REARTIKULACIJA
Staš Kleindienst: ON EUROPEAN CONSCIENCE AND TOTALITARIANISM
On April 2nd, 2009, members of the European parliament adopted the European Parliament resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism. The Resolution is an official document which deals with the issues of the totalitarian past (especially) of former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and with the contrast between the violent past and peace-loving social order of the contemporary European Union. It is basically an ideological document, adopted in order to reproduce and reinforce the imperialist-colonialist roots on which the idea of Europe was founded. We can point out three crucial points where this tendency can be detected.
Firstly, the document promotes European values by producing a diametrical difference where ideology becomes an issue of the past and is absent in the new global world order, which started in 1990, and stands on universalist ideas of human dignity and individual freedom. This difference, of course, produces the post-ideological state of today’s EU and makes neoliberal ideology impalpable, blurred between economic speculations and the apolitical state of its population. In short, the idea of the document is to produce a dualist perspective on past and present, where, in opposition to the violent past, the present is presented as a peaceful era, ready to build on the idea of harmony among all nations that constitute the European Union.
In practice, the situation is different. The idea of a united Europe stands on closed outer borders, where the agency Frontex (a specialised independent body tasked to coordinate the operational cooperation between Member States in the field of border security) conducts its patrols and intelligence-driven operations on both sides of the border to keep the migrants out, while on the other side, the promised disappearance of inner borders is mainly due to the access of cheaper labour from eastern countries of the EU and free flow of capital. This also leads to the perception of migrations of Eastern European workers as a threat to the domestic work force. This threat is constantly being used by right wing politicians to produce fascist, nationalist or racist discourses for their own political benefit. This can be seen in the case of Italy, which introduced a state of emergency throughout the country by criminalizing Romanian workers, or in the recent outbursts of violence towards immigrants in Belfast; these being just two examples. The fact is that this leads to generalized images of people from the east as barbaric nomads, which need to be civilized and domesticated as they bear the burden of a traumatic totalitarian past.
And here we come to the second major point of the resolution, the traumatic past of eastern post-socialist countries. The process of expanding the European Union to post-socialist countries brought also the “new traumatic past” to the EU, the communist totalitarianism. Even though the Resolution deals with totalitarianism in general, the focus is on communist regimes of Eastern Europe, not on fascism or Nazism, as if they had already reached the point of sobering and reflection. We can’t deny the fact that the Resolution was adopted in a time when the world is experiencing the deepest financial crisis since the breakdown of 1929 and the concern about rising anti-capitalist leftist ideas (the London conference on the idea of communism in March 2009, with lecturers such as Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Boostels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Wang Hui and Slavoj Žižek, being just one clear example of this concern) has also knocked on the doors of European leaders. We can thus see the Resolution as an answer to the rising idea of new communism brought upon by respectable intellectuals in a time of economic crisis, but more importantly, the Resolution puts blame on the nations of Eastern Europe and gives them a mission to accept responsibility, ask for forgiveness, and encourage moral renovation. So the main objective of the Resolution is to subdue new members and to reinforce internal division in their domestic political discourse.
And here we come to the third main point of the Resolution: if on one hand communist regimes are criminalised, on the other hand, the dualist logic of the document completely by-passes the imperial-colonial perspective of violence and subjugation. As opposed to any form of totalitarianism, colonialism can not be put into the perspective of a traumatic past in the same way. Firstly, it didn’t happen on European soil and secondly, the consent through which colonialism was naturalized was made by supranational institutions such as Christianity and humanist thought, because both could provide the non-ideological universalist, eurocentric, white male perspective of a civilizing mission as an excuse for subjugation and exploitation. We can also see the period of 20th century de-colonization as an event which, on symbolic level, prepared a purifying moment for the colonizer, only to de-link historical colonization with its succesor, who today colonizes third world countries through ownership and capital, and hides behind a promise of spreading peace and democracy.
It is this ability of apolitical neoliberal discourse to break and reshape the connection between language and its context, and therefore to organize a new use for names and terms whose symbol meanings are based on their historic origins, which can hide the real strategies of neoliberal exploitation. We can see this in today’s use of symbol institutions, such as human rights or soveregnty (sovereignty being a popular tool for enpowering USA-led puppet governments in Iraq or Afganistan with power only to pass new privatisation laws), but also in the use of institutions set up after World War II to look over stable international relations (UN, World Bank, IMF) which are being used nowdays for creating conditions for the colonization of the second and third world. In practice, this can be seen in the crediting of third world countries (ex-colonies) in return for their natural resources or industry. The symbolic power of institutions thus becomes a priceless tool for the legitimization of the neoliberal logic of expansion and the naturalisation of colonial discourses in today’s society.
And this is the precise point through which we can link back historical colonization with contemporary forms of subjugation through capital that today’s West is leading. The non-ideological framework makes colonization an economic paradigm, rather than a political one, and through this, internalizes its political discourse so that no external reflection on its violent processes can be made. It is this elimination of externality (through the production of apolitical subjects and control of the interpretation of its processes of violence) that can make the imperial-colonial regime spread around the globe and work endlessly. So the question we should pose in relation to the alternatives of capitalism is not where the idea of communism failed or how we could make it work properly, but rather where the imprial-colonial regime of exploitation triumphed in reshaping itself into an acceptable and prefered form of governing.
Staš Kleindienst is an artist and a theoretician based in Ljubljana.
Firstly, the document promotes European values by producing a diametrical difference where ideology becomes an issue of the past and is absent in the new global world order, which started in 1990, and stands on universalist ideas of human dignity and individual freedom. This difference, of course, produces the post-ideological state of today’s EU and makes neoliberal ideology impalpable, blurred between economic speculations and the apolitical state of its population. In short, the idea of the document is to produce a dualist perspective on past and present, where, in opposition to the violent past, the present is presented as a peaceful era, ready to build on the idea of harmony among all nations that constitute the European Union.
In practice, the situation is different. The idea of a united Europe stands on closed outer borders, where the agency Frontex (a specialised independent body tasked to coordinate the operational cooperation between Member States in the field of border security) conducts its patrols and intelligence-driven operations on both sides of the border to keep the migrants out, while on the other side, the promised disappearance of inner borders is mainly due to the access of cheaper labour from eastern countries of the EU and free flow of capital. This also leads to the perception of migrations of Eastern European workers as a threat to the domestic work force. This threat is constantly being used by right wing politicians to produce fascist, nationalist or racist discourses for their own political benefit. This can be seen in the case of Italy, which introduced a state of emergency throughout the country by criminalizing Romanian workers, or in the recent outbursts of violence towards immigrants in Belfast; these being just two examples. The fact is that this leads to generalized images of people from the east as barbaric nomads, which need to be civilized and domesticated as they bear the burden of a traumatic totalitarian past.
And here we come to the second major point of the resolution, the traumatic past of eastern post-socialist countries. The process of expanding the European Union to post-socialist countries brought also the “new traumatic past” to the EU, the communist totalitarianism. Even though the Resolution deals with totalitarianism in general, the focus is on communist regimes of Eastern Europe, not on fascism or Nazism, as if they had already reached the point of sobering and reflection. We can’t deny the fact that the Resolution was adopted in a time when the world is experiencing the deepest financial crisis since the breakdown of 1929 and the concern about rising anti-capitalist leftist ideas (the London conference on the idea of communism in March 2009, with lecturers such as Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Boostels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Wang Hui and Slavoj Žižek, being just one clear example of this concern) has also knocked on the doors of European leaders. We can thus see the Resolution as an answer to the rising idea of new communism brought upon by respectable intellectuals in a time of economic crisis, but more importantly, the Resolution puts blame on the nations of Eastern Europe and gives them a mission to accept responsibility, ask for forgiveness, and encourage moral renovation. So the main objective of the Resolution is to subdue new members and to reinforce internal division in their domestic political discourse.
And here we come to the third main point of the Resolution: if on one hand communist regimes are criminalised, on the other hand, the dualist logic of the document completely by-passes the imperial-colonial perspective of violence and subjugation. As opposed to any form of totalitarianism, colonialism can not be put into the perspective of a traumatic past in the same way. Firstly, it didn’t happen on European soil and secondly, the consent through which colonialism was naturalized was made by supranational institutions such as Christianity and humanist thought, because both could provide the non-ideological universalist, eurocentric, white male perspective of a civilizing mission as an excuse for subjugation and exploitation. We can also see the period of 20th century de-colonization as an event which, on symbolic level, prepared a purifying moment for the colonizer, only to de-link historical colonization with its succesor, who today colonizes third world countries through ownership and capital, and hides behind a promise of spreading peace and democracy.
It is this ability of apolitical neoliberal discourse to break and reshape the connection between language and its context, and therefore to organize a new use for names and terms whose symbol meanings are based on their historic origins, which can hide the real strategies of neoliberal exploitation. We can see this in today’s use of symbol institutions, such as human rights or soveregnty (sovereignty being a popular tool for enpowering USA-led puppet governments in Iraq or Afganistan with power only to pass new privatisation laws), but also in the use of institutions set up after World War II to look over stable international relations (UN, World Bank, IMF) which are being used nowdays for creating conditions for the colonization of the second and third world. In practice, this can be seen in the crediting of third world countries (ex-colonies) in return for their natural resources or industry. The symbolic power of institutions thus becomes a priceless tool for the legitimization of the neoliberal logic of expansion and the naturalisation of colonial discourses in today’s society.
And this is the precise point through which we can link back historical colonization with contemporary forms of subjugation through capital that today’s West is leading. The non-ideological framework makes colonization an economic paradigm, rather than a political one, and through this, internalizes its political discourse so that no external reflection on its violent processes can be made. It is this elimination of externality (through the production of apolitical subjects and control of the interpretation of its processes of violence) that can make the imperial-colonial regime spread around the globe and work endlessly. So the question we should pose in relation to the alternatives of capitalism is not where the idea of communism failed or how we could make it work properly, but rather where the imprial-colonial regime of exploitation triumphed in reshaping itself into an acceptable and prefered form of governing.
Staš Kleindienst is an artist and a theoretician based in Ljubljana.
