In the waning years of socialism, the nation remained the dominant idea of social order in Eastern Europe. In the underground literature of samizdat, oppositional political thinkers in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary employed this term as they sought models for political community. Thus, they extended their key notions of freedom and human rights beyond ideological contradictions to develop a specific, oppositional concept of the nation.

Gregor Feindt, Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte