At the end of 2012, the German President Joachim Gauck visited Croatia. For some reason, I had the honour to be one of three Croatian intellectuals chosen to meet him and have a closed-room conversation about Croatia’s entry to the European Union, but mainly focused on the intellectual and cultural sphere.

      When you are invited to meet a president, if you are not a complete idiot, the immediate reaction should be the famous Lacanian lesson that ‘a madman who believes he is king is no madder than a king who believes he is king.’ In other words, a king who believes he possesses an inherent ‘king gene’ is implicitly mad. And the same goes for presidents. A ‘president’ is a symbolical function, even if – or, especially if – he is from Germany (where Angela Merkel runs the game).

      In the end, I was pleasantly surprised. It was really interesting to chat with Mr Gauck. He wasn’t just kindly present waiting for the official programme to end, but posed many different questions and showed interest in the Balkans. Although it was planned that culture had to be the main topic of our conversation, politics was in the air. Knowing him not only as an ‘unverbesserlicher Antikommunist’ (‘incorrigible anti-communist’, as the Stasi described Gauck in their file on him), but also as a former Lutheran pastor and someone who seriously studied theology, at one point I asked him a question about the relation between theology and debt, with a political subtext, of course. The question was based on a manuscript from the thirteenth century cited by Jacques Le Goff:

      Usurers sin against nature by wanting to make money give birth to money, as a horse gives birth to a horse, or a mule to a mule. Usurers are in addition thieves, for they sell time that does not belong to them, and selling someone else’s property, despite its owner, is theft. In addition, since they sell nothing other than the expectation of money, that is to say, time, they sell days and nights.⁷

      Le Goff offers a detailed analysis of how between the twelfth and fifteenth century a caste of tradesmen developed from a small and despised group into a powerful force not only influencing social relations or even architecture, but first and foremost – social time. What is, according to Le Goff, the hypothesis of the trading activity? Exact timing: the accumulation of supplies in anticipation of famine – buying and selling at optimum moments. In other words, what Le Goff wants to show is that – before the emergence of usurers – in the Middle Ages, time still belonged to God (or to the Church), but today it is primarily the object of capitalist expropriation/appropriation.⁸

      Gauck’s answer about the function of debt was this: ‘It is a matter of responsibility.’ Unfortunately, at this precise moment, as much as I was tempted to do so, I was polite enough not to graze the symbolic function of the President anymore. The question I wanted to pose was, of course, the following one: ‘Is it the responsibility of the German bankers, or of the Greek citizens who depend on the credit?’

      And it is not only a question about capitalist domination or financial speculation; it is a theological question par excellence. If our future is sold, then there is no future at all.

      And here we come to an interesting episode from recent Croatian history. When at the end of 2012 General Ante Gotovina, considered by many in Croatia as a war hero but ten years ago the biggest obstacle to the European future of Croatia, was freed from the International Court of Justice in The Hague after seven years of imprisonment, the first thing he did when he arrived back was give a speech at the central square in the capital of Croatia, where he offered a calm and terse message to the gathered crowd of 100,000 people: ‘The war belongs to the past; let’s turn to the future!’ Among primarily emotional and some nationalist reverberations, this was the most sober message. But only at first sight.

      Only a few days later, asked by a Serbian journalist about his stance towards the return of exiled Serbs to territories liberated by the operation ‘Storm’ (‘Oluja’), the General answered: ‘This is still their home, and I don’t have to invite them back, since you can’t invite someone to his own home.’ He concluded with: ‘But let’s turn to the future!’ The motive of the future as the main motto of the freed general was best summarised by his lawyer during a Croatian TV show. Asked what the General, now the single most popular person in Croatia, would do with his popularity, the lawyer answered succinctly: ‘He will use his popularity to promote the future.’ He added that the acquittal didn’t only justify the past, but also saved the future. Of course, what he forgot to add was that his future was business. Recently he invested in the gasification in his hometown Zadar, worth almost 800,000 euro. So finally, after the war and all this international justice business, we can take what we were fighting for in war – democracy and a free market!

      The unavoidable irony of this hyperinflation of the future lies in the fact that never since the break-up of Yugoslavia and the end of the war was there so much public debate and discussion about the past – not about the future. Not only people on the streets, but distinguished political analysts declared that only now ‘the war is over’ and that Croatia was finally ‘free’, which could only mean that until now all of us lived in the past. All of a sudden we were ejected into the future. Politicians, public intellectuals, newspapers, TV shows – all were full of confronting the past, resembling the period in Germany during the 1960s: on the one hand, what did the operation ‘Storm’ really mean (now the Hague Tribunal verdict had made it clear it was legitimised as a liberation operation), and on the other hand, what crimes were still inflicted on the Serbian minority (since the generals were freed, who was now responsible for the crimes that did happen?). Instead of falling into this trap of what Hegel would call ‘die schlechte Unendlichkeit’ (once again all the endless debates were about who killed more people and whose actions and victims were more justified), the General focused himself on the future.

      But what does the future really look like? As happens in rare moments, history was condensed within just a few days: at the end of 2012 the Croatian public was surprised by two other judgments that are not only giving a new meaning to the past, but also determining the future. The first verdict was against the former minister of economy, Radomir Čačić, who caused a traffic accident with two fatalities in Hungary in 2010. Although the minister was fully aware that there was a high chance he would end up in jail, he was behaving as if this didn’t concern him as the most important Croatian politician at that time. In a way, the fate of the country was held hostage by his past – because it was clear that he would be convicted, there was no future in his decisions or in his (austerity and privatisation) strategy. The second verdict was a ten-year prison sentence for the former prime minister for ‘war profiteering’. Among other things, Ivo Sanader was found guilty because between 1994 and 1995, during the war, he conferred high-interest rates on loans for Croatia, taking a commission of 5 per cent, which was around 7 million shillings. In other words, what he did during the 1990s directly affected the future of Croatia – namely today’s external debt.

      As we can see, the future didn’t die during those seven years when General Gotovina was in prison. The death of the future is inscribed in the very nation-building process. Yes, Croats fought in the war, and many fought really defending their homes and families, truly believing in a better Croatia. But at the same time, the ones who convinced them to fight for Croatia worked hard to steal