h uman a rchitecture ournal of the ociology … v 1/manuelaboatca-fm.pdf · h uman a rchitecture: j...

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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

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Portrayals of Eastern European coun-tries as “bridges” between East and West are

commonplace both in the media and in thepolitical discourse. In particular, the popularlabel “gateway to the East” is used in historytextbooks, tourist guides, and economic re-ports to equally describe Warsaw, Budapest,

No Race to the SwiftNegotiating Racial Identity in Past and Present

Eastern Europe

Manuela Boatcã

Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected]

Abstract: Portrayals of Eastern European countries as “bridges” between East and West arecommonplace both in the media and in the political discourse. While the question of the histori-cal origin of Europe’s East-West divide is still under heavy dispute among social scientists, it canbe argued that it was the Orientalist discourse of the 19th century that decisively shaped the con-tent of the present categories of Western and Eastern Europe and made policies of demarcationfrom “the Orient” an important strategy of geopolitical and cultural identification with Europe.The enduring quality of Orientalism’s effects on both national self-definitions and social and cul-tural policy in Eastern Europe is examined in the present paper in two successive steps: first, bylooking at the intellectual discourse in 19th century Romania against the background of thecountry’s political independence from the Ottoman Empire and increasing economic, culturaland political orientation toward Western Europe; second, by discussing the resurgence of sys-tems of representation based on this type of discourse in the context of the European Union’s“Eastern enlargement”. In the first case, the terms of the Western European discourse wereappropriated such as to make the “Oriental barbarism” in which Romanian society had been“steeped” until acquiring independence from the Ottoman Empire the point of departure for thedevelopment of a European (civilized, Christian, modern) identity. In the second case, the degreeof connection to the Ottoman, and therefore Islamic legacy of Eastern European candidates to theEuropean Union has been reinstrumentalized as a legitimating strategy for discursive practicesof inferiorization, exoticization, and racial othering that parallel the region's economic peripher-alization.

Manuela Boatcã is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociological Theory, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingol-stadt, Germany and will be Visiting Professor at the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ), Bra-zil, in the Fall of 2007. Her research interests include political sociology, sociology of development, gender and violenceresearch, and postcolonial studies in historical-comparative perspective, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe andLatin America. She is author of “From Neoevolutionism to World-Systems Analysis. The Romanian Theory of ‘Formswithout Substance’ in Light of Modern Debates on Social Change” (2003), “Semiperipheries in the World-System: Reflect-ing Eastern European and Latin American Experiences,” Journal of World-Systems Research, XII, 2, 2006, “The Eastern Mar-gins of Empire. Coloniality in 19th Century Romania,” Cultural Studies 21, 2007.

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Bucharest, Sofia, and Istanbul (Hann 1995:2). Thus, in the European imaginary, East-ernness, in its European variant, is beingcontinually passed on—and, as such, consis-tently refuted—all the way to Europe’s geo-graphical borders as they are defined today.

As definitions of the border betweenWestern and Eastern Europe have histori-cally shifted to highlight ethnic, economic,imperial, or religious divides within thecontinent, so have attitudes toward theproximity of the Orient and the threat it wasperceived to represent at different momentsin time. Rather than a twenty-first centuryphenomenon, efforts to reject an Easternidentity constitute a historically recurringpattern in the construction of Eastern Euro-pean national self-definitions that has beeninextricably tied to (1) the military, eco-nomic and cultural impact of the OttomanEmpire in the region on the one hand and (2)the representations of Islam and the Orientin the geopolitical imaginary of the Euro-American core on the other.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centu-ries, the ongoing process of negotiating geo-graphical borders while reasserting histori-cal claims to territory and power resulted infurther subdivisions such as Central, North-ern, Southern and Southeastern Europe.Whereas Central Europe was conceived as athird zone between Eastern and Western Eu-rope, but was coterminous with the nine-teenth century geopolitical project of Mit-teleuropa, Southeastern Europe was coinedas a politically correct term for designatingthe Balkans, the easternmost region withinthe East itself (Gallagher 2001: 113). Due toits proximity to Asia and its legacy of Otto-man dominance, it was this last subcategoryin particular which has conjured up the im-age of a bridge between Orient and Occi-dent, and which as a result has periodicallyacquired the scent of temporal in-between-ness as well—of the semideveloped, semico-lonial, semicivilized, semi-Oriental (Todor-ova 2002) always in the process of “catchingup with the West.” The resurgence of the

stigma thus attached to the concept becomesincreasingly clear today, when the same ste-reotypes attached to the alleged “Balkanidentity” are being used in the political, so-cial scientific, and media discourse of thevery Europe the ex-Communist countriesare trying to (re)join.

The question of the historical origin ofEurope’s East-West divide is still underheavy dispute among social scientists,and—in view of its economic, political, andreligious dimensions—probably evincesmore than one answer. For the purposes ofthe present analysis, however, it can reason-ably be argued that it was the Orientalistdiscourse of the 19

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century—in the under-standing Edward Said (1979) attributed tothe term—that decisively shaped the con-tent of the present categories of Western andEastern Europe and made policies of demar-cation from “the Orient” an important strat-egy of geopolitical and cultural identifica-tion with Europe for the latter region. As adiscourse dominating Western representa-tions of the Other and allowing Western Eu-ropean culture to gain “in strength and iden-tity by setting itself off against the Orient asa sort of surrogate and even undergroundself” (Said 1979:3), Orientalism firstemerged in the period following the En-lightenment. Scholarly, literary and scien-tific depictions of the Orient as backward, ir-rational, in need of civilization, and raciallyinferior produced during the next centuriesserved as background for representations ofthe Occident as progressive, rational, civi-lized, even biologically superior, thus justi-fying European colonization and control.

In order to examine the applicability ofthis system of representation to inner-Euro-pean processes of inferiorization and racialothering in historical perspective, it is neces-sary to address two interrelated questions:first, what kinds of mental maps

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of the Oc-cident, the Orient, and the boundaries sepa-rating them were being negotiated duringthe 19

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century and, second, how do theyrelate to the remapping of European order in

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the process of Eastern enlargement? To thisend, the impact of the so-called “Easternquestion”—the growing decline of the Otto-man Empire—on the cultural self-defini-tions and the geopolitical agenda of its Euro-

pean possessions in the 19

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century—is dis-cussed using the example of Romania; sub-sequently, the present-day resurgence ofsystems of representation based on an Ori-entalist type of discourse—of which Islamo-phobia is an instance—are examined in thecontext of the European Union’s “Easternenlargement.”

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According to Edward Said, Islam hadbeen Europe’s lasting trauma ever since itsemergence in the seventh century. In time, ithad come to stand for “terror, devastation,the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians”(1979: 59)—an image that, until the end ofthe seventeenth century, was constantly re-

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Edward Said uses the term “imaginativegeographies” to refer to the end results of the“universal practice of designating in one’s minda familiar space which is ‘ours’ and an unfamil-iar space which is ‘theirs’” (1979: 54). However,while imaginative geographies can be found onboth ends of the power differential between Ori-ent and Occident, it is the process by which theyacquire one-sided definition power and are con-sequently linked to projects of territorial expan-sion that grants them the explanatory forcecharacterizing the Orientalism of the nineteenthcentury, the Balkanism of the twentieth and theIslamophobia of the twenty-first. I therefore usethe term “mental maps” in order to differentiateit from the power-laden “imperial maps”(Coronil 1997; see also Boatcã 2006) of whichsuch discourses are a result.

Map 1. Europe after the Congress of Berlin 1878Source: Philip Lee Ralph, World Civilizations

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inforced by the geographical proximity toEurope and to Christian civilization of “theOttoman peril.” European representationsof “the Muslim, Ottoman, or Arab” there-fore tended to be ways of controlling theOrient as a place culturally, intellectuallyand spiritually outside Europe and Euro-pean civilization and at the same time as theOther against which the latter had been con-structed (Said 1979: 71; Connolly 1996: 13).

By mid-nineteenth century, however,the gradually decaying Ottoman Empirehad irretrievably become the “sick man” ofan economically and politically rising Eu-rope. Meanwhile, its possessions remainedat least as interesting for the Tsarist Empireas they were for the expansion of Westerncapital, always in search of new markets. Sit-uated between the Habsburg, the Ottomanand the Tsarist Empires, the three RomanianPrincipalities Transylvania, Wallachia andMoldavia had long occupied a strategic po-sition, especially because of the access to theBlack Sea and the mouth of Danube of thelatter two.

As of 1711, Wallachia’s and Moldavia’sboundaries had therefore been periodicallyredrawn to the territorial benefit of Austriaand Russia, at the same time as Turkish su-zerainty exposed them to constant politicalintervention and fiscal exploitation. The endof Ottoman domination and the right to freeexport they had regained in the first half ofthe 19

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century equaled an economic andcultural opening toward the West as well asa shift into the Western sphere of influence,whose agrarian supplier and market for in-dustrial goods the Romanian provinces be-came. Given that the Ottoman Empire hadbehaved more like a traditional world em-pire—using control of its provinces in orderto finance military campaigns and luxuryspending—the “shift of peripheral axis”(Bãdescu 2004: 82) from the periphery of theEmpire to that of the Western capitalist corethat the Romanian Principalities underwentin the 19

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century amounted to a transitionfrom a “protocolonial system” (Chirot 1976:

10) under Ottoman rule to a “neocolonial”one as an agricultural periphery of the capi-talist world-economy controlled from West-ern Europe.

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2.1. The Westernizing Project

Along with the shift of geopolitical axiswent a shift in the intellectual and politicaldiscourse, taking place in united Romaniaas of 1859 (see Boatcã 2003). Caught betweenthe need of uniting their territories the betterto protect them, the proximate powers’ at-tempts to incorporate them, and their posi-tion as “buffer state” (Stahl 1993: 87) absorb-ing the military tensions among the threeempires surrounding them, Wallachia andMoldavia enjoyed a love-hate relationshipwith Western Europe. Conversely, the Euro-pean powers’ decision to grant the Princi-palities relative autonomy at the end of theCrimean War reflected the many politicaland economic interests linked to the fate ofthe two Romanian provinces: By removingthem from under the Russian protectorateand declaring them autonomous, the GreatPowers—Russia, the United Kingdom,France, Austria, and Prussia—created a“buffer state” that warranted Austria andRussia the security of their frontiers againstTurkey’s claims and that, as a result, had tobe modernized in order to fulfill its new roleas bridgehead of Western capitalism. Ac-cordingly, modernization on Western Euro-pean terms went along with increasing dis-tancing from the Ottoman Empire.

In accordance with the program of lib-eral reform in effect since 1848, Prince Cuza,the first ruler of the united Romanian prov-inces, undertook a tremendous effort of rap-idly modernizing the country and facilitat-ing the penetration of foreign capital. Thisentailed adopting a series of legal codes on

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This situation has been documented forthe same period of time for both Hungary andPoland with the help of the similar concept of“semi-colony” (see Böröcz 2001: 31, Adamczyk2001)

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the model of French and Prussian legislation(Code of Trade, the Penal and the Civil Na-poleonic Code), promulgating a new Consti-tution drawn up on Belgium’s model, creat-ing economic and financial institutions (theChambers of Commerce, a national bank, aCourt of Accounts), institutions of highereducation (the Universities of Bucharest andJassy, Schools of Fine Arts and art galleries,Conservatories, cultural societies, the Ro-manian Academy, the Romanian Athe-naeum), and introducing the metric systemfor measures and weights as well as a postaland telegraphic system. Westernization, civ-ilization, and economic progress started be-ing viewed as closely related and mutuallyreinforcing processes (Love 1996: 26), whilethe Romance origin of the national lan-guage, alongside the Christian nature of Ro-manian Orthodoxy, became crucial argu-ments in the effort to escape the connota-tions of “backwardness,” “irrationality,”and “savagery” that “the Orient” had ac-quired in the dominant Western imaginary.

2.2. Internal Orientalism

The first work by a Romanian travelerto Western Europe stating Romania’s imper-ative need to catch up with the West byadopting similar institutions and ideas,Dinicu Golescu’s “Notes from My Journey”(1826) invited a verdict on the frame of mindof an entire generation of scholars. Coinedby cultural historians, the resulting label“the Dinicu Golescu complex” was sup-posed to convey what they considered to bean inferiority complex characterizing theRomanian intellectuals’ realization of theprofound lag between Romania and West-ern Europe (Georgiu 2000: 116). Althoughthe nineteenth-century intellectuals’ aware-ness of their country’s peripheralityprompted a sophisticated cultural reaction(see Boatcã 2003) that far exceeded a passiveinferiority complex, their tenacious attemptto negotiate a Western cultural and racialidentity alongside a common national senti-

ment involved embarking on the “Occiden-tal mission to the Orient” (Said 1979: 87) onWestern Europe’s side.

In a faithful replication of the binary op-positions inherent in the cognitive map ofOrientalism, pitting the period of Ottomandomination

against the recent cultural andeconomic opening toward Western Europethus became commonplace in the Romanianintellectual and political discourse of thetime. While the former was viewed as char-acterized by “Turkey‘s darkness,” withwhich the entire Orient was associated, thelatter was tellingly epitomized by referencesto the Enlightenment, the French Revolu-tion, and Occidental—especially French andGerman—civilization (Maiorescu 1973: 239).Interestingly, the terms of this Orientalistdiscourse were not only appropriatedwithin Romanian liberal thought, whichnaturally favored both the economic and thecultural-political orientation toward theWest, but within conservatism as well. Assuch, it was embedded in the very criticismconservatives directed at the liberal policyof rapid institutional and economic modern-ization in the absence of the necessary his-torical and social prerequisites for such aprocess:

“Steeped in Oriental barbarianism untilthe beginning of the nineteenth century, Ro-manian society started to awake from itslethargy around 1820, perhaps seized onlythen by the contagious movement by whichthe ideas of the French Revolution hadreached even the outer geographic extremi-ties of Europe. Attracted to the light, the Ro-manian youth undertook this extraordinaryemigration towards the fountains of Frenchand German science, which has kept grow-ing to this very day and which has broughtpart of the luster of foreign societies to freeRomania. […] And thus, limited by a fatalsuperficiality, their hearts and minds in-flamed by too light a fire, the young Roma-nians did and do come back to their home-land with the decision to emulate and repro-duce the appearances of Western culture, in

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the belief that they would thereby also atonce attain the literature, the culture, thearts, and above all, liberty in a modernstate” (Maiorescu 1973: 163).

In the conservatives’ view, therefore, thepernicious effects of Western Europe’s mo-nopoly on the direction of Romania’s cul-tural and economic development stood inclose relationship with the latter’s Orien-tal—and hence uncivilized—heritage. For acountry situated geographically and cultur-ally “at the border between barbarianismand civilization” (Maiorescu 1973: 241), con-servatives argued, thorough social changebecame a matter of national survival. Hav-ing deprived Romanians of the “advantage”of uncritical cultural borrowing warrantedby a “barbarian condition” (Maiorescu 1973:241), the shift of axis from the periphery ofthe Ottoman Empire to that of Western Eu-rope simultaneously mandated a criticalview of the modernizing process, in order toensure that the benefits of Western culturecould be appropriated.

While the notion of “barbarism” was aclear reference to the dichotomization prac-ticed in the exportation of the global designof civilization as a legitimating strategy foran economic and ideological “civilizing mis-sion,” the conservatives’ account was notequivalent to reproducing this developmen-talist ideology by acknowledging its terms.On the contrary, they unveiled the close con-nection between the economic prerequisitesfor peripheralization and the epistemologi-cal divides enforced thereby, thus viewingdichotomization and processes of peripher-alization as ideological constructs at the ser-vice of particular economic interests:

…when a race degrades itself byway of economic ineptness, it iscredited with being lazy, fatalistic,ignorant. Indians are lazy. Turksare Mohammedan and fatalistic,incapable of competing with theEnglish, and these circumstancesare presented to us as causes of

their increasing weakness. Never-theless, one hundred years agoTurks had the same religion, andtrade with them was among themost sought after. The Moors inSpain were Mohammedan andtheir religion was no obstacle to arelatively high degree of civiliza-tion. Of different religions and ofdifferent origins, under other cli-mates and other geographical lati-tudes, human states resemble eachother as soon as they are declinedthe possibility of diversifying andmultiplying their citizens’ occupa-tions, of allowing them to developany kind of individuality. Subse-quently limited to agriculture, theyhad to export their products in thecrudest form, whereby the land isexhausted, productivity decreases,and the work’s income keeps get-ting smaller. (Eminescu 1881: 387f.)

While at the same time correctly identi-fying the Western, especially Austrian, eco-nomic policies in Romania as a colonial en-deavor meant to “open the gates of the Ori-ent” (Eminescu 1876: 47) for Western capital,the Romanian conservatives’ recourse to apolarized imagery contrasting a civilizedOccident to a barbaric Orient neverthelessreproduced the very mental map whichserved to legitimize this endeavor. From theepistemological position of the semi-Orien-tal at which the Western discourse hadplaced them, they thus in turn engaged in apolicy of “internal Orientalism”—not unlikethe phenomenon of “internal colonialism”(González Casanova 1965, Stavenhagen1965) discussed in the Latin American con-text—that has been independently diag-nosed throughout Eastern Europe and theBalkans (Wolff 1994, Todorova 1997, Adam-czyk 2001, Lindstrom 2003, Böröcz 2005). Itsproliferation within the eastern parts of Eu-rope in the end resulted in a “gradation ofOrients,” defined as “a pattern of reproduc-

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tion of the original dichotomy upon whichOrientalism was premised” (Bakic-Hayden1995: 918), which deemed Asia as more Ori-ental—and, on that account, “more other”with respect to the unmodified category ofEurope—than the Balkans, and the latter inturn as more Oriental and other, and conse-quently less European, than Eastern Europe.The same logic of “nesting Orientalisms”(Bakic-Hayden 1995) was to resurge in theregion in view of the prospect of politicaland economical European integration atstake for Eastern Europeans after 1989.

3. THE EASTERN QUESTION OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

With the proclamation of Communiststates throughout the non-Western world af-ter World War II, the century-old culturaland religious dimension of the Occident-Orient dichotomy was gradually eclipsedby the primarily political bipolarity of theCold War opponents. It however resurfacedall the more forcefully soon after the col-lapse of the Eastern European Communistregimes and the resulting geopolitical re-shuffling, globally marketed as “the end ofhistory” (Fukuyama 1992) and of the searchfor political alternatives to neoliberalism

and globalization. For Eastern Europeancountries, this has not only meant beingonce again defined as “catching up” withthe West politically, economically, and jurid-ically, but also being recast into the geo-graphic mold of the old European subdivi-sions of Central, Northern, Southern Eu-rope, and the Balkans, along with the histor-ical claims to power as well as cultural andracial identity underlying them.

3.1. The Europeanizing Project

In 1993, Harvard political scientist Sam-uel Huntington argued that the 500-year-oldeastern boundary of Western Christianityhad recently served to replace the relativelyshort-lived Iron Curtain as the most signifi-cant dividing line in Europe by a more per-vasive divide that he called the “Velvet Cur-tain of culture,” thus restoring the civiliza-tional map of the 16th century.

In this view, not only are cultural differ-ences arising from the distinct confessionaldenominations of Protestantism/Catholi-cism on the one hand and Orthodoxy/Islamon the other associated with significantlydifferent degrees of economic advancementin West and East, respectively, but their im-pact on the trajectory of European moder-

Fault lines North/West South/East

Religion Protestant/Catholic Orthodox/Muslim

Economic progress High Low

Role in history of European modernity

Central Peripheral

(Future) political system Stable democracy ? (Democracy unlikely)

Table 1. Huntington’s “Velvet Curtain of Culture”Compiled from: Huntington 1993

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nity is taken to have been essential as well:According to Huntington, whereas WesternChristianity was both actively involved in,as well as shaped, by feudalism, the Renais-sance, the Enlightenment, the French Revo-lution, and industrialization, both OrthodoxChristians and European Muslims haveonly been “lightly touched” (Huntington1993: 30) by them. Along the same line, sta-ble democracies are considered a likelyprospect for countries of the West, not, how-ever, for those on what obviously representsthe “wrong” side of the curtain.

While graphic representations of pat-terns of social conflict tend to take on thecharacter of self-fulfilling prophecies, in thiscase it seems more reasonable to assumethat Huntington’s map is symptomatic of—rather than responsible for—the resurgence

of the rhetoric enabling Western Europe toportray itself as essentially benign, libera-tory, and civilizing against the backgroundof a perpetually backward and repeatedlyoppressed “East” into which Orthodoxyand Islam become culturally convoluted. Inthe context of the self-proclaimed civilizingproject of the European Union, this howeveramounts to a renewed race for identityamong those Eastern European countriessituated on the hem of the “Velvet Curtain”that supposedly separates “proper” Chris-tianity from Islam. For them, the race’s en-during stake—access to Western markets,employment opportunities, and financialaid—amounts to an exercise in “moral geo-politics” (Böröcz 2005: 115) that involvesdiscarding—or at least downplaying—their“Easternness” while professing a will toWesternization.

Thus, negotiations of cultural and racialidentities framed in terms of repudiating anOriental past, stressing one’s contribution toEuropean civilization, and mapping one’sintegration into the European Union as a“return to Europe”—and therefore as an actof historical reparation—once again domi-nate the identity rhetoric across Eastern Eu-rope. The recurrent tropes used in the pro-cess are highly reminiscent of the ones dis-cussed above in the context of nineteenth-century Romania: On the one hand, nationalelites have referred to the political and eco-nomic transition of both Croatia and Slove-nia in the 1990’s as liberation from “Balkandarkness” (Lindstrom 2003: 319). At thesame time, the electoral promise of rejoiningEurope both institutionally and economi-cally has been grounded on the emphasisplaced on the country’s century-old role as“bulwark of Christianity”3 against the Otto-man threat in both Croatia and Poland

Map 2. The Transformation of Western EuropeSource: Huntington 1993, p. 30

3 “antemurale Christianitatis,” a title equal-ly claimed first and foremost by Austria, furtherby Poland and Romania, but explicitly used byPope Leo X in 1519 in reference to Croatia, in ac-knowledgment of the role of the Croatian armyin fighting back the Ottomans.

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(Bakic-Hayden 1995: 922) and has rein-forced claims of historical belonging to Cen-tral Europe (rather than Eastern Europe orthe Balkans) throughout former Yugoslavia(Bakic-Hayden 1995: 924, Lindstrom 2003:324).

Although never explicitly addressed assuch, one of the main objectives of such ne-gotiations is “whiteness” (see Böröcz 2001:32), the accomplishment of which is seen asdepending on a thorough break with anddisavowal of Islam/the Orient/the Otto-man legacy. Accordingly, individual strate-gies of delimitation are contingent uponhanding over Easternness, Orientality, andultimately non-whiteness to newly con-structed “others” within the region, thus in-ternally reproducing Orientalism in kaleido-scopic fashion:

“…while Europe as a whole has dispar-aged not only the orient ‘proper’, but alsothe parts of Europe that were under orientalOttoman rule, Yugoslavs who reside in areasthat were formerly the Habsburg monarchydistinguish themselves from those in areasformerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire andhence ‘improper’. Within the latter area,eastern Orthodox peoples perceive them-selves as more European than those who as-sumed identity of European Muslims andwho further distinguish themselves fromthe ultimate orientals, non-Europeans”(Bakic-Hayden 1995: 922).

Especially in the wake of the September11th attacks and the framing of the terroristthreat as “Islamic challenge” to the entireWestern world, Westernization has increas-ingly become a matter of taking sides in the“clash of civilizations” Huntington deemedcharacteristic of future conflicts. In this con-text, the fact that the European Union’s cur-rent expansion occurs under the heading of“Eastern enlargement” and that incorpora-tion of the Central and South Eastern Euro-pean countries into the European Union iscommonly referred to as a process of “Euro-peanization” once again points to the bridg-ing character devolving upon the European

East in the Western cognitive map. Thus, thegeneral notion of “Europe” used to denoteWestern, Northern and (parts of) SouthernEurope throughout the nineteenth and thetwentieth centuries has now become synon-ymous with the European Union, whereasthe Eastern parts of the continent have beenrecast as a region whose political, socio-cul-tural, or religious of questionable European-ness and wanting economic and juridicalstandards.

Counting the tasks of overseeing, domi-nating and civilizing the controlled territoriesand their populations as the defining fea-tures of colonial control, Böröcz (2001: 23)has put forth the notion of “contiguous em-pire” in order to characterize the EuropeanUnion’s colonial relationship with the East-ern European applicants. Unlike the modernworld’s more commonplace “detached em-pires,” in which the métropole and its colo-nies were territorially disconnected, contig-uous empires have more difficulty in cate-gorically excluding their inferiorized others.Hence, spatially detached colonial rule willtend to produce “qualitative hierarchies ofdifference, leading to essentialized otheringthrough exoticization, feminization, pueril-ization and racialization” (i.e., Orientalism),whereas in a situation of spatial contiguitybetween colonizer and colonized, the mech-anism of othering will rely on a “quantita-tive pattern of inferiorization: this type ofother is seen as being perhaps of the samesubstance but offering an inexcusably infe-rior level of performance” (i.e., Balkanism).The latter will accordingly be traced to its lo-cation in the métropole’s own, less devel-oped past (2001: 25).

Against this background, the discourseof “Europeanization” applied to countrieswith a century-old European cultural andsocial tradition (from Poland and the CzechRepublic to Hungary and Romania) con-forms to this very logic. On the one hand, itreinstrumentalizes the Orientalist imageryto imply that distance from the Orient repre-sents the underlying yardstick by which

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standards of modernity and civilization aremeasured. On the other hand, it employs themechanism of quantitative inferiorization inorder to mobilize the inferiority complexesthus incurred for its own geopoliticalprojects: As the Islamic threat replaced theCommunist one in the hegemonic Occiden-tal imaginary, Eastern Europe exchanged itspolitical and economic Second World statusfor that of a culturally and racially SecondWorld. By being (reasonably) white, Chris-tian, and European, but at the same timebackward, traditional, and still largelyagrarian, it thus represents Western Eu-rope’s incomplete Self rather than, as in thecase of Islam and the Orient, its Other(Todorova 1997: 18). What ImmanuelWallerstein has called “the family feud to-nality” (2003) of processes of racial otheringwithin kindred cultural spaces thus allowsEastern Europe to be simultaneously ex-

cluded and included in the identity of theexpanding contiguous empire of the E.U. ac-cording to the quantitative pattern of inferi-orization described above.

3.2. Orientalism: Comeback with a Vengeance

The fact that the theory and practice ofthe European Union’s “eastern enlarge-ment” act as an “orientalising tool” (Böröcz2001: 6) becomes apparent in the fact that,for now, the last countries to be negotiatingadmission into the European Union shouldbe Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and (possi-bly) Turkey, in an almost exact replication ofthe degree of their connection to or overlapwith the Ottoman, and therefore Oriental,legacy. While the first two were initially con-sidered for the fifth enlargement round of

Map 3. EU Enlargement 2004 (dark grey), 2007 (light grey) and pending (lighter grey)

Source: CIA World Factbook



2004, at least the political grounds on whichthey have been denied membership until2007 are clearly reminiscent of the mentalmap of 19th century Orientalism. Explicitlydesignated by the European Commission asthe “critical yardsticks for EU accession”(Rehn 2006: 5), the fight against corruptionand crime, trafficking in human beings, andthe reform of the judiciary system have be-come the lines along which increasingly di-vergent levels of the “progress” required ofboth countries are being assessed.

These criteria poignantly reflect the Ori-entalist prism through which the perfor-mance of the two countries—and, by extrap-olation, that of all future candidates—isevaluated: corruption, human trafficking(especially in the form of forced prostitu-tion) and the missing rule of law clearly be-long to the repertoire of Oriental despotismthat prominently featured among the im-ages of the Orient constructed in the eigh-teenth and nineteenth centuries and that arenow being reproduced in relation to the Eu-ropean East. Singling them out as critical is-sues in the countries under scrutiny not onlyrenders the applicant states exotic and infe-rior (Kovács 2001: 205), but, more impor-tantly, traces their problems back to a pastwhich the member states have supposedlyovercome. This obscures both the continuedexistence of similar problems (such as cor-ruption) in core states (Kovács 2001) and theWest’s active contribution to their veryemergence in Eastern Europe and parts ofAsia, as in the amply documented case ofsex trafficking in women and children (Bales1999, Laczko et al. 2002), that, since the1990s, predominantly targeted the Euro-pean East, as opposed to its focus on Thai-land, the Philippines, and Latin America inthe 1980s.

Nevertheless, the Commission’s latestevaluation commended Romania on prelim-inary progress in all these aspects and statedthat the rule of law now prevailed “for thefirst time in the history of the country”(Rehn 2006: 3), and at the same time judged

Bulgaria’s corresponding efforts as “lim-ited” and “not yet satisfactory” (Rehn 2006:3; 4). It thus relegated the latter country to anearlier point in the reform process—onecharacterized by an inefficient and partisanjudiciary and a crime-ridden civil society—and further tightened the monitoring pro-cess by assigning the two candidates to-dolists—a longer one for Bulgaria, a shorterone for Romania—on the fulfillment ofwhich depend both the date of entry and theamount of EU funds to be received after ac-cession. Given that no such restrictions wereapplied for previous EU enlargements, onecan contend that, in terms of Europeanness,the above-mentioned cultural and racialSecond World status of South-Eastern Euro-pean countries translates as second-class EUmembership.

On the other hand, Turkey’s admission,postponed on similar charges as Romania’sand Bulgaria’s, but with a different degreeof gravity, still lies in the distant future.Apart from the lasting uncertainty of the un-dertaking, the gap separating Turkey fromthe (predominantly) Christian candidatesstands out especially when taking into ac-count that, despite the fact that Turkey’s ap-plication for full membership dates back to1987, it was granted the status of a candidatecountry in October 2005 and her accessionnegotiations will be carried out along withthose of Croatia and the FY Republic ofMacedonia, who had first applied in 2003and 2004, respectively. The grounds for de-nying membership to the one candidatewhose official state religion is Islam wereadditionally reinforced in the post-9/11 geo-political context, when the EuropeanUnion’s professions of solidarity with theUnited States in the fight against “Islamicterrorism” paralleled debates aboutwhether the Common European Constitu-tion should contain provisions about the“Christian roots of Europe” and thus ex-clude references to an Islamic legacy—aninitiative led by eight Catholic Europeancountries.4 Although the proposal was

102 MANUELA BOATCÃ


eventually rejected, the mental map under-lying it reveals a sharpening of the Muslim-Christian divide that is reflected as much inEU immigration policies and school curric-ula as it is in its accession negotiations withnew candidates. Tellingly, Albania, a coun-try with a large Muslim majority and a longhistory of Ottoman rule, still does enjoy thestatus of a candidate to the European Union,a prerequisite to which is considered to be “arapprochement between Albania and Euro-pean values and standards” (EuropeanCommission 2006).

4. HISTORY REPEATING

Much like the functionalist notion ofuniversal stages of development, which sit-uated North America and Western Europeat the peak of social evolution, the postu-lated continuum of Europeanness rangingfrom Catholicism and Protestantismthrough Orthodoxy up to Islam translates asa scale of degrees of the ontological inabilityto fully Europeanize. By tracing this defi-ciency to the cultural and religious back-ground of the remaining candidates to theEuropean Union, both mental and physicalmaps based on this notion replicate the logicaccording to which the “feudal remnants” ofThird World economies and societies werediagnosed as obstacles to their attempted“modernization” and the achievement of“capitalism.” In so doing, they not only per-

petuate the dominant evolutionist view ac-cording to which human civilization pro-ceeds in a linear way from an initial state ofnature through successive stages leading toWestern civilization (Quijano 2000: 543),but, more importantly, they obscure the mil-itary, economic and epistemic power rela-tions which uphold the current core-periph-ery structure of the modern world-system.

Rather than a new world order, the geo-political reshuffling following the end of theCold War seems to have brought about amere shift of focus in the choice of measur-ing sticks for barriers to socio-economicachievement and political advancement, theparadigmatic model of which remains theWestern European one. Accordingly, as cul-turalist explanations for Eastern Europe’slow economic performance and political sta-bility regain prominence, increased depen-dence on Western European trade and in-vestment, technology, and overall regula-tions ensure the region’s economic Third-Worldization. In this context, Andre GunderFrank has suggested that the Second Worldstatus of Communist countries was an“ideological illusion” which obscured theassignment of both the East and the South toa Second world to which the First has re-peatedly blocked access (Frank 1992: 36).While at least the economic disparities be-tween the Communist semiperiphery andthe formerly colonized periphery during theCold War era make such a conflation ofSouth and East empirically problematic, to-day both the deteriorating cultural andepistemic terms of trade discussed above

4 Spain, Poland, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia,Czech Republic, Malta, Italy.

Figure 1. Modernization ModelCompiled from: Parsons 1966

f unctional differentiation

Primitive Intermediate Modern



and the political-economic trends character-izing Eastern Europe with respect to West-ern Europe increasingly point toward the re-gion’s peripheralization:

“the industrial economies of theWest, in Europe and elsewhere, areincreasingly capable of transfer-ring a major part of the adjustmentcost of the world economic crisis tothe “second world” East as theyhave already done to the “thirdworld” South. In so doing, the“second” world is also being“Third Worldized” […] The inter-minable missions of “expert ad-vice” and International MonetaryFund (IMF) policies that had al-ready depressed the economies ofthe South and East in the 1980s aretoday even more legion in the Eastwhere they further promote thisbankruptcy.” (Frank 1992: 42f.)

In the end, prolonging the interim statusof “applicant states” amounts to a renewedquasi-colonial situation, this time character-ized by legal and economic dependence ona foreign authority, and ideologically sup-ported by means of a continued reconstruc-tion of “modern” identities in which an Ori-entalist imaginary plays a central part. Inthis case, the race for a “more European”identity won’t be to the swift, yet both theswift and the slow will go on bearing the race

marker of “lesser whiteness” whose legiti-macy they acknowledged when entering ne-gotiations.

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