Overcoming ‘Otherness’: Central and Eastern European Nations and the Idea of ‘Europe’

ABSTRACT

The idea of ‘Europe’ in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has evolved significantly during the three decades of post-communist transition. Initially, anti-Soviet elites from the 1980s portrayed the region as equal/complementary to the Western part of the continent, which for its part perceived CEE as its ‘Other’. The first decade of post-communist transition was marked by a switch to nationalist thinking and the evocation of the idea of ‘Europe’ as one of nation-states. Finally, contemporary discourses of ‘Europe’ in CEE revolve around three different pillars, that is, European exceptionalism, European universalism and Transatlanticism, in contrast to Western discourses.

KEYWORDS:

• Central and Eastern Europe
• idea of Europe
• European identity
• post-communist transition
• Otherness

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the contributors to the Meandering in Transition: Thirty Years of Reforms and Identity in Post-Communist Europe edited collection, and especially to Oleksandr Pankieiev, for inspiration. In addition, the author is thankful to three anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editorial team for helpful suggestions.

Notes

1 In this article, unless mentioned otherwise, we will consider the following nations as part of the CEE region: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. This selection reflects the belonging of these nations to the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War – they are united by a shared history of “non-historical nations” (Rudnytsky 1981, 358-68). Today, almost all of them are placed in one regional cluster by the United Nations (UN) Statistics Division. The nations of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia are not included in the selection due to their non-alignment with the Soviet Union and, therefore, their pursuit of a different developmental path after 1945. That said, we strongly maintain that the discursive borders of the CEE region are fluid and rarely overlap with the administrative borders of nation-states.

2 In this respect, Jacob Mikanowski (2017) writes: “Eastern Europe belongs less to the geography recorded in road atlases than to psychogeography. It isn’t really a place, but a state of mind.” Benjamin Paloff (2014, 690) adds to this point that “‘Eastern Europe’ is a metaphor that Western discourse has unwittingly conflated with physical space. In geographic terms, east is always east of the observer’s privileged position, but this is not true of ‘Eastern Europe’”. In other words, external observers tried using geographic descriptors to define clusters of cultural identities beyond the Iron Curtain.

3 Discussing the ideas of ‘Europe’, one should acknowledge that they were per se an intellectual exercise of non-communist elites who spoke against the Kremlin-promoted visions of the regional space. Very few communist intellectuals considered it justified to develop ideas of ‘Europe.’

4 In line with this, Vernon A. Aspaturian (1984, 12) concluded that “Eastern Europe” had neither been a naturally emerging concept nor had manifested any unity (apart from ideological) in international relations: “in spite of the political-ideological homogeneity that characterizes contemporary Eastern Europe, it is a remarkably diverse aggregation of states and nations in terms of traditional characteristics. It has been the traditional diversities […] that have shaped the Eastern European past and have determined its political fate to be more often an object of the international system than a subject, individually and collectively.”

5 Szűcs, unlike Kundera, preferred using CEE, not CE, throughout his text.

6 At that time, the Visegrád Group included three members: Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Therefore, Kravchuk referred to it as a triangle. For more details see: Kushnir (2019, 54); Afanasiev (2014, 55).

7 Aspaturian (1984, 8) claimed that the only factor keeping the “Eastern European” states together was the USSR: “The relationship of individual East European states to the Soviet Union at any given time will remain the single most important and uncomplicated variable conditioning the international behavior of the states in the region.” To this, Serhii Plokhy (2011, 763) adds that the borders of “Eastern Europe” (ideological and imaginary) had always been a debatable topic, which only intensified in the post-Cold War era: “The web will provide you with endless variants, starting with those that treat the region as everything between Prague in the west and the Ural Mountains in the east, and ending with more ‘modest’ proposals […] which would limit the region to the former western borderlands of the Soviet Union, from Estonia in the north to Moldova in the south.”

8 In this respect, Mikhail Minakov (2021, 27-8) writes that “the creative destruction of the Soviet Marxist vision of the future was substituted by the prophecy of moving from authoritarian politics, state censorship, political police, and administrative economy towards civil freedoms, liberal democracy, pluralist politics, and a free market. This was called an ‘all-encompassing transition’ in 1989-91”.

9 Checkel and Katzenstein (2009, 11-2) refer to exceptionalism as a “populist conception” and to universalism as a “cosmopolitan” conception: “These cosmopolitan and populist conceptions of identity differ in both the form and the content of politicization. Cosmopolitan conceptions appeal to and are motivated by elite-level politics. Populist conceptions reflect and respond to mass politics. Cosmopolitan conceptions focus on political citizenship and rights. Populist conceptions center on issues of social citizenship and cultural authenticity.” In turn, Franco Zappettini (2019, 177) uses the following classification of contemporary European identities: nation-centric, Euro-centric and cosmopolitan (or polycentric). In its pivotal features, the latter classification overlaps with the here proposed exceptionalism, universalism and Transatlanticism.

10 Some Western philosophers add fuel to this belief. For instance, Chantal Delsol (2007, 13) defines CEE as “hope for Europe”, which would save the West from drowning in relativism and nihilism. Western Europe should draw from its “periphery”, where the true Christian spirit, tolerant and guided by dignity, was preserved. See Stolarz 2013 (34-6).

11 Ukraine and Moldova remain exceptions here, as they are yet to gain full membership.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ostap Kushnir

Ostap Kushnir is Assistant Professor at Lazarski University, Warsaw, Poland.