Euro-orientalism and the making of the concept of eastern Europe in France, 1810-1880

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 77, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 591-628

  Adamovsky, Ezequiel ^a  

^a UNIVERSIDAD DE BUENOS AIRES   (Argentina)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33646767796     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/497718     Document Type: Review

References (213)

1. Ezequiel Adamovsky, "Land of Absence: Liberal Ideology, the Image of Russia, and the Making of Western Identity (France, c. 1740-1880)" (PhD diss., University College London, 2003).
2. See also my articles "Civilizar un Pueblo Bárbara: Las imágenes de Rusia en el debate de la ilustración francesa acerca del concepto de 'civilizatión,'" Anales de Historia Antigua, Medieval y Moderna (University of Buenos Aires) 34 (2001): 163-90
3. "Muros de ladrillo, muros imaginarios: El Muro de Berlín y otras imágenes en el discurso de subordination de 'Europa Oriental,"' Revista del Centro de Estudios Internationales para el Desarrollo 1, no. 2 (1999): 32-47
4. "Russia as a Space of Hope: Nineteenth-Century French Challenges to the Liberal Image of Russia," European History Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2003): 411-50
5. "Diderot en Rusia, Rusia en Diderot: El papel de la imagen de Rusia en la evolution del pensamiento politico del último Diderot," Stvdia Historica: Historia Moderna (Salamanca) 22 (2000): 245-82
6. and "Russia as the Land of Communism in the Nineteenth Century? Images of Tsarist Russia as a Communist Society in France, c. 1840-1880," Cahiers du Monde Russe 45, nos. 3-4 (2004): 1-24.
7. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA, 1994), xi.
8. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979), 1-2.
9. See Louis Leger, "Les études slaves, leur importance et leur difficulté," Revue Politique et Littéraire, no. 40 (March 30, 1872), 946-49
10. and Souvenirs d'un Slavophile, 1863-1897 (Paris, 1905).
11. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 298, 304, 274, 278, 141.
12. See Francine-Dominique Liechtenhan, "Le russe, ennemi héréditaire de la chrétienté? La diffusion de l'image de la Moscovie en Europe occidentale aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles," Revue Historique 285, no. 1 (1991): 77-103, 86, 97, 101
13. "Les découvreurs de la Moscovie: L'apprehension des observateurs occidentales face à la montée de Moscou," Histoire, Economie, Société 8, no. 4 (1989): 483-506
14. and "La progression de l'interdit: Les récits de voyage en Russie et leur critique à l'époque des tsars," Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 43, no. 1 (1993);
15. Ekkehard Klug, "Das 'Asiatische' Russland: Über die Entstehung eines europäischen Vorurteils," Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987): 265-89;
16. M. S. Anderson, Britain's Discovery of Russia, 1553-1815 (London, 1958), 80-81;
17. Michel Mervaud and Jean-Claude Roberti, Une infinie brutalité: L'image de la Russie dans la France des XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1991);
18. Marshall T. Poe, "A People Born to Slavery": Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476-1748 (Ithaca, NY, 2000).
19. In addition to these methodological shortcomings, Wolff's interpretation of elements such as cartographic evidence and some sexual references is totally ungrounded. For more criticism of Wolff's book, see Michael Confino, "Re-Inventing the Enlightenment: Western Images of Eastern Realities in the Eighteenth Century," Canadian Slavonic Papers 36, nos. 3-4 (1994): 505-22;
20. Csaba Dupcsik, "Postcolonial Studies and the Inventing of Eastern Europe," East Central Europe 26 (1999): 1-14. Vladimir Berelowitch has also challenged, perhaps too politely (his article is, after all, included in a compilation edited by Larry Wolff and Sergei Karp), Wolff's conclusion that the idea of Eastern Europe emerged in the eighteenth century;
21. see Vladimir Berelowitch, "Europe ou Asie? Saint-Pétersbourg dans les relations de voyage occidentaux," in Le mirage russe au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Sergei Karp and Larry Wolff (Ferney-Voltaire, 2001), 57-74, 59-60.
22. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, in Oeuvres complètes, 13 vols. (Paris, 1853), 3:74.
23. Simone Balayé, Madame de Staël: Lumières et liberté (Paris, 1979), 162.
24. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, in Sammtliche Werke, 16 vols. (Karlsruhe, 1820), 2:227-28, 322.
25. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, in Sammtliche Werke, 2:227-28, 322. Ibid.
26. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, in Sammtliche Werke, 3:20-21, and 6:36.
27. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, in Sammtliche Werke, 6:31-35.
28. On Herder and the Slavs, see Helen Liebel-Weckowicz, "Nations and Peoples: Baltic-Russian History and the Development of Herder's Theory of Culture," Canadian Journal of History 21 (1986): 1-23;
29. Mechthild Keller, '"Politische Seeträume': Herder und Russland," in Russen und Russland aus deutscher Sicht, 18. Jahrhundert: Aufklärung, ed. Mechthild Keller (Munich, 1987), 357-95;
30. Pierre Pénisson, "L'imaginaire européen de Johann Gottfried Herder," in Transfers culturels triangulaires France-Allemagne-Russie, ed. Katia Dmitrieva and Michel Espagne, Philologiques, no. 4 (1996), 141-52;
31. H. Barry Nisbet, "Herder's Conception of Nationhood and Its Influence in Eastern Europe," in The German Lands and Eastern Europe, ed. Roger Bartlett and Karen Schönwälder (New York, 1999), 115-35;
32. Wolfgang Gesemann, "Herder's Russia," Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (1965): 424-34.
33. Germaine de Staël, De l'Allemagne, in Oeuvres, 3 vols. (Paris, 1838): 3:6-7.
34. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Contrat social, in Oeuvres complètes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1971): 2:534.
35. Germaine de Staël, Dix années d'exil (Brussels, 1830), 194-203, 294.
36. On Staël and Russia, see Olga Trtnik Rossettini, "Mme de Slaël et la Russie d'après les articles parus en URSS sur l'influence française en Russie au début du XIX siècle," Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate 16, no. 1 (1963): 50-67;
37. S. Durylin, "G-zh De Stal' i eë russkie otnosheniia," in Russkaia Kul'tura i Frantsiia, ed. S. A. Makashin, 3 vols. [Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, nos. 29-34] (Moscow, 1937-39), 3:215-330;
38. Vladimir Brett, "Considerations et observations de Mme de Staël pendanl son voyage en Russie en 1812," Revue des Pays de l'Est 30, no. 2 (1989): 91-99.
39. The first Pan-Slavic Congress met in Prague in 1848, and il was held under the leadership of the Czech historian František Palacký. The Russian variant of Pan-Slavism gained more notoriely in the 1860s.
40. Hans Lemberg, "Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert: Vom 'Norden' zu 'Osten' Europas," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 33 (1985): 48-91.
41. Oscar J. Hammen, "Free Europe versus Russia, 1830-1854," American Slavic and East European Studies 11, no. 1 (1952): 27-41.
42. Robin Okey, "Central Europe/Eastern Europe: Behind the Definitions," Past and Present 137 (1992): 102-33.
43. I have found an incidental use of the expression as early as 1601, in the index to a book by Claude Du Pré, where it is said that the Gauls once controlled Europe orientale et occidentale. See Claude Du Pré, Abrégé fidelle de la vraye origine et généalogie des François (Lyon, 1601). Even earlier, in 1552, Guillaume Postel made the same point about the presence of the Gauls in l'orientale partie de l'Europe.
44. See Guillaume Postel, L'histoire mémorable des expéditions depuys le déluge faictes par les Gauloys, ou Francoys depuys la France jusques en Asie, ou en Thrace et en l'orientale partie de l'Europe (Paris, 1552), 16, 31.
45. Joseph Vaissete, Géographie historique, ecclesiastique, et civile, ou Description de toutes les parties du globe terrestre (Paris, 1755), 3.
46. See, e.g., Abbé Grenet, Abrégé de géographie ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1781), 1-2;
47. Abbé Gaultier, Leçons de géographie (Paris, 1789), 1.
48. See, e.g., Guillaume de L'Isle [aka Delisle], Introduction à la géographie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1746);
49. Buffier, Geographie universelle, 8th ed. (Paris, 1759), 9;
50. P. C. V. Boiste, Dictionnaire de géographie universelle, ancienne, du Moyen Age, et moderne, comparées, 2 vols. (Paris, 1806), 1:332.
51. Adriano Balbi, Abrégé de géographie, rédigé sur un nouveau plan d'après les derniers traités de paix et les découvertes les plus récentes (Paris, 1833), 107-8.
52. The concept had also been used in Balbi's Introduction à l'atlas ethnographique du globe (Paris, 1826), xlix.
53. See Per Stig Møller, Malte-Bruns litteraere kritik og dens plods i transformations-processen mellem klassicisme og romantik i Fransk litteraturhistorie 1800-1826 (Copenhagen, 1973), 495-533, which contains a long summary in French.
54. Malthe Conrad Bruun and C. Mentelle, Géographie universelle ancienne et moderne, 8 vols. (Paris, 1816), 2:xxix-xxx.
55. Malthe Conrad Bruun, Traité élémentaire de géographie (Paris, 1830), 468-69. Other contemporary French geographical works also started to divide the Continent in two halves and/or to use the concept of Europe orientale.
56. For example, in Dufau and Guadet, Dictionnaire universel abrégé de géographie ancienne comparée, 2 vols. (Paris, 1820), 2:383, Europe was divided into Occidental and Oriental halves. The former encompassed the British Isles, France, Spain, the German lands, Dalmatia, and Illyria, while the latter included Italy, Greece, and the area of the Russian Empire. The concept of Europe orientale had also been used before - although only incidentally -in the anonymous work
57. La géographie en estampes, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1819), 39.
58. It also appeared beginning in 1826 in A. Kilian and C. Picquet's Dictionnaire géographique universel, 10 vols. (Paris, 1823-33), 3:723, to which Bruun was one of the contributors.
59. Dominique Dufour de Pradt, L'Europe et l'Amérique en 1821, 2 vols. (Paris, 1822), 1:117-18.
60. François Guizot, Histoire parlementaire de France: Recueil complet des discours prononcés dans les Chambres de 1819 à 1848, 5 vols. (Paris, 1863), 2:156.
61. Ernest Charrière, "Considérations sur l'avenir de l'Europe," in La chute de l'Empire, drame-épopée précedé d'une introduction historique, ou Considérations sur l'avenir de l'Europe (Paris, 1836), i-lvi, quote on xxxix.
62. Ernest Charrière, La politique de l'histoire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1841-42), 2:170.
63. Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Du système industriel, 1 vols. (Paris, 1966), 2:23.
64. François Guizot, Cours d'histoire moderne (Paris, 1828), 10.
65. Saint-Marc Girardin, review of the pamphlet L'Angleterre, la France, la Russie et la Turquie, Journal des Débats, July 18, 1835, 1. Interestingly enough, he had made a similar point the previous year; however, in this case the "political civilization of 1789"-that is, the "Western spirit"-was said to be threatened by Russia's "despotic civilization"-that is, the "spirit of the North"
66. (Saint-Marc Girardin, Notices politiques et littéraires sur l'Allemagne [Paris, 1835], x-xi).
67. See e.g., "Monuments antiques de l'Europe orientale," in Le magasin pittoresque (Paris, 1839), 207-8. It is interesting to note that in the long parliamentary debates of 1840 on the creation of the chair of Slavic languages and literatures at the Collège de France, nobody uttered the phrase (although the baron de Gérando did say that the Slavic nations occupied "tout l'Est de l'Europe"). Another indirect indication of the novelty of the concept is that the first book or series title to contain the expression Europe orientale in the CD-ROM database
68. French Bibliography, 15th Century to 2000 (Research Libraries Group, 2000) appears in 1854 and that the author is not a Frenchman. The next title does not appear until 1871, and until 1899 there are only twelve additional entries. A quick comparison with the catalog of the British Library is re-vealing: the first book title to contain the expression "Eastern Europe" appears in 1846, and there are only eleven entries by 1899.
69. See, e.g., Saint-Marc Girardin, untitled article on the persecution of Catholics in Russia, Journal des Débats, October 23, 1842, 1;
70. Astolphe de Custine, La Russie en 1839, 2 vols. (Paris, 1990), 2:302;
71. Jean-Henri Schnitzler, Statistique générale méthodique et complète de la France, 4 vols. (Paris, 1846), 1:4; Montalembert and Guizot in their speeches at the Chambre des Pairs (see Moniteur Universel, July 3, 1846);
72. Edmond Robinet, L'Europe, histoire des nations européennes: Russie, Pologne, Suède, et Norwège (Paris, 1847), 48;
73. Henri Martin, De la France, de son génie et de sos destinées (Paris, 1847), 314;
74. Charles Sirtema de Grovestins, La Pologne, la Russie, et l'Europe Occidentale (Paris, 1847), 217-18;
75. Jules Michelet, Légendes démocratiques du Nord (Paris, n.d.), 5;
76. François Combes, La Russie en face de Constantinople et de l'Europe (Paris, 1854), 73, 273;
77. Charles Sirtema de Grovestins, Tableau politique et moral de la Russie (Paris, 1854), 41-42.
78. See, e.g., L. Dussieux, Force et faiblesse de la Russie au point de vue militaire (Paris, 1854), 27;
79. Émile Montégut, "De l'idée de monarchie universelle," Revue des Deux Mondes, July-September, 1854, 194-210, esp. 206;
80. Saint-René Taillandier, "Les Allemands en Russie et les Russes en Allemagne," Revue des Deux Mondes, August 1, 1854, 633-91, esp. 636;
81. and Allemagne et Russie (Paris, 1856), 95-97;
82. Augustin Picard, "Le gouvernement des tsars et la société russe," pts. 1 and 2, Revue des Deux Mondes, November 15, 1855, 865-94; and December 1, 1855, 1035-64 (1063);
83. Alphonse de Lamartine, Histoire de la Russie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1855), 2:403-4;
84. Jean-Henri Schnitzler, L'empire des tsars au point actuel de la science, 4 vols. (Paris, 1856-69), 1:1-8, 3:738-39;
85. Hippolyte Castille, Portraits politiques au dix-neuvième siècle: Alexandre II, 3rd éd. (Paris, 1856), 34;
86. François Combes, Histoire de la diplomatie slave et Scandinave (Paris, 1856), 276;
87. Emile Barrault, La Russie et ses chemins defer (Paris, 1857), 3;
88. A. Regnault, Esquisses historiques sur Moscou et Saint-Pétersbourg à l'époque du couronnement de l'empereur Alexandre H (Paris, 1857), 203;
89. Louis Wolowski, "La question du servage en Russie," pts. 1-3, Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1858, 317-49; August I, 1858, 595-631; and September 15, 1858, 393-446 (322);
90. Henri Martin, "Préface" to Autriche et Russie, by F. Smolka (Paris, 1869), v-xvi, esp. v-vi;
91. Saint-René Taillandier, Tchèques et Magyars: Bohême et Hongrie (Paris, 1869), and La Serbie (Paris, 1872), 2, 8, 406;
92. Louis Leger, Le monde slave (Paris, 1873), 266
93. and "Les travaux de la Conférence Tocqueville sur l'Europe orientale," Revue Politique et Littéraire, no. 10 (September 2, 1876), 232-33;
94. Cyrille [Adolphe d'Avril], Voyage sentimental dans les pays slaves (Paris, 1876): Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, "La liberté en Russie," Revue des Deux Mondes, February 1, 1877, 710-17, esp. 717;
95. Alfred Rambaud, Histoire de la Russie (Paris, 1878), 1-3 and passim.
96. However, it must be borne in mind that, such romantic socialists notwithstanding, most leftist writers were conspicuously repelled by things "Oriental" or "Slavic." See, e.g., Proudhon's Le Peuple, in which Russia was considered a barbarous nation and Pan-Slavism was perceived as a threat of "reactionary barbarism" against "progressive civilization": "Le Panslavisme russe et la démocratie allemande," Le Peuple, no. 4 (November 8-15, 1848), 6;
97. and "Le Panslavisme," Le Peuple, no. 50 (January 7, 1849), 1.
98. See the following articles by Cyprien Robert, "Le monde gréco-slave," pts. 1-7, Revue des Deux Mondes, February 1, 1842: 380-430; June 15, 1842: 879-938; August 1, 1842: 353-410; December 15, 1842: 939-99; March 1,1843: 811-90; May 1, 1843: 415-79; July 15, 1843: 271-312 (381)
99. "Le monde gréco-slave: Du mouvement unitaire de l'Europe orientale," Revue des Deux Mondes, November 1, 1844, 427-64
100. "Le monde gréco-slave: Le système constitutionnel et le régime despotique dans l'Europe orientale," Revue des Deux Mondes, February 1, 1845, 409-50
101. "Le monde grécoslave: Les Diètes de 1844 dans l'Europe orientale," Revue des Deux Mondes, August 15, 1845, 647-82
102. "Les deux panslavismes," Revue des Deux Mondes, November 1, 1846, 452-83, and his book Le monde slave, son passé, son état présent et son avenir, 2 vols. (Paris, 1852).
103. See also Adolphe Lèbre, "Mouvement des peuples slaves, leur passé, leurs tendances nouvelles: Cours de M. Mickiewicz," Revue des Deux Mondes, December 15, 1843, 951-93, esp. 954 and 991.
104. The same publishing house that published La Pologne and Robert's book also published a series of books under the series name Bibliothèque de l'Orient Européen: Bibliothèque Slave.
105. Hippolyte Desprez, "La Russie et la crise européenne," Revue des Deux Mondes, March 15, 1850, 1100-23, esp. 1102 and 1118
106. and "La Russie et le slavisme," Revue des Deux Mondes, May 1, 1850, 524-42, esp. 525 and 542;
107. Frédéric Le Play, Les ouvriers européens, 6 vols. (Tours, 1877-79), 2:ix;
108. Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive, 4 vols. (Paris, 1890-95), 3:xxix, xliv.
109. Louis Leger, L'état autrichien (Paris, 1866), 15;
110. Elias Regnault, La question européenne improprement appelée polonaise (Paris, 1863), 10;
111. Henri Martin, La Russie et l'Europe (Paris, 1866), 16, 97-98;
112. Julian Klaczko, "Le Congrès de Moscou et la propagande panslaviste," Revue des Deux Mondes, September 1, 1867, 132-81, esp. 135;
113. Robert, "Le monde gréco-slave," 381.
114. See the account in the Revue Politique et Littéraire, no. 44 (April 27, 1872).
115. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, L'empire des tsars et les russes, 4th ed. (1881-89; repr., Paris, 1990), 7, 298, 353, 354, 503, 890, 909 ("Orient"); and 15, 105, 117, 212, 227, 236, 326, 327, 349, 399, 465, 615, 870, 890, 906, 1122 ("North"). "Eastern Europe" appears in the text together with allusions to Asia, comparisons with Arab nomadism, and depictions of backwardness, despotism, lack of private property, and "communist" practices among Russian peasants. Predictably, Eastern Europe is presented as opposed to Occident, Europe occidentale, Europe historique, and Europe proprement dite, which gives the idea that Eastern Europe is a deviant area. For other late examples of Russia viewed as a "Northern" country
116. see Gustave de Molinari, "La Russie et le nihilisme," Journal des Economistes 14 (April 1881): 5-31 (31);
117. Léonce Pingaud, Les français en Russie et les russes en France (Paris, 1886), vii.
118. Elisée Reclus, Nouvelle géographie universelle, 19 vols. (Paris, 1880), 5:289.
119. For Reclus, Eastern Europe "still participates to some extent in the Asiatic world." In turn, the West was meant to "incorporate" the Orient into the "world of civilization": Elisée Reclus, Hégémonie de l'Europe (1894), 5-12.
120. See Gilles Le Béguec, "Un conservatoire parlementaire: La Conférence Molé
121. Tocqueville à la fin de la IIIe République," Bulletin de la Société d'Histoire Moderne 83, no. 22 (1984): 16-23.
122. The other members were Labadie-Lagrave, d'Aymery, de Bray, d'Aillières, d'Antioche, Arnous, A. Boulay de la Meurthe, Léon Bourgeois, Chauffard, A. Cohn, Henry Defert, F. Dreyfus, Fauvel, Ferrère, G. Fournier, Guérin, Hartmann, Herbette, Hippeau, Hutchinson, de Lallemand de Mont, Fernand Cassany de Mazet, Peyrot, Joseph Reinach, de Ronseray, Roquet, Sarchi, and Waliszewski.
123. Most of these books seem to be unavailable. I have found information on only four of them: Joseph Reinach, Serbie et Monténégro (Paris, 1874);
124. Léon Bourgeois, La Hongrie (Paris, 1875);
125. Fernand Cassany de Mazet, La Pologne (Paris, 1875);
126. and Henry Defert, Tchèques (Paris, n.d.).
127. As is well known, the methodology of Begriffsgeschichte requires that concepts be analyzed by locating them in two different contexts: synchronie and diachronic. The first part of this article examines the synchronie context, analyzing the political and intellectual reasons for the emergence of the concept of Eastern Europe, the political and semantic struggles between different uses of the concept, and the shifts in its meaning until it finally crystallized in an accepted and predominant usage in the period 1810-80. But concepts also need to be placed in the diachronic series to which they belong. We can understand the significance of the data from the period 1810-80 only if we know that the concept of Eastern Europe was the cornerstone of a whole discursive formation that consolidated itself in the twentieth century. We are able to analyze the making of the idea of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century as an intellectual artifact fundamental to the mental mapping of Western identity only because we know that such an artifact gave way to Euro-Orientalism. In other words, without information about the twentieth century it is not possible to interpret the chain of semantic shifts in the nineteenth century as pointing in a certain direction (i.e., as a chain).
128. On the beginnings of Slavic studies outside the Slavic world, see J. J. Gapanovitch, Historiographie russe hors de la Russie (Paris, 1946);
129. Uwe Liszkowski, "Russlandbild und Russlandstudien vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Zur Gründung der deutschen Gesell-schaft zum Studium Russlands 1913," Osteuropa 38, no. 10 (1988): 887-901;
130. Michael Hughes, "Bernard Pares, Russian Studies and the Promotion of Anglo-Russian Friendship, 1907-14," Slavonic and East European Review 78, no. 3 (2000): 510-35;
131. Clarence Manning, A History of Slavic Studies in the United States (Milwaukee, 1957);
132. Josef Hamm and Günther Wytrzens, eds., Beiträge zur Geschichte der Slawistik in nichtslawischen Ländern (Vienna, 1985).
133. The eight-volume American study Marxism, Communism, and Western Society: A Comparative Encyclopedia (ed. C. D. Kernig [New York, 1972]), and the two-volume French study Le grand defi USA/URSS: Encyclopédie comparée (ed. Marc Saporta and Georges Soria [Paris, 1967]) are good examples of the role of academics in bifurcating the world. In the French work, the split between Russia and the United States becomes explicit. Another good example is the well-known Anglo-American academic journal Soviet Survey, which was renamed Survey: A Journal of East & West Studies in 1971. Similarly, the journal of the Istituto di studi e documentazione sull'Europa comunitaria e l'Europa orientale in Italy was named Est-Ovest in the mid-1980s, while the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in France has published a journal called Revue d'Études Comparatives Est/Ouest since 1970. On the lexicon of East and West during the cold war, see Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, 1997), 55-62.
134. Interestingly enough, there is a very old tradition of similar metaphors, beginning with the medieval image of Poland as an Antemurale Christianitatis. See Jadwiga Krzyzaniakowa, "Poland and 'Antemurale Christianitatis': The Political and Ideological Foundations of the Idea," Polish Western Affairs 33, no. 2 [1992]: 3-24). In nineteenth-century France, images such as a "barrier," "wall," "defensive line," "strong-hold," "fortress," or "cord" against "contagion," which allegedly needed to be placed between Russia and Western Europe, were very common.
135. See, e.g., [André d'Arbelles?], De la politique et des progrès de la puissance russe (Paris, 1807), 106;
136. C.-L. Lesur, Des progrés de la puissance russe depuis son origine jusqu 'au commencement du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1812), 469;
137. Napoleon I, Correspondance, 32 vols. (Paris, 1870), 32:352;
138. Dominique Dufour de Pradt, Du Congrès de Vienne, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1815), 125;
139. Adrien Peladan, La Russie au ban de l'univers et du catholicisme (Paris and Lyon, 1854), 11;
140. Moniteur Universel, January 29, 1864, 151. The metaphor of the iron curtain was already in use in the 1920s, well before Winston Churchill made it famous: see Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924 (London, 1997), 237;
141. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, "Who Drew the Iron Curtain? Images East and West," in Borders in Art: Revisiting Kunstgeographie, ed. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius (Warsaw, 2000), 241-48, esp. 242.
142. Stephen Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience (New York, 1985), 1-37.
143. Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Nicolas II, la transition Interrompue (Paris, 1996), 17-18;
144. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 278-79;
145. Bertram Wolfe, Communist Totalitarianism: Keys to the Soviet System (Boulder, CO, 1985), 274;
146. Karl Wittfogel, "Russia and the East: Comparison and Contrast," Slavic Review 22, no. 4 (1963): 627-43.
147. See the fascinating justification of the label "Eurasian" as a new subtitle of the journal Kritika: "Eurasian Studies?" Kritika 1, no. 2 (2000): 233-35.
148. Mikko Kivikoski, "'Anti Politics' and Civil Society: Forgotten Ideas in East Central Europe?" in Russia: More Different than Most, ed. Markku Kangaspuro (Helsinki, 1999), 45-76, quote on 45.
149. Lucio Caracciolo, ed., R. Dahrendorf, F. Furet, B. Geremek: La democracia en Europa (Madrid, 1993), 27-31.
150. George Schöpflin ("Central Europe: Definitions Old and New") and Nancy Wood ("Central Europe: A Historical Region in Modern Times"), in In Search of Central Europe (Cambridge, 1989), 62, 7.
151. Georges Nivat, Regards sur la Russie de l'an VI (Paris, 1998), 283-85.
152. See Katlijn Malfliet, "How 'European' Is Russia Today?" Slavica Gandensia 27 (2000): 151-76.
153. cannot restrain myself from offering two outstanding examples of the pervasive presence of the idea of Eastern Europe in mass culture and of the fear that "the wall in our minds" still evokes (even without Communism around). The first is an article in the Guardian Weekly that appeared in the context of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (1999), in which the possibility of a new Pan-Slavism was discussed and ambiguously dismissed. The dismissal, however, came only after readers were alerted by means of a big map of Eastern Europe displaying the number of inhabitants of each country and the total sum of Slavs. See Ian Traynor, "Expedient Band of Slav Brothers," Guardian Weekly, April 25, 1999, 19. The second example is an editorial, published in 1999 in Argentina's most important newspaper, celebrating the fall of Communism and the Berlin Wall but warning readers about the new "cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic walls" that replaced the old one in Eastern Europe.
154. See "Después de la caída del Muro," Clarín, November 12, 1999, 18. For a more detailed description of Euro-Orientalism today
155. see Adamovsky, "Muros de ladrillo." For an interesting comparison between the content of Sovietology and cold war spy literature in France, see Erik Neveu, "Les miroirs troublants de la 'sovietologie' spontanée," in Back in the USSR: Représentations de l'Union Soviétique, éd.
156. Loïc Blondiaux and Sylvie Gillet, Politix: Travaux de science politique, no. 18 (1992), 56-76.
157. For a description of the ideological origin of the concept of Eastern Europe and its place in academic studies, see Joanna Kostylo, "Eastern Europe and the Historian," Slovo (London) 13 (2001): 153-71.
158. Similar stereotypes were at times applied even to nations that were eventually accepted as part of the narrative of Europe's superiority - notably, to Spain or nineteenth-century Germany. This is not strange if we consider that the grand narrative of civilization was a historical construction and that it experienced many changes in its geographical delineation and shifts of meaning until it finally crystallized. The distinctive feature of Euro-Orientalism is to be found in its peculiar combination of discursive elements and (as I will argue later in this article) in its clear class function. Thus, for example, if most peripheral areas were constructed as "spaces of absences" of Western ingredients, the exclusion of Eastern Europe by means of Euro-Orientalism seems to have served, in particular, to confront mass politics, Communism, and collective institutions (elements that, apparently, are less likely to be found in other comparable discourses).
159. See Samir Amin, "The Construction of Eurocentric Culture," in Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Diana Brydon, 5 vols. (London and New York, 2000), 4:1674-91;
160. Sandra Harding, "Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies: A Space for New Questions," Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, in ibid., 5:2041-56;
161. Silvia Federici, ed., Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its "Others" (Westport, CT, 1995);
162. James M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York, 1993);
163. Edgardo Lander, ed., La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales, perspectivas latinoamericanas (Caracas, 2000);
164. Arif Dirlik, Vinay Bahl, and Peter Gran, eds., History after the Three Worlds (Lanham, MD, 2000);
165. Peter Gran, Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History (Syracuse, NY, 1996);
166. Ozay Mehmet, Westernizing the Third World: The Eurocentricity of Economic Development Theories (London and New York, 1999);
167. Victor Lieberman, ed., Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1999).
168. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 4, 32, 35;
169. Nahla Abdo, ed., Sociological Thought beyond Eurocentric Theory (Toronto, 1996), 13;
170. Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey, eds., Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective (Lanham, MD, 2002).
171. Gyan Prakash, "Can the 'Subaltern' Ride?" in Brydon, Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts, 3:916-33, quote on 924.
172. This is the main theme, for example, in Larry Wolff 's Inventing Eastern Eu rope. On subaltern perspectives and the legacy of Enlightenment, see Federici, Enduring Western Civilization, xii-xiii;
173. and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002), 20-37.
174. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 137-56, 183-203.
175. Before Hardt and Negri, Fredric Jameson had already called our attention to the "happy marriage" between postmodernism and capitalism in his acclaimed "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, no. 146 (1984): 53-92.
176. Subaltern scholars have argued that the category of class that is often employed in, for example, Marxist historiography tends to essentialize the complex social relationships to be found in non-European societies by reading them through a conceptual framework originally developed for European realities. That is indeed a valid point, even though some have tended to exaggerate it. It is therefore important to note that the concept of class is not used here in this article in its narrow economic meaning but, rather, in one that encompasses its cultural and political dimensions. By "class," I do not mean one particular group of people distinguishable by the amount of money they have or by their ownership or lack of ownership of the means of production. Under capitalism, production and social reproduction take place on a society-wide, global scale. Thus, for example, the production of wheat takes far more than the labor of the rural workers directly involved in it: it also requires the work of those who produced other necessary inputs in other countries - of the bus drivers who took them to work; the teachers who taught them to read; the agronomists who devised better methods of production; the physicians who treated them when they were ill; the students who will become teachers, physicians, and agronomists tomorrow; the unemployed and the illegal immigrants who keep salaries at a "convenient" level; the domestic (family) workers who raised them; the policemen who ensured social order for all this to happen; and so on. Therefore, class relationships are not only to be found in the direct exploitation of one specific social group ("the rural workers") by another ("the owners of the rural company") but are also disseminated throughout the (global) body social. Thus, all the people whose work is directly or indirectly exploited by the capitalist norms of production and reproduction, and all who are subject to the power of those norms, are under class domination. This includes the specific configurations of class domination to be found in peripheral countries, which are often (wrongly) considered precapitalist or premodern. "Class ideology" refers here to the set of ideas, concepts, representations, and so on that organize and legitimize that domination in its different situations. "Liberal-bourgeois ideology" refers to the specific, historical configuration of class ideology in the modern (capitalist) world. On this definition of "class," see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis, 1994), 8-21.
177. Remembering the anniversary of the discovery of America in 1992, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse argued that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was like "another New World" waiting to be discovered; moreover, the end of Communism left that country "facing a tabula rasa" (Victorieuse Russie [Paris, 1992], 381-82). By that, she probably meant that Russia now had the chance to be transformed into something different. However, the discovery of the New World becomes a rather unfortunate comparison if we think of it from the viewpoint of the Russian "natives." The fact that the French scholar "forgot" the five hundred years of violence that accompanied the forcible inclusion of the Americas in the capitalist world system invites the thought that Euro-Orientalist discourse will probably overlook the violence of a similar process in Eastern Europe.
178. See e.g., Piotr Sztompka, "Civilizational Incompetence: The Trap of Post-Communist Societies," Zeitschrift für Soziologie 22 (1993): 85-95.
179. In a lecture at the Moscow School of Political Studies in 1999, Richard Pipes went so far as to argue that Russia's "enemy" is the Russians themselves, whose culture is undermining economic and political reforms. See Richard Pipes, "What Russians Should Do in the Twenty-First Century," Russia on Russia (London) 1 (2000): 42-49.
180. A prestigious American publishing house considered it necessary in 1989, when it reprinted the marquis de Custine's famous account of his journey to Russia in 1839, to remind readers that "some tendencies that we attribute to 'Communism' today may simply be Russian: expansionism, autocracy, bureaucracy, centralism, secrecy, contempt for personal rights and public opinion, and so on." The volume was given the revealing (and nonauthentic) subtitle A Journey through Eternal Russia (Astolphe de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey through Eternal Russia [New York, 1990]). Indeed, the old testimonies of European travelers may still be used within the academic field to "prove" that Russia has certain "eternal" (bad) characteristics (see, e.g., Anna Rédei Cabak, "Russia in a Western Mirror: A Presentation of Denis Diderot, Mme. de Staël, and André Gide," CFE Working Paper Series, Lund University, 2001, http://www.cfe.lu.se/CFEPaper13.pdf).
181. It must be said, however, that some scholars did raise this issue. See, e.g., Stephen Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York and London, 2000), 19-21;
182. David Wedgwood Benn, "Warm Words and Harsh Advice: A Critique of the West's Role in Russian Reforms," International Affairs 77, no. 4 (2001): 947-55;
183. Michel Roche, Thérapie de choc et autoritarisme en Russie: La démocratie confisquée (Paris and Montréal, 2000);
184. Esther Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development (Princeton, NJ, 1999).
185. See Said, Orientalism;
186. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York and Oxford, 1997). True, Todorova's work clearly identifies differences of class in Western perceptions of the Balkans (i.e., aristocrats/conservatives, on the one hand, and middle class/liberals, on the other, tended to perceive different features more prominently), but she interprets "Balkanism" more as a mere form of ethnocentrism than in terms of its class functions (if any).
187. Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, "After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World," in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi (London, 2000), 191-219, esp. 214-15.
188. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London, 2001), xix, 5 6, 8-9.
189. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 190-95.
190. See, e.g., Carrère d'Encausse, Victorieuse Russie, 36, Lénine (Paris, 1998), 21-22
191. and L'Union Soviétique de Lénine à Staline: 1917-1953 (Paris, 1972), 8.
192. See n. 39 above. A contemporary example of this can be found in Carrère d'Encausse, L'Union Soviétique, 8.
193. The image of Eastern Europe as a land that lacks civilization can be found in many contemporary sources. The sociologist Piotr Sztompka went so far as to coin the concept of "civilizational incompetence" to name the malaise of Eastern Europe past and present. See his "Civilizational Incompetence" (n. 71 above). Similar uses of the binary construction of West/East as civilization/barbarity can be found in other leading contemporary scholars, and even in Russian philosophers. See Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, La Russie inachevée (Paris, 2000), 190, 285;
194. Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London, 1996), 43;
195. Evert Van der Zweerde, "Civil Society and Ideology: A Matter of Freedom," Studies in East European Thought 48 (1996): 192-93. The use of similar concepts such as "modernity," "development," or "progress," performing the same binary divisions between West and East, is much more common ("civilization" remains somewhat unfashionable).
196. The idea that Eastern Europe's deficient civilization/development/ progress is due to the weakness or absence of its "middle class" or "bourgeoisie" can be found in many contemporary sources. See, e.g., Nivat, Regards sur la Russie de l'an VI (n. 60 above), 20, 281;
197. Marie-Pierre Rey, Le dilemme russe (Paris, 2002): 20;
198. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (1974; repr. Harmondsworth, 1987), 191-220;
199. Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (London, 1998), 246-48;
200. Harley Balzer, ed., Russia's Missing Middle Class (New York and London, 1996), 300.
201. The theme of Eastern Europe's lack of freedom due to the lack or weakness of "civil society" is recurrent in the academic arena. For example, Alain Besançon, Martin Malia, and Richard Pipes agree that the lack of "intermediate" or "independent" associations in tsarist Russia is a key to understanding the triumph of authoritarian tendencies in the tsarist period and after 1917. See Alain Besançon, Les origines intellectuelles du Léninisme (Paris, 1977), 58, 110, 101
202. and Présent sovietique et passé russe (Paris, 1976), 47;
203. Martin E. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York, 1994), 6 and 507
204. and Russia under Western Eyes (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 32-35, 412;
205. Richard Pipes, Three Whys of the Russian Revolution (London, 1998), 8, 17-18. The idea of the "lack of civil society" is also fundamental to the interpretations of the school of totalitarianism, which dominated the field of Slavic studies for decades, and also in contemporary studies on the "transition" to democracy in Eastern Europe. The list of examples would be endless; to mention but a few: Schöpflin and Wood, eds., In Search of Central Europe (n. 59 above);
206. Ralph Dahrendorf, After 1989: Morals, Revolution and Civil Society (London, 1997);
207. Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (London, 1994);
208. Anne Le Huérou and Kathy Rousselet, eds, La société civile en Russie: De l'utopie à l'engagement civique? Problèmes politiques et sociaux (série Russie), vol. 814 (Paris, 1999);
209. Z. T. Golenkova, ed., Problemy formirovaniia grath-danskogo obshchestva (Moscow, 1993).
210. The necessary link between individuality, pluralism, private property (and the idea that collective forms of ownership of property bring about despotism), and freedom is a classic tenet of liberal thinking that can easily be found in the field of Slavic studies. For example, Hosking calls the plebeian forms of collective property and association - the mir and artel' - Russia's "totalitarianism from below." See Geoffrey Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union (London, 1991), 26-34, 55, 213. Similarly, basing himself in no evidence whatsoever, Pipes concluded that "the Russian peasant shared with other primitive men a weakly developed sense of personal identity"; the
211. See Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 158.
212. Some examples of this can be found in the field of positivist psychology. The reformist liberal theoretician Alfred Fouillée argued in his widely read positivist treatise Esquisse psychologique des peuples européens (4th ed. [Paris, 1903], 397-452) that Slavonic blood was not purely "Arian" but mixed with that of Asian races. The shape of Slavonic skulls confirmed this Oriental pedigree. Hence their "absence of intellectual life," "sensitivity," "melancholy," "love for equality" even in servitude, "passivity," "simplistic" reasoning, superstitious and "fanatic" approach to religion, and so on. The Russians in particular seemed to be the most "primitive," "passive," "inert," "unbalanced," and unsuitable to "capitalism" of the Slavs, due to their "Turanian and brach-yocephalic" element. Needless to say, Fouillée presented scientific evidence of the superiority of the Western psychology (the French in particular). These stereotypes, albeit in more subtle formulations, can also be found in more recent scholarship.
213. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World (n. 64 above), 17.