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11 - Europe’s Debt Denied: Reflections on 1989 and the Loss of Yugoslav Experience of Direct Democracy
- Edited by Stefan Nygard, University of Helsinki
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- Book:
- The Politics of Debt and Europe’s Relations with the ‘South’
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 15 October 2020
- Print publication:
- 18 June 2020, pp 247-277
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Summary
SOMEWHERE AND SOMETIME between 1989 and 2009 Europe lost its East. It ceased to be a monolithic political actor and broke into individual national elements with diversified situations and relations within the European Union. With its disappearance as a distinct political actor, its legacy has been subjected to reworking, which has rendered it meaningless at best, and at worst made it appear harmful to Europe's present and future.
To some this was the result of a long-desired revolutionary transformation that returned Eastern Europe to the main course of European history. In this view, the forty-five years of Eastern European history appear as a history gone astray. To those on the other side of the ideological divide, which is getting more visible in European politics after the political vertigo of the so-called post-ideological age, the loss was a counter-revolutionary motion, a conscious and intentional erasure of the legacy of social revolutions, and it created a debt that may well be paid off by contracting our present's visions of the future.
More specifically, the historical process of regime change has been complemented by a conscious political erasure of the legacy of socialist politics. The transition obscured the political experience of democratic practices of socialism, as well as the revolutionary experience of anti-fascist struggle and later uprisings and resistance to the regimes, which finally culminated in 1989. It is argued here that a political debt has thus been incurred, which is made visible and felt in present-day Europe through its political crisis of the so-called democratic deficit. The narrative of the triumph of the Western model in the Cold War has nowadays come to appear more and more as something of a pyrrhic victory because, as Susan Buck-Morss suggests, ‘the historical experiment of socialism was so deeply rooted in the Western modernising tradition that its defeat cannot but place the whole Western narrative into question’. It is my intention to show that post-1989 motions against the legacy of the socialist East, particularly Yugoslavia as a politically and culturally hybrid society, seriously shrank the horizons of our political future as seen from this present.
9 - An Unsettled Past as a Political Resource
- from Part III - Claims for Justice in the History of Modernity and in its Present
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- By Svjetlana Nedimović, European University Institute Florence
- Edited by Peter Wagner, CREA Research Professor, Universitat de Barcelona
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- Book:
- African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 August 2016
- Print publication:
- 09 March 2015, pp 197-218
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Summary
A PAST WITHIN the framework of transitional justice is reckoned with and assigned definite significance through the processes of truth seeking, prosecution, acknowledgment of suffering and ultimate redemption through reparations and targeted institutional reforms. This perception of the past and past reckoning reflects an understanding of society that overlooks the open-ended and deeply conflictual historicity of societal existence, captured in Castoriadis's notion of the social–historical. The failure to recognise continuous engaging with the past as the gist of societal existence is related to the dominant conceptualisation of modern society. A society is modern insofar as it is radically detached from its past, because the prevalent conceptualisation of modern temporality is progressivist, as are also transitional justice narratives. The reconceptualisation of society as social–historical allows for a much broader understanding of past reckoning as engaging with the past beyond the framework of transitional justice, its processes and mechanisms.
Certain changes in the field of past reckoning are heralded by the recent shift of focus and approach to transitional justice, suggesting ‘weariness of [conventional] institutions’ and moving away from the dominant understanding of transitional justice as ‘limited and linear’ movement (McEvoy and McGregor, 2008: 6). The motion is twodimensional– towards civil society activities on the one hand, and on the other, to the processes in everyday life of communities which experienced mass violence and possibly continue to experience tensions and divisions.
Transformative motions, however, retain continuities with the conventional approaches that focused on the roles of crime tribunals and official truth commissions, where the past is treated as a burden to be overcome. As will be argued here, such understanding of the past is informed by the modern future-oriented conception of time. In that context, past reckoning is successful only insofar as it delivers society of its traumatic past. By contrast, I shall argue, on the basis of Castoriadis's theory of the social–historical, that engaging with the past is an inescapable dimension of societal existence and its self-creative process. Such past is not necessarily a burden but can become a political resource in the (re)construction of political community. The resourcefulness of the past, however, is vitally dependent upon standing or permanent political institutions and normative frameworks, though this has been overlooked by previous analyses that focus on the importance of the ad hoc instruments of transitional justice and civil society.