PRIN 2022 - "Eastern Europe" between Russia and the West: Contested Spaces, Identity Building and Memory Policies in Historical Perspective

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has once again drawn the world’s attention to the peculiar geopolitical and geo-cultural dynamics of “Eastern Europe” – the mosaic of peoples, languages, cultures and religions, located between Russia and the West, that received its contemporary shape from the dissolution of the multiethnic empires in the aftermath of the Great War and was later incorporated into the Communist sphere during the bipolar era. The end of the Cold War sparked a still ongoing intellectual debate – refueled by the enlargement of the EU – about the repositioning of the East European states on the political map, Russia’s attitudes towards the novel configurations that Europe was taking on, the role played by the legacies from the 20th century in shaping the relations between Western Europe, Russia and the other countries of the post-Communist world. This Project gathers together eleven scholars, subdivided in three research units (Universities of Naples Federico II, Rome La Sapienza, Venice Ca’ Foscari), and equipped with the assortment of skills necessary to elucidate, against its 20th-century background, a key issue in this debate: the mutual influences between the changes in international scenario that have been affecting Eastern Europe in the last 30 years and a range of cultural elaborations adopted by the political actors involved, such as national identity constructions, memory wars, public uses of the past, geo-historical representations of contested borderlands, perceptions of otherness, competing ideas of Europe. This goal will be pursued along three main lines of research: the first will examine a cluster of case-studies in national state-building and minorities policies involving Romania, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Russia; the second one will focus on the production of history textbooks in Czechia, Ukraine, Russia, and other forms of memory politics spread throughout the area, including the Baltic states and the Balkans, such as memory legislation and mass exhumations; the third one will enlarge the scope of the inquiry to West European (e.g. Italian, British, French, German) cultural and diplomatic engagements with Eastern Europe in the period under review. A further ambition of this Project is in fact to obtain and disseminate a deeper understanding of the specificity of Eastern Europe and its relations with Russia and the West so as to contribute to a more integrated, truly pan-European approach to the general history of Europe, whose growing need, fostered by the development of the EU, is particularly felt in Italy at all levels of higher education. More generally, what underlies this Project is the belief that a critical awareness of the historical processes which shaped nowadays Eastern Europe represents a sine qua non for a correct diagnosis of the potential for conflict and the chances for stabilization of the region according to values of justice, peace and cooperation among the European peoples.