Narratives of European Identity and the Making of the Other

8/6/2019 Narratives of European Identity and the Making of the Other

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3rd ECPR Graduate Conference

Section 2 Panel 53 Comparative Regional IntegrationID 728

Narratives of European Identity and the Making of the OtherInside the European Union

The Eastern European as Alterity

Emanuel Crudu

[email protected]

IMT Advanced Studies Institute, Lucca, Italy

Ph.D. Candidate in Political Systems and Institutional Change

A listener calls up 'Armenian Radio' with a question: 'Is it possible', he asks, 'to foretell the future?'

Answer: 'Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: thatkeeps changing'.

1

The use of "the East" as the other is a general practice in European identity formation. "The East" isindeed Europe's other, and it is continuously being recycled in order to represent European identities.

Since the "Eastern absence" is a defining trait of "European" identities, there is no use talking about the

end of an East/West divide in European history after the end of the Cold War. The question is not

whetherthe East will be used in the forging of new European identities but how this is being done.

Iver Neumann2

A friend of mine . . . once said that an author coming from Central and Eastern Europe to the West willfind an ideal literary situation there. He can narrate fantastic stories about his country, about his part of

the continent, can sell them as nothing but the truth and can then retire comfortably because his stories

will never be verified. This is possible, on the one hand, because the public thinks that just about

anything could indeed happen here; on the other hand, because these countries remind the West moreof literary fiction than of actually existing states.

Andrzej Stasiuk3

1 The joke is quoted by Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945, (London: The Penguin Press, 2005), 830.2 Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other. The East in European Identity Formation, (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1999) 207.3 Andrzej Stasiuk, Wild, Cunning, Exotic: The East Will Completely Shake Up Europe, in Daniel Levy, Max Pensky,

and John Torpey (eds.), Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War, (London:

Verso, 2005), 104.


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Twenty years have passed since the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe. Usually

when the passed time is expressed in round numbers there is a boom in commemorations,

monuments and memorials, art works and public conferences. It is not necessarily the same case in

terms of public debates, political usage of remembrance, reconciliation, restitution or disclosure in

most post-communist states and in Western Europe as well. This paper is rather a circumstantially

elaborated attempt to confront some simple questions of memory from within the context of

enlarged European Union but from the perspective of an Eastern European. It is not a paper on the

past or historicity but rather an inquiry into the ways the past is acknowledged or ignored in

connection to the present. Writing this paper in Italy and reading Maria Todorovas book about

Imagining the Balkans4 made me reflect similar as she did in the opening of her book that

maybe if I would have written it at home it would have been about the Romanians othering EU and

othering themselves from EU. But being in Italy and previously attending a conference in Germany

about remembrance connected to the 1989 revolutions it suddenly came as a challenge to go deeper

into a subject that seemed to me to be approached in Europe in a divided manner. On one side, from

a Western Europeans perspective, if I am to use the East-West slope stereotypes, the last 20 years

are a pretext for not cozy commemoration of unclear circumstances in 1989 that have anyway to be

integrated as European in their victory and non-European in their past. On the other side, from an

Eastern European perspective, emerges an embarrassing confusion on a multitude of not yet clear

events that leads to discursive avoidance of remembrance (sometimes politically correct sometimes

not: see Timothy Garton Ash5) in favor of simply commemorative discourses joined by an exotic

feeling of being somehow different and particular in the actual context of Europe. Both of these

very different approaches and the feelings involved in each incited my interest. Still, this paper is

limited by being at the same time just the beginning of my explicit reflection on the topic and the

result of limited readings from a wide variety of books that might give a better account than what I

manage to do here. It intends anyway within these acknowledged limitations to approach

critically some features of the Western European identity narrative and to follow some traces that

indicate its othering manifestations regarding Eastern Europe. Yet, by doing so, I subscribe to

Merje Kuuss statement that to criticize this narrative is not to deny the need to harmonize the

applicant states policies with those of the EU and NATO. It is rather to problematize the hierarchy

4 Maria Todorova,Imagining the Balkans, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).5 Timothy Garton Ash, Trials, Purges and History Lessons: Treating a Difficult Past in Post-Communist Europe in

Jan-Werner Muller (ed.),Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),

265-282, 282.


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of places that is implicit in the narrative. This hierarchy views difference in terms of essential core

features of places rather than in terms of specific historical circumstances.6

Since memory and remembrance are more about identity than about outcomes of

institutional politics or realist history my starting point is the inquiry about perceived gaps in the so

called European identity and discontinuities involved in approaching the past in the reunified

Europe. Although is institutionally integrative, EU has no assertive position towards acknowledging

the past of new post-communist members but rather chooses to develop in parallel a European

identitarian emphasis and a process of othering. The terms of discussing European identity are

mainly configured by the post-Second World War standards and narratives which are not always

inclusive towards historical trajectories of the new members. The Cold War and post-Cold War

memories of post-communist nations are most of the time considered to be marginal or too

complicated for the integrative identitarian project financed by EU. Though a tremendous literature

on post-communism was written, just rarely it is attached to the emancipating project of European

identity building other than as an independent variable for its underdevelopment. Must the past of

these new members be acknowledged in the EU identitarian project or must the terms of

compliance shape also the imaginary of people from these countries? Does the EU develop

conditionality requirements for historical amnesia? Is European identity inclusive or club based

exclusive? These are important questions since, as Tony Judt says, the communist experience did

not come from nowhere, did not disappear without leaving a certain record, and cannot be written

out of the local past, as it had earlier sought to extrude from that past those elements prejudicial to

its own projects7.

One of the main questions that absorbs an increasing amount of energy is whose identity is

in fact European identity, assuming there is one. Another question is how Europe became so

quickly integrative after such a long history that found a first fragile unity only in front of common

non-European threats and then a profound unity in division during the Cold War. Is it still true

that the only unity Europe has is a unity in diversity or is there something more as some (i.e.

Gadamer, Habermas) argue? Edgar Morin (1987) was profoundly right describing Europe

historically as a self-organizing vertigo. But that was an outcome of his concern with complexity

paradigms. This vertigo continues today but enchanted by more beautiful words of an invoked unity

that historically is not fully acknowledged and culturally even more precarious. Yet hard efforts are

made in this direction. An institutional approach can fruitfully explain the EU model of framing,

6 Merje Kuus, Geopolitics Reframed. Security and Identity in Europes Eastern Enlargement(New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 2007), 29.7 Tony Judt, The Past is Another Country. Myth and Memory in Post-War Europe, in Jan-Werner Muller (ed.),

Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, 157-183, 175.


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enlargement and integration. But still does not explain why EU is focused on such a deep search of

a common identity and to what extent such an identity if it doesnt treat the memories of nations

within seriously integrates, includes or assimilates or even remains blind. European identity

making creates and reproduces through daily practices an internal alterity while enlargement risks

to make the process of othering constitutive to most of European identitarian endeavours if they are

approached uncritically. The discourse and the construction of interests and identities within the EU

constitutive process of othering in both internal and foreign manifestations significantly impacts the

potential formation of a cohesive European demos, the nature of polities in the European Union and

challenges the validity claims of normative statements within the EUs logic of appropriateness.

Thus, in a reshaped paraphrase, a new spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of the other.

The departure point of this paper is the explicit assumption that identities are dynamic social

constructs rather then substantive ontological pre-givens. If a European imaginary is shaping a

European community in Benedict Andersons (1991) understanding of imagined communities,

than multiple identifications should be possible in an inclusive logic. Yet, inside recent Europe, a

logic of appropriation functions in conjunction with an exclusivist/exclusive/marginalizing logic of

preset imperatives of integration under the domain of EUs acquis historique communautaire8

and

the politics of the fait historique accompli. Frank Schimmelfennig (2003) has convincingly shown

that EU takes the features of a rather exclusive club when its about to pay the price for its

collective identity in terms of facilitating a beneficial integration to new members. This paper

therefore seeks to examine how to situate the project of European integration and its impact on the

ways the meaning of Europe has been constructed in recent decades in the wider analysis of

alterity making. Its central point is to tackle the reasons for EUs failure to acknowledge the whole

of its territory in identitarian terms. In methodological terms, the present study accommodates

within the wide area of European enlargement studies with a constructivist emphasis on the

European identity formation and its role in shaping a particular European polity.

A paradoxical political identity gradually puts emphasis on the fragility of European

integration (Wver, 1990). The fluidity of borders and internal diversity creates constitutive others.

While a constant emphasis was put on the bordering effect of alterity making (Neumann 1996b,

1998, 1999; Melegh 2006; Cerutti 2008; Kuus 2007, 2004) little or no emphasis was given to

internal processes of othering. This paper aims at filling this gap by approaching frontally the

national and trans-national internal European processes of alterity making. Since a common market

is not a way of living together, diverse nations of Europe pass within the transnational identity

8 About the existence of an acquis historique communautaire see Fabrice Larat, Present-ing the Past: Political

Narratives on European History and the Justification of EU Integration, German Law Journal, 6, February 2005, pp.

273-290, pp. 287-289.


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making through self-othering stages while a significant number of new-members are saluted alterity

in the enlarged Europe. European identity takes shape through an internal dynamic of

dichotomization and complementarization (Eriksen, 1995). It asserts the core/periphery nexus by

absorbing the desirable as commonality and marginalizing the different as unaligned. While an

identity based explanation is better able to account for the enlargement decision itself than

conventional theories of integration (Schimmelfennig, 2003; Sedelmeier, 2005) we can infer more

about the substance of European identity only if we get to know more about the Europes and

European others (Neumann, 1999). In the context of this analysis, the EU membership status is

essential in that it influences the very way in which diverse actors see themselves and are seen by

other as social beings (Risse, 2009). Acknowledging the existence of the internal others is essential

since it indicates the context-dependent formation of a European identity and in the meantime

dramatically limits the reifying tendencies of essentialist or primordialist understandings of it. This

is because identitarian narratives not only describe but also produce identities (Campbell, 1992;

Paasi, 1996) as collective rationalizations of social relations (Eder, 2009). Anna Triandafyllidou

(2001) has extensively showed how national identities are reconsidered and the ways in which the

images of Self and Other are transformed in the emerging new Europe. The European enlargement

determined the increase of narratives mediating social relations and thus the formation of multiple

non-congruent networks of social relations that generated a profound diversity of identity building

patterns. Since the time of the Enlightenment successive European orders have been characterized

by a clear hierarchy. Western Europe constituted the core, whereas otherEuropes (the East, the

South, and the far North) were viewed as somehow less important, less civilized, less European.

As Larry Wolff (1994) showed in his fascinating book on Inventing Eastern Europe, we can trace

the Western view on Europe as a division in two distinct civilizational entities back in the

intellectual agenda of the 18th

century. Eastern Europe is thus, in Wolffs account, a cultural

construction invented by the Enlightenment intelligentsia out of ideological self-interests and self-

promotion. This construction inflicted however long-lasting mental mappings that continue to

configure prejudicial quasi-ontological views of the West towards the East. Today, the invention of

overarching regions raises the question of whether this hierarchy is fading away, making it possible

to introduce other Europes equal to the old core.

I believe that the idea of a common European identity after recent enlargements or future

ones risks to be constructed on a memory kitsch. Whether inside or outside the European Union,

post-communist national identities were and still are very troubled ones emerging from confused

memories. Also in terms of supra-national identities, the cultural concepts of South-Eastern Europe,

Central Europe, transition societies, developing democracies and many others connected to the


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region emerged mainly in an axiological identification through separation with Russia perceived

unjustly as the evil other, as everything that is opposed to Western Europe, as a different civilization

(Neumann, 1996a, 1996b) challenging progress and modernization. The newly developed concepts

made the relation between Eastern and Western Europe more complicated on one side by placing

Eastern and Central European national identities on a singular common European cultural whole or,

on the other side, asserting the desirable character of Western modernization and development. This

second choice generated imperatives for emancipation, accession, compliance that curiously were

perceived as the legitimate return to Europe. This return was institutionally endorsed first by

NATO and then by EU enlargement: first geopolitics and security, and then, economics and

regional stability scenarios. But where does the European identity fit in here? Little more than

twenty years ago Western scholars had no ability to predict the end of the Cold War and since than

on they show little ability to understand or deal with its outcomes. As Checkel and Katzenstein

expressed it, almost everyone was taken by surprise at how the return of Eastern Europe was

profoundly and irrevocably changing European identity politics.9

A very often used independent variable for explaining the existence of a European identity is

the common historical European playground, a common culture that can be traced back to ancient

times that framed, of course, its current beauty as a condition of possibility. Let me take just one

illustrative example. In 2002 Anthony Pagden (2002) started his introduction to The Idea of Europe.

From Antiquity to the European Union, an ambitious and valuable book that he edited, as follows:

Today, as the older territorial and national boundaries of the world become increasingly uncertain,

the quest for national and transnational identity has intensified.10

Such statements are taken for

granted quasi-everywhere in optimistic cultural approaches of Europe and in political discourses

about Europe today. Yet, it is not always obvious and even less clear how come suddenly the

national boundaries are becoming now more uncertain than they were during the whole modern

process of nation-building in Europe. And where can we concretely detect the intensified quest for a

transnational identity cited by Pagden other than in scholarly works, political statements and EU or

other multi/transnational financed projects ? And, if it truly is so, why does it have to be understood

as a EU-making process rather than as consequences of globalization? Yet, later in his Introduction

to the volume, after arguing for the contested historical unity of Europe, Pagden presents many of

the essay authors inside the book as being hopeful about the possibilities of a new and happier

European future11

. Why a new and why a happier Europe after surveying in a book on Europe all

9 Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein (eds.),European Identity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2009), xi.10 Anthony Pagden, Introduction, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European

Union, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1-32, 1.11

Ibid, 2.


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its glorious ideas from ancient Greece to EU? Probably because many cultural historians may forget

in the optimistic struggle for meaning that the political promises of happiness proved to be

dangerous in modern ideological politics. And if we have to talk about a new Europe it means it

will be a produced/invented one and that, for such a thing, it might need an imaginary that it

currently does not possess. But Pagdens history of Europe is rather a cultural, deliberately

exclusive history of Western European thinkers chosen mostly to serve the purpose of making a

point. Established on idealist tracks of readings from Kants cosmopolitan views, Pagdens

approach of a common European cultural unity shaped by history strikes us again by the conclusion

it reaches: To create a genuinely transnational identity, a genuinely European culture, means

blending the features of existing European cultures into a new whole.12

While many historians

hardly tried before to convince us that a common European identity is there built on historicity,

now, the existing historically-shaped European identity must be created and even more curiously

created as genuine through a culinary process of blending various tastes in a good meal. It

might be that Europe is a more complicated kitchen and such unhappy metaphors are unfortunately

too easily and too often used throughout historical accounts in addressing current European issues.

Pagden goes further by asserting that we have to shape this European identity looking at it from

Japan:

Viewed from Europe there may be no such thing as a European culture. Viewed from

Japan there clearly is. What the new Europe must generate is a sense of belonging that

retains the Japanese eye-view, a sense of belonging that can perceive diversity while giving

allegiance to that which is shared.13

I guess EU should involve Japanese researchers in framing an European identity. Yet,

following Pagdens chapter onEurope: Conceptualising a Continent, some approaches might look

just as far and objectively distant as Japan in their view-point towards the real Europe. And the

outside look on Europe that Pagden invokes is constitutive to European constant creation of

others: no need to go outside Europe for finding outsiders! I believe that Pagdens invocation ofJapan is representative of the substantialist view on the European core that can be perceived only

from the view-point of the core of a competing identity and not from peripheries within or

outside(terms used not necessarily in Wallersteins manner). But in many books on European

history the process of othering is an unintentional reflex that only indicates the mentioned spectre of

the other in Europe. Yet, by all said above nothing diminishes Pagdens virtues as an excellent

historian.

12Ibid, 23.13

Ibid, 24.


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In reality however, I stay in line with those that argue that Eastern and Central European

countries lived their own separate self-organizing historical vertigo. As Attila Agh elaborates, the

West

almost always dominated their neighbours to the East which by the twentieth century were

generally very small and, at most, semi-developed countries. Furthermore, these small

countries (although many of them were packed into the Habsburg empire for several

centuries) suffered from the pressures of Western modernised and industrialised states on one

side and the Eastern empires (Russian and Ottoman) on the other. They have been swinging

through history between long waves of Westernisation and Easternisation. After the last five

decades of Easternisation, there appears once more to be a fundamental turn in the other

direction and so their Westernisation begins again14

.

The period before the Second World War, the war itself and post-1945 memories of Westernbetrayal of the East were covered by selective sentimentality, transformative amnesia, and a

pathos for cultural invention of a genuine unity. No responsibilities for political abandonment have

been addressed. And there will be none since these states are on a functional path of achieving

through conditionality the great historical aim of emancipation and of a new alignment. Getting

there will make the new Europeans become truly Europeans. But the vertigo societies of Eastern

Europe are confused once again in their search for local, national, regional and European identities.

They are treated as a unit only when dysfunctions are explained, otherwise the engagement for EU

integration was rather centripetal, a competition for accession among them that fragmented the

region once more. Central and South-Eastern European nations had to pursue the goal of

emancipation extremely fast as if it were a school task. Transition and democratization studies

regarding post-communist societies scholarly show tremendous enthusiasm in pursuing such aims

as there were causal chains to be followed. Yet, a simple insertion inside the post-communist realm

will show otherwise. A deficit of history, memory, disclosure, and of understanding of past are in

place and affirm resistance to fast aimed targeted goals of EU identitarian integration. After all it is

hard to wish to become when you dont really know who you are while living in historical apathy.

On the other side, Western superficiality in addressing recent history of these countries exposed the

EU to policy confusions and sometimes it seemed that the EU has serious troubles in dealing with

its new citizens. These troubles generate the path of creating the other, the alterity inside EU.

The European Union produced the new Europeans and for simplicity tries to greet it with

identity. By doing so it also produced two categories of the other: the external and the internal. The

external ones are complex and geopolitical: the unilateral hegemonic American, the falsely

14 Quoted by Iver B. Neumann, Europes Post-Cold War Memory of Russia: cui bono?, in Jan-Werner Muller (ed.),

Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, 121-136, 122.


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mythologized undesirable Russian, the concerning Turkish (Neumann, 1999), the troubling post-

colonial, the post-Yugoslav, the cheap efficient Chinese, Pakistani or Indian, the fast spreading

Muslim, etc. The internal ones are even more troubling since they can be integrated in an imagined

form of unity and in an historical inheritance but in the meantime escapes it: namely here the

Central and Eastern European. This internal one is both familiar and foreign but brings a luggage of

commonality with him at all time: its the same as another. He is the unplanned child of new

Europe: he brings joy to the parents but restricts the budget and challenges predictions. Even if

Europe is about free mobility and movement this new inside other remains still an immigrant in

most of EU Western countries. As Adrian Favell puts it:

An evaluation of the future of this new European migration system, then, needs to stress

both dimensions of the Europe it is building. Yes, the integrating Europe of mobility

promised by demographers and economists is happening. But the system they are moving

into is more often than not a system based on a dual labour market in which East Europeans

will take the secondary, temporary, flexible roles based on their exploitability in terms of cost

and human capital premium. Europe thus comes to resemble the USMexico model: where

EastWest movers do the 3D15

jobs or hit glass ceilings, and where underlying ethnic

distinctions between East and West are unlikely to disappear. In a sense, this mode of

inclusion continues the iniquitous longerstanding historical relationship between East and

West ... Eastern Europeans will get to move, and they will learn the hard way that the West

only wants them to do jobs that Westerners no longer want. The danger, in short, is they will

become a new Victorian service class for a West European aristocracy of university educated

working mums and creative class professionals, who need someone to help them lead their

dream lives16

.

An interesting division between the self-perception of Europe and of the inner other was

inserted in 2003 by the Habermas/Derrida intellectual statement in their attempt to respond to

Donald Rumsfeld17

. Acknowledging in 2003 the support of the new Europe (meaning Central and

Eastern Europe) for the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld opposed it to the old Europe as a counterbalance of

Western European opposition for the war. This led Habermas in a quick reply (Derrida just signed

the article) to refer in essentialist terms to the core Europe that should define the European moral

perspective on the war in Iraq. For Habermas it is France and Germany or the Old Europe/Core

Europe that are supposed to define the counterbalance to the US unilateralism. Nevertheless,

despite the international politics statement, Habermas managed to make explicit a cleavage that

15 3D is for dirty, dangerous, and dull16 Adrian Favell, Immigration, Migration and Free Movement in the Making of Europe, in Jeffrey T. Checkel andPeter J. Katzenstein (eds.),European Identity, 167-189, 184-185.17 Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derida, February 15, Or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common

Foreign Policy, Beggining in the Core of Europe, Constellations, 10 (3), 2003, pp. 291 297.


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usually is kept hidden in approaching Europe: when its about the political identity of the EU, it is

the core that should matter as a reflection of a European attitude and not the new Europe. One

of the many answers to such statements is that of the famous Hungarian writer Peter Esterhazy:

Once I was an Eastern European; then I was promoted to the rank of Central

EuropeanThen a few months ago, I became a New European. But before I had the chance

to get used to this status even before I could have refused it I have now become a non-

core European. While I see no serious reason for not translating this new division (core/non-

core) with the terms first class and second-class, still, Id rather not speak in that habitual

Eastern European, forever insulted way18

.

The former French President Jacques Chirac deepened Rumsfelds claims by stating that EU

candidate states are in a position to choose between Brussels and Washington when they take

positions on foreign policy matters. Such events shows Christopher J. Bickerton - augured badly,

suggesting that once the EUs membership had grown to 25, it would be impossible for the

continent to achieve any geopolitical unity19

.

Attila Melegh (2006) wrote a convincing book on the complexities of the processes of

othering inside Europe and especially in regard to Central and Eastern Europe. He sees an East-

West slope connected with a liberal utopia (in Karl Mannheims interpretation of this term) that

links the frame of the process of othering in colonial and post-colonial Western discourse with a

process of othering produced inside EU concomitantly with the enlargement towards the East.The East-West civilizational slope is, for Melegh, historically established and has been

biopolitically (in Foucaults meaning) visible since 18th

century. The EU enlargement is just another

form of othering Central and Eastern Europe both from the West but as well from the East as an

internal reaction towards the Western patronizing attitude. For Melegh this is a sociologically

visible phenomenon that does not have to be transformed in normative statements but more

profoundly analyzed since this slope shows significant tendencies to resist in the forthcoming times.

In a book about What Holds Europe Together? aimed at answering Romano Prodi request

for finding the roots of solidarity that can strengthen Europe in the future, Janos Matyas Kovacs,

referring to the narratives of enlargement states that:

18 Quoted by Holly Case, Being European: East and West, in Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein (eds.),European Identity, 111-131, 112-113.19 Christopher J. Bickerton, A Union of Disenchantment: The New Politics of Post-Enlargement Europe, in Yannis

Stivachtis (ed.), The State of European Integration, (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 89-110, 91.


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Nonetheless, scattered references to the overambitious demands of the Easterners, as well as

to their poor performance, bad habits, etc., remained an indispensable component of even the

friendliest Western narratives.20

Elaborating on the concept of solidarity, Matyas Kovacs (2006) shows even a division in

understanding the term itself in Western and Eastern Europe since in an Eastern European

understanding of solidarity one cannot include the element of self-interest or mutual dependency

that are essential to the Western European understanding of it. Solidarity, as understood in most

Eastern European countries, is a form of moral unselfish gratification that involves sacrifice and

uninterested care for the other. Such an Eastern European understanding of solidarity excludes the

solidarity with a stronger or more powerful other and inserts therefore once more a cleavage inside

a potential EU perception of a united community. This gap in understanding solidarity can be easily

perceived in the commonality of asserting the idea of an existing solidarity of the West with the

poor East simultaneously with a strong opposition in Western Europe towards redistribution of

their wealth involved by the enlargement. There were no solidarity based approaches in the

bureaucratic enlargement procedures EU applied from Brussels for the East as Kovacs argues

but rather a rigorous calculus of costs-benefits and a rhetoric of indifference asserting the free basis

of accession and the will of the Eastern European countries to join as essential reasons for an

institutional expansion of EU. I believe that Saint Simon would be sad and unemployed now in

Brussels among his fellows experts. As Jacques Rupnik puts it:

The enlargement to the East is a case of asymmetrical integration. The asymmetry has

facilitated the transfer of norms and institutional convergence, but not a commensurate

transfer of resources. In this the EUs function of regulation takes precedence over the

function of redistribution. Yet the regulatory function is likely to be accepted as legitimate by

the newcomers from Central and Eastern Europe if it remains to some extent related to

redistribution. Otherwise, cynics may be tempted to conclude that this is a case of the less

there is to distribute, the more there is to regulate.21

Though the otherness or alterity of the new EU members, of Russia, or of Orients in

their cultural or geographic understandings is perceived as a periphery problem in the emancipator

dominant narratives inside the EU, I believe that it will strongly shake its foundations in the

upcoming future and will ask for a re-negotiation that will bring EU to one of its most initial

statuses: the one of a conflict resolution tool. As a denominator for a periphery European I

20 Janos Matyas Kovacs, Between Resentment and Indifference. Narratives of Solidarity in the Enlarging Union, in

Krzysztof Michalski (ed.), What Holds Europe Together ?, (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press,2006), 54-85, 58.21 Jacques Rupnik, The European Unions Enlargement to the East and European Soldarity, in Krzysztof Michalski

(ed.), What Holds Europe Together ?, 86-92, 88.


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subscribe to Alexei Millers next statement formulated from a Russian perspective but applicable I

believe to all others:

It is indeed impossible to define, once and for all, what European culture is. However it is

possible (and necessary) to pinpoint those elements of the European cultural tradition that

should be perceived as potential sources of danger. One of these features, for example, is the

drive for domination, deeply imbedded in the European tradition. When, as now, the enlarged

and, hopefully, stronger EU strives to obtain new power for political action, this danger

should be remembered.If we say that it is a common European culture that must provide

new energies for cohesion and the shaping of a common political identity, we must admit

that, as with any enterprise of identity formation, this one must inevitably involve the

practices of othering in shaping a we. European culture has a centuries-old tradition of

using different others for identity formation. The effort to mobilize culture as an

instrument for cohesion and unity should begin, not with the construction of a European myth

(which is well under way) and practices of othering, but with such values as compassion, self-

restraint and recognition, not only of diversity, but also of conflicts in cultural heritage and

values. We should remember that when a system of values or a culture are impossible to

define, when they are open, they are also open to diverse manipulations, particularly on the

part of those who are engaged in cultural production and equipped for such manipulations.

For this reason, I continue to have greater confidence in material interests and in practical

politics, where people are more subject to verification and responsibility

22

.Merje Kuus (2007) sees, despite the rhetorical claimed unity, a geopolitical continuity and

reproduction of the division between East and West. The narrative of the insecure Eastern Europe

both for inside Europe and for external (Oriental!?) challenges persists after the end of the Cold

War. The double enlargement is not undermining but working in tandem with the notion of a

multitiered Europe in which Europeanness declines as one moves east.23

Originated in the 18th

century, the East/West slope was profoundly different from the ancient-long otherness of the Orient:

Eastern Europe became an entity of negative connotations inside Europe as an internal alterity.

This figure of Eastern Europe Kuss says has undergone a number of transformations since its

inception, but its premise of otherness has persisted.24

The post-Cold War understanding of

Eastern Europe is, for Kuus, nothing else but a continuation of the established model by the area

studies and Sovietology during the Cold War that treated Russia, the Soviet republics and satellite

states as a bloc. In 1997, Adam Burgess was already showing that the sense of profound difference

between East and West has, if anything, intensified with the end of the political division of Europe

22 Alexei Miller, European Culture, an Ambivalent Heritage, in Krzysztof Michalski (ed.), What Holds EuropeTogether ?, 165-166, 165-166.23 Merje Kuus, Geopolitics Reframed. Security and Identity in Europes Eastern Enlargement, 22.24

Idem.


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between communist and capitalist blocs.25

After the Cold War, transitology was nothing else than a

modernization theory that emerged from the reflexes of the now obsolete Sovietology of the Cold

War. Institutionally, transitology was tied to many of the same political and intelligence

organizations that had managed the Cold War26

.

In a neoliberal fashion, most Western researchers acknowledged the specificity of Eastern-

Central Europe in terms similar to those used to refer in approaching the Third World as a

problematic target for moderate messianic aid. Since during the Cold War Central and Eastern

Europe were hardly considered to be identitarian part of Europe, after 1990 the concept of Europe

re-entered into an open debate which brought to the floor the conception of Europeaness. This led to

the normative idea that what is European is good and whatever is good is European27

. The newly

integrative approach of an altruistic emancipating modernization theory generously delivered by

most researchers from the West suffers from Platos didactical influence. After almost half of a

century of forgetting the ideal prototype of good polity due to historical estrangement from the

model/Idea/rational politics, Central and Eastern Europe can be taken out from the cave/curtain

and coached to achieve, through a process ofanamnesis (simultaneously conditioned by an instant

amnesia on recent history), the validity of a Western shaped democracy. The cave men can finally

be taken to see the light of reason but, as in Platos phaideic project, this is not going to be an easy

task: it requires a strong will and determination for the subject to become what is ought28

.

Europeanization says Kuus is conceived as a kind of graduation from Eastern Europe to

Europe proper, a process in which the accession countries must prove that they are willing and

able to internalize Western norms.29

In this process, to return to Platos ironically invoked

framework of thought, what matters is recognizing the prototype, the models, and by doing that they

will easily surpass the shadows inflicted in memory by the imperfect too imperfect copies in the

recent history of these nations. The perpetuation of the Cold War logic of arguments appears

astonishing in Eastern othering. As Popper (1957) outlines it in his famous bookThe Open Society

and its Enemies, Platos model was born in his historicist anger at democracy. It is possible that the

European model will emerge once again after the 90s in a frustrating anger on history.

Essentialist views of Europe may legitimize otherness in a similar fashion to Platos times. And this

may be a trajectory that should be strongly questioned since even if Europe is not perfect it doesnt

mean it cannot get worst. Just as Platos antidemocratic views exercised a tremendous seduction

25 Adam Burgess,Divided Europe: the New Domination of the East, (Chicago Illinois: Pluto Press, 1997), 2.26 Merje Kuus, Geopolitics Reframed. Security and Identity in Europes Eastern Enlargement, 24.27Ibid, 27.28Iver Neumann sees this pedagogical task as being attached more to the versions of Enlightenment. See Iver B.Neumann, Uses of the Other. The East in European Identity Formation, 110.29

Merje Kuus, Geopolitics Reframed. Security and Identity in Europes Eastern Enlargement, 28.


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over the most democratic minds, the contemporary Europeanization approaches are sometimes

seductive for intelligent people even when they are subversive for their own promoters. In the

meantime, the historicist path of building Europe in an energetic Western perspective can be easily

blurred by an emerging othering of the Easterners themselves as well. Because, to palimpsest

Tony Judt, Western Europe is already afloat in a sea of mis-memories about its own pre-1989

attitude towards communism. Whatever they now say, the architects and advocates of a unified

Europe `a la Maastricht never wanted to include a whole group of have-not nations from the east;

they had yet fully to digest and integrate an earlier Mediterranean assortment. Furthermore, the

history and memory of western political and cultural attitudes towards the east is an embarrassing

one and if the west forgets its own immediate past, the east will not since at a time when Euro-

chat has turned to the happy topic of disappearing customs barriers and single currencies, the

frontiers of memory remain solidly in place in Eastern European memory, where the wheel of

history has all too often been turned by outsiders.30

Natasa Kovacevic (2008) argues even more forcefully in her book Narrating

Post/Communism that during the Cold War, Western Europe constructed its European identity

through a demonization of Eastern Europe and of its communist regimes within. She argues that

after the Cold War, Western Europe suppressed completely the legacies and histories of the Eastern

European countries in order to justify the transition to liberal democracy and to perpetuate their

dependency on the West31. For Kovacevic, a double Orientalization of Eastern Europe emerged: an

external one coming from the West and a self-Orientalization of Eastern Europe coming from the

narratives of anti-communist dissidents of the region in their will to represent themselves as

emancipated, westernized, enlightened experts of the East. The conditional inclusion/exclusion

dialectic involved in the understanding of the EU common future makes for Kovacevic the

dialogue between Western and Eastern Europe impossible. She sees the West-East relationship as a

colonial or proto-colonial attitude, moving in a direction rejected by Maria Todorova (2009). Since

Todorova argued against a projection of colonial approaches on Eastern Europe, Kovacevic sees in

this nothing else than another biased perception of Western Europe as axiological civilized and

legitimate in mastering Eastern Europe. Kovacevics approach is much closer to Etienne Balibars

(2004) leftist view and to a more artificial line of argumentation, in my view in seeing a colonial

attitude in the idea that the patronizing Western behaviour cannot be separated from the subsequent

idea of a potential conquest. In my own view, this may unnecessarily complicate the understanding

30 Tony Judt, The Past is Another Country. Myth and Memory in Post-War Europe, in Jan-Werner Muller (ed.),Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, 157-183, 180-183.31 Natasa Kovacevic,Narrating Post/Communism. Colonial Discourse and Europes Borderline Civilization, (London

and New York, Routledge, 2008), 1-3.


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of whats happening now and might bring us back on one side to a required comparative

framework towards Habsburg, Ottoman and Soviet masteries in the region and on another side

to an excessively and dramatically elaborated language in analyzing otherness through an

expansion to endogenous factors. Though her analysis of post-colonial textual manifestation is

valuable, it might be too much to generalize from particular colonial narratives to a general

attitude(though I must say some particular examples are convincing). Kovacevics focus on

cultural/literary texts and images is understood as a valid tool for analyzing collective anxieties and

identity crises. But, we must say that most literary texts or particular cultural manifestations

acknowledge especially exceptional and/or limit experiences. Thus they should be perceived rather

as indicators and not explanatory tools since a control group would need to be included. Her

emphasis on the total rejection of the communist past without historical recognition of specific (non

refutable based on ideologies) modernizing projects may be a good point to make and deserves

further elaborated research. Still, her biographical fight is mainly with the end of history that

anyway we all now either failed to acknowledge or never happened. As Kuus (2004) showed, the

East/West slope does not necessarily operate in clear geographical terms but rather in valorised

terms of degrees of Europeaness, Eastness, developed - not yet developed, mature-immature,

secure-less secure, etc. Even more, this axiological scheme is broken by divisions inside Eastern

Europe itself where the geometrically variable concept of Central Europe became indeed close-

hearted to Western Europe and provided some pain in the Eastern excluded part. Milan Kundera

(1984) is famous for his apology of the Western character of Central Europe. Still this achieved

nothing but making the scale of Europeaness even more elaborate. Eastness is still European

identity under construction but not quite a domain for colonization. We might want to avoid using

a colonial vocabulary for understanding whats actually going on. The process of othering doesnt

have to be a process of alien-ing. I therefore agree with Cerutti that whatever may happen now,

the emergence of a European self-identification process depends on future political developments

much more than on cultural pre-givens.32

The problematic dimension in framing a European identity as a practical tool for cohesion,

solidarity and would-be policies is if its formation is dialogical or will consist purely in

submission of the other. Though an illustration of a historically contingent idea of the self the

European citizen is anchored in a very discursive but yet not elaborated identity. One of the things

ignored in approaches of European identity is that individual or collective, historical or ah-hoc

identity always requires a subject. Of course now the question would be if there is a real subject for

32 Furio Cerutti, Why Political Identity and Legitimacy Matter in the European Union, in Furio Cerutti and Sonia

Lucarelli (eds), The Search for a European Identity. Values, Policies and Legitimacy of the European Union, (London

and New York: Routledge, 2008), 3-22, 7.


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a European identity? Though the qualitative approaches found difficult problems in observing a

European subject of identification, the quantitative ones locates such a subject by statistically

numbering inside opinion polls (of course through ignoring subjective reasons) how many prefer to

consider themselves Europeans before or above their national identity. Therefore it seems that the

only comfortable way of providing fundamentals for an existing European identity is mathematical

modelling and the belief that politics is mostly an outcome of political institutions. But when its

about European identity, statistics provoke just what Hannah Arendt (1958) called the communist

fiction:

The laws of statistics are valid only where large numbers or long periods are involved, and

acts or events can statistically appear only as deviations or fluctuations. The justification of

statistics is that deeds and events are rare occurrences in everyday life and in history. Yet the

meaningfulness of everyday relationships is disclosed not in everyday life but in rare deeds,

just as the significance of a historical period shows itself only in the few events that

illuminate it. The application of the law of large numbers and long periods to politics or

history signifies nothing less than the wilful obliteration of their very subject matter, and it is

a hopeless enterprise to search for meaning in politics or significance in history when

everything that is not everyday behaviour or automatic trends has been ruled out as

immaterial. However, since the laws of statistics are perfectly valid where we deal with large

numbers, it is obvious that every increase in population means an increased validity and a

marked decrease of "deviation." Politically, this means that the larger the population in any

given body politic, the more likely it will be the social rather than the political that constitutes

the public realm.33

In quantitative terms it is rather a challenge to measure a European identity. The main tools used in

EU over time to provide some measurements of identity were the Eurobarometer and the European Values

Study surveys. As Michael Bruter (2005, 101-103) emphasized, questions inside these surveys are highly

problematic in regard to respondents attachments to an invoked European identity. First, the questions in the

surveys design changed over time and identity measurements involved asserted arbitrary tensions between

national and European identities that are questionable in quantitative terms and trapped in language.

Secondly, the validity of these measurements is questionable because its unclear if they indicate identities

rather than preferences since it involves respondents in agreeing with a pregiven hierarchy. Thirdly, in

measuring identity a conceptual problem also emerges: the answers of respondents cannot be compared since

they do not all refer to a common definitional conception of identity. It is impossible to distinguish inside

these surveys whether respondents refer in their answers to a civic component of identity linked to EU or to a

cultural component that encompasses the idea of European shared culture, values and history.

33Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 42-43.


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Therefore, according to numbers and polls we can claim to have an already framed

European identity as an answer to predetermined questions. The operational concept of such a

perceived identity can work well in Brussels bureaucracy, however, it says little about perceptions

of people and is even less functional when dealing with ongoing problems inside EU. The

Romanian case in such polls is a good example: though the polls show a decrease in the pseudo-

enthusiasm that accompanied admission in the EU, most Romanians will answer that they strongly

feel attached to European values due to a historical form of national pride that resists to locating

Romania on the periphery of the European project. Yet reality shows meanwhile little knowledge

and awareness of Romanian people about what are those values and how they can be traced in a

historical continuity of the Romanians. The lack of political culture can produce statistically the

same results as in established democracies of the Western nations. Yet such an identitarian affinity

cannot be traced by a qualitative approach with the same results. A large part of Romanian

(especially the large rural part) still have no idea what EU is about, even after accession. As

Checkel and Katzenstein shows:

Yet, several analytic biases limit the ability of this scholarship to fully capture identity

dynamics in contemporary Europe. Substantively, it focuses too much on EU institutions.

Methodologically, it is hindered by excessive reliance on survey instruments such as the

Eurobarometer polls. To be sure, cross-national surveys and refinements to them are useful

for helping to understand basic distinctions in the political orientations of mass publics inEurope and toward the EU. But polls risk imposing a conceptual unity on extremely diverse

sets of political processes that mean different things in different contexts. Indeed, survey

questions may create the attitudes they report, since people wish to provide answers to

questions that are posed34

.

The end of the Cold War and the emergent trends might have happened too fast. Twenty

years passed so quickly, and the new post-communist states inside the EU and the EU itself are

confused identitarian entities. The memory kitsch is likely to be the result that nobody in Western

Europe believed that it will all happen so quickly though for Eastern Europe the process of EU

admission was mostly perceived as undignifiably slow. But, if institutional matters could have been

rushed by political and economical desiderates and circumstances, their political solidity and

legitimacy have to be strengthened through identitarian cohesion. Central and Eastern European

countries are perceived inside the EU as disciplined pupils available and ready to learn. As in any

classroom there are some more eager, some lazier, and some misbehaved, but in the long run

34 Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein, The Politicization of European Identities, in Jeffrey T. Checkel and

Peter J. Katzenstein (eds.),European Identity, 1-25, 10.


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through continued efforts and passing several tests, they all become part of a cohesive generation.

But sometimes within a history of education one has to account for what is actually taught.

Such cohesion requires a step back to the luggage of national memories through real

disclosures and revisiting the past or it can be puerile inventions based on instant amnesia. But

about the second choice I have strong doubts it will resist. Especially if the postmoderns are right

and a competition between multiple identities in fashion and choosing an unhistorical narrative are

available, the future will not be so different from the past: confusion is fun and, as long as it

produces welfare, European identity will seduce. But what about the structural inequalities in

Europe?

The new Europe, bound together by the signs and symbols of its terrible past, is a

remarkable accomplishment; but it remains forever mortgaged to that past. If Europeans are

to maintain this vital linkif Europe's past is to continue to furnish Europe's present with

admonitory meaning and moral purposethen it will have to be taught afresh with each

passing generation. 'European Union' may be a response to history, but it can never be a

substitute.35

After 1945 many nations had a lot to be silent about. However what they talked about

mattered and it gradually came out that what they didnt talked about mattered as well. Both

memory and amnesia are now attached to a certain image that European nations and Europe as a

union have on themselves. After 1989 things started looking as more of the same: civilized silenceseemed more sustainable in the process of evaluating Europeaness for the newcomers. For Tony

Judt, the unnatural and fundamentally false European identity is the result of the deliberate and

sudden unconcern with the immediate European past and its replacement by Euro-cant in its

various forms36

. By analyzing the EU institutional narratives, Fabrice Larat showed that within the

texts of the European treaties we can already find visible attempts to unify the historical roots of

integration in forms that promote an official historiography through which some aspects of the

European legacy are accepted and some are definitively rejected37

. To such a historiography Judt

reacts when he writes that the ways in which the official versions of the war and post-war era have

unraveled in recent years are indicative of unresolved problems for both western and eastern

Europe38

. In the period after 1945, as Judt argues, it was not only the division of Europe that

constituted the post-war trademark but it was also the period during which Europes post-war

35 Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945, 831.36 Tony Judt, The Past is Another Country. Myth and Memory in Post-War Europe, in Jan-Werner Muller (ed.),Memory

and Power in Post-War Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 157-183, p. 157.37 Fabrice Larat, Present-ing the Past: Political Narratives on European History and the Justification of EU

Integration, cit., p. 283.38

Tony Judt, The Past is Another Country. Myth and Memory in Post-War Europe, cit., p. 157.


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memory was molded39

. The wartime memory/amnesia nexus currency was constituted by the

simple but cynic logic of a self-indulging projection of the guilt and blame toward the Germans. By

using the logic of They did it! it naturally followed Were innocent. An instant amnesia

comfortably installed while the memories of complicity during the atrocious war all over Europe

were soon to be marginal for a continent engaged now in two radically different versions of

reconstruction that will remain as a scarf over two types of modernities: the Eastern and Western

ones. It was the myth of resistance that emerged instantly all over Europe to strengthen the selective

qualities of memory and thus to be innocent a nation had to have resisted, and to have done so in

its overwhelming majority, a claim that was perforce made and pedagogically enforced all over

Europe, from Italy to Poland, from the Netherlands to Romania40

. The widespread of such

official normative narratives as mnemonic loci were considered strategies to reinstall legitimacy

and to channel energies towards reconstruction.

After 1989 the Central and Eastern European countries followed a similar strategy while

Western Europe greeted them with the happy aura of the now self-discovered status of a Cold War

victor. Despite not being so keen as America on using and enjoying the statement We won the

Cold War, Europe has chosen amnesia once more: it was the Soviet Unions fault ergo we are

once again innocent. This amnesia however created some strong but confused feelings after 1989

of some sort of unity that will soon come to be covered through the rational-choice messianism of

conditionality as marking the functional and equal opportunity driven integration in the European

community of axiological choices. In identitarian terms, the individuals from the post-communist

countries were invited in a generous void: a ready shaped would be European identity with no real

interest but some very limited exotic curiosity for their past and an emancipatory narrative that

exposed them to the pedagogical task of learning now the other face of modernity: to adapt to the

future by forgetting the laggardness of their past. Amnesia became a prerequisite of integration and

a requirement of Europeaness. However, the inexplicit victors approach on the end of the Cold

War does nothing but pushes forward the Cold War logic itself. The division of Europe rather

persisted through the narrative reflexes of taking the post-Cold War as a return to normalcy of the

East which now no longer represents a threat for Europe but a laggard that has to be taught afresh

how to adjust to presumably universalistic desirability incarnated by the West. This move was

nothing else than the return to the original reflexes of the Enlightenment that invented Eastern

Europe in evaluative terms in the first place. To quote Larry Wolff extensively:.

39Ibidem, p. 160.40

Ibidem, p. 163.


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The revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe has largely invalidated the perspective of

half of century, compelling the reconsideration of Europe as a whole. The maps on the

wall have always showed a continent of many colors, the puzzle pieces of many states;

the dark line of the iron curtain, supplying the light and shadow in front and behind,

was drawn on the maps in the mind. Those maps must be adjusted, adapted,

reconceived, but their structures are deeply rooted and powerfully compelling. In the

1990s Italians are worriedly deporting Albanian refugees: Albanesi, no grazie! reads

the graffiti on the wall. Germans are greeting visitors from Poland with thuggish

violence and neo-Nazi demonstrations, while tourists from Eastern Europe are being

arbitrarily stopped and searched in Paris shops, under the suspicion of shoplifting.

Statesmen, who once enthusiastically anticipated the unity of Europe, are looking away

from the siege of Sarajevo, wishing perhaps that it were happening on some other

continent. Alienation is in part a matter of economic disparity, the wealth of Western

Europe facing the poverty of Eastern Europe, but such disparity is inevitably clothed in

the complex windings of cultural prejudice. The iron curtain is gone, and yet the

shadow persists.41

This is not to say that Western Europe was not messianic enough after 1989 but that it was

nor prepared nor willing to treat the Eastern part of Europe as its equal partner. As Timothy Garton

Ash has put it, the only fact that seemed to matter anymore about communism was and still is in the

present the fact that it is over42

. It is surprising the indifference that EU showed and continues to

show for the need/moral requirement of Central and Eastern European countries to engage seriously

with their own past. The enlargement process can be seen once again as an ad-hoc requirement for a

pre-defined Europeanization than as an effective identity-sensitive integration. European Union

required compliance and got it. However, when its about identitarian integration is rather a move

from alignment of the less Europeans to the core Europe while the East/West slope tends to persist

within the EU with visible features. The persistence of the slope does not come from engagement in

acknowledging the tragic experiences in the East but rather from the perception that the East will be

truly European when it will be more of the same/more of the West while for the moment being

acknowledged as less. According to the EU logic of the fait historique accompli, Eastern Europe

should gradually disappear as a distinct category inside the EU as a result or a sign of the so called

convergence induced through conditionality. However, the identitarian narrative that evaluates in

terms of Europeaness or les-Europeaness nations inside the EU will not fade away very soon.

Thimothy Snyder argued that the differences encompassed within the historical memory in

Eastern and Western Europe go seriously beyond the experience of the Cold War. The Cold War

itself despite being a common experience generated rather diverse perspectives. One of the facts

41 Larry Wolff,Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford, StanfordUniversity Press, 1994, p. 3.42 Timothy Garton Ash, Trials, purges and history lessons: treating a difficult past in post-communist Europe, in Jan-

Werner Muller (ed.),Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, cit., pp. 265 282.


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that Snyder notes as being rarely acknowledged in recent accounts of remembrance in the West is

the particularity of the historical memory that emanates in Eastern Europe from a double occupation

both by Germans and Soviets. In some sense it is harder to integrate the Easter experience in a

wider European historical account precisely because almost all of the worst acts of political

violence in Europe in the twentieth century took place in lands that fell behind the Iron Curtain43

.

The particular nature of the Cold War as not being hot produced no significant individual

experiences, mourning and memorialization in Western Europe but mental divisions that tend to

persist. Eastern Europe was exposed to a temporal decalage in dealing with its own memories of the

Second World War, Holocaust and the Soviet atrocities that when available to be put on an open

floor were to be confronted with the prioritizations resulted from the views of the present and

future. Thats how some collaborators of the Nazis could have been refurbished as heroes in some

post-communist states due to their opposition to the Soviets that became now a virtuous currency.

In terms of this temporal desynchronization in accessing the historical memory, Eastern Europe is

described by Benot Challand as in a state ofallochronism that results from its different positioning

in time in relation with Western Europes referent in dealing with memory. The preference of

Eastern Europeans to prioritize memories of Nazi and Soviet occupations and the atrocities derived

from them over the memory of Holocaust is taken as an example of allochronism. Allochronism

becomes, for Challand, a sign that different positionings in times of memorialization create

distances among various groups. Specific axiological attributes are attached to the reference point

setter and the desynchronized: active/passive, advanced/laggard, modern/traditional. The allochron

group is thus disempowered and projected into a state heteronomy. Heterochrony is a

terminological combination between allochronism and heteronomy that is seen by Challand as

optimal for describing the difference within the collective representation of Eastern Europe in

Western Europe. In his words, heterochrony expresses the situation in which a given group does

not have the capacity to choose the cognitive means to perceive itself as a consequence of being put

in a different time location44. By trying to avoid the bias of Western-centrism in explaining the

differences in dealing with the past, Challand explicitates also the asymmetrical nature of cognitive

perceptions on the proper way to deal with the past in the two socially constructed sides of

Europe. In this sense, a division along the East-West line is still an object of reproduction and

reification45

. This division might persist at least until EU will truly become an ever closer union

43 Thimoty Snyder, The Historical Reality of Eastern Europe, East European Politics and Societies, 23(1), February

2009, pp. 7-12, p. 10.44 Benot Challand, 1989. Contested Memories and the Shifting Cognitive Maps of Europe, European Journal of Social

Theory, 12 (3), 2009, pp. 397-408, p. 400.45

Ibidem. p. 397.


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among the peoples of Europe. And this moment doesnt look to be fast approaching as some would

like to think.

The European identity issue, in a cost-benefits analysis of most of scholarly work, could be

easily abandoned with no real significant consequences. Ruth Wittlinger (2009) explained that the

lack of a European identity does not necessarily have to be seen as a severe flaw.46

However if it is

still believed that there is some normative pressure on supporting open debates on the topic, then

todays dominant approach from the top to the bottom should be abandoned, and a more critical and

realist approach should as well introduce the others and the reshaping of memory and

remembrance that they bring with them. An approach of European identity should be complemented

today with public debates on national histories of the new members, with reconciliation, restitution,

disclosure and awareness rather than indifferent arrogance of the old towards the new learners that

need just time to disciplinate and adjust. Europe should escape the spell of Plato. The new member

states that are too busy now to comply should find the energy and the EU should support this to

affirm their understanding of Europeanity of their past, present and future beyond institutional

rhetoric and widespread troubled attitudes. Serious discussion, research and activism should

therefore be professed inside the new EU nations and agreeing with Timothy Garton Ash47

I

believe that historians should exercise now an important role in revealing the lessons of history in

these other nations, in clarifying the role of the past in shaping perceptions of Europe as union, if

not as a locus for a common identity.

Therefore, it is not so much that memory is the independent variable determining political

culture and ultimately policies, but that memory to some extent is political culture48

. Europe,

Europeanism, Europeanization shall be complemented now with cerebral understanding fromRussia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, etc. The others should

write their own stories about being European and these stories should become integral parts of the

European self-understanding and shape EU policies in the future. The explicit integration of these

stories will lighten again the dialogical nature of Europe and will provide a potential exit from the

embarrassing not imagined but imaginary European identity and open the path for a true integration.

46 Ruth Wittlinger, The Quest for a European Identity: A Europe Without Europeans?, in Klaus Larres (ed.),A

Companion to Europe Since 1945, (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2009), 369-386, 380.47Timothy Garton Ash, Trials, Purges and History Lessons: Treating a Difficult Past in Post-Communist Europe in

Jan-Werner Muller (ed.),Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, 265-282, 282.48

Ibid, 26.


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Such histories can also have the benefit of constructively including what is perceived for now as

ignorable or undesirable: path dependencies in post-communist democratization, accomplishments

in the modernizing communist projects, complicities of the West with the East, memories of

abandonment and also support and cohesion, exclusion, tragic destinies, remembrance instead of

instant amnesia, retributions and recognition, perceptions, processes of specific elite and intellectual

configuration, dissidents and diasporas, national narratives, cultural affinities, dynamic integrative

dimensions of post-communist culture that actively complement the passivity of compliance.

Remembrance can take these countries out of sloganisms and give meaning and value to both

national self-valorisation and active integration.

Europeans must find a way to rewrite the larger narrative so as to include both East and

West. This requires a confrontation with two basic matters of the recent European past: that

the center of the suffering Second World War was in the East rather than the West, and that

East Europeans had to experience communist subjugation for four decades rather than

European integration. It should be simple, one might think, to accept the full historical force

of Nazi and Soviet terror. The European Union, after all, is built upon the premise that

totalitarianism must never return. Yet in practice this requires some humility. One often hears

the argument, nowadays, that Americans can learn about total war and political terror from

Europeans, because they experienced the horrors of twentieth century. This is true. By the

same token, West Europeans have much to learn from East Europeans.49

But, after all, there is no problem in being an alterity, an other. Quite the contrary, the

acknowledgement of difference could be the legitimate dialogical position that framed Europe (even

though sometimes dramatically) over centuries. There is no problem in believing that there is

something like a British, American, German, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian mentality. Yet it is

important to be aware of what conclusions we draw from these differences since its known that

cultural stereotypes are usually inaccurate. The problem is rather being a de-valorised other, as

part of a dialectical or evolutionist game as the unequal among equals and developing axiological

reactions to that. This is also an old historical game for Europe, and it didnt have the most

honourable outcomes. Most of the time the category of Eastern Europe seems to be an operational

signifier for specific particular goals. This paper was not an apology of the East or a victimization of

it but rather an attempt to locate difficult spots in the widespread narrative of a united Europe. It

rather acknowledges that it should be integrated, as Im sure that it must/will become, as a non-

dialectical partner in identitarian politicization of Europe. Because,

in its core definition, political identity is the overarching and inclusive project that is shared

by the members of the polity, or in other words the set of political and social values and

49 Timothy Snyder, United Europe Divided History, in Krzysztof Michalski (ed.), What Holds Europe Together ?,

185-188, 188.


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principles in which they recognize themselves as a we. More important than this set

(identity) is the process (self-identification through self-recognition) by which the people

recognize themselves as belonging together because they come to share, but also modify and

reinterpret those values and principles which are the framework within which they pursue

their interests and goals.50

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