At the Fence of Metternich's Garden. Mykola Riabchuk
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resources of Russia. And they will never be as attractive, promising, disappointing, concerning, disturbing, menacing as their Eurasian neighbor. In these terms, the Western approach towards Eastern Europe will always remain as it has always been, utilitarian and instrumental. Charity begins at home, just keep this in mind.
2.
So what can Eastern Europe offer to the West? Geopolitical stability? Yes, to a certain degree, but the major concern still is Russia, and world’s security and stability depend mostly on developments there. Of course, Eastern Europe may have assumed again the role of cordon sanitaire, if it was stable itself (the Balkans are the major yet not the only problem), and if this role (a “linchpin of the new post-Cold War Europe,” in Strobe Talbott’s words) has not shifted eastward, to Ukraine. Then, maybe Eastern Europe can attract the West economically? Hardly so. There are no important natural resources there, and there is a dearth of goods that could compete on the Western markets. And the cheap labor force from the East is probably even less needed in the West than the cheap Eastern goods. Perhaps only some problems of economic as well as political transition may draw the attention of Western specialists—as material for esoteric books, articles and Ph.D. dissertations.
Then what about the culture, the last fortress where East Europeans retreated after numerous historical blows and where they cherished their imaginary statehood, their imaginary Europeanness, their inner freedom? Indeed, they have much to offer in this field; the last decades of communism witnessed an enormous revival of various forms of cultural activity, both in the legal framework and underground. But again, it was a high culture which could hardly affect anybody except a narrow circle of intellectuals, both in the East and in the West. Of course, the favorable political conjuncture of the 1980s had largely facilitated the influx of East European books, films, and fine arts to the West. And some East European names became really fashionable—not so much, however, from their major works as from their op-ed articles and interviews featured in the major Western newspapers and magazines. In 1989–1990, when this vogue reached its climax, Tony Judt complained that “the whole subject remains in the hands of the Zivilisationsliterati, of East and West alike,” but he also quite reasonably assumed that “after all, the fashion will pass, but it will at the very least leave in paperback translations a library full of works by authors, living and dead, of whom the Western reader was hitherto ignorant” [Judt 1990: 50].
In the West, however, as elsewhere in the world, ignorance can be quite compatible with the best libraries, full of the greatest works. I have met a lot of university students in the U.S. who had never heard names like Goethe, Faust, or Gogol, so I was not surprised that only a few of them knew who was Milosz, Brodsky, or Kundera (Havel appeared a bit more recognizable but mostly as a politician rather than a playwright). But even this partial ‘success’ of the Easterners is very likely to fade in the nearest future, since the communist threat has disappeared, the evil empire presumably fell in rubble, and new celebrities from the East, like Zhirinovsky, Zyuganov, and Lukashenko, have advanced in the pages of Western newspapers. Manchester capitalism seems to be less supportive for the liberal arts in Eastern Europe than over-aged and senile communism.
Today [1997], as we can easily notice, the best filmmakers move to the West to make their fortunes; and the best East European artists follow them and paint everything, including fences and walls; and the best musicians perform usually abroad, sometimes in Carnegie Hall, more often in churches and restaurants; and the writers and scholars penetrate Western universities to teach whatever they can: one of them (Yevgeny Yevtushenko) confessed recently in The New York Times that he is neither qualified nor academically prepared to teach Pushkin but, in his words, he loves the poet and will teach the love.
Apparently, it is not just a Polish but an East European problem; the tremendous endeavor of East European intellectuals to withstand totalitarianism and to preserve inner freedom has passed out and become history. Today [1997], the region enters a new, non-heroic era when the old habits of resistance and fighting are obsolete while the new habits of mundane systemic work are not yet acquired. The combatants of the long anticommunist struggle may feel disappointed and dissatisfied; they still employ their outdated discourse (and the harped-upon Central East European myth is just a part of it), but East European societies seem to be not very interested. Some people are lured by the populists, some turn back to the familiar communists, and some simply switch off their ears and brains from any political messages. We have entered a new epoch, and new leaders, ideas, and slogans are apparently needed. And Tony Judt’s sobering criticism of the Central European mythology might be as topical nowadays as ever:
To suppose that this part of the Continent was once a near-paradise of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic multiplicity and compatibility, producing untold cultural and intellectual riches, has been part of the Western image in recent years. Yet […] in truth Central Europe, from the Battle of the White Mountain down to the present, is a region of enduring ethnic and religious intolerance, marked by bitter quarrels, murderous wars, and frequent slaughter on a scale ranging from pogrom to genocide. Western Europe was not always much better, of course, but on the whole it has been luckier, which is almost as good [Judt 1990: 48].
Milan Kundera was certainly right when describing Central Europe as “not a state” but “a culture or a fate.” “Its borders [he wrote] are imaginary and must be drawn and redrawn with each new historical situation. Central Europe therefore cannot be defined and determined by political frontiers […] but by the great common situations that reassemble peoples, regroup them in ever new ways along the imaginary and ever-changing boundaries that mark a realm inhabited by the same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same common tradition.”
But he was apparently wrong when explaining why this myth (this “imaginary realm”, in his words) had not been appealing to Westerners; why it was considered as “outmoded and [was] not understood.” In Kundera’s view, Western Europe itself was “in the process of losing its own cultural identity,” “it no longer perceive[d] its unity as a cultural unity”; and because of this “it perceive[d] in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it [saw] in Central Europe only Eastern Europe” [Kundera 1984: 36–37].
There is no need at this point to go deeper into the problem of European identity as based on a common religion and culture (“the supreme values by which European humanity understood itself, defined itself, identified itself as European”). The major vulnerability of Kundera’s arguments does not lie in his hypothesis that there was a moment when European identity changed and culture bowed out, giving way to the marketplace, to technical feats, to mass media and to politics. Maybe he is right, maybe not. What seems to be really questionable in his theory is an unproved assumption that, before that very moment, Eastern Europe had been perceived in Europe as its integral part. History gives little evidence for this argument. To the contrary, Shakespeare’s well-known remark from the Tempest (“Bohemia. A desert country near the sea”) could serve a good motto to the entire history of Western-Eastern relations. “A desert country near the sea” is just another term for the black hole behind the fence of Metternich’s garden.
Today, Eastern Europeans have a good chance to remove the fence to the east—somewhere to the western or eastern Ukrainian borders (this depends on many circumstances, but first and foremost on the commitment of the removers). And then, Eastern Europe may have become just a Europe, without additional qualifications and humiliating discussions about who is ‘more’ Central and ‘more’ European. Exactly, as nobody in Benelux or in Switzerland cares whether they are Western or ‘Central Western’ Europeans.
3.
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