Phantomgrenzen. Räume und Akteure in der Zeit neu denken

The book under review inaugurates a new series, ‘Phantom Borders in Eastern Europe’ (Phantomgrenzen im östlichen Europa), edited by the five authors of this opening volume. They constitute the group of principal investigators in the research project of (almost) the same title in which their studies originate (www.phantomgrenzen.eu), financed by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research between 2011 and 2017. The project has been coordinated at the Berlin-based Centre Marc Bloch, a German–French research center for the humanities and social sciences. The project’s results are fed by both pluridisciplinarity—mainly geographers and historians—and debates at the intersection of at least two academic traditions, the French and the German.

This volume sets the programmatic stage, and promotes further exploration of what the authors call the ‘time-space-complex’ (12). The core question is: How can (state) borders continue to shape social realities once they have been institutionally removed, or at least have changed their (political) nature? Through the conceptual tool of ‘phantom borders’ the authors signal their avoidance of any determinism or reification of historical regions. At the same time, they point out that ‘phantom borders’ embrace more than simply discursive constructions. They have the capacity to shape social realities. ‘Territoriality (and its borders) as a social process’ (Die gesellschaftliche Prozesshaftigkeit von Räumlichkeit (und ihrer Grenzen)), 38) is constituted by spatial imaginaries (Raumimaginationen), spatial experiences Raumerfahrungen), and the formation/creation of space (Gestaltung des Raumes, 9). Reinhart Koselleck’s Erfahrungsräume (spaces of experience) and Erwartungshorizonte (horizons of expectation) immediately spring to mind. His work, in fact, has been a major inspiration for these reflections.

The five chapters following the introduction set out to prove empirically the analytical validity of ‘phantom borders’. Most convincingly this is done by the concept’s ‘inventor’, the French geographer Béatrice von Hirschhausen, and I will illustrate the concept by delineating her case study in more detail. In rural Romania, access to water supply has been accomplished mostly since the 2000s and with the help of the European Union. In her ‘geography of running water taps’, von Hirschhausen visualizes on a map how here, in the last decade, the possession, or not, of such taps has retraced the former Habsburg–Ottoman border along the Carpathian mountain crest. She then peels apart the layers involved in creating this ‘phantom border’. Age-old discourses oppose a ‘more modern’ Transylvania and Banat to a ‘more backward’ Oltenia, Moldavia, and Wallachia, and the installation of running water has been engulfed in this discourse. There are many structural parallels between von Hirschhausen’s two sample villages, while they are characterized by different morphologies: huge brick houses in the Banat, as opposed to mainly wooden or clay houses in Oltenia. The available resources in both villages seem to be roughly the same. While in the Banat village a veritable competition with regard to housing modernization has been ongoing, the Oltenian villagers would rather spend their money on electronic appliances and good internet and TV access. The task now is not simply to see the mental map of a civilized west vis-à-vis an underdeveloped (south)east confirmed, and to steer clear between the Scylla of ‘naive positivism’ and the Charybdis of ‘generalised relativism’ (99). How do the villagers relate to the space in which they live? In the Banat, they refer to previous generations, who built brick houses over 60 years ago—these can be renovated, and in the eyes of the dwellers need to be. In Oltenia, the small size and less solid materiality of the houses makes it impossible simply to install bathrooms, heating systems, even modern windows. One would have rather to build a new house. Such a decision requires more resources, more effort, and not least the will to rupture (more) radically from the existing structures.

Clearly, the ‘space of experience’ here and there has been both created (earlier) and (potentially) shaped creatively. In addition, actions are conditioned by multifold horizons of expectations. The Banat villagers have been able to maintain their selfimage of being ‘more modern’ beyond the rupture of the ending of their socialist life worlds. The Oltenian villagers previously had a strong consciousness of belonging to the privileged socialist flag-posts of miners and factory workers, something that went utterly bankrupt (literally and ideally) with the end of the system. It is this void that accounts for much of their reduced horizon of potentiality, which, more often than not, seems to leave no choice other than emigration. They would rather invest in (transportable) technical commodities than in the long-term planning to build a new house. In sum, von Hirschhausen invites readers never to take discourses at face value, but to consider the actors involved and to explore ‘societies in their own modes of self-understanding and of [motivations for] action’ (99).

Dietmar Müller and Hannes Grandits, in their case studies, play an analogous tune. Müller explores how, on a regional scale in enlarged interwar Romania, certain structural traits have survived both economic and political rupture. His intention is to take further the (unresolved) question about real or imagined features of the Balkans, as debated some years ago, mainly between Holm Sundhaussen and Maria Todorova. Exploring the juridical unification of formerly separate territories, he shows how both ‘experiences and imaginaries together offer the material from which actors constitute a horizon of expectation that is regionally specific and circumscribed by phantom borders’ (83).

Hannes Grandits contextualizes the reemergence of certain ‘phantom borders’ in Southeastern Europe after 1989 by connecting them to the nostalgic turn (Svetlana Boym) that has become characteristic of most postsocialist countries. Such nostalgia has been nurtured by the elites’ references to imaginaries of the past, instrumentalizing these in their political agendas (148). In Croatia, knowledge about the former military border between Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire has been revived as an image of Croatia as a ‘civilizational border’ against a perpetuated negative image of the ‘orient’. Grandits’ second example is the Greek-Albanian border, where the collapse of the hermetically sealed Cold War border brought about the return of previous irredentist regional ‘phantoms’. Albanian postsocialist mass migration toward Greece has contributed to this changed codification, which refers to the idea of a Greek northern Epirus in southern Albania and an Albanian Çamëria in Northwestern Greece, precisely crossing the newly reopened state border.

Von Hirschhausen, Müller, and Grandits accomplish well what they announce in their introductory ‘scholarly positioning’: they work toward a creative renaissance of the methodological debate on structures and actors, discourses and their (de)construction, imaginaries and realities, which, they assert, has reached a veritable impasse.Deconstructive efforts have gone far enough to make it almost prohibitive for, for example, geographers even to draw maps, as this is already seen as an illicit attempt at rationalization (21).

The ‘phantom borders’ analytical tool indeed can help give new life to the determinisms at both ends of this debate. In fact, the authors even undersell their concept in several respects. First, they do not explore how it might be fruitful for Nationalism Studies. How could their analytical twist take further Brubaker’s concept of the nation as a process and contingent event? Second, they do not explore how ‘phantom borders’ work in extreme situations. How are they utilized, accelerated, radicalized in times of (world) war and occupation? Third, they do not explore the longevity of epistemological ‘phantom borders’. Why is it that, a quarter of a century after the demise of state socialism, scholarly thinking still largely functions along the former Cold War East–West binaries? Why is Eastern Europe still so far away in many Western minds that they would rather foster entangled thinking about other world regions? To be sure, Postcolonial Studies have brought the issue of epistemological ‘hierarchies’ to the fore; and it has been a theme played by East Europeanists as well. Yet, how and why have engrained epistemological mindsets been effectively renovated so little? And how, in Eastern Europe itself, have they become narrower (more national) in so many ways, rather than more entangled and open?

The remaining two chapters, by Thomas Serrier and Claudia Kraft, respectively, certainly make for interesting reading as well. However, rather than focus on the concept at stake, they also introduce additional reflections, at the risk, unfortunately, of blurring rather than contributing to the finetuning. Thomas Serrier refers to the (historical) German–Polish borders, marked by plurifold changes, population displacements, and painful remembrance. He convincingly argues with the two ‘classics’, Fernand Braudel and Pierre Nora. Instead of the Braudelian cumulative longue durèe (quasi-) immobility, he proposes that the persistence of ‘spatial palimpsests’ (110) be read in the contingent terms of the interests of the actors in their time. ‘Vanished borders’ can experience cyclical upswings, when the sociopolitical urge to do so arises.

Serrier criticizes Nora’s lieux de mémoire as too conditioned by the nation-state framework. He suggests focusing more on urban spaces as the most saturated in terms of ‘phantoms of eerie times’ (127). However, he performs here a shift of focus from phantoms of spatiality to those of temporality. He defines phantom borders as ‘remnant phenomena which materialize as a continuation of former borders’ (119), and, even more generically, as various modes to ‘read time in space’ (111, quoting the well-known book by Karl Schlögel). Analytically, this leads off-track. What is more, it risks depriving the ‘phantom-border’ concept of its innovative potential. Schlögel, precisely, and many others have wittingly reflected on the theme previously. As the authors themselves note in the introductory chapter, the temporal dimension remains the more fugitive one in the concept of ‘phantom borders’ (28). Certainly, there can be no talk of a continuity of minds of people several generations apart, before and after the end of a (political) border. Memory studies have done much to increase knowledge of how memories and amnesia function. What are abundant, too, are studies of loss and nostalgia toward previously owned lands.

In the concluding chapter, Claudia Kraft reflects more generally on the innovative potential of research on Eastern Europe in the context of Area and Global Studies as well as Postcolonial Studies. How can East European Studies contribute to overcoming Western-or Euro-centric perspectives (167)? Kraft’s reflections recall what the late Holm Sundhaussen, a guiding spirit of the ‘phantom-borders’ project (11), used to say: The methodological innovation brought about by the field of Postcolonial Studies could have been brought about by the field of Southeast European Studies—had its protagonists any interest to do so. Instead, the field has continued to function mostly within its traditional self-referentiality.

To be sure, Sundhaussen’s reproach has not gone totally unnoticed. It has been precisely from Southeast Europeanists that effort has been put lately into paving the way toward a history-writing that entangles the region with others, that goes beyond all determinisms, that promotes a contingent focus on the actors, that (re)focuses on (comparative) social history, that asks different questions.^[1] Here is, therefore, my moment of regret with regard to this volume: it could have communicated more with the companion-of-mind, slightly earlier works that have just barely opened up new paths of investigation, much in analogy to the one under scrutiny here. And coincidentally, these too have been greatly and explicitly influenced both by Reinhart Koselleck and by the debate between Holm Sundhaussen and Maria Todorova. If this plea to get together reads like a harbinger of what I see as the potential for a more coordinated and effective establishment of a renewed trope of research, it is intentional.