ABSTRACT
Central Europe and the Balkan Peninsula – albeit with occasional cross references to the Russian Empire, the USSR and the post-Soviet states, where
appropriate.
2. The Implications of the “Demi-Orientalization” of East Central Europe, the Balkans and East Slavic Europe
Wolff (1994) has very influentially argued that the modern Western conceptions
of “Eastern” and “Western” Europe originated as mental constructs (products of “mental mapping”), and that the “invention” of “Eastern Europe” was crucial to
the subsequent “Orientalization” of its inhabitants.
