National stereotypes

The history of our countries is depicted for us in schoolchildren’s text-books as a sequence of clashes and alliances, as the successive stream of undertakings that make kinship connections or divide them, lasting decades or at times only a brief realisation of a few months, peoples and nations of Europe. In reality, as the experts know well, behind every choice that concerns or has concerned International Relations is the continual and often changeable construction of stereotypes and of the images of “self” and of the “other”. These stereotypes and images make the choices and assumed tendencies of this or that country, of this or that toilette, that “naturally” and desirably appear in the public opinion, or as a significant and considerable part of it. This book, published under the patronage of the Commission Internationale des Études Historiques Slaves of the Comité International des Sciences Historiques, proposes a series of essays written by some of the most prominent specialists of the history of East-Central Europe on the stereotypes that have characterized the relationships between these countries both during the past and in the present days.