Origins

Abstract

This chapter situates Eastern Europe within a global history of empires and their demise, exploring the region’s status as both part of an imperial Europe and, at times, its defying anti-imperialist periphery. It examines how states that had emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman, German, Habsburg, and Russian Empires navigated a world dominated by powerful, yet declining, Western European empires. The Soviet Union, influenced by a diverse range of anti-colonial activists, founded the Comintern, and became the first major state to provide support for anti-colonial struggles. By the 1930s, however, the Soviets had retreated, and in the wake of the Second World War reverted to great power politics. Smaller non-Communist Eastern European states fought to survive in an international environment in which their sovereignty was still in question. Some elites struggled to consolidate their fragile new polities in the white imperial world of the interwar period. Both identifying with the continent’s expansionism, and highlighting their experiences of living under empires within Europe, some of these same elites viewed themselves as ‘superior colonizers’ who could redeem an imperial project degraded by violence. Such a ‘civilizing mission’ would be brought not only to the ‘backward’ peripheries of their new states, but also to territories in Africa and Latin America, the acquisition of which would, they hoped, ensure their recognition as fully sovereign European polities. Yet with the growing threat of Nazi imperialism, others developed solidarities beyond Europe. Thus the empathetic affinities between Eastern Europe and the anti-imperial movements beyond Europe were established well before the institutionalization of socialist internationalism under postwar Communist regimes.