Europe's Margins Aren’t Behind, Their True Value's Just Being Ignored

Europe's Margins Aren’t Behind, Their True Value's Just Being Ignored

Europe loves a story about “catching up.”

Southern Italy must catch up to the North.
East Germany must catch up to the West.
Post-socialist Central Europe must catch up to the “advanced” core of Europe.

This story is presented as neutral description, as if history simply flowed downhill toward modernity and some places got stuck in the mud. But the “catching up” story is not neutral. It is a technology of power: it explains away structural inequity as cultural deficiency, and it justifies a long chain of decisions that relocate sovereignty—over land, over firms, over futures—somewhere else.

If you’ve lived inside these divides, the insult is not only economic. It’s existential. You learn that your region’s ways of living are “not serious,” your social habits are “backward,” your tempo is “lazy,” your reluctance to play the careerist game is “a problem,” and your memories are “false.” The center doesn’t simply take resources; it takes interpretive authority—the right to define what counts as progress.

But here’s the twist that the “catching up” story cannot grasp:

What if these regions aren’t merely lagging?
What if they are holding capacities that the center has actively eroded—capacities for human life that cannot be replaced by GDP?

That’s not a romantic slogan. It’s an empirical claim about what marginal places preserve, practice, and reproduce—often precisely because they were never fully absorbed into the center’s tempo, ideology, and social design.

The politics of “backwardness” is a politics of dispossession

In all three cases—Southern Italy, East Germany, and post-socialist Central Europe—the familiar material pattern is not just “inequality.” It’s something more specific:

• Decisions move outward.
• Ownership moves outward.
• The region becomes a labor reservoir and a managed territory.
• And then a stigma narrative (“backward”) arrives to make this feel natural.

That stigma does real work. It trains people to doubt their own ways of living. It turns structural limits into personal shame. It makes people internalize that they deserve less.

But stigma has another function: it prevents revalorization. If you can convince a place that its strengths are defects, you can strip it of confidence, autonomy, and imagination—then sell it “development” that looks suspiciously like dependence.

So let’s do the opposite for once. Let’s name what these places hold, and why it matters.

Southern Italy: temporal sovereignty and relational wealth

Southern Italy has been framed for generations through deficit talk: laziness, corruption, clientelism, inefficiency—an entire moral vocabulary used to explain economic hierarchy as cultural failure.

Yet anyone who spends real time in the South sees something else: a different theory of life.

Not as an ideology, but as practice:

• Life is organized around relationships, not merely schedules.
• Value is produced through mutual presence, not only through productivity.
• Social time is not a leftover; it’s an infrastructure.
• The household and the neighborhood remain meaningful economic units: food cycles, care cycles, repair cycles.

The South is often described as “slow.” But slowness can also be read as temporal sovereignty: the ability to refuse a world where the clock is the ultimate authority and the self must always perform.

This is not a fantasy; it is a measurable lived difference. The center often has more money, more options, more institutional thickness. But it also produces chronic stress, thin sociality, and a permanent sense of being behind in one’s own life.

Southern Italy shows that another arrangement is possible: where “success” is not only individual mobility upward and outward, but the capacity to remain rooted, embedded, and human.

The center calls this backward because it cannot price it.

Czechia: everyday ecological citizenship (not the performative kind)

Czechia is frequently described as “post-socialist,” as if its defining feature is what it lacks compared to the West. But Czechia also holds a deep cultural competency that many western societies have partly lost: nature as everyday life, not as a weekend brand.

This isn’t just about hiking. It’s about a dense ecology of practices:

• tramping cultures that produce community through shared movement and simple living;
• mushroom hunting and foraging literacies that make the forest legible;
• lesní školka / forest kindergarten logics that treat weather as normal and children as belonging outdoors;
• informal and semi-formal communities of practice that transmit land-knowledge across generations.

None of this needs to be framed as nationalist pride. It’s more interesting than that. It’s a social design: a culture where ecological competence is not reserved for specialists, where “nature” is not consumed as an exotic escape from urban life, but integrated into the baseline of what a life is.

In the West, “sustainability” often becomes a moral performance—an identity, a purchasing strategy, a policy slogan. In Czechia, there’s often something quieter and more durable: habit. Culture doing the work that campaigns cannot.

That’s a serious asset. It’s a living curriculum for a future that will require land-literacy and non-commodified resilience.

East Germany: longing for socialism is not ignorance—it’s comparative memory

Here we have to be honest: people in the former GDR do romanticize aspects of state socialism. Not because they forgot repression or shortage or surveillance, but because systems are not one-dimensional.

And because what followed “unification” was not simply freedom. It was also:

• rapid asset restructuring,
• humiliating cultural pedagogy (“learn how to be modern”),
• externalized ownership,
• and a durable hierarchy of legitimacy.

When East Germans express longing, they often aren’t longing for authoritarianism. They’re longing for social guarantees, collective infrastructures, and forms of solidarity that made life intelligible and secure, even if the political form was deeply compromised.

There is also a deeper point that western moral language tries to avoid: modern liberal-capitalist states maintain strong security and policing apparatuses too—often using techniques that are remarkably continuous across regime change. The West’s story that authoritarianism is uniquely “over there” is convenient; it hides the coercions that make market society run.

So when someone says, “life felt more secure,” or “people were less alone,” or “the West is cold,” they are not necessarily confessing authoritarian desire. They may be making a precise comparative claim:

• that market society produces isolation as a baseline;
• that the West’s friendliness is often performative and transactional;
• that the constant competition for status corrodes community.

East Germany retains—sometimes stubbornly—residual collectivities: habits of association, directness, pragmatic mutuality, and an intuition that the social world can be organized differently than the market’s default settings.

Even if these habits are mixed, contested, and uneven, they exist. And they matter.

What these “margins” actually share

Southern Italy, Czechia, and East Germany are not the same. Their histories differ; their political trajectories differ; their injustices differ.

But they share a structural position: they have been treated as spaces to be managed by external standards, and they have been pressured to exchange their own capacities for acceptance.

And yet they persist as repositories of counter-capacities that the center struggles to reproduce:

1. Relational density
   Social ties as infrastructure, not decoration.
2. Temporal sovereignty
   The refusal of speed as the measure of worth.
3. Land-literacy
   Everyday ecological competence, intergenerationally transmitted.
4. Collective memory of alternative organization
   Not nostalgia as weakness, but memory as evidence that social systems can be different.
5. Low-capital abundance
   The ability to produce meaning and stability without constantly converting life into money.

The center calls these things “backward” because it cannot govern them easily. They reduce dependence on market-mediated solutions. They make people harder to discipline through scarcity narratives. They generate quiet autonomy.

Revalorization: not tourism, not nostalgia—political re-seeing

Revalorizing marginal capacities does not mean turning them into lifestyle content. It does not mean romanticizing poverty. It does not mean claiming these regions are utopias.

It means something more rigorous:

• seeing retained capacities as assets rather than defects;
• building languages that defend them against stigma;
• and treating them as design resources for futures that will demand more than growth.

It also means refusing the center’s epistemic authority. The “modern” world has produced astonishing wealth and also an astonishing thinning of life. The metrics of the center are not neutral. They are the outcome of power.

So the question is not “How can the margins become more like the center?”
The more radical question is: What can the center learn from what it tried to erase?

Because in a century of ecological constraint, social fragmentation, and political exhaustion, the so-called margins may not be behind.

They may be holding what comes next.