What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents. Slavoj Žižek
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And there are a number of other cases, which date back to telecommunications, another once-profitable industry that is now German, while all the doors are now open to privatisation of the railway, energy sector, healthcare system etc.
And here again we return to Gotovina and his ‘promotion of the future’. If you think that his vision of the future is an empty gesture without any content, think again. What did the General do right before the Croatians voted in the referendum on joining the EU? Although during his time in prison he hesitated to give any political messages, just a day before the EU referendum he urged all Croatian citizens to go to the referendum and vote for the European Union – and, to be sure the future would be certain, he himself voted in The Hague’s prison cell. It is precisely this perspective which can give us a clear explanation of this hyperinflation of the future, which now gets a clear outline. Just a few days after his ‘futuristic speech’ in Zagreb, he visited the coastal city of Zadar where he admitted that his vision of future was the European Union. Then, eventually, he released a dove of peace into the air.
But doesn’t the future seem a bit different? A long time ago, on one of Zagreb’s façades stood a famous graffiti: ‘We don’t have Cash, how about MasterCard?’ (Namely, the translation of ‘Gotovina’ is neither more nor less than ‘Cash’.) Today we have both, General Gotovina and MasterCard, but we don’t have any cash – we live in an economy of debt. Here the insights of the Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, known for his thesis about semio-capitalism as the new form of capitalism (financialisation as a process of sign-making), could be useful. In his book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, he claims that banking is actually about storing time. In a sense, in banks we are storing our past, but also our future. Bifo goes a step further and claims that German banks are full of our time: ‘The German banks have stored Greek time, Portuguese time, Italian time, and Irish time, and now the German banks are asking for their money back. They have stored the futures of the Greeks, the Portuguese, the Italians, and so on. Debt is actually future time – a promise about the future.’9
And if we now interpret the conversation with President Gauck, aren’t precisely German or Austrian banks, among others, storing Croatian time as well? Most of the citizens – not only in Croatia, but in the whole region of the Balkans – are now highly indebted, owing money to foreign-owned banks that have spread around the Balkans and control its whole financial sector. According to some estimation, 75.3 per cent of banks in Serbia, 90 per cent in Croatia and up to 95 per cent in Bosnia and Herzegovina actually belong to German, Italian and French banks.10 The integration of the Balkans into the EU already started twenty years ago!
So, what we should do today is to repeat the famous slogan ‘Danke Deutschland’, but of course, in a cynical manner. When Germany recognised Croatia as an independent state in December 1991, a Croatian singer performed a song under the title ‘Danke Deutschland’ on national television. Although the kitschy song actually wasn’t very popular in Croatia, it clearly shows the prevailing atmosphere: this was the time when many villages and towns in Croatia had a Genscher Street or a Genscher Square, named after the German foreign minister, and even today there are some cafés having his name. As was expected, the song ‘Danke Deutschland’ was immediately used – and played rather more often – in Serbia as a mean of counterpropaganda, which claimed this was further proof of the eternal relationship between Germany and Croatia, namely between the ‘Third Reich’ and the Ustaša regime in Croatia. TV Belgrade went even so far as to play the clip for ‘Danke Deutschland’ over filmed scenes of crowds greeting Germans in the middle of Zagreb at the beginning of the Second World War. Why is it so impossible to imagine such an enthusiasm regarding the enlargement of today’s Europe?
In an early text published during the war, in 1992, Slavoj Žižek developed the famous thesis that the Balkan ‘ethnic dance macabre’ was actually a symptom of Europe, reminding us of a story about an anthropological expedition trying to contact in New Zealand a tribe which allegedly danced a terrible war dance in grotesque death masks. When the members of the expedition reached the tribe, they asked the village to perform it for them, and next morning the performed dance did in fact match the description. The expedition was very satisfied; they returned to civilisation and published a much-praised report on the savage rites of the primitives. But here comes the surprise: shortly afterwards, another expedition arrived at this tribe and they found out that this terrible dance actually didn’t exist in itself at all. It was created by the aborigines who somehow guessed what the strangers wanted and quickly invented it for them, to satisfy their demand. In other words, the explorers received back from the aborigines their own message. And, as you can guess, Žižek’s point is that people like Hans-Dietrich Genscher were the 1990s version of the New Zealand expedition: ‘They act and react in the same way, overlooking how the spectacle of old hatreds erupting in their primordial cruelty is a dance staged for their eyes, a dance for which the West is thoroughly responsible. The fantasy which organised the perception of ex-Yugoslavia is that of the Balkans as the Other of the West: the place of savage ethnic conflicts long ago overcome by civilised Europe, the place where nothing is forgotten and nothing learned, where old traumas are being replayed again and again, where symbolic links are simultaneously devalued (dozens of cease-fires broken) and overvalued (the primitive warrior’s notions of honour and pride).’11 But far from being the Other of Europe, ex-Yugoslavia was rather Europe itself in its Otherness, the screen onto which Europe projected its own repressed reverse.
And doesn’t the same hold for the peripheral countries of Europe as well? Isn’t Greece, soon joined by Croatia, today’s mirror of Europe and all what is repressed in the centre? On the one hand, considering the Balkans still as ‘the Other of the West’, just before the entrance of Croatia to the EU, the European Commission engaged a London-based public relations agency – which usually worked for Coca-Cola, JP Morgan Chase and British Airways – at a cost of 20 million euro to ‘break the myths and misconceptions about EU enlargement’ and to ensure Croatia’s accession was smooth.12 On the other hand, like the aborigines of New Zealand, trying to fit into the Western fantasy, Croatia’s government had to spend 600,000 euro, just before the referendum on the EU, to convince the Croats they would soon become part of civilised Europe.
Already these two details show that the enlargement of the EU is definitely not what it has been before. There is no optimism in the air anymore. And the true question still remains: what does Europe want? And whose responsibility is it for the current state of Europe? This is something this book will try to show, not only questioning the responsibility of the European elites but also rethinking the responsibility of the Left.
Slavoj Žižek
3 WHEN THE BLIND ARE LEADING THE BLIND, DEMOCRACY IS THE VICTIM
In one of the last interviews before his fall, Nicolae Ceausescu was asked by a western journalist how he justified the fact that Romanian citizens could not travel freely abroad although freedom of movement was guaranteed by the constitution. His answer was in the best tradition of Stalinist sophistry: true, the constitution guarantees freedom of movement, but it also guarantees the right to a safe, prosperous home. So we have here a potential conflict of rights: if Romanian citizens were to be allowed to leave the country, the prosperity of their homeland would be threatened. In this conflict, one has to make a choice, and the right to a prosperous, safe homeland enjoys clear priority.
It seems that this same spirit is alive and well in today’s Slovenia, where, on 19 December 2012, the constitutional court found that a referendum on legislation to set up a ‘bad bank’ and a sovereign holding would be unconstitutional – in effect banning a popular vote on the matter. The referendum was proposed by trade unions challenging the government’s neoliberal economic politics, and the proposal got enough signatures to make it obligatory.
The idea of the ‘bad bank’ was of a place to transfer all bad credit from main banks, which would then be salvaged by state money (i.e. at taxpayers’ expense), so preventing any serious inquiry into who was responsible for this bad credit in the first place. This measure, debated for months, was far from being generally accepted, even by financial specialists. So why prohibit the referendum?