Eastern Europe

The term "Eastern Europe" suggests a self-contained world of kindred regions. This is fiction, and to some extent we can reconstruct precisely how it originated. It may be founded on older images of Russia, but it goes back primarily to the French Enlightenment. For centuries before that, the only cultural and political axis of significance had been the north-south divide. Following the Renaissance, the "barbaric" regions north of the Alps sought to appropriate the political and cultural legacy of the Roman Empire. This led to the development - in parallel with colonialism - of competing notions of what constituted the centre of the "civilized" world. The impetus for a shift to a west-east cultural axis came from Paris around the middle of the 18th century, when French Enlightenment thinkers pronounced the orient - which combines the geographical "east" with proximity to the "orient" - to be that region that remained close to the French or European Enlightenment. The east-west axis marked out a descent from the centre of enlightened civilization into less and less civilized zones. For travellers, the road to the East, from its supposed beginnings in Poland, Hungary, or Galicia, became a voyage into increasingly Asiatic zones.