A top American liberal arts college with a storied reputation for teaching foreign countries’ languages, cultures, and history should know better than to lump thriving democracies together with a warmongering dictatorship. Yet Middlebury has just advertised for a tenure-track position in comparative politics, “with a regional focus on the politics of Russia and Eastern Europe.”
The jarring errors in this brief phrase are not specific to the Vermont ivory tower. Most universities in the “old West” (North America and western Europe) are still stuck in the same intellectual trap. And they risk imposing their outdated thinking on the next generation of policy-makers and opinion-formers, with the same catastrophic results.
The first mistake is to treat “Eastern Europe” as separate. All European countries have worries about populism, immigration, security, and economic growth. They manage these difficulties through political choices made in competitive elections, under the rule of law, with strong institutions and lively media scrutiny. Politics in these countries features similarities and also differences. It makes as little sense to impose an east-west divide as it would to use a north-south one.
Russian politics, if one can call it that, is quite different. It involves naked power struggles, routine murder of opponents, the fungibility of power and wealth, the personality cult of Vladimir Putin, and above all the role of imperialism and xenophobia. With the possible exception of Belarus, these qualities appear nowhere in the politics of countries elsewhere in Europe.
The entrenched “Eastern Europe” category dates from the continent’s division after 1945; a better term would have been “eastern-ruled” Europe, reflecting the Soviet imperial presence there. Even when this geopolitical category existed, it was no monolith. The shared historical catastrophe was imposed in different ways in different places and on countries where identities, history, and culture varied hugely. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, its meaning has splintered further. In the 20-plus countries once afflicted by the one-party state, the planned economy, and Soviet domination, half the population now has little or no memory of these traumas.
Worse than the category’s irrelevance is the prejudice it embodies. The western half of the continent is familiar; what lies east is fuzzy on the mental landscape. Pejorative words such as “Balkanize” and “Byzantine” are used as synonyms for fragmentation and complexity.
A related problem is Russia-centrism. A centuries-old colonial history means that the word “Russia” is loaded with overlapping layers of linguistic, territorial, political, and historical meaning, even in what may, at first sight, seem politically innocent cultural studies. Many of the great names we think of as “Russian” (Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Kandinsky), for example, have Ukrainian roots too. The British poet Rudyard Kipling is damned for his imperialist flaws, but how many fans of Russian poetry know of the racist jibes penned by beloved authors such as Alexander Pushkin (to the Poles) and, more recently, Joseph Brodsky (to Ukrainians)?
Studying Russia through a colonial (and maybe one day post-colonial) lens is essential, but so is making space for the victims of that colonialism. Some notable scholars, such as Tim Snyder at Yale, are bringing Ukrainian history and culture into the academic mainstream. But we are only beginning to remedy decades of neglect (Tatar studies, anyone?)
The ignorance and arrogance that these lazy categories and habits epitomize spill quickly into the politics of life and death. Since the 1990s, far too many in the “old West”—Berlin, Brussels, Paris, London and Washington DC—disregarded, patronised and belittled people who warned us about Russian imperialism. Many of those decision-makers studied at places like Middlebury. The price of their mistakes is paid elsewhere.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
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