Recursive Easts,Shifting Peripheries

Whatever happened to the notion of Eastern Europe and Europe’s “eastern” peripheries? The three articles in this special forum of East European Politics & Societies and Cultures take up this timely question, inquiring into the renewed (or continuing) salience of both the “East” and the “periphery” within European symbolic and political geographies. In the decade that followed the end of the Cold War, the dismantling of state socialism on the European continent, and the creation of the European Union, a lively and extensive interdisciplinary debate arose around the nature and the uses of “Easternism.” In the Yugoslav context, for example, anthropologists and historians argued over whether these Easternist discursive configurations constituted a variant of what Said identified as Orientalism (Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992) or something sui generis (as in Todorova’s 1997 analysis of Balkanism). ¹ Scholars tracked the deployment of easternizing discourses by political elites wishing to differentiate themselves from their neighbors, whether it be Croats from Serbs, Latvians from Russians, or Bulgarians from Turks, as well as the disciplining and paternalist uses to which such labels were put by European Union (EU) member states judging the political “maturity” of post-socialist accession candidates and aspirants. These processes reworked and, at times, reconfigured older understandings through which political, economic, and cultural peripheries had been drawn. Ultimately, however, subsequent waves of EU enlargement and the process of NATO expansion led some scholars and politicians alike to proclaim that not only was the “transition” out of state socialism in Eastern Europe over but that Eastern Europe no longer was a meaningful political or cultural designation (if it had ever been). Even those observers like Hungarian sociologist Elemér Hankiss who recognized the persistence of an East–West divide within Europe nonetheless argued that “it does exist but is only one among the many dividing lines that criss-cross Europe and it may not be the most important one—or at least its importance is rapidly decreasing.” ² In short, Eastern Europe had been largely deconstructed out of existence in a manner not so different from that of the Mediterranean. ³

A series of events—notably the financial crisis that began in 2008, Crimea’s annexation by Russia in 2014, and the migration/refugee “emergencies” that became acute in 2015 and 2016—shattered this short-lived era of Euro-optimism. With hopes for European convergence together with the giddy days of economic prosperity and EU expansion a distant memory, popular media have been quick to highlight the possibility of a “new Cold War” and to reinforce the notion of key dividing lines in Europe. (Not surprisingly, the Mediterranean regional appellation has also returned with a vengeance, as have long-standing views of it as site of both conflict and coexistence, barrier and bridge.) The financial faultlines created by the 2008 crisis, for instance, demonstrated the enduring vitality of the concept of peripheries. Although some scholars had discarded an older (seemingly outdated) world systems language of economic centers/peripheries in favor of more culturally infused terms such as margins, the flows of bailout funds to Europe’s edges (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) and the constriction of those countries’ middle classes underscored the salience of the idea of economic peripheries. With the exception of Ireland, however, the PIIGS supposedly feeding at the EU trough were located in the European South, apparent evidence that a North–South axis had supplanted the formerly dominant West–East one. Yet, as we have seen, more recent events have also reinvigorated discourses of easternism within Europe, revealing both old and new, overlapping and intersecting, peripheries on the axis of North–South, West–East. ⁴

In the summer of 2015, for instance, the “Balkan corridor” route traversed by migrants transiting from the Mediterranean to Austria and Germany became a metonym for a new old “Eastern” divide. European countries unwilling to admit significant numbers of migrants (and likewise viewed as undesirable places by those same migrants) now constitute Europe’s new “East,” in contrast to the (relatively more) “welcoming” Western and Northern countries of Germany, France, and Austria. In saying this, we focus on the representation of such differences, leaving aside the complicated reality that many European countries usually deemed “Western” and “Northern,” such as Denmark, have also chafed at the EU quotas for and obligations to refugees and that considerable opposition to hosting refugees also exists within Germany and France. And, of course, the desire to “regain sovereignty” over borders and reject EU migration policies has informed actual political events from Europe’s western limits (e.g., the United Kingdom and the Brexit referendum) to its eastern marches (e.g., the Hungarian police’s employment of “border hunters”). ⁵ Despite these sea changes within European political life and discourse, however, scholars have been slower than either journalists or nationalist politicians to take up a topic that just a few short years ago appeared to have run its course or been superseded: Europe’s Eastern peripheries.

In addressing this, the essays collected here operate in the spirit of Katherine Verdery’s seminal Daedalus essay “Whither ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism’?” in which she queried the supposed decline of the nation-state’s viability. In that essay, she questioned scholarly prognostications regarding the disappearance of the nation-state, arguing instead, “It seems more likely that nation is once again changing its referent.” ⁶ Like the nation, neither the “East” nor “periphery” have disappeared as meaningful signifiers in European symbolic geographies but, rather, have changed and transformed. In this sense, we consider West and East, center and periphery, not only as dialogic concepts but also as recursive in the sense used by Judith Irvine and Susan Gal. Writing of styles of speech mapped onto specific populations within a Senegalese village, Irvine and Gal note that although “categories of people were linked iconically to their styles of speech, which were seen as displays of their respective temperamental essences,” in reality speech styles were not a “property of contrasting groups, but were rather reproduced recursively whenever two interlocutors engaged in establishing rank differences between each other—even differences within the same overall social category.” ⁷ Similarly, notions of “West” and “East,” “center” and “periphery,” are reproduced in recursive and situational fashion, even as they appear to signify “temperamental essences.”

In a semiotic analysis of the public-private distinction, Gal elaborates her thinking on recursivity in ways that provide further insight into the enduring power of distinctions such as West-East and center–periphery within Europe. Gal distinguishes between the sociohistorical processes that established the public and private as conceptually relevant domains and their fractal nature once they become a “taken-for granted part of a cultural scene.” ⁸ On the one hand, this allows scholars to account for the development of real differences on the ground that have contributed to distinctive identities and trajectories between those regions sorted into categories like eastern and western (and, indeed, elsewhere Gal and Kligman have devoted considerable space to the distinct historical trajectories of the private–public spheres in “Central and Eastern Europe” versus “Western Europe”). ⁹ On the other hand, it recognizes not only the co-constitutive quality of cultural categories such as public–private, western–eastern, and center–periphery but also their nature as “indexical signs that are always relative: dependent for part of their referential meaning on the interactional context in which they are used.” ¹⁰ Yet these signs prove not merely indexical but also fractal, argues Gal. Drawing on geometric ideas of fractals to account for patterns that self-repeat at ever smaller scales, she notes that social scientists have long possessed similar concepts (such as anthropological models of segmentary lineage societies) to capture the nesting character of many social phenomena (whether discursive or not). ¹¹ According to Gal, a distinction such as public–private (or West-East or center–periphery)

can be reproduced repeatedly by projecting it onto narrower contexts or broader ones. Or, it can be projected onto different social “objects”—activities, identities, institutions, spaces and interactions. . . . Then, through recursivity (and recalibration), each of these parts can be recategorized again. . . . It is crucial that such calibrations are always relative positions and not properties laminated onto the persons, objects, or spaces concerned. They are like Bakhtinian voicings or perspectives rather than fixed categories. ¹²

Applying Gal’s understanding of fractal recursivity to the East European–West European divide thus expands upon the concept of nesting orientalisms used by Bakić-Hayden and Hayden to describe the processes by which eastern alterity is projected onto one’s neighbor in a pattern of descending replication. Whereas Bakić-Hayden and Hayden applied nesting orientalism to the specific context of identity politics within the former Yugoslavia, adopting Gal’s terms illuminates how a whole range of distinctions, including public–private, center–periphery, democratic–socialist, present–past, modern–backwards, and civilized–primitive, become laminated onto the West–East distinction within Europe while sidestepping debates about the appropriateness of Said’s Orientalism to (East) European contexts. (For more on those debates, see Ballinger’s article, “Whatever Happened to Eastern Europe?” in this special forum.) Gal’s reference to fractals and dynamic non-Euclidean systems further underscores the paradox that a hierarchy of value typically plotted along what Attila Melegh has called a “civilizational slope” is best analyzed in non-linear terms. ¹³ Whereas Melegh devotes considerable attention to the relationship between discourses of the East–West slope and local narratives, that is, to how social actors translate the rhetoric of the slope into identities and practice, Gal similarly highlights the “strong materiality” of recursive fractal discourses and their availability “for creating embodied subjectivities.” ¹⁴ Such comments highlight the status of these discourses as material and social facts, the focus of the discussion in this special forum.

In its query, “Whither Europe’s ‘Easts’ and ‘Peripheries?’” this special forum also acknowledges the critical role played by East European Politics and Societies in keeping such issues on the scholarly agenda. In particular, we echo the questions raised in the May 2015 special issue of EEPS, whose contributors took up the question of “Whither Eastern Europe” within the specific disciplinary context of political science. Our contributors join this extended conversation, offering dispatches from different disciplinary fields (anthropology, history, and media and cultural studies). In contrast to the articles arrayed by Bernhard and Jasiewicz in that 2015 issue, however, we focus on a nexus of conceptual questions and topics—borders, tidemarks, peripheries, and symbolic geographies—that cut across disciplines. Although we tend to focus on how these concepts can help us make sense of the region and its dynamics, we also consider how findings from the region can contribute to broader debates, such as those on Orientalism. In doing so, we take seriously Bernhard and Jasiewicz’s admonition: “The dilemmas that we study are by no means unique and the particular scope conditions posed by our region provide a means to test existing theories and develop new ones that are relevant to our peers working on critical issues in the study of politics generally.” ¹⁵

Drawing on a diverse set of theoretical interlocutors that range from Said to Žižek to Lacan, Christoffer Kølvraa’s essay, “Limits of Attraction: The EU’s Eastern border and the European Neighborhood Policy,” evidences clearly the recursive processes at work in the European Neighborhood Policy. In doing so, he challenges facile analyses that treat Othering processes as largely the products of dichotomous and exclusionary thinking. Whereas Kølvraa focuses on EU policy makers (a particular kind of “center”), Alena Pfoser challenges simplistic understandings of bordering, Othering and peripheralisation from another direction (and another set of geographic sites). In her essay, “Nested peripherialisation: Remaking the East–West Border in the Russian–Estonian Borderland,” Pfoser draws upon ethnographic accounts of the Russian-Estonian border to explore the recursive negotiations and contestations of understandings of peripherality. Ballinger’s piece “Whatever happened to Eastern Europe? Revisiting Europe’s Eastern Peripheries” simultaneously analyzes shifts in European symbolic geographies and critical scholarship examining such geographies. She makes the case for the continued relevance of the periphery concept as one that highlights the durability (a recursive durability or perhaps a durable recursivity?) of notions of easternism in European cultural politics. In distinct ways, then, each author traces the durability and lability of easternisms as key bordering processes in contemporary Europe.

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In her essay, “Whatever happened to Eastern Europe? Revisiting Europe’s Eastern Peripheries,” Ballinger interrogates the central theoretical questions at the heart of the special forum. She inquires into the supposed “obsolescence” of both the notion of Eastern Europe and the scholarship dedicated to this topic, which flourished in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War’s end. For some observers, the (putative) twenty-first-century shift from a political economy of “transition” to one of “integration” rendered the scholarship on easternness in Europe a historical artifact. The symbolic and political boundary processes marking out East and West, however, possess not only long histories but durable afterlives, as recent events (from the financial crisis to the emergence of the Balkan “migration” corridor) demonstrate. In refocusing our gaze on the construction of the East in European cultural politics, Ballinger does not advocate merely adopting earlier perspectives on Orientalism (or Balkanism). Rather, she forges productive dialogue between what have remained largely separate bodies of literature on regionally specific variants of easternism while simultaneously drawing upon recent work (such as Sarah Green’s tidemark notion) ¹⁶ dedicated to rethinking polity borders and boundaries. In doing so, she makes the case for the continued power of the periphery concept (as opposed to margin or edge), which retains its prominence 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—shaping the landscape of contemporary Europe.

Whereas much (though not all) of the language of periphery emphasizes the deficits of those places opposed to centres and cores, Kølvraa instead examines the institutional fashioning of peripheries through the politics of attraction. In “Limits of Attraction: The EU’s Eastern Border and the European Neighborhood Policy,” Kølvraa explores the desires instantiated by the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP). Launched in 2002–2003, the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) was reworked in 2009 to include a special focus on the (non-EU) Eastern European countries (the Eastern Partnership). Although presented as the EU’s response to Eastern neighbors’ desires for closer ties to the Union, the ENP ignored that such desires (if they even existed) centered on full EU membership, rather than mere neighborliness. Indeed, the EU’s insistence that the ENP entailed neither a promise of nor a definite ruling out of membership, meant that the policy trapped the eastern neighbors in a continuous state of ambivalent liminality. By examining the core documents of the ENP as well as the public discourses through which the neighborhood idea was presented and defended, Kølvraa argues that this ambiguity at the heart of the policy proves central to the ideas of European identity embedded within it. This version of European identity centers on the self-congratulatory idea of Europe as “the club everybody wants to join,” thereby imagining the non-European world in terms of its desire for Europe. In order to understand the identity-discourse embedded in the ENP, it is therefore necessary to think beyond the straightforward dynamics of Othering and exclusion.

The kinds of borders established in the ENP are more slippery and complex than those visualized as a simple exclusion of the non-European from the EUropean. In the case of Europe’s eastern peripheries, this does not entail a simple bordering of Europe as such but instead a distinction between those who were European (the EU) and those inscribed with a desire for becoming (fully) European (the neighbors). In this kind of European identity discourse, the fundamental ideological positioning of the East—in the form of the neighbors—is thus not simply as the Other (i.e., essentially and permanently not-Europe). Here, “becoming eastern”—the EU institutional expression of which is the inclusion in the ENP—means inscription with a desire to become western; to become more or fully EUropean. The East is defined not by its own position but by its desire for the privileged position of the articulating (EUropean) subject. To become Eastern is already to plot one’s Escape—to desire to become something else.

Finally, in “Nested Peripherialisation: Remaking the East–West border in the Russian–Estonian Borderland,” Pfoser traces the interplay of attraction and aversion across the old border between Russia and Estonia, a border now overlaid with a new EU–non-EU division. The Russian–Estonian borderland has frequently been framed as a civilizational divide between East and West. After 1991, Estonia’s “return to Europe” and its distancing from the Russian–Soviet past pushed the border of the West further eastwards. Analyzing how metageographical categories like “Europe,” “West,” and “East” and underlying hierarchical understandings in space are appropriated in everyday narratives, Pfoser introduces an action-oriented approach to the East–West border that simultaneously builds upon and takes in new directions older debates about nested identities within the region. Pfoser’s perspective emphasizes what people do with borders, such as complaining, claiming benefits, or making status claims. Drawing on more than fifty narrative interviews in the border towns of Narva (Estonia) and Ivangorod (Russia), the article highlights three border narratives used to negotiate sociospatial change: the narrative of becoming peripheral or Eastern, the narrative of becoming “European,” and a narrative that contests the East–West hierarchy by associating the East and one’s own identity with positive qualities. Pfoser argues that on both sides of the border, the status as a “new periphery” does not create unity but rather results in parallel and competing projects of imagining space and constructing difference. This “nested peripherialisation” at Europe’s new margins reflects power relations and uneven local experiences of transformation.

This special forum aims, then, to reframe the terms of the debate and move a topic—Europe’s eastern peripheries—back to the center of the scholarly agenda.