Shortly after the fall of Yanukovych\u2019s regime in late February 2014, I got a call from a Czech journalist asking for a brief comment. Her first question was fully in line with the Russian coverage of the events: \u201cWas it a revolution in Kyiv or a coup d\u2019etat?\u201d<\/p>\n
I lost my nerves and responded in kind: \u201cAnd what was there in Prague back in 1989? A revolution or a coup d\u2019etat?\u201d<\/p>\n
She was apparently shocked and perhaps insulted by my impertinent lip. How could I dare to make such a comparison? How could I equate their great, spectacular, glorified literature and film, Velvet Revolution with a third-world mutiny of Fascist gangs against a legitimately elected president?..<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course, it was a revolution!\u201d she exclaimed proudly. \u201cThe Velvet Revolution!..\u201d<\/p>\n
I had to be duly ashamed for my ignorance bordering on arrogance.<\/p>\n
She may have never read Milan Kundera\u2019s article\u00a0Un\u00a0Occident kidnapp\u00e9<\/em> but she sounded like she perfectly knew where the West, i.e., \u2018true\u2019, Europe ends, where legitimate freedom-loving revolutions could happen and where they could not \u2013 and should not. She sprang from the same cultural milieu and exemplified the same mental matrix; she held the same dual complex of inferiority and superiority: the feeling of being undervalued and betrayed by the West and the feeling of a similar if not greater contempt for the East.<\/p>\n This made me read the classic Milan Kundera essay from a different angle: not so much as a passionate plea for freedom and \u2018return to Europe\u2019, away from Soviet dominance (for this goal had actually been accomplished), but \u2013 as an attempt to achieve that goal at the cost of the implicit exclusion of all other prisoners of the Communist camp as less worthy, less \u2018European\u2019, less striving for freedom and probably less deserving of it. This very legacy of Kundera\u2019s exclusivist concept has come to the fore in recent decades, discernable in both public attitudes to the \u2018East\u2019 and in specific state policies (or lack thereof). It is certainly not Milan Kundera\u2019s fault since he merely reproduced (but, regretfully, did not question) traditional, long-existing structures of thought and argumentation. Paradoxically, his text appeared to be a part of the same discursive traditions against which he rebelled \u2013 the tradition of \u2018Philosophic Geography\u2019 and various policies it inspired and legitimized.<\/p>\n Larry Wolff, who borrowed the term from John Ledyard\u2019s eighteenth-century travelogue, defined it as geography subordinated to specific philosophical values (i.e., ideological preferences). This was the kind of geography that made Chancellor Klemens von Metternich proclaim that Asia begins at the end of Landstrasse, i.e., on the southeastern outskirts of Vienna. And nowadays, it still makes his compatriots believe that the Ukrainian border is much further away from Vienna than the Swiss border (even though it is in fact hundreds of kilometers closer), or that Krak\u00f3w and Budapest are located closer to Moscow than to Paris. \u2018Philosophic Geography\u2019 has played an important and often disastrous role for Eastern Europeans, especially at the end of the Second World War and in its aftermath.<\/p>\n The Yalta conference held in February 1945 in Crimea was emblematic in this regard \u2013 not only because it determined (or legitimized, at least) the ceding of Eastern Europe to Stalin\u2019s butchers but also, in an equally quirky way, spared Greece from the same ordeal, insofar as it was recognized as the \u201ccradle of the European civilization\u201d, the land of \u201cimmortal glories\u201d, in Churchill\u2019s words, \u2013 contrary to all other, apparently unremarkable and therefore disposable, nations of the East. This was fully in line with \u2018Philosophic Geography\u2019, so the real continuity of modern Greece and Greeks with that homonymous \u2018cradle\u2019 and its vaunted \u2018glories\u2019 did not matter. \u2018Philosophic Geography\u2019, as Larry Wolff sarcastically remarked on some other occasion, \u201cwas a free-spirited sport, so much that it was not actually necessary to travel to Eastern Europe in order to participate in its intellectual discovery.\u201d1<\/sup><\/p>\n Edward Said, in his classic book, defined Orientalism as \u201ca Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.\u201d2<\/sup> Larry Wolff followed suit when defining Western \u2018knowledge\u2019 of Eastern Europe as a \u201cstyle of intellectual mastery, integrating knowledge and power, perpetuating domination and subordination. As in the case of the Orient, so also with Eastern Europe, intellectual discovery and mastery could not be entirely separated from the possibility of real conquest.\u201d3<\/sup> It was not only Napoleon who employed this knowledge, and not only Hitler and Mussolini who brought some tenets of \u2018Philosophic Geography\u2019 to their extremes. It was also, ironically, their opponents and nemeses, Churchill and Roosevelt, who employed that peculiar \u2018knowledge\u2019 to justify the takeover of Eastern Europe by their indispensable Soviet ally.<\/p>\n In many regards, the experience of East Europeans with their Western brethren has been very traumatic. It has been overloaded with false expectations, bitter resentments, and poorly hidden psychological complexes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In many regards, the experience of East Europeans with their Western brethren has been very traumatic. It has been overloaded with false expectations, bitter resentments, and poorly hidden psychological complexes: of inferiority, betrayal, abandonment, cheating and underappreciation. They could not but feel the gap between the lofty ideals proclaimed by the Western democracies, and their practical policies are driven much less by ideals and much more by pragmatically calculated national interests. It was apparent long before the disgraceful attempt to accommodate Stalin in Yalta [1945] at the cost of Poland and other East European nations or to appease Hitler in Munich [1938] at the cost of Czechoslovakia.<\/p>\n Two decades earlier, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George disclosed his principles with a charming imperial candidness, when declaring the will to trade not only with Bolsheviks but \u201ceven with cannibals.\u201d4<\/sup> And in 1933, at the height of the genocidal famine masterminded by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, the British Foreign Office, fully in line with those principles, reported secretly: \u201cThe truth of the matter is, of course, that we have a certain amount of information about famine conditions in the south of Russia [sic], similar to that which had appeared in the press… We do not want to make it public, however, because the Soviet government would resent it and our relations with them would be prejudiced.\u201d5<\/sup><\/p>\n This does not mean that the gap between noble ideals and the mundane reality of geopolitics could be completely bridged, and the conflict between normative values and practical interests could be easily solved. Hans Morgenthau, a classic of the \u2018realist\u2019 school in modern political thought, argued that \u201cethics in abstract\u201d is not applicable in the field. The morality of political decisions should not be judged by intentions but by results.6<\/sup> Essentially, this is anything but a recast of the old Carl von Clausewitz dictum on politics is the art of the possible.<\/p>\n There is certainly some rationale in this pragmatic approach, but there is also a dangerous loophole in a seemingly logical argumentation that allows to (mis)represent any immoral steps as pragmatic, reasonably calculated and only feasible. Nobody would expect NATO to bomb Moscow to stop the Russian genocide in Chechnya, as they bombed Belgrade to rescue the Kosovars. And nobody wanted the West to liberate the annexed Tibet or Crimea as they liberated Kuwait after Saddam Hussein had \u2018re-unified\u2019 it with Iraq. Still, short of military invasion, there are many other instruments in international politics that could be employed but usually are not. And this acquiescence reflects not so much the vaunted pragmatism of Western leaders as their trivial cynicism and lack of integrity.<\/p>\n Eastern Europeans\u00a0have had many good reasons to feel betrayed by the West, belittled and alienated.\u00a0But, on the other hand, this political stance and ideological niche had been already occupied by the Soviets.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n All this puts Eastern Europeans in an awkward position. On the one hand, they have had many good reasons to feel betrayed by the West, belittled and alienated. This could naturally result, as elsewhere on the globe, in zealous anti-Westernism, nationalism, xenophobia, isolationism and autarky. But, on the other hand, this political stance and ideological niche had been already occupied by the Soviets. Very few independently minded Easterners wished to identify themselves with the hated regime and join its anti-Western crusade. Whatever hard feelings they may have had against the seemingly haughty and arrogant West, they had to choose it as the lesser of two evils. They were, in a sense, \u201cWesternizers by default.\u201d<\/p>\n Their ambivalent hate-love attitude toward the Western brethren was pronouncedly articulated by East European intellectuals in the 1980s when they invented a peculiar concept of \u2018Central East Europe\u2019 as a powerful argument for their \u2018European belonging\u2019 and a passionate claim for \u2018return to Europe\u2019, to \u2018normalcy\u2019. For the Westerners, it was a timely reminder that the region could be more than \u201cfootnotes to Sovietology\u201d, as Timothy Garton Ash aptly put it, that \u201cEast Berlin, Prague, and Budapest are not quite in the same position as Kiev or Vladivostok\u201d and that \u201cSiberia does not begin at Checkpoint Charlie.\u201d7<\/sup> (Whether Siberia really begins in Kyiv and whether Ukraine\u2019s capital is exactly \u201cin the same position as Vladivostok\u201d was not discussed at the time, with some dramatic consequences apparent today).<\/p>\n Despite the semantic similarity to the earlier nineteenth-century term Mitteleuropa<\/em>, \u2018Central Europe\u2019 was completely devoid of Pan-Germanic ideological connotations. On the contrary, it asserted the uniqueness and sovereignty of an endangered small nation squeezed, for the latest part of their history, between Russia and Germany. Of the many texts that elaborated the topic, Milan Kundera\u2019s essay \u201cThe Tragedy of Central Europe\u201d (1984) gained probably the highest prominence. Published originally in French,8<\/sup>\u00a0it was translated into several dozen languages, including the most quoted English version in the influential New York Review of Books.<\/p>\n The message Kundera conveyed to the Western audience in his essay was two-fold. On the one hand, he provided multiple evidence of the region\u2019s traditional, centuries-long, engagement in European cultural life and substantial contribution to the common heritage. The region, he wrote, was neither different nor separate from the West, but integral and indivisible. It was actually a part of the West, unjustly cut off from its illustrious body and \u2018stolen\u2019, \u2018kidnapped\u2019 (as the French title implied) by sinister, essentially anti-European, Russia. This does not make yet the region indisputably \u2018Eastern\u2019, for Central Europe, in Kundera\u2019s poetical narrative, is not a state, but a culture or a fate: \u201cIts borders are imaginary and must be drawn and redrawn with each new historical situation. Central Europe, therefore, cannot be defined and determined by political frontiers […] but by the great common situations that reassemble peoples, regroup them in ever new ways along the imaginary and ever-changing boundaries that mark a realm inhabited by the same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same common tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n The second of Kundera\u2019s arguments ran, subsequently, against the West\u2019s parochial and myopic view of the region as allegedly \u2018Eastern\u2019 and therefore different and rather legitimately relinquished into the Soviet sphere of influence. This could not have happened, he argued, if Western Europe itself was not \u201cin the process of losing its own cultural identity,\u201d if it still understood \u201cits unity as a cultural unity,\u201d rather than seeing in Central Europe \u201cnothing but a political regime,\u201d and downgrading thereby one of the crucial parts of its culture and history to the empty political construct of \u2018Eastern Europe\u2019.9<\/sup><\/p>\n Kundera\u2019s article gained high appraisal and became programmatic for a whole generation of Central East European intellectuals. It explicitly legitimized their sublime \u2018European dream\u2019 and coveted \u2018return to normalcy\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Kundera\u2019s article gained high appraisal and became programmatic for a whole generation of Central East European intellectuals. It explicitly legitimized their sublime \u2018European dream\u2019 and coveted \u2018return to normalcy\u2019, and implicitly delegitimized their forcible inclusion into the Soviet realm and political subordination to the presumably non-European power. Yet the article also encountered severe criticism from various quarters. One of the first and most renowned responses came from the fellow \u00e9migr\u00e9 writer Joseph Brodsky who correctly pointed out Kundera\u2019s \u201creductionist approach\u201d, excessive \u201cgeneralizations\u201d, \u201climited or lopsided\u201d notion of European civilization, and misuse of \u201chandy dichotomies\u201d like East-West, feeling-reason, them-us and so forth. \u201cThe sad truth about him (and many of his East European brethren) is that this extraordinary writer has fallen an unwitting victim to the geopolitical certitude of his fate \u2013 the concept of an East-West divide\u2026 His sense of geography is conditioned by his sense of history.\u201c10<\/sup><\/p>\n Brodsky made many other good points in the article. In particular, he aptly remarked that the modern police state was a product of the French Enlightenment, that Das Kapital<\/em> was translated into Russian from German, and that the Soviet version of Communism (so loathed by Kundera) was as much a product of Western rationalism as of Eastern emotional radicalism. He duly recalled that Communist totalitarianism was not only exported by Russia but also encountered there very strong resistance \u2013 much stronger (Brodsky goes ad personam<\/em>) than in Kundera\u2019s own country, either in 1948 or 1968; that foreign tanks invaded Prague not only from the hated East but also from the celebrated West; and that the last European war was by and large \u201cWestern civilization\u2019s civil war.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite its stylistic prowess and shrewd observations, Brodsky\u2019s article did not attain, however, the prominence of Kundera\u2019s text \u2013 partly because of its personal wisecracks against the opponent, and partly because it focused too much on defense of Dostoyevsky and Russia, appearing perhaps too partisan. The main flaw, however, of Brodsky\u2019s essay was, as the Bosnian writer Adin Ljuca contends, the same as Kundera\u2019s: both failed to find their way out of \u201chandy dichotomies\u201d and overcome them, both remained at the level of a \u201cbad ping-pong match\u201d (\u201ca traumatized Czech\u201d vs. \u201ca big-souled Russian\u201d who, despite everything, seeks an alibi for himself), \u2013 \u201cas if Evil originated in the East or in the West\u201d, rather than in each person\u2019s words and deeds, choice and responsibility.11<\/sup><\/p>\n The problem is barely new as it had been already raised in 1968-1969, in the polemical exchange between Kundera and V\u00e1clav Havel, specifically in the latter\u2019s response to Kundera\u2019s article \u201cThe Czech Lot\u201d published a few months after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.12<\/sup> Havel, with his preeminent moral sensitivity, very astutely noticed the threat of relativism, fatalism, and collective irresponsibility that may have resulted from assigning a \u2018geographic position\u2019 with a discursively overblown role. Ironically, fifteen years later, the same essentialized and oversimplified \u2018geographic\u2019 argument would be used to acquire the special status of the \u2018stolen West\u2019 for a few privileged nations deemed \u2018Central European\u2019 and therefore exceptional, different from all other captive nations, by the very fact of their historical and geographical provenance. Kundera, in fact, succumbed to the same playbook of \u2018Philosophic Geography\u2019 that he seemed to vehemently renounce in its Soviet, \u2018geopolitical\u2019 reincarnation. In both its editions, the eighteenth-century exclusivist pathos manifestly prevailed.<\/p>\n This made even sympathizers of the idea express some cautious criticism of Kundera\u2019s simplifications and his manipulative use of facts and terms. Timothy Garton Ash described in particular how Kundera and his followers opt for the term \u2018Eastern Europe\u2019 or \u2018East European\u2019 when the context is neutral or negative, but prefer to speak of \u2018Central\u2019 or \u2018East Central Europe\u2019 when the statement is \u201cinvariably positive, affirmative, or downright sentimental.\u201d He recalled assiduously that not only Kafka, Bart\u00f3k and Ha\u0161ek were \u2018Central Europeans\u2019 but Adolf Hitler as well; that nationalism and racism are as much a part of the local legacy as multiculturalism and tolerance; and that a \u201csuper-bureaucratic statism and formalistic legalism took to absurd (and sometimes already inhuman) extremes\u201d had been the region\u2019s particular features long before the advance of Soviet Communism. \u201cAren\u2019t there specifically Central European traditions“, he asked waywardly, \u201cwhich at least facilitated the establishment of communist regimes in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and traditions which those regimes signally carry forward to this day?\u201d13<\/sup><\/p>\n Nationalism and racism are a part of the local legacy as multiculturalism and tolerance; and that a \u201csuper-bureaucratic statism and formalistic legalism took to absurd\u00a0extremes\u201d had been the region\u2019s particular features long before the advance of Soviet Communism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ten years later, Tony Judt reiterated the same criticism even more forcefully: \u201cTo suppose that this part of the Continent was once a near-paradise of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic multiplicity and compatibility, producing untold cultural and intellectual riches, has been part of the Western image in recent years. Yet [\u2026] in truth Central Europe, from the Battle of the White Mountain [1620] down to the present, is a region of enduring ethnic and religious intolerance, marked by bitter quarrels, murderous wars, and frequent slaughter on a scale ranging from pogrom to genocide. Western Europe was not always much better, of course, but on the whole, it has been luckier, which is almost as good.\u201c14<\/sup><\/p>\n Perhaps the best account of East European woes and flops, underperforming and lagging behind, was provided by the Hungarian \u00e9migr\u00e9 intellectual Gy\u00f6rgy Sch\u00f6pflin in his seminal 1991 article on the political traditions of Eastern Europe.15<\/sup> Drawing largely on the concepts of Jen\u0151 Sz\u0171cs,16<\/sup>\u00a0he formulated certain caveats that partly absolved from the sin of essentialism. He spoke not about primordial entities called \u2018East\u2019 and \u2018West\u2019 but about two different, historically informed, political traditions that variously correlate but never thoroughly coincide with different specific states stretching from the west of Europe (France and Britain) to its \u2018far east\u2019 represented by Russia.<\/p>\n These two traditions, as he contends, fundamentally differ in conception, generation, legitimation and exercise of political power. Western tradition evolved from the initial division of power between secular and church authorities, largely facilitated by the supranational character of the Catholic church. This introduced something absent in non-Western traditions \u2013 the idea of limitation of power by formal rules (starting from the Magna Carta<\/em> [1215], the English precursor of all modern constitutions), and the idea of contractual relations between rulers and subjects (something unfathomable in the Ottoman, Russian and other \u2018Eastern\u2019 empires).<\/p>\n All this was either missing \u2013 as in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (where the fusion of the Orthodox Church with authorities left little room for any autonomous social actors), or was rather weak \u2013 as in Central East Europe (where the relative weakness of the Prussian and Austrian empires, vis-\u00e0-vis their Western counterparts, handicapped development of the subordinate nations as well, even though local Catholic and Protestant Churches were not etatized, as was the case in Byzantium and Muscovy, or eventually Russia). Eastern Europe, in sum, \u201cconstituted a transitional zone between the Western tradition of the division of power and the Eastern tradition of concentration of power.\u201d17<\/sup><\/p>\n All the East European nations entered a period of national independence after the First World War with a common agenda of catch-up modernization. All of them lagged behind their Western counterparts and shared common problems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n All the East European nations entered a period of national independence after the First World War with a common agenda of catch-up modernization. All of them lagged behind their Western counterparts and shared common problems inherited from the former empires they used to belong to. At the same time, they differed substantially from each other in terms of their development, with the most conspicuous difference being determined by their past belonging to either more advanced Austrian and German empires (Catholic\/Protestant realm) or more backward Russian and Ottoman empires (Orthodox or Muslim area). Central East Europe was definitely the closest in its development to the West, so the myth of the \u2018kidnapped Europe\u2019 is not completely off-base.<\/p>\n Sch\u00f6pflin does not discuss this issue but implies, rather reasonably, that the Soviet and, more generally, Communist dominance was not the only and probably not the main reason for the region’s backwardness. Deeper historical\/structural factors had been at play and, as the author appropriately remarks, \u201cthe development of Greece [that was not \u2018liberated\u2019 by the Soviets] in the first two to three decades after the war is instructive in this respect.\u201d18<\/sup> One may perhaps extend this line of argumentation by saying that even in 1990 or 2020 Greece would still have looked more like in the 1960s or 1970s if it had not been taken under the guidance and guardianship of the European Community.<\/p>\n The same line of argumentation implies that geographic-cum-geopolitical labelling may play a crucial role in some nations\u2019 destinies. The only reason that Greece looked, by the 1990s, more advanced than Czechoslovakia was that it was recognized (arbitrarily) as \u2018Western\u2019 and forcefully pulled into the West European political and economic orbit, while Czechoslovakia (and many more nations) were designated as \u2018Eastern\u2019 and left in the cold. This makes \u2018Easterners\u2019 understandably wary of this kind of labelling and determined to distance as far as possible from a dangerous geographic (\u2018philosophical-geographic\u2019) zone that bodes them no good but, most likely, exclusion, abandonment and betrayal.<\/p>\n \u2018Central Europe\u2019 is a discursive life-belt that gives some nations a chance to be rescued on the secure board of the Western flagship. But it fits only a few of them \u2013 Czechs, Hungarians, partly Slovaks and perhaps Slovenes who loathe being \u2018Balkans\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u2018Central Europe\u2019 is a discursive life-belt that gives some nations a chance to be rescued on the secure board of the Western flagship. But it fits only a few of them \u2013 Czechs, Hungarians, partly Slovaks who also hate to be \u2018East Europeans\u2019, and perhaps Slovenes who loathe being \u2018Balkans\u2019. Others need to extend the term hyphenating it into \u2018Central-East Europe\u2019 like Poles or Romanians or invent something else like \u2018Nordic\u2019 for the Balts, or the Mediterranean for the Croats, Montenegrins and perhaps Albanians. Bulgarians have no choice because the very term Balkans stems from the name of the mountains on their territory. And Ukrainians, Moldovans and Belarusians have to either go to \u2018Eurasia\u2019 (the new code-name for Russia and its truncated \u2018sphere of legitimate interests\u2019) or become a \u2018New Eastern Europe\u2019 since the \u2018old\u2019 Eastern Europe disappeared.<\/p>\n John-Paul Himka, a renowned Canadian historian, has quipped at this \u201cnew geography\u201d of the continent that has a West, a Center, but no East. \u201cFoucault would have loved this geographical gaping wound,\u201d he remarked sarcastically, referring to the penchant of the French philosopher to analyze discursive twists and tricks, and \u201cto determine the power relations that constitute organization and accumulation of discourses we consider to be knowledge.\u201d19<\/sup> Such an analysis would definitely reveal, as Himka implies, that the \u201cdivision into regions is not a value- or narrative-neutral act\u201d, regionalization has a strong \u201cpolitical meaning\u201d, and any naming\/renaming indicates \u201crepositioning and reconfiguration of power relations.\u201d<\/p>\n From this point of view, the concept of \u2018Central Europe\u2019 had been originally conceived as a discursive attempt of the \u2018powerless\u2019 nations subjugated by the Soviets to acquire some power by identifying themselves symbolically with the West and persuading the West to reciprocate. It was an attempt to employ the soft power of \u2018Europe\u2019 to counterbalance the hard power of Moscow. It is not surprising that the concept gained broad popularity inasmuch as it was perceived first and foremost as a liberating, \u2018emancipatory\u2019 project, \u201ca metaphor of protest.\u201d20<\/sup>\u00a0Little if any attention was paid at the time to its peculiar spatialization and potential exclusiveness.<\/p>\n The concept of \u2018Central Europe\u2019 had been originally conceived as a discursive attempt of the \u2018powerless\u2019 nations subjugated by the Soviets to acquire some power by identifying themselves symbolically with the West.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The situation has changed dramatically in 1989-1991, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, when the concept of \u2018Central Europe\u2019 ceased to be a tool of symbolic emancipation in the utopian realm of culture and became a tool of discursive lobbying in the callous field of practical politics. As the fight for inclusion into the privileged Western clubs of the EU and NATO began, the other, exclusivist side of the concept came to the fore: \u201cthe lopping off from the old Eastern Europe of its eastern portions, now included in \u2018The Former Soviet Union\u2019 or \u2018Eurasia\u2019, and of its southern portions, now \u2018Southeastern Europe\u2019 or, more frequently, \u2018The Balkans\u2019.\u201d21<\/sup> \u201cFar from becoming a region-building notion, [the concept] was harnessed as an expedient argument in the drive for entry into the European institutional framework.\u201d22<\/sup><\/p>\n In summary, as the Ukrainian philosopher, Volodymyr Yermolenko bitterly remarked, \u201cthe idea of the \u2018stolen West\u2019 may have been liberating for Central Europe, but for Europe situated further east it was disastrous.\u201c<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In summary, as the Ukrainian philosopher, Volodymyr Yermolenko bitterly remarked, \u201cthe idea of the \u2018stolen West\u2019 may have been liberating for Central Europe, but for Europe situated further east it was disastrous. Instead of breaking down the wall between East and West, it simply shifted it further eastwards. The idea should have been used to fight totalitarianism everywhere, but instead localized it geographically in the territories of the former USSR, thereby placing a permanent \u2018curse\u2019 on our east European lands… Instead of remaining faithful to his own dictum and seeing just how much diversity there is on the whole of the European continent, [Kundera] chose to split it into two parts, in opposition to each other \u2014 the humanist West versus the demonic East that had stolen [Central European] part of the West.\u201d23<\/sup><\/p>\n Today, as all the non-Soviet countries of the former Communist block have been either admitted in the EU or placed on a firm track towards membership, the exclusivist aspect of the concept of \u2018Central Europe\u2019 became predominant. It is felt with a particular poignancy and frustration in the \u2018wrong\u2019, post-Soviet part of Eastern Europe that was left programmatically beyond all the processes of the EU enlargement. Once again, since 1945, \u2018Philosophic Geography\u2019 facilitates the new division of Europe, providing geopolitical \u2018realists\u2019 with a ready-made set of quasi-historical narratives and ideologically warped arguments. It not only habitually redefines Russia as Europe\u2019s significant \u2018Other\u2019 (this presumably coincided with Russians\u2019 own view of Europe and of themselves),24<\/sup>\u00a0but also tacitly recognizes all the post-Soviet republics (except for the Baltic states) a legitimate sphere of Russian \u2018privileged interests\u2019. Fully in line with \u2018Philosophic Geography\u2019, the EU spells out that a country\u2019s classification as \u2018European\u2019 is \u201csubject to political assessment\u201d. This allows it to arbitrarily relegate Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova into an obscure \u2018Eurasian\u2019 space, and define them in all EU documents euphemistically as the \u2018partner states\u2019 or \u2018neighboring states\u2019 but never as \u2018European\u2019.<\/p>\n \u2018Eurasia\u2019 appears here as a discursive twin or, rather antipode, of \u2018Central Europe\u2019,\u00a0The new brand of \u2018Eurasianism\u2019 can therefore be defined\u00a0as an attempt to control and manipulate so-called \u2018Eurasia\u2019 which is merely a code-word for the post-Soviet republics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u2018Eurasia\u2019 appears here as a discursive twin or, rather antipode, of \u2018Central Europe\u2019, while the latter serves to enhance the European credentials of the \u2018good\u2019 part of Eastern Europe, the former serves to dismiss any claims of the \u2018bad\u2019 part of Eastern Europe to European entitlements. The new brand of \u2018Eurasianism\u2019 can therefore be defined in a Saidian way as an attempt to control and manipulate so-called \u2018Eurasia\u2019 which is merely a code-word for the post-Soviet republics. The term is embraced both in Russia and in the West, albeit for different reasons. In Russia, the \u2018Eurasian\u2019 discourse aims primarily at dominance over and re-integration of the post-Soviet space. In the West, \u2018Eurasian\u2019 discourse aims primarily at the marginalization of the post-Soviet republics, their exclusion from the European project and placing them within the Russian sphere of influence and, presumably, responsibility.<\/p>\n It does not matter whether Ukrainians, or Georgians, or Moldovans are all that happy with another Yalta-style settlement. From the very beginning, the post-Soviet states were clearly separated in all Western policies from the non-Soviet postcommunist states. While the latter were considered undoubtedly \u2018European\u2019 and sovereign, eligible for eventual membership in the EU and NATO \u2013 depending exclusively on their ability to meet the required criteria, the latter were removed into a nebulous \u2018Eurasian\u2019 space \u2013 regardless of their own intentions and self-identification. No \u2018Copenhagen criteria\u2019 were applicable here since the membership prospects were not on the agenda, and no incentives and guidance and guardianship for reforms were provided. This might be the main reason for the emergence of a developmental gap between the Balkan states and western \u2018post-Soviet\u2019 republics that otherwise have been very similar in most terms.<\/p>\n The experts rarely juxtapose these two groups and even less willingly compare their positions in the early 1990s when the Balkan states actually lagged behind Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and even Moldova in most social, political and economic indices. They prefer to compare, in most cases, today\u2019s post-Soviet Eastern Europe not with the Balkan states, but with the more advanced nations of Central Europe that actually held higher development rankings from the very beginning of the post-communist transformation and benefited substantially from the EU accession track.25<\/sup> The comparison conveniently justifies the exclusion of the post-Soviet group from the European project and, as any circular argument, turns ultimately into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Balkan nations, within this civilizational teleology, were assumed to be \u2018European\u2019 \u2013 exactly like Greece long ago, hence properly assisted, and hence proved \u2018European\u2019, while the western post-Soviet republics were, conversely, assumed to be \u2018non-European\u2019, hence left in the cold, and hence, predictably, proved \u2018non-European\u2019.<\/p>\n The post-1991 developments in Eastern Europe seem to dismiss Kundera\u2019s exclusivist and, implicitly, supremacist concept in two different ways. On the one hand, the most advanced postcommunist states Poland and Hungary, two epitomes of the very idea of \u2018Central Europeanness\u2019, have apparently lost their \u2018European\u2019 fervor and undergone what observers believe is an \u2018illiberal counter-revolution\u2019.26<\/sup>\u00a0On the other hand, the series of democratic, anti-authoritarian and, in most cases, pro-European revolutions that occurred in the post-Soviet space in the past decades prove that freedom, dignity and rule of law are universal values, and neither Western nor \u2018Central\u2019 Europe have any monopoly on them. It might be the proper time, when observing the democratic upheaval in Belarus, to recollect the old Norman Davies dictum: \u201cEastern Europe is no less European for being poor, or undeveloped, or ruled by tyrants. In many ways, thanks to its deprivations, it has become more European, more attached to the values which affluent Westerners can take for granted.\u201d27<\/sup><\/p>\n The destruction of the Berlin Wall was just the beginning of a long and painstaking process. There are many more walls in Eastern Europe and elsewhere still to be dismantled.<\/p>\n Shortly after the fall of Yanukovych\u2019s regime in late February 2014, I got a call from a Czech journalist asking for a brief comment. Her first question was fully in line with the Russian coverage of the events: \u201cWas it a revolution in Kyiv or a coup d\u2019etat?\u201d I lost my nerves and responded in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[110,143,495,487],"class_list":["post-9742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nezarazene","tag-central-europe","tag-culture","tag-kundera","tag-mitteleuropa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9742"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10716,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9742\/revisions\/10716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Eastern Europe within the Tenets of \u2018Philosophic Geography\u2019<\/h2>\n
Kundera\u2019s Resentment<\/h2>\n
The True Tragedy of Eastern Europe<\/h2>\n
Against the Developmental Teleology<\/h2>\n
\n\n