Enthusiasm While the EU is arguing about where to find the money for its rearmament plan, a parallel debate is quietly taking place: where to find the soldiers? This is where culture will be called upon.
For decades political leaders have categorically insisted that there was no alternative to financial austerity across the whole of the European public realm. And yet suddenly, within a few dizzying days (not even a month), we have jettisoned half a century of borrowing limits to invest 800 billion Euros in defence and the military. And this excludes the UK and its commitments. If only in terms of the abandonment of an economic orthodoxy, we are in a new age.
But this is not new. This is again. We ought to be conscious of what is coming towards us.
It is not for Clickbait Citizen to examine how we have reached a point where re-arming Europe is deemed to be necessary. Here we remain focused on the relationship between power and culture, the arts and the interplay between fact and fiction in the forming of social consent. Suffice to say that war and the arts has an interconnected history extending back to at least the ancient Greeks. Clytemnestra and Orestes realize in ‘The Oresteia’ that every attempt at one final act of violence only sets the stage for the next.
But I do want to take a brief look at the multiplicity of cultural and historical narratives, understandings, and tensions that re-arming will unleash across contemporary Europe.
Where one is situated, both geographically and culturally, has a profound impact upon the way one interprets the past and predicts the future, especially for us Europeans. Elsewhere I have written about how attitudes towards Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is rooted for many Bulgarians in seeing Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and even Putin’s Russian Federation as its national and spiritual brother, if not saviour. It is deeply embedded in a series of facts, assumptions and myths reinforced by a cannon of literature, contemporary school curricula, national hero days, street names, and other cultural and artistic paraphernalia. And this includes museums. As Boris Groys explains more generally:
The museum has taken its modern shape as a result of the French Revolution and subsequent revolutions and wars… The modern museum is constructed as a system of universal representation within a national cultural context, or as a kind of symbolic empire. In the context of modernity, the museum collects everything that falls out of fashion and out of use, as well as everything foreign, exotic, other. The modern museum is thus a symbolic space of the heterogeneous in the relatively homogenous context of the modern nation-state.
As Europeans are instructed to re-arm, each nation-state will reach for its own cultural references for legitimacy and reassurance. We need to know who we are, where we come from, what we are being asked to defend when we are about to send our children to war. If we follow one trajectory, the who we are route, we Europeans will be defined by the multiple and contradictory myths and histories of our forefathers. If this is the path we walk then our lands, borders, religions, ethnic groups and languages will determine our conclusion- that most countries are more or less homogenous linguistically, religiously and ethnically. That is still a common definition of a modern nation-state in Europe. If we follow another trajectory we could reaffirm the principles and values that we share as citizens of democracies - equality, defence of plurality and human rights, diversity, intellectual openness, and generosity. This way we would arrive at another conclusion - Europe is a symbolic space, heterogeneous and values driven. Yes, I know which route chimes better with a populist vibe and call to arms. But what is clear is that a guiding hand from our forefathers will lead us to the place that started wars in previous centuries.
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