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East Central
Europe Program
New School University
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| Current
Issue: Vol. 14/1 (46) |
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Kidnapped
Europe: The Odds of Rescue
Elzbieta Matynia
When
I came from Poland to the United States in the early 80s I thought I
was coming from Europe to America. I was wrong. I was coming from a
part of Europe that was -- for Americans -- hardly visible. It wasn’t
on their mental map. Their Europe’s fantastical geography only
had a West, even though, as in the conspicuous case of Italy, it had
a fairly visible south. Everything east of Germany, Austria, and Italy
-- including the populations, cities, villages, and languages, even
the landscape -- was gone.
I felt that my situation was a perfect substantiation of the early modernist,
grotesque play by Alfred Jarry, “Ubu Roi,” where action was
placed, as Jarry put it, “in Poland, meaning nowhere.” Of
course, in 1981, nice Americans, when they heard “Poland,”
would volunteer the names of Walesa and the Pope, just as they had no
doubt volunteered the Czech names they’d gotten to know during
the Prague Spring, or Hungarian names after the Uprising in 1956. But
notwithstanding these exceptions, the sizable lands east of West Berlin
had disappeared, had become a black hole, as a result of the consensus
reached at the conferences in Yalta and Potsdam. And, just as with a
poor neighbor in a hospice, one did not go there, one did not care,
one did not have to know.
That pariah Europe began regaining some visibility among those more
curious and aware when it became known that it was imaginatively reinventing
civil society in the late 70s in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
This gradual reappearance was further supported by the region’s
assorted writers in exile whose various efforts to help their countries
included bringing public writings to the West that had been circulated
as samizdat and then smuggled abroad. These efforts, as Milosz put it
in his Native Realm, brought their corner of the world, his “familial
Europe,” just a little closer to the rest of the world.
The timing of these efforts happened to be just right. The workers in
the invisible shipyards, mines, and steel mills had organized themselves
against the workers’ party-state and for a while got the attention
of the West. Intellectuals decided that, despite the odds, they would
behave and act as though they lived in normal countries: they organized
charters and committees; and they managed to write and publish outside
of state control. In the West, the writings on this absent Europe by
Czeslaw Milosz, Milos Kundera, Jeno Szucs, Joseph Skvorecki, Danilo
Kis, or Gyorgy Konrad found a new and relatively friendly climate, prepared
in part by Philip Roth’s very popular Penguin series, aptly entitled
Writers from the Other Europe. Reports of the democratic discourse and
civic practices taking place in the region fell on fertile ground in
the West, because, as many observed, they coincided with a search in
the West for alternatives to Marxism, which had been losing its explanatory
power.
Perhaps the single most consequential piece, the one that launched the
most compelling debate on the absent Europe, was the essay by Milan
Kundera published in 1984 in the New York Review of Books entitled “The
Tragedy of Central Europe.” This essay was widely received as a
powerful indictment of Western Europe. I find the title of its French
original, published six months earlier in Le Debat, somewhat more to
the point: “Un Occident kidnappe ou la tragedie de l’Europe
centrale” brought to mind, as it would for any European brought
up on Greek mythology, the story of the Phoenician princess Europa,
kidnapped by Zeus disguised as a white bull. And in Kundera’s passionate
argument, Kundera’s absent Europe is “a displaced, kidnapped
and brainwashed West that insists on defending its identity.” More
specifically, it is a part of the Greco-Latin West, which, though geographically
in the center, like Germany and Austria, culturally belongs to the West,
and which -- kidnapped by the Soviet Union -- ended up politically in
the East.
Geographic Europe, Kundera argued, had long been divided into two culturally
distinctive parts, one rooted in Rome and one in Byzantium; and when
a slice of its western part was kidnapped in 1945, its identity was
continuously abused and manipulated -- hence the recurrent revolts,
insurrections, rebellions. He suggested that his Europe, this “uncertain
zone of small nations between Russia and Germany,” a site of wars,
conquests and occupations, distrusted politics and history and ought
to be looked upon not as a geopolitical entity but as a state of mind,
a worldview, and a mindset. Not having a geography, this thriving Kingdom
of the Spirit was a resilient realm of autonomous culture where music,
poetry, the arts, and philosophy ruled. Its immaterial existence generated
a culture of fate, focused on the task of preserving its western-ness.
At the same time, Kundera observed, the “beloved western Europe”
had lost touch with the values it once stood for, lost touch with itself,
and therefore did not even notice that it had lost a part of its very
own soul, as well. In such a situation, felt Kundera, it was Central
Europe that was the real crucible of Europe.
Kundera’s essay was and is an excellent piece of rhetoric, but
for me it is problematic, as it lionizes the occidental victim and forcefully
(but needlessly) insists on a sharp difference between the kidnapped
West and the East, thus constructing a culturally bipolar Europe, with
a strict West-East civilizational divide. He counterposes an alleged
rational-ironic distance that he sees as a key feature of the culture
of Central Europe, to what he sees as the overly emotional, premodern
culture of the East, specifically Russia. He resolutely but inaccurately
defines the culture of Central Europe through its aversion to romanticism,
which, according to Kundera, is a truly eastern, more specifically Russian,
characteristic. However, according to most accounts, romanticism was
a dominant cultural paradigm that shaped both the culture and politics
of survival in the region. And when Kundera passionately argues about
the refined spiritual kingdom and the culture of fate of the kidnapped
Europe, he himself is wrapped up in its own inherent antinomies and
perplexities. And he reveals the special sensitivity, bordering on obsession,
of the Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians regarding their particular right
to European self-identity.
Kundera’s essay was published roughly 20 years ago, and I am sure
that in his wildest dreams he would not have envisioned the possibility
of his displaced Europe finding its way back home -- even less so the
possibility of an actual formal unification with the then budding European
Union. His essay seems even to defy such a possibility. The idea that
Kundera’s Europe of the Spirit could actually be united with the
Europe of Steel and Coal, as the European Union was known in its early
phases of unification, would have sounded like a mind-boggling, science-fiction
scheme that could only have been conceived by a contemporary writer
of the Alfred Jarry variety.
But unthinkable designs became thinkable. And when, in 1992, the Wall
Street Journal wrote that the State Department had instructed its embassies
worldwide that the term “Eastern Europe” was banished from
the lexicon of the agency, and that the region would now be referred
to as Central Europe, Kundera should have been happy. Thousands of young
Americans discovered Prague, Budapest, Krakow, and East Berlin; democratic
institutions were built and launched along with stock exchanges; and
indeed Kundera’s Europe has lost its invisibility. The catch phrase,
the “Return to Europe,” was one of the key themes of both
the anti-Communist revolutions and the post-Communist changes throughout
the entire region. And after the first decade of transformation, the
phrase “transition to Democracy” was replaced by a new one:
“European unification.”
I am not asking whether Kundera’s vision was correct or not, as
I understand it to have been a strategic and expedient one, and I grant
that this vision was shared by intellectual elites in the region. But
it is interesting to look at what happened to this self-conception of
the kidnapped Europe as a result of these unpredictable events -- the
peaceful revolutions of 1989 and the ensuing democratization in the
region. What has happened to this “crucible of European culture”
since the process of accession to the European Union was launched, now
that its legal inclusion in the community of European nations has become
not just a matter of a few years, but just months?
First, the alleged inherent cultural unity of this part of Europe did
not prevent an almost immediate weakening of the earlier cross-border,
regional solidarity between intellectuals, members of the human- rights-based
democratic opposition who had initially assumed positions of responsibility
in their respective countries and governments. Kundera’s countries
of Central Europe met in Vysehrad in the early 90s, and established
a mechanism for regional collaboration known as the Vysehrad Group,
or the Vysehrad Triangle. But as soon as the argument arose that such
an arrangement perpetuated the old division of Europe and might be taken
as an alternative to integration with the European Union, it lost ground
and became a largely meaningless enterprise. With the Czech’s reminder
that Prague is, after all, west of Vienna, a palpable competition between
the countries emerged, as far as their western-ness was concerned. Fairly
soon, if the density of airplane connections is any indication, the
links of Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw appeared to be stronger with Paris,
Berlin, London, or Brussels than between the Vishehrad countries themselves.
The East-East solidarity was gone, replaced by East-West strategies,
and Kundera’s culture of fate became fragmented at best.
Second, throughout the 90s, a major re-crafting of socio-political landscapes
took place in Central Europe: numerous political parties emerged, elections
were conducted, and re-privatization processes were launched. One element
of this landscape deserves particular attention: a political orientation
that focuses on articulating the tension between what I call the West
and the past or, to play with the signposts, between the West and the
right. The strengthening of this right-wing discourse and orientation
often coincided with a considerable weakening of the very orientation
that had facilitated the peaceful revolutions and negotiated transitions.
The region’s dominant dissident orientation -- a civil-society-based
agenda of human rights, imaginative democratic practice, and sense of
civic responsibility -- already began to lose its leading position in
the 1990s, and in some cases (e.g. Union of Freedom in Poland) has been
completely marginalized. In many cases it has quickly become dominated
either by the so-called post-communist left, or eventually, by the radical
right. The post-communist left usually represents a significantly reformed
party, in the sense that, as in the case of Poland or Hungary, it is
quite removed from subscribing to any real socialist principles, and
is strongly supportive of accession to Europe. The radical right emerged
from the mixed populist and nationalistic constituencies, which have
simmered under the surface, often incited in the past by the communist
regimes themselves, or as in the case of Poland, by peculiar religious
groupings, and is naturally suspicious of the West and against the accession
to Europe.
There is an economic argument explaining the emergence of populism in
Central Europe, which points out that populism appeals to those who
lost the most in the transition: the pensioners; the unemployed, former
workers of the obsolete industrial plants who are too old to be retrained;
and parts of the rural population. But I would like to offer a cultural
argument that I believe may help to identify some of the tasks ahead
for the two Europes that could help to make the union of Europe viable.
Populism appeals to a nostalgia for the past, but not just the past
in general. There is a part of the cultural tradition constructed in
the late 19th century that makes Poles, Hungarians, and even Czechs
(who were once valiant organizers of the Pan-Slavic movement against
the continental empires) particularly susceptible to populism. Populism
thrives on certain simplified versions of a selectively digested romantic
tradition, shaped by writers who saw themselves as serving the nations
that had disappeared from the map of the continent. From the early 19th
century on, this hegemonic and highly functional cultural paradigm was
employed in the task of regaining political nationhoods, and for its
sake appeared mostly unyielding, as those involved agreed on the historical,
cultural, theological, and often messianic legitimacy of the task. Kundera,
the writer of ironic distance, does not subscribe to this tradition,
which is, perhaps, at its weakest in Bohemia -- but even he is not completely
free of it.
I believe that to recognize the lingering power of this paradigm is
of utmost importance for the two Europes, as the labor of unification
will not suddenly end on May 1, 2004, when the eight countries of the
region formally join the Union. This 19th-century, all-embracing paradigm
was based on a unified romantic-symbolic style of culture and served
a compensatory-therapeutic function for the nations without a state.
It designated a very clear role for art and the artist throughout most
of the last two centuries: to perform service on behalf of the captive
nation taken over by the imperial continental powers.
As its sole role was to mobilize cultural differences in the salvational
service of national politics, I’d like to call it, after Appadurai,
“culturalism,” or perhaps more specifically “salvational
culturalism.” Though salvational culturalism was most pronounced
in Poland, one could detect its persistence throughout the region. And
Kundera, despite being expressly anti-romantic, continues this tradition.
With his stress on cultural difference, his construction of bipolar
distinctions, and his intentional divisiveness, he was a perfect agent
of salvational culturalism. And he is not so different from the 19th-century
romantic poet Mickiewicz, who, exiled and displaced, lobbied in Europe
-- mostly in France -- for recognition, sympathy, and support for Poland’s
aspirations for political self-determination. (The most recent climax
of salvational culturalism in Poland was the “Solidarity”
movement of 1980-81, with its peculiar mixture of national and civic-oriented
currents resembling earlier romantic-national efforts.)
The weakening of the civic-participation model that had been encouraged
in the 80s by the practices of the democratic opposition, and the re-mobilization
of salvational culturalism in the 90s, made it possible for populist
parties to enter loudly into the debate on the union with Europe, and
to exploit both economic and cultural fears of a sell-out of national
land and sacred values. The direct consequence of such a state of mind,
independently conceptualized by Kundera in terms of Europe’s soul,
are the demands -- stipulated above all by the radical right in Poland
-- to make an official commitment to “European” (meaning Christian)
values by etching it into the Union’s constitution.
Central Europe is clearly more complex and multifaceted than Kundera
wanted to see it in 1983, but it is not so easy to sort out what it
is today, as perceptions differ depending on the location of the observer.
Is Central Europe this missing person, perhaps even a relative, found
by the International Red Cross in some backwater like Siberia and now
an impoverished pariah repatriated back home? Or is it a valiant culture,
with centuries-long experience in resisting repressions, which managed
to work out a new resourceful social culture, and -- departing from
the logic of revolution -- to end dictatorships through negotiations?
Does it have its roots in the cosmopolitan rationality of enlightment,
or in the national commitment of the romantics? And with all its perplexities,
sensitivities, and inadequate resources, will it be a burden or an asset
to the Union?
Perhaps one thing is certain: both the period of democratic transitions
and the processes of European integration have unleashed debates on
national rather than European identity, and it was not just the populist,
radical right that began to question the need for a larger European
loyalty. Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and even Slovaks, who for so long
wanted to be a part of democratic Europe, have found themselves divided
into Euroenthusiasts and Euroskeptics. The president of the Czech Republic,
Vaclav Klaus, who calls himself a Euro-realist, cautions his citizens
on the consequences of being “a small country surrounded by a larger
Europe that is striving to become a super-state.” In an interview
for Gazeta Wyborcza he insisted that he wants to be above all a citizen
of the Czech Republic who happens to live on the European Continent.
“I do not want to be a citizen of Europe, and I hold it against
other politicians that they do not think in the same manner.”
Old anxieties and distrust inherited from the past are still among the
people, and now they are re-emerging among the political elites. Though
the unfortunate disciplinary talk by Chirac, castigating the heads of
the region’s governments for backing Bush’s war, and the recent
vision of the core of Europe and the Europe of different speeds proposed
by Habermas and perceived by many as divisive did not help, there is
a sense on both sides that they themselves have to work on changing
the suddenly confrontational climate.
In light of the upcoming enlargement, and of Habermas’ and Derrida’s
call for an engendering of European patriotism, one must first ask the
question whether this is something that ought to be desired. And then,
assuming the continuing durability of national identities, and recognizing
that the citizens of Central Europe have been able only recently to
savor a sense of national sovereignty, can one successfully build a
European identity?
For those wise people in Brussels who do think of an enlarged Europe
as a community, and not just a well-functioning administrative and economic
contraption, I suggest turning again to culture and examining these
elements from the region’s past that could be activated to transcend
national identities and thus contribute to building a European one.
To rescue the kidnapped Europe is to meet it halfway, though, on some
newly built bridge, as the odds of rescue would be far greater then.
At this halfway point the paradigm of salvational culturalism may not
be fully at work yet, and perhaps a new one will promptly emerge, as
the situation of an encounter will not call for confrontation or self-defense
to preserve dignity. Instead it may activate openness, the capacity
for critical self-distance, and a certain caution about closing the
process of self-identification, about too rigidly fixing one’s
self-identity. Just as in Ivo Andric’s novel, The Bridge on the
Drina, one could envision the construction of a kapia on this bridge,
that extra built-in space where differences meet and are negotiated,
where it is possible for people to look through each other’s glasses
and to plant the seeds of trust.
Beyond symbols and usable imagery, there are concrete achievements available
that could help to engender a broader, more civic and inclusive European
identity. This Europe was not just, as Kundera would have it, a frontier,
a bastion, a bulwark, and one has to work at bringing it back. In this
Europe, where borders were moved back and forth, where in fact there
are no incontestable borders, a culture of the borderlands has developed,
and the practices of a good neighborhood have already been at work.
And the memory of great multicultural cities such as Prague or Vilnius
is still cherished. Who in the West is familiar with the achievements
of the Reformation Hussites in Bohemia and Moravia; who knows about
the constitutional tradition? After all, the very first and progressive
constitution in Europe was voted by Poland’s parliament in 1781.
There are the accomplishments of the human-rights-based movements, representing
all generations of rights, culminating in the persistence of the democratic
opposition, the works of Havel and Konrad and Michnik and Kis, which
prepared the ground for the emergence of civil society. And there exists
a body of diasporic critical thought that examines the very danger of
fixing one’s identity in stone, the distanced and irony-based works
of people like Gombrowicz or Danilo Kis, or the novels of Kundera.
I would not worry
about the feasibility of a European civis mundi, but I have no doubt
that this will require building bridges that have kapias, where citizens
can discover each other and practice together the idea of a good neighborhood,
and not just a European one. Coming from where I come from, I think
that universities are such kapias, and summer schools -- places like
Viadrina or the Graduate Faculty with its University in Exile ethos
-- represent a virtual community of world citizens.
But I do worry about the invisibility of those who are still being left
behind: Ukrainians, Belorussians, and the small countries in the Balkans.
Elzbieta
Matynia is
a senior lecturer at the Graduate Faculty and Director of TCDS
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