Keywords

Introduction

A glance at European Studies curricula in the Netherlands and across Western Europe reveals a marked pattern of underrepresentation when it comes to Eastern Europe, a region that has at times—and rather revealingly—been called ‘the other Europe.’ As a historian interested primarily in political ideas and political history, this underrepresentation strikes me as rather curious and in need of reconsideration for several reasons. A case for rethinking can certainly be made in terms of Realgeschichte. After all, a host of the most cataclysmic and consequential transformations in recent European history have started and often also played out primarily in Eastern Europe—just think of the Sarajevo assassination in 1914 and the outbreak of World War I (WWI), the Nazi German attack on Poland and the start of World War II (WWII), Nazi and Soviet projects of empire building and mass violence, the 1948 coup in Prague and the beginning of the Cold War confrontation, or the refolutions in Warsaw and Budapest in 1989 and the end of the continent’s East-West division (Garton Ash, 1990). As I shall aim to explain below, beyond such more factual references, the place and role of East European countries also appears critical when we wish to analyse Europe’s transformation in modern and contemporary times and address major challenges the European project currently faces.

Starting from the understanding that the notion of ‘Eastern Europe’ was ‘invented’ by Western thinkers during the Enlightenment as a space in-between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbaric,’ this chapter will draw on insights from a host of disciplines—politics, economics, sociology, linguistics, geography, religious studies, and psychology in particular—to try and conceptualize this rather elusive entity with the larger aim of reflecting on East-West dynamics in modern and contemporary Europe. By applying concepts such as ‘the demi-Orient’ (Wolff, 1994) and ‘semi-peripheries in the world system’ (Wallerstein, 1974) and, more specifically, theories of ‘nesting Orientalism’ (Bakić-Hayden, 1995) and ‘the East-West slope’ (Melegh, 2005) while explicating their multidisciplinary origins, I shall first discuss how and with what consequences Eastern Europe was made to fit into the modern system of integrated and rather homogeneous nation states. I will subsequently try and trace how the East European aspiration to be accepted as ‘fully European’ has led to the enlargement of the EU after 1989 and resulted in a less well-balanced Union. This part of the chapter will suggest that the just mentioned key aspiration on the part of East Europeans may have directly contributed to the rise of ‘illiberal democracies’ in countries such as Poland or Hungary—which points to an urgent need to reconsider East-West dynamics and their consequences in a more complex and interdisciplinary manner.

In other words, the current essay draws on and combines insights from a host of humanities and social science disciplines to offer critical reflections on political ideas and develop a new narrative of political history. It shows how the very concept of Eastern Europe has been shaped by various disciplinary discourses and how the asymmetrical relationship between ‘Eastern Europe’ and ‘Europe’ can only be properly grasped when thinking in an interdisciplinary manner.

A Powerful, Malleable Concept

Since the making of modern Eastern Europe is practically inseparable from the power of symbolic geographies, let me begin with some general remarks concerning the conceptual history of Europe and the implications of the imaginary Eastern border of this quasi-continent. Since the beginnings of modern history some five centuries ago, inhabitants of Europe have tended to view their continent as substantially different from other ones and have often depicted it as especially valuable, if not downright superior. In the early twenty-first century, Europeans increasingly recognize their continent to be a rather smallish part of the planet that—though undoubtedly influential in certain areas—is no longer of central import in global affairs (Chakrabarty, 2000).

At the same time, numerous Europeans living today believe the European political and social model—typically understood, if not necessarily in so many words, as the partly transnational governance of post-classical, liberal democratic nation states with an embedded form of capitalism—to be preferable to its major, US American and Chinese alternatives and, thus, of continued universal relevance (Jarausch, 2021). In other words, despite having clearly declined in relative terms and no longer exercising a large share of global power, many Europeans hold on, at least implicitly, to the idea that Europe remains a particularly ‘civilized’ kind of place that other continents could emulate to their benefit.

Given such peculiar continuities in European thought from colonial times into our post-colonial present, it is worth recalling that few key concepts have in fact been as malleable across the millennia as the idea of Europe. This remarkable idea has crossed many boundaries, transitioning from mythology to geography, and then on to religion and culture, to emerge as an increasingly contested political concept in our age—the properly contextual study of Europe across the centuries thus requires a multidisciplinary approach before more interdisciplinary reflections can be developed. As will be familiar, the name of an abducted and raped princess in Greek mythology came to be employed as an—at first, admittedly, rather vaguely defined—geographic expression to refer to a part of the world different from the actual place of Europa’s own origins.

During the Middle Ages, this part of the world, coexisting in an often-conflictual relationship with the so-called Islamic world, acquired marked religious connotations: it came to be associated with the realm of Christendom. Importantly for my purposes, the Middle Ages was also the era in which, due to the great schism of 1054, the distinction between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Christianity first acquired seminal importance; a religious distinction on which the concept of Eastern Europe, to be invented during the philosophical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, would draw, however imperfectly.

The idea of Europe then got connected in early modern times to notions of a specific civilization with claims to universality. It was racialized at the high point of European imperialism in the late nineteenth century with devastating consequences outside and—with the racial imperialism of German Nazism, above all—soon also inside the continent (Mazower, 2008). In the post-war period of the last century, ‘Europe’ was launched as a novel political-economic-legal project with an unclear end goal—a project that was at first, for rather obvious political reasons, entirely restricted to one side of the Iron Curtain and which, in fact, derived good parts of its raison d’être from opposing ‘the East’ (Patel, 2020).

Self-celebratory longue durée narratives may attempt to trace back the origins of Europe to ancient times, to ancient Greece and Rome in particular, but, as a self-conscious project by that name, Europe can be said to be a quintessentially modern invention. A key paradox of nationalism, identified by Benedict Anderson (1983) as the combination of the relative novelty of national consciousness with the retrospective construction of an extended line of continuity, thus, appears to apply to predominant forms of European self-identity too. As more detailed analyses in conceptual history can reveal, many of the traditions the European project claims to embody today were in fact developed by people for whom ‘European identity’ was at most marginally important.

Consequential Imaginary Borders

Zooming in on our specific subject of Eastern Europe within European and global frames, it is essential to first consider the puzzling geography of a continent that is not quite a continent and the dilemmas and tensions that have resulted from the underdefined nature of Europe’s borders. While water defines the geographic borders of Europe in the West, the South, and the North, this quasi-continent lacks such clear boundaries in the East. The geographic border between Europe and Asia is usually placed somewhere in the middle of Russia. Irrespective of whether it is meant to be constituted by a river or mountain ranges, such a border between continents is, of course, imaginary—and Istanbul’s supposed bridging of its European and Asian sides also convinces more as a symbol than as a ‘hard fact’ (Maçães, 2018). It is worth adding that there is no natural border either between places in continental north-western Europe like the Netherlands and areas in the Far East, which implies, among other things, that Eastern Europe—unlike the narrower area of the Balkans (Mazower, 2000)—cannot be viewed as anything more than a very loose geographic category.

In strictly geographic terms, Europe may be an imaginary continent, but one whose peculiar manner of invention has had serious cultural and political consequences. Constructed as a quasi-continent, Europe has, apparently, been in almost constant need of delineating its own limits vis-à-vis the East to remain distinct while ‘Europeans’ have also recurrently pushed eastward to spread further the ‘ideas of Europe.’ While the latter pursuit does not need to take violent forms, the Europe-Asia divide has in fact rarely been conceived in a detached, let alone symmetrical fashion in recent centuries. As it was enforced as the standard way to perceive the modern world, the distinction between these ‘two continents’ has tended to be not only about a divide in space but also about a gap in time—about ‘the synchronicity of the asynchronous,’ to cite Ernst Bloch (1935). We might go as far as to suggest that Europeans have often defined Asia not in a positive sense but rather through how that larger part of their landmass was meant to differ from the European peninsula and, more specifically, what it lacked to be quite like it.

Much of what I have just stated may be said to be common knowledge in our post-colonial present. However, there remains an underdiscussed intra-European layer to the same complex of questions. If Europe has recurrently been defined through distinctions between itself and ‘the East,’ where does that leave Eastern Europe, the part of the world that combines these two notions in its very name? As Benjamin Schenk has shown in his conceptual history, ‘Eastern Europe’ has first emerged as a subject of scholarship by geographers in the eighteenth century. The term was then used in philology, modern linguistics as well as history before it would have acquired a primarily political connotation in Cold War-era scholarship—without the Eastern bloc states themselves using the term ‘Eastern Europe’ in any prominent way to refer to themselves (Schenk, 2017).

While the discourses pursued by the just mentioned disciplines have all constructed ‘Eastern Europe,’ they have delineated it in overlapping but far from identical ways. To take just two examples from linguistics and religious studies that allude to some of the complexities involved: Polish is a Slavic language (and thus typically studied in Slavic and East European languages departments), but Polish society is predominantly ‘Western’ (Roman Catholic) in the Christian-religious sense of the term, whereas Romanian is not a Slavic but a Romance language; however, Romanian society is predominantly ‘Eastern Orthodox’ in the Christian-religious sense.

Remarkably, people’s current understanding of the dividing line between Eastern and Western Europe also appears to be impacted by disciplinary context. This was shown, among others, by an intriguing 2008 experiment conducted in Hungary where most students in a geography class correctly identified that Prague lies further to the west than Vienna but their fellow students in a history class insisted that Vienna belonged to ‘the West,’ whereas Prague—apparently still in the historical shadow of the Cold War at the time—was located in ‘Eastern Europe’ (Bolgár & Horváth, 2008).

The Ambiguous Status of the Demi-Orient

Often depicted as that part of Europe which is not ‘fully European,’ but rather a sort of ‘demi-Orient’ within the geography of Europe, a multidisciplinary engagement with the study of Eastern Europe also reveals that such a pattern in the realm of ideas has a remarkable parallel in the findings of socioeconomic studies regarding the world system as articulated, perhaps most famously, by Immanuel Wallerstein. Tracing the rise of the modern capitalist economy, Wallerstein has attached great import to the role of semi-peripheries which were closely connected, through unequal relations of exchange, to the developed core areas. When it comes to Eastern Europe, cultural demi-Orientalization and socioeconomic semi-peripheralization appear to have gone hand in hand. Thinking about studies of culture and socioeconomic development simultaneously, that is, in a more directly interdisciplinary manner, in fact reveals semi-peripheralization and demi-Orientalization to be logical correlates. When it comes to mapping this region in a global scheme of things, the two approaches with their different interests and foci present almost mirror images of each other. Crucially for my purposes here, the simultaneous potential to include and exclude Eastern Europe underlies both these mappings, creating an unusually ambivalent situation.

When Eastern Europe acquired the political-economic-geographic shape of the Soviet (or Eastern) bloc, it emerged not only as a major focus of area studies on the other side, that is, ‘in the West,’ but probably also as the most significant part of the world against which the self-declared European project, launched exclusively in Western Europe, now defined itself. While viewing the Eastern half of this quasi-continent primarily as a political threat after its Sovietization in 1947–1948, a threat famously summed up through the concept of ‘totalitarianism,’ post-war West European perspectives on Eastern Europe, nonetheless, also preserved elements of an older, condescending-Orientalist manner of thinking.

Ambiguities did not stop there. Just as Western discourses sometimes included East European countries as ‘Christian’ and ‘European’ and, therefore, viewed them as deprived of freedom and democracy against their will, they could at other times exclude the very same ‘Easterners’ from a narrower, more Western-style definition of Europe for a variety of reasons. These include seeing Eastern European nations as not properly ‘developed,’ as places lacking stable forms of statehood and independent social organizations, or even as peoples especially prone to violence, a crude stereotype especially frequently applied to Southeast Europeans or, more colloquially, the people of the Balkans (see Todorova, 1997). Somewhat schematically put, the politicization of the concept of Eastern Europe during the Cold War meant that anti-communist discourses reconciled to the Cold War division of the continent defined ‘the East’ out of Europe, whereas anti-communist discourses bent on opposing the status quo ‘in the East’ would highlight its Europeanness (Kundera, 1984).

What the concepts ‘Asia’ and ‘Eastern Europe’ thus share is that they were both developed externally to the people they were meant to designate. Due to their primarily negative manner of definition (negative in the sense of providing a definition through what something lacks as well as the implied value judgement behind that perceived absence), both categories possessed only limited potential for self-identification. The relationships these terms reflected, and in some sense brought into being in the first place, have differed from one another in one crucial respect though. That is, that East Europeans, unlike their Asian counterparts, have made repeated and, at times, vocal claims to belong to the very same category of Europeans as ‘the Westerners’ (or, more narrowly speaking, the West Europeans). They have made such claims while members of the latter group could be prone to distancing themselves from them and would also make occasional attempts to reshape them in their own image—clear signs of an asymmetrical and not particularly well-balanced relationship, to the historical development of which I now turn.

Polarized Occidentalisms

As a result of this asymmetrical and not particularly well-balanced relationship (which conceptual history can help us grasp), the status of Eastern Europe has remained ambiguous and profoundly uncertain. To overcome such asymmetries, various individuals and groups within Eastern Europe have aspired to ‘truly belong’ to this prestigious ‘continent of the imagination’ and aimed to transform their own societies in the image they had of countries further west—often with substantial, if at times poorly informed support from Western actors.

Such attempts to modernize and ‘Westernize,’ however, have repeatedly generated controversies and could yield powerful political responses in the name of local traditions. As various groups in these societies would be opting, and sometimes oscillating, between admiration and rejection, between hopes and resentments of ‘Western models of modernity’ (Delanty, 2013), a pattern of internal cultural and political polarization crystallized and has been reproduced across generations. In this respect, the controversy between Westernizers and Slavophiles in nineteenth-century Russia might be viewed as something of an archetypical conflict within the political cultures of modern and contemporary Eastern Europe (Walicki, 1975).

This internal polarization between ‘Westernizers,’ often called ‘imitative liberals’ in our age, and authoritarian nationalists, again widely labelled ‘populists’ today, has in many ways been a consequence of Eastern Europe’s unequal relationship with Western Europe and the West, more broadly. After all, the key difference between imitative liberalism and authoritarian nationalism is the way they define Eastern Europe’s relationship to a West perceived to be more developed and liberal.

An interdisciplinary perspective combining insights from socioeconomic and cultural analysis suggests that East European liberals are intent on reproducing the conditions of the socioeconomic core in the semi-periphery through imitation, whereas authoritarian nationalists emotionally revolt against symbolic practices of demi-Orientalization which only tends to reproduce the perception in the West of Eastern Europe not being ‘properly Western’ (Krastev & Holmes, 2019). These are two predominant, if contrasting and polarized versions of East European Occidentalism that have come to shape a turbulent recent history full of sudden ruptures and unexpected reversals.

It is also worth noting in this context that there is no comparable internal polarization within West European societies that could be interpreted as the consequence of these societies’ relationship to and assessment of phenomena in Eastern Europe. While it is thus important to study the variety of Orientalism in Western Europe when it comes to Eastern Europe, it is perhaps even more essential to grasp the special variety of Occidentalism in Eastern Europe (Buruma & Margalit, 2004).

Devastating, Ironic Consequences in Twentieth-Century History

After a conceptual historical introduction that drew on insights from a multiplicity of disciplines and combined them to create a new interdisciplinary conceptualization of ‘Europe and its East,’ and the sketching of a relational approach to political ideas focused on two prevalent and polarized versions of Occidentalism in Eastern Europe, let me turn to political history more directly. Employing such an interdisciplinary conceptualization and relational approach to political ideas to try and rethink political history means at least two things. It implies that the dynamics of East European political history can only be properly grasped when East-West interactions within Europe and, more specifically, the Western ‘models of modernity’ that East European actors have constructed and contested are foregrounded. An interdisciplinary approach to how the asymmetrical relationship between the ‘two halves’ of the continent has played out in political history also allows us to offer original insights into how East-West dynamics have come to define modern and contemporary Europe.

The first major attempt to create a post-imperial Eastern Europe and establish it as part of a broader European and Western political project was made through the ‘Versailles system’ introduced at the end of WWI. Inspired by the ideas of US President Woodrow Wilson and drawing on French political traditions in particular, the key ambition at the time was to introduce a system of democratic nation states. Significantly enlarged, re-established, or newly created countries such as Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and (what came to be called in 1929 as) Yugoslavia were meant to serve as the key pillars of this system (Connelly, 2020). Nation states with their titular majorities and—often only nominally—protected minorities thus became the dominant form of statehood in what was, at the time, a much more diverse and mixed macro-region of Europe than Western Europe. Even the countries with relatively large titular majorities, such as Poland or Romania, still had around 30% minority populations in the interwar years.

Although the post-imperial system introduced at the end of WWI reflected the aspirations of key political actors and broader mass movements within Eastern Europe to create something akin to what existed further west, the first attempt to remodel this ‘demi-Oriental’ sphere along Western lines backfired and had disastrous mid-term consequences. The new democratic regimes in the region exhibited numerous weaknesses and shortcomings. Except for Czechoslovakia, they were soon overthrown across Eastern Europe.

What was worse, new totalitarian-imperial orders were soon imposed with extreme violence by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and often also with notable levels of local support and complicity (Snyder, 2010). Minority populations consisting of millions and millions of individuals were meant to enjoy institutional protection on the national and—via the League of Nations—international levels. As a matter of fact, their members were often discriminated with many of them persecuted and eventually murdered, with East European Jews during WWII foremost among them; Eastern Europe being the main centre of Jewish life prior to the unprecedented Nazi and collaborationist onslaught, about 95% of all victims of the Holocaust came from this broad region (Laczó, 2018).

With hindsight, the first major attempt to remodel Eastern Europe along Western lines of democratic nation states thus not only failed to fulfil its promise but the attempt contributed to unleashing cataclysmic processes that had been considered unthinkable within the geography of Europe. Devastatingly and more than a little ironically, what was meant to be a new, post-imperial version of Eastern Europe and part of the ‘new Europe’ soon became subjected to previously unseen levels and brutality of racial violence. This vortex of violence admittedly started already in the late nineteenth century, taking particularly egregious forms within the disintegrating Ottoman Empire to reach its peak across Eastern Europe during the 1930s and 1940s—a region Timothy Snyder (2010) famously referenced as the bloodlands between Hitler and Stalin. The dramatic experiences of Eastern Europe soon made new concepts invented by scholars from the region to denote mass crimes, such as crimes against humanity and genocide, enter the legal vocabulary and common parlance worldwide (Sands, 2016).

The devastating vortex of violence in Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and mass immigration into Western Europe in the post-war period combined to assure a great reversal. Before the end of the century, the macro-region of the continent that had entered modernity as a much more diverse one came to be divided into ever smaller and—as a general tendency—more homogeneous nation states. In the post-war decades, the previously rather homogeneous nation states of Western Europe became significantly more diverse (Gatrell, 2019).

The cultural and political consequences of this momentous reversal became plainly visible the latest around 2015—to the incomprehension of many commentators in Western Europe and not only there. Based on their response to the humanitarian crisis related to refugees and migrants, East European political leaders and large segments of local populations appear to have ‘normalized’ the relative ethnic homogeneity that had been created through so much violence in recent history. While the incomprehension at such rejectionism was understandable, the utter historical novelty of a diverse Western half of Europe and a system of rather homogenous nation states in the Eastern half was rarely noted at the time—which, clearly, has to do with the fact that this perplexing ‘great reversal’ between Europe’s ‘two halves’ is yet to be studied and discussed more comprehensively.

What should nonetheless be clear is that the first major attempt to remake Eastern Europe in the image of Western Europe via the nation state principle not only meant the temporary triumph and utterly tragic failure of an imitative form of Occidentalism but has also produced a thoroughly ironic result—after all, Eastern Europe today looks a lot more like Western Europe did about a hundred years ago, but that is also true the other way round.

The ‘Europeanization of Eastern Europe’ and the Remaking of the EU

The peculiar entanglements and asymmetrical relationship between the ‘two halves’ of the continent have certainly not disappeared with the second great westernizing revolutions of East European peoples in 1989. Just when many Western intellectual debates revolved around Francis Fukuyama’s liberal teleological thesis on ‘the end of history’ (1992), East European societies were embarking on a highly complex, indeed unprecedented transformation out of the party state and the planned economy.

Disoriented due to the sudden collapse of Soviet rule and the disappearance overnight of their life-worlds, members of these societies generally wished to assert their ‘Europeanness’ shortly after 1989 and to be perceived as akin to their West European counterparts (Laczó & Lisjak Gabrijelčič, 2020). The signifier ‘Europe’ arguably alluded to a new utopia of sorts in Eastern Europe undergoing its painful post-communist transformation—it referenced a land of plenty, liberty, and security. At the very same time, West Europeans tended to re-assert their right to measure and assess the ‘Europeanness’ of East Europeans. In the case of the European Union (a West European Union in all but name at the time), this was done primarily through the 1993 introduction of the Copenhagen criteria according to which they could judge whether countries of the ‘other Europe’ rightfully belonged to the European project or fell short of ‘European standards.’

The horizon of ‘EU accession’ certainly helped aspiring countries remain relatively stable and stay on the course of liberal transformation, with the post-Yugoslav states constituting a most tragic exception. However, being expected and eager to fulfil a plethora of external conditions in a moment of nominal democratization answered to many of the central questions of national political life before more substantial debates could have taken place. As reflected in Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes’ famed imitation thesis (2019), the efforts of Eastern Europeans after 1989 always had something akin to the unequal and one-sided way Jewish assimilation tended to be conceived back in the nineteenth century.

According to Krastev and Holmes’ primarily socio-psychological explanation (2019), it was this asymmetrical power relationship and the concomitant imitation imperative in Eastern Europe after 1989 that has yielded acts of rebellion—rebellions of resentment and self-assertion—in more recent years, a massive reversal that should perhaps be viewed as another pendulum swing between two forms of Occidentalism. If the imitative core of the interwar ‘Versailles system’ in Eastern Europe was replaced after WWII by a rejectionist form of Occidentalism, we may have experienced a comparable, if certainly less radical swing between two opposed forms of Occidentalism since 1989.

The drawn-out process and uneven success of EU enlargement has also introduced new hierarchies between the ‘more’ and the ‘less’ Europeanized. Such new hierarchies have fuelled what anthropologist and comparative religion scholar Milica Bakić-Hayden (1995) has called nesting Orientalism. A key insight of Bakić-Hayden’s theory is that Orientalism does not necessarily function in a straight-forward fashion with clear sides, that is a distinct West Orientalizing a distinct East. Much rather, Orientalizing practices also take the form of ‘exclusionary self-inclusion’ in the West. They can and do get encoded into relations between immediate neighbours in a sort of chain, with local Westernizers being especially prone to delineating themselves and their country from those ‘further East,’ as in the cases of Germans from Poles, Poles from Ukrainians, Ukrainians from Russians, etc. Such practices of nesting Orientalism reinforce what global sociologist Attila Melegh (2005) has termed the East-West slope.

It is indeed conspicuous today how it is precisely those East European countries, such as Poland or Hungary, which had been the first and most eager to ‘Westernize’ (or ‘Europeanize’) after 1989, which then ended up electing and re-electing governments with exclusivist visions of Europe and Europeanness. Instead of internalizing the liberal-normative project of the West, the current PiS- and Fidesz-led governments in these two countries have started to propagate religiously connoted, civilizational, even implicitly racist ideas of what Europe ought to stand for.

Their much-discussed illiberal projects may indeed severely damage the rule of law and thus pose an existential challenge to the European Union. However, such a turn to exclusionary illiberalism might in fact be less paradoxical than often assumed. The fact that Eastern Europeans, who have been asserting their right to belong to Europe in recent decades (and whose preparedness to truly belong has been measured via numerous criteria), have increasingly insisted on their right to exclude others from Europe, may also be interpreted as a direct consequence of a certain logic of Europeanization. In accordance with the theories of Bakić-Hayden and Melegh, ‘Europeanizing yourself’ and ‘Orientalizing others’ may be approached as two sides of the same coin when it comes to post-communist Eastern Europe; they may be viewed as part and parcel of the same refocusing on Europe that began already prior to 1989 and that, indeed, needs to be analysed in a global frame (see Mark et al., 2019).

There is more to East-West dynamics that is of relevance to understanding contemporary transformations in Europe. As mentioned above, Western discourses during the Cold War sometimes symbolically included Eastern Europe as ‘Christian’ and ‘European’ places that were thus deprived of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ against their will (Stovall, 2021) and should be considered as potential parts of an ‘enlarged historical West’ (Sakwa, 2017). Political and cultural actors from Eastern Europe in turn tended to make the supposed connections between Christianity, Europeanness, freedom, and democracy more explicit in the reconfigured Europe after 1989. Government representatives in some of the newer members of the enlarged EU, such as in Poland and Hungary, are certainly among the most vocal today in propagating more exclusionary ideas of Europe and the West—ideas that tend to be considered more controversial, not to say anachronistic further west.

This shows that the second attempt to remodel Eastern Europe along West European lines could also result in certain countries’ arrival in a place where the West once was. At the same time, the debates surrounding the illiberal turn of these two nation states modelled on the West at the end of WWI and now parts of an ‘enlarged historical West’ have recently added to the worsening polarization between two alternative self-understandings: that of the West as a liberal-progressive-normative-optimistic project and a culturalist-racial-nostalgic-resentful one.

However, the entry of East European countries not only impacted the political culture of the newly enlarged West but also contributed to the emergence of a less well-balanced Union. While nearly every second member state of the EU could be called ‘post-Eastern’ by 2013, in demographic terms the ‘newer’ ones contained only about one-fifth of the overall Union population. There being significant economic disparities between the western and the eastern ‘halves’ in the early twenty-first century, the economic share of the latter has in fact remained well below one-fifth (on the history of these disparities, see Janos, 2000). In other words, an economically rather underdeveloped part of the continent containing numerous mostly smallish nation states—which, as we have seen, had been modelled on the West—would come to play a disproportionately large political role on the European level post-2004 in the sense of being responsible for nearly every second Council vote and European Commissioner. At the same time, these ‘post-Eastern’ member states would come do so without their citizens acquiring anywhere near proportional representation within the EU’s own elite (Drounau, 2021). In other words, East Europeans have acquired disproportionate power within the Union via the nation state principle but continue to exert negligible influence via the transnational logic. The main conclusion should be clear: the enlarged EU has been notably less well balanced across various realms and in terms of the composition of its political elites than the Union of 12 founded at Maastricht or its Cold War-era precursors.

Concluding Remarks

This chapter has drawn on and combined insights from a range of disciplines—politics, economics, sociology, linguistics, geography, religious studies, and psychology—to explore East-West dynamics in modern and contemporary Europe. Following a conceptual historical introduction offering reflections on the ideas of ‘Europe’ and ‘Eastern Europe’ by drawing on theories of the ‘East-West slope’ and ‘nesting Orientalism’ in particular, my two main aims have been to sketch the variety of Occidentalism in Eastern Europe and to suggest an alternative interpretation of the modern political history of European nation states as well as the contemporary EU.

In other words, through an interdisciplinary treatment of key concepts and complex political ideas, I have aimed to develop a new narrative that foregrounds East-West dynamics to reinterpret European political history. Without my engagement with studies of the modern world system as developed in sociology and economic history, post-colonial critiques of Orientalism first articulated within literary and cultural studies, and analyses of symbolic hierarchies and how they shape aspirations as presented by anthropologists, among representatives of other disciplines, I would not have been able to rethink the asymmetrical relationship and the historical process I was interested in.

Such an interdisciplinary approach to the example of ‘Europe and its East’ was not only meant to show the benefits of thinking explicitly about how various disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences have come to shape complex concepts and what we can gain by combining their insights. This approach also points to a broader and urgent need to think about intermediate, ambivalent statuses in the global system and their implication for global history. As such an exercise regarding the problem of Eastern Europe shows, inclusion and exclusion may be far from pure categories easy to dichotomize while their dialectic can still have momentous consequences.

More concretely, I have aimed to show throughout this chapter how both a broadly interdisciplinary and properly historical approach to the European project of the early twenty-first century can help us grasp how discursive polarization and institutional misbalances have become intertwined again, giving rise to a renewed sense of an East-West divide. By considering such avenues through which East European positionality and experiences can be included in discussions of Europe in a more substantial and critical manner, this chapter has ultimately intended to provide new impulses to the broader interdisciplinary field of European Studies.