Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac
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allow humanity to contest or forgive each other, and then move on and act anew in the future. Recovering human meaning is a prerequisite for revitalising human possibilities, and the Faust legend is one such cultural resource opening up human history to new beginnings.
In our citation of the works of Goethe and others, we affirm cultural remembering against an abstract de-humanising cosmopolitanism. Such a technique was deliberately practiced in the dissident poetry of Eastern Europe against totalitarian amnesia. The New Europe of cosmopolitan empire represents technocracy over democracy, scientism over humanism. In its different forms, scientism is the governance of societies according to natural science models, and the political uses of sciences have implications for political freedom and scientific freedom (Beale and Kidd 2017; Djilas 1972; Monk 1999). Evolving transnational governance within the continent and beyond involves eroding national belonging, and independent national political and legal traditions (Bickerton 2012), and cultural historical forgetting from the common law system of north-west Europe to the socialist self-management system of south-east Europe. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk wryly observes the redundancy of European national languages and humanist traditions under a ‘monoglossia’ of transnational technocratic governance ‘positivistic training planners object to the humanities in general, and the concept of literary and artistic education in particular. They see clearly that reading Faust costs entire days, while War and Peace delays the reader for several weeks’ (Sloterdijk 2013 [2005]: 260).
We seek to analyse the leading ideas of the New Europe against the past ideals expressed in the Faustian European spirit. The New Europe we refer to is not that of Eastern Europe versus Western Europe. Instead we mean the post-1989 New Europe and its emerging model of cosmopolitan empire in contrast to the former European ideal as a family of free self-determining nation states, an ideal traceable back to the Greek independent city states in the classical ancient period, and in the modern period to the Dutch republic whose history inspired Goethe’s work. Some of the new historiography deconstructing national histories and their colonial wrongs is ironically invoked to legitimise cosmopolitan empire of today against national self-determination, while its expanding transnational governance has its own neo-colonial relations and inhumane ramifications.
This book is focused on the rise and fall of European aspirations for national development to provide material prosperity and prevent natural disasters. European models of transnational governance are crystalising in forms retreating from the humanist European spirit of freedom, the pursuit of knowledge, and openness to historical change. To the earlier key moments of cosmopolitan thinking identified by the sociologist Ulrich Beck (1944–2015) (Beck 2006: 45), we may add Beck’s own form of risk cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan empire (Beck and Grande 2007). Beck gained the status of a leading public voice in Germany, and his ideas have strongly influenced European thinking on transnational governance. Beck’s studies are compelling in their analysis of globalisation, the erosion of nation states, and their critique of reductive profit-seeking economic models, neglecting the social and environmental harms of their economic activities (Beck 1992 [1986]). Beck sought transnational governance to curb the power of nation states, national interest, and majoritarian democracy to oppose neoliberal economics and support environmentalism. Nevertheless his analysis equivocated over whether he was describing or prescribing a future where people no longer enjoyed the political freedoms and material securities of home and faced a precarious, homeless and migratory future (Beck 2016). The transnational governance of risk cosmopolitanism, and its attack on national independence, has its own serious costs, which are ironically leaving people more exposed to economic exploitation and insecurity. The new millennium has witnessed an ironic convergence of Beck’s risk cosmopolitanism driven by environmentalism and the neoliberalism he opposed in today’s resilience governance, which encompasses security, development, and disaster management (Duffield 2018).
Beck’s model of ‘world risk society’ essentially opposed human venture (Beck 2006) and wanted to restrain human activity whose outcomes were unknown. Risk-averse cosmopolitanism is diametrically opposed to the Faustian endorsement of human deeds. However, without new human deeds venturing into the unknown, progressive social change is stifled. Goethe imagined building sea defences and reclaiming new land for cultivation. Risk cosmopolitanism is counter to engineering bold visions of inland paradises or the faith in common action involved to realise such possibilities. Europe is retreating from brave human construction to eradicate disasters and leaving people more exposed to natural forces. Indeed Sloterdijk, whose last name ironically invokes the Dutch engineering tradition, is one of the leading European academics embracing a post-humanist philosophy and treating attachment of self to place, especially the modern nation state, as fallacious (Sloterdijk 2013 [2005]: 150–4). Moreover the humanities themselves have retreated from humanism, and in their retreat from humanist beliefs, they are making the humanities and the study of literature redundant. Any bureaucratic objections to the long read that Sloterdijk observes would have little impact in an intellectual climate affirming the value of the classical humanist tradition. Goethe himself shared assumptions with the scientific governance being proposed by the then new doctrine of positivism, while remaining at the heart of European literature (Berman 1988 [1982]: 72).
Faust’s vision of free establishing a free land with free inhabitants is an aspiration worth holding on to. Yet Goethe’s vision of political freedom was limited. Goethe presented an ambitious hydro-engineering project. Faust commanded public works, but we see no public voice in action, rather conscripted workers (Watt 1996: 205–6). At the end of Faust Part II’s larger world, we seem more distant from people than we were in Part I’s more personal world whose traditional Faust treatment depicted more eloquent yearnings for freedom. Goethe was described by Carlyle as a seer (Carlyle 1893 [1832]). No doubt Goethe would have liked being cast in the role. Goethe was inclined to enlightened despotism and disdainful towards the public (Lewes 1908 [1863]: 434–42). Risk cosmopolitanism and transnational governance echo Goethe’s enlightened patrician attitudes, but without his redemptive engineering of the future. Almost invariably the Faust myth is invoked today to condemn the Faustian bargains and pacts of modernity and propose a more humble human existence on the planet. Goethe’s Faust embodied a progressive humanist moment in European history. Today’s post-humanism embodies a defeated humanist spirit and an impoverished fragmented existence for the many, who find themselves without the securities of the old modernist welfare state and living amid crumbling national infrastructures (Duffield 2018). Its resilience governance offers a Faustian puppet condition, and expectations of people behaving and adapting within prescribed limits, and wary of those daring to think, act, and judge independently as either individuals, communities, or states. That life is becoming more menaced and insecure is especially evident in the historical European borderlands where Tesla was born. Arendt warned of the dangers of a new political homelessness, where the communal world between us erodes, and the political sandstorms that may ensue in desert conditions (Arendt 2005: 201–4). Regions of Europe today witness such desertification and intimations of potential sandstorms. The Faust myth continues to speak to the dilemmas of modern societies. Engaging with its themes helps clarify the circumstances we confront and how we could act. Above all the yearnings for freedom, self-determination and a meaningful existence animate its abiding attraction. Renewed Faustian aspirations and collective endeavour could humanise the continent and fulfil the earlier promise embodying freedom, development, and security.
Outline of study
Goethe, like Shakespeare, has accumulated a vast literature around his work. Goethe has been described as having one of the most thoroughly documented lives as a writer. Concerned with preserving his own legacy, Goethe commissioned family members and employed individuals, notably Johann Eckermann, to archive his work. Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (1930 [1836]) is the best contemporary account of Goethe’s thoughts, rivalling Goethe’s own autobiographical volumes (Goethe 1974 Vol. I and II). Among the biographies of Goethe in English, G. H. Lewes’ Life and Works of Goethe (1908 [1864]) is one of the great nineteenth-century commentaries on Goethe, with important insights into his literary and theatre work. Of present studies, Nicholas Boyle’s two volumes of Goethe: The Poet and the Age are wonderfully detailed (Boyle 1991, 2000). While Andrew Piper’s Brief Lives is a compelling introduction to Goethe’s times and individual works, Goethe’s Faust