Patricia Chiantera-Stutte

MODELS OF CONSTRUCTION OF THE MIDDLE-EUROPEAN IDENTITY AT THE TURN OF THE 20 th CENTURY: THE GEOPOLITICAL AND LIBERAL INTERPRETATIONS.

The issue that will be addressed in my research is the twofold construction of the “Middle-European identity” at the beginning of the 20 th century in the geopolitical and in the liberal tradition, i.e. on the one hand, the construction of a geopolitical and cultural idea of a Mitteleuropa, whose character is its “unity in diversity” and, on the other hand, its juxtaposition to the other – i.e. Russia. In addition my project aims at discussing the division between a liberal and a geopolitical/reactionary ideal of Mitteleuropa, showing that in most of the authors the themes of tolerance and respect of nationalities intersect with some imperialistic ideas.

Following Mommsen's classification, two streams, or rather two “ideal-types”, can be detected in the history of this concept Mitteleuropa: the vision of a tolerant, federative Mitteleuropa and the project of a Great Germany, politically dominated by the German Volk .

My project will try to show that these visions are “ideal-types” and therefore the models of Mitteleuropa constitute a mixture of various and sometimes seemingly contradictory elements.

The descriptions of Middle-Europe are some of the most debated and controversial themes in the scientific and non scientific literature. Following Stirk , its key features are the assumption of unity of all nations “belonging” to Mitteleuropa and the opposite push to resist integration.

These divergent stances bring vulnerability and are the main obstacles to the achievement of stable political arrangements in that area.

In this perspective, the common characteristics shared by the different middle-European nations underline the lack of a solid and complete unity of Mitteleuropa. These are: ethnic diversities, the disequilibrium related to the dominance of the German ethnic group, the threatening presence of Russia on the borders, stifling urban development and, lastly backwardness in terms of economic growth. The projects on Mitteleuropa therefore represent attempts to come to terms with and find solutions to these features of the region, i.e. its ethnic complexity, its inherent disequilibrium and its backward socio-economic indicators-structures. Three possible solutions have been historically delineated: one is the imperialistic hegemony of Germany ; another is the foundation of a Central European Federation, and, lastly the creation of a region of multinational states.

Another line of interpretation is followed by Jörg Brechtefeld, who points out the features that have been historically seen as constitutive of the idea of Mitteleuropa. More specifically, Jörg Brechtefeld, in his “Mitteleuropa and German Politics”, identifies three dimensions that characterise the idea of Mitteleuropa in its history: The cultural one, i.e. that “of a cultural Gemeinschaft in the heart of Europe with common values, common traditions, and a common history”; the economic one “in the form of a common market or free-trade zone”, and lastly a political interpretation, i.e. “a region with common political interests primarily directed against Russia in the East and France in the West”. To these three dimensions I would add the geopolitical one, that explores the link between a territory and a culture in the Middle-European area. Two interesting data have to be underlined concerning the interpretations and the dimensions of Middle-Europe: first, the different dimensions of Mitteleuropa are normally not exclusive, because they can be found combined in most of the works, and secondly, the feature that is common to all definitions of Mitteleuropa is its role as a “land between” and, at the same time, the issue of its delimitation/expansion to the East – Drang nach Osten . In this regard, it is worth remarking that the peculiar character of the concept Middle-Europe is linked not only to its liminar nature (“an identity that hovered on the border” ) but also to the fact that in some of its interpretations it defines the borders between a negative outside and a positive inside – in the so-called “classical” geopolitics between the German area (positive inside) and the Slav (negative outside).

In order to analyse the idea of Mitteleuropa, I believe it could be useful to adopt a constructivist approach, i.e., to reconstruct the ways in which it has been seen as a unitary area and to trace how the creation and the maintenance of its boundaries have been fed by the literature and in scientific debates. In this perspective what is interesting is not what Mitteleuropa is, but how it has been described over time, i.e. the «tales» told about its existence and its boundaries. The adoption of a constructivist approach to the theme of Mitteleuropa could make it possible to complement the historical analysis with the methods used in contemporary research in the field of international relations – with regards especially to the Copenhagen School and to the works by Iver Neumann. In this way, even if the idea of Mitteleeuropa comes to be disentangled from the debate on the “real” borders of the Mitteleuropean area, the richness of the debate, continuities as well as discontinuities in the representation of Mitteleeuropa will be analysed and interpreted in relation to the categories self/other and to the continuous creation of boundaries. The issue at stake here is the creation and re-creation of a collective identity called “Mitteleuropa” in terms of the clash of different discursive practices. The starting point of the approach used is that “the collective self is predicated on certain key political ideas – such as what constitutes a state or a nation – and the collective self will try to make these ideas the basis for institutionalisation when it partakes in political cooperation” .

In order to reconstruct the political identity of Mitteleuropa at the turn of the 20 th century I will now turn to consider the geopolitical and the liberal tradition of thought in Germany .

In my previous investigation on the geopolitical interpretation of Mitteleuropa, elaborated by Friedrich Ratzel, Joseph Partsch and Albrecht Penk, I began to analyse the creation of the collective identity of “Mitteleuropa” with regard to the definition of a homogeneous culture and of an exclusionary ethnic model. I underlined in this tradition the central role played by the link between the territory, the culture and its related ethnic group.

The so-called illiberal line of thought on the political Central-European order, which found one of its initiators in Ernst Jäckh's imperialistic vision , was strengthened in the imperial era, when Germany joined the concurrence of the imperial World powers and when the model of a cultural and racial homogenous nation-state spread in Europe . The Germanisation of minorities or their exclusion became the corollary of the Middle-European political project in many plans during the 20s and 30s. Three main currents can be distinguished in this illiberal vision: geopolitics, the Völkisch and the conservative revolution.

These currents are not identical with the nationalsocialist Weltanschauung , even if they may have contributed to the diffusion and even to the success of National-socialist ideas. Hitler and the academics who supported his regime refused any idea of a federation, as well as any limitation of the territorial expansion to Middle-Europe. The geopolitical theories of the unity of a Central-Europe, sharing particular cultural values and having a homogeneity of territory, as well as an intermediate position between East and West, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Capitalism and Communism, were too “narrow” in the Nazi perspective. Instead of a German expansion in central Europe , the National-socialist supporters of the Reich asserted the domination of the superior race or master people ( Herrenvolk ) on slave-peoples in the whole world.

The interpretative tools offered by geopolitics, an extremely popular science at the beginning of the 20 th century , to other sciences and to politics were spatial concepts to understand and foresee the lines of the territorial state developments – expansion or decline.

Friedrich Ratzel, whose most famous book was “Politische Geographie oder die Geographie der Staaten, des Verkehrs und des Krieges”, imagined the state as a natural organism, a living force moulded by its soil: the state is, in his words, the ”physical embodiment of the popular will and the product of a centuries-old interaction between a people and their natural environment : ein Stuck Boden und ein Stuck Menschheit ”. The science that he initiated, i.e. anthropogeography, aimed at discovering the ways in which the natural forces of the soil impressed particular movements to the ethnic groups and determined their history and their specific form of civilisation. According to Ratzel, nature and civilisation were strictly intermingled even in the developed industrial societies, which deepened their relation to the soil through their better knowledge and consciousness of it. The link between man and space was the nucleus of anthropogeography: it was a real union and a scientific truth. The Volk who had acquired a consciousness of the space could become a Raumüberwindende Macht – a power capable of conquering the space. The Lebensraum was therefore an organic metaphor used by Ratzel to indicate the space necessary for a state to evolve; on the contrary, when the state did not search for new space, it was bound to decay. The new winning powers were in this perspective, those whose demographic, economic and cultural capacity were greater than their existing territorial limits – in this view the boundaries were always mobile lines of tension. In Ratzel's social Darwinistic view of the international equilibrium there was no place for a stable state: the rule that subjugated all living forms – and therefore also the states – was: moving upwards or downwards, expanding or decaying. Therefore states had the right and the duty to grow: “The territory of a state is no definite area fixed for all time – for a state is a living organism and therefore cannot be contained within rigid limits – being dependent for its form and greatness on its inhabitants, in whose movements outwardly exhibited especially in territorial growth or contraction, it participates”. Germany represented for him the new emerging power whose frontiers were expanding in the East – “Drang nach Osten”.

In spite of Ratzel's acknowledgement of the State as the prime actor in international relations, his theory is difficult to reconcile with state sovereignty, because the founding theoretical elements of anthropogeography, i.e. space (the geographic location) and position (the relation with other spaces) become the essence of the state and not the object of the state's domination. Obviously the organic state conception developed by Ratzel and later by Rudolf Kjellen was in opposition to French bourgeois republicanism, the legacy of 1789.

The critique against civic nationalism was sharpened by Albrecht Penk, a volkisch geographer who attacked the Western-European state-powers, guilty of having deprived Germany of its “natural” territory after the First World War with the Treaty of Versailles. Penk, who was a member of the Stiftung für deutsche Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung , supported the project of a Großdeutschland , divided the German future Lebensraum , as Ratzel had already suggested, into a Volksboden (a zone occupied by German-speaking people) and a Kulturboden (a zone where German culture was predominant, which was measured through the observation of cultural practices, building styles and landscape features). The concept of Kulturboden shows Penk's conviction of German Volk 's rootedness in the landscape. According to this opinion, the culture was expressed in a vague and at the same time pervasive way: “culture” was the landscape, which carried the traces of the German mentality and labour, even when the inhabitants did not speak German and had no direct link with the German nation. Penk's model of central-Europe was the Zwischeneuropa , which denoted the whole area from and including Scandinavia to Italy and the Balkans and had to be dominated by Germany .

Also Albrecht Haushofer, the most famous exponent of the geopolitical school during National-socialism, shows the influence of Darwinism on geopolitics: he combined the division of colonised and imperial peoples with the maps of pan-regions. In Haushofer's works the nation was compared to a biological organism: the nation had to fight against the environment to survive and to expand in its natural Lebensraum . Haushofer, who distinguished the old decaying powers of Great Britain and France from the new ones, in particular Germany , believed in the spiritual affinity between Germany and Russia , which had to unite their forces in order to build a Eurasian power, opposed to American capitalism.

The pan-regions imagined by Haushofer reproduced the well-known map elaborated by Ratzel, Kjellen, Penk and, before them by Halford Mackinder: Eurasia was focused on Germany , whose weakness, i.e. its “position between”, was at the same time its strength. Germany represented the indispensable nexus between East and West, capitalism and communism and it had a civilising and imperial key-role for the rebirth of Europe 's civilisation and power. The natural existence of Panregions presupposed that the world was a “closed space”, in which every state had to gain hegemony and organise in order to increase its efficiency through imperial expansion and through its struggle or alliance with other states.

In my project I will consider the other model of “Mitteleuropean identity”, i.e. the liberal and federative Mitteleuropa outlined by Adolph Fischhof, Constantin Frantz and Friedrich Naumann. These three authors have been chosen because their idea of Mitteleuropa became a topos in the literature at the beginning of the 20 th century. It is necessary to point out the main problem of the liberal definition of Mitteleuropa at this time, i.e. the creation of the Eastern boundary. The acknowledgement of the internal ethnic and cultural plurality of Mitteleuropa, i.e. the uncertain relationship between the Volk, the culture and the territory, raises the issue of the boundary definition, because the different ethnic groups belonging to Mitteleuropa are characterised by diverse cultures which may have different relations to the “other”, i.e. to Russia . On the contrary, in the geopolitical exclusionary interpretation, the boundaries, even when they are mobile, are decided by the will or the need of a Volk , seen as a historical homogeneous agent.

All the authors that have been chosen for the analysis were writing between the 19 th and 20 th centuries, in a period when the issue of the Middle-European role as a distinctive civilisation and political power faced with the growing hegemonic powers of America and Russia becomes central in scientific and political debates and when the Austrian empire claims a pivotal role in the constitution of a Middle-European federation in juxtaposition to the projects oriented towards the Prussian leadership.

It seems that even in the visions of two federalists and more «liberal» authors, such as Friedrich Naumann and Constantin Frantz, there are major differences in relation to the perception of the Other – externally Russia and America , internally the Jews – and to the scope and organisation of the Middleuropean federation.

Naumann in his “Mitteleuropa” (1915) emphasised the “flexibility in relation to all components of national groups”, even if he invoked a pivotal role of the German ethnic group when he described the future Middle-European citizen. He wrote that «a type of Middle-European person may evolve, combining all the elements of culture and strength and become the bearer of a rich and varied civilisation integrated with a German core».

In Frantz's interpretation, the German role in the future confederation is even more marked. On the one hand Frantz underlines that federalism is the key form of collective life; on the other hand he states that federalism is «nothing less than the Germanic principle ... the federation principle expresses both the libertarian instinct of the Germanic peoples and their impulse towards expansion». In Frantz's historical reconstruction the Christian occident was Germanic in origin and Germanic in spirit. Therefore Germany had been inextricably linked to Europe and its destiny was to lead Western Europe once again to a new greatness in opposition to America and Russia .

In order to renew Europe , Frantz underlined the necessity of making a war: he wrote that «only a war – a Bundeskrieg – will create German unity for us» . In a striking image he described the Klammer , i.e. the cement that would hold the various interests and states together, and the Hebel , i.e. the lever to urge governments to action: the first was the crusade under the banner of Christianity; the second was war. With regard to Middleeuropean internal ethnic groups, Frantz showed his negative judgement against the Jews: they could not be part of the Reich because they could not participate in the Christian mission, which was the ultimate aim of the Middleeuropean confederation.

In order to investigate and compare these models of Mitteleuropa I will use an anthropological and political category, i.e. the “collective identity”. In this way, light will be thrown on the construction of the cultural and political “area” of Mitteleuropa, whose characteristic is the lack of homogeneity and internal diversity – of peoples, cultures and landscapes. In particular, the images of Mitteleuropa will be interpreted using the categories integration/exclusion and the dimensions external/internal for two reasons. First, in order to point out the construction of the Mitteleuropean external identity – i.e. the relation to the “other”, the non-member – and of its internal identity – the way of theorising the internal diversity of peoples and culture. Secondly, in order to lighten the mechanisms of integration and exclusion working in this process: integration of “other” peoples and nations; exclusion through the creation of boundaries.

My aim is therefore to identify the “diacritica”, i.e. the markers of identity that make it possible for social groups to produce and reproduce their identity through the creation of boundaries . Undoubtedly in the construction of boundaries, the first basic step is the identification of enemies and the action of war; here war has to be interpreted as «a major aspect of being ... a way (for men) to achieve an ideal form of subjectivity».

The approach that I have suggested should allow me to map some of the various models of Mitteleuropa at the beginning of the 19.th century and to find out about their exclusive or inclusive elements and, especially, about their theorisation of the nexus Other/Self.

This historical reconstruction and this model definition could be useful at a later stage in order to interpret the discussions about the role of Mitteleuropa in the European Union. Two considerations reveal a striking analogy in the discussions about the boundaries of the EU and of Mitteleuropa: the necessity of defining the culture and its political identity with respect to the East, and the desire to create a “unity in diversity”, i.e. a feeling of being part of a common project in different peoples. Reflecting on these questions would mean considering the continuities and discontinuities of the concept of Mitteleuropa after the Second World War and its re-emergence during the process of EU enlargement, when Eastern European candidates used their self-representation as Middle-European, i.e. as cultural members of the European area. In this case the belonging to the “Middle-European culture” becomes a political quality, which can be used in order to claim membership to the EU and to define the borders of the EU with respect to Russia . After 1989, when the debate on Middle-Europe re-emerged in the new context of EU enlargement not only in the intellectual , but also in the political arena, the aspect of the creation of boundaries began to be visible. The question on the boundaries of Central Europe was also entwined with that of German and Russian influence in that area and of the consequent penetration of the Slav civilisation in Europe . Even if the distinction between the Slav and the German part of central Europe had lost the pejorative and moralistic connotation it had till the Second World War, it still had a symbolic and “discriminatory” power in the official EU context. The definition of the belonging to Mitteleuropa works in the current political EU debate both as an “indicator” of the success for the EU application of an ex-communist country, and as a source of distinction between Eastern European countries. In that way, the connotation of “Middleuropean country” is no longer used in order to plea for re-unification, as happened in the debate of the 80s, but both as a source of discrimination between Eastern European applicants and as a way of fixing the external boundaries of the EU. Therefore the identification with central-Europe becomes a widely used theme in the “applicant rhetoric” as well as, seemingly, the starting point for the EU deliberation. The writings of Timothy Garton Ash and the declarations of the Polish minister of Foreign Affairs, Krzysztof Skubiszewski, are some examples of the symbolic “force of the distinction” – to use Bourdieu's definition - of the “middle-European identity”. Timothy Garton Ash wrote that “Historically and culturally, Poland , Hungary and Czecholovakia belong to Europe ... It makes sense to start with those (central European countries) which are nearest. Poland , Hungary and Czechoslovakia are nearest not only geographically, historically, and culturally, but also in the progress they have already made on the road to democracy, the rule of law and a market economy”. It is worth stressing the vagueness of the expression “nearness” to Europe , as well as the fact that European culture and values are taken for granted and still not defined. The same applicant rhetoric is applied in the discourse in 1992 by Krzysztof Skubiszewski: “The association of the three countries [i.e. Czechoslovakia , Hungary and Poland ] with the European Community is relevant to their security and also to that of the West: the hard core of Europe will include a bigger territory.” According to Iver Neumann, the construction of a Middle-European identity through the appeal to a common history and through the exclusion of the others – the next “Slav” state – from the “Middle-European status” is a structural feature of the applicant rhetoric. Will this seemingly abused appeal to Middle-Europe contribute to the building of the EU identity – in an exclusionary mode as happened in the era of nationalism?

I would like to thank sincerely for their help Christopher Williams and Lidia Greco.

W. Mommsen, Die Mitteleuropaidee und die Mitteleuropaplanungen im Deutschen Reich vor und während des ersten Weltkriegs, in: R-G- Plaschka, H. Haselsteiner et al., Mitteleuropa-Konzeptionen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts , Wien, Verlag des Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, 1995, XIX-XXVII.

P. Stirk, The idea of Mitteleuropa , in: Stirk (eds.), Mitteleuropa. History and Prospects , Edinburgh Un. Press, Edinburgh,1994, pp. 1-35.

MacMillan Press, London , 1996, p. 9 ff.

Neumann I. B., “European identity, EU-Expansion and the Integration/Exclusion Nexus“, in: Cederman L.E., (eds.), Constructing Europe 's identity. The external dimension , Bouldner, London , 2001, pp. 149.

Agnew J., Geopolitics re-visioning world politics , London , Routledge, 1998, pp. 94 ff.

See also Neumann I.B. , Uses of the Other: the East in European identity formation , Un. of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis , 1999.

Ivi, p. 30.

P. Chiantera-Stutte, The ambiguous heritage of Mitteleuropa: the resurfacing of Mitteleuropa as a counter-image to the EU in Austrian populism , in “Law and critique”, 14, 2003, 325-353.

Ernst Jäckh, Das größere Mitteleuropa. Schriften der “Deutschen Politik”” , Weimar, Kiepenheuer, 1916. See: Mommsen W., „Die Mitteleuropaidee und die Mitteleuripaplänungen ...“, cit.

See Mommsen W., „Die Mitteleuropaidee ...“, cit., p. 18.

The division of three currents of thought on central Europe and their distinction from the Nationalsocialist project of world domination does not mean that there are not crossing themes between them and that they are not partly influenced by the racial doctrines. The geopolitical vision of a Mitteleuropa striving against Slavs and competing with world capitalism dominated by America is a common theme that can be detected in the conservative revolution – in Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger - and, on the other hand, an organic vision of the relation between man, his culture and his soil is a feature of the “positivistic” geopolitikers like Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellen. In all geopolitical visions of Central Europe , as well as in the writings of the conservative revolution, the affirmation of the superiority of German ethnicity and culture, and the conservation of some kind of Middle-European state borders , coexisted. The ideas expressed by some exponents of the conservative revolution were much more a synthesis of the geopolitical reflection about the interplay between geographical and political factors and the considerations about the particular German culture juxtaposed to Western European civilization, than the direct product of racist ideologies.

On the popularity and diffusion of geopolitics see: Heffernan M., The meaning of Europe , London, Arnold, 1998, pp.49 ff. ; O'Tuathail G. (eds.), Critical geopolitics: the politics of writing global space , Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, Ebeling F ., Geopolitik , Berlin., Akademie Verlag, 1994; Herb G.H., Under the map of Germany. Nationalism and propaganda 1918-1945 , London , Routledge, 1997.

Ratzel F., Politische Geographie oder die Geographie der Staaten, des Verkehrs und des Krieges , München/Leipzig, Oldenbourg, 1897, p.2.

This expression was later used in National-socialist political writings and speeches.

Ratzel F., “The territorial growth of States”, in: Scottish international magazine , XII/7, July, 1896, p. 351.

See Penk A., 1925, “Deutscher Volks- und Kulturboden” in: von Loesch K.C. and Ziegfeld A.H., (eds .). Volk unter Völkern , Breslau , Hirt, 1925, pp.62-85.

„Zwischeneuropa” came from a book of that name by Giselher Wirsing ( Zwischeneuropa und die Deutsche Zukunft , Jena, Diederichs, 1932), who , with Moeller van der Bruck and the journal “Die Tat”, supported the Eastern orientation of Germany away from the democratic west towards Bolshevik Russia.

Penk A., “Politisch-geographische Lehren des Krieges“, in: Meereskunde , 9-10, 1915, pp. 12-21.

On Haushofer see: Laack-Michel U. , Albrecht Haushofer und der nationalsozialismus Stuttgart,, Klett, 1974.

Haushofer K., Der Kontinentalblock: Mitteleuropa-Eurasien-Japan , München, Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1941. Although he supported Hitler, his vision of the Central Europe federation (with Germany as the dominant power), was not ethnically homogenous and he imagined the future Eurasian pan-region as a transcultural and transracial zone, founded on alliances between equal partners.

Panregions are “large functional areas linking core states to resource peripheries and cutting across latitudinally distributed environmental zones” (O'Loughlin J., van der Wusten H., “Political geography of panregions”, cit., p. 2) and panideas are “principles for organizing the world system or basic ideologies for many units” (idem. p.4).

My paper is concerned with the geopolitical and the cultural definitions of Mitteleuropa in the literature in this period, neglecting the economic ones, where the issue of identity creation is less important.

Partsch's Central Europe appears in 1903; Ratzel writes his Deutschland. Einführing in die Heimatkunde in 1907 ; Politisch-geographische Lehren des Krieges by Penk dates from 1915. Österreich und die Bürgschaften seines Bestandes by Fischhof appears in 1869; Frantz publishes his Die Weltpolitik unter besonderer Bezugnahme auf Deutschland in 1882 and Nauman publishes Mitteleuropa in 1915.

This is Stirk‘s thesis (in: Mitteleuropa. History and perspectives , Edinburgh University Press 1994, Edinburgh 1994, 11 ff.) who defines the period after 1850 as a turning point in the definition of Mitteleuropa.

Naumann, Mitteleuropa , 1915,Berlin , pp. 100-101 .

C. Frantz, (1882-3) Die Weltpolitik unter besonderer Bezugnahme auf Deutschland, Osnabrück, 1966, vol. 3, pp. 49-50.

C. Frantz, Der dänische Erbfolgestreit und die Bundespolitik , Berlin, 1864, p. 61.

Gefahr aus dem Osten , in: Schuchardt O., (ed .) Die Deutsche politische Zukunft , vol.1, 1899, p. 150.

I. Neumann, European identity, EU Expansion, and the Integration/Exclusion Nexus , in L.-E. Cederman, Constructing Europe 's identity. The external dimension , Boulder , London , 2001, 141-164; and Russia as Central Europe 's constituting other , in “East European Politics and Societies, 7,2, 1993, 349-369.

See F. Barth, Ethnic groups and boundaries, ???, 1969.

Shapiro Michael J., Reading the postmodern polity: political theory as a textual practice, 1992, p. 420.

See Brechtefeld, Mitteleuropa and German Politics , MacMillan, London, 1996; Stirk, Mitteleuropa ...

See for example H.Schmitt, Die Selbstbehauptung Europas. Perspektiven für das 21. Jahrhundert , Stuttgart, 2000.

See I. Neumann European identity, EU Expansion, and ...

See two striking examples of this debate in: J. Bidlo's 1934 division of Europe along cultural features between an orthodox economic backward Eastern Europe and a Central Europe in: “Ce qu'est l'histoire de l'Orient Européen” in: Bulletin d'information des sciences historiques en Europe Orientale , VI, 1934, pp. 11-73. See also the comment by O. Halecki, “Ce que c'est l'histoire de l'Orient Européen” ibid., pp. 83-93.

See Kovacs J.M., “Westerweiterung ...” , cit.; Neumann I. B., „European identity, EU-Expansion and the Integration/Exclusion Nexus“, in: Cederman L.E., (eds.), Constructing Europe 's identity. The external dimension , Bouldner, London , 2001, pp. 141-164.

Neumann I. B., “European identity ...” , cit.

Ash T.G., Mertes M., Moïsi D., “Let the East Europeans in!”, in: New York Review of Books , 24 Oct. 1991, p.19.

Krzysztof Skubiszewski, „The challenge to Western Policy of change in Eastern Europe“, cited in I. B. Neumann, „European identity ...“, cit., p. 148.