Self-Colonization of Central and Eastern Europe

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Self-Colonization of Central and Eastern Europe

• Alexander Kiossev,
• University of Sofia

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• Part 1 The Post-Colonial Turn
• Introduction into the mess of concepts

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Colonization

• Colonialism is the establishment and
  maintenance, for an extended time, of rule over
  an alien people that is separate from and
  subordinate to the ruling power. It is no longer
  closely associated with the term colonization,
  which involves the settlement abroad of people
  from a mother country as in the case of the
  ancient Greek colonies or the Americas.
  Colonialism has now come to be identified with
  rule over peoples of different race inhabiting
  lands separated by salt water from the imperial
  center ... Some further features of the
  colonial situation are domination of an alien
  minority, asserting racial and cultural
  superiority over a materially inferior native
  majority contact between a machine-oriented
  civilization with Christian origins, a powerful
  economy, and a rapid rhythm of life and a
  non-Christian civilization that lacks machines
  and is marked by a backward economy and a slow
  rhythm of life and the imposition of the first
  civilization upon the second
• Emerson, Rupert Colonialism. In Sills, David L.
  (Hg.) International Encyclopedia of the Social
  Sciences. Bd. 3. New York, London Macmillan
  1968, pp. 1-5

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Analysis of the definition

• Rule/domination over alien people
• Settlers (not necessarily)
• Distance (salt water)
• Alien-ness as different race (race distance)
• Alien-ness as cultural difference (cultural
  distance)
• Alien-ness as religious difference (religious
  distance)
• Technological difference (technological distance)
• Economic differences (economic distance)
• Different rhythms of life (anthropological
  distance)
• Imperial centre

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Questions

• What is the reason for connecting the rule with
  the imposition of the first civilization upon
  the second? Colonization is more than rule it
  requires imposition of superior civilization by a
  distant Empire.
• Why are differences presented as distance and
  distance as superiority legitimizing the
  rule/imposition?
• The concept of superiority is split religious
  (Christian) superiority vs. ethnic/racial
  superiority reducible vs. irreducible
  (natural) superiority.
• What is the role of the salt water? It implies
  new type of sea transportation, a whole new manly
  world of sailors after 1492, risky voyages into
  the dangerous open sea, sea monsters, pirates,
  savages, adventures, exotic islands, earthly
  paradises It implies imagination.

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What does imposition of civilization mean?

• Import of institutions
• Power/knowledge import of cognitive categories
  supporting the rule
• Import of practical know how
• Standardization/Normalization
• Import of legal frame
• Control and sanctions, menagerial skills
  GOVERNMENTALITY
• I
• import of religion and ideology the Grand
  Narrative of progress, modernization and the
  burden of the white man
• Import of educational models
• Giving birth to new goals, dreams and longings
  import of IMAGINATION

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What is social imagination?

• Social imagination usually implies a background
  intuitive knowledge, a body of stereotypes shared
  by a community for Charles Taylor it is a widely
  shared pre-theoretical reservoir of shared
  perceptions, both descriptive and prescriptive.
• Here we assume that usually this reservoir is
  structured as a historical narrative, which rules
  the dreams, longings and phantasma shared by the
  members of certain social group.
• Next assumption Colonialism is not only rule
  over distant territories and alien populations
  it is rule over the collective imaginations, over
  the reservoir of dreams, longings and phantasma
  both of the imperial and the colonized
  populations. It is imposition of a Grand
  Eurocentric Narrative.
• I.e. colonization is not only domination, it is
  hegemony internalization of the hegemonic
  cultural values, narratives, images - self-
  stigmatizion and traumatic subjectivization. It
  is a longing for Ëurope, The West, the
  civilized World.
• Modern colonization is marked by two dominant
  mirror longings the innocent Earthly Paradise
  vs, The Civilized World of Christianity,
  Progress, Enlightenment and Civilization Between
  them are distance and the salt water.

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The postcolonial condition

• The process of decolonization after the WW II in
  Asia, (the Arab world, Indo-China, Indonesia)
  and Africa 1949 1965. The model cases Indian
  independence 1947 the Suez Crisis 1956. The
  spread of the decolonization process all around
  the world, disintegration of all colonial
  Empires.
• Local Asian and African nationalisms, democracies
  and authoritarian regimes, political chaos,
  ethnic cleansing success stories and
  unsuccessful states.
• The problem of the colonial legacy and the
  Empire writes back. The europeanizined local
  elites and their values.
• The anti-colonial intellectual resistance Frantz
  Fanon and the program for vomiting of the
  European cultural values. Are alternative
  culture, alternative language (cultural codes)
  and alternative, non-European imagination
  possible? New national and pan-African
  literatures
• Cultural wars and the revision of the Eurocentric
  cultural canons 1982 Stanford

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Postcolonial studies

• Inside the American and west-European university
  academic critique and deconstruction of
  Eurocentrism
• Edward Said and Orientalism as critique of the
  Eurocentric power/knowledge about the East
• Homi Bhabha and the critique of hegemonic
  narratives. The split, hybrid and fragmented,
  impossible narratives of the colonized
• Gayatry Spivak and The Subaltern cannot speak
• The general problem lack of authentic symbolic
  resource of the colonized knowledge, narratives,
  language imagination. Symbolic colonization.
  

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The Metaphor Self-Colonization

• This metaphor can be used for cultures having
  succumbed to the cultural power of Europe and the
  West without having practically been invaded and
  turned into colonies. Historical circumstances
  transformed them into an extra-colonial
  periphery, lateral viewers who have not been
  directly affected either by important colonial
  conflicts or by the techniques of colonial rule.
• Yet, they are in a situation where they had to
  recognize self-evidently the foreign cultural
  dominance and voluntarily absorb the basic values
  and categories of colonial Europe. The result
  might be named hegemony without domination.
• The reason the rule over imaginations
  trespasses the borders of the actual territorial
  colonial rule In the world of late XIX centuries
  the colonial imagination started functioning as
  Universal (in fact, Eurocentric) Symbolic
  Order, valid everywhere - even in the few
  non-colonized corners of the.
• Short labels for this process of global
  conquering the various local imaginations
  civilization process, progress, Modernity,
  westernization, Europeanization.

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Self-colonization, imagination and public
discourse

• Important difference between factual colonial
  conquer and the conquer of desires, longings and
  hopes. The conquer of the imagination of the
  repressed (the dream about the West,
  Europeanization) the ultimate form of Power.
• The maps of the real Empires and the Empires of
  the imaginations do not coincide the ideal West
  is bigger than the real West.
• This form of Power the conquer of imagination
  could be called self-colonization. The joke and
  the Californication.
• Self-colonizing imagination is not a
  psychological phenomenon it is the inner
  structure of cultural production and the paradigm
  of the public discourse of the peripheral
  countries it has public validity.

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Example 1 the first Bulgarian journal the
obsessive imagining of absence

• In 1842 Konstantin Fotinov (1790 - 1858), the
  creator of the first Bulgarian magazine
  Lyuboslovie (Philology), published a remarkable
  appeal which treats ardently and with pain all
  that lack of civilisation in the Bulgarians
• "Where are their daily newspapers and magazines,
  or the weekly and monthly ones? Where are their
  artistic magazines, their rhetoric, mathematics,
  logic, physics, philosophy, etc., etc., which man
  needs more than bread? Where is their history,
  written in detail and widely spread among people,
  such as the other nations have and which would
  help us to stand side by side with the others and
  make the others aware of the fact that we are as
  verbal as the rest of God's creatures?"
• The Bulgarian press during the National Revival
  abounded in similar appeals dealing with the lack
  of civilisation. They all represent patriotic
  complaints about various shortages about the
  lack of cultural institutions, literary or
  scientific achievements, good manners or great
  Bulgarian poets. Yet, in spite of their variety
  and heterogeneity one can see that all these
  complaints expressed much more a morbid awareness
  of the absence of a whole civilisational model
  rather than of some concrete civilisational
  achievement.

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• Part II
• Modernization, Civilization, Europeanization or
  Self-Colonization?

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Imagination and practice

• During the XIXth century this imagination of
  absence (variants of barbarity, orientalism,
  backwardness etc.) has been transformed into
  practical modernization programs. Important!
  social imagination is not only imagination, it
  has real practical consequences.
• The sociological mechanism of this process the
  local elites were educated in cross-border
  universities back home, they took up roles as
  educators, revolutionaries, writers, journalists,
  tutors and started disseminating the
  Europe-centered colonial conceptual repertoire.
• They did it without violence or colonial
  governmentality but through the softer channels
  that had the leverage for captivating the
  imagination stories, books, school classes and
  textbooks, popular literature, political
  propaganda and journalism.
• These early patriots without nations, self-styled
  national utopians and visionaries, introduced the
  notion of the sovereign nation and invented, by
  dint of studied models, local historical
  traditions.

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The dark side of the universal Eurocentric
imaginary the internalization of asymmetries
and hierarchies

• Traditionally named Europeanization and
  Modernization, this process had along with
  its indisputably positive effects its dark side
  as well.
• Along with the values of Christianity,
  civilization, the Enlightenment, along with the
  placards of progress, liberty and revolution, the
  Europe-centered colonial were irreversibly
  cemented into the collective imagination of such
  groups. The trauma of being peripheral is
  internalized and transformed into a key element
  of the national identity building process.
• The notions of a European center and peripheries,
  of masters and natural subjects,
  enlightened and non-enlightened of a
  civilization source and its passive recipients,
  are taken to be natural, eternal and
  self-apparent they became part of the common
  cultural currency and the public discourse of
  the new nations.

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Consequences the traumatic identity building

• The new imagined communities (i.e. the modern
  nations) emerge in a power field in an
  asymmetrical global imagined geography, which is
  strongly hierarchical and hegemonic - they
  immerge in an Eurocentric World.
• Their collective identities are from the very
  beginning fatefully marked by their specific
  imaginary l?cation in this asymmetrical colonial
  Eurocentric world they are either in the Centre
  (the focus of Civilization, Modernity and
  Progress) or in one or another of the variously
  stigmatized peripheries (backward, barbaric,
  exotic or shameful).
• Accordingly, the peripheral nations internalize
  their birth-stigma and perceive themselves trough
  it a process of traumatic collective
  identity-building, painful and sometimes shameful
  collective subjectivation and sense of belonging.
  They perceive themselves as cultures of absences
  and backwardness.
• There is dialectical duality of shame and pride
  in the self-perception of such peripheral
  nations, in their public sphere emerge two group
  of ideologists apologists of better
  westernizations and catching up with West
  and the opposite trend, pride nationalists,
  nativists (zapadniki I povhveniki)

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Consequences the imported, imitative and hybrid
high cultures

• The artists and thinkers in such cultures are
  living with the sense of periphery and
  provincialism, they follow fashions, rarely
  create fashions, ideas, paradigms.
• They struggle for recognition by foreign
  audiences and experts the local (peripheral)
  recognition is not enough.
• Translation and translatability are crucial
  issue.
• Any attempt of self-centering in such cultures
  looks suspicious it borders with nationalism,
  autochthonic ideologies, archaic nativism and
  xenophobia.

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Example 2 the longing for Bulgarian novel

• 1870 1890 The Sense of Absence of the Novel.
  Translation, Bulgarizations. genre Imitations
  import of models.
• The First Bulgarian Novel (1989 Ivan Vazov) and
  the negative reaction of the newly born Bulgarian
  literary criticism two accusations 1. it is
  imitation 2. it is not a real novel.
• 1890ies. The rival literary context the
  competing non-Novels memoirs,
  autobiographies, short stories, journalistic
  documentary, vs. epic poems, lyric prose, lyrics.
  
• 1890 1914 Generational Quarrels,
  Non-recognition of previous novels, contested
  tradition, difficult canon building
• The need for recognition by foreign authorities
• Problems of translatability/non-translatability.
  2012-2013 The case Gospodinov Ruskov.

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The imported modern public institutions and their
social status

• Similar to the situation in the real colonies,
  the institutions in the self-colonizing cultures
  were not created in a process of incremental
  maturing and adaptation turning them into
  unquestionable and long-lasting, habitual
  practices.
• They were imported as prestigious European models
  and imposed by sweeping modernizing gestures of
  the elites who scraped them together and
  legitimized them in a broadly westernizing and
  very often eclectic and inherently controversial
  manner.
• In this process there always remained a whole lot
  of things impossible to import the practical
  know how, the habits and routines, the well
  established ethos, the roles and rules in an
  everyday performance of an institution.
• As a result, the institutions were too often
  accommodated, used in unexpected ways to
  unforeseen ends, in line with bricolage patterns,
  i.e. they are hybridized.
• This in turn provided a special role to the
  public sphere it had to live up to certain
  standards amidst public outcry, vitriolic
  criticisms and blazing philippics. Public
  institutions often found themselves under so much
  and so blatant pressure as to push them to the
  brink of loosing their credibility altogether.

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Example 3 modernization and de-Orientalization
of Sofia the longing for European capital.

• 1880 1930 The modernizing struggle of the
  municipality. De-Orientalization of Sofia on
  symbolic and infrastructural level. Streets,
  public parks, pavement, street lamps,
  electricity, trams.
• Destruction or self-destruction of the old
  turkishmarketplace, of the numerous mosques.
• Building of prestigious public buildings in
  European style national parliament, national
  theatre, university, banks, galeries, schools
  etc.

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Sofia 1879
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The De-Orientalization process
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The De-Orientalization process 2
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Sofia-Centre 1900
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Sofia-Centre The National Theatre 1907
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Sofia-Centre the University 1930
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Example 4 building and usages of Sofias first
modern waterworks network

• By the time of the National Liberation (1878)
  Sofia populations (11 000) uses water from only
  54 public fountains there are just 3 Ottoman
  "experts to take care for them.
• The first waterworks project was designed by the
  engineers Belov and Kubassov. 1884 - difficult
  financing, yet the municipality demonstrates
  will for modernization combined with a chaotic
  tactics of economizing and improvised
  adjusting off the technical realization of the
  project. The hybrid nature of the technological
  result.
• Tensions between political authorities and
  technical experts, corrupted governmentality,
  private interests shadowing the public interest
  and the technological standards.

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The real waterworks cultural practices and
usages

• Resistance by the peasant population surrounding
  Sofia sabotages.
• The unexpected difficulties in maintenance of the
  waterworks network. Lack of educated technical
  personnel.
• The strange water habits of the Sofioters (
  1900 population of 70 000) and the economic
  collapse of the modernizing project - the
  population, used to pre-modern attitude to water,
  doesnt regard water as commodity, refuses to
  pay for it, it steals water with illegal pipes
  etc.

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The imagined ideological waterworks

• Municipality pride of the technical miracle
• Journalistic enthusiasm about the symbol of
  progress
• General approval and pride of the public

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The first phase 1884 -1900
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The first phase 1884 -1900 the Apostles of
Progress
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The Consumers of Progress
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Consequences on the anthropological level the
status of norms and practices in everyday life

• Lack of factual colonial governmentality bad
  management, imperfect rules of the game, local
  interests, weak control of results and misusages
• The imported norms (ideals, models, rules) remain
  non-imbedded in the everyday practices they are
  too distant, too alien, too non-habitual.
• The habitual everyday practices are wild,
  resistant, non-obedient they tactically use
  the norms for their own purposes

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Example the German Menscheschlange and English
queue vs. the Bulgarian ??????

• The Queue simple model of social institution
  habitual formal rules, ruling roles, behaviors
  and mutual expectations
• Visibility of norms, usages and mis-usages
• Visualisation of order, disorder (chaos or
  transgression?) and sanctions

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Menschenschlange
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Menschenschlange (arbeitslose Informatiker in
Zürich)
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English queue
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English queue
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Bulgarian ?????? (literal meaning tail)
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Queue in front of Sofias bank
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Ukrainian case
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The western message of the queue image - the
reproduced social order
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?????? as the eastern image of poaching tactics
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Poaching tactics is conscious about the norm
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Interactions and tensions between high and
popular culture

• It could be summarized as a stream of indignant
  criticisms alleging shortage of civilization from
  the top and torrent of irony, adaptations,
  adjustments, travesties, special uses,
  substitutions and hybrids from the bottom
  designed to evade or undermine the top.
• The masses, engrossed in their traditional way of
  living (with its own channels, agents and pace of
  modernizing and Europeanizing), never went the
  whole way in recognizing their Europeid elites
  with their modernizing projects and civilizing
  claims.
• The elites suffered the paradox of an inherent
  illegitimacy as being locally born, not truly
  European on their part, they decried the
  inferior human material of the masses

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Discussion about the situation in Eastern Europe
before 1989

• Was the membership in the Eastern bloc under the
  leadership of the Soviet Union and during the
  Cold War a colonial rule? Or maybe not?

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Discussion about the recent situation in Eastern
Europe

• How should we interpret the enlargement of EU
• Accession?
• Colonization?
• Self-Colonization?
• None of this terms is adequate, we have to look
  for a different label
• What are the reactions of the different
  sociological strata of the population in your
  country toward the accession, what are the
  tactical East European uses and misuses of EU And
  Europe?