SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 392 (p. 121). However, Gazprom Media took control of NTV in April 2001. And Mickiewicz writes of Mikheil Saakashvili that ‘[h]e could have walked right off an American college campus’. But there is no ‘could’ about it: he studied for an LLM at Columbia Law School. There is also a disconcerting absence of citations to back up substantive claims — particularly worrying for a work of scholarship. Given the weight Mickiewicz attaches to the students’ emphasis on comparing sources of information, it is particularly surprising that she herself does not place her findings in comparative perspective. Are her characterizations of these ‘future leaders’ particular to modern-day Russia, or might they simply reflect the attitudes of students across time and space? For example, Mickiewicz tell us that the students ‘lack a reflex of bowing to authority’ (p. 60), and ‘regard themselves as co-equals with their leaders’ (p. 44). Are the students likely to retain this stance when they enter the power hierarchies of the Russian bureaucracy and other places of work? These problems are compounded by the book’s disjointed organization, as well as frustrating features of the text itself, including the unnecessary repetition of material and a large number of typos. Have no illusions: the intention of this book is laudable, but its execution is not. New College, University of Oxford B. H. Noble White, Stephen and Feklyunina, Valentina. Identities and Foreign Policies in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus: The Other Europes. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingtoke and New York, 2014. x + 350 pp. Figures. Tables. A note on sources. Index. £73.00. This book is an important contribution to the ongoing academic debate on Europe and different modalities of European identity. The authors ventured to look at the concept of Europe from its margins, in some respects continuing the discussion started by constructivist scholars Pertti Joenniemi and Noel Parker. The question they raised about a decade ago — whether Europe can be (re)defined by its non-central actors — seems nowadays even more relevant for countries like Turkey and Kazakhstan (p. 2) whose political and cultural discourses include essential European components. Countries of the South Caucasus should be definitely included in the list of European borderlands with hybrid and often fragmented identities, but also with a strong traction towards Europe expressed culturally, religiously or politically. Based on these examples of ‘partial Europeanness’, the authors of the book come to an important conclusion that ‘Europe should have different boundaries for different purposes’ (p. 3), which points to a deeply political nature of these REVIEWS 393 boundaries and their construction. Thus, as the authors mention, Morocco would not be considered for EU membership, but Cyprus became a member ‘although it was conventionally located in Asia and part of its territory was under Turkish jurisdiction’ (p. 6). White and Feklyunina rightfully claim that Europe ought to be understood as a ‘web of communications and interactions’, ‘a narrative network’, or an agglomeration of cultural spaces defined by values, religions, languages and other criteria (p. 4). This explains the central research question tackled in this book: how various versions of European identity are constructed through discourses and cultural practices in Europe’s east? Authors’ analysis contains an interesting observation of different interpretations of the ‘centre of Europe’ in Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia (p. 11) — countries that otherwisemightbeconsideredbelongingtoEurope’seast.Themainfocusofthe book is, however, on Ukraine and Belarus (p. 17) as ‘cleft countries’, otherwise dubbed borderlands and margins, and on Russia. The latter, of course, sees itself as an autonomous pole of power in Europe, and an alternative to the EU. It is the cultural and discursive construction of Europe at its eastern margins that is of major interest to the authors. This process of engaging with Europe (p. 37) takes different forms — from accepting European languages and enjoying European beauties (aristocracies in Slavic nations ‘spoke French, holidayed in Biarritz, and took the waters at Baden-Baden’, p. 11) to imitating them (p. 13). These various practices of gravitating towards Europe constitute a cultural precondition for ‘the unity of Europe’ (p. 65), yet the basic problem at this point is that this unity can be understood from different perspectives. For the...