Europe as a periphery: Vision of the world of Kazakh students

Abstract

Geographical knowledges are never neutral but rely on power mechanisms whose springs are analyzed by critical geopolitics. These knowledges mobilize representations that have been constructed at a given moment in a given place by certain actors and disseminated for a certain purpose. They are more or less marked by political and ideological injunctions. The representation of the world that has been most widely disseminated is the division into continents. It shows how Europeans perceive themselves and how they have long considered their relations with other parts of the world, generally in a dissymmetrical way.

The FP7 research project Eurobroadmap (2009-2011) confirmed that this representation was widely disseminated throughout the world. Continents dominate the cartographic representations of the world space of 10,000 students interviewed in 18 countries. Europe is a central and structuring region in the representations, despite its blurred limits and its frequent confusion with the European Union. This project also brought some unexpected results. While we know that respondents rarely forget the landmasses in their division of the world, that they are reluctant to draw boundaries there, and that when they are forced to do so, they use national borders, the Central Asian space contradicted these results: it was often forgotten or even cut off, without national borders being followed.

For this reason, we decided to use the same method of investigation in Kazakhstan, which is located in what is commonly called Central Asia and lies precisely on the conventional boundary between Asia and Europe, between the Urals and the Caspian Sea. Surveys were conducted in 2018 and 2019 following the same protocol as in the previous project in three cities - Astana, Karaganda and Almaty. The results provide an unexpected perspective and partially challenge the continental Eurocentric view of the World. In these representations, the weight of nation-states is unusually great. On the other hand, instead of continental confines, or even a Central Asian region, the representations of the world of Kazakh students are characterized by a large Eurasian region with Kazakhstan as a center and Europe as a periphery.

The vision of the world of Kazakh students is that of young people from a country that has been independent only since 1991 within a region of the world that is far from having been built by its relationship to Western Europe as is the case in many other regions due to colonization. This political context allows to observe the weight of other representations and geopolitical narratives mobilized to describe Kazakhstan and its place in the world, and in so doing the place that is allocated to Europe. Using the concepts of high and low geopolitics, we attempt to interpret this representation of the World which seems to provincialize Europe and to upset the traditional vision of the World.