But globalization is nothing new.
Greece established settlements in the areas which are now Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan by around 329 B.C., where they met with representatives of China. The Romans sent diplomats into China by around 166 A.D., so when Marco Polo made his famous trip to China in the late 1200s, there had already been a millennium of contact between Europe and eastern Asia.
In the 400s A.D., Attila, king of the Huns, moved through Europe with his army. Also known by the name ‘Etzel,’ Attila marched through what is now Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, and into Italy. Although Attila’s presence was primarily military, it nonetheless had a cultural and social impact. One of his wives was a Roman, another one was probably a Goth. The Huns were a nomadic group from central Asia who had settled in the area of what is now Hungary.
In the early 1200s, Genghis Khan, also known as ‘Temujin,’ advanced from Mongolia as far west as Poland.
Although Europe’s contacts to China, Mongolia, and other parts of central Asia go back more than 2,000 years, such contacts were sporadic and occasional.
By contrast, on a more regional level, contact between the nations of central Europe have been ongoing and largely uninterrupted over the millennia. The peoples of central Europe have continuously interacted with each other over the centuries.
Maps can be misleading: territories are shown with clear boundaries. But social and cultural contact often ignores those frontiers. In areas close to either side of a border, languages are mixed. In Strasbourg, a city in France near the German border, German is spoken as much, and sometimes more, than French, and the locals refer to their home as Straßburg. Likewise, the Belgian government acknowledges German as one of that country’s official languages, spoken mainly in border areas.
But cultural interaction goes into the hearts of these countries and is not limited to border regions, as authors Uwe Oster, Dieter Benecke, and Carol Gratton write:
Even before our current century, history could not be isolated and considered only from the point of view of one nation or one people. In this century it is even less possible because distances hardly matter and the world has shrunk to the size of a global village. Germany lies in the heart of Europe. The history of Germany, therefore, has always been the history of its neighbors in Europe and the world.
It is impossible to write the history of any one nation, nation-state, people, or country without reference to its neighbors. The history of Germany cannot be told without telling the history of Europe. This is always true, but especially true of the centuries prior to 1871. In that year, Germany as a sovereign unified territory appeared for the first time.
The history of Germany prior to 1871 is the history of various German kingdoms, with their various alliances and enmities among themselves, united only by a common language and culture, but not by politics or economics. Indeed they were as likely to be allied with a non-German neighbor as with a fellow German kingdom. France and Hungary have a role to play in German history as much as Saxony and Bavaria.
