From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area: Memory Cultures of Bordering Communist and Postcommunist Europe
From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area: Memory Cultures of Bordering Communist and Postcommunist Europe

Summary/Abstract: The demise of communist dictatorships in East Central Europe, the end of their Cold War border regimes, and the region’s “return to Europe” shook the sociogeographical notions predicating national identities and their place within the continent. At one extreme, the Schengen process turned some of the formerly most contested and zealously guarded borders into open spaces; at the other, some of the previously relatively permeable intra-USSR administrative lines became state borders of “Fortress Europe.” Parallel to and cutting across the genealogy of territorial borders and border politics, memories have formed of post-war/Cold War national seclusion and exclusion, cultural frontiers and cohabitations, and community separation and proximity. [...]

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