Abstract
This article investigates how the notion of Eastness informs the discourse of European Union (EU) enlargement. Eastness here refers to an inscription of identity — a process by which places, events and societal developments are endowed with a likeness to the ‘East’ as distinct from ‘Europe’. Drawing examples from academic scholarship on EU enlargement, the article outlines how the inscription of Eastness functions in the enlargement discourse, and how its functions have changed since the end of the Cold War. I argue that the erstwhile East (of Europe) as a territorially defined periphery of Europe has been layered into multiple peripheries with varying degrees of Eastness. One might say that parts of the former East have become less East-like and more Europe-like, while others are still endowed with a high degree of Eastness. At the same time, European identity is still constructed in terms of the East. Economic, political and social developments in East-Central Europe are still conceived in terms of proximity to, or distance from, an idealized Europe or Europeanness. The situation is neither one of a static and monolithic othering nor of the dissolution of Eastness. The East is best understood not as a location but as a tendency, one always inscribed in degrees, shades and flavours. The challenge is not to unearth a core meaning or location of the East, but the specific and often unremarkable processes by which Eastness is inscribed onto places.
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Notes
In other words, Europe and the Eastness are performatively constructed. See Kuus (2007) on a performative construction of political identity.
Discourse is understood here as a set of assumptions, claims and modes of analysis that enable and constrain speech and practice. The EU enlargement discourse is therefore not the sum of what is said about EU enlargement, but the tacit grammars within which enlargement is problematized as a particular kind of process requiring particular kinds of solutions. The core concern of discursive analyses is not with the specific content of what is said or written about geopolitics. Their concern is rather with the rules that make particular political practices legible and legitimate, while making other practices illogical, unfeasible or illegitimate. This paper thus does not seek to reveal deep hidden meanings of political practice — what individual decision-makers ‘truly’ think or what beliefs are shared among the population. Instead, it highlights persistent assumptions, themes and tropes that both enable and constrain political debate and political practice. These assumptions often remain unnoticed, not because they are hidden but because they are taken for granted. Discourses are not discernible in terms of their core substance, but in terms of their effects (of normalizing particular conceptual and political approaches to complex social issues). They are not a property of the speaker but of the particular political arena. In the context of this paper, academics do not put forth discourses; they operate within discourses. I therefore do not attempt a comprehensive review of identity or security claims in Central Europe or the roots of these claims. Instead, I elucidate the geographical and territorial assumptions that enable these claims. Discourses do not enforce a complete agreement or unity of methodology. They operate through fractured, flexible and contingent practices that nonetheless form a certain regulation. They channel disagreement into a framework within which the act of disagreement obscures actors’ shared allegiance to categories that contain their disagreements. To speak of the EU enlargement discourse, then, is not to deny debate but to foreground the arguments and modes of analysis that encase the debate; the assumptions and arguments in relation to which other arguments have to be positioned. Discourses are not contained within state institutions or projected from these institutions. They are produced in many spheres of the civil society, including education, entertainment and the media. Their power lies in their dispersed and routine ordinariness. My analysis focuses on the elite governmental and academic discourse because this is the discourse within which public policy is proposed and implemented. To focus on elite discourse is not to imply that everyone internalizes that discourse, but to concentrate on these modes of analysis that frame public debate and cannot be dismissed as ignorant or illegitimate. For further methodological discussions of discourse, see O'Tuathail and Agnew (1992), Campbell (1998), Gusterson (1999), Weldes et al. (1999), and Wæver (2002).
Russia is a good example that a place that is ‘eastern’ is not necessarily cast as weak in the sense of traditional power politics. Russia's ‘strength’ becomes in this context an additional sign of its otherness as it is evoked to distance Russia's power-political position from the supposedly more nuanced and ‘postmodern’ position of the EU. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this insight.
Actors in the region have an incentive to keep the region ‘insecure’. Due to the prominence of security in the EU enlargement discourse, engagement with East-Central Europe is premised on it being insecure. Browning and Joenniemi (2004) note in the context of the Baltic Sea region that the scaling down of the security rhetoric in the region may make international co-operation more difficult as politicians are less inclined to channel funds into a region that is no longer insecure. The dependency of western engagement with East-Central Europe on security was also notable in aid policies as aid packages were channelled to states that were considered security risks to the west (Weel 2001; Danjoux 2002).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Gregory Feldman, the Editors, and the four reviewers of this journal for their detailed and constructive comments on earlier versions of the article. Research for the article was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The usual disclaimers apply.
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Kuus, M. Something old, something new: Eastness in European Union enlargement. J Int Relat Dev 10, 150–167 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jird.1800121
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jird.1800121