World View/Paul Gillespie: It is often considered convenient to think about international politics with categories such as "developed" and "underdeveloped", "modern" and "backward", "centre" and "periphery", "civilised" and "barbarian".
Such binary classifications are usually associated with judgmental ones which determine attitudes, shape identities and create prejudices, such as "us" and "them", "self" and "other", "same" and "different", "friend" and "enemy".
During the Cold War "East" and "West" were used to differentiate the two power blocs within a value framework of free/unfree. Now that it is over these terms have lost their political purpose and for the most part regained their geographical ones. But traces of older prejudices remain embedded in the new cartography. Thus we still talk of central and eastern Europe, distinguishing between groups of the 10 previously candidate, now accession states set to join the European Union next year during Ireland's EU presidency at a major event in Dublin on May 1st.
Central Europe was sharply distinguished by writers in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland such as Milan Kundera and Czeslaw Milosz in the 1980s from more Russian-dominated states in eastern Europe as a means of affirming their European cultural identity. It made political sense to distinguish these groups of states as they negotiated with Brussels over the last 10 years. But now that 10 of them are set to join its political purchase is more problematic.
Are Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia included in this geographical category? Bulgaria and Romania would appear to be, and it will fall to the Irish presidency next year to make progress in negotiations which they hope will see them join in 2007. How can Turkey be included - is it part of eastern Europe?
The Government will also be leading talks with Ankara with a view to deciding on whether to open formal accession talks. The "wider Europe", which Gay Mitchell wrote about in this column recently, including Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus will also figure largely, most evidently in the debate over harsh asylum rules and more or less permeable borders between them and the enlarging EU.
And what of the Balkan states? Croatia has already applied to join the EU. At the Thessaloniki summit in June EU leaders declared that these states (defined as the western Balkans) - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro - share a vocation to join the EU and are entitled to do so. "The speed of the movement ahead lies in the hands of the countries of the region."
Stabilisation and association agreements have been put in place involving substantial financial transfers. The declaration underlined the need to establish functioning market societies, to return refugees as a means of ethnic reconciliation - "fragmentation and divisions along ethnic lines are incompatible with the European perspective, which should act as a catalyst for addressing problems in the region". There is a warning that "organised crime and corruption is a real obstacle to democratic stability, the rule of law, economic development and development of civil society in the region and is a source of grave concern to the EU."
There are echoes here of those political and judgmental attitudes and categories, of long-standing prejudices about the East as "backward" and less "civilised" than the West, not fully "part of Europe". This point can be made notwithstanding the undeniable success of European integration since the end of the Cold War in preventing Balkan-type wars elsewhere in post-communist Europe.
This success is fully acknowledged in "south-eastern Europe", a broader geographical category increasingly used to bring Austrian, Balkan, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek and Turkish political leaders and researchers together to examine how they stand in the new continental configuration.
The psychological impact of having their European identities recognised and affirmed by the EU is difficult to exaggerate. It will help to change stereotypes created over the last century of eastern Europe as backward and different and of the Balkans as epitomising political fragmentation, ethnic conflict and savage reprisals. In this respect "Balkan" came to typify eastern difference in Europe much as "Orientalism" did for the Muslim world further east.
Countering such stereotypes is an important part of normalising relations between the different civilisations and cultures in Europe. This point was made well by the former Greek foreign minister, Theodoros Pangalos, in 1999 (he was otherwise quite a hard tactical opponent of Turkish EU membership): "We find the statement that Turkey does not possess the cultural prerequisites for membership in the EU totally unacceptable . . . The Turks and the Greeks lived together during the Ottoman Empire period. A common lifestyle means a common civilisation . . . Once it is argued that Muslims are not Europeans, next day it might be said that Orthodox Christians are not European, and later it would be said that the left is not European."
A typical assumption from the West has been that normal developed nation-states consist of homogenous ethnic blocs. In that perspective "eastern" Europe's complexity is ambiguous, even anarchic. The Bulgarian-American historian Maria Todorova, in her landmark study, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997) points out that the word macédoine denotes a mixed salad. She recalls that the "complex ethnic mixture was held responsible for the instability and disorder of the peninsula, which was diagnosed [by a US academic in 1948] as afflicted by 'the handicap of heterogeneity'."
Nowadays one might rather talk of the handicap of homegeneity. Researchers in the region are turning these social realities to advantage by redefining contemporary identities as pluralia tantum, always inherently multiple and heterogeneous, involving several belongings and acts of identification by social groups. Instead of being "liminal" - on the threshold - or in-between, they argue that increasingly all modern identities must be defined and understood as heterogeneous like their's. Their region is a laboratory of such diversity to be celebrated, not problematicised.
Ireland has been similarly stigmatised as abnormal because of its majority-minority problems, which is a good reason to pay more attention to south-eastern Europe. It is easier now to understand why Hubert Butler, the original and now more appreciated theorist of liberal nationalism here, should have spent so much time writing about the Balkan and Baltic states from the 1930s to the 1960s.
pgillespie@irish-times.ie