A nation with a fully developed cultural identity of course has no problem in facing the challenges and influences from the outside. Indeed, facing up to different mentalities and forms of behaviour is the only attitude Slovenians might adopt in order to avoid succumbing to the alluring sirens of self-sufficiency, provincial xenophobia and consequent national withering. The "other" becomes an enemy only when we are unsure of our own identity. In the case of Slovenia, however, there should be little doubt about the existence of such specific national identity. The accomplishments of the leading writers, artists, and other creative minds provide the Slovenian nation with a strong sense of identity regardless of a small number of people that make up the total Slovenian population. I hasten to add that a small number of people, two million, does not necessarily make a nation small. Moreover: it would not be impossible to argue that the metaphysical smallness of a nation may be measured first and foremost in regard to how much the people believe into their nation's creative potential and the richness of their cultural tradition.
The argument of the small numerical size as an evidence in support of the claim about the inevitable, if gradual absorption of Slovenian nation in the "larger context" is much used today in Ljubljana as well as in Brussels. It is, alas, far from being new. A quick glance at the Slovenian history reveals a long tradition of this erroneous, albeit politically potent "argument of numbers". Such was, for example, the 19th century Ilyrian tradition of writers like Stanko Vraz and Ljudevit Gaj, who called for the unification of Slovenian and Croatian languages on the basis of alleged "linguistic pragmatism". After the First World War, this argument manifested itself in the ideological straight-jacket of the "integral Yugoslavism". Today, the argument is often advanced by members of the political elite who do not understand politics in the ancient Greek sense, that is, as a discussion of res publica, "public affairs". Instead, they view it as nothing else but an exclusivist technology of power. As such, they mistakenly believe that Slovenians can somehow be European in a direct, unmediated sense, without first being who Slovenians really are: the citizens of the Slovenian nation-state. In other words, the fact that Slovenians are Europeans only insofar as they are citizens of the Slovenian nation-state, is in the folds of the "argument of numbers" almost entirely lost.
I am convinced, though, that the issue should be reversed. It was precisely the numerical limitation of Slovenians as a people that forced the key players in the Slovenian national culture to interact with foreign strategies of creativity and thinking, critically recuperating them according to their own will and principles. After all, the small population, coupled with a fruitful, if troublesome, geographic location of Slovenian nation at the crossroads of the Roman, Panonic, Germanic and Balkan cultural traditions has always presented our ancestors with the impossibility of an ideal bucolic "sameness". The notion of self-absorbed and uncontaminated Slovenian culture where national ego in Arcadia would be quietly nurtured is of course but an illusion.
Slovenian creative minds have been traditionally in a dialogue with the gospel of the Western civilization, drawing on the linguistic self-confidence of Protestantism, the Italian Renaissance, the Central European baroque, French rationalism, German Romanticism and Expressionism, historicist Viennese architecture, English rock'n'roll, American pop-art and French "new-wave" films, not to mention the allure of Hollywood screen and the intricacies of Balkan blues.
The idea that art and culture, if understood only as a formal ornament to the national life, can provide neither national freedom nor unfettered flight of imagination, appeared very early in the Slovenian history. The sheer decorative, non-substantial character of works of art and cultural tradition at large would of course end in nothing else but in a gradual decay. The leading Slovenian literary critic in the period between the world wars, Josip Vidmar, captured the importance of local interaction with the tendencies of the wider world in his seminal essay "The Cultural Problems of Slovenian Identity" (1932). He vividly explained that a small nation is "like a very uneven peninsula - the ocean keeps splashing against its many shores and the fresh wind infinitely blows over its entire surface".
This commitment to the "winds" of the Central European sentiment and the "ocean" of the Western civilizational experience has personally helped me in two ways. Both as a writer who is using universal codes of expression to present what I believe is an individual vision, and as a Slovenian with a particular collective experience in my background, I gradually came to see that it would be impossible to divorce myself from the treasure of the national cultural references. A truly cosmopolitan personality can only be the one, I surmise, who comfortably traverses various cultural meridians of the planet, while not giving up the reflection of his/her national roots. Such genuine cosmopolitanism was, for example, exercised in opuses and biographies of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Rainer Maria Rilke, Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan, to name but a few.
In post-independence Slovenia, there are two types of provincialism that combat this kind of cosmopolitan habitus. The first one was given birth by the conservative nationalist formula of an autarkic and often violent "navel gazing", i.e. the mentality that cannot, would not, and is unable to learn anything from the others. The second kind of provincialism is represented by the bona fide liberal "internationalists" whose main characteristic might be seen in the fact that they despise each and every aspect of the national identity because of fear of being lumped together with the nationalist zealots. As a result, this position drives "internationalist" liberals toward an uncritical approval of each and every idea that comes from "the West". Such minds in a servile manner offer their ingratiating "bless you!" when this or that fashionable cultural guru sneezes in Paris, London or New York.
Both kinds of opponents to the dialectics of local and global aspect of human condition are active in contemporary Slovenia. This constellation is, alas, not all that different from other post-communist countries. The velvet revolutions in 1989 indeed produced a semblance of the renaissance of the national ideas in Eastern and Central Europe, encouraging the debates on validity of the national cultural experience and teasing the peoples with the cheep utopian promise of miraculously resolved conflicts in newly independent countries. Almost a decade after the annus mirabilis, however, it has become rather clear that only a very few original approaches to the relation between the national and global aspect of collective identity emerged on the ruins of communist ancien regime. Intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe have, with largely thoughtless transplantation of assorted Western stereotypes and conceptual forms, almost unanimously accepted the role of "poor relatives" that only compete with each other in efforts to impress their rich cousins in Europe, that is, Western Europe.
However, what kind of Europe are we really talking about? As for me, I am convinced that the discussion must primarily concentrate on the following difference between two aspects of "the European idea". One the one hand, one must entertain the project of integration of diverse European societies, an enterprise based exclusively on the economic standards. As such, this is a goal that is as interesting as it is crucial. On the other hand, one must take measure of Europe as a common, if elusive spiritual and mental realm. What is the price of the first aspect taking over the second? Modern European epiphany does not reveal itself solely in the noble tradition of the Roman law, Greek philosophy, Renaissance art and Romantic poetry, of universal human and civil rights. Contemporary idea of Europe is advanced in the increasingly popular right-wing politics of "fascism with a smile", too. This highly conservative gate-keeping is cast not only as a tool to strengthen "natural" communities but is no less forcefully presented as a legitimation of the global market economy. The latter is promulgated by the progeny of nefarious Lord Chamberlain whose job is to ram down our throats the idea that the "economics of the bottom line" is the ultimate, if not the only purpose of human existence.
After the disintegration of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany, Western Europe cannot, despite the ever-growing homogenization of the global markets, obscure its metaphysical failure and political sterility. Internal disintegration of its political and moral backbone was particularly well unmasked in the third Balkan war, where the European diplomacy for the most part struggled to deny the basic right to self-defence to Bosnian and Croatian victims. This situation is painfully reminiscent of the 1930s, a period in which Europe was myopically proud of its arrogant authority of "the sick...secret diplomacy that trades with territories of small nations, calming down the rebellious looks with the League of Nations, run by the traders and oppressors themselves", as the Slovenian avant-garde poet Srečko Kosovel wrote in his lucid public lecture "Disintegration Of Society And Decay Of Art" (1925). Kosovel was of course describing the situation in his time. His prophetic insight, however, poetically intimates of the situation today.
More to the point: thrilled by the political proximity to Western Europe and full of resentment for the present Serbian political madness, those who shape Slovenian public discourse often grow oblivious to the fact that in the contemporary world the philosophy of the postmodern domination no longer requires machine guns to express itself. The primary strategy today appears to be the use of the forms of the seemingly harmless "ethnically neutral" economy, trans-national capital, uniform cultural patterns and a gradual mass-media unification of each and every particular mentality and idiosyncratic experience. If Slovenians are to survive as a full-fledged nation in the times of unavoidable economic integration and often hollow rhetoric of the "united Europe", then we must keep in mind not only the capacities of economic productivity, but also those of our operas and theatres. Successful businessmen should thrive equally well as the variety of national TV and radio stations; political know-how should be thought about in the same breath as the accomplishments of the diverse creative and intellectual impulses. While it is certainly not an easy job for such impulses to extend their reach beyond the national borders, the importance of cultural creativity nonetheless lies in that it serves as a constant reminder that, after the declaration of independence, our dilemma should no longer be spontaneously expressed in light of the defeatist traditional formula, advanced by the 19th century writer, Fran Levstik: "We can either be Russian or Prussian". Today, we can finally be ourselves.
Having said all that, I make no bones about it. I do realize that there is no point in pretending to ignore relevant historical and social-political processes that have led to our contemporary condition. In other words: from the village champions (Yugoslavia) Slovenians have become the Olympic losers (Western Europe). Instead of colonization with the accompanying politics of Italianization, Germanization and Serbization, all of which were fought against not in the least because the enemy was possible to define, we are now facing the situation of the anonymous multinational capital. Its formidable forces are discussed in Slavoj ižek's essay "Multiculturalism Or The Cultural Logic Of The Multinational Capitalism" (1997). Here, this famous philosopher bitterly argues that the multinational capital does no longer call for the use of unmediated violence, since particular cultures are much more effectively destroyed by the global market itself.
How to respond to this challenge? I have no original answer. As a poet, though, I simply think that the inspiration may still be drawn from the rich heritage of Slovenian cultural innovation and experiment, if not directly from the literary works of art. Not very comforting, I admit. It is, alas, most likely the only comfort one can possibly get. A political program that would ignore the spiritual an cultural component of the national identity in Slovenian efforts to join European Union, would soon find itself in a position where it will be reduced to managing perhaps better paid, yet sorrowfully hollowed out labor force whose main attraction for foreign investments will be its low hourly wage.
A responsible attitude towards the national tradition is essential to the extent that culture is not a gift from our ancestors. Instead, we have borrowed it from our grandchildren. Today's situation is less than promising. In Central and Eastern Europe, we are, on one hand, dealing with ethnic fundamentalism which prioritises the "Blut-und-Boden" ideology. On the other hand, we are witnessing the upsurge of a-national liberalism, triggered by the social-Darwinist logic of the market.
Benjamin Barber, American theorist of communitarism, described in his meticulously researched "Jihad vs. MCWorld" (1995) these intertwined processes as a mixture of hatred, the exclusiveness of the tribal form, and the all-embracing maximization of profit. Specific movements founded on the grounds of ethnic, religious or cultural obsessions with a prescribed way of communication which Barber calls Jihad, as well as movements of McWorld (aspirations for uniformity and homogenization promoted by global corporations), share many similarities despite their mutual hostility. The underlying idea of both is a dismissal of democracy. Jihad uses the bloody policy of the ethnic exclusivism while McWorld prefers the bloodless economy of profit. The result of the former is voluntary blindness within which the traitors of the tribal Cause are persecuted, while the latter offers the consumerist rigor mortis where we all do nothing else but "entertain ourselves to death."
Neither under the Jihad's canopy nor under the McWorld's umbrella, however, is there a place for a citizen. Jihad replaced this concept by a paranoid warrior and McWorld cultivates an ignorant consumer. If the ancient truth about si non est civis, non est homo is still valid today as it should be, then the consequences of accepting either Jihad or McWorld will be those of a premeditated catastrophe. Without the comprehensive experience of citizenship there is no democracy. The emphasis on democracy within this context is essential if one is to realize that the democratic order provides conditions for the emergence of public sphere with its capability to produce free development of various personal practices and cultural styles.
Such public sphere depends on the civil society which, in turn, articulates itself through the tension vis-a-vis to the institutions of the nation-state. This tension is a corner stone of a democratic society. From this vantage point, the importance of the nation-state is indismissible since it provides minimum of regulation of conditions for the functioning of the social life. Zygmund Bauman, arguably the most lucid theorist of postmodernity in the English-speaking world, in his book "Life in Fragments" (1995) argues: "The bigger the share of sovereignty that nation-states relegate to the supra-national all-European institutions, the lesser the possibility for a successful defense of their own identities, based on the nation- state." Should we choose to dismiss the idea of the nation-state, we thus, in the final analysis, allow the proliferation of movements of local and ethnic communities, and concomitantly tolerate the destructive crusade of "fast music, fast food and fast computers" of the global capitalist machine.
Allowing both processes to grow unhindered would in my opinion prove disastrous. The worlds of Jihad and McWorld are by definition incapable of respecting that unity of the symbolic, cultural and social experience which builds multilayered history of national existence and collective mentality. Both are primarily reflected in the mother's tongue which is not only a mechanical tool of communication. Instead, it must be first and foremost understood as a metaphysical worldview. For this writer, a poet by vocation, this aspect is of fundamental relevance in discussing affairs of culture, its pitfalls and advantages. The fateful intimacy of language and national identity was in the Slovenian history best perceived by poets, starting with a founding father of modern letters, Romantic poet France Prešeren. His rejection of German, the language he could bring to the highest aesthetic levels, did not imply a simple pragmatic exchange of the means of expression (a financially more powerful area, larger public, sizable market, etc.). Prešeren's commitment to his mother tongue was an embodiment of an existential and political decision, his article of faith, that seems to be today gaining a renewed importance. If the mother tongue presents a particular worldview, it is possible to argue that it also represents a language of a specific comprehensive perspective that cannot be sufficiently expressed in any other language. Consider a following anecdote. One of my college students has, after a lecture, come up to me and sadly stated that he really is not sure what makes him a Slovenian. He is surfing on the Internet, watching MTV and Hollywood "slash and burn" movies, dressing in Benneton shops, and listening to the Viennese international radio station The Blue Danube, while all the rural idyllic of the Slovenian "hayracks" and the rituals of peasant festivities are, understandably, lost to him. I am sure that he is not alone in facing this central dilemma. I often wonder about it myself. But when I, in the course of our discussion, switched to English only to prove a point, my student suddenly realized how English, despite being the lingua franca of the modern world and the language of international mass culture, radically narrowed his verbal register and flattened out his imaginative horizon.
It is thus the specific perspective of the mother tongue that integrates all the cultural, geographic, symbolic and social aspects of the national experience. The refuge of our mother tongue is thus the place where every single thing has a name. Small wonder. The language, after all, transcends our individuality since it is older and greater than time which is, in turn, older and greater than space, as Joseph Brodsky illumintaingly says in his essay "To Please a Shadow" (1989). Make no mistake: I, too, find the nationalistic logic which ignores all that is foreign and different, most repulsive. But that does not mean that I have to automatically subscribe to another extreme which would make me reject the national experience tout court. A personal example might be in order here. I happened to have spent many years in America. I have my second alma mater there, my publisher, my friends, my editorial affiliations, and professional network. I could even go so far as to say that I figuratively live on the bridge between Slovenia and America. In my home in Ljubljana, my wife and I speak American English to each other for she, an American herself, does not yet feel comfortable in her adopted language.
Despite varieties of such "Americanization" of my self, however, I cannot and would not follow many Slovenian politicians of the economic reductionism and their business counterparts, who cheerfully declare that a disrespect of the mother-tongue, five hundred words in Basic English and the fluency in the rhetorics of cable TV spontaneously put them on the best path to a promised land of (Western) Europe. I have no desire whatsoever to adopt this attitude. I cannot support it because I know that a human being cannot live on bread alone. This that does not necessarily mean that I support the privileges of starvation, either.
If it is true that life without a spiritual sphere in which existential experience of an individual and of a nation can be fully expressed is but a dull vegetative life, then the Slovenian economic success in the age of the newly gained independence must be accompanied by a cultural narrative about the symbolic and the material value of the language, ethical values, the fateful burden of history and the mythic tradition. This story makes us see our lives against the broader background of national destiny, making us a critical link in the great chain of being that is not going to end with us; it makes us preserve our national culture and language in the era of the current European integration that considers smaller nations an unnecessary inconvenience.
Many sceptics would of course question the need to preserve the national culture. These voices argue that the concern with res publica should be an exclusive matter of professional politicians. I, for one, think otherwise. I am convinced that the preservation of the cultural conscience in a broader environment of a civil society is essential in a democratic nation-state not only because it is too important to be left to the political elite alone. Now that we have come to the end of our Yugoslav via dolorosa, the awareness of importance of national culture may prevent us from turning into Viennese lakeys, as Serbian popular press is wont on calling Slovenians. The crass metaphor, of course, is farfetched but it does nonetheless dramatize the present Slovenian uncritical longing towards the "European Paradise Lost."
If we try to resist the modern temptation of perverted Descartesian slogan "I shop therefore I am!", then we may still find an inspiration - with doubts though not without hope, in a committed, though not glorifying way - in the meaning of the cultural tradition. Thus we may perhaps figure out where we stand while attempting to decode the signals of the modern pre-catastrophic world. In the latter not only individuals but entire nations are being destroyed. Under the pressure of the ideology of "cold peace" entire nations are condemned to disappearance, as we have been all too painfully reminded by the Bosnian tragedy.
To assume a firm stand against both the provincial mind of ethnic exclusivism as well as that of corporate homogenization, we must look back to the history of Slovenian literature. There, at least to me, the grace of that special light is revealed, the glow of which our lives are enriched by that narrative which is "just to the complexity and multiple meanings of the history and is able to open up a broad realm of human creativity that with elegance of its form reaches to a kind of transcendence and appeals to the better aspects of our selves", as the American critic Neil Postman said in his opening speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1993.
Inspiration that Slovenes use to measure the distance and proximity of the collective mentality is probably best seen in the characters of literary works of art. Their destinies and fights are still, in my opinion, a great source of inspiration even today for they reveal how the existentialist dilemma of Slovenians has always been connected with the metaphysical dilemma of cultural identity. The latter has not been automatically accepted as a given, as it was not accepted either by Germans or by Serbs. We had been living under the same roof in a less than equal relationship with the former for long eleven centuries, and with the latter for seventy years.
The characters of our national literature had to fight first for their identity and second, to ensure its wider public recognition. The essential archetype of these rites of passage suggests their contemporary usage. This should be viewed in the fact that Slovenians have not created a nation-state only to freely enjoy the thrills of ex Occidente luxus. The nation-state should be here to help us be, and not to simply have, if I may paraphrase Erich Fromm's perhaps forgotten, though still very powerful distinction.
The emphasis that I chose to place upon language and comprehensive national cultural experience has, in a limited context of this essay, but a single ambition: to dramatize the inherent dangers of the entirely economist approach to Slovenian identity, striving to put absolutely all affairs of culture, art and their social existence to the mercy of the invisible hand of the market. If we are not aware of the history of our national culture which cannot and should not be measured according to its "marketability", we may very well turn into the tribe of children with no memory and no concerns and thus, by extension, without freedom. Such kind of tribe was totally unprotected when it faced the underground cannibalistic children of the dark, as H. G. Wells described the consequences of losing the sense of history in his work "The Time Machine".
A small nation at the end of the 20th century is thus presented both with a challenge and a responsibility to show that we are up to bringing the very notion of freedom to bear.
Krasnogruda nr 8, Sejny 1998, Pogranicze.