The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of distinction between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.
-- Sir William Francis Butler
Organised around the twin themes of modernisation and nationalism, this book offers a historical survey of territories between the Baltic and the Aegean, occupied by Modern Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, from 1740 to the present.