Kolmas Eurooppa 1900-luvulla:

olematon vaihtoehto?

Authors

• Vesa Saarikoski

Abstract

So-called Eastern Europe or East-Central Europe has been in history a region between Byzantine Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism, between the Islamic Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire, between Russia/Soviet Union and Prussia/Germany, between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, briefly between East and West. This Europe in Between can be seen as a regionalized whole united by the historical experience of being in between. The image of the Europe in Between has been negative but there have been attempts to change this negative image to a positive one and create a regional identity, a kind of Third Europe between East and West. In this article the question of the Third Europe mainly introduced by the intelligentsia is examined in the 20th century emphasizing three points of time. In the middle of the First World War Friedrich Naumann, a German politician, wrote his theses about Mitteleuropa and soon this German Mitteleuropa was challenged by T.G. Masaryk’s regional reconstruction composed of small peoples between Germany and Russia. The Central Europe debate launched by Milan Kundera in the 1980s tried to find a way out of Soviet-type homogenization by reconstructing a Central European identity. After the collapse of the Soviet system there have been some attempts to tinge the grey zone between the rich West of the EU and the poor Russian East with the idea of a Third Europe instead of the western alternative of the EU and NATO.