1st Edition
Europe and the East Historical Ideas of Eastern and Southeast Europe, 1789-1989
This volume investigates competing ideas, images, and stereotypes of a European ‘East’, exploring its role in defining European and national conceptions of self and other since the eighteenth century.
Through a set of original case studies, this collection explores the intersection between discourses about a more distant, exotic, or colonial ‘Orient’ with a more immediate ‘East’. The book considers this shifting, imaginary border from different points of view and demonstrates that the location, definition, and character of the ‘East’, often associated with socio-economic backwardness and other unfavourable attributes, depended on historical circumstances, political preferences, cultural assumptions, and geography. Spanning two centuries, this study analyses the ways that changing ideals and persistent clichéd attitudes have shaped the conversation about and interpretations of Eastern Europe.
Europe and the East will be essential reading for anyone interested in images and ideas of Europe, European identity, and conceptions of the ‘East’ in intellectual and cultural history.
Introduction: Europe and the ‘East’ – Self and Other in the History of the European Idea
Mark Hewitson and Jan Vermeiren
Part 1: Conceptualizing the East
1. Europe’s Many Easts: Why One Orient Is Not the Other
Patrick Pasture
2. Europe and its Orientalisms: Epistemology and Practice in the Long Nineteenth Century
Gavin Murray-Miller
3. Europe and the Balkans: Mapping History in the Southeast
Rolf Petri
Part 2: National Identity and the Eastern Borders of Europe, 1789-1914
4. Sergey Uvarov and the Coming of Age of Russian Conservatism
Lien Verpoest
5. Nation and Europe: Adam Mickiewicz’s Writings and Political Activity and the Dilemma of Identity in the Nineteenth Century
Marek Stanisz
6. The United States of Europe and the ‘East(s)’: Giuseppe Mazzini, Carlo Cattaneo, and Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso
Fernanda Gallo
7. A Colonial and European Nation? Colonial Discourse and European Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Discourse
Christoph Kienemann
8. The Hungarian Nation between East and West: The Limits of the Nationalist Imagination in the Long Nineteenth Century
Philip Barker and Thomas Lorman
9. Re-imagining Arcadia: The South Slavic Balkans in the Changing Ideal of Western Europe, 1885-1914
Samuel Foster
Part 3: The New East in an Age of Geopolitics, 1914-1989
10. Between East and West: Europe, the US, and the USSR in the 1920s
Richard Deswarte
11. How to Break Away From a ‘Science of the Enemy’: Polish and German Experts Challenging the ‘Otherness’ of Eastern Europe, 1918-1972
Estelle Bunout
12. Beyond Bipolarity: The European Movements and the Role of Eastern Europe in the Work of Carlo Cattaneo
Silvio Berardi
13. The East and the Rest: British Leftwing Intellectuals’ Refashioning of the European Idea at the End of the Cold War
Marzia Maccaferri
Biography
Mark Hewitson is Professor of German History and Politics at University College London.
Jan Vermeiren is Associate Professor in Modern German History at the University of East Anglia.
