Resumen de Decolonizing Eastern Europe: A global perspective on 1989 and the world it made
James Fowkes, Michaela Hailbronner
The end of the Cold War can be usefully understood as a moment of decolonization, and the post-1989 experience, for many states, as a postcolonial one. But we do not usually think in these terms when it comes to Eastern Europe, even though it has faced similar challenges to countries further South. Among those challenges has been the search for a new national and constitutional identity—a task complicated by a colonized past, yielding not a few identity-builders to resort to what we call constitutional kitsch. But we wonder whether Eastern Europeans have been afforded less space to build their own post-1989 identities, compared to places further South. And we wonder if this has to do with our greater sensitivity to this postcolonial need in places where we find such terms more natural, while Eastern Europe may have been too close to Europe for that need to be taken as seriously.
