How Central Europeans Became Eastern European

In the previous chapter, I examined a tendency to blame Central European inability to catch up with the West, not on the way Western-dominated economic and political structures were introduced in the area, but on an alleged cultural difference between West and East in Europe. The West is said to be culturally predisposed to freedom and democracy, and the East not. This mechanism for racializing Eastern Europe's alleged failure includes work by academics who argue that an unbridgeable East– West gap has existed in Europe centuries before the fall of communism. In the 1990s, some of them came to entertain a thought that had never occurred to Churchill, namely, that the Iron Curtain he saw in his famous 1946 speech descending across the continent only replaced an imagined divide of a much longer date, possibly going back to the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment. These scholars were quick to give the academic imprimatur to the litany of complaints about the eternal and intractable backwardness of Eastern European culture. While economists discussed the postcommunist region as one of the world's ‘emerging markets’, what these historians and social scientists saw emerge was an iceberg of obscurantism re-emerging, having been partly kept underwater by communist oppression. But ‘Eastern Europe’, as a uniform, culturally distinctive, and socially and politically inferior area, was not invented in the eighteenth century. Nor in the nineteenth. If it was, it was not known to a British traveller like the soldier and priest George Robert Gleig, who in the 1830s described the average labourer in early nineteenth-century Bohemia (now Czech Republic) as better off than an Englishman of comparable social station, and considered the political heritage of Bohemia to be superior to that of Germany (though no match for the superior state of liberty in England). Prague provided him with ‘the pomp and splendour of a great capital’, except for the unparalleled squalor of its Jewish Town. No, the invention of ‘Eastern Europe’ in the form that we know it did not yet happen, either in the Enlightenment, as some scholars claim, or in the 19th century, as do others. It is of much more recent vintage, essentially produced in the Cold War, and only getting more intense after it. But to demonstrate that, we need to examine both of these proposed dates of origin carefully.

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