The legacy of division: East and West after 1989

When the Cold War came to a sudden end thirty years ago, the two halves of the continent declared in unison their intention to overcome the legacy of the division. Eastern Europeans appeared eager to ritually condemn, if not to critically examine, their recent past and were especially keen on asserting and proving their ‘Europeanness.’ Westerners, too, hoped to see the countries of the former Eastern bloc transformed and potentially absorbed into an enlarged and ever deeper project of political integration. Mutual ignorance and deep-seated misperceptions seemed a temporary hindrance on the path towards the unification of the continent.

After 1989, the conviction became common that the Cold War had been an anomaly. The Iron Curtain may have enforced a perception of stark differences between the two halves of the continent, and may even have turned such differences into a fact for more than a generation, but the distinction between East and West was said to be little more than a symbolic construct. It was repeatedly asserted that the boundary separating the two halves of the continent was fluid, negotiable, and subject to deconstruc-tion. Yet the integration projects launched during the early postwar decades, which despite being restricted to one side of the Iron Curtain made increasing claims to represent Europe as a whole, drew on long-standing traditions in western European thought that marginalized and even excluded the experiences of the continent’s eastern half.  

And it was similarly overlooked that structural differences between various macro-regions of Europe had a history stretching back much further than the Cold War.... read more:

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