February 6, 2025
By Will Collins
Writing in 1948, the caustic left-wing historian AJP Taylor sounded a rare hopeful note in the final chapter of The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918, his book on the autumn of one of Europe’s great dynasties:
Marshal Tito was the last of the Habsburgs: ruling over eight different nations, he offered them ‘cultural autonomy’ and reined in their nationalist hostility . . . More fortunate than the Habsburgs, Marshal Tito found an ‘idea’. Only time will show whether social revolution and economic betterment can do better than Counter-Revolution dynasticism in supplying central Europe with a common loyalty.
Over 75 years later, this passage reads as wishful thinking on the part of a Tito-sympathizing academic. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the “Counter-Revolutionary dynasticism” of the Habsburgs amassed a considerably better—or at least longer—record than Yugoslavia’s revolutionary socialism. Tito’s regime lasted from 1945 to 1989. The Habsburg Dynasty endured from the Middle Ages to the end of World War One.
What makes The Habsburg Monarchy worth reading, however, is not one errant prediction. Despite his mixed track record as a prognosticator, Taylor understood that Habsburgs and communists alike struggled to govern a region that has long been a locus of nationalist discontent. Both regimes tried to balance the competing claims of ethnic, linguistic and religious groups. Both found the contradictions too great to bear over the long run.
Now liberalism faces the same challenge. The sudden collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s is typically described as a triumph for its main ideological competitor, Western liberalism. This interpretation is wrong, or at the very least incomplete. The rapid breakups of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia were in fact the most recent of Europe’s nationalist revolutions. The same grievances that ended the Habsburg, Romanov, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman dynasties and contributed to the rise of fascism during the interwar period were temporarily stilled by the superpowers’ Cold War rivalry. In 1989, however, nationalism reasserted itself with a vengeance. Franz Josef, the long-serving Habsburg emperor who once called himself “the last monarch of the old school,” would have instantly recognized the forces that toppled his communist successors. Today’s liberals, progressives, and EU technocrats are grappling with the same forces.
The Forgotten History of the Post-Communist Era
Our understanding of 1989 as a liberal triumph rests on a few iconic images that endure in the popular imagination, as well the subsequent integration of most of Central and Eastern Europe into the Western economic and political sphere. Young people tearing down the Berlin Wall, the “Singing Revolution” in the Baltic states, chants of “Havel to the Castle” in Prague—these made-for-TV episodes resonate because they fit neatly into a narrative of youthful, idealistic liberalism versus dour communist autocracy that flatters Western sensibilities. This mythology is so potent that it’s invoked every time a color revolution or a protest breaks out around the world. From Ukraine to Georgia to Hong Kong, any political movement with a perceived liberal bent is celebrated as a successor to 1989.
The trouble with this account is that it ignores much of what actually happened during the post-communist transition period. Consider the trajectory of Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. An array of newly reawakened national identities redrew the map, often quite violently, in the space of just a few years. After a period of national dormancy under the Soviets’ rough tutelage, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania suddenly reemerged as independent countries. The Baltic states, with their distinct languages and historic ties to Western Europe, were obvious candidates for a national reawakening, but this trend extended even to countries like Ukraine, which has always enjoyed a close cultural kinship with Russia (the current conflict notwithstanding). Despite mutually intelligible languages, shared institutions, and a unified history dating back to the interwar period, Czechoslovakia split into Czech and Slovak halves over relatively minor economic disagreements.
The most violent manifestations of the nationalist revival occurred in the former Yugoslavia, where Tito’s ‘idea’ barely outlasted Tito himself. Observers of the late Habsburg era often noted that the dynasty’s fortunes were bound up in the person of Franz Josef, whose decades-long career as an imperial figurehead was an important bulwark for the regime. Similarly, Tito’s austere charisma and status as a partisan hero kept Yugoslavia from coming apart at the seams. Just over a decade after his death, the multiethnic federation he had bequeathed to his successors descended into violent conflict. Not coincidentally, Tito was succeeded by Slobodan Milošević, a former high-ranking Party member who seized on Serbian nationalism as a replacement for the exhausted ideology of Yugoslav communism.
One counterfactual worth considering is the possibility of the Balkan Wars spreading north along national fault lines. According to the Dutch journalist Jaap Scholten, the Hungarian military prepared contingency plans to occupy the Romanian province of Transylvania, home to a substantial Hungarian-speaking minority, in the confusion of the early 1990s. Before World War Two, Transylvania’s contested status was one of the most intractable problems in Eastern Europe. This dispute was frozen in amber during the Cold War but reemerged as a potential flashpoint after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Tension between Hungary and Romania over the status of Transylvania’s Hungarian speakers persist to this day. In the early 2000s, far-right Romanian politician Vadim Tudor threatened ethnic Hungarians on the campaign trail, calling himself “Vlad the Impaler.” In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán still portrays himself as a defender of Transylvania’s embattled Hungarian minority.
The End of East Germany, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia
Even the more benign post-1989 developments were marked by the influence of renascent national feeling. In a too-little, too-late bid to shore up its crumbling legitimacy, the German Democratic Republic tried to resuscitate Martin Luther and Frederick the Great’s reputations as part of a broader effort to emphasize the regime’s German identity. This ploy couldn’t save East Germany, but it does reflect its leaders’ belated realization that nationalism was a force to be reckoned with. Most international observers expected a slow path to German reunification, checked by cautious politicians and British, French, and Russian concerns about the sudden reappearance of a united Germany in Central Europe. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s original plan called for a currency union and an incremental five-year process to bring the two countries back together. This was quickly abandoned in the face of overwhelming public enthusiasm for rapid reunification on both sides of the wall.
In Russia, meanwhile, Boris Yeltsin seized the mantle of leadership from the suddenly out-of-date Mikhail Gorbachev by pivoting from perestroika to patriotism. Today, Yeltsin is remembered as a bumbling drunk who helped lay the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, he was one of the first Russian leaders to grasp the implications of resurgent nationalism. “Yeltsin,” wrote the historian Tony Judt, “had the political instinct to re-programme himself as a distinctively Russian politician: emerging first as a deputy for the Russian Federation after the March 1990 elections and then as Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet – i.e. the Russian Parliament.”
To be sure, economic anxiety and other quality of life issues also played a major role in inciting popular resistance to late-stage communism. But this commonsensical observation merely highlights the fact abstract ideological considerations were far from most people’s minds when the old system collapsed. Outside a few dissident circles, the drab gray world of actually existing socialism was a much more effective argument for jettisoning Marxist dogma than appeals to liberal idealism.
Moreover, national sentiment was often bound up with economic grievances. In Yugoslavia, the comparatively prosperous Slovenes and Croats resented directives from Serb-dominated Belgrade. The Serbs in turn feared the growth of the Albanian population of Kosovo, which was not just fecund and Muslim, but economically dependent on the rest of Yugoslavia. Dislike for Russian transplants in Riga or Tallinn was heightened by the fact that Latvia and Estonia were among the wealthiest of the Soviet republics. Under their Thatcherite Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, the commercially minded Czechs charged ahead with a program of economic liberalization in the early 1990s while the poorer Slovaks demurred, a disagreement that eventually led to the so-called “velvet divorce.”
The fate of liberal darling Václav Havel and his short-lived presidency of a unified Czechoslovakia is a lesson in the limited appeal of political liberalism. Much to his dismay, Havel found that his reputation as a heroic dissident wasn’t enough to keep Czechoslovakia together. By the time he left office in 2003 as president of the geographically diminished Czech Republic, Havel was more popular internationally than among his countrymen. Newly independent Slovakia was midwifed by the populist Vladimír Mečiar, who exploited fears of economic liberalization and Hungarian separatism to dominate Slovak politics through the 1990s.
Western Integration and Eastern European Nationalism
As for Central and Eastern Europe’s integration into the West’s economic, security, and political institutions, the history of the past 30 years, especially the friction between Western governments and their new Eastern allies, is much more legible when viewed through the lens of nationalism. If 1989 was first and foremost a series of national uprisings, the reluctance of Eastern European countries to trade Moscow for Brussels suddenly makes sense.
The career of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who first came to prominence as a fiery anti-Soviet dissident, illustrates this essential continuity. One reason Orbán is viewed with such disdain by liberal Hungarians and foreign critics is his apparent betrayal of his youthful ideals. A characteristic account can be found in Tainted Democracy by Viktoria Szelényi, herself a former Fidesz member: “For those of us who remember the courage and astuteness Orbán displayed in his early days, his complete political volte-face is baffling.”
Orbán has a politician’s knack for seizing an opening, and his transformation from liberal firebrand to outspoken Hungarian nationalist was surely influenced by cold political calculation. But there is an underrated element of continuity between Orbán the dissident and Orbán the conservative nationalist. In 1989, the main threat to Hungarian sovereignty was the Soviet Union’s military presence in Central and Eastern Europe, highlighted by repeated Soviet interventions in its near abroad, including the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. In 2024, Russian tanks are safely on the other side of a Ukrainian buffer state, while the European Union shapes everything from energy infrastructure to agricultural subsidies to tech regulation. EU mission creep, combined with its opaque and anti-democratic character, has aroused resentment among conservative voters across Eastern Europe. Having ousted the Soviets, is it any wonder that nationalists like Orbán have fixed on Brussels as their next antagonist?
Nationalism—the Demon in Democracy?
Even Orbán’s liberal counterparts can’t afford to ignore resurgent nationalism. In Poland, the recent election of Donald Tusk was hailed as a victory for pro-Western liberalism and a repudiation of the Orbán-aligned Law and Justice Party. Tusk is more liberal than his predecessors on a range of issues, but he has carefully avoided antagonizing conservative voters on questions related to national sovereignty, most notably immigration. According to Tusk, stopping mass migration is a question of “the survival of Western civilization,” a line that could be inserted seamlessly into any of Orbán’s recent speeches. Tusk’s government has also taken steps to harden its Belarussian border.
Orbán’s critics often warn of “liberal backsliding,” the idea that the hard-won political gains of the 1990s and 2000s will be eroded by creeping autocracy. Sometimes these accusations have merit, as is the case with the pro-Fidesz slant of Hungarian state media. But critics often forget that Central and Eastern European politicians must work within the constraints imposed by their electorates. As Henry Olsen has demonstrated, nationalist and conservative parties have dominated Hungarian politics since the Soviet withdrawal. These voters are not doctrinaire opponents of European integration or political liberalism. Freedom of movement within the Schengen Zone, generous economic subsidies, and the feeling of being part of ‘Europe’ remain broadly popular. Handing over major decisions on border control, energy policy, and national security to the EU is a tougher sell.
Indeed, the case for autocracy in Eastern Europe often rested on a profound suspicion of democratic preferences. Here Franz Josef’s career again comes to mind. After lamenting his status as the last of the “old school” European monarchs, the emperor continued, “It is my duty to protect my people from their politicians,” presumably because those politicians were prone to exploiting national grievances for their own ends. Marshal Tito, who ruled the multinational Yugoslav federation with an iron fist, understood this sentiment. More than a few technocrats in Brussels and Strasbourg would likely agree.
Nationalism and Violence in Modern Europe
Today, a map of Eastern Europe’s hotpots is a map of once-dormant national conflicts reawakened by the end of the Cold War. The most obvious example is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is often portrayed in the Western press as a conflict between liberal democracy and autocracy. Given Ukraine’s mixed democratic track record and the very public outpouring of Ukrainian nationalism (some of it quite unpalatable to Western sensibilities), the war is better understood as a clash between rival nations.
In the Baltics, Russia has experimented with ‘hybrid warfare’ – provocative military maneuvers combined with political, economic, and cyber-attacks that fall just short of open conflict. Putin is unlikely to invade a NATO member in the midst of a grueling war in Ukraine, but these tactics will continue because Estonia and Latvia are still home to large Russian minorities that agitate for linguistic and cultural autonomy.
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, a similar pattern prevails. Where serious national grievances persist, the threat of violence lingers. The Dayton Accords were meant to end the fighting in Bosnia until Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks could reach a more durable settlement. While Bosnia has been quiescent since the 1990s, the three sides have never been able to reach a permanent peace agreement. In the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo, riot police recently clashed with Serb protesters over the installation of Albanian mayors in majority Serb towns. As long as restive nationalities exist in close proximity, the former Yugoslavia will remain troubled.
Reconciling Liberalism and Nationalism
Westerners typically assume that liberalism is humanity’s default setting, an unspoken yearning shared by people across all cultures and societies. The truth is more complicated. Liberalism exerts a powerful draw, especially on intellectuals, because it promises creative freedom and valorizes individual achievement. But its appeal is often eclipsed by nationalism, religion, tribal affiliation, and other loyalties, even in the putatively enlightened West. The history of Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 is a useful reminder of this reality.
This is not to say that liberalism and the more benign strains of nationalism are fundamentally irreconcilable. In Eastern Europe, the two forces are typically linked. Hungarians annually celebrate their 1848 uprising against the Habsburgs, a revolution spearheaded by the liberal patriot Lajos Kossuth. In 1956, another valiant but ultimately futile rising against the Soviets was spurred by patriotic feeling and a backlash to the Stalinist excesses of the Rákosi regime. The peaceful 1989 revolution followed the same template. To anti-Soviet dissidents, it was self-evident that demands for Hungarian sovereignty and a free and open society went hand-in-hand.
Though it is often described as the bete noire of nationalists, EU membership and national sovereignty are also compatible. There is no popular groundswell in countries like Hungary and Poland for abandoning the EU. The Hungarian countryside is dotted with infrastructure projects made possible by the organization’s internal cohesion funds. From Prague to Warsaw to Budapest, Central European capitals have been remade in the space of a generation by EU-enabled investment and tourism. Younger Central and Eastern Europeans have grown up accustomed to traveling and working in Western member states.
An ultra-progressive, ultra-consolidated, and maximally-intrusive version of the EU is a different story, however. Historically, liberalism has sold itself as a set of norms and institutions that enable individual freedom and societal flourishing. Until recently, liberals did not insist on specific policy prescriptions on issues like foreign affairs and border control, which were widely understood to be national prerogatives. The recent turn towards a baroque and intrusive set of rules on race, gender, and sexuality is another departure from traditional liberalism. It is not surprising that Central and Eastern European countries, which are more culturally conservative than their Western counterparts and more sensitive to issues of national sovereignty because of their history, would bridle at these impositions.
It is noteworthy that the most effective political challengers to nationalist politicians usually steer clear of left-liberal and progressive pieties. Polish Prime Minister Tusk is an Atlanticist and a Russian hardliner, but he is also skeptical of the EU’s green energy policies and has loudly proclaimed his intent to protect Poland’s borders. Moreover, Tusks’s confrontational approach to Russia is in keeping with Polish nationalism, which has always been skeptical of Russian intentions.
In Hungary, Orbán faces a potentially formidable challenger in Péter Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s Fidesz Party who has turned apostate. Magyar has avoided challenging Orbán on immigration or foreign policy, preferring instead to focus on issues like corruption, infrastructure spending, and Hungary’s anemic economy. When Budapest’s liberal mayor took issue with Orban’s equivocal response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he invoked Hungary’s own resistance to the Soviets in 1956. Successful opposition leaders have found ways to criticize right-populist incumbents without disavowing their own patriotic bona fides.
Today, Eastern European politics demonstrates that voters often place national identity and quality of life issues over abstract ideological concerns. This should come as no surprise, as these same issues helped bring about the collapse of communism a generation ago. Westerners often assume the West won the Cold War because of the superiority of its ideas. In truth, the West won because of the superiority of its economic and political system and the inherent instability of the Soviet empire, which attempted to suppress the restive nations of Central and Eastern Europe through military force and ideological propaganda. This empire collapsed in 1989 thanks to a complex mix of genuine liberal sentiment, popular discontent with the economic shortcomings of communism, and resurgent nationalism. This is a less satisfying story than the idea of a bottom-up liberal uprising, but it has the virtue of being true.
Will Collins is a lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.