Seminar 3: Regionalizing and Deregionalizing the World

Grouping areas of the world is sometimes a way of simplifying and homogenizing parts the world and, what’s more, it can help establishing prejudices and stereotypes. Still, it serves as a useful tool to scholars in order to split the world in different sections that are more feasible.

Regionalizing the world is indeed a way of rationalizing the world by creating specific knowledge of it. This is due to the fact that having a global perspective of the whole world as a single place is, for most of the times, impossible or too complex to be grasped by one single individual, or at least it is perceived as such by most contemporary academics. This process of fragmentation has been indeed very common not only in geography but in other sciences (taxonomy…) At the same time, the regionalization of the world explains the appearance of disciplines such as International Relations and Intercultural Relationships, as the disciplines that study the contacts between these separate “regions” (or states, in the case of International Relations). Seeing that regionalization is unavoidable if we want to understand the world, it has been a major concern for many authors to provide with a “neutral” regionalization or, at least, analyze the way we conceptualize the “regions” of the world through historical, political and even semiotic perspectives to be aware of what assumptions we are making whenever a certain “region” is mentioned.

In his work “The Europeans. A Geography of People, Culture, and Environment”, R. C. Ostergren and J. G. Rice after studying the “creation” and perception of Europe as an entity come up with a very clear classification of the different types of regions, according to the way their inhabitants perceive them or other peoples do and the attachment of a region to a certain official institution. This classification includes: instituted regions, naively perceived regions and denoted regions.

The first arises as a consequence of the implementation of an institution (of whatever nature) over a certain extension of territory. A naively perceived region, in contrast, is not articulated around a certain institution but is due to a set of values or conceptions either by the inhabitants of a region or by a group of people that is alien to the region. Finally, denoted regions don’t stem up from any “perceived centrality” but are actually neutral terms used by studious that group some areas of the globe either because they share a common trait (uniform regions) or because a central point that scholars perceive (but that the inhabitants might not) around which a certain number of territories is organized (nodal region). (OSTERGREN, 2011)

In this essay, the use of Eastern Europe and EECA (Eastern Europe and Central Asia) by media and academic literature will be discussed and compared in order to elaborate some conclusions regarding these cases but also some general conclusions in relation to the notion of “region” itself.

Though neutral in its wide spread use nowadays for designating the area comprised beyond Germany, Austria and North Italy to the Ural mountains and to Greece, in its Southern part, the term Eastern Europe is usually the unconscious vehicle through which the “concept” of Eastern Europe travels (WOLFF, 1994). The “concept” of Eastern Europe is much more older than the term of Eastern Europe; indeed it has been used for a very long time to denote a wide range of cultural, religious, political and social continuities and discontinuities between Eastern and Western Europe, but if we had to choose an official birth date for it, according to Larry Wolff, this should be the end of the 17th century and the Enlightenment. Coined by traveler Lous-Philippe, count of Ségur when we visited the tsarina Catherine the Great , and reinforced by numerous travel accounts later on, l’orient d’Europe was a sort of inferior version of Western Europe attempting to resemble Western civilization but not fully civilized, the crossroad between Europe and Asia(WOLFF, 1994):

• Despotic regimes that tended towards authoritarianism and centralized power around a certain individual (tsar for example)

• Mostly agrarian regimes that maintained a state of serfdom for the majority of their citizens until the end of the 19th century

• Persistence of paganism as well as a different conception of religiosity (Orthodox Christianity) that linked religion and state through the figure of the patriarch

This “externally perceived” region created by Western Europeans persisted and took new forms during the rise of communism during the 20th century. With the creation of the two Blocks (Western and Eastern) the difference between Europe and “the other Europe” arose again and still persists today. The difference, in contrast to previous times, was not justified on “moral” or “ethnic-linguistic” grounds but rather because of differences between political systems. Authoritarian systems still persist across Eastern Europe after communism: Putin in Russia, Lukashenko in Belarus, instable regimes in Hungary –Victor Orban- or Poland –Andrej Duda-, that have low democratic practices and are attempting to disrupt the European establishment by questioning the fundaments of EU such as the free movement of people or the liberty of press or the separation of the three powers…

A situation that is used by media to portray Eastern Europe as a “different Europe” that though included in the “Europe section” deserves a different treatment. This explains the systematic emphasis that Western press puts on the political systems in countries of Eastern Europe. In a small study that my group conducted about the topic that can be seen in the blog easterneuropeupf at the section of Recent News Concerning Eastern Europe we found that it is very difficult to have news about Eastern European countries that had nothing to do with their political systems, as if in these countries there were no other activities that mattered, such as culture, literature, social problems, arts...). Also, a will to turn Eastern European countries into peripheral countries of Europe could be observed in different newspapers, for example, Le Monde, which in its Europe section (separated from another section: European Union) an interactive map such as this could be seen:

The map constraints Europe within very small frames and, apart from showing a difference between EU and non EU countries so that when you roll the mouse over a EU country its name appears but if you roll the mouse over a non EU country it doesn’t (does this mean that non EU countries in Europe should be regarded as not or less European than EU countries?), clearly relocates all Eastern European countries to the margins (Southern-Eastern margin in the case of Balkans and Northern-Eastern Margin in the case of Russia, which is, indeed, not fully represented in the map) in order to justify its minor presence and coverage in the news.

In conclusion, while it is difficult to find direct definitions and portrays of Eastern Europe as a whole in Western Press a more indirect way of defining and differentiating Eastern European countries from Western European countries (and thus creating a perception of Eastern Europe that justifies the creation of the concept of Eastern Europe as something different, and sometimes, radically opposed to Western Europe) persists in subtle ways, such as the selection of the news or the portrayal of Europe as a whole but with certain deliberate spots.

Eastern Europe is, in some ways, a naively internally perceived region as well. Mostly, it is due to pan-Slavic movements, that started during the 19th century and have persisted until nowadays, at least in the field of popular music, where we can see attempts of having contemporary Slavic rhythms: it is the case of BRAC, by Polish Cleo and Ukrainian Donatan. It should be noted, though, that this internally perceived regiondoesn’t apply to the whole of Eastern Europe, but only to Slavic ethno-linguistic groups (not to Hungarians, Rumanians, Baltic...).

After the fall of communism, scholars started to acknowledge the complexity and diversity of the countries under a communist regime and abandoned the term Eastern Europe. This recognition led to the birth and spread of new expressions that are nowadays very easy to be found in World Bank or IMF reports. To designate countries that got along more or less well and became EU members after the fall of communism we have ECE (Eastern Central Europe) mainly to refer to Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia and sometimes even Poland. True Eastern Europe (EE) usually only remain Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Romania. Then there’s also the Balkans region.

Additionally, there’s also EECA (Eastern Europe and Central Asia) region, which is mainly a post-cold war way of referring to former URSS republics in Central Asia (another naively perceived region) and also including communist countries in Europe. EECA comprehends such a vast and diverse piece of the world that it doesn’t mean to imply any similarity between the different countries it includes (no geographical, cultural, artistic common traits). It is more of a nodal denoted region used by scholars to designate all territories that used to be under a communist regime during the 20th century and related to the Soviet Union. This classification doesn’t rely on any particular feeling of community among the inhabitants of EECA or a feeling of “otherness” expressed by any other group of people. On the contrary, it is mostly used to study demographic and economic trends in the region after the fall of communism, since the area has proven to be tightly intertwined despite not having a comprehensive institution behind that regulates activities across EECA countries or a common cultural heritage (QUINNIN, 2007). It serves as an efficient term to encompass a big area that presents particular intra dynamics, especially due to migration from and to Central Asian countries and Russia and, to a lesser extent, Eastern European countries, as well as transcendent economical flows, that are also the reason of institutional agreements between the states in EECA region, especially regarding oil supply and transportation as well as creation of free zones (EASTERLING, 2014).

It could be argued that, while the term of Eastern Europe, now very rare in academic literature, is, in a way, a perpetuation of the binary system that started, as explained above, in the Enlightenment and later reinforced and “refurbished” by the Cold War and EU and that is mostly maintained indirectly the EECA region, both as a concept and as a term, implies a post-communist approach to global dynamics, with less connotations (as it doesn’t relate explicitly to the communist systems, in contrast to the expression “former communist countries”). While still dependent on the binary opposition Asia/Europe (the name says it: Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as two different things) the concept of EECA is innovative because, at least, it acknowledges the scope of the cultural and social flows between the two regions Eastern Europe and Central Asia beyond its shared communist past and allows some syncretism, while the term Eastern Europe acts more as a standardizing force.

After analyzing both cases (Eastern Europe and EECA) it is clear that there are certain differences between these regions, which, indeed, are very logic, as these terms were formulated to serve very different purposes. This can raise the question: if so different things that serve so different purposes are, at the same time, called regions, then what is a region after all?

It should be noted that regions don’t exist in the world; there are no borders in nature (the so called “natural borders” are not “borders” as such but certain geological systems such as mountains or seas that are perceived as borders by a group of people i.e. Ural mountains as a border to differentiate two continents that are in fact the same piece of land: Eurasia). It’s all a human construction. It is no surprise then, that regions, being as they are mere fabrications, serve a political agenda and entail a certain vision of the world. Ironically, it could be said that maps themselves are a declaration of principles.

Additionally, one could also discuss to what extent regions are even able to serve a political agenda in a world that, as so many scholars have argued, is becoming unified, through time-space compression and in which a global culture is emerging and a global landscape is starting to be perceived (through the creation of “global cities”). It might be more accurate, then, to start talking about “global regions” as contexts (rather than physical places) in which people from all across the world live in similar conditions, encounter similar architecture and urbanism and sometimes are even oriented by similar values. If we do subscribe to this perception, though, to what extent would “global regions” mean a true rupture with the process of fragmentation of knowledge of the world that the “old” regionalization of the world implies or actually reinforce it? To what extent does this new conceptual framework allow a more fluid understanding of the dynamics of the world?

Whatever the answers for the previous questions it is clear that the concept of “region” is not neutral at all but it, however applied, implies a certain degree of assumptions and a will of fragmentizing the world, of isolating a certain aspect of reality or knowledge about it, overemphasizing it and differentiating it from the rest, a procedure that in sometimes is not fully legitimized, as it is the case of Eastern Europe.

References:

-EASTERLING, K. (2014) Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure space, Verso, London

-OSTERGREN, R. C &RICE, J. C. (2011), The Europeans: a Geography of People, Culture, and Environment. New York: Guilford Press.

-QUILLIN, B. ; MANSOOR, A. (2007) Migration and Remittances: Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, Washington Digital version available at: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/6920/384260Migratio101OFFICIAL0USE0ONLY1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y[Last accessed 26/10/2016]

-WOLFF, L. (1994) Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford, Stanford University Press.