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Do international relations scholars not care about Central and Eastern Europe or do they just take the region for granted? A conclusion to the special issue

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A Correction to this article was published on 22 January 2022

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Abstract

How can we explain Central and Eastern Europe’s (CEE) relative absence in the ‘worlding International Relations’(IR) conversation? What does provincializing the discipline from CEE might look like? I argue that CEE has been relatively neglected in the ‘worlding IR’ literature 1) due to local factors, 2) because it might have been turned into an ‘unimportant other’, 3) and because the history of the region challenges the macro-categories – ‘West/non-West’, ‘North/South’, ‘core/periphery’ – that structure this conversation. I show how the special issue offers promising endeavors to provincialize IR that are transferable to other contexts, for instance small states. Doing so, I use CEE as a case study to build a bridge between the special issue and the different debates it contributes to – making IR a less Eurocentric/parochial field, decentering European IR from the IR produced in UK/Scandinavian countries, and exploring the conditions of formulating critiques that produces something other than the problems they denounce.

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Notes

  1. I define ‘postcolonial Eurocentrism’ as an emerging form of Eurocentrism that follows the criteria of Eurocentrism commonly mentionned in the literature – denial of ‘non-Western’ agency, teleological narrative centred on the ‘West’ and idealisation of the ‘West’ as normative referent – but whose system of value is the complete opposite of the one embodied by traditional Eurocentrism: ‘With postcolonial Eurocentrism, Europe is also considered to be the primary “proactive” subject of world politics – but, in this case, by being described as the leading edge of global oppression, not progress. Indeed, according to postcolonial Eurocentrism, European capacity to homogenise the world according to its own standards of unification is considered to be a malevolent process (i.e. the destruction of diversity) rather than a benevolent one (i.e. a show of positive leadership). In both forms of Eurocentrism, the discourse performs “the West” as the main actor capable of organising the world in its image. European exceptionalism remains the same – although, from the postcolonial Eurocentric view, Europe is not considered to be the best actor ever, but the worst.’ (Alejandro 2018b)

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gokhan Ciflikli and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on previous versions of this article.

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  1. London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

    Audrey Alejandro

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Correspondence to Audrey Alejandro.

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Alejandro, A. Do international relations scholars not care about Central and Eastern Europe or do they just take the region for granted? A conclusion to the special issue. J Int Relat Dev 24, 1001–1013 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-021-00245-9

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