consequences. While globalisation 3.0 is on the rise, geography seems to have been replaced by individual networks and cultural belonging. Are you considered part of the club or not? Novelist Ingo Niermann sees an expanding Europe as an elitist club that grows through subsidies rather than conquest – a fortress ‘with lots of milk and little honey’. 2 This is not an isolated reading, but one that is shared by many countries and individuals around the world, especially those towards the East of Europe. Whether truisms about geography can be confirmed will become evident over the next two decades. With crude oil prices rising daily, the issue of mobility becomes more and more challenged. A resource crisis of such kind might as well lead to a situation of a reversed globalisation: a return of the accelerated and super-growth locale. East Coast Europe , which took place during Spring 2008, is a project, and a publication, about the perceptions of contemporary European identity and its relation to spatial practices and international politics. 3 The title East Coast Europe is a word play. Europe is the central topic for investigation, its contemporary culture, expansion, and its status as a continuing social project. East Coast refers to two distinct edges of Europe, both real and imaginary – the geographical East Coast of the United States of America and the political East Coast of the European Union. The two east coasts are related in in the title to trigger debate. The project invited leading figures in culture and politics from the the two coasts – of the United States of America, and of such European Union neighbourhood countries as Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Lebanon, Macedonia, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Turkey and Ukraine to comment on their perception of Europe today. East Coast Europe dives into the urgent details of a dense network of contemporary experiences of the European Union’s extensive exchange of knowledge, people, and goods with the East Coast of the United States and also with its own eastern border. These two crisp north-south borderlines belie many geographic spatial complexities including such islands as Switzerland and the western Balkans that now reside within the landmass of Europe but outside the European Union. The project set out to investigate the cultural and political confluence between these two north- south borderlines, one geographic and one political. What is this new transverse region through multiple time zones? What are its challenges and possibilities for social, political and spatial practices? Europe as a political and economic construct has been expanding ever since the Treaty of Rome in 1957. In its current territorial set up, the most eastward point of the EU is near Turtle Bay at the tip of Cyprus. This point might shift soon. By constructing an imagined scenario in which Europe is an island, and therefore has a coast – a clearly defined perimeter with an edge – one might be able to speculate on the political, cultural and economic variables and how those might spatialise in the
future. Engaging in this mind-game, defining criteria as to what constitutes the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ becomes increasingly difficult. East Coast Europe investigates some of the rudimentary questions we are currently encountering: what determines the notion of border? What are the basic features of the European Union experiment as seen from both ‘coasts’? Is Europe being perceived as a unified entity and if so, as a counterweight to the US? How does the changing global landscape affect the realities of Central Europe and its lateral peripheries? What is the most important question for the EU in the mid-term, in terms of expansion? In which direction will further integration drift – culturally, ethically, economically? Asking questions usually assumes that there are answers. Much of the content of East Coast Europe consists of conversations: open questions, verbal ping-pong with cultural practitioners, artists, politicians and former military commanders – individuals from the two distinct east coasts. We do not know the answers to most of those questions, and most politicians do not offer them either. However, without laying claim to cultural practices as a seemingly singular tool of investigation, we believe that critical cultural production can be used as a barometer and a pro-active instrument to investigate what is at stake, what has changed and what we can learn from some of those changes. Rather than generating a toolbox, East Coast Europe produces a set of critical reflections on the relationship between Europe and its own perception vis-à-vis the East coast of the United States. The countries along the line we traced functioned as a mechanism to isolate some of the variables and phenomena we were interested in. If one observes the current economic boom of Eastern Europe, an optimistic mind could easily fall for romantic notions of the Wild West, nostalgic narratives of potentials and possibilities. Yet, reality confirms that almost every success story of ‘the East’ – be it Eastern Europe, the Gulf, India, or China – has been received with heavy scepticism and critique by the West. To my mind, the vast majority of this criticism is not based on reason or actual content, but resentment and fear. While central European economies have come to a grinding halt, the further we move east, the more seems possible. When the mobile phone giant Nokia recently left behind its production site in the city of Bochum – and opened a new factory in the Cluj, Romania – German politicians and media alike were furious. While Romanian politicians accuse central Europe’s welfare luxury of primitive protectionism, the local economy in Romania continues to thrive. It seems that when it comes to media-coverage of any geography east of the ‘welfare-belt’, western journalists tend to ruthlessly pull all registers of phenomenological critique. When the former boxing-champion Vitali Klitschko announced in 2008 that he would run for mayor in the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev, many US journalists made fun of his challenge, although Klitschko is considered the most favourable candidate from the democratic
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