Eastern Europe: history of an idea.
It was shaped by the Enlightenment, not the Cold War. And the mental maps that etched into our collective consciousness are still there.
Where does Eastern Europe begin? Where does it end?
According to the EuroVocabulary of the European Union, Eastern Europe comprises the countries of the European continent located east of the current borders of the Union and which were part of the Warsaw Pact, referred to as 'Central and Eastern European countries'. So far, this is the official definition.
The perception, however, is far from unambiguous.
Ask a German and tgey will tell you that the East begins at the Polish border. Ask an Italian and he will tell you that the East begins... boh maybe in Trieste. For some Vienna is a gateway to the East (for some Salzburgers it is already the Balkans). And what about Prague? Heart of Europe, as most Czechs will say, or already East?
The question is that Eastern Europe is not just geography or even just history. It is a multifaceted concept reflecting culture, linguistic roots, ethnography, economic conditions, religion, politics and the personal viewpoints derived from all this.
The ambiguity surrounding Eastern Europe is partly due to the way Europe was divided after the Second World War and the widespread use of the term 'Iron Curtain' to describe the division. This term became widely accepted and reinforced the idea of a clear division between Eastern and Western Europe.
The Iron Curtain is still in our heads.
For those born until the early 1970s, the term Eastern Europe is closely associated with the Iron Curtain. Winston Churchill's famous quote, 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain descended across the continent', sums up this conception of Eastern Europe.
The term 'iron curtain' was first used by Goebbels in February 1945 as a reaction to the Jalta conference to describe the territories occupied by the Soviet Union after Germany's capitulation (See: V. Ullrich Acht Tage im Mai - Eight days in May: the last week of the Third Reich).
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Churchill echoed this sentiment in a telegram to President Truman a few days after the end of the war, stating that 'an iron curtain is drawn across their front. We do not know what is going on behind'.
For decades, the region beyond the Iron Curtain was seen as a mysterious and invisible realm, dominated by the Soviet Union and characterised as Slavic and Russian-centric. However, this perception was not only a product of the Cold War.
The idea of Eastern Europe as an obscure, minor and even somewhat barbaric world has older origins. The mental map we used and, to some extent, still use today, has deeper roots dating back to the 18th century.
Eastern Europe: an Enlightenment construct.
In his book 'Inventing Eastern Europe' (1994), historian Larry Wolff delves into the origins of the concept of Eastern Europe, which he describes as a project of philosophical and geographical synthesis developed by Enlightenment thinkers.
In earlier centuries, the cultural and political axis of Europe was north-south, with Italian cities inheriting the Roman Empire and representing a civilised Renaissance world in contrast to the powerful but still barbaric North.
However, with the shift of politics and economics towards France and Great Britain in the 18th century, culture followed suit and Paris became the centre of Enlightenment thought. This led to the formation of a new west-east axis, where the east was seen as a land not yet reached by the enlightened civilisation.
Explorers, adventurers, geographers, thinkers and novelists: Eastern Europe as a land of discovery, study, cultural projects and fantasy.
Along this west-east axis, during the 18th century, travellers, ambassadors, adventurers and geographers physically moved: some for political missions, others for training, some with a taste for discovery and others charged with mapping places, describing customs, classifying and census-taking.
Equally crucial to the development of the idea of Eastern Europe were those who travelled through thought, whether philosophical or narrative: philosophers such as Voltaire and J.J. Rousseau, writers such as Rudolf E. Raspe (The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
For all of them, travel, real or imaginary, was also philosophical: through their descriptions of the geographical and human landscapes of the European East, they also defined their identity as Western Europeans: enlightened, advanced, placed at the top of a ladder that Eastern Europeans had only just begun to climb, coming from backward lands that still had pockets of barbarism and norms that accepted violence, serfdom and sexual slavery as natural conditions.
The higher they climbed on this scale, the less Asian and more European they would become: it was the Enlightenment in Paris, London and Weimar that defined the standard of what it meant to be European.
A space between civilisation and barbarism: how 18th century travellers experienced and described Eastern Europe.
'The inhabitants of the Ukraine, of Russia, of the Danube plains, in short, the Slavic peoples, are a link between Europe and Asia, between civilisation and barbarism'.
La Comédie humaine, Honoré de Balzac
In 1778, at the age of 31, William Coxe, an English historian and priest who was a travelling companion and tutor to the nobility from 1771 to 1786, embarked on a journey through Poland to Russia. Observing the Polish people, Coxe felt as if he was leaving Europe behind. He wrote:
'Poles, in their features, appearance, dress and general appearance, resemble Asians more than Europeans; and it is clear that they have Tatar ancestry'.
In 1784, Count Louis-Philippe de Segur, also aged 31, left France to serve as Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary of Louis XVI at the court of Catherine II in St. Petersburg, Russia. While crossing the frontier from Prussia to Poland, he had the feeling that he was crossing an important border, but he could not figure out what it was. He realised that the place he was travelling to was not Europe, but neither was it Asia or the Orient. It was a kind of intermediate geographical space, a realm that existed between Europe and Asia, characterised by a stark contrast between opulence and extreme poverty, large cities and deserts, civilisation and wilderness.
For Giacomo Casanova, a legendary figure known for his sexual exploits, the trip to Russia was an opportunity to orient himself in a new society where slavery was a prevalent concept. He discovered the practice of buying young women and learned that beatings of slaves and servants were considered the norm. Although he tried to avoid using the word 'slave', he soon became comfortable with the violence and slavery he encountered, considering it a cultural aspect of Eastern Europe. Like Casanova, other 18th century travellers discovered that Eastern Europe was a place where beatings were acceptable, even desirable. They learned to adjust their moral compass according to the 'variety of manners' present in those nations.
Russia, first and foremost, and its Prussian Empress.
2022 brought to light a worrying reality: many Western individuals and governments continued to regard Russia as the only significant nation in Eastern Europe, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
☞ This perspective can be seen in the Nord Stream 2 project, which mainly aimed to cut off Eastern European countries from gas supplies from Russia to Germany, yet Germany ignored criticism from these countries for years.
This mentality towards Eastern Europe originated in the 18th century, when the Russian Empire expanded southwards and westwards. Instead of being viewed with alarm, Russian expansionism was admired.
This admiration was aroused by the leadership of Peter the Great and Catherine, the Prussian-Russian Empress, who were perceived as bringing the ideals of the Enlightenment to Eastern Europe.
The champion of this fascination and vision of Russia as a civilising agent was above all the philosopher Voltaire.
Voltaire, who wrote a history of Russia under Peter the Great and corresponded with Catherine the Great, never travelled to Russia. However, he is considered the 'copyright owner' of the idea of Eastern Europe.
Voltaire formalised his fascination with Russia in his book 'History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great', published in 1759 and 1763. He continued to express his admiration for Russia through his correspondence with Catherine the Great in the 1760s and 1770s, considering her the greatest patron of the Enlightenment.
Earlier, in 1731, Voltaire had written about Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the Crimea in his book 'History of Charles XII'. In it, he described the Zaporozhian Cossacks as 'the strangest people on earth', a 'bunch of ancient Russians, Poles and Tatars', with a religion he described as 'a kind of Christianity', an economy based on 'brigandage' and a violent political system that elected a leader and then slit his throat.
The philosopher compared the inhabitants of the eastern European regions to Mexicans before their discovery by Cortes, describing them as born slaves, ignorant and lacking in arts and industry. He found satisfaction in 'discovering' these lands without having to physically go there and was proud to have mapped them against Western Europe, thus making Eastern Europe more accessible to Western Europeans.
Catherine the Great's journey to the Crimea: a public relations event, a demonstration of identity and a spectacle.
The only physical journey Voltaire could have been anxious to undertake was the one undertaken by Empress Catherine in 1787, when she travelled from St. Petersburg to the Crimea to visit the newly acquired territories.
From Kherson onwards she was accompanied by a group of diplomats, writers, nobles and women and even emperors, such as Joseph II of Austria. This journey from the Baltic to the Black Sea was a major public relations event designed to celebrate Russia's greatness and establish a sense of identity. It was also a memorable spectacle orchestrated by Grigory Potemkin, the governor-general of Russia's new southern provinces.
Catherine the Great set off from St Petersburg in January 1787. Along the way, she and her retinue stopped in Kiev, where they had to wait three months for spring and melting ice before continuing along the Dnieper. The city was a melting pot of ethnicities, with Cossacks, known for their 'indiscipline', and Tatars, once dominant in Russia, now humbly submitting to a woman's rule. The group also encountered nomadic Kirghiz tribes and 'savage Kalmucks'.
Meanwhile, Grigory Potemkin was preparing a 'brilliant show' along the river route. Towns, villages and even rustic huts were decorated and disguised to look like magnificent cities and palaces, creating the illusion of a grandiose and civilised Russia that was now truly part of Europe. But was it real? Behind the 'Potemkin villages' were the descendants of the once feared hordes, and there was poverty, violence, serfdom. But the Empress' PR message got through. She was converting semi-Asian tribes into Europeans.
Voltaire the ideologist of Catherine?
"I am older, madam, than the city where you reign" (...) "I even dare to add that I am older than your empire".
Letter from Voltaire to Catherina the Great, 1765
Voltaire's war letters offered Catherine a philosophical reflection on her military campaigns, in which Wallachia, Poland, Bessarabia and Georgia were constituent elements of a new European geography.
Catherine's reign was a succession of wars of conquest that turned the whole of eastern Europe into a war zone and ended in 1795 with the partition of Poland between Russia, Austria and Prussia.
For Voltaire, the mastery of Eastern Europe was an integral part of the Enlightenment programme: to settle the regions of Europe plunged into chaos and obscurity. In the German Catherine he found the champion of the kingdom of Reason, who in her mission of civilisation in the East brought first arms and then the arts.
"Currently in Petersburg there are French actors and Italian operas. Magnificence and even taste have replaced barbarity in everything”.
Expelling the Turks from European soil, as Catherine did by conquering the Crimea and the Sea of Azov, was for Voltaire the high point of this mission, which he celebrated before the French and 'explained' to Catherine herself in his many years of correspondence.
A conflict of power and thought: Rousseau's Poland versus Voltaire's Russia.
Two Western Europeans discuss the nature and fate of the nations of Eastern Europe.
Just as Voltaire admired an empress he had never met and a country he had never visited, Rousseau detested that same empress and her state, contrasting them with the Polish nation.
Starting with the Social Contract (1762), J.J. Rousseau entered the territory of political theory and decided to apply it to the Polish case, a country that at the end of the 18th century would not resist the appetites of the great empires, ending up devoured and divided between Prussia, Austria and Russia.
For Rousseau, Poland was, like almost the whole of eastern Europe, a disorderly and undisciplined country, parcelled out by its nobles. Too easy prey for the great empires, the only way to strengthen it, according to Rousseau, was to enter the hearts of Poles with a strong national idea, stronger than internal political divisions. In his book Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (1782, Considerations on the Government of Poland), he addressed the Poles directly in a heartfelt manner:
"You cannot prevent them from swallowing you up; at least make sure they cannot digest you. [...] If you make it so that no Pole can ever become Russian, I guarantee that Russia will not subjugate Poland'.
Rousseau, the philosopher of the social contract, develops his political theory in a nationalistic sense and repeatedly celebrates Polish diversity, which he contrasts with the supposed homogenisation of other peoples, the offspring of imperialism; ☞ in the long run, Rousseau's thought will leave a much stronger imprint on Eastern Europeans than Voltaire's.
"Do exactly the opposite of that much admired tsar" (...) "No Pole dares to present himself at court dressed in the French manner".
"A Frenchman, an Englishman, a Spaniard, an Italian, a Russian, they are all virtually the same man" (but a Pole) "must be a Pole".
Cfr: When Poland Was Nowhere: Foreigners Reflect on the Partitions & a Stateless Nation, 2017
Enlightenment anthropology of Eastern Europe: barbarians in ancient history, half savages and half civilised in modern times.
Whether they were curious, fascinated, admirers of this or that empress, or eager to promote their philosophical vision and political agenda, it made little difference how the Enlightenment thinkers looked at the land they lived in. What they saw - physically or through the accounts of others - were unkempt villages, dirty streets, unkempt and still rather barbaric people, like their ancestors or the ancestors the historians of the time attributed to them.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789), by the English historian Edward Gibbon, summarised the 18th century view of the Roman Empire and the reasons for its fall. At the same time, he gave a broad portrait of the patchwork of peoples and tribes collectively called 'barbarians'.
In Chapter XLII of his six-volume work, Gibbons examines the 'State of the Barbarian World' in the 6th century, immediately after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and introduces the 'Tribes and Incursions of the Sclavonians'.
He offers a dual classification of ethnic groups, defining two large families: the Bulgars, more or less identified as Tartars, and the Sclavonians, characterised mainly by their language. Many of the descriptions offered in his work were of picturesque ferocity and - when he compared the Slavs to German barbarians - with an obvious pro-German bias that saw the Slavs as inferior in many respects. German thinkers would later state this point with an even more strident claim to science.
The German point of view: between a barbaric past, a semi-wild present and a bright future.
Goethe
In 1790 Goethe made a week-long excursion to Poland, as far as Krakow, and summarised the experience in a letter to Herder:
"In these eight days I have seen much that is remarkable, although for the most part it has only been remarkably negative.
Fichte
The following year, Fichte moved to Warsaw to work as a private teacher. After leaving Leipzig in Saxony, he travelled through Silesia, then part of Prussia, to Poland.
The correlation between 'worse' and 'Polish' was evident in Silesia when he saw 'villages uglier than those in Saxony'. Jews were also present and in the inn 'nothing was like in Saxony'.
Filth was a recurring theme: Fichte described streets 'full of straw, rubbish and manure'. Observing that cities were crowded with Jews, he also had some reservations about ethnic Germans in Poland:
"They are pleasant, reasonable, helpful and polite, only impure, just like the national Poles, and almost more so, as you notice more in them to a German eye". Warsaw also did not impress him: 'The entrance is like a Polish village, huts instead of houses, manure in the streets'.
It was from these accounts that words like Halbwildheit and Halbkultur emerged to describe that 'intermediate state' between full civilisation and barbarian roots that was, in a phrase, the eighteenth-century idea of Eastern Europe.
Herder.
In a completely different tone - positive and prophetic - Johann Gottfried von Herder, a philosopher of history and language and a passionate explorer of folklore, developed an optimistic image that influenced not only Pan-Slavic intellectuals but also future generations of Czech, Polish, Russian and Croatian politicians (*).
(*) See Herder’s Ideas and the Pan-Slavism : A Conceptual-Historical Approach, 2018, Dušan J. Ljuboja.
In 'Lineamenti di una filosofia della storia dell'uomo' (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit 1784-1791) Herder writes:
"[...] they [the ancient Slavs] followed the workings of the mines, understood the smelting of metals, made linen, produced mead, planted fruit trees and led, according to fashion, a gay and musical life. They were liberal, hospitable to excess, lovers of pastoral freedom, but submissive and obedient, enemies of plunder and robbery. All this did not preserve them from oppression; on the contrary, it contributed to their oppression. For since they never aspired to sovereignty, had no hereditary princes among them devoted to war, and thought little of paying tribute in order to enjoy their lands in peace, many nations, especially of German origin, oppressed them unjustly'.
Herder imagined a bright future for all Slavs and foresaw that their potential would give rise to the 'new age of man', which would replace the decaying European culture:
"The changing wheel of time, however, turns without ceasing, and since (... ) legislation and politics, instead of a military spirit, must and will increasingly promote quiet industry and peaceful commerce between the different states, these now deeply sunken, but once industrious and happy peoples will awake from their long and heavy slumber, shake off their chains of slavery, enjoy the possession of their delightful lands from the Adriatic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains, from the Don to Moldavia, and celebrate on them their ancient festivals of peaceful commerce and industry."
Herder developed his understanding of the role of the Slavs and their land in Riga, under the patronage of Russian Empress Catherine II, from 1764 to 1769. His 'Journal meiner Reise aus 1769' also mentions the Ukraine, which he praises as a 'new Greece', as a key element of the future European cultural renaissance.
How many of these visions of Eastern Europe have influenced the history of the last two centuries?
Very, very much. The entire 20th century was one long confrontation between imperialisms, in which most Slavic countries and peoples were seen as lands to be exploited (the Ukrainian 'Kornkammer') and peoples to be enslaved.
Western European countries, both democratic and imperial-fascist, placed themselves on a pedestal from which they did not come down even after the end of the Cold War. Therefore, the mental map was still that of a middle world that had to be transformed according to Western models.
Prof. Wolff recalls that in August 1991, when Gorbachev returned to Moscow from the Crimea after the failed coup d'état, the New York Times declared that the Russians were ready 'for the mammoth task of civilising their country', more or less the task that Voltaire had attributed to Peter the Great. In September of the same year, the Neue Zurcher Zeitung headlined 'Hope for a European Russia'.
Gorbachev expressed in 1987 the need to see the Soviet Union fully recognised as European:
"Some in the West are trying to exclude the Soviet Union from Europe. From time to time, they inadvertently equate Europe with 'Western Europe'. These ploys, however, cannot change the geographical and historical reality. Russia's commercial, cultural and political ties with other European nations and states have deep roots in history. We are Europeans. The history of Russia is an organic part of the great European history'.
Gorbachev, 1987, in The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History, 2004
We should have listened better to what Gorbachev was telling us. Instead, the story since 1990 has been one of role models and imitators.
As Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev have pointed out in 'Explaining eastern Europe' (Journal of Democracy 3/2018), relations between East and West have moved from a Cold War clash between two hostile systems to a moral hierarchy within the Western liberal system that existed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One imperative of the post-communist politics of Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 could sum up their political philosophy: 'Imitate the West!'
Although the post-communist reformers called the process by many names - democratisation, liberalisation, enlargement, convergence, integration, Europeanisation - the goal remained the same. To become 'normal', their countries had to become like the West. The importation of liberal-democratic institutions, the application of Western political and economic recipes and the adherence to Western values were part of this process.
Attempting to emulate a foreign model of economic and political reform, however, has entailed many more moral and psychological disadvantages than many had anticipated. The life of the copycat produces feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, dependency, and loss of identity.
Thus, the xenophobia, authoritarian chauvinism, and political evolution towards illiberalism that we experience in Hungary, Poland, etc. are not so much about politics as they are about psychological factors: they reflect a deep disgust with the post-1989 'imitation imperative', with all its demeaning and humiliating implications.
See: Explaining eastern Europe: Imitation and its discontents, 2019, Eurozine
The rest is today's history.
On the one hand, the European Union struggles to hold the reasons of its Western founders together with those of the former Soviet bloc countries. However, with the war of aggression against Ukraine, some of these countries have taken a leading role in the reaction to this war.
In the background, perhaps we need to overcome once and for all the mental maps inherited from the 18th century. The only way to talk about Europe and to rethink its identity is to start again from the East and from the reasons of identity that make Ukraine - incredibly and fortunately - resist and not bend, as one might otherwise attribute to those who believe more in commercial reasons.
The European Union cannot emerge divided from this war and you cannot put some countries above others. The time has come to emphasise the word 'Union' and to redefine it - thirty years after it assumed this name (Maastricht Treaty, 1992) - by giving it a new meaning.