Authors

Discussion

Current debates, which since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have characterised discourse in Western society, have once again made the term Eastern Europe an omnipresent cipher.

The question of whether Ukraine belongs to the Western international community or is part of the ‘other’ Europe, and thus also part of backward, ‘'half-Asian’ Europe, has been and remains a central axis in the debate about Western support for the country and its inhabitants. But where do these attributions come from, when did they become influential, and how can they be analysed?

This paper aims to answer these questions by examining migration movements in Eastern Central Europe in the 19th century. The paper focuses on Ukrainian and Czech migrants who travelled to the United States and arrived in New York. Based on the discourse on foreign and self-perception, the paper aims to trace when, how and why migrants were considered Eastern Europeans and how this affected the localisation of their regions of origin. The paper thus takes up approaches from reflexive migration research, combines them with new research on the phenomenon of anti-Eastern European racism, and applies them comprehensively to migration in the 19th century for the first time.

The project thus explicitly examines the construction of the space known as ‘Eastern Europe’ prior to the division of Europe by the Iron Curtain and seeks the origins of modernist mental maps in the long 19th century, a period in which the political and cultural order of the present were decisively negotiated.

The paper is a work in progress document of a project currently in the conceptual phase.