Tales and Legends

I often have the feeling that we disown the past, dislike it or are embarrassed by it. And so we often make up little stories about what was, because we believe it will make it easier to live with what is. Through an emotional, ideological or manipulative prism we create history à la carte. We choose, as we wish and need, tales and legends about our own past, historical fictions about times that never were, or were not the way we claim they were.

Part of the left, for example, is very sensitive to right-wing descriptions of life in the former common state and under the previous regime. These accusations are not always the most accurate and often lapse into absurd descriptions of hardships that never existed. A shortage of fruit yogurt, for example. Fact check. We had fruit yogurt in Yugoslavia, and it was available to everyone. I know, because even then I didn’t like it. But all the fruit yogurt in the world cannot change the fact that the previous regime was not free. And all the yellowed photographs of working people and citizens winding en masse along the Adriatic coastal road towards proletarian holidays in Fiat 600s and 101s cannot change the fact that Yugoslavia was not paradise on earth. Remember, this was a country in which only one truth was tolerated in the media, with room on television only for glorifying the one and only authority. This was a country in which journalists were not allowed to ask the regime awkward questions. This was a country in which the judiciary and prosecution had to work as the executive dictated. In which civil society was branded and persecuted as a danger to the nation and the state. This was a country in the party’s grip of a personality cult, ideological uniformity, enforced unity, paranoia about external enemies and repression. This was a country in which criticism of the authorities was unpatriotic, treasonous and criminally prosecuted. True, we had yogurt. And Coca-Cola. Just like today. Comparisons with other Eastern countries that were in an even rougher embrace of socialist love are misleading. Just because some had it even worse and had even less freedom does not mean we had it good. And for all its relative liberalism, the previous regime was paranoid and relentless towards ideas and people it suspected of threatening it.

Equally misleading are little stories about a proletarian paradise compared with the exploitation of the working class in the capitalist West. There was more socialism in Scandinavia than in our country. What we had above all were slogans. By attributing credit for social justice to a monolithic authoritarian regime, they do a disservice to those who strive for this civilizational value in a democracy. It is grist to the mill of neoliberals, since it makes it easier for them to dismiss demands for more social justice in society as an unconstitutional Bolshevik conspiracy. The biggest problem with yogurt-provoked sotto voce Yugo-nostalgia, however, is that it quite stupidly calls into question the reasons for establishing an independent state. If we had it so good before, why did we go our own way? If independence was not motivated by efforts for democracy, a socially just society and individual freedoms, then it was merely a nationalist project to establish a mono-ethnic state. In their furious reaction to lies about fruit yogurt, some walk straight into the trap of those who want to re-establish uniformity of thought in the name of a different ideology, but with the same authoritarian aftertaste.

On the other side of the yogurt polarization we have politics and ideology that do not change history but invent it. The historical paradigm of right-wing populism is based on the fairy tale of a return to the good old days that never existed. It sells us a return to a state that never existed, the Carantanian panther, and fairy tales about national, sovereign states as the only forms of state organization that can ensure the nation’s prosperity and protect it from external enemies. There are quite a few problems with this story. The first is the claim that sovereign nation-states are the natural state of stability and security. Historically, this is a plain lie. With very rare, unstable and short-lived interruptions, most European nations throughout history struggled from war to war within empires. In a few cases at the head, mostly as a subordinate part of one of them. Timothy Snyder calls this the European myth of the wise nation. According to this narrative, European nation-states have a long and rich history. And yet the myth of the wise nation is invented. In Western and Central Europe there were practically no nation-states in history. In Eastern Europe there were a few, but they did not meet a glorious fate. The nation-states in the Balkans laid the foundations for the First World War, and after it six new nation-states emerged in Eastern Europe, all of which had been removed from the map by the middle of the Second World War. In the narrative of those who advocate a return to the warm and safe bosom of the wise and sovereign nation, European integration is not a civilizational step forward that for the first time in history created the conditions for European nations to coexist without conflicts and wars, but a departure from the ideal of the nation-state. The argument of those who advocated the “liberation” of the United Kingdom from the Brussels yoke, according to Snyder, “rests on the assumption that the British nation-state would re-emerge once the layers of European integration were removed and the previous state of ‘independence’ restored. But there never was such a thing. The historical process of the loss of empire coincided with the historical process of European integration, which created the Britain that exists today.”

Populism loves to talk about sovereignty. It is a word that tickles many people in the tummy, or a hand’s breadth lower. “Nobody’s gonna screw with us, we do what we want” has become a doctrine that is making its way back from the vocabulary of frustrated misfits at the counter of the local bar into the discourse of high politics. Less and less Europe, more and more nation. Fewer and fewer European values, more and more Nazis. The problem with sovereignty is not that states should not have the right—and the duty—to freely and democratically adopt and enforce laws on their territory. To ensure the security and prosperity of their citizens and, if necessary, protect them from the dangers that threaten them. But the fact is that European states achieve these goals much more successfully as part of European integration than outside it, and especially than as illiberal banana republics, which some politicians sell as the alternative. Sovereignty has its precise legal meaning in international law. Sports commentators are also very fond of it when they rave about “summer” football and sovereign victories. In history, however, sovereignty was not so much the right of nations to decide their own fate as the exclusive privilege of the ruler to maintain his power at their expense by coercion. That is how the Nazi court jurist Carl Schmitt interpreted sovereignty. For him, the only sovereign state was one that allowed the government to introduce a state of exception and thus enabled it to rise above the laws and the constitution at its own discretion and without any oversight. That is precisely why we should be thoroughly worried when insistence on respect for the constitution and the laws begins to be presented as an unnecessary formality, or even as annoying and unpatriotic obstruction of those in power and harm to the nation. In a democracy, the rule of law can never be subject to the discretion of politics, even with the best intentions.

The institutional, legal, political and economic antithesis of the “traditional” understanding of sovereignty was brought by European integration, first with the founding of the Council of Europe and the adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights, and then with the European Communities, from which the European Union emerged. It is based on the democratic rule of law, which means that the rights and freedoms of individuals are protected by laws and the constitution against the arbitrariness of the authorities, and on pluralist democracy, which allows citizens freely to choose their government. Both are the complete antithesis of sovereignty as Schmitt understood it. In the jargon of the political doctrine slowly spreading from modern Russia across the eastern part of Europe, this right of the ruler to do whatever he pleases is called “bespredel,” or unlimited power. The newfound enthusiasm of a growing number of Europeans for such a social order is reminiscent of Stockholm syndrome. One would not expect people to renounce of their own accord, and with such zeal, their right to influence society and hand it over to someone who, in the end, can do with them whatever comes into his head. Sovereigntists achieve this with a dystopian presentation of a world in which everyone threatens everyone, and everyone threatens us most of all. Relations, whether between nations or within them, are reduced to the belief that you can only win if someone else loses. In such a world, in which we are constantly under threat, there is of course no room for cooperation and integration, still less for pluralism, social criticism and individual freedoms. Fear, distrust and hatred are psychological ammunition, and with them the populist sovereigntist maintains power and justifies authoritarianism and repression. A return to the good, sovereign old days is a fairy tale, but not all fairy tales have a happy ending.