Vienna between East and West: the construction of a new transborder Central European region

Abstract

Neither East nor West East-West cleavages in Europe are a key determinant to understanding Vienna as a rich, but nevertheless semi-peripheral city between Eastern and Western Europe. The Habsburg Empire (1282-1918), of which Vienna was the capital city, covered large parts of the region between Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire and Russia. It was characterized by multiple nationalities and was internally structured with multiple and changing centre-periphery relations – North-South, as well as East-West, and dominant German/Hungarian nationalities versus the other, mainly Slavic nations. Vienna is thus a privileged site for the study of the spatial imaginaries and strategies accompanying the transformations of this broad region, and their socio-economic, political and cultural implications. East and West have been crucially antagonistic mind maps in Western thought, like ‘we’ and ‘the others’, Orient and Occident, and the West and ‘the rest’ (Hall 1994). In the ninth century, Charlemagne separated the Franco-Germanic part of Europe from the Slavic East with an East-West divide very similar to the one later erected by the Iron Curtain (Szücs 1990: 13). In the West, a Christian feudal order evolved out of a symbiosis of the Roman slaveholder latifundium and the German communitarian social organization. Its relatively decentralized power structure permitted a plurality of languages and autonomous cities evolved from the power vacuum (Anderson 1978: 148), constituting a fertile ground for later modernization. From the end of the Middle Ages onwards, the territorial expansionism of the West resulted in the crusades, reconquista and colonization (Komlosy 1994; Hobsbawm 1990). The East experienced a different trajectory. Russia, the sentinel of Europe on the eastern front, had to bear the brunt of repeated invasion waves by Mongols, Tartars and other Asian nomadic people (Anderson 1980), a crucial determinant to an understanding of the centralist and authoritarian structure of its state and society. These different historical-geographical trajectories have significantly contributed to shaping the ‘morphological contrast between the state in the East and West’ (Gramsci 1971) and the different forms of political praxis: ‘In the East the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society’ (Gramsci 1971: 238). The Habsburg Empire was part of eastern Central Europe, which was surrounded by the West and Russia. This ‘in-between region’ (Szücs 1990), consisting of Poland, Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, for centuries oriented itself towards the West, but had difficulties in building truly Western institutions, especially a strong civil society. The countryside was sparsely populated (Anderson 1980), the cities were smaller and less independent, the nobility was larger and more influential (Szücs 1990), and the Counter-Reformation was strong. The Habsburg Empire was thus a hybrid, combining elements of the East and the West under one dynasty for more than 600 years.