Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe?

Abstract

This article is part of the special section titled Recursive Easts, Shifting Peripheries, guest edited by Pamela Ballinger. 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 refugee 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 perspectives 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 practice 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.