What lies beneath

Slovenia's greatest artists have been exiles, says Slavoj Zizek, so what will the country bring to the EU?

What lies beneath


In the months before Slovenia's entry to the European Union, whenever a foreign journalist asked me what new dimension Slovenia would contribute to Europe, my answer was: nothing. Slovenes are obsessed with the notion that, although a small nation, we are a cultural superpower: we possess a hidden treasury of 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 a wonderful scene from Fellini's Roma, which start to disappear the moment the daylight reaches them.

Such narcissism is not a Slovene speciality; there are versions of it all around eastern Europe: we value democracy more because we had to fight for it recently; we still know what true culture is, not being corrupted by cheap Americanisation, and so on. In reality, the most interesting Slovene artists and writers have either isolated themselves from the cultural mainstream, or left the country. Ivan Cankar, widely considered Slovenia's greatest writer, spent his most productive years in Vienna, and Veno Pilon, arguably the most important modernist painter, left early for Paris and stayed there.

The Slovene attitude of cultural superiority finds its counterpart in the patronising cliché according to which the east European post-communist countries are poor cousins who will be admitted back into the family only if they behave properly. (Recall the reaction to December's elections in Serbia, where nationalist gains were read as a sign that Serbia is "not yet ready for Europe".) A similar process is going on in Slovenia: the fact that nationalists collected enough signatures to enforce a referendum about the building of a mosque in Ljubljana is sad; the fact that a majority thinks the mosque should not be allowed is 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 to be a Slovene. In such cases, the occasional threats from Brussels cannot but appear welcome: show multiculturalist tolerance or else.

But this simplified picture is not the whole truth: the ex-communist countries that most ardently support the US "war on terror" are also deeply worried that their cultural identity, their very survival as nations, is threatened by the onslaught of Americanisation - we thus witness the paradox of pro-Bushist anti-Americanism. In Slovenia, the right-wing nationalist opposition reproaches the ruling coalition for promoting pop culture and mindless entertainment to turn Slovenes into an easily manipulated crowd incapable of serious reflection.

This ambiguity finds its perfect counterpart in the message of the west to post-communist countries. Recall the two-sided pressure the US was exerting on Serbia in the summer of 2003: to deliver suspected war criminals to the Hague, and to sign a bilateral treaty with the US obliging Serbia not to deliver to any international institution (ie, to the same Hague court) US citizens suspected of crimes against humanity - no wonder the Serb reaction was one of perplexed fury.

How do post-communist countries navigate in this sea with conflicting winds? If there is an ethical hero of recent times in ex-Yugoslavia, it is Ika Saric, a modest judge in Croatia who, without any clear public support and despite death threats, condemned general Mirko Norac and his colleagues to 12 years in prison for crimes committed in 1992 against Serb civilians. Before the sentence, the nationalist right, with its veterans' organisations, was perceived as a powerful force not to be provoked, and even the leftwing government refused to stand firmly behind the trial. But when the sentence was passed, nothing happened: the demonstrations were much smaller than expected and Croatia rediscovered itself as a state ruled by law.

In an old joke from the German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter from me is written in blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the west, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair - the only thing unavailable is red ink..."

Is this not how ideology functions? We "feel free", now as then, when we lack the language - "the red ink" - to articulate our unfreedom. It is the basic task of critical art and culture to provide the red ink.

But we should not forget that the crimes of Norac and his companions were justified as a defence of European values against what was seen as the primitive Orthodox or Muslim universe. The story goes back to Milosevic and his strategic alliance with the anti-communist nationalism simmering mostly among conservative poets and writers in the 1980s. True, Milosevic "manipulated" nationalist passions - but it was writers, Dobrica Cosic among them, who delivered him the stuff to be manipulated. They were at the origins of it all, when, in the 70s and early 80s, they started to sow the seeds of aggressive nationalism in other ex-Yugoslav republics. Instead of the industrial-military complex, we in post-Yugoslavia had the poetic-military complex, personified in Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian-Serb poet-warrior. And the same thing applies in Slovenia, where among the opponents of the mosque in Ljubljana are nationalist writers who oppose it on the grounds of a perceived threat to European values.

There is a perplexity around the issue of post-communist countries joining the European Union: which Europe will they be entering? Max Horkheimer wrote in the 1930s that those who do not want to speak (critically) about liberalism should also keep silent about fascism. Mutatis mutandis, one should say to detractors of the new US imperialism: those who do not want to engage critically with Europe should also keep silent about the US.

This, then, is perhaps the "contribution" to Europe of Slovenia and the other accession countries: to cause us to ask the question that lies beneath the self-congratulatory celebrations: what Europe are we joining? And when confronted with this question, we are all in the same boat, "New" and "Old" Europe.

Slavoj Zizek is professor and senior researcher in the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana.