East Central Europe between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century

The publication of this volume, edited by Siegfried Huigen and Dorota Kołodziejczak, represents another contribution to the rapidly growing field of postcolonial studies, with a focus on the East and Central European (ECE) region. Some authors employ a postcolonial perspective in order to elucidate the relationship between states that were not directly involved in colonial expansion and the broader non-Western world. In fact, the articles collected in this publication draw on the tools of postcolonial studies to analyze the national imaginaries of these states. The individual chapters, while focusing on disparate areas of research, collectively present a unified and well-considered body of work.The introduction by Huigen and Kołodziejczak presents some of the main theses and assumptions that provide a general reference for the book's chapters. The most important of these is the foregrounding of the postcolonial approach as a new analytical framework for the history of the region. Another significant idea is the recognition of the greater value of postcolonial studies as a benchmark for comparative analysis, rather than as a way of proving the postcolonial status of the ECE countries themselves. At the same time, it is worth noting and appreciating the use of the concept of post-dependence as a more appropriate starting point for ECE research. The authors themselves recognize and make explicit the danger of self-orientalization inherent in such a line of research. The assumptions put forward by the editors are developed in a chapter by Claudia Kraft. The author provides an extensive and well-argued analysis of the application of the postcolonial research approach to the study of ECE history. Of particular interest is the comment on the necessity to view the region not only in terms of space (peripheral or in-between), but also through the prism of changes over time, which have influenced the formation of dependency frameworks.In the following chapter, Tomasz Zarzycki examines the phenomenon of Orientalization of the East as well as self-Orientalization in Polish discourse. He identifies and employs two key concepts in his analysis: psychologism and culturalism. Zarzycki argues that specific attitudes and mentalities exhibited by the populace of a particular nation can be associated with Orientalist patterns. This is demonstrated through an examination of contemporary discourses on Eastern-ness and dependencies present in countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Zarzycki, like the other contributors to the volume, draws attention to the way in which the discourse of Orientalism and self-Orientalization is currently used by representatives of different political options. The accusations formulated by the Right against liberals of subordination to the West are linked by Zarzycki to the concept of the surrogate hegemon introduced earlier by Ewa Thompson (p. 66).The second section is comprised of four chapters, each of which examines a distinct case study of the relationship between the periphery and core. The initial chapter is a comparative analysis of attitudes toward colonialism and anti-colonialism in the context of independent Poland and Ireland. Róisín Healy highlights that Ireland has, for a significant portion of its history, exhibited the attributes of a peripheral state. This designation is often associated with countries in the ECE region, particularly in terms of religious diversity, marginalization in the global economy, and the emergence of anti-state nationalism. By drawing attention to these parallels, the author establishes a comparative framework between Ireland and Poland, particularly in the context of colonial attitudes. The author posits that both the Irish and the Poles were subject to colonialism, yet simultaneously participated in the imperial processes of the dominant states. The primary distinctions between these two cases emerge at the point of their emancipation from external sovereignty. Healy attempts to identify the sources of the discrepancy between a still anti-colonial independent Ireland and an independent Poland seeking its own overseas expansion. It is evident that the disparity in the geopolitical position of the two countries played a pivotal role. From its very inception, the Second Republic was confronted with a formidable challenge from its immediate neighbors. This predicament intensified during the 1930s, a period which Healy associates with the intensification of colonial discourse, a strategy employed to compensate for genuine weakness.The following two chapters examine the interactions between Eastern Europeans and India. In both cases, the focus is on representatives of the European intelligentsia, from different historical periods and political systems. Raul Cârstocea examines the impact of Mircea Eliade's visit to India and his exposure to colonial realities on his intellectual development. Cârstocea, who reads Ealiade's texts through a postcolonial lens, sees his support for the far-right Legion Movement as an attempt to escape peripherality and to resist the spiritual and intellectual domination of the West. Agnieszka Sadecka's chapter, on the other hand, discusses the role of Polish reporters in the creation of anti-Western and anti-colonial propaganda of the Polish socialist state. The narrative created by Polish reporters travelling to India was, of course, tailored to the needs of anti-imperialist propaganda from the Eastern bloc. Sadecka notes, however, that there were distortions in the Polish texts, such as the negation of negative endogenous factors. The most interesting part of the chapter deals with the dissonance between the declared attitudes of Polish reporters and their actual behavior, which was marked by the orientalization of India. The fourth chapter in the section is Jagoda Wierzejska's contribution on Polish writer Andrzej Bobkowski's writings on Guatemala (1948–1961). Bobkowski's work is analyzed as compensatory, whereby an Eastern European experiences social upliftment after living in a former colony.The final section of the book focuses on displaced identities. Kinga Siewior offers an analysis of the representation in the popular culture of the Polish “Regained Territories” as an extension of the image of the borderlands (kresy). She identifies a set of elements present in both the pre-war kresy image and in the post-1945 representation of the “Regained Territories,” suggesting a continuity in the portrayal of these regions. She considers the “Regained Territories” in the context of re-colonialism. In this process, the perpetuation of certain images of the newly occupied territories acted as one of the factors that facilitated the domination of the new space. Emilia Kledzik's chapter deals with the question of consolidating the identity of minority groups. The key concept used by the author is that of “necessary fiction,” i.e., a procedure that refers to a pre-colonial heritage that can only be reproduced in a limited form. The focus of this study is Roma literature, or literature that describes the Roma. Kledzik posits that, given the historical experience of ECE Roma, the application of a postcolonial methodology may facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the issues of dependency and self-representation. Finally, Miriam Finkelstein's analysis of post-unification Berlin is conducted through the lens of the tensions that emerged between ECE and Russian writers. Finkelstein draws attention to the attempts of Russian writers to overwrite the image of Berlin by monopolizing the experience of communism in their works. Of particular interest is the perspective that depicts Russians as a colonizing force in Berlin's Eastern European diaspora.In sum, Kołodziejczyk and Huigen's book is a collection of good chapters that thoughtfully and meticulously confirm, in various fields, the leading thesis of the uniqueness of ECE as being “in between” the colonizing West and the colonized non-Western world. The division of the book into three main thematic sections facilitates the reader's identification of recurrent topics. The fact that the individual chapters were written by authors dealing with seemingly disparate subjects renders the book more versatile for those interested in the adaptation of imperial and postcolonial studies to research on ECE past and present.