A preliminary version of this text was given in December 2003 as the Oskar Halecki lecture at the Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas at the University of Leipzig. My gratitude to Stefan Troebst for his rigorous and insightful reading. I also wish to thank the participants in the modernities reading group at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where a broad and passionate exchange of ideas over the academic year 2003-2004 much improved my overall understanding of the category and phenomenon in all of its multifarious aspects, disciplinary interpretations, and regional variations.

1. Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; Braudel, , On History, (Chicago, 1980).Google Scholar Paul Ricoeur maintains that in order to escape the clutch of events, French history of the Annales tradition had to ally itself with disciplines that are not preoccupied by time, like geography, economy, and anthropology. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1984-1988), 1:95-111. Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1985)Google Scholar, originally published as Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt, 1979); Koselleck, , Zeitschichten: Studien zurHistorik (Frankfurt, 2000)Google Scholar; and Koselleck, , The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concept (Stanford, 2002).Google Scholar

2. Zub, Alexandru, ed., Temps et changement dans l'espace roumain:fragments d'une histoire des conduits temporelles (Iaşi, 1991), v.Google Scholar

3. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative; also his essays “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” “Narrated Time,” “Time Traversed: Remembrance of Things Past,” and “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” in Mario J. Valdés, ed., A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (Toronto, 1991). On Edmund Husserl's treatment of time, see Michalski, Krzysztof, Logic and Time: An Essay on Husserl's Theory of Meaning (Dordrecht, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nadel, George, ed., History and the Concept of Time, vol. 6 of History and Theory (Middletown, Conn., 1966).Google Scholar See also Hellekson, Karen, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (Kent, 2001).Google Scholar

4. Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 110, 112.Google Scholar

5. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983).Google Scholar See also Henry Rutz, ed., The Politics of Time, American Ethnological Society Monograph Series, no. 4 (Washington, D.C., 1992). The only article in the latter volume dealing with eastern Europe is Katherine Verdery's “The ‘Etatization’ of Time in Ceaujescu's Romania,” 37-61.

6. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 67.

7. Osborne, Peter, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London, 2000), 61.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 59.

9. Ibid., 54. This is not the place to dispose lightly of a fruitful and passionate debate, yet I would like to emphasize that my phrase “universal modeling” is not used here in any derogatory or ironic sense. Quite to the contrary: I believe that the concept of the modern as a universal category is powerful precisely because of its global extent. I do not think that it intrinsically implies a normative European model and a rigid sameness in its concrete regional and historical variations, despite the fact that many studies have erred in this respect and despite justified critique that has been heaped on them (and by extension, on the concept). While rightly arguing against the dangers of a Eurocentric paradigm, in which European history is sold as universal history, the now fashionable notions of alternative or multiple modernities come with their own liabilities, chief among them a slip into easy pluralism and cultural relativism. Stacy Pigg, in particular, has argued against the concept of the modern as universal, proposing instead to attribute its influence to its cosmopolitan nature, as if modifying an adjective from die Latin to the Greek would suddenly purify its subject. Pigg, Stacy, “The Credible and the Credulous: The Question of ‘Villagers’ Beliefs’ in Nepal,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 2 (1996): 160–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cited in Walley, Christine J., “Our Ancestors Used to Bury their ‘Development’ in the Ground: Modernity and the Meanings of Development within a Tanzanian Marine Park,” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2003): 33–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. The literature on the question is enormous. See Taylor, Charles, “Nationalism and Modernity,” in Beiner, Ronald, ed., Theorizing Nationalism (Albany, 1999).Google Scholar For a general overview, see Özkirimli, Umut, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (New York, 2000).Google Scholar For a specifically east European take, see Todorova, Maria, “Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Communist Legacy in Eastern Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 7, no. 1 (1993): 135-54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Armstrong, John A., Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1982)Google Scholar; Smith, Anthony D., The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge, Eng., 1981)Google Scholar; Smith, , The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; Llobera, Josep R., The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe (Oxford, 1994).Google Scholar Curiously, while in the past it was historians who mosdy kept the flame of the “deep roots” of the nation alive, it is now sociologists who are arguing the thesis. Medieval historians, conversely, have been increasingly skeptical about this. See, for example, Dann, Otto, ed., Nationalismus in vorindustrieller Zeit (Munich, 1986)Google Scholar; and most recently, Geary, Patrick J., The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002).Google Scholar

12. Llobera, The God of Modernity, ix.

13. Ibid., ix, xiii.

14. The most complete exposition of his understanding of nationalism is in Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983). Several authors, among them Kenneth Minogue and Elie Kedourie, accost Gellner's posited correlation between industrialization and nationalism. Minogue asserts that Britain industrialized without any nationalism at all, while Kedourie emphasized the spread of nationalism in the Balkans, particularly Greece, long before the advent of industrialization. Kedourie, Elie, Nationalism, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar; Minogue, Kenneth, “Ernest Gellner and the Dangers of Theorising Nationalism,” in Hall, John A. and Jarvie, Ian, eds., The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner (Amsterdam, 1996), 113-28.Google Scholar It is in his specific response to Kedourie in that volume that Gellner registers the point that die Balkans obstruct the smooth logic of his theory. Gellner, “Reply to Critics,” 630.

15. On other similar counts, Gellner responds by pointing out that “industrialism cast a long shadow” before its actual reality and that it was only intellectuals who were nationalists (BBC radio discussion with Kedourie, cited in Özkirimli, Theories of Nationalism, 140). But in the end, at least Gellner was puzzled. Hagen Schulze, on the other hand, brushes aside any potential criticism that he is not even dealing with eastern Europe, or only dealing with it in a subordinated (stiefmütterlich) way, by reproducing the clichés about two millennia of totally separate civilizational development after the division of the Roman Empire, in which the eastern part of the continent bypassed important phases like the Renaissance and Enlightenment, in whose wake national sovereignty and democracy followed. While he points to three distinct European regions for the rise of nations—the West, the East, and a central area, i.e. Germany and Italy—the latter is actually subsumed in the western model. Schulze, Hagen, Staat und Nation in der europäischen Geschichte (Munich, 1994), 16–17, 148-50.Google Scholar

16. Akhil Gupta, “Rethinking the Temporalities of Nationalism in the Era of Liberalization” (paper, the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, North Carolina, April 2001), 11 (cited with the permission of the author). He quotes Jawaharlal Nehru, who in the 1950s spoke of the catching-up imperative for India, according to which it had to achieve in two or three decades what “the advanced nations of the West” had accomplished in a century or two. The same was, of course, one of the most obstinately persisting refrains in the ideology of state socialism, which boasted the achievements of an accelerated and overtaking development.

17. See Reinhart Koselleck, “Deutschland—eine verspätete Nation,” in Koselleck, Zeitschichten, 359-380.

18. For the purposes of this text, eastern Europe will be treated as a loose and conventional historic-geographic space, encompassing both southeastern Europe (the Balkans) and east central Europe. While Russia definitely is part of eastern Europe, its exclusion from this coverage is merely a matter of convenience: its sheer size presupposes the mastery of a huge historiography with somewhat different emphases and nuances. At the same time, I believe that the general parameters of the argument can be easily and successfully applied also to the broad Russian context. Yet, I would like to shy away from easy generalizations about Russia in a systemic way; in a word, I do not want to commit vindictively upon Russia the reverse of the Cold War academic practice of subsuming eastern Europe (itself a very diverse entity) into the Russian model.

19. Joseph L. Love evokes the names of Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Ragnar Nurske, Kurt Martin, Hans Singer, Alexander Gerschenkron, Peter Bauer, Paul Baran, Michal Kalecki, and others. Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (Stanford, 1996), 6. Love argues that “in the interwar period … the newly independent and newly configured nations of East Central Europe constituted a ‘proto'-Third World in which the problems of economic and social backwardness were first confronted and formally theorized, against a range of development options, which included Soviet socialism” (214).

20. See the important collective volume of Daniel Chirot, ed., The Origins of Backxvardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley, 1989), which was the result of a conference at Bellagio in 1985 and includes the first-class articles of Chirot, Robert Brenner, Peter Gunst, Jacek Kochanowicz, Fikret Adanir, John Lampe, and Gale Stokes. This approach has produced important research, and at least a few other works are worth mentioning, even if they do not necessarily reach identical conclusions: John Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550-1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations (Bloomington, 1982); John Lampe, “Moderization and Social Structure,” Southeastern Europe 5, pt. 2 (1979): 11-32; Iván Berend, T. and Ránki, György, The European Periphery and Industrialization, 1780-1914 (Cambridge, Eng., 1982)Google Scholar; Berend, and Ránki, , “Underdevelopment in Europe in the Context of East-West Relations in the Nineteenth Century,” Etudes Historiques Hongroises 1 (1980): 687–710.Google Scholar; Palairet, Michael, The Balkan Economies, 1800-1914: Evolution Without Development (Cambridge, Eng., 1997)Google Scholar; Holm Sundhausen, “Zur Wechselbeziehung zwischen frühneuzeitlichem Außenhandel und ökonomischer Rückständigkeit in Osteuropa: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der ‘Kolonialthese,'” Geschichteund Gesellschaft 9 (1983): 544-63; Sundhausen, , “Der Wandel der osteuropäischen Agrarverfassung während der frühen Neuzeit: Ein Beitrag zur Divergenz der Entwicklungswege von Ost- und Westeuropa,” Südost Forschungen 42 (1983): 169-81Google Scholar; Sundhausen, , “Die ‘Peripherisierungstheorie’ zur Erklärung Südosteuropäischer Geschichte,” in Hinrichs, Uwe, Jachnow, Helmut, Lauer, Reinhard, and Schubert, Gabriella, eds., Sprache in der Slavia und auf dem Balkan: Slavistische und balkanologische Aufsätze; Norbert Reiter zum 65. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden, 1993), 277-88Google Scholar; Schönfeld, Roland, ed., Industrialisierung und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Südosteuropa (Munich, 1989)Google Scholar; and Todorova, Zwetana, ed., Probleme der Modernisierung Bulgariens im 19. und 20.Jahrhundert (Sofia, 1994).Google Scholar

21. Szücs, Jenö, “Three Historical Regions of Europe,” in Keane, John, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London, 1988), 291–331 Google Scholar; Daniel Chirot, “Causes and Consequences of Backwardness,” in Chirot, Origins of Backwardness, 1-14. The latter way of thinking was inspired by the significant impact of the work of Eric L.Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge, Eng., 1981).

22. This latter has been the dominant assessment in a majority of general accounts of the Ottoman Empire whose primary attention is focused on the workings of the empire from the center. They usually give Balkan nationalisms short shrift, explaining them away as primarily generated by the manipulations of Russia and, to a lesser extent, of the Habsburgs and of France.

23. For general accounts of east European nationalism, see Sugar, Peter F. and Lederer, Ivo John, eds., Nationalism in Eastern Europe (Seattle, 1994)Google Scholar; Sugar, , ed., Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, Md., 1995)Google Scholar; Niederhauser, Emil, The Rise of Nationality in Eastern Europe (Budapest, 1981)Google Scholar; György, Andrew, Nationalism in Eastern Europe (McLean, Va., 1970)Google Scholar; Sussex, Ronald and Eade, J. C., eds., Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe (Columbus, 1985)Google Scholar; Plaschka, Richard, Nationalismus, Staatsgewalt, Widerstand: Aspekte nationaler und sozialer Entwicklung in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa (Munich, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Augustinos, Gerasimos, ed., The National Idea in Eastern Europe: The Politics of Ethnic and Civic Community (Lexington, 1996).Google Scholar See also the specific coverage of southeastern Europe in Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920 (Seattle, 1977); Hösch, Edgar, “Die Entstehung des Nationalismus in Südosteuropa,” Südosteuropa: Zeitschrift für Gegenwartsforschung 42, no. 10 (1993): 551-63Google Scholar; Reiter, Norbert, ed., Nationalbewegungen auf dem Balkan (Wiesbaden, 1983)Google Scholar; Djordjevic, Dimitrije and Fischer-Galati, Stephen, The Balkan Revolutionary Tradition (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Traikov, Veselin, Ideologicheski techeniia i programi v natsionalno-osvoboditelnite dvizheniiana Balhaniledo 1878 godina (Sofia, 1978)Google Scholar; Djordjevic, Dimitrije, Révolutions nalionales des peuples balkaniques, 1804-1914 (Belgrade, 1965)Google Scholar; Stokes, Gale, Nationalism in the Balkans: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1984).Google Scholar Worth mentioning are also some major collective works on European nationalism in general, in which eastern Europe again assumes the role of recipient of ideas: Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter, eds., The National Question in Europe in Historical Context (Cambridge, Eng., 1993); Louk Hagendoorn et al., eds., European Nations and Nationalism: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives (Aldershot, Eng., 2000). For a first-class, recent comparative attempt in a general European framework that can serve as the rare example of a balanced rendition, see Hirschhausen, Ulrike von and Leonhard, Jorn, Nationalismen inEuropa: West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich (Göttingen, 2001).Google Scholar

24. For a recent critique of the Kohn model, see Hroch, Miroslav, “Ethnonationalismus— eine ostmitteleuropäsiche Erfindung,” Oskar-Halecki Vorlesung 2002 (Leipzig, forthcoming)Google Scholar. For a particularly poignant example of how hardwired these ideas are, see the otherwise excellent recent study of Mary Neuburger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, 2004). The author first pronounces the cabbalistic formulae of modern political correctness, which are supposed to somehow exempt the ensuing narrative: “[In] emphasizing the similarities and appropriations between European and Bulgarian nationalist ideas, I do not want to imply that Bulgarian nationalism was a mere facsimile or distortion (as many scholars argue) of West European nationalisms. Instead, I agree with Partha Chatterjee's assertion that ‘latecomer nationalisms’ are not just following a ‘script already written’ but are inherently creative projects of individual national imaginations” (7). Yet, this proleptic entry does not deter die author from asserting that it was “the politically charged observations and ethnographic ‘discoveries’ of European scholars and travelers in the region [that] ignited Balkan national visions and ambitions” (18), completely neglecting volumes of empirical work on the genesis of Balkan nationalism. She further maintains that “Bulgarian thinkers pulled devices for understanding their past from the European conceptual toolbox” (24— a rather crude literal instrumentalism), or even that their visions of their plight within the Ottoman Empire were “supplemented, if not invented by European notions of Ottoman, and more generally, ‘Asiatic’ depravity and barbarism” (24), all the while positing a hypothetical dichotomy between “European” and “Bulgarian” and thoroughly dismissing native Orthodox traditions of stereotyping the Ottoman. Having started out by magnanimously conceding that “as with any child, Bulgarian nationalism also had its own genetic code” (7), she ends by enforcing this puerile metaphor in the concluding chapter of the book, where die two infants—Bulgarian and Muslim—are, in the end, helpless objects of adult ideas, like European nationalism: “Throughout its modern history, the Bulgarian-Muslim encounter has unfolded in the shadow of European influence. Bulgarians were caught up in the irrepressible current of European ideas, such as nationalism, which ultimately drove a wedge between Bulgarian and Muslim” (201).

25. It is impossible to even begin to cite the enormous historiography produced both in and about eastern Europe. Even mentioning a few important works would be a disservice to the many other unmentioned, but still important ones. A good way to start is to look up the literature cited in the country-by-country treatments in the two aforementioned collections: Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, and Sugar, Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century.

26. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 81.

27. Emphasis mine. See Sugar, Eastern European Nationalism, 20, and Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 8-9. The notion of integral nationalism is adopted from Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of Nationalism (New York, 1990) and ultimately derived from Carlton J. H. Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931).

28. Sugar, Eastern European Nationalism, 8. Such thinking inevitably leads him to facile conclusions of this kind: “The roots of today's problems—the inability of the various nations living in the Balkans to cooperate and the so-called historical hatred that separates them—can be found in the arrival of nationalism and in modern interpretations of historical events.” For a replication of this line of thought see, among numerous others, the aforementioned works of Hagen Schulze, Jeno Szucs, as well as Gale Stokes, Three Eras of Political Change in Eastern Europe (New York, 1997).

29. Ibid. The German intermediacy is seen as a facilitating agent for the adoption of western ideas: “By the time they became operating forces east of Germany they were at least twice removed from their western models.” Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Euro\e, 13.

30. Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 46.

31. Hroch, Miroslav, The Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups Among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge, Eng., 1985).Google Scholar For a critique of the essentializing link between the bourgeoisie and nationalism, see Llobera, The God of Modernity, 123-33, 220. Sugar's facile theory is all the more astounding as the majority of the individual contributions to Sugar's collection actually demonstrate (sometimes explicitly insisting on) the indigenous roots of nationalism and refuse to employ the importing metaphor.

32. Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 47-48.

33. Kohn, Hans, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (New York, 1948), 330 Google Scholar; cited in Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 9—10.

34. Sugar, Eastern European Nationalism, 417.

35. Sundhaussen, Holm, “Europa balcanica: Der Balkan als historischer Raum Europas,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 25, (1999): 626-53Google Scholar

36. Sundhaussen, “Europa balcanica,” 639. The following polemical argumentation was formulated first and published in Maria Todorova, “Der Balkan als Analysekategorie: Grenzen, Raum, Zeit,” Geschichteund Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 470-92. See the latest response of Sundhaussen: “Der Balkan: Ein Plädoyer für Differenz,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29 (2003): 608-24.

37. Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870— 1914 (Stanford, 1976).Google Scholar

38. Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi, Genes, Peoples, and Languages, trans. Seielstad, Mark (New York, 2000).Google ScholarPubMed

39. Sundhaussen, “Europa balcanica,” 552-653.

40. Of the plentiful literature on this problem, see the recent work of Uli Linke, Blood and Nation: The Eurofjean Aesthetics of Race (Philadelphia 1999).

41. Gupta, “Rethinking the Temporalities,” 15-16.

42. Ibid., 16.

43. There are very few, if any, genuine comparative studies of the rise and development of nationalism in the two imperial regions of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. Most general historical accounts of eastern Europe simply enumerate the separate cases without analyzing the existence or lack of regional characteristics. On the other hand, the studies that posit fundamental differences between east central and southeastern Europe (the majority of them belonging to political scientists) do so without any empirical analysis, instead imposing models. The famous essay by Jenö Szücs, “Three Historical Regions of Europe,” does not even deal with southeastern Europe, as it presumes its absolute difference as conventional knowledge, without proving it. A recent rare attempt at comparison is Miroslav Hroch, “Die nationalen Formierungsprozesse in Mittel- und Südosteuropa: Ein Vergleich,” in Elitenwandel und Modernisierung in Osteuropa, Berliner Jahrbuch für osteuropäische Geschichte 2 (Berlin, 1995), 7-16. It makes for embarrassing reading from an otherwise great historian who attempts to impose a comparative analysis based on rather scanty knowledge of southeast European developments. It probably would not be worth mentioning were it not for its rarity, and for the fact that it illustrates the profound difficulties of genuine comparisons when undertaken without the appropriate expertise. On the other hand, some valuable intra-regional comparisons are beginning to appear. See, for example, Mishkova, Diana, Prisposobiavane na svobodata: Modernost-legitimnost v Surbiia i Rumuniia prez XIX v. (Sofia, 2001)Google Scholar, or Bock, Ivo, Kollektive Identitdten in Ostmitteleuropa: Polen und die Tschechoslovakei (Bremen, 1994).Google Scholar Although uneven in terms of quality, the collective volume of Jolanta Sujecka, ed., The National Idea as a Research Problem (Warsaw, 2002), which was the outcome of an international conference at the Polish Academy of Sciences, is also worth mentioning. While the introduction misses the opportunity to address the comparative potential of the separate studies, the very fact that they range naturally across the posited divide, including Poles, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Czechs, Kashubians, and Buriats, is already quite a positive development.

44. Hroch distinguishes between two distinct stages in the process of nation building: one beginning in the Middle Ages, the other accompanying the transition to a capitalist economy, i.e. the formation of the modern nation per se. The first stage produced two different outcomes. One was the development of the early modern state, absolutist or with a representative estates system, under the domination of one ethnic culture. In this case, the old regime was transformed, by reform or revolution, “into a modern civil society in parallel with the construction of a nation-state as a community of equal citizens.” The second outcome occurred in cases when “an ‘exogenous’ ruling class dominated ethnic groups which occupied a compact territory but lacked ‘their own’ nobility, political unit or continuous literary tradition.” While Hroch is cautious enough to show transitional cases and exceptions, as a whole the first outcome prevailed in western Europe, whereas the second was typical for eastern Europe. Hroch, Miroslav, “From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation: The Nation-Building Process in Europe,” in Balakrishnan, Gopal, ed., Mapping the Nation (London, 1996), 79–80.Google Scholar

45. Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival, 22-24 and passim. In his 1996 article, “From National Movement,” Hroch characterized Phase C as the period when “the major part of the population came to set special store by their national identity” (81). This can be disputed in light of the significant literature on the protracted process of nation formation, most radical and successful after the triumph of nationalism and the erection of a nation-state even in the west European zone (the classical work being that of Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen). Apart from the quibble over “the major part of the population,” one can still accept the mass phase by reducing the support to a substantial part of the population or to a part forming a critical mass, without in any way constituting a majority.

46. Sensitized both to the classicizing spirit predominant in the west and to the ideas of liberal nationalism prevailing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Adamantios Korais worked tirelessly to imbue his fellow Greeks with pride in their glorious past. Praising “the illustrious city of Paris, the home of all arts and sciences, the new Athens,” he concluded that while it “would amaze anyone, but for a Greek, who knows that two thousand years ago in Athens his ancestors achieved a similar (perhaps higher) level of wisdom, this amazement must be mingled with melancholy, when he reflects that such virtues are not only absent from the Greece of today, but they have been replaced by a thousand evils.” Clogg, Richard, ed., The Movement for Greek Independence, 1770-1821: A Collection of Documents (New York, 1976), 45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This is thus an apt example of the dialogical principle evoked above, where a mutually enriching dialogue is going on between the west European Enlightenment inspired by Greek classical thought and the Greek Enlightenment in the person of one of its main exponents, Koraís, who himself was one of the principal and pioneering channels for the transmission of Greek authors to the intellectual audience in Paris and was, at the same time, inspired by the spirit reigning there.

47. I have since come across a happy exception, although it is an exception: the excellent article by Kristina Popova, “Khramut ‘Sv. Dimitur’ i boiat pri Port Artur: Subitiia i vreme v pripiskite vurkhu tsurkovnite knigi v selo Teshovo 1849-1927 g.” (The ‘Sv. Dimitur'church and the battle at Port Arthur: events and time in the marginalia of sacred books in the village of Teshovo 1849-1927), Balkanistic Forum 3, no. 2 (1994): 76-106. It demonstrates the gradual change of mentality and perception of time among the clergy, and the substitution of cyclical with linear time in the course of half a century. See also Tsvetana Georgieva, “Istoricheskoto suznanie i otchitaneto na vremeto,” Istoriia 1 (1992): 12- 16. A couple of articles in the aforementioned edited volume by Alexandra Zub also touch on similar problems for Romania: Mihai Dorin, “Interférence temporelles dans la révolte de Horea (1784)” and Liviu Antonesei, “Interprétations du temps populaire dans la culture roumaine de l'entre-deux-guerres,” in Zub, Temps et changement, 85-97, 167-86.

48. For example, Hans Medick's work on plebeian culture and economy, in particular the experience and behavior of the poor and the propertyless in the transition to capitalism. “Plebejische Kultur, plebejische Öffendichkeit, plebejische Ökonomie: Über Erfahrungen und Verhaltensweisen Besitzarmer und Besitzloser in der Übergangsphase zum Kapitalismus,” in Robert Berdahl, Alf Lüdtke, and Medick, Hans, eds., Klassen und Kultur: Sozialanthropologische Perspektiven in der Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt, 1982).Google Scholar

49. See in particular Koselleck's treatment of historical acceleration: “Gibt es eine Beschleunigung der Geschichte?” and “Zeitverkürzung und Beschleunigung: Eine Studie zur Sekularisation,” in Koselleck, Zeitschichten, 150-76, 177-202, esp. 165, 175, as well as, in general methodological essays, 9, 101, 307.

50. Bloch, Ernst, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt, 1962)Google Scholar, cited in Lüdtke, Alf, ed., Was bleibt von marxistischen Perspektiven in der Geschichtsforschung? (Gottingen, 1997), 15–16.Google Scholar

51. Ibid., 18-19.

52. Fabian, Time and the Other, 143.

53. Hunt, Lynn, “Against Presentism,” Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association 40, no. 5 (May 2002): 7ff.Google Scholar She observes that, ironically, intolerance toward forebears who fail to live up to present standards appears more readily in Western interpretations of its own, rather than of the non-Western, past. With the advent of cultural relativism and political correctness, “we more easily accept the existence and tolerate the moral ambiguities of eunuchs and harems, for example, than of witches.“

54. Fabian, Time and the Other, 147.

55. Ibid., 41.

56. Ibid., 165.