Over time ‘Eastern Europe’ has become the repository of connotations and characteristics not necessarily linked with specific geographical areas. Nesting Orientalisms is a consequence of this flexibility of the ‘dark side of Europe.’ Bakic-Hayden used this construct to analyze national stereotypes in the former Yugoslavia, where “the designation of other has been appropriated and manipulated by those who have themselves been designated as such in orientalist discourse”. She described a system of stereotypes, where Western Europeans saw Yugoslavia as Vibram FiveFingers part of the Balkans (and thus ‘Other’) and Yugoslavs from the North considered the Yugoslavs from the South as ‘the East’ by playing on the Hapsburg versus Ottoman legacies. In the latter group, people of Orthodox faith considered themselves more European than people of Muslim faith. Finally, European Muslims distinguished themselves from non-Europeans. In a similar fashion, Czech, Hungarian and Polish dissidents re-introduced the term ‘Central Europe’ in the 1980s to present themselves as “the Eastern outpost of Europe”. In doing so, Central and Eastern European countries claim their own ‘Europeanness’ against their (Eastern) neighbors, reproducing a graded dichotomy between Europe and ‘the East’.
The literature on the ‘multiplication of Eastern Europe’s’ and, more generally, the formation of European identities, focuses on issues of citizenship, migration and the behavior of political elites and the media. Jiirgen Habermas argued that the development of a “political civic identity” among European citizens is necessary to further pursue any form of integration. Etienne Balibar analyzed the evolution of the very concept of ‘citizenship’ as a consequence of the new ways in Five Fingers Shoes which Europe is constructed. Donald McNeil discussed the ‘clashing identities’ of Europe considering an array of phenomena: the transformative actions of EU institutions, various national, regional and urban transformations, changes in popular culture, the role of mobility and migration, and processes of border formation and destruction. Despite all of this literature, the role of economic actors in these processes is under-researched. The literature acknowledges the importance of flows of businesspeople in creating transnational identities, but does not explore this in depth. I argue that it is important to fill this gap, for two main reasons. First, the enlargement of the EU is a powerful issue shaping European identity. The establishment of functional market economies is one of the three Copenhagen Criteria.
Therefore, the actions and perceptions of economic actors influence identity changes in Europe. Second, as economic sociologists point out, cultural understanding and identity, rather than ‘objective’ rationality are key drivers of business decisions. Nina Bandelj showed that calculations of risk and returns are not effective in the unstable environments of post-socialist countries. Firms must rely on social networks, cultural understandings, and power relations to make investment decisions. In order to fill this gap, this paper looks at nesting Orientalism from the standpoint of Italian investors. As they established investments in Central Eastern Europe from the 1990s, they ‘appropriated’ and ‘domesticated’ the areas where they invested, and pushed their imagination of the ‘East’ to countries beyond the boundaries of the European Union (such as Ukraine and Moldova).

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