What I will do, I will speak about the idea of the European
integration or the crisis of the idea of the European integration and
link it to the Eastern European topics.
I will speak about perceived or factual differences between Eastern
and Western Europe.
I will address the historical caesuras which made the historical
experiences of Eastern and Western parts of Europe similar but non
-simultaneous.
In the second part, I will speak about the genesis of the modern
Eastern European nationalism and track them back to the solid
understanding of the nation.
And in the third part, I will address the problem of contested
narratives concerning the historical past and the importance for the
project of European integration.
So one of the popular opinions attributes the current crisis of the
European Union to its Eastern enlargement.
One can often hear about division of East and West or read that
countries have been brought to the European Union that are not
interested in European integration.
I quote here a random article from German magazine Spiegel from 2016,
just one among many similar opinions.
Even though skepticism towards the European Union has long ceased to
be a prerogative of Eastern European states, it is still necessary to
ask why the Eastern European states of the European Union tend to
return to the concept of national sovereignty, whether and why they
impose integration clauses.
An answer to these questions should also take into account the
historical genesis of today's Western and Eastern Europe, which is of
central importance for the concept of post-national foreign and
cultural policy.
And a symmetry between Western and Eastern Europe can be traced back
to the Enlightenment.
In his book, Inventing Eastern Europe, The Map of Civilization and the
Mind of the Enlightenment, US-American historian Larry Booth showed
that the Enlightenment discourse of civilization excluded Eastern
European countries from Europe and shifted them to Asia.
The cultural or philosophical geography of the Enlightenment thus demi
-orientalized Eastern Europe, which could be described as
underdeveloped, backward, or barbaric.
The Western European view of Eastern Europe, even if not directly
linked to political interests and clans, nevertheless remained the
gaze of intellectual mastery, which simultaneously or retrospectively
legitimized crimes of political ownership.
Most Western European states developed from empires or colonial states
into nation-states, while the Eastern European nation-states, maybe
with the exception of Russia, on the contrary emancipated from the
European empires.
Therefore, a nation-state already has different, if not conflicting,
semantics for a former empire and for its former parts.
Another setting of non-simultaneity between Eastern and Western Europe
dates back in particular to the post-war period, World War II, and the
division into two opposing blocs.
Georgian philosopher, Soviet Georgian philosopher, Merab Amardashvili,
described this non-simultaneity as a difference between chronological
and historical time.
He did not understand the non-simultaneity as judgmental.
Western Europe was not progressive, and Eastern Europe was not
backward.
But similar historical developments took place at different
chronological points in time.
The different contexts of thought caused differences, which the
Bulgarian scholar Niklena Nikolchina calls heterotopic harmonies.
Theoretical and political key concepts, such as human or humanism,
could be, and were in fact, interpreted differently to the West and
East of the Iron Curtain.
In political theory, critical left thinking was developed in the West
as a critique of capitalism, and has tried, from Hannah Arendt to
Etienne Balibar, to relate the questions of social equality to the
questions of political freedom, and vice versa.
For many left-wing intellectuals, the Soviet Union remained, and to a
certain extent still remains, an alternative to capitalism.
While they were not at all prepared to see the Soviet Union, at least
in its Stalinistic period, as a hell, if not the same but comparable
to that of national socialism.
In the East, the questions of political freedom were of paramount
importance.
Eastern European intellectuals had to learn that relative social
equality, which nevertheless led to an informal distribution of
wealth, could not solve the issues of political freedom.
These fundamental different experiences led to disappointments in
mutual expectations.
It is still a great issue of very different understanding of freedom
and of equality to the Eastern, Western parts of Europe.
The third important aspect relevant to the differences between Western
and Eastern Europe concerns developments after the collapse of the
Soviet Union and simultaneous rise of the European Union and its
subsequent Eastern enlargement.
While the member states of the European Union tried to overcome their
experiences with nationalism in the 20th century in a sub-national
project of the European Union, the Eastern European states, especially
the former republics of the Soviet Union, rediscovered this oppressed
political nationalism.
Comparison between the European Union is only possible in a very
limited sense.
Basically, only the development factor can be compared.
While Western Europe developed from the nation states into an
integrative project, Eastern Europe, despite all the differences in
the political system and the involuntary integration mechanisms,
developed in an opposite direction, from a common state or block of
states into nation states.
Although the Soviet Union could be described as an integrative,
supranational project, the nation, the concept of the nation, played
such an important role in the concept of the Soviet Union, the US
-American historian, Francine Hirsch, described the Soviet Union as an
empire of nations.
The Soviet concept of the nation was a specific mixture between ethnic
and cultural nationalism.
The final narrowing of the nation to ethnicity only took place within
Stalin's national policy and led to the outbreak of ethnic nationalist
after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But even for the post-Soviet period, ethnic nationalism was only one
option, a catastrophic one, made by various political actors alongside
other concepts like cultural nationalism, religious nationalism, and
state nationalism.
The struggles for definition of nation, what nation is, or how we
should understand nation, are still ongoing, not only in Eastern
Europe, but now as we see in Western Europe as well, despite the
formal commitment to the state nationalism.
The renaissance of the nation states in Eastern Europe can hardly be
explained without their genesis from the Soviet national policy, or
Stalin's national policy.
The oppressed political nationalists in Eastern Europe after 1922, and
between 1922 and 1945, did not mean that there was no place for
nationalism.
In his early writings on Marxism and the national question in 1913,
Stalin already understood the nation as ethno-linguistic or cultural
-territorial unity.
His later version of national policy was based on the division into
national form and socialist context.
While the socialist context was politically related to the official
state ideology, the national form was essentially reduced to the
national language and culture, which was intended to express the
general socialist context.
In the Soviet Union, national feelings could not be articulated
politically, so culture became its primary venue.
Many conflicts that later became political and military, such as
Georgian -Abkhaz or Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict, were fought in the
Soviet Union by scientists, mostly historians.
Since cultural nationalism in the Soviet Union could not have any
relation to present, as well to the future outside the given
ideological framework, instead it concentrated on the past.
This past was imagined as isolated, without any reference to present
and future, and often mythically transfigured and idealized.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eastern European nationalists
inherited this historical image formed by Stalin's national and
cultural policy and relied upon it, mostly completely without any
criticism or reflection as a starting point for domestic and foreign
policy.
Especially since 1960s, attempts were made to create a uniform, non
-national Soviet culture.
The failure of the integrative Soviet Union project led to the
renaissance of ethnic and cultural nationalists, which after the
collapse of the Soviet Union were available as more or less only forms
of political organization, later supplemented by religious
nationalists, and came into conflict with the external forms of
political organization.
And we can speak of them like facades, about facade democracies, where
the democratic form is there, but the context is eminently
nationalist.
The genealogies of nationalism play an important role in the
integration project of the European Union, because they generate
conflicts between future projects of the European Union, and I think
this workshop is one of the tasks of thinking about this future, and
the images of the past of Eastern and recently also of Western
European nations.
In his lecture at the Martin Roth Symposium, Professor Kurt Hübner
complained about the loss of the European integration narrative.
One could regard the integration narrative as the blueprint for the
future, but any future can hardly be designed if one does not agree on
the interpretation of the past.
For many Eastern European countries, Russia and Ukraine, Georgia and
Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the dispute over the past has already
become a serious source of political and military conflicts.
The dispute over defining power of the past is at the center of the
hegemonic struggles that have now arrived in Western Europe as well.
The question of how to deal with different historical images and
perceptions, some of which are mutual, is a methodological question of
historical and cultural status.
This is a point where cultural and educational policy can and must
overcome historical and cultural wars.
At present, the development factors between Eastern and Western Europe
seem to be reversed.
More precisely, the dividing lines no longer run between Western and
Eastern Europe, but between the European Union and Europe outside the
European Union.
Strangely enough, countries on the periphery of Europe that are not
yet members of the European Union and whose membership is anything but
certain, like Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, or Balkan states, plead for
stronger integration than the EU states, also the Eastern European
states of the European Union, that are now showing integration
fatigue.
In the European Union, it is often believed that the integration
aspirations of the Eastern neighbors have purely economic reasons.
But this opinion falls short.
Despite of all the crises of the European Union, it still offers more
attractive political model than its neighborhood, Russia, Turkey, or
Iran.
The view from the periphery of Europe towards the European Union is
different and much more optimistic than the view from the center of
the European Union towards its own periphery.
This view must be taken seriously because it will play a role for both
the integration of the European Union, or integration of narrative of
the European Union, and the future of Europe, which does not coincide
with the European Union.
For about 40 years, the Eurocentric cultural model has been
criticized.
According to this model, Western Europe is responsible for innovation,
development, while the European and non-European periphery is
presented as a passive recipient of this development.
In 2006, the Center of Literary and Cultural Studies, where I work,
the center launched a project entitled Topography of Pure Cultures of
Europe regarding the shift of Europe to the East.
The idea of this project was to observe Europe from its supposed
peripheries.
Europe's origins ought to be multiplied and it ought to be
demonstrated that Europe cannot possibly be traced back to Western
European metanarratives.
Making this plurality of European voices audible is one of the tasks
of cultural and educational policy.
One example, there are numerous clichés about Balkan and Eastern
Europe or about migrant migrants coming from Eastern Europe and from
the Middle East.
These clichés are mostly negative, as you are well aware of, and would
portray Eastern Europeans or people from other parts of the world,
other migrants, as less developed and cultured, violent, criminal, and
dangerous.
Despite all the simplification of this representation, there are
people who spread these primitive clichés in European parliaments.
To counter the above is the task of cultural and educational policy.
A country like Georgia, where I'm originally from, for example, would
be associated for years with Stalin, with war, and with pride.
Georgia was the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2018.
Around 200 Georgian books were translated into German for the book
fair.
Of course, it is difficult to say that the book fair and Georgian
literature fundamentally changed the picture and perception to a
positive one, but in any case, they made the picture much more
different.
If they don't completely change the clichés, they will definitely
question and challenge them.
This is an example of what cultural policy can do in a very positive
sense.
Making images, using opinions more differentiated, and making people
think about what they would not normally think about.
Thank you very much.