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ISSN: 1540-5699. Copyright by Ah ead Pu blishing H ouse (imp rint: Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN

ARCHITECTURE

Journal of theSociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Oma r Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

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ENTAL

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Portrayals of Eastern European coun-tries as bridges betw een East and West are

commonplace both in the media and in thepolitical d iscourse. In pa rticular, the popu larlabel gateway to the East is used in h istorytextbooks, tourist guides, and economic re-por ts to equally describe Warsaw, Bud apest,

No Race to the Sw ift

Negotiating Racial Identity in Past and Present

Eastern Europe

Manuela Boatc

Catholic University of Eichsttt-Ingolstadt

man [email protected]

Abstract: Portrayals of Eastern European countries as bridges between East and West arecommon place both in the m edia and in the political discourse. While the question of the histori-cal origin of Europes East-West divid e is still und er heavy dispu te amo ng social scientists, it canbe argued that it was th e Orientalist discourse of the 19th centu ry that d ecisively shaped the con-tent of the p resent categories of Western and Eastern Europe an d m ade p olicies of dem arcationfrom the Orient an important strategy of geopolitical and cultural identification with Europe.The end uring quality of Orientalisms effects on both n ational self-definitions and social and cul-tural po licy in Eastern Europ e is examined in th e present pap er in two successive steps: first, bylooking at the intellectual discourse in 19th century Romania against the background of thecountrys political independence from the Ottoman Empire and increasing economic, culturaland political orientation toward Western Europe; second, by discussing the resurgence of sys-tems of representation based on this type of discourse in the context of the European UnionsEastern enlargement. In the first case, the terms of the Western European discourse were

appropriated such as to make the Oriental barbarism in which Romanian society had beensteeped until acquiring ind ependence from the Ottoman Emp ire the point of departure for thedevelop ment o f a European (civilized, Christian, modern ) identity. In th e second case, the degreeof connection to th e Ottoman , and th erefore Islamic legacy of Eastern European cand idates to theEuropean Union has been reinstrumentalized as a legitimating strategy for discursive practicesof inferiorization, exoticization, and racial othering that parallel the region's economic p eripher-alization.

Manuela Boatc is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociological Theory, Catholic University of Eichsttt-Ingol-stadt, Germ any an d w ill be Visiting Professor a t the Instituto Universitrio de Pesquisas d o Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ), Bra-zil, in the Fall of 2007. Her research interests include political sociology, sociology of development, gender and violenceresearch, and postcolonial studies in historical-comparative perspective, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe andLatin America. She is author of From Neoevolutionism to World-Systems Analysis. The Romanian Theory of Formswithou t Substance in Light of Modern Debates on Social Change (2003), Semiperip heries in th e World-System: Reflect-ing Eastern European and Latin American Experiences, Journal of World-Systems R esearch, XII, 2, 2006, The Eastern Mar-gins of Empire. Coloniality in 19th Centu ry Roman ia, Cultural Stu dies 21, 2007.


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Bucharest, Sofia, and Istanbul (Hann 1995:2). Thus, in the European imaginary, East-ernness, in its European variant, is beingcontinually passed on and, as such, consis-tently refuted all the w ay to Europes geo-graph ical borders as they are defined tod ay.

As definitions of the border betweenWestern and Eastern Europe have histori-cally shifted to highlight ethnic, economic,imperial, or religious divides within thecontinent, so have attitudes toward theproximity of the Orient and the threat it wasperceived to represent at d ifferent mom entsin time. Rather than a twenty-first centuryphenomenon, efforts to reject an Easternidentity constitute a historically recurring

pattern in the construction of Eastern Euro-pean national self-definitions that has beeninextricably tied to (1) the military, eco-nomic and cultural impact of the OttomanEmpire in the region on the one han d an d (2)the representations of Islam and the Orientin the geopolitical imaginary of the Euro-American core on the other.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centu-ries, the ongoing p rocess of negotiating geo-graph ical borders wh ile reasserting histori-cal claims to territory and pow er resulted infurther subd ivisions such as Central, North-

ern, Southern and Southeastern Europe.Whereas Central Europ e was conceived as athird zone betw een Eastern and Western Eu-rope, but was coterminous with the nine-teenth century geopolitical project of Mit-teleurop a, Southeastern Europe w as coinedas a politically correct term for designatingthe Balkans, the easternmost region withinthe East itself (Gallagher 2001: 113). Due toits proximity to Asia and its legacy of Otto-man dom inance, it was this last subcategoryin particular which has conjured u p the im-age of a bridge between Orient and Occi-

dent, and which as a result has p eriodicallyacquired the scent of temporal in-between-ness as wellof the semid eveloped , semico-lonial, semicivilized, semi-Oriental (Todor-ova 2002) always in the p rocess of catchingup with the West. The resurgence of the

stigma thus attached to the concept becomesincreasingly clear today, when the same ste-reotypes attached to the alleged Balkanidentity are being used in the political, so-cial scientific, and media discourse of thevery Europe the ex-Communist countriesare trying to (re)join.

The question of the historical origin ofEuropes East-West divide is still underheavy dispute among social scientists,and in view of its economic, political, andreligious dimensionsprobably evincesmore than one answer. For the purposes ofthe present analysis, however, it can reason-ably be argued that it was the Orientalistdiscour se of the 19

th

centuryin the und er-

standing Edward Said (1979) attributed tothe termthat decisively shaped the con-tent of the presen t categories of Western an dEastern Europe an d mad e policies of dem ar-cation from the Orient an important strat-egy of geopolitical and cultural identifica-tion with Europe for the latter region. As adiscourse dominating Western representa-tions of the Other an d allowing Western Eu-ropean culture to gain in strength and iden-tity by setting itself off against the O rient asa sort of surrogate and even undergroundself (Said 1979:3), Orientalism first

emerged in the period following the En-lightenment. Scholarly, literary and scien-tific depictions of the Orient as backw ard , ir-rationa l, in need of civilization, and raciallyinferior produ ced d uring the next centuriesserved as background for representations ofthe Occident as progressive, rational, civi-lized, even biologically superior, thus justi-fying European colonization and control.

In order to examine the ap plicability ofthis system of representation to inner-Euro-pean processes of inferiorization and racialothering in histor ical per spective, it is neces-

sary to address two interrelated questions:first, wh at kinds of mental maps

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of the Oc-cident, the Orient, and th e bound aries sepa-rating them were being negotiated duringthe 19

th

century and, second, how do theyrelate to the remapp ing of Europ ean order in


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the process of Eastern enlargement? To this

end, the impact of the so-called Easternquestionthe growing d ecline of th e Otto-man Empireon the cultural self-defini-tions and the geopolitical agenda of its Euro-

pean possessions in th e 19

th

centuryis dis-

cussed u sing the example of Romania; sub-sequently, the present-day resurgence ofsystems of representation based on an Ori-entalist type of discour seof wh ich Islamo-phobia is an instanceare examined in th econtext of the European Unions Easternenlargement.

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According to Edward Said, Islam had

been Europes lasting trauma ever since itsemergen ce in the seventh centu ry. In time, ithad come to stand for terror, devastation,the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians(1979: 59)an image that, until the end ofthe seventeenth centur y, was constantly re-

1 Edward Said uses the term imaginativegeographies to refer to the end results of theu niversal pra ctice of designa ting in ones minda familiar space which is ours and an u nfamil-iar space which is theirs (1979: 54). However,while imaginative geographies can be found onboth end s of the pow er d ifferential between Ori-ent an d Occident, it is the p rocess by wh ich theyacquire one-sided d efinition power and are con-

sequently linked to projects of territorial expan-sion that grants them the explanatory forcecharacterizing the Orientalism of the nineteenthcentury, the Balkanism of the twentieth and theIslamoph obia of the twenty-first. I therefore usethe term mental map s in order to differentiateit from the power-laden imperial maps(Coronil 1997; see also Boatc 2006) of whichsuch discourses are a result.

Map 1. Europ e after th e Cong ress of Berlin 1878Source: Philip Lee Ralph, World Civilizations


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inforced by the geographical proximity toEurope an d to Christian civilization of theOttoman peril. European representationsof the Muslim, Ottoman, or Arab there-fore tended to be ways of controlling theOrient as a place culturally, intellectuallyand spiritually outside Europe and Euro-pean civilization and at the same time as theOther against which the latter had been con-stru cted (Said 1979: 71; Conn olly 1996: 13).

By mid-nineteenth century, however,the gradually decaying Ottoman Empirehad irretrievably become the sick man ofan economically and politically rising Eu-rope. Meanwhile, its possessions remainedat least as interesting for the Tsarist Empire

as they were for the expansion of Westerncapital, always in search of new markets. Sit-uated between the Habsburg, the Ottomanand the Tsarist Empires, the three RomanianPrincipalities Transylvania, Wallachia andMoldavia had long occup ied a strategic po-sition, especially because of the access to theBlack Sea and the mouth of Danube of thelatter two.

As of 1711, Wallachias and Moldaviasboun daries had therefore been periodicallyredraw n to the territorial benefit of Austriaand Russia, at the same time as Turkish su -

zerainty exposed th em to constant p oliticalintervention and fiscal exploitation. The endof Ottoman dom ination and th e right to freeexport they had regained in the first half ofthe 19

th

century equaled an economic andcultural opening tow ard th e West as well asa shift into the Western sphere of influence,whose agrarian supplier and market for in-du strial goods th e Romanian provinces be-came. Given that the Ottoman Empire hadbehaved more like a traditional world em-pireusing contro l of its provinces in orderto finance military campaigns and luxury

spendingthe shift of peripheral axis(Bdescu 2004: 82) from the per iphery of theEmpire to th at of the Western cap italist corethat the Romanian Principalities underw entin the 19

th

century amou nted to a transitionfrom a p rotocolonial system (Chirot 1976:

10) under Ottoman rule to a neocolonialone as an agricultural periph ery of the capi-talist world-economy controlled from West-ern Europe.

2

2.1. The Westernizing Project

Along w ith the sh ift of geopo litical axiswent a shift in the intellectual and politicaldiscourse, taking place in united Romaniaas of 1859 (see Boatc 2003). Cau gh t betw eenthe need of uniting their territories the betterto protect them, the proximate powers at-tempts to incorporate them, and their posi-tion as bu ffer sta te (Stahl 1993: 87) absorb-ing the military tensions among the three

empires surrounding them, Wallachia andMoldavia enjoyed a love-hate relationshipwith Western Europe. Conversely, the Euro-pean powers decision to grant the Princi-palities relative autonomy at the end of theCrimean War reflected the many politicaland economic interests linked to the fate ofthe two Romanian provinces: By removingthem from under the Russian protectorateand declaring them autonomous, the GreatPowersRussia, the United Kingdom,France, Austria, and Prussiacreated abuffer state that warranted Austria and

Russia the security of their frontiers againstTurkeys claims and that, as a result, had tobe modernized in order to fulfill its new roleas bridgehead of Western capitalism. Ac-cordingly, modernization on Western Euro-pean term s went along w ith increasing d is-tancing from th e Ottoman Empire.

In accordance w ith the p rogram of lib-eral reform in effect since 1848, Prince Cuza,the first ruler of the un ited Romanian p rov-inces, und ertook a tremend ous effort of rap-idly modernizing the country and facilitat-ing the penetration of foreign capital. Thisentailed adopting a series of legal codes on

2 This situation has been documented forthe same period of time for both H ungary an dPoland with the help of the similar concept ofsemi-colony (see Brcz 2001: 31, Adamczyk2001)


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the m odel of French an d Prussian legislation(Code of Trade, the Penal and the Civil Na-poleonic Code), promu lgating a new Consti-tution d rawn up on Belgium s mod el, creat-ing economic and financial institutions (theChambers of Comm erce, a national bank, aCourt of Accounts), institutions of higheredu cation (the Universities of Bucharest andJassy, Schools of Fine Art s an d art galleries,Conservatories, cultural societies, the Ro-manian Academy, the Romanian Athe-naeum ), and introducing the metric systemfor measures and w eights as well as a postaland telegraphic system. Westernization , civ-ilization, and economic progress started be-ing viewed as closely related an d m utu ally

reinforcing processes (Love 1996: 26), whilethe Romance origin of the national lan-guage, alongside the Christian nature of Ro-manian Orthodoxy, became crucial argu-ments in the effort to escape the connota-tions of backwardness, irrationality,and savagery that the Orient had ac-quired in the d ominant Western imaginary.

2.2. Internal Orientalism

The first work by a Romanian travelerto Western Europ e stating Romanias imp er-

ative need to catch up with the West byadopting similar institutions and ideas,Dinicu Golescus Notes from My Journey(1826) invited a verd ict on the frame of mindof an entire generation of scholars. Coinedby cultural historians, the resulting labelthe Dinicu Golescu complex was sup-posed to convey wh at they considered to bean inferiority complex characterizing theRomanian intellectuals realization of theprofound lag between Romania and West-ern Europe (Georgiu 2000: 116). Althoughthe nineteenth-century intellectuals aware-ness of their countrys peripheralityprompted a sophisticated cultural reaction(see Boatc 2003) that far exceeded a p assiveinferiority complex, their tenacious attemptto negotiate a Western cultural and racialidentity alongside a common national senti-

ment involved embarking on the Occiden-tal m ission to the Orient (Said 1979: 87) onWestern Europes side.

In a faithful replication of the binary op -positions inherent in the cognitive map ofOrientalism, pitting the period of Ottomandomination

against the recent cultural andeconomic opening toward Western Europethus became common place in the Romanianintellectual and political discourse of thetime. While the former w as viewed as char-acterized by Turkeys darkness, withwhich the entire Orient w as associated, thelatter was tellingly epitom ized by referencesto the Enlightenment, the French Revolu-tion, and Occidentalespecially French and

Germ ancivilization (Maiorescu 1973: 239).Interestingly, the terms of this Orientalistdiscourse were not only appropriatedwithin Romanian liberal thought, whichnatur ally favored both the economic and thecultural-political orientation toward theWest, but within conservatism as well. Assuch, it was embedd ed in the very criticismconservatives directed at the liberal policyof rapid institutional and economic modern -ization in the absence of the necessary his-torical and social prerequisites for such aprocess:

Steeped in Oriental barbarianism u ntilthe beginning of the nineteenth century, Ro-manian society started to awake from itslethargy around 1820, perhaps seized onlythen by the contagious movement by w hichthe ideas of the French Revolution hadreached even the outer geograp hic extremi-ties of Europ e. Attracted to the light, the Ro-manian youth undertook this extraordinaryemigration towards the fountains of Frenchand German science, which has kep t grow-ing to this very day and which has broughtpart of the luster of foreign societies to free

Romania. [] And thus, limited by a fatalsuperficiality, their hearts and minds in-flamed by too light a fire, the young Roma-nians did and do come back to their home-land w ith the decision to emulate and repro-duce the appearances of Western culture, in


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the belief that they would thereby also atonce attain the literature, the culture, thearts, and above all, liberty in a modernstate (Maiorescu 1973: 163).

In the conservatives view, therefore, thepernicious effects of Western Europes mo-nopoly on the direction of Romanias cul-tural and economic development stood inclose relationship with the latters Orien-taland hence uncivilizedheritage. For acountry situated geograp hically and cultur-ally at the border between barbarianismand civilizat ion (Maiorescu 1973: 241), con-servatives argued, thorough social changebecame a matter of national surv ival. Hav-ing depr ived Romanians of the advantage

of uncritical cultural borrowing warrantedby a barbarian cond ition (Maiorescu 1973:241), the shift of axis from the periphery ofthe Ottoman Empire to that of Western Eu-rope simultaneously mandated a criticalview of the mod ernizing process, in order toensure that the benefits of Western culturecould be appropriated.

While the notion of barbarism was aclear reference to the dichotomization prac-ticed in the exportation of the global designof civilization as a legitimating strategy foran econom ic and ideological civilizing m is-

sion, the conservatives account was notequivalent to reproducing this developmen-talist ideology by acknowledging its terms.On the contrary, they u nveiled th e close con-nection between the economic prerequisitesfor peripheralization an d the epistemologi-cal divides enforced thereby, thus viewingdichotomization and processes of peripher-alization as ideological constructs at the ser-vice of particular econom ic interests:

when a race degrades itself byway of economic ineptness, it is

credited with being lazy, fatalistic,ignorant. Indians are lazy. Turksare Mohammedan and fatalistic,incapable of competing with theEnglish, and these circumstancesare presented to us as causes of

their increasing weakness. Never-theless, one hundred years agoTurks had the same religion, andtrade with them was among themost sought after. The Moors inSpain were Mohammedan andtheir religion was no obstacle to arelatively high degree of civiliza-tion. Of different religions and ofdifferent origins, under other cli-mates and other geographical lati-tud es, human states resemble eachother as soon as they are declinedthe possibility of diversifying andmultiplying their citizens occupa-tions, of allowing them to develop

any kind of individuality. Subse-quently limited to agriculture, theyhad to export their produ cts in thecrudest form, whereby the land isexhausted, productivity decreases,and the works income keeps get-ting smaller. (Eminescu 1881: 387f.)

While at the same time correctly identi-fying the Western, especially Austrian , eco-nomic policies in Romania as a colonial en-deavor m eant to open th e gates of the Ori-ent (Eminescu 1876: 47) for Western cap ital,

the Romanian conservatives recourse to apolarized imagery contrasting a civilizedOccident to a barbaric Orient neverthelessreproduced the very mental map whichserved to legitimize this endeavor. From theepistemological position of the semi-Orien-tal at which the Western discourse hadplaced them, they thus in turn engaged in apolicy of intern al Orientalismnot un likethe phenomenon of internal colonialism(Gonzlez Casanova 1965, Stavenhagen1965) discussed in the Latin American con-textthat has been independently diag-

nosed throughout Eastern Europe and theBalkans (Wolff 1994, Todorova 1997, Ad am -czyk 2001, Lindstrom 2003, Brcz 2005). Itsproliferation within th e eastern p arts of Eu-rope in the end resulted in a gradation ofOrients, d efined as a pattern of reprodu c-


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tion of the original dichotomy upon whichOrientalism was premised (Bakic-Hayden1995: 918), which d eemed Asia as m ore Ori-entaland, on that account, more otherwith respect to the unmodified category ofEuropethan the Balkans, and the latter inturn as more Oriental and other, and conse-quently less European, than Eastern Europe.The same logic of nesting Orientalisms(Bakic-Hayden 1995) was to resurge in theregion in view of the prospect of politicaland economical European integration atstake for Eastern Europ eans after 1989.

3. THE EASTERN QUESTION OFTHE

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

With the proclamation of Communiststates throughou t the non-Western world af-ter World War II, the century-old culturaland religious dimension of the Occident-Orient dichotomy was gradually eclipsedby the primarily political bipolarity of theCold War opp onents. It however resurfacedall the more forcefully soon after the col-lapse of the Eastern European Communistregimes and the resulting geopolitical re-shuffling, globally marketed as the end of

history (Fuku yam a 1992) and of the searchfor political alternatives to neoliberalism

and globalization. For Eastern Europeancountries, this has not only meant beingonce again defined as catching up withthe West p olitically, economically, and jur id-ically, but also being recast into the geo-graphic mold of the old European subdivi-sions of Central, Northern, Southern Eu-rope, and the Balkans, along w ith the h istor-ical claims to power as well as cultural andracial identity und erlying them .

3.1. The Europeanizing Project

In 1993, Harva rd political scientist Sam-uel Hu ntington argu ed th at the 500-year-oldeastern boundary of Western Christianity

had recently served to replace the relativelyshort-lived Iron Curtain as the m ost signifi-cant dividing line in Europe by a m ore per-vasive d ivide tha t he called the Velvet Cur-tain of culture, thus restoring the civiliza-tional map of the 16th century.

In this view, not only are cu ltura l differ-ences arising from the distinct confessionaldenom inations of Protestantism/ Catholi-cism on the one hand and Orthodoxy/ Islamon the other associated with significantlydifferent d egrees of economic ad vancementin West and East, respectively, but t heir im-

pact on the trajectory of European moder-

Fault lines North/ West South/ East

Religion Protestant/ Catholic Orthodox/ Muslim

Econom ic progress High Low

Role in history of Europ eanmodernity

Central Peripheral

(Futu re) political system Stable d em ocracy ? (Dem ocracy u nlikely)

Table 1. Hun tington s Velvet Cu rtain o f Culture

Compiled from: Hun tington 1993


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nity is taken to have been essential as well:According to H untington, whereas WesternChristianity was both actively involved in,as well as shap ed, by feud alism, the Renais-sance, the Enlightenment, the French Revo-lution, and ind ustrialization, both Orthod oxChristians and European Muslims haveonly been lightly touched (Huntington1993: 30) by them. Along th e sam e line, sta-ble democracies are considered a likelyprospect for countries of the West, not, how-ever, for th ose on w hat obviously representsthe wron g side of the curtain.

While graphic representations of pat-terns of social conflict tend to take on thecharacter of self-fulfilling p roph ecies, in thiscase it seems more reasonable to assumethat Hu ntingtons map is symptomatic ofrather th an responsible forthe resurgence

of the rhetoric enabling Western Europe toportray itself as essentially benign, libera-tory, and civilizing against the backgroundof a perpetually backward and repeatedlyoppressed East into which Orthodoxyand Islam become culturally convoluted. Inthe context of the self-proclaimed civilizingproject of the European Union, this howeveramounts to a renewed race for identityamong those Eastern European countriessituated on the h em of the Velvet Curtainthat supposedly separates proper Chris-tianity from Islam. For them, the races en-during stakeaccess to Western markets,employment opportunities, and financialaidamounts to an exercise in mora l geo-

politics (Brcz 2005: 115) that involvesdiscardingor at least down playingtheirEasternness while professing a will toWesternization.

Thus, negotiations of cultural an d racialidentities framed in terms of repud iating anOriental past, stressing on es contribution toEuropean civilization, and mapping onesintegration into the European Union as areturn to Europeand therefore as an actof historical reparationonce again domi-nate the identity rhetoric across Eastern Eu-rope. The recurrent tropes used in the pro-

cess are highly reminiscent of the ones dis-cussed above in the context of nineteenth-century Romania: On the one han d, nationalelites have referred to the political and eco-nomic transition of both Croatia and Slove-nia in the 1990s as liberation from Balkandarkness (Lindstrom 2003: 319). At thesame tim e, the electoral p romise of rejoiningEurope both institutionally and economi-cally has been grounded on the emphasisplaced on the countrys century-old role asbulwark of Christianity3 against the Otto-man threat in both Croatia and Poland

Map 2. The Transform ation of Western Euro peSource: Hunt ington 1993, p. 30

3 antem ura le Christianitatis, a title equal-ly claimed first and foremost by Au stria, furtherby Poland an d Romania, but explicitly used byPop e Leo X in 1519 in referen ce to Croat ia, in ac-knowledgm ent of the role of the Croatian armyin fighting back the Ottomans.


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(Bakic-Hayden 1995: 922) and has rein-forced claims of historical belonging to Cen-tral Europe (rather than Eastern Europe orthe Balkans) throughout former Yugoslavia(Bakic-Hayden 1995: 924, Lindstrom 2003:324).

Although never explicitly ad dressed assuch, one of the main objectives of such ne-gotiations is whiteness (see Brcz 2001:32), the accomplishm ent of wh ich is seen asdepending on a thorough break with anddisavowal of Islam/ the Orient/ the Otto-man legacy. Accordingly, individual strate-gies of delimitation are contingent uponhanding over Easternness, Orientality, andultimately non-whiteness to newly con-

structed others within th e region, thus in-ternally reprodu cing Orientalism in ka leido-scopic fashion :

while Europ e as a wh ole has dispar-aged not only the orient proper, but alsothe parts of Europe th at were und er orientalOttom an ru le, Yugoslavs who reside in areasthat were formerly the Habsburg mon archydistinguish themselves from those in areasformerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire andhence improper. Within the latter area,eastern Orthodox peoples perceive them-selves as more European than those who as-

sumed identity of European Muslims andwho further distinguish themselves fromthe ultimate orientals, non-Europeans(Bakic-Hayd en 1995: 922).

Especially in the w ake of the Septem ber11th attacks and th e framing of the terroristthreat as Islamic challenge to the entireWestern world, Westernization has increas-ingly become a m atter of taking sides in theclash of civilizations H un tington d eemedcharacteristic of futu re conflicts. In th is con-text, the fact that the Europ ean Union s cur-rent expansion occurs und er the heading of

Eastern enlargement and that incorpora-tion of the Central and South Eastern Euro-pean countries into the European Union iscomm only referred to as a process of Euro-peanization once again points to the bridg-ing character devolving up on the European

East in the Western cognitive m ap . Thu s, thegeneral notion of Europe used to denoteWestern, Northern and (parts of) SouthernEurope throughout the nineteenth and thetwentieth centuries has now become synon-ymous with the European Union, whereasthe Eastern parts of the continent h ave beenrecast as a region wh ose political, socio-cul-tur al, or religious of questionable Europ ean-ness and wanting economic and juridicalstandards.

Counting the tasks ofoverseeing, domi-nating an d civilizing the controlled territoriesand their populations as the defining fea-tures of colonial control, Brcz (2001: 23)has pu t forth the notion of contiguous em -

pire in order to characterize the EuropeanUnions colonial relationship with the East-ern European ap plicants. Unlike the mod ernworlds more common place detached em-pires, in w hich the m tropole and its colo-nies were territorially disconnected, contig-uous empires have more difficulty in cate-gorically exclud ing their inferiorized other s.Hence, spatially detached colonial rule willtend to produce qualitative hierarchies ofdifference, leading to essentialized otheringthrough exoticization, feminization, pueril-ization an d r acialization (i.e., Orientalism),

whereas in a situation of spatial contiguitybetween colonizer and colonized, the m ech-anism of othering will rely on a quantita-tive pattern of inferiorization: this type ofother is seen as being perhaps of the samesubstance but offering an inexcusably infe-rior level of p erforman ce (i.e., Balkanism ).The latter will accord ingly be traced to its lo-cation in the mtropoles own, less devel-oped past (2001: 25).

Against this background , the discourseof Europeanization applied to countrieswith a century-old European cultural and

social tradition (from Poland and the CzechRepublic to Hungary and Romania) con-forms to this very logic. On the one han d, itreinstrumentalizes the Orientalist imageryto imply that distance from the Or ient repre-sents the underlying yardstick by which


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standard s of modern ity and civilization aremeasured . On the other hand, it emp loys the

mechan ism of quantitative inferiorization inorder to mobilize the inferiority complexesthus incurred for its own geopoliticalprojects: As the Islamic threat replaced theCommu nist one in the h egemonic Occiden-tal imaginary, Eastern Europe exchanged itspolitical and economic Second World statusfor that of a culturally and racially SecondWorld. By being (reasonably) white, Chris-tian, and European, but at the same timebackward, traditional, and still largelyagrarian, it thus represents Western Eu-ropes incomplete Self rather than, as in the

case of Islam and the Orient, its Other(Todorova 1997: 18). What ImmanuelWallerstein has called the family feud to-nality (2003) of processes of racial otheringwithin kindred cultural spaces thus allowsEastern Europe to be simultaneously ex-

cluded and included in the identity of theexpand ing contiguous em pire of the E.U. ac-

cording to the quan titative p attern of inferi-orization d escribed above.

3.2. Orientalism: Comeback with aVengeance

The fact that the theory an d practice ofthe European Unions eastern enlarge-ment act as an orientalising tool (Brcz2001: 6) becomes apparent in the fact that,for now, the last countries to be negotiatingadm ission into the European Union should

be Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and (possi-bly) Turkey, in an almost exact rep lication ofthe degree of their connection to or overlapwith the Ottoman, and therefore Oriental,legacy. While th e first two w ere initially con-sidered for the fifth enlargement round of

Map 3. EU Enlargement 2004 (da rk grey), 2007 (light g rey) and pen din g (lighter grey)

Source: CIA World Factbook


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2004, at least the p olitical groun ds on wh ichthey have been denied membership until2007 are clearly reminiscent of the mentalmap of 19th century Orientalism. Explicitlydesignated by th e European Commission asthe critical yardsticks for EU accession(Rehn 2006: 5), the fight against corruptionand crime, trafficking in hu man beings, andthe reform of the judiciary system h ave be-come the lines along which increasingly di-vergent levels of the progress required ofboth coun tries are being assessed.

These criteria poignantly reflect the Ori-entalist prism through which the perfor-mance of the two coun triesand, by extrap-olation, that of all future candidatesis

evaluated: corruption, human trafficking(especially in the form of forced prostitu-tion) and the m issing rule of law clearly be-long to th e repertoire of Oriental d espotismthat prominently featured among the im-ages of the Orient constructed in the eigh-teenth and n ineteenth centuries and that arenow being reprod uced in relation to the Eu-ropean East. Singling them ou t as critical is-sues in the countries und er scrutiny not onlyrenders th e app licant states exotic and infe-rior (Kovcs 2001: 205), but, more impor-tantly, traces their problems back to a past

which the member states have supposedlyovercome. This obscures both the continuedexistence of similar problems (such as cor-ruption ) in core states (Kovcs 2001) and theWests active contribution to their veryemergence in Eastern Europe and parts ofAsia, as in the amply documented case ofsex trafficking in w omen and children (Bales1999, Laczko et al. 2002), that, since the1990s, predominantly targeted the Euro-pean East, as opposed to its focus on Thai-land, th e Philippines, and Latin America inthe 1980s.

Nevertheless, the Commissions latestevaluation comm ended Romania on prelim-inary p rogress in all these aspects and statedthat the rule of law now prevailed for thefirst time in the history of the country(Rehn 2006: 3), and at the same tim e jud ged

Bulgarias corresponding efforts as lim-ited and not yet satisfactory (Rehn 2006:3; 4). It thu s relegated th e latter coun try to anearlier point in the reform processonecharacterized by an inefficient and partisanjud iciary an d a crime-ridden civil societyand further tightened the monitoring pro-cess by assigning the two candidates to-dolistsa longer one for Bulgaria, a shorterone for Romaniaon the fulfillment ofwhich d epend both the date of entry and theamou nt of EU funds to be received after ac-cession. Given that no su ch restrictions wereapp lied for p revious EU enlargements, onecan contend th at, in term s of European ness,the above-mentioned cultural and racial

Second World status of South-Eastern Euro-pean coun tries translates as second-class EUmembership.

On th e other h and , Turkeys admission,postpon ed on similar charges as Romaniasand Bulgarias, but with a different degreeof gravity, still lies in the distant future.Apart from the lasting un certainty of the un-dertaking, the gap separating Turkey fromthe (predominantly) Christian candidatesstands out especially when taking into ac-count th at, desp ite the fact that Turkeys ap -plication for full membership dates back to

1987, it was granted the status of a cand idatecountry in October 2005 and her accessionnegotiations w ill be carried out along withthose of Croatia and the FY Republic ofMacedonia, who had first applied in 2003and 2004, respectively. The grounds for de-nying membership to the one candidatewhose official state religion is Islam wereadd itionally reinforced in the post-9/ 11 geo-political context, when the EuropeanUnions professions of solidarity with theUnited States in the fight against Islamicterrorism paralleled debates about

whether the Common European Constitu-tion should contain provisions about theChristian roots of Europe and thus ex-clude references to an Islamic legacyaninitiative led by eight Catholic Europeancountries.4 Although the proposal was


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eventually rejected, the mental m ap u nd er-lying it reveals a shar pening of the Muslim-Christian d ivide that is reflected as m uch inEU immigration policies and school curric-ula as it is in its accession negot iations with

new candidates. Tellingly, Albania, a coun-try with a large Muslim m ajority and a longhistory of Ottoman rule, still does enjoy thestatus of a candidate to the European Union,a p rerequisite to w hich is considered to be arapprochement between Albania and Euro-pean values and standards (EuropeanCommission 2006).

4. HISTORY REPEATING

Much like the functionalist notion ofun iversal stages of development, w hich sit-uated North America and Western Europeat the peak of social evolution, the postu-lated continuum of Europeanness rangingfrom Catholicism and Protestantismthrough Orthodoxy up to Islam translates asa scale of degrees of th e onto logical inabilityto fully Europeanize. By tracing this defi-ciency to the cultural and religious back-ground of the remaining candidates to theEuropean Union, both mental and physicalmap s based on this notion replicate the logicaccording to w hich the feudal remnants of

Third World economies and societies werediagnosed as obstacles to their attemptedmodernization and the achievement ofcapitalism. In so d oing, they not only p er-

petuate the dominant evolutionist view ac-cording to which human civilization pro-ceeds in a linear way from an initial state ofnature th rough successive stages leading toWestern civilization (Quijano 2000: 543),

but , more imp ortan tly, they obscure the mil-itary, economic and epistemic power rela-tions which uph old the current core-periph-ery structure of the mod ern world -system.

Rather than a new world ord er, the geo-political reshu ffling following the end of theCold War seems to have brought about amere shift of focus in the choice of measur-ing sticks for barriers to socio-economicachievement an d political advancement, theparadigmatic model of which remains theWestern European on e. Accordingly, as cul-turalist explanations for Eastern Europes

low economic performance and political sta-bility regain prom inence, increased dep en-dence on Western European trade and in-vestment, technology, and overall regula-tions ensure the regions economic Third-World ization. In this context, And re Gund erFrank has su ggested that the Second Worldstatus of Communist countries was anideological illusion which obscured theassignmen t of both the East and the South toa Second world to which the First has re-peatedly blocked access (Frank 1992: 36).While at least the economic disparities be-

tween the Communist semiperiphery andthe formerly colonized p eriphery du ring theCold War era make such a conflation ofSouth and East empirically problematic, to-day both the deteriorating cultural andepistemic terms of trade discussed above

4 Spain, Poland, Ireland, Portu gal, Slovakia,Czech Republic, Malta, Italy.

Figure 1. Modernization Model

Compiled from: Parsons 1966

functional differentiation

Primitive Intermediate Modern


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and the political-economic trends character-izing Eastern Europe with respect to West-ern Europe increasingly point tow ard th e re-

gions peripheralization:

the industrial economies of theWest, in Europ e and elsewhere, areincreasingly capable of transfer-ring a m ajor part of the ad justmentcost of the world econom ic crisis tothe second world East as theyhave already done to the thirdworld South. In so doing, thesecond world is also beingThird Worldized [] The inter-minable missions of expert ad-

vice and International MonetaryFund (IMF) policies that had al-ready depressed the economies ofthe South and East in the 1980s aretoday even more legion in the Eastwhere they further promote thisban kru ptcy. (Frank 1992: 42f.)

In the end, prolonging the interim statusof applicant states amou nts to a renew edquasi-colonial situation, this time character-ized by legal and economic depend ence ona foreign authority, and ideologically sup-ported by means of a continued reconstruc-tion of modern id entities in which an Ori-entalist imaginary plays a central part. Inthis case, the race for a more Europeanidentity wont be to the swift, yet both theswift and th e slow will go on bearing the race

marker of lesser whiteness whose legiti-macy they acknowledged when entering ne-gotiations.

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