LAUSR

In his presidential address to the Annual Convention of the newly renamed Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in 2011, Bruce Grant proclaimed “We are all Eurasian.” While eschewing any geographical definition of Eurasia (instead characterized as a set of “continually shifting alignments”), Grant points to the possibilities of Eurasia acting effectively as a geopolitical concept which might, had history unfolded differently, have been the concrete expression of Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Common European Home” (Grant 2012). Grant’s address, and the renaming of ASEEES which inspired it, reflected a trend for area studies’ centers on the region to incorporate the term “Eurasia” into their titles in place of other designators such as “Russian and East European.” Thus, in a move which also reflected the incorporation of parts of the former communist world into the European Union, the 50-year-old Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham recently renamed itself the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies—allowing it to retain the acronym CREES. Similarly, the Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University in Japan renamed itself in 2014, the year before its 60 anniversary, as the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center. Meanwhile, academic journals such as Eurasian Geography and Economics (renamed in 2002), the Journal of Eurasian Studies (2011), Eurasia Border Review (2010), and Eurasian Business Review (2011) have added momentum to this movement. The turn towards the term “Eurasia” is also evident in the region itself, where it reflects new regional alignments, most notably in the title of the Eurasian Economic Union (2011), and earlier the Eurasian Development Bank (2006). In these formulations, Eurasia is an idea, as well as a geographic signifier, suggesting something other to Europe. Politicians and thinkers from the region, as well as external commentators, may have a variety of reasons for turning to the term Eurasia. The fact that they increasingly do so suggests that the term itself is loaded with political connotations, and therefore begs the question as to whether it serves scholarship better than any other term. As Stephen Hutchings noted in a foreword to a recent volume dealing with Eurasia: