What did the “other Europe” hope for?

The liberals in most post-socialist countries dominated the “transition” for about two decades. Their hegemony started to be questioned only after the EU enlargement took place. Since then they have had to compete with the nationalist-populist visions of Europe that would soon triumph in countries like Hungary and Poland and find more than one ally within the “old Europe.”

But what was it that this liberal vision offered to the East after the fall of socialism? In essence, it came down to the following: the former socialist states should without negotiations and much delay adopt the neoliberal model of their capitalist transformation. They should satisfy all economic, administrative and political demands required to join “Europe” as quickly as possible. What was offered in return? Well, the simulacrum of their “Europeanization.”

Many believed sincerely that they would sit at the same table with Western European countries and decide the matters in the spirit of equality and unanimity. Others were only interested in lucrative bureaucratic positions in Brussels. In a similar fashion, upcoming new strata of the young and educated, located mostly in capital cities, benefited from mobility, financial injections and nicely paid jobs, outsourced from the West. Many indeed flourished under the umbrella of the European integration. But many, in fact the majority, did not. They saw EU citizenship as just another name for work visas for the West and were happy to change their depressed former industrial cities for working at fish-and-chips stands in Glasgow or Newcastle.

Those who could not leave and could not feel palpable benefits remain angry at the entire world and ready to embrace nationalist myths and conspiracy theories. For the right or wrong reasons, they simply cannot believe in the liberal vision of Europe nor can they trust some unknown people in grey suits in Brussels making decisions about their lives. They thus return to what has always been there and what was very useful when communism had to be brought down: nationalism.

After all, people need a convincing narrative about the confusing world we live in, and nationalism paints a simple picture of an external domination that joined forces with treacherous minorities and liberal cosmopolitan urban elites against their own “tradition,” victimized nation and its faith. They rarely question capitalism as such — after all that would suspiciously smell of socialism — only the issue of who should manage it. The solution is thus found in national capitalism in which social equality is traded for protection from external and internal enemies.

There is Yugoslav exceptionalism, during and after socialism, in this whole story. In that region, at the end of the 1980s, the unholy alliance of anticommunist nationalists and the former communist nationalists formed to bring down not only socialism but its entire legacy of social emancipation and brotherhood among Yugoslav peoples. The liberal vision of economic reforms, coupled with the prospect of joining the EEC, united a weak coalition of the reform-minded communists and liberals. It was defeated by the ethnonationalist vision busy with the “national question,” border adjustments and ethnic cleansing. Europe was something to deal with once the dust settled.

The liberal vision reappeared again in the 2000s, after the removal of the Milošević and Tuđman regimes, coupled this time with neoliberal privatization frenzy. In the 2010s it would gradually lose — like elsewhere in post-socialist Europe ⁠— its power of persuasion. The EU today is at best seen as a provider of the structural funds whose tangible benefits cannot stop the resurgence of virulent nationalism such as in Croatia, that joined the EU in 2013; for others, the EU is a distant (Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia) or, finally, both a distant and suspicious destination (Serbia).

The so-called “transformative power” of the EU over the post-socialist zone has disappeared. It was based on the historic uniqueness of the European unification and it worked as magic, as long as enough people believed in it. Eventually it did not take place because it could not take place under the conditions of defeat and subordination.

The “self-incurred immaturity” after socialism

Post-socialist citizens, naturally, do not see their “velvet revolution” as defeat, but as liberation from double burden: Soviet control and the ideology of socialism. They see themselves as “victims” — even 30 years later, right-wing MEPs keep on drafting EU parliament declarations equating Nazism and communist anti-fascism — who recovered their long lost national freedom, and some of them even achieved independence. This was a suitable narrative to calm the spirits during the turbulent post-socialist times. The “defeat” here refers not to the unbearable lightness of the disappearance of the socialist regimes but to the self-inflicted loss of agency the day after. In other words, the victors of the long Cold War not only treated the former socialist citizens as the losers but they themselves unconsciously subscribed to that role.

How is it possible that courageous fighters against Soviet totalitarianism and Asian despotism ⁠— as it was often called ⁠— laid their arms and gave up on their thirst for independence, immediately after their glorious revolution? This is, indeed, a curious historic phenomenon. As soon as they recovered autonomy, they were ready for uncritical adoption of the EU acquis — the laws and rules designed by someone else — and they embraced new foreign tutelage with fervor. After stepping on the historic stage in 1989, as Boris Buden reminds us, they regressed quickly to, in Kantian terms, “self-incurred immaturity.” They became “children” that have to be guided by the paternal West into full adulthood.

The EU on the other hand had to figure out how to integrate these provinces that willingly accepted its leadership. The real practical solution, I argue, was found in the East German model. The swift colonization of East Germany through the “unification” process amounted to nothing short of an Anschluss through political and administrative control and through the economic shock managed by the now infamous agency Treuhand. The agency was established in 1990 with the goal to rapidly privatize the former GDR’s assets. Destruction of the existing East German economy went through merciless fire sale privatizations favoring Western capital and not paying the slightest attention to the wants and needs of East Germans. The results were soon visible: economic depression followed by massive emigration to the West, demographic decline, social depression and the rise of the extreme right.

Only recently the Ossies started talking about the social and personal consequences of the tsunami that hit them after the Wall came down. The reason for this silence might be found in the collective guilt. West Germans “saved” them from failed socialism and the good Wessies still have to pay for their economic well-being. Therefore, they themselves had no vocabulary to actually speak about it and, besides, no one wanted to listen. At the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, German journalist Sabine Rennefanz wrote openly about the Treuhand disaster capitalism, about her father losing a job and minimal security, about the destruction of not only a political regime but of a really existing society under the banner of the unquestioned German “unification.”

This was turned, with variations and various sequencing ⁠— depending on the country in question ⁠— into the model for the rest of the post-socialist zone. The process of “Europeanization” was administratively organized via the so-called “accession negotiations,” which was just another deceiving term for what amounted to more or less a very long translation process. The EU member states were free to interpret the famous Copenhagen criteria as they liked, and many still complain that letting them in too early, without a consolidated EU that would show them their real place, was a serious mistake. The goal was to measure the “suitability” of new candidates via the foucauldian mechanisms of discipline, control and punishment.

The convenient side of the story was the fact that political elites of the candidate countries would implement all necessary reforms and “structural adjustments” themselves. The results were strikingly similar to those in East Germany: economic depression, depopulation, social despair and the rise of the nationalist right and the extreme right. We have to mention, however, that, like in East Germany, there are also zones of prosperity and a minority of prosperous citizens that in semi-peripheral economies managed to communicate with globalized markets, the core countries’ industries and their consumers’ needs (especially in relation to Germany).

We should not be surprised to read a recent lamentation of a French-Romanian liberal MEP, Clotilde Armand in Financial Times. In the midst of the severe clashes between EU member states over the bloc’s post-Brexit budget — they fight each other as “ferrets in a bag” in the words of a EU diplomat — Armand complains about the intentions to further slash the structural funds for the Eastern states at the moment when they are losing highly educated people — and thus their wealth — en masse.

She enumerates all the financial benefits that the Western banks and firms get from Eastern Europe, surpassing by far the allocated funds. In a telling passage she describes how everything in her life is owned by the Western capital, in this case French. “At home in Bucharest, I shop in a French-owned supermarket, and my phone operator and my water company are French. I pay my gas bill to a French multinational, through a French bank of course.” She concludes her plea to maintain EU funds for poorer regions by the following words: “If the west starts reneging on these promises, they risk tearing up the European social contract.” One could almost laugh faced with such naivety — there is someone who still believes that there is a “European social contract”! — had it not been tragic all together.

Thirty years later: intellectual poverty, depopulation, fragmented resistances

Havel, Kundera, Milosz, Konrad, Michnik, Heiner Müller… the names I learned to respect when I was still a kid. But where are the Eastern European literary and intellectual giants today? Force yourself to remember one or two names — save Slavoj Žižek — that have a profound influence on global debates? You might have a hard time and you will eventually come back to Žižek as indisputably the only post-socialist thinker to have an impact on the international intellectual and philosophical stage.

Here Žižek only confirms the above-mentioned Yugoslav exceptionalism within the Cold War order thanks to its own road to socialism. Žižek could become relevant in the West because he knew the West already back home in Yugoslavia. It massively imported American and Western popular culture, literature and philosophy, whilst its citizens could freely travel and work abroad. He triumphed at Western universities in the 1990s and the 2000s with his entertaining de-masking of the capitalist ideology mixed with a disarming charm of Balkanic political incorrectness. He showed no inferiority complex and was hailed as the “Elvis of philosophy.”

But what happened to the others and to one of the previously most intellectually vibrant regions of the world? Do Eastern Europeans have nothing to say to the world after 1989? The economic and political subordination, achieved through uncritically importing the Western model of liberal democracy and neoliberal economy, translated itself into cultural and intellectual submission as well. As in economy or consumerism, Eastern Europeans rushed to “catch up” with the West they envied so much.

They imported and translated the classics of liberalism and the contemporary priests of the neoliberal thought on a mass scale — skillfully avoiding Western neo-Marxist and critical theory — whilst at the same time busying themselves cleaning their shelves and libraries of all that Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukacs and Brecht, including their own autonomous philosophical schools developed during that unfortunate “pause in history” called socialism.

The staggering intellectual poverty of the post-socialist region today means only one thing: a surprising incapacity of its intellectuals, writers, artists and scholars — with notable expectation of some marginal rebels — to originally analyze socio-economic and cultural condition of their societies today and to create an independent public position that could have wider social and political relevance. But to do so, they would need to critically analyze the contemporary European capitalist order and would thus need to check if somewhere in the basement some of the prohibited old leftists somehow survived.

In the unlikely event that this happens any time soon, the real consequences are already there and involve “people on the move,” which are not only the migrants or refugees escaping global pogroms and economic devastation, but Eastern Europeans themselves escaping post-socialism. Almost all post-socialist states recorded population losses between five and 25 percent in Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Only the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia registered moderate gains. In thirty years Bulgaria will have nearly 40 percent fewer people than in 1990, and Romania, Serbia and Croatia roughly 30, 24 and 22 percent, respectively. Some observers already link the demographic disaster to the erosion of democracy and the triumphant nationalist right.

Whilst Eastern European NATO members ⁠— with the help of the Ukrainians ⁠— exercise for a potential clash with Russia, the Balkan states got the dirty job of EU’s border guards. Under the undeclared state of exception, they have freedom to break all international humanitarian conventions and to “push back” migrants on their borders. A series of filters have been created to minimize the number of immigrants who manage to pass through despite the multiple razor fences.

At the beginning of March 2020, the crisis escalated on the Turkish-Greek border. EU president Von der Leyen visited the area and congratulated the Greeks for sending the army against civilians to “protect Europe.” After severely punishing Greece in the previous years, the EU establishment expressed firmly that in this critical situation, it “stands with Greece.” The defeat and subordination — austerity-hit Greece has been relegated to the Southeastern inferior league — has acquired a new twist: the job of the subordinated, as it is often the case, is to turn against the unwanted.

So, how to resist, on one hand, the structural subordination, and on the other the predictable nationalist and neo-fascist reaction? In the context of rampant historic revisionism and near-total de-legitimization of the entire modern tradition of socialism, it is not easy to oppose both neoliberal capitalism and nationalist mobilization. The intellectual poverty described above means that an alternative to the two dominant forces —  liberal and nationalist-conservative —  can rarely be heard. Furthermore, progressive forces must often make coalitions with liberals to protect endangered rights, especially minority and women’s rights, and minimal democratic values from the onslaught of aggressive nationalists. Depopulation makes it even harder to develop progressive social and political movements, while at the same time reinforcing intellectual poverty through an unstoppable brain drain.

However, one can notice some partial successes such as the rise of social movements in the Balkans over the last decade, especially in the post-Yugoslav region, including the strong electoral performance of the Left party in Slovenia. It is again due to the aforementioned Yugoslav exceptionalism and to the fact that the strong tradition of anti-fascism and anti-nationalism, coupled with the unquenched thirst for social equality, still reverberates throughout this region. It also means that the death of the left in post-socialist Europe might have been prematurely announced.

Beyond reformism, towards a different unification in Europe

In the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, one could not fail to notice a huge scaffolding with one sentence illuminated with electric light bulbs. It says, “There will be no miracles here.” The artist behind this work, Nathan Coley, found this sentence in a 17th-century French royal proclamation in a town where allegedly many miracles had occurred. It could be displayed on every political institution, their role always being to prevent miracles within the given order.

The role of the EU as it stands is to prevent the miracle of its unification. The reason is simple, it was always a supra-national organization with an economic agenda that never presupposed equality. And there can be no unity — and thus unification as process — without equality. More concretely, the first condition for unity is political and socio-economic equality both within, and among political communities. The second condition is to look in the same direction when the future is concerned —  and this is impossible without the first condition. I am aware, like everyone else, that equality does not come by a magic wand or a revolutionary decree. But it has to be the guiding principle of our actions.

It is clear by now that the major intellectual and thus political mistake was made to conflate “Europe” with the European Union. It imposed itself even stronger with the waves of the EU’s Eastern enlargements when it had become almost possible to geographically equate the EU with Europe — everyone learned in the 1990s already to overlook the Balkans. Now, with Brexit things are slowly getting back to normal and we will, hopefully, more carefully distinguish between “Europe” and a political-economic inter-state organization covering large parts of the continent of Europe.

But old habits die hard. The Guardian‘s editor in chief, Katherine Viner, proudly proclaimed: “Britain is leaving Europe. The Guardian is not.” The obvious truth is that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has just left the EU, but that does not sound so appealing, hence the obfuscation, “Britain” for the UK, “Europe” for the EU, and an entirely false conclusion that the island of Great Britain and the northern part of the island of Ireland are no longer part of Europe. Little wonder then that in the same article, the author boasts that the Guardian was there “at the collapse of communism and reunification of Europe.”

The consequences of words, terms and platitudes we use are far-reaching. In a similar fashion, any criticism of the EU as governing body is often branded as “euroscepticism,” which comes to an amalgam of insane nationalists and leftist extremists. This article, for instance, has been written by someone who firmly believes that any progressive future on this part of Eurasia must be European. This does not necessarily involve the EU as it stands, but it might.

I find that the belief in “national” politics and sovereignty as we knew it in the 20th century is a dangerous delusion. It is disturbing that this myth persists among some parts of today’s left. An illusion that you can fight against global capitalism by recapturing old-fashioned national institutions, devoid of real power, cannot turn the left into a true transformative political movement. Its internationalist spirit demands a pan-European approach without fabricated dichotomies, geographical fatalism, and arbitrarily constructed borders of what Europe is — and what it is not.

But there is another problem with the progressive left in Europe today. Faced with the EU as the greatest historical effort to integrate the continent, it is important to avoid a false dilemma between its reform and — convinced that no reform of such neoliberal entity is possible —  its destruction that should eventually, in apocalyptic accelerationist imagination, unleash a class revolution on its ruins.

When it comes to reforming the EU, it seems that everyone has been busy writing manifestos, from Diem25‘s European New Deal, The “Manifesto for democratization of Europe” launched by Thomas Piketty, to the “Manifesto for the Founding of a European Republic,” written by Robert Menasse and Ulrike Guerot. The problem is that they do not take into account that the European unification did not really happen in Europe by the sheer power of the acquis communautaire and through the EU enlargements. Even worse, they do not even mention the subordinated post-socialist Europe, nor what to do with yet non-integrated Balkans.

Another inconvenient truth is that, realistically, no profound reforms of the EU as it is seem possible and, at the same time, its further erosion — and the COVID-19 crisis gives us a taste of it — might bring devastating consequences out of which no progressive outcome could develop. The vultures of souverenism, nationalism and neo-fascism are there and have already convinced large groups of European citizens, including moderate ones, that the world is basically a jungle in which only your — national — community could protect you. The “Europe of peoples” would for them only mean a temporary alliance of European chauvinists against global threats, from outside and from within. This horrifying vision, sadly, today has greater political resonance among Europeans of all classes than the old leftist hope that “another world is possible.”

We are standing today between the yet unacknowledged impossibility of European unification under the existing institutional arrangement, and the tempting abandonment of any attempts at unifying Europe. This offers, I believe, a real possibility for the truly emancipatory left to, beyond reformism, decry the non lieu of the European unification without abandoning Europe as space for a future unity based on equality. Under the circumstances, this will surely be a minoritarian position whose power lays in audacity to confront the reality as the first step to reshape it. Only then we might see miracles in Europe, again.