In the months before Slovenia�s entry to the European Union, whenever a
foreign journalist asked me what new dimension would Slovenia contribute to
Europe, my answer was instant and unambiguous: NOTHING.
Slovene culture
is obsessed with the notion that, although a small nation, we are a cultural
superpower: We possess some agalma, a hidden intimate treasure of cultural
masterpieces that wait to be acknowledged by the wider world. Maybe, this
treasure is too fragile to survive intact the exposure to the fresh air of
international competition, like the old Roman frescoes in that wonderful scene
from Fellini�s Roma which start to disappear the moment the daylight reaches
them. Such narcissism is not a Slovene specialty. There are versions of it all
around Eastern Europe: We value democracy more because we had to fight for it
recently, not being allowed to take it for granted; we still know what true
culture is, not being corrupted by the cheap Americanized mass
culture.
Rejecting such a fixation on the hidden national treasure in no
way implies ethnic self-hatred. The point is a simple and cruel one: All Slovene
artists who made a relevant contribution had to �betray� their ethnic roots at
some point, either by isolating themselves from the cultural mainstream in
Slovenia or by simply leaving the country for some time, living in Vienna or
Paris. It is the same as with Ireland: not only did James Joyce leave home in
order to write Ulysses, his masterpiece about Dublin; Yeats himself, the poet of
Irish national revival, spent years in London. The greatest threats to national
tradition are its local guardians who warn about the danger of foreign
influences.
Furthermore, the Slovene attitude of cultural superiority
finds its counterpart in the patronizing Western cliche which characterizes the
East European post-Communist countries as a kind of retarded poor cousins who
will be admitted back into the family if they can behave properly. Recall the
reaction of the press to the last elections in Serbia where the nationalists
gained big�it was read as a sign that Serbia is not yet ready for Europe. A
similar process is going on now in Slovenia: The fact that nationalists
collected enough signatures to enforce a referendum about the building of a
mosque in Ljubljana is sad enough; the fact that the majority of the population
thinks that one should not allow the mosque is even sadder; and the arguments
evoked (Should we allow our beautiful countryside to be spoiled by a minaret
that stands for fundamentalist barbarism?, etc.) make one ashamed of being a
Slovene. In such cases, the occasional threats from Brussels can only appear
welcome: Show multiculturalist tolerance�or else!
However, this
simplified picture is not the entire truth. The first complication: The very
ex-Communist countries which are the most ardent supporters of the US �war on
terror� deeply worry that their cultural identity, their very survival as
nations, is threatened by the onslaught of cultural �Americanization� as the
price for their immersion into global capitalism. We thus witness the paradox of
pro-Bushist anti-Americanism. In Slovenia, the Rightist nationalists complain
that the ruling Center-Left coalition, though it is publicly for joining NATO
and supporting the U.S. anti-terrorist campaign, is secretly sabotaging it,
participating in it for opportunist reasons and not from conviction. At the same
time, however, it reproaches the ruling coalition for undermining Slovene
national identity by advocating full Slovene integration into the Westernized
global capitalism and thus drowning Slovenes in contemporary Americanized pop
culture. The idea is that the ruling coalition sustains pop culture, stupid TV
amusement and mindless consumption in order to turn Slovenes into an easily
manipulated crowd, incapable of serious reflection and firm ethical
stances.
In short, the underlying motif is that the ruling coalition
stands for the �liberal-Communist plot�: Ruthless, unconstrained immersion in
global capitalism is perceived as the latest dark plot of the ex-Communists,
enabling them to retain their secret hold on power. Ironically, the nationalist
conservatives� lament about the new emerging socio-ideological order reads like
the old New Left�s description of the �repressive tolerance� of capitalist
freedom as the mode of unfreedom�s appearance.
This ambiguity of the
Eastern European attitude finds its perfect counterpart in the ambiguous message
of the West to post-Communist countries. Recall the two-sided pressure the
United States exerted on Serbia in the summer of 2003: U.S. representatives
simultaneously demanded that Serbia deliver the suspected war criminals to the
Hague court (in accordance with the logic of the global Empire which demands a
trans-state global judicial institution) AND to sign the bilateral treaty with
the United States obliging Serbia not to deliver to any international
institution (i.e., the SAME Hague court) U.S. citizens suspected of war crimes
or other crimes against humanity (in accordance with the Nation-State logic). No
wonder the Serb reaction is one of perplexed fury! And a similar thing is going
on at the economic level: While pressuring Poland to open its agriculture to
market competition, Western Europe floods the Polish market with agricultural
products heavily subsidized from Brussels.
How do post-Communist
countries navigate in this sea with conflicting winds? If there is an ethical
hero of the recent time in ex-Yugoslavia, it is Ika Saric, a modest judge in
Croatia who, in the face of threats to her life and without any visible public
support, condemned general Mirko Norac and his colleagues to 12 years of prison
for the crimes committed in 1992 against the Serb civilian population. Even the
Leftist government, afraid of the threat of the Rightist nationalist
demonstrations, refused to stand firmly behind the trial against Norac. However,
just as the nationalist Right was intimating that large public disorders would
topple the government, when the sentence was proclaimed, NOTHING HAPPENED. The
demonstrations were much smaller than expected and Croatia �rediscovered� itself
as a state of the rule of law. It was especially important that Norac was not
delivered to the Hague, but condemned in Croatia itself�Croatia thus proved that
it does not need international tutelage.
The dimension of the act proper
consisted in the shift from the impossible to the possible: Before the sentence,
the nationalist Right with its veteran organizations was perceived as a powerful
force not to be provoked, and the direct harsh sentence was perceived by the
liberal Left as something that �we all want, but, unfortunately, cannot afford
in this difficult moment, since chaos would ensue.� However, after the sentence
was proclaimed and nothing happened, the impossible turned into the routine. If
there is any dimension to be redeemed of the signifier �Europe,� then this act
was �European� in the most exemplary sense of the term.
And if there is
an event that embodies the cowardice, it is the behavior of the Slovene
government after the outbreak of the Iraq-U.S. war. Slovene politicians
desperately tried to steer a middle course between U.S. pressure and the
unpopularity of the war with the majority of the Slovene population. First,
Slovenia signed the infamous Vilnius declaration for which it was praised by
Rumsfeld and others as part of the �new Europe� of the �coalition of the
willing� in the war against Iraq. However, after the foreign minister signed the
document, there ensued a true comedy of denials: The minister claimed that,
before signing the document, he consulted the president of the republic and
other dignitaries, who promptly denied that they knew anything about it; then,
all concerned claimed that the document in no way supported the unilateral US
attack on Iraq, but called for the key role of the United Nations. The
specification was that Slovenia supported the disarmament of Iraq, but not the
war on Iraq.
However, a couple of days later, there was a bad surprise
from the United States: Slovenia was not only explicitly named among the
countries participating in the �coalition of the willing,� but was even
designated as the recipient of financial aid from the United States to its war
partners. What ensued was pure comedy: Slovenia proudly declared that it did not
participate in the war against Iraq and demanded to be stricken from the list.
After a couple of days, a new embarrassing document was received: The United
States officially thanked Slovenia for it support and help. Slovenia again
protested that it did not qualify for any thanks and refused to recognize itself
as the proper addressee of the letter, in a kind of mocking version of �please,
I do not really deserve your thanks!,� as if sending its thanks was the worst
thing the United States could do to us. Usually, states protest when they are
unjustly criticized; Slovenia protests when it receives signs of gratitude. In
short, Slovenia behaved as if it was not the proper recipient of the letters of
praise that went on and on�and what we all knew was that, in this case also, the
letter DID arrive at its proper destination.
The ambiguity of Eastern
Europeans therefore merely mirrors the inconsistencies of Western Europe itself.
Late in his life, Freud asked the famous question �Was will das Weib?� (�What
does Woman want?�), admitting his perplexity when faced with the enigma of
feminine sexuality. And a similar perplexity arises today, when post-Communist
countries are entering the European Union: Which Europe will they be
entering?
For long years, I have been pleading for a renewed �Leftist
Eurocentrism.� To put it bluntly, do we want to live in a world in which the
only choice is between the American civilization and the emerging Chinese
authoritarian-capitalist one? If the answer is no, then the only alternative is
Europe. The Third World cannot generate a strong enough resistance to the
ideology of the American Dream; in the present constellation, it is only Europe
that can do it. The true opposition today is not the one between the First World
and the Third World, but the one between the Whole of First and Third World (the
American global Empire and its colonies) and the remaining Second World
(Europe). Apropos Freud, Theodor Adorno claimed that what we are getting in our
contemporary �administered world� and its �repressive desublimation� is no
longer the old logic of repression of the Id and its drives, but a perverse
direct pact between the punitive superego and the Id�s illicit aggressive drives
at the expense of the Ego�s rational agency. Is not something structurally
similar going on today at the political level, the weird pact between the
postmodern global capitalism and the premodern societies at the expense of
modernity proper? It is easy for the American multiculturalist global Empire to
integrate premodern local traditions�the foreign body that it effectively cannot
assimilate is European modernity. Jihad and McWorld are two sides of the same
coin. Jihad is already McJihad.
Although the ongoing �war on terror�
presents itself as the defense of the democratic legacy, it courts the danger
clearly perceived a century ago by G.K. Chesterton who, in his Orthodoxy,
deployed the fundamental deadlock of the critics of religion: �Men who begin to
fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away
freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church�The secularists have not
wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that
is any comfort to them.�
Does the same not hold today for the advocates
of religion themselves? How many fanatical defenders of religion started by
ferociously attacking the contemporary secular culture and ended up forsaking
any meaningful religious experience? In a similar way, many liberal warriors are
so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they will end by flinging
away freedom and democracy themselves if only they may fight terror. They have
such a passion for proving that non-Christian fundamentalism is the main threat
to freedom that they are ready to fall back on the position that we have to
limit our own freedom here and now, in our allegedly Christian societies. If the
�terrorists� are ready to wreck this world for love of another world, our
warriors on terror are ready to wreck their own democratic world out of hatred
for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are
ready to legalize torture�the ultimate degradation of human dignity�to defend
it. And, along the same lines, we may lose �Europe� through its very
defense.
A year ago, an ominous decision of the European Union passed
almost unnoticed: The plan to establish an all-European border police force to
secure the isolation of the Union territory and thus to prevent the influx of
immigrants. THIS is the truth of globalization: the construction of NEW walls
safeguarding the prosperous Europe from the immigrant flood. One is tempted to
resuscitate here the old Marxist �humanist� opposition of �relations between
things� and �relations between persons�: In the much celebrated free circulation
opened up by global capitalism, it is �things� (commodities) which freely
circulate, while the circulation of �persons� is more and more controlled. This
new racism of the developed is in a way much more brutal than the racism of the
past: Its implicit legitimization is neither naturalist (the �natural�
superiority of the developed West) nor any longer culturalist (we in the West
also want to preserve our cultural identity), but unabashed economic egotism�the
fundamental divide is between those included in the sphere of (relative)
economic prosperity and those excluded from it.
What we find
reprehensible and dangerous in U.S. politics and civilization is thus A PART OF
EUROPE ITSELF, one of the possible outcomes of the European project. There is no
place for self-satisfied arrogance: The United States is a distorted mirror of
Europe itself. Back in the 1930s, Max Horkheimer wrote that those who do not
want to speak (critically) about liberalism should also keep silent about
fascism. Mutatis mutandis, one should say to those who decry the new U.S.
imperialism: Those who do not want to engage critically with Europe itself
should also keep silent about the United States.
This, then, is the only
true question beneath the self-congratulatory celebrations that accompany the
extension of the European Union: WHAT Europe are we joining? And when confronted
with this question, all of us, �New� and �Old� Europe, are in the same boat.
Slavoj �i�ek, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany. Among other books, he is the author of The Fragile Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
