When Winston Churchill said on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, that “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” he observed that Europe had become divided into two spheres of influence: one dominated by the Anglo-Saxon allies and the other by the Soviet Union.1 However, the division of Europe already had a longer history. The concepts of Western Europe (civilized, rich, progressive) and Eastern Europe (uncivilized, poor, backward) were already present in the European imagination in the eighteenth century.2 A Polish historian, Andrzej Nowak, has recently pointed out that the very concept of Eastern Europe can be traced back to the official justifications of the imperialistic expansion of Russia. For instance, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Emperor Peter I constructed an image of Russia as both European and Asian, with a mission of civilizing the uncivilized, and Eastern Europe was key to that allegedly civilizing and indeed imperialistic and colonialist project. Interestingly, it was during Peter’s reign that the ancient border of Europe on the river Don was replaced by Russian cartographers with a new border, on the Ural Mountains, which remains the accepted boundary even now. Nowak argues that the very concept of Eastern Europe is an ideological space of Russia’s special interests and rights, negotiated with what has become “Western Europe.”3
If we read the actual text of Churchill’s speech at Fulton, we’ll see that he speaks of the iron curtain dividing something unnamed (Europe?) from what he calls “the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe,” which have fallen into the Soviet sphere. Indeed, several important intellectuals from that miserable place in between “the West” and Russia protested, without much success, of course, against that ideological redrawing of the spiritual map of Europe. In 1983, Milan Kundera published an essay in the French journal Le Debat, entitled “Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale” (A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe),4 in which he argued that Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary are in no sense “Eastern Europe” but instead lie at the heart of the continent and, spiritually, belong to what then was already called the West.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the countries of Central Europe were trying to repair the damage of the past centuries by reconnecting with the imaginary West, two Polish historians born in 1920s wrote histories of that part of Europe, trying to emphasize its peculiarities. In 1992, Piotr Wandycz, a Polish émigré teaching at Yale, published The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present,5 while in 1998 Jerzy Kłoczowski (who, unlike Wandycz, remained in communist Poland after the war) published a groundbreaking study in Polish, whose title in English would be Younger Europe: Central-Eastern Europe and the Christian Civilization of the Middle Ages.6 What Kundera called “Central Europe,” Wandycz called “East Central Europe,” and Kłoczowski coined his own term, “Younger Europe,” but all of them were speaking about the three medieval kingdoms that joined Christian civilization in the eleventh century: Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland. In a broader sense, however, Kłoczowski speaks of Younger Europe as also comprising Scandinavia and the Eastern and Southern Slavic lands, baptized by the Byzantine Empire, so the whole region extends between the Baltic, the Adriatic, and the Black Seas.
Both Wandycz and Kłoczowski argued that the identity of Central Europe is founded on a special relation to the idea of freedom, but also to the ideas of equality, justice, and tolerance or peaceful coexistence of different social groups. This part of Europe began to flourish during the European crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Poland became the political center of the region at the dawn of modernity, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by virtue of its union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which included large parts of Ruthenia. At the same time, Bohemia and Hungary, under the Habsburg rule, went into decline. Even a short glance at history makes it clear that Central Europe developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, because both its Western neighbor, Germany, and its Eastern neighbor, Ruthenia, were politically fragmented and in deep crisis. However, as soon as they became united and powerful, Central Europe started to diminish.
The identity of Younger Europe consists in a certain in-between status. Since its beginning it has looked toward the (imaginary) West as the source and root of Christian civilization, which it eagerly joined, but it has also looked toward the (imaginary) East as the force inimical to that civilization. As a result, it came to define itself as the antemurale Christianitatis (“bulwark of Christendom”). Already in the late Middle Ages it was subject to pressures from all geographical directions. From the West came the pressure of the older and more advanced German civilization, with German settlers arriving in large numbers to live in Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary. From the East, the pressure came from the more numerous East Slavic peoples, whom Moscow had the ambition to unite under its rule since the early fifteenth century. From the South, the pressure of the Muslim expansion continued, which, in the form of the Ottoman Empire, strived to conquer the whole of Christian Europe since the second half of the fourteenth century. This has been, certainly, quite a tragic situation, for Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, but, at the same time, the constant effort of defending their spiritual and political identity against these three pressures created a strong sense of freedom as the highest political and moral good. The matter was more complex because one of those pressures, the German culture, did not only act through sheer force, like Russia and Turkey; on the contrary, it was attractive as the mediator of the ancient European civilization as it was consistent and at times ruthless in its eastward expansion.
Another highly significant factor, when we talk about Central Europe, is its internal diversity. From the Middle Ages, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland have had to contain various ethnicities, languages, and cultures. The Finno-Ugric Hungarians ruled over Slovaks in the north, Croatians and Serbs in the south, and Wallachians (or Romanians) in the East. In fourteenth-century Bohemia there were already numerous German settlers, particularly in cities, which could be seen also in Poland, especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the inhabitants of the rich, northern region, reconquered by Poland from the hands of the Teutonic Order, were increasingly German speaking. Hungary had its own, large and internally coherent population of “Saxons” in Transylvania.
Poland also invited a large population of Jews, which grew enormously and were given royal privileges; when the Jews were expelled from Spain and most of the Western European kingdoms, they were welcomed in Poland. The union with Lithuania and Ruthenia created additional opportunities and problems. A similar, maybe even more important challenge was religious diversity, which followed the ethnic and linguistic one. First, Eastern Orthodox and Catholics, but then also Protestants of different denominations, and even Muslims were living together in Central Europe. And there were neither large-scale persecutions nor religious civil wars (apart from Hussite Wars in the fifteenth century). There were conflicts, of course, but historians point out that the religious identity of Catholics and Protestants in Central Europe was more “fuzzy-edged” than in other parts of Europe. There was vitriolic polemic, as everywhere, but also serious attempts at reconciliation and never an idea of eliminating the heretics altogether by force. This was very different from what was going on in Italy, Spain, France, England, or Sweden at the time (not to mention Russia and Turkey, of course).
Another point is the social structure of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, which also developed differently in the late Middle Ages. The political nation in these kingdoms consisted of an unusually large nobility, which enjoyed, as an estate, equal rights and liberties unheard of in other parts of Europe. Political power was not centralized, as in the West (absolutism) or the East and South (despotism). The political constitution sought for in Bohemia and Hungary, and established successfully in Poland-Lithuania in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is called either proto-democratic, by historians who like it, or anarchic, by those who do not. The Western or Russian historiography of the last two centuries blamed the fall of Central Europe on its “excessive freedom.” However, there is a different narrative to be told as well: freedom, equality, and tolerance run in the veins of Central Europe, despite its miserable history, or perhaps because of it.
In my recent book Plato and Jesus, not Caesar,7 I have argued that because of all these factors, and also because of its “younger,” aspiring status with regard to “older” Christian kingdoms (to use Kłoczowski’s terminology), the spiritual identity of Central Europe is based on a specific relationship with metaphysics and religion. I think two points are essential. First, modernity in Central Europe did not follow the path of relentless atheism, materialism, and liberalism, but retained some links to the premodern Christian Platonic vision of reality as theophanic, that is, as a manifestation of God and deeply “enchanted” (to use Max Weber’s term).
Second, from that theophanic vision, preserved for a very long time despite secularization, stems a political vision, which, in very premodern terms, is grounded in metaphysics and, especially, in the theophanic idea that Man is the image of God and therefore dynamically participates in God’s nature. In Central Europe there is, paradoxically, both a great emphasis on the practice of politics in contrast with speculation and theory, and a great stress that politics and morality must be ultimately grounded in God who is the source of all reality and of humankind in particular. The modern, liberal project of destroying the link between politics and metaphysics, and of making metaphysics and religion private affairs outside the political sphere, was never fully embraced in Central Europe, despite its serious devotion to what in the modern period came to be called “the West,” but was and is, in fact, “the past” (as a living inspiration).
In the late fourteenth century, when the University of Paris and German universities were dominated by nominalism, at the University of Prague Jan Hus and his followers were staunch Platonists, claiming that dedication to eternal Truth is the ultimate reason of religious, political, and social reforms. Around the same time, when the German lawyers representing the Teutonic Order were arguing before the pope and emperor that Pagan Prussians or Lithuanians should be exterminated by Christians and their land taken, Paweł Włodkowic from the University of Cracow argued, following Thomas Aquinas, that all men, regardless of ethnicity and religion, are the image of God and enjoy the same rights based on natural law and the metaphysical structure of created reality.
A bit later, the Hungarian court of Matthias Corvinus was fascinated by the Florentine Platonism of Marsilio Ficino with all its Neoplatonism, astrology, magic, alchemy, and hermeticism, and Ficino himself was invited to create a second Platonic Academy in Buda (although he never made it to Hungary). These medieval seeds developed and bore fruit in early seventeenth-century Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, where philosophers such as Jan Jesenský (or Jeszenszky, since he claimed to be a Hungarian subject), Jan Amos Komenský, and Valerian Magni were engaging in not only theoretical but practical politics, following their metaphysical and religious principles.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the nations of Central Europe were colonized by the German Empires of Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs from the West, and the Russian Empire from the East, this tradition could still be seen. In Czechia, Tomaš Masaryk, Jan Patočka, and Václav Havel belong to this Christian Platonic tradition. In Poland, Adam Mickiewicz, Wincenty Lutosławski, and Józef Czapski, not to mention John Paul II, represent this spiritual heritage. The same goes for Polish Hassidism, which was the modern, highly original version of the Neoplatonic mysticism of the Kabbala in Central Eastern Europe, which inspired Martin Buber, who grew up in Lwów (Lviv) and once described himself as “a Polish Jew.” In Hungary, Béla Hamvas and György Lukács can be seen as intellectual giants of that tradition as well. Lukács, who was fascinated by Platonism and was mocked by his comrade Béla Kun for being a “Communist theologian,” represents a perverted relationship between metaphysics and politics. Hamvas, one of the (still unknown) geniuses of the twentieth century, was censored and persecuted in Hungary on personal orders from Lukács because he rejected all the modern political ideologies and believed that humans cannot turn the earth into heaven, but still can and even must live on earth in a heavenly way.
Despite the dominance of liberalism in Europe and its former colonies, we have been hearing in recent decades, in the so-called “West,” increasingly metaphysical and religious language in politics. Usually, it is domesticated and toned down to ideas such as “identity” and “meaning,” when it is argued that the West must be self-confident and recover the meaning of its existence if it is to face the challenge of mass migration, Islam, or the autocratic axis of China, Russia, and Iran. This language seems less prominent in internal affairs, where the right-wing parties in Western Europe, like their left-wing counterparts, seem to be non-metaphysical and non-religious, often in an openly Nietzschean way.
The countries of Central or Younger Europe (including the countries historically influenced by them, like the Baltic states or Ukraine) have in significant ways tried to imitate “the West” and have become secularized and liberal as a result. However, I think that on some deeper level they have retained their historical spiritual identity—perhaps in their national subconscious, if there is such a thing. The countries between Germany and Russia or between the Baltic, the Adriatic, and the Black Seas have their own peculiar spiritual identity, and, perhaps because their experience of modernity didn’t consist in the enjoyment of power, wealth, and prestige but in the loss of all these things, they may be indispensable to Europe, or to “the West” broadly conceived. Not by creating some alternative European Union or by a naïve belief that virtue will be rewarded in worldly terms. Central Europe has been as pragmatic in terms of politics as it has been Platonic and Romantic. These are no contradictions. What Central Europe has to offer operates on a different level of reality, and we may yet come to appreciate that level, not only in our individual but also in our social and political lives.
Mateusz Stróżyński is Professor of Classics and Philosophy at the Institute of Classical Philology of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). His recent books include Plotinus on the Contemplation of the Intelligible World (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Plato and Jesus, not Caesar: Metaphysics of Freedom and Tyranny in Younger Europe (Brill, 2026).
Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace,” speech delivered on March 5, 1946, at Westminster College, Fulton, MO, https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/sinews-of-peace-iron-curtain-speech.html.
Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994).
Andrzej Nowak, “‘Eastern Europe’: How It Was Formed and How It Functions as a Russian Imperial Concept,” in Spatial Dimensions of Russian and Soviet Imperial Ideologies and Practices (1689–2024), ed. Andrzej Nowak (Göttingen: Brill, 2026), pp. 19–65.
Milan Kundera, A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, trans. Linda Asher and Edmund White (New York: HarperCollins, 2023).
Piotr S. Wandycz, The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
Jerzy Kłoczowski, Młodsza Europa: Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia w kręgu cywilizacji chrześcijańskiej średniowiecza (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1998).
Mateusz Stróżyński, Plato and Jesus, not Caesar: Metaphysics of Freedom and Tyranny in Younger Europe (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2026).