Grenzsetzende Macht

Using a historical and comparative perspective, the present article argues that the politically most effective and strategically most enduring boundaries of modernity were not those between nation-states, but rather those whose orienting and identity building function were based on the maintenance of a power imbalance essentializing cultural, religious or economic differences. The main argument is that the historically unique power of definition, which has conferred validity to the different versions of the West/Rest or North/South explanatory models up to this day, can be traced back to two elements: on the one hand, to the constitutive relationship between Western notions of cultural difference and the global Western power (“Occidentalism”), on the other hand, to the universalizing perspective which in this power context was declared as the only valid scientific representation of space (“hubris of the zero point”). The historical and current impact of this discursive strategy for constructing essentialized spaces are shown using the examples of Latin America and Eastern Europe as typical products of asymmetric boundaries.