Shrinking ‘Middle’ The geopolitics of Central Europe

2025 has been a politically supercharged year in Europe’s middle region. Elections in Germany, Austria, Romania, and Poland played out, to an important extent, as questions of choice between the EU and Russia, ‘West’ and ‘East.’ 2026 promises just as much in Hungary, where the government might enlist the five hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Mohács for a further realignment of national memory with a shift towards Moscow and a perplexing ‘Turkic’ identity – if the regime can ward off the first serious challenge to its power at next year’s elections. What do the polarised choices facing the region tell us about Central Europe as a geopolitical space? Does it even make sense to talk about a ‘Middle Europe’ as a unit of analysis? If it does, what significance does it retain, and what developments can we expect?

In conversation with Luka Ivan Jukić, ahead of the publication of his book, Central Europe: the Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea (Hurst, forthcoming in August 2025), Dr Barnabás Szabó (Post-doctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Geopolitics) interrogates the idea of a European ‘middle’, a concept that sprang up in so many forms between the period of Ottoman expansion in the sixteenth century to the eastward enlargements of the European Union in the twenty-first. The panel will be chaired by Elvira Tamus (PhD Candidate at the Cambridge History Faculty and Research Assistant at the Centre for Geopolitics).

About the speaker:

Luka Ivan Jukić is a journalist and historian based in London. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Financial Times, New Lines Magazine, Engelsberg Ideas, Foreign Policy, History Today, and other publications.