December issue 2024.4
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Still “catching up”? The ideas of “Europeanness” in East Central Europe Introduction. Lingering dream of “Europe”: negotiating in-betweenness and East-West divide
Postcolonial scholarship has made a significant contribution by highlighting and critically assessing the liminal, inbetween positionality of Eastern Europe, which has contributed to the neglect of voices and experiences from the region. Discourses that construct and reproduce the notion of Eastern Europe “catching up” have been examined in historical, anthropological, and sociological contexts, as well as across various fields, including international relations, memory studies, democratization, and European integration. This theme section explores some of these intricacies through the case studies of Poland, Hungary, Latvia and Estonia.
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Caught between pasts and futures: Negotiating the meaning of the Left among female politicians in post-socialist Poland
This article examines how female politicians in Poland’s contemporary Left navigate the complex legacies of socialism and communism in shaping their political identities and practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted before the 2019 parliamentary elections and during the 2021 party unification convention, as well as 23 in-depth interviews with current and former female left-wing politicians, the article explores how the socialist past continues to structure the discursive field within which the Left defines itself and whether this process is gendered. The analysis reveals how associations with socialism and/or communism are simultaneously disavowed and re-appropriated, as female politicians negotiate their belonging to a “progressive Europe” while distancing themselves from the stigmatized post-socialist East. The article argues that this negotiation unfolds from a distinctly post-socialist “in-between position,” where temporal and spatial hierarchies intersect with gendered experiences of political engagement.
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The fragility of memory. Case studies of rearranging memory-scapes in Estonia
Views of the past are constantly being revised, with the impact of different political and social occurrences generating new narratives and ways of interpreting history. This essay focuses on three cases of recent spatial reconfiguration in Estonia, all demonstrating how contrasting memoryscapes are perceived, especially after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since then, the Soviet memorials, symbols and murals in public space in Estonia have fallen under intense scrutiny as remnants and symbols of the Soviet regime. Russian aggression towards Ukraine seemed to reopen the wound of the most recent trauma. At the same time, the legacies of more remote oppressors, the Baltic Germans, has taken on a new meaning as a more neutral and even positive heritage. With three examples of spatial transformation, the essay examines the choices made on treating the layers of Estonian history and raises questions about how current decisions could shape our perception in the future.
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In pursuit of the authentic. Latvia’s intimate nationalism in the past, present and future,
This essay traces the development of Latvian nationalism from its emergence in the 19th century to the present, particularly examining how the relationship between the individual and the nation has been interpreted. By relying on the ideas of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his idealization of authentic cultures, this essay examines his influences on the invention of authentic Latvian culture (and people) in the 19th century, as well as the afterlives of Fichte’s ideas during the Ulmanis regime, the independence struggle in the 1980s, and finally, in the contemporary, liberal era. The essay argues that the unfavorable comparison to their idealized, “authentic” selves has contributed to a discourse in which people are expected to engage in a personal and inherently intimate relationship with their nation. I argue that these principles produce an anti-populist nationalism that distinguishes Latvian nationalism from its European counterparts.
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Make Europe Great Again. The contingencies of Euroscepticism in illiberal Hungary
The article examines the role of Euroscepticism in the construction of an illiberal hegemonic regime by the Hungarian government, and its operationalization by right wing public intellectuals in their professional and subjective geopolitical analyses. Building on Alexei Yurchak’s concept of hypernormalisation, it argues that Hungarian Eurosceptic narratives have become part of a formalized authoritative discourse that provides a guiding framework for the regime’s intellectuals to voice their opinion about global politics and contemporary history, while leaving space for a set of diverse and often contradictory meanings to emerge in relation to Europe and the European Union.
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Jessica Gorter. “I’m interested in how memory is inherently subjective, shaped by time, emotion, and experience”
Filming from under a history in erasure: Jessica Gorter’s documentary films about Russia’s memory and counter-memory.
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Hadley Z. Renkin “Silence will not protect any of us”
Hadley Z. Renkin on Hungarian sexual politics, geotemporal belonging, and the impending reemergence of fascism.
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Karlis Leyasmeyer and the Christian speaking circuit. Anti-Communism and Evangelism in 1950s America
Dr. Karlis Leyasmeyer arrived to the United States in 1949 as a displaced person from Latvia. While unknown to most Americans, he quickly embarked on a coast-to-coast speaking tour, organized by newly formed evangelical groups like Youth for Christ and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. In these talks he glorified Christ and harshly criticized Soviet communism. We explore how Leyasmeyer went from relative unknown, to featured speaker in short order, but also how he situated himself in multiple spaces in his new country: as both a Latvian refugee among other Latvians, and as an evangelical Christian among American evangelicals. At times, Leyasmeyer thrived in these environments, but he would also find himself at the intersection of these groups. This research examines Leyasmeyer’s early career, his many achievements, but also how he developed an intellectual and theological outlook that was distinct from his Latvian contemporaries, as well as from the larger movements of American evangelicals.
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Oral history of our time Challenges and visualization
The article explores how the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian war is transforming the discussion around the oral history method under the conditions of an active war and analyzes the potential of the graphic novel as a new form of publishing oral history sources. The focus is on the theoretical, methodological, and practical dimensions of oral history, as well as on the question of which forms of public representation become relevant in the situation of an ongoing event. Drawing on the project “Graphic Narratives about the War” (archival interviews from the 1990s and new recordings from 2022–2024, created in cooperation with the NeuengammeConcentration Camp Memorial), the article demonstrates how the combination of interviews and original graphic art influences the construction, interpretation, and affective perception of narratives. The theoretical section of the article outlines key conceptualizations of oral history as theory, method, and practice, distinguishes between “documentation” and “oral history” within the context of the “unfinished past,” and argues for the ethical foundations for choosing the graphic format. The empirical section describes the working process — from selecting and transcribing interviews to script adaptation, collaboration with artists, and decisions regarding content, form, format, and dissemination of the publication. The study contributes to current discussions on oral history in times of crisis, and public humanities, proposing the graphic narrative as a safe and meaningful tool for representing oral testimonies in the context of an ongoing war.
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Cultural recolonization in the post- Soviet space
This article examines how culture functions as a strategic instrument of recolonial power in the post-Soviet space, where imperial legacies, Soviet infrastructures, and contemporary authoritarian practices converge. Integrating postcolonial, decolonial, and recolonial frameworks, the study analyzes three emblematic cases – Gergiev’s 2008 Tskhinvali concert, the 2014 opera Crimea, and Sandro Sulaberidze’s 2023 protest in Tbilisi – to show how artistic production legitimizes territorial conquest, naturalizes hierarchical authority, and disciplines cultural autonomy.1 The article argues that recolonization today operates not only through military force but through performative, affective, and institutional mechanisms that render domination intelligible, emotionally resonant, and politically durable.
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