Gradual “de-Orientalization” of the East Central Europe and the Balkans since the end of the Cold War

Orientalism”, wherein one nasty Orientalism lurks inside another, like a set of

Russian “mamushka” dolls (Bakic-Hayden 1995). (The key texts in this sorry story, above all Kundera (1984), are more fully assessed in Comisso and

Gutierrez (2004) and in Bideleux and Jeffries (2007b, 8-22).) This was an early warning that, instead of being decisively renounced and banished, “essential-

ist” and “Orientalist” (pre)conceptions of “Eastern Europe” would henceforth be deployed more exclusively against South and East Slavs, Romanians and

Albanians.