Ideologies of Eastness in Central and Eastern Europe

Tomasz Zarycki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317818564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how the countries of Eastern Europe, which were formerly part of the Soviet bloc have, since the end of communist rule, developed a new ideology of their place in the world. Drawing on post-colonial theory and on identity discourses in the writings of local intelligentsia figures, the book shows how people in these countries no longer think of themselves as part of the "east", and how they have invented new stereotypes of the countries to the east of them, such as Ukraine and Belarus, to which they see themselves as superior. The book demonstrates how there are a whole range of ideologies of "eastness", how these have changed over time, and how such ideologies impact, in a practical way, relations with countries further east.

1 Central and Eastern Europe and the idea of the East

One of the key assumptions in this book, an assumption already discussed by several authors, posits that contemporary Central and Eastern Europe is a prisoner of what Edward Said called Orientalism. The region can be seen as both a victim of external orientalization and, at the same time, as a locus of intensive production of orientalist discourses. Moreover, as I am arguing, it is practically impossible to imagine this region without falling into the trap of Orientalism. Given such pessimistic assumption, I am not proposing any simple recipes of overcoming that orientalization. What I want to do instead is to understand the mechanisms which stand behind the discoursive stigmatization of that part of Europe. I am analyzing diverse discourses dealing with the Eastern identity of the region and its sub-regions. They range from local adaptations of post-colonial theory to discourses of regional identity developed in specific metropolitan centers. I consider all of them as constituting “Ideologies of Eastness” and try to elucidate them as ways of facing and responding to mechanisms of orientalization. At the same time, I will attempt to demonstrate how these ideologies themselves reproduce orientalist schemes. To achieve my aims, I will analyze selected discourses by presenting them in a wider context, one going much beyond the textual or symbolic dimension of social life. In particular, I propose a view on Central and Eastern Europe inspired by a broadly defined school of dependent development as well as by Stein Rokkan’s analysis of political cleavages. First of all, however, I am relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, in particular, on his concepts of capitals and of the field of power. Using insights from these and selected other methodological approaches, I attempt to develop a model of orientalism in Central and Eastern Europe in which discoursive and symbolic processes are linked to economic and political developments. In doing so, however, I am trying to avoid not only what could be called discoursive reductionism, but also economic or political determinisms. I accomplish this, first of all, by proposing a model of a peripheral field of power through which mechanisms of dependence as well as diverse social forces, including cultural, economic and political processes, are mediated. At the same time, I suggest to view the peripheral field of power and its ideologies through the lens of critical theory, in particular, critical sociology which I clearly distinguish from public sociology. As I am arguing, the peripheral field of power generates two parallel reinterpretations of global and native discourses which I identify as liberal Euro-enthusiastic and conservative Euro-skeptical discourses. My thesis is that both of them are susceptible to the Orientalizing rhetoric and are not able, as they often claim, to distance themselves from structures of economic and political hierarchies and interests. Since Orientalist biases and dependencies on dominant social hierarchies are much more transparent and obvious in conservative discourses, I am devoting greater attention to the analysis of liberal discourses. My critical attitude to these liberal discourses is largely based on a conviction that calls for equality, dialogue or diversity, no matter how sincere and worthy of respect and support, are alone in themselves not capable to produce an ideal society. At the same time their practical implementation besides positive effects may generate new, non-obvious and often hidden inequalities and hierarchies. In this book, I will attempt to show how it may happen.

The main case studies used in this book include Polish discourses of Eastness; more specifically those refereeing to and coming from Eastern Poland. I am, however, trying to show the wider context of these discoursive structures and to locate them within the structures of Central and Eastern European hierarchies of power. In the Polish case, I am focusing on two implicit assumptions of the dominant discourses of Eastness which I call doxa of dependence and doxa of the intelligentsia. While their roles may be different in particular Central and Eastern European countries, I believe that the model presented below will appear inspiring for students coming from other parts of the region and at the same time will stimulate discussion on restrictions and challenges to the application of critical theory outside its original Western context.

Edward Said introduced the notion of Orientalism a couple of decades ago (Said, 1978). Said’s book gained a wide recognition in the world of academia and beyond, and defined a new notion of orientalism. Although Said’s Orientalism was confronted by numerous critiques and triggered several debates in which many of Said’s assertions have been challenged, the basic thesis of the book has been widely recognized. In particular, Said was credited for pointing to and labeling a specific mode in which the Middle East has been depicted in Western literature and other Western discourses, a mode which can be seen as biased in systematic and predictable ways. Shortly thereafter, the success of Said’s book inspired attempts at tracing similar structures in Western discourses referring to other areas of the world. One of these areas included Central and Eastern Europe. As a region being very close to the Western core, or even constituting a part of it or its “internal periphery”, Central and Eastern Europe may be seen as a real testing ground for Said’s model and, in a broader sense, for post-colonial theory. Lessons from this confrontation may in turn serve a wider goal of reflection on modern critical social theory. Therefore, in this book I want to reflect on how Orientalism, and, more generally, postcolonial theory function in reference to East Central Europe. In addition, I would like to offer my perspective on how this confrontation of Western and peripheral intellectual concepts with semi-peripheral social and political realities as well as with local intellectual contexts may be seen as inspiring for wider global audiences.

One of the arguments I present in this book is that in the semi-peripheral conditions of Central Europe it is practically impossible to avoid discussing the identity of the region without falling into the trap of some form of what Said called Orientalism. Any contemporary discourse on this part of Europe will have to refer explicitly or implicitly to its semi-peripheral or dependent position in relation to the Western core. At the same time, by such a reference, this type of discourse will contribute to the reproduction of the region’s subordinate position and part of the “orientalist stereotypes”. I will, therefore, argue that any project which targets the symbolic emancipation of Central and Eastern Europe, in particular if defined uniquely in discoursive terms, will always prove to be impossible. Moreover, as I will try to exemplify by discussing several cases taken from the region, any such attempt could be considered as a proof of the above thesis. In other words, any discourse on the place of the region of Central and Eastern Europe in the contemporary political, economic and symbolic relations’ order, will have to be partly based on assumptions which can be considered orientalist to some extent. All such discourses could be called “ideologies of Eastness”. This book itself could not be considered free of such assumptions. There are, however, different ways of approaching the problem of the region’s dependence, and in effect, different ways of naturalization of its subordinate, weaker position. While this book can’t pretend to be uninvolved in the process of reproduction of the region’s orientalist stereotypes, it will try to build a reflexive perspective on these clichés by juxtaposing several positions which may mutually deconstruct their own limitations. However, as will be argued in the following chapters, without a comprehensive attempt at reconstructing the mechanism of economic, political and cultural relations within the global system of power, any intellectual attempt at overcoming the orientalist perspective on the peripheral region of Central and Eastern Europe will prove restricted.

My main object of study in this book will be discourses on Central and Eastern Europe, both those which can be called “internal” as well as those which can be labeled “external”. However, one must be aware of the highly relative nature of distinctions between “inside” and “outside” discourses, particularly in the case of this region so closely linked to Western Europe. Its definitions and borders are stakes in symbolic and political games, and its location within the hierarchies of the wider European space are highly contested. Central and Eastern Europe is known for being simultaneously “inside” and “outside” Europe, as will be discussed at length later in this book. In any case, the discourses in question will be considered here as representing “ideologies of Eastness”, that is, as ways to address the “eastern” aspects of identity formed by communities located in this part of Europe. I will use the term “ideologies” in reference to a wide spectrum of discourses ranging from political speeches and media, through intellectual debates up to academic theories. This choice is based on my conviction that no clear boundary can be set between specific types of discourses Specifically, no academic discourse can pretend to have a status of neutral, non-ideological description of the social world. All of these discourses are deeply entrenched in the wider universe of social texts and their “ideological” character can be studied as is the case with all other types of discourses. Moreover, as selected examples from Central and Eastern Europe will illustrate, academic discourses are easily adopted in political and other fields. In addition, ideas developed in the framework of critical theory may suddenly migrate from academic texts, aspiring to analyze social processes, to a public discourse, including political speeches and media texts. Therefore, in this book, no clear distinction will be recognized between the “ideological” discourses of Eastern Europe and their “objective” analyses. I will look at a diverse spectrum of voices dealing with the problem of “eastness” in this part of Europe and try to contextualize them, more specifically, to examine their relationship to the symbolic forces of Orientalization that permeate the social space of this part of the continent.

One of the crucial differences between East Central Europe and Said’s and other orientalists’ Orient is the ambiguity of the relationship towards Europe, which both regions have. While the old Orient was clearly separated from Europe and defined as fundamentally different, East Central Europe’s position is always unclear. It is constantly on the margins, on the verge of Europe. It is simultaneously an indelible part of Europe, and outside of Europe. The border between Western Europe that is “true” Europe and Eastern Europe is relative, contested and has an infinite number of incarnations. Maria Todorova has pointed to a similar pattern whereby the South-Eastern periphery of Europe was assigned an ambiguous status (Todorova, 1997). She contrasted Said’s Orientalism model based on the rule of binary opposition to discourses about the Balkans and their supposed ambiguity. Such a situation offers simultaneously advantages and disadvantages. While in classic post-colonial context hierarchies, at least these produced in the West, are clear and borders between nations, states, historical heritages, cultures or races are defined, stable and uncontested, in Central and Eastern Europe the very existence of difference becomes an object of dispute. As we know, even the very existence of the region, in particular that of Central Europe, is constantly questioned. Regions such as Central Europe, Central-Eastern Europe or the old Mittle Europa (Mittel Europa) and others are often considered “imagined”, artificial or temporal. As Atilla Melegh has noticed, we can even encounter acts of “denial” of their “real existence” as those who are in a midway of the east-west hierarchy (Melegh, 2006). This turns our attention to a number of metaphors like “surface”, “fake”, “non-authentic”, “imitative”, “Potemkinvillage like”, and many others which are often applied to the region’s modernity and Europaness, qualities that as appear to be, as always, not genuine. Another kind of metaphor, which emphasizes a similar ambiguity is that of a lack of maturity, of a childish character. Yet another popular way of representing Central and Eastern Europe is linked to “liminality”. The region may be referred to as an “interface zone between civilizations”, however, it is the notion of a borderland which seems to best reflect this trend. This notion will be discussed in more detail in one of the following chapters.

Marina Blagojević argued that the indefiniteness of Central and Eastern Europe, and the vagueness of its position, may be related to the notion of the semi-periphery as it is understood in world system theory (Blagojević, 2009). As she wrote:

in this reading then, the semi-periphery is a space located close to the core yet not the core itself, always “lagging behind” yet not distant enough to develop an alternative scale of evaluation, hence forever measuring itself with the yardstick of the core. Positioned between the center and the periphery, it has characteristics of both. It cannot be subsumed under the postcolonial subject, because, from the viewpoint of the periphery, it is “too white”, too industrial, too developed, and, most importantly, not eligible for claiming victimhood due to the absence of colonial experience.

(Blagojević, 2009: 38)

In its Balkan version, the region may play the role of Europe’s “internal Other” (Todorova, 1997) and its inhabitants may be perceived as “non-’White’ whites, non-European Europeans” (Blagojević, 2009: 27). To quote Ivana Spasić, “the inhabitants of the semi-periphery have the option of recognizing themselves (partly) in Western ‘superiority’, but, not being ‘white’ enough, they cannot help feeling their collective self to be chronically deficient” (Spasić, 2011: 275). Matthias István Köhler reminds us that in Wallerstein’s perspective, semi-peripheries serve as a buffer between the core and the peripheral areas, and prevent the core states against an uprising of the periphery. What is keeping together societies at the semi-periphery, is the ideology of catching-up with the core states (Köhler, 2012).

Thus, most discourses on Central and Eastern Europe may give an impression that the region has a radically unclear definition, extremely complex relations with the Western world stemming from it being simultaneously inside and outside of this world, incomprehensible internal structure, multidimensionality of dependence, etc. At the same time, however, it would be difficult to question the fact that the region is structured by and can be assigned a position in a clear and almost universally recognized hierarchy. Atilla Melegh called it an “east-west slope”; József Böröcz used a notion of a “rule of the European Difference”; Merje Kuus wrote about “varying degrees of Europeanness and Eastness” (Kuus, 2004a); Marko Živković used a notion of “gradients of depreciation” (Živković, 2011). This turns the region into a laboratory of exclusions and, more generally, of a symbolic violence based not so much on binary divisions between “us” and “them” but rather on hierarchies which are seemingly blurred, not easily admitted, implicit rather than explicit. The ambiguity of those hierarchies does not make them any less central for the organization of social life. I will, therefore, argue in this book for the crucial and often neglected role of hierarchies in an analysis of dependencies. The emphasis on hierarchies should, in my view, become much more central in the agenda of contemporary critical social theory. The region of Central and Eastern Europe with its specific forms of orientalism seems to illustrate this point well. Social hierarchies are often complex, ambiguous, contested and informal. This is what makes them so useful in reproduction and naturalization of power relations. While binary divisions are much more visible because of their well-defined character, complex hierarchies may be presented as irrelevant or “subjective”, which makes their work much more subtle.

Interestingly, for different reasons, according to particular social norms requiring the formal recognition of an equal status of a given community’s members, including norms of politeness, because of the informal and contested/disputed character of some of the hierarchies and many other reasons, on many occasions naming social hierarchies is not accepted in the public sphere. For instance, it is usually not accepted, at least in the broadly defined liberal discourse, to name dominant hierarchies of cultures, nations, religions, races or sexes. Alluding to them requires sometimes a negative form, that is, they may be mentioned only through their criticism, and presented as unjust inequalities or stereotypes. On the other hand, however, public discourse is permeated with discussions of hierarchies relating to the economic sphere. Often hierarchization is expressed in indirect forms, in particular, it can be transmitted through the hidden assumptions of many statements. Interestingly, however, there are several spheres in which open hierarchization is socially accepted and does not require use of indirect discoursive techniques. For instance, countries, regions and cities, as well as companies and individuals, are constantly compared and ranked according to their economic performance, attractiveness or innovativeness. Cultural institutions and artists can also be publicly ranked, just as parties and politicians are on scales of people’s support, or universities and academics are on scales of professional excellence, measured for example by citation indexes and other more complex indicators. These former hierarchies are publicly legitimized and spreading them is usually not perceived as a reproduction of stereotypes or inequalities. One could thus distinguish between spheres in which hierarchies are allowed to be publicly discussed, and those, where hierarchies are usually silenced and pushed into the sphere of implicit and informal forms of communication. Of particular importance in such context seems to be the border between these zones and the power of its delimitation. The power to determine which of the hierarchies are permitted to be named publicly and which should remain silenced allows certain hierarchies to be hidden by presenting them as unjustified and harmful to those who appeared in the bottom part. This does not necessarily mean that such a silencing will reduce their salience, in particular because they may be inherently related to socially recognized hierarchies which are considered “objective” and “rational” even if cruel. Thus, for instance, while hierarchization of national cultures may not be widely accepted in the modern public sphere, hierarchization of national economies is at the center of public discourses. Because of the common link of these hierarchies to the general status hierarchies of countries, an implicit ranking of national cultures, even if theoretically assumed as equal, is possible. Therefore, we could note that the liberal principles of equality and those of political, religious or racial neutrality or fairness are in practice applied quite selectively in particular fields. On the one hand, there are those fields where these liberal principles are interpreted as a requirement for silencing any public references to dominant hierarchies which could be considered unjust and whose naming might heave performative effects. On the other hand, there are fields where the dominant hierarchies can be openly discussed. Naming them in such contexts is often seen as a positive incentive for all those seen as involved in a democratic and more or less just competition.

We could note that in the modern Western culture one of the criteria used to legitimize the above mentioned border between fields where open hierachization is recognized and those where it is taboo-ized, is the assignment of agency. Those objects which are assigned agency and thus can be considered free to develop their status are usually “rankable”. Features and objects which are considered “given”, stable, those which cannot be changed by free actors, are usually considered as being politically incorrect to be ranked. Such distinctions, however, in particular when attribution of agency is concerned, may be very arbitrary. Moreover, hierarchies, which are considered “natural” and thus “irrelevant”, that is, requiring silencing, are usually strongly related to those which are publicly recognized. Most importantly, however, one could argue that the fact of silencing politically incorrect hierarchies does not make them disappear. It is, of course, a highly contested issue to what extent silencing unwanted hierarchies reduces their impact. On the one hand, we can argue that the very act of naming some hierarchies reproduces them and, in effect, reinforces their impact. On the other hand, silencing some hierarchies may be seen as resulting in masking them and in this way, making their impact less visible but possibly more penetrating. The communist period in Central and Eastern Europe provides a wide number of spectacular examples of bans on publicly discussing hierarchies which existed in the informal sphere despite official declarations of equality for all citizens.

One could note that using such a perspective, in which symbolic depreciation may be an aspect of a much wider power relations structure, implies a need for a more reflexive use of such notions as “stereotype”, “myth” or “inferiority complex”. As it may appear, the later notion may refer to weaknesses of nations, regions or other communities, which have much deeper roots beyond the surface symbolic depreciation. In many instances, as in the case of Central and Eastern Europe, we may deal with cases of what could be called “actual inferiority” in the sense of its non-purely psychological or cultural character, but particularly pertaining to the region’s economic and political domain, or low symbolic status. This “actual inferiority” notion could be condemned on moral or other grounds, but iswidely recognized and can be considered as a social fact. One of the important assumptions of the liberal approach to social order is that the political and, especially, economic weakness of specific actors should not be used as a basis for making any moral judgments about those actors, in particular, implying their cultural inferiority. It would be indeed hard to question, in particular, from the point of view of most systems of European values, a view that human dignity should not by denied to anyone, and thus, the act of suggesting moral inferiority on the basis of economic or political status is condemnable. However, one can’t deny the inherent interdependency between spheres of culture and moral judgments, on the one hand, and those of economics and politics, on the other hand. Thus, while the assignment of equal dignity to all human beings may be a respectable ideal and a recognized political value, for an empirical researcher it seems important to distinguish between his/her political and moral convictions, and his/her duty to reconstruct the actual mechanisms of the social world, in particular, to study the processes producing actual differentiations in terms of one’s moral status in dominant hierarchies of prestige and culture. Such studies involving the reconstruction of actually existing hierarchies of not only economic and political, but also cultural and moral character, should not be produced with an intention of using them as a basis of le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Central and Eastern Europe and the idea of the East
• 2 Central and Eastern Europe in a center-periphery perspective
• 3 The dependence doxa: Western hegemony and its naturalization in Central and Eastern Europe
• 4 The intelligentsia doxa: the hegemony of the intelligentsia and its naturalization
• 5 Post-colonial theory in the Central European context
• 6 The Kresy (old borderlands) discourse and its critics
• 7 The new borderlands discourse
• 8 Constructing new identities for Eastern Poland
• 9 Belarussian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian reactions to Polish discourses on the East
• 10 Conclusions: critical theory in the Central European context
• References
• Index