ABSTRACT

Portrayals of Eastern European countries as bridges between East and West are commonplace both in the media and in the political discourse. In a faithful replication of the binary oppositions inherent in the cognitive map of Orientalism, pitting the period of Ottoman domination against the recent cultural and economic opening toward Western Europe thus became commonplace in the Romanian intellectual and political discourse of the time. With the proclamation of Communist states throughout the non-Western world after World War II, the century-old cultural and religious dimension of the Occident-Orient dichotomy was gradually eclipsed by the primarily political bipolarity of the Cold War opponents. It however resurfaced all the more forcefully soon after the collapse of the Eastern European Communist regimes and the resulting geopolitical reshuffling, globally marketed as the end of history and of the search for political alternatives to neoliberalism and globalization.