I’ll never get over how the east-west Europe framing got changed after the 90s, and how nowadays poles, Czechs, Slovaks etc are so desperate to be “in the club” that the concept of “central Europe” suddenly became so important to them, to the point that they will get triggered by any implication that they’re eastern European, despite their long history of literally being slavs.
Central Europe was originally a thing to imply that the Habsburgs and Hohenzollern realms are more “Asiatic despots” than the good and righteous western european democratic governments of France and the UK. The German Empire promoted this also because it meant they could do more “in your face” colonialism and clamp down harder on people wanting more political equality because Germany was not “western european”.
So its like twice the fools errand that the czechs and slovaks do. Worse is probably the Baltics thinking they are northern europeans because sweden colonized estonia or something.
nah, central europe as a concept is much older, the cold war split of western vs eastern europe was the new thing.
eastern europe used to roughly mean the parts that are eastern orthodox christian, and central europe was the catholic areas next to it (HRE + its “extensions” by prussia and austria)
nah, central europe as a concept is much older, the cold war split of western vs eastern europe was the new thing.
Sure, but there’s definitely some auto-chauvinism going on among people of formerly socialist nations in Europe, especially ‘progressive’ liberals. I often heard people say that we here are culturally backwards because of our inherent cultural traits like dishonesty and laziness, often contrasting that to for example the honest hardworking Germans. Sometimes this supposed backwardness is also blamed on socialism.
It’s as sad and pathetic as it sounds but it’s a real thing I’ve experienced quite often.
I’ll never get over how the east-west Europe framing got changed after the 90s, and how nowadays poles, Czechs, Slovaks etc are so desperate to be “in the club” that the concept of “central Europe” suddenly became so important to them, to the point that they will get triggered by any implication that they’re eastern European, despite their long history of literally being slavs.
Central Europe was originally a thing to imply that the Habsburgs and Hohenzollern realms are more “Asiatic despots” than the good and righteous western european democratic governments of France and the UK. The German Empire promoted this also because it meant they could do more “in your face” colonialism and clamp down harder on people wanting more political equality because Germany was not “western european”.
So its like twice the fools errand that the czechs and slovaks do. Worse is probably the Baltics thinking they are northern europeans because sweden colonized estonia or something.
Lmao it’s the same in Croatia, you’ll trigger a lot of people if you imply Croatia is part of the Balkans.
nah, central europe as a concept is much older, the cold war split of western vs eastern europe was the new thing.
eastern europe used to roughly mean the parts that are eastern orthodox christian, and central europe was the catholic areas next to it (HRE + its “extensions” by prussia and austria)
Sure, but there’s definitely some auto-chauvinism going on among people of formerly socialist nations in Europe, especially ‘progressive’ liberals. I often heard people say that we here are culturally backwards because of our inherent cultural traits like dishonesty and laziness, often contrasting that to for example the honest hardworking Germans. Sometimes this supposed backwardness is also blamed on socialism.
It’s as sad and pathetic as it sounds but it’s a real thing I’ve experienced quite often.
for sure