BOOK REVIEW: Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea
By Luka Ivan Jukic / Hurst & Co.
Reviewed by: Jean-Thomas Nicole
The Reviewer Jean-Thomas Nicole is a Policy Advisor with Public Safety Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of Public Safety Canada or the Canadian government
REVIEW — In Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea, Luka Ivan Jukic delivers a masterful and deeply intellectual chronicle of a region that has long defied easy categorization. This is not a conventional history of borders and battles, but a sweeping civilizational narrative—one that interrogates the very idea of Central Europe as a cultural, political, and philosophical construct. For readers of The Cipher Brief, whose interests lie in the strategic undercurrents of global affairs, Jukic’s work offers a rare synthesis of historical depth and geopolitical acuity.
Luka Ivan Jukic is a journalist and historian based in London, with a postgraduate degree from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Financial Times, Engelsberg Ideas, History Today, and New Lines Magazine, among others.
His writing often focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and the ideological legacies of empire and nationalism. Central Europe is his first major book, but it builds on years of incisive commentary and historical essays that have earned him a reputation as one of the most thoughtful voices on the region’s past and future.
Milan Kundera’s famous essay, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” serves as a thematic anchor, framing the region not as a geographic fact but as a kidnapped idea—one that belonged to the West but was politically annexed by the East. This essay became a rallying cry for dissident intellectuals and helped reframe the region’s identity during the Cold War.
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) was one of the most influential literary voices of Central Europe, whose life and work embodied the region’s complex cultural and political history. Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Kundera came of age during the rise of communism and was initially a member of the Communist Party. However, his relationship with the regime was fraught and ultimately adversarial. His early works, including The Joke (1967), offered biting satire of Stalinist ideology and the absurdities of totalitarian life, leading to his eventual exile in France in 1975.
Kundera’s influence in Central Europe extended beyond literature. He became a symbol of intellectual resistance, a voice for cultural autonomy, and a critic of ideological conformity. His insistence on the dignity of “small nations” and the importance of memory and irony in literature resonated deeply with writers, historians, and policymakers across the region.
Jukic uses this moment to launch a broader inquiry: What is Central Europe, and why does its identity matter?
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Yet Jukic does not merely echo Kundera; he interrogates and expands upon the Czech novelist’s ideas, offering a more historically grounded and critically nuanced account of the region’s evolution.
He acknowledges Kundera’s cultural diagnosis while also challenging its limitations, particularly the romanticization of a lost cosmopolitan order and the exclusion of certain voices and experiences. He both honors and critiques Kundera’s vision, using it as a springboard for a broader historical and geopolitical analysis.
In this sense, Jukic’s book can be read as a kind of intellectual dialogue with Kundera for a post-Cold War and post-Ukraine war era.
Structured in four sweeping parts—The Rise (1740–1848), The Pride (1848–1918), The Fall (1918–1948), and The Life (1948–present)—the book traces the evolution of Central Europe from a multilingual, multiethnic mosaic under the Habsburg and Prussian empires to its fragmentation under the pressures of nationalism, war, and totalitarianism.
Jukic’s narrative is rich with detail: the linguistic politics of Latin, German, and vernacular tongues; the ideological tensions between Enlightenment universalism and Romantic nationalism; the rise of liberal reformers and the collapse of cosmopolitan aristocracy.
What makes this book particularly compelling for a strategic audience is its refusal to reduce Central Europe to a collection of nation-states. Jukic dismantles nationalist historiographies and instead presents the region as a civilizational process—one marked by rupture, reinvention, and persistent ambiguity.
He shows how the Enlightenment reshaped education and governance, how the revolutions of 1848 exposed the limits of liberal nationalism, and how the post-WWI treaties created fragile states haunted by ethnic tensions and authoritarian temptations.
The interwar years and the rise of fascism are treated not merely as political phenomena but as cultural and psychological crises. Jukic explores the role of antisemitism, the collapse of multiethnic coexistence, and the transformation of cities like Vienna and Prague into battlegrounds of identity. The Holocaust and postwar expulsions are presented as the final death knell of the old Central Europe—a civilization erased not only by genocide but by the triumph of homogenizing ideologies.
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Yet the idea of Central Europe survives. In the post-1989 era, Jukic charts the region’s “return to Europe” through EU and NATO accession, while also noting the rise of illiberal democracies and the fading of a shared civilizational memory.
The book ends with reflections on Ukraine’s struggle for sovereignty, invoking the “Kunderian problem” as a lens through which to understand the region’s ongoing contestation between East and West.
The “Kunderian problem”—the tension between cultural identity and political reality—is not resolved in Jukic’s book but reframed as a persistent question that continues to shape the region’s destiny.
Within that intellectual perspective, Jukic positions himself as both heir and critic. He recognizes the symbolic power of Kundera’s vision, especially its role in galvanizing dissident intellectuals during the Cold War. But he also insists on a more inclusive and historically rigorous account—one that incorporates the linguistic politics of the Habsburg realm, the ideological fractures of the interwar period, and the contested meanings of “Europeanness” in the post-1989 landscape.
Jukic’s prose is elegant, his scholarship formidable, and his analysis consistently incisive. He draws on a vast array of sources—from parliamentary debates and literary manifestos to dissident essays and archival documents. The bibliography alone is a treasure trove for policy analysts and historians alike.
For Cipher Brief readers, Central Europe is more than a history—it is a strategic meditation on the fragility of identity, the dangers of ideological absolutism, and the enduring relevance of cultural complexity in shaping geopolitical outcomes. In an age of resurgent nationalism and contested borders, Jukic reminds us that the past is not merely prologue—it is a battlefield of ideas still unfolding
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Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats
