The peoples of Europe

by H. J. Fleure

In western Poland the peasantry are Polish for the most part, the townsfolk are Jews and Germans with a few Poles, and the aristocracy until 1914 was to some extent German. Farther east the aristocracy was Polish and largely anti-German, the peasantry Polish, and the intermediate people still largely German and Jew. Farther east still the middle class of the towns continued the same general character, but while the aristocracy was Polish, the peasantry was Lithuanian or White Russian or Ruthenian, according to district. One needs but to play upon the possible combinations among these elements to realize how difficult it is to secure unity. It is often the natural fate of aristocracies to fade out unless they can recruit themselves from below, and that recruitment has usually meant the ultimate merging of the aristocracy in the tradition of the simple folk, the classic case being the merging of the Norman aristocracy of Britain in the Anglo-Celtic heritage of the commoners. But the merging of aristocracies would not bring unity because of the burgher element, largely German, and the labouring element, largely Jewish. Farther west the petit-bourgeois element of the market towns has often mediated differences between peasant elements of different regions, but as in Poland the former is not to any extent Polish, it is inconceivable that it should mediate between the Polish peasantry farther west and the Ruthenian and other elements farther east. In Rumania the difficulties are analogous, and so are those of Hungary. Parts of Yugoslavia seem fortunate in having a simpler problem.

A mere catalogue of the peoples of East-Central Europe with appended notes would hardly justify the space it would need in this small book, especially as information of the kind is easily available in standard works of reference. It therefore seems more useful to sketch in broad outline the physical and vegetational facts of East-Central and Eastern Europe in order to bring out the essentials of the setting of human life and the variation of that setting with the region so that peoples of diverging outlook and traditions have grown up in those regions.

The first and simplest physical fact is the immense broadening out of the European plain, which, in the region between the Rhine and Vistula, is practically Prussia alone, while farther east it has added to it the ancient land-elements of the north, so that its effective extent is from the White Sea to the Black Sea through degrees of latitude, and consequently through marked gradations of climate. The climatic facts are equally well known. The great extent of the land surface, and still more the fact that it is but a small extension of the far greater land surface of the Asiatic interior, give it a condition of dense dry cold air through the winter.

The form of the plain, with the consequent possibility of ingress of westerly winds eastwards along the plain in summer, i.e. when the cold anticyclone has gone, gives a wedge of summer rain, alternating with considerable warmth, and this wedge is of the utmost importance in human geography. It is the area in which the summer green and winter black and white forest can grow, but as already stated the beech grows only in its western portion, and stops along a line from about Danzig or Königsberg to the east of Bukovina.

Farther east the wedge is occupied by oak and elm, but the valuable beech is absent. The deciduous forest region includes South-west Finland, and its northern boundary runs eastward from the vicinity of Petrograd past Vologda. In many current maps its southern boundary is made much too sharp; the possibility of its growth depends here largely upon moisture, so it spreads into the drier south-east along river and other lines of relative dampness. The country with zones of deciduous forest interspersed with grass land is known as the 'Ukraine' or 'Border', and on its border towards the grasslands and semi-desert we have the Cossack country, with the Don Cossacks on the western side of the barren patches near the lower Volga, and the Orenburg Cossacks on their eastern side. The Ukraine and its eastern extensions are floored to a large extent with earth rich in organic matter (black earth, Tchernoziom), and have possibilities of considerable agricultural development if a settled scheme of life can be devised. In the south-west the language of the peasantry is Ruthenian, farther east Russian, both variants of Slavonic speech, but variants which seem fated to diverge from one another more and more. The climate of the Russian plain largely inhibits the higher grades of intellectual activity during the seasons of severe cold and heat, with the result that those whose circumstances do not give them artificial protection from the weather must depend to a large extent on routine for the continuance of social organization. Conditions are thus not favourable for development of a complex unity over a wide area, and localism is therefore the prevailing tendency, carrying with it probabilities of maintenance and even of development of dialect-differences rather than of linguistic unification. These brief indications give us an insight into some of the more serious, if less appreciated, problems of governmental schemes in the varied vegetative regions of what was once Russia, which yet lacks convenient orographical boundary lines between its different parts.

Our memories from earliest years are stored largely in verbal forms, and as a consequence the language of our early youth has deep-seated associations, which remain as conscious or unconscious memories, the latter if we forget our early speech and learn a new language. That the old language is not completely lost seems to be proved by experiments in hypnosis, which show that the associations of that old language remain, and that therefore the associations with the second language learnt tend to remain incomplete unless a very special personal effort is made, made therefore by a supernormal mind, to overcome this difficulty. Common language-associations of early childhood are thus a most important link between men, promoting mutual understanding and easing intercourse and mutual confidence for the subnormal and normal, rather than supernormal, individuals who form the bulk of a population, and this helps us to see why the linguistic unit is so important in political matters, and unity of language is so often the basis of the successful state, which is consequently so difficult to organize in Eastern Europe.

These reflections apply more particularly to the region formerly known politically as Russia, but they also apply to some extent in South-east Europe, though the phenomena of language are there to some extent masked by others. The region commonly known as the Balkan Peninsula is to a very large extent high land, with opportunities for seasonal pasturage on the hills, and this, together with the unsettlement due to the strikingly contrasted life of the thin coastal fringe and to the pressures from Asia Minor and from the North, has impeded the evolution of the settled life, the market town, and the nation-state.

The thin coastal fringe is a zone of Mediterranean life in which, already prior to classical times, hoe-culture and the tending of fruit trees had become one of the mainstays of life, but commerce was almost equally important. It is the home of the city-state, and in times of peace Greek became the chief language, with Latin, and later Italian, on the Adriatic coast. In times of disturbance the commercial element seems to have been partly submerged, and Slavonic or Slavonized elements have spread in, so that in Dalmatia it is possible to debate indefinitely the affinities of the people's social heritage, and much the same might be said of various portions of the north coast of the Aegean.

Inland the great height implies cold winters, and these supervene even in the lowlands when the latter are open to the north (Vardar) or to the east (Danube). The conditions here are thus practically those of Central and even of East-Central Europe, and as social evolution has been impeded we find here still a good deal of seasonal nomadism or transhumance ([p. 90]), a marked survival of the large family unit holding and working lands in common (the Serb Zadruga), and an early and still feebly organized type of town (especially the lesser towns of Rumania). A Jewish element (Ashkenazim in Rumania) is valuable commercially in most of the towns, and the vestiges of the Turk are found far and wide.

Whereas lands which now have Romance, Celtic, or Teutonic speech have received large elements of civilization, and therewith of religion, from or through Rome and the western Mediterranean, the east of Europe has been largely outside the sphere of Roman influence, and has received contributions to its civilization and religious organization from Constantinople, with results that are different in many ways, though Constantinople owes a great deal to Rome, and though both Rome and Constantinople look back to ancient Mediterranean civilization.