Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea
Central Europe keeps being declared dead and keeps being invoked. Jukic asks what the idea was ever for.
Luka Ivan Jukic traces the idea of Central Europe from the multi-ethnic empires through the catastrophes that ended them, and into its revival as a political argument after 1989. The recurring lesson is how rarely the project worked: the region’s shared identity was mostly asserted by intellectuals rather than felt by the people it claimed.
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Tyler Cowen
Luka Ivan Jukic, Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea. I took this sentence to encapsulate the main lesson of the book, namely that this does not usually work: “Central Europeans were, as ever, masterfully adept at rearranging polities into new configurations.”
Source · October 2025
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