Imaginaries of (Dis)integration - East-West Division and the Spectre of Illiberal Regionalism in Central Europe
Following the financial, debt and more general Eurozone crisis facing the EU after 2008, Moisio et.al. (2013, 2) argued that the emergence of divisive imaginations of North-South difference challenged “the fiction of European unity.” Similarly, since the crisis year of 2015, discourses of East-West division and their reflections in suggestions of a multispeed Europe have intensified (Anghel 2020; Lehne 2019). According to this narrative, post-socialist member states of the EU have backtracked on their commitments to a political community of shared values and norms, revealing their lack of readiness or maturity for fully-fledged integration into EU institutions. In addition, the spectre of illiberal regionalism in Central Europe has raised fears of a breakdown of respect for the rule of law. On the other hand, Buzogány and Varga (2018) and others have argued that a conflation of liberal democratic values with neo-liberal ideology has acted as a catalyst for eurocritical shifts within the European Union as a whole. Imaginaries of East-West difference are thus problematic simplifications as they obfuscate the nature of the EU’s internal crisis and lack of cohesion. In terms of statecraft, ontological security entails the pursuit of a stable sense of self-identity in order to act politically. Following on the work of Rumelili (2018) and others, I suggest that imaginaries of division are fed by disruptions of the EU’s self-identity and sense of purpose. Focusing on Visegrad Four political regionalism, I argue that no monolithic “illiberal” counter-narrative to mainstream Europeanisation has emerged. What we instead find are several co-existing projects of positionality within the European Union that seek to avoid and/or counteract marginalisation.
Mots clés : Geopolitical imaginaries|ontological security|political identities|Central Europe|Visegrad Four
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