Overlapping ideological boundaries and transformations in the EU periphery: the Baltic States and Kaliningrad
ENFirstly, I will seek to demonstrate how the allegedly "postmodern" project of EU integration and expansion actually carries within it strong overtones of modernism. This is clearly evident in the case of the Baltic States, whose transition from post-communist to EU member states was actively articulated through the establishment of clear-cut boundaries, state sovereignty, national homogeneity and liberalisation of national economy. Such spatial engineering of Europe's modern competitive socioeconomic order, I maintain, creates both potential for change and a certain fixity, as reproduction and reinforcement of the expansionist European core proceeds at the expense of marginalisation of underdeveloped peripheries. Secondly, I will argue that in order to understand the extent of European spatial and institutional changes in the Baltic periphery, we have to place this region within a larger geo-historical framework, whereby the implications of Russian pre-modem - as well as Soviet and Russian modern - empire-building impose limits on both the fixed metaphysics of nationalism and the progressive rationality of modernism. European governance theory, confronted by path-dependency arguments, is thereby invited to engage with broader post-colonial debates related to the issues of underdevelopment and marginalisation of the European "double periphery''1 ofKaliningrad. In the final part of my argument I will explain how the inclusion/exclusion discourse, which informs all policies and actions of"inclusive communities" such as the EU and nation-states, may be irrelevant in the case of the Kaliningrad Oblast. Despite the various claims emanating from experts and the European commission, the enlargement of the EU will not necessarily bring common market prosperity or dreadful isolation to those "outer" peripheries of the Union, such as Kaliningrad. [Extract, p. 115]
