The Continued “Orientalization” of Europe’s Communist States during the Cold War Heyday of “East European Area Studies”

Catalonia) as well as in Belgium, Scandinavia and Germany were decidedly “ethnic”; (iii) Europe’s East-West differences were not innate, “civilizational”,

“essential” or cultural, but transient outcomes or reflections of then-prevailing East-West differences in socio-economic and state structures; and thus were not absolute and intractable “givens”, but situational, circumstantial and poten-

tially changeable or malleable (Bideleux and Jeffries 2007a, 15-21; Bideleux and Jeffries 2007b, 7-16).