Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)

Return to Contents»

Orientalizing Post/Communism: Europe's "Wild East" in Literature and Film / Nataša Kovačević

This essay originally appears in Nataša Kovačević's book Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe's Borderline Civilization, Routledge 2008, pp. 1-20. Material from this essay is reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, Taylor and Francis Books.

Abstract: The essay posits post/communist Eastern Europe as a neocolonial terrain to show how contemporary discursive underpinnings of global capitalism and liberal democracy have been shaped by a combined Orientalist demonization of communist regimes and Eastern European cultures. It analyzes how old Orientalisms surface in the Cold War period, re-articulated in narratives that define a European or civilizational ideal as an essentially liberal-democratic project against the discursive palimpsest of totalitarian, barbarian, and Oriental communists. The establishment of this discourse has helped to justify transitions to market economy and liberal-civic society in post-communism. These developments increasingly provincialize Eastern Europe through suppressing its communist histories and legacies, placing it in an economically and politically subordinate position with respect to the EU and US, and continuing its dependence on the West as a point of reference for a definition of its identity. Intersecting insights from postcolonial, Marxist, and deconstruction theories, the essay focuses on texts written by Eastern European anti-communist dissidents and exiles, or else by authors who ethnically and linguistically straddle the borders between civilization and the "Wild East" as they map Eastern locales and present post/communism to (largely) Western audiences. As with texts emerging in a traditionally post/colonial situation, exile or incessant border crossing in these texts frequently signify fragmentation and disjunction in terms of national, cultural, or linguistic identification. The essay, therefore, examines the discursive conditions that prompt Nabokov, Brodsky, Kundera and others to simultaneously present themselves as native, Eastern European experts and emancipate themselves – and their homelands – as civilized, Enlightened, or Westernized. Importantly, the authors' attempts to articulate such seemingly oppositional identities create discursive openings for recognizing and analyzing the Orientalist discourses that seek to contain them. These are valuable for deconstructing the basic concept of Eastern Europe, and exposing Eastern Europeans' preoccupation with their reflections in the Western mirror and the concomitant tradition of self-Orientalization.

1. Bleaching Eastern Europe's Cultural "Blackness"

The perfidious Chinese, half-naked Indians and passive Muslims are described as vultures for "our" largesse and are damned when "we lose them" to communism, or to their unregenerate Oriental instincts: the difference is scarcely significant. (Edward Said 108)

The collapse of the Wall, the Curtain and much more besides, deprived "Europe" of its partition along the militarized and policed frontier which had defined its identity as opposed to the presumed alternative culture of Leninism. It turned out that this alternative was not merely a failure, but had for a long time been no more than a pretence; mass action and mass sentiment rejected it, because for many years nobody had believed in it enough to make it work; and the liberal-democratic capitalism of the Community was faced with the task, not of transforming a counterculture, but of filling a vacuum and tidying up a gigantic mess . . . in late 1991 it seems apparent that "Europe" – both with and without the North whose addition turns it from "Europe" into "Western Civilization" – is once again an empire in the sense of a civilized and stabilized zone which must decide whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent and unstable cultures along its borders but not yet within its system: Serbs and Croats if one chances to be Austrian, Kurds and Iraqis if Turkey is admitted to be part of "Europe." (JGA Pocock 304)

<1> Citing Said and Pocock beautifully encapsulates the key concepts explored in this essay: first, the reification of Eastern Europe as a civilizing project (task) by the European Union and North America; and second, the reification of its communist legacies as "unregenerate Oriental instincts" that must be abandoned in this process. Indeed, as many news reports which anticipated and followed the EU Enlargement in 2004 and 2007 imply, Eastern Europe is finally on the road of becoming European by no longer being communist. This binary belies a disturbing political vision, which gives little cause for celebration of a "common" EU future – it indicates that Europe continues to be predicated on the idea of conditional inclusion/exclusion and that any true dialogue between its Western and Eastern members is impossible. Rather, Eastern Europe, in this latest attempt to "modernize" and catch up with the ever-elusive Western prosperity and civilization, cannot negotiate the rules of the game: it must satisfy the EU, IMF and World Bank criteria prescribed for achieving "democracy, "privatization," "capitalism," "diversity," "human rights protection" and many others in order to become emancipated as "European."

<2> It is appropriate here to recall that this impossibility of dialogue, unidirectional flow of directives and their acceptance as necessary for emancipation from economic or cultural "inferiority" typically defines a colonial, or a proto-colonial relationship. But when writing about Europe, Eastern Europe in particular, postcolonial critics and historians have been wary of using this terminology. Certain Eastern European states are only begrudgingly discussed as postcolonial even in terms of its Soviet, Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman imperial legacies (or the legacy of German rule in Poland). Only recently – and even then reluctantly – has Eastern Europe been discussed as a colonial terrain of the Western tradition, perhaps more famously in Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994), a valuable work on the discursive "invention" of Eastern Europe by the Western European imaginary over the last two centuries and in Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić's anthology Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (2002) which blends the discussion of the Balkans and Eastern Europe as Western post/neocolonial "others" [1 ].

<3> The more entrenched argument goes – paralleling Maria Todorova's discussion of the Balkans in Imagining the Balkans (1997) – that no Eastern European country ever suffered the type of colonial disenfranchisement, exploitation and racism typical in, for example, Asian or African colonies. While this is a valid distinction, I argue that this line of thinking ultimately obfuscates a long history of Western attempts to identify itself as enlightened, developed, and civilized in distinction to Eastern Europe and as a result, to intellectually master Eastern Europe through description and classification, fixing it into stereotypes of lamentable cultural, political and economic backwardness (e.g., agrarian, old-fashioned, despotic, totalitarian, obedient, abnormally violent, bloodthirsty) or, alternately, praiseworthy conservation of its "noble savages" (here, pallid Western city dwellers, enervated by industrial fumes or corporate discipline, are contrasted with big, healthy, lazy and gregarious Eastern Europeans) [2 ].

<4> The difficulty of recognizing this pernicious proto-colonial relationship is compounded by the contemporary euphemistic discourse about the European Union as an occasionally bumpy and antagonistic, but ultimately benevolent, equality-oriented and multicultural enterprise, which, like the equally obfuscating term globalization, suppresses the mechanisms of capitalist expansion, withdrawal of social welfare policies and creation of new peripheries and widespread impoverishment [3 ]. Uncovering these mechanisms dropped, by and large, from official political discourses, Étienne Balibar (2002, 2004) has vehemently criticized the myth of a multicultural, egalitarian European Union in the face of its assimilationist policies, its disappearing labor unions, as well as its predication of citizenship rights on member states' national origin. Finally, the very term Eastern European makes for a particularly confusing and schizophrenic position. On the one hand, Eastern Europeans have been defined and define themselves as "European," especially in distinction to their more "Oriental" neighbors, an act that could be explained in terms of Milica-Bakić Hayden's (1995) "nesting Orientalisms" which she applies to the formation of ethnic identity in the Balkans. But on the other hand, Eastern Europeans, while not "other" as much as Asians or Africans, are also "not quite" European; rather, they are semi-European, semi-developed, with semi-functioning states and semi-civilized manners (perhaps this also explains, as Wolff demonstrates throughout Inventing Eastern Europe, the oscillations between racial designations of Eastern Europeans as whites, blacks, gypsies, and even apes).

<5> The establishment of "real" colonial rule and subsequent imperialist projects that legitimated it – a worthy distinction made by Robert Young in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) – necessarily creates a context of study different from that of Eastern Europe, marked by the absence of "real" colonies or the various imperialist institutions, discourses, or people implicated in their rule. However, this work takes the viewpoint of Larry Wolff that "as in the case of Orientalism, so also with Eastern Europe, intellectual discovery and mastery could not be entirely separated from the possibility of real conquest" (8). In other words, I argue that this "intellectual discovery and mastery" of Eastern Europe is always-already implicated in the political, economic and cultural interactions between the West and East and in this, I challenge Aijaz Ahmad (1992) and other critics of Said who, in a dialectical fashion, accuse him of emphasizing textuality at the alleged expense of exposing material consequences of Orientalism.

<6> In Gearóid Ó Tuathail's terms, this geo-graphing of Eastern Europe not only produces knowledge of an essentially arbitrary space ("geography"), but also creates certain geopolitical contexts for its imperial management (7). For instance, the geo-graphing of Eastern Europe is reflected in such material decisions as the "rescuing" of Greece, glorified as the cradle of European civilization, from communism and Stalinist rule after World War II, the NATO bombing of Serbs and Montenegrins because they could not get over alleged ancient ethnic hatreds, or the greater financial aid by the West to post-communist states that are Catholic or Protestant rather than Orthodox [4 ]. Not less importantly, this is also reflected in the attempts of various Eastern European peoples to market themselves as civilized, developed, tolerant, or multicultural enough to be geo-graphed as European, as well as in their internalization of the stigma of inferiority, manifesting itself in a host of instances from self-stigmatization to glorification of stigma as a form of anti-Western identification.

2. Dissident Narratives

I deplore the attitude of foolish or dishonest people who ridiculously equate Stalin with McCarthy, Auschwitz with the atom bomb and the ruthless imperialism of the USSR with the earnest and unselfish assistance extended by the USA to nations in distress. (Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions 50)

[The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia] did not happen irresponsibly, as an act of aggression or out of disrespect for international law. It happened, on the contrary, out of respect for the law, for a law that ranks higher than the law which protects the sovereignty of states. The alliance has acted out of respect for human rights, as both conscience and international legal documents dictate. (Vaclav Havel 6)

<7> Among the recent historical, sociological and cultural studies accounts which delve into Eastern European colonial in(ter)ventions, most focus on either the period before the twentieth century (for instance, Larry Wolff [1994]) or as is sometimes the case with Balkan studies, on the overlapping of discourses on early twentieth-century Balkan Wars, World War I and the recent Yugoslav civil wars [5 ]. Additionally, while some of these studies analyze ways in which Eastern European narratives look to the West and engage with discourses that perform their civilizational "inferiority" (like, for instance, the many studies of Russian national identity in the nineteenth century and earlier and the conflicts between Slavophiles and Westernizers), the majority instead focus on the constitution of various Western European and/or North American identities through constructions of "otherness." Among the studies that use Eastern European narratives as a point of entry, few look at specifically literary and film narratives which can, as I will suggest, yield fruitful readings if analyzed as post- or anticolonial texts, while simultaneously allowing us to revamp some of the ossified concepts in postcolonial theory in order to engage with the present moment.

<8> In the context of the above discussed discourses on Eastern European cultural "blackness," I therefore shift the focus of study from Western narratives that map this locale to Eastern European narratives which are haunted by these same discourses, as the quotations from Nabokov and Havel attest. This preoccupation of Eastern Europeans with their various reflections in the Western mirror and concomitant self-stigmatizations or self-celebrations are perhaps the most elusive and least discussed avatars of what could be called, for lack of a better theoretical term, Eastern European Orientalism. Because of Eastern Europe's direct geographic, political and cultural proximity to Western Europe and indirectly, to North America, its acceptance of Western models has, overall, been far smoother, more voluntary and more urgently executed than in other colonial locales. In fact, it is this voluntary – and largely unrecognized – self-colonizing tendency vis-à-vis the West which distinguishes Eastern Europe from other targets of Western colonialism and which will be one of the primary topics of this discussion [6 ].

<9> According to Rastko Močnik, the same "Orientalist ideology that downgrades and holds down" the region as a whole "also holds up the ruling position of local political classes, which in turn act. . .as the local agents of the international system of domination" (85) [7 ]. This double domination, in turn, facilitates and is facilitated by a generally favorable attitude to the ideal of European civilization and an almost fatalistic consensus that the current model of Western social development is the way to go (post-communist transitions are necessarily difficult and may take centuries, but it is worth it because prosperity – and acceptance by the world community – awaits us). Because of the urgency of the present moment and because this has been neglected by academic study, I am particularly interested in tracing the contours of Eastern European Orientalism in literary and visual texts emerging throughout the communist and post-communist periods. I place focus on cultural texts, because they often articulate and analyze collective anxieties and identity crises resulting from self-Orientalization which are missing from the more visible, official political discourses.

<10> The term postcolonial traditionally signifies fragmentation, disjunction, the crossing of national, cultural and linguistic borders, figuratively and/or literally. Many of these Eastern European authors indeed write from a position of linguistic and/or national border-crossing, articulating identities in conflict with the Orientalist discourses that seek to contain them. In this respect, narratives by Eastern European exiles [8 ] in Western Europe and North America during the communist period are of special interest, as they can help theorize the trajectories of self-colonization, as well as strategies for its subversion. It is in those texts that the disjunctions of identity, the aporia of, on the one hand, denouncing communist "barbarians" to Western audiences and on the other hand, being personally victimized as an Eastern "barbarian" in need of civilizational disciplining, becomes especially prominent.

<11> This denunciation of communist – frequently Russian – barbarians and the need to overcome the stigma of Orientalism, by proving one's allegiance to Western civilizational achievements, is already discernible in the texts written by that famous Eastern European emigrant Joseph Conrad long before the October Revolution. In essays such as "Autocracy and War," "A Note on the Polish Problem" (1928) and novel Under Western Eyes (1911), Conrad establishes Orientalist themes that we will see reverberating throughout the texts written during communist and post-communist periods. For Conrad, Russia is a semi-Asiatic country which has no place meddling in European affairs; even the worst European autocracies guilty of militant imperialism preserve a sense of ethical decency, responsibility and rationality, but Russia is "an abyss of mental darkness" based upon irrationality, illogicality, mysticism and "the apathy of hopeless fatalism" (The Works of Joseph Conrad 98).

<12> In contrast to Western enlightenment, democratic development and general political normality – which, Conrad argues, also characterizes Poland, so the West should embrace Poland as one of its own – Russia stands out as a moral aberration, embodying complete lawlessness, degeneration and ideological emptiness. Not surprisingly then, Conrad portrays communist or socialist attempts to violently change this system in Russia as politically immature, emerging from political evil as desperate gestures and producing their own evil in turn. In Under Western Eyes, the unfavorable portrayal of assorted Russian revolutionaries only enforces Conrad's assertion that Russia's madness is incomprehensible to a Westerner and that the pathology of tyranny only breeds the pathology of revolution, which is equated with terrorism and anarchism.

<13> In the schizophrenic narratives emerging in response to communist takeovers across Eastern Europe, Milan Kundera, echoing Conrad's gesture, similarly wrests his Bohemia from unwieldy Russian paws and claims it for the liberal, democratic Europe (ontologically distinct, of course, from Russia). Czesław Miłosz mixes his fascination with Paris, to him a phantasmagoria of capitalist consumerism, with his consternation at the "No Poles allowed" sign at the French border, while Nabokov's many Pnins haunt the North American academic landscape, patronized in their badly dressed, socially awkward, Russian ways. One could argue that Eastern European literature, for the large portion of the twentieth century, in fact reached Western audiences primarily in the context of the Cold War, which directly or indirectly contributed to the fetishizing of these exiled authors – so much that some of them willingly embraced the role, "writing" themselves as stock dissident martyrs and/or satirizing this Western fetish.

<14> At the same time, this political climate implicated their narratives in the various other attempts by the West to understand, map, geo-graph the communist "other." In this respect, these narratives are brought to a moment of crisis through a recognition of self-stigmatization and/or recognition of the attempt at containment by the Western "other." One can trace, as Homi Bhabha writes, the "ex-centric sites of experience and empowerment" that the "poetics of exile" creates by bringing the present moment into disjunction with itself, in this case exploding the articulation of history through Cold War mythology (4).

<15> For instance, Vladimir Nabokov fashions himself as a martyred Russian exile in the United States, arguing that his political and cultural "othering" of communist regimes aligns him with Western liberal discourses, while his Russianness makes him acceptably exotic and "different" to American audiences. Pale Fire (1962) expresses this double bind, rather than liberatory potential, of anti-communist exile: Charles Kinbote seemingly exemplifies an emancipated, Westernized subject but exceeds the acceptable level of foreignness afforded him, thus ultimately exposing and escaping discursive containments by Cold War Orientalisms. A similar relationship informs the exilic self-fashioning and geo-graphing of Eastern/Western/Central/ Europe in Joseph Brodsky's (1986, 1995) and Czesław Miłosz's (1968, 1982, 2001) autobiographical-philosophical essays, where a critical respect for the validity of their lived experience behind the Iron Curtain has made it difficult to contest the "truth" of their delineation of Easternness and Westernness. However, their geographic divisions of Europe are invested in ideological binaries which cast the East as immutably totalitarian – whether monarchic or communist – against the West as progressive, politically fluid and respectful of human rights.

<16> Conversely, Milan Kundera and Günter Grass articulate a European (civilizational) ideal in political and cultural, rather than geographic terms: as a conglomerate of Western Enlightenment traditions of human rights, democracy and freedom of expression and some form of humanized, soft capitalism. From this perspective, both communism and fascism are discursively demonized as deviations from the European ideal. I believe, however, that there is potential for recognizing this ideal's Orientalist trappings, especially in Kundera's Slowness (1996) and Grass's The Call of the Toad (1992), which criticize Western colonial attitudes toward post-communist Eastern Europe and the rise in nationalist/identity politics enabled precisely by Western liberal, multiculturalism discourses.

<17> The figurative, as well as literal, borders between Eastern Europe and the "free world" thus survive the Cold War to resurface, in familiar guises, in post-communist texts. In this period, Eastern European narratives again posit displaced identities, this time not communist exiles, but rather refugees from the post-communist civil wars and/or emigrants from the economically devastated locales of Eastern European transitions to capitalism. While Cold War Orientalism continues to permeate the narrative landscapes, they are accompanied by the more fashionable discourses of globalization, critically evaluated in their many guises as narratives of world peace, human rights, multiculturalism and consumerism. In addition to narratives which thematize disjunctions resulting from the movement from East to West, we should also focus on those that bespeak the "unhomeliness" created in Eastern locales through an introduction of Western neoliberal capitalist models and discourses into the shambles of socialist welfare systems. In recent novels by Dubravka Ugrešić (1994), Victor Pelevin (2002) and Gary Shteyngart (2002) and films by Emir Kusturica (1995) and Wolfgang Becker (2003), the prospects of globalized existence and inclusion into the EU, NATO or the ultimate master-signifier – "the free world" – are narrated with excitement as much as with skepticism and disenchantment, as new subjectivities and opportunities, but also new inequalities and hierarchies surface within the global space.

<18> Another significant feature of these works, one that is starkly absent from the existing critical readings, is what I refer to as communist nostalgia, although I acknowledge that this term hardly exhausts the multiple, often contradictory, layers of meaning that emerge in the narratives of various communist legacies. My interest in Eastern European discourses of communist nostalgia, which I will discuss at more length later, lies in their attempt to open up another instance of a present that is out of joint with itself, to reclaim the specters of the communist past in order to posit an open future – one that is, again, not appropriated and fixed by the teleology of capitalist globalization. Hence, finally, the deliberate naming of this section "dissident narratives": the designation of Eastern European dissident, generally signifying an anti-communist dissenter, already contains potential for dissidence from or interruption of any hegemonic narrative.

<19> The mechanisms of recognition and critique of self-Orientalization which arise from the gesture of dissidence from hegemonic narratives deserve special attention. For instance, Victor Pelevin's and Gary Shteyngart's mock-nostalgic novels, Homo Zapiens (2002) and The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002) respectively, explore utopian possibilities contained in remembering and critically re-evaluating the legacy of communism. This memory collapses the distinction between the criminal, transitioning post-communist East and the orderly, developed West which enables Western discursive and political management of Eastern European societies.

<20> However, one should certainly not overlook the contemporary criminalization of Eastern Europe through a discourse on the unwieldy, murderous Balkans, its most irredeemable region. In this respect, it is imperative to problematize Slavoj Žižek's seemingly leftist-liberal position on the Yugoslav 1990s' wars because he presents himself as a native expert to Western audiences by nevertheless slipping into multiculturalist racism, ethnicization of guilt and identity politics, which have garnered support for the "free world's" intervention in the wars. Perhaps we should look to Aleksandar Hemon's (2000) and Dubravka Ugrešić's (1994) novels as alternative narratives of the Yugoslav wars and Yugoslavia in general, placing it outside of (Western) discourses of multiculturalism and identity politics. Finally, beyond the murderous politics of Yugoslav wars, one can turn to recent films – specifically Theo Angelopoulos' Eternity and a Day (1999), Emir Kusturica's Underground (1995) and Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye, Lenin! (2003) – to examine utopian possibilities, for redefining the concept of Europe, and the European Union), in terms of an anti-colonial and anti-nationalist politics.

<21> I have so far been using the term Orientalism in order to show my indebtedness to Said, although I am aware that this also exposes my argument to some of the same criticism to which Said's seminal work was subjected. Lest I be accused of what Dennis Porter (1983), James Clifford (1988) and Robert Young (2001), among others, have called the continuity, ahistoricity, or homogeneity of Said's methodology in outlining an Orientalist discourse, I want to stress that, although I look at a particular historical range and notice similar patterns of cultural stereotyping during this time (some of which certainly echo earlier historical patterns), I do not argue that there is a uniform or uninterrupted narrative of Eastern European Orientalism. This is also one of the reasons I consider the literary and visual texts I mention as disparate rather than representative of any discursive "tradition," and do not generally attempt to glean an "accurate" history of the discursive formations that highlight this Orientalism, an impossible task in itself. Each narrative is analyzed as a singular intervention within and into this discourse, entering into a constellation [9 ], but not continuity, chronological or otherwise, with other texts. My focus is on concepts, themes, etc. as they may emerge, rather than on formulating a structured narrative of Eastern European Orientalism.

<22> But, while the task of historicizing and looking for Foucauldian epistemological breaks, interruptions and contradictions is a worthy one, it also leads to an excessive preoccupation with the internal consistencies/inconsistencies of a discourse, which was, I feel, perhaps the unwitting effect of much academic criticism of Said. As a result, the discourse folds back into itself instead of expanding into other fields of study, where it could have shown how it figures in the creation of particular subjectivities, how it participates in political exchanges.

<23> For the same reason, I am reluctant to define where exactly the Eastern Europe or the West mapped in this text begins or ends. Arguably, there are a number of historically concrete countries that have traditionally been considered Eastern European. As Larry Wolff (1994) shows, Russia has almost always been Eastern Europe if not outright "the Orient." And arguably, the borders of Eastern Europe (and Western Europe, or the West), have shifted a number of times in different historical periods, or sometimes in different accounts of the same historical period, frequently depending on the author's location in this discursive geography. Thus, to Czesław Miłosz, Prague is often the threshold into Western Europe; to Milan Kundera, it is Central Europe (itself a term marking a desperate attempt to escape designation as Eastern European); to Shteyngart, it is Eastern Europe, morphing into the fictional city of Prava, an every-Eastern European-city. In the communist and post-communist periods, Eastern Europe has been geo-graphed as the lands behind the Iron Curtain, and because I am writing about this particular mapping of Eastern Europe many of the authors discussed are from post/communist Europe.

<24> However, defining the border so clearly problematizes a potential inclusion of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos into the discussion (Greece is both Balkan/Eastern European and the cradle of Western civilization), of East German director Wolfgang Becker (East Germany was both German and Eastern European after World War II), or of any Yugoslav authors/directors (Yugoslavia was Eastern European but without Iron-Curtain communism). Instead, I propose keeping the borders of Eastern Europe open and shifting, while analyzing ways in which the narratives themselves engage with this imaginary geography. Eastern Europe, Europe and the West figure as concepts rather than monolithic geo-historical entities, while at the same time inevitably affecting concrete peoples by engendering all sorts of real borders among them.

<25> So far, I have been including the Balkans in my discussion of Eastern Europe, since the Balkans, despite spawning a separate field of study recently, remain Orientalized as extreme Eastern Europe. That it is impossible to disassociate the Balkans from Eastern Europe is also confirmed by Wolff's (1994) and Todorova's (1997) projects, which, despite their stated focus, consistently and symptomatically implicate one within a discussion of the other. It is especially difficult to theorize the Balkans in isolation from political and social patterns in the rest of Eastern Europe during the communist and post-communist periods. As Tomislav Longinović writes, the Balkans are frequently subsumed under Iron-Curtain Europe before 1989; after the fall of communism, the alleged absence of old divisions "polarized Eastern Europe into a North-South division between the advanced Central Europe and the bloodthirsty Balkans" (41) [10 ].

<26> Of course, as is the case with Eastern Europe, the borders of Central Europe and the Balkans (or the non-Central Eastern Europe?) shift depending on the account. A renowned Eastern European scholar Timothy Garton Ash offers definitions that are particularly exemplary of the geographic arbitrariness of these categories: he divides this "other Europe" into a "second" ("Central") and "third" (?) Europe, grouping the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, the Baltic States and Slovenia in "Central" Europe and Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Serbia in the "third" Europe (121). What is especially interesting here is less a definition of clear borders and more the political and cultural overdetermination of concepts such as Central Europe and the Balkans. Therefore, I suggest that we investigate how Eastern European narratives engage with the discourse of Central Europe as a redeemable Eastern Europe and with the Balkans as irredeemable, extreme, and problematic Eastern Europe.

<27> By repeatedly flaunting terms such as Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and the Balkans I do not mean to negate or dismiss as unimportant the specificity of numerous ethnic, linguistic, or any other identities that comprise this space. Indeed, since Said, many theorists have been careful not to portray a particular geo-discursive area as monolithic for fear of suppressing differences, minorities, or, indeed, creating "margins and outsiders" in Bart Moore-Gilbert's words (72). Additionally, some theorists have devoted their efforts to distinguishing between the different Orientalisms emerging in different national imaginaries; notable here is Lisa Lowe's (1991) effort to compare and contrast French and British Orientalisms, both challenging and supplementing Said's project. Similarly, Maria Todorova and Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić methodologically depart from Said who set "the stage for peaceful coexistence by dismantling difference" and instead "affirm constitutive differences and paradoxes," but nevertheless with the same political goal in mind as Said – "multicultural coexistence" (Bjelić and Savić 5).

<28> While I necessarily recognize these "constitutive differences and paradoxes," I believe they should not be analyzed merely for their own sake (in terms of discussing the specificity of German Orientalizing of Poland, or American Orientalizing of Russia, for instance), but rather with the goal of tracing their participation in the general discourses and anxieties that accompany the concepts Europe and Eastern Europe. The political vision of this essay is that theorizing what is assigned as a general or common attribute to always-already divergent national or any other identities is fruitful not only because it reveals the trajectories of globalization and opens up the possibility of a unified struggle to deconstruct such attributes, but also because focusing on specificity for the sake of its affirmation, i.e., "emancipation" into global visibility, potentially locks it into the logic of "multicultural coexistence." I see this as an essentially conservative ideal which in its mainstream liberal form in fact perfectly coexists with the myths of Western civilization and Eastern Europe. In that spirit, the literary and visual narratives mentioned likewise do not perform a multicultural (or gender, or any other) sampling of Eastern European authors for the sake of diversity; rather, these narratives are selected for their singular interventions into the general discourses I have outlined above.

<29> In support of this battle against assigning primacy to national or ethnic specificity, I cite former Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Drnovšek's warning to his electorate in 1995 as a case in point: the choice is not between this Slovenia or that Slovenia; the choice is no less than "between Europe and the Balkans" (Močnik 94).

"The Hinterland of the New European Reich": Democracy's Border or Democracy's Limit?

What the proper historical stance . . . 'relativizes' is not the past (always distorted by our present point of view) but, paradoxically, the present itself – our present can be conceived only as the outcome (not of what actually happened in the past, but also) of the crushed potentials for the future that were contained in the past. (Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute 90)

The means to get beyond the crisis is the ontological displacement of the subject. The most important change therefore takes place inside humanity, since with the end of modernity also ends the hope of finding something that can identify the self outside the community, outside cooperation and outside the critical and contradictory relationships that each person finds in a non-place, that is, in the world and the multitude. This is where the idea of Empire reappears, not as a territory, not in the determinate dimensions of its time and space and not from the standpoint of a people and its history, but rather simply as the fabric of an ontological human dimension that tends to become universal. (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 384)

<30> In his discussion of the Yugoslav civil wars, Étienne Balibar calls Yugoslavia, as well as the post-communist East, an opportunity for Europe to reconsider its borders, as well as its "apartheid." If Europe is to achieve what he calls an "open citizenship," it must cease to "other" the Yugoslav situation as "atypical" and rather accept it as "a local projection of forms of confrontation and conflict characteristic of all Europe" (We, the People of Europe 5). The metaphor of Yugoslavia, or by analogy Eastern Europe, as a mirror for Europe effectively promotes it from democracy's borderland, or – in racist terms of a colleague that Balibar quotes – "the Hinterland of the new European Reich," to a crucial symbol of the crisis of identity in the so-called developed world (We, the People of Europe 123).

<31> The Yugoslav wars demonstrate that Europe, as well as the United States (their union appropriately consummated via NATO), have a schizophrenic identity as well when it comes to Eastern Europeans: on the one hand, their violent conflicts and political and economic crises are alien, on the outside, as something that could never happen in the developed world; on the other, the geographic proximity, as well as the cultural, racial, etc. closeness denote the upheavals as something of Europe, as a terrain where European civilization must be protected and barbarism contained. This latter way of inclusion is of course not the one that Balibar explicitly has in mind, since this again leads not to a reconsideration of the concept of Europe, but to an affirmation of some transcendentally pure identity of Europe in the name of which the ugly spots must be cleansed.

<32> However, this particular pattern of simultaneous inclusion-exclusion is significant because it helps us theorize new types of racism that arise globally, after the struggles for colonial liberation and as old ethnic and racial exclusions allegedly take a back seat through a host of juridical measures. Many postcolonial theorists have expressed optimism that old Eurocentric-type racism is disappearing as the world can no longer be neatly divided into a European or American "center" or Asian and African "peripheries." According to Ajrun Appadurai, we live in the era of complex transnational movements of people, finances and ideas, which undermine the idea of stable boundaries in the center-periphery model and give rise to hybrid discourses and identities that challenge racism (299). Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman argues that, through "denationalization of the state," the traditional efforts towards assimilation are becoming obsolete in the climate of cultural plurality and tolerance of differences (168). Among other prominent scholars who espouse similar views are, of course, Homi Bhabha (1994) with his celebration of cultural hybridity and subversive potential of mimicry and Stuart Hall with his emphasis on "diaspora, diversity, hybridity and difference" (237).

<33> But the alleged denationalization or deracialization of state policies does not do much towards deconstructing the seemingly supranational and supra-racial identities such as an Eastern European, European, cosmopolitan, or global citizen. The term American is, or course, reluctantly used because of its explicit association with a country and because "Americanization" has received a generally bad rap in the rest of the world. This type of racism, like racism which Orientalizes Eastern Europeans, predicates a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion: that is, the barrier to one's inclusion is no longer (on the surface, at least) one's ethnicity or race, but rather one's cultural, political and economic behavior. In this sense, inclusion is always possible since it is always possible to "tweak" one's culture or politics to merit international acceptance. On the other hand, exclusion (especially through fashionable policies such as economic sanctions or military interventions) remains a permanent feature of this still conditional inclusion. The Eastern European narratives under consideration mark a passage towards the obsession with not so much race as behavior, presentation and image, in order to appear civilized or worthy of Western accolade.

<34> Exemplary here is Dubravka Ugrešić's description of Eastern Europe in Have a Nice Day as a "sister" she cannot escape, a disgracefully uncivilized double that wears "cheap make-up," "talks too loudly," "wipes its lips with its hand," and whose desperate eyes reveal a "need to stop being a second-class citizen and become someone" (23). In Kundera's Slowness we encounter a hapless Czech scientist Cechoripsky whom the narrator treats satirically for his obsession with denouncing communism during a presentation to a Western audience, a presentation itself weakened by the scientist's extreme anxiety over his cultural insignificance, his hopelessly outdated paper and, predictably, his ugly clothes. These narrative moments are significant in that they can help us recognize and theorize the "racism without race" in Balibar's (1991) terms, one that in fact keeps the ideology of multiculturalism in place and with it, global capitalist networks.

<35> Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri try to explain why the mechanisms of hierarchy and logic of inclusion/exclusion are today difficult to recognize and thus make the ideology of multiculturalism seem truly egalitarian:

The hierarchy of the different races is determined only a posteriori, as an effect of their cultures – that is, on the basis of their performance. . . racial supremacy and subordination are not a theoretical question, but arise through free competition, a kind of market meritocracy of culture. (193)

The language of marketing and advertising is quite appropriate here in light of my earlier observations on image and presentation of one's culture; also multiculturalism as an ideology frequently follows the rhythms of the market as "diversity" in university brochures, ethnic clothing, restaurants, etc. But I would like to revise Hardt and Negri's notion to also include the "older" type of a priori, biological racism which intersects with the "racism without race." I argue that both have essentially the same hierarchical structure, positing an ideal, or primary white, European/American, capitalist, Christian identity, although this identity is an absent cause in the latter type of racism.

<36> Because of this, there is no true "free competition" of cultures, as is evident in the differential inclusion/exclusion of countries and nationalities with respect to the European Union. Thus, despite satisfying a number of criteria for accession more successfully than other candidate countries, Turkey's entry is again delayed; the accession of Czech Republic and Poland was favored but followed by lingering, unstated anxiety about the Slavic types it brings. Finally, the very criteria of multiculturalism legitimate isolation and racist policy towards those proclaimed to be non-multicultural and hence, paradoxically, "isolationist": hence the discomfort that NATO exhibited in bombing Yugoslavia, as a country of white people, yet not quite European (or white) in that it also has authoritarian, ethnically intolerant, gender-discriminatory policies [11 ].

<37> Indeed, this type of multicultural racism and its crucial role in obviating the need for dialogue with the "enemy," legitimating military or other interventions and stripping the targeted people of meaningful political agency remains to be theorized. Eastern European narratives are interesting from this perspective not merely as mimetic testimony to the existence of multicultural racism, but because they posit subjectivities that test the limits of multiculturalism, expose its aporias and with it, question the viability of any democratic politics similarly based on emancipation, on the "rescuing" from a state of abjection and striving to an a priori determined ideal proclaimed as universal (i.e., multicultural tolerance, human rights). The moment of crisis in many Kundera's novels, for instance, comes with a recognition that the self-victimization of communist dissidents legitimates their "rescue" into democracy, free speech, and other bounties of the West, but at the same time there is a feeling that this discursive field is borrowed, alien and non-negotiable.

<38> More significantly, the self-victimization turns one, indeed, into a victim on behalf of which the rescue is taking place but who is, in the last instance, not given a political voice – the type of non-subject that Slavoj Žižek (2002), following Giorgio Agamben, humorously renames "homo sucker." The silencing of characters in the face of this discursive appropriation almost obsessively haunts many Eastern European narratives, from Kundera and Nabokov to recent novels by Dubravka Ugrešić, Andrei Makine and Gary Shteyngart. In Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), it is poignantly reflected in the advertisement for Sabina's exhibition of her Czech photographs in the West: as a barbed wire is grafted onto her face to signal communist oppression, she is silenced both physically and figuratively – communism is essentialized as an unquestioned abjection, a Badiouian (2001) "universal evil" (like the Holocaust, which the barbed wire invokes) from which she must be rescued, even as she protests, ineffectively so, against the ad and the discursive categories it employs.

<39> This alleged guilt of the West about not rescuing Eastern Europe from the evil of communism indeed resonates today when the European Union Enlargement, like the simultaneous acceptance by the United States, is advertised as a payback for past wrongs (Ivaylo Ditchev 242). This self-sanctioned right of a supranational body to intervene, to rescue, but also the accepted necessity of intervention by the victim, according to Hardt and Negri, marks a passage from old imperialism to Empire. Especially in narratives that deal with the wars in former Yugoslavia, Europe is invoked as an idealized agent of Empire that will save Yugoslavia from itself, i.e., "ancient ethnic hatreds," but frequently this idealization is brought into a crisis when the victim realizes that there is no ultimate rescue, no ultimate emancipation (and not only because Europe and the United States intervene either too early or too late and in less than ideal ways).

<40> As with Ugrešić's narrator in Have a Nice Day, an Eastern European can indeed become a "global" citizen in the United States, but always continuing in the logic of identity politics – always fixed in the identity of a Balkan war refugee and all the accompanying exotic stereotypes. In Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook, similarly, the protagonist Vladimir Girshkin, a Manhattanite, can never quite shake off the "expansive Russian soul" stereotypes because it is hip to be "multicultural." The limits of multicultural tolerance are in fact beautifully announced through Shteyngart's portrayal of Rybakov, a Russian refugee in New York who is officially flaunted as a mascot of New York's openness to foreigners until he reveals himself as a flaming racist who refuses to be re-educated, all the while proclaiming his love for America, democracy, and capitalism (397). Multiculturalism becomes, in Balibar's terms, "otherness-within-the-limits-of-citizenship," within the limits of what is non-threatening, assimilable, conducive to cooperation instead of rioting (Politics and the Other Scene 159).

<41> In this respect, the narratives at hand not only question multiculturalism, identity politics and the politics of emancipation, but also allow for a radical re-envisioning of these ideas. The dissidence comes first through a criticism of communist and/or nationalist grand narratives of identity containment, but that discernment does not make for an easy acceptance of the grand narratives of democracy, multiculturalism, progress, or capitalism. Rather, the postcolonial condition of these narratives opens up the possibility of recognizing some of the same strategies of containment floating in the "free world." Hence there is rarely a celebration of cultural hybridity or cultural nativism as a radical option, but possibly, there is a movement to something (an undefined something) beyond. What is certain is that multicultural racism is haunted in these narratives by the unstated hierarchies of older racism, perhaps paralleling the way in which we can glean, behind a de-centered Imperial logic, the older, Wallersteinian (1979) core-periphery divisions. The core today is not only the United States and its explicit imperialist pretensions, as David Harvey (2003) warns us, but also the Europe that subtly advertises itself as a non-imperial(ist) project.

<42> As a strategy of simultaneous identity emancipation and containment, multiculturalism is also suspect because, as Gayatri Spivak writes, it is "determined by the demands of contemporary transnational capitalisms. It is an important public relations move in the apparent winning of consent from developing countries in the dominant project of the financialization of the globe" (397). Thus a multicultural, liberal identity is also one that can be safely contained and streamlined into the corporate work/marketplace, the logic being that one will not question class polarizations if one can speak one's language, practice one's religion, etc. What multiculturalism and accompanying discourses of liberal democracy successfully "other" is any leftist politics, which they repeatedly associate with Stalinist-type totalitarianism, human rights violations and lack of basic consumer goods, in comparison with which they indeed appear as more desirable.

<43> It is no secret that today's cultural racism targets any communist politics, but what has not been sufficiently investigated is how this attack on communism reinforces and is in turn reinforced by other racist discourses, biological and/or cultural, about the peoples who venture into communist adventures. I suggest that the "othering" of Eastern European communism was aided, among other things, precisely by the existing discourses on Eastern European racial inferiority, barbarism and overall backwardness and in fact, the two Orientalist strands are difficult to distinguish in anti-communist narratives. Hence the hope of, once again, becoming European or a member of the civilized world once communism is dead. In turn, this invokes the myth of some organic pre-October-Revolution European unity that – as we know from the much longer tradition of Eastern European Orientalism – never existed. However, this myth is so strong that even Étienne Balibar wonders if the end of communism did not signal the "lifting of the obstacle that was blocking the progress of European unity," as if communism were some temporary aberration, a European lapse into madness; capitalism is never, meanwhile, described as an "obstacle" (We, the People of Europe 90).

<44> Since I posit Eastern Europe as a postcolonial terrain, I also consider the significance of communism to its history and the formation of its identity in postcolonial terms. This leads me to here draw on Robert Young's important conclusion that "the historical role of Marxism in the history of anti-colonial resistance remains paramount as the fundamental framework of postcolonial thinking" (6). In this sense, Eastern European communist legacies should not be analyzed only in terms of the degree of economic innovation upon or departure from Western capitalist practices. Indeed, if one does that, then one will conclude, like Immanuel Wallerstein (1991), that communism and capitalism are parts of the same "world system," or like Slavoj Žižek that "'actually existing Socialism' failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism," used its "instrumental reason," was not radical enough (The Fragile Absolute 19) [12 ]. These are of course valid assertions, but what this type of approach misses is the significance of communism as a line of flight for Eastern Europeans from, not only the power grids of Western nations, but also the stigma of economic and cultural inferiority, escape from the logic of capital and the logic of being the "other."

<45> Because this escape was executed largely with the gaze turned towards the Western mirror, the obsession was nevertheless with modernization, production and, basically, catching up with those considered developed, in a similar way that today's obsession is catching up with Western consumption. But the innovations of Eastern European communism were nevertheless great in the area of social welfare policies and the egalitarian ideology of social solidarity which today's post-communist democracies are rapidly replacing with ideals of individualism, civil liberties, and "de-personalized relations of economic dependence" resulting in "an atomized field of free and equal, equally abstract individuals, who entertain shifting packages of beliefs and who manifest no evident social anchorage" (Močnik 87). In this respect, Eastern Europe's communist legacies are also important because of their attempts to counter fears of poverty, economic anxiety and competition that capital thrives on, which, I suggest, is closely related to countering fears of racial stigmatization and competition for emancipation from second-class civilizational status. This interrelatedness is especially conspicuous in contemporary post-communist narratives rife with references to Eastern Europe as a "second-class citizen," a "poor relative" of Europe. Also, the renewed competition to, as Ivaylo Ditchev appropriately phrases it, "occupy the place of some big Other's desire," combines the candidates' proofs of success in economic and social remodeling with their claims to racial/cultural closeness to Europe; thus, Romanians invoke their Latin origin, the Polish their Catholicism, etc. (235).

<46> Because of ghastly human rights records and ultimate inability to catch up with Western models of production and consumption, Eastern European communist regimes probably helped strengthen the stigma that they tried to escape. But their legacy is important primarily because of what they did partly achieve, as well as because, as Žižek writes, they "simultaneously opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations which, among other things, enabled us to measure the failure of actually existing Socialism itself" (Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 131). Žižek even goes as far as to suggest that what anti-communist dissidents overlook is that the very position from which they denounced communist terror in the name of human solidarity was opened up, made possible exactly by the communist regimes themselves (Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 131). Arguably, Žižek's position could have been made possible by the utopia of communist solidarity as much as by the utopia of liberal democratic solidarity, but his line of reasoning deserves serious consideration because it illuminates the utopian potential itself in dissident narratives.

<47> If Eastern European narratives measure the failure of real existing communism against its promise, they also measure similar failures of liberal democracy. Especially in post-communist narratives, there is a movement towards salvaging the memory of communist rule in order to work through its trauma, but also to discern and validate the types of social structures or subjectivities that are disappearing through Eastern European initiation into global capitalism. Hence we witness an astonishing shift in Milan Kundera's writing in his recent novel, Ignorance (2002), where, instead of attacking the stock evils of communism – authoritarianism, herd mentality and kitsch – the characters lament the loss of utopian ideals, also hinting that the occupation of the Czech Republic by global capital is, indeed, worse than the Soviet occupation.

<48> What is at stake, therefore, is an interruption of the present by the past, or, rather, the inability of the present to shake off the specters of the past which it continually proclaims to be dead. Relying on Walter Benjamin's notion that this "dialectics at a standstill" – the past moment seen in conjunction with the present moment – opens up the possibility of radically changing the vision of the future, I propose to read the various guises of communist nostalgia as Benjaminian "memory" that "flashes up at a moment of danger," the present process of transforming Eastern European countries into global capital's dreamworld: dependent economies, highly stratified societies and sources of cheap labor (Illuminations 255). Eastern European texts that narrate communist pasts can today constitute what Dipesh Chakrabarty, following Martin Heidegger, calls "affective histories," to him "subaltern" histories not conceived of in ethnic, racial, or gender terms, but rather as ways of being-in-the-world that exist both inside and outside of the narrative of capital, supplementing it but also exposing its limits, its inability to "translate" into its own language all human experience (95).

<49> Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook, for instance, thus reads the mafia circles in post-communist Eastern Europe from the schizophrenic perspective of global capitalism and multiculturalism – both as testimony to Eastern European ontological inability to mimic Western business practices and as a necessary evil of transitions sure to disappear once democracy is in full swing (hence a satirical portrayal of American expats bent on bringing "democracy" to the East). But the Mafiosi are also persistent reminders of the communist times by whose downfall they were disenfranchised and impoverished. Moreover, their deliberate ridiculing of Western "good" business practices, their refusal to subject their time to the rhythm of the corporate workplace and the "irrationality" and "absurdity" of their Situationist-type interventions resist appropriation by the narrative of capital. I am interested in ways in which this and other texts resist the urge to relegate Eastern Europe to a place in the global march of history, or under present conditions, to a neocolonial status.

<50> It is significant that in devising his notion of "affective histories" Chakrabarty also uses the term "minor histories," following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's discussion of "minor literature" in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986). To Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, a Prague Jew, creates "minor literature" by radically deterritorializing German, "language of the masters"; Kafka brings German to "the desert" by exposing its poverty and preventing its appropriation by nationalist cultural myths (26). A "minor literature" is thus conceived of as literature of "immigrants," of "nomads" for whom it is both impossible to write in a "major language" – also the language that establishes a national "great literature" – and impossible to write otherwise (16). I read the Eastern European narratives at hand similarly as "minor literature" that expresses this twofold impossibility, although I want to complicate Deleuze and Guattari's notions of "major language" and their conception of it as a national language. For Czesław Miłosz, writing in English while residing in the United States is tantamount to capitulating to the logic of capital, to a Western civilization which he criticizes as a vulgar ideology of consumerism. His opting for Polish instead is thus less a way to "reterritorialize" himself into a Polish identity, than to "deterritorialize" English as a "major language" of capital rather than a specific national tradition. For Joseph Brodsky, who writes in both Russian and English while in exile, the decision to write in English – a "major language" of his new country – similarly serves to "deterritorialize" Russian which he understands as the "major language" not so much of a national identity but of widespread communist oppression.

<51> In other words, the trauma of nomadism and exile is not revealed only through writing in an alien language, for Deleuze and Guattari an oppressive language from which one is nationally and culturally alienated. Rather, "minor literature" is also one that signals exile from and within one's own national and cultural language, in terms of the hegemonic political discourses through which this language makes possible its oppression. "Major languages" are these discursive fields that police, regardless of what national language or regional dialect is actually used, what can be said. In this respect, Eastern European narratives variously participate in, as well as "deterritorialize" the discursive fields of official communisms, anti-communist discourses, Orientalist reifications of Eastern Europe and the language of civilization, progress, human rights, liberal democracy, and multiculturalism.

<52> As with multicultural racism, the notion of supranational "major languages" (although not without clear national interests, as in the case of "racism without a race") opens up another possibility for theorizing the oppressive mechanisms of globalization, especially those rhetorical categories that police behavior by advertising themselves as common sense, universal human values. Victor Pelevin's Homo Zapiens, from this perspective, becomes "minor literature" in its attempt to expose the absolute violence, as well as the absurd incongruity, of the incursion of the "major language" of capitalist marketing and advertising into Russian in the post-communist era. Pelevin, like Kafka, exposes the poverty of this language, as well as the language of Russian nationalism, when he portrays attempts to add an "ethnic" Russian flair to Western-type marketing campaigns in order to appeal to the natives. This unwieldy marriage at the same time signals the collusion of the two discourses of power, countering arguments that post-modern nationalisms are a challenge to the process of globalization.

<53> Eastern European "minor" narratives in this way reveal the various strategies of identity containment crucial to what Hardt and Negri have termed the "biopolitics" of Imperial "society of control," but also allow for formulating new subjectivities, new kinds of collectivity that do not rely on the familiar strategies of identity politics crucial to the reproduction of multicultural complacence and global capitalism (23). When Slavenka Drakulić (1997), for instance, discusses her use of "we" to talk about Eastern Europeans, she explicitly criticizes the dominance of the "we" of communist-nationalist identification over the individual "I." Yet, she also endorses it as a path to a non-coercive, non-nationalist collective of Eastern European peoples with communist pasts who need to critically reconsider their shared myths about Europe, their inferiority complexes and their self-Orientalization (4). When at the end of Emir Kusturica's film Underground the undead protagonists of Yugoslav communist and post-communist conflicts float away happily on an anonymous piece of land, what we have is perhaps a collective without a nationality, a state, or a master plan for the future.

<54> The memory of communism resuscitated throughout these narratives creates not so much conditions for a simple repetition of the past (itself already impossible), but a heterotemporality that challenges the cooptation of time by capital, or in Bhabha's words, "poses the future as an open question" through "history's intermediacy" (231). This excessive, unruly remainder that resists translation into the narrative of global development and unity creates potential for the impossibility of translating Eastern Europeans into the Volksmuseum of global cultures based on that stereotypes that, indeed, make them Eastern European. Posing the future as an open question also poses European identity as an open question. As Jacques Derrida writes, the idea of a democracy that is not coopted by a master narrative of the future, the democracy which is always anticipated but never definitively arrives, is related to the idea of a European identity that is not coopted by a transcendental ideal. If Europe is to strive towards this idea of democracy, it must likewise keep "opening [itself] onto that which is not, never was and never will be Europe" or opening itself to an other it "can no longer even relate to itself as its other" (77, 76). Of course, the challenge is to maintain open not only the European identity, but indeed the identity of any other unifying project whose membership promises to bring liberation and emancipation. But then, the notion of a radical opening may bring into question the very possibility of existence of such projects, based as they are on defining their identities against the identities of the excluded others.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.

Angelopoulos, Theo. Eternity and a Day. New York: New Yorker Video, 1999.

Appadurai, Ajrun. "Difference and Disjunction in the Global Culture Economy." Global Culture. Ed. Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1990. 295-311.

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. New York: Verso, 2001.

Bakić-Hayden, Milica. "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia." Slavic Review 54.4 (1995): 917-31.

---. "What's So Byzantine about the Balkans?" Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 61-79.

Balibar, Étienne . "Is There a Neo-Racism?" Race, Nation, Class. Eds. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso, 1991. 17-28.

---. Politics and the Other Scene. New York: Verso, 2002.

---. We the People of Eruope? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004.

Bauman, Zygmunt. "Modernity and Ambivalence." Global Culture. Ed. Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1990. 143-71.

Becker, Wolfgang. Goodbye, Lenin! Culver City: Sony Pictures, 2003.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1999.

---. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Bjelić, Dušan, and Obrad Savić, eds. Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

Brodsky, Joseph. Less than One: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986.

---. On Grief and Reason: Essays. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

Conrad, Joseph. Under Western Eyes. London: Harper & Bros.: 1911.

---. The Works of Joseph Conrad: The Uniform Edition. London: J. M. Dent and Sons: 1928.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Deltcheva, Roumiana. "East Central Europe as a Politically Correct Scapegoat: The Case of Bulgaria." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 1.2 (1999): <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb99-2/deltcheva99-1.html>

Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Ditchev, Ivaylo. "The Eros of Identity." Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 235-51.

Drakulić, Slavenka. Café Europa: Life after Communism. New York: Norton and Company, 1997.

Dupcsik, Csaba. "The West, the East, and the Border-Lining." Social Science in Eastern Europe Newsletter, Special Edition (2001): 31-39.

Garton Ash, Timothy. "Catching the Wrong Bus?" The Question of Europe. Eds. Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson. New York: Verso, 1997. 117-26.

Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. New Haven: Yale, 1998.

Grass, Gunter. The Call of the Toad. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. J. Rutherford. Lawrence & Wishart: London, 1990. 222-37.

Hammond, Andrew. The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945-2003. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.

---. "'The Danger Zone of Europe': Balkanism between the Cold War and 9/11." European Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (2005): 135-54.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

Havel, Vaclav. "Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State." The New York Review of Books 10 June (1999): 6.

Hemon, Aleksandar. Nowhere Man. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Kujundžić, Dragan. "'After': Russian Post-Colonial Identity." MLN 115.5 (2000): 892-908.

Kundera, Milan. Ignorance. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Harper/Collins, 2002.

---. Slowness. Trans. Linda Asher. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

---. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. London: Faber, 1984.

Kusturica, Emir. Underground. New York: New Yorker Video, 1995.

Longinović, Tomislav. "Vampires Like Us: Gothic Imaginary and 'the serbs.'" Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 39-60.

Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

Miłosz, Czesław. Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition. Garden City: Doubleday, 1968.

---. To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

---. Visions from San Francisco Bay. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982.

Močnik, Rastko. "The Balkans as an Element in Ideological Mechanisms." Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 79-117.

Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. New York: Verso, 1997.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.

---. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.

Pelevin, Victor. Homo Zapiens. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. New York: Viking, 2002.

Pocock, J.G.A. "Deconstructing Europe." The Question of Europe. Eds. Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson. New York: Verso, 1997. 297-318.

Porter, Dennis. "Orientalism and Its Problems" The Politics of Theory. Eds. Francis Barker et al.

Proceedings of the Essex Sociology of Literature Conference. Colchester: U of Essex, 1983. 179-193.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Shteyngart, Gary. The Russian Debutante's Handbook. New York: Riverhead, 2002.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

Therborn, Göran . "Europe in the Twenty-First Century: The World's Scandinavia?" The Question of Europe. Eds. Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson. New York: Verso, 1997. 357-84.

Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.

Ugrešić, Dubravka. Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan Wars to the American Dream. New York: Viking, 1994.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Capitalist World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.

---. Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.

Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Žižek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion. New York: Verso, 2001.

---. The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for? New York: Verso, 2000.

---. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. New York: Verso, 2002.

Notes

[1] In literary and cultural studies, the consideration of Eastern Europe's post/coloniality is even more recent. For instance, promising work has been done by Dragan Kujundžić (2000) on Russia's post-colonial cultural Westernization beginning with Peter the Great, by Andrew Hammond (2004, 2005) on Cold War and post-Cold War cultural representations of the Balkans and Eastern Europe and by Roumiana Deltcheva (1999) in the field of Eastern European, especially Balkan, film studies. [^]

[2] The assorted stereotypes have been discussed at length by Wolff, Todorova and the contributors to Bjelić and Savić's anthology. [^]

[3] Göran Therborn (1997) compares Eastern European countries' results of transitions thus far, offering bleak prospects for Europe's united future: greater class polarization, as well as greater upper-middle-class rapprochement, West and East, higher unemployment and overall strengthening of illegal and criminal business networks. He also cites the portentously worded World Bank recommendations to Eastern European countries: "Forget Western Europe. Look to Latin America or South-East Asia (Singapore). In particular, look to the Chilean private pension funds" (379). Although there is faith and optimism that the European Union may eventually overcome some of these problems, they nevertheless haunt both old and new EU states – and the ones whose EU entry is perpetually delayed. [^]

[4] For the historical trajectories of Greece's exceptional status with respect to Eastern Europe and the Balkans, see Wolff (1994) and Todorova (1997). The differential treatment received in the post-communist period by Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox states is noted by Milica Bakić-Hayden (2002). [^]

[5] In the wake of Western imaginings of the Balkans during the Yugoslav 1990s' wars, there have been many more studies about the Balkans specifically than about Eastern Europe as a proto-colonial terrain constructed through imaginary geography. As a consequence, many studies of the Balkans span both historical and more recent, twentieth century discourses. See, for instance, Andrew Hammond (2004) and Vesna Goldsworthy (1998). [^]

[6] For a commentary on this voluntary mimicry of the West, see, for instance, Csaba Dupcsik (2001) and Dragan Kujundzic (2000). [^]

[7] Here, I have slightly adapted Močnik's terms – he refers primarily to "Balkanism" and Croatian and Slovenian attempts to escape it by proving their Europeanness. But, I believe his conclusions apply to Eastern Europe in general, as similar mechanisms of power operate in any country desiring emancipation through entry into the European Union. [^]

[8] Although some of the authors discussed in this essay "willingly" left their countries after communist takeovers (e.g., Nabokov, Miłosz), I refer to them as exiles because this term, unlike the terms expatriate or even émigré, adequately expresses their political undesirability at home and the irreversibility of their decisions. They are, in effect, exiled either directly or indirectly, because the return to their countries during communist regimes was impossible and/or would have imperiled their lives. [^]

[9] I borrow the concept "constellation" from Walter Benjamin (1968, 1999). Benjamin considers historical events in constellations that they might form with one another at different moments, which allows for a more dynamic interpretation of history than its traditional understanding as a linear narrative. [^]

[10] Todorova's analysis of the phenomenon of Central Europe agrees with Longinović's account in that she shows how the Balkans were included by some and excluded by other visions of Central Europe before 1990, but how they were consistently excluded afterwards. She argues that the reason was that the Central European idea "made its entry from the cultural to the political realm" after 1990 (154). That is to say, while prior to 1990, Central Europe was seen as a cultural identity used to either oppose Russia's ideological appropriation and show allegiance with Western cultural traditions, or else reject both Russia and the West but pose as an intermediary identity, after 1990, it became a political tool in a general competition for acceptance into the European Union, NATO and other premier clubs. As such, it had to distance itself from Balkan civil war barbarisms. [^]

[11] There is still much emphasis on race and religion – today, most notably Islam – as markers of difference that are targeted despite Western claims to the contrary. While this is undoubtedly a valid emphasis (old racism is alive and well), it does not help expose the mechanisms of this other, much more insidious type of racism exactly because it pretends to be multiculturalism. This is possibly one of the reasons that the bombing of Yugoslavia, a safe operation because it could not be accused of racism, is virtually unmentioned today, while the earlier Gulf war and the Vietnam war are continually invoked. [^]

[12] Wallerstein (1991) believes in a co-dependency of capitalist and communist regimes. Because he essentially sees them as offshoots of the same "world system," he predicts that the demise of communism in 1989 will lead to a crucial crisis in capitalist societies as well. [^]

Return to Top»