Divided Europe

The New Domination of the East

Almost a decade on from the sweeping political changes that began in 1989 the “post-communist” East remains excluded from the rest of Europe. Divided Europe systematically challenges the Western understanding of, and impact on, Eastern Europe in the late 20th century. Through a highly readable and critical assessment of the new cultural division of Europe, and of the centrality of cultures and “civilisations”, Adam Burgess scrutinises the Western obsessions with history, ethnicity, intolerance and the need for “civil society”. He concludes that the West, anxious to bolster its own flagging moral authority over the East in the quest for a post Cold War “other”, has not itself “failed” Eastern Europe. Rather it has created failure, dismissing the consequences as the product of an “intrinsic backwardness” inherent in the East.