ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the production of Eastern Europe in the European and global spaces of competing modernities. It employs the concept of simultaneous contrast, that is comparing different perspectives at the same time, to elaborate five spatialities producing Eastern Europe as a place in practice and discourse. These spatialities are: the communist world system, interstate relations, the idea of development, the capitalist world economy, and cultural relations. These spatialities are melded in the construction of European space by the primacy of the East—West ideological division. The global space of competing modernities is constructed in multiple discourses. European space is dwarfed by the global competition of modernities in the enlarged East—West division of ideological and security conflict, around the two ‘superpowers’, the USA and the Soviet Union, articulated in the idea of the Cold War. The idea of the First, Second and Third Worlds constructed global space in terms of the ideological divisions and non-alignment. This became transformed into the development debate in the form of the West—East—South construction. The contacts and superficial similarities of the West and East in development characteristics extended this idea to a North—South development division. Meanwhile in the predominant projection of Western global modernity — the capitalist world economy — a tripartite core—periphery conceptualisation that characterised the early period became overlain by the first signs of globalisation and the production of global space as a single place. The communications technology and media associations of the globalisation concept extended the discourse to the idea of cultural imperialism.
