Eastern European Backwardness - Coursework Example

We confront severe international and intercultural conflicts in a period when we envisioned that we had already abandoned that type of backwardness or savagery behind us. Dealing with these predicaments demands that we keep our feet grounded on the larger picture. Another essential concern to discuss here is the hesitancy of at least some of us to just acknowledge the most vicious attributes of human nature. If we have to make a choice whether to be destructive or backward, it is apparent those to a certain extent many of us also have a tendency to prefer the contrary and to shape a more promising future for humanity than appears probable at the moment. For that attempt, every one of us who have some ideas, some paths, and a suggestion that the undertaking before us demands new insights, new destinations to reach, and a possibly extraordinary amount of collaborative task. To the degree that we are capable to gain knowledge from the past, we may be capable to move farther than what thus far appears to be rerun of history. As maintained by Brenner (1993), in periods of insecurity human societies, or more precisely their citizens, are anxious of three things: “the unknown, a remembered past and, often some part of themselves” (p. 33). If anything has transpired in the narratives of Kate Brown and JSTOR, it is in fact a reflection of these forces as they contribute to the backwardness of Eastern Europe. What looms in the future appears no longer as knowable as it one was assumed to be. The ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ at the aftermath of the World War II cannot easily be repeated or even reproduced in the final decade of the twentieth century (Wolff 1994, 83). There linger the reminiscences of Nazi Germany, connected to the narrow-mindedness and prejudice, past and present alike, toward those who are considered minority or basically proclaimed to be economically and culturally polluting. These are sinister images, dreaded not merely by those outside of Germany, but as well as by the countless people who reside within that nation’s new boundaries. I. The Defeat of Sovereign Power One of the grand paradoxes of our period is the reality that long-established frameworks and knowledge apparently are not working. The backwardness of Eastern Europe as well as Germany is the backwardness of our world. Kate Brown indirectly pointed out the deep-seated transformations in international systems that have emerged throughout the recent decades. Numerous of the policies and organizations, NATO is a case in point of the latter, nuclear prevention an instance of the former, that were established at the aftermath of World War I involved a sort of integrated obsolescence. The formation of ‘devils’ or adversaries in that context have left us with the option of either deserting such concepts on the whole, or discovering new adversaries once the previous ones weakened or were defeated. The traditional reaction has, apparently, been the extension or rediscovery of even earlier adversaries, frameworks, and policies, to a certain extent than an effort to generate basic change. Present dilemmas affect citizens of Eastern Europe on exceptionally individual levels on a daily basis. The example of East Germany, which presented a particular form of economic and physical protection for men and women alike that can no longer be located in the unified Federal Republic, is a bleak case in point of the reality. But regimes in Eastern Europe discover it improbable to satisfactorily address such predicaments as spiraling crime (Baylis & Leone 1994). The ordinary citizens cannot ignore the ready availability of drugs and the enormous amounts of money their transactions produce for vastly successful criminal industrialists of our period. Nations once assumed of as superpowers can no longer have the funds to stage wars whose costliness is the outcome of the core economic structures they designed. More and more, they cannot even offer the health care for the members of their society that technology facilitated, but that is extremely expensive that it pressures whole economies. What may appear like an invincible economic civilization at present becomes the future’s savings and loan scam or Japanese letdown to sufficiently recognize global economic factors (Baylis & Leone 1994, 107). Once apparently reliable groundwork of nationhood is shuddering everywhere. II. Eastern Europe: A Remnant of Civilization As a number of scholars have argued, prior to 1914 West European and American intellectuals portrayed Eastern Europe as a land of party Orientalized, backward and immoral citizens, thus distinguishing themselves and a romanticized West, in terms of civilization and empire, from the nations of Eastern Europe; this analysis implores a significant concern. How did the cultural paradigms of Westerners about Eastern Europe following the Great War demonstrate the political evolution that had taken place? Through an exploration of interwar British, French and American texts, in addition to both recent scholarly researches and travel reports that were publicized regarding the region, one can assume that West Europeans and Americans still have their deep-seated knowledge about the region and its peoples (Wolff 1994). They could have formed an encouraging discourse on the area through looking at East Europeans as political as well as cultural equals, civilized citizens of the novel European homeland, rather than perceiving them as barbaric savages. The New Europe, a journal, aimed to show the possibility of the shaping of a constructive image of Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, these early aspirations faded away immediately after the end of the peace convention and even the use of the phrase ‘the New Europe’ narrowed in the 1920s. In an attempt to make the empire of West Europe appear dominant and superior, several thinkers depicted an Eastern Europe that was the native soil of degenerate, mediocre cultures characterized by savagery, backwardness and semi-Orientalism, ideas that situated Eastern Europe in closer link with the Orient than with the dominant civilization of Western Europe (Wolff 1994, 90). Therefore, in relation to cultural concepts, a New Eastern Europe never had the chance to truly emerge. But what of the Catholic associations in Eastern Europe, such as Poles, Croats, Czechs and Slovenes? Did their cultures originate too from Western civilization? According to a number of historians, these nationalities, including the Germans, surrendered their positions in the Western empire due to the barbarous, Oriental savagery their civilizations demonstrated at the time of the war. All parties carried out unspeakable cruelties and massacres, but several West Europeans thought that the felonies of the Eastern Europeans and Germans far outdone their own crimes. They hence labeled these unlawful peoples into that are less than truthfully European, despite of the Germanic features frequently related with Western civilization. Mentions of Oriental-style savagery of East Europeans awakened gruesome images of Asiatic gangs, such as the Mongols and the Huns that invaded Europe at some point in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Such visions were heritages of wartime propaganda. But they as well functioned as very important connections between combat zone resentments and a more profound sense of cultural cynicism that categorized the East Europeans and Germans into the same kind of barbarians (Brenner 1993). A number of scholars have differentiated between Orientalism and Balkanism, asserting that Westerners dealt with the Balkans as a unit different from the Orient of the Middle East. However, at the time of the interwar, several thinkers often made use of the same concepts to depict the Orient and Eastern Europe, involving the Balkans, hence distorting the differentiation between Orientalism and Balkanism. Basically, Balkanism was assimilated into the Western discussion of Eastern Europe generally, and the concepts used to portray the region in contrary to the West started to unite with those customarily given to the Orient (Baylis & Leone 1994). Equally significant was the steady expansion of the concept ‘Levantine,’ which initially implied a European citizen of the Levant or an individual of mixed European and Eastern ancestry residing in the Levant. By the opening of the twentieth century, sojourners and academics began making use of the concept ‘Levantine’ to moneylenders from Greece, to some Eastern Christians such as the Armenians, as well as to any non-Muslim citizen of the Orient. These Westerners from before 1914 perceive Levantines as corrupted half-breeds, half Caucasian and half Eastern, doing illegal businesses and exploiting the natives and polluting pure Easterners with immorality and greed (Baylis & Leone 1994, 115). By the time some scholars started writing throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the subject of the Levantine had branched out from the Eastern Mediterranean as well as Southern Europe to Czechoslovakia and the entire Eastern Europe. Levantines were not anymore Europeans of Oriental origins corrupting the Muslims of the Middle East, and not anymore were Southern Europeans vulnerable to becoming Levantines the moment they reached the Levant. At the time of the interwar period, East Europeans such as the Czechs were the Levantines who resided in what is referred to as the ‘trumpery New Orient’ (Baylis & Leone 1994, 115-116), a new Levant which is now known as Eastern Europe. Immediately as pre-war Levantines terrorized to multiply and spread the malady of immorality to the Easterners close to whom they resided, hence East Europeans threatened to circulate a similar malady to the Western Hemisphere itself. In a sense, the notion of the Levantine culminated from a European living in the Levant to a European half-breed citizen in Europe itself. For some scholars, Eastern Europe was never the genuine West or even the true East (Wolff 1994). To a certain extent, it was a backward territory of dishonored peoples situated somewhere in the middle of the two and in definite opposition to the own culture of the West, which they considered as tremendously superior. III. Conclusions At present the West once again wrestles with the concern of Eastern Europe. Should Eastern Europe be recognized into a victorious image of Europe, or kept isolated as an inferiorly economic and undemocratic region? My analysis of Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place shows that a significant occurrence, such as the Great War or the decline of communism, does not necessarily imply a transformation in deep-seated ideas regarding a region. Eastern Europe following 1918 was stigmatized the ‘New Europe’ simply as some have mentioned of the area in the post-1989 period. But people should accomplish more than merely label attention-grabbing titles. In order to usher in a social alliance through economic and political transformations, they should recognize ‘East Europeans,’ the customary others, as cultural counterparts who are basically as European as those who inhabit the western side of the continent. If they genuinely yearn for the establishment of one Europe, then Westerners should accept their own uncertainties and insecurities with no outcrop of unconstructive visions on an Eastern Europe so as to give back for those self-misgivings. Conceivably, the costs of ideologically provoked cultural beliefs and biases after World War I can be a message for those who pursue to transform Europe in the contemporary period. References Baylis, Thomas & Leone, Richard. The West and Eastern Europe: Economic Statecraft and Political Change. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1994. Brenner, M.J. "EC: Confidence Lost." Foerign Policy, 1993: 24-43. Brown, Kathryn L. A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland. Harvard University Press: USA, 2004. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Read More