Bibliograph

Central Europe through the lens of language and politics, on the sample maps from the Atlas of language politics in modern Central Europe, Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, and Catherine Gibson (eds.)

Type

Label

Central Europe through the lens of language and politics, on the sample maps from the Atlas of language politics in modern Central Europe, Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, and Catherine Gibson (eds.)

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-89)

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Central Europe through the lens of language and politics

Oclc number

1013475244

Responsibility statement

Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, and Catherine Gibson (eds.)

Series statement

Surabu Yūrashia kenkyū hōkokushū, 10

Sub title

on the sample maps from the Atlas of language politics in modern Central Europe

Summary

During the 1980s, Central Europe re-emerged as a concept of socio-political analysis in samizdat publications brought out in the region when the Cold War division of the continent into Eastern and Western Europe still stood fast. This concept of a newly found self-definition among Central Europe’s literati and dissidents was brought to the wider attention of the West in 1984 by the Czech(oslovak) writer Milan Kundera in his seminal essay published in the New York Review of Books (Kundera 1984). To some it was a revelation that Central Europe could be a world unto itself, while others criticized this concept as a political delusion. More nationally-minded critics also saw it as a tool for a potential renewed German domination over the region. They reiterated how during the First World War Mitteleuropa had been a blueprint for building an economic-cum-political bloc in Central Europe under the joint control of Germany and Austria-Hungary (Naumann 1915). The breakup in 1989 of the Soviet bloc gave a lease of political reality to Central Europe. However, following the 1993 founding of the European Union (EU) the region’s freshly postcommunist states applied for membership in this union, seen as a synonym of the West or, more exactly, of Western Europe. The Central European wish to join the European Union was a desire to become part of Western Europe. The curiously changing membership of the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) vindicates this view. Founded in 1992 by Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, the original member states promptly left it when they joined the EU in 2004. Nowadays, CEFTA embraces Albania, Moldova, and the post-Yugoslav states that have not joined the EU yet.--, Provided by Publisher

Contributor

Subject