Central Europe: bringing a forgotten realm to Global International Relations

In recent decades, intensive attempts emerged to introduce a new Global International Relations (GIR) research programme related to the post-colonial critique of western dominance and its efforts to overcome the current geopolitics of knowledge. Even though several regional and national approaches have been included in GIR, the integration of semiperipheral IR thinking is only in its early stages. Some of them still remain almost neglected within the GIR context. In response to this challenge, this paper aims to introduce the IR thinking produced in Central Europe (CE) by four semi-peripheral nations – Czechs, Hungarians, Poles and Slovaks – into the GIR framework. It highlights the specifics of the region that should be reflected in GIR as a genuinely global discipline. We address the specific position of Central Europe close to the West but, for various reasons, never fully integrated into its core and the related epistemological uncertainty of how to study regional realities. Simultaneously, we search for those regional CE ideas that would be more generally applicable in the study of international relations and, at the same time, mirror the unique experience of an area with not only close ties to the West in terms of civilisation but also a long tragic history.