"Deads Lands" or "New Europe"? Reconstructing Europe, Reconfiguring Eastern Europe: "Westerners" and the Aftermath of the World War

A NEW EUROPE OR DEAD LANDS? In Britain during 1916, a periodical called The New appeared. Believing that Great War offered an unique opportunity to destroy dynastic empires that prevented nationalities like Czechs and Poles from having their own self-governing homelands, contributors such as R. W. Seton-Watson, Elmer Davis, and W. J. Rose advocated establishment of independent states, based upon nationality, throughout Eastern Europe. The creation of new nation-states would, these men thought, rectify an historic injustice and satisfy legitimate claims of nationalities. After 1918 many intellectuals and popular writers invested their fears and hopes for postwar era in notion of Eastern Europe, a region that they saw as a geographical, political, and cultural entity of self-governing nation-states distinct from Western Europe. (1) As several scholars have demonstrated, before 1914 West European and American thinkers depicted Eastern as a place of semi-Orientalized, backward, and degenerate peoples, thereby differentiating themselves and an idealized West--in civilizational terms--from others of Eastern Europe. (2) This analysis begs an important question. How did Westerners' cultural ideas about Eastern after Great War reflect political transformation that had occurred? Through a study of interwar French, British, and American literature, including both contemporary scholarly studies and travel accounts that were written about region, one can conclude that West Europeans and Americans did not change their fundamental ideas about area and its peoples. (3) They could have created a positive discourse on region by viewing East Europeans as political and cultural equals, fellow citizens of new European home, rather than seeing them as uncivilized savages. The journal The New sought to demonstrate potential for formation of a positive East European image. However, these early hopes died soon after close of peace conference, and even use of term the New Europe tapered off during 1920s. In an effort to make West European civilization look superior, many writers described an Eastern that was home of inferior, degenerate cultures characterized by barbarity, pseudo-Orientalism, and Levantinism, ideas that placed Eastern in closer connection with Orient than with high culture of Western Europe. Thus, in cultural terms, a New Eastern never came into existence. After Great War, negative constructions of Eastern tied into ideas about Western civilization's decline and probable collapse. Notions of Western decline dated to late nineteenth century, yet some of most influential prognosticators of that decline, particularly Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee, only published their ideas in 1918 and years following. During interwar era, writers who deprecated Eastern as a zone of uncivilized people did so in an attempt to find meaning for idea of Western civilization in wake of war. In a few seminal cases, men like Arnold Toynbee, Paul Valery, and Henri Massis analyzed symptoms of Western deterioration, sought solutions for Western problem, and in process depicted Eastern as inferior to West in order to present West in best light possible, that is, by contrasting Western with its degenerate Eastern neighbor. While one might think it contradictory to maintain that Westerners defamed Eastern in order to uphold as superior a Western civilization which they believed to be in a state of decline, in reality no contradiction exists. West Europeans and Americans thought that West had entered most severe crisis of its existence after Great War and that disintegration seemed to loom on horizon. But most of them believed that with reforms, such as a spiritual revival, Western civilization could be saved from fate of others, including those in Eastern Europe, who had slipped beyond point of salvation. …