The reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe

SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE

and noble patriot, who wished to make Russia strong and prosperous, and see his fatherland, which was deeply submerged under the Turkish wave and totally forgotten by the world, recover some of its departed glories. His idea was to promote the free confederation of all Slav nations, where each of them would enjoy complete political autonomy based upon a democratic constitution. He hoped also through such a confederation to achieve the reunion of the churches. In that Krizani¢ never succeeded.

Anyhow, the idea of Panslavism took more conerete shape in the past century, when in 1880 the first society of Slavophils was formed in Russia, to be followed by two Panslav Congresses, one held in Prague (1848) and the other in Moscow (1867).

The Russian Slavophils, weighed down by the reaction of Prince Metternich’s system as well as by the excess of the revolutions in Europe, thought that the civilisation of the Western nations had proved a complete failure. They were close students of German idealism, especially of Schelling and of the Hegelian philosophy of history. They accepted Hegel’s dialectic method and his a priori concept of an Absolute Reason, which it was believed incarnated itself in the life of nations. But Hegel came to the conclusion that the spirit of Humanity (Weltgeist) born in Asia incarnated itself in an inadequate form in the Oriental World. In Greece it attained its

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