Читать книгу At the Fence of Metternich's Garden - Mykola Riabchuk - Страница 9

Back in 1994, The Atlantic Monthly featured Matthew Conneley’s and Paul Kennedy’s article ‘Must It Be the West against the Rest?’ with a provocative picture on its cover. A white middle-class American was grilling a barbecue in his backyard while hundreds of colored people of all races faced the process silently from behind the fence.

The metaphor seems to be highly topical. No contemporary discussion on the future of Europe and of the world can ignore the profound West/Rest divide that tends to become even deeper, harsher and irreconcilable. One need not be a committed Marxist to appreciate Immanuel Wallerstein’s idea of ‘world-economy’ as a highly hierarchical system where the developed ‘core’ nations (the ‘West’) have historically established dominance over the ‘periphery’ and ‘semi-periphery’ (the ‘Rest’), and where no ‘peripheral’ or ‘semi peripheral’ nation can get into the ‘core’ without the core nations’ support and consent.

Such a view, however discredited by the Leninist revolutionaries and anti-globalist zealots, and even more compromised by the corrupted, incompetent and repressive ‘peripheral’ regimes, is largely accepted by those intellectuals who bother to think about global problems and who reasonably loathe a world where the average European cow gets more in subsidies than an average African manages ever to earn, however hard he or she works. Yet, at the same time, the view seems to be unacceptable for the majority of the common people in the West—not only because of the discrediting and compromising factors mentioned above, and not only due to the apparent absence of any feasible solution in sight. It might be psychologically uncomfortable to recognize that the well-being of the West is largely based on the poverty of the Rest; that the so-called ‘free market’ favors the stronger player who is in position to establish (and change if necessary) the rules of the game, i.e., all sorts of self-indulgent tariffs, quotas, and subsidies; and that the popular liberal mantra of free movement of goods, services, and capital—without free movement of the labor force—is just Western hypocrisy.

Any talk on the essence of Europe and on its probable future should be placed, therefore, in a global context. It cannot be ignored—with all its profound divides and controversies. The recent paper ‘On the Spiritual and Cultural Dimension of Europe’ prepared by the Reflection Group [2004] of prominent European intellectuals, paves a rather uneasy way between the Scylla of political expedience and the Charybdis of political correctness. The middle way seems to be simple. The paper asserts that ‘economic integration as a basis of the European peaceful order’ is not sufficient today. It requires political integration, based on common values and institutions. Such an integration can be facilitated by the common European culture. The process would be ultimately beneficial not only for Europeans but for the whole world: “If Europe acknowledges the values inherent in the rules which foster its unity, then it will hardly be able to refuse a solidarity with others defined through these rules.”

These nice words and intentions could be hardly denied, even though the next sentence reveals a possible (and rather typical) loop-hole for many Western commitments and declarations: “From this globally defined solidarity, there follows a European duty, to make a contribution in accordance with its strengths and possibilities to ensuring peace in the world and to fighting poverty” (italics are mine.—M.R.) Double standards that dramatically undermine not just Western impartiality and credibility, but Western values in general, can be easily justified by the notion of ‘strengths and possibilities’. Thus, the genocide in Chechnya, unlike in Kosovo, could be tolerated; the authoritarian regime in Uzbekistan, unlike in Belarus, could be internationally recognized; totalitarian China, unlike Cuba, should be accepted; its occupation of Tibet could be regarded with a blind eye, unlike Hussein’s invasion in Kuwait; the Russian oligarchic economy, unlike its Ukrainian twin, could be given ‘free market’ status, and so on.

The main problem, however, is that the paper, like many other European cultural projects, twists between the apparent task—to support the political integration of the EU (ostensibly represented as ‘Europe’) by a cultural and spiritual pillar, and the hidden desire—to represent this particular goal as universalistic and inclusive. ‘Fortress Europe’ is a reality, which will not be dismantled in the foreseeable future since it corresponds to how the world (world-economy) is arranged. People within the fortress will certainly benefit from political integration, and the fortress itself will be certainly more competitive and secure against internal and external challenges. And common culture and spirituality would indeed be of some help, both internally and externally. This does not mean, however, that without all these cultural and spiritual extras the solidarity within the fortress would perish, because the economy, as the Euro-idealists contend, is not able alone to keep the necessary social cohesion. It looks more likely that the barbecue in the backyard and the hungry faces behind the fence would facilitate the social cohesion and solidarity of the barbecue-makers fairy well. Of course, a good politics is desirable to make the backyard more secure; and a good culture would undoubtedly improve the internal climate and international PR.

But the whole story seems to be primarily about the barbecue in a cozy garden and throngs of aliens forcing their way in. At least, this is how the majority of outsiders would interpret the ambiguous notion of ‘European solidarity’: “This solidarity must be stronger than the universal solidarity, which human beings (should) feel for other human beings, for example when they give humanitarian aid”. Eurocentrism looms large in these words of the rapporteurs and there is probably nothing wrong with that—as long as we recognize that all peoples are equal but values are not, and as far as Europeans themselves are firmly committed to their professed values.

Whatever nice words intellectuals may say about cultural interaction along the borders, for the majority of Europeans their external borders are primarily a source of security threats rather than of cultural exchange and enrichment. The reason for this is simple: “The existence of a social security system implies that there is a defined space in which people can earn benefits … Many people express the idea that migrants are essentially coming to profit from the social security system to which they have not contributed and have no right; these people conclude therefore that they should be excluded by strongly defended clearly demarcated frontiers” [Hübner 2001: 28–29].

Three years ago [in 2004], on the eve of the “big-bang” EU enlargement, I happened to look through international newspapers that covered the forthcoming historic event. Virtually every second report resembled a war communiqué—a direct report from the frontline:

Dorohusk, Poland—The message here at this gleaming border post overlooking the thickly forest banks of the Bug River is that Poland is ready.

Inside a spotless weapon room is a rack of snub-nosed Glauberyt automatic pistols, a Polish version of the famous Uzi. There are 9-millimeter pistols, boxes of bullets, two submachine guns and night vision goggles inside green canvas kits.

Outside is a Land Rover, motorcycles and two dogs trained to follow tracks in the woods. Not seen, but also available to protect this stretch of the 327-mile border between Poland and Ukraine, are snowmobiles, a helicopter and a patrol plane (…)

“There was a belief that hordes of illegal migrants are waiting outside our borders and that our controls were inefficient,” said Jan Truszczyński, Poland’s chief European Union negotiator (The New York Times, 25 April 2004).

The sample comes from the respectable New York Times read throughout the world, and it represents rather a typical than an exceptional way of addressing the issue—here is, for comparison, a twin-article from the British Observer cooked apparently by the same recipe:

Come May Day, the edge of the edge of Europe … Here [at the little village of Horodlo] is the easternmost point of a new 2,400-mile frontier of the European Union …

Springtime is stirring in the little park in Horodlo and in the Sparrow pub, to which Darek and Monika have returned from Warsaw, hoping the frontier will mean new business. “They’re bringing in 40 extra policemen just for our little village,” says Monika, “to add to the two we have at the moment. And that’s in addition to the border guards.”

“They’ve been chasing out the Ukrainians,” says Janusz who keeps the mini-market, “because the Ukrainians bring in smuggled cigarettes to sell for two zlotys (28p), while we have to sell them for five. Now people will have to come to us for a smoke.”

The border of the new EU is both porous and harsh. Upriver, what they call the new ‘Velvet Curtain’ is being drawn, on Brussels insistence—a necklace of new guard posts manned by thousands of newly recruited armed men (Observer, 18 April 2004).

From such reporting, very few readers would ever guess that the above-mentioned “edge of the edge of Europe” is located in fact a hundred kilometers east of Europe’s geographic center, and that the eastern border of Europe is located some three thousand kilometers east of this mythical “edge of the edge”—a bit further than the western border in Portugal. But geography is not the main victim of this reporting. Who are the people who inhabit that empty space—three thousand kilometers of the ‘Wild East’? Would the reader ever imagine that the human beings on the other side of the border, behind the “edge of the edge” live quite a normal life and have many businesses besides smuggling cigarettes and challenging European Land Rovers, helicopters and snowmobiles, let alone a Polish version of the Uzi and Central East European dogs trained to follow tracks in the woods? Some of those easterners, one wouldn’t believe, build aircraft and teach students, translate European poetry and conduct symphonic orchestras, and most of them have typically one head and two eyes, and move mostly vertically on their two legs. All of them, however, are treated as underdogs, an inferior East European race of smugglers and prostitutes eager to sneak into the European garden for a free barbecue. Just try to enter any West European consulate with a Ukrainian passport and you will feel the superiority of the pettiest official who knows in advance that you are not a writer, not a scholar, not a journalist but just human trash like everybody else in this land, just one more trickster striving to blunt the officials’ vigilance and bypass the fence.

Honest journalism would certainly try to present the other side of the coin, however catchy and marketable the first, outer side might be. So far, only the Polish mass media care about balanced reporting on the ‘new neighborhood’ and, not surprisingly, it is primarily Polish politicians who treat their eastern neighbors, in most cases, honestly and coherently. They never avoid hot issues (and there are quite a few hot issues between Poland and Ukraine, many more than elsewhere in Europe). But they do not refrain from good words about the diligence of Ukrainian agricultural workers—even if they work illegally; they do not blame Ukrainian teachers in remote Polish villages for the country’s high unemployment; and they do not reduce eastern aliens to the caricature images of The New York Times—perhaps because they know that the neighborhood is not just about a chasing Ukrainians out with Polish versions of the Uzi and smart dogs trained to follow tracks in the woods:

The Ukrainian tourist is a guest who is very much awaited in Poland [Polish radio quotes a government official]. Today we have almost 2m tourists from Ukraine, tourists who come to our country above all for rest. This is a prosperous tourist, a tourist who spends relatively a lot of money in Poland. Zakopane [leading southern mountain resort] and the south of Poland today in great measure live from Ukrainian tourists. But Ukrainian tourists ever more frequently come to the Polish coast, to the Tri-City (Polish Radio 1, 30 June 2005).

As a matter of fact, serious studies reveal today [2007] that only 6% of Ukrainians express intention to emigrate, and only 13% have valid international passports—a far cry from a mass exodus from an impoverished country [Konieczna 2004: 3–5].1 Again, the poverty in Ukraine is a very relative notion (if compared with Africa or South Asia). A nominal average salary in Ukraine of $112 a month is in fact—in adjusted purchasing capacity—five times higher. In practical terms it means that an inhabitant of Kyiv, where the average salary is $400–$600 a month, can afford more or less the same standard set of goods and services as an inhabitant of Moscow, Athens, or Lisbon. Little surprise then, that the capital city, where the unemployment rate is next to zero, has become itself a powerful magnet for labor migrants, from both Ukraine and abroad (mostly from Asia). Such a ‘buffer’ apparently cushions the flow of labor-seekers to the West.

In sum, the Ukrainian immigration ‘threat’ is largely exaggerated. As a matter of fact, reliable studies prove that there are about a million, maximum two million Ukrainians working abroad, with either legal or illegal status. Nearly half of them (41–45%) work in Russia, about 18% in Poland, and about 11% in the Czech Republic. In all these cases not only geographic closeness (cf. the very limited move of Ukrainians to neighboring and visa-friendly Hungary) but also language and cultural proximity prove to be more important than higher salaries in the West. Western countries as destinations for Ukrainian Gastarbeiters lag far behind Ukraine’s immediate neighbors: about 11% of Ukrainian Gastarbeiters work in Italy, 9% in Germany, 7% in Portugal and 7% in Spain. In real numbers, this means around 100,000 workers, and certainly not more than 200,000, in each country.

Virtually all of them work hard and raise no claims to Western welfare. Most of them have no intention to stay permanently in the host country, but typically return to their families in Ukraine with earned money to invest in housing, education of children, or small business. Even those few who decide to stay permanently abroad usually get integrated in the host society, i.e., create no ethnic ghetto, exhibit no welfare parasitism, and certainly prove no susceptibility to religious fundamentalism or Al-Qaeda propaganda. Ironically, the countries where Ukrainian workers are most present, fear the ‘Ukrainian invasion’ much less than the countries where Ukrainians are virtually absent. It was primarily Poland, Portugal and Spain which tended to legalize Ukrainian illegal workers and sign agreements with the Ukrainian government to regulate the inflow, employment and return of Ukrainian, mostly seasonal, laborers.

Xenophobia is primarily a biological, not a sociological phenomenon. It comes from a basic instinct that can be controlled—or not; it can be tamed by culture and education—or released and exploited by populist ideologies and political forces. The second approach is certainly much easier to employ, so there is little surprise that the populist media and glib politicians make a scare-crow of a ‘Polish plumber’ who allegedly takes all the jobs from diligent Frenchmen, and blame the allegedly ‘too soft’ visa regime that reportedly facilitated a large-scale import of Ukrainian prostitutes to Germany in 1999–2001 (even though at the same time dozens of reputable Ukrainian professionals—scholars, journalists, businessmen—were denied visas: a clear sign that it was not a matter of ‘softness’ but, rather, of large-scale corruption, in which German officials had been apparently involved).

It is certainly not so easy to influence the dominant public discourses, but the problem should be definitely addressed and a degree of political correctness and professional responsibility should be established by joint efforts of politicians, journalists, experts, governments and, of course, public intellectuals. So far, it seems they may talk abundantly about Europe as a cultural project and about their common ideals and values, but can hardly spread their wishful thinking beyond their low-circulation books and esoteric journals. Real people who get real news and make real politics know pretty well that Europe ends at the eastern border of the EU. Further east, as the EU official document states, the so-called “European (sic) Neighborhood” begins. Mr. Frits Bolkestein, an EU commissioner, put it unequivocally: “In the east, there is a geo-political need for a buffer zone between the EU and Russia” (Financial Times, 7 March 2004). “In this context [a German scholar comments] the impending shift in the boundary of the EU squares well with an influential macro line-driving exercise, namely the lines drawn by Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations (1996). For this American, once the EU border has moved eastwards to include Poland there can be no reason to consider any further extension to the east. Eastern Christianity is another civilization, antagonistic to the liberal, pluralist, democratic Europe that Huntington wants passionately to defend. In short, here we have a strong macro argument for a cultural border, for the first time congruent with the political and economic border, and likely to accentuate pressures to consolidate a permanent ‘Fortress Europe’ to the west of the new border” [Hann 2001: 74].

In practical terms, ‘Fortress Europe’ means just a new iron curtain that protects the in-group against the out-group, the European haves against the non-European have-nots. Or, as a Romanian scholar ironically remarks, it is a “new wall that separates Europe from the ‘desert of the Tatars’ to its east”, since “the primordial and immediate interest of EU Europe as regards wider Europe is clear: Guard the borders east and south to prevent immigration and other unwanted flows from and through these marginal countries” [Mungiu-Pippidi 2004: 53].

Such an approach, however, is highly dubious in moral terms since it subverts the very principles the western liberal democratic world is built upon. This world, of course, is very inventive in finding convincing excuses and sophisticated ways to bypass some principles or to accommodate them to the daunting reality. But even in purely practical terms, besides the questionable commitments to elevated words and exalted ideals, the minimalist strategy aimed at containment of ‘odd neighbors’ may require ultimately even more resources than its maximalist alternative aimed at their engagement. In the modern world, where versatile security threats became globalized, firm borders tend to bring less and less help:

“Hard borders are not even very useful for combating cross-border crime. Most experts agree that improving police and security cooperation between countries is a more efficient alternative than hiring lots of border guards or buying expensive surveillance technology” [Zielonka 2004: 29]. “Extensive research shows that numbers of migrants will be limited, and that organized crime is much better fought through targeted, intelligence-led policing in the cities, not border controls and visas alone. Criminals usually have access to passports and forged documents, so new border controls will have a much bigger effect on Ukrainian traders and Belarusian peasants than on organized crime. But politics is often irrational—opportunistic politicians (like Jörg Haider) exploit potent fears of uncontrolled migration, even if these fears are unfounded” [Grabbe 2001: 42].

In sum, we should probably recognize that Europe would never become a genuinely cultural project, as Denis de Rougemont and other Kulturliterati envisaged. There is too much of Realpolitik around, too much of ‘might makes right’ and ‘charity begins at home’. There are too powerful forces and too strong temptations to make project Europe genuinely political and economic. And this is why we should still produce our low-circulation books and esoteric journals, and carry out our discussions on European culture, identity, and solidarity. We cannot complete our idealistic project but we can probably rescue it from ultimate degradation.

For Ukrainians and other East European nations who have been cynically (‘pragmatically’) excluded from Europe as a political project, culture remains the only field where they can cherish their imaginary Europeanness, and look for symbolic resources that might enhance their resistance to the dark neo-Soviet/neo-imperial forces that loom large in the East. Again and again, they should refer to Norman Davies’ encouraging dictum: “The right to be referred to as to ‘Europe’ (…) cannot be granted to just one part of the continent. Eastern Europe has never ceased to be European only because it was poor, underdeveloped, or ruled by tyrants. On the contrary, due to the fact that it was deprived of so many things, it became more European, more attached to the values that may be taken for granted by more prosperous citizens of the West” (Tygodnik Powszechny 18, 1992).

The impressive Orange Revolution in Ukraine, otherwise unexplainable, came fully in line with these perspicacious words, as well as with Adam Zagajewski’s earlier deliberations—relevant, as it appeared, not only in Central but also in Eastern Europe: “Soviet Russia has created some very strange things in our part of Europe. It has created informants, liars, censors, and bums who don’t feel like working. But at the same time, without wanting to, it has produced wonderful things in people who by the grace of God are stronger, and somehow more noble. It has aroused in them a wild hunger for truth, freedom, dignity, books, paintings … for Europe. And this is exactly how Europe exists in Central Europe—as a Europe of the imagination, of delusion, of hope, of hunger … The enormous cultural longing felt so strongly in our part of Europe is one of the paradoxical consequences of ‘Sovietization’” [1987: 21].

However critical we might be of fortress Europe and however unhappy we might feel with Wallerstein’s world-economy, we should clearly understand that no one can change these odd systems from the outside, if at all. No outsiders’ complaints would be heard inside or, if heard, taken seriously. All these complaints apriori are compromised as laments of lazy-bones, failures, or crazy leftists. Sometimes, or perhaps often, it’s true. But the West/Rest problem exists, and any attempt to cushion it or, at least, to facilitate cushioning—as our modest intellectual activities do—should be continued despite all setbacks.

2005

1 Cf. the conclusion made by the same reputable Polish sociologist: “Research reveals that there are no reasons to fear any new wave of the labour migration from Ukraine. It seems that everybody who wanted to move, has moved. In the meantime, the great majority of the citizens is absolutely not interested in any issues related to search for a job abroad. The group of travellers is rather narrow, albeit very active” (Ibid., p. 10).