What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents. Slavoj Žižek
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a similar type of ‘blackmail alternative’, among which the most frequent was: ‘If we don’t enter the EU, we will stay in the Balkans.’ In such an atmosphere it is no surprise that the referendum on Croatia’s accession to the EU recorded the lowest turnout among all current member states. With an attendance of only 43 per cent of its citizens, Croatia has beaten the previous record holder, Hungary, where the referendum was attended by 45 per cent. One possible explanation was nicely formulated by Croatia’s prime minister after the first official results: ‘Afraid that the referendum might fail, we changed the Constitution’, involuntarily echoing the famous proverb by Bertolt Brecht: ‘When government doesn’t agree with the people, it’s time to change the people.’ Not only were the rules of the referendum indeed changed in 2010 because of the EU accession, but also other (legal, economic etc.) things were settled beforehand.
When, only six days after Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation which triggered the ‘Arab Spring’, 41-year-old TV engineer Adrian Sobaru attempted to commit suicide during the Romanian prime minister’s speech in parliament by throwing himself off the gallery dressed in a T-shirt saying, ‘You have killed our children’s future! You sold us!’ almost no-one took this as an indication of what was going to happen in the European Union. Only a year later, thousands of Romanians protested against austerity measures (mainly provoked by the privatisation of the healthcare system). Unlike at the time of the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 or 2007, there is no optimism in the air anymore – and yet, Croatia is joining the club.
Only last year the EU was facing huge protests and several general strikes from Spain, Portugal and Greece to England, Hungary, Romania and future member state Croatia.13 And there is a new anti-democratic tendency in the EU, which does not only manifest itself in the success of right-wing movements (Golden Dawn, etc.) and governments (Viktor Orbán). An even bigger threat to democracy is the new technocrat elites in power; people who are actually provoking new nationalist tendencies and who all have one thing in common: they all worked for Goldman Sachs; people such as Mario Monti, Mario Draghi or Lucas Papademos. Actually, the last one is the best example for what is wrong with the EU today. If we play with the etymological meaning of ‘papa’ (which means ‘father’ and ‘goodbye’), at the same time you have a ‘father of the people’ (Papa demos) and someone who is saying ‘goodbye to the people’ (Pa-pa demos). When we spoke about this weird congruity, Slavoj Žižek made a brilliant Hegelian synthesis: if you put the two together, you have neither more nor less than the mythology of Saturn who is eating all of its children, except Jupiter! (Namely, ‘papa’ in Croatian and Slovenian language also means ‘eating’.)14
Actually, the Croatian referendum was another symptom of the EU’s democratic deficit. We had a referendum after everything was already settled. We did not have a referendum in 2003, when Croatia applied for EU membership. We did not have a referendum in 2005, when Croatia officially opened negotiations with the EU. We did not even have a referendum in 2010, when our Constitution and the rules of the referendum were changed because of future EU membership. In other words, today we are in a situation where we can only choose what was already chosen throughout these stages. The question, repeated continuously by the Croatian government, ‘What is the alternative?’ already sounds like blackmail and is strangely reminiscent of the there-is-no-alternative-slogan made famous by Margaret Thatcher. And it is not by chance that we have a paradox here in the shape of an allegedly social-democratic government actually putting forward neoliberal reforms faster and more efficiently than the former conservative government. Already now – as a plan to ‘rescue’ the economy – this social democratic government is announcing gradual privatisations of highways and railways, the energy sector and even prisons.
At the same time we witness the bizarre situation where the government is trying to convince the people that Croatia has to join the EU because, firstly, we will no longer be part of the Balkans anymore, and secondly, we will finally be part of the West. Sometimes it is enough to take a look at the path of the previous candidates who are now full members of the club, to see what sort of mythology haunts each new member state. In his provoking book Eurosis – A critique of the new Eurocentrism, Slovenian sociologist Mitja Velikonja made an extensive discourse analysis starting from the observation that the infinitely reproduced mantras of the new Eurocentric meta discourse have caught on and became normalised within all spheres of social life: in politics, in the media, in mass culture, in advertising, in everyday conversations. In his own words: ‘Never during the one-party era of the uniformity of mind under Yugoslav totalitarianism did I see as many red communist stars as I saw yellow European stars in the spring of 2004, that is to say, under democracy.’15 In short, what we have is a kind of ‘virosis’, therefore the neologism ‘Eurosis’.
The pattern is always the same: according to the then Slovenian foreign minister, by joining the EU, Slovenia has come ‘one step closer to the European centre, European trends, European life, European prosperity, European dynamics and the like’. On the other hand, all things that are ‘backwards’, ‘bad’ or ‘out’ stand for – you can guess – the Balkans. Or, as one journalist said in the Spanish daily El Pais, ‘By joining the EU, Slovenia escaped the Balkan curse.’ But if we take a closer look, Europe is ‘Balkanised’ already, and, on the other hand, the Balkans is ‘Europeanised’ as well. This can be best explained if we look at the main myths circulating in the Balkan region since Slovenia entered the EU and moving from one candidate to the other, finding its temporary resort in Croatia and waiting to transmigrate to other countries such as Montenegro or Serbia. The first myth is the one about corruption, the second on prosperity and the third brings us to the recent Nobel Peace Prize.
Here is the first myth: ‘When we enter the EU, there will be less corruption.’ By now, almost everyone knows about the Hollywood-like story of Croatian ex-Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, escaping from Croatia and being caught on the highway near Salzburg. He was accused of several corruption affairs, including an Austrian bank (Hypo-Alpe Adria) and Hungarian oil company (MOL). In other words, without European partners, he couldn’t be involved in these corruption affairs. The last discovery is a ‘deal’ made between Sanader and Sarkozy, because of which Croatia’s national carrier, Croatia Airlines, faces bankruptcy unless it can change a contract that was signed in 2008 by the former prime minister. Sanader struck a deal worth 135 million Euros with the former French president, to buy four planes back in 2008 with Airbus France. Croatia Airlines didn’t really need the planes, but it was Sanader’s ticket to secure a meeting with Sarkozy, just before France took over the presidency of the Council of the EU. At the same time, Jacques Chirac was found guilty of corruption and the German President Christian Wulff had to resign because of alleged corruption. So much about the thesis there will be less corruption in the EU than in the Balkans. What we are facing here is a clear case of applying double standards perfectly illustrated by a recent edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung where Commission President Barroso gave a big interview claiming we need ‘more Europe’, accompanied by a small piece of news that Romania won’t get the green light to enter the Schengen Zone. Why? Because of corruption. So speaking about ‘reforms’ and ‘monitoring’, why isn’t the same applied to the EU itself? And to take it to the extreme: why shouldn’t new member states ‘monitor’ the EU?
And here we come to the second myth: ‘When we enter the EU, there will be more prosperity.’ It is not difficult to dispute this myth. It’s enough to look at the ‘prosperity’ of PIIGS or, as they have recently been called, the GIPSI, an expression which, by the way, perfectly illustrates the actual significance of the periphery for the centre. Croatia will not join the centre – it will be part of the GIPSI states. Recent statistics show that Croatia – with more than 50 per cent – is the third country in Europe when it comes to youth unemployment, after Greece and Spain. As the Polish philosopher Jaroslaw Makowski noticed, ‘Until now, sociologists have focused on the so-called “lost generation”, but politicians had been wary of using the phrase, until Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti broke the conspiracy of silence, telling his young compatriots: “You’re a lost generation.” Or, more precisely, “The truth, and unfortunately it’s not a pleasant one, is that the promise of hope – in terms of transformation and improvement of the system – will be only for those young people who will come of age in a few years.”’
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