Regions in the History of Central Europe

REGIONS IN CENTRAL EUROPE UNDER COMMUNISM: A PALIMPSEST

PART FOUR REGIONS IN CENTRAL EUROPE UNDER COMMUNISM A PALIMPSEST Kristian Gerner 'At least for some regions of Europe, one of which is Upper Silesia, nationalism has brought much suffering.'1 The Concept of Region At the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, the problen~, or task, facing the Central European states was seen as follows. They were to depart from the parenthesis that was the Soviet era, and from an anomalous societal condition, and return to Europe, which was defined as that which was 'normal'. The mass media, politicians and social scientists in the West were generally agreed that these states and their peoples had been oppressed, and prevented from realising their inherent potential by the Soviet overlordship and Con1ITlunist party rule under which they had lived for nearly half a century. In the post-war era, when the Central European states were constituent parts of a hierarchically structured monolithic bloc, Western Europe underwent profound changes. These included not only evolution toward a European Union (EU), but also the growing importance of the regional level both in political rhetoric and at times also in political reality. When these states rejoined the family, the question that naturally arose was whether their self-fulfilment and welfare would best be served by participation 1 Ingeborg K. Helling, ' "Spataussiedler" from Poland: Lifeworld and biography', in R. Grathoff and A. Kloskowska (eds), The Neighbourhood ofCultures (Warsaw, 1994), p.112. 178 Regions in Central Europe under Communism 179 in the EU, as well as by decentralisation and the strengthening of regions. Approaching regions as problematic phenomena itself implies that one understands territory - in this case, Europe - as being divided into hierarchically arranged territorial entities, of which some are independent states, others are permitted limited self-rule while yet others exist only as names and contain no independent political institutions. Names themselves have shifting status, some being anchored in a historical context and others merely designations for development projects. Is the~e such a thing as a Baltic region, a Lake Malar region and a Barents Sea region? Do they compare with, for example, Sweden, Switzerland and Scania? In which instances are we observing fact, and in which are we rather dealing with constructions and projections that do not correspond to any political reality? Or is there no clear boundary between these two dimensions? How important are issues such as the context and Zeitgeist? In his discussion of the region as a'political and territorial concept, Anssi Paasi has noted that it refers to a social construction which needs to be approached from a historical perspective. His definition is a good basis for studying regions in Central Europe during the Soviet era: Regions are not 'organisms' that develop and have a life-span or evolution in the manner that some biological metaphors - so typical in Western political thought - would suggest. Rather, following Dear and Wolch, regions and localities are understood in this framework as being a complex synthesis or manifestation of objects, patterns, processes, social practices and inherent power relations that are derived from simultaneous interaction between different levels' of social processes. [...] Through the institutionalization process and the struggles inherent in it, the territorial units in question 'receive' their boundaries and their symbols which distinguish them from other regions. 2 Paasi argues that a region's name is its mostsignificant symbol. It 'converges' historical development, great events, episodes and recollections into one, thus engendering in individuals an experience ofcollective identity linked to the region.3 In. this context 2 Anssi Paasi, Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border (Chichester, England, 1995), pp.32-3. 3 Ibid., p.35. 180 Kristian Gerner the question of continuity in the collective consciousness comes to the fore. Can a region which has a historically manifested identity disappear? Can it slumber and reawaken? Can actors on the historical stage construct a 'historical' region·which did not in fact exist as such, and thereby endow such a region with legitimacy so it will gain acceptance in the eyes of other actors? A region can be defined as a structure. Referring to Fernand Braudel, Stein Rokkan and Charles Tilly, Daniel-Louis Seiler gives the concept this meaning: By structures I mean long-run unvariant systems of relations which subsume social facts and which influence both actors and organizations in an unconscious way. [...] Most of the structures to be dealt with link political power and territory, but also...