ABSTRACT
Perhaps not surprisingly, together with its historical and geopolitical relevance,
Eastern Europe seems to have also lost much of its specificity. From all perspectives, the region is now nothing but a shadow of the menacing other that
it stood for during the cold war: institutionally included – or on the path of being included – in the big Europe, economically on the right capitalist track,
politically designed on the universal model of liberal democracies and ideologically the most enthusiastic pupil of the ruling post-ideological discourse. Even in academia, the still unquestioned division of labour – which requires that
non-Westerners specialize in their own identity or region because direct experience is, apparently, their only ability, while Western scholars because of
their exclusive ability to conceptualize, are allowed to freely roam the earth in the balloon of theory – makes it as if the normal relation appears in
reversed form: it is no longer the crucial relevance of the topic that requires
scores of specialized scholars; it is rather the constant production of scholars coming from the region that seems to require inventing a specific object of
study for them. And yet, some specific particularities still seem to characterize the region.
