Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe?

The Return of Borders

For politicians like Van Rompuy, the putative shift from a political economy of “transition” to one of “integration” rendered the notion of Easternness within Europe a historical artifact. The politics of academic knowledge, which incentivizes new and cutting edge research, reinforces this dismissive tendency. As David Kaufer and Cheryl Geisler wryly put it, “Academic communities are factories of novelty, encouraging members to plod toward their yearly quota of inspirational leaps.” ¹² The structures of EU-related funding constitute one driver of such novelty; European Research Council (ERC) grants, for example, call for work that goes “beyond the state of the art.” Certainly, according to such criteria, the well-trod ground of studies on easternness hardly appears beyond (!) the state of the art. In interrogating the critical stakes of easternness, however, we should exercise caution before consigning the idea of the East—and its very real material effects—to the rubbish heap of once fashionable (and fundable) academic topics. The symbolic and political boundary processes that have marked out East and West, thereby defining and differentiating Europe, possess not only long histories but durable afterlives. Material processes of peripheralization (economic, political, intellectual) remain one of the most visible of these afterlives.

Technically referring to life after death, an era following a particular event, or an unexpected persistence beyond an original context, afterlives prove a more capacious category than legacies, capturing the sense of traces, resonances, survivals, and pathways. ¹³ In this, it proves compatible with the “tidemark” concept developed by anthropologist Sarah Green within the larger EastBordNet project specifically as a means to reframe understandings of borders within Europe. I highlight the work of EastBordNet here because it furnishes the institutional and conceptual framework for the articles that make up this special EEPS forum. The existence of this network and its associated projects (conferences, workshops, publications) funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) proves typical of broader efforts to break down barriers through the creation of a common European Research Area spanning both EU member countries and candidates/aspirants. Reflecting upon another EU-funded project (that of the Marie Curie), Michal Buchowski has underlined the very real danger that such projects may reinforce the divides they are meant to overcome by conveying the message that “post-socialist subjects can be redeemed only if properly trained and transformed into a Western ‘us’.” ¹⁴ This appears particularly true for those initiatives that stress “reform” and “training.” ¹⁵ COST, by contrast, welcomes “bottom up” initiatives. In bringing together participants from both COST member and non-member countries, the EastBordNet has instead assiduously sought to forge dialogue across disciplines and across “national” and regional scholarly traditions—including the often fraught one between “West European” anthropologists and “East European” ethnologists. ¹⁶

EastBordNet has also sought to forge a dialogue across diverse traditions of thinking on borders. Just a decade ago, David Newman noted the irony that the “renaissance” of border studies had not succeeded in overcoming certain conceptual and disciplinary borders. “One only has to look at the border writings of geographers, sociologists or political scientists to see that they largely remain territorially fixed within their own disciplinary compartment,” observed Newman, “rarely crossing the boundary to take on or to cite the relevant literature of the ‘other.’” ¹⁷ The tidemark notion, which has gained traction within wider anthropological circles beyond those of Europeanists—indeed, becoming the organizing concept of the American Anthropological Association meeting in 2012—represents one response to the problem diagnosed by Newman. Like the “East,” borders became the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny in the 1990s, only subsequently to fall out of (relative) fashion. To be more precise, in the 1990s there flowered a version of “borderland studies” that, inspired by works like Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizo, Renato Rosaldo’s (1989) Culture and Truth, and Cherríe Moraga and Anzaldúa’s (1981) This Bridge Called My Back, celebrated the “bastard” mestizo/a of the borderzone formed at the edges of the US and Mexican states. This body of work provoked a vigorous and sustained critique, some focused on the brutal realities of the border, others on the exportability and suitability of this “borderlands” model for other times and places, yet others on the representational bias of the borderlands framework. ¹⁸

Simultaneously, however, there developed a different border framework focused on both the empirics and theoretical implications of polity borders. Most visible in the work of Hastings Donnan and Tom Wilson (1994, 1999, 2005, 2010), who co-edited a series of influential volumes on the topic of borders, ¹⁹ this alternative “border studies” built upon earlier, pioneering work on political boundaries, such as Cole and Wolf’s (1974) The Hidden Frontier and Barth’s (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. ²⁰ Even as “borderland studies” diminished in visibility, this “border studies” deepened and took new directions. The influence of seminal studies of the European early modern period—notably monographs by Peter Sahlins and Benjamin Kaplan ²¹ —reflected growing dialogue between scholarship on bordering in the pre/early modern and contemporary eras.

The EastBordNet initiative established in 2006 drew upon these different ways of thinking about borders, even as it reflected the optimism in pre-crisis Europe about the role such intellectual networks might play in expanding and diversifying pan-European intellectual communities. Growing out of an initial call by Sarah Green to create a comparative framework for the study of money, gender, and sexuality in the Baltics and the Balkans—that is, two key eastern border regions along Europe’s northern and southern peripheries—the EastBordNet has facilitated an ongoing dialogue between scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds and institutional settings about the nature and lived realities of borders in Europe. ²² EastBordNet has thus sought to challenge the academic and disciplinary boundaries that have tended to compartmentalize border studies into distinct disciplinary tracks (e.g., “anthropology of borders,” “border histories,” and so on). Like the border studies perspective elaborated by Donnan and Wilson, the EastBordNet has taken polity borders or literal borders as its central focus, although not to the complete exclusion of boundaries and borders in their more metaphorical or figurative meanings. In particular, Green and her collaborators in EastBordNet (including our forum authors) have addressed question of borders and “borderness,” the latter term used by Green to refer to “the different senses of border that have been expressed in different places and at different times, and how that relates to the way borders are both generated by, and/or help to generate, the classification system that distinguishes (or fails to distinguish) people, places and things in one way rather than another.” ²³

The emphasis on polity borders offered a corrective to an overly loose understanding of borders that threatened to make borders everything and nothing all at once. Ironically, much of the earlier work on borders and borderlands took the border itself for granted, failing to interrogate the ethnographic realities of actual state borders. As Green notes, “border, in itself as a concept and an entity, was not the point of these borderlands debates; rather, the point was that once border existed, people could challenge it, transgress it, become hybrids, etc. Whether or not a line was still there somehow became beside the point.” ²⁴ The point of the scholarship that has developed out of the EastBordNet, then, has been to investigate a range of identities and performances constituted around and through borders and processes of bordering. The contribution of the tidemark concept in relation to borders lies precisely in recuperating the physicality of borders as both traces and lines, in highlighting what they mark (and sometimes scar) in both time and space, and in specifying contingency and continuity. While the historical contingency of borders might strike some as obvious, the tidemark idea goes well beyond this, encouraging scholars to think about the particular temporalities and rhythms instantiated by borders in particular historical formations. ²⁵ In particular, tidemarks direct attention to broader and entangled questions of “How places, locations, and spatial regimes are being reclassified as border regimes change.” ²⁶

While the EastBordNet project represents a lively reinvigoration of the scholarship on borders, I have highlighted it here not for its exceptionality but rather its representativeness of new lines of thought and interest. Indeed, in 2012 alone, two major scholarly association meetings—those of the American Anthropological Association and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies—dedicated their conferences to the themes of borders and border crossings. After the initial boom and bust of the 1990s, then, borders and boundaries have returned to the forefront of the scholarly agenda. Developing out of the extended conversations of EastBordNet, our forum contributors take up particular bordering processes constituted by easternism within the European context. This topic has also inspired recent lively conversations well beyond those of EastBordNet, as evidenced by the series of conferences (now going into a sixth year) dedicated to the subject of “Re-Inventing Eastern Europe.”

Taking debates concerning easternness that came to the fore in studies of Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Russia, the Balkans, and Southeastern Europe in the 1990s in new directions, the essays in this special section forge productive dialogue between what have often remained largely separate bodies of literature on regionally specific variants of easternism. While these literatures owe much to Edward Said’s seminal study, Orientalism, they also labor to distinguish the particularities of, for example, Balkanism or Russian Orientalism from the discursive constellation of Orientalism analyzed by Said.

In light of the complicated relationship between Orientalism as described by Said and European articulations of peripherality, the terms eastern and easternness that I employ in this essay offer the advantage of highlighting the multiple meanings associated with this symbolic geography. This vocabulary echoes Green’s choice of “borderness” over borderliness and other similar terms in order to signal “how different senses of border (borderness) have been the subject of ongoing ontological projects, those of empires as well as people going about their everyday lives.” ²⁷ When considered together, peripheries and easternness make for particularly visible kinds of borders. Such borders, in turn, constitute tidemarks, analogous to those reminders of historic high waters that remain marked out on shorefront bulkheads and pilings.

The Virtues of Easternness

In most histories of Europe, as well as of the Cold War, 1989 marks a radical rupture in both time and space. Heonik Kwon contends, “‘after 1989’ or ‘after the End’ works in most contemporary analytical discourse as an indicator of the novelty of knowledge—a sign that the presented discourse is about aspects of the world here and now and not about the defunct order of things from the closed, nonexistent era [of the Cold War].” ²⁸ Such a view certainly informed Van Rompuy’s contentions about the disappearance of the East noted earlier or the all-too-common triumphalism that marks a history of the Council of Europe, in which the fall of the Berlin Wall represents “year zero” for a Europe in which “East-West division was brought to an end by the ‘autumn of the peoples.’” ²⁹ (Such notions have extended histories, of course, given the pervasive view of 1945 as an earlier “year zero” for Europe.) By contrast, during the two decades following the Cold War’s (putative) end, many scholars of Europe instead remarked upon the enduring power of the boundaries marking out East and West, as well as the ways in which such distinctions were being reinscribed, challenged, and subverted. In both their contributions and their limitations, these works point the way forward for deepening our understanding of these boundaries.

Some of the initial lines of debate had been laid out before 1989 by intellectuals like Milan Kundera and György Konrad who hailed from states (Czechoslovakia and Hungary, respectively) typically classified during the Cold War as belonging to Eastern Europe. Opposed to the political and cultural inclusion of their societies in a Soviet-dominated Eastern sphere, Kundera and Konrad sought to resurrect an older geographic identity as Mitteleuropean. Catalyzed by Kundera’s provocative 1984 piece, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” this debate centered on the salience of a Central European identity, as well as the historical responsibility of Germany, on the one hand, and Russia/the Soviet Union, on the other, in “kidnapping” nations like Czechoslovakia and Poland from their supposedly genuine, European trajectories. ³⁰ As Peter Bugge has demonstrated, this controversy not only reflected competing visions of the historical nature of the region but itself had a deep history, drawing upon older discourses mapping out Europe, the East, and the idea of a “virtuous middle.” ³¹

Although the Central European question opened up the possibility of an ambiguous “betwixt and between” space between East and West, in practice the claim to a Central European identity usually served less as a regional variant of non-alignment than as a strategy for “reclaiming” a Western European heritage and a denial of Easternness (through a projection of it onto the ostensible imperial power, Russia/the Soviet Union). In 1986, Timothy Garton Ash, an early and important figure in the literature on the East/West symbolic axis that would flourish in the 1990s, concluded, “We are to understand that what was truly ‘Central European’ was always Western, rational, humanistic, democratic, skeptical, and tolerant.” ³² In the face of this tendency to assert a Mitteleuropa distinct from the East only then to elide it with Western Europe, Ash not surprisingly titled his essay in the form of a question: “Does Central Europe Exist?”

Other scholars, like Iver Neumann, implicitly broadened the question—asking “Does Europe exist?”—by directing their attention to how Europeans have defined themselves, past and present, in opposition to eastern others. Writing from a constructivist position within international relations, Neumann detailed the role in identity formation played by various “Easts,” ranging from Russia to Turkey to the inner Easts (like the Republic of Bashkortostan within the Russian Federation) against which peoples often viewed by their western neighbors as quintessentially eastern (such as Russians) have positioned themselves as Western and modern. ³³ In examining the processes through which self and other are fashioned, Neumann focused on the strategies by which difference is cast in both temporal and spatial terms, in ways that resonate with the tidemark concept. Scholars from different disciplinary perspectives like Burgess (1997), Stark (1992), and Ghodsee (2005) instead addressed the political and cultural consequences of an othering that pathologized post-socialist Eastern Europe as backwards and in need of imported models of civil society, capitalism, and even feminism. ³⁴ The end result was what, to paraphrase both Stark and Ghodsee, we might deem “westernism-by-design,” that is, the mistaken belief that the groundwork for Western-style economies and political systems could be laid down by design (and fiat) in the wake of the “year zero” of 1989. Neumann’s work underscores the ways in which westernism-by-design was by no means merely an external imposition, as many elites in Eastern Europe participated in these processes of (self) othering.

On Europe’s southern and eastern peripheries, the wars in the former Yugoslavia made painfully clear the potentially tragic consequences of such othering processes. This prompted, in turn, a veritable flood of publications analyzing the rhetorics of Balkanness and Balkanization operating within the region and without. Negative understandings of Balkanness typically invoked “eastern” traits ranging from the Byzantine and Orthodox heritage to the Ottoman past as explanations for violent ethno-nationalism and atrocities. Critical scholars like Milica Bakić-Hayden and Robert Hayden brought to light the ways actors within the region imputed easternness to their neighbors, thereby seeking to align themselves politically and culturally with Europe and the West. The process by which each group envisions “the cultures and religions to the south and east of it as more conservative or primitive” thus produced a scenario of what Bakić-Hayden and Hayden called “nesting orientalisms.” ³⁵ Many of the political mechanisms ostensibly designed to erase these East-West divisions—including European Union enlargement and the introduction in 2004 of the European Neighborhood Policy—have, in reality, further nourished a sense of difference. (On the latter, see Kølvraa’s contribution to this forum.) ³⁶ In post-accession Poland, for example, the losers of transition (including workers from socialist agricultural and industrial projects) have now been interpolated into the orientalist framework as a new series of others—what Buchowski deems “stigmatized brothers.” ³⁷ Likewise, in the Baltic region, EU accession “has not helped the parties to ‘put the past behind them,’ as optimistic end-of-history scenarios foresaw. Instead, some of the most dramatic clashes over history and memory have taken place after the historic enlargement of Western institutions.” ³⁸

As these comments suggest, rapid and often dramatic transformations on the ground served as a key impetus to the scholarship on bordering practices of easternness in the European context. The extended linguistic and cultural turns that had put the “politics of representation” and attendant questions of power at the center of scholarly attention in the humanities further stimulated the critical analysis of European symbolic geographies. Published within five years of one another, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) had helped set the terms of the debate for the scholarship dedicated to the regional variants of Easternness in Europe. In some instances, the inspiration consisted in critique, as when Neumann took Anderson to task for neglecting to comment upon the imagined qualities of regional communities. ³⁹ The most influential works in this vein, notably Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe (1994) and Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997), focused on the discursive construction of Europe’s internal Others in the Eastern European and Balkan hinterlands. Both implicitly and explicitly, these works highlighted the question of the applicability of notions of colonialism and postcolonialism to Eastern/postsocialist Europe. To put it in overly simplified terms, Wolff sees (and some would say, imposes and reads back anachronistically) Orientalism as a guiding principle for the idea of European alterity from eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers onward ⁴⁰ whereas Todorova posits Balkanism as a modern phenomenon that operates in a manner quite distinct from Orientalism.

Said famously defined Orientalism as a discursive configuration and “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’” For Said, “Orientalism [exists] as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” ⁴¹ Although Said firmly located Orientalism in the post-Enlightenment, Wolff identifies the eighteenth century as a critical moment for the articulation of Western European identities in opposition to Eastern others, ⁴² in this instance along Europe’s peripheries rather than Said’s Near East. In Europe, this shifted the primary axis of differentiation from North/South to East/West. (Other authors have instead asserted the persistence of “northern” Europeanness as the key marker of difference into the nineteenth century. ⁴³ ) In tracing how Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire supposedly invented a “backwards” realm within Europe whose civilizational deficits were measured in terms of distance from Paris, Wolff’s analysis takes clear inspiration from Said’s work. Indeed, Wolff contends, “One might describe the invention of Eastern Europe as an intellectual project of demi-Orientalization.” ⁴⁴ Wolff’s critics instead have accused the scholar of inventing and projecting such orientalism backwards in time, in effect Orientalizing Eastern Europe. ⁴⁵

While clearly inspired by Said, Wolff’s account focuses much less on the question of Easternness as a technology of rule than in Said’s pathbreaking work. The colonial question enters most explicitly into Wolff’s study in his discussion of Russian imperial ambitions and the positioning of Russia as a European power and culture vis à vis its Eastern subjects in Central Asia, Siberia and so on. ⁴⁶ The issue of whether the territories comprising the contiguous or continental land empires of the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Ottomans constituted colonial (and, subsequently postcolonial) spaces proper has troubled any straightforward reception of Said’s work among students of European easternisms. Within Russian studies, for example, scholars have spilled considerable ink debating whether Said’s framework adequately explains traditions of Russian Orientalism. ⁴⁷ Studies of Russia’s indigenous peoples, for example, often draw more upon thinkers like Johannes Fabian or Michel Foucault than Said in understanding the construction of difference in Russia’s Far East. ⁴⁸ In inquiring into whether postcoloniality offers a productive and appropriate framework for understanding the post-Soviet space, David Chioni Moore has proposed a model of “reverse-cultural colonization” distinct from Orientalism. In his mind, “the standard Western story about colonization [is] that it is always accompanied by orientalization in which the colonized are seen by their masters as passive, ahistorical, feminine, or barbaric” ⁴⁹ does not hold for Russia, where the colonizing power long worried over its cultural inferiority to the West.

In her influential conceptualization of Balkanism, Todorova likewise rejects the applicability of Said’s insights to the (south)eastern edges of Europe. Todorova thus challenged many of the scholars contributing to what became known as the New Balkan Studies, an approach whose proponents engaged in “a belated debate with Said’s Orientalism.” ⁵⁰ Whereas authors like Allcock (1991), Bakić-Hayden and Hayden (1992), Goldsworthy (2013 [1998]), Fleming (2000), Neuberger (2004), and others focused on what they viewed as variations of Orientalist themes circulating through and about the Balkans, Todorova contends that Balkanism stands apart. ⁵¹ Todorova maintains, “Unlike orientalism, which is a discourse about an imputed opposition, balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity.” ⁵² In her view, the Balkans represent not the dichotomized Orient by and against which the Occident defines itself but rather a liminal zone of transition, one marked by “unimaginative concreteness” in contrast to the fantastic (and relational) projections that constitute Said’s Orient. Furthermore, Todorova argues, “balkanist discourse is singularly male,” ⁵³ in contrast to orientalist discourse depicting the East as a sensual and feminized space.

For at least two decades, Todorova’s book set the agenda within Balkan studies, prompting other scholars to examine the historical specificities of Balkan discourses within diverse contexts and locales. ⁵⁴ A sustained attention to self-ascription, largely absent in Said’s analysis of Orientalism (and Wolff’s of Eastern Europeanism) as a technique for ruling over or authorizing rule over the colonized, characterizes the multiple methods and disciplinary expertise marshaled in the study of Balkanism. Todorova devotes her entire second chapter to the topic of “Balkans as self-designation,” evidencing how intellectuals (and others) in the region have no choice but to deal the Balkan notion, even if it is ultimately to reject it. “In the Bulgarian case,” contends Todorova, “the Balkan is intimately known; therefore, the name is a Bulgarian predicament, from which Bulgarians not only cannot escape but have found a way to aestheticize.” ⁵⁵ Writing of Romania, Cioroianu similarly describes an “impossible escape” from the Balkans. The hope of “escaping easternness” also runs through literature on the Baltics, as well as the modernizing, westernizing version of Russian identity. ⁵⁶

Confronted with this dilemma of impossible escape, intellectuals in Europe’s eastern peripheries share with their Mediterranean counterparts what Paul Sant Cassia has so brilliantly described in language borrowed from Pirandello as the dilemma of acting out scripts that are only partly of their own making. “Character-ideas” such as honour (for the Mediterranean) or primitivism (for the Balkans) often take on a life of their own within these scripts. While not denying his Mediterranean actors agency, Sant Cassia acknowledges the constraints placed on their action by the durability of such character-ideas. These actors “can be seen as authors in search of characters to develop in their own theatre.” ⁵⁷ Such a notion resonates with Said’s contention that “because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action.” ⁵⁸ The “Balkans” (or easternness or Balticness, etc.) themselves become character-ideas with which actors in the region must contend.

In short, the lively and productive discussion opened up by the debate over the utility of Said’s Orientalist framework for the study of Europe’s eastern peripheries has yielded a body of scholarly work attentive to historical and geographical specificity that nonetheless possess important comparative potential (as with the Mediterranean). ⁵⁹ This, in turn, has helped to correct the overly monolithic vision of Orientalism for which Said has received considerable criticism. ⁶⁰ Likewise, the tendency to treat in a unified analysis representations of the region produced both by outsiders and insiders has complicated the question of agency among the subaltern in Europe’s peripheries. Yet for all the references by scholars of the Balkans or Russia or the Baltics to the Near East case described by Said and for all the debates about how to categorize rule by external powers in the region, the traffic has too often gone in one direction. Too few scholars of French or British colonialism or those working within the paradigm of postcolonial studies outside of the region take account of the intense debates about easternism in Europe. While one might read this positively as sign of a long overdue “provincializing” of Europe (to use the language of Chakrabarty), it nonetheless represents an impoverishment of scholarship that risks reproducing peripherality.

The partitioning of scholarship on easternisms threatens to replicate the troublesome politics of knowledge that constructed notions of the east/Orient in the first place. A number of recent publications exploring orientalisms within Latin America, for example, bear not a single mention of Todorova’s important work or debates about orientalist dynamics anywhere in Europe. ⁶¹ Perhaps even more surprising, relatively few scholars working on other European peripheries make reference to relevant work on easternisms within Europe. ⁶² Even a scholar like Ezequiel Adamovsky, author of a monograph exploring Western ideas of Eastern Europe, cannot answer his own query about the role of class ideology in formulations of Orientalism and Balkanism, begging off with the excuse, “My poor knowledge of ‘Oriental’ and Balkan studies does not allow me to risk an answer”! ⁶³

As a result of this limited dialogue, scholars run the risk of reinventing the wheel and missing important connections (as opposed to the comparative bent of much of the discussion of whether Eastern Europe can be considered a postcolonial space). Vera Tolz’s analysis of Oriental studies in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet period exemplifies both the potential and limitations of much of the work on Europe’s eastern peripheries. Taking seriously the voices of imperial scholars, particularly the undervalued Petersburg “Orientologists,” Tolz demonstrates the kinds of entanglements between orientalist thought and scholars that have been overlooked within the frequently compartmentalized bodies of work on these subjects. Most strikingly, Tolz reveals “that Said’s work on Orientalism was indebted—via Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who studied in the Soviet Union—to the critique of European Oriental Studies formulated by [Petersburg Orientologists] Ol’denburg and Marr.” ⁶⁴ Ironically, however, Tolz does not cite any relevant work on Balkanism or orientalist debates elsewhere in Europe, likely missing other important entanglements.

What other overlaps and intertwinings of ideas, personnel, scholars, or technologies of rule remain to be excavated? What stories about eastern peripheries remain to be told? I will offer here just a few examples of promising and important responses to such questions. One fruitful approach investigates the sometimes surprising invocations of Said’s concept of Orientalism in socialist and post-socialist societies. Following on the work of Tomasz Zarycki, for example, Sanna Turoma and Maxim Waldstein note that in Poland, “the reception of Western postcolonial theories is dominated by right-wing, nationalistic intellectuals, who, paradoxically, use the ideas of Edward Said and other early postcolonial theorists to bring together their traditional Russophobia with more recent and ‘hip’ Euro-skepticism.” ⁶⁵ In a similar manner, prominent Polish sociologists have taken concepts such as those of cultural capital and habitus derived from the critical sociological thought of Pierre Bourdieu and applied them to legitimate, rather than deconstruct, post-socialist re-inscriptions of hierarchy. ⁶⁶ Excavating these wider contexts for the reception and rearticulation of critical theories underscores the need for greater reflexivity on the part of scholars who participate in “European” fields of knowledge and power.

Another way to think beyond the terms of the debate has been to challenge the very binary choices—Orientalism versus Occidentalism, Orientalism versus Balkanism—that have framed so much of the scholarly discussion to date. Such a premise underwrites the “East looks West” project on travel writing centered at University College London. In a series of essay collections and anthologies, Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis and their contributors examine the writings by travelers from Europe’s “East” to and within Europe and beyond, reversing the gaze of Orientalism. At the same time, they caution, “Not all evocations of the Balkans are, necessarily and primarily, reflections in the mirror of the West.” ⁶⁷ As Bracewell puts it, “An approach predicated on clear-cut oppositions between Self and Other, East and West, tradition and modernity, has little to say about the multifaceted character of identity discourses constituted in these borderlands, not just with reference to Europe or an undifferentiated ‘West’ or ‘East’, but to a whole series of other Others.” ⁶⁸

Sharing this desire to go beyond the binary terms of the mainstream debate, Stefanescu has instead argued for a “‘triangular identity formation.’” Insisting upon recognition of the (post)colonial character of the eastern reaches of Europe, Stefanescu maintains that with the creation of the Soviet empire, “A new pole was added and the usual binaries of postcolonial writing (West/Orient, us/them) were replaced by what may seem to most like an impossible positioning of the East European self between three others, at one and the same time adversarial and contaminating: The West, the Soviet Union, and the ‘Orient’ (the colonial primitive).” ⁶⁹ During the Cold War, of course, the ideology of Third Worldism and non-alignment born at Bandung complicated bipolar logics. As both an idea and a palpable presence in the Second World (thanks in part to those Third World scholars who visited Soviet and East European universities),

The Orientals/Third World colonial subjects were at once the spectre of the Eastern Europeans’ own failure and barbaric backwardness, but they were also natives of a romantic paradise of exotic opulence, as well as former subalterns who had gained their freedom just as the Eastern Europeans were losing theirs. All of the three reference points had something that the Eastern European lacked: a definite identity. The Sovietised Eastern European was neither a clear winner, nor a clear victim, neither Western, nor Eastern, neither entirely civilized, nor an utter barbarian or natural man. To be a Sovietized Eastern European was to be almost like any of the three stable identities—but not quite— in an area of endless interference. ⁷⁰

In arguing this, Stefanescu depicts Eastern European identities as something between East and West in a manner akin to Todorova’s description of Balkanism while suggesting that Orientalism plays a key role in that formulation—and not just in constituting a true Other against which eastern europeanism is contrasted. Rather, the Third World “Oriental” as a historically located subject of decolonization stands as a model of lost possibilities for those in the Second World. This approach both highlights the significance during the Cold War of the “three world theory” as a category of practice through which understandings of Eastern Europe were triangulated and reveals its inadequacy as an analytical frame, given the actual entanglements of the First, Second, and Third Worlds.

In their influential effort to think through the relationship between the “posts” of post-colonalism and post-socialism, Chari and Verdery similarly reject the three worlds approach as “an ideology that associates postcoloniality with a bounded space called the Third World and postsocialism with the Second World.” ⁷¹ They note, in particular, the role of academic disciplines in reinforcing this artificial division. In its stead, they complicate the di- and tri-chotomies of the Cold War not by adding yet another (fourth) term but rather conceptualizing “a single analytical field—‘the (post) Cold War.’” ⁷² In taking the (post) Cold War as their primary frame, Chari and Verdery put forward a notion that emphasizes the temporal over the spatial. Other students of easternisms, notably Michal Buchowski, have likewise argued for an increasingly deterritorialized approach. With the Cold War’s end, Buchowski contends, the logics of the east make most sense in terms of social space and class inequalities, a point echoed by Adamovsky with his contention that “Euro-Orientalism is a form of class ideology.” ⁷³ For Buchowski, contemporary European orientalism proves a “refraction, a derivative or correlate of a phenomenon covered by such concepts as globalization, the expansion of multinational capital, flexible capitalism, transgressions, migrations, transnationalism or the media-covered global village.” ⁷⁴ All of these authors (Buchowski, Adamovsky, and Chari and Verdery) rightly highlight global dimensions of socio-economic inequality, thereby offering a corrective to the scholarly tendency to frame discussions of eastern alterity in terms of (local) culture and ethnicity. The vast scale of formulations such as the “global” endorsed by Buchowski or the “(post) Cold War” in Chari and Verdery, however, threaten to dissolve the specificities of Europe’s easternisms. They also divert attention from the new bordering processes dividing Europe along the lines of those who support competing visions of “‘drawbridge up’ or ‘drawbridge down.’” ⁷⁵ Like understandings of easternness, these borders map unevenly and cut across polity borders but they nonetheless still possess critical spatial effects (as evidenced by the Brexit referendum). The insights of the analysts discussed here thus most productive when considered in tandem with the reinscription of inequalities in, through, and across space (something that the tidemark concept emphasizes), in particular the entangled political, economic, and social bordering processes that have redrawn Europe’s peripheries.

The Power of Peripheries, Then and Now

Like easternness, the relational notion of the periphery marks out the shifting tides of power and asymmetry across time and space. Yet the notion of the periphery itself constitutes a tidemark, one that perhaps peaked with the high tide of dependency theory in the 1970s and 1980s. For this reason, some contemporary social analysts prefer to employ the terms “edge” or “margin,” dismissing periphery and peripherality as overly saddled with the baggage of world systems and dependency theory.

In his introduction to the Geopolitics of Europe’s Identity: Centers, Boundaries, and Margins, for example, Noel Parker posits the superiority of the “margin” concept:

The term “margin” is used to focus attention on the possibility that what lies on the edge has autonomous, active effects beyond its marginal space, including what is central in the space where it is marginal. In this sense, “marginal” is distinguished from “peripheral,” a more passive condition of being shaped by and/or excluded from the center . . . what is “peripheral” exhibits features arising passively from being on the edge—dependency, perhaps, or feelings of inferiority. Features that arise from a position on the edge of the center’s identity and its effects, and which have the potential to impact beyond the edges, are referred here as features of “a margin.” ⁷⁶

According to Parker, margins remain less tied to a notion of territory than do peripheries. Margins may even be positive, in part because “both margins and centers are defined via their relationship, and hence [that] what are deemed the capacities of the center are already, in some sense, hostage to the margin.” ⁷⁷

Unless we accept the caricatured version of the passive periphery that Parker employs, however, it remains unclear how much his notion of the margin differs from that of the periphery and, in practice, the two terms often prove complementary. Like borders and easternness, peripheries possess multiple (and slippery) usages in social theory and everyday life. Admittedly, in the accounts of some dependency theorists, peripheries (and semi-peripheries) do figure as territorial units produced through their exploitation by core states in the sort of passive and mechanistic process criticized by Parker. Yet such a spatialized understanding of periphery nicely highlights the concrete place-ness of Europe’s eastern regions asserted by those scholars seeking to differentiate European easternisms from Said’s Orient, what he defined as “a project, not a place.” In directing attention to the spatiality and materiality of empires, for example, scholars like Turoma and Waldstein have sought to “reinterpret it [the Russian and Soviet empires] as a surface, or space, of relationships, the basic structure of which is a nested opposition between center and periphery.” ⁷⁸

It should be noted, though, that in adopting the core–periphery concept, Wallerstein and others associated with the world-systems perspective urged a much more metaphorical and processual usage. ⁷⁹ Reflecting back on the historical origins of the notion, Wallerstein commented, “one could use a shorthand language by talking of core and peripheral zones (or even core and peripheral states), as long as one remembered that it was the production processes and not the states that were core-like and peripheral.” He added, “In world-systems analysis, core-periphery is a relational concept, not a pair of terms that are reified, that is, have separate essential meanings.” ⁸⁰ Terence Hopkins and Wallerstein offered a similarly processual read of peripheries, “Looking at the world economy as a whole, some states are clearly ‘in-between’ in the core-periphery structure, in that they house within their borders (in adjacent but often unrelated sectors) both peripheral processes in relation to core states and core-like processes in relation to adjacent peripheral states.” ⁸¹ Indeed, Wallerstein and other proponents of world systems devoted considerable attention to semi-peripheries, a concept that has proved productive for analyzing the politics of academic knowledge in places like postsocialist Poland. ⁸²

Given the durability of notions of eastern backwardness, it seems appropriate—indeed, crucial—to retain a perspective on core–periphery dynamics that stresses the active production of underdevelopment, as opposed to a presumed undevelopment following out of (immobile) cultural traditions. Within the anthropology of Europe, the use of the core–periphery lens helped open up study of southern and eastern Europe, moving beyond the folkloristic or isolated community study models that had hitherto prevailed. ⁸³ Pioneer studies of European easternisms, such as those of Wolff and Todorova, likewise find utility in the core–periphery language, although they largely take the terms for granted rather than subject them to the same sort of scrutiny that “Eastern Europe” or the “Balkans” receive. In fact, Wolff reminds readers that world systems and the core–periphery model provided a major impetus to the development of the very field of East European studies—and vice versa. He goes so far as to claim that “Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century provided Western Europe with its first model of underdevelopment, a concept that we now apply all over the globe.” ⁸⁴

Wolff’s statement highlights the salience of periphery as a local category of meaning and practice in many European contexts, including but not limited to those marked out as eastern. Intellectuals and others in the region may employ the term periphery to highlight their sense of difference, whether in cultural, political, or economic terms. Indeed, the economic crisis of 2008 reinvigorated the language of peripheries in both media and scholarly discourse, with the coining of new terms such as “super periphery” to describe areas, including many Balkan states, “highly vulnerable to the [negative] effects of the Eurozone crisis, yet lacking support from the European Union (EU) bail out funds and policy instruments.” ⁸⁵ As one aggrieved letter writer to the Irish Independent put it, “I used to love the European Community. . . . Everyone got a say, there was no bullying or big countries . . . Then came the European Union, it simply slid in. . . . Suddenly, we were a ‘periphery’ country.” ⁸⁶

From another direction, periphery may also refer to codings of space, as in the common European differentiation of the urban periphery or suburbs. Carl Rowlands, for instance, identifies a “new social geography” evident in the capital cities of the (EU) periphery. Here, the economic shift to retail and tourism manifests itself architectonically in “a mixture of protected heritage, unchecked urban decay, and questionable speculative regenerative schemes.” ⁸⁷ Peripheries are thus frequently re-valued (albeit unevenly). Assmuth even goes as far as to describe “positive peripheries,” ⁸⁸ further challenging Parker’s contention that the periphery necessarily denotes something passive and negative.

These understandings of the periphery also bring out another common conceptual pairing: center–periphery. At times, the substitution of the term core with center reflects a more formal approach to politics than that found in world systems, as in studies of center–local governmental relations. Sociologist Edward Shils employed the notion of center–periphery in a manner that highlighted the symbolic and opposed the sacred center to the profane. Describing the center, Shils captured its paradoxically nonterritorial yet locational logic: “The central zone is not, as such, a spatially located phenomenon. It almost always has a more or less definite location within the bounded territory in which the society lives. Its centrality has, however, nothing to do with geometry and little with geography.” ⁸⁹ The essays of Kølvraa and Pfoser that round out this special forum track peripheries in relation to both cores and centers, attending to the rich possibilities of periphery as both analytical frame and object of analysis.

Finally, my decision not to privilege a more au courant term such as edge or margin over periphery signals the urgent need to retain the emphasis on (political) economy inherent in the periphery concept. In advocating for “margin,” for example, Parker locates its origins in French poststructuralism, specifically Derrida’s thinking on indeterminacies and fluidity—a move of distancing from periphery’s associations with various Marxist and world systems approaches. More than anything, the so-called economic “crisis of the periphery” in contemporary Europe demands that we pay attention to peripherality in its various meanings and deployments, particularly the economic. ⁹⁰ The language of periphery serves as a scholarly anchor in a bewildering new linguistic landscape marked by the “technical jargon of macroeconomics” ⁹¹ through which the European political-economic crisis that began in 2008 is both produced and managed. Indeed, in the broader “economy of words” that constitutes the European economy as a “communicative field,” ⁹² periphery retains its salience as both critical concept and media shorthand for (relative) backwardness. Likewise, the asymmetries of power inherent in the notion of periphery underscore the various forms of political, economic, and legal control exercised by the EU over its borderlands. ⁹³ The periphery concept thus offers a particularly powerful lens through which to consider the recombinations and intersections of old distinctions—North versus South, East versus West—shaping the landscape of contemporary Europe.

Conclusions

It would be easy to dismiss the deconstructive and historical literatures on Balkanisms, European Orientalisms, and European easternisms as having become nearly as clichéd as the tropes they seek to unpack, that is, as gatekeeping concepts that have functioned to set a research agenda for the region to the exclusion of other topics. In this essay, however, I have argued for the enduring power of these concepts as categories of practice or meaning. For those individuals suffering the effects of life in a European superperiphery or for migrants trapped in the no-man’s land of the “Balkan corridor,” the language of Eastern peripheries continues to resonate as a way to denote deep asymmetries. Similarly, such a conceptual vocabulary provides those in the Balkan countries remaining outside of the European Union—what wags have called the “Restern Balkans” (in contrast to the “Western Balkan” label with which I began this essay) ⁹⁴ —a means to articulate their sense of being the periphery of the periphery of the periphery. As a label to denote cultural, political, and economic difference, then, “Eastern Europe” is alive and well.

As a category of analysis, the purchase of Orientalism for understanding Eastern Europe has proven contested, leading to competing formulations (such as Balkanism) and hybrid terms (such as Euro-Orientalism). In my analysis, I have grouped these various concepts under the umbrella term easternism (or east europeanism and European easternism). When wed to a perspective that emphasizes bordering processes and the cartographies of peripheralization, analytical frameworks on easternism powerfully illuminate the mappings of new hierarchies of class, not just ethnicity and race, within European societies and across them (particularly within the context of EU integration). As relevant and dynamic categories of both meaning and analysis, then, easternisms prove akin to tidemarks, which refer to “both the marks themselves and activities or objects designed to describe, analyze or measure them.” ⁹⁵ Perspectives on easternism highlighted here also offer entry points into larger debates about colonialism and its afterlives, symbolic geographies, alterity, and the scale and methods of scholarly analysis that transcend the region. Eastern Europe, it would seem, is alive and well—sometimes living under an assumed identity, sometimes hiding in plain sight but still demanding our critical attention and tools.