Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012 9783869456072, 9783883097992
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Leonidas Donskis
libri nigri 24
Copyright © 2013. Traugott Bautz Verlag. All rights reserved.
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World
Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012, Traugott Bautz Verlag, 2013. ProQuest Ebook
Leonidas Donskis
Copyright © 2013. Traugott Bautz Verlag. All rights reserved.
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012, Traugott Bautz Verlag,
LIBRI NIGRI
24
Edited by
Hans Rainer Sepp
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Editorial Board Suzi Adams · Adelaide │ Babette Babich · New York │ Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray · Waterloo, Ontario │ Damir Barbarić · Zagreb │ Marcus Brainard · London │ Martin Cajthaml · Olomouc │ Mauro Carbone · Lyon │ Chan Fai Cheung · Hong Kong │ Cristian Ciocan · Bucureşti │ Ion Copoeru · Cluj-Napoca │ Renato Cristin · Trieste │ Riccardo Dottori · Roma │ Eddo Evink · Groningen │ Matthias Flatscher · Wien │ Dimitri Ginev · Sofia │ Jean-Christophe Goddard · Toulouse │ Andrzej Gniazdowski · Warszawa │ Ludger Hagedorn · Wien │ Terri J. Hennings · Freiburg │ Seongha Hong · Jeollabukdo │ Felipe Johnson · Santiago de Chile │ René Kaufmann · Dresden │ Vakhtang Kebuladze · Kyjiw │ Dean Komel · Ljubljana │ Pavlos Kontos · Patras │ Kwok-ying Lau · Hong Kong │ Mette Lebech · Maynooth │ Nam-In Lee · Seoul │ Balázs Mezei · Budapest │ Monika Małek · Wrocław │ Viktor Molchanov · Moskwa │ Liangkang Ni · Guanghzou │ Cathrin Nielsen · Frankfurt am Main │ Ashraf Noor · Jerusalem │ Karel Novotný · Praha │ Luis Román Rabanaque · Buenos Aires │ Gian Maria Raimondi · Pisa │ Rosemary Rizo-Patrón de Lerner · Lima │ Kiyoshi Sakai · Tokyo │ Javier San Martín · Madrid │ Alexander Schnell · Paris │ Marcia Schuback · Stockholm │ Agustín Serrano de Haro · Madrid │ Tatiana Shchyttsova · Vilnius │ Olga Shparaga · Minsk │ Michael Staudigl · Wien │ Georg Stenger · Wien │ Silvia Stoller · Wien │ Ananta Sukla · Cuttack │ Toru Tani · Kyoto │ Detlef Thiel · Wiesbaden │ Lubica Ucnik · Perth │ Pol Vandevelde · Milwaukee │ Chung-chi Yu · Kaohsiung │ Antonio Zirion · México City – Morelia.
Edited at the Central-European Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University Prague. www.sif-praha.cz
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012, Traugott Bautz Verlag,
Leonidas Donskis
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World
Copyright © 2013. Traugott Bautz Verlag. All rights reserved.
A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009–2012
Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012, Traugott Bautz Verlag,
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
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Die deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie. Detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet abrufbar über http://dnb.ddb.de
Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH D-99734 Nordhausen 2013 Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier Alle Rechte vorbehalten Printed in Germany
ISBN 978-3-88309-799-2
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012, Traugott Bautz Verlag,
Copyright © 2013. Traugott Bautz Verlag. All rights reserved.
To the memory of John Hiden
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012, Traugott Bautz Verlag, 2013. ProQuest
Copyright © 2013. Traugott Bautz Verlag. All rights reserved. Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012, Traugott Bautz Verlag, 2013. ProQuest
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Contents
Foreword
10
Acknowledgments
13
1. The Cycle of Abuse, or a Grimace of the New Europe
14
2. Trapped by Half-Truths
17
3. Unnoticed Fascism
20
4. The Miraculous Year 1989, or In Praise of Weakness
23
5. European Citizens, or How the Culture of Curiosity Works
26
6. Memory Wars
29
7. Reason or Treason?
33
8. The Tragedy with Fragile Signs of Hope
36
9. The Springtime of Our Discontents?
39
10. Does the Baltic Region Exist?
42
11. The Treason of Intellectuals, Or An Identity Crisis?
45
12. We Are Faster than History, Yet Slower Than a Lifetime
48
13. A Lonely Voice of Despair
51
14. The Craving for Liberty in the Arab World
54
15. Belgique mon amour…
57
16. Freedom and Democracy in Decline
60
17. Do Old-Fashioned Intellectuals and Politics Have a Future?
63
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18. The Culture of Fear
66
19. The Dissonances of Realpolitik and Human Rights
69
20. Postimperialism
72
21. A Dangerous Delusion
75
22. A New Technocratic Revolution or the End of Modern Nations?
78
23. Where Does Memory Live?
81
24. Spenglerian Fallacy and Europe as Mutual Rediscovery
84
25. The Individuals by Default
87
26. The New Russia with the Worn-Out Leader
90
27. Commercialism or a Cult of Brutality and Power?
93
28. The End of Modern Politics?
96
29. Discursive Handicap of Central and Eastern Europe
99
30. Remembering a Friend of the Baltics
102
31. The Blind Leading the Blind?
105
32. Democrats and Dictators
108
33. The Revolt of Crooks
111
34. The Source of Success
114
35. Searching for the Europe of Czesław Miłosz
117
36. From the Revolution of Dilettantes to the Managerial Revolution
120
37. Human Rights and Multiculturalism in Our Troubled World
123
38. Nationalism and Postimperial Syndrome
126
39. The Crisis of Liberalism?
129
40. Liquid Totalitarianism
132
41. The New Class of Political Entertainers
135
42. The Ukrainian Perspective on Politics
138
43. It Happens Overnight
141
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44. Is Football just Another Name for Politics?
144
45. When Treachery Becomes Virtue
147
46. Criminals in Politics
150
47. Is European Culture a Fantasy?
153
48. Our Ambiguous New World, or Can We Reverse a Tragedy of the EU?
156
49. A Heroic Narrative in Violation of Good Conscience
159
50. The Inflation of Genocide
166
Epilogue
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Sketching and Mapping the Moral and Political Sensibilities of Our Time
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174
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Foreword
The year 2009 marked a substantial change in my life. Having long served as a wandering scholar, then as a well-established Lithuanian academic and host of an intellectual television program, I was elected to the European Parliament on behalf of Lithuania. It was in July 2009 that a Lithuanian journalist who served at that time as a columnist in The Baltic Times came up with a proposal for me to act as one covering the life and creative endeavor of a MEP, and also offering some insights into Lithuanian and all-European politics and culture. After deliberating a bit, I agreed to accept and began writing a monthly text for The Baltic Times. Looking back, I have no regrets. Serving as a columnist and writing short pieces that were meant to give more focus on and attention to the region of small countries with a big and rich history repaid me in many ways. I began analyzing Lithuania’s legislation and foreign policies, and also those of our difficult neighbors to the east. A closer observation of dissent and its suppression in Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and other “transitional democracies,”—or, to be precise, tyrannies parading as democracies—was an asset as well, since I have always been keen on defending human rights, especially those of human rights activists themselves, people like dissenting Russian intellectuals and disbarred Chinese lawyers. Since much of my scholarship revolved around East European studies and East European intellectual history in particular, it would have been incomprehensible for me to bypass men and women of dissent and ideas whose moral choices and political actions were formative and decisive when I was working on my early academic books. This was the case, for instance, with Identity and Freedom, the book
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in which three noted Lithuanian émigré scholars and intellectuals are portrayed: the sociologist Vytautas Kavolis, the political scientist Aleksandras Shtromas, and the poet and literary scholar Tomas Venclova. Shtromas and Venclova were high-profile Soviet dissidents. Writing of them, I had no chance to rethink and portray them otherwise than through an intense process of delving deeply into the life and work of major Russian and Ukrainian dissidents who were Shtromas’s and Venclova’s brothers- and sisters-in-arms. The genre of brief commentary is not totally alien to me, and it has never been so, as I was early on writing short commentaries for Lithuanian newspapers and online magazines. Yet this time I had to take on a different path in terms of linguistic and political sensitivities, since writing for an English-speaking readership allowed me to reassess many things trying to make them as understandable and available, or, on the contrary, challenging, intriguing, and provocative as possible. Whatever the case, a brief political commentary is not a philosophical essay; nor is it a free-floating review essay or an intellectual overview of literature and arts. Having said this, the point was to find somehow a proper way to connect my Eastern and Central European sensitivities to a wider readership made up by people of various professions, creeds, doctrines and political views. Therefore, this book is an account (as well as a hidden diary) of a politician and human rights defender who has at hand more tools to handle his experience in scholarly ways than his more conventional peers. My experience as coordinator on behalf of European liberals in the EP subcommittee on human rights, and also as an active human rights defender helped my considerably in getting first-hand knowledge of the human rights situation and record in many regions and countries of the world. In addition to The Baltic Times, in 2011 I began acting as a columnist for Ukrainian Week, a bright and challenging magazine that richly contributes to the atmosphere of political liberty, dissenting opinion, and civic-mindedness in Ukraine. Thanks to the translation of my books into the Ukrainian language, I was not an unknown en-
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tity in this large and wonderful country. Due to the circumstances related to the rule of President Viktor Yanukovych, which forced Ukraine to live on the edge and stand at a crossroads, my outspoken writings were—and continue to be—much in tune with the fearless journalism of Ukrainian Week. This allows a window of opportunity and hope for a great country that, in my view, embodies multicultural richness, disturbing social complexities, dramatic political dilemmas, and splendid literary and the cultural accomplishments of a boundary region of European intersections known as Eastern Europe. Thinking as a philosopher wearing the mask of a modern social and political commentator, writing as a writer yet acting as a politician: such is the lot of a person standing in my shoes. I have accepted this challenge and adventure in my life as good fortune, trying to benefit as a thinker and as a European citizen. Whether I have succeeded or failed is something that I wouldn’t know. Only the reader can tell. L. D.
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Brussels, Belgium October 2012
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Acknowledgments
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I have the pleasant duty of thanking my colleagues and friends at The Baltic Times and the Ukrainian Week alike, who have graciously allowed me to include in this book the commentaries I wrote for them. For the permission to use my essay, “The Inflation of Genocide,” I am grateful to European Voice. For translation of my essay “A Heroic Narrative in Violation of Good Conscience” from Lithuanian into English, my thanks are due to Geoffrey Vasiliauskas. For translation of the first part of the epilogue from Lithuanian into English, I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Mykolas Drunga. For copyediting, polishing and trimming this book, I am grateful to David Hargrove. I cannot thank enough my colleagues Dr. Christoph Böhr and Professor Dr. Hans Rainer Sepp for their collegiality, kindness, and valuable suggestions. L. D. Strasbourg, France October 2012
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1 The Cycle of Abuse, or A Grimace of the New Europe
The Fourteenth of July 2009 was an historic date marking two hundred and twenty years from the beginning of the French Revolution. One would expect a celebration of the date to embrace the new reality of Europe; first and foremost, its unique and historically unprecedented solidarity. One would think that that day marked the reconciliation of Europe, the Old and the New, to use Donald Rumsfeld’s parlance—especially in light of the election of the Polish Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Jerzy Buzek (former prime minister of Poland and one of the heroes of the Solidarity movement) as president of the European Parliament. A unique chance opened up to put many things behind us, including frequent clashes of the moral and political sensibilities of the “two Europes,” meaning Old Europe’s liberal, tolerant attitudes to human diversity, and New Europe’s old-fashioned infatuations and reactive conservatism. Yet this was not to be. It would have been too good to be true. How ironic that on that same day when the newly elected European Parliament opened the plenary session, Lithuania’s Parliament, the Seimas, adopted a law which turned down, almost overnight, everything that present Europe stands for and everything it represents. The Lithuanian Law on the Protection of Minors from the Detrimental Effect of Public Information, adopted on 14 July 2009, struck human rights defenders and media people, both in Lithuania and in the EU, as overtly homophobic and profoundly undemocratic. This law, twice vetoed by Lithuania’s former president, Valdas Adamkus, was over-
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ruled by the Seimas. In addition, the law was severely criticized by President Dalia Grybauskait÷, the nation’s current leader. More than that, the law has recently been assessed in vigorous terms by the Lithuanian media, political commentators, and several civil liberties and human rights defenders who stressed its homophobic substance along with its dangerous political implications, such as censorship and self-censorship. Needless to say, this law has little if anything to do with the protection of children. Instead, it discriminates against the gay and lesbian citizens of the country. Whatever the case, the law’s equation of homosexuality to physical violence and necrophilia is morally repugnant and deeply disgraceful. Still, it is difficult to believe that the adoption of such a law was possible in an EU country at the beginning of the twenty-first century. One can take this law as an unfortunate move and as a profound misunderstanding, to say the very least. Changes to Article 310 in the penal code, and Article 214 in the administrative code, were debated in the Seimas. These articles would criminalize—with the threat of a fine, community work, or imprisonment—any person involved in the “promotion” of homosexuality in “any public space.” If this is not a slide into state-sponsored homophobia and criminalization of public expression of Lithuania’s gay and lesbian citizens, what is it? A sad reminder of the cycle of abuse in a country that suffered isolation and humiliation for more than five decades? This law is a disgrace, but even more disgraceful would be an attempt to obfuscate, trivialize, and, in effect, justify it. This is why a sort of déjà vu occurred upon hearing how some conservative politicians in the EP tried to depict the EP Resolution on this law as a blow allegedly dealt by the EP to the national parliament of a sovereign country. In their understanding, the idea to ask for the Human Rights Agency’s expert opinion on whether this law contradicts fundamental rights would jeopardize the independence and sovereignty of Lithuania. What can I say on this issue both as a Lithuanian and as an MEP? If we apply double standards by refusing to react to the violations of
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human rights within the EU, yet simultaneously engaging in verbose assaults on Russia, China, or Iran, are we not at the peril of closing ranks with those profoundly undemocratic countries? What would the dividing line between the EU and Russia be if we had adopted the principle of non-interference with national parliaments on such matters as human rights? This would signify the end of Europe in its present form. If so much sound and fury comes in defending the “holy” rights of the national parliament to criminalize diversity, are we not at risk of transforming the EU into a merely amoral trading bloc, to use the words of Joseph Galliano? (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2009/sep/14/gay-hate-laws-lithuania) All in all, the European values, norms, and solidarity prevailed, and the EP sent a powerful message reminding all of the simple truth that civil liberties and human rights can never be confined to domestic affairs. They are not a property of the state, no matter how just and democratic that state might be. And they never shall be so as far as the EU is concerned.
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2 Trapped by Half-Truths
Are the Baltic countries and Ukraine really praising to the skies their WWII Nazi collaborators or celebrating their disgraceful pages of the past? This is the question that arises on hearing present Russia’s never-ending insinuations on the Baltic States as failing to adopt the truly European standard in assessing WWII. In fact, Russia itself detests and furiously condemns any attempt to hold it accountable for the crimes against humanity it committed in the twentieth century. Small wonder that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has recently accused Ukraine and the Baltic States of historical revisionism and alleged praise of their Nazi collaborators. Russia’s rage can easily be explained by pointing to a fear of losing the remnants of its political and moral authority and, perhaps, its very legitimacy—if not as a superpower, then at least as a global player. Telling sweet lies to its own citizens and practicing selfdeception seem all that Russia has to offer to both its older and younger generations of hard-line state supporters now. Being hesitant to admit its crimes and fallacies, Russia objects not only any equation of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany but also any stronger, symmetry-of-crime-based opinion on the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939. This does not mean, however, that there are no threats resulting from the equation of Nazism and Communism, or from the idea of equivalency of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in terms of their crimes against humanity. However tempting it may be, the idea of the moral and political equivalency of National Socialism and Communism has its dark side. It concerns an unavoidable relativization, trivialization, and obfuscation of the Holocaust. Moreover, this idea can
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be grossly and dangerously misleading in nuance and detail, although it can make sense from the point of view of conventional wisdom. In a way, both major totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century can be viewed as one another’s negative double. In fact, they have obviously closed ranks in their brutal practices, violent politics, and social engineering undertakings. Yet, on a closer look, it appears that we would unpardonably simplify things by holding them as identical. Not because one was somewhat less repulsive or more humane than another, but because the paths that the West took in treating them diverged irreversibly. The West was an ally to the Soviet Union. Even more importantly, the Soviet regime had gradually transformed itself into a sort of authoritarian dictatorship, which, under Leonid Brezhnev, bore a stronger family resemblance to the cleptocratic and criminal regimes of Africa and South America than to Nazi Germany or even Stalinist Russia. The fact is that the West has worked out a modus vivendi with the Soviet regime, which lasted not merely twelve years like Nazism, but for more than seventy years. Whatever the case, we cannot succumb to the temptation to adopt black-and-white theories that rest on half-truths. Russia’s fierce resistance to a wide international condemnation of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact as the first move and one of the genuine causes of WWII has nothing to do with European clashes of historical memory. Present-day Russia’s historical revisionism is not about history at all. It is about the present and the future. In fact, it is as much about history as the occupation of Ossetia and Abkhazia was about the defense of Russian citizens’ human rights. Let us call a spade a spade. Russia still tries hard to repaint and relegitimize its criminal policies in Chechnya and the lands of Georgia by parroting Western political vocabulary and presenting the world with a blend of fantasy and jokes about its struggle against international terrorism. Much in that same fashion, Russia, by denying the fact of the occupation and annexation of the Baltic States in 1940 and by justifying the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, is paving the way to a new division of Europe and, presumably, to Finlandization of the Baltic countries.
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What happened in Georgia a year ago may have been Russia’s attempt to set up a pattern for a similar scenario in Ukraine or the Baltics. Ironically, Mikhail Gorbachev appears to have been a dove of peace, and the USSR under him a new and promising, albeit flawed, democracy to compare to Putin-Medvedev’s Russia that does not bother to embrace the ugly legacy of its totalitarian past as a source of national pride. True, Russia, like many other nations, heroically fought the Nazis. The civilized world will never forget that. Yet heroism in WWII cannot become the license to rehabilitate Stalinism or, even worse, to justify and, thus, symbolically repeat the crimes of the past recasting them as part of an internationally acceptable pattern of Realpolitik.
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3 Unnoticed Fascism
British historian Norman Cohn (1915–2007), in his book Warrant for Genocide, argued that the Nazis and the Holocaust they committed have overshadowed earlier genocidal events and atrocities in Europe that, although unquestionably of smaller scale, were nearly as sinister and cruel as those initiated by the Third Reich. Cohn described the earlier politics and practices of hatred as “unnoticed fascism.” He meant a series of horrible antisemitic pogroms orchestrated by the Okhrana (or Okhranka, as it was called by the masses), the secret political police of the Russian Empire. These pogroms stretched from the infamous Kishinev pogrom in 1903 through the massacre of the Jews by the Whites during the Civil War in Russia, claiming the lives of several hundred thousands of Jews. Had a sinister and murderous antisemitic ideology that fuelled the massacre remained the unparalleled phenomenon of this sort in the twentieth century, it would have doubtlessly merited the name of fascism, especially referring to the Union of the Russian People (Soyuz Russkogo Naroda), commonly known as the Black Hundreds, a fanatical terrorist hate group skillfully manipulated by the Okhrana. Small wonder that National Socialism made humanity forget its predecessors with all their imperfections and inconsistencies. Whatever the case, we know for certain who manufactured the two major antisemitic forgeries used to fuel bigotry of the masses and boost the morale of soldiers before the pogroms—including the Kishinev pogrom—namely, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The Grand Rabbi Speech. The former was crafted by Pyotr Ivanovich
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Rachkovsky, the sinister head of the foreign branch of the Okhrana in Paris, whereas the latter was nothing more than an excerpt from Hermann Goedsche’s sensationalist 1868 novel, Biarritz, based on a fictional Rabbi’s midnight speech to the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, an element of a nineteenth-century conspiracy theory. Yet again, déjà vu arises when watching Andrei Nekrasov’s and Olga Konskaya’s (1964–2009) film Russian Lessons (2009). After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West was convinced that the epic struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism, no matter whether the latter was disguised as a rival civilization to the West or as a legitimate heir to, or another version of, the Enlightenment, was over. That was not to be. When the war in the Balkans broke out and the West revealed the shocking barbarity and hatred deeply embedded in the former Yugoslavia (the country once considered the most civilized part of the communist system, seemingly based on a peaceful federation), Slobodan Milosevic firmly monopolized and embodied the evil of postCommunism. More than that, he and the Balkans in general became a reference point when dealing with the unholy trinity of the postCommunist condition—uncertainty, unsafety, and insecurity— resulting in attempts to rewrite history, redraw the boundaries, and to establish a single historical memory regime. The horror of Srebrenica, where Serbian militants exterminated, in two days, more than eight thousand innocent civilians before the eyes of the shocked and demoralized Dutch military, and where the most awful war crimes since the end of WWII were committed, in the middle of Europe, overshadowed the horror of both RussianChechen wars, not to mention ethnic cleansing, looting, and organized violence in Abkhazia. The slaughter of civilians in Chechnya was put into the category of the internal affair of the Russian Federation. After the 9/11, the extermination of Chechens, like the smashing of this tiny and longsuffering country from the face of the earth, received the new and
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firm legitimacy. This time it was a “noble” cause, rather than just a war over oil or gas pipeline: namely, the fight against terrorism. And now we watch Andrei Nekrasov’s Russian Lessons, codirected by Olga Konskaya who passed away shortly after the film was finished. The images are disturbing. As Nekrasov showed, providing the undisputable evidence, the alleged Georgian planes that bombed Tskhinvali were, in fact, Russian planes bombing the city of Gori in Georgia. Yet these images were used in Germany and other EU countries as official coverage of the Russian-Georgian war. Vladimir Putin, when speaking as a mentor and lecturing a noted German journalist, reveals the full scale of cynicism of Russia, and the self-inflicted blindness and cowardice of the West. “They know that we lie, and we understand that they know that we lie”: this is the Russian dissident and human rights defender Stanislav Dmitrievsky’s formula for the Kremlin’s attitude to the EU concerning the condition of human rights in Russia. Two years ago, Andrei Nekrasov presented his film Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case at the Cannes film festival. The film sent a powerful message to the world that the Kremlin can poison with impunity its critics and adversaries in a foreign country of which they are citizens. The Russian state that waged war against its best people since the times of Pyotr Chaadaev is now targeting and assassinating dissenting journalists and human rights activists and defenders, from Yuri Shchekochikhin and Anna Politkovskaya to Natalya Estemirova. All in all, the new Russian fascism went unnoticed. Do we need one more wake-up call? Haven’t we had enough?
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4 The Miraculous Year 1989, or In Praise of Weakness
The year 2009 marked the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It appears that 1989 was a year that was nothing short of miraculous. The effects of World War II, with its sinister and seemingly insurmountable divisions within Europe, were seemingly gone overnight leaving no trace of the disbelief, despair, and hopelessness that devastated Eastern and Central Europe for more than forty years. Instead, Western Europe was filled with joy and the sense of solidarity. As Adam Michnik, a hero of the Solidarity movement and a towering figure among the intellectuals and dissenters of Central Europe, recently noticed, it is quite tempting nowadays to assume the role of having been the then-leading force and the major inspiration behind the historic fall of totalitarianism in Europe. Therefore, it was with sound reason that Michnik called the year 1989 the “annus mirabilis,” or the “miraculous year.” In the United States, it is taken for granted that it was nothing other than the economic power of America that stripped the former Soviet Union of its potential infliction of a humiliating defeat in the Cold War. German politicians would proudly assert that their wise and patient Ostpolitik was a decisive factor in this historic struggle, rather than any direct force or bellicose stance of America. In Poland, nobody doubts that Pope John Paul II has come to delegitimize Communism both as a world system and a major rival ideology, whereas the Solidarity movement dealt a fatal blow to the mortally wounded Soviet system, demonstrating that the working
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class can revolt against the Working Class State and deprive it of the remains of its legitimacy. In the Baltic states, it is widely assumed—and not without reason—that the living chain of the joined hands of the Baltic people in 1989, followed by the exceptional role of Lithuania as the first rebellious and breakaway republic, also played a role in the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism in Europe, the role that was much too obvious to require emphasis. All of these reasons and arguments are more or less correct. If such a unique combination of forces and inspirations had not been possible, 1989 would never have become the decisive year that changed history. Yet, one more human factor exists that seems to have been overlooked in Eastern and Central Europe. No matter how much passion and controversy this factor and its mention would arouse, I have to spell out its first and last names: Mikhail Gorbachev. Needless to say, Gorbachev himself was bound to become a sharp dividing line between Eastern and Western Europe, probably nearly to the same extent as the assessment of 1968. What looked to a Western European intellectual like the Grand March of History stretching from the Latin Quarter of Paris to the rest of the globe, as the character Franz from Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being has it, was a tragedy, and likened to the jackboot trampling on the face of a human being, as another character describes it. Socialism and the promise of freedom as a theory in the West proved a horrible practice in the East in that same year, 1968. Memory politics, as well as opposing memory regimes, still divide Europe. The same applies to Mr. Gorbachev. A regrettable liar, coward, and hypocrite in the eyes of Lithuanians who suffered most from the bestiality and brutality of Soviet troops in January 1991, Gorbachev is highly esteemed and cherished in the unified Germany, nearly as a saintly figure. On closer examination, however, he is a more tragic figure straight of a Shakespearean play. Equally vilified in the Baltic countries and Russia itself, he became a test case of historical memory
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and political sensibilities. In Russia, with its increasing nostalgia for the power and international prestige of the former USSR being is far beyond that of the present-day, Gorbachev is blamed for the collapse of the empire. Yet the fact is that Gorbachev—no matter if he is a man of halftruths and leader of an inexorably doomed attempt to humanize totalitarianism, as the Lithuanian poet and literary scholar Tomas Venclova has labeled him—proved far less driven by irrational impulses of power and blood-thirst than one could expect from the head of the most dangerous and unpredictable state in the world who finds himself cornered. True, he misinterpreted nationalism of the occupied nations and misrepresented the real state of affairs of the USSR. More than that, he found himself totally confused and lost at a crossroads of the state whose very existence violated justice and all modern sensibilities. And here is my final point: Willy-nilly, Gorbachev allowed himself to be seen globally as a weak and confused individual, which would have been unthinkable from his predecessors and successors. If anyone doubts that, let him or her try to imagine Yuri Andropov or Vladimir Putin in Gorbachev’s shoes, let alone other ghosts of the Kremlin. For lack of a better term for this phenomenon, I would call the reason behind Gorbachev’s unwillingness to respond to his failure in the Baltics with massacre if not decency and humanism, then at least human weakness and moral intuition that may have suggested to him that his story was over. Another epoch had begun, an epoch in which he didn’t belong. If one is able to step away from a powerful position and office without causing bloodshed and casualties in retaliation, it is a sign of decency and dignity. Sometimes it is worth celebrating not only the courage and resolve of those on our side, but the human weakness and confusion of our adversaries as well.
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5 European Citizens, or How the Culture of Curiosity Works
What is the role of the academe in fostering and strengthening the EU? The answer is quite simple: the education of a multilingual, tolerant, curious, and liberal-minded European. True, we are all familiar with countless jokes on how it makes no sense to expect an emotional lump in the throat on hearing the European anthem, or how pointless it is to endeavor to create something like “European patriotism.” They are meant to poke fun of the idea of being at home in Europe as a symbolic space of values and ideas. Yet the indisputable fact is that European universities provide a nearly perfect framework for such an education. If we are not to conflate high-ranking officials of the EU, or “professional” Europeans, with people for whom Europe is their natural home in terms of their feeling most at home in several European languages and cultures, then we will have to state it plainly: European universities are a success story in the European unification process. Perhaps they are the only success story of this kind. Many times, I saw with my own eyes how the United Europe works during my teaching exchange students at several European universities where I had an English-speaking audience of young people from European countries and the US. They were curious about every single detail of European intellectual history, including the history of Baltic and Eastern European ideas. European Citizens are therefore not a fantasy. In fact, the sooner we realize that our European commitments help our country to get rid of its limitations or to move to a higher level of intellectual and
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cultural dialogue with other European countries, the better for us. In a way, it is a call to return to the roots of modern Europe, namely, to the ideals of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment during which a joint devotion or dedication to a certain set of values and ideals was able to overcome enormous political animosities. Recall the numerous translations of Spanish dramatists and admiration for them in, say, Elizabethan England, which hated Spain as an archrival and adversary. Or recall the great admiration for French culture that deeply permeated nineteenth-century Germany and Russia, countries that had more than one good reason to dislike French politics. Symbolic European citizenship and citizenry date back to the days of Sir Thomas More and Erasmus; the same applies to the Republic of Letters set up by Voltaire and other philosophes, and enthusiastically endorsed by such people as Cesare Beccaria and David Hume, not to mention their great German successor from the Baltic lands, Immanuel Kant. European humanists and philosophers preceded and anticipated the political and economic architects of present-day Europe, that is, the founding fathers of the EU, such as Robert Schumann and Jean Monet. This was possible only through the aforementioned symbolic European citizens. The only question, then, is how to translate that symbolic citizenship into a self-activating political citizenship of present-day Europeans. A number of students sooner or later come to appreciate the uniqueness of Europe, which lies in its diversity, openness, and also in the responsiveness of European cultures. When students realize that they can find a distinct language and culture merely fifty miles away, they reveal a simple secret: Europe is made up of countries that are relatively small and tiny, yet powerful in terms of culture and historical legacy. The size of the Netherlands or Belgium becomes irrelevant if I want to pursue my studies in the history of magnificent Dutch and Flemish painting, or if I decide to undertake a research project related to Latvian literature, Estonian cinematography, or Lithuanian theatre.
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When we reveal the highlights of culture or the masterpieces of art in a small country, we identify a cultural and intellectual center of gravity with which we are preoccupied, rather than simply a tourist attraction. Therefore, the answer lies in academic exchange programs and talented educators. I remember an exchange student from Poland at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, who told me that the reason she decided to learn the Lithuanian language and to study Lithuanian cultural history was her fascination with Lithuanian theater: Her interest in an entire nation grew from this simple spark of curiosity. The time came when she wanted to reveal what was behind a Lithuanian theatre company whose production she enjoyed immensely, and how a small country was able to devise such strikingly original interpretations of classical plays. This “culture of curiosity” is our real hope for the future.
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6 Memory Wars
We are now witnessing the increasing strength of a sinister tendency in the United States and Europe. Politicians find themselves preoccupied with two domains that serve as new sources of inspiration: namely, privacy and history. Birth, death, and sex constitute the new frontiers on the political battlefields. Since politics today no longer functions as a translation of our moral and existential concerns into rational and legitimate action for the benefit of society and humanity, and, instead, is becoming a set of managerial practices and skillful manipulations with public opinion, it is not unwise to assume that a swift politicization of privacy and history promises the way out of present political and ideological vacuum. Suffice it to remember that the hottest debates over abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage over the past twenty or so years to conclude that the poor human individual, whether on the way into the world or dying, or consummating a marriage, continues to be regarded either as a property of the state and its institutions or, at best, as a mere instrument and hostage of a political doctrine. This is nothing new under the sun, though. If we are to believe such incisive dystopian writers as Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, or such groundbreaking social theorists as Michel Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman, modernity always was, and continues to be, obsessed with how to gain as much control over human body and soul as possible without physically exterminating people.
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The same is true with regard to society’s collective memory and sentiment. As we learn from George Orwell’s 1984, history depends on those who control the archives and records. Since human individuals have no other form of existence than that which is granted by the Party, individual memory has no power to create or restore history. But if memory is controlled or manufactured and updated everyday, history degenerates into a justificatory and legitimizing design of power and control. Logically enough, this leads the Inner Party to assert that who controls the past controls the future and who controls the present controls the past. If you think that it no longer makes sense to refer to the Orwellian world, please think about memory wars in present Europe. That Russia has already become a revisionist power is obvious. Moreover, it attempts to rewrite the history of the twentieth century by rehabilitating Stalin and depicting him to have been merely a wise, albeit sometimes cruel, modernizer of Russia. As we can see, Stalin appears here to have been just another version of the Great Modernizer of the State, like Peter the Great. Needless to say, an attempt to outlaw what is regarded in Russia as “historical revisionism”—that is, criminalization of any effort to put into question whether the Soviet Union with its labor camps, overtly fascist practices, and antisemitism was any better than Nazi Germany (for those who have doubts about this, please recall the Holodomor in Ukraine or methodical extermination of Russian Jews and Jewish culture under Stalin)—has its logic. By no means is it about the past. As early as Mikhail Gorbachev’s time, a plethora of decent and courageous Russian historians exposed the Soviet Union to have been a criminal state. Stalin was explicitly regarded as a criminal and paranoiac dictator who committed some of the most horrible crimes against humanity. The fact that Vladimir Putin’s Russia changed the interpretation of the past nearly overnight shows that everything is about the present, rather than the past.
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Although the denial of the Holocaust is too complex a phenomenon to be confined to legal practices and administrative measures, Germany outlawed the denial of the Holocaust out of its firm commitment never to repeat the past. Russia cynically denies its occupation and annexation of the Baltic States, as well as its numerous crimes against European nations, because it sends a message to us that it would gladly repeat recent history, restoring the past and rehabilitating political doctrine that Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s Russia regarded as overtly criminal and hostile to Russia itself. Hence, an attempt by the Baltic States and of Eastern-Central European nations to work out a viable antidote against Russia’s revisionism is undertaken. However understandable and logical this attempt, the idea of the political and moral equivalency of Communism and National Socialism is not the most convincing approach, for Western Europe and the US will always take deep exception to the claim that the crimes of the Holocaust and those of the Soviet era were of the same nature. Therefore, something must be done to untie this Gordian knot of history. I propose that our politicians and public figures stop romanticizing the political forces of 1941 that tried to save the independence of the Baltic States collaborating with the Nazis. The tragedy was that our countries were “liberated” from the Nazis by the Soviets, instead of Great Britain or America. All in all, only our political courage and moral integrity, rather than selective interpretation of history, can end our memory wars with Russia or with the Far Left of Western Europe. We cannot allow Russia to distort history by spreading ugly lies about the Baltic States as crypto-fascist countries. Yet we must be fair and sympathetic to the Holocaust survivors, who fear (and rightly so) that a simplistic, relativistic approach to the Shoah as—supposedly—one of many Holocausts in Europe becomes a sort of obfuscation and trivialization of the tragedy. History can never be left solely to politicians, no matter whether democratic or authoritarian. It is not a property of a political doctrine
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or the regime it serves. History, if properly understood, is the symbolic design of our existence and moral choices we make every day. Like human privacy, our right to study and critically question history is a cornerstone of freedom.
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7 Reason or Treason?
Raison ou trahison? Reason or treason? What happened to France? Did we witness once more the art of maneuvering of the Gaullist France that will never confine herself to the role of midwife of American politics? Or was it merely a regrettable instance of what political commentators take as a rapid “Shröderization” of the European political class, that is, a sheer act of economic pragmatism tinged with corruption, albeit wrapped in the colorful paper of sugary lip service about international cooperation and solidarity? Needless to say, when France recently decided to sell the warship Mistral to Russia, a powerful strategic weapon capable of a potential full-scale attack from the Baltic Sea, the Baltic countries could barely welcome such a move from a NATO ally and EU friend. Quite a few politicians in the Baltics made it clear that this was nothing less than a treacherous act of a supposed friend and ally. Others cautioned against jumping to conclusions and to await more information. The easiest way to explain the entire affair would be to rely on the economic logic behind this controversy. France badly needs Russian markets, to say nothing about its gas and oil. Germany is far ahead of France at this point, which sheds more light on why the aforementioned stratagem may have been regarded as a turning point in the two countries’ economic cooperation. As regards the political aspect of this story, we all know the beautiful, albeit empty, phrasing used in an attempt to apply such pearls of conventional political wisdom as “cooperation prior to isolation,” and others. Of course, we can easily credit the French Prime Minister François Fillon and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Bernard Kouchner for reminding Europe, the UK, and the US that France has its historically
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formed political sensibilities and priorities. Russia is a difficult partner, rather than a foe. C’est vrai. Vous avez raison. Yet when it comes to the credibility of France among her smaller partners and friends in Eastern Europe, the Mistral deal dealt a nearly irreparable blow to the reputation of France as a moral and political leader of the EU. After Jacques Chirac’s (in)famous reminder that Poland and the Baltic States missed a good opportunity to remain silent, the Mistral deal is the second overt and public act of the extension of the middle finger to the small allies in the EU and NATO. Whatever kind of political vocabulary or perspective we apply, this is so. We can take it one way or another, but the outcome remains the same. No one benefited from this but Russia. In fact, no other nation will benefit as far as the future of the EU is concerned. The political credibility of the major forces of the EU as a security-generating entity will be undermined for a long time. And the reason behind it lies not in the faults of French policymakers’ political reasoning but in their lack of political imagination and historical sensitivity. Eastern European historians of political ideas remember quite well how the French philosopher Alain Besançon described the source of the strength of Communism. According to Besançon, the failure of the West to understand the nature of Communism is the source of its success. Curiously enough, Besançon’s disciple Françoise Thom, a history professor at Sorbonne, added recently that never before has misunderstanding of Russia in Western Europe been as great as it is now. A sort of self-inflicted blindness fuelled by sweet lies and the charms of self-deception, it results in the shutting of eyes to the fact that Russia provoked the war against the sovereign state of Georgia, and then occupied and annexed parts of Georgia’s territory. No matter how strongly we agree on Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili as hardly a raw model democrat, the fact remains that the West has swallowed this déjà vu episode that was straight from the geopolitical repertoire of the twentieth century.
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We believe that Russia is on the way to reforming its economic and political systems. Yet we tend to forget, as Thom points out, that all the waves of modernization of Russia resulted as a reaction to its defeats and losses. Peter the Great undertook his reforms after the defeat of Russia by Sweden near Narva, Alexander II after the painful loss of the Crimean War, Nicholas II after the disastrous defeat of Russia by Japan. Let me add Mikhail Gorbachev to this chain: he had good reason to make a desperate attempt to modernize the military and economic potential of the Soviet Union after its disgraceful failure in Afghanistan. Why don’t we then take a closer look at what motivates Russia concerning her modernization efforts now? Is it a sincere wish to make the country a trustworthy partner and a reliable neighbor, instead of a constant existential threat and foe of the Baltic States and other neighboring countries? A clear conclusion that Russia, in the face of the dangerous growth of China’s power and prestige, has no other historical option than to take the path leading to the strategic partnership with the US and the EU? Or bitterness and anger about the greatest geopolitical catastrophe, as Vladimir Putin named the collapse of the Soviet Union? It is time to answer these questions. Last but not least, it is pivotal for the EU to start speaking with one voice regarding the safety and security of every European nation. Otherwise, the major powers of Europe will fail the European project into an eventual slide into the sinister logic of the twentieth century. We should not allow this to happen. For the sake of the Baltic States. And for the sake of Europe.
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8 The Tragedy with Fragile Signs of Hope
The crash of the Polish president’s airplane near Katyn, which cost Poland the loss of a significant part of the country’s elite, left a rich soil for the growth of speculation and fueled the nation’s political imagination. That Katyn became the most potent symbol of Poland’s sufferings and the nation’s cri du cœur was obvious well before the recent tragedy that claimed the lives of 96 people, including Poland’s President and First Lady. Something else happened there as well. In the final act of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Escalus, the Prince of Verona, explains to the crowd of Veronese townsmen how hatred has punished the entire town. The Montagues lose Romeo, as well as his mother, Lady Montague, who dies during the night before the gathering. The Capulets lose young Juliet and Tybalt. Escalus is left alone in a world without his beloved kinsmen, Mercutio and Paris. This is what hatred claimed, regardless of whether people had the answer to the question of who was behind this mayhem. Yet there is room left for hope. Although the outcry “a plague unto your houses” becomes the mortally wounded Mercutio’s prophecy, it does not prevent Verona from the brighter side of the tragic story. Escalus implies that they were all punished, as if to say that from now on the town is bound to live in peace. The heads of the warring clans, the old Montague and his counterpart, Capulet, become brothers. The tragedy is therefore the highest price of peace. The modern social and moral order based on the rule of law prevails over the logic of revenge and the metaphysics of blood. Can Poland and Russia close the doors on the twentieth century and open a new page of their dramatic history? Yes, they can. I fully realize that the warm hug that Vladimir Putin gave to the Polish
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Prime Minister Donald Tusk when the latter was moved to tears on the view of the remnants of the crashed plane does not promise any sudden and miraculous breakthrough in the difficult relations of the two Slavic nations. Hope lies elsewhere. The fact that Russia has finally agreed on the Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s visit on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of a horrible crime against Poland shows that the time has come to allow such things happen. The Russian political elite cannot be as naïve and myopic as to expect to hear only politically neutral and comforting words in this gathering of sorrow, memory, and pain. They knew quite well that the massacre of more than twenty thousand Polish ranking officers—and, incidentally, of some Lithuanians among them—would deal a mortal blow to the attempts of the Kremlin to rehabilitate Stalin and rewrite history textbooks if exposed as a vicious crime against humanity, and as a testimony of lies of Soviet propaganda concerning the Katyn massacre as the alleged war crime committed by the Nazis,. Moreover, they perfectly understood that cynically eliminating the Katyn massacre from the list of Stalin’s crimes against Eastern and Central European nations will sooner or later remind observers of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’s aspects concerning the Soviet invasion of Poland as part of the Pact, and of the military and political cooperation of both totalitarian regimes. This is not to say that the Soviet Union, along with Germany, was equally responsible for the rise of the Nazis. Whatever the case, present-day Russia clearly decided to assume part of the responsibility for the crimes of Stalin and its own predecessor, the Soviet Union. Otherwise, it would be impossible to explain why and how Russia’s state television channel showed Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn, which should have come to the Russian audience as a shock. Yet the fact remains that the Katyn massacre was inseparable from the beginning of the Second World War. Contrary to the Soviet and present-day Russia’s official narrative, WWII did not commence with Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union. It began with the
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invasion of Poland by both allies. By agreeing on the commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn massacre, Russia sent a signal to the world that it is no longer interested in seeing the foe in Poland and that it is prepared to at least partly revise its foreign policies in Eastern and Central Europe. If this assumption is correct, such a breakthrough would have critically important political implications for the Baltic States, Ukraine, and, perhaps, even for Georgia. It happened for the first time that the Kremlin, instead of paying lip service, instead of denying that it had anything to do with the incident, instead of insisting that the whole thing may have been a sinister provocation of ideological and political adversaries, showed sincere sympathy for the mourning country. If that was not simply an outbreak of temporary sentiment, then it may signify the arrival of a new period in the relations between Russia and Central Europe.
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9 The Springtime of Our Discontents?
The springtime of our discontents includes not only the profound economic crisis in Greece, which threatens to develop into a chain reaction, creating a domino effect and possibly affecting Portugal and Spain. Perhaps, for the first time in the past decade, a shadow of uncertainty hangs over the future of the EU. Let us put aside the almost banal temptation to engage in a lengthy debate on whether it was fair to dismiss Lithuania’s candidacy to the euro zone because of what appears now to have been just a miserable and marginal gap between the standard set by the EU and the country’s economic performance. Suffice it to compare this story to the economic performance of Greece, and to the degree of irresponsibility recently shown by its political elite to arrive at the conclusion that the denial of Lithuania’s application on the grounds of its alleged failure to meet the qualifications of the euro zone is the best proof of the EU double standards and unfairness. In fact, it is not my wish to add insult to injury with this point; it was discussed recently by my Estonian and Slovenian colleagues in the third-largest political group of the European Parliament: the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE). Whatever the case, this is not the main point that I would like to make here. It is possible that Estonia’s accession to the Euro Zone is a symbolic victory of the entire Baltic region worthwhile of praise and celebration. We have other threats to the stability and solidarity of the EU. The greatest one, in my view, is a misperception of social and political reality. Immediately after the election of Viktor Yanukovych as the new President of Ukraine, we witnessed a déjà vu picture of an Eastern European country caught between its past and future. The deci-
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sively important country, Ukraine found itself at a crossroads of its crucial political choices that will determine the future of the entire region, including Russia itself. This time it is barely the same story of a small unfamiliar country, in the middle of nowhere, that evokes merely geographical and historical curiosity of Western Europeans. What is happening in Ukraine now is about a grim backlash and a swift sliding of the huge country, whose relationship to the EU is critical for the independence and well-being of the Baltic States, into the grey zone of Russia’s geopolitical games and manipulations. By refusing to regard the Holodomor as the genocide of the Ukrainian people and a crime against humanity, Yanukovych sent a clear signal to Russia that his new interpretation of history is on Russia’s side. In doing so, and also in rewriting history textbooks for Ukrainian high schools, he and his establishment legitimize Russia’s strategic attempt to regain domination and influence over the former republics of the Soviet Union, and to deprive them of their possible leaning towards the EU and NATO. Gas for independence, that is, the stable supply of gas at reasonable prices for the refusal of striving for one’s membership in the EU and NATO, becomes a new devilish stratagem of Putin’s Russia with an indecipherable role conferred for Medvedev. The EU did not react to the absorption of such a large and important country with incredible speed, the country whose joining the EU and NATO may have substantially affected the future of the entire continent. More than that, Ukraine would have substantially strengthened NATO setting a crucial example for Russia, as if to say that the story of animosity, not to say civilizational rivalry, between Russia or Eastern Europe and Western Europe has ended. Yet the EU chose to leave Ukraine to its own devices to avoid irritating the Gazprom and Russia. Europe betrayed Ukraine in a silent and banal fashion, thus allowing Russia to split the old and the new members of the EU, and to impose on us the logic of bilateral relations with Russia based on “sheer pragmatism.” Who on Earth can
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now take seriously our regrettable lip service to European solidarity after this knife plunged in the back of Ukraine? If this act of treachery and indifference is not the abandonment of the EU Eastern neighborhood policy, what is it? Last but not least, let us take the Mistral deal between France and Russia eagerly followed by other NATO countries that are desperately trying to sell to Russia as much strategic weaponry as possible. If NATO members can sell the most advanced weaponry to the third countries—in this case, to the state which recently held some of NATO members occupied and annexed—with such an ease and without even consulting each other (not to mention the slightest reaction to the new existential threats posed to the Baltic States, i.e., partners of that same security system and members of that same club), aren’t we witnessing the beginning of the demise of NATO? For the first time in its recent history, Russia changed its armament paradigm. Having long been a self-sufficient state on security and armament, Russia started buying strategic armament from Israel and NATO members. It would be unpardonable of us to ignore this fact. Especially for those who know quite well that a failure, or a refusal, to critically assess one’s difficult and criminal past is nothing other than a license to repeat it, albeit in a different form. Does this all mean that Vladimir Lenin’s famous metaphor of the rope—with which the greedy, stupid bourgeoisie of the West will, according to him, unavoidably craft for Soviet Russia only to be hanged by the Bolsheviks in due course—a prophetic one? The springtime of our discontents allows us to think about it.
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10 Does the Baltic Region Exist?
What is the relationship between Lithuania and the other two Baltic nations? It differs from Latvia and Estonia in more than one way. No matter how rich in historically formed religious communities and minorities it is, Catholic Lithuania, due to its historic liaisons with Poland and other Central and Eastern European nations, is much more of an Eastern-Central European nation than Lutheran Latvia or Estonia. Therefore, it would be quite misleading to assume seemingly identical paths by the Baltic States to their role and place in modern history. Lithuania’s history and its understanding would be unthinkable without taking into account such Eastern and Central European countries as Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. Latvia is inseparable from major German and Swedish influences, and Estonia from Swedish and Danish, not to mention its close cultural ties with Finland. Lithuania is an old polity with a strong presence in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Latvia and Estonia emerged as new political actors in the twentieth century. It was with sound reason, then, that after 1990, when Lithuania and the other two Baltic nations gained independence, politicians and the media started making jokes about the unity of the three “Baltic sisters,” achieved through their common experience of having once been inmates in the same prison cell. Small wonder, then, that this led Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a former foreign minister (now president) of Estonia, to describe Estonia as a Nordic country, rather than a Baltic nation. In fact, once they had come into existence, the Baltic States underwent considerable political changes in the twentieth century.
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It is worth recalling that Finland, before the Second World War, was considered a Baltic State, too. That is to say, four Baltic States existed in interwar Europe. The fact that only three entered the twenty-first century is an irony of recent history. Yet some similarities and affinities between the Baltic States are too obvious to need emphasis. All three nations stood at the same historic crossroads after the First World War. All were linked to the fate of Russia in terms of dependence, independence, and emancipation. All three existed as independent states from 1918 to 1940. At that time, all three introduced liberal minority policies, granting a sort of personal, non-territorial cultural autonomy to their large minorities, Lithuania to its Jewish, Latvia to German, and Estonia to German and Russian minorities. All three sought strength and inspiration in their ancient languages and cultures. All have a strong Romantic element in their historical memory and self-perception. Last but not least, all benefited from émigrés and their role in politics and culture. It suffices to mention that the presidents of all three Baltic States have been, or continue to be, émigrés, who spent much of their lives abroad and who returned to their respective countries upon the restoration of independence after 1990: Valdas Adamkus in Lithuania, Vaira Vīėe-Freiberga in Latvia, and Toomas Hendrik Ilves in Estonia. Most importantly, the trajectories of the Lithuanian and Baltic identities allow us to understand the history of the twentieth century better than anything else. Yet the questions arise: What will the Baltic Region be like in the twenty-first century? What will be the common denominator between Klaipeda, Riga, Tallinn, Kaliningrad, and St. Petersburg in the new epoch? Will the Baltic States come closer to the Nordic states, or will they remain a border region in which contrasting Eastern and Western European concepts of politics and public life continue to fight it out amongst themselves? Will we able to apply to the Baltic countries that description by which Milan Kundera attempted to identify Central European countries: a huge variety of culture and thought in a small area? Will the
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tie that binds us to our neighbors be just a remembrance of common enslavement and a sense of insecurity, or will we create a new Baltic regional identity, one that is both global and open and in which we can map our past and our present according to altogether different criteria? These are some of the questions the Baltic Region raises: formulating them is no less useful and meaningful than answering them. Possibly here is where some vital experiences are tried out, experiences that larger, more influential countries have not yet had but which await them in the future. It may be that the Baltics were and still remain a laboratory where the great challenges and tensions of modernity can be tested and the scenarios for European life in the not-too-distant future may take shape.
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11 The Treason of Intellectuals, or An Identity Crisis?
Tomas Venclova is regarded as one of the most accomplished and noted Lithuanian humanists in the world, and rightly so. An eminent Lithuanian poet, literary scholar, and translator, Venclova had long acted as a conscious and dedicated dissident opposed to the entire project of the former Soviet Union with its crimes against humanity, severe human rights violations, brutal suppression of all fundamental rights and civil liberties, and violent politics. Having spent a good part of his life in Lithuania, Venclova was exiled to the West in 1977, where he built his academic career, eventually becoming Professor of Slavic Literature at Yale University. Far from a conservative nationalist, Venclova has always spoken out in favor of liberal values. This could be a clue to his deeply moving and sensitive essay on the tragedy of Lithuania, the Holocaust that claimed the lives of more than 220, 000 Lithuanian Jews. The essay in question, “The Jews and the Lithuanians,” written in the 1970s, revealed Tomas Venclova as the first Lithuanian writer who showed the real scope of the tragedy admitting the guilt and responsibility of those Lithuanians who collaborated with the Nazis and actively participated in the massacre of Lithuanian Jews. Deeply embedded in the best intellectual traditions of Eastern and Central Europe, his collection of essays, Forms of Hope, reads like a moral map of a great European public intellectual and political thinker. Venclova recently made a strong and effective comeback to the public domain of Lithuania publishing, in July 2010, with an elegantly written and caustic essay, “It Suffocates Me Here.” Wittily referring to the clash of the character Strepsiades, a staunch defender of the
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ancient Greek tradition, and his challenger Socrates, both depicted in Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds, Venclova described some of the ongoing political and moral debates in Lithuania as a backlash of parochialism and moral provincialism, and as a fear of modernity, applying harsh words and judging his country from a critical perspective. Without the shadow of a doubt, the essay became a landmark in the area of public debate. Small wonder that a dozen angry, noisy reactions to Venclova’s essay appeared over the past two months, as this piece of polemical writing dealt a blow to conservative and nationalistic writers of the country. The bitter response would not last long, though. Adding insult to injury, Venclova’s critics came to describe him as an arrogant and rootless cosmopolitan, whereas the opposing camp, the supporters of the essay, implied that Venclova came up with a timely and principled call upon his country to take a close look at itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century to be able to rethink its past and present. Moreover, much in the spirit of Julien Benda’s manifesto on the intellectual’s responsibility, La trahison des clercs (The Treason of Intellectuals), Venclova’s essay became an attack on those who regard the nation-state as the end in itself, and who see the paramount mission of the intellectual in the defense of that nation-state at any price against the supposed evils of modernity and globalization. To his credit, Venclova was correct in raising this issue, as the Lithuanian media was peppered over the past months with a number of skeptical comments on the loss of Lithuanian identity and even independence after the country’s accession to the EU. More than that, some of the former political activists and heroes of Lithuania who fought for its independence in the national liberation movement Sąjūdis in the late 1980s, had gone so far as to suggest that the European Union is hardly any different from the Soviet Union, and that both these political formations were, and continue to be, the gravediggers of the European peoples and of their independence and liberty.
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What can be said in this regard? No matter how critical or skeptical we could be of European bureaucracy or the new managerial class that ignores local sensibilities and cultural differences, such a comparison does not merit serious attention. Yet this new sort of rhetoric sent a clear message that part of the former political and intellectual elite of Lithuania found themselves deeply alienated from the new political reality of Europe. In ancient Athens, writes Venclova, Socrates died for his freedom of thought, doubt, and the right to question everything around. As we learn from Socrates, uncertainty is not the enemy of a wise man, and an unexamined life is not worth living—these chestnuts of perennial wisdom became an inescapable part of critical European thought. For Strepsiades and his modern followers, everything has to be certain and easily predictable. Therefore, one’s own little garden attains greater importance than universal humanity. Whatever the case, says Venclova, it is Strepsiades, rather than the greatest cultural hero of Western Europe, Socrates, who is alive and well in present-day Lithuania. According to him, to defend the pattern of identity and statehood of the nineteenth century, instead of modern moral and political sensibilities, is nothing other than a betrayal of the mission that intellectuals must carry. The question remains quite timely and serious: What is the pattern of identity that Lithuania and the two other Baltic States could maintain as a bridge between their precious cultural legacy and the world? In fact, an identity crisis is part of the search for identity. The Baltic States that surfaced to the world, restoring their existence and securing their place in the political, mental, and intellectual maps of the world, know it better than any other country or region on the globe.
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12 We are Faster than History, Yet Slower Than a Lifetime
Interestingly enough, the “faster than history” idiom acquires a special meaning when dealing with social change in Central and Eastern Europe. The speed of time in what Czesław Miłosz and Milan Kundera, each in his own way, described as “yet another Europe” is beyond the historical, cultural, and political imaginations of Western Europeans and North Americans. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, post-Soviet and post-Communist countries underwent considerable social and cultural change. To paraphrase the title of Kundera’s novel that became one more admirable idiom to express the Eastern-Central European sense of history and grasp of life, all this leads to the experience of the unbearable lightness of change. What happened in Western Europe as the greatest events and civilization-shaping movements in centuries acquired a form—in Central and Eastern Europe—of mandatory and rapid economic and political programs that had to be implemented by successor states of the Soviet Union. This is to say, the new democracies had to catch up with Western European history to qualify for entry into the exclusive and honorary club of Europe. Moreover, “yet another Europe” had to become even faster than history, transforming itself into a more or less recognizable collective actor of the global economy and politics. Capitalism, which had long been presented in Soviet high school textbooks as the major menace to humankind, now seems more aggressive and dynamic in post-Soviet societies than in far more moderate, timid, egalitarian, social-democratic, welfare-state-orientated, and post-capitalist Western European countries.
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Sweden, Finland, and the rest of the Nordic countries, for instance, can only marvel at what they perceive as a sort of oldfashioned, historically recycled, and ruthless capitalism of the Baltics, or, in more conventional terms, the libertarian economy of Estonia and other Baltic countries. The countries that once symbolized to Soviet citizens the embodiment of “wild capitalism” with its overt glorification of the winners and contempt for the losers, now appear astonishingly communitarian, warm, and humane. Indeed, they are pure and innocent by comparison to the “firstcome first-served” or “grab the stolen” or “catch it all” mentality that paradoxically, albeit logically, blends with a sort of Marxism turned upside down; this extremely vulgar variety of economic determinism and materialism in Lithuania and other Eastern-Central European countries barely surprises those who know quite well that the last things one could expect to be named among priorities are culture and education. Although quite a few pay lip service to it without giving much consideration as to how to foster intellectual dialogue among countries, somehow almost everybody agrees there that the West has to pay for “the culture, uniqueness, and spirituality” of post-totalitarian countries—generous grants in exchange for suffering and unique experience. Lithuania seems mentally locked somewhere between the discovery of the intrinsic logic of capitalism characteristic of the nineteenth century, and the post-Weimar Republic period: an incredibly fast economic growth, then a slowdown, and a passionate advocacy of the values of free enterprise and capitalism, accompanied by a good deal of anomie, fission of the body social, stark social contrasts, a shocking degree of corruption, and the culture of poverty with all its indications: mistrust, self-victimization, disbelief in social ties and networks, contempt for institutions, cynicism, and the like. If we want to imagine a blend of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury phenomena of consciousness, politics, and culture, then we can safely assume that our post-modern and post-totalitarian era
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proved capable of squeezing two centuries of uninterrupted European history into one decade of the “transition” of Lithuania from the planned economy of Communism to a free-market economy and global capitalism. In a way, Lithuania appears to have become a kind of laboratory where the speed of social change and cultural transformation could be measured and tested. Indeed, Lithuania is far ahead of what we know as the grand historical narrative, or, plainly, predictable and moralizing history; nay, these societies are faster than history. They are faster than history, yet slower than a lifetime. People often complain here that their lives and careers have been ruined by this rapid social change and grand transformation. They take it as a tragedy arguing (and not without reason) that their lives, energies and works have been wasted, if not completely spoiled. A lifetime of a human being proves insufficient to witness a thrilling and sweeping transformation of society.
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13 A Lonely Voice of Despair
During my last visit to Washington, D.C., where I participated in a timely and good conference on the historical memory and justice in Eastern Europe at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, I had a pleasant morning read of newspapers. Suddenly, my attention was attracted to a letter from a Russian journalist published in The Wall Street Journal (Friday, November 12, 2010). The letter in question was a moving appeal to the politicians in the West, and also was an account of the lost friends written by Elena Milashina, an investigative journalist for Novaya Gazeta and a recipient of Human Rights Watch’s 2010 Alison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism. Novaya Gazeta covered nearly all politically charged, complicated, and controversial stories ranging from the sinking of the Kursk submarine in the Barents Sea in the year 2000 to the Beslan school siege in the fall of 2004. Whereas in the first case government officials tried to cover up the fact that twenty-three sailors aboard the submarine survived for many hours after a deadly explosion in the torpedo unit, in the second case the government reported 354 hostages, but Ms. Milashina herself reported over 1,000. More than that, Ms. Milashina and her fellow journalists from Novaya Gazeta destroyed the official version of the event, which suggested that the initial explosions in the school building were triggered by the hostage-takers. The fearless Russian journalists proved the opposite: Although it remains unclear whether or not the event was staged, the undisputed fact is that the secret services fired first. In her note from Moscow, “The High Price of Journalism in Putin’s Russia,” Ms. Milashina reminds us of what is happening in the
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battlefield. While she describes the independence of Novaya Gazeta, some grim and telling facts come to us as a wake-up call. As she notes: “Yet we have paid a heavy price for our independence. Over the past ten years, five of Novaya Gazeta’s journalists have been murdered. One of the victims was our star correspondent and my mentor, Anna Politkovskaya, who was assassinated in 2006 after tirelessly exposing brutal human-rights violations in Chechnya” (p. A19). What can I say upon hearing such a testimony? I met the incomparable Anna Politkovskaya in 2003. During a conference in Austria, she overtly spoke of the hell in Chechnya with its war atrocities and severe, awful, routinized human-rights violations. She went so far as to paint black-on-white all the war crimes committed by Russia in Chechnya. Some of my Russian and Belarusian colleagues left the conference room, most probably out of fear of being reported as her accomplices. I found myself enchanted with this fearless person whom I thanked for returning in me the feeling of gratitude to, and love for, the Russia of Peter Chaadaev and Alexander Herzen. We had an unforgettable conversation after which I planned many times to invite her to my country. I planned to do so until the terrible news struck me in 2006: Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated like many other of the best people of Russia against who the regime waged war, this time after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A lonely voice of despair, Ms. Milashina’s letter from Moscow led me to a comparison of Russia and the Baltic States in terms of freedom of expression and quality journalism. I have to say that each time I try to give it a thought, I find myself slightly confused. True, a deep gulf exists between Russia and us in terms of censorship or, rather, its absence, not to mention the political persecution of journalists and the silencing of dissenting voices. Yet our paths diverged not only from this point of view. Whereas such independent Russian publications as Novaya Gazeta, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, or www.grani.ru defend liberal and democratic values, their counterparts in Lithuania chose to rely on po-
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litical scandals, cheep sensationalism, chilling statistics of Lithuania’s suicide rate (the highest in the world), an unmatched degree of bullying in high schools, and heartbreaking stories from the lives of local pop stars. I do not imply that all this does not exist in Russia. It certainly does. But they worked out a powerful antidote, which we have yet to develop in Lithuania. It is difficult to resist the temptation to sum it up as a typical twenty-first-century failure to value political liberty and freedom of expression, while Russian journalists still pay the twentieth-century price for freedom. And the name of that price is no more and no less than someone’s life taken suddenly, brutally, and unexpectedly. Truth stopped on the run. Life for truth-telling, death for the privilege to remain a free and independent person in a country whose power structure denies the value of human life, worth, and dignity—this is the lot of a Russian human rights activist or of a conscious journalist. The gate to success and to the world of entertainment is wide open, yet it closes each time when the moral heirs of Chaadaev and Herzen attempt to remind authorities that Russia is not their property and that patriotism can be critical and demanding, instead of a sort of sugary aggression and contempt for disobedient neighbors combined with the whitewash of history. There is only one way for us to help Russia rid itself of its imperial past and troubled political present. This is our sympathetic understanding of Russian democrats struggling for the democratic future of Russia. Each time the EU or its major members try to make it up to Putin and his ruling clique in the Kremlin instead of working with democratic politicians and dissenters, it is a silent betrayal of Anna Politkovskaya, Natalya Estemirova, and their noble cause.
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14 The Craving for Liberty in the Arab World
It was with sound reason that the French philosopher André Glucksmann has recently exploded with the devastating criticism of the European Union for its failure to support the spirit of freedom and craving for liberty so potently manifest in the Middle East and in the Arab world. Right before our eyes—on the Internet and in the global media which have become our home away from home nowadays—a unique global political change occurred, most probably the second in scale and importance after the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet it came to us as the winter of our discontent, rather than that of our joy. What happened to us then? Why on earth should we have remained so complacent about, not to say insensitive to, the courage and resolve of the Arab peoples that revolted against their tyrants, thus creating the global chain reaction and domino effect in world politics? In Glucksmann’s opinion, the EU was totally unprepared for such a turn in world politics. In fact, so was the United States. Glucksmann insisted that the EU and the US were too fixated for a long time on regional “safety and security” allegedly provided by “our thugs” and “our loyal and predictable” dictators such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, and even Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi—especially judging by the affectionate relationship between Libya and Italy in their migration policies and security operations. There is an even more unpleasant aspect to this hesitancy. To put aside all pearls of political correctness, the modern Arab world had long been perceived by Europeans and Americans alike as a realm of
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religious zeal, backwardness, bigotry, and fanaticism in which the rule of law, political liberty, and democracy do not apply by definition and where they have no chances whatsoever. Hence, the reliance on dictators who were smart enough to play the game with the West, instead of irritating and scaring it with the Russian or Chinese scenarios of civilizational alternatives. As in other similar cases of the disengagement and complacency of the US and the EU, sweetened and softened with endless tirades about the uniqueness of non-Western identities and cultures, what was and continues to lie beneath is a profound disbelief in a simple truth that the Arab world is made up of people like us. A seemingly simple, yet a surprisingly revealing point reiterated by the British historian Simon Schama over the past weeks. Therefore, the real discovery we made during the social upheavals or political revolutions, if you will, was that they are people whose dignity and self-esteem had long been hurt and violated by their own dictators skilled at playing petty power and economic games with the American and European elites, rather than by sheer American imperialism and Israel’s violent politics vis-à-vis the Palestinians, as quite a few commentators and politicians would simplistically assume. More than that, we have to face the fact that it is they, not we, who now defend the fundamental values of the West. This is Francis Fukuyama’s time. Fukuyama should triumph and rejoice in the uncompromising defense of the idea of freedom undertaken by the Arab world, which was long humiliated by their modern tyrants tinged with European values, rather than deeply permeated by them. In fact, the duo of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev in Russia, or Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, or Alyaksandr Lukashenka in Belarus, no matter how profound their internal differences (Ukraine is still a flawed democracy with much diversity and freedom of conscience to compare to the hopeless situation in Russia and Belarus) or how much they differ from Arab countries, should observe these developments with uneasiness and fear. The domino effect is a remote possibility.
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Needless to say, we should not overrate what happened and what is still on the way in the Arab world. However tempting, a comparison of the Middle East with the Baltic States in 1990–1991 would not be plausible; nor would it be accurate. Human rights, political pluralism, and the rule of law are not concepts that the Middles East can hope to promote easily or immediately. The absence of the traditions of democracy, as well as the continuing critical role of the military and state security units in those countries as the only agencies capable of preserving the region’s more or less feasible pro-Western orientation, do not promise a blue and cloudless sky for those countries’ genuine democrats. At best, they can hope for the Turkish scenario; at worst, they will face the Iranian one. And the possibility of civil war cannot be ruled out either. Whatever the case, this is what freedom is all about: unpredictability and uncertainty are its inescapable aspects. Those who wish to sacrifice them for the sake of “stability” and more certainty will always opt for the Mubarak-type enlightened autocracy, or Putinesque “managed democracy,” or any other similar grotesque variety of liberal democracy, instead of the unbearable lightness of freedom. As far as the West is concerned, the EU and the US grew accustomed to safely dealing with dictators rather than accepting the challenges of someone else’s freedom. Well, life itself will sooner or later force them to change or abandon this remnant of the colonial mindset.
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15 Belgique mon amour…
Belgium appears as a small replica of the European Union. A nearly perfect embodiment of modern fears, phobias, uncertainties, and ambivalence, Belgium can break all kinds of conventional wisdom as a house of cards. To engage in cliché dropping when portraying this tiny, albeit ambitious country (critically important to the EU) is a pointless undertaking. Belgium is both down-to-earth and cosmopolitan depending on which aspect of its rather nebulous identity structure and multifaceted reality we discuss. It may well be described as fiercely nationalistic and leaning towards populism if we keep in mind its notorious culture wars and political animosities between Flemings and Walloons or such dangerous forces as the political party Vlaams Belang (that is, Flemish Interest). At the same time, Belgium is strikingly and powerfully European: open, multicultural, multilingual, and sophisticated. Belgium is both a dream and a nightmare of the EU. It is a dream so far as an ability to live in an interconnected world of multiple identities and several languages is concerned; yet it is also a nightmare, once we start thinking about a siege mentality or an intense loathing of a neighboring people, its culture, language (even if you happen to be elegantly fluent in it), never-ending culture wars, stereotyping, and scapegoating. Belgium easily covers two possible scenarios of the EU and its further integration, the best-case and the worst-case scenarios. If the EU succeeds, it will bear a strong family resemblance to Belgium, although the scale will be different. Yet if ,God forbid, it fails for some reason, we will end up in similar feuds and family quarrels that have already become a distinct mark of present Belgium. To refer to their terms of endearment, “Frogs” and “Waffles” are the ethnic, cultural, and political equivalents of the feuding clans of Mon-
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tagues and Capulets who force you to find yourself in a troubled and divorcing family where you like both sides without being able to help them find a way to live together. What results from this world of fear and loathing intertwined with the ability to conceal them through the elegance and power of judgment is creative vitality, unpredictability, and a good deal of cynicism. A vibrant economy, a rich cultural life, the stunning beauty of old Flemish towns, and an incredible cuisine go hand-in-hand with the aforementioned mutual animosities and hostility to the European Commission and other EU institutions (an middle finger extended at the building of the European Commission is not a uniquely rare episode from Brussels’ street life, if you take the word of an eyewitness). Putting aside the miracles of Flemish art history ranging from Jan van Eyck and the Flemish Primitives to Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and other giants of Flemish Baroque painting, or such cultural icons of modern Europe as René Magritte, Belgium rightly merits the name of the heart of Europe due to the high level of its political class. This small nation has an ambitious political class whose members in the European Parliament are committed to the EU and especially to the federalist vision of Europe more than their counterparts from far larger delegations. The names of Belgian liberals Guy Verhofstadt, Annemie Neyts, or Louis Michel are known to anyone more or less familiar with the European Parliament and the European Commission. As in the social sciences, where it is impossible to expect the rise of political science and sociology without the country’s major role in shaping modern life and our modern sensibilities, the political class can hardly mature without being able to meet serious challenges of modern life. The center of the unholy trinity of modernity, that is, uncertainty, unsafety, and insecurity generated by a wealthy and industrial nation, rather than by a poor country with a cleptocratic and authoritarian ruling clique, Belgium may well be said to have become a litmus test case of European integration.
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Belgium can become instrumental in changing our key concepts and terms when observing modern political life. On February 18, 2011, the country marked 250 days it spent without the government, thus breaking the record of Iraq. Now it is approaching the mark of 300 days. And guess what? Nothing happened. Life goes on. The news that Belgium can convey to the world is that the country with a well-functioning system of local governance and with strong municipalities can live without the government. It can do so successfully avoiding anarchy, social unrest, anomie, fragmentation, deterioration of public services, and the like. Needless to say, it would have ended up in social unrest, looting, and anarchy had the EU institutions been just an empty sound. Having moved from status as a rather awkward country, a battlefield of major European powers, to that of a pilot project—if not the playground—of European politics, Belgium has a new raison d’être. We can be reminded by Belgium of the fact that the cultural diversity of Europe may succeed where its politics fails. To share a culture of belonging, at the same time managing an immense political and cultural diversity, and accommodating lands in which every fifty kilometers a different language can be heard and a unique culture displayed, is itself a great lesson of wisdom. In fact, a more homogenous cultural milieu combined with a centralized state can hardly teach it. This is why Belgium is a place where the twentieth century ends and the twenty-first begins.
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16 Freedom and Democracy in Decline
After listening to the Freedom House report, Freedom in the World 2011, on democracy and freedom across the world (presented to the Human Rights Subcommittee Meeting of the European Parliament, the only conclusion that was possible to reach was that freedom and democracy are in decline. I realize that this is at odds with the general wave of enthusiasm evoked by the chain of revolutions and uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, yet the Freedom House speakers in the EP were able to offer only such an assessment. Freedom House is the oldest human rights organization in the United States. Established by Eleanor Roosevelt in October 1941, it began issuing, from 1972, its world reports monitoring human rights situations around the globe. The Freedom House report is perceived as an important message to the world, rather than merely a social science exercise. The political map of the world used by the Freedom House colors anti-democratic regimes that have no respect for fundamental rights and civil liberties with the color grey. Green is reserved for those countries where human rights are respected. A glimpse of the world at this point reveals a picture of something like a grey ocean with some scattered, isolated green islands. We cannot deceive ourselves anymore portraying respect for human rights as a global norm, and disrespect for them as an unpleasant aberration. The disrespect and violation of human rights is a global tendency, and not the exception. The Orwellian jackboot trampling on the human face is a welcome-to-the-twenty-first-century sign instead of a fantasy. I have to admit that we live in relatively safe times, to compare them with the twentieth century. Yet the problem lies elsewhere. In
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spite of our obsessions with safety and security, even at the expense of our civil liberties, dignity, and privacy, the threat of a new world war is not as high as it was in the Cold War era. Even if we call the regional conflicts and political turbulences a new kind of war whose logic is beyond our reach, and which is waged by major powers on their adversaries without their direct involvement, and with a possibility to dislocate that war, that is to say, to have it fought elsewhere and with someone else’s hands, they do not pose an ultimate threat to freedom and democracy. No matter how ugly and dangerous conflicts happen to be, it is difficult to imagine the world without them. Yet freedom is something that is possible to achieve. Without a shadow of a doubt, the fall of the Berlin wall accompanied by a series of Eastern European revolutions and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–1991, or a series of ongoing revolutions in the Arab countries should be a sufficient argument against those who are still inclined to paint freedom as solely a European and Western phenomenon. Things are different with regard to human rights, however. Those who passionately fight for independence and freedom tend to forget about their freedom-loving rhetoric immediately when the revolution is over and when it comes to accommodating and respecting human diversity. Therefore, we shouldn’t conflate independence or freedom fights and a firm commitment to democratic values and human rights. Those things don’t necessarily come hand in hand. Their paths may diverge. What we call the democratic world or, if you will, an exclusive club of democracies that tries to demand respect for human rights all over the world is a tiny minority of more or less democratic states and their respective civil societies vis-à-vis a voiceless and powerless majority of those individuals who are abused, persecuted, and oppressed by their anti-democratic regimes that simply do not care about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For those regimes, the Declaration is merely an empty sound.
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A strong temptation exists to go so far as to overtly call into question the very existence of international community and even that of international law. I remember how an honorable recipient of the Andrei Sakharov Award, Sergei Kovalev, echoing some of his fellow Russian dissidents, put this black on white several times saying that an unpleasant truth is that what we call international law is practiced solely as an aspect of Realpolitik, especially when it is imposed by the winners who inflict it on those defeated as part of the logic of victory and humiliation. Instead of being a fiction, both international community and international law should act independently from the winner who takes it all. According to the Freedom House, press is the first target of dictators all over the world. Then the turn comes for an assault on NGOs. The assault on NGOs is a fairly new tendency, which might be explained by the fact that NGOs, in some countries, are replacing traditional (or dysfunctional) political parties. Fear of justice and retribution in antidemocratic regimes may be one reason, yet fear of failure, jealousy, and suspicion that you are dealing with a prospective rival may push some political forces, even in flawed democracies, to treat NGOs as a threat. What’s the news for us then? A soft decline of freedom and democracy in the Baltic States, as the Freedom House notes. An obvious decline in Ukraine under Viktor Yanukovych. Success in Latin America, as Chavez appears just an aberration, and Brazil turns out to be much preferable for Latin American countries than Venezuela in terms of a choice of a pattern for further development. China and Russia? All quiet in that front. Or disquiet, depending on how we view and voice it. 2011 is likely to be the year of our discontents as far as human rights are concerned.
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17 Do Old-Fashioned Intellectuals and Politics Have a Future?
An interesting discussion took place in the Frankfurter Rundschau (26 September 1992). When asked by his interviewer whether intellectuals will succeed in maintaining their social significance, the Spanish literary critic and author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (recognized especially for the renowned Detective Carvalho detective saga) wittily replied, “the connection between CNN and Jane Fonda will be the only organic intellectual in the world.” Montalbán went on, adding that he had more confidence in intellectuals who appear in public collectively, rather than as individuals. He then concluded that social criticism will survive into the twentyfirst century, shaping new social movements. The only thing that we, as (in his words) “individualist intellectuals,” are still good for is forming critically minded communities. According to the Spanish writer, the role of the intellectuals will decrease, but at the same time, stronger critical collectives will emerge. Undoubtedly, intellectuals have a future, although it may significantly differ from that role of the lonely Teiresiuses and Cassandras, dissenters, nay-sayers, and personifications of the conscience which we knew quite well in Eastern and Central Europe over the past fifty years. In our self-absorbed age—obsessed with consumption, intensity, attention seeking, self-exposure, and sensationalism—an individual intellectual can hardly avoid sinking into oblivion without becoming a victim or a celebrity. Therefore, the fact is that we live in a world which increasingly leaves less room for people like Andrei Sakharov, John Paul II, or
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Václav Havel. A seemingly unquestionable moral authority can be easily marginalized by assuming their names yet changing the logic of their moral choices: in silence and without notice. A safe bureaucratic practice and a well-established routine can be as dangerous for the authenticity of the defense of human rights as a selective approach to it. For instance, there is something profoundly embarrassing, not to say ironic and even sinister, about the way in which the political groups negotiate and calculate their choices when nominating human rights defenders for the Sakharov Prize in the European Parliament. What lurks behind a routinized Realpolitik practice is a legitimizing authority of the greatest human rights defender whose name is used for the self-aggrandizing purposes of politicians. The anonymity and unaccountability of the political and bureaucratic groups is as destructive to the fate of great intellectuals and critics as is the political kitsch or the cult of celebrity within the media world. In fact, we live at a time when old-fashioned—or “preFacebook” era—intellectuals are at the peril of being relegated to the margins of politics and the public domain. They are at risk of becoming non-entities. This is no joke; indeed, far from it. If you go to the public, you can make yourself heard and visible only through IT and public communication novelties or through television talk shows. The rest is history. All in all, technology outpaced politics. Either you actively engage in the world of IT, or you don’t exist. You can, therefore, you ought. You can be online; therefore, you ought to be online. If you are offline, you cease participating in reality. Simple as that. Yet it would be too early to play funeral music for intellectuals. They can survive by forming critically minded and interpretive communities, as mentioned by Montalbán. Moreover, they can be instrumental in shaping new social movements, which becomes especially obvious in the Facebook era. And social movements, for their part, can fundamentally reshape our political life, leaving little of what we knew thus far as conventional politics.
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For all this looks like the end—or at least the beginning of the end—of Politics with a capital “P” in our contemporary world. Classic politics was always associated with the power to turn private problems into public questions as well as the power to internalize public questions and turn them into private, even existential questions. Today, this political mechanism is out of tune. What we in our postmodern politics treat as public questions most often are the private problems of public figures. It is a public secret, then, that ours is a time when politics bows out. Look at the numerous political clowns gaining in popularity nowadays, more relevant and popular than any of the old-fashioned bureaucratic or “expert” politicians. We are swiftly approaching the phase of political life when a major rival to a well-established political party will be not its fellow political party of different cut or shade, but an influential NGO or a social movement. Russian and Chinese autocrats feel this quite well. As we all know, NGOs are not welcome in the tyrannical regimes; neither is Facebook, especially after a series of the Middle East Facebook Revolutions, or the Arab Spring, or even now during the Facebook Revolution of the young Spanish indignados in Madrid. In all likelihood, these acts of resistance and social unrest anticipate the era of virtual social movements which will be conducted or integrated by conventional or new political parties. Otherwise, political parties will be smashed by these movements from the face of the earth. These events offer a timely perspective on politics in the Baltic countries where it turned out, after the 1990s, to be more difficult to motivate society to vote in the democratic elections than to mobilize it against a threat to its political independence or linguistic and cultural identity.
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18 The Culture of Fear
Ours is a time of fear. We cultivate a culture of fear that is growing increasingly powerful and increasingly global. Our self-revealing age, with its fixation on cheap sensationalism, political scandals, “reality” television, and other forms of self-exposure in exchange for public attention and fame, often reward or prize moral panic and apocalyptic scenarios incomparably more than a balanced approach, light irony, or modesty. What is behind this tendency? An overwhelming fear of crumbling to the ground or merely being oneself: the fear of unimportance; the fear of vanishing into the air, leaving no trace of visibility or presence; fear of being like others; fear of being beyond the reach of TV and the media world, which is tantamount to one’s becoming a non-entity or reaching the end of one’s existence. There was a time when fatalistic and pessimistic philosophers— with their predictions of the inexorable doom of European culture, or the breakdown of the Western World—sounded as a voice of the twentieth century, ennobled by its somber and tragic experiences of WWI, America’s disastrous Great Depression, the rise of totalitarian dictatorships, and other forms of modern barbarity. The paradox is that now it is almost bon ton to predict the collapse of Europe—financial, political, and cultural. Visigoths are certainly coming, one way or another: African, Asian, and Eastern European migrants and refugees strip Europe of its historically formed identity, whereas Muslims pose a direct threat to the legacy of Christianity and its fundamental rights and liberties. Funeral music for Europe has become commonplace over the past five years or so.
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What the German philosopher of culture, Oswald Spengler, perceived as a yet-unpronounced refusal of, and as yet undeclared parting with, a great unifying principle behind Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo, Raphael, Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, our new Internet and Facebook Cassandras proclaim as the onslaught of the New Visigoths. What the Austrian thinker of tragic fate, Egon Friedell, saw as a profound crisis of the European soul, our new Cassandras assess merely in terms of the loss of power, domination, and prestige. Suffice it to mention an amateurish and, in effect, regrettable, albeit enormously popular, book, Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Germany Abolishes Itself: How We Are Putting Our Country at Risk), an attempt to beat the drums of threat to German and European identity undertaken by Thilo Sarrazin, a former German finance ministry official and finance senator of Berlin. The most astonishing, not to say incomprehensible, thing is that we live in relatively safe and happy times. Any comparison of our era, even if it happens to be confused and unpredictable, with the epoch of two world wars strikes me as totally misguided, tasteless, and, ultimately, thoughtless. Therefore, the question can be raised as to whether people understand what they say comparing profoundly different things while beating the drums of threat. The answer is not as easy as it may at first appear. The fear of modernity is old news. Every new phenomenon can cause an outbreak of moral panic and overreaction. Yet we can see here something like a tamed or domesticated fear. The point is that fear has long ago become part of popular culture, nurturing our troubled and apocalyptic imagination: earthquakes, tsunamis, all natural disasters, and war crimes ceased to exist on a remote plane of reality. Now they are with us all the time, feeding our sensationalist media and preventing us from the sweet dream that there is, or there is the possibility of, a remote island somewhere that we could be absolutely safe and happy.
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Fear wears various masks. It may speak the language of existential and intimate experience, yet, on a closer look, it appears that we are in control of large segments of organized fear: think about horror films and horror stories which function as an irreplaceable part of entertainment along with television’s situation comedies and stand-up comedians. We don’t quite fear, yet we fear. I fear, therefore, I am. On the other side of that coin, fear nurtures hatred, and hatred nurtures fear. Fear speaks the language of uncertainty, unsafety, and insecurity, which our epoch provides in large quantities, even in abundance. A proliferation of conspiracy theories and vigorous, albeit simplistic, approaches to the EU reminds one of how difficult—even unbearable—life lived in constant doubt and uncertainty can be. As Zygmunt Bauman would have it, there was a time when our rationalistic culture consoled people, suggesting that uncertainty is merely a temporary pause before the arrival of a new, plausible theory or in-depth explanation. Now we have to learn how to live with a sense of constant uncertainty. What comes to a philosopher or artist as an inspiration may become a calamity for ordinary people who fear that their lives could be spoiled and wasted. And the trouble is that here comes a dodgy politician who firmly promises to handle an issue chasing away all our fear and discontent. Thus, fear has become a political commodity paving the way for a new wave of populism and xenophobia in Europe. Before our eyes, the culture of fear manufactures the politics of fear.
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19 The Dissonances of Realpolitik and Human Rights
When the great Russian humanist, dissident, and human rights defender, Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989)—whose ninetieth anniversary was marked on 21 May 2011, and in whose name the European Parliament Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought and the defense of human rights was initiated—was asked about what kind of universal ideology could be adopted by humanity in the future, he described the universality of human rights and our commitment to defend them as the only set of values and ideas capable of bridging the gulfs and reconciling the opposites. Otherwise, according to the patron saint of Russian and Eastern European liberal dissent, we would be trapped in ideological fights and culture wars for decades to come. How ironic, then, that Eastern and Central European countries, which once immensely benefited the noble cause of the defense of human rights and human dignity, today themselves tend to violate those very rights on the grounds of championing their ethnic and linguistic sensitivities or of fostering their revised and updated historical-political narratives. Yet they are not alone in this. In fact, the idea that democracies do not violate human rights, and that violation of rights is the sole of undemocratic and oppressive regimes, sounds as a joke at the beginning of the twenty-first century. All in all, human rights seem to have become the raison d’être of the EU. In fact, the EU conferred itself a special role as a key global actor in the field of human rights. Once the EU is a community of values rather than an immoral trade bloc or soulless technocratic political player, human rights become top priority, at least in theory. True, there is little disconnectedness or naïveté about this: a better, more reliable criterion to check the political and practical reliability of
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the state in question other than a close analysis of how our partners or adversaries observe human rights in their respective countries has yet to be offered. Tell me whether you respect the difference and dignity of humanity, and I will tell you what I can expect of you as a partner. On the other side, suffice it to subtract human rights from the package of liberal democracy, and we will immediately get authoritarian capitalism or technocracy masquerading as democracy. Therefore, human rights are not only about preservation of the legacy of natural law theory, European humanists, Enlightenment philosophers, or such luminaries as Andrei Sakharov. They are a deeply practical matter and also an efficient instrument of policymaking. Bridging the gaps of memory and sensitivity, while coming to grips with what we tend to deny as a political echo of the twentieth century, we lay the foundations for the twenty-first-century world which is expected to reconcile that which has been separated by modernity—the individual and community, rationality and religion, innovation and tradition, truth and value. Yet not everything is as beautiful and serene here as it may appear. Upon closer examination, we notice the political dissonances in the EU, especially when conservative politicians blame the EP for some resolutions it adopts, implying that the EP deals a blow to the national parliaments and strips them of their dignity. What can I say on hearing this as an Eastern European myself? If we apply double standards, refusing to react to the violations of human rights within the EU, yet simultaneously engaging in verbose assaults on Russia, China, or Iran, are we not at the peril of closing ranks with those profoundly undemocratic countries? What would the dividing line between the EU and Russia be if we had adopted the principle of non-interference with national parliaments on such matters as human rights? This would signify the end of Europe as it is now. If so much sound and fury comes from defending the “holy” rights of the national parliament to criminalize diversity or freedom of expression, are we not at risk of transforming the EU into a value-free political entity? Whatever the case, the EP
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keeps sending its powerful messages reminding of a simple truth that civil liberties and human rights can never be confined to the nationstate and its domestic affairs. They are not a property of the state, no matter how just and democratic that state might be. Hopefully, they never will, as far as the EU is concerned. On the other side, human rights are often unscrupulously and easily sacrificed to successful international relations, trade, and foreign policies. It is sufficient to recall the efforts of the EU to make it up to Russia and China every time it comes to the supply of Russian gas and oil for the major European players, or trade agreements and major projects with China. Yet the fact remains that both countries infringe human rights, not to mention the overt and methodical extermination of Russian dissenters, critics of the Kremlin, and human rights defenders in Russia, or the war waged by the People’s Republic of China on its civil society, opponents, dissenting intellectuals, and even lawyers already disbarred by the regime. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are likely to live in a world where the successful exercise of power, be it plausible violence or good economic performance, increasingly becomes a license to abandon individual freedom, civil liberties, and human rights. Russia and China may best exemplify this sinister tendency, the embodiment of the Chinese alternative to the West, whose essence lies in capitalism without liberty, or the free market without democracy.
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20 Postimperialism
What exactly is meant by “postimperialism” here? One could call it a strange state of affairs between politics and international relations, when former empires deny their colonial history but maintain great influence in their former satellite states, which, under the guise of political correctness and good taste, are called “friendly nations” and “traditional allies.” Besides, postimperialism cannot be imagined without a paternalistic, protective attitude toward smaller or economically and politically weaker countries. The current European Union vision, as seen from the perspective of the exclusive club of France, Germany, and, perhaps, Great Britain, which also includes countries holding less power and influence (noted for not having de facto a decisive vote at critical moments), is a typical expression of postimperialism or postimperialist syndrome. There is, however, another possible future for Europe—a Europe where smaller states and nations would have the last word when speaking about cultures or details of community life hundreds of years in the making. That would be a Europe in which Danes, the Flemish, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Icelanders would play no smaller role than the French, Germans, or British. When former president of France, Jacques Chirac, accidentally said that the countries of Eastern Europe had missed their chance to keep quiet, he undoubtedly stripped bare a carefully disguised postimperialist syndrome. It resulted in leaving a huge gulf between the two Europes, irrespective of what titles they are given. Postimperialist syndrome can also exist in countries that have long lost the positions they once held in the international arena but still maintain a thinly disguised paternalistic, moralistic, and arrogant
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attitude to their former colonies or weaker neighbors. The British and French are too obvious to mention here—we may well remember the commonly expressed feelings of Swedish politicians toward Finland or the Baltic states. Interestingly, the imperial sentiments of Swedes, which up until now have not descended into a strange amalgam of Swedish socialism and monarchism, enshroud the veil of Sweden as a “moral superpower”—they often assign themselves the reputation of being the most just and advanced country in the world, allowing Swedes to easily moralize all the other “backward” countries. I shall never forget how, during a seminar in Stockholm, the outwardly respectable moderator, a former diplomat, started talking about the Baltic states as if they were countries whose mentalities and customs were difficult for Swedes to understand because everything was completely different there. The argument was that similar forums would aid in increasing their awareness. In other words, the territory of the Baltic states is ubi leones. After this masterpiece of postimperialist syndrome, a Finnish film director stood up and openly mocked the Swedish moderator, calling his ideas recidivistic, from the perspective of taking a colonialist approach to one’s neighboring countries. This was not an isolated case—in Sweden, as well as Germany, the Baltic states are talked of more often than the United States in the sense that to understand them, one must in the least take a course on Baltic anthropology, which would reveal incomprehensible codes of behavior, feelings, and thinking new to the West. Postimperialism is a mask or veil of power once held but now lost, of which there are attempts to remind a significantly changed world of the division of roles in the former theater of world politics. Postimperialist syndrome is expressed not only through nostalgia, political rituals, or the hope of maintaining one’s importance but also through intellectual strategies that hope to deflect the origins of today’s most painful problems away from oneself and address them to
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new political actors. In other words, place one’s own historical mistakes on the shoulders of newcomers. For example, a typical element of the discourse on postimperialist syndrome is throwing the shadow of doubt onto the appearance of smaller nations on the world political map—deliberately discrediting the current world order, or the logic of emancipation that helped these very same smaller nations disentangle themselves from their respective empires and create modern states. In simple terms, this is a way of frightening the world with the monster of nationalism, at the same time exclaiming remorse that the former world order has fallen apart, a world in which the logics of identity were completely different, and no alleged antagonism existed between nations. The dramas of the twentieth century are often explained by nationalism or its dangerous intrusion into the system of international relations and world politics. These sentiments, when expressed in larger nations, are presented as authentic patriotism; the same reaction that nationalism creates among smaller nations is presented as being “suicidal.” In fact, it is self-deception and dangerous delusion. Not nationalistic reactions, however nasty they happen to be, but rather the postimperialist syndrome of former empires and totalitarian states is a threat to the existing global social and moral order, as those postimperialistic entities tend to change the system of international relations in accordance with their needs. This happened more than once in the twentieth century, and we should not be incurably naive and misguided again.
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21 A Dangerous Delusion
One of the most dangerous delusions of our times is the firm conviction of the European Left and its counterparts in North America that Israel is a most—if not the most—troublesome and sinister state in the world, one which may cause a new world war. (As if a new global war cannot break out at any minute in, Afghanistan, India, Kashmir, Pakistan, or Russia.) What of the genocidal regime of Sudan? Or the theocracy that is Iran, whose dynamic and talented people deserve far better than the deranged, fanatical mullahs who run their state, and even worse: a Holocaust-denying political buffoon as their president. Together, they increasingly bear a family resemblance to the former Soviet political elite, with the only exception that the Soviet Union was a militantly irreligious state. What of this? Merely mention them, and you find a smile on the face of your opponent: “Since when is Israel a club member of such states? Would you like to position it this way? Is that what you want?” Well, we can do much more than that. Think of Russia and China, two major actors of world politics. Confronted with the facts of outrageous human rights violations and the systematic murder of political opponents and journalists in Russia, or the shocking denial of Chinese authorities to allow a Nobel Peace Prize winner to participate in the award ceremony (not to mention China’s rapidly declining human rights record or its nasty policies vis-à-vis disbarred human rights lawyers) and anti-Israel leftists would insist on Israel’s greater responsibility as a democracy.
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Okay, we can take that as an argument, although it is difficult to regard it as terribly plausible and convincing. We know that democracies at war are far from being at their best, and that war may disfigure politics and change the country beyond recognition. Israel is at war since its inception. As long as the opposing criminal and homicidal organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah deny Israel its rights of existence and regard the Jewish State itself as a crime and as a catastrophe, we cannot be surprised. No civilized state on earth would ever do business with agencies or power structure units that do not respect the lives and wellbeing of its citizens and that wish to outlaw and delegitimize it. If the measures undertaken by Israel or the militancy of its policies come as a shock, then let us try to imagine what would have been the reaction of the UK if thousands of missiles had been launched into its territory, say, from Calais. Or, for instance, the reaction of France to the massacre of its civilians on its territory as a retribution to its foreign policies in North Africa. If we still think that it would be any better and more humane than those of Israel, then we are at the peril of losing a sense of reality. No war has ever done any good to any nation, even if that war is thought to be just and nearly saintly. Even World War II, which gave the Allies the sense of a just war, had its unjustifiable cruelties, atrocities, and iniquities. No one will ever be able to justify the atrocities committed in Dresden, nor the British and American bombing of German civilians when the war had ended and the Nazis defeated. And yet we can easily expect the argument that the backbone of fascism had to be crushed and that fascism had to be smashed from the face of the earth. If this is so, why on earth should we bypass and overlook the fact that anti-Israel forces and organizations in some Arab countries, and even in Palestine itself, have their roots in their historical alliance with the Nazis? If anybody doubts that, it is high time then to remind of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was a friend and ally to Adolf Hitler, and whose convictions hardly differed
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from the Nazis. One of the most unfortunate and ludicrous mistakes made by the allies after the war was their reluctance and failure to bring the Grand Mufti to justice for his criminal activities and alliances whose aim was the Jew-free Palestine. As Elena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov’s widow and herself a legendary Soviet dissident, rightly noticed, the idea of the founding of the Jews-free state of Palestine, while regarding Israel as part of the Palestinian Arabs’ fatherland lost after the Nakba (that is, Israel’s Independence Day regarded by the Palestinians as the Day of the Catastrophe), looks like a posthumous grimace of Nazi project. There should be somewhere a Judenrein world… No sound, conscientious person would ever suggest painting the Palestinian-Israeli conflict black and white. It is far from the struggle of good and evil. In most cases, it would be easy to argue that, as the Israeli writer Amos Oz pointed out, the tragedy there is that the right fights the right. Another tragedy is that the war gradually kills the human soul depriving us of our sensitivity and powers of association. No nation has ever benefited from war, and no one ever will. Yet the idea that what is happening in Israel now is a recurrent colonial policy, rather than merely an unfortunate and unresolved territorial conflict between the two nations, is nonsense on the stilts. If we are not trapped by our troubled imagination, we have to distinguish between reality and our wish to project Europe’s colonial guilt and bad conscience on quite a different and specific conflict which itself was and continues to be the outcome of World War II caused by Europe. This is why the idea of the UN to legitimize the state of Palestine would be a grave mistake. No state can come into existence without negotiations, political compromise, and dialogue with the neighboring countries, especially those that are bound to live side by side forever.
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22 A New Technocratic Revolution, or the End of Modern Nations?
We live in the time of obsession with power. As Zygmunt Bauman wittily noticed, the old formula of politics as a carrots-and-sticks strategy still holds, yet we, having seen in the twentieth century, the worst nightmares of sticks, are likely to experience the domination of carrots nowadays. Power manifests itself as the financial and economic might and potential, rather than military force and the language of militarism. Yet the logic remains the same. This is the old good Wille-zur-Macht, or the will-to-power, whether it assumes the guise of Friedrich Nietzsche or Karl Marx. The point is not if you have an identifiable Weltanschauung, a resilient identity or a major ideology; instead, the point is about how much power you have. I buy, therefore, I am. We got accustomed to regarding a human being merely as a statistical unit. It does not come as a shock to us to view human individuals as workforce. The purchasing power of society or the ability to consume became crucial criteria to evaluate the degree of suitability of a country for the club of power to which we apply various sonorous titles of international organizations. The question whether you are a democracy becomes relevant only when you have no power and therefore have to be controlled through the means of rhetorical or political sticks. If you are oil-rich or if you can consume or invest really much, it absolves you from your failure to respect modern political and moral sensibilities or to stay committed to civil liberties and human rights. On a closer look, what is happening in Europe is a technocratic revolution. A decade or two ago it was crucial to have proof that you
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are a democracy to qualify for the club. What mattered was a set of values and commitments. For now, we are likely to enter the new stage in world politics: what really matters is your financial discipline, the ability to be suitable for a fiscal union, and your economic conduct. Recalling Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (the title of this anti-utopian novel is an anagram of Nowhere—hence, a clear allusion to Thomas More’s Utopia), here we have the political and moral logic of Europe turned upside down. In Erewhon, Butler pokes fun of a utopian community where illness becomes a liability and where a failure to remain healthy and fit is prosecuted. Something of this kind can be found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where a failure to be happy is seen as a symptom of backwardness. A caricature of the pursuit of happiness in a distant technocratic and technological society should not console us as something beyond our reality, though. What we have in Europe now is an emerging concept of the liability of economic impotence. No kind of political and economic impotence shall remain unpunished. This is to say that we no longer have a right to fail, which had long been an inescapable aspect of freedom. The right to be open to the possibility of bankruptcy or any other possibility of failure was part of the European saga of freedom as a fundamental choice we make every day facing its consequences. Those days are gone. Now you are at risk of becoming a gravedigger of Europe or even of the entire world if you send a wrong message to the global market. You may cause a global domino effect, thus letting down your foes and allies who equally depend of that same single world power structure. This is a new language of power, hitherto unseen and unidentified by anybody in world history. Behave yourself, otherwise you will spoil the game and will let us down. In doing so, you will jeopardize the viability of a moral and social order within which no country or nation remains responsible for itself. Everything has its global repercussions and implications. And how about the nations? Up to now we were certain that the European nations embodied the Calvinist principle of predestination
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implying a possibility to be happy in this earthly life and in thisworldly reality; the Kantian principle of self-determination became more relevant in the nineteenth century. There was a world where the pursuit of happiness, like the possibility of salvation and selffulfillment spoke the language of the republic and its values: hence, the emergence of postcolonial nations after two world wars and after the breakup of empires. What we have today in our second modernity bears little, if any, resemblance to this logic of the first modernity, as Ulrich Beck would have it; we can no longer experience the passions and longings of the twentieth century, not to mention the dramas of the nineteenth century, no matter how hard we try to relegitimize our historical and political narrative. To use the terms of Zygmunt Bauman, the liquid modernity transformed us into a global community of consumers. What was a nation in the era of solid modernity as a community of memory, collective sentiment and moral choice, now is a community of consumers who are obliged and expected to behave in order to qualify for the club. In the epoch of Facebook, the nations are becoming extraterritorial units of a shared language and culture. We knew in the era of solid modernity that the nation was made up of several factors, first and foremost by a common territory, language, and culture as well as by the modern division of labor, social mobility, and literacy. Nowadays, the picture is rather different: a nation appears as an ensemble of mobile individuals with their logic of life deeply embedded in withdrawal-and-return. It is a question of whether you are online or offline with regard to your country’s problems and the debates around them, instead of deciding once and for all whether you are going to stay in that same place or vote for those same political actors for the rest of your days. Either you are on or you are off. This is a daily plebiscite of a liquid-modern society.
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23 Where Does Memory Live?
Once I became a witness to a stunning dialogue between a celebrity jazz musician and the audience. It happened on 22 October 2006, during the show by Cuban-born American jazz trumpeter, Arturo Sandoval, in the Kaunas Jazz festival, Lithuania. A most revealing dialogue occurred after a couple of opening tunes that proved Sandoval one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of our time. He paused and addressed the audience: “Who of you know the great trumpeter Timofei Dokshizer who lived in Vilnius and just passed away?” A mortal silence fell after the roar of fascination with which the audience had greeted the celebrated musician. The question took the audience by surprise. People had come to rejoice in a world famous celebrity, instead of breaking their heads trying to learn about the existence of a local unknown. “Timofei Dokshizer was a tremendous trumpet teacher and musician,” continued Sandoval. “I want to pay tribute to him by playing a piece dedicated to him. Is his wife here tonight?” A small and humble lady stood and lifted her hand. “Thank you,” said Maestro. For a moment, the audience seemed moved by this episode but then it was again totally absorbed by an unforgettable performance from a Cuban magician of jazz. Who was Timofei Dokshizer (1921–2005)? Why did Sandoval decide to interrupt his show to pay tribute to a musician whose name was an enigma? I then uncovered the story behind the name. To my astonishment, I realized that he was the same Ukrainian-born master of trumpet whose sound had mesmerized me in my young days, when I studied music and attended auditions for classical musicians. One of the miracles for me was the beauty of the trumpet sound in “The
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Neapolitan Dance” from Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake. Another highlight of his glowing mastery was “The Flight of the Bumblebee” from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan. The trumpeter whose records were inseparable from our music education was this man, Timofei Dokshizer, who would have turned 90 years old on 13 December 2011. Even I, a music lover, was unaware of the fact that Dokshizer spent many years in Lithuania working in Vilnius. It took a Cubanborn American genius of jazz to set a lesson in cultural memory and local sensibility. And it made me think about memory. Where does it live? Where does it dwell? Are we more sensitive to our history and culture only when it pertains directly to our own lives? What if everything is the other way around? What if we need the Other to experience ourselves and to get a sense of reality and history? What if memory lives elsewhere? Memory comes from without. It comes from the Other. We console and deceive ourselves by telling a fairytale about how we, not others, preserve the history and memory of our country. And the disturbing fact is that memory comes from without and preserves us and our culture, and our history. What we need in our times of incessant change is a sweet self-deception about the past, our protective armor and strength. Yet what we actually need is a political/historical narrative which would justify our present choices and actions. Sometimes, this narrative is needed merely as an aspect of our foreign policy. In our self-revealing and self-exposing age, we need a motivation and legitimization discourse which seeks its strength in various sensations, inventions of the grandeur of the past, and other sorts of stories that would found and legitimize us, and then would herald to the world about how unique we are. Yet the point remains that others, not us, need us as part of reality and history, rather than a kind of imagined community of shared sentiment and sensitivity. Memory that preserves us from non-existence comes from without. Memory does not live here. Memory lives elsewhere.
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A true danger is that this willful forgetting is no joke. In many ways, we are a community of willful forgetting, rather than a community of memory. The historic lot of our society, the totalitarian version of modernization and two world wars with their calamities and identity-obliterating, memory-erasing, staggering blows, deeply affected Eastern and Central European countries. And recalling the interpretation that Milan Kundera provided of Central Europe’s tragic, anonymous, and memory-erasing modernization in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting, we may assert that Central European modernity is an organized process of forgetting; a phantom city alienated from its own history and obsessed by a desire to begin that history anew or to reject its real history and in its place exhibit a souvenir history; and its ghostly inhabitants, people without a history or a memory. Such a destructive version of modernity is purveyed in the recently deceased Lithuanian writer Ričardas Gavelis’s novels Vilnius Poker, 1989, and Vilnius Jazz, 1993. We choose to forget what is unbearably close to us, what painfully reminds us of our misery and anguish, what deals a blow to our self-esteem destroying a romanticized and sugary version of our history. The heroic version of history is always little more than sheer self-deception, as we prize what others despise. We celebrate what signifies a tragedy for other people. We satisfy the thirst of our monument-erecting, self-aggrandizing, self-establishing, and selfcelebrating imagination to live up to our present needs and expectations. What we call “collective memory” and “history” usually become merely the means to set up a pragmatic policy for today. This is why we shouldn’t be surprised at a lesson in memory and local sensibility of a Cuban-born American jazz trumpet virtuoso who comes to Lithuania to remind us of his deceased peer, a great, albeit neglected and semi-forgotten, Ukrainian-born and Russianspeaking trumpeter, an unforgettable soloist in “The Neapolitan Dance.”
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24 Spenglerian Fallacy and Europe as Mutual Rediscovery
No matter how popular Oswald Spengler is deemed to become once again due to a profound crisis of Europe, one thing prevents me from taking him seriously. True, he made many subtle points as regards the decline of Europe between two world wars, yet one of the most dubious ideas defended by the author of The Decline of the West was that on parallel and separate existence of cultures. For Spengler, the slightest attempt to emulate or at least to get closer to the forms of another culture was nothing short of what he termed pseudomorphosis: a false spread and interplay of cultural forms. The example that Spengler took was a pseudomorphosis of Westernizing policies undertaken by Peter the Great in Russia. According to Spengler, the building of Saint Petersburg was nothing but a parallel reality in non-European Russia. This was exemplified by the reaction of Slavophiles who felt deeply hostile to Europe. Yes and no—that’s how I would react to this. Whereas Russian politics had little, if anything, to do with modern Europe, Russian literature and culture was a miracle of Europe. Even if Dostoevsky thought that nothing was as ephemeral and remote from Russian reality as Saint Petersburg, his own novels were bound to become part of the European cultural canon. Allow me to cite three examples that prove Spenglerian fallacy better than anything else. First, let us recall the eminent film director, Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990), who lived in the former Soviet Union was a great example of the canon as a continuing rediscovery of self in the world of multiple identities and as a shared space of cultural identity. He was born into an Armenian family in Tbilisi (now Georgia) and spent a
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great deal of time in Ukraine and Georgia, finally settling in Armenia. All of these countries considered him to be one of their own. He spoke several languages. Incidentally, that was a time when it was possible to play the ethnocultural identity card, precisely because the Soviets started allowing such minor identity games. Parajanov went to Ukraine to make a magnificent film, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964)—regarded as a classic in Ukraine. The Ukrainians acknowledged the film as a significant part of their national rebirth movement. The film is filled with religious and folkloric themes and did not fit the social-realism criteria of Soviet cinema at the time. That was how a person made himself up while acting in several cultures, all of which were involved in a conversation consisting of intertwined, multiple strands, constantly reweaving itself. Parajanov achieved international fame and professional credit after the triumph of his film The Color of Pomegranates. The film is a biography of Sayat Nova (1712–1795), the “King of Song,” a great poet of Armenian origin who lived in Georgia, and wrote in the Armenian, Georgian, Persian, and Azerbaijani Turkish languages. The greatest folk singer-songwriter that ever lived in the Caucasus, Sayat Nova would be unthinkable without the context of several languages and cultures. Therefore, it is hardly possible to squeeze the cultural canon as it stands today into a single culture. The ability to place something exclusively in one culture means that we have merely a political invention or a political project masquerading as culture. Instead, Europe is reborn each time one culture is rediscovered and permeates another culture. Europe is not about purity; it is rather about the ability to live someone else’s life in terms of a plot, narrative, and memory. Secondly, we could remember Sergei Parajanov’s classmates in the VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography at Moscow, Russia), Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov, who had long worked together making several masterpieces, and who, perhaps, will best be remembered for their immortal films Flight (1970; based on Mikhail Bulgakov novel White Guard) and Legend on Tijl (1970;
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based on Charles de Coster’s The Legend of the Glorious Adventures of Tijl Uilenspiegel in the Land of Flanders and Elsewhere). Legend on Tijl was nothing short of a miracle. The mystery of liberty deeply entrenched in the Flemish masterpiece was refracted through the profound drama of Russian love for liberty—no matter how deeply abused and disappointed by the reality of the twentieth century. Coupling great camera work with an epic brushwork, this film revealed the stunning beauty of Flemish portraits and religious painting dating back to the Flemish Primitives. Actors’ faces, eyes, hands, and long gazes were straight from Rogier van der Weyden’s or Hans Memling’s portraits. The film had a double plane of aesthetic existence: whereas its longing for freedom and celebration of rebellion was too obvious to need emphasis, the film was permeated by love for early modernity and for what may be described as a miracle of European culture which is so manifestly powerful in the early discovery of human individuality. Thirdly, it was Emir Kusturica’s first English-language film, Arizona Dream (1993), where the otherness, if not the otherworldliness, of the Deep South of the United States was revealed through the surrealist interplay of love, sex, and death, which was best embodied in the profoundly European music of Goran Bregović as well as in a deeply Serbian feeling of the ambivalence of multiculturalism and otherness—something that the tragedy of Sarajevo alone can teach us. Oswald Spengler has not seen all of this, alas.
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25 The Individuals by Default
My Finnish friend, a philosophy professor from Helsinki, once told me that, for some of his colleagues, Estonia is an example of the worst nightmare of libertarian politics. Such a remark, if publicized, would have dealt a blow to a sweet dream of Lithuanians to stand in the Estonians’ shoes enjoying Finland in the vicinity and celebrating 70 kilometers away from something radically different from postCommunist traumas and painful dilemmas. The dream was broken by my colleague as a house of cards falls. Too much individualism, atomization, and fragmentation of societal ties, too little sensitivity and compassion, too huge a gap between the jet set and ordinary folks, no welfare state—these were the main points made by my Finnish friend. Ironically, the postCommunist folks who had always thought about the West as a blissful utopia of freedom and civil liberties accompanied by some iniquities of capitalism, should have found themselves in the shoes of those admirers of free-market economy’s side effects that manifest themselves in our new habits of the mind and those of the heart. “Whereas life in Helsinki is like a constant Sunday afternoon, life in Riga is always a Monday morning,” a graduate student from Latvia once said after my seminar in Helsinki. I would start an argument by reminding that we, Eastern Europeans, seem to have skipped the era of political and moral individualism of the industrial era. Having been isolated from the social and political changes of the West for more than five decades, we find ourselves in the era of, as Zygmunt Bauman would have it, liquid modernity with its toolboxes made to enhance our powers of association—the Do It Yourself strategy and the Assume Responsibility for the World mindset, Facebook as the embodi-
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ment of liquid friendship, that is, the weakening of human bonds, and social networks on the net as a new policy of inclusion and exclusion. Do It Yourself (DIY)—this is a new code of behavior widely assumed as a new moral responsibility of the modern individual. There was a time when we had good reason to expect to be, say, a scholar clearly knowing that we would find a publisher, a book designer able to supply the layout of the book, and a manager capable of a skilled strategy to promote and sell our book. Last but not least, we expected to be paid for our endeavor, instead of paying ourselves to the publisher for the work we have done for their benefit. Nowadays things tend to change in more ways than one: We must first pay for publishing, then provide a camera-ready copy of the book, and also assume responsibility for a good marketing strategy. Do It Yourself. Be an academic, a scholar, and a manager at one and the same time. Get the money for your research, conduct your research, publish a monograph, and then attempt a PR move to promote it. Do it yourself. Make of yourself anything you want. You will be a self-made-man or a self-made-woman by acclamation and default, instead of free choice. This is no longer Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s dream of a human individual capable of shaping him or herself. The paradox is that the individual is now shaped by globalization and its anonymous forces. Somehow, this strikingly reminds of Karl Marx’s dream. There are many reasons to regard Marxism to have originated as a form of technological determinism. Marx’s resentment against the modern division of labor as the principal reason behind the split of human personality and the resulting alienation from their creations and products sheds much light on Marxism as an awkward reaction against solid modernity. The humanization of science and technology, according to Marx, can occur only in Communism as the new socioeconomic formation, which coincides with the end of prehistory and the beginning of real history. Therefore, Communism will harmonize the human personality divided by the modern division of labor and capitalism. It will do
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so by fully releasing the creative potential of humankind hitherto suppressed by the modes of production based on the division of labor and exceedingly encouraged specialization. We will be able to toil and rejoice over physical work, while simultaneously cultivating our mind, soul, and all other faculties of our creativity and imagination. We will display our magnificent abilities as worker, scholar, or artist upon our wish or someone else’s request. Hence, we clearly see the manifestly utopian moment in Marxism, its tirades against early utopias and French utopian socialism notwithstanding. This is no joke nowadays. Instead of harmonizing and reconciling our faculties of the soul, we become individuals by default. We are supposed to act on behalf of the world. We have to tackle all the grave problems created by previous generations. We are expected to find the way out of the most painful predicaments of modernity—as courageous, self-asserting, self-sufficient, risk-maximizing, and conscious individuals. Who cares that Ulrich Beck and Zygmunt Bauman warned us that there are no local solutions to globally produced problems, and that individuals cannot act as a viable and sufficient response to social and political challenges which became part of our lives by accident and whim of history, instead of our conscious choice. How true this is of the Baltic region, a laboratory of unbearably light, rapid, and incessant change. The best scene from the Monty Python film Life of Brian (made with the stroke of genius) as regards our destiny to be individuals by acclamation of the world or simply by default, is that in which Brian, a young man from Jerusalem mistaken for Jesus Christ, wakes up after a sweet night of passionate love and appears naked at the window. He is saluted by a crowd gathered below. Desperately trying to rid himself of this sound and fury of true believers, Brian says, “But you are all individuals! You are all different!” A single voice in the crowd replies, “I am not.” Yes, we are all individuals nowadays. We are so by acclamation or by default, rather than by dramatic and intense moral choice.
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26 The New Russia with the Worn-Out Leader
That Russia is not the Soviet Union seems obvious to anyone more or less familiar with history and not devoid of the sense of reality. Yet what happened over the past months was much more than a sheer repetition of history or an echo of the Arab Spring, as we are inclined to sometimes think. We have to admit that we Balts are keen on historical observations and comparisons. Some of them work, others don’t. A strong sense of history coupled with a sharp feeling of the dramatic character of modern social and political change in a small country is our asset. However, when it comes to Russia and its perception, we succumb to some clichés and simplistic interpretations out of our wish to overreach and over-generalize. A mechanic comparison of Russia and the former Soviet Union is a good example. In fact, Russia under Vladimir Putin bears much more family resemblance to African cleptocracies, such as Nigeria, or to South American authoritarian populist regimes like that of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela than to the former Soviet Union. It was with sound reason, then, that Andrei Piontkovsky, a noted and subtle Russian political analyst, and also a caustic and merciless critic of Putin, once pointed out that whereas Soviet crimes and nightmares were something out of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Putin’s regime was hardly more than farce. You can apply such terms as “sinister figures,” “single-minded fanatics,” “villains,” or describe people who had an ideology and who made an impact on big part of European and North American intellectuals, not to mention the Middle East. But how can you apply these terms to the folks who are simply thieves and whose only ideology is oil and gas?
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Therefore, we urgently need a paradigm shift with regards to Russia and its assessment. It will not vanish in the air leaving no trace; nor will it become something profoundly different in the near future. We are bound to live side by side with Russia as a problematic neighbor and partner, rather than a fatal, sinister, and once-and-forall foe to the Baltic States. Among the strong sides of Russia, we can easily mention its enormous intellectual potential, creativity, and one of the greatest cultures in the modern world. I have to confess that once Adam Michnik, a great Polish journalist and dissident, a legend of the Solidarity movement in Poland who acts now as editor-in-chief of the largest Polish daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, hit the bull’s eye when describing himself as an antiSoviet Russophile. It was a timely and accurate note, as quite a few people from my generation would depict themselves as political Russophobes and cultural Russophiles, political Russophobia clearly stemming from a potent anti-Soviet sentiment. Much to my delight, there are many indications that present-day Russia stands head and shoulders above its own president. Vladimir Putin cannot define himself other than through his nostalgia for the former Soviet Union, whose demise was, as the saddened former KGB colonel called it, the worst “geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century. The younger generations of Russia will have nothing to do with this sort of Soviet jingoism. Imperial patriotism and revenge-seeking may motivate the Russian power structure elite (siloviki), but it means nothing to young, middle-class Russian people who are at best indifferent to, if not overall sarcastic toward, the Soviet Union and “the paradise on Earth” it created in Eastern and Central Europe. A powerful anti-Putinist sentiment that came out manifestly in Moscow during the rallies shows that Putin won the battle but lost the war. What happened on 4 March was as predictable as the beginning and the end of the day. He was elected President of Russia for six years, holding the possibility to rule the country until he reaches 90.
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So what? What kind of surprise is this? What else could we expect of the candidate who had 70 percent of TV time in the state-run channels and who simply banned Grigory Yavlinsky from the elections? Most regrettable is the fact that Mikhail Prokhorov was not the candidate able to defeat Putin. Two other rivals of Putin, the ferociously xenophobic and antisemitic communist, Gennady Zyuganov, and the political buffoon with fascist inclinations, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leave the question open as to whether Putin or they would have been a lesser evil for Russia and the world. Putin’s is a passing victory in the losing war that he is waging against democracy and liberty in Russia. Having started his assault on the rule of law and fragile elements of democracy in Russia, this nostalgic, colorless, faceless, and soulless figure, who walks in disguise as a strongman, a Rambo-like macho with some qualities of the Agent 007, ended up as a comical character. People poking fun of him and comedians making jokes about his split into the strongman and a lovey-dovey character, sentimental about the most vulnerable things in the world, remind us of the atmosphere in the Soviet Union in the 1970s under Leonid Brezhnev, when the fear of repression was intertwined with political anecdotes and humor targeted at the grotesque Soviet leader. Therefore, we need a new paradigm to deal with Russia. It will change one day. It is learning how to live without Putin. And that day is coming.
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27 Commercialism or a Cult of Brutality and Power?
The amount of negative information, brutal imagery, and violence in the Lithuanian media raises the issue of whether the reasons behind publicizing this sort of information lie in extreme commercialism or in a disguised power cult? Many of us have noticed the inexplicable amount of negative information, brutal images, and detailed scenes and reports of violent acts in the Lithuanian media. The first pages of self-proclaimed “serious” newspapers flash information about violent and brutal clashes in a local drinking hole between partners and couples who abuse alcohol. Criminality chronicles in Lithuania are so inflated and emphasized that it is becoming hard to believe that we live in a country that is not in the throes of war and still manages to uphold its internal social peace. It is close to impossible to find another nation that features so many reports on violence and negative information in its media. Attempts were made to explain this trend by blaming the growth of the tabloid press and the commercialization of journalism as a whole. Whatever the case may be, this argument is not completely convincing. The press and television in many countries is undergoing rapid commercialization. But neither in England, whose press and television is just as affected by rapid and uncontrollable commercialization, nor in the Benelux or Scandinavian countries can such an abundance of violent scenes be seen. Not to mention that even their tabloid press would hesitate to feature the type of information that Lithuanians are “fed.” So how can the outbreak of this brutality and power cult in Lithuania be explained, openly identifying the causes? Is outright commercialism simply encouraged by the lack of quality journalism
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or any valid alternative media or do the reasons lie elsewhere? Are we lagging behind the West, or conversely, are we free from high culture and thus left in the middle of the modern barbarian avant-garde, far ahead of the West wherein a rich heritage of civilization still manages to stop and restrain this outburst of brutality and vulgarity? Perhaps we are somewhere between the new barbarianism (still on its way in the West); pioneer barbarianism—capitalism without democracy (so far this is the Chinese or present-day Russian model, but its spread throughout the world cannot be dismissed); a free market without personal freedom; the strengthening of the economic dictatorship and the accompanying disappearance of political thinking; and the final transformation of politics into a part of mass culture and show business, where the real power and governance lies in the hands not of a publicly elected representative but someone selected by the most powerful and privately controlled segment of society— the heads of the central bureaucracy, business, and the media. Even if there is but a small grain of truth in these gloomy assumptions, they still fail to explain our extraordinary ability of creating an emotional hell and presenting our country as if it were catastrophe-stricken or had become the most terrible place on Earth. It is strange that this internal hell is created by Lithuania itself. I have socialized with my students, who are from Kosovo, Albania, BosniaHerzegovina, and Serbia, countries that have had and continue to experience real problems. Complaints or talk of Lithuania’s problems appeared overinflated and even improper when compared with countries living with truly oppressive and tragic present-day situations. The key to solving this problem may be a simple detail: We do not relate (and entirely without reason) two mutually related and determining factors—the overabundance of reports on violence and brutality and their portrayal in our media, and the psychoanalytical implications of our undoubtedly sadistic and masochistic political commentary, where the predominant goal is to belittle others and oneself. Our brutal and degrading manner of speaking about others or ourselves, that is, social and political commentary as a slow process
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of self-negation and destruction, has in fact nothing to do with being critical. Healthy criticism is the construction of alternatives and the trial of thoughts or actions from logical perspectives or other knowledge or known ways of thinking. Spoken and mental cannibalism or the moral destruction of one another can mean only one thing—the rejection of free and open discussions and their murder before they can even start. Sadistic language is commonly used to control, to torment, and in so doing, to overthrow the object under discussion, while masochistic language is typified by the type of self-commentary that not even the fiercest enemy of an individual or country would imagine making. As Erich Fromm noticed, only those who have not taken an interest in such topics may think that sadism and masochism are aspects of the structure of a character or personality that are in opposition to one another. They are in fact closely related and often become entangled into the one sadomasochistic knot, precisely because they come from the one source—the fear of loneliness, rejection by the world, and isolation. As freedom is usually understood by weaker individuals as standing naked and defenseless in front of a dark and hostile world, the only way to save oneself is to break a stranger’s spirit, or one’s own personality. Do not read into my comments that I have in mind the authoritarian servitude of those who do no more than read and watch the violent media—I am not speaking about the victims. The authoritarian personality creates this type of media. It is its revenge on the world, and the dialectics of obedience and power, and the joy of demeaning oneself and others.
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28 The End of Modern Politics?
The question of whether modern politics, the way they have existed for centuries, will survive the twenty-first century is a serious one. The Manichaeism of the left and the right, which, in Milan Kundera’s words, “is as stupid as it is insurmountable,” and which is deeply grounded in Western Europe and North America, is much more than partisan politics. Had it been that way, it would have been quite safe to assume that there no other way can be offered to deal with polarities and opposing visions of human existence than democratic politics with its ethics of rational compromise without losing one’s core principles, dignity and identity. However, on a closer look it appears that this is not so. We suffer from unproductive, albeit dramatic, encounters of irreconcilable and mutually exclusive moral concepts, cultural codes, and visions of the world around us, which politicians try to appropriate, accommodate, and monopolize nowadays. Yet not a single chance exists to reconcile those poles reaching a common denominator. At this point, a moral compromise of our time, which we call “human rights ideology,” could be quite deceiving even in the West. Undisguised irritation of right-wingers at every hint dropped by their colleagues from the left concerning LGBT rights is reciprocated by the left at any time when it comes to an attempt of the right to singleout the persecution of Christians in the world, or merely to mention Christianity as a driving force behind Europe, or at least as a form of moral and political sensitivity, the attempt that usually is turned down by the left. As long as politicians are preoccupied, not to say obsessed, with human body, privacy, and memory, they will tend to replace the
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search for a good policy with the quest for moral majority bulldozing their way towards new forms of social control, the latter being disguised as moral and educational concerns. It was with sound reason, then, that Michel Houellebecq described this internal conflict of modernity as a clash of two fundamentally opposing anthropologies: the “other-worldly” one, oriented towards a distant ideal in whose name its adherents act and speak trying to cover a characteristically modern territory of human sensibility and life, and a “this-worldly” one, which does not pretend that it has any superior or paramount plane of existence and identity, and is overtly materialistic and hedonistic. The first preserves life in all of its forms fiercely opposing abortion and advocating the divine beginnings of the human being, and the second defends the relationship between the female body and a woman’s dignity, or that between privacy and freedom. The first is a fraud in the sense that it presents itself as a timehonored and ancient tradition speaking a modern language of power and acting as an actor of today with the voice of a thousand-years-old collective prophet; yet, in a way, so is the second, since it tries hard to introduce itself as a voice of today, although it speaks out in favor of an old idea of anthropocentrism deeply embedded in the Renaissance. What is left behind the struggle of these two deeply antagonizing and mutually exclusive anthropologies is a fundamental tension of modernity. What is a proper public agency (provided there is any at all) of the mystery of human life, freedom and conscience? Who speaks for us? Those who control us, or those who supposedly know us better than we do? In fact, neither. And this brings us to the next pivotal question: What is the potential of politics to represent modern humanity, and what is the future of political parties, those agents of power that speak in the name of the relationship between the individual and community, translating their private concerns into public matters, empowering them, and connecting them to the public domain?
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In the epoch of Facebook, and especially after the Arab Spring, it becomes obvious that political parties will survive into the next century or perhaps even into the second half of this one on the condition that they begin act as and close ranks with social movements. Otherwise, parties are at the peril of becoming irrelevant and useless. Either they will come close to social movements as a new expression of sporadic social and political will (something similar to the Indignados in Spain) or they will lose the ground functioning merely as outdated and banal cliques. As groups of people conscious of their political goals and interests, political parties are at risk of being removed, in the long run, by politicized corporate or semi-religious groups, which can be tinged with vague postmodern sectarianism. Human bonds and joint dedications are much stronger in such quasi-religious groups than in political parties, whereas the pursuit of economic interest can be much more efficient in quasi-parties organized as new cells of the corporate world. In both cases, old-fashioned political parties that always relied on the classical logic of power deeply embedded in the territorial unity as well as in the modern marriage of politics and culture will find themselves in a no-win situation. Genuine democratic representation and legitimacy, rather than the search for the efficacious forms of public communication, appears as a pivotal problem of present politics. In addition, that same question remains unanswered as to whether our modern political sensibilities are in tune or at odds with our ethical and existential concerns. We cannot leave them out if we want to avoid the nightmare of grotesque politics, which would end up in TV reality shows becoming the predominant form of political life and recruiting new folks for politics exclusively from show business, sports, and adult movie industry.
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29 Discursive Handicap of Central and Eastern Europe
In his reflections on Central Europe and Kundera, George Schöpflin, a British political theorist of Hungarian background who acts as a Member of the European Parliament on behalf of Hungary, aptly described the phenomenon that he termed the “discursive handicap” of Central Europe and the disparity of linguistic and cultural voices of the West and Central Europe. This creates an obvious asymmetry of power and prestige when it comes to the use of languages, discursive strategies, and interpretations. This is more than true with regard to identity politics and educational strategy. For instance, Schöpflin writes: “Whereas no one would look twice at an analysis of the United States by someone who knows no English, their counterparts dealing with Central Europe have no such qualms. They do not learn Polish or Czech or Hungarian, but rely on translators and will accept what may be a very partial picture of Central European reality (and one they cannot verify). As a result, the Central European voice is weaker, and this is never recognized. Those with the more powerful voices shout loudest and drown out the weaker ones.” I have analyzed this sort of discursive handicap more than once. In fact, if you happen to be an American, a Brit, or a Frenchman, you speak prose simply introducing yourself. Yet if you are a Lithuanian, a Latvian, or an Estonian, you are obliged to work hard telling stories about your country or introducing your counterparts to the history of your country. This is so, since you are a non-person in the quick identification system that is part of mass narratives in the West.
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For a person from Tuscany, it would never occur that she or he has to insist on the fact that Italy is Europe. Yet if you are a Baltic person amidst good people from big countries who are not at their best when confronted by history and culture, the status of your country can be easily put into question. Far from a joke or an innocent story, this reflects the asymmetry of power and prestige not only in the world of public affairs but in the world of ideas as well. It does. You are measured and perceived merely by your purchasing power or by your CV, once your country does not have the quick identification code in terms of its economic performance or political power. Schöpflin is absolutely right concerning the absurdity of disparity in the area of competence, which exists between the West and Central and Eastern Europe. If you are not French but you are fluent in the language, qualified in French philosophy or history of ideas, not to mention in French literature, you will never get a senior post at a French university. The same applies to Great Britain: no matter how brilliant foreign researchers of Shakespeare or Marlowe or Hobbes or of any other symbolic gatekeeper of English culture could be, they will never get a post at a British university due to their continental upbringing and “nebulous” educational system. Yet a qualified French or British scholar is always welcome at any decent Central and Eastern European university, including such areas as Central and Eastern European studies, that is, the symbolic centre of identity. The same with the United States—true, this country used to be more open to foreign talents in the area of humanities and social science disciplines. Some disciples of Mikhail Bakhtin, Yuri Lotman, or Sergei Averintsev—major humanists of the world and all of Russian background—got jobs in the US. Yet, make no mistake: during the Cold War era the Soviet Union, i.e., Russia, was an archenemy whose cultural codes and nuances of history and identity had to be studied. Much of the West’s infatuation with Islamic studies nowadays stems from a similar, if not identical, impulse. Eastern Europe was full of men and women of ideas, fluent in several languages, making translations of William Shakespeare, Fran-
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çois Villon, or William Blake, that were second to none in the world (among them: Boris Pasternak, Ilya Ehrenburg, Samuil Marshak), yet these people were perceived as lesser Europeans or, at best, as “poor cousins” of Europeans. Becoming a hostage of your country’s politics or economic performance is a curse of modernity due to the fact that predominant historical-political narratives and interpretations that sell well come from the West. If you are not a product of Western educational system and, if your views have not been molded in Western institutions of higher education, you will have to find a specific niche not to challenge or otherwise put into question the narratives that reflect the existing distribution of power and prestige. True, there is such an area as Central and East European studies where Central and Eastern Europeans can fulfill themselves in the West due to their obvious advantages over their Western counterparts in terms of command of languages and local sensibilities. The trouble is that yet another Europe lacks such symbolic gatekeepers that would prioritize their interpretations and perspectives. But if it did, it would be immediately qualified as xenophobic and provincial. Unfortunately, Central and Eastern Europe’s lack of strategy in the area of the humanities worsens the state of affairs. A rather similar situation in Western Europe is small consolation, as the asymmetry and disparity only widens the gulf and works for the benefit of Western narratives and institutions. This applies to the Baltic region as well, alas. If we don’t reverse this situation, we will be at risk of self-inflicted intellectual and cultural colonialism. Most telling is the fact that Central and Eastern Europe eagerly emulates the British system of academic management, which is merely about the commodification of universities and education initiated in the era of Margaret Thatcher. It is highly unlikely that this would help eliminate the aforementioned disparity and asymmetry. We should not deceive ourselves.
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30 Remembering a Friend of the Baltics
John Hiden, an eminent British historian and a dedicated friend of the Baltic States, passed away on 10 August 2012. Professor John Hiden (1940–2012) was one of the most eminent British historians of the Baltic region. In addition to his deeply original and valuable work on modern Eastern and Central European studies and the history of British diplomacy, Professor Hiden’s monographs on the emergence of the Baltic States and their turbulent political story in the twentieth century will long be remembered as one of the strongest contributions that British and European historians made to Baltic studies. He set up the first Baltic Research Unit in the United Kingdom and others throughout Western Europe. Founded at Bradford University, this academic center, whose head Professor Hiden had served as, shaped the work of his colleagues pioneering in the study of minorities and cultural autonomy in the Baltic States, a unique aspect of Baltic intellectual, political, and cultural experience, albeit little known and underappreciated in the West. Professor Hiden’s colleagues, first and foremost Bradford University historians Martyn Housden and David Smith, challenged and enriched Baltic studies in many ways. When the Baltic Research Unit stopped functioning at Bradford University, after the early retirement of Professor Hiden, it moved to Glasgow University where Professor Hiden worked as a Senior Visiting Fellow and where Dr David Smith was in the lead, allowing the center to continue its work. A bright and multitalented academic, as well as a prolific scholar and writer, John Hiden was at home everywhere there was room for Baltic studies and creative dialogue with his fellow historians.
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Professor Hiden appears to have been the most famous researcher and biographer of Paul Schiemann, a pre-war LatvianGerman journalist, liberal-minded, anti-totalitarian intellectual who became a prophet of modern political and moral sensibilities related to minority issues. Small wonder, then, that Hiden’s excellent and groundbreaking book, Defender of Minorities, caused many historians to pay greater attention to the minority policies of the Baltic States and cultural autonomy research. The German journalist and human rights defender Paul Schiemann (1876–1944) was only recently discovered by historians as a unique public and political figure in pre-war Latvia and, in fact, all of Europe. He was born in Jelgava and spent most of his life in Riga. Though belonging to the German minority and identifying himself with it, he was totally loyal to the newly independent Republic of Latvia. An equally implacable critic of both totalitarian regimes, Schiemann, earlier than anyone else, saw the equal threats that the Nazi and Communist regimes posed to the small European nations and to Germany’s and the Soviet Union’s neighbor states. Schiemann deeply believed that minorities in Europe had to create institutions designed to strengthen their mutual relations and to justify the peaceful co-existence of multiple cultures. He expounded his ideas in the German-language Riga newspaper, Rigasche Rundschau, and he was the first in Europe to organize a Congress of Nationalities, joining together representatives of European ethnic and cultural minorities numbering dozens of millions. Interestingly enough, it is precisely in the Baltic Region, from Immanuel Kant through Johann Gottfried Herder to Paul Schiemann, that we see a logical continuity: the development of an essentially liberal idea that nations should not deprive one another of their specific identity but should search for an open and rationally corrigible form of political life that would help the culture of each to flower in opposition to imperial domination and the forcible assimilation of the smaller nations and minorities by larger ones.
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In Hiden’s view, Western European countries nowadays face the same challenges (stemming from migration and the emergence of large new ethnic and cultural communities) that Lithuania and the other two Baltic states experienced well before World War II. Therefore, the cultural autonomy of Lithuanian Jews and Latvia’s and Estonia’s experiences with minority policy deserve to be closely studied in the West. There are probably not many historians, political scientists, and scholars in the world who would claim that the Baltic States possess political experiences not shared or understood by the West and that, therefore, the latter should learn from the Baltics precisely because the Western world now experiences something akin to the permanent condition of the Baltic countries even when they were independent: a steady sense of uncertainty; of a lack of security; of the need to establish, assert, and preserve oneself; a sense not felt by powerful Western countries but ever present in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. Needless to say, John Hiden was an atypical academic and historian. If he weren’t such, he would neither have developed an interest in the Baltic Region and its twentieth century saga nor devoted his entire professional life to studying them. Baltic academics have lost a precious colleague, a beloved friend, and a talented scholar. A gifted, albeit somewhat lately revealed, fiction writer, an erudite historian with a rare breadth and subtlety of grasp of social reality, a Londoner full of elegance, wit, and surgically sharp and precise humor, John Hiden will be greatly missed. Postscript On a deeply personal note: John passed away on 10 August 2012. On the morning of 11 August 2012, I woke up in my hometown, Klaipeda, got up, and wrote a new aphorism on death. In a couple of hours, I received a note from a British colleague about John’s sudden death.
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31 The Blind Leading the Blind?
Zygmunt Bauman, commenting on Michel Houellebecq’s novel, The Possibility of an Island, singled out this novel of warning as a genuine dystopia of our time, exposing our frame of mind with its insecurities, phobias, and discontents. Most telling was his emphasis on what he described as a new sense of fatalism, powerlessness, and helplessness in the face of the new pattern of technology and politics, the latter being merely a derivative and subordinate of the former. The blind leading the impotent—this is Bauman’s metaphor which addresses, with the stroke of genius, the issue of the divorced of politics and power. In the past, politics was all about goals, directions, ethical concepts, visions, and objectives, which were indispensable for a blueprint of a viable social and moral order. Power served to politics as instruments to achieve these goals and to implement the visions, thus living up to the expectations of the political class and citizens. From now on, their paths diverged. The individual is expected to become a parliament, a government, a corporate world, and an army for him or herself, since no public body assumes responsibility for the future nowadays. We are left to our own devices for the sake of our freedom and autonomy which are quickly forgotten when it comes to taxes, bad biographies, and skeletons in our closets for the purpose of blackmailing and silencing us, not to mention mass surveillance and daily violations of our privacy. We are all uniquely free insofar as the state has no policy to sustain public good or education—the paradise ends as soon as we start criticizing public bodies and undermining their legitimacy and prestige. This is to say that we are all individuals by decree when the state
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is idle or morally and politically bankrupt, as Bauman would have it. Yet behind his wise, albeit caustic, words, is a clear sense that no particular individual can assume responsibility for socially and globally produced problems. We deceive ourselves by taking things otherwise. The blind leading the impotent, according to Bauman as yet applied to Houellebecq. Yet I am tempted to apply a classical metaphor based on an old fable as seen in a painting by the genius of Brussels, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Blind Leading the Blind, is truly a masterpiece by a great Flemish master; it hangs in the Museo di Capodimonte at Naples, Italy. The painting is based upon a saying of Jesus that appears in the Gospels: “Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into the ditch?” The painting represents the world of a grim Renaissance parable. Several blind men stumble and fall. Since none has vision, they can only rely on their sense of fellowship and on the indivisibility of the group. Yes, but the question looming over the scene is, what if the one leader of the group has no visual grasp of reality, either? What if he himself is blind? Another question arises: what is the meaning of being in charge of a group of the blind if you are blind as well? A sincere belief that a thing is so makes it so, as William Blake would have it? Sweet lies and self-deception? If we are to believe a legend, the one who was responsible for the group had a minimal visual grasp of the world around him. It could have been that public authorities or guards of the town had more respect for the one in the lead and who, therefore, could represent the group. A good reason to conceal your blindness and pretend that you can see a bit… Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s moralizing painting leaves no doubt as to whether the blind who leads the blind can see. Of course, he cannot. As the allegory suggests, our arrogance is a loyal sister to our folly and stupidity, for how can we rely on ourselves when we have no faith; nor do we have any moral guidance. A world devoid of criteria is quick to judge. The more uncertain we are about ourselves, the stronger our resolve about the others. The more insecure we are at
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home—the more frenzy will be in our attempt to provide security for the rest of the world. This reminds me of our patronizing attitude to the Eastern partnership countries. We seem to export democracy and human rights ideology, yet we somehow fail to notice that democracy is not doing well in the EU itself. It had long been unwell in Hungary, and now it seems to have gone for a long summer vacation in Romania. The most primitive concept of democracy, according to which it suffices to have fifty votes plus one to pass for a legitimate democratic power, helped bulldoze the way toward what appears as a silent coup d’état in Romania. There is so much sound and fury each time it comes to our support of and confidence in Georgia and Azerbaijan as the countries opposed to Russia, yet our anti-Putinism, no matter how just, wellgrounded, and logical, cannot become a license for Mikhail Saakashvili to kill democracy in Georgia; nor can it serve as an absolution from all sins for Ilham Aliyev who is responsible for the regrettable human rights record of Azerbaijan. No matter how passionately we wish Ukraine and Moldova well, we cannot turn a blind eye to what is happening there in terms of corruption. Even if we admire Armenia, we cannot ignore the deteriorating situation of civil liberties and justice there. The fact that Rector of Yerevan State University, Professor Suren Zolyan, a world-class scholar, was sacked by his minister of education for purely political reasons reveals something disturbing about our friend and partner. And we cannot keep our eyes wide shut. Because the blind cannot lead the blind.
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32 Democrats and Dictators
George Orwell once offered an insight into the source of double standards applied to violence when it comes to European pacifists. When confronted with facts of violence at home, they take a stand immediately leaving no room for doubt and ambiguity; yet they choose to keep a blind eye, if not their eyes wide shut, on violence practiced not in the Western world, at least not in democracies. Why? Orwell dropped a hint that is most telling not only when dealing with violence but with dictatorships. Pacifists and all “fighters for peace” fiercely oppose violence at home, since they don’t believe that violence can be successful in a democracy, that is, at home. Yet they secretly admire successful violence elsewhere, especially when and where it is possible to get rid of all Western influences—such as capitalism and the elite’s insensitivity to culture—nearly overnight. In fact, some democrats secretly admire dictators. Incredible as it sounds, this is a fact of life. They feel that their inability to find a strong-hand in a democratic setting tells something disturbing about the deficiency—or limitations—of democracy. At the same time, this only shows how little dignity, dissenting powers, and belief in democracy a great many democrats possess. They are unable to position themselves, even to imagine themselves, other than in quiet acceptance of an established power structure. Yet, they are never quite prepared to fight hard for what lies behind that power structure—a blueprint for a viable social and moral order, and a value orientation. Needless to say, human vanity also plays a role. Red carpets, pompous rituals, bombastic speeches, champagne and caviar, the delights of a leisure class, luxury—this is a set of something that is not necessarily taken for granted in a democratic politician’s life, unless
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she or he holds high office, prestige, and unquestionable legitimacy. Those who don’t achieve this state generally make up a local or international jet set, or demi-monde, and are more likely to be merely passing, temporary social figures, hungry for credit and recognition. Not every democrat is what he appears. What lies underneath frequently happens to be sheer opportunism and blind obedience to those with power—not soft or sophisticated, but real and hard power, with unlimited financial and military capabilities. However, democrats who tango with dictators tend to rationalize these dangerous liaisons as demonstrations of their flexibility, their long-term perspective on politics, a fine sense of responsibility, and an ability to control dictators, penetrating their mindset and predicting their actions. Who cares that this is sheer self-deception: dictators are skilled at fooling democrats, and not the other way around. It happened to the author of these lines more than once that some shocking manifestations of forgiveness and solidarity to sinister autocrats and dictators came from the circles of people with unquestionable democratic credentials. If I ever exposed some conversations with high-ranking and noted European politicians who shamelessly and overtly supported antidemocratic and dictatorial leaders, not to mention their standing and warm applause to various political crooks and adventure seekers from Eastern Europe, this would come as a piece of deeply disenchanting and petrifying news. A politician with dictatorial inclinations and authoritarian leanings, in a democratic political setting, is being stripped of his dictatorial powers; he may remain an autocratic type, yet he ceases consolidating power solely in his hands. With the new death of European politics, the emergence of several more or less successful leaders with obvious authoritarian leanings, such as François Sarkozy and Victor Orbán, this is no longer seems a sensation. On the contrary, it is old news. The choice between a corrupt democrat and a decent autocrat is an old dilemma. The new one is between a theatrical authoritarian who tries hard to reconcile himself to democratic sensibilities, and a
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dull democrat who loses in sound and fury yet gains in legitimacy and difficult moral and educational aspects of democracy. Technology, which has already outpaced politics, making it into its chambermaid, increased and strengthened the sense of uncertainty and ambivalence, especially in situations when we are bound to choose between a Facebook hero and a clumsy congress animal, or between a virtuoso political actor and a decent, albeit hopelessly weak, petty mouse of a certain political party. All these reflections are relevant in the light of what has recently happened between Hungary and Azerbaijan. As we know, an Azerbaijani military officer brutally murdered his colleague from Armenia during a NATO training event in Budapest. The murderer confessed and was serving a life sentence in Hungary until he was recently returned to Azerbaijan, pardoned by President Ilham Aliyev. More than that, he was promoted to the rank of major and greeted as a national hero. An example of this shocking insensitivity and barbarity is especially horrible in the face of allegations that there was an agreement between Victor Orbán and Ilham Aliyev to release him, and that this was part of the package of important economic agreements. And here is a fact which may be shocking for Fidesz apologists and admirers: Victor Orbán is as much a democrat as Ilham Aliyev. The only serious political difference between them is that the first operates in a flawed and endangered democracy, and the second in an overt tyranny which parades as a transitional democracy. This is so, as many democrats nurture a dream about their pocket dictators. The reality is harsh to them, though: it turns out that every dictator has his pocket democrats in the EU.
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33 The Revolt of Crooks
We had long thought that cleptocracy is something safely distanced from Europe and therefore related only to African and Latin American political classes. What strikes us now, however, is the fact that we witness its strong presence in Europe. What is happening in Eastern Europe now may well be described as the revolt of crooks, thieves, and cheats who make up the current political class. There was once a time when the revolt of the masses, as José Ortega y Gasset would have had it, was about making modernity fulfill its promises of equality, the pursuit of happiness, and better life for the majority of aspiring and ambitious individuals. The masses do not revolt now for the new opportunities—instead, they revolt out of despair striving for the bare minimum of human rights and civil liberties, and in trying to defend the remains of their human dignity. Whereas the masses revolt for their rights and dignity now, the dodgy fellows quietly revolt for something totally different, subverting democracy and making it into a caricature. What do they revolt for? They do seek their chances and opportunities to achieve a fusion of business and politics. The criminalization of political classes and the politicization of organized crime mobsters appear as awkward exports from the East that move westward with great success. Is it corruption? Yes and no. As Andrei Piontkovsky, a noted Russian political commentator, caustically noted, corruption in its conventional form does not exist in present Russia. To witness a classical situation of corruption, normally, we would expect to see a businessman bribe a state official. This happens, according to Piontkovsky, in all democracies or otherwise normal states with their countless imperfections.
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Yet this is not the case in Russia, where a businessman and a state official are one and the same person. President Vladimir Putin is a businessman and a state official. A billionaire and a state president, he creates a phantasmagoria of rapidly accumulated wealth and consolidated political power. The divorce of economic and political power once was a trait of the West, whereas the marriage of the two signified the political culture of the East. The first was inseparable from the history of Western Europe’s modernity, the second symbolized Russia’s Byzantine history with all those who participated in its symbolic design of power. Doubtlessly, Putin’s Russia is a cleptocracy, and so, alas, is Ukraine, albeit far more pluralistic and democratic than Russia, where wealth does not yet translate into diversity and political liberty. However unfortunate, with a frozen conflict and the breakaway territory of Transnistria, this generous “gift” of Russia, Moldova’s politics remains closer to Ukraine than to Russia. A poor country with its highranking thieves, endemic corruption, and political mafia, it nevertheless resists the temptations of dictatorship. The entire bloc of Eastern partnership countries could be described as a league of states that pretends to speak the language of democracy, while in reality rejecting its logic suffering from cognitive dissonance and interpretive dyslexia regarding the very heart of the essence of modernity—namely, the separation of powers and a strict diving line between economic and political power. It is precisely this dyslexia that prevents them from distinguishing between lawful economic power and political legitimacy. The “you are in business, therefore, you are in politics” reasoning may be reciprocated or reversed by the “you are in politics, therefore, you are in business” logic. This is a feature of a post-totalitarian political culture that stretches from Russia to Kazakhstan, with some minor nuances and differences in Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Yet we should not deceive ourselves by firmly ascribing this trajectory of political ethics exclusively to Eastern Europe. Dodgy fel-
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lows in Eastern Europe have their guardian angels in the EU. The Putin-Schröder travesty is old news, yet the “Schröderization” of Western Europe’s political classes seems a stable and prospective pattern. Some commentators described this phenomenon as the cheats’ uprising in Romania. This is not a violation of or a threat to democracy. Instead, it appears as a mortal blow to democracy, which allows us to assume that liberal democracy does not exist in Romania anymore. When you realize that the president of the state is impeached only because he becomes a threat to people with a skeleton in their closet, and that the constitutional court is dysfunctional, and that all committee members who insist that 85 copied-and-pasted pages in the doctoral dissertation of Romania’s prime minister Victor Ponta constitute plagiarism are fired, it becomes impossible to call all this otherwise than the rebellion of crooks. These crooks are not alone. When you find out that some top British liberals are backing a person such as Dan Voiculescu, a sinister figure in Romanian politics whose shadowy story dates back to the Ceausescu regime, an informer of the Securitate, and a crook whose subordinate is Ponta, only then you start realizing the degree of this malaise. Western liberals would hardly tolerate a crook in their own circles, yet they salute and back him elsewhere, as that crook comes up with an offer which can only appear once in a lifetime, or who can praise them up to the skies, decorate, or otherwise actualize them. For corruption provides many more options than transparency and routine policies, which always talk prose and prevent a crook within them, already suppressed at home, from acting freely and without impunity elsewhere.
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34 The Source of Success
One of the most prominent and perceptive experts on the former Soviet Union, the French historian, philosopher, and political scientist Alain Besançon once suggested that “failure to understand the Soviet regime is the principal cause of its successes.” More than that, Besançon went on adding that it is difficult to find in any one Western country at any one time “rarely more than a dozen minds capable of understanding the Soviet phenomenon and of translating what they know into politically useable terms.” Curiously, Alain Besançon’s disciple Françoise Thom, a history lecturer at Sorbonne, added fairly recently that never before has misunderstanding of Russia in Western Europe been as huge as it is now. According to her, a sort of self-inflicted blindness fuelled by sweet lies and charms of self-deception, it results in shutting the eyes before the fact that Russia provoked the war against the sovereign state of Georgia, and then occupied and annexed parts of Georgia’s territory. No matter how strongly we agree on Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili as hardly a raw model democrat, the fact remains that the West has swallowed this déjà vu episode that was straight from the geopolitical repertoire of the twentieth century. We are tempted to believe that Russia is on the way to reforming its economic and political systems. Yet we tend to forget, as Thom points out, that all the waves of modernization of Russia came as a reaction to its defeats and losses. Peter the Great undertook his reforms after the defeat of Russia by Sweden near Narva, Alexander II after the painful loss of the Crimean War, Nicholas II after the disastrous defeat of Russia by Japan. Let me add Mikhail Gorbachev to this chain: he had good reason to make a desperate attempt to mod-
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ernize the military and economic potential of the Soviet Union after its disgraceful failure in Afghanistan. As for China or other Asian autocracies that attempt to put together a free-market economy and zero political liberty and pluralism, modernization in Russia continues to lie in the development of technology and the military potential of the nation. True, perhaps for the first time in modern Russia’s history the political and industrial elite of the country agreed on the import of the new weapons and warfare technologies (just recall the French Mistral history, not to mention Israeli war intelligence planes, etc.), rather than relying exclusively on the export of weapons, which indicates a paradigm shift in strategic planning and thinking about the future. Yet it does not change the essence of this issue, as modernization, in Russia, is in no way related to such core Western values as the individual’s autonomy and dignity, fundamental liberties and human rights, political liberty and pluralism, subsidiarity and the rule of law. To put it simple, the model of what may well be perceived as a potential club of emerging rival powers, from China to Russia, that position themselves as a new ideological and civilizational alternative to the West, is based on authoritarian capitalism, or capitalism without liberty, a sinister phenomenon of the post-Cold-War world. What does modernization signify for present Russia and its political elite? What is the way in which Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev understands modernization? In theory, he appears as a new modernizer inclined to talk about the emergence the new democratic Russia, whereas the omnipotent Prime Minister Vladimir Putin doesn’t use this word clearly preferring “stabilization”—and understandably so, as democracy will never “stabilize” the world in the sense that he is so fond of, that is, imposing the once-and-for-all order and arresting social and political change. Unfortunately, never has the will-to-misunderstand Russia been as strong in the EU as it is now. If it did not happen to me in Brussels, I would never have believed that such a pearl of wisdom could come from the lips of a ranking official from the European Commis-
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sion. Yet the fact remains that the bureaucrat in question once made himself clear, and in presence of academics and exchange students, regarding the role of Russia as a prime stabilizing factor in such areas as the Caucasus. The EU failed to understand the critical aspects of present-day Russia’s politics. As in those old days when Soviet dissidents were a lifetime ahead of all Western politicians and political scientists put together in terms of their clear understanding of the logic of power in the USSR, the Russian journalists and human rights defenders cannot stand the rubbish about Russia they hear in the EU. The legendary Soviet dissident and Russian human rights defender, Sergei Kovalev, once told me that the supposed naiveté of the West is merely an illusion. They understand everything. Didn’t they understand what kind of anti-fascist Stalin was when another antifascist Lion Feuchtwanger brought to the West good news about the paradise on earth in the Soviet Union? They did, and their naiveté was just a trick and self-deception. And then Kovalev aptly summed it up challenging Alain Besançon: “They do not tolerate fascism of their own, but they tolerate it elsewhere.” A sincere belief that anything is so makes it so, as William Blake’s winged phrase suggests. A sincere belief that gas and oil are more important than human rights can be supported by a theory that we have to respect the people’s choice. Although we know that there was no choice and that there never will be any, if we keep applying double standards and requiring legitimacy and respect for human rights only from the small, while thinking of the big and powerful as trying to catch up and improve, then we are foolish because the record shows the opposite.
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35 Searching for the Europe of Czesław Miłosz
2011 was the year of Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004). The centenary of the greatest modern Polish poet allowed us a glimpse of Eastern and Central Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century. An eminent and cosmopolitan European—albeit deeply rooted in the Lithuanian and Polish historical and cultural sensibilities—Miłosz felt at home in several European cultures and languages, and spent much of his time in the United States. Miłosz anticipated the crucial dilemmas of European identity and memory that we started tackling immediately after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The paradox of Miłosz is that it was through the fame of his eyeopening and captivating political essays on the mindset of the Eastern European intelligentsia, rather than his superb poetry and literary essays, that he became a central figure among Eastern and Central Europe’s émigrés in the US, and all over the world. The Captive Mind came as a shock to the West. The same applies to Joseph Brodsky and other greatest Eastern and Central Europeans who captivated the West as public intellectuals and social critics, rather than brilliant authors or living classics of literature. Miłosz stripped much of Western Europe and the US of their political myopia and naiveté concerning the nature of the communist regime. He did so by showing that not only coercion and violent politics, but also the vanity and fear of Eastern European intellectuals, played pivotal roles in the emergence of what he described in The Captive Mind as “Ketman”—the art to act one way in public while concealing one’s true political views or even religious and cultural identity.
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As the late British-American historian and intellectual Tony Judt (1948–2010)—who, among his other areas of competence, was knowledgeable of Eastern and Central Europe’s intellectual dramas and history of ideas—subtly noted reviewing Miłosz’s The Captive Mind and commenting on the phenomenon of Ketman, “writing for the desk drawer becomes a sign of inner liberty,” which is the sad lot of an Eastern European intellectual frequently bound to choose between his country and his conscience. In the pivotal part of his perceptive review, Judt reveals his belief that the fear of the West’s indifference was a primary moving force behind the mental acrobatics and immoral maneuvering described by Miłosz as Ketman. Judt quotes from The Captive Mind: “Fear of the indifference with which the economic system of the West treats its artists and scholars is widespread among Eastern intellectuals. They say it is better to deal with an intelligent devil than with a goodnatured idiot.” In fact, it is not infrequent in Eastern and Central Europe that culture precedes and shapes politics. In the case of Lithuania, it was through the word of two most eminent Polish men of letters, people of multiple identities, such as Miłosz himself and a Parisian Polish émigré Jerzy Giedroyc (1906–2000), the highly respected editor of the leading Polish-émigré literary-political journal, Kultura (1947– 2000), that it became possible to confront some worn-out clichés concerning the clashes of memory that occurred between twentiethcentury Lithuania and Poland. From the Lithuanian side, Tomas Venclova, a Lithuanian poet and literary scholar, who also acts as Professor of Slavic Literature at Yale, was in the lead from the very beginning of the debate on Poland vis-à-vis Lithuania. In his essays and poetry, Venclova easily and naturally migrates between Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, and Jewish sensibilities bridging these cultures and identities. In this, Venclova remains unique among Lithuanian writers and thinkers. Born in Klaipeda and raised in Kaunas, Venclova, in his essays and poetry, comes to project his worldview onto Vilnius, a character-
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istically Central European city around whose poetic vision revolves the entire map of his thought. This is, perhaps, best revealed in “A Dialogue about a City,” a masterpiece of the epistolary genre written by Venclova and Miłosz. Two perspectives on Vilnius, Lithuanian and Polish, not only complement one another; they reveal how human memory and sentiment work re-enacting history and bridging it with the present. “A Dialogue about a City” was written in the late 1970s, yet it took quite a while for both countries to put behind their mutual animosities, which was achieved nearly overnight when Poland and Lithuania signed, in 1994, a historic treaty of friendship and cooperation. It recognized Vilnius once and for all as the unquestionable capital of Lithuania. This cleared the air and paved the way for a friendship, a natural outcome of the centuries of a common state and of a shared culture. A happy combination of liberal patriotism, multiple and communicating identities, and the readiness to criticize one’s own country, instead of searching for the Devil elsewhere and, first and foremost, in an opponent, best exemplified by Miłosz still stands as his invitation to us to search for the Europe as an extended motherland, or the native Europe, to put it in his words. Local sensibility combined with sensitivity and attentiveness to other cultures and identities could become a clue to present dilemmas of the troubled European identity. We should search for the Europe of Czesław Miłosz, instead of returning to the hibernating, frozen dramas of memory and identity, which appear as the unholy legacy of the twentieth century. It is extremely important to remember this now, when Lithuania and Poland have nearly ruined their relations for no serious reason.
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36 From the Revolution of Dilettantes and to the Managerial Revolution
The Lithuanian writer Ričardas Gavelis—an ironic, caustic, and brilliant, albeit underappreciated to the point of neglect in his own country, who was especially active in the 1990s, once coined the term “the epoch of dilettantes” to describe the explosive proliferation of universities and colleges, both public and private, whose number rocketed almost immediately after the country’s independence. One could no doubt assume that this reflected a far wider tendency characteristic of the former Soviet “republics” in general. Gavelis suspected that this propensity to found a university for nearly every town in a small and relatively poor country would inevitably result in a dangerous devaluation of any higher standards of university education, thus further widening the deep gulf between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. Although he was far from engaging in a cult of “pure specialists,” Gavelis feared the domination of aggressive mediocrities with their ability to silence polite and calm professionals, men and women of letters who think twice before saying and undertaking something. His fear was not exaggerated. What happened in the post-Soviet political space was a revolution of dilettantes. People who were to become the “old new” managerial and political classes, business community, jet set, and the cultural elite were all recruited from the Communist Party or Communist Youth, which was a public secret in Eastern Europe. In fact, they had more social capital and networks than all other segments of postCommunist society put together.
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“Dilettante” is not always a bad word, though. Just recall Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni, a great Venetian Baroque composer, who dared calling himself a Venetian dilettante. Yet Gavelis clearly meant something different. What is inexorably lost in translation here is the nuance of a silent independence and creativity of men and women of letters, a sort of Slow Food movement for societal life and culture, facilitating important things to happen, such as original books, civilsociety-oriented debates, and the birth of political ideas. Alas, we did not get any closer to such a Slow Food for thought; instead, having escaped the political kitsch and ideological tyranny of the Soviets, we found ourselves desperately trying to catch up with the academic Junk Food of Western Europe. We started remedying our malaise with medicines that will only distance us from what Western liberal education used to be, instead of bringing us any closer to it. What happened after 1990 in Eastern Europe was an extreme acceleration of unprecedented economic, social, and political change leaving no chance to slow down and reflect for a while. A laboratory of the most rapid change ever seen in modern history, Eastern Europe began to lose the window of possibility to think and react slowly. The need for an immediate action or lightning-fast reaction to the emergency calls and challenges of a radical transformation left no room for independent intellectuals bound to choose between functioning as the new court rhetoricians and public relations managers serving the political class, or allowing themselves to be relegated to the margins of international academic life. True, there was one option left for an Eastern European intellectual as a poor cousin of her Western European counterpart, aptly described by Ernest Gellner in one of his posthumously published essays: namely, a permanent or temporary migration across the globe without any chance of the final settlement of his merits and creative accounts or even without a remote possibility of certainty. “A wandering academic,” “a gypsy scholar,” or, to use an American euphemism for a jobless academic, “an independent scholar” (or
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“unaffiliated scholar,” to recall one more Orwellian pearl of the seemingly sensitive Newspeak of the senseless and insensitive world of today)—these are all masks on the face of the existential and intellectual homelessness of an Eastern or Central European intellectual. More than twenty institutions of higher education exist in Lithuania, whereas Ukraine has hundreds, if not thousands, of such institutions. Like the majority of EU countries, Lithuania is now confined to the new managerial experiments—officially labeled as “substantial structural reform”—trying to reduce the number of the universities (I don’t mind them doing so) by making them merge or transforming them (alas!) into semi-corporate bodies run like a business company whose paramount mission is service and efficiency, rather than original, in-depth research and top-level teaching. These senseless experiments are far from innocent and harmless, though. We are facing a serious, real risk of bidding farewell to the university as a cornerstone of European culture, an institution that has survived many states and forms of government. Even in Italy, the new managerial class stopped talking about the autonomy of universities. Eastern European intellectuals did their utmost to escape the most humiliating effects of the revolution of dilettantes only to find themselves in the trenches and barricades of the new managerial revolution in the academic world. A Hegelian irony of history.
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37 Human Rights and Multiculturalism in Our Troubled World
Whereas Western European and North American human rights activists and politicians engaged in the defense of human rights do their utmost to mainstream those rights as a pivotal aspect of foreign policies, the founding fathers of Russian human rights movement, Andrei Sakharov and Sergei Kovalev, denied Realpolitik from the bottom of their hearts and minds, attempting to replace it with an alternative thought-and-action-system, or value-and-idea-system, which they described as a new universal ideology, or non-ideological ideology: that of human rights. A Western European thinker, the French philosopher André Glucksmann, may legitimately be described as a brother-in-arms to Sakharov and Kovalev in their consistent and powerful denial of Realpolitik as a sort of self-comprehending and convenient lie. Soviet dissidents fought for the inmost human right to live and enjoy self-worth and dignity, instead of trying to adjust this right to Realpolitik by applying it selectively, which is clearly the case with the Western world. The dissidents did their utmost to fight the dehumanizing and depersonalizing totalitarian megamachine, heroically opposing the conquest of the sphere of privacy and legitimate human secrets by power discourses and brutal power politics. Therefore, we would be unpardonably naïve and inaccurate by considering as brothers- and sisters-in-arms to Soviet and Russian dissidents those present-day European politicians or well-paid, wellestablished, safe, and secure human rights activists in the West: they have never experienced the abyss of lawlessness and constant fear of
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assassination, and have never been through the hell of total unsafety and insecurity. In a world of legitimized dissent, a human rights official, civil servant, or functionary cannot assume the guise of a maverick who is on brotherly terms with Natalya Estemirova or Anna Politkovskaya. That would be a travesty. Another problematic aspect of seeking normativity for humanrights is that a series of political events over the past two decades were frequently motivated and explained by referring to the necessity to internationalize and mainstream human rights. The internationalization of human rights, however, was not accompanied by any clear definition of the relationship between state sovereignty and uncontrolled international agencies. This process cannot avoid such offshoots and side effects as double standards applied to big and small states regarding political boycotts or war crimes. Concerning the tensions raised by current multiculturalism, whether we prefer to apply this term to the historically formed polyvocality of traditions and cultures or to the political void created by our political elites with all their complacency and disengagement (which we mockingly refer to as “political correctness”), here we find ourselves in a field of immense tension stemming from globalization, where the will (and necessity) to use a cheap foreign workforce on one hand, clashes with the hope, on the other hand, to not take on the culture of this workforce and to remain within one’s own culture and identity zone. How can a good life and the use of a foreign workforce be combined with maintaining a familiar culture, language, and historical identity? How can this servitude of foreigners, inherited from previous ages of an established hierarchical society, be legitimized in the face of the modern world’s promise of equality? The answer is: by trying to integrate, to assimilate, or to simply keep the Other at a safe distance. Isn’t that what is meant by the whole ideology and practice of multiculturalism? Emigration, immigration, and all the apprehensions that attend them are expressions of the tension between the enthusiasm of a
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global economy and the dreams of a local culture, that is, the dream to live simultaneously in one’s own culture and surroundings while participating in a truly global society. What else could be meant by the European skepticism of mass American culture and its worldwide success? Neither denies the advantages of a global economy model, which they gladly use themselves as soon as they find employment in the United States. But no one wants to lose one’s own cultural surroundings, or habitat, as no one wants to adopt a new culture as part of one global economy package. Like multiculturalism, which seems a perfect reference point when dealing with the epoch of disengagement, the concept of human rights tends to become an excuse for disengaged politicians and intellectuals. They find a niche in which the correct term uttered at the right time in the right place becomes a password to enter the gate of power at no cost. An unmistakable move, such a password should not deceive us. For without action and engagement, multiculturalism—in spite of its explicit reference to culture—is not about respect for someone’s unique culture; instead, it is about our doing nothing to accommodate and manage human diversity in a time of anxiety and fear. We allow them to go free with their uniqueness, as they have nowhere to go, anyway. We know it perfectly well. Likewise, human rights call for participation, instead of critical observation enjoyed from a safe distance. The more we disregard and abuse human rights at home, the more fiercely we tend to fight for them elsewhere. A safe distance and a set of correct words—this is what people of ideas and public affairs need the most in the epoch of disengagement.
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38 Nationalism and Postimperial Syndrome
Let us pity poor nationalism. All the calamities of the twentieth century are blamed on it. In fact, an attempt to explain the twentieth century’s social catastrophes without attributing them to the decline of empires, changed power constellations, and the totalitarian “modernization” of the world, but, instead, attributing them to nationalism is in the very least unfair, and perhaps even foolish. The two world wars were not started by nationalism, but by collapsing empires and the new regimes stepping into their place, which sought to occupy the former power positions and realize the same totalitarian projects, regimes guided by global Communist and racist Nazi ideologies. Moreover, empires have collapsed thanks to nationalism. It was due to the disintegration of the Russian Empire that Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States became independent—Finland at that stage was also considered a Baltic State. The British Empire was seriously shaken by the battles for Irish liberation, while Mahatma Gandhi’s movement made no less gentle an impact. The last nail in the coffin of the French Empire was the war in Algiers. This raises the simple question: Where should our sympathies lie? With those nations that liberated themselves from empires (sometimes quite liberal empires, such as the Austro-Hungarian, but empires nonetheless)? Or with the fallen empires? Which side are we on, that of imperialism or freedom? The burden of the white man or the emancipation of former colonies? Those who secretly believe in the postimperialistic factor of a mission that instills a civilized way of life, or the legitimacy of new nations of the world? The belief that great powers stabilize the world, which is why they should not be dismantled, is truly absurd. This logic led to the
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outbreak of both world wars and is most likely to ignite another, if there is no timely reaction to declarations that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. In fact, this statement by Vladimir Putin, a long-term, or simply recurrent, president of Russia, is different to the expression of postimperialist syndrome in the countries of Western Europe— unlike Western politicians, Russia’s president did not even try to disguise his way of speaking and thinking. What is being discussed is not a political facade, which must serve as a reminder of its former power, but the restoration of the Soviet Union and the former empire’s borders. The world may well be better off if Russia would only apply Western postimperialism, especially the British version that allowed the English, with their trademark political humor and ability to laugh at their own pretences and grandeur, to bid farewell to their imperial past. When the tragedy of the former Yugoslavia is mentioned and nationalism is offered as an explanation, it is hard to dismiss the thought that a helplessly superficial perspective of the problem is being taken. The Balkans were a time bomb set on “Delay” immediately after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is obvious that after World War II, this fragmented country was superficially brought together as a federation by Josip Broz Tito, thereby simply keeping the lid on Pandora’s box, which was bound to open up sooner or later. Not nationalism but the delayed domino effect of the collapse of empires created massacres in places where the West could and should have intervened but failed to do so in time. There is no bloodier a period in international politics than the first and last phases of an imperial cycle—it is their formation and collapse that starts a long-term killing and destruction effect; yet in their periods of stability, they can undertake their “civilizing mission” in the colonies and maintain a period of balanced power resulting in relative political stability. In this respect, are there not uncanny similarities between the massacres in Yugoslavia and Rwanda? In both cases, one group was
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favored at the cost of the other, which naturally sowed the seeds of their mutual deadly hate: Belgian bureaucrats and administrators chose the Tutsis, not the Hutus, to work in the police force or as minor clerks. In both cases, the passivity of the West and the “wait-and-see” delaying stance it undertook was in itself a crime. And in both cases, the empires finally collapsed, and artificial codes of ethnic and political relations were introduced in the former colonies. After these events, and in light of the increasing aggression in Russian politics, only cynics or fools could state that the nationalism of small, weak nations is the greatest threat to Europe and the world. The real threat is the delayed collapse of old empires and the resulting formation of new hegemonic derivatives. I do not wish to make allusions, but it may well be that the real and most terrible effects of the disintegration of the Soviet Union will only be felt in the possibly not-too-distant future. Here we find ourselves in the world of modernity and ambivalence. Everything depends on the social and political context. Like marriage, nationalism can easily become a tool of oppression or emancipation, traditionalism or reform, subjugation or liberation. Like the search for an identity, nationalism and patriotism come as a promise of self-comprehension and self-fulfillment in the world of ambivalence and ambiguity. Yet if we end up as a conservative nationalist opposed to a liberal patriot, or vice versa, we do not find the way out of this predicament.
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39 The Crisis of Liberalism?
After 1989, the Polish sociologist Jerzy Szacki, when asked about the chances of liberalism to change the intellectual landscape and the logic of political life in Eastern Europe, expressed grave doubts. He feared, and with sound reason, that liberalism, if planted in the soil of post-Communist societies, would become its own caricature turning into an inversion of Marxism celebrating and obsessively associating itself with economics and financial power, instead of speaking up in favor of liberty and human rights. Szacki was the hundred percent right. This is exactly what happened to Eastern and Central Europe. After the breakup of the former Soviet Union, there emerged what I would describe as the matrix of Eastern/Central European politics: the former communist party assumed all financial power creating a network within which economic and political power merged into an indivisible whole, whereas its opposing power, a conservative-nationalistic party with some remnants of former communists who would paint their hut anew nearly overnight, became sort of its negative double—a churchly and more or less authoritarian unit in its spirit fiercely opposed to the former power structure, yet hardly different from it in terms of democratic sensibilities. And where were our would-be liberals left in this context? At best, they tended to become in those days detached and semiacademic clubs, studying and celebrating Adam Smith and a grossly simplified concept of the Invisible Hand. In addition, an explosive proliferation of the translations of Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and other laissez-faire liberal economists quickly led to the sonorous titles with which the newly born liberals in Eastern
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Europe christened center-left liberals in Western Europe and North America—“pinkos,” “socialists,” “communists,” “traitors of liberalism,” and the like. I remember a quick exchange I had with an American colleague who was about to give a public lecture at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio as part of his short-list performance in seeking a tenure-track position there. Awaiting my public talk in a neighboring auditorium, I wished him the best of luck, to which he reacted by offering a brief recollection of his impressions of the Czech Republic. Commenting on the new draft of the constitution, he noted ironically that what he encountered there was a striking version of Marxism turned upside down. “Not a single word about culture or education, just economy,” he sighed. Yet this was merely an insignificant part of a painful problem. The fact that the majority of liberals in Eastern and Central Europe failed to reveal and appreciate the liberalism of Isaiah Berlin, John Gray or Michael Ignatieff—an inclusive and critical interpretive framework for the politics of dialogue and co-existence on the grounds of mutual recognition and human worth, instead of a onedimensional, doctrinal, and partisan approach, was regrettable, but it was not to be the worst piece of news. More was yet to come. The aforementioned political matrix of Eastern and Central Europe opening up the political space for bipartisan system with no authentic niche left for the liberals, allowed some catch-it-all or pocket parties set up by the new tycoons and political revengeseekers to pass for the liberal forces which was the real tragedy. The old-fashioned, worn-out modes of political discourse and rhetoric were a tiny segment of post-Communist political drama; the fact that pocket parties or various sorts of quasi-liberal mishmash were accepted into the political family of European liberals was far more painful for the future of liberalism. Those political calculations and manifestations of political technocracy have already dealt a serious blow to European liberals. Desperately trying to recruit new “brethren in faith” from Eastern
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Europe, European liberals are in peril of losing their own political identity and raison d’être. The caricature of liberal ideas in Eastern Europe, where liberalism has been confined to the technocratic advocacy of the free market as well as to the resulting vulgar economic interpretation of the human world, is a contraction of Eastern European intellectual and moral vacuum after 1990. Regrettably, its counterpart in Western Europe does not look any better if we take into account the rejection of educational and moral aspects of politics, which is a cancer of the new European liberalism obsessed with how to find a niche and to be accommodated in global policy making and Realpolitik. Disdain for the humanities and liberal education, coupled with blindness to culture and its crucial role in Europe, seems a curse of European liberals. I can easily imagine a reaction of those who would fiercely oppose this writer by reminding me of the commitment of liberals to human rights. This may be true to some extent, but we cannot deceive ourselves by taking liberals as the only champions of human rights—it makes no sense to assume the moral monopoly here, as many liberals are simply unaware of the dramas of the peoples and individuals from Eastern and Central Europe that engraved the names of great dissidents on the memory of this part of Europe. Nobody has the monopoly of truth in politics, and the same applies to virtue and ethics in general. While technocracy walks in the guise of democracy, liberals today betray a human being every time they treat him as merely a worker drone, a statistical unit, or part of a majority and electorate. This is a crucial issue that liberalism has yet to address.
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40 Liquid Totalitarianism
The term “soft totalitarianism” is on the lips of many commentators. They imply that the European Union is not a democracy, but, instead, a technocracy that walks in disguise. Due to mass surveillance and secret intelligence services that increasingly demand, on the grounds of the war on terror, that we should be subject to body screening at the major airports of the world or that we should provide every detail of our banking activities, without excluding the option of exposing the most personal and intimate aspects of our life, social analysts tend to describe this sinister propensity to strip us of our privacy as “soft totalitarianism.” In fact, they may be right. All these aspects of modernity, with the increasing obsession to control our public activities without losing a heightened sense of alertness when it comes to our privacy, allow us to safely assume that privacy is dead. As a person who grew up in the Brezhnev era, I thought a bit naively for some time that human dignity was severely violated solely and exclusively in the former Soviet Union: after all, we were unable to place a telephone call to a foreign country without official control and reports on our conversations, not to mention monitoring of our correspondence and all other forms of human exchanges. As Zygmunt Bauman would have it, those days still belonged to the era of solid modernity when totalitarianism was clear, discernible, obvious, and manifestly evil. To use Bauman’s terms, in the era of “liquid modernity,” mass surveillance and colonization of the private is alive and well, yet it assumes different forms. In the major dystopias of our times—Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984—an individual is invaded,
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conquered, and humiliated by the omnipotent state, as she is deprived of privacy, including its most intimate aspects. The omnipresent TV screen in Orwell’s 1984, or the reporting on one’s neighbor to authorities, lover or friend (if it makes sense to use these terms since love and friendship as modern feelings and expressions of free choice are abolished there) appears as a nightmare of modernity without a human face, or modernity where the jackboot is planted firmly on the human face. Most horrible was an aspect of this totalitarian version of modernity that suggested that we can penetrate every aspect of human personality. A human being is therefore deprived of any sort of secret, which makes us believe that we can know everything about him. And the ethos of the technological world paves the way for action: we can, therefore, we ought. The idea that we can know and tell everything about another human being is the worst kind of nightmare as far as the modern world is concerned. We believed for a long time that the choice defines freedom; I would hasten to add that so does, especially nowadays, the defense of the idea of the incognizibility of the human being and the concept of the untouchability of their privacy. The beginnings of liquid totalitarianism, as opposed to solid and real totalitarianism, may be exposed in the West each time we see people craving for television reality shows and obsessed with the idea of willingly and freely losing their privacy by exposing it on a TV screen—with pride and joy. Yet there are other, far more real forms of government and politics that merit and richly deserve this term. In fact, there is a long way to go from the new forms of mass surveillance and social control in the West to an overt and explicit divorce of capitalism and freedom in China and Russia. First and foremost, liquid totalitarianism manifests itself in the Chinese pattern of modernity, an opposing pattern to Western modernity, with its formula of capitalism without democracy or the free market without political liberty. Divorce of power and politics described by Bauman develops its distinctly Chinese version: the financial power may exist and prosper there insofar as it does not merge or
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.
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overlap with political power. Get rich but keep away from politics. Ideological politics is a fiction in China, since Mao Zedong was betrayed a thousand times by his Party, which ceased to be a Communist stronghold and, instead, turned into an elite managerial group. It is impossible to betray Chinese Cultural Revolution and Communism more than the Chinese modernizers did under the guise of the magic touch of modernity with the help of the free market and instrumental rationality. Another case of liquid totalitarianism is Putin’s Russia with its theory of managed democracy, fully equipped with Putinism, a vague and strange amalgam of nostalgia for the grandeur of the Soviet past, with gangsters and crony capitalism, endemic corruption, cleptocracy, self-censorship, and remote islands left for dissenting opinions and voices on the Internet. To the contrary of the Chinese version of the divorce of capitalism and political liberty, the Putinesque variety implies a total fusion of economic and political power combined with impunity and state terror that overtly lends itself to gangs and criminal cliques of various shades. The noted Russian political analyst, commentator, and essayist Andrei Piontkovsky, one of the most courageous dissenting voices in Putin’s Russia, aptly described a striking historical affinity between the Soviet Union on the eve of the 1937 purge and present-day Russia by pointing out that Ilya Ehrenburg had best expressed the mood of the intelligentsia with his phrase “Never before have we had such a prosperous and happy life!” The irony is that the benefits that came to the intelligentsia from Stalin were merely a prelude to the horrors of the purge. “Things are shockingly similar in Russia now,” says Piontkovsky. Like Stalin, Putin simply bribed the intelligentsia. Less stick and more carrots. All in all, whereas Stalinism was a Shakespearean tragedy, Putinism is a farce. Yet there is hope that Russia woke up.
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41 The New Class of Political Entertainers
Dystopian literature depicted the nightmares of the twentieth century. The novels cited earlier, We, Brave New World, 1984, and Darkness at Noon (albeit the latter qualifies for the club of novels of warning to a lesser extent) anticipated those simulations of reality, or fabrications of consciousness, that were, and continue to be, deeply and strikingly characteristic of the modern mass-media world. That our perception of the world and our awareness may be framed by the mass media, that we deal with images, forgeries, and phantoms, instead of reality as it is, was plausibly demonstrated by Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard’s acclaimed theory of simulacra, or simulations of reality, is quite similar to what Milan Kundera has aptly described as the world manufactured by the new mass-media type whom he calls “imagologues,” the engineers and dispensers of images. Imagology, the art of making sets of ideals, anti-ideals, and value-images that people are supposed to follow without thinking or critically questioning, is the offspring of the media and advertising. If so, as Kundera argues in his novel, Immortality, reality disappears. An old lady in a nineteenth-century Bohemian village had far more control of her own life and a deeper knowledge of the cycles of nature and mundane reality than a millionaire or a powerful politician nowadays, confined to throwing his life on the mercy of spin doctors. If we take a closer look at Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (La possibilité d’une île), we can see a similar view on what happened to the politics of art and the art of politics. Art and fiction cannot survive otherwise than by surrendering themselves to images of sex, violence, and coercion; moreover, they close ranks with fic-
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tionalized politics and sensationalist media messages by subsuming to cheap scandal mongering, noisy conspiracy theories, unlawful insinuations, conjecture, and hatred skillfully translated into the language of political cartoons and entertainment. Yet there is no reason to exaggerate the role of imagologues, or, in present political parlance, spin doctors, as politicians themselves are keen on acting as constructs of the media. They are not that same breed or class of people from those who initiated the Puritan Revolution in England, the first action in modern history that established the rule of law as a controlling principle above the king, to the Second World War and post-war epoch with historic figures like Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle or Willy Brandt. Now, they are pop culture stars, celebrities, victims, or entertainers. In most cases, they function as the new class of politician-entertainers. Only two things matter in the world of technological and consumerist society, as depicted by Houllebecq: the entertainment of politics and the politics of entertainment. This is the reason why stand-up comedians, television producers working on political entertainment, and talk show hosts become an inescapable and critically important part of the new establishment. Politicians cannot exist without imagologues, according to Kundera. Nor can they exist without political humor, or, to be more precise, the entertainment world. They can change their places at any time. Political humorists and entertainers can go into politics, whereas politicians gladly become television stars, preoccupied or at least tinged with political entertainment. Just think about Silvio Berlusconi. Curiously enough, the new forms of political entertainment go hand-in-hand with a gradual disappearance of the old good humor. The new political humor is more about concealed hatred than jokes and laughter, and hatred turns out to be about angry political buffoonery nowadays. Hate and humor are easily convertible and interchangeable. Hatred becomes a valuable political commodity. Buffoonery becomes a widely accepted and assumed form of political intelligence service. Look at the head of Russia’s Liberal Democrats,
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Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who, to recall a witty description by a German politician, after five minutes of his talk in Germany proved an antiliberal, after ten minutes an anti-democrat, and after fifteen a fascist. It was with sound reason then that the British historian Peter Gay described the epoch of the invention of modern political cartoons as an era of hatred. If we make jokes on the fringes of what is allowed and on the edge of permissiveness, we are bound to border on hatred—precisely like the main character of Houellebecq’s novel, Daniel, a highly successful and angry stand-up comedian in whose case indecent and dubious jokes about Jews, Palestinian Arabs, Muslims, immigrants mark his success, make his name, and become the name of the game. In our technological consumerist society, entertainment is far preferable to genuine humor, which survives on the fringes of entertainment, power, and prestige. The whole world has become political. As a result we have been freed of the stereotypes and nonsense of our earlier experience. But we will also lose humor, which was born of none other than stereotype—from safe nonsense in an unsafe world—and powerlessness. This is so not only because political animosities and hatred masquerade as entertainment and popular culture. The point is that politics is about empowerment, which is why it cannot tolerate weakness. The brilliant humor of East European Jews is a perfect example of existence on the other side of the field of power. The political humor of our times—with its safe flirtation with power—is politics in its truest form. It is no longer anti-structure or linguistic carnival, but a light and breezy adjustment to the structure and field of power. It is also a warning: Ladies and gentlemen, you are not the only ones here. Share or you will perish. That’s the name of the new game.
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42 The Ukrainian Perspective on Politics
In my book, Power and Imagination: Studies in Politics and Literature, recently translated into Ukrainian, I made honorable mention of Mikhail Bulgakov and his work of genius, The Master and Margarita. The Ukrainian-born writer, who became a dissenting voice of Russian literature silenced for decades, anticipated the emergence of modern barbarity. His masterpieces, such as The Master and Margarita (a modern—and essentially Eastern European—version of Faust, yet in this telling, a woman gives her soul to the Devil in exchange for her beloved man, a cornered and anguished writer confined to a mental asylum) allow us to regard this great Ukrainian and Russian writer to have been for Eastern Europe what Kafka was for Central Europe. He was a prophet of the modern forms of evil or of the Devil in politics, if you will. In addition to Bulgakov’s political and moral incisiveness manifest in his novels and stories, he is the brightest example of what theorists call the anxiety of physical destruction, as opposed to the anxiety of influence: the anxiety of influence appears as more widespread in the West, whereas the anxiety of physical destruction seems more characteristic of Eastern Europe. The sense of the surreal, grotesque, and absurd is widely believed, and with sound reason, to have been deeply grounded in Eastern and Central European literature. In fact, it reached Parisian literary circles through Eugène Ionesco, yet was also manifest in such Polish writers as Witold Gombrowicz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. If we can derive this form of literary sensitivity and of the representation of the world from Jonathan Swift, then we should add immediately that the
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genius of Ukrainian literature, Nikolai Gogol, was much of an Eastern European Jonathan Swift. A major figure in Eastern European literature, Gogol may have been the father of the modern political fable based on that strong sense of the surreal, grotesque, and absurd. If Gogol was a Swift for Eastern Europe, then Mikhail Bulgakov seems to have been an Eastern European Kafka. No matter how uniquely distinct and incomparable these writers in terms of style and form, they best caught and expressed the Zeitgeist of their epoch. It was with good reason that Arthur Koestler once called his close friend George Orwell a missing link between Jonathan Swift and Franz Kafka. We could, no doubt, confer similar roles in Eastern European and world literature to the geniuses of rich, multilingual, and magnificent Ukrainian literature, such as Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov, Sholem Aleichem, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Isaac Babel, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, and Yuri Olesha, to name just a few. Or we could recall Paul Celan, a great Ukrainian-born Romanian-Austrian poet whose name was engraved with golden letters on the German-speaking world’s literary map as a reference to the best in postwar European poetry. A poet of genius, a translator of Russian poetry, including Osip Mandelstam, Paul Celan immortalized his name with Todesfuge (Death Fugue)—the greatest poem ever written on the Shoah. Thus, Ukraine is quite a fertile soil of thought, moral imagination, and sensitivity that covers an immense territory of modern experience, from the comic to the tragic. Playing a subtle game with literary allusions, the eminent Yale historian Timothy Snyder, in his article on Ukrainian politics that he wrote for The New York Review of Books, stressed Gogol’s Nose as a symbol of the absurdity and deformity of Russian tyrannical state and the seemingly powerful, albeit grotesque, bureaucracy it produced. Yet the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, appears in Snyder’s essay as a character losing his hands instead of his nose: the hands that have a life story of their own. These are the hands that can steal or beat up an innocent person.
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We badly need a Gogol of our time who would point out what else has been lost by Eastern European politics. This would shed more light on Western Europe’s deformities as well.
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43 It Happens Overnight
It happens overnight. Evil strikes suddenly. Like the kiss of death, it comes in many faces—as a promise of the restoration of the sense of pride, certainty, safety and security. It may come in the guise of pursuit of happiness. It may walk disguised as a romantic patriotism. As we have seen, it may assume the facet of an industrial faith in rationality and in the future of humanity. It happens overnight. Mikhail Bulgakov described the coming of evil as a visit of the devil. Suffice it to deny the validity of keywords of humanity, such as truth, faith, loyalty, and conscience—and His Excellency Devil will come up with a rich offer of power, prestige, sweeping change, and rationality, albeit at the expense of memory and daring to oppose power. It happens overnight. Power comes in many faces. It may come as a major secular religion of the industrial world (just let us think about Marxism) or as a forgery of the mixture of 1968 with its infatuations with and cravings for revolutionary change, sex, young beautiful bodies, lust for life and immortality (recall Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island). Or it comes as a clown. It happens overnight. Yes, it comes as a buffoon who starts as a popular entertainer, yet who ends up as a bloody dictator. Think about a sinister mixture of a nasty thug and a political buffoon— Alyaksandr Ryhoravich Lukashenka. He started the whole story as an ordinary guy with nothing to lose and as a seemingly good, albeit a bit simplistic pal, yet he ended up as a killer-trickster. This is not funny anymore, as it happened overnight. Evil comes laughing or making us laugh.
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It happens overnight. Evil comes laughing or making us laugh. Just recall Bats’ka (Daddy) telling, in an assembly of war veterans, a moving and heart-breaking story about his early orphan’s years, as he lost his dear and beloved father during the Second World War. Veterans began choking, people tried hard to suppress the lump in the throat, yet it did not take long for journalists to figure out that Bats’ka was born in 1954. It happens overnight. Evil comes laughing or making us laugh. With sound reason, George Orwell chose wise and moving words of warning, solidarity and compassion in his “Foreword for the Ukrainian Reader” that he wrote for the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm. He knew of the indescribable sufferings of the Ukrainian people. Contrary to Lion Feuchtwanger, H. G. Wells, or André Gide, he was not naïve; or, should I say, he chose not to be so. It happens overnight. Incidentally, when I purchased a copy of this book in Pennsylvania, it was an extremely beautiful volume, creating a strong contrast between its striking visual beauty and its rather somber content. Yet I was struck by a most telling detail. In a colored plate I saw Stalin playing a trick—putting his thumb on his nose and smiling in an overt and nonchalant manner. Evil laughs and makes us laugh. By laughing at evil, we lose our vigilance. In doing so, we have fun. It happens overnight, and the power speaks. Human beings change overnight. Friends betray one another blaming this on the conflict of loyalties or patriotic commitments. In fact, they are all hungry for power, money, and prestige. We learn all this from The Master and Margarita as well as from other two dystopias or sciencefiction novellas or immortal fables of the genius of Kiev—The Fatal Eggs and The Heart of a Dog. It happens overnight. How can we lose our freedom? Unfortunately, it happens swiftly. Moreover, it happens in our naïve anticipation of the “better” that is to come yet without our fighting back or resisting. We inflict a defeatist theory on ourselves making ourselves
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believe that corrupt democrats have to be punished by turning them down and allowing tricksters, clowns, and buffoons to replace them. It happens overnight. Nowadays, it is called a dilemma between competent and expert-like, albeit unpopular, policy makers and their theatrical rivals who expose themselves as masters of political acting, rather than fools and would-be dangerous autocrats. We have one more ready-made, deceiving, and misguided theory that we, instead of creating a sort of cordon sanitaire to contain sinister characters in politics, should let them get into office. As this theory goes, such a move would deal a blow to their reputation, exposing their incompetence and foolishness. It happens overnight. The trouble is that evil comes as a trickster but it never goes as one. It stays and attempts to change us into itself. Fear is a loyal sister to Evil—with sound reason, Mikhail Bulgakov despised fear as a major vice of humanity. Another sister of Evil is incurable naïveté that borders on stupidity. Once we choose to believe that there can be once-and-for-all good and bad individuals in politics, we pave the way for a dictatorship that will come overnight. It happens overnight. A sincere belief that anything is so makes it so, as William Blake once put it. If we believe that wealth and efficiency absolve from corruption, and also from contempt for human life, dignity and worth, we lie to ourselves. If we choose to believe that well-being is more important than freedom, we pave the way for serfdom. It happens overnight. If we prefer “stability” (as if there were something stable in democracy which always rests on doubt, competition, and critique, which deliberately creates a conflict to expose things and to expose hidden alternatives for the future) over uncertainty, unsafety, and insecurity brought about by freedom, we cannot complain. And then it will happen overnight.
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44 Is Football just Another Name for Politics?
The Euro 2012 Cup is over. “The winner takes it all, the loser is standing small”—this is what we learn from a good old hit song by ABBA. And the winner is Spain, the same Spain whose summer then became the summer of its discontents. The silver winner, Italy, is another hero of the Euro 2012 Cup whose political and economic lot seems anything but serene and happy now. What did we learn from this Euro Cup? First and foremost, we learned that football is not politics. That’s the best news we could possibly get from the tournament. Teams that took delight in the play, rather than in barbarity and brutality disguised as football, set a wonderful lesson for their fans who felt pride or sorrow for their team but who never projected an imperial sentiment or power politics onto the play. Two teams whose entire entourage and fans did play politics failed—those were Poland and Russia. Regrettably, Poland proved a mediocre team that has yet to return to the days of its glory associated with the 1974 golden era generation of Włodzimierz Lubański, Grzegorz Lato, Andrzej Szarmach, Kazimierz Deyna, Robert Gadocha, and Jan Tomaszewski, or with less powerful, albeit ambitious and good, team of 1982 led by Zbigniew Boniek. Robert Lewandowski is a good scorer, but he was unable to make history. Not now, not this time, alas. Russia was just a shadow of the team it was when, under the guidance of Guus Hiddink, it dealt a blow to the grandees defeating the Magnificent Orange and entering the European football elite. This time another Dutch magician, Dick Advocaat, could not do anything to save Russia from a humiliating and astonishing defeat to
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Greece. Yet the real and rather painful problem of Russian football lies elsewhere. After the surprise victory of Greece, Russian football fans had gone so far as to demand an apology from their team for the wound and pain that they supposedly inflicted on the great nation. It must have been under the influence of Robert Lewandowski who offered an apology to the Polish fans for the failure of the team that the Russian fans decided to take an action. Adding insult to injury, they started insinuating to the Russian football team that their fellow countrymen should suffer a bad conscience after the defeat inflicted on them by Greece. The Russian celebrity striker and top scorer Andrei Arshavin replied with little diplomacy putting it simply that the team has nothing to apologize for. This moral cacophony was later joined by the manager of the Ukrainian football team, Oleg Blokhin, who implied that the Russian team should have offered an apology for their failure to live up to the expectations of their fans. Oleg Blokhin, who had long been my own hero since those unforgettable days when he and the incomparable Dinamo Kiev of 1975 smashed PSV Eindhoven and Ferencváros winning the European Cup and qualifying for the Super Cup final against Bayern Munich, which left no chance for the legendary team of “Kaiser” Franz Beckenbauer, missed a good opportunity to remain silent after the fresh incident during which he physically challenged a journalist who dared criticizing his team. The temperature rose. Needless to say, a talented striker of one of the best football teams ever, Blokhin must have been bitterly disappointed after the chances of his bright team to qualify for the quarterfinal were ruined by England. Yet his angry remarks and harsh words, not to mention his failure to contain himself and behave as an historic personality of European football, exposed an unfortunate grimace of the past when sports were just a chambermaid of politics. No loyal and loving fan of his or her team would ever require an apology for lack of favor from Lady Fortune, which always comes as
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torment for every team and professional athlete. What happened this time was lack of respect of Russian football fans not only for their team but for the Euro 2012 tournament, and, ultimately, for football, as well. Bon ton for every fan is to rise and give his or her respect to the defeated team as if to say that they love and respect their team not only when it wins. Loyalty and fidelity is not about success; nor is it about reward. What surfaced here was not a bitter sentiment about this sporting life but, instead, a poorly camouflaged political hysteria over the supposed humiliation of the great nation. Déjà vu, alas. As if Russia were the former Soviet Union and was expected to defeat the rotten and decadent West; as if other teams were not colleagues and brothers-infootball, and as if their fans were not soulmates. Before the second leg of the 1975 final of the aforementioned Super Cup of Europe between Dinamo Kiev and Bayern Munich, Ukrainian war veterans kept asking Dinamo not to let them down playing against a German team. I can never forget how astonished I was by this. Well, this is something that is difficult to accept now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century and especially in the context of the EU, but it made sense then when the folk felt strongly about that. I learned this from the interview with Vladimir Veremeyev, a virtuoso master of the corner kick, an incarnation of the legendary coach and manager Valery Lobanovsky who was a virtuoso of the corner kick himself. And yet it was not the team’s fidelity and loyalty to the war veterans (with all due respect) that won the historic game. Instead, it was the genius of that team.
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45 When Treachery Becomes Virtue
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are likely to live in a world where the successful exercise of power, be it plausible violence or good economic performance, increasingly becomes a license to abandon individual freedom, civil liberties, and human rights. Alas, no social networking, mass education, or emerging global sensibilities, can alter this logic of things. From the epoch of Niccolò Machiavelli onwards a quiet revolution has taken place in the process of becoming a personality. If the criterion and definition of truth given, among others, by Thomas Aquinas (the correspondence of a thing to the intellect: adaequatio rei et intellectus) was still operative in science and philosophy, it undoubtedly ceased to hold in practical life and politics where it was no longer believed that power derived from God and that politics is intrinsically an abode of virtue and a form of wisdom. The modern revolution engineered by Machiavelli’s political thought is best embodied in his concept of verità effettuale (efficacious truth), whereby truth becomes practice—in fact, practical action. Truth in politics is reached by the person who generates action and achieves results, but not by the person, who defines, articulates, and questions, in the light of virtue, or examines, in the context of the classical canon, that action and those results. This is to say that truth is success, and, conversely, success is truth. The politician who creates an enduring practice, who transforms an idea into an action, and who institutionalizes that idea is the one who has truth on his side. How he does all that is of secondary importance. Not a goal that justifies means, but an actor who wedges his skeptics and critics from all periods and from a variety of cultures
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into the same form of politics and life comes to be considered right, historical, and immortal. Truth is that which stays in memory, while failure is condemned to die and to be stigmatized as fiasco and shame. Survival at the cost of virtue and higher morality sounds forth as an early voice of the modern world; only later will that voice be caricatured by Social Darwinists and racists as the symbolic center of the struggle to survive. The tyrant who has centralized the state and liquidated his opponents becomes father of his nation, but a despot who has tried to do the same but has lost out or has failed to reach all his goals earns universal scorn and is actively forgotten. Forces that have successfully executed a coup d’état or revolution become heroic insurrectionists against reactionary, morally bankrupt institutions, but if they are unsuccessful they become mere conspirators or rioters. Shame and stigma attach not to a refusal of virtue, to an embrace of wickedness, and to an active choice of evil, but to a loss of power, to an inability to hold on to it, to suffering defeat. Power is honored, but utter powerlessness or even just weakness does not deserve a philosophical conception of its own or any kind of sympathy. In this paradigm, sympathy and compassion are due only to those who do not participate in the sphere of power. But if you are in it, it is either success that awaits you, or else death and disappearance. Death can be a simple forgetting: they are the same. That is why in this paradigm of modern instrumentalism treachery is easily justified: if it ends in the retention or enlargement of power, it is easy to position it as a painful sacrifice in the name of the state or as a big and common purpose or ideal. But if the treachery ends in failure and the conspirators suffer a fiasco, then with help from symbolic authority and the state machinery it is securely placed in the exalted category of supreme disloyalty to the state—high treason. If the conspiracy went well and the head of state or of the institution is liquidated or at least compromised, then the conspirators become patriots and statesmen; but if the old system prevails and
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sweeps up all those that organized the conspiracy, the latter are not only destroyed but left to history as traitors and persons incapable of loyalty, i.e., as weaklings all around. Finally, there is also a metaphysics of treachery: it can be explained as disappointment with former friends, partners, companionsin-arms, and ideals, but that doesn’t change the heart of the matter. A treachery interpreting itself this way sounds like a naive hostage to self-suggested disappointment and to the discovery of a new world, but its deep causes lie somewhere else. In our days treachery has become the chance, fortune, and practice of situational man, a pragmatist and instrumentalist torn from his human essence and isolated from and by other people. As is well known, remorse and guilt today have become political commodities in games of public communication, just like carefully dosed-out hatred has. Perhaps infidelity has become not so much an article of trade as an element of instrumental reason and situational virtue. In a world of intermittent human ties and of inflated words and vows, faithlessness no longer shocks. When fidelity ceases to be at the center of our personality and a force that integrates all of a human being’s identity, then treachery becomes a situational “norm” and “virtue.” What happens to politics? It becomes a haven for people of situational—or mobile, as Erich Fromm called it—truth. It easily lends itself to adventure-seekers, criminals and crooks of various shades. The winner takes all, just like elsewhere in our increasingly competitive and instrumentalist world. This sporting life.
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46 Criminals in Politics
Is politics free of criminals? Has it ever been so? In fact, it hasn’t. Far from war criminals, who, as a cynic’s dictionary would suggest, are statesmen who lost the war (whereas the heroes solely remain on the winning side), felons squeeze in politics from time to time. Crooks, charlatans, various kinds of dodgy figures, even mobsters become part of the classe politique. As a witty saying goes, the dividing line between a parliament and a prison tends to be quite thin. Politics has always been about a watershed between legitimate and illegitimate figures in power. In fact, legitimacy is the most precious property of politics. Yet well before political leaders reach the heights of legitimacy and law, they tend to get close to the world of crime. One need only remember that Niccolò Machiavelli’s concept of the prince as un mezzo bestia e mezzo uomo (half beast, half man) to prove this to have always been the case. A ruler who succeeds in unifying and centralizing the state by any political means or ethical cost becomes a hero, whereas those who fail to achieve their ends go down in history as bloodthirsty villains, hungry for power. A successful rebel becomes a revolutionary and a reformer, yet a failed one is relegated to the margins of political history as the head of a pointless uprising and stirrer of social unrest. Successful dictators and tyrants cannot achieve much without the help of the underworld of crime, for they always need assassins, thieves, crooks, torturers, and manipulators. On a closer look, what we take as the heroic saga of the clash between liberal political regimes and dictatorships is, in fact, the clash between civilized politics and brutal exercise of power by criminals.
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Even the tragedy of Russia in the twentieth century, Shakespearean in scale and intensity, began as the collapse of a withering imperial power and the onslaught of a criminal element. After all, Stalin, on the rise and, especially during his Baku period, was a mere thug. In more than one way, he was a criminal who was uniquely successful in consolidating power and creating a self-legitimizing myth as the heirapparent to Lenin, and also as his brother-in-arms and disciple. The Russian state collapsed as it was taken over by a criminal regime disguised as the Universal Church of the Left. Criminalization of politics and, conversely, swift politicization of criminal groups and gangs is not an exclusive phenomenon of the dark past, though. Suffice it to recall the beginning of a rapid period of painful change in the former Soviet Union when, to call things by their right names, criminals and various shadow groups sought to surface, legalizing themselves and their agendas. Some of them were solemnly accepted into the classe politique; others failed to achieve such heights and were excluded or jailed. Who were Vladimir Putin and his entourage when their notorious company The Lake came into existence? Who was Viktor Yanukovych in his youth? What kind of political elite exists in post-Soviet countries where wealth was not accumulated throughout decades and centuries but, instead, was acquired on a fast lane left for statefavored profiteers protected by the former power structure agents? It could hardly have been anything other than a fusion of the so-called siloviki, that is, KGB officers, secret service agents, state-protected thieves, and some entrepreneurs who accepted the challenge of closing ranks ad cooperating with the sinister mishmash leftover from the former empire’s power machine. Curiously enough, sometimes they can bear family resemblance to power and wealth groups of Renaissance Italy—such as famous families that ruled Italian city-states for centuries. Recall the Orsini family and the Colonna family in Rome, the Medici family in Florence, or the Sforza family in Milan. They had their own court judges, court artists, court scholars, and court historians; quite frequently,
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they acted not only as political dynasties and noble families but as political struggle and crime units as well. Mario Puzo’s perceptive novel, The Family, explores the family of Pope Alexander VI as a prototype of the modern mafia. His son, Cesare Borgia, becomes a cardinal at age eighteen, yet abandons his early ecclesiastical career and goes on to reach the heights of genuine political and military glory. Judging by Niccolò Machiavelli’s account in The Prince, a perfect embodiment and incarnation of un mezzo bestia e mezzo uomo, Cesare Borgia took a political path as a beast of prey and merciless killer, yet ended up as a political visionary and an architect of a unified and strong Italy. Even for a killer and criminal, a chance exists to become a statesman. Or vice versa. Much of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets may be described as a metaphysics of crime committed in the name of good and humanity. This has been witnessed by European historians, dramatists, and poets; and we ourselves can testify to it, as we have seen much turmoil, unrest, and the ups-and-downs of Eastern Europe from 1990 onwards. What is crucial is whether a family, a household, or a clan, is held superior to the state, and whether they remain the opposing agencies. However, the worst thing happens when they merge. Misdemeanor and felony are inescapable parts of politics until they become watered down, washed away, or otherwise marginalized. True, a former felon can become a committed statesman. Unfortunately, we have seen too much of an opposite tendency.
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47 Is European Culture a Fantasy?
Is European culture a fantasy? Is it more or less so than European politics? These are the questions that cross my mind again and again when I try to think of how to reverse the ongoing tragedy of the EU—namely, its slow, silent demise, which is a fact of reality, to my dismay. European culture sometimes is dismissed as a fantasy or fiction inasmuch as it is argued that there is no such phenomenon as an allembracing and all-encompassing European culture. Is this assumption correct? No, it is profoundly wrong, misplaced, and misguided. Only those who are out of touch with the cultural history of Europe can claim Europe to have never been an entity deeply permeated by a unifying and controlling principle, be it the legacy of classical antiquity and Judeo-Christian spiritual trajectories, or be it a value-and-idea system that revolves around liberty and equality, these two heralds and promises of modernity. Pyotr Chaadayev’s Philosophical Letters appear as a profound intellectual testimony to this truth. The Russian philosopher wrote with pain that his country never experienced the great dramas of modernity; nor did it have an historic opportunity to be molded by the greatest historical-cultural epochs of Europe, such as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Baroque, or the Enlightenment. As Chaadayev argued, Russia had none of these. Therefore, European history did not speak to Russia the language of its great cravings for liberty, emancipation of the human soul, and individual self-fulfillment. For Europe is more than merely economic and political reality, according to Chaadayev. It is an idea, a religion, a dream, and a trajectory of the soul. In fact, modernity and freedom appear to Russia as
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something alien, imposed, emulated, or otherwise adopted from without; yet in Europe they became part of psychology and even the physiology of human individuals. Europe is inconceivable without a certain modern faith, which has become a brother to liberty, instead of a tool of oppression. Such were ideas for which poor Pyotr Chaadayev was pronounced a madman and confined to house arrest. Today, these same ideas are on the agenda of every mediocre mainstream politician, instead of shaping a dissenting theory of an intellectual naysayer. The idea that European culture is a fantasy can be claimed only by those who have never understood the fact that the foundations for portraiture art in England were laid by a Fleming, Sir Anthony van Dyck; that the Flemish Primitives greatly influenced their peers in Venice and elsewhere in Italy; that Caravaggio was behind not only Rembrandt but the group of Caravaggisti in Utrecht as well; that Baroque music was an interplay of Italian, German, and French genius (consider Bach vis-à-vis Vivaldi or Italian opera composers vis-à-vis Handel); that the greatest Elizabethan dramatists in England were under the spell of Spanish literature, works coming from their political foe, the country they hated as a political archrival. The dialectic of politics and culture is just as much about the whole of Europe as is the dialectic of war and peace. For me, the very symbol of Europe is the great Flemish Primitive Hugo van der Goes’ work of genius, The Triptych of Tommaso Portinari, which hangs at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. The head of the Medici bank branch in Bruges, Tommaso Portinari, was a patron of Hugo van der Goes; his family also supported a German-born genius of Bruges, Hans Memling. This economic, political, aesthetic, mental, and existential knot of Italian, Dutch, Flemish, French, and German genius from the Middle Ages onward reveals what I would call the Soul of Europe. Europe starts where we fail to classify and categorize a human individual. Europe emerged repeatedly where Martin Buber, born in Vienna, with his Austrian and German upbringing, and who spent
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much of his time in Lviv, adopted Eastern European sensibilities by committing himself to Hassidic tales and by converting spiritually to Ostjuden, that is, Eastern European Jews at who German Jews used to look down as regrettable people. Europe emerges where we adopt a common destiny, and a silent and joint dedication to our history and political legacy. Ironically, we fail to see that the only sphere where Europe as our common home became a fact of life, rather than a manifestation of wishful thinking, is education and culture. The future of Europe is unthinkable without the art of translation. It was with sound reason that Milan Kundera made a joke about the role of the work of interpreters in the European Parliament, clearly suggesting that it is far more important for the future of the EU than the labor of members of the EP. We will inexorably fail in our EU policies if we keep relegating literature, culture, and the art of translation to the margins of European life. If there is a chance that the EU can survive the twenty-first century as a club of democratic nations, or even as a federal state able to blaze the trail to other nations seeking the rule of law and democracy, it will occur only on the condition that we give equal justice to education and culture. Most importantly, culture serves as an anticipation of more just and coherent politics—utopias, dystopias, social criticism in the form of humor, and similar forms of dissent, moral imagination and alternative—which are pivotal for politics. This is far from a detached and politically naïve wish; in fact, this is a matter of fact. The EU failed where politics was unable to overcome national selfishness and disbelief in the European project. Yet the EU up to now has been successful everywhere it spoke the language of education, literature, and culture.
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48 Our Ambiguous New World, or Can We Reverse a Tragedy of the EU?
Arnold J. Toynbee, echoing a great many historians, once asked: Does history repeat itself? Karl Marx wittily and caustically answered this question in the nineteenth century by reminding us that it does, and twice at that: once as tragedy and then as farce. There are many indications that what proved to be a Shakespearean tragedy in the twentieth century will now repeat itself as a farce. The Soviet Union and its new industrial faith, as Ernest Gellner described it, was nothing short of a civilizational alternative and rivalry to Europe, or to the West, if you will. A deep disappointment with the supposed Jerusalem of the Left, along with the real collapse of modern belief (or disbelief) in a hidden alternative to capitalism and liberalism had a component of a universal tragedy. Or think of China whose ideology without any ideology, or capitalism without liberty, has as much to do with the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s political legacy as its present social and moral order has with liberal democracy. No theory or ideological doctrine of the twentieth century can explain this phenomenon. Living in a postideological and, in all likelihood, post-political era, creates quite a few predicaments when trying to apply the mainstream views or conventional wisdom of the past. And what is happening in the EU itself? George Soros, in his article “The Tragedy of the European Union and How to Resolve It” published in The New York Review of Books (September 27–October 10, 2012, Vol. LIX, No. 14, pp. 87–93) has offered a clue to this problem. I do not wish to be misunderstood, though.
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By no means do I regard George Soros as a saint. He himself is a symbol of the mayhem created by global capitalism accompanied by the weakening of the state, which has become a rather impotent entity, deaf and blind in the face of the challenges posed by globalization, and, therefore, acting at best as a security agency for global corporations. A nearly perfect amalgam of soullessness and heartless capitalism (whether we call it Wall Street capitalism or cowboy capitalism) and left-wing sensibilities, Soros may well be described as a true hero of globalization. Therefore, he talks sense. He knows of what he speaks. His is a world of the double-faced Janus: one face advocating the advantages of global free-market economy, and the other being aware of the damage inflicted by the modern economic structure on poorest countries, failed states, indigenous people, or all new emerging political entities lost in transition. Lost for the decades to come. Right-wing structure coupled with left-wing energy, or rightwing practice reconciled to left-wing political vocabulary—here is our ambiguous creation, which we could call modernity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is a world in which politicians either rhetorically or more or less differ from one another only prior to an election, and close ranks immediately when the election is over. The world which may be shaped or healed by one hand, and damaged or destroyed by another, although both of these hands would belong to one and the same person or institution. I’ve always had a problem with left-wing millionaires such as those from Hollywood who, no matter how overpaid or perhaps overrated their talent, are keen on heralding their progressive views, social sensibilities, and sensitivity to poverty. George Soros is incomparably more than that. He is a left-wing billionaire whose hedge funds nearly ruined some East Asian economies, and yet whose Open Society Fund network in Eastern and Central Europe succeeded in helping these nations’ educational and cultural efforts far more than their own national ministries of education and culture combined.
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This time Soros hit the bull’s eye: He succinctly described that the tragedy of the EU is that it originated as a global open society that pursued the ends to create a club of democracies with their full commitment to human rights and civil liberties; yet what will emerge after the Euro crisis is likely to be a hierarchical system with two classes of member states—creditors and debtors. How can we expect political symmetry, equality and reciprocity in the system with such an asymmetry of economic power? And this class differentiation is highly likely to become permanent because for the debtor countries, due to economic policies and fiscal reasons, it will be impossible to catch up with the creditor countries. According to Soros, “Germany has actually benefited from the Euro crisis, which has kept down the exchange rate and helped exports.” Instead of doing the bare minimum necessary to resolve the crisis, Germany should “lead or leave the EU.” Quite far from its inception, the present EU power structure works, paradoxically producing the new center (Germany) and the new periphery (Greece, Spain, Italy). If countries like Italy can be assessed as peripheral within this power structure, it tells something disturbing about the state of affairs in the EU. Small wonder, Soros suggests that Germany must act as a benign and benevolent hegemon—something in the manner of the Unites States after the Second World War. We must face it: the EU is not the same entity of equality, freedom, and openness it used to be. Yet if Germany decides to assume genuine moral and political leadership, we can hope for a better scenario, one with room left for the ideals of an open society.
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49 A Heroic Narrative in Violation of Good Conscience
The ceremonial reburial of the leader of the Lithuanian Provisional Government (PG), Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, which took place in May 2012, and the tension and details associated with it, said more about Lithuania today than all the news and commentary over the past twenty years put together. Back when the Sąjūdis movement for Lithuanian independence was just beginning, we encountered Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance and considered it a sensation, even a miracle, this film about an invasion of a human soul by an almost Satanic totalitarian system, taking away its sensitivity and memory. The destruction of the ancient holy place in the city is synchronized with William Shakespeare’s sixty-sixth sonnet, memorized by local murderer and dictator Varlam Aravidze and recited to his future victims. It was a wonderful performance of an aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore (the cabaletta Di quella pira). After his death, a woman appears whose family was murdered by the monster; she cannot come to terms with the idea that the remains of Varlam Aravidze will be peacefully returned to the land of Georgia. The film ends with the murderer’s son being convinced that something is not right and refusing to bury his father, having come to the realization that the loss of conscience and human sensitivity is too large a price to pay for loyalty. Failing to recognize the crimes of the past, the family’s and the entire nation’s present fails to congeal, and the present becomes instead the hostage and victim of the lie. Abel Aravidze’s son, the grandson of the murderer Varlam, is unable to
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bear the burden of shame and pain for the destroyed destinies of the town’s people, whose lives had become mere details or insignificant trifles in the family’s stories about their proud past and heroism. I am not in any way comparing the character of the leader of Lithuania’s PG with the horrible Repentance. That would be somewhat of an overstatement, distasteful and, in the end, not clever. I am just talking about the Shakespearian dilemma that the Georgian film director understood so well in presenting his immortal film. What is more important: the historical tale that inspires the town and morale among its citizens, or the truth and conscience? Can these things in general coexist peacefully? Should small details and unimportant matters—which you will, in any case, not be able to preserve for the whole of the people with whom the current and future generations must live—be sacrificed for the sake of the heroic narrative? Zygmunt Bauman developed the theory of the adiaphorization of consciousness in which he states that during times of social upheaval and at critical historical junctures or intense social change, people lose some of their sensitivity and refuse to apply the ethical perspective to others. They simply eliminate the ethical relationship with others. These others don’t necessarily become enemies or demons but more like statistics, circumstances, obstacles, factors, unpleasant details, and obstructing circumstances. But at the same time they are no longer people with whom we would like to meet in a “face to face” situation, whose gaze we might follow, at whom we might smile, or to whom we might even return in the name of recognition of the existence of the Other. People who have lost their sensitivity temporarily or for a long time are not demons. They simply remove from their sensitivity zone certain people or entire groups. As the Greek stoics of antiquity and later religious reformers and thinkers of the Renaissance believed, there are things which are in reality inessential and unimportant, matters over which there is no point to argue or cross swords. This kind of unimportant thing is called an adiaphoron (Greek neuter singular, άδιάφορον, from ά-, a negative prefix marker, + διάφορος, “different,”
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making “indifferent”) and the plural is adiaphora. An example of usage is found in the letter that Philipp Melanchthon wrote to Martin Luther in which he said the Catholic liturgy was an adiaphoron, hence it was pointless to argue about it with the Catholics. In Lithuania, adiaphorization of consciousness and memory affects our historical narrative of World War II. The Jews appear in it as some sort of obstacle, hindrance, an annoying detail appearing in the wrong place, disallowing the construction of the heroic narrative of Lithuania and her aspirations to freedom. It is simply disappointing that they appear there. After all, History itself is against the Jews. One must choose: (a) to separate from oneself a portion of the citizens of the Republic of Lithuania, to place them outside the category of citizens, to approve Germany’s Nuremburg laws on the seizure of Jewish property and their separation from other citizens, to renounce them as citizens, in no way to associate the justice system and the entire state with them and, finally, to give them over for destruction; or (b) to act the way the King of Denmark did, refusing to separate the Jews from other citizens and the state, and therefore to wear upon one’s breast, as the King did, the Jewish Star of David. There is no third way. Either you give up some of your citizens for humiliation, robbery and death, or you protect them in the same way you would protect all of your other citizens, without regard to their origins and views. That’s all. Full stop. No compromise is possible in this ethical and political situation. Unless, of course, you want to say that not all people have the same right to life, but then that’s a concept of the Nazis. The theory that there are those unworthy of life laid the foundations for the adiaphorization of the consciousness of Europe. Or, one can claim (as is often done in Lithuania) that, allegedly, one must act cleverly with Satan, i.e., with the Nazis, for the sake of a noble goal: the restoration of Lithuanian independence. For now, let’s leave for interpreters of Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky the question of whether it is allowable to sacrifice for the sake of the state the lives of those less worthy to live, or the life of even one innocent person
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(unless that person chooses to lay down his life for his country, but in that case this is his own free decision, not a matter for military bureaucrats and their social engineering), and let’s instead ask if a political elite who turn over some of their citizens for annihilation, or merely place them outside the category of human beings, are heroes, or whether they are traitors to their state and its citizens. Lithuania’s real tragedy was that it was liberated by the Soviets instead of the British or Americans: after the first horrible trauma and degradation of Lithuania, when not a single shot was fired in reply to occupation, and after the attempt to wash away this shame with one’s own blood and the blood of others, the second historical blow hit Lithuania. If Lithuania hadn’t been “saved” by the Soviets, but instead liberated by the West, the political elite of democratic Lithuania would have tried the Provisional Government and the Lithuanian Activist Front as Nazi collaborators and traitors. This needs to be said and understood once and for all. There is no doubt that the documents of the LAF and PG would be found to be proof of criminality. They would be interpreted as treason against the Republic of Lithuania, including Leonas Prapuolenis’s address in the name of the LAF over the Kaunas “Radiofonas” radio station in which he clearly stated the need to get rid of Jews, to cleanse Lithuania of them and (in a passage worthy of Goebbels) to rescind the rights of settlement that Lithuanian Grand Duke Vytautas the Great granted to Jews because of their treason against and lack of loyalty to Lithuania. This did not happen, of course, and so Lithuania is still trying to battle against her historical humiliation, characterized by the thinking that everything that is against the Soviets and the entire Soviet past is in and of itself good. It isn’t. This idea of “heroes by default,” heroes resulting from omissions from the historic record, or more precisely the suppression of history, sooner or later must come into conflict with both the West’s political-historical narrative of the Holocaust and with Lithuania’s own prominent personalities, with their courage, nobility, and conscience.
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For me, that noble Lithuania is represented by Algimantas Mackus’s poem Jurekas, and Antanas Šk÷ma’s novel Izaokas, and also Tomas Venclova’s essay “Žydai ir lietuviai” (“Jews and Lithuanians”) in his Vilties formos (Forms of Hope), and not by the idealism of the rebels of the June Uprising of 1941, who on the very first day of the uprising spread the vision of a Lithuania without Jews. The condemnation to degradation and death of a fragile and stigmatized part of the population in the name of even a grand political goal isn’t idealism, though; it’s the most terrible species of Realpolitik. The two concepts shouldn’t be confused. If we have a dearth of heroes, what’s stopping us from building statues to commemorate Sofija Binkien÷ and the other righteous among the nations who rescued Jews? What isn’t allowing us to take pride in Lithuania’s unshakeable dissidents, such as Nijol÷ Sadūnait÷, or the humble and fearless Samogitian Viktoras Petkus, who so recently left us, and who so impressed his fellow gulag inmate Aleksandr Solzhenitsin? Or what’s stopping us, for that matter, from making Vytautas Landsbergis into a hero for all of Europe, a comrade-in-arms with Poland’s Solidarity movement and Václav Havel? For whom is it still not clear that Sąjūdis and Lithuania’s historic victory against the Soviet Union in 1991 washed away forever the national shame over the humiliation of the Lithuanian people in 1940, or that the tables have now turned, and Vladimir Putin and others nostalgic for the Soviet Union will never forgive Lithuania for humiliating the empire in the international arena and in the eyes of the entire world? Is this still not clear to us? Do we really need to fight these senseless battles between ourselves and with our past, compromising Lithuania for no reason? Unfortunately we have chosen a different logic of morality. Jews are not ours. They do not belong to Lithuania. They are unimportant things, inconvenient details, circumstances and academic footnotes pushed by historians. They are hindrances. Because of them, we are unable to create our gallery of heroes and our heroic narrative as we would like. All that remains is for us to ask ourselves whether all this
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supposed patriotic pragmatism is sensible. It is not serving the past and certainly not honoring the memory of the dead, but simply allowing for political mudslinging and sending the “right” message to voters. If so, that means we are choosing an immoral version of patriotism which no longer includes ethics, truth, or conscience. I am not casting aspersions upon the memory of Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. He was an intellectual and a teacher. Let his family, friends, and colleagues honor his memory. The Republic of Lithuania joining in with official honors, however, means only one thing in civilized politics: we approve of the policy carried out by his cabinet. That means the Holocaust and its proposition were not our and the world’s great tragedy. That means we accept responsibility for the words and deeds of the Lithuanian Provisional Government. Even if in this case we are not talking about legal responsibility, it is still worth remembering that there is a thing called political responsibility. And something called moral responsibility, although that might be too much and too unpleasant a requirement. To be a hero, it is not enough to merely not be a criminal; you still must at least nominally oppose the crime being committed in front of you. Or at least condemn it after some time. It wasn’t angels and demons that fought World War II, unfortunately, it was frighteningly and terribly “normal” and healthy people. There were those who were veritable antisemites, but that rescued Jews because they saw their suffering with their own eyes, rather than saying something abstract or signing documents for discriminating against them, robbing them, and murdering them. To see everything and remain silent, and to speak much without observing are two inherently contradictory existential and ethical situations. Those who did not see and signed off on it could later be struck by what they saw and could then rescue Jewish children. Antisemites were able to rescue Jews, and non-antisemites were able to turn them over in the name of their homeland, a concept from which
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they removed ethics, empathy, sympathy, and the human face with its pleading look and the long meeting of eyes. This is why we differentiate between, on the one hand, the importance of weak, all-too-human, beloved-by-someone, awfully healthy and normal people in the eyes of their families and friends and on the other, the universality of ethics. At the same time we comprehend the different status of the political judgment of these people, which might—and unfortunately does—produce horrible things. Otherwise, we will continue to build monuments to our traumas and humiliations, and rather than battle against our state’s problems, weaknesses, and real defects, we will battle against those who dare see and speak differently. Who needs the heroes? Happy are those individuals and nations that have their heroes? Or unhappy and troubled are those who need them at any cost? Yet there is no such thing as heroism without conscience and ethics. We know that. It’s just that, sadly, it’s more comfortable and more human to forget that. All too human.
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50 The Inflation of Genocide
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We are living in an era of not only monetary inflation, but also of the inflation—hence devaluation—of concepts and values. Sworn oaths are being debased before our very eyes. Once, by breaking an oath, a person lost the right to participate in the public square and to be a spokesman for truth and values. He would be stripped of everything except his personal and private life, and would be unable to speak on behalf of his group, his people, or his society. Pledges have also suffered devaluation. Once upon a time, if you went back on your word you were divested of even the least measure of trust. Concepts are also being devalued; they are no longer reserved for the explicit task of describing precise instances of human experience. Everything is becoming uniformly important and unimportant at one time. My very existence places me at the center of the world. Genocide and its Inflation In my experience, the pinnacle of the concept of “inflation” was reached ten years ago, when I came across articles in the American press describing the “holocaust” of turkeys in the run-up to the Thanksgiving holiday. This was probably the case of a word being used unthinkingly or irresponsibly. Disrespect for concepts and language only temporarily masks disrespect for others; and this disrespect eventually bubbles to the surface.
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In recent decades, the concept of genocide has undergone a perilous devaluation. Here, I would like to stress that the devaluation of this concept has not been underpinned by a concern for humanity as whole or for the condition of contemporary humaneness—just the opposite: it is a symptom of the history of the revaluation of the self as the world’s navel and, concurrently, of an insensitivity towards humanity. Moreover, the immoderate use of this word threatens to stifle dialogue.
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The Concept of Genocide Genocide is a term used in philosophy, political science, and sociology, but also in law; it is clearly defined in UN legal documents, and a precise definition of genocide exists in international law. After the mass slaughter of national and ethnic groups by the Nazis, the term began to be used to designate the doctrine of deliberate extermination of national, religious or ethnic groups; and to designate the execution of this doctrine. A genocide is the annihilation en bloc of a people or of a race, irrespective of class divisions, dominant ideology, and internal social and cultural differences. Genocide does not denote a battle against an enemy which, under conditions of war or revolution, is something that is clearly defined by classical military, ideological or political-doctrinal criteria. If this were the case, any revolution, and the systematic annihilation of those opposing it, would need to be labeled genocide. Genocide is annihilation without pre-selection, where the victims are utterly unable to save themselves—in theory or in practice—by an ideological change of heart, by religious apostasy or, ultimately, by betraying the group and going over to the other side. On this view, let us then agree that the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in 1572 and the bloody mass killings of Huguenots throughout France; the terror unleashed during the Middle Ages by
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the Inquisition, which led to the murders of masses of women, witches, soothsayers, Jews and homosexuals; and the wiping out of entire village populations in the Vendée by French revolutionaries from 1789 through 1794—regardless of how harrowing all of this carnage was—did not amount to genocide. Those people met with a barbarous end, but almost all could have saved themselves by going over to the side of their enemies or persecutors. Genocide is both a theory and a praxis (although it is a praxis first and foremost) that leaves its intended victims without any hope of escape—even if they choose to go over to their enemy’s side. You are guilty at birth, and this fatal error of having been born— this original sin—can be corrected only by your extermination. Such is the metaphysics of genocide and absolute hatred. The only way of resolving the “problem” is by the complete and utter annihilation of bodies, lives, blood, and skin pigment. In his Nobel address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn compared nations to thoughts of God; it was the murder of this single God—which goes beyond good and evil and which promotes the destruction of the entire world—that is the true genocide. It is a symbolic murder of humanity, because the annihilation of one form of human existence relegates the existence of other peoples to the margins of mere future practicalities. Killing one person makes it that much easier to go out and kill others. Genocide and History There is no point in devaluing the concept of genocide through ratiocinations about the genocide of cultures and languages. Such phenomena, quite simply, do not exist—nor have they ever existed. Until the twentieth century, larger and more powerful states not only defeated but also assimilated smaller countries and nations, as much as we are loath to admit this.
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Doubtless, the forced assimilation of individuals and nations is a repellent part of imperialism and of imperial politics as a spiritual principle; but it is not a crime against humanity once it becomes a routine and voluntary practice undertaken by the elites of smaller nations who later go on to rise to influence in the adopted metropolis. After all, we cannot regard the history of all our civilizations as one ongoing crime and one endless genocide of some group or other. Whitewashing a concept benefits no one. Whether we like it or not, the Holocaust was the one and only bona fide genocide in human history. It was unique not only because of its scale, its praxis and its industrial methods of annihilation, but because of its determination never to call a halt to the Final Solution as long as a single Jew remained alive. Ultimately, it was not a garden-variety mass killing; it was a policy decision taken by an industrial and civilized state; one into which the country’s entire economic and industrial machinery was plugged in, bolstered by military might and a political propaganda apparatus. Which is why other genocides of the twentieth century need to be discussed with provisos, although this does not in any way diminish the scale of these other tragedies, nor does it diminish the culpability of the perpetrators in the eyes of God and humanity. Although they were more sporadic and involved less forward thinking, the other twentieth century mass killings that exhibited genocidal features, beyond any shadow of a doubt, were no less sickening. The massacre of Armenians during the First World War; the slaughter of Roma during the Second World War; Stalin’s Holodomor, which unleashed mass starvation on the Ukrainian populace; the killing spree that saw millions of Tutsis cut down in Rwanda; and, lastly, the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia—all of these macabre twentieth century events can be considered mass killings with genocidal traits.
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Their aim was not to destroy isolated groups or social strata among the enemy, but to liquidate as many members of an ethnic group as possible.
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Genocide, Lithuania, and Stratocide Did Lithuania experience genocide? No, it did not. No matter how cruel the Soviet terror that was visited upon the Baltic states, a large segment of Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian society, by going over to the other side, by becoming collaborators, was not only able to save itself, but also secure for itself successful careers in the administration of the occupying regime. This group was able to wreak havoc on and settle scores with its own people, doing so with impunity. There was never any project for a complete annihilation of the Baltic peoples—had this been the case, it is very unlikely that we would still be around. In writing this, I am in no way downplaying the scale of the atrocities committed in the name of Soviet communism. I will always deplore any attempt to exculpate or to diminish the scale of the crimes committed by that bloody and essentially criminal regime. Nonetheless, let us be honest and honorable by acknowledging that we did not experience a true genocide. It was not for nothing that philosopher and Soviet dissident Grigory Pomerantz suggested referring to the Soviet terror not as genocide, but as stratocide—the annihilation of certain strata and classes within a nation. He explained that it was not an entire nation that had been wiped out, as a racial or ethnic whole, but its most educated, most cultured, and most socially conscious strata. Russians do not refer to the physical annihilation of their intelligentsia and bourgeoisie—numbering in the millions of lives lost—as genocide, just as the purges during China’s Cultural Revolution,
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which ended the lives of tens of millions of Chinese, was never proclaimed a genocide of the Chinese people. Genocide is not a mass slaughter motivated by an internal ideological or political struggle—if that were the case, civil wars would end up falling into the category of genocide. In the case of genocide, one nation engages in the premeditated annihilation of another; the aggressors do not seek to subjugate the victims, nor to bring them to heel and foist upon them an alien doctrine, religion or ideology. So let us be precise. The end result of a totalitarian revolution, and of the institutionalized social engineering that seeks to level a society’s composition by liquidating a particular class, is no better than genocide—but it is not genocide. This is why the excessive use of this word is not benign at all.
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Genocide and its Marginalization If you want to downgrade the Holocaust or shove it into the margins of history, all you need to do is come up with another genocide that took place in that same country, even if it is one that does not quite fit the legal criteria for and definition of genocide. If the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania is not investigating the Holocaust, then a question surfaces: what is it investigating? And what is its definition of genocide? A law currently being drafted for debate by Lithuania’s legislature would make it a crime to deny that genocide against the Lithuanian people was ever conducted by the Soviets. It follows from this that whenever historians, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and law professors discuss the concept of genocide, or discuss historical cases of genocide, they end up running the risk of landing in jail if they express any doubts about the genocide of Lithuanians by the Soviets—as if this could be somehow identical to that conducted by the Nazis against the Jewish people.
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In my view, attempts to criminalize discussion are totally out of place in any democratic state. Such attempts pose a grave threat to the freedoms of thought and of conscience, which could easily end up being stifled in the name of a threat to national dignity or security. Forgive me, but this sounds like a melody from the repertoire of some authoritarian regime. If the reply to this charge is that Holocaust denial is forbidden and punishable as a crime in Germany and Austria, I will readily admit that I am in no way enamored with that practice. The criminalization of Holocaust denial causes a slackening of conscience, safely removing the Holocaust from the sphere of ethics and morality and tucking it into the neatly arranged sphere of law. Furthermore, a halo appears above the heads of Holocaust deniers and revisionists—and it is the dangerous ideas of these people that must be defeated through forthright discussion, not by shutting away the proponents of such ideas in a windowless cell. You can put someone in the dock for denying the past tragedies of a country or nation—you can even put such a person behind bars—but this will not hinder him from demonstrating contempt and insensitivity towards that nation or state in the present. Leftist politicians in countries that prohibit Holocaust denial, who shun lengthier discussions of the topic and who, at the same time, merrily fulminate against Israel, labeling it a fascist state and referring to the suffering of the Palestinian Arabs as genocide, leave me wondering if the criminalization of Holocaust denial in Western Europe is not a phenomenon marching in step with a new form of antisemitism that has begun growing shoots—a politically correct, left-leaning, anti-globalist antisemitism (one strain of which is ideological anti-Americanism) that employs criticism of Israel as a disguise. Antisemitism, it would seem, has been thrust out the front door only to be allowed to climb back in through the window.
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Therefore, when addressing the painful episodes of human history we should ponder the dangers of our contemporary amoral and relativist culture. By quashing open and rational discussion, we will never restore to our concepts and values their original content. And there are no laws that can help us here either.
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Epilogue Sketching and Mapping the Moral and Political Sensibilities of Our Time
Fragmentary writing is, ultimately, democratic writing. Each fragment enjoys an equal distinction. Even the most banal finds its exceptional reader. Each, in turn, has its hour of glory. Of course, each fragment could become a book. But the point is that it will not do so, for the ellipse is superior to the straight line… Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990–1995
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1 We live in a time when man is totally determined by his situation and is constantly taking himself apart before desperately trying to reassemble. Ernest Gellner hit the mark by dubbing this hero of modernity “modular man” in reminiscence of the furniture that was popular in England in the 1960s. The idea was simple: pieces of furniture could be assembled in any manner one wished. If your financial resources permitted, you could buy enough components to make a table, chairs, and cabinets; if resources were modest, a smaller quantity of these same components would suffice for just a bed. There was nothing permanently fixed in place; a room’s furnishings could radically change from day to day. According to Gellner, the fate of modular furniture became that of modern humanity. Both can be fabricated in any manner you like. On the one hand, this is part of the project of modernity and its great promise: a human being no longer belongs to anyone or anything with his whole personality for all his life; therefore, he freely chooses his forms of community, his associations, and his organizations. If
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you rent an apartment, pay your landlord all rent due, and then decide to rent another flat, no one will consider your decision to be a breach of trust or an act of disloyalty, much less a treachery. The same logic applies to participation in clubs, societies, and associations. One freely joined them, and one can just as freely relinquish them without necessarily having to justify oneself, or being stigmatized, or wearing a badge of dishonor. On the other hand, and paradoxically, the disappearance from our lives of a unique way of choosing forms of life, a social environment, and life partners, has caused a veritable revolution in modern man’s existence. If membership in a club or community is not rigidly fixed and is readily changeable, then inevitably things enter into our lives that perhaps we don’t want, but that are part and parcel of modernity’s package. Take it or leave it. Together with a modular, freely created and recreated identity, we also inexorably reach the unavoidable fact of our mutual exchangeability. No institution becomes yours by any fundamental one-time ethical choice. You find yourself belonging to a nation in one of two ways: either by default, without anybody so much as thinking about it, just by conveniently evading any tormenting dilemma requiring an existential answer, or by choosing it as a project of a community of memory and sentiment, by exchanging rings of the imagination, so to speak, and thus by joining your biography to the history of something bigger than you. Gellner openly put the label “nationalist” on nineteenth-century modular man. For a long time, the liberal project was indeed a loyal friend, perhaps even a brother to nationalism; only later did they become foes, when, under the influence of social Darwinism and racism, radical Nationalists began to strip nationalism of its lovely Romantic component and assume the view that what animates a nation is not a disdain for empires nor a resolve to struggle and die for an ideal of freedom that brings humanity closer together, but a biological principle, the call of blood and soil, a fate stronger than even the most beautiful use of the language, cultural fidelity, and devotion to the country’s freedom and well-being can seal. Nationalism dissolved
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empires, brought down monarchies, and gave the coup de grace to Europe’s aristocracy: old Europe ceased to exist as soon as it became clear that the majestic culture of Europe had been built upon the union of imperial power, tradition, and faith, a foundation so evidently meaning the subjugation of other nations and countries. At the same time the epoch of modular man fashioned social, political, and cultural masks that concealed the dark side of modernity. Together with freedom there came social mobility and the opportunity to create bonds not through your class, faith, and laws, i.e., through loyalty in the classical sense of that concept (being on this side of, rather than beyond, juridical and political space), but through language, the same newspapers read by everybody, common trajectories of memory, and a territorial (no longer regional and local, but state-territorial) and historical feeling of attachment. Add to this the new polemicists and journalists of public life, who discover not only forms of the past but their own alleged affinity to the common man. Although it must be said that, often, the passages a sophisticated left-leaning journalist or conservative historian of noble birth produce about the common man are nothing but the manufacture of and search for solidarity within oneself—even as one tries to convince oneself that the searching and the struggle are on behalf of the truth. And what is history to the non-historian? Isn’t it something that resembles what disputes of doctrine become not to the expert of canon law or the theologian, but to the ordinary, statistical person? Briefly put, the genie is out of the bottle. You can become what you will. Your nation is something you choose—just like any other fundamental form of modern identity. This is the source of Zygmunt Bauman’s insight that the weaker our powers of community and our culture of bonding become, the more fiercely we search for our identity. The essence of being human does not lie in self-definition. If our sociability is impaired and we no longer have any powers of communion, then identity becomes a meaningless quest for masks. For, after all, identity acquires meaning only in virtue of a connection with
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somebody else. It isn’t what we think about ourselves. Identity is our tender dream about our similarity to those with whom we wish to identify, and also about our differences from them. It is also what others dream, think, and say of us. Thus, in addition to the modular man, there is another excellent metaphor, or perhaps a whole story, for modernity: Don Juan, who in Zygmunt Bauman’s eyes is modernity’s real hero. “Chi son’io tu non saprai” (“Who I am you won’t know”): these words from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, written by the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (who had Don Juan getting intimate with two thousand women) reveal the crux of the modern manipulator’s asymmetry. You won’t see me because I’ll withdraw and leave you when it’ll no longer be safe for me to stay with you and reveal too much of myself and my hidden suffering or weakness. Who I am, you’ll never know, but I’ll find out everything about you. (Of course, that’s a man’s tragic illusion: he will never know anything about a woman—the only thing he can do is hurt her and make her unhappy.) This is not Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur wandering about town, seeking to experience it, trying eagerly to catch intense, passionate, burning or, alternately, modest, stealthy, and quick glances, as the last stanza from À une passante has it: “Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais, Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!” This is the fear of being recognized because you are planning a treachery and hence cannot reveal your hand. On the other hand, it’s the fear of putting a stop to changing and searching. Don Juan, after all, equates happiness with change—he is searching for a woman of perfect beauty; therefore, any enduring connection with, or longer-lasting look at her will, sooner or later, sow a doubt as to whether there isn’t an even more beautiful woman somewhere around the corner. Thus, happiness consists of the good fortune of being fast, effective, unrecognized, and, most important of all, unburdened by any deeper commitments. According to Bauman, Don Juan is the hero of modernity because for him the meaning of joy and existence is velocity, change, variability, and the chance of always starting anew, as if it were possi-
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ble in human relations to gain something meaningful without continuous conversation, participation of feeling, communication, and the giving of oneself. Don Juan is the champion of fast, intensive, strong experience, pleasure, and seduction (i.e., manipulation and the exploitation of someone else’s trust). Here we come face-to-face with the question: What, in our epoch, happens to, or more accurately, becomes of such fundamental things as loyalty and treachery? Let’s start with the observation that both do exist, yet it is ever more difficult clearly to recognize, name, and define these fundamental forms of human relationship. Why? Because these concepts no longer stir us. They don’t leave us with any deeper experiences. They’re like King Lear who left his riches and powers to his two elder daughters, Goneril and Reagan; disowned the only authentic being in his family, his youngest daughter Cordelia; and finally was left with only his Fool. In an epoch of situational man constantly changing himself and his story (or the legend of his descent), loyalty becomes something uncomfortably moralizing, old-fashioned, rigid, and inoperative, needlessly complicating life. Hence, the inability to discern the depth of loyalty. For faithfulness is not a weakness, an aversion to risk and a fear of making changes, as contemporary people would undoubtedly surmise from listening to business gurus or reading fashionable magazines; rather, it is the strength to brave the dangers of selfrevelation and to survive the final knowledge of oneself. Fidelity is founded on a deep paradox and an anti-Don-Juanite asymmetry: it is the courage to reveal one’s weakness and limitations to a loved one while at the same time not wishing to behold one’s feebleness, which an endless changing would only provoke. In other words, it is an abstinence from intense changes directed only to oneself that would deform one’s character and the bases of love or friendship. It is a resistance to change and to intense new experiences that, in our popular culture. are seen as keys to happiness. The formula for fidelity and love is as follows: you will certainly find out my name and everything about me, but I am not totally cer-
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tain whether I wish to know everything about myself, if learning that knowledge happens without you. If it is with you, then fine, I’m ready. Sandro Botticelli, through his model Simonetta Vespucci, would say this about love: “I love what I eternalize, what humanity won’t be able to turn its gaze from, what it sees with my eyes.” Pedro Almodóvar would speak through his films: “I love those to whom I want to speak, I love what, when I see it, I can’t stop talking about.” I guess David Lynch might say, “I love those with whom I want to joke around, whose smile I long to see, whose laughter I want to hear.” Faithfulness is the desire to talk, to make jokes, to offer revelations of oneself and the surrounding world, and do this together with a chosen other. Not alone, not with just any other, but with a beloved human being. Loyalty is the strategy of discovering this world together. Milan Kundera has written that to be is to exist in the eyes of him or her that you love. Treachery is capitulation, surrender, and failure to open up yourself and your human potential in the company of one human being. It is fragmenting yourself into episodes from which you can no longer pull yourself together integrally. It is an escape from discovering yourself through one human being—your lover or friend. Or treachery becomes your defeat by the fear that soon your weakness, which you tried with all your strength to hide, will be revealed. It is then that brief encounters can help: the more often and the more briefly you’re together with accidental partners (even if you call them friends or lovers), the easier it is to conceal your inability to create long-term relationships, which require hard work with yourself. A human being’s unknowability (more accurately, the refusal to know him only as a physical object or part of nature—without his own free participation); the belief that God manifests himself in man through a human connection, love, friendship, powers of community and sociality—is just that impulse that compels us to stop looking for anything else. The woman loved becomes the most beautiful one, and not the one whose look hasn’t yet caught you, the one whom you
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haven’t yet seen in the crowd, the one fantasized about who hasn’t yet wreaked havoc upon your soul. You refuse to know the other completely, for that would be like believing you can know God— after all, it’s we that are His creatures. You can know only your own text or creation, or the cultural and historical forms created by mankind in general, as Giambattista Vico thought in the eighteenth century. He didn’t believe that the Cartesian project of knowing the world would result in being crowned by success and making humans happy. It’s not mathematics and the quest to explore nature but trying to solve the riddle of human sociality through language, politics, rhetoric, literature, rituals, and the arts that will become the royal road to oneself. We cannot know ourselves as the work of God. We can only interpret our own works. In any case, God is within us as our power of community and sociality: love and faithfulness are His language in us. But you cannot hope to know everything about a human being and think you can know him to the end because in that way you destroy his freedom and uniqueness. Besides, a person has a right to inviolability and to that which he doesn’t wish to reveal to anyone, to secrets that ought never be verbalized or discussed. It was not for nothing that Bruno Bettelheim proposed a new interpretation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, Bluebeard. He surmised that what lay behind the cruel punishment or revenge was a drama of treachery. The forbidden room, in his view, represented something that couldn’t be trespassed without violating the space of another person’s dignity. One ought not to know all about another person because that destroys his or her integrity, freedom, and inviolability, and also deforms our relations with that other human being. Bettelheim surmised that behind Bluebeard’s closed doors there lay a drama of faithlessness and treachery, and that treachery is doing something that tells us other things that are impermissible and that expose in us forces and impulses that a wise and moral person tries to suppress within himself.
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It is illicit and dangerous to know everything about the other, just as it is about oneself. If you want to know about yourself, it is meaningful to do so only with and through another, with him or her observing and participating; in other words, through love. Self-knowledge in isolation from the other produces monsters of reason and imagination. Knowing another while seeking to remain unknown and invisible destroys sympathy and human empathy. If you want to know another person, you can aspire to this only through empathy and love, but not by making of the other person a field of observation, a set of data, or a tool of doctrine. If you love someone, then refuse to learn or know something about that person. This is an impulse negating what is peculiar to Don Juan. A wise person deliberately does not want to find out everything about himself without the person he loves participating in this quest. For without love and loved ones, you will eventually discover within yourself a monster. But Don Juan remains alien to this moral logic. “Chi son’io tu non saprai.” I know, but you don’t. I experience, but you do not. I see you, but you don’t see me. I seek another person’s self-disclosure and self-revelation not giving even the tiniest bit of myself in return and not revealing either my feelings or my pains or the true condition of my soul, and sometimes not even my name. The asymmetry of power putting on the mask of passion; the desire to categorize the other, to put her or him into a pigeonhole while creating an illusion of feeling and a legend of passion; the failure to experience feeling and passion while simulating the having and losing of them: these are forms of modern ambivalence that we can find in Don Juan’s meandering subject matter and its later interpretations, already at some remove from Tirso de Molina’s original version and its medieval ancestors. Stefan Zweig in his perceptive essay on Don Juan and Giacomo Casanova convincingly exposed the irreconcilable differences between these two European antiheroes. Don Juan is a collector of women whom he doesn’t really love: what is important for him is to establish a relationship of conquest, a relationship of having a woman
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just right there, of using her body and physical beauty—in short, a relationship of availability and manipulation,. According to Zweig, Casanova, on the other hand, becomes sincerely enamored of women and makes them feel like queens: he genuinely believes he has fallen in love with each of them and endeavors to give a woman as much joy and pleasure as possible. Casanova is a perfect lover and a virtuoso of short-lived romances. Don Juan also engages in short-lived affairs and then quickly withdraws, but he doesn’t genuinely fall in love and nothing quivers in his soul when he permanently finishes with a woman. Both Casanova and Don Juan are heroes of modernity in that they masterfully construct short-term relationships. It’s ironic that today we have to mobilize business managers, administrators, communication specialists, and producers to create the miracle of a shortlasting fascination for, and adulation by, large groups of people; while Don Juan and Casanova indeed were the classical protagonists of this technique of evanescent relationships, though each in his own unique way, as we’ve seen. You can’t know everything about yourself and your future. Knowing his destiny killed the Scottish warrior and nobleman Macbeth. If it weren’t for the witches’ prophecy, the protagonist of Shakespeare’s tragedy would not have committed crimes for the sake of gaining power and the crown, nor betray his king, Duncan, and his closest friend and brother-in-arms, Banquo. Learning of his destiny or desiring to prove himself and finding out everything (in our popular culture that would be experiencing everything and being seen by everyone while doing so): this just kills. Macbeth ascertains his fate in the absence of his friends, therefore his loneliness leads him tragically to betray them. For friends are an alternative to blind fate. And Macbeth did not have the courage to embrace this alternative. The state security secret services of our day and their obsession to know every detail about a person to use in character assassination are contemporary realizations of a satanic topic in Baroque literature. It is enough to recall Luis Vélez de Guevara’s novel, El Diablo cojuelo
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(The Devil upon Crutches) (the more famous version was later created by the French writer Alain-René Le Sage as Le diable boiteux). In this work, the devil knows everything that happens in people’s households and the details of their most secret and intimate lives: their feelings, betrayals, bestialities, deceits, their poisonings for money and inheritances, their histories of bankruptcy and success, their revelries, lecheries, and love affairs. To the student who frees him from a magus’s spell, the devil displays the entire panorama of Madrid’s nightlife. It is interesting that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, being robbed of one’s intimate life and privacy or their disclosure to others was held to be a satanic act. Nowadays, people happily reveal their lives on various television reality shows or when they become politicians, cultural stars, victims, or the main actors in scandals. If we believe the moral implications of Baroque literature, it is we who have taken over Satan’s “values” and live by them even when we practice modern forms of exorcism and use violent means to convert others to our faith. From the epoch of Niccolò Machiavelli onward, a quiet revolution has taken place in the process of becoming a personality. If the criterion and definition of truth given, among others, by Thomas Aquinas (the correspondence of a thing to the intellect: adaequatio rei et intellectus) was still operative in science and philosophy, it undoubtedly ceased to hold in practical life and politics where it was no longer believed that power derived from God and that politics is intrinsically an abode of virtue and a form of wisdom. The modern revolution engineered by Machiavelli’s political thought is best embodied in his concept of verità effettuale (efficacious truth), whereby truth becomes practice—in fact, practical action. Truth in politics is reached by the person who generates action and achieves results, but not by the person who defines, articulates, and questions (in the light of virtue) or examines (in the context of the classical canon) that action and those results.
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The politician who creates an enduring practice, who transforms an idea into an action, and who institutionalizes that idea is the one who has truth on his side. The means he employs are of secondary importance. Not a goal that justifies means, as Niccolò Machiavelli would have assumed, but, instead, an actor who wedges his skeptics and critics from all periods and from a variety of cultures into the same form of politics and life comes to be considered right, historical, and immortal. Truth is that which stays in memory, while failure is condemned to die and to be stigmatized as shameful fiasco. Survival at the cost of virtue and higher morality sounds forth as an early voice of the modern world; only later will that voice be caricatured by Social Darwinists and racists as the symbolic center of the struggle to survive. The tyrant who has centralized the state and liquidated his opponents becomes father of his nation, but a despot who has tried to do the same but has lost out or has failed to reach all his goals earns universal scorn and is actively forgotten. Forces that have successfully executed a coup d’état or revolution become heroic insurrectionists against reactionary, morally bankrupt institutions, but if they are unsuccessful they become mere conspirators or rioters. Shame and stigma attach not to a refusal of virtue, to an embrace of wickedness, and to an active choice of evil, but to a loss of power, to an inability to hold on to it, to suffering defeat. Power is honored, but utter powerlessness or even just weakness does not deserve a philosophical conception of its own or any kind of sympathy. In this paradigm, sympathy and compassion are due only to those who do not participate in the sphere of power. But if you are in it, it is either success that awaits you, or else death and disappearance. Death can be a simple forgetting: they are the same. That is why in this paradigm of modern instrumentalism, treachery is easily justified: if it ends in the retention or enlargement of power, it is easy to position as a painful sacrifice in the name of the state or as a big and common purpose or ideal. But if the treachery ends in failure and the conspirators suffer a fiasco, then with help
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from symbolic authority and the state machinery it is securely placed in the exalted category of supreme disloyalty to the state: high treason. If the conspiracy went well and the head of state or of the institution is liquidated or at least compromised, then the conspirators become patriots and statesmen; but if the old system prevails and sweeps up all who organized the conspiracy, the latter are not only destroyed but left to history as traitors and persons incapable of loyalty, i.e., as all-around weaklings. Finally, there is also a metaphysics of treachery: it can be explained as disappointment with former friends, partners, companions-in-arms, and ideals, but that doesn’t change the heart of the matter. A treachery interpreting itself this way sounds like a naive hostage to self-suggested disappointment and to the discovery of a new world, but its deep causes lie elsewhere. In our days, treachery has become the chance, fortune, and practice of situational man, a pragmatist and instrumentalist torn from his human essence and isolated from and by other people. Today, it is well known that remorse and guilt have become political commodities in games of public communication, as has carefully dosed-out hatred. Perhaps infidelity has become not so much an article of trade as an element of instrumental reason and situational virtue. In a world of intermittent human ties and inflated words and vows, faithlessness no longer shocks. When fidelity ceases to be at the center of our personality and a force that integrates all of a human being’s identity, then treachery becomes a situational “norm” and “virtue.” Treachery, it seems, has been turned upside-down into a virtue and a norm of contemporary politics, only short-lived and situational like Gellner’s modular man and his constantly changing and transformed “commitments.” For it is only in relations of true fidelity that the concept of treachery and the practice deriving from it get their sense. Where there is no loyalty and fidelity, treachery is just a routine everyday act of breaking one’s word and lying, justified by an alleged or real constant and dramatic change in the situation, “new challenges” and “unforeseen circumstances.”
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Our current world is slowly turning us into little Don Juans. It’s not only sex without emotion, physical intimacy without love, being together without an all-pervading sense that this is fragile and that, therefore, such an encounter ought to be looked at as a miracle that will vanish if we do nothing. It’s also fabricating one’s success and building one’s legend at other people’s expense, using them as situations, fragments, and individual components of one’s own project. So let’s not ask in what shape or form we will sooner or later meet up with the Stone Guest—Donna Anna’s father. He will return like a boomerang, like those things we openly laugh at in this global epoch of youth and the cult of the young body: old age, loneliness, and forgetting. It’s worth remembering that nothing in human history has ever conquered this—except love, friendship, loyalty, and their honest, faithful midwife, the spirit of creativity.
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2 To have a plausible political-historical narrative nowadays means to have viable politics, rather than policies masquerading as politics. Politics becomes impossible without a good story in the form of a convincing plot or an inspiring vision. The same concept applies to good literature. When we fail a method in our scholarship, or when a method fails us, we switch to a story; this sounds much in tune with Umberto Eco. Where scholarly language fails, fiction comes as a way out of the predicament with an interpretation of the world around us. The funny thing is that politics does not work without our stories. This is to say that modern politics needs the humanities much more than politicians suspect. Without travel accounts, humor, laughter, warning and moralizing, political concepts tend to become empty. With sound reason, therefore, Karl Marx once wittily noted that he learned much more about the nineteenth century’s political and economic life from Honoré de Balzac’s novels than from all the economists of that time.
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This is the reason Shakespeare was far and away the most profound political thinker of Renaissance Europe. Niccolò Machiavelli’s works Florentine Stories and Discourses on Livy tell us much about his literary vocation and also about the talent of a storyteller—no less than exuberant comedies penned by Machiavelli, such as The Mandragola. Do we tell each other European stories nowadays to enhance our powers of interpretation and association, and to reveal one another’s experiences, traumas, dreams, visions, and fears? We don’t, alas. Instead, we confine the entire European project merely to its economic and technical aspects. Stories lay the foundation for Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece, Decameron; nothing other than stories about human suffering, whatever their blood and creed, made Voltaire’s philosophical tales, such as Candide, ou l’Optimisme (Candide, or Optimism), truly European stories. This reference, as well as the human reality behind it, crossed my mind almost immediately when I started teaching a course on politics and literature at the University of Bologna. The reason was quite simple: I had the entire fabric of Europe in my class, as the course was given within the East European studies program with the participation of students from Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, including such non EU countries as Albania, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine. We easily surpassed and crossed the boundaries of an academic performance and discussion, for it was human exchanges on the newly discovered and shocking moral blindness of classmates or neighbors, human dramas of high treason, moral treachery, disappointment, cowardice, cruelty, and loss of sensitivity. How can we miss the point talking “past and present” to each other that it was Dante who coined the phrase “the cult of cruelty,” and the English writer Rex Warner who forged the phrase “the cult of power”—that is, political idioms that we use constantly while unaware that they are not straight out of today’s vocabulary.
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Suffice it to recall that the real founding fathers of Europe— Renaissance humanists Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam— made friends in Paris conjointly translating Lucian from Greek into Latin, and also connecting their friend, German painter Hans Holbein the Younger, to the royal court of England’s King Henry VIII. Whereas the great Flemish painter Quentin Matsys saved for history the face of their friend in Antwerp, Peter Giles, Hans Holbein the Younger immortalized the faces of his benefactor Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam. Yet the bad news is that politics colonized culture nowadays, and this went unnoticed, albeit under our noses. This is not to say that culture is politically exploited and vulgarized for long- or short-term political ends and objectives. In a democratic political setting, culture is separated from politics. An instrumentalist approach to culture immediately betrays either technocratic disdain for the world of arts and letters or poorly concealed hostility to human worth and liberty. However, in our brave new world, the problem lies elsewhere. We don’t need the humanities anymore as a primary driving force behind our political and moral sensibilities. Instead, politicians try to keep the academia as unsafe, uncertain and insecure as possible—by reshaping, or “reforming” it, into a branch of the corporate world. By and large, this idea of the necessity to politically rationalize, change, reshape, refurbish, and renovate the academia is a simulacrum, in Jean Baudrillard’s terms. It conceals the fact that the political class and our bad policies are exactly what desperately need the change and reform. Yet the power speaks: if I don’t change you, you will come to change me. We stopped telling moving stories to each other. Instead, we nourish ourselves and the world around us with conspiracy theories (which are always about the big and powerful, instead of the small and humane), sensationalist stuff, and crime or horror stories. In doing so, we are at the peril of stepping away from the innermost European sensibilities, one of which is and has always been the legitimacy
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of opposing narratives, attitudes, and memories. Human beings are incomplete without one another. At this point, it is worth stressing that William Shakespeare, more than any other genius of early modernity, is likely to have become a modern sensibility. Like Niccolò Machiavelli or his own contemporary and significant other, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare seems to have developed into a modern moral and political sensibility, a criterion of modernity, and even a symbolic design within which we perceive and interpret ourselves and the world around us. We cannot bypass Shakespeare when we encounter a problem of evil, both in its classical forms and in its modern incarnations. The psychogenesis and sociogenesis of modern feelings and sentiments, namely, love and friendship, as opposed to traditional forms of our grasp of the world and of human powers of association, is also inseparable from Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays. It is with sound reason, then, that such modern sensitivities as loyalty, intimacy, and privacy are tested and closely observed in the political world of Elizabethan dramatists. Shakespeare appears not only as a miracle of his time; he comes to us as a mystery and as a pivotal test of our sensitivities. Whether he existed and whether he wrote his plays and sonnets is a secondary issue in the face of the miracle of his profoundly modern perception of human reality whose embodiment and symbol he has become. The quarrel over the definite and final stroke of brushwork as to whether it was executed by Rubens or his entourage, Rembrandt or Ferdinand Bol or Aert de Gelder, is as senseless and meaningless as the ink spilled in the debates on whether William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote his immortal plays. The miracle of Shakespeare has little if any to do with who exactly Shakespeare was. The way Shakespeare was perceived by Goethe and Schiller tells us something of critical importance about the clash of modern sensibilities in the epoch of Friedrich the Great and the Sturm und Drang movement when the principles of Bildung and Kultur prevail over that of Zivilisation in an epoch where social and moral sensibilities are
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shaped by the conflict of semi-feudal and modern approaches to the world. The way in which Leo Tolstoy interpreted Shakespeare tells us something of critical importance about the encounter of opposing modes of critical discourse or Eastern and Western European hermeneutics, especially in interpreting modernity. At the same time, the way in which Sigmund Freud perceived Shakespeare tells us something disturbing and crucial about a problem the writer poses for a modern world which, no matter how egalitarian, is tinged with elitist interpretations. Far exceeding the boundaries of Renaissance perceptions of reality, Shakespeare offers in Hamlet not only la mente audace ideal as key to the brave mind of a modern hero who thinks and acts simultaneously or who comes to bridge thought and action; Shakespeare also appears with a strikingly modern idea that the will to misunderstand the world around us lives side by side with the will to understand it; that religious and erotic feelings can roll into one; that there is something deeply erotic about power and powerful about intimacy; that we tend to speak unspeakable and to think unthinkable; that we choose to be deceived or to deceive ourselves, as the truth is unbearable for us. In this, Shakespeare precedes and anticipates Freud. As in Hamlet, the emergence of the individual can signify the marriage of thought and action. This ideal of the brave mind put forward by Renaissance humanists is obvious in Hamlet’s ability to outsmart and get rid of his treacherous friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Yet the arrival of the modern individual may signify the reverse tendency, the divorce of thought and action, which is the case with Hamlet and which becomes the reason of his defeat—albeit political rather than moral—and death. In many cases, Shakespeare sounds uniquely modern. He is a contemporary in terms of his powers of anticipation of human dramas, political and existential. Suffice it to recall, for instance, that Othello signified, among other things, a new kind of fear over success, in Italy and England, of some strikingly different individuals from
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remote countries and societies to realize how similar the worries and anxieties of Shakespeare’s epoch could have been to those of our time. The fear of the Other who is capable of becoming one of us appears to have been with modernity from its inception, which powerfully reminds us of identity dramas in nineteenth-century Europe. It paves the way for the bright individuals who treat their biographies like works of art inventing their personae and miraculously adapting to societies that had long been hostile to them. In Othello and Shylock, there is something that strikingly anticipates the emergence of such heroes of modernity as Benjamin Disraeli and Karl Marx—to remember Isaiah Berlin’s masterpiece essay on two modes of Jewish identity as best embodied by Disraeli and Marx. Shakespeare understood better than any other poet and playwright that the choice between a friend and an institution/established practice can be as dramatic as that between a lover and a clan. Albert Camus once noted that he respects the law, yet would be willing to protect his mother from it. Didn’t Shakespeare come up with that same painful dilemma portraying the Prince of Verona, Escalus, as bound to choose between his kinsman Mercutio’s friend Romeo, who avenges the death of his cousin, and the law and order of Verona? Do we not face this dilemma each time we must choose between an incompetent state with its flawed judicial system, and a courageous and virtuous individual who breaks the law? 3 At a conference organized by the Telos Institute in L’Aquila on 7–9 September 2012, to discuss the European crisis and theories of Europe’s decline (the location being sadly symbolic when you recall that three years ago an earthquake nearly destroyed this lovely mountain town of the Abruzzo region), the Italian philosopher (and my colleague in the European Parliament’s ALDE group) Gianni Vattimo claimed straightforwardly that politics in Italy had come to an end.
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As he put it, the two major political forces agreed on what was the most important thing to do right now, namely, to make sure that the policies of the technocratic and non-political Mario Monti administration—policies designed to save the economy of Italy—be kept going. Regardless of who wins elections in the future or what was happening in the country, all conscientious forces had better get on the bandwagon and pull in the same direction. I can only add that Gianni Vattimo hit the nail on the head: we’re looking in vain for any confrontation between distinctive visions for Italy or Europe as a whole, or for any contest between ideas. That’s done and gone. All that’s left is managing the economy, which, as is becoming ever more obvious, is just a palliative, because no single state is able to control the economy anymore, it having long ago turned global. The same goes for the universities, scholarship, national security, and migration, not to mention the logic of the globe’s intellectual life, which no single nation is able to fathom and encompass. “Catherine Ashton is a likable woman, but who’s heard of her or knew anything about her before she became the EC’s Vice-President and the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the de facto EU Foreign Minister?”—Vattimo asked and continued: “Who elected her? Whom did she have to persuade? What is her vision for the world? And, while we’re at it, who knew anything about Herman van Rompuy? Where’s the political process here? Where did it vanish to?” Vattimo talked at length about the fact that the concept of social and political class had disappeared and that politics had gone from people’s lives. This set me to thinking about even more questions, which I later raised. For example, what will political parties be like in the future? That is totally unclear to me as of now. It seems pretty certain that in ten or fifteen years they will be quite different from what they are at present. After the Arab Spring and the indignados protests, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the power to change, to reform, and to renew the world no longer lies in organized structures devoted to
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preserving the status quo nor in political parties desperately trying to keep up with the latest information technologies; rather, it lies in spontaneously expressed political wills and their instant consolidation in and through social networks. If political parties do not merge with social, intellectual, and cultural movements, they will wither and die. It is evident even now that politics has become an appendix of technology or, at best, its housekeeper. Technology is developing at a much more rapid pace than are political programs, moral attitudes, communication strategies, and opportunities for strengthening human ties and legitimizing one’s own activities. Is there anyone who still doubts that politics has some time ago moved into the virtual sphere and has already become a sophisticated communication game which national elites are controlling ever less and just ever more helplessly observing from the sidelines? This technological and informational shock gives rise to two tendencies that are just killing politics. One is the ever increasing centralization of the state; the unlimited spying on persons whom the controlling structure finds suspicious or incomprehensible; and the proliferation of police state elements engaging in constant surveillance and total control over an individual’s privacy. The other is the transformation of politics into agonistic communication games, or an overt circus with an ever greater number of show business personalities participating in it. Lithuania is a nearly perfect example of the post-mortem incarnation of politics, in which a bureaucratic, centralized, and unitary police state fuses with political grotesquerie and outright buffoonery. The politicians/entrepreneurs involved in this monkeyshine, though long on bad terms with the law, enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution and arouse no interest from the secret services (their biographies are so bad that, easily susceptible to blackmail, they can be forced to resign or flee the country in a jiffy). On the other hand, prosecutors and secret services are much more interested in public critical comments and anti-structural movements that have little real power but are more difficult to control.
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The political battles of future decades will be marked by confrontations between bureaucrats and actors from the protesting masses, with the possibility of occasional role reversals not excluded. There’s nothing really everlasting in this world of permanent change: a political actor or clown quietly dreams of becoming a bureaucrat (for that is the only way he can be absolutely sure of at least a minimum of emotional and financial security), while a bureaucrat, if he suddenly needs legitimization, i.e., elections or their imitation, eagerly and quickly starts to learn the art of entertaining a real or virtual crowd. Thus bureaucrats and clowns become interchangeable. Political parties will, in all likelihood, ultimately be pushed out by social and cultural movements. It’s possible that the latter will come to be dominated by socially engaged professionals: economics, science, industrial/military espionage, high technology, military power and technique won’t disappear anywhere, and managing these things is something that mere bullshit artists from the street or bureaucrats will never be able to do by themselves. New power alliances will form from groups of elite representatives of the media, business, science, art, and entertainment worlds. These people will need dramatic narratives—compelling stories or alleged conflicts—capable of inflaming voters for at least some time. Nowadays conflicts and scandals can be easily manufactured. The socalled spin doctors are excellent at this. It’s harder to hold people‘s attention for very long and to gain at least a minimum of lasting respect and loyalty from them. These things often evaporate as soon as we see the beginnings of them. In a world that has lost clear criteria, respect depends on the circumstances and is very short-lived, as are loyalty and relations between humans in general. It used to be that politics began with the language of priorities, an understanding that some things are so important that without dialogue and debate they couldn’t lead to action and be made a fact of societal life. This language of priorities meant a vision for the world, a sense of where one finds oneself in the current situation of people’s lives and what directions for the future one proposes and articulates.
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After that came the institutionalization of these projects, making them a part of state governance and public administration. Politics furnished the directions, points of orientation, the language, ideas, and tools to turn projects into reality. Action was never possible without power that was legitimate, morally responsible, and democratically accountable, a power with the ways and means of realizing visions. Today, according to Zygmunt Bauman, politics has been divorced from power. Nowadays power runs on its own, and politics tries to survive: it no longer explains anything and offers no visions or programs for renewing the world. It only needs ever new waves of fear and moral panic so that certain groups in society could be mobilized and a gigantic, ever growing state machine devoted to surveillance and colonizing and taking over the last vestiges of individual privacy could be justified, a machine that though incompetent, primitive, and morally provincial is brutal and technically efficient. Thus we are living at the beginning of the age of politics’ demise. In Lithuania this is more than obvious. It’s a real era of postpolitcs. No one believes in anything. But they vote. They vote because they don’t want to see a repeat of what has just been. Of course they don’t believe in those they vote for—everything depends on having been well consumed. If you haven’t offended anyone, if you’ve managed to be liked at some point, and—best of all—if you’ve provoked laughter on a TV show, your chances to be elected have increased threefold. Lithuania has never previously seen the sort of antipolitics and postpolitics we are witnessing now. There is no longer anything in Lithuania that could be described as politics. All that’s left are cynical communication games eventually won by those who are holding open microphones the longest. Civilized politics has been discredited in Lithuania so much that it will take years and perhaps decades before it can be returned to that level of social agreement and communication that existed between the return of independence in 1990 to about 2003.
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Everything can be forecast—but this is no longer just Lithuania’s drama but part and parcel of globalization. Since it is no longer possible to win on the economic rhetoric of the Right, everyone—from the far right to the ultraleft—enters elections armed with the rhetoric of the “miracles” of social solidarity, universal welfare, secure childhood, and the promise of access to scholarship, higher education, and culture. And then everyone quickly returns, or turns, to the right, since global capitalism cannot in any way be managed from the Left alone. A left-wing verbal abracadabra and a totally insensitive rightwing political practice, both everywhere leaving their mark of fatalism and of the irreplaceability of capitalism—these are the true realities of postpolitics. The real end of Right and Left as they are totally converging is our new reality. Purely right-wing rhetoric has been discredited as much as purely left-wing practice has. That’s why they need each other as never before, together with a simulation of their incompatibility. For that simulation masks a simple fact of the logic of government and power: we accept your left-wing rhetoric and moral lexicon (human rights; multiculturalism; gender equality) while our practice will adjust to whatever the global economic system needs. Period. C’est tout. Will postpolitics exhaust itself? Is it possible to return to a politics of drawing distinctions, of engaging in dialogue, of seeing and hearing the other? Perhaps. But only if what might be called minor politics revives—a politics taking shape not in centers of power and in major capitals but first of all in the surrounding communities. If politicians participated in smaller neighborhoods gatherings, in student discussions, without the presence of journalists and the media, and not only before elections when they’re just shooting the bull instead of seeking to grasp what local people are truly concerned with, then perhaps a ray of hope will emerge. Self-governance, local democracy, a refusal by free intellectuals to serve centers of power or powerful politicians and instead joining up with informal endeavors rather than dreaming of being accepted by
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an incompetent official elite and becoming part of lifeless central procedures after undergoing an initiation into power—this is the only thing that in the future might still keep the possibility of an authentic politics alive.
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4 A deliberately unfinished work of art also has its metaphysics and aesthetics, and so does an unfinished and open-ended thought. Some humanists and philosophers greatly contributed to the creating of a new kind of scholarship, the scholarship of twenty-first century—not theoretically or ideologically “rationalizing” and dividing the human world and social reality, not dogmatically rigid and unreflective, not soulless and totally insensitive about its social effects or political and moral implications, but reflective, ironic, critical, attentive to every single detail of human existence, and, most importantly, perfectly aware of the vulnerability and fragility of the human world. At this point, I would especially emphasize Zygmunt Bauman. Theoretical sensitivity and empathy may be likened to a way of speaking, an attitude that eliminates the prior asymmetry between the looker and the looked-at. It is like Jan Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring overwhelming us by unexpectedly giving back to us our own gaze and leaving us voicelessly wondering: who is looking at whom? We at her, hanging along with many other immortal masterpieces of Dutch art at the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague, or she at us? The gazed-at gazes at the gazer, thereby returning to the world all the forgotten dialogue. It is a dignified and silent gaze between equals— instead of that boundless consuming, using, knowing, and aggressively indoctrinating that we get back in the guise of an alleged dialogue. Zygmunt Bauman views the viewer, conceives the conceiver, and talks to the talker, for the audience of his readers and his partners in dialogue are not just theoreticians worthy of him and not some fantasized personalities. He presents his ideas to the little man or
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woman—the persons whom globalization and the second (liquid) modernity has displaced. He continues the labors that Stephen Greenblatt, Carlo Ginzburg, and Catherine Gallagher, the representatives of the new historicism and contrahistory (microhistory, small history) have begun, consciously rejecting history as a grand narrative. Instead of un grand récit they construct the historical anecdote, a detailed and meaningful narrative about actual people: une petite histoire. The historical time of Bauman’s theorizing is not linear but pointillist. The form of his history is constituted not by the greats of the world but by its little persons. It is the history not of the great thinkers but of the banishment of the small man to the margins. Bauman’s sympathy is manifestly on the side of the losers of modernity, not its heroes. We will never know their names. They are like the nonprofessional actors with their amazingly individual and expressive faces (untouched by commercials, self-promotion, mass consumption, self-adulation, and conversion to a commodity) in the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, such as The Gospel according to St. Matthew and Decameron. These are the biographies not of the pioneers of modern economic structure (capitalism, if you will), les entrepreneurs, the geniuses of early modern art, but of such people as the heretic Menocchio, burned at the stake and featured in Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (first published in Italian as Il formaggio e i vermi, 1976). These minor and tacit actors of history’s drama give substance and shape to our own forms of anxiety, ambiguity, uncertainty, and insecurity. We live in a world in which contrasts of wealth and power are constantly increasing while differences in environmental security are steadily diminishing: today western and eastern Europe, The United States, and Africa are equally (un)safe. Millionaires experience personal dramas and shocks that through social networks become instantly known to people having absolutely nothing in common with them other than the capacity at any moment to experience such up-
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heavals themselves. Politicians thanks to mass democracy and mass education possess unlimited opportunities to manipulate public opinion, although they themselves directly depend on attitudinal changes in mass society and can be destroyed by them. Everything is permeated by ambivalence; there is no longer any unambiguous social situation, just as there are no more uncompromised actors on the stage of world history. To attempt to interpret such a world in terms of the categories of good and evil; the social and political optics of black and white; and almost Manichean separations, is today both impossible and grotesque. It is a world that has long ceased controlling itself (although it obsessively seeks to control individual people), a world that cannot respond to its own dilemmas and lessen the tensions it has sowed. Happy are those epochs that had clear dramas, dreams, and doers of good or evil. Today technology has surpassed politics, the latter having in part become a supplement to technology and threatening to bring the creation of a technological society to completion. This society with its determinist consciousness regards a refusal to participate in the technological innovations and social networks (so indispensable for the exercise of social and political control) as sufficient grounds to remove all those who lag behind in the globalization process (or have disavowed its sanctified idea) to the margins of society. An epoch of fragmentation calls for fragmentary writing. A short essay for a friend, a sketch, or a letter from nowhere, as if it was meant to be found in the bottle in the middle of the sea or on the coast of a remote country, can shed new light on the way in which we perceive ourselves and the world around us. According to Isaac Bashevis Singer, events are often wiser than people. This is true, unless people are able to recognize their significance. For how many opportunities—how many wistful looks, or people eager for our response—do we fail to recognize? Many! They pass by and disappear just as we are dreaming about meeting them. This appears as a pivotal message from the troubled modern world.
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LIBRI NIGRI THINKING ACROSS BOUNDARIES
Edited by Hans Rainer Sepp
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The libri nigri meet preferentially at sites where the boundaries of realities, standpoints, disciplines as well as cultural traditions and traditions of knowledge come into view and where their assumptions are negotiable. To trace their intentions of reasoning is more important than the search for the reasons themselves; the daring experiment means more than the effectual model; disturbing action more than the drive towards safeguarding. Since the sites for decisive action are found mostly on the fringes and not at the centers and since boundaries not only function as limits but also simultaneously cover up the potential for difference and otherness, this series will also not refrain from entering the terrain of the Utopian.
1
Hans Rainer Sepp Die Grenze denken Prolegomena zu einer Philosophie des Transkulturellen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-792-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-793-0
2
Yoshiko Oshima Zen – anders denken? Zugleich ein Versuch über Zen und Heidegger 2. Aufl.
3
Max Lorenzen Philosophie der Nachmoderne Die Transformation der Kultur – Virtualität und Globalisierung Herausgegeben von Cathrin Nielsen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-668-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-668-1
4
Hisaki Hashi und Friedrich G. Wallner (Hg.) Globalisierung des Denkens in Ost und West Resultate des Österreichisch-Japanischen Dialogs broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-555-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-560-8
5
Aleš Novák Heideggers Bestimmung des Bösen broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-650-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-651-3
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012, Traugott Bautz Verlag, 2013. ProQuest
Copyright © 2013. Traugott Bautz Verlag. All rights reserved.
6
André Julien S. E. Faict Philosophische Voraussetzungen des interkulturellen Dialogs Die vergleichende Philosophie von Hajime Nakamura im Dialog mit Anthropologie und Hermeneutik broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-683-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-684-1
7
Peter Schwankl Diplomatisches Verhalten Ein phänomenologischer Versuch über das Wesen des Diplomatischen Herausgegeben von Georg Lechner broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-517-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-516-5
8
Paul Janssen Vom zersprungenen Weltwerden broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-685-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-686-5
9
Constantin Noica De dignitate Europae Übersetzt von Georg Scherg Herausgegeben von Mădălina Diaconu broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-708-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-709-1
10
Constantin Noica Briefe zur Logik des Hermes Übersetzt von Christian Ferencz-Flatz und Stefan Moosdorf broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-434-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-435-9
11
Ananta Charan Sukla (ed.) Art and Expression Contemporary Perspectives in the Occidental and Oriental Traditions broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-710-7 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-711-4
12
Dean Komel Den Nihilismus verwinden Ein slowenisches Postscript zum 20. Jahrhundert broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-712-1 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-713-8
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012, Traugott Bautz Verlag, 2013. ProQuest
Copyright © 2013. Traugott Bautz Verlag. All rights reserved.
13
Tatiana Shchyttsova (Hg.) In statu nascendi Geborensein und intergenerative Dimension des menschlichen Miteinanderseins broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-716-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-688-9
14
Chung-Chi Yu and Kwok-ying Lau (eds.) Phenomenology and Human Experience broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-722-0 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-723-7
15
Daniel Aebli Wie modern ist die Antike? Studien und Skizzen zur Altertumswissenschaft broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-729-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-730-5
16
Hiroo Nakamura Für den Frieden broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-731-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-732-9
17
Günter Fröhlich Anthropologische Wege Ulmer Stadthausvorträge broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-733-6 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-734-3
18
Hans-Dieter Bahr Die Anwesenheit des Gastes Entwurf einer Xenosophie broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-761-9 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-762-6
19
Massimo Mezzanzanica Von Dilthey zu Levinas Wege im Zwischenbereich von Lebensphilosophie, Neukantianismus und Phänomenologie broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-750-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-751-0
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012, Traugott Bautz Verlag, 2013. ProQuest
Copyright © 2013. Traugott Bautz Verlag. All rights reserved.
20
Klaus Kanzog Mit Auge und Ohr Studien zur komplementären Wahrnehmung broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-784-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-785-5
21
Silvia Stoller und Gerhard Unterthurner (Hg.) Entgrenzungen der Phänomenologie und Hermeneutik Festschrift für Helmuth Vetter zum 70. Geburtstag broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-771-8 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-772-5
22
Claus C. Schnorrenberger Chinesische Medizin – Placebo, Wissenschaft oder Wirklichkeit? broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-776-3 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-777-0
23
Detlef Thiel Maßnahmen des Erscheinens Friedlaender/Mynona im Gespräch mit Schelling, Husserl, Benjamin und Derrida broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-782-4 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-783-1
24
Leonidas Donskis Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009–2012 broschiert ISBN 978-3-88309-799-2 gebunden ISBN 978-3-88309-800-5
Fifty Letters from the Troubled Modern World : A Philosophical-Political Diary 2009-2012, Traugott Bautz Verlag, 2013. ProQuest