In the last 10 years, with increased migration to Europe via its eastern borders and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, these borders have become the subject of heightened attention and scrutiny both from the political institutions in Brussels and from the politicians and people inhabiting the countries at the eastern edge of the European Union (EU). While the history of Europe’s borders, their cultural and political impact, have long surpassed the supranational project that is the European Union, the most recent contestations and sociocultural negotiations arguably began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the incremental expansion of the EU to former communist states. While from an everyday perspective, borders are mainly understood as political and geographical entities, their symbolic meaning and cultural impact is often more interesting for academic research; it is this that is at the centre of the volume under review. The geographical focus of the collection edited by Elissa Helms and Tuija Pulkkinen lies in the Balkans and the Baltics, two regions that are rarely thought of together, even though, as the collection demonstrates, their shared position on the threshold between East and West produces a lot of similar meanings and experiences.

Building on the extensive research that has been done on border spaces, their impact on societies, and the people who cross them or live in their proximity, Helms and Pulkkinen argue that borders are “productive” in nature, meaning that they create cultural and sociological phenomena that would “not have existed in that form without the borders” (2). The phenomenon the chapters in this volume explore is “desire”, with a special emphasis on desires relating to sex and gender. While connecting borders with questions relating to sex and gender is not new, the volume is distinct in its focus on the “desire-productive” (2) nature of borders. This common thread is closely adhered to by the group of authors, despite the fact that they come from fields and disciplines as diverse as the social sciences, philology, social anthropology, gender studies, and migration studies. The collection consists of a total of eight chapters, with Chapters 1 to 5 as well as 7 approaching the issue from an ethnographic point of view and mainly being based on participant observations and interviews. Chapters 6 and 8 are based on textual and iconographical sources and take a methodologically different approach. All chapters are insightful and contribute to the argument put forward by Helms and Pulkkinen. In the following I will give a brief overview of all chapters, but highlight Chapters 6 and 8, which in my opinion produced particularly relevant insights.

Sarah Green (Chapter 1) examines three different types of borders – and, subsequently, the different types of desire they produce in the people that cross them – that overlap on the Greek island of Lesvos: the border between two nations, Greece and Turkey; the one dividing EU territory from a so-called “third country” (25); and the border between one’s own reality and an imagined, utopian space. What is at first glance a surprising connection between the imaginary of female Western tourists seeking and simultaneously constructing their utopian, “sunny” space and the lived experience of local Greek women on the island clearly illustrates the variability of the editors’ approach and therefore provides a sound introductory chapter.

Rozita Dimova (Chapter 2) explores desires produced in the border regions of Greece and North Macedonia in the context of the Greek financial crisis – i.e. the desire to maintain one’s lifestyle after the economic downfall or to escape the realities of economic hardship and receive special treatment across the border. The third chapter by Aija Lulle examines the role of borders in Latvian women’s sense of sexuality and the ethnosexualisation they experience after migrating to Portugal. Chapter 4 by May-Len Skilbrei deals with border-crossing prostitution in Nordic countries and the desires of both the women from postsocialist societies who sell sex and the Nordic men who specifically seek out paid sex with “Eastern European” women. Anastasia Diatlova and Lena Näre (Chapter 5) conducted interviews with women from postsocialist societies who migrated to Finland and Italy. Their study finds that the women strategically use different forms of gendered desire in pursuit of a better life and that their actions can be placed in the context of a renegotiation of a “post-socialist gender order” (97). Chapter 7 by Olga Davydova-Minguet and Pirjo Pöllänen examines how the border space between Finland and Russia has historically produced desires related to the past and the future, and how each of these relate to the category of gender.

Michaela Schäuble (Chapter 6) uses a variety of textual and iconographic sources to provide an account of the past and present of Croatia’s sexualised and gendered self-narrative as “defender of Western European Christian culture” (118), which is complicated by its geographical and cultural position in the Balkans. Located at Europe’s geographical and cultural southeastern periphery, Croatia’s self-image throughout history has been representative of a desire to belong and appeal to the western part of Europe and distinguish the nation from the eastern “other”, epitomised by the remaining Balkan states and nations.

At the same time, Europe’s historical reluctance to embrace Croatia meant it consistently returned to national narratives and the creation of hero figures rooted in traditional Balkan folklore. These narratives and images, as Schäuble vividly shows, are both gendered and sexualised in nature. Nineteenth-century images for example show Croatia embodied in a female warrior figure defending Western civilisation from the Balkan and Muslim “other”. Other female depictions of Croatia show the nation as a “shy, neglected and vulnerable girl who is in need of male protection and seeks recognition from Europe” (139). In the 1990s, this protector was epitomised by Ante Gotovina, a general of the Croatian army during the Yugoslav Wars. The countless popular books, films, and television series produced about Gotovina depict him as a heroic male figure that is based both on folkloric tales of the hajduci (121) – untamed but honourable bandits living in the border regions – and noticeably sexualised. Europe and the Western world, which not only failed to welcome Croatia with open arms after the breakup of Yugoslavia but also humiliated the nation by prosecuting its war hero Gotovina for war crimes, then became a “whore” in nationalist Croatian narratives: an immoral female figure that stands in opposition to the nation’s honourable self-images as either female warrior figure, neglected and vulnerable girl, or strong male (Balkan) hero figure.

Katja Kahlina and Dušica Ristivojević (Chapter 8) explore the recent surge and interlinking of anti-LGBT and anti-EU discourses in Serbia. They make the argument that the European Union’s repeated critique of Serbia’s lack of LGBT rights since the start of the country’s integration process in the late 2000s and early 2010s has in turn produced a Serbian desire “to claim national and cultural difference” (175) and as a consequence, a rise in the combined anti-LGBT and anti-EU rhetoric in certain societal and political groups. With texts and speeches by EU actors and institutions, the authors first show how the liberalisation of LGBT rights in the EU was part of the construction of a European identity during the early 2000s. By defining “morally desirable qualities” (165) held by its members, EU countries distinguished themselves from the post-Soviet states that displayed deficiencies in this respect and simultaneously raised the bar for potential membership. Right-wing groups in Serbia then blamed the increased activity and visibility of LGBT groups, especially the organisation of the Belgrade Pride parade, on the government giving in to outside pressure from the EU. The visibility of LGBT activism in the Serbian capital was rhetorically connected to a loss of sovereignty, both cultural and even territorial, with right-wing demagogues marking the Pride parade as a tool of distraction in the controversy over Kosovo’s independence. The EU’s cultural border-making practice of demanding LGBT rights, the authors argue, produced “a desire to strengthen difference” and “an anti-LGBT imaginary becomes the basis of a newly affirmed national identity” (175). While the overall connection between the crafting of an EU identity and a Serbian reluctance to bow to outside pressure is demonstrated convincingly in this chapter, the narrow focus of border practices being responsible for “producing” a political outcome or movement can at times overlook the agency of the right-wing demagogues who intentionally and maliciously capitalise on controversial or emotional issues for their own political gain.

While I have chosen to highlight the two chapters where the relevance of the research is most apparent to me, all authors put their findings in a wider historical and political context, proving the overall pertinence of the volume, while indicating the need for further research. The bigger part of the research was conducted before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022, and a lot has changed as a result. This volume provides pivotal insights into important immediate antecedents to current anxieties, imaginaries, and controversies playing out on Europe’s eastern borders.