The Cultural Impact of EU Expansion

Europe at the Door of Europe

Next year the first Eastern European countries are to enter the European Union. What may be expected of this connecting of European cultures?

Aleksandar Gatalica

European culture is at a crossroads. Many people will say that this is no wonder, since the Old World has been in a ferment ever since the year 1791. Nevertheless, next year the first Eastern European countries are to enter the European Union, bringing with them not only their economic, political and social heritage, but also their artistic, spiritual and moral baggage. What may be expected of this connecting of European cultures?

The answer: a lot that the EU's cultural strategists cannot plan for at this time. For it must not be forgotten that Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania or Slovenia were only in sporadic contact with the West during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance or the Baroque and Classical eras, and in the 20th century these countries, emerging from the Habsburg and German empires, did not share in Western European ideals, nor did they truly participate in the experience of artistic and spiritual creativity.

And what has been happening over the past eighty years? To put it briefly: the entire tumultuous 20th century. And if it is true that, at the beginning of this period, between the two world wars, countries like Czechoslovakia or Hungary had some degree of cultural traffic with Weimar Germany or France, or philosophically-inclined Austria, this can scarcely be said for the Baltic countries.

Afterwards socialism came to all these countries, mainly borne on the wings the liberating Red Army, while the Baltic countries had already been annexed following the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact. After 1945 the Hungary of Georg Lukacs, the Czech Republic of Vaclav Havel and the Poland of Czeslaw Milosz became isolated cultural bastions where the cult of the intellectual hero, most often embodied in the work of writers, was passionately nurtured.

As in Romanticism, the writer was the herald and embodiment of free speech, bold criticism and the spirit of disobedience. In all the countries of Eastern Europe, ours included, everything was based on the courageous words of the hero. Today we know that there was more of the ethical than the aesthetic in the passionate broaching of these issues, yet old habits die the hardest. As Leszek Kolakowski has said, what is contained in the writings of Father Florenski, what Sandor Marai or, in this country, Đilas or Ćosić wrote – for years these were questions of high aesthetic significance in Eastern Europe.

DANGEROUS HEROES: During that time the West experienced a number of revolts by students and intellectuals, yet it was already clear at the beginning of the 1960s that these events would culminate in a certain self-indulgence. That this process would be completely overcome only twenty years after the death of Sartre is something not even a pessimist could have predicted. What actually happened?

Despite the fact that a united Europe is based on the principle of a community of diverse cultures, the past two decades have witnessed an effort to quietly lay the foundations of a unified European aesthetic. This effort has not followed a straight and narrow path; it is nourished by memories of Western European socialist ideals, and draws inspiration from Goethe's 19th century notion of the brotherhood of European nations. In practice, however, this project yields, for the most part, art for the "middle class", inspired by the clear and ethically valid aim that Western Europeans should learn to disavow the strong passions and base impulses that cost many millions of lives in two world wars.

Although there are no rules here, and art is considerably more healthy in today's Austria, Spain or Italy, the current scheme of Western European intellectual practice may be characterized, to some degree, as lacking in fresh material. At the same time, Eastern European writers, who will become citizens of a united Europe next year, are still tapping away on typewriters. During the transition years they have learned that EU artists are expected to enter a market with nearly three hundred million inhabitants, and to behave in a market-oriented manner. Yet the entire cultural situation in these countries still rests upon seductive and, for Europe, potentially dangerous hero figures.

What will happen next year when these intellectual heroes (or would-be heroes) enter the common market and begin selling their books, paintings or music on an equal footing with industrious Western artists? At first, most likely, nothing. Opportunism and bowing to cultural icons are widespread practices in the East, and a good number of first-rate intellectuals have found a way of adapting their work to audiences in a society which expects rapid success.

SPIRITUAL CO-EXISTENCE: But spiritual currents run much deeper, for the collective unconscious is part of them as well. In this country, intellectual issues often boil down to disdainful discussions of "artism", and it is in vain that I have, for years, called attention to the fact that they are much more than that, since art works to cleanse the soul. Art fortifies identity, and it goes without saying that greater self-confidence is the foundation of all success in business and other areas of life which are apparently quite unconnected with it.

For this reason, we should expect that the old tendencies will live on, subversively, in the heads of former Eastern European artists for decades after unification, inevitably blending with Western practices and leading to the creation of a specific Western-Eastern European spirit in the 21st century.

This process was seen "in vivo" following the reunification of East and West Germany. Today, after more than a decade, we see scars in Germany which are not architectural in nature, nor visible only on the streets of Berlin. The spirit of East Germany simply has not been embraced by the rest of Germany, and it seems that the recommendations made by the Western side in the form of unobtrusive cultural directives have not been accepted in Leipzig and Dresden. Thus, mechanical cohabitation has, one decade later, been transformed by the organic co-existence of two German cultures. And although it seems like mixing oil and water, the German public is still wavering, and frequently re-examining itself artistically and spiritually.

The same thing will also happen to Europe, since oil and water can be mixed anyhow; it is simply a question of how much the vessel containing them is shaken.

(First printed in "Politika", December 21, 2002)