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At the discussion table, we would like to draw our attention to the specificity of East Central Europe both as an imaginary space on the colonial maps of the past, as an actual locus in the colonial world-system and as a specific position from which to look at the colonial history and its troubled legacies in the present. Drawing on existing research, we would like to reconsider how and to what extent various colonialist discourses from the mid 19th Century on affected the state- and nation-building in the region, while taking into account the precarious symbolical status of “the East” in the colonial imagery of the time. We would like to go further into that direction and ask whether - and if so then how far - these colonial discourses influenced the socialist era and more recently the post-socialist present of the region. Given the specific responses of the Visegrád countries during the so called migration crisis, in the recent discussions about the climate change or in other global agendas, we ask why, to what extent and in what forms the colonial thinking and the historical experience of catching-up with “the West” persisted and still have been playing a significant role in political de/mobilization in individual countries of the region and in the East Central Europe as a whole.Filip Herza works as a post-doc researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Ethnology. His main focus is on history of knowledge, mainly related to embodied differences such as race, gender and disability, with emphasis on East Central Europe in global and colonial context. In his previous project, Filip concentrated on imaginations of embodied "otherness" and the freak show culture in 19th and early 20th century Prague. Lately, he ventures into the colonial /global history of the interwar Czechoslovakia.Dr hab. Grzegorz Krzywiec – Researcher at the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences (Polska Akademia Nauk, PAN). Published largely on Polish anti-Semitism, Polish-Jewish relations, right-wing and fascism in Poland in Central and East European context. Among others: Polska bez Żydów. Studia z dziejów idei, wyobraźni i praktyk antysemickich na ziemiach polskich, 1905-1914, (Instytut Historii, Warszawa 2017); Chauvinism, Polish style. The Case of Roman Dmowski. Beginnings (1886-1905) (Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2016). With Kamil Kijek, co-editor of the special volume of Jewish History Quarterly (Kwartalnik Historii Żydów), 2, June 2016 on Polish anti-Semitism in the 1905-1939 period. Now running a project on cultural history of Polish fascism.