ABSTRACT
Such perspectives highlight the need for further “de-Orientalization” of Western perceptions, preconceptions and attitudes relating to Europe’s postcommunist states, partly to help their inhabitants to throw off the injurious
ethnocentric and essentialist caricatures and constraints which repeatedly have limited their opportunities and potential. This article argues that the
gradual widening and deepening of European integration has helped the East Central European and Balkan post-communist states to reap growing benefits
from the steadily expanding supranational civil legal order centred on the EU, and that this has been promoting structures, frameworks, opportunities and
incentives which offer the most promising ways and means of (i) “de-Orientalizing” these countries; (ii) gradually dissolving or diluting troublesome and divisive primordial attachments and identities; (iii) transcending the essential-
ist East-West dichotomies which have polarized modern Europe; (iv) diminishing the privileged (and often irksomely arrogant and intrusive) tutelary roles of
West European states vis-a`-vis Europe’s post-communist states; and (v) merging what remains of “East European area studies” into the broader, less-
essentialist and less-ethnocentric framework of “European Studies”. Unfortunately, further “deepening” and “widening” of European integration
and further “de-Orientalization” of Europe’s post-communist states have been seriously impaired by the major economic crises that have afflicted Europe (as
well other parts of the world) since 2008. The relatively “easy” credit-financed and consumption-led economic growth, which most European states enjoyed to varying degrees from 2001 or 2002 to 2007 or 2008, has been superseded by a
harsher economic climate which has strained social fabrics and cohesion, dampened business confidence, curtailed foreign direct investment (FDI) and
impeded further deepening of European economic integration. These setbacks were exacerbated by the Eurozone crisis and austerity measures of 2010-13,
which pushed the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro into “second recessions” in 2012 (IMF 2014, 181,
184). Indeed, most of the Balkan post-communist states have been suffering socio-economic setbacks and hardships even more severe than the more widely publicized ones in the Eurozone’s “Southern Periphery”. Together with the
concurrent growth of European xenophobia, this has been retarding further “de-Orientalization” of the Balkan post-communist states and further “deepen-
ing” and “widening” of European integration. Nevertheless, there has been strikingly little reversion to earlier forms of authoritarianism, xenophobia and
R.
