Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac
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settlement. The statehood of the republics was recognised, but their national development has been circumscribed by the lack of industrial development strategies, which reflects a European-wide outlook. European turning away from Faustian industrial development is captured in its transnational environmental advocacy condemning large dam building. The World Commission on Dams in its 2000 report confirmed the shift of international development goals away from big dam building and large-scale hydro-engineering as sea defences for flood prevention or as energy provision. The demise of its old industries and slowdown of new industrial projects in Croatia illustrates Europe’s rejection of Tesla’s Faustian engineering dreams.
Chapter 6, ‘The Metamorphosis of Risk Cosmopolitanism’, discusses political catastrophism and the anti-Faustian ideas underlying European governance which believes that national self-determination and industrial development are no longer tenable. Instead its resilience models converge environmental and liberal thinking on complexity and complex adaptive systems, managing how populations function in insecure changing environments. This convergence is evident in the writings of the sociologist Ulrich Beck and the economist Friedrich Hayek. Beck’s risk cosmopolitanism was shaped by environmental concerns and advocated the precautionary principle being adopted in European decision-making to prevent environmental harm. He was critical of industrial growth strategies and utilitarian economic models. Ideologically his risk cosmopolitanism opposed Hayek’s free market economics. Nevertheless, both were sceptical of collective human agency embodied in the nation state and adopted ecological systems thinking. Thus ecologism may reconcile the neoliberal shift from national industrial strategies, leaving national infrastructure to market forces. Collective retreat is manifest in the move away from large-scale sea defences to eradicate floods to non-structural flood management and the return of reclaimed land to the sea. Resilience governance deserts the Faustian dream of political and material freedom. Instead malicious demons dictate a misanthropic outlook seeking to circumscribe human activity and secure nature against humanity. We are left with what the academic and former aid worker Mark Duffield has termed ‘post-humanitarianism’, a vision where populations find themselves living in the ruins of modern hopes and expected to live with disasters (Duffield 2018).
Chapter 7, ‘Submerging Humanity and Rewilding Tesla’s Homeland’, concerns scientism, and the demise of European humanism, and its influence on ecological rewilding models in Croatia. The twentieth-century Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža saw the experience of Dutch nation building as prefiguring the challenges faced by the Balkan nations in the twentieth century. The modern nation builders of his generation did not share the same antipathy towards modern industrialisation or romantic view of living in pre-modern conditions displayed by many western European intellectuals. These national leaders believed in harnessing nature to humanity’s needs. They were inspired by Tesla’s Faustian dreams of engineering the future. For they loathed their country’s marginal existence. They wanted to escape the condition of being European borderlands and become free peoples and countries. Yet what was the direction of modern politics, science, and development? Goethe’s Faust loomed over the physicists developing atomic science, even before the dropping of the atomic bomb. Tesla sought solutions in science against politics but was wary of the new physics because of its potential to shatter the world. Conversely the Yugoslav political leader-turned-dissident Milovan Djilas supported industrial development and was open to the new physics but opposed scientism or scientific dogmatism as undermining both political freedom and scientific endeavour. Djilas’ concerns over scientism did not lead him to reject modern scientific and industrial development, not least because he came from a family whose historical fate was the insecure subsistence farming and banditry of the European borderlands. Djilas’ concerns over scientism are relevant to European governance, which affirms science in ways elevating nature over humanity. Europe’s rejection of a humanist Faustian spirit is epitomised by its rewilding movement wanting to create new wildernesses free from humans. Rewilding experiments in the Dutch polderlands and other European programmes to breed back wild bulls akin to the extinct aurochs have inspired projects in the Croatian Velebit Mountains in the region of Tesla’s birth. However, their implementation involves important questions over the continent’s political and economic settlement and its unequal north-south relations. In essence European rewilding projects are legitimising the economic collapse and demise of communities in southern Europe, and Croatia is among the countries finding themselves becoming borderlands again.
The Epilogue, ‘The New European Wilderness’, concludes on the contemporary European rejection of Faust’s salvation and today’s interpretation of the Faust myth to indict humanity. The Faust myth speaks to human estrangement from nature and aspirations to forge a different world. Herman Hesse’s 1927 novel Steppenwolf was in this tradition. His protagonist found succour from Goethe’s promise of redemption and beliefs in a higher truth. The humanitarian cosmopolitanism after the Second World War was more hopeful of new beginnings even under the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Conversely contemporary risk cosmopolitanism struggles to forgive the deeds of the past and sees the necessity of curbing human agency and action in the world. Engineering Faust’s vision of land free from the threat of floods is more technically possible today but is culturally alien. Large-scale Faustian infrastructure building to protect human settlements is being rejected and replaced with digital governance of vulnerable critical infrastructure, threatened ecosystems, predatory zones, and populations at risk. Faust’s fall is characterised by the return of the wilderness to parts of Europe. It is tempting to romanticise the wild wolfish conditions of New Europe’s borderlands. However they represent the demise of European humanist aspirations and the expansion of inhospitable spaces without living communities. Arendt’s warning over the desertification of politics and political sandstorms in desert conditions is relevant to a Europe where market and natural forces prevail over collective self-determination. The Faust myth recognises our restless nature as imperfect crooked timber with a spark of the divine that is not content with a passive existence but searches for a more meaningful existence. The Faustian spirit wants to venture on ships into dangerous waters but to return to the sheltered harbours of home. Our anti-Faustian spirit is jeopardising both venture and home. Goethe’s Faust recognises it is impossible to act without erring, and if we are not forgiven when we err, then we are inhibited from acting. In affirming human deeds, Goethe’s work contends our very redemption lies in our Faustian striving and our Gretchen forgiving.
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