We present the analysis and summary of the results obtained by the application of 2-D integrated lithospheric modelling, assuming local isostasy, along 11 profiles that pass across the Carpathian-Pannonian region and their surrounding units. The results are illustrated on a new map of the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary depth. The Carpathians are characterized by significant changes in the lithospheric thickness both across and along this mountain chain. The internal parts of the Carpathian arc are represented by moderately thickened lithosphere (∼140 km on average), whereas in their external parts LAB depth reaches up to 240 km. Along the Carpathians, the lithospheric thickness increases from the Western Carpathians (140–200) via the Eastern Carpathians (240 km) up to the Vrancea zone, where the largest LAB depth of 300 km is modelled. No lithosphere thickening was found in the westernmost part of the Western Carpathians. Here, the average thickness of the lithosphere is only ∼100 km. The thinnest lithosphere was modelled in the Pannonian Basin (60–100 km). In the Transylvanian Basin, it thickens from about 120 to 170 km. The other modelled areas are the East European Craton (100–180 km), the West European Palaeozoic platform (90–160 km), the Trans-European Suture Zone (150–240 km), the Apuseni Mts. (100–180 km), the Moesian Platform (160–200 km), the Balkanides (160–180 km) and the Srednogorie and Rhodopes area (140 km on average). The results clearly show that the variations of the LAB depth are modified not only by the age of the tectonic units but also by ongoing geodynamic processes.

Seven specialists in Central and East Central European history have come together to discuss the state of the field of gender studies in their subfields. Much emphasis is placed on thinking about how the current political situation in the 2020s is affecting what historians do, what is taught in the classroom, and how it relates to the larger political environment. This forum is based on the 2026 American Historical Association (AHA) Central European History Society (CEHS) presidential panel of the same name. The contributors collaborated to produce a forum accessible to non-specialists and for use in the classroom. It serves as a resource for anyone interested in the historiography of gender studies for the region, which includes the lands east of France and west of Russia.

This article looks at how the Czech national identity is constructed in the print media, covering the November 17, 1989, anniversary commemorating the end of the communist rule in Czechoslovakia. It examines front-page articles published in the four most circulated nationwide dailies on November 18, 1999, and front-page articles published in the four most circulated nationwide dailies on November 18, 2019. It pays closer attention to two speeches repeatedly referred to in these articles — a speech by Václav Havel from 1999 and Andrej Babiš from 2019. The underlying research questions are whether the discourse of the 2019 coverage of the November 17 events is different and, more specifically, whether and how the construction of the Czech national identity in the media has changed. It draws theoretically on the work of Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, and Norman Fairclough in relation to concepts of power, discourse, and symbolic power. It adopts the constructionist approach to national identity, which it links to modernity and industrialization and draws on the works of Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Eric Hobsbawm in this regard. The research uses critical discourse analysis as its methodological tool, and briefly explains its use.

Through the example of Romania’s divergence from Soviet refugee policy in the case of the 1971 East Pakistani refugees, this article suggests that great powers face barriers to persuading even weaker states within their orbits of influence to acquiesce on issues of refugee politics. Responses to refugees touch sensitive state concerns about sovereignty. Aiding refugees can be an implicit condemnation of the state from which refugees flee. States that want to avoid the microscope of international opinion looking inside their own domestic human rights contexts will be hesitant to scrutinize another state, even in the context of a great power proxy conflict. As Romania sought to leverage favorable economic agreements, including with Pakistan and India, its position on the East Pakistani refugees reflected a hinge approach that attempted to balance political and economic relationships on both sides of the conflict. Small states use diplomatic entrepreneurship to work between larger powers as they pursue their own strategic goals. This article uses archival, diplomatic documents from Bucharest, some of which had never been accessed prior to this research. The article contributes a small state’s perspective based on diplomatic correspondence by its own officials and in its own language.

As East-Central Europe shifted from empires to nation-states, financial insecurity became an everyday reality. Ordinary people found themselves suddenly cut off from their savings and vulnerable to the rapid devaluation of new national currencies. Focusing on the Polish-Czechoslovak border, this article discusses the Teschen Savings Bank in the divided city of Teschen (Cieszyn/Český Těšín). It traces the protracted yet futile efforts of Český Těšín’s leaders to recover Czechoslovak residents’ deposits stranded in Poland. Drawing on negotiation records from the local, regional, and national levels, the article demonstrates how financial entanglements inherited from the imperial era persisted into the postwar order. It further shows how the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Czechoslovak state seemed to have obstructed meaningful resolution. Ultimately, it argues that the government’s failure to address these deeply felt grievances eroded public trust and contributed to the unraveling of the interwar political order.

Neolithic developments in central Europe cannot be adequately described through narratives of large-scale sweeping migrations and uniform sociocultural transformations. With such accounts, diversity and hybridisation are commonly relegated to the frontiers, whereas the inner landscapes are portrayed as homogeneously transformed. This paper highlights the biases that sustain this broad-brush image and, drawing on regional case studies, presents the increasing evidence that challenges it. Inhabitants of persistent enclaves maintained distinctive material representations, subsistence strategies, and hypothetically retained specific biological ancestry long after the surrounding regions had adopted the trajectories emphasised in conventional Neolithic schemes. Building on these observations, the paper introduces the concept of inner peripheries: regions situated among the canonical core zones, yet only loosely integrated into their networks. Shaped by specific environmental constraints and social processes, these inner peripheries constituted a structurally important component of broader Neolithic dynamics in central Europe and should not be sidelined. The concept provides a framework for understanding how alternative pathways of development coexisted with more conventional narratives and thus offers a necessary corrective to prevailing interpretative models.

Recent scholarship locates the origins of modern free trade policies in the early modern free port movement. This historiography has focused on the intellectual and political history of free ports and emphasized the importance of local and regional factors in shaping trade liberalizations in different European countries and colonies. Based on evidence from eighteenth-century Hamburg, this article proposes a different reading: it argues that free trade policies emerged in response to Atlantic trade expansion. The sources suggest that merchants and magistrates were aware of the monumental change which the growth of the Atlantic trade presented and the economic opportunities it provided. The liberalization of individual ports aimed to capture a greater share of that commerce. Free ports therefore constitute an early example of global economic change driving local European policymaking.

This paper proposes an ecological framework for understanding medieval mining towns as dynamic socio-ecological systems shaped by flows of matter, energy, capital and information. Drawing on concepts from human and political ecology, it examines how mining, technology and power structures interacted to produce feedback loops and tipping points that transformed both society and the environment. A case study of Kutná Hora (Czechia) illustrates these mechanisms, showing how the discovery of silver triggered cycles of population growth, technological innovation and capital accumulation, whilst also causing deforestation, pollution and social stratification. The study highlights how medieval mining towns functioned as adaptive, self-organizing systems embedded in global economic networks, revealing early forms of extractive capitalism and environmental change. This ecological perspective offers a heuristic model for analysing historical urban environments and their long-term sustainability, bridging archaeology, history and environmental science.

The Linear Pottery Culture site of Eilsleben, Germany, is the earliest potential fortified settlement in the borderland between the Early Neolithic world and Late Mesolithic populations. Building on extensive excavations and new fieldwork, an interdisciplinary programme investigates models of interaction between early farmers and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in this region.

This article discusses the extent to which it is possible to label European integration as a new critical juncture of politics in Central Europe by using four Central European countries of Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia as the focus of our investigation. The article presents the historical critical junctures of Central European efforts to liberalise and democratise politics and to create liberal democratic political institutions: the Revolution of 1848, the emergence of independent states in 1918, the Sovietisation of Central Europe between 1945–48 and democratic transition after 1989. We argue that after 2004, when the Central European countries entered the European Union (EU), the claims related to the liberal democratic nature of the EU polity triggered nationalist and illiberal opposition. Therefore, the EU membership has provided a new critical juncture impacting the consolidation or destabilisation of liberal democratic patterns of government. The article further argues that path dependence on the previous critical junctures of Central European politics plays a role in the political development of these countries’ stance on European integration. The authors show that there has been a contradiction between nationalism and liberal concept of democracy since the mid-nineteenth century and that this contradiction manifests in critical junctures based on European integration too.

In Central Europe, people trust each other less than in Western European countries. According to the common approach to volunteering, this should also mean fewer volunteers available. Our research examines whether two forms of volunteering—formal and informal—compete for engaged individuals in Central Europe. On a sample of 2,034 respondents from Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, we analyzed by structural equation model on how social capital and human capital influence wealth and time availability in relation to formal and informal volunteering. Our findings show that the two forms of volunteering do not compete but rather complement each other. Additionally, income has a stronger influence on both formal and informal volunteering than time availability. Furthermore, formal volunteering appears to be more sensitive to fluctuations in the availability of financial resources and time among potential volunteers, confirming resource theory.

This article examines the lives of three politicians from Austria’s crownland of Bukovina—Aurel Onciul, Nikolai Wassilko, and Benno Straucher—who pursued distinct national ambitions and built successful political careers as advocates of democratization and nationalization under imperial rule. It aims to highlight the multiple transitions these individuals experienced, including shifts from conservative to democratic mass politics, struggles for national rights, and the passage from imperial to national orders. After 1918, Onciul became a representative of a nationality with its own nation-state, while Wassilko and Straucher became spokespersons for embattled minorities. All three struggled to adapt to the new national order, and the forces of nationalization they once championed ultimately turned against them. The article argues that the nationalist politics that had brought these politicians success under imperial rule were later criticized by their co-nationals as treasonous and opportunistic, illustrating the complex and often paradoxical outcomes of nationalization processes in Central Europe.

How do actors seek to modify international hierarchies and improve their position in international society? To answer this question, this article develops a novel analytical approach to study a phenomenon it calls ‘the middling of international hierarchies’. This phenomenon consists of actors attempting to produce, occupy, and claim the ‘middle’ position in international hierarchies. The article focuses on one pathway through which actors pursue this strategy: the invocation of ‘middle’ categories. Actors engaged in middling seek to transform binary hierarchies into trichotomous ones, producing and claiming the ‘middle’ position in such hierarchies in the process. In doing so, these actors distance themselves from those categorised in the lower rungs of the hierarchy without directly challenging those sitting atop international pecking orders. Making use of an ‘uncommon foundations strategy’, the paper develops its claims through two illustrative cases: the emergence of the ‘Dominions’ category in the early 20th-century British Empire and the re-popularisation of the label ‘Central Europe’ during the late Cold War. The paper presents a general and theoretically novel approach to how actors seek to modify international hierarchies, while also revealing unexpected commonalities between social categories in world politics that might otherwise appear unrelated.

Cemeteries of the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik culture (LBK, 5500–4900 BC) evoke a sense of emerging permanence of place as agricultural subsistence spread westward through Central Europe. Yet assumptions about the sequence of senescence and longevity of cemetery use are based on limited data. Here, the authors challenge the view that cemetery burial was a long-lasting Neolithic practice, modelling 50 new radiocarbon dates from the cemetery of Schwetzingen alongside published dates from eight other LBK mortuary contexts. The results, they argue, indicate a short-lived, largely contemporaneous cemetery horizon across Central Europe, forcing a re-evaluation of Early Neolithic social history.

The early medieval stronghold of Grzybowo, Wielkopolska, was a large complex, comprising two strongholds and an extensive outer settlement, with numerous elite movable monuments. Excavations suggest that this was an important site for the ruling dynasty, with analogies for this form of central stronghold found in Ruthenia and Bohemia.

As Poland began to expand towards the east in the 1340s, a large-scale settlement initiative commenced on the former Polish-Ruthenian borderland in the Carpathians. This initiative, along with integration of German and Polish colonists, resulted over time in the emergence of a Polish cultural group known as Forest Germans (in Polish Głuchoniemcy). In 1871-1989 Polish-German conflict led to the relevant ethnonym and choronym being removed from both Polish academic and popular discourse. As a result, no systematic geographical research into the location and borders of their settlement region was carried out. All we have are its dispersed, imprecise geographical descriptions from the period between the second half of the 17th century and the first half of the 20th century. Despite the erasure of this term from discourses and obstruction of the process of self-determination by the local population as Forest Germans at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries primarily for political reasons, the existence of a community which can potentially be identified today as Forest Germans at the former Polish-Ruthenian border is a fact. This article outlines the problems, challenges as well as the very process of delimiting Forest Germany, along with a general outline of its boundaries.

This article describes the research on the nationalization of peasantry in Poland by the Polish sociologist Józef Chałasiński (1904–1979). He realized that the ethnicity and nation in Poland were formed with the exclusion of peasants marginalized by privileged classes. The idea of a nation was used to ensure class domination over peasants; their inclusion in the nation was tantamount to the abandonment of the peasant culture and rural lifestyle. Chałasiński described the emergence of a modern Polish nation through the popularization of the elite culture, which led to the gradual disappearance of the peasant class in Poland.

Research on the nexus between education and nationalism in the Habsburg Empire has often focused on the role that language may have played in top-down nationalization processes and the popular dissemination of national thought. According to contemporary nationalist logic, undergoing education in a certain language of instruction also entailed the internalization of nationalist values inherent to its corresponding nationalist movement. The present article argues that the Habsburg educational experience was much more contingent, and draws attention to the diversity of pedagogical approaches towards nationalism and nationality that could be encountered in Austrian schools during the last five decades of Habsburg rule. By using examples from German- and Slovene-language textbooks, it shows that sociopolitical, temporal, as well as institutional factors played an important role in determining the practical values and attitudes towards the nationalism that students encountered during their school years. With systematic empirical studies remaining rare, further research will be necessary to gain a fuller insight into the complexities of the Habsburg education system and its potential effects on popular collective identity formation.