Mental Maps of Eastern Europe: States, Mentalities, Modernisation

Abstract

Eastern Europe has been the object of orientalising discourses portraying it as a region defined by problematic statehood, underdevelopment, and nationalist-religious warmongering. These discourses have produced 19 th -century mental maps of Europe contrasting a perceived 'core' European area ending with the Frankish Empire's eastern border and coinciding with later Enlightenment influence and an indistinct 'Orient' or 'East', bypassed by "modernising" processes. This contribution focuses on (post-)Cold War discourses in social science and shows how these discourses re-produce 19 th -century layers of orientalising map-making and keep East-West differences alive by tracing deficient, fragile or repressive state institutions back to alleged Eastern European 'mentalities'.'the West' and turn them internally indistinct in falling behind "modern civilisation". As this article exemplifies with Eastern Europe, the region's diversity calls for a mix of such features to make it internally indistinct and externally distinct from the 'West', resembling how colonial categories reduced the perceived diversity of Western hemisphere populations (Mignolo, 2001, p. 434).