MONICA SPIRIDON

Identity Discourses on Borders in Eastern Europe

Europe and Its Limits

In European usage, the meaning of the word border has progressively changed from a fact of nature to a cultural, political, and ideological product of human will. Natural frontiers do not exist either in a topographical or in a linguistic sense, and the self-conscious linking of place and identity is quite a modern phenomenon, rooted in nineteenth-century Europe. For example, although Greek geographers looked for units that could claim some distinctive local identity, they were not able to establish hard and fast boundaries but instead identified human or natural regions (or a mixture of both) that exhibited only a distinctive core, separated from the core of another region by transitional zones. Only in the nineteenth century, when the new “nation states” vociferously proclaimed their identity, did frontiers become formalized and fortified.

Modern sociologists insist that frontiers are not spatial entities with sociological implications but rather social facts that manifest themselves in spatial forms. This type of spatial limit is simply a translation of the psychological processes of delimitation into spatial coordinates. At the same time, modern cultural sociology urges us to take into account the manipulation of the category of frontier in the most diverse social and cultural practices. Thus, according to Georg Simmel, psychical processes of delimitation ultimately produce regions, countries, realms, and many other types of cultural space that are representative for a specific social collectivity and not necessarily coincident with geo-political borderlines. The German sociologist focuses on the active role played by collectivities of any size in the process of defining borders and frontiers. At the same time, he broadens the semantic area of the categories of border and frontier so that they represent all psychological processes of delimitation connected in some way with collective cultural practices.

In a more general sense, accepted by a broader category of cultural researchers (be they anthropologists, historians, literary comparatists, ethnologists, and so on), we may conclude that frontiers are elementary spatial structures that assume the function of marking geopolitical discontinuities, operating on the levels of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. On a symbolic level they are linked to the identity of specific communities related to specific territories. Anthropologists have underlined the essential part played by symbolism in the foundation, by way of delimitation, of all collective identities. On an imaginary level, the processes of manufacturing border identities tend to result in elaborate fictional projections.

These sketchy considerations also apply to the European processes of spatial delimitation. From a strictly theoretical perspective, the French tradition inaugurated by the Annals School constantly focused on the significant relationship between the categories of frontier and identity. From Lucien Febvre to Fernand Braudel, the French school of geographical history cherished the idea of a topographical identity based on a so-called genius loci. To quote Marie Claire Robic: “The genius loci of the French territory is caused by its spatial pattern, and its history can be seen as a process leading from a natural spatial order to a human spatial organization.”  The equation frontier versus identity has been constantly present in Fernand Braudel’s considerations of French identity. In turn, Lucien Febvre has analyzed the semantic evolution of the notion of the frontier as a sign of changing historical realities during the period of nation building.

As Eric Hobsbawm has already contended, during the twentieth century European identity as a complex unit became a cultural construction that would always include certain spatial areas and necessarily exclude others. It can even be said that the idea of a European cultural identity covers geopolitical, ideological, and symbolic dimensions that are not completely coincident, but instead overlap, converge, and diverge in confusing and sometimes even paradoxical ways. Eastern versus Western Europe, the European core area versus its peripheral areas, Mittel Europa, the Balkans, the European Occident versus the European Orient . . . these are a few examples of competing, overlapping, and crisscrossing European delimitations that disguise various geopolitical, ideological, cultural, moral, economic, and aesthetic alternatives.

Throughout the twentieth century this way of representing Europe has accumulated a rich store of mostly reductionist conceptual matter that is still active up to the present day. In what follows I will focus on the Romanian cultural case study as an epitome of the process of manufacturing projective spatial delimitations across the Eastern European area.