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Black Box East:
Post-Communist Laboratories of Globalization
Berliner Gazette 2021

Black Box East
Even decades after the official end of the Cold War, “the East” remains the Other. Only because of this reinforced Othering of what most media designates “post-communist” space could it so comfortably be instrumentalized as a black box of the West’s profit-driven “ethical imperialism.” The much-invoked opacity of “the East” was and still is presented as a lack of transparency and hence a legitimation for ostensibly “civilizing” therapies and impositions. Meanwhile, that very opacity has been used to veil economic processes such as privatization in obscurantism, that is, beyond the light of rational comprehension and democratic accountability.

Even decades after the official end of the Cold War, “the East” remains the Other. Only because of this reinforced Othering of what most media designates “post-communist” space could it so comfortably be instrumentalized as a black box of the West’s profit-driven “ethical imperialism.” The much-invoked opacity of “the East” was and still is presented as a lack of transparency and hence a legitimation for ostensibly “civilizing” therapies and impositions. Meanwhile, that very opacity has been used to veil economic processes such as privatization in obscurantism, that is, beyond the light of rational comprehension and democratic accountability. 

Scrutinizing the double standards underlying capitalism’s post-1989 expansion, the Berliner Gazette (BG) project BLACK BOX EAST takes Germany as a starting point: a nation-state whose entrepreneurial agenda (“first we take East Germany, then we take eastern Europe and beyond”) has reached a critical limit. The most obvious signs of this would be the increasing precariousness and radicalization of identitarianism in “the new states,” as BG founding editors Magdalena Taube and Krystian Woznicki show in their introductory essay. Read it in English (EN) or German (GER).

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Berliner Gazette (BG) is a nonprofit and nonpartisan team of journalists, researchers, artists, and coders, experimenting with and analyzing emerging cultural and political practices. Since 1999 we have been publishing berlinergazette.de under a Creative Commons License with more than 1,000 contributors. In dialogue with our international network we create annual projects, exploring the issues at hand not only in the form of text series but also conferences and books. Our latest projects include Black Bok East (2021), Silent Vorks (2020), More Vorld (2019), Ambient Revolts (2018), Signals (2017), A Field Guide to the Snovden Files (2017), Friendli Fire (2017) , Tacit Futures (2016), UN|COMMONS (2015), BKV (2012) i McDeutsch (2006).