Читать книгу Diversity in the East-Central European Borderlands - Группа авторов - Страница 9

The specificity and at the same time comparability of the selected cities stem not only from their modes of coping with the voids left by the legacies of large-scale violence, but from their position as frontiers of geopolitical expansion and stakes of great power rivalries. These characteristics can be aptly addressed with the help of the concept of borderlands. As particular types of spatial regimes, European borderlands have been formed by discourses focusing on their special anthropogeographic conditions, cultural-historical distinctiveness, and political designs (Mishkova and Trencsenyi 2017: 8). Borderlands are commonly regarded as peripheries or margins of certain territorial entities, usually nation-states (Diener and Hagen 2010), whose particular conditions and local color are rooted in the past. However, the cultural fragmentation and mélange of borderlands are anything but local anomalies belonging to history. On the contrary, they have to be acknowledged as basic features of modern spatial orders “where identities and experiences are constantly being contested in specific sites or localized centers of power” (Lugo 1997: 53).

The concept of borderlands connotes problematic places where competition, appropriation, and violence have been the flipside of the co-existence of various ethnicities, religions, and other symbolic orders (Bartov and Weitz 2013). Hence, what is crucial to the understanding of borderlands is not only their material topography and location in political grand projects, but also specific modalities of power pertaining to appropriation, production, and contestation of diversity (Mishkova and Trescenyi 2017: 2). In particular, borderlands often assume centrality in matters of symbolic politics due to daily entanglements with “otherness” and the rich texture of constraints and opportunities. This is especially true in post-1989 East-Central Europe where labeling some regions as “borderlands” became an effective tool for crafting certain normative visions of the post-communist development. These visions are not always based on historically correct estimations of borderland diversity, as they are primarily aimed at serving the neoliberal agenda of the peripheral elites who exploit local cultural capital in the hope of enhancing the competitiveness of their regions (Zarycki 2011: 90–97). Nevertheless, such whipping up of regional distinction is not a completely new phenomenon. As pockets of social and political instability and spaces of non-compliance with centrally imposed regulations, borderland regions have often been used for large-scale social experiments and political projects combining transformations of material environments with fostering a new type of political subject (Bartov and Weitz 2013; Amar 2015; Gross 1988).

Political projects of uniformization notwithstanding, in East-Central European borderlands, and especially in their urban milieus, certain facets of cultural diversity pertained throughout the calamities of the twentieth century. One such facet is a constant exposure to the scrutinizing gaze of the “other,” whether literally or metaphorically. This may happen through daily (and mostly unreflective) contact with material milieus, borrowed words, pieces of folklore, and family stories that hint at the presence of a “foreign” spiritus loci within a familiar cultural landscape. Another characteristic feature is a “banal” cosmopolitanism designating the borderland as “a prolonged time and a border space, in which people learn the ways of the world and of other people, … [and] thus the place where a … cosmopolitan subject is emerging” (Agier 2016: 9). This type of cosmopolitanism often emerges through public interactions linked to specific places, “from market squares to basement taverns to elegant clubs: places that had indeed often been built to enable… cosmopolitan sociality” (Humphrey 2012: 20). As such, the cosmopolitan sociality serves as a strategy making it possible to quickly stich together the social fabrics torn by internal conflicts and rapid political transformations. It can efficiently conceal voids left by the drastic or gradual disappearance of whole segments of the urban populace by switching the focus to overarching symbols of central power, intellectual goods, and the latest fashions preoccupying local bohemians. It may be argued that the strategy of symbolic accretion described by Dwyer and Alderman goes hand-in-hand with “banal” urban cosmopolitanism. In a manner analogous to the geologic processes of sedimentation, uplift, and erosion, borderland cityscapes are susceptible to “over-writing, embellishment, and erasure… thought of in terms of what has been called symbolic accretion.” As a result, “different historical meanings are layered onto them, thus challenging the notion that these symbols have a final, established meaning” (Dwyer and Alderman 2008: 169–70).

Symbolic accretion, cosmopolitan sociality, and urban pockets of difference link to another significant feature that makes this set of cities comparable. Wrocław, Lviv, Chernivtsi, and Chişinău are places that have generated a plethora of stories and projected their own—often competing—“myths” referring to their borderline status and the unique quality of their urban life (see in particular the chapter by Czajkowski in this volume). For more than a century, the Semper fidelis myth of Polish Lwów clashed with the myth of the same city as the capital of “Ukrainian Piedmont,” but the present-day urban mythology elevates the “golden age” of the benevolent Habsburg empire and multicultural ambience of the city. In post-1991 Chernivtsi, the mythology of Ukrainian national liberation co-exists with the Bukovina Mythos originating from the Habsburg epoch and pinpointing a one-of-a-kind patchwork of languages and cultures as well as an ideal version of urban tolerance. Wrocław/Breslau has been glorified as a unique place of creativity, academic achievement, and enterprise, contested in the German and Polish imagery, but nowadays the focus has shifted to bridging the rifts with the help of a new EU mythology professing openness to the world and an end to national antagonisms. The Russian imperial myth of Chişinău as an urban patchwork with an oriental touch is nowadays eclipsed by national mythologies glorifying the great history of the Moldavian/Romanian people/s, but it is still viable in many contexts, not least artistic and literary ones. Urban mythologies expose complex transnational itineraries that connect Lviv with Wrocław, Chernivtsi with Chişinău, and Lviv with Chernivtsi in multiple ways. In turn, the issue of complex cross-border relations leads us to another conceptual pillar of this book, namely the problematic of transnational memories and memory cultures that both (trans)form and (re)mediate imagery of the historical diversity that is not here anymore, but still reverberates in multiple public and private contexts.