If ‘Eastern Europe’ is an invention, so is ‘Central Europe’. It, too covers, if on a lesser scale, different areas, different populations, different cultures. But while Eastern Europe was invented by outsiders, in the West, Central Europe was invented by Central Europeans themselves. In fact, Central Europeans have reinvented themselves several times.

‘Central Europe is not a region whose boundaries you can trace on the map— like, say, Central America’, wrote Timothy Garton Ash. ‘It is a kingdom of the spirit.’ But what exactly is that spirit? Marcin Moskalewicz and Wojciech Przybylski, coeditors of an anthology that brings together a number of scholars from the area, ask, ‘Is it possible to complete the map of Central European ideas? Is it possible to finally understand the peculiarity of Central Europe?

Their answer is, ‘Definitely not’. In this chapter, I nevertheless attempt to trace the history of Central Europe, as an idea tied to a place between the East and West of Europe, from its initial, nineteenth-century German formulation to Orbán's corrupt illiberal version. What we will find is that, radical as Orbán's notion is, it is not as different from its antecedents as we might have expected.

Since the nineteenth century, the concept of Central Europe has changed form and content repeatedly, yet maintained a surprising continuity. It is this that we, in this chapter, will seek to understand. Before the Central European local patriotism of the Visegrád Alliance, as advocated by Viktor Orbán, we can discern three phases of Central European identity. First, amid the revolutionary fervour in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, Central Europe or Mitteleuropa was a German idea, meant to raise the region between Russia and France into a new European force under German leadership. Second, after the First World War, Polish and Czechoslovak versions of Central Europe ironically excluded Germany, and meant to create an alliance that would be politically and culturally located between Germany and Russia. The third incarnation of the Central European idea came in the 1980s. Then, some ‘dissidents’ under communism, and some of their Western allies, imagined a post-Cold War region in the heart of Europe that would position itself between not only America and Russia but also between heartless capitalism and totalitarian socialism.