Tristes Toponymies: The Problem with Eurasia

178 Комментарии / Comments Mark BASSIN TRISTES TOPONYMIES: THE PROBLEM WITH EURASIA Over the past decade the curious toponym Eurasia has enjoyed a rather spectacular trajectory. From its obscure early life in the eccentric geopolitical and geo-historical musings of a White-Russian émigré political movement – which dissipated well before the onset of the Second World War and whose manifestos remained unknown archival curiosities until the early 1990s – it has become something of an international fashion. Its conceptual and ideological elasticity, along with its utterly non-Soviet resonances, have made it a ubiquitous term of reference in public political discourses across the former Soviet Union.Along with this, and for not entirely different reasons, the term has been embraced by American academics as well. As Mark Von Hagen’s comments indicate, it offers a powerful appeal on an intellectual-analytical level as a sort of conceptual platform for the reexamination and rethinking of what might loosely be called the Russian experience. Beyond this, the term has demonstrated its positive utility for the more quotidian concerns of university and research administration, which found itself confronted after the demise of the USSR with a terminological crisis of existential dimensions . Without a Soviet Union, after all, “Soviet Studies” could no longer realistically call itself that, and some sort of new geographical designation had to be found. In the event, “Eurasia” seems to provide the most effective option, preferable to all alternatives, including even “Russian Studies” itself. The reasons for the latter preference are admittedly complex, but we may be forgiven for assuming that they have something to do with a mundane desire on the part of academic administrators to minimize organizational disruption by retaining as intact as possible under the new rubric the corpus what used to be called Soviet Studies. Avoiding a messy rethink as to where 179 Ab Imperio, 1/2004 exactly Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Far East, and indeed Ukraine might be re-allocated in the area studies scheme of things, that is to say, “Eurasia” offers an apparently elegant solution. But is it really so elegant? Despite what the clear and satisfyingly precise lines on a map seem to tell us, geographical regions are in fact notoriously ambiguous animals. We have long had to deal with this problem in such slippery geographical concepts such as “Eastern Europe,” and it would surely be futile to expect that any new regional terminology we might deploy now is going to be free from it. To the extent that we need to operate with these macro-geographical concepts – and we most certainly do, not only for administrative purposes – then we will have to learn to live with the ambivalence that invariably pervades them. At the same time, however, “Eurasia” occupies a class by itself, in terms both of the multiplicity of ways in which it is geographically delimited as well as the great variety of meanings and significances that are projected onto it. There can be a debate as to whether Eurasia is in fact the best conceptual-geographical platform for our post-Soviet purposes, but there can be no question that the term should be used only with a full appreciation and understanding of its many contrasting valences. In this spirit, I would point to three particular dimensions of Eurasia’s polysemicity that might give us pause for thought. To begin with, exactly what and exactly where is Eurasia supposed to be? Mark Von Hagen refers to it as space that is “terminologically... contested,” but this does not really do justice to the enormity of the contrasts between the alternatives on offer. Indeed, compared with the global disjunctions of Eurasia’s alternative geographical contours, the more familiar differences between contending vision of “Eastern Europe” pale into something approaching insignificance. One possible configuration of Eurasia corresponds to the original sense of the term as it was coined by geologists in the 19th century as part of the development of plate tectonic theory. As a replacement for physiographical ideas handed down from the Greeks about the division of the earth’s land surface into maco-units or continents, this Eurasia comprises Europe in toto plus Asia in toto. The latter two entities – territorially contiguous in...