RUSSIA AS EUROPE'S OTHER Iver B. Neumann European ...

has been variously discussed in the past will impinge on the political business
at hand. And yet, when it comes to the question of where Russia fits in, there
is very little by way of scholarly reflection on how this complex of issues has
been handled previously.
What follows is an attempt to provoke a debate about how Russia has been
constructed by (other) Europeans over the last five hundred years, and what
relevance these constuctions may have at present. Given the amount of relevant
empirical material, the amorphous social setting of the discussions and the
variations involved between different localities and language communities at any
one given, the level of generalisation must necessarily be high. From the end of
the last century onwards, and particularly over the last thirty years, attempts
have been made to specify and justify a way of analysing the social construction
of reality at this level of generality by using the concept of discourse. The
relevant questions of theory and method need no treatment here. However, since
the word ’discourse’ is now being used in and out of season to refer to
everything from a friendly chat to the historical period of modernity in its
entirety, suffice it to say that discourse is social and political life understood in
terms of its matrices. It is a system for the formation of statements - a ’regime
of truth’ - as well as ’the groups of statements that belong to a single system of
formation’ (Foucault 1972: 1972). To apply the concept of discourse results in
a displacement of what is being analysed and theorised, it works to replace the
study of things which exist prior to discourse with an interest in the regular
creation of objects (Waever et al. forthcoming). Working with a broad brush,
I have made only feeble attempts at drawing up boundaries between different
discourses (such as the strategic) as well as between periods.
Since identity formation is context based, identities cannot be pinned down as
uniform over time, but will be in a constant state of flux. Different constructions
will clash, as the most pervasive construction (or authorised version) is being
reiterated, modified, challenged. 3 ’Russia’ will mean different things not only
3 To the methodological individualist it is, of course, a crucial question just who
authorised the authorised version or, to rephrase, how a set of opinions come to be
represented as facts. The standard social science procedures for determining this has been to
look at the images held by politicians in office as well as senior servants, or to look at highly
codified belief systems or ideologies. The focus here, however, is rather on what may be
called the noise factor: Those representations which declare themselves most noisily in the
discourse are held to be a worthy starting point for analysis, and it becomes an empirical and
therefore variable question just how any one particular representation came into being.
Whereas some elements will be traced back to authors below, the focus here is firmly on the
representations themselves.
2