To the editors:
Jochen Böhler concludes his essay with an implied warning, that the national populist agendas presently gaining ground in Europe’s multicultural societies are precisely those that plunged Eastern and Central Europe into civil war between 1918 and 1921. Bohler’s essay is drawn from the main argument of his acclaimed Civil War in Central Europe: The Reconstruction of Poland, 1918–1921, published by Oxford University Press in 2018. One cannot read the essay or especially the larger book without thinking of the present-day war in Ukraine and the brutalities visited upon its multinational society, which are driven at least in part by post-imperial Russian nationalism.
The region that is the subject of Böhler’s essay would be embraced within the borders of the Second Polish Republic after 1921. But before the First World War, it had belonged to the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires. In 1914, national identity had made inroads but generally remained weak among the largely rural populations in these borderlands. The war created shatterzones along the eastern front, particularly in the Austrian crownland of Galicia. Its aftermath left much larger power vacuums, forcing inhabitants to choose sides among would-be nation-states, themselves inspired by colonialist and mini-imperial mentalities. And since these states lacked the structures that could partly ensure their stability, competing non-state groups and actors exercised enormous power at the local level and engaged in unrestrained violence. Such conditions are far more definitive of civil wars than interstate wars. Involved in these conflicts were Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic, the two main successor states to defeated and dismantled empires; each faced civil wars of their own.
The conflict in Ukraine, beginning in 2014 and preceded by Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Abkhazia, bears some resemblance to the period discussed in Böhler’s essay. The armed conflict outside Nagorno-Karabakh, which is now in its second iteration, may not have been immediately provoked by the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the ensuing rise of competing nationalisms in its ethnically mixed southern and western peripheries. But the conflict was only a matter of time, especially as the Russian Federation sought to reestablish control of the post-Soviet space by intervening in support of one local ethnic actor over another. Regular armies equipped with conventional weapons have been involved, particularly in Ukraine in 2022. So too have militias and mercenaries in paramilitary groups akin to those of 1918–1921. With the recent images coming out of Bucha, the brutality and intimacy of the violence in Ukraine should be familiar to Böhler’s readers.
In 2014, the Russian-speaking inhabitants in Ukraine’s easternmost provinces were forced to choose between a Ukrainian state in which they may have felt like second-class citizens and the Donetsk and Luhansk statelets manufactured from Russian cloth on the model of Abkhazia. In 2022, they have been asked to choose again. Those that have chosen loyalty to Ukraine have become the principal targets and victims in what might be considered a Russian civil war.
I may be stretching an analogy between conflicts separated by a century. What is happening now may not be a second violent decolonization of Russian imperial space. It is definitely not a conflict of all against all, which seemed to define Central and Eastern Europe in the years following the First World War. But without Ukraine, Russia is not an empire. That is a reality that those Russians who cling to a post-imperial identity defined by populist nationalism find impossible to accept.
Robert Blobaum
Jochen Böhler replies:
I am very grateful to Robert Blobaum for pointing out parallels between the violence perpetrated in Ukraine about a hundred years ago, and that of today. Indeed, in my book Civil War in Central Europe, I argue that East-Central Europe, from Germany to Russia, was engulfed in civil war between 1918 and 1920, a period that saw emerging states give rein to ethnic nationalists who murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians—men, women, children, and the elderly—with racist motives. The harrowing images from Bucha, and many other places in Ukraine, evoke this history.
The brutal Russian attack on Ukraine, now progressing into its second month, has parallels with the past. To my eyes, the greatest threat to Europe today is resurgent ethnic nationalism. This movement mobilizes terrorists, paramilitaries, and, as last resort, regular armies to use violence against the ethnic other in order to either exclude, assimilate, break, or annihilate such groups. This is what occurred in East-Central Europe after the First World War, and it is exactly what Russia is doing in Ukraine now. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is on its way to becoming a fascist dictatorship, invading neighboring countries and oppressing populations it considers non-Russian, destroying their culture, persecuting their elites, and murdering civilians en masse.
The story of ethnic nationalism that erupted in 1918 had a terrible sequel in the emergence of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler. I have long resisted drawing parallels between the Second World War and what is happening in the middle of Europe today. But if one must draw a parallel, I think it is this: To begin with, Nazi Germany ostensibly wanted only to bring ethnic Germans “home to the Reich,” as in the case of the Sudeten Germans in the areas of Czechoslovakia bordering Germany in 1938. Then, in 1939, Hitler raided Czechoslovakia and used an alleged genocide against ethnic Germans as an excuse to invade Poland and murder tens of thousands of civilians by the end of that same year. In the last few months, similar shallow excuses for violence have echoed from the Kremlin. Mariupol in 2022 eerily resembles Warsaw in 1939.
On the other side of this conflict, Ukraine is mobilizing its heroic resistance from a movement of civic nationalism, not from the ethnic nationalism of which Russia accuses it. These claims are entirely hypocritical. It is Russia itself that is practicing merciless ethnic nationalism. In reaction, Ukrainian people of diverse cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds are fighting desperately, with a Jewish president at their helm, for the freedom of a multiethnic Ukrainian state. They fight against a cynical regime that denies Ukraine’s right to exist and seeks to wipe it out in a nightmarish frenzy of Russification.
All democratic states in Europe—except Hungary, which is itself advocating for a strong ethnic nationalism—are manifesting their solidarity with Ukraine today. But if these states really subscribe to their core values—such as individual freedom, international solidarity, and civil and human rights—they must support Ukraine by all means in the fight against Russia’s aggressive ethnic nationalism. At the same time, they must also withdraw all support—including payment for energy—from Russia immediately. Even if this comes with hardships, it is certainly worth the price. German history has barbarously shown that ethnic nationalism knows no borders.
