Christian Noack has studied Eastern European History, Media Studies and Slavonic Studies at the University of Cologne. His PhD thesis (2000) was devoted to "National Movement and Nation-Building  among the Muslims of the Russian Empire. He taught Eastern European History at the University of Bielefeld, Germany (2000-2007) and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (2007-2011). He is associate professor for Eastern European Studies at the Universiteit van Amsterdam since August 2011.

His research is focused on the past and present of Muslims and other Minorities in Russia and Central Asia, the cultural and social history of the late Soviet period and the representations of history and collective memories across Europe.

The growing importance of cultural and public diplomacy in the Russian Federation’s foreign policy since the mid-2000s has not gone unnoticed. So far, research on the subject has focused on policy documents testifying to the rise of a “soft power” discourse in Putin’s leadership circles. During the last decade or so, it would seem Russia’s political leadership set-out to base its geopolitical influence increasingly on “attraction” (Nye), particularly through culture. This does not necessarily mean doing away with “hard power” or/and coercion, as the cases of Ukraine, Moldova or Georgia testify.

Recent Russian policy documents indeed emphasise the importance of “miagakaia sila” for securing Russia’s foreign policy interests, in particular in the “near abroad”, be it through new identity concepts, such as the “compatriot” (which refers to Russian speakers living abroad, 2000-2013), or the establishing of new institutions, like the “Russkii Mir” foundation (2007) and the “Rossotrudnichestvo” agency (2008).

This research, emerging from the Jean Monnet Network Project “Nemesis: Memory and Securitization in the European Union and its Neighbourhood,” seeks to explore the specifics of Russian language promotion and its acceptance (“push” and “pull” factors) in a number of case studies, coving the near (from Kazakhstan to Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova) and far abroad (Ireland & Germany).

The research on Russia’s Culture and Language Promotion abroad produced two major outputs, an online course on “Russian Soft Power” (https://canvas.instructure.com/register ; login code:YYFK3K) and a collective volume under the title The Politics of Language Beyond Russia has been published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021. The online version of the book can be accessed here.

Project Website

The European Spa as a Transnational Public Space and Social Metaphor (2019-2022) has been part of the HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) funding initiative of the European Union devoted to the topic Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe. The HERA call defined public spaces as “open domains of human encounters and exchanges”, “connected with the exchanges of values and beliefs and with the formation and appropriations of institutions”. It invited humanities scholars to identify “how the relations between culture and [European] integration within the context of public space(s) have been modelled”.

Within this framework, our project set out to rethink the spa as a core concept and object of European debate. It investigated how the European spa, with its characteristic institutions such as the Kurpark, sanatorium, grand hotel and casino, developed into a transnational public space and functioned as a stage for the negotiation of political, social and cultural issues of European relevance. 

Together with our partners from Spa associations and resorts, local archives and museums, we produced a travelling exhibition, displayed at various spas and spa museums, educational materials and a catalogue of digital resources concerning European spa culture. Moreover, we combined our fieldwork in the different countries with a “researcher in residence” programme. While conducting our project research in situ at our partners’ spa locations, we engaged in events open to the public such as lectures, ‘pint of science’, guided tours through the museums / spa vicinities, presentation and discussion of spa novels or films.

Crowd Sourcing database

An important part of our work was the collection of data on spa towns and spa institutions across Europe in a crowd sourcing database, which is still operational and inviting interested specialist to contribute.  For details see our website. If you should be intereted in contributing, please contact me (c.u.noack@uva.nl). 

Spa History and Spa Literature

 The principal investigators are currently preparing a two volume publication on spa history and spa literature with Bloomsbury. 

Subproject of the Horizon Europe Project “United in Narrative Diversity? Cultural (Ex-) Change and Mutual Perceptions in Eastern and Western Europe at the threshold of the digital age”, 2023-2026, financed by the European Commission’s ‘Horizon’ programme.

Hanna Klimpe, Professor of Social Media at HAW Hamburg (lead)
Christian Noack, Associate professor of Eastern European Studies an der University of Amsterdam
Jana Kazaz / Dominika Hajdu, Globsec – Ideas Shaping the world (Slovakia)
Sophie Picard, Maîtresse de conférence at Université Aix-Marseille

In international communication, Russia has risen from a non-actor to an apparent mastermind of (digital) narratives which are often linked to recent anti-liberal tendencies in East and West. During the Cold War, the West feared the Soviet propaganda machine, but only in 2007-08, Russia has revived its efforts to disseminate ‘its own story’ by substantial investments into foreign language broadcasting and online media activities, especially on social media. Those efforts have only been taken more seriously in the Western World after the US elections in 2016, during which the interference of Kremlin propaganda in the electoral campaigns have widely been reported both by scientists and journalists.

From a Western perspective, this change in foreign policy and communication policies suspiciously coincided with application of Russia hard power, towards Estonia (2007), Georgia (2008), the Annexation of Crimea in 2014 and since 2022, most blatantly, in the full-scale war on Ukraine; giving rise to the perception of Russian soft power being part and parcel of a new strategy of ‘hybrid warfare’. For Eastern and Central European countries, who have known attempts at the mobilization of ethnic minorities and Russian speakers against the governments accompanied by the hacking of sensible web infrastructure for decades, this coincidence came as no surprise.

With the ongoing war in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s attempt to destabilize the cohesion and solidarity of EU member states, our project focuses on cultural differences in the perception of Russian disinformation narratives in Poland, Slovakia, Germany and France, especially in relation to the war on Ukraine. We chose Poland and Slovakia as two member states of the Visegrád group and therefore central forces of Eastern/Central Europe and Germany and France as central forces of the Western part of the European Union. We especially take into consideration national particularities such as the role of Poland as an early supporter of Ukraine’s aspiration to join the EU or Germany as the EU member state with the highest percentage of Russian speakers among the population.

By researching existing databases like those of East StratCom Task Force or European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), and mining additional data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Telegram, we will examine the cultural differences in the perception of Russian disinformation narratives and the way in which they enforce tensions between Eastern/Central and Western EU member states. Our analysis will contain a comparison of the differences in emphasis of known framing strategies (such as the framing of Ukrainian government as a Nazi regime or Western European liberalism as a threat to traditional values, the threat of the war to socioeconomic stability) in the four countries as well as the observation of the variation of those framing strategies in specific cultural contexts. On a formal level, we will also research whether we can find significant differences in the quality of media in which disinformation narratives are spread and shared in the different countries (i.e., whether we can detect a preference of videos, deepfakes/AI, memes, text-based messages).

Our aim is to identify strategies to adapt framings to specific cultural contexts and to help journalists as well as politicians and stakeholders in cultural policy to identify specific narratives as well as framing patterns. This should facilitate the development of more targeted strategies in opposing such disinformation narratives, with the latter having already left negative imprints on the transcultural dialogue between Eastern/Central and Western EU member states.

In the course of the research, we aim at a close exchange and collaboration with other scholars in the field, with media watchdogs and with journalists, directly involved with the impact of the social media narratives (re-)distributed by pro-Russian actors via social media. GlobSec, the ZEIT-Stiftung, Clingendael, and the FU Berlin are among our strategic partners for this project.

We will distribute and discuss our research strategies among these partners and organise workshops and other forms of online exchange in order to refine and, if necessary, revise our approaches during the life-spa of the project (2023-2026).  and revise. The project findings will be disseminated via academic publication, conferences, workshop with journalists, briefings for stakeholders in European and national agencies. Last not least, they will inform the design of new course on the BA and MA levels in the participating universities.  

Subproject of the Horizon Europe Project “United in Narrative Diversity? Cultural (Ex-) Change and Mutual Perceptions in Eastern and Western Europe at the threshold of the digital age”, 2023-2026, financed by the European Commission’s ‘Horizon’ programme.

Prof. Beata Ociepka (Lead), Institute for International Studies, Uniwersytet Wrocławski

Prof. Pierre-Frédéric Weber, Institute of History, Uniwersytet Szczeciński

Dr Christian Noack, Department of History, European Studies and Religious Studies, University of Amsterdam,

After a quarter of a century, since the Ukrainian and migration crises of 2014-5, the honeymoon of the ‘past-historic era’ (Fukuyama) following the collapse of communism in 1989-91 is over. Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, not even the paradigmatic perception of a “New Cold War” is tenable any more. Russia is at war with Ukraine, and according to its own propaganda, with the West at large. While the war ostensibly united Europe against the aggressor, signs of increasing alienation between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ members of the European Union become more tangible with every major crisis, be it in terms of conflicting security interests, of democratic or legal standards.

In fact, there is substantial evidence that this parting of ways between East and West predates the second decade of the 21^st century. Our research project suggests to review these processes of alienation through the prism of (post-)colonial theory, taking the political and cultural relations materialising the field of cultural diplomacy as a case. What is the impact of the post-colonial narratives in the West and the East of Europe? Can Said’s concept of Orientalism be transferred to the case of the West and the East of the EU? Can the post-colonial approach be useful in the process of decoding the very term of European heritage and European values in the West and in the East?

We ask to what extent the cultural diplomacy of the EU countries in East and West reflects ethnocentrism, as for example in nation branding approaches to cultural diplomacy. To what extent, by contrast, does it contribute to a better mutual understanding in international relations? Are success stories of the past, like the de-escalation in post WWII Europe, for example in the French-German or, more recently, Dutch-German relations, transferable to current East-West relations within Europe? Or are they, on the contrary, a perpetuation of the tendencies of ‘old’ Europe ‘teaching’ the ‘newcomers’ inapplicable lessons, thus shaping mutual perceptions in the long term in a negative way

These appear to be valid questions in period of time in which the routines of cultural diplomacy are challenged by issues like migration, pandemics and the war against Ukraine. The Covid pandemic, for example, deprived European citizens temporarily of direct contacts and immersion in other European countries. Since 2014, the Ukrainian war has challenged the role of cultural diplomacy as the “open channel of communication” between the countries in conflict even more fundamentally. We assume that the decrease in direct exchanges facilitates the rise of stereotypes, cliches and prejudices in mutual perceptions, further petrifying established post-colonial East – West narratives.

The working hypothesis of this part of NARDIV project is that the approach to intercultural exchange in cultural diplomacy develops in a trade-off between domestically defined ‘national interests’ and internationally established ‘cosmopolitan’ practices, with the liberalism and de-nationalising character of the latter being perceived as a ‘colonial’ imposition. In consequence, Western-centric narratives have been contested in the East. The aim of the project is to lay bare the often-times concealed tensions with the aim of paving the way for a new dialogue between stakeholders, state and non-state actors in the fields of cultural and public diplomacy, allowing for more diversity in the narratives of diverse national states and an overarching European communality.

Focusing on narratives and frames, this project analyses the discourses about the past and their use in cultural diplomacy to answer the question as to whether the West and the East share the same understanding of “Europeanness”, “European values” and “European heritage”. We suggest that the answer is negative, and that the post-colonial approaches will be useful to explain the causes.

The projects rests on three strands of research:

1. The post-colonial as an issue and as a frame in the operation of EUNIC clusters (Prof. Ociepka)

EUNIC defines itself as ‘the European network of organizations engaging in cultural relations (…) with a network of over 120 clusters’ (www.eunicglobal.eu/about). This subproject assumes that the modes of cooperation within the clusters, between the cultural institutes and the other involved actors from the West and the East, will reveal the impact of the postcolonial narratives and interpretations and will influence the organization of the clusters, their relations with stakeholders in hosting countries, topics and content (messages). The objective of this part of the WP study is to analyze the processes of inclusion and exclusion in cultural diplomacy between the West and the East, while focusing on the clusters and to check on the mechanisms why and how clusters are constructed, where do the ideas to build the new ones are formed and which nodes of the EUNIC network play the programming roles in them. The study will be focused on three clusters (one in each country: France, Germany, Poland) and done from the neo-institutional angle in the form of the analysis of the structures and decision taking processes. Media analysis is a relevant part of this subproject. Its objective is to check whether the media as actors of public debates used the post-colonial frames to serve for more understanding in international relations or to strengthen the ethnocentric discourses. The interviews and media analysis will allow for the in-depth study of the perceptions and their reflection in clusters’ initiatives. To achieve its aims, the study uses the effects of the two cases Polish-Ukrainian and German – Polish, covered by the same WP, as history will be the base for many post-colonial narratives.

2. Germany and Poland (Prof. Weber)

Since the early 1960s the French-German path leading “from enmity to friendship” has been considered both in France and in (West) Germany as a success story and has acquired a paradigmatic status for other nations trying to rebuild their bilateral relations after periods of war and conflict. Since the late 1980s, it is looming large as a model for Poles and Germans in order to foster reconciliation process. Often uncritically applied, its mechanism produced positive and negative results, in the third decade of the 21st century, the relationship between Germany and Poland is often still tense. This sub-project proposes to deconstruct the French-German conflict-solving process and, especially, the soft power of “friendship” as one of its main slogans regarding political practice and achievements in the relations between French and Germans. Analysing the patterns in the public discourses on reconciliation, and exploring the actual implementation by interviewing with German and Polish practitioners, it suggests that the Western (French-German) reconciliation patterns are perceived as unifying, de-nationalising and homogenising in a post-colonial way in Poland.

3. Poland and Ukraine (Dr Noack)

In the 21st century, crucial aspects of 20th century history of Poland and Ukraine have become bones of contention. Other than in Western Europe, where historical research was conducted at universities, and commemoration mainly institutionalized in museums and memorial sites, government and opposition in both states are aiming at an institutionalization of their respective “correct” interpretations through Institutes of National Remembrance, besides state-funded museums and memorials. This positioned Poland in either affirmative or dismissive ways towards mainstream history debates in Western Europe. At the same time, Poland supported the pro-Western and anti-Soviet reorientation in the politics of memory in the wake of Ukraine’s Orange revolution. In cooperation with the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS), this sub-project suggests to scrutinize Ukrainian memory politics, specifically the view of 20th century Polish-Ukrainian relations since 1991, applying a post -colonial perspective on the most important transnational influences, above all Soviet / Russian, Polish, national diaspora in the US and Canada, and EU-European.