Introduction
The wide scope of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s scientific and technical interests extended to, on a European or global scale, a surprising number of issues in the field of politics, history, linguistics, religious matters, culture, economics, even mining, on the horizon of which Eastern Europe inevitably appeared time and again. While admitting that the focus of his scholarly, expert, or advisory activity never was on Eastern Europe, as it was on other, more significant, geographical or geo-political units such as, for example, Westphalian Europe, the Holy Roman Empire, Russia,Reference Guerrier1–Reference Grau3 the Islamic world,Reference Almond4, Reference Varani5 or China,Reference Li and Poser6, Reference Miodoński7 I argue that evidence can be found in Leibniz’s oeuvre that he thought of the territory between the Western and the Eastern powers as a region that differs distinctly from its neighbours, and that the countries of this territory have inner similarities.
His political, cultural, or linguistic interest in this part of the world was engendered by three main factors: the waning of the Turkish Empire, the changes that transformed the vast regions of the emerging northern empire of Russia, and the post-1648 constellation in Western Europe. The midway nature of Eastern Europe that aroused Leibniz’s interest had accordingly three main elements. Eastern Europe is, first, a strategically important territory between the East and the West; secondly, it is a channel of communication forwarding information about the East to the West; and thirdly, it is a suitable territory for Western (and Russian) economic expansion.
The Raison d’être of Eastern Europe: the Turks
Leibniz very early on recognized that the region between the Eastern powers (Russia and the Ottoman Empire) and the Holy Roman Empire was not only of key importance politically and militarily, precisely because of its vicinity to these two oriental powers, but that it also posed questions concerning Europe’s cultural self-understanding. Leibniz pointed out this double transmitting function of Eastern Europe in a letter to the Polish scholar Adam A. Kochański, librarian of the Polish King John Sobieski, in December 1691. For Leibniz it was not only in a political sense that Eastern Europe was situated between the West and the East but also in the sense that any information about far-away China and Russia was channelled through this region.
The East European region extending from the eastern borders of the German states to the Crimea was composed of only two states at that time – the Kingdom of Poland and the Kingdom of Hungary, with the latter occupied partly by the Turks. Leibniz was, arguably, the only first-rate European thinker and political adviser who observed and commented upon the decades-long Hungarian war of liberation. It is in relation to the anti-Turkish wars in Hungary that the contextual situation of Leibniz’s views, from the peace treaty of Vasvár in 1664 to the battle of Zenta in 1697, seems to be of importance.
The main factor of the surfacing of Eastern Europe, in Leibniz’s view, was the changing character of the war against the Turkish Empire. While earlier theorists advocated the unity of Christendom and the leadership of the Holy See or some similar Christian power, Leibniz had to take into account the mercurial character of European politics of his time. That it was the Turkish threat to the Western parts of Europe that made Eastern Europe emerge as a distinct entity is backed by Leibniz’s yoking these countries together as ‘Polonia Hungariaque’.Reference Leibniz8 But even considering them together, it makes, of course, a great difference that Poland was a member of anti-Turkish alliances while Hungary was the object of them.
The expression ‘Polonia Hungariaque’ throws into relief the difference in importance between the two state formations of Eastern Europe, which corresponded to their territorial extension as well as their political impact at the time. Poland, and especially its capital, were more highly valued by Leibniz for the cultural transfer with China and Russia, mostly because the Post Road that led to China via Moscow started in Warsaw. When Leibniz needed information about the origin and language of the Hungarians, he obtained it not from Hungary directly but from Kochański in Warsaw – the same person who passed on knowledge about the Far East. That is, for Leibniz, Warsaw was the centre of the information exchange with the East, while the political news about Hungary came to European public opinion from Vienna.
The Ridiculous and the Rebellious: the Limits of Leibniz’s Sympathy
Although Leibniz felt solidarity with the nations of Eastern Europe because of their exposure to the Turks, his sympathies were soon spoiled by the character of the Poles and the Hungarians as well as eclipsed by his new-born admiration for Russia. One of the practical reasons that turned Leibniz’s attention to Eastern Europe was the mission of his employer, the Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg, in relation to the candidature of the Count Palatine Philip William of Neuburg to the Polish throne. On this occasion he dedicated a pamphlet entitled ‘Specimen Demonstrationum politicarum pro elegendo Rege Polonorum novo scribendi genere exactum’ to the situation in Poland, which was published under the pseudonym Georgius Ulicovius Lithuanus in 1669.
In light of Leibniz’s later ironic statements about the backwardness of Polish culture, it is worth recalling that the syllogistic ‘Specimen’ was intended to introduce the rule of formal rationality in East European matters. The situation of Poland, according to Leibniz’s analysis, is perilous first because of its direct contact with the Barbarians: the Turks, the Tartars and the Russians. Further, the weakened state rendered the political situation in Poland even more dangerous. At this crucial passage, Leibniz reminds the reader that, at variance with the whole demonstrative character of this somewhat awkwardly formulated syllogistic treatise, the argument on Poland’s very special situation between Christians and Barbarians is based not on demonstration but on empirical induction: this means that his evaluation of Poland’s international vulnerability remains immune to the usual criticism against the Specimen’s general argument.
After the Vasvár peace treaty, compassion for the Hungarians ran through Europe. However, this sympathy as well as the Christian ideology behind the anti-Turkish war were nullified by the alliance between the Turks and the rebellious Hungarian Count Imre Thököly who ‘would sell his soul’, as Leibniz wrote, ‘for a principality’.Reference Leibniz9 From this moment on, Leibniz found it hard to sympathize with the Hungarians’ nationalist goals, and in his opinion the natural outcome of events would be that the territory of the liberated Hungary would be annexed by the Habsburg Empire. During his stay in Vienna in 1688–1689, he recommended to the Emperor the implementation of an America-like colonization scenario in Hungary.
The rise of Russia fascinated Leibniz. Its cultural and international significance never ceased to amaze him; truly, the new Russia became an important external element to the equilibrium and harmony of the Westphalian European political order. Russia, as opposed to Eastern Europe, was not only a mediating element for Leibniz but it also had a huge intrinsic value and an even higher cultural and civilizing potential. For Leibniz, Tsar Peter the Great could and should be placed among the great personalities of mankind. Leibniz rightly perceived that Russia was a potential global power while Eastern Europe could become important only when the inner-European balance of power was at stake.
The shift in Leibniz’s attention from Eastern Europe towards Russia went hand in hand with his turning from religious issues to problems of sociological and cultural interest.Reference Richter2 The ethnic groups of Eastern Europe still intrigued him scientifically, as did the Scythia project, i.e. the linguistic and ethnographic exploration of the territories from Poland to Russia. Although Leibniz excluded the East European ethnic groups from amongst the nations, with his linguistic research conducted equally on English and Polish (and several other languages), he acknowledged their culturally and linguistically distinct existence. The region continued to pose a scientific and political problem for him as long as its situation was flexible and its future unpredictable. After these options were closed, and in a manner Leibniz agreed with, the political importance of the region declined. After the Turkish reconquista, an enlarged model of balanced powers emerged in his thinking that pushed Eastern Europe into insignificance.
Eastern Europe within a Changing Europe
Eastern Europe in Leibniz’s system was not only dependent on Europe but its character kept changing along with his ideas on Europe. When Europe metamorphosed from a unity into a structure composed of a centre and a periphery (geographically, politically, and culturally) and when this structure then transmuted into another composed of a Western, a central and an Eastern part, the role, the place and the importance of Eastern Europe changed accordingly. But it is also true that the changing historical situation in Eastern Europe motivated Leibniz to modify his overall understanding of Europe.
In his writings from 1670 defending the interests of Germany, most of all in his ‘Securitas publica’, he used the concept of Central Europe, placing, naturally enough, Germany in ‘das Mittel von Europa’Reference Leibniz10, anticipating, as later interpreters of the ‘German’ Leibniz liked to reiterate, the early twentieth-century concept of Mitteleuropa. Positing Germany as Central Europe, the region eastwards of it appeared not only as a real and coherent one but also one that might be a rival to Germany’s political aspirations.
In the context of the Turkish wars, civilized Europe is the antithesis of barbaric Asia. From this point of view it is significant that China does not count as ‘Asia’, i.e. it is not seen as barbaric but as civilized, only differently. When observed from a global viewpoint, Europe appeared to be more unified than divided. The global scale gave Europe, in Leibniz’s eyes, a more harmonious contour. Leibniz made a decisive step towards identifying Europe with today’s Western Europe, that is to say with the states and territories involved in the Westphalian peace system. The regional aspects disappeared from his thinking and the contrary concept of the East became Europe and not the West. From Europe as a unity of culture and civilization, Eastern Europe is not different in kind, let alone that can it be considered as the opposite of Europe. It is only different in degree: it is of lesser degree culturally.
An Image of Eastern Europe in Propaganda and Print Culture
As for the general outlines of the information system in early modern Europe, by the seventeenth century permanent embassies at European courts developed a wide network that served as the principal vehicle for transmitting political information. This network was rapid, safe, systematic and well-ordered, and thereby possessed unrivalled advantages with relation to other channels of information.Reference Hiller11
Concerning his access to the news, Leibniz belonged to the privileged. Although not being a member of the diplomatic corps, Leibniz had several connections with international policy-makers. So he obtained his information first-hand, and the outcomes of his analytical or advisory work was fed back into this information system.
Thus, Leibniz was a receiver, disseminator and analyst rather than a maker of news on Eastern Europe. As the internationally perhaps most significant event in the 1660s and its echo in Europe shows, Leibniz’s views changed in harmony with the shifts in European public opinion. After the 1664 Vasvár peace treaty between the Habsburg court and the Turks, there was wide sympathy for the Hungarian case in international public opinion. With time, these positive emotions faded and, by 1683, because of the rebellious Imre Thököly’s alliance with the Turks, the all-European anti-Turkish ideology also became hollow. As there was no Hungarian court, there were no legates in Hungary either: Leibniz gathered his information from Vienna. While Hungary regarded itself as a bulwark of Christianity, Leibniz regarded Hungary as a country that posed problems for Christianity by its rebellion against the Emperor’s order.
Concerning the persons who provided Leibniz with information about Eastern Europe, Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk was a typical German, as was Johann Daniel Crafft. His correspondent from Warsaw, the Jesuit mathematician and librarian Adam Adamandus Kochański was also an acquaintance from Mainz, Germany, where Kochański had been an instructor of mathematics in the late 1660s. Vienna was the fountain of political news while Warsaw was that of scientific information, not only about the whole of Eastern Europe, consisting at that time of the vast territories of the Kingdom of Poland from the Baltic to the Crimean on the one hand and of the Kingdom of Hungary on the other, but also about the almost totally unknown region called by Leibniz Scythia, spreading endlessly between the eastern confines of Poland and the Chinese Empire. Scientifically, his primary contacts were in Warsaw, which he considered as a regional centre of knowledge and through which he gathered information from the entire region, including Hungary.
Political news about Eastern Europe was spread across the continent through correspondence and pamphlets, while scientific knowledge about the region was preferably disseminated via books. Theoretically, Leibniz’s reflections concerning the boom of print culture in seventeenth-century Europe touch initially upon the problem of the quantitative, almost flood-like, increase of books. In his Consilium de Encyclopaedia nova conscribenda methodo inventoria as well as his Préceptes pour avancer les sciences and Discours touchant la methode de la certitude et l’art d’inventer, pour finir les disputes et pour faire en peu de temps de grands progres, Leibniz faced the problem posed by the ‘horrible mass of books’.Reference Leibniz12 As he writes,
time and again, I see myself obliged to compare our knowledge to a large shop or store without order and inventory; since we ourselves do not know what we possess already and we cannot help ourselves in need. There is an infinity of beautiful thoughts and useful observations that can be found in the authors and even more diffused among people, in the praxis of each and every profession. If the most exquisite and the most essential of all this were gathered, and ordered by a number of indexes suitable to find and to employ everything there where it is appropriate, perhaps we would admire our richness and complain our blindness that we have profited from them so little.Reference Leibniz13
The problem of ordered knowledge has two principal aspects. The first is the separation of reliable knowledge from the flood of popular culture. This means making useful compendia on the one hand and ordering knowledge according to the logical rules of demonstration on the other.
The second aspect is to find the proper place for each and every piece of information and knowledge. Information, according to Leibniz,
written in printed books or in manuscripts, old or new, occidental or oriental, can be found either in its right place or out of its place. Those that are more or less at their place are those which are indicated by the authors of systems or treatises there where the material makes it necessary. But what is said en passant, or is situated there, where it is to be found with difficulty, is out of place.Reference Leibniz13
Leibniz dealt with the issue of ordering scientific knowledge not only in theory but also in practice. To have a closer look into Leibniz’s views about systematic knowledge on Eastern Europe, his sketches concerning the ordering of the library of Duke August in Wolfenbüttel provide us with important information. In these plans, Leibniz endeavoured a systematized mapping of the state of the art in the human and social sciences on a global scale. Concerning Europe, its occidental part was divided by him into the Northern, Germanic part and the Southern, Latin one: in both of them linguistic, geographical, historical and economic information seemed to be for him in happily univocal taxonomy, i.e. the outlines of the region were well-defined and the particular branches of knowledge shed light, perfectly complementing each other, on the overall characteristics of the northern or southern European regions. Hence, the division of science confirmed the existing regional borders.
In Eastern Europe, however, the difficulties of geographical and scientific taxonomy underlined the complicated geo-political reality. Leibniz faced problems while trying to systematize knowledge about a region the confines of which were uncertain and where the linguistic and cultural territorial maps did not overlap.
With regard to language structures, Leibniz recognized that the non-Germanic, non-Latin and non-Slavic languages, i.e. Celtic and Finno-Ugric idioms, pose a taxonomic problem. Because of their shared geographically peripheral situation he classified them as languages of ‘reliqua Europae’: ‘Reliquae linguae Europaeae ut Wallica, Cantabrica, Estonico-Finnonica etc. Ungarica’Reference Leibniz14; ‘Reliquae Europaea<e> Wall[ica,] Hibern[ica,] Cantabr[ica,] Finn[onica,] Eston[ica,] Hung[arica]’.Reference Leibniz15
From a purely geographical point of view, he considered Poland, Russia, Hungary and the Balkans (what he calls ‘Illyrica’ and ‘Thracica’) together, without attempting to find a comprehensive designation for that group: ‘Polonica, Russica, Hung[arica,] Illyr[ica,] Thrac[ica]’.Reference Leibniz15 In this plan (Tabula de ordinaria bibliotheca), Leibniz thus simply did not try to find such a perfectly overlapping taxonomy as in the case of the regions and the languages of the Latin or Germanic peoples.
Another of his plans for classification, however, is not based on similarities and differences concerning languages and their geographical situation, but on that of scientific knowledge about languages and geography. In this case, the systematic ordering of the topic was by definition indispensable. Hence, Leibniz tried to classify historical-geographical sciences dealing with the East European region under the label of ‘Graeco-Slavonica: <Graeco->Savonica polonica, Russica, Hungarica, Graeca’.Reference Leibniz16 That is, he tried to apply the territorially-based division on scientific accumulation of knowledge, too. But, tellingly enough, he deleted the word ‘Graeco-’, and in a third sketch he chose a simple solution that safeguarded the transparency and harmony of his overview of scientific knowledge on Europe at the cost of sacrificing its linguistic heterogeneity. He classified Hungary and Greece under the rubric of Slavic studies: ‘Slavonica, polonica, Russica, Hungaria usque in Graeciam’.17 As his plans for library catalogues show, Leibniz was among the very first who faced the equivocal situation of the Hungarian language and culture in Eastern Europe.
Conclusion
Eastern Europe changed with the rise of the institution of the nation state and the end of the Turkish threat, but what transformed Leibniz’s thinking about it was primarily the surfacing of a global perspective with the emergence of Russia as a challenging Eurasian power and with new knowledge about China. Europe became, in Leibniz’s international system, the opposite of the East; that is, the barbaric but soon-to-be-civilized Muscovites and the highly civilized China at the same time.
While Hungary and Poland remained undeniably parts of Europe from religious, military, and economic points of view, they were unconventional and puzzling regions from a political and cultural perspective. The interest that put Eastern Europe as a region into relief was short-lived and disappeared with the end of a specific historical constellation: the system of West European nation states on the one hand and their temporary coexistence with the Turks on the other. The end of the Turkish wars in Hungary and the emergence of Russia among the great powers put an end to this period.
Characteristic for the Leibnitian moment is that the East is defined not in relation to the contrary concept of the West but to that of Europe. The place of Eastern Europe created problems within the new, Westphalian order while it had not posed any theoretical difficulty in medieval Europe. The conception of the Eastern European region in Leibniz’s political theory as a middle one between the East and the West is the result of a transitory period that, even in its imaginary form, had some interpretive potential with respect to the geopolitical problems of Europe and that ceased to exist when the conditions that had called it into being disappeared.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the support of the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany.
This article originates from a workshop on Early Modern Print Culture in Central Europe held at the Academia Europaea Wroclaw Knowledge Hub 16–18 September 2013.
Gábor Gángó graduated in Hungarian studies and history from ELTE Budapest University in 1991; he obtained his PhD there in literary studies (1997) and in philosophy (2004). He is professor at the Institute of International Studies and Political Science at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary and scientific advisor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre in the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research encompasses German intellectual history, political ideas in East-Central Europe, and early modern and modern philosophy. His most recent book (Marxismo, cultura, comunicación: De Kant y Fichte a Lukács y Benjamin) was published at Herramienta in 2009.
