The Other Europes

Europe's interior frontiers

European historiography has a geography problem. Most general accounts of European history are really accounts of Western European history: the Roman inheritance, feudalism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, industrialisation. Everything east of the Rhine — and especially east of the Elbe — appears in supporting roles, as a backdrop against which the "real" European drama unfolds.

This is not an accident. It reflects the fact that academic categories encode power. The term "Eastern Europe" itself demonstrates what scholars call semantic indeterminacy: it functions simultaneously as a geographical space, a historical-cultural region, and a contested idea shaped by late twentieth-century discourse rather than any stable analytical category. The companion term "Central Europe" is equally indeterminate — and the two concepts define each other in a relationship that says as much about Western European anxieties as it does about the lands in question.

What Eastern and Central European territories do share is a set of structural characteristics that distinguish them from Western Europe: land-based empires that persisted into the modern era, the relative longevity of serfdom, and a long experience of being administered by states centred elsewhere — Vienna, Istanbul, Moscow. They are not peripheral by nature. They became peripheral by force of military, economic, and historiographic domination.

The Balkans as Europe's internal Other

Nowhere has this distortion been more pronounced than in representations of the Balkans. In 1997, the Bulgarian-American historian Maria Todorova published Imagining the Balkans, which documented and named the phenomenon: Balkanism.

Balkanism is a discourse — a system of representation — that constructs the Balkans as Europe's inferior "Other within". This is a region geographically inside Europe, populated by predominantly Christian peoples with white skin, yet systematically portrayed in Western discourse as violent, irrational, backward, tribally fragmented, and incompletely modern. The Balkans are not the distant Orient: they cannot be othered through absolute geographical separation. Instead, they function as a repository of negative characteristics against which Western European self-definition is constructed.

Todorova was careful to distinguish Balkanism from Edward Said's Orientalism. Orientalism described the Middle East and Asia as non-European, Islamic, and geographically distant. Balkanism applies a different framework to a region that is geographically European, historically Christian, and has no formal colonial relationship with the West — yet still gets treated as insufficiently European. This makes Balkanism a more intimate, paradoxical form of othering. The Western European observer cannot dismiss the Balkans as alien; the region must instead be characterised as fallen, contaminated, incomplete.

Balkanism operates as a power-knowledge system in the Foucauldian sense: the knowledge it produces is not neutral description but serves political purposes, justifying external intervention, EU governance asymmetries, and structural hierarchies between Western and Balkan states.

"Balkanization" — the global metaphor for fragmentation and violent partition — reveals how thoroughly Balkanist stereotypes entered English as common-sense geography. When we speak of any region being "balkanized," we are unknowingly repeating a representational system built on Western European anxieties about its own southeastern border.

The Ottoman legacy and the memory it left behind

To understand the Balkans, you need to understand the Ottoman state — and to understand how thoroughly post-Ottoman nationalism worked to erase that understanding.

For roughly four centuries, most of the Balkan peninsula was part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans administered their religiously diverse subjects through the millet system: a framework that organized populations primarily along confessional (religious) rather than ethnic lines. Orthodox Christians — Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks — were grouped together under the same millet headed by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople. What would later be defined as separate ethnic identities did not map onto how identity was officially constituted or experienced under Ottoman rule.

This confessional framework shattered in the nineteenth century as ethnic nationalism spread across the peninsula. The transition was not simply a rediscovery of pre-existing ethnic identities. Balkan nationalism reconstructed rather than liberated populations: it dissolved local communities organised by village and religion and reconstituted them as members of ethnic nations. Where the same village had once been organised confessionally, competing ethnic definitions — Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek — now contested each other for the same ground. This is one reason why Balkan conflicts over territory look so intractable: the categories themselves were constructed through conflict, not inherited.

The process was violent. The Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, which expelled the Ottoman Empire from most of Europe, involved systematic ethnic cleansing committed by all belligerent parties — Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria — against civilian Muslim populations. In September 1913, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Constantinople agreeing to a population exchange based on ethnicity: the first formal legal sanctioning of ethnic cleansing in European history. These patterns of demographic homogenization prefigured the twentieth century's catastrophes.

Post-Ottoman nation-states did not build their identities on Ottoman foundations. They did the opposite: they engaged in deliberate de-Ottomanization — systematically erasing Ottoman architecture, place names, administrative practices, and cultural legacies from official memory, and constructing national narratives in which Ottoman rule was an "oriental yoke" interrupting authentic European continuity. Western EU discourse has not challenged this erasure; it has perpetuated it, reluctant to accept the Ottoman-Islamic cultural constellation as a legitimate component of European heritage from Budapest to Thessaloniki.

Soviet imperialism and the postcolonial question

Moving north and east from the Balkans, a different set of questions arise about empire and memory.

Between 1945 and 1989, most of Central and Eastern Europe lived under Soviet domination. Soviet and Russian control extended, in different forms, from the Baltic states to Central Asia, over periods ranging from fifty to two hundred years. But was this colonialism? And does postcolonial theory — a body of thought developed primarily to address Western European overseas empires in Africa, Asia, and the Americas — apply to Eastern European experience?

The answer is genuinely contested. The post-Soviet sphere of twenty-seven nations had been virtually absent from postcolonial studies discourse until scholars began proposing a global postcolonial critique that included Eastern Europe alongside non-European cases. The obstacle was partly structural: Marxist emancipation vocabularies had dominated postcolonial studies, making Soviet imperial domination difficult to acknowledge within that framework.

The key distinction is geographical: Soviet control operated over contiguous territories incorporated into state apparatus, not over distant colonies administered separately across oceans. This makes Soviet imperialism structurally different from French rule of Algeria or British rule of India. Some scholars respond that Eastern Europe is best understood as a "peripheral extension of European coloniality", and propose a "decolonial option" as common ground between postcolonial and post-communist experiences. Others insist the differences are significant enough that applying postcolonial vocabulary risks obscuring rather than illuminating Eastern European history.

What is not in dispute is the historiographic transformation that followed 1989. Eastern European historiography underwent a fundamental shift to delegitimize communist-era interpretations and construct new national narratives. Universities, schools, museums, and public memorials systematically reframed interpretations of medieval, early modern, and modern history to emphasize national continuity while rejecting Soviet narratives of "liberation." An imperial turn in both Russian and Western scholarship, beginning in the early 1990s and prompted by the opening of provincial archives in the former USSR, opened new analytical frameworks for theorising Russian and Soviet domination through imperial and colonial lenses.

Memory politics in post-communist Eastern Europe functions as deliberate political tool-work: monument removal, museum redesign, and curriculum revision are mechanisms through which states construct national identities and geopolitical orientations. Between 1990 and 2000, approximately half of all Soviet antifascist monuments were destroyed across the region. Red Army memorials originally commemorated as "Liberators from German Fascism" were reinterpreted to carry narratives of occupation and suffering. These memory battles did not end at national borders: they collided with European Union frameworks. Eastern European EU members relate to Holocaust memory and WWII liberation narratives very differently from Western European states. The EU, twenty years after the 2004 enlargement, still contains a persistent mnemonic divide between East and West that membership alone cannot resolve.

Roma: Europe's most consistently excluded community

Across all these diverse Eastern European and Balkan contexts, one community has been consistently marginalised regardless of which empire or state held power: the Roma.

Roma people are Europe's largest ethnic minority. Yet significant discrepancies exist between self-identified Roma ethnicity and external classification: in Hungary and Romania, approximately two-thirds of those externally classified as Roma reject this identification, in part because such identification carries severe social stigma and discrimination. The categories used to count and administer Roma populations are themselves social constructions, produced through bureaucratic quantification with its own politics.

The history of Roma in Europe includes one of its most neglected chapters of slavery. In the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, Roma were legally owned as property — by the state, the Orthodox Church, and the nobility — for approximately 500 years, from the fourteenth century until 1843 in Wallachia and 1856 in both principalities. At the time of abolition, approximately 250,000 Roma were freed. This foundational historical injustice received almost no scholarly attention for over a century.

Contemporary Roma life across Europe is characterised by multi-dimensional, interlocking discrimination. According to EU data: 78% of Roma live in overcrowded households; 43% experience discrimination when attempting to buy or rent housing; one-third of Roma households lack tap water; and barely half have indoor flush toilets or showers. Segregated housing limits access to schools; educational deprivation constrains employment; economic exclusion prevents access to adequate housing and healthcare. These are not separate problems but mutually reinforcing barriers.

Understanding Roma marginalisation as a historical structure — rather than a cultural attribute of Roma communities — requires engaging with the concept, developed by Mahmood Mamdani, of how colonial and postcolonial states create "permanent minorities" by politicising and institutionalising ethnic categories. Mamdani argues that resolving such conflicts requires more than legal recognition; it requires the "unmaking of the permanence" of artificially constructed identities.

The Nordic north: exceptionalism and its discontents

A different problem attaches itself to the north. The dominant Nordic self-narrative holds that Nordic countries were different from other European colonial powers — either not really colonial at all, or colonial in a uniquely gentle way. Postcolonial scholarship challenges this as a historiographical myth that specifically obscures the colonial subjugation of Indigenous Sámi peoples.

The Nordic form of colonialism was distinctive precisely because it was legible as non-colonialism. Rather than classifying the Sámi as a distinct people requiring separate administration — as in North American models — Nordic states integrated them as ordinary citizens who happened to speak a different language. This made historiographical erasure of colonial relations easy: if the Sámi were simply citizens, there was no colony. The actual cultural assimilation, displacement, and erosion of Sámi autonomy could be described as natural integration rather than conquest.

The second Nordic problem runs in a different direction: the weaponisation of Norse mythology by nationalist movements. German Romantic nationalism in the early nineteenth century deployed Old Norse mythology as a nativist counterpart to Greek and Roman traditions, in service of German national state-building. The völkisch movement then metastasized this Romantic nationalism into racialized ideology, rewriting history through folklore, medieval epics, and white supremacy. Nazi racial ideology represented the extreme terminus of this development, weaponising Germanic mythology to justify domination. The line from nineteenth-century Romanticism to fascist ideology to contemporary white supremacist movements appropriating Viking imagery is a continuous thread — not an aberration.

Modern archaeogenomic evidence directly contradicts the ethnic purity claims on which all these appropriations rest. Norse societies were genuinely multiethnic and multicultural, and Viking identity was occupational and cultural, not hereditary. But the evidence matters less than the recognition of why such appropriations occur and what political purposes they serve.

After 1989: integration and the "return to Europe"

The 1989 revolutions were predominantly peaceful: the cascade from Poland through Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia to Bulgaria consisted largely of non-violent mass demonstrations. Romania stands as the singular exception where armed violence brought down the regime. The revolutions were enabled by Gorbachev's July 1989 statement that "any interference in domestic affairs and any attempts to restrict the sovereignty of states are inadmissible" — the explicit withdrawal of the Brezhnev Doctrine.

What followed was framed almost universally in Western historiography through a teleological narrative of "return to Europe." Eastern European states were represented as moving from communist periphery toward Western European democratic norms and liberal economic models. The 2004 EU enlargement brought eight Central and Eastern European states into membership — the largest single expansion in the EU's history — through a condition-based process requiring applicants to adopt the entire acquis communautaire across thirty negotiation chapters.

Scholars have noted the structural asymmetry in this framework. "Return to Europe" implies that Eastern Europe was temporarily absent from its proper home. It frames Western European liberal democracy as the destination, Eastern European political history as a deviation to be corrected, and the process of integration as absorption into pre-existing norms rather than mutual transformation. This narrative remained, as one study found, "strikingly potent" even when scholars raised objections to it.

Meanwhile, EU integration discourse has perpetuated Balkanist representations for the Western Balkans still outside the Union, positioning the region as requiring external stabilisation, expertise, and correction. The logic of "exporting stability" to Europe's unstable periphery is Balkanism in contemporary institutional form.

Core Concepts

Balkanism A discourse, identified and named by Maria Todorova, that constructs the Balkans as Europe's internal inferior Other. Unlike Orientalism, Balkanism cannot rely on geographical distance: the Balkans are inside Europe, predominantly Christian, and their peoples are not racially categorised as non-European. Balkanism instead works by positioning the region as incomplete, contaminated, and insufficiently modern. The discourse produces real political effects, justifying EU governance hierarchies and external intervention.

Nesting orientalisms Milica Bakic-Hayden's concept describing how Balkanist logic reproduces itself within the region. Each Balkan community positions itself as more European and less "oriental" than its southern and eastern neighbours, creating concentric hierarchies of othering that mirror, at smaller scale, the West's othering of the Balkans as a whole. Communities that are themselves subjected to external stereotyping deploy the same logic against their neighbours.

Millet system The Ottoman administrative framework organising populations by religious community rather than ethnicity. Under the millet system, identity categories were confessional: a Serb and a Bulgarian might belong to the same millet, while a Greek Orthodox and a Greek Muslim were in different ones. Nineteenth-century ethnic nationalism required dissolving this framework and reconstructing populations as members of ethnic nations — a process of transformation, not revelation.

Postcolonial applicability to Eastern Europe An ongoing scholarly debate about whether postcolonial theory — built primarily to address Western overseas empires — can adequately capture Eastern European experiences of Soviet and Russian imperial domination. The debate turns on questions of geography (contiguous vs. distant territories), ideological framing (Soviet universalism vs. racial hierarchy), and whether the structural effects on culture, memory, and political life are comparable enough to warrant shared analytical vocabulary.

Memory politics The deliberate use of historical memory as a political resource. In post-communist Eastern Europe, memory politics involves choices about which monuments to preserve or remove, which historical periods to emphasise in education, and how to narrate the relationship between national suffering and European frameworks. These choices shape national identity and geopolitical orientation, and they create the EU's persistent mnemonic divide between Eastern members who centre Soviet occupation and Western members who centre the Holocaust.

Nordic exceptionalism The claim that Nordic countries did not participate in colonialism, or participated in a distinctively gentle form of it. Postcolonial scholarship identifies this as a myth that specifically enabled the erasure of Sámi colonial history by classifying Indigenous people as ordinary citizens rather than as a colonised people requiring distinct recognition.

Compare & Contrast

Balkanism vs. Orientalism

	Orientalism	Balkanism
Principal theorist	Edward Said	Maria Todorova
Target region	Middle East, Asia, Africa	The Balkans (southeastern Europe)
Geographical relationship	External, distant, colonial	Internal, proximate, European
Religious framing	Islamic, non-Christian	Predominantly Christian
Core stereotype	Exotic, timeless, irrational	Violent, primitive, incompletely European
Key mechanism	Absolute otherness	Ambiguity — European but insufficiently so
Political function	Justifies overseas colonial rule	Justifies EU governance asymmetry, external stabilisation
Complicating factor	Colonial subject racialised as non-white	Subject is European, Christian, white — proximity creates paradox

The critical distinction Todorova draws is that Balkanism operates through ambiguity rather than absolute opposition. The Balkans cannot be positioned as the Other because they are clearly not-European. Instead, they are constructed as a kind of failed Europe — which paradoxically makes the othering more persistent, because the region cannot simply be ignored as alien.

Soviet imperialism vs. Western overseas colonialism

	Soviet / Russian imperialism	Western overseas colonialism
Territorial model	Contiguous land empire, state integration	Distant colonies administered separately
Ideological justification	Socialist universalism, anti-imperialism	Racial hierarchy, civilising mission
Duration in Eastern Europe	45 years (Cold War period) to 200+ years (Russian Empire)	Variable, often longer
Postcolonial recognition	Initially excluded from postcolonial studies	The paradigmatic case for postcolonial theory
Scholarly treatment	"Imperial turn" since the 1990s; contested	Central to postcolonial canon since Said (1978)
Structural effects on memory	Monument removal, historiographic transformation	Decolonial movements, repatriation debates

The debate is not about whether Soviet domination caused serious harm — it clearly did. The question is whether the analytical tools developed to understand one form of empire illuminate the other, or whether applying them risks distorting both.

Annotated Case Study

Roma slavery in Romania: the limits of European historical recognition

Roma were enslaved in the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia for approximately five centuries, beginning in the fourteenth century. They were owned as legal property by three categories of owner: the state, the Orthodox Church, and the nobility. Abolition came in stages: Wallachia abolished slavery in 1843, both principalities in 1856. Approximately 250,000 Roma were freed at the time of final abolition.

Why it matters for understanding the present. This is not a historical curiosity with no present relevance. The structural marginalisation Roma face in contemporary Europe — overcrowded housing, segregated settlements, discrimination in employment and education, absence of basic services — is the accumulated product of centuries of exclusion in which slavery is the most extreme episode but not the only one. Historical continuity connects the legally-owned Roma of fifteenth-century Wallachia to the Roma families living without tap water in segregated Italian camps in 2024.

The classification problem. One of the most revealing aspects of contemporary Roma policy is the basic question of who counts as Roma. In Hungary and Romania, roughly two-thirds of those externally classified as Roma by researchers or officials do not self-identify as Roma. In Bulgaria the pattern reverses. Self-identification varies according to context, stigma, and the consequences of being classified. External classification systems are social constructions — they are produced by states and researchers with their own political agendas — and they raise serious questions about whether European frameworks for Roma "integration" are targeting the right people, in the right ways, for the right reasons.

The Mamdani lens. Mahmood Mamdani's theory of colonial "permanent minorities" — identities institutionalised by states for purposes of control — helps explain why Roma marginalisation proves so resilient to policy intervention. If the category itself was produced through processes of exclusion and classification, then policies that simply target "Roma" as a pre-defined problem group may reproduce the logic that sustains marginalisation rather than challenging it.

The scholarly neglect. For most of European history, Roma slavery in Romania received almost no scholarly attention. It sits outside the canonical narratives of both Eastern European history (which centre national liberation from Ottoman or Soviet rule) and of European slavery (which centres Atlantic slavery). This double exclusion is itself significant: it reflects which communities get to define which histories count as European history.

Common Misconceptions

"Eastern Europe is a stable, well-defined historical region." "Eastern Europe" has no stable definition. The term demonstrates "semantic indeterminacy", functioning as a geographical space, a historical-cultural idea, and a discursive construct shaped by post-Cold War academic and media usage. "Central Europe" and "Eastern Europe" define each other against a Western European standard. Using the category as if it had always meant the same thing imports unexamined assumptions into historical analysis.

"The Balkans are inherently violent." The persistence of the word "balkanization" in English as a synonym for fragmentation and violent conflict reflects the success of Balkanist discourse, not the reality of Balkan societies. Balkanism is a representational system with political functions — it justifies governance hierarchies and external intervention. The historical record of political violence in the Balkans is no more exceptional than that of Western European states that fought two world wars and conducted centuries of colonial violence. The difference is whose violence gets described as cultural pathology.

"The 1989 revolutions liberated Eastern Europe and returned it to its proper European place." This framing — the teleological "return to Europe" narrative — presents Eastern European historical experience as a temporary deviation from a Western European norm. It frames integration as absorption rather than mutual transformation, and it obscures the ways in which post-communist transitions generated their own distinct political forms and memory frameworks. Scholars note that this narrative "remained strikingly potent" even when challenged.

"Nordic countries had no colonial history." The myth of Nordic exceptionalism is a historiographic construction that serves to erase Sámi colonial history. Nordic states integrated Sámi as ordinary citizens rather than acknowledging them as a colonised people — a strategy that enabled the denial of colonialism while colonialism was being carried out through cultural assimilation, displacement, and erasure of Sámi autonomy.

"Norse/Viking culture belongs to a single ethnic European lineage." This claim, used by nineteenth-century nationalist movements and later by white supremacist groups, is directly contradicted by archaeogenomic evidence. Norse societies were genuinely multiethnic. Viking was an occupation and social role, not an inherited ethnic status. The political deployment of Norse mythology — from German Romanticism through völkisch ideology to contemporary white supremacism — is a history of appropriation, not inheritance.

"Soviet monument removal after 1989 was simply the correction of a historical distortion." Monument removal is a contested practice of memory politics, not a neutral restoration of truth. Between 1990 and 2000, approximately half of all antifascist monuments in Eastern Europe were destroyed. The narratives added to (or substituted for) Soviet commemoration — centring national suffering under Soviet occupation — involved deliberate political choices about which memories to prioritise and which to silence. This is not an argument against monument removal; it is an argument for recognising it as a political act with consequences.