The Ruins of a Myth or a Myth in Ruins? Paul Blokker University of Trento

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The Ruins of a Myth or a Myth in Ruins?Paul
BlokkerUniversity of Trento
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The Myth of Central Europe

• Myth The myth of Central Europe as emerged in
  the 1980s
• Focus The political-cultural dimension or a
  distinct set of ideas on the political
• Exploration The significance of the rubble of
  the myth of Central Europe
• Question Can these ideas on the political still
  speak to us today?

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The Myth of Central Europe

• Identification Some tangible aspects
  underpinning the Central European Myth
• Distinct experience with communism
• Salience of cultural capital and role of
  intellectuals
• Distinct experience with modernity

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The Myth of Central Europe

• Distinct experience with communism
• - Troubled relationship with the Soviet centre
• - Communism as imposed from without
• - Moments of dissent 1956, 1968, 1980-81
• - Revolutions/radical self-limitation of
  1989

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The Myth of Central Europe

• Role of the Intelligentsia
• - Ersatz elite predominance of cultural elite
  or Bildungsbuergertum (Eyal, Szelenyi 1998)
• - Distinct role of intellectuals as vanguard,
  emancipators
• - Specific views of political philosophy, as
  intertwined with the everyday (Szakolczai Wydra
  2006)

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The Myth of Central Europe

• Distinct experience with modernity
• - In contrast to Western development of
  modernity, interrupted experience
• - Unsettled modernity or alternate
  modernities (Arnason 2003 2005) successions of
  liberal nationalism, fascism, communism,
  neo-liberalism

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Prima facie evidence for distinct Central
  European political culture?
• 4 distinct ideas of the political and the role
  of political power in society
• - the idea of anti-political politics,
• - an anti-foundational view of politics,
• - a valorization of multiplicity and cultural
  diversity,
• - an endorsement of dissent

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Anti-political politics
• i. An engagement with politics by
  non-political means a rejection of partaking
  in power and interest-based politics (as
  inherently corrupting)
• ii. An attempt of a society to give itself its
  own rules a collective engagement with the
  common good

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Anti-political politics
• A society does not become politically conscious
  when it shares some political philosophy, but
  rather when it refutes to be fooled by any of
  them. The apolitical person is only the dupe of
  the professional politician, whose real adversary
  is the antipolitician. It is the antipolitician
  who wants to keep the scope of government policy
  (especially that of its military apparatus) under
  the control of civil society (Konrad 1984 227).

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Anti-political politics
• Directly related was the idea of civil society
• Widely shared among the Central European
  dissidents 'parallel polis' (Benda) or
  self-organization (Uhl)
• Civil society and self-organization were
  'envisaged on a local level... as a call for
  the recovery of a more self-determining and less
  alienating political order' (Baker 2002 38).

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Anti-political politics
• In dissident discourse, one can find a distinct
  sensitivity for smallness (Goldfarb 2009) and the
  need for the proximity of democratic politics
• there can and must be structures that are
  open, dynamic and small beyond a certain point,
  human ties like personal trust and personal
  responsibility cannot work' (Havel 1985 93).

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Anti-political politics
• The basic aim of the self-organization of civil
  society, of independent and parallel activities,
  is the preservation and renewal of normality...
  the renewal of civic awareness and interest in
  the affairs of the community' (Dienstbier 1988
  231).

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Anti-foundationalism
• - The critique of any form of overpowering,
  systemic ideological structure
• - Living in truth as a critique of political
  ideology and political systems subjecting the
  individual
• - Acknowledgement of fundamental flaws in both
  post-totalitarian and capitalist/mass-consumption
  societies

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Anti-foundationalism
• And in the end, is not the grayness and the
  emptiness of life in the post-totalitarian system
  only an inflated caricature of modern life in
  general? And do we not in fact stand (although in
  the external measures of civilization, we are far
  behind) as a kind of warning to the West,
  revealing to its own latent tendencies? (Havel
  1985)

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Anti-foundationalism
• According to Jirí Pribán (Czech legal scholar)
• the demand to live in truth escapes every
  judgment and communicative procedure which seeks
  to define binding normative criteria of truth
  (2002 49).
• In this regard, the 1989 velvet revolutions
  proved that no discourse has the power to declare
  itself universal or sovereign and therefore to
  claim to be the normative basis for political
  institutions. There is no actual voice or
  discourse which can speak in its name and define
  its normative framework... Democracy speaks in
  many voices (2002 50).

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Multiplicity and co-habitation
• - A specific tolerance for cultural diversity
  (result of a learning process based on historical
  contingencies and because of the co-presence of a
  great number of small nations in the region)
• - An ability to preserve elements of
  Gemeinschaft in the region in contrast to the
  predominance of modern society in the West
• - A continuous exposure of the small nations of
  Central Europe to external threats, and the
  related ability to live in a state of liminality.

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Multiplicity and co-habitation
• Diversity is a given if we are to respect
  reality, we must respect that diversity. Central
  European culture offers us a natural opportunity
  to extend our horizons (Konrad 1985 109).

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Multiplicity and co-habitation
• The strength of this part of Europe has always
  been the blending of religions and languages, of
  nationalities and cultures. This multinational,
  multicultural, rich mixture was able to produce a
  literature informed by the values of cultural
  pluralism and culture tolerance. The region was
  characterized by multinational states, states
  that united within their boundaries people who
  spoke different languages. Living together
  condemned people to tolerance. They either had to
  learn to live with dissimilarity or fight to the
  death. Such indeed was the fate of the nations of
  this area they either lived together or they
  fought one another (Michnik 1989 22).

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Multiplicity and co-habitation
• Being Central European means learning to keep
  our nationalism, our national egotism, under
  control. We can't get rid of our national
  feelings any more than we can get rid of our
  personal feelings. We need to reach moral and
  legal agreements with one another, so that our
  nationalisms will gradually develop into more
  sensible Euro-nationalisms (Konrad 1985 112).

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Multiplicity and co-habitation
• Euronationalism is the principle of association
  between European peoples on a basis of autonomy,
  equality, and democracy. Perhaps the new
  nationalism of our Central European area will
  come together on the basis of this principle. The
  consciousness of ethno-linguistic communities is
  an elementary fact. The sophisticated nationalist
  seeks a worthy place for his people in the
  European family (Konrad 1985 112).

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Dissent
• - The mythical nature of Central Europe
  sustaining its utopian dimension fed in an
  important sense into the idea of dissent and
  anti-political politics.
• - Central Europe posited the frame of
  possibility, the horizon in which anti-political
  ideas and actions could be raised and perceived.

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Dissent
• There are no Central European structures, but
  Central European political actions are thinkable
  steps towards a common utopia, where military
  blocs would dissolve into peoples and
  individuals, and peoples and individuals would
  associate with one another in new civil
  configurations' (Konrad 1985 115).

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Dissent
• The relation of the Central European myth to
  traditions of dissent can be disentangled by
  referring to two elements
• 1. a distinct historical experience of
  sacrifice, and
• 2. a politico-philosophical tradition with a
  strong attention for morality in politics.

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Dissent
• - Example Jan Patocka's notion of 'the
  solidarity of the shaken dissident community
  of the shattered
• - As part of the Central European myth, it could
  be reformulated as the idea that it is only
  through tragic historical experiences, which
  disrupt the naiveness of normal everyday life,
  that one gains a truthful and deeper
  understanding of the meaning of politics,
  solidarity and the political community.

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Dissent
• - Civic virtue is an important element of Vaclav
  Havel's idea of a life 'lived in truth'.
• - 'The Power of the Powerless citizens of
  communist societies could shake themselves loose
  from the entanglements of totalitarian control by
  simply not participating in standard communist
  rituals anymore.

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A Central European Political Culture?

• Dissent
• The strategy of dissidence is applicable to the
  liberal democratic conditions of the rule of law
  because legality seeks to declare itself the
  sovereign legitimation framework there as well
  although this is done with the help of the moral
  vocabulary of human rights and democracy. Dissent
  is not only a political position and action. It
  is first of all an expression of the social
  requirement of understanding and comprehending
  every structure and normative system in order to
  make them legitimate (Priban 2002 170).

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Conclusions

• Relevance of the Myth beyond 1989
• The argument has been that a Central European
  myth can be related to a Central European
  political culture, consisting of four components
  
• - anti-political politics,
• - anti-foundationalism and pluralism,
• - the valorization of cultural diversity,
• - an ethic of dissent.

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Conclusions

• Relevance of the Myth beyond 1989
• Anti-political politics despite a predominance
  of neo-liberal ideas and perceptions of politics
  as interest and power-based after 1989, distinct
  features of the legacy of anti-political politics
  can be traced.
• - e.g., institutionalization of forms of
  democracy with a kind of republican flavour, such
  as local democracy and self-government, as well
  as forms of direct democracy.

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Conclusions

• Relevance of the Myth beyond 1989
• Anti-foundationalism revolutions of 1989
  themselves rejected any kind of full-blown
  revolutionary idea (often mistaken for the
  absence of new ideas). Some observers have taken
  this as a most significant form of 'radical
  self-limitation', which can play an extraordinary
  role in, for instance, constitutional politics
  (cf. Arato 2000).

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Conclusions

• Relevance of the Myth beyond 1989
• Diversity stimulation of a learning process,
  both within and without the region, not least in
  terms of the sensibility towards new forms of
  understandings of minority rights (cf. Ringelheim
  2010).

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Conclusions

• Relevance of the Myth beyond 1989
• Dissent significance also beyond the Central
  European experience crucial nature of the ethic
  for dissent in modern democratic regimes plagued
  by the lack of legitimacy and threatened to
  succumb to forms of populism.