Political actors from many different countries locate their home country as a unique transition
point between the East and the West. The terms east and west have become highly symbolic yet
also have a relative meaning since every place is east of somewhere and west of somewhere
else. What gives this banal cliché such irresistible attraction? How does East-West symbolism
interact with other symbolic geographies? This book examines East-West rhetoric in several
different historical contexts seeking to problematize its implicit assumptions and analyse its
consequences particularly in parts of Europe where political actors conflate local geography
with symbolic Easts and Wests. The various contributions to the book provide an overview of
East-West discourses in scholarly writing trace the medieval origins of European East-West
symbolism and discuss East-West discourses in nineteenth-century Germany interwar Poland
Yugoslavia and Transylvania twentieth-century Finland Turkey in the late Cold War and
post-Communist Belarus.
