Vol. 4 · No. 1

Maria Goloubeva, Riga Stradins University, Latvia

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Abstract

The comparison of texts focused on travel experiences from three periods of Baltic history reveals the emergence, rather than the disappearance, of perceived borders between 'cultures' and 'civilizations'. I suggest that the dualist perception of the relationship between own culture and 'the West' in the Baltic States has not only emerged fairly recently with nationalism and a change of elites in the nineteenth century. In fact, the dualism of 'East-West' perception was greatly exacerbated during the Cold War, leading to the construction of new hierarchies based on perceived economic achievement and implicitly insurmountable 'cultural' difference. It is likely that today a more conflict-oriented picture of coexisting of cultures in the region is in place than in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.