This collection of essays reflects the personal experience of a Ukrainian intellectual engaged
since his Soviet-time youth in a painstaking but fascinating process of the both cultural and
political ¿Europeanization¿ of his country. The title refers ironically to the notorious
Chancellor Metternich¿s quip that Asia presumably begins at the eastern fence of his garden (or
as another apocryphal version maintains at the eastern end of the Viennese Landstrasse). This
is a story of both exclusion and inclusion of walls and fences but also of a longing for
freedom and a quest for solidarity. It is a book on different ways of being a ¿European¿¿at
both the collective and individual level ¿despite various challenges or perhaps thanks to
them.
