Knocking on Europe's door : Romanian academia between communist censorship and western neglect

Kurzfassung/Abstract

While overall social scientific attempts at pinpointing the origin of Europe’s East-West divide range from awarding the imagined border near-timelessness to viewing it as barely over a century old, Eastern European intellectuals are currently more concerned with the resurgence of discourses about the “otherness” of their geocultural location(s) in the post-Cold War era. Focusing on Romania, the article looks at the new division of scholarly labor among academics in the context of the shift from Eastern (communist) to Western (neoliberal) ideological authority and the pending European “integration”. Caught between the struggle to overcome the defining power of old and new stereotypes (“Balkanism”) and the effort of restoring to collective memory those approaches to the specificity of Romanian social reality that had been banned during Communism, Romanian intellectuals address the more general issue of a peripheral country’s entitlement to shape the imaginary of the core.