East Europe: splitting nationalities

Until the sixteenth century, nationalities had little opportunity to realize their common attributes, because the social and geographical aspects of a multinational environment prevented it. One factor included the fragmentation of common nationalities by class: nobility, peasant, and a restricted middle class. The nobility of a territory, what ever their nationality, considered themselves members of one class. Another factor concerned language, for the educated people used Latin, Greek, French or German. Even when their written language had the same origin as the vernacular, it differed from the spoken language (Kohn 1942). As a result the nobility and peasants, even of the same nationality, could not communicate easily. Perhaps the greatest disadvantage, however, was that no literary form existed in the vernacular language for preserving national traditions. In addition, the problem of parochialism, ie, overcoming distances, compounded class and language differences in splitting nationalities. The residents of a territory were familiar with only the local area to which they could be loyal and not to the area occupied by a nationality. Furthermore, nationalities adhered to various international religious that tended to hinder the expression of national feelings. Lastly, political organisation which might have focused national feeling did not correspond to nationality. For a long time multinational states dominated in Eu because the forces of patriotism to territory or ruler were stronger than loyalty to natinal group. Cohesion between members of a nationality because fragmented by factors of class, language, distance, religion and political organisation.

The three absolute empires Prussia, Austria, Germany as well as Russia that ruled East Europe must be separated from the forth Empire of East Europe – the Ottoman. This fourth empire which ruled over portions of the Balkans for periods of up to five hundred years, had political, economic, and social characteristics markedly different fromt hose of the other three. These characteristics help to explain why the Balkans evolved in a divergent way from the rest of East Europe. The Ottoman Empire represented a military state supported by Islamic faith. Its structure rested on perpetual military conquest because the administrative and military bureaucracies were drawn from slaves, mostly conscripted in the Christian areas of the Balkans. Supplementing this group was a native Islamic military class that was given landed estate from which they drew revenues in exchange for providing military services. However they did not constitute a noble class in the European sense, for all land in the Ottoman Empire belonged to the Sultan. The primary goal of the state was the fiscal exploitation of the imperial possessions except beyond the Danube river – in Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania – where a native landholding class was allowed to remain. Elsewhere, the existing nobilities were eliminated. This goal of exploitation helps to explain the economic backwardness of the Balkans under Turkish rule, a condition, of course reflected in part in the landscape: without a noble class of land owners, the land was not cultivated in any systematic way, and large areas of uncultivated land existed throughout the Balkans because may Christian peasants were driven into mountain areas or to large towns. An indirect result of Turkish exploitation, therefore, was the depopulation of certain areas; for example, village settlement on the Hungarian plain declined as people fled to the towns for protection. Christians paid larger taxes than Moslems, which often prompted conversions to the Islamic faith. Today’s Moslems still dominate the population in areas where conversions were greatest as in Bosnia.

Although comparative statistics are lacking, Berend and Ranki (1974) point out that Britain, Germany, and France before the first World War produced 72% of Europe’s population produced 6.3% of the industrial output; over one-half came from the East Europe portion with 60% of this from bohemia. These figures demonstrate that East Europe before the first world war was not heavily industrialized except in parts of Prussia. Industrial programs have been carried out through a series of national plans which have been helped by the public ownership of the means for production and controlled allocation of resources. The pattern of industrial location under socialism eludes easy analysis, because a variety of explanatory factors are present including autarky, military, strategy, ethnic minorities, unexploited raw materials, existing centres, and cooperation through the east Europe common market, large integrated steel plants in all countries, t he improvement of backward areas like Slovakia, the decentralization of older industrial regions like upper Silesia, and oil pipeline from Russia to four countries.


Rugg, Dean S., East Europe, Longman publishing, 1985