Cultural Politics of Globalization and Community in East Central Europe

If—as Aimé Césaire pointed out at the time of the birth of the EU’s predecessor—”Europe is morally, spiritually indefensible,” what were 36 leading Hungarian writers, social scientists and human rights activists doing in March 2001 when, in denouncing the widely noted presence of racism in Hungary, they thanked France for the its profound, longue-durée goodness as an essential European feature? Is a misplaced praise of European goodness necessary to denounce racism? How is it possible to denounce racism by referring to ‘Europe,’ the main historic source and seemingly inexhaustible supplier of “modern” racism, as the source of goodness? This paper aims to understand the signatories’ project by making visible the West as an idea at work in east-central Europe. It also draws upon some basic themes from the liberal-nationalist register of Hungarian literary history and augments conceptual work by Guha, Chakrabarty and Chatterjee, in an attempt to reveal some dynamics of the ongoing construction of the trope of the east European as the West’s poor relative—a cognitive activity in which west and east European intellectuals are engaged, with more or less equal verve (and goodness).