The Normative Threat of Eastern Europe: The Return of ‘Eastern Europe’ as an Ontological Insecurity Trope

A combination of undemocratic developments in Hungary and Poland and the eastern Europeans’ foot-dragging about solidary burden-sharing at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe has brought back the familiar allusions of eastern Europeans as troublemakers for the European unity and peace. This paper offers a discursive dissection of ‘eastern Europe’ as a subtly subversive challenge to Europe’s security of ‘self’, entailing a fear of being overrun by an ‘Other’ perceived as endangering one’s particular normative and cultural order. Proceeding from Ingrid Creppell’s (2011) notion of normative threat, I argue that the reappearance of ‘eastern Europe’ as an ontological insecurity trope points at a set of deeper anxieties within Europe, some of which are systemic (doubts about the efficacy of integration and the legitimacy of the European Union) and some more contingent (vacillation about defending the European political order from populist upsurge amidst ‘resurgent nationalism’).