Imitators Spurned: Why the West Needs Central Europe to Stay in its Eastern European Place
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The excitement when the barriers came crashing down – the actual wall in Berlin and the imagined Iron Curtain across Europe – soon cooled. The Westerners were disappointed with the Easterners, and the Easterners were disappointed with their disappointment. In this chapter, I elaborate on how accepting the East Central Europeans as full members of the Western club was actually never really intended. There was the usual scorn with which the privileged view those who are less rich and powerful, and who, as the more fortunate see it, have only themselves to blame. But, more importantly, full acceptance of East Central Europe was never in the interest of Western business. Western multinational corporations were not out to take on new partners. They were looking for new markets and cheap labour in Europe's East, much as they had always done in the Global South. As we have seen earlier, the universal contempt for a culturally and economically backward East in Europe is replicated in every place, along the way from England to the borders of Russia. Historically, the English felt it for the French and together the English and the French felt it for the Germans; now western Germans feel it for eastern Germans, who may feel it for Poles and Czechs the way they in turn feel it for Ukrainians and Russians. (While also western Ukrainians may feel it not only for Russians but also for eastern Ukrainians.) This transitive Orientalism is for the most part unreflecting and unexamined by those infected by it. They include not only the right-wing illiberals but, perhaps even more so, the left and liberal Bildungsburgertum , the educated classes or ‘intelligentsia’, who in each area see themselves as mediators between the local population and the prestigious culture of the West. The cultural capital they possess in the form of their familiarity with Western cultural trends and languages (now mainly English), earns them at times the respect, and at other times the resentment of their compatriots, who may see them as betraying their native roots. At the same time, it makes them feel entitled to be taken seriously as intellectual equals in the West. That is exactly what they hoped would happen once the communist regimes fell and released them from their Cold War confinement in the Eastern Bloc.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".