Reconceptualizing Eastern Europe: Toward a Common Ethos

The aim of this essay is a philosophical reconstruction of the category of Eastern Europe (as topographical and ethical, and only by implication a geographical one). This will proceed in three steps. First, deconstruction of the category in question by exposing its colonialist and post-colonialist origins. Second, projection of a new cultural geography of Eastern Europe. The main criteria of which are: 1) belonging to the European community of values, 2) being directly and permanently exposed to a paradoxical cultural formation, neither European nor Asian, which poses a constant threat to all neighboring states and nations – Russia. In the third step, Eastern Europe is presented as a specifically determined way of living, experiencing, and self-understanding, localized in particular space(s); that is, a particular ethos rooted in a concrete topos/topoi. This ethos has been driven by the ideals of freedom, equality, cultural diversity, and the sovereignty of the people; and actualized in a kind of cultural flexibility, hybridity, and polyphony. However, this ethos has never been something given. It has been gradually developing throughout its dramatic history, and this was not only a history of those sublime ideals (and their partial actualization), but also of their real and brutal negation. That is why this ethos is grounded in a constantly renewed activity of self-questioning and self-searching, in a persistently recurrent will of self-determination; and that is also why Eastern Europe cannot be enclosed in a single narrative, but it expresses itself through different and often competing stories.