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Europe is?between?east and west in an obvious geographical sense: between the Asian continent, of which it forms a peninsula, and the Europeanized societies of the Americas.?Until recently, it was of course geopolitically partitioned between East and West, as the front line of, respectively, the Warsaw Pact and NATO. Berlin, itself partitioned, was both a Western metropolis and an Eastern capital, with American GIs, off duty but in uniform, strolling through the latter and the odd Soviet sentry in the former. The residues of the East/West partition of Europe are still with us, not least in Berlin itself, though they have again been overlaid, as they always used to be, by other geographical and social divisions. It now makes sense once again, as it did for a year or two after 2nd?World?War, to think of a European Politics in which principle includes the whole sub-continent, although East and West experienced completely different trajectories over the second half of the 20th century.
Europe's eastern border will remain an issue for the foreseeable future. At the time of writing, the question of Turkey's membership of the EU is still not finally resolved. Even if we take that Boston Bruins Patrice Bergeron jerseys politically as achieved, along with the accession of the Western Balkan states of former Yugoslavia and Albania and of Ukraine and Belarus, there remains the open question of Russia and the rest of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Many of the latter states, if they are not unequivocally European, would certainly pass the ‘Turkish test' as substantially secularized and Westernized Muslim societies. Whereas the western end of Europe is clearly marked by the Atlantic Ocean, its eastern edge is not just imprecise, but fundamentally indeterminate, in the sense that any attempt to fix it conceptually or politically generates paradoxes which undermine the attempt. As Liotta (2005: 69) puts it, ‘In broad sense, the "new" map of Europe includes Turkey, Ukraine, the Russian Federation (see also Lavenex, 2004; Rumford, 2006).
Europe is however between East and West in a more interesting internal sense, with substantial populations in many parts Boston Bruins Patrice Bergeron jerseys of Europe identified with Asia in one way or another and/or with ‘eastern' religions, such as, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. This is, of course, true of North America or Australasia as well, but in Europe it is a much Boston Bruins Patrice Bergeron jerseys more prominent feature, with several prospective member-states of the EU predominantly Muslim by religion. Even excluding central Asia from consideration, we have Turkey, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania as prospective member-states with substantially Muslim populations.
To register these facts is to confront a Europe which is not so much between as beyond East and West (Delanty, 2006a; Wang Hui, 2005a, 2005b), just as much as hyper-modern Dubai, Singapore or Hong Kong. At the same time, however, the internal East― West divide remains an important structuring feature, not just of Europe as a whole but of many European states and even many European cities, whose smart western suburbs are upwind of the central and eastern quarters. The East/West ‘wall in the head'?2?is not confined to Berlin, nor more substantial walls to Jerusalem. Most fundamentally, the East/West divide has been shaped by ideologies of European (and, within Europe, Western) superiority which continue to influence such concrete issues as EU enlargement negotiations. As étienne Balibar (2004: 24?5) has suggested, ‘We should resist the illusion of believing … that some national traditions are open, tolerant, and "universalist" by "nature" or on account of their "exceptionality", whereas others, still by virtue of their nature or historical specificity, are intolerant and "particularist".' Balibar was referring to national traditions and to their attitudes to foreigners, but the point has a more general application. Jan Nederveen Pieterse writes (2002: 141)
