Narrating Post/Communism

Colonial Discourse and Europe's Borderline Civilization

Natasa Kovacevic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134044139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The transition of communist Eastern Europe to capitalist democracy post-1989 and in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars has focused much scholarly attention - in history, political science and literature - on the fostering of new identities across Eastern European countries in the absence of the old communist social and ideological frameworks. This book examines an important, but hitherto largely neglected, part of this story: the ways in which the West has defined its own identity and ideals via the demonization of communist regimes and Eastern European cultures as a totalitarian, barbarian and Orientalist "other". It describes how old Orientalist prejudices resurfaced during the Cold War period, and argues that the establishment of this discourse helped to justify transitions of Eastern European societies to market capitalism and liberal democracy, suppressing Eastern Europe's communist histories and legacies, whilst perpetuating its dependence on the West as a source of its own sense of identity. It argues that this process of Orientalization was reinforced by the literary narratives of Eastern European and Russian anti-communist dissidents and exiles, including Vladimir Nabokov, Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, in their attempts to present themselves as native, Eastern European experts and also emancipate themselves – and their homelands – as civilized, enlightened and Westernized. It goes on to suggest that the greatest potential for recognizing and overcoming this self-Orientalization lies in post-communist literary and visual narratives, with their themes of disappointment in the social, economic, or political changes brought on by the transitions, challenge of the unequal discursive power in East-West dialogues where the East is positioned as a disciple or a mimic of the West, and the various guises of nostalgia for communism.

1
Introduction

Bleaching Eastern Europe’s cultural “blackness”

The perfidious Chinese, half-naked Indians and passive Muslims are described as vultures for “our” largesse and are damned when “we lose them” to communism, or to their unregenerate Oriental instincts: the difference is scarcely significant.

(Said 1979:108)

The collapse of the Wall, the Curtain and much more besides, deprived “Europe” of its partition along the militarized and policed frontier which had defined its identity as opposed to the presumed alternative culture of Leninism. It turned out that this alternative was not merely a failure, but had for a long time been no more than a pretence; mass action and mass sentiment rejected it, because for many years nobody had believed in it enough to make it work; and the liberal-democratic capitalism of the Community was faced with the task, not of transforming a counterculture, but of filling a vacuum and tidying up a gigantic mess…in late 1991 it seems apparent that “Europe”—both with and without the North whose addition turns it from “Europe” into “Western Civilization”—is once again an empire in the sense of a civilized and stabilized zone which must decide whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent and unstable cultures along its borders but not yet within its system: Serbs and Croats if one chances to be Austrian, Kurds and Iraqis if Turkey is admitted to be part of “Europe.”

(Pocock 1997:304)

The Said and Pocock quotations beautifully encapsulate the key concepts I intend to tackle in this work: first, the reification of Eastern Europe as a civilizing project (task) by the European Union (EU) and North America; and, second, the reification of its communist legacies as “unregenerate Oriental instincts” that must be abandoned in this process. Indeed, as many news reports which anticipated and followed the EU Enlargement on 1 May 2004 imply, Eastern Europe is finally on the road of becoming European by no longer being communist. This binary belies a disturbing political vision, which gives little cause for celebration of a “common” EU future—it indicates that Europe continues to be predicated on the idea of conditional inclusion/exclusion and that any true dialogue between its Western and Eastern members is impossible. Rather, Eastern Europe, in this latest attempt to “modernize” and catch up with the ever-elusive Western prosperity and civilization, cannot negotiate the rules of the game: it must satisfy the EU, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank criteria prescribed for achieving “democracy,” “privatization,” “capitalism,” “diversity,” “human rights protection,” and many others in order to become emancipated as “European.”

It is appropriate here to recall that this impossibility of dialogue, unidirectional flow of directives and their acceptance as necessary for emancipation from economic or cultural “inferiority” typically defines a colonial, or a proto-colonial relationship. But when writing about Europe, Eastern Europe in particular, postcolonial critics and historians have been wary of using this terminology. Certain Eastern European states are only begrudgingly discussed as postcolonial even in terms of its Soviet, Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman imperial legacies (or the legacy of German rule in Poland). Only recently—and even then reluctantly—has Eastern Europe been discussed as a colonial terrain of the Western tradition, perhaps more famously in Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe: the map of civilization on the mind of the enlightenment (1994), a valuable work on the discursive “invention” of Eastern Europe by the Western European imaginary over the last two centuries and in Dušan Bjeli

and Obrad Savi

’s anthology Balkan as Metaphor: between globalization and fragmentation (2002), which blends the discussion of the Balkans and Eastern Europe as Western post/neocolonial “others.”¹

The more entrenched argument goes—paralleling Maria Todorova’s discussion of the Balkans in Imagining the Balkans (1997)—that no Eastern European country ever suffered the type of colonial disenfranchisement, exploitation, and racism typical in, for example, Asian or African colonies. While this is a valid distinction, I argue that this line of thinking ultimately obfuscates a long history of Western attempts to identify Western Europe as enlightened, developed, and civilized in distinction to Eastern Europe and, as a result, to intellectually master Eastern Europe through description and classification, fixing it into stereotypes of lamentable cultural, political, and economic backwardness (e.g. agrarian, old-fashioned, despotic, totalitarian, obedient, abnormally violent, bloodthirsty), or, alternately, praiseworthy conservation of its “noble savages” (here, pallid Western city-dwellers, enervated by industrial fumes or corporate discipline, are contrasted with big, healthy, lazy, and gregarious Eastern Europeans).²

The difficulty of recognizing this pernicious proto-colonial relationship is compounded by the contemporary euphemistic discourse about the European Union as an occasionally bumpy and antagonistic, but ultimately benevolent, equality-oriented, and multicultural enterprise, which, like the equally obfuscating term globalization, suppresses the mechanisms of capitalist expansion, withdrawal of social welfare policies, and creation of new peripheries and widespread impoverishment.³ Uncovering these mechanisms dropped, by and large, from official political discourses, Étienne Balibar (2002, 2004) has vehemently criticized the myth of a multicultural, egalitarian European Union in the face of its assimilationist policies, its disappearing labor unions, as well as its predication of citizenship rights on member states’ national origin. Finally, the very term Eastern European makes for a particularly confusing and schizophrenic position. On the one hand, Eastern Europeans have been defined and define themselves as “European,” especially in distinction to their more “Oriental” neighbors, an act that could be explained in terms of Milica Baki

-Hayden’s (1995) “nesting Orientalisms,” which she applies to the formation of ethnic identity in the Balkans. But, on the other hand, Eastern Europeans, while not “other” as much as Asians or Africans, are also “not quite” European; rather, they are semi-European, semi-developed, with semi-functioning states and semi-civilized manners (perhaps this also explains, as Wolff demonstrates throughout Inventing Eastern Europe, the oscillations between racial designations of Eastern Europeans as whites, blacks, gypsies, and even apes).

The establishment of “real” colonial rule and subsequent imperialist projects that legitimated it (a worthy distinction made by Robert Young in Postcolonialism: an historical introduction (2001)) necessarily creates a context of study different from that of Eastern Europe, marked by the absence of “real” colonies or the various imperialist institutions, discourses, or people implicated in their rule. However, this work takes the viewpoint of Larry Wolff that, “as in the case of Orientalism, so also with Eastern Europe, intellectual discovery and mastery could not be entirely separated from the possibility of real conquest” (1994:8). In other words, I argue that this “intellectual discovery and mastery” of Eastern Europe is always-already implicated in the political, economic, and cultural interactions between the West and East, and in this I challenge Aijaz Ahmad (1992) and other critics of Said who, in a dialectical fashion, accuse him of emphasizing textuality at the alleged expense of exposing material consequences of Orientalism.

In Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s terms, this geo-graphing of Eastern Europe not only produces knowledge of an essentially arbitrary space (“geography”), but also creates certain geopolitical contexts for its imperial management (1996:7). For instance, the geo-graphing of Eastern Europe is reflected in such material decisions as the “rescuing” of Greece, glorified as the cradle of European civilization, from communism and Stalinist rule after World War II, the NATO bombing of Serbs and Montenegrins because they could not get over alleged ancient ethnic hatreds, or the greater financial aid by the West to post-communist states that are Catholic or Protestant rather than Orthodox.⁴ Not less importantly, this is also reflected in the attempts of various Eastern European peoples to market themselves as civilized, developed, tolerant, or multicultural enough to be geo-graphed as European, as well as in their internalization of the stigma of inferiority, manifesting itself in a host of instances from self-stigmatization to glorification of stigma as a form of anti-Western identification.

Dissident narratives

I deplore the attitude of foolish or dishonest people who ridiculously equate Stalin with McCarthy, Auschwitz with the atom bomb and the ruthless imperialism of the USSR with the earnest and unselfish assistance extended by the USA to nations in distress.

(Nabokov 1990:50)

[The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia] did not happen irresponsibly, as an act of aggression or out of disrespect for international law. It happened, on the contrary, out of respect for the law, for a law that ranks higher than the law which protects the sovereignty of states. The alliance has acted out of respect for human rights, as both conscience and international legal documents dictate.

(Havel 1999:6)

Among the recent historical, sociological, and cultural studies accounts which delve into Eastern European colonial in(ter)ventions, most focus on either the period before the twentieth century (for instance Larry Wolff (1994)) or, as is sometimes the case with Balkan studies, on the overlapping of discourses on early twentieth-century Balkan Wars, World War I and the recent Yugoslav civil wars.⁵ Additionally, while some of these studies analyze ways in which Eastern European narratives look to the West and engage with discourses that perform their civilizational “inferiority” (like, for instance, the many studies of Russian national identity in the nineteenth century and earlier and the conflicts between Slavophiles and Westernizers), the majority instead focus on the constitution of various Western European and/or North American identities through constructions of “otherness.” Among the studies that use Eastern European narratives as a point of entry, few look at specifically literary and film narratives, which can, as I will suggest, yield fruitful readings if analyzed as post- or anti-colonial texts, while simultaneously allowing us to revamp some of the ossified concepts in postcolonial theory in order to engage with the present moment.

In the context of the above-discussed discourses on Eastern European cultural “blackness,” I therefore shift the focus of study from Western narratives that map this locale to Eastern European narratives which are haunted by these same discourses, as Nabokov’s and Havel’s quotations attest. This preoccupation of Eastern Europeans with their various reflections in the Western mirror and concomitant self-stigmatizations or self-celebrations are perhaps the most elusive and least discussed avatars of what could be called, for lack of a better theoretical term, Eastern European Orientalism. Because of Eastern Europe’s direct geographic, political, and cultural proximity to Western Europe, and, indirectly, to North America, its acceptance of Western models has, overall, been far smoother, more voluntary, and more urgently executed than in other colonial locales. In fact, it is this voluntary—and largely unrecognized—self-colonizing tendency vis-à-vis the West which distinguishes Eastern Europe from other targets of Western colonialism and which will be one of the primary topics of this work.⁶

According to Rastko Mo

nik, the same “Orientalist ideology that downgrades and holds down” the region as a whole “also holds up the ruling position of local political classes, which in turn act…as the local agents of the international system of domination” (2002:85).⁷ This double domination, in turn, facilitates and is facilitated by a generally favorable attitude to the ideal of European civilization and an almost fatalistic consensus that the current model of Western social development is the way to go (post-communist transitions are necessarily difficult and may take centuries, but it is worth it because prosperity—and acceptance by the world community—awaits us). Because of the urgency of the present moment and because this has been neglected by academic study, I am particularly interested in tracing the contours of Eastern European Orientalism in literary and visual texts emerging throughout the communist and post-communist periods. I focus on cultural texts, because they often articulate and analyze collective anxieties and identity crises resulting from self-Orientalization which are missing from the more visible, official political discourses.

The term postcolonial traditionally signifies fragmentation, disjunction, the crossing of national, cultural, and linguistic borders, figuratively and/or literally. Many of the Eastern European authors that occupy the chapters to come indeed write from a position of linguistic and/or national bordercrossing, articulating identities in conflict with the Orientalist discourses that seek to contain them. In this respect, narratives by Eastern European exiles⁸ in Western Europe and North America during the communist period are of special interest, as they can help theorize the trajectories of self-colonization, as well as strategies for its subversion. It is in those texts that the disjunctions of identity, the aporia of, on the one hand, denouncing communist “barbarians” to Western audiences and, on the other hand, being personally victimized as an Eastern “barbarian” in need of civilizational disciplining, become especially prominent.

This denunciation of communist—frequently Russian—barbarians and the need to overcome the stigma of Orientalism, by proving one’s allegiance to Western civilizational achievements, is already discernible in the texts written by that famous Eastern European emigrant Joseph Conrad long before the October Revolution. Although an analysis of his texts exceeds the scope of the present study, it is important to mention that in essays such as “Autocracy and War,” “A Note on the Polish Problem” (in Conrad 1928) and the novel Under Western Eyes (1911), Conrad establishes Orientalist themes that we will see reverberating throughout the texts written during the communist and post-communist periods. For Conrad, Russia is a semi-Asiatic country which has no place meddling in European affairs; even the worst European autocracies guilty of militant imperialism preserve a sense of ethical decency, res...

Table of contents

• BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 “Doubly obscure” dissident narrative
• 3 Shifting topographies of Eastern/Central/Europe in Joseph Brodsky’s and Czesław Miłosz’s prose writing
• 4 Deviant stepchild of European history
• 5 Primitive accumulation and Neanderthal liberalism
• 6 Ethnicizing guilt
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index