Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac
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the UK and elsewhere in Europe, and the day after the World Health Organisation announced that Covid-19 represented a global public health emergency.
We thank the series editors Tony Burns and Ben Holland at the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, and Rebecca Annastasi colleagues at Rowan & Littlefield, Dhara Snoweden, Sathya Shree and their for their support of the book. Our research was facilitated by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council and working on ‘A Shared Space and a Space for Sharing: A Transdisciplinary Exploration of Online Trust and Empathy’, led by Peter Bath with Julie Brownlie, Dave Boothroyd, Heather Draper, Nishanth Sastry, and others. We further thank Denis Abdić, Sabine Beppler, Andreas Bieler, Nenad Bobić, David Chandler, Rory Cormac, Ruth Davidson, Andrew Denham, Oliver Dodds, Paul Drury, Cees van der Eijk, Nicky Bean, Paul Eliot, Frank Furedi, Pauline Hadaway, Jo Herlihy, Dennis Hayes, Catherine Gegout, Mathew Humphrey, Gulshan Khan, Chun-Yi Lee, Jan Meyer-Sahling, Caitlin Milazzo, Ian Pegg, Chris Pierson, Denis Radić, Ljubo Radić, John Raglett, Wyn Rees, Julian Reid, Matthew Rendall, Bettina Renz, Stefano Saccomani, Lucy Sargisson, Alex Serafimov, Jens Sorenson, Eddie Tembo, Annemarie Walter, and Kevin Yuill.
We are also grateful for the invitations to speak and the feedback we received at the universities of Birmingham, Derby, Gothenburg, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sheffield, Westminster, and the Swedish Institute of International Affairs as well as the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, and various city salons, conferences, or festivals, including at the Brunswick Inn in Derby, and the Barbican and the Wellcome Trust in London. We are indebted to long discussions with Mark Duffield and Jean Duffield. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful recommendations.
The book acknowledges extensive use of the following translations and other works:
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1949 [1808]) Faust, Part I. Translated and introduced by Philip Wayne. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1998 [1832]) Faust, Part II. Translated and introduced by David Luke. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (2009 [1832]) Faust, Part II. Translated and introduced by David Constantine. London: Penguin.
The book contains excerpts from the following publications:
Pupavac, Vanessa (2008) ‘A Critical Review of the NGO Sustainable Development Philosophy’, in Zheng Yongnian and Joseph Fewsmith (eds) China’s Opening Society: The Non-state Sector and Governance. London: Routledge, pp. 15–35.
Pupavac, Vanessa (2010a) ‘The Consumerism-Development-Security Nexus’. Security Dialogue, Vol. 41(6), pp. 691–713.
Pupavac, Vanessa (2010b) ‘From Materialism to Non-materialism in International Development: Revisiting Rostow’s Stages of Growth and Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful’, in Jens Sorensen (ed.) Challenging the Aid Paradigm: Western Currents and Asian Alternatives. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 47–77.
Vanessa Pupavac (2014) ‘Natural Disasters: Trauma, Political Contestation and Potential to Precipitate Social Change’, in Erica Resende and Dovile Budryte (eds) Memory Trauma in International Relations: Theories, Cases and Debates. London: Routledge, pp. 74–91.
This book would have been impossible without study leave from the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham and support from Tony Simmonds and his fellow librarians and IT colleagues.
Finally we thank Jelena and Carl, who visited Nikola Tesla’s home village of Smiljan with us, and most of the Croatian towns, villages, and mountains mentioned in this book.
Chapter 1 Faustian Visions of ‘A Free People Standing on Free Land’
Here there shall be an inland paradise:
Outside, the sea, as high as it can reach,
May rage and gnaw; and yet a common will,
Should it intrude, will act to close the breach.
So proclaimed Faust in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epic poem (Goethe 1832 Act V ‘The Great Forecourt of the Palace’ in Luke 1998: 223). The blind and dying Faust was in a hurry to complete his vision. Mephisto was hovering over Faust’s frail body, ready to snatch his soul. Faust had contracted a demonic pact to enjoy worldly powers, and the devil wanted to claim his due. Could Faust escape hell? Faust died overseeing a grand project to build coastal flood barriers, drain the marshes, and reclaim land from the waves. Faust’s redemptive act for humanity is a vision of a free society, enjoying liberty and security, cooperating with each other to maintain the sea defences and cultivate the fertile land.
Our book returns to Goethe’s Faust as a focal point to review European humanist visions of ‘a free people on free land’, anchored by modern development and eradication of disasters (Goethe 1832 Act V ‘The Great Forecourt of the Palace’ in Luke 1998: 223). In our return, we follow the precedent of Goethe and His Age (1968 [1947]) by the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs (1885–1971), whose study was written against the background of European totalitarianism and the shadow of war. He returned to Goethe’s work as ‘a taking-stock of the historical heritage’ and ‘a necessary start toward something new’ against the modern crises and the looming war years (1968 [1947]: 161). Goethe’s Faust itself takes stock of Europe’s historical heritage during turbulent times (Piper 2010: 65–68). The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin described Faust as ‘an Iliad of modern life’ (Pushkin in Lukacs 1968 [1947]: 157). Faust’s odyssey spanning antiquity to modernity explored human strivings to find meaning and create a home in the world. Literature helps us interrogate our lives and times and make sense of what matters. We may narrate the confusions of the present, recall the confusions of the past, and, through our capacity to forge meaningful narratives, imagine a renewed future. Our study focuses on Faust the Developer and takes up a key theme pursued by the American philosopher and Marxist humanist Marshall Berman (1940–2013). His All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1988 [1982]) analysed Faust the Developer to explore the yearnings and contradictions of modernity more broadly. In taking these precedents, we share Berman’s definition of humanist modernism as ‘any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it’ (ibid.: 5).
The German writer Goethe (1749–1832) has been described as the last Renaissance man of modernity, spanning reason and passion, science and poetry, government and scholarship, the planetary and the microscopic, and the epic and the lyrical; bridging the past and the future; and defining the scope of his age (Boyle 1991, 2000; Lewes 1908 [1864]; Lukacs 1968 [1947]; Piper 2010). Goethe’s work has offered European culture a vital blood transfusion more than once, whether Europe after the revolutionary and Napoleonic upheavals or the war-ravaged world confronting Lukacs. Goethe’s British translator and champion, the historian Thomas Carlyle saw an artist and a polymath surveying his age and offering his contemporaries guiding purpose. In Carlyle’s words, Goethe was ‘the Uniter, and victorious Reconciler, of the distracted, clashing element of the most distracted and divided age’ (Carlyle 1893 [1832]: 237–8). Goethe’s ‘incommensurable’ narrative explored the contradictions of the European Faustian spirit (Eckermann 1930 [3 January 1830]: 341). His Faust addressed the meaning of Europe and Europe’s humanist heritage in an era of political revolutions, counter-revolutions, and wars of national independence. The narrative poem swept across European history, putting the medieval Christian and ancient classical traditions into dialogue with the new scientific age. In Faust’s conjuring words, ‘Speech to and fro entices, calls it forth’ (Goethe Faust II 1832 Act III ‘The Inner Courtyard’ in Constantine 2009: 163). Goethe’s universal aspirations were a compelling reference point to rekindle a humanist European culture from the ashes of total war. He remains a compelling reference point to explore European humanism today.
We too are at a critical juncture for Europe, a Europe estranged from its humanist tradition and modernity, where the disasters of humanity overshadow