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For any living nation, researching and
promoting its history are primarily its own responsibility and a matter of
national self-respect in regard to cultural policy. Because of the complex
geopolitical situation of Lithuania, foreign scholars are interested in
her history – and not only in neighbouring Poland, Russia, and Belarus.
When researching Lithuanian history, it is of the utmost importance to
bear in mind its European context and not artificially isolate it from its
Western and Eastern neighbours. The ability to identify general processes
in Lithuanian history and see the similarities and differences in
comparison to the rest of Europe is a way of inducing foreign historians
to help bring Lithuanian historiography into the wider world of West
European and North American historiography. It should be remarked that the
situation is not hopeless: some foreign universities and other research
institutions have centers for East-Central Europe that could become
interested in Lithuanian history in a wider context. By way of example, we
may mention one of Germany’s principal centers for research on
East-Central Europe – the Herder-Institut (http://www.herder-institut.de/),
the London-based School of Slavonic and East European Studies (http://www.ssees.ac.uk/),
the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University in the USA (http://www.huri.harvard.edu/),
and the Center for European and Eurasian Studies at the University of
California - Los
Angeles (http://www.isop.ucla.edu/euro/).
Traditionally important for knowledge of Lithuanian history (especially
early) has been the research of Polish (the faculties of history at the
universities in Warsaw, Krakow, Poznań, etc.), Belarusian, Ukrainian, and
Russian scholars.
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