Using English-language newspaper articles retrieved from digital repositories, this article examines the cultural asymmetrical encounter between Western and Eastern Europe after 1989. It argues that due to the rise of the Iron Curtain after 1948 and the post-war progress of the Western European integration project after 1950, the idea of ‘Europe’ was confined to the West until 1989. After 1989, however, the Eastern European nations were free to ‘return to Europe’, and in order to do so they followed the ‘reference model’ of the West. Taking the institution of the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) as a case study, the article demonstrates how both Western and Eastern European cities used the ECOC title as a gateway to modernity, why it acquired an extra functionality in the East as a stage where they could showcase their ‘European’ credentials, and how it gradually developed into one of the EU’s ‘soft power’ resources.