Holger Briel

Aristotle University Thessaloniki

June 2005

Frankfurt goes East (with varying results)

Once upon a time I was Eastern European, writes the Hungarian author Peter
Esterhazy in. 2003. Then I was promoted to Central European. Those were the times,
even if not for me personally. There was a dream of Central Europe, a vision of its future,
debates on what shape this future should take - everything; everything needed for a
proper "round table", though that's not entirely fair like this. Then a couple of months ago
I became a New European, but before I knew what hit me, before I could get accustomed
to it or dissociate myself from it, I became a not-hard-core European, a non-grass-roots
European. I felt like the man who lives in Munkcs/Mukacevo and who never leaves
his native town, but is first a Hungarian, then a Czechoslovak, then a Soviet citizen. In
this part of the world, this is how you become a cosmopolitan. (Esterhazy 2003).

Recently, this kind of displacement has become the norm for many citizens living in
where exactly? If anything has become clear at all over the last few years (and all the
more so with the French and Dutch rejection of the proposed European constitution) it is
that Europe has become a mere specter, a spirit. A non-essentialist spirit at best, an
essentialist at worst. Indeed, it seems more difficult than ever to define where Europe is,
let alone Eastern Europe or Southeastern Europe. On an administrative level, things
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seemed to be progressing rather smoothly until this 29th of May 2005. But now a new
situation seems to have developed.

Again this question, where is Europe? It will become clear that one single question will
not do. According to the Institut Gographique National, todays centre of Europe is
situated slightly north of Vilnius, a fact which might surprise even the most ardent
Europeanist, perhaps even some of the citizens of Vilnius itself. However, this fact (and
our reaction to it) sheds light on an important fact: there are many Europes. And there
always have been. This fact can be gleaned from a contrastive analysis of political maps
of Europe over the last three millennia. According to Lila Leontidou, various Europes
were existent at different historic periods. (MAPS). She sees a historic triplet of European
ontologies at work: pagan, Christian, and secular. But the story becomes even more
complicated: depending on which story is used, Europa was either kidnapped by Zeus or
liberated by him from eastern oriental fetters. Contentious stories already at work at the
beginning of the European discourse! And the myth continues today at the heart of
European bureaucracy: after all, Europa is carved into the Greek 2-Euro coin.

So what about Eastern Europe then? If Europe is hard to pin down, so is (South-) Eastern
Europe. Good example: watching the CNN weather report: here, Greece and Bulgaria
share the same fate. They are excluded from the European as the weatherperson stands in
front of their bits on the map, gesturing towards a more important Europe. While this is
merely annoying on one level (wheres the weather?), it shows a certain lack of
sensitivity on the parts of our allies. CNNs meteorological map of Europe occludes

certain areas. No doubt for practical purposes, or so we are told. That this might have a
larger effect on the cognitive mapping of Europe by CNN viewers is something this
station is perhaps blissfully unaware of. This no mere whimsical example. The Weather
report is also a report of our time, of the changing of time, of changing times (cf. the
double meaning of the words kairs in Greek and temps in French). To deny people this
re-orientation re-presentation on the world stage or even only to themselves can be
deemed a wicked act of denying them history or at least historicity. But there is hope. In a
similar instance, New Zealand vigorously lobbied against its complete exclusion from the
CNN weather map. It now has reclaimed its rightful geographical space on the map, a
fate which will hopefully be shared by Greece and Bulgaria in the future.

The recent enlargement of Europe has certainly problematised things further, with the
envisaged continued enlargement through the accession of Bulgaria and Rumania in 2007
and Turkey sometime further down the line also looming large. But already the notion of
where the East is is quite complicated. Historically, the East was the Orient, then
Byzantium, later the Osman Empire. For the longest time, Russia, Poland and Lithuania
were not considered Eastern countries, but rather Northern Europe. However, culturally
and socially Eastern Europe can be at least weakly defined. Carsten Goehrke and Heiko
Haumann list the following examples:. Furthermore: Festmachen laesst sich die
Eigenstaendigkeit etwa an der bedeutenden Rolle von Dorfgemeinden mit ihrer
Selbstverwaltung und ihren Wertvostellungen in vielen osteuropaeischen Laendern, an
einem trotz regionaler Vielfalt hohen mass aenhnlicher Produktionsformen
namentlich im Agrarbereich, an gemeinsamen Familien- und Gesellschaftsformen (so am

erweiterten Familienhaushalten oder an der Besonderheit des Buergertums), an einer

von Westeuropa unterschiedenen und keineswegs schlechteren Stellung der Frau, an
einer groesseren Toleranz gegenueber Andersglaeubigen, an alternativen
Herrschaftsformen (staendisch-demokratisch in Polen, Boehmen, Ungarn und
Kroatien, autokratisch in Russland), an besonderen Auspraegungen freiheitlicher Ideen
und Bewegungen (Goehrke 2004)

These examples already demonstrate that the discourses of western superiority are all but
doomed to failure at the cliffs of Eastern realities. Yet another cultural example, where
Eastern European culture has developed into a certain in-between-state is the Ukrainian
Church which keeps the rites of the Orthodox church, but has a catholic Doxa.

Despite these examples, however, Goehrke and Hauman fail to detect an indigenous
common Eastern European mentality, even during the Soviet Block times: Eine
gemeinsame "osteuropaeische Identitaet" hat sich offenbar in der Bevoelkerung nicht
verankert, gerade auch nicht waehrend der kommunistischen Periode." (Goehrke 2004)

What they do note is that a nomenclature shunning the term the Balkans in favour of
the more neutral Southeastern Europe has developed, as many seem to associate the
former only with barbarism and brutality. Some historians, however, do want to
reintroduce more historical terms, such as Levant in order to work out the particularities
of a certain area. (cf. Schwara (2003). In any case, in defining the east the state:
"Entscheidend ist dabei, wo man geographisch und kulturell steht, von welchem

Standpunkt aus die Himmelsrichtungen definiert werden. (Goehrke 2004).

One last complication: Goehrke and Haumann also have a definite agenda in mind,
namely the rescue of beleaguered university departments of East European Studies. Even
their article must take into consideration from where it is written: and in their case it is
from Switzerland, rather than from Germany, where eastern European Studies once again
has a different twist and direction (and is dying a different death).

By now it has become clear that various strategies of centering were/at work when
describing Europe. The historical Central Europe is an ideological construction expressed
in German political discourse via Vienna and Bismarck and not a geographical unit. But
Europe is not only geographically or culturally contentious. An additional move, and we
are still merely circling this constellation called Europe, must be made towards the
analysis of the language, and particularly the metaphors used to describe Europe. It is of
course easy (yet absolutely necessary) to critique metaphors used for instance in attempts
to sanction wars (e.g. patriot missiles). Less easy is it to criticize the metaphors Europe
brings forth in sympathetic discourses about its own ontogenesis.
In an excellent essay, Petr Drulk (2004) analyses some the metaphors applied to Europe:
In examples dating back to the time of Charlemagne, he charts the move from the view of
Europe as the res publica christiana, to that of a container to that of an anthropomorphic
being. From 1945 onwards, the idea of Europe became that of a balance, an equilibrium.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, finally, and the ensuing increased integration, there was
yet another change, a move away from spatial metaphors towards temporal ones, a

Europe on the move. The metaphor of the bicycle, which needs to be in motion in order
to be functional, took hold. Until the 29th of May 2005, that is, when the French voted
down the constitution. And in reference to the Dutch Nee on 1 June 2005, Roger Cohen in
the International Herald Tribune (4 June 2005) keeps with the metaphor and smugly
states that the bicycle is now in the ditch. Drulak introduces one more metaphor, that of
the radial structurisation of Europe, with a soft-border core and many satellites,
chronotopically polydistant from its core. Important to remember here is that
metaphoricity, or metonymy, if one wants to use its postmodern pendant, is deeply
associated with literary texts. And yet, these metaphors inform and discipline a large part
of European(s) self-understanding, with all the trials and tribulations such literary
interventions entail.

In another essay entitled The Paradox of Liberal Nationalism, Frans Jacobs calls for
this liberal nationalism, despite the paradoxes inherent in a combination of liberal and
nationalist. He rightly cites the breakup up Yugoslavia as an example what can happen
if nationalism is left to its own devices. Yet he also argues, and I believe rightly so, that
peoples local and centuries old allegiances cannot be made to go away by a
buerocratically minded bloodless cosmopolitan nationalism (Jacobs 2000:156). The
contents of Europe (including the discourse on its constitutive borders) needs to get
people excited, a desideratum a Habermasian mere ideal systems situation cannot fulfil.
But we need to tread carefully here. While Jacobs has good intentions, his usage of blood
metaphorically in this instance is a serious lapse. A new ius sanguinis is the last thing
anybody in Europe needs. This is then a further case demonstrating how difficult and

important it is to deconstruct European metaphors, no matter where they originate.

Case in point here is also Gorbatschovs metaphor of the Common house of Europe, a
phrase taken at Western European face value rather than within its Russian context and
hence thoroughly misunderstood. This prompted Brzisnskis remark that a house does not
make a home.

But despite the metaphoricity of it all, we have still not quite arrived. First it is time to
introduce one of the main protagonists of the Eastern integration, Juergen Habermas.
Well-known in the west as a the author of many texts on sociology, philosophy and
communicative theory, since 1989 he has mostly written on the eastern integration of/into
Europe. Habermas was an remains vastly influential on East Europeans. His texts were
already studied during Soviet times by Adam Michnik in Poland, by the members of the
Belgrade Circle and by Hungarian intellectuals, amongst others. Furthermore, his support
of the first Gulf War and of the bombings of Kosovo and Serbia might have surprised
some, but was congruent with his thinking of universalist values. His rejection of the
second Gulf War (together with Jacques Derrida and a slew of Western intellectuals is
also well known.

Habermas, of course is also well aware of the problems associated with locating apt
descriptions, borders and modes of action when it comes to the Eastern Europe. In his
text Einbeziehung des Anderen (1998) he writes:

 In einer oekologissch, wirtschafltich und kulturell immer dichter verflochtenen Welt

decken sich Staaten, die legitime Entscheidungen treffen, in ihrem sozialen und
territorialen Umfang immer seltener mit den Personen und Gebieten, die von den Folgen
dieser Entscheidungen potentiell betroffen sind. Jenseits der Nationalstaaten bilden sich
andere Grenzen, die fuer nationale Belange eine fast ebenso grosse Bedeutung
gewinnen wie die Grenzen des eigenen Territoriums.

(cf. here Marjorie Jouen, EU Commissioner in charge of Regional Policy, imagines a

Europe much independent of its national borders. In a 2004 paper, she distinguishes five
different areas of intensive trade: Northwestern Europe, the Baltic Sea, the Western
Mediterranean, Central Europe and lastly the eastern Balkans (Jouen 2004, my italics)).

Diese nicht-deformierte, weder von innen noch von aussen okkupierte

ffentlichkeit muss in den Kontext einer freiheitlichen politischen Kultur eingebettet sein
und vom freizuegigen Assoziationswesen einer Zivilgesellschaft getragen werden, in die
gesellschaftlich relevante Erfahrungen aus intakt bleibenden privaten Lebensbereichen
einfliessen koennen, damit sie dort zu oeffentlichkeitsfaehigen Themen verarbeitet
werden. (Habermas 1996:190).

These well-intentioned remarks certainly describe a liberated view of Europes perhaps

the globes future. But he falls prey to questionable terminology. I na telling passage, he
describes what citizens want from Europe: Der Staatsbuergerstatus muss einen
Gebrauchswert haben und sich in der Muenze sozialer, oekologischer und kultureller

Rechte auszahlen. The fact that the status of citizens should be described in economic
terms such as Gebrauchswert does make one wonder where he is going with this. (It
might be ironic, it is written in italics, but neither the paragraph within which this phrase
appears nor Habermas in general lend themselves to easy irony) (Habermas 1996). (At a
2003 conference on the EU and Southeastern Europe young people from all over the
eastern Europe made it very clear what it was they expected EU: not money, but PEACE!
(http://www.ieis.lu/courses/Executive%20Summary%20-%20Sipan%202003.doc))

Perhaps also due to such problematic phraseology, Habermas has recently been unable to
garner much enthusiasm for his well-intentioned projects of modernity and European
integration. Case in point is a review of a lecture Habermas gave in December 1997 at
Berkeley. The reviewer, John Brady, then a Pol-Sci graduate student, summarises
Habermas call for the intensification of international relations, but believed he heard
notes of hopelessness and resignation in speech. He thinks that this call for
internationalization is only a shirking of individual responsibilities on a national. This
being Berkeley, he ends with a much more positive discussion of the deeds of Marcuse
and Lettau.

In his theory of communicative action, Habermas contrasts instrumental act(ion)s, which

are systems constitutive with communicative act(ion)s which are part of the life-world
(Lebenswelt). This compartmentalization is typical of Habermas, but might not reach far
enough. One might rightly ask: If Habermas manages to move the discourse of rationality
away from philosophy into the social sciences, something he does rather elegantly, why

not then go further and move much of it, even if only heuristically, auf Widerruf, into the
realm of culture? It is the speaking about which creates shared experiences which in turn
are building blocks for social events. And I am suggesting that one of the failures of
Europe today is this lack of speaking about. Perhaps it is necessary to also look
elsewhere.

In his 1991 text The Other Heading, Jacques Derrida takes a text on Europe by the
French writer Paul Valery as the starting point for his European ruminations. Derrida
states that Valery observes, looks at and envisages Europe; he sees in it a face (visage), a
persona, and he thinks of it as a leader (chef), that is as a head (cap) looking west. (20)
Valery defines the crisis of spirit as the crisis of Europe, Derrida faults him for that (34)
Valerys diagnosis is the examination of a crisis, , the crisis that endangers capital as
cultural capital. (67).

Derrida is being careful and observant in his analysis. Just because a writer writes on
Europe, does of course not mean that s/he is right. Any intervention of the new that
would not go through the endurance of the antinomy would be a dangerous mystification,
immorality plus good conscience, and sometimes good conscience as immorality. (72)
But Valery, in his failure, does remind us of important facts: Hence the duty to respond
to the call of European memory, to recall what has been promised under then name
Europe. and to cultivate the virtue of critique in this process. (76-7)

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For Derrida, in the wake of Valery and of more recent events, politics must be
reconfigured: We are perhaps moving into a zone or topology that will be called neither
political nor apolitical but, to make cautious use of an old world, quasi-political
neither monopoly nor dispersion therefore. (40-1),

(Plays with capital (le) and capitale (la) [capital of a country] 16

There is no culture or cultural identity without this difference with itself. (Derrida
1991:9-10)
Our heading being not only ours but the other. (15)
Something unique is afoot in Europe, in what is still called Europe even if we no longer
know very well what of who goes by that name. Indeed, to what concept, to what real
individual, to what singular entity should this name be assigned today? Who will draw up
its borders? 5
Cape also means cloak, somewhere under which one can hide.
Valery called Europe a cape or appendix, Nietzsche little peninsula of Asia lv
is it not also necessary to resist with vigilance the neo-capitalist exploitation of the
breakdown of an anti-capitalist dogmatism in those states that had incorporated it? 57
(Here, one is almost reminded of Adornos dictum on the last page of Negative Dialectics
that one must sympathize with transcendentalism, but only at the time of its downfall.
And only under the auspices of an individualised account of his/herstory.

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If, to conclude, I declared that I feel European among other things, would this be, in this
very declaration, to be more or less European? (83) It is up to us to define what these
other things are.

Derrida excels in using literature as a starting point for a quasi-political intervention,

leaving neither literature nor politics intact in the process. Of course, it must be
remembered that his essay was written under the impression of the liberalisation thought
concomitant with and stemming from the fall of the Soviet empire and before the
European Balkans war. Habermas on the other hand is unable to leave the discursive
systems o his own creation. While he does differentiate various strands of discursive
formations in these systems, one isnt quite able to shake off a certain mechanicalness
offered up by his worldview. He does state very clearly that the life world should
influence politics, but in view of his huge systemic impulse, authentic individuality seems
to have as little space as the one Adorno sacrificed as lost on the altar of high modernism.

It has become clear by now that there can be no monogenealogy for Europebut rather that
Europe has always been in need of regional ontologies needed, ontologies created by
language, fed by art.

We have known for some time now that we are living in Imagined Communities, as was
the title of Benedict Andersons seminal 1983 book. In this text Anderson, in a series of
striking and stringent arguments, delineated the historic and social pitfalls of taking
imagined communities as a starting point in attempts to achieve national unities. His

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historic examples make it very clear that such mythologizing is prone to distort or write
away historical construction, with potentially horrendous results. Yet it can also be argued
that such imagined communities do serve a purpose, albeit only a heuristic one.
Especially so when it comes to having to deal with not just a (new) neighbour or two, but
with the results of globalisation viewed as a whole. In fact, many cultural and political
analysts acknowledge the fact that a complete absence of localist/nationalist politics was
exactly the trigger for the 19902 Balkan wars. Localised critical discourses allow groups
of people to search in cultural archives for their histories vis--vis a changing world,
thereby creating consensual chronoscopes which in turn may lead to a deeper
appreciation of the formation processes which had governed the rise of their communities
in the first place. This reflection on the imaginary process active in the formation of a
community can act as a tool to dispel any mythologizing moment which might otherwise
influence this process towards taking on the contours of an essentialzing nationalism.
What would be gained by this is a communitarianism doing justice to the uniqueness of a
culture while at the same time being aware of the always already existent differences
within its own making.

What is in need of clarification then is how this process of imagining should work in the
future. Perhaps (and this is finally my proposal) it is time to have another look at
Benjamins Denkverbot of the aesthetisation of politics. The logical result of Fascism is
the introduction of aesthetics into politics, Benjamin writes in the epilogue of his 1935
Art in the Age of its mechanical reproduction. And this very sentence has kept art out of
politics for the last 60 years. What is often forgotten though is that his prohibition was

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postulated against and within an at the time overarching Nazi paradigm, a paradigm
invited amongst other things by the political shortcomings of Weimar Germany. And even
recent art continues to proliferate this view.

The 2002 Hungaro-Canadian Film Max, received rather controversially, sketches Adolf
Hitlers life in the late 1910s against the positive foil of the Jewish art dealer Max
Rothman: both of them artists, both of them coming out of the war disillusioned.
Furthermore, Max had lost an arm in the war preventing him from any further painting.
Instead, he becomes an art dealer, exhibiting much new, politicized art. Hitler, on the
other hand, fails to make an impact with his art and becomes involved with voelkisch
elements. At pivotal stages in the film, his character states that Politics is the new Art,
again just before he makes his first decidedly anti-Semitic speech. At one point he is seen
as scribbling down the formula Art + Politics =Power. While this film has many virtues,
depicting the beginning of the end of a potentially good Hitler solely in terms of the
failed artist, rather than extending its of his biography also to the time before WW I and
looking at simultaneously at the political realities in the Weimar republic as a setting for
his rise to power, the myth of artistic license (and consequent failure) as the root of
political evil is born. And this is also the point Benjamin seems to fall for when he writes
in his essay about the dangers of the Fascist aesthetisation of politics. I would even go so
far as saying, and this will be elaborated further down, that Jrgen Habermas falls into the
same trap when he rejects the artistic impulses and, similar to Plato, keeps the artist out of
his legitimized republic by simply ignoring them as constitute political factors.

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It could now be claimed, with I believe reasonable certainty that most of these political
shortcomings have been addressed and overcome successfully in the 50 odd years of the
Western European democratisation process. Might the European/national institutions now
be strong enough to allow for such a process, a process which would prove to be
beneficial in many resects? It would allow for a regionally influenced cultural
(re)alignment of policies, a culture-centric deconstruction of political processes and
contents, a reworking of the relationship periphery center, and an opening towards
alternate futures.

This proposal would not imply that future politics should be mere Kulturpolitik. Rather,
it would mean to use some of the strategies used in literature (and in its criticism and
interpretation) and make them fruitful for a political process which is aware of the sea in
its middle, of the impossibility of grounded self-identity. Rather than making politics
fruitful for art, something that has been done for a long time (cf Ruehle), also with
varying results, it would create a need for the state to (also) describe itself in aesthetic
terms, thereby revalorizing or rezoning the life-world vis--vis its systemic needs.
Cultural products can influence/create physical objects (e.g. Star Trek communicators and
mobile phones, or Arthur C Clarks writings and the emergence of a satellite network
spanning the globe). So why should they only be incorporated, co-opted into our
consumption processes and not also in our rationalised, streamlined political process

It should also be remembered that the very term political is cultural in its etymology,

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thereby inscribing an historico-cultural dependency into its definition which should at

l(e)ast find entrance into its present self understanding/exposure.

What is needed is not a systemic re-valorisation of life-worlds, but rather a life-world

influenced/determined revalorisation of the systemes at work in this performance called
(political) Europe. Politics (politiki) and culture (politismos), met in the city a long time
ago. Perhaps it is time then that they met again, in the new city of Europe and this time
perhaps it will be under more fortuitous circumstances. And rather in this Greek way than
in the Latin version of a linguistic rooting where culture and colonisation come up as
distant relatives (Derrida 1991:7)
Could it be the time to perform Europe, an idea taken from theatre as a stringent
mechanism to inscribe the very difference at the centre of Europe into its constitutive
discourses. To use Habermas, perhaps one could suggest a communicative process of
imagining Europe along the lines of a multicultural, nonidentical art.

And why not use art as a starting point? Derrida does use a writer to make claims about
Europe, but chooses one of his non-fictional texts, if such exist. Bakhtin's exposition of
texts implicit in the rise of the novel, heteroglossia. Bakhtin: "The novel is the only
developing genre and therefore it reflects more deeply, more essentially and rapidly,
reality itself in the process of its unfolding." (The dialogic imagination, 7) (Austin: U of
Texas P. 1981) Kundera: "the great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores,
by means of experimental selves (characters) some great themes of existence."

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plus Musil's essayism, quoted in Collins.

Elka Tschernokoshewa (2004) does open up the discussion on what Europe is or could be
with decidedly cultural terms: Eine Chance fuer Europa sehe ich immer dann entstehen,
wenn es Strukturen oder Raeume gibt, wo Osteuropa fuer das Universale stehen kann
So koennten einige Konventionen in Europa etwas aufgelockert werden: z.B. ueber den
Sinn des Lebens, ueber den Umgang mit der Zeit und Arbeit oder mit Kindern und
aelteren Leuten, mit Gastfreundschaft oder Naturheilmitteln. So wie das Emir Kosturiza
in seinen Filmen zeigt oder die Musik von Goran Bregoviae Wenn aber diese
balkanische Perspektive nicht als eine fremde, sondern als eine von vielen
Moeglichkeiten bei unserer eigenen Sinnsuche erlebt oder begriffen wird, dann kann sich
etwas in unserem Deutungs- und handlungshorizont oeffnen.

While her examples and envisaged teleologies are quite telling, this is not the place to
discuss these further; important is her insistance on hybrid cultures as models for a
universalist/pragmatist evaluation of Europe.

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ses. One of the pitfalls of the new European Constitution, and who has read it, is that it
merely describes sets of rules for a (largely) neo-liberal economic continent order.
Nothing much to inspire people.

Bell hooks made a good point. She described the basic postmodernist dilemma as
follows: just when it is possible for minorities to act as agents of their own fate for the
first time, of assuming a voice and an identity, post modernism is immediately taking
away this agency from them. A similar problem can be construed for the political entities
of Eastern Europe. Willing or not, they have become ensconced in a globalisation process
which is more decentering than the admittance to it in the first place.

Internet mediated realities interpretability of overwhelming texts. For a notion of

deliberative democracy made fruitful in a Bulgarian context in a semi-Habermasian style,
and incorporating the Internet as means (something Habermas does not say), see Yotov
(2003).

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globalisation creates national states, as the states have to define themselves as centres of
diacritical competence vis--vis other centers. Bulgaria feels like Europe, but is outside
Europe. Crisis in existential chronotope: no clear past, neither clear future. After
communism: Privatization of assets and nationalization of losses (David Stark) (cf.
Kabakchieva 2002)

liminalities
inkonablen vs incalculable
deliberative politics
anti neoliberalism
asymmetric globalisation, and Europeanisation one might add. In an enlightening essay
delineating the rise and stagnation of the Bulgarian university, Alexander Kiossev (2001)
makes it quite clear that south eastern European institutions might not have as much in
common with other European institutions. Dahrendorfs glokalisation

Return to history, proclaimed by such divergent political thinkers as Ralf Dahrendorf

(2004)and Odo Marquard (2000).

Jokisch Distinktionstheorie, using approach social subjects with a set of opposites action
is distinction (Jokisch 1999)

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Sztompka: 1989 did energize sociology throughout Eastern Europe; but in uneven ways.
But: building a new house turned out to be insufficient of building a new home
Brzezinski, quoted in Sztiompka . Letting aside the issues surrounding the metaphor, it
was clear that something was missing in the integration process. . Habermas and other
Frankfurt sociologists, e.g. Claus Offe did And while it is true that 89 did open up
sociological investigations of the new eastern and southeastern countries, soon internet
investigations superceded these localized integrative undertakings. And as Sztompa
states, many eastern models of university institutions were modeled after the Soviet
Union split between research and teaching institutions, thereby retarding the
dissemination process of new research. But he also points out that there are many new
concepts coming out of former Eastern block countries, concepts such as self-limiting
revolution, nonpolitical politics, political capitalism, conversion of social capital,
civilzational incompetence post-communist trauma, etc.

Piotrowski: looks at art exhibitions of other European art. Attempts to sell it as other,
oppositional art. And indeed, the east-west gallery in on the lower east side could also be
cited as such an example- interestingly enough, Bulgaria is often left out of these
exhibits, perhaps for a number of reasons alphabetical, topographical, confessional. The
problem is: that central European culture (as a discursive concept) is the historical,
rather than the present day point of reference. He argues therefore for finding a different
discourse to describe the relations between East and West.

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The point is here that the political situation in Europe- old and new, is not comparable to
the Weimar republic. A steady process of democratizing powers has assured that these
things will not happen again. And a lesson learned from the Bosnian wars is that if
nationalism is left unchecked as an essentialising discourse, wrongful death of the
innocent ensues. The culture that is able to found or perhaps only sustain political
processes is a culture deeply critical of totalizing or conclusive processes, a deeply poststructuralist art.

Even Jameson, while getting close, is only able to speak of a pedagogical political
culture (Jameson 1991:95). But why stop there, why not a pedagogical cultural politics?

Anderson: peculiarity of nationalism is that it has to be fashioned "up-time", going

backwards in time from an originary present, aided by what he calls "wherever the lamp
of archaeology casts its fitful gleam." (205)

One could then ask how a suchlike structured and thoroughly deconstructed Europeanism
might not be able to admit to its own mythologizing present. This honesty would pave the
way for the application of theories of interpretations familiar to all who find themselves
broadly in the field of cultural studies. Indeed, perhaps even taking this field as a
theoretical metonymy of its own constructedness, with its unwillingness to adhere to

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strict disciplinary boundaries, evening making this assumption a sine-qua-non of its own
theoretical foundation. And this might also work for European phenomena in need of
interpretation, in waves usurping whatever dominant discourses were on offer at the
metropolitan marketplace of politics.

Genius loci

In terms of perceived attempts of Western Europe to retain its sovereignty of definition

over the rest of Europe, cf piotrowsky on art exhibitions on Eastern European art in the
time period just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. How to present his part of Europe, this
other Europe, making it consumable? Bulgaria, unlike Poland of Hungary did not have
any artistic historical points of reference or biographies which would lend themselves to a
reevaluation, an Anknuepfungspunkt for a renewal of weaving any national artistic fabric.

Habermas in constitution article: Europe requires the legitimation of shared values.

In order to create the empirical circumstances of a pan-European "identity-formation",

Habermas lists the following characteristics: "the emergence of a European civil society;
the construction of a wide-wide public sphere; and the shaping of a political culture that
can be shared by all European citizens." (Habermas 2001) While Habermas naturally
privileges the political, merely allowing culture an attributive function, I propose to open
up this relationship to a decidedly European interventionist differance.

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Habermas/Derrida (2003): Europe should, besides defending her social security standards
also defend and press on with a cosmopolitan order on the basis of the Voelkerrecht
against competing plans.

The West as a spiritual construct includes more than only Europe.

An attractive, even contagious vision for a future Europe does not just fall from the
sky. (Habermas/Derrida 2003). This is a hard to translate phrase, - a vision falling from
the sky is hard to imagine, even in quotation marks. And yet, this vision is the thing we
need. And if politicians cannot supply it, we must look elsewhere. The end of art might
be a good starting point, as it frees art from perhaps some of the remaining few
disciplinary strictures. But with the end of art also has to go hand in hand other art
applications and this is where politics would come in as an ideal arena.

Deep throat as an example of how close politics and (a certain kind of art) are. Google it
and the result will be a heady mixture of porn and politics.

It is this little move, this gesture form a political culture to a cultural politics that makes

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all the difference, probably written with the Derridean a, always under construction.

Bakunin can call himself the patriot of the oppressed countries. (Jacobs 200:141).

This broad face (one of the original meanings of the Word Europa) of Europe is today
in a state of flux, of self-definition. At one point in his essay on Valery and Europe,
Derrida asks:What philosophy of translation will dominate in Europe? (Derrida
1991:58) Indeed, what language does it need to create this Europe? The fact that this is a
conference about aesthetics and politics, held in tandem by two English departments
across a forbidding border is certainly a reason for hope, a realization that we are on the
right track, perhaps even half-way there. I look forward to Pol Sci departments holding
conferences on literature!

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