated as part of the Byzantine and Ottoman legacies, and Transylvania, Bukovina and the Banat that were shaped by the Habsburg project of modemity. In the Romanian context the debate on Central Europe reached its peak at a time when it lost re1evance in the Polish and Hungarian contexts. While conceding to recent critiques on the constructed and often exclusivist nature of symbolic geographical catcgories, the authors maintain the heuristic valuc of regional frameworks of interpretation as models of historical explanation transcending the nation-state at sub-national or trans-national level.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84994235632&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1163/18763308-90001031
DO - 10.1163/18763308-90001031
M3 - Review Article
AN - SCOPUS:84994235632
SN - 0094-3037
VL - 32
SP - 5
EP - 58
JO - East Central Europe
JF - East Central Europe
IS - 1-2
ER -