Posts com a Tag ‘Leste Europeu’

The image of North-Eastern Europe appears composite and complex. While its geographical conglomeration is cut across by the Baltic Sea, it is not a coherent area at a cultural and political level. Yet, the numerous investments made by local and international actors in attempting to define this space call for a closer scrutiny of the processes of imagining and re-imagining spaces[1]. North-Eastern Europe is a repository of numerous perceptions and self-perceptions on a local, region, and global level. It is a crossroad for international routes and a point of contact for insular realities, near and distant at the same time.

In the last centuries, the history of the Baltic Sea has also been a history of how the small riparian states devised the most diverse and original strategies to coexist and emerge from the shadow of major continental players in their Eastern and Southern flanks. These strategies ranged from adapting their culture, politics, and identities in face of the most threatening existential dilemmas, in geopolitical contexts in which the transnational circulation of persons, ideas and goods made impossible the hermetic closure of state borders to foreign influences. Going international and searching for legitimation from foreign partners was the drive of ideas and practices of regional cooperation, of cultural and diplomatic initiatives with states and international organizations. The power of imagining one’s own “island” as a part of a broader entity was a resource for the states in the process of guaranteeing peace and stability in the region; for many societal groups, imagination has been (and is) an important resource for planning a better world in which to achieve freedom and emancipation. Yet, spreading utopia about unity, peace, and cooperation was also a means by which imperialist powers attempted to inscribe the small states within their areas of influence. Therefore, there are good arguments for treating analytically the act and the practices of imagining with the same methods by which processes of knowledge circulation are presently analyzed within the field of history of knowledge [2]. Like knowledge, imagination does not exist by itself: it has a historically-defined genealogy; it is produced by actors that diverge for education and social position; it is inscribed in genres and carried in media of the most different kind; it has different kinds of audiences; it may be comprehensible, endorsed, and even allowed only in determined places, and not in others. Leia Mais