ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Central and Eastern Europe in the context of the conceptions, perceptions and practices of the 1990s that have been permeated by the idea of the ‘global’. There is a new consciousness of the global; the globe as a single place. Place in its material and discursive modes has become understood as globalised. This chapter explores Central and Eastern Europe in the practices and perceptions of five discourses of global relations. These are interpreted as competing conceptualisations encompassed in a new global spatial modernity. The first of these is globalisation and the second globality. These two will be treated as a one-world, whole earth, oppositional discourse; the third is the discourse of emerging markets; the fourth is the demise of the communist global world system and the idea of post-socialist global regions; and the fifth is World Systems Theory. None of these discourses uses the concept of Marchlands, but as I will show in each Central and Eastern Europe are produced as a borderland. Each provides a partial insight into the neo-liberal order of spatial modernity, as it affects the Marchlands. Thus the chapter explores the new particularities of the Marchlands as a place of transition, and resituates them in the maelstrom of place relations in global spatialities of the 1990s.
