Mykola Riabchuk - At the Fence of Metternich's Garden

Like any myth, the concept of Central Eastern Europe will not dissipate immediately. It will exist until there is Eastern Europe as a certain post-communist reality, and until unpredictable “Asia” stands on the Bug, or the Dnieper, or elsewhere eastward. As any myth, it has its own power, since it was created as a rephrasing of classical myths—those of the lost paradise and the promised land. The paradise was the Habsburg Empire and “cultural unity”, while the promised land was the EC, NATO and, again, “cultural unity” within a broader scope. In the internal sphere, this myth facilitated popular anti-Soviet and anticommunist mobilization; in the international sphere, it substantiated demands to the West for further recognition and support.

Yet, from the very beginning, this myth proved to be extremely exclusivist and, thereby, harmful; its side effect was not only the mystification of ‘central’ Easterners with overly pinkish visions of their pasts and futures, but also the establishment of a very dubious hierarchy of ‘more’ and ‘less European’ nations in Eastern Europe. Since ‘European belonging’, under peculiar political circumstances, had been far more than just a cultural/geographical notion, the detachment of some ‘Central’ European nations from Eastern Europe implicitly meant that the non-members of this privileged club did deserve less, if any, Western attention and help. In practical terms, it looked like a quarrel among the prisoners over which of them used to love freedom more and deserved to be released first.

Today [1997], as the ‘central’ Easterners elbow their way to EC and NATO and raise up their European credentials, one cannot but notice, with some regret, that they appear no less exclusivist than the Westerners as soon as they manage to jump over Metternich’s fence. And now, they come to believe that “Asia” begins somewhere to the east of Poland and to the south of Hungary, and that Macedonia, Belarus, and Armenia are but more “desert countries near the sea.” The Westerners had already paid the price for their exclusiveness, but for the Easterners, the price may be much higher.

All our talk about cultural unity is worthless as long as we neglect Albanians because they are poor, we neglect Belarusians because they are heavily Sovietized, we neglect Lusatian Sorbs because they are too small, we neglect Georgians and Armenians because these two oldest Christian nations are too far away from our gardens.

Who cares about all that? Who cares about wonderful Georgian cinema, which certainly was the best in the former Soviet Union and, perhaps, one of the most interesting in the world? Who cares about excellent Georgian theatre, painting, about the bright philosophers and translators (the first and only translation of Joyce’s Ulysses in the USSR was Georgian!). Who cares about great Georgian literature, which has at least two modern writers, Otar Chiladze and Chabua Amiredjibi, who would have honored the long list of Nobel Prize winners if anybody managed to read and translate them from their incomprehensible language … Again, the “tremendous intensity of spirit,” the “wild hunger for Europe” demonstrated by a small East European nation which never lost its cultural longing for Europe, have not been noticed anywhere, even by the closest neighbors. So how can we, “Central East Europeans”, complain about somebody’s ignorance, being equally ignorant ourselves?!

My Ukrainian friends may contend that their country, at least its westernmost part, is no less ‘Central European’ than Poland or Slovakia—but how to promote it into the privileged club of ‘true’ Central Europeans, if even Croats and Transylvanians look at the entrance as rather suspicious candidates? My friends may argue that the Central European, ‘Habsburgian’, myth is alive in Ukrainian Lviv even more than in Vienna or Prague; they may bring, among many proofs, the programmatic issue of the journal “Ї”—with Ukrainian translations of Bruno Schulz, Sacher-Masoch and Milan Kundera, and the stylish portrait of the emperor Franz Josef on the cover sheet of their coveted holy scripture. They would barely understand why the ‘true’ Europeans just laugh at it or, at best, smile condescendingly.

Sincerely, I believe we should stop this competition in symbolism and focus more on daily life and mundane issues. If we believe in ‘Europe’ as a system of values, we should promote them within, regardless of whether we are located in Central, or Eastern, or Central-Eastern Europe, or on the Pacific rim. Small is beautiful, and marginality might be an asset. It depends on how we manage to use its tricky advantages.

The process which Eastern Europe is undergoing now can be called normalization. It is interesting but hardly attractive. It promises little room for any ‘uniqueness’ and would certainly dissatisfy East European intellectuals who want their countries to be at the forefront of world attention. But the combatant consciousness must have gone, and exhibitionist complexes vanished. In the best scenario—unless ‘Asia’ returns, and new dictatorships re-emerge, and a new Bosnia flares up—Eastern Europe would be successfully marginalized and would certainly draw no more attention than Greece, Portugal, Finland, or Iceland. Is that so bad? For old combatants—probably yes, but for most people—no. Most people don’t care about the fence, whether it’s eastern, or central, or south-eastern. They care about the garden. I feel it’s a good time to roll up our sleeves and till it.

1998

Back in 1994, The Atlantic Monthly featured Matthew Conneley’s and Paul Kennedy’s article ‘Must It Be the West against the Rest?’ with a provocative picture on its cover. A white middle-class American was grilling a barbecue in his backyard while hundreds of colored people of all races faced the process silently from behind the fence.

The metaphor seems to be highly topical. No contemporary discussion on the future of Europe and of the world can ignore the profound West/Rest divide that tends to become even deeper, harsher and irreconcilable. One need not be a committed Marxist to appreciate Immanuel Wallerstein’s idea of ‘world-economy’ as a highly hierarchical system where the developed ‘core’ nations (the ‘West’) have historically established dominance over the ‘periphery’ and ‘semi-periphery’ (the ‘Rest’), and where no ‘peripheral’ or ‘semi peripheral’ nation can get into the ‘core’ without the core nations’ support and consent.

Such a view, however discredited by the Leninist revolutionaries and anti-globalist zealots, and even more compromised by the corrupted, incompetent and repressive ‘peripheral’ regimes, is largely accepted by those intellectuals who bother to think about global problems and who reasonably loathe a world where the average European cow gets more in subsidies than an average African manages ever to earn, however hard he or she works. Yet, at the same time, the view seems to be unacceptable for the majority of the common people in the West—not only because of the discrediting and compromising factors mentioned above, and not only due to the apparent absence of any feasible solution in sight. It might be psychologically uncomfortable to recognize that the well-being of the West is largely based on the poverty of the Rest; that the so-called ‘free market’ favors the stronger player who is in position to establish (and change if necessary) the rules of the game, i.e., all sorts of self-indulgent tariffs, quotas, and subsidies; and that the popular liberal mantra of free movement of goods, services, and capital—without free movement of the labor force—is just Western hypocrisy.