Central Europe in search of (lost) identity. Literary and legal findings

Why Central, and not Eastern Europe? This is the question that people from the West often ask. Central Europeans, on the other hand, do not doubt that they are not a part of the East. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the notion of Central Europe and to investigate whether a common Central European identity exists, both in the general and legal aspect. In the first, introductory part of the paper the author ventures to define the idea of Central Europe. The second part of the paper is devoted to the question of a general Central European identity. The author approaches the problem through the analysis of four authors describing the region – Milan Kundera, György Konrád, Czesław Miłosz, and Timothy Garton Ash. In the third part of the paper the author focuses on the concept of a potential Central European legal identity, whose existence is still widely debated, comparing and contrasting two opposite approaches to this problem. In the final, concluding part of the paper the author outlines the ideas for further research into the intersections between the countries of the region.