Eastern Europe

Mental Maps of Eastern Europe: States, Mentalities, Modernisation

“…This contribution argues that Eastern Europe emerges out of several intersecting mental mapping exercises adding further layers of difference to the distinction between a ‘core’ European area and an indistinct ‘Orient’ or ‘East’. Such mental mapping emerges during the late Enlightenment and the 19 th century (Bideleux, 2015; Lemberg, 1985; Neumann, 1999; Okey, 1992; Schenk, 2012; Wolff, 1994), but re‐surfaces ever since through new layers of difference, adding further claims about allegedly distinct non‐Western mentalities. At times they portray Eastern Europeans as “paternalists” with little personal initiative and over‐dependent on their state, and at times as cynical and cunning profiteers, undermining state structures.…”

“…It was Enlightenment thinkers that depicted Eastern Christianity's political homeland, the Byzantine Empire, as a “theocratic antithesis of Enlightenment” (Wolff, 1994). While they thought less in East‐West binaries and more in categories of a civilised South (reflecting the legacy of classical Greek and Roman antiquity) versus barbaric “North” (also including Polish and Russian lands), they were aware of the association between Russian lands and Eastern Church (Lemberg, 1985; Schenk, 2012). The North‐South ‘civilisational’ axis turned into an East‐West axis over the 19 th century's first half.…”

“…These observers produced the basis for othering Eastern Europe even where Western‐Christian, by defining Western Europe as having a unique “reasoning” capacity due to Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment that leaves little room for an Eastern Europe “plunged in chaos and darkness” (as Larry Wolff paraphrased Voltaire; Wolff, 1994, p. 197). Intellectual and political elites in Eastern Europe either internalised these accounts (Murphy, 2018) or opposed them by pointing out that the East starts further to their south or east, in the Balkans or in Russia (Schenk, 2012; Todorova, 2009).…”