Whatever Happened To Eastern Europe?

675020
research-article2016
EEPXXX10.1177/0888325416675020East European Politics and SocietiesBallinger / Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe?
East European Politics and

Societies and Cultures
Volume 31 Number 1
February 2017 44–67
© 2016 Sage Publications
Whatever Happened to Eastern 10.1177/0888325416675020
journals.sagepub.com/home/eeps
Europe? hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Revisiting Europe’s Eastern Peripheries

Pamela Ballinger
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
This article examines the critical purchase of the notion of Eastern Europe. Although
scholarship exploring various easternisms flourished in the two decades following the
Cold War’s end, for some observers this framework appears increasingly irrelevant for
understanding contemporary Europe. The symbolic and political boundary processes
marking out East and West within Europe, however, possess both deep histories and
durable afterlives, as recent events (from the financial crisis to the Mediterranean refu-
gee crisis) demonstrate. In refocusing our gaze on the (re)constructions of the East in
European politics, this article does not advocate a mere reiteration of earlier perspec-
tives on Orientalism (or Balkanism). Rather, the discussion points the way towards
productive dialogue between bodies of literature on regionally specific variants of
easternism while simultaneously introducing new concepts (such as the tidemark) into
the debates. Furthermore, the essay makes the case for the continued salience of the
periphery concept, which retains significance as a local category of meaning and prac-
tice in many European contexts. “Periphery” thus offers a particularly powerful lens
through which to consider the recombinations and intersections of old distinctions—
North versus South, East versus West—transforming the spatial, political, and cultural
landscapes of contemporary Europe.
Keywords: easternism; peripheries; borders; tidemark
I n a 2012 article, Bulgarian scholar Dimitar Bechev warned that states in the
Western Balkans had been reduced to the “periphery of the periphery,” what he
defined as “countries that have an important stake in the current debate about the
future contours of Europe but no real voice.”1 Bechev highlighted the realities of
Europe’s new(est) political, economic, and cultural geographies, as the promise of a
better life held out by Eastern enlargement has instead exposed many of those living
on the edges of the European Union to that zone’s instabilities and vulnerabilities.
In arguing this, Bechev asserted the continued salience of the notion of periphery as
an analytical frame for understanding processes by which Europe’s borders have
been—and continue to be—(re)drawn. By contrast, Bechev’s use of the designation
“Western Balkans” for what during the Cold War usually went under the label
Southeastern or Eastern Europe put into question the ongoing relevance of the
“Eastern” appellation within the contemporary European space. Herman Van
Ballinger / Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe? 45
Rompuy, former President of the European Council, offered a similar observation at

the 2011 EU–US Summit, albeit one tinged with triumphalism rather than the ele-
giac quality of that made by Bechev: “Since the end of the Cold War, there is no East
anymore.” Adding that “there is still a West,” Van Rompuy continued, “The EU’s
priority is its neighbours, to the south and to the east.”2 In Van Rompuy’s estimation
(and implicitly that of Bechev), then, while there still existed states located physi-
cally to the east of the EU, the “East” as a meaningful discursive configuration no
longer exists.
At first glance, such comments prove surprising in light of the decades-long
debate among scholars—a fair portion of it waged in the pages of East European
Politics and Societies—about the relevance of Eastern Europe as both a category of
analysis and of practice.3 However, these remarks proved neither novel nor logi-
cally inconsistent. In his genealogy of what he calls “Euro-Orientalism,” for
instance, Adamovsky reminds us, “the concept of Western Europe does not neces-
sarily imply the idea of Eastern Europe, for theoretically it could stand in opposition
either to a diversity of non-Western nations with nothing in common or, as was
often the case, to Russia alone (that is, not including other nations).”4 With the end
of the Cold War, scholars questioned an older perspective focused on explaining the
origins of Eastern European “backwardness” by examining the structural similari-
ties—indeed, the fractal-like recursivities—shared by the “high modernist” systems
of the United States and the Soviet Union. Scholars in a wide range of fields pointed
out mirroring effects on both sides of the Cold War divide in realms like consump-
tion/consumerism, tourism, youth culture, and utopianism.5 Students of Third World
politics highlighted the shared (relative) peacefulness or chilliness of the Cold War
within the superpower blocs, in contrast to its “hotness” in places like Vietnam and
the divided Koreas.6
Interest in methodologies of global scale, as well as of transfer and entanglement,
further challenged the scholarly naturalization of “national” or regional units of anal-
ysis. Scholars interrogated the utility and epistemological logic of area studies, now
positioned as a “handmaiden” to Cold War strategic interests. Centers for Russian
and East European Studies rapidly acquired new designations, such as those of
“Eurasian Studies” or umbrella labels like “International Studies.” New thematic
groupings, like post-communist and post-socialist, also came to stand in for previous
area appellations. These tags de-throned spatial understandings in favor of temporal
ones with, as Kivikoski puts it, post-communism “often described as a determined,
inevitable journey from communism to liberalism, from state socialism to parliamen-
tary democracy, from ‘East’ to ‘West.’”7 Yet, as Kivikoski’s comments imply, these
new classifications did not do actually away with the E/W divide but merely recon-
figured and displaced it—not just into the past but increasingly as a key axis of divi-
sion and differentiation within both Europe’s putative “Easts” and “Wests.”
The stock character of the “Polish plumber” who has migrated to Western Europe
thanks to the policies of EU enlargement, for example, embodies the fear of a
46 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
displaced “Eastern Europe” now lurking in the heart of France or the United
Kingdom. Whereas in the mid-2000s French anxieties about Polish workers were
mocked gently, with the Polish Ministry of Tourism’s tongue-in-cheek posters featur-
ing a hunky Polish plumber inviting Western Europeans to visit him “at home,” by
the time of the 2016 Brexit vote the anxieties aroused by Polish plumbers had become
deadly serious.8 In the rash of hate crimes that have followed the Brexit referendum
in the United Kingdom, Poles have become a particularly visible target.9 This fear of
a supposedly diffused and internalized easternness can, of course, lead to a reasser-
tion of external boundaries, as seen in Brexit campaigners’ emphasis on sovereignty
over borders and control of movement.
How as scholars, then, are we to understand, plot, and analyze these shifting coor-
dinates of “easternness” in an ever more contested “European” landscape? Should
we treat contemporary “Eastern Europe” as merely a geographic denotation (as Van
Rompuy would have it) or even, perhaps, a floating signifier? On the one hand, the
geography of debt created by the global financial crisis pushed Europe’s peripheries
westward, as well as northward and southward, lending support to the claim that the
notion of specifically East European peripheries have become largely meaningless.10
Indeed, Brexit fury against Britain’s financial contributions to the EU was posed as a
revolt by the periphery against the center in a new topsy turvy geography in which
distinctions of center–periphery no longer seem to possess clear spatial referents.
(Those in the Western Balkans might nonetheless point up the all too real and mean-
ingful differences between their position as a periphery of a periphery and claims by
Leave supporters to inhabit one.) Furthermore, a deterritorialized notion of Islam
(and the “Islamic threat”) has come to occupy the “savage slot”11 once filled by east-
ernness—or has at least created a parallel (and sometimes reinforcing) set of catego-
ries. On the other hand, the territorial ambitions of Putin’s Russia and its dependencies
(like Crimea) have infused the language of eastern and western alliances with
renewed political and military salience. In addition, finger-pointing within Europe
over the current refugee/migration crisis has sharpened all the cardinal points of
Europe’s symbolic compass (North/South, West/East). The image of Balkan states as
unwelcoming “waiting rooms” for migrants en route to Germany (as well as Austria
and Scandinavia) and the attempts to create a zone of migrant containment in Turkey
have reactivated longstanding notions of the West’s desirability and rehardened the
porous borders created by Schengen.
In this essay, I survey the uneven terrain of the so-called New Europe through the
lens of “older” literatures and perspectives focused on Europe’s “Eastern” borders.
What purchase does scholarship focused on understandings of easternness have in a
moment of hardening boundaries between newcomers and citizens, young and old,
wealthy elites and working class, intellectuals and anti-intellectuals in Europe? In
addressing this question, I argue that ideas of easternness and peripheries not only
possess continuing political and scholarly relevance but also acquire new analytical
power when (re)connected with an invigorated field of study focused on borders and
bordering processes. The case studies by Pfoser and Kølvraa in this forum offer rich
examples of the empirical rewards of such an approach. Here, I sketch out the broader
set of intellectual conversations within which to situate those analyses, offering not
an exhaustive review (which would be impossible) but rather a cluster of productive
suggestions for thinking about easternism within Europe today. Throughout, I keep
an eye on the politics of scholarly location that have so often reinforced notions of
alterity within 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 consign-
ing 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 bound-
ary processes that have marked out East and West, thereby defining and differentiat-
ing 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 capa-
cious 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 under-
lined 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 particu-
larly true for those initiatives that stress “reform” and “training.”15 COST, by con-
trast, 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 schol-
arly traditions—including the often fraught one between “West European” anthro-
pologists and “East European” ethnologists.16
EastBordNet has also sought to forge a dialogue across diverse traditions of think-
ing on borders. Just a decade ago, David Newman noted the irony that the “renais-
sance” 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 prob-
lem 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 “bor-
der 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
Kaplan21—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 dia-
logue between scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds and institutional set-
tings 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., “anthropol-
ogy of borders,” “border histories,” and so on). Like the border studies perspective
elaborated by Donnan and Wilson, the EastBordNet has taken polity borders or lit-
eral 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 under-
standing 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 bor-
ders. 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 border-
ing. 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 contin-
gency 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 entan-
gled 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 scholar-
ship 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 consti-
tuted 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 asso-
ciated with this symbolic geography. This vocabulary echoes Green’s choice of “bor-
derness” 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 consid-
ered together, peripheries and easternness make for particularly visible kinds of bor-
ders. 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 triumphal-
ism 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 ambigu-
ous “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 ten-
dency 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 con-
structivist position within international relations, Neumann detailed the role in iden-
tity 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 examin-
ing 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 per-
spectives 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, capi-
talism, 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 eastern-
ness 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 pro-
duced a scenario of what Bakić-Hayden and Hayden called “nesting orientalisms.”35
Many of the political mechanisms ostensibly designed to erase these East-West divi-
sions—including European Union enlargement and the introduction in 2004 of the
European Neighborhood Policy—have, in reality, further nourished a sense of differ-
ence. (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 agri-
cultural and industrial projects) have now been interpolated into the orientalist
framework as a new series of others—what Buchowski deems “stigmatized broth-
ers.”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 eastern-
ness 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 anachro-
nistically) Orientalism as a guiding principle for the idea of European alterity from
eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers onward40 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 identi-
fies 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 sup-
posedly invented a “backwards” realm within Europe whose civilizational deficits
were measured in terms of distance from Paris, Wolff’s analysis takes clear inspira-
tion 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 back-
wards 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 impe-
rial 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 stu-
dents of European easternisms. Within Russian studies, for example, scholars have
spilled considerable ink debating whether Said’s framework adequately explains tra-
ditions of Russian Orientalism.47 Studies of Russia’s indigenous peoples, for exam-
ple, 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 inquir-

ing 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 femi-
nized 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-designa-
tion,” 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 speci-
ficity 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 ten-
dency 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 trouble-
some 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, can-
not 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 postcolo-
nial 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 demon-
strates 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 technolo-
gies 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 invo-
cations 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 mul-
tifaceted 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 con-
taminating: 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 refer-
ence 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 cat-
egory 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 con-
tends, 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 capital-
ism, transgressions, migrations, transnationalism or the media-covered global vil-
lage.”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 inequali-
ties in, through, and across space (something that the tidemark concept empha-
sizes), 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 depend-
ency 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 cen-
tral 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 posi-
tion 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 complemen-
tary. 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 spa-
tiality 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 meta-
phorical 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 remem-
bered 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 mean-
ings.”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 undevelop-
ment 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 mean-
ing 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 eco-
nomic 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 archi-
tectonically in “a mixture of protected heritage, unchecked urban decay, and ques-
tionable speculative regenerative schemes.”87 Peripheries are thus frequently
re-valued (albeit unevenly). Assmuth even goes as far as to describe “positive periph-
eries,”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 concep-
tual 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 mar-
gin over periphery signals the urgent need to retain the emphasis on (political) econ-
omy 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 bewilder-
ing new linguistic landscape marked by the “technical jargon of macroeconomics”91
through which the European political-economic crisis that began in 2008 is both pro-
duced 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 border-
lands.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 con-
cepts 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 eco-
nomic 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 pow-

erfully 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 inte-
gration). As relevant and dynamic categories of both meaning and analysis, then, east-
ernisms 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 colonial-
ism 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.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Laura Assmuth, Peter Bugge, and Aspasia (Sissie) Theodosiou for comments on an
earlier version of this paper, which began to crystallize in discussions at the EastBordNet editors meeting
held in Aarhus (Denmark) in April 2013. Funding for that meeting was provided by COST Action IS0803
and Aarhus University. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for EEPS for their thoughtful feedback
and engagement with my arguments.
Notes
1. D. Bechev, “The Periphery of the Periphery: The Western Balkans and the Euro Crisis,” European
Council on Foreign Relations 60 (2012): 8.
2. H. Van Rompuy, “Remarks by Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council following
the EU-US Summit,” EUCO 146/11 (28 November 2011): 2.
3. On the dangers of confusing categories of analysis and practice, see R. Brubaker and F. Cooper,
“Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47.
4. E. Adamovsky, “Euro-Orientalism and the Making of the Concept of Eastern Europe in France,
1810-1880,” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 3 (2005): 595–596.
5. For an exemplar of such an approach, go to S. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The
Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
6. H. Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
7. Cited in Adamovsky, “Euro-Orientalism,” 612.
8. On the Polish tourism campaign, see T. Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from
Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: Norton, 2016), 278.
9. On anti-Polish xenophobia, P. Buonadonna, “First They Came for the Polish Plumbers: A
Dystopian View of Life Post-Brexit,” The Telegraph, 3 June 2016. See also the BBC report at http://www.
bbc.com/news/world-europe-36656348
10. The EU’s emerging economic peripheries are often imagined in porcine terms that rest upon
chauvinistic assumptions about lazy others who feed off of the EU trough: PIGS (Portugal Italy Greece
Spain), PIIGS (Portugal Italy Ireland Greece Spain), and PIIGGS (Portugal Italy Ireland Greece Great
Britain Spain). As the expansive nature of the PIGs appellation suggests, the financial crisis expanded the
peripheries that had shrunk so dramatically thanks to EU infrastructure funds during the boom years
before the financial crisis.
11. M. Trouillot, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in
Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Robin Fox, ed. 17–44 (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 1991).
12. D. S. Kaufer and C. Geisler, “Novelty in Academic Writing,” Written Communication 6, no. 3
(1989): 286.
13. In using the language of afterlives, I wish to sidestep complex debates over whether enduring
institutional and structural asymmetries within Europe are best understood in historical terms as the result
of path dependencies or, as Todorova has proposed, legacies. For a useful introduction to the large litera-
ture on East European/socialist legacies, see J. Wittenberg, “Conceptualizing Historical Legacies,” East
European Politics and Societies 29, no. 2 (2015): 366–78.
14. M. Buchowski, “Intricate Relations between Western Anthropologists and Eastern Ethnologists,”
Focaal 63 (2012): 30.
15. On how the Bologna reform and other such European-wide educational initiatives have rein-
scribed European alterities, refer to V. Tomusk, ed., Creating the European Area of Higher Education:
Voices from the Periphery (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007).
16. Buchowski, “Intricate Relations,” 24.
17. D. Newman, “Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue,” European Journal
of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (2006): 173.
18. For the canonical texts in this borderland literature, refer to G. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La
Frontera, the New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987); C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa, eds., This
Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (London: Persephone Press, 1981); R.
Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
19. For relevant works, turn to H. Donnan and T. M. Wilson, eds., Border Approaches: Anthropological
Perspectives on Frontiers (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994); H. Donnan and T. M. Wilson,
eds., Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford: Berg, 1999); H. Donnan and T. M. Wilson,
eds., Culture and Power at the Edges of the State: National support and Subversion in European Border
Regions (London, MD: LIT Verlag, 2005); H. Donnan and T. M. Wilson, eds. Borderlands: Ethnographic
Approaches to Security, Power and Identity (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010).
20. J. Cole and E. Wolf, The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley (New York:
Academic Press, 1974); F. Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of
Difference (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969).
21. P. Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991); B. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration
in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
22. EastBordNet workshops and working groups have been held in universities in Bulgaria, Croatia,
Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Northern Ireland,
Norway, Slovenia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, among others.
23. S. Green, “A Sense of Border,” in A Companion to Border Studies, ed. Thomas M. Wilson and
Hastings Donnan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012), 580.
24. S. Green, “Lines, Traces and Tidemarks: Reflections on forms of borderli-ness,” COST Action
IS0803 Working Paper no. 1 (2009), 6.
25. For a discussion of temporality, borders, and displacement, see P. Ballinger, “Borders and the
Rhythms of Displacement, Emplacement and Mobility,” in The Blackwell Companion to Border Studies,
ed. Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012), 389–404.
26. S. Green, “Borders and the Relocation of Europe,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 349.
27. S. Green, “A Sense of the Border,” 587.
28. H. Kwon, The Other Cold War, 4.
29. D. Huber, A Decade Which Made History: The Council of Europe, 1989-1999, trans. Vincent Nash
(Strasbourg: Council of Europe Press, 1999), 288.
30. For a summary of these debates, see T. G. Ash, “Mitteleuropa?” Daedalus 119, no. 1 (1990): 1–21;
M. Kopeček, “Politics, Antipolitics and Czechs in Central Europe: The Idea of ‘Visegrád Cooperation’
and Its Reflection in Czech Politics in the 1990s,” in Questionable Returns, ed. A. Bove (Vienna: IWM
Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, 2002), 1–13.
31. P. Bugge, “The Use of the Middle: Mitteleuropa vs. Strední Evropa,” European Review of
History—Revue européenne d’Histoire 6, no. 1 (1999): 15–35.
32. T. G. Ash, “Does Central Europe Exist?,” The New York Review of Books 33, no. 15 (1986).
33. I. B. Neumann, Uses of the Other—“The East” in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For an in-depth discussion of the dualisms at the heart of Russian
identity, see I. B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International
Relations (London: Routledge, 1995).
34. A. Burgess, Divided Europe: The New Domination of the East (London: Pluto Press, 1997); D.
Stark, “Path Dependence and Privatization Strategies in East Central Europe,” East European Politics
and Societies 6, no. 1 (1992): 17–54; K. R. Ghodsee, The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and
Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
35. M. Bakić-Hayden and R. Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic
Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (1992): 4; see also M. Bakić-
Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–31.
36. On enlargement, also see M. Kuus, “Europe’s Eastern Expansion and the Reinscription of
Otherness in East-Central Europe,” Progress in Human Geography 28, no. 4 (2004): 472–89.
37. M. Buchowski, “The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized
Brother,” Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 3 (2006): 467–70.
38. E. Berg and P. Ehin, “Incompatible Identities? Baltic-Russian Relations and the EU as an Arena
for Identity Conflict,” in Identity and Foreign Policy: Baltic-Russian Relations and European Integration,
ed. E. Berg and P. Ehin (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 1. The Neighborhood Policy instead rests upon
an “alleged normative equality” between the EU states and their neighbors. In reality, however, the policy
exports a set of values, establishing an uneven relationship between the “master” and the neighboring
“pupils.” For the case of the Baltic states and Russia, see D. Jakniūnaitè, “Neighbourhood Politics of
Baltic States: Between the EU and Russia,” in Identity and Foreign Policy: Baltic-Russian Relations and
European Integration, ed. E. Berg and P. Ehin (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 120–21, 131.
39. E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); B. Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).
40. For the most forceful critique of Wolff along these lines, turn to M. Confino, “Re-inventing the
Enlightenment: Western Images of Eastern Realities in the Eighteenth Century,” Canadian Slavonic
Papers 36, no. 3/4 (1994): 505–22.
41. Said, Orientalism, 2–3.
42. L. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
43. Confino, “Re-inventing the Enlightenment,” 516.
44. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 7.
45. G. Franzinetti, “The Idea and the Reality of Eastern Europe in the Eighteenth-Century,” History
of European Ideas 34 (2008): 364.
47. For an introduction to the debates within Russian studies, see the special issue of Kritika dedicated
to “Orientalism and Russia.” Readers are also referred to D. Brower and E. Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s
Orient: Imperial Borderlands and People, 1700-1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997),
and R. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2001). For the Habsburg case, Lemon contends that debates about whether the
former Habsburg realm is genuinely postcolonial borrow from the growing scholarly field of German
colonial and postcolonial studies. See R. Lemon, Imperial Messages: Orientalism as Self-Critique in the
Habsburg Fin de Siècle (Rochester: Camden House, 2011), 3. On the question of both German and
Austrian imperialism, readers are directed to Berman (1998), Berman (1999), and Csáky, Feichtinger, and
Prutsch (2003). Refer to N. Berman, “K.u.k. Colonialism: Hofmannsthal in North Africa,” New German
Critique 75 (Fall 1998): 3–27; R. Berman, “German Colonialism: Another Sonderweg?,” European
Studies Journal 16, no. 2 (1999): 25–36; M. Csáky, J. Feichtinger, and U. Prutsch, eds., Habsburg
Postcolonial: Machstruckturen und kellktives Gedächtnis (Innsbruck, Austria: Studien Verlag, 2003).
Alison Frank has argued that Austria-Hungary’s lack of overseas colonies did not preclude it from think-
ing like an overseas empire, in particular in seeking to expand its borders through maritime trade. Go to
A. Frank, “Continental and Maritime Empires in an Age of Global Commerce,” East European Politics
and Societies 25, no. 4 (2011): 779–84. In the introduction to the new edition of her Inventing Ruritania:
The Imperialism of the Imagination, Vesna Goldsworthy details the impoverished understandings of both
colonialism and imperialism employed by those scholars who classify the Ottomans as neither colonial
nor imperial. See V. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013), xviii–xix.
48. Said’s thinking features relatively little in key works on understandings of alterity ascribed to
Siberia and the Russian Far East, e.g., A. Bloch, Red Ties and Residential Schools: Indigenous Siberians
in a Post-Soviet State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvanian Press, 2003); B. Grant, In the Soviet
House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Y.
Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1994); N. Ssorin-Chaikov, The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003).
49. D. Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global
Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 121.
50. V. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, xvi. Of course, even in her rejection of the Orientalist frame-
work for understanding the Balkans, Todorova also engages with Said’s arguments. Wolff recognizes
Todorova as the scholar who has most significantly “pointed the way towards new approaches to the study
of Southeastern Europe.” L. Wolff, “Foreword,” in New Approaches to Balkan Studies, ed. Dimitris
Keridis, Ellen Elias-Bursac, and Nicholas Yatromanolakis (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s / The Institute for for-
eign Policy Analysis), x. The differences between thinkers like Todorova and Bakić-Hayden should not
be exaggerated, as even Todorova acknowledges the powerful operation of “internal orientalisms” within
the Balkans. M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 58.
51. J. Allcock, “Constructing the Balkans,” in Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travellers in
the Balkans, ed. John Allcock and Antonia Young (Bradford: Bradford University Press, 1991), 170–91;
Bakić-Hayden and Hayden, “Orientalist Variations”; K. Fleming, “Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan
Historiography,” American Historical Review 105, no. 4 (2000): 1218–33; V. Goldsworthy, Inventing
Ruritania; M. Neuberger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in
Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
52. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 17.
53. Ibid., 15.
54. D. Bjelić and O. Savić, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
55. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 57.
56. A. Cioroianu, “The Impossible Escape: Romanians and the Balkans,” in Balkan as Metaphor:
Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. D. Bjelić and O. Savić (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002), 209–34. For examples in work on the Baltics, refer to M. Lehti and D. J. Smith, eds., Post-Cold
War Identity Politics: Northern and Baltic Experiences (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003); and D. J.
Smith, ed., The Baltic States and Their Region: New Europe or Old? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005).
57. P. Sant Cassia, “Authors in Search of a Character: Personhood, Agency and Identity in the
Mediterranean,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 1, no. 1 (1991): 4. This echoes Adamovsky’s descrip-
tion of Euro-Orientalism as a script, “Euro-Orientalism and the Making of the Concept of Eastern Europe
in France,” 619.
58. Said, Orientalism, 3.
59. In contrast to Todorova, who insists on the incommensurability of Orientalism with Balkanism,
many scholars instead qualify Said’s ideas when studying European peripheries. In his study of late
Habsburg literature, e.g., Lemon stresses what he calls “Orientalism as self-critique,” wherein authors
deploy the Orient “not to bolster Occidental imperialism but rather to express concerns about their own
troubled empire.” Lemon, Imperial Messages, 1. Tomislav Longinović similarly describes Ivo Andrić’s
brand of Orientalism as embracing “a hybrid culture in which clear distinctions between Eastern and
Western elements of identity gradually became indistinguishable.” T. Longinović, Vampire Nation:
Violence as Cultural Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 122.
60. The exegetical literature devoted to Said is vast. For an introduction to the reception of
Orientalism, go to A. L. Macfie, ed., Orientalism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2000); D. Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2007); and I. Warraq, Defending the West: A Critique of Said’s Orientalism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus,
2007).
61. E.g. C. Civantos, Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and
the Writing of Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); I. López-Calvo, Alternative
Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007); I. López-Calvo, ed.,
One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the ‘Oriental’ in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).
62. For an important exception, see the comparative discussion of the Balkans and Italy in J.
Schneider, ed., Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998).
63. Adamovsky, “Euro-Orientalism,” 623.
64. V. Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial
and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 20.
65. S. Turoma and M. Waldstein, “Introduction. Empire and Space: Russia and the Soviet Union in
Focus,” in Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories or Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. S. Turoma
and M. Waldstein (New York: Routledge, 2016), 24.
66. T. Warczok and T. Zarycki, “Bourdieu Recontextualized: Redefinitions of Western Critical
Thought in the Periphery,” Current Sociology 62, no. 3 (2014): 342–46.
67. W. Bracewell, “Balkan Travel Writing: Points of Departure,” in Balkan Departures: Travel
Writing from Southeastern Europe, ed. W. Bracewell and A. Drace-Francis, 1–24 (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2009), 18.
68. W. Bracewell, “The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing,” in Under Eastern Eyes:
A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, ed. W. Bracewell and A. Drace-
Francis (Budapest: Central European University, 2008), 120.
69. B. Stefanescu, “Reluctant Siblings: Methodological Musings on the Complicated Relationship
between Postcolonialism and Postcommunism,” Word and Text 2, no. 1 (2012): 22.
70. Stefanescu, “Reluctant Siblings,” 23.
71. S. Chari and K. Verdery, “Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and
Ethnography after the Cold War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 1 (2009): 12.
72. Chari and Verdery, “Thinking between the Posts,” 18.
73. Adamovsky, “Euro-Orientalism,” 617.
74. Buchowski, “The Specter of Orientalism in Europe,” 465–66.
75. S. Shakespeare cited in “Drawbridges Up,” The Economist (30 July 2016).
76. N. Parker, “A Theoretical Introduction: Space, Centers, and Margins,” in The Geopolitics of
Europe’s Identity: Centers, Boundaries, and Margins, ed. N. Parker (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), 8–9.
77. Parker, “A Theoretical Introduction,” 12.
78. Turoma and Waldstein, “Introduction. Empire and Space,” 18.
79. Wallerstein acknowledges that the core-periphery concept was “an essential contribution of Third
World scholars” that originated in debates in the 1950s in the United Nations Economic Commission for
Latin America (ECLA). I. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004), 11.
80. Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis, 17.
81. T. K. Hopkins, I. Wallerstein, et. al., World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology (New
York: Sage, 1982), 47.
82. T. Warczok and T. Zarycki, “Bourdieu recontextualized.”
83. Important anthropological works that used the notion of core–periphery to think beyond the con-
fines of the traditional community study include J. Cole, “Studies in the Political Economy of Peripheral
Europe,” Dialectical Anthropology 6, no. 1 (1981): 81–101; O. Pi-Sunyer, “Elites and Noncorporate
Groups in the European Mediterranean: A Reconsideration of the Catalan Case,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 16, no. 1 (1974): 117–31; J. Schneider and P. Schneider, “Modernization and
Development: The Role of Regional Elites and Non-corporate Groups in the European Mediterranean,”
with Edward Hansen, Comparative Studies in Society and History 14 (1972): 328–50; J. Schneider and
P. Schneider, Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily (New York: Academic Press, 1976); K.
Verdery, “Internal Colonialism in Austria-Hungary,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2, no. 3 (1979): 378–99;
Verdery, “Ethnic Relations and Hierarchies of Dependency in the Late Hapsburg Empire: Austria,
Hungary and Transylvania,” in Ethnicity and Nationalism in Southeastern Europe, Papers on European
and Mediterranean Societies, No. 14, ed. J. Cole and S. Beck (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam,
Antropol-Sociol. Cent., 1981), 1–28.
85. W. Bartlett and I. Prica, “The Deepening Crisis in the European Super-periphery,” Journal of
Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 15, no. 4 (2013): 367.
86. P. Bleach, “The ‘Periphery,’” Irish Independent (2 June 2012).
87. C. Rowlands, “Europe’s Periphery,” Soundings 46 (Winter 2010): 120.
88. L. Assmuth, “On the Margin, at the Centre: A View from a Northern European Periphery,” in The
Baltic Sea Islands of Estonia: A Periphery in Transition, ed. Laura Assmuth and Aili Kelam (Tallinn:
Estonian Academy Publishers, 2001), 9–17.
89. E. Shils, ”Centre and Periphery,” in The Logic of Personal Knowledge, ed. Polanyi Festschrift
Committee (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1961), 117. In light of this, alongside the core–periphery/center–
periphery opposition we might add major/minor, high/low, Great/little tradition, and so on.
90. In doing this, we also recognize the salience of the periphery notion in European economic history.
See, e.g., D. Aldcroft, Europe’s Third World: The European Periphery in the Interwar Years (Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate, 2006).
91. S. Narotzky, “Europe in Crisis: Grassroots Economies and the Anthropological Turn,” Etnográfica
16, no. 3 (2012): 629.
92. D. Holmes, Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5.
93. R. A. Del Sarto, “Borderlands: The Middle East and North Africa as the EU’s Southern Buffer
Zone,” in Mediterranean Frontiers: Borders, Conflicts and Memory in a Transnational World, ed. D.
Bechev and K. Nicolaidis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 3.
94. https://europeanwesternbalkans.com/2015/07/29/instead-of-enlargement-restern-balkans-in-con-
solidation/.
95. S. Green, “What’s in a Tidemark?,” Anthropology News 52, no. 2 (February 2011), 15.
Pamela Ballinger is associate professor of History and Fred Cuny professor of the History of Human
Rights at the University of Michigan. She is the author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the
Borders of the Balkans (Princeton University Press, 2003).

Whatever Happened To Eastern Europe?

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Whatever Happened To Eastern Europe?

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

675020

East European Politics and

Revisiting Europe’s Eastern Peripheries

Keywords: easternism; peripheries; borders; tidemark

Rompuy, former President of the European Council, offered a similar observation at

The Return of Borders

to overcome by conveying the message that “post-socialist subjects can be redeemed

The Virtues of Easternness

variants of Easternness in Europe. In some instances, the inspiration consisted in

Said in understanding the construction of difference in Russia’s Far East.48 In inquir-

work on Europe’s eastern peripheries. Taking seriously the voices of imperial

recognition of the (post)colonial character of the eastern reaches of Europe,

In arguing this, Stefanescu depicts Eastern European identities as something

inequalities, a point echoed by Adamovsky with his contention that “Euro-Orientalism

The Power of Peripheries, Then and Now

According to Parker, margins remain less tied to a notion of territory than do

of Wolff and Todorova, likewise find utility in the core–periphery language,

It would be easy to dismiss the deconstructive and historical literatures on

and the cartographies of peripheralization, analytical frameworks on easternism pow-

You might also like