By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Dritan Abazovic, deputy prime minister in the government of an officially sovereign country, says a big surprise is coming from Washington to solve all inconveniences in the Montenegrin political stage. Dritan loudly calls for the American Deus Ex Machina intervention. I’d like to use this opportunity to congratulate him on his openness. We all know that we’re a colony, but few high-ranking politicians speak about it so clearly.
My generation remembers that very well: we were children in Olympic Sarajevo and we often used the word: American. That word in our speech meant “perfect, the best in the world, and I want it”. We used it to answer a long list of questions: from “is a movie playing in the Dubrovnik cinema good?” to “do you like my new Adidas sneakers?”.
At the same time, we were retelling a joke suggesting that films were divided into good and Russian to the point of exhaustion.
No, we were not non-aligned. We wanted the best: we wanted our lives to be American, too. By the 1980s, America had ideologically conquered the territory of Yugoslavia. Our children’s games involving the word American were a benign manifestation of the ideological triumph of “Western values” in the former Yugoslavia. We had the opportunity to see that malignancy at the beginning of the war in Bosnia, when Sarajevo residents, as bombs fell on their heads, firmly convinced of justice, moreover: the perfection of democratic countries, explained to each other that the war in Bosnia, once it began, was going to end soon because “the West and America will not allow it.”
At that moment, it was clear that the West, for us as well as other “non-free peoples who dream of democracy”, acts as an agent of the great Other. Hundreds of thousands of human lives later, by ending the war and imposing peace, America will reaffirm its status as what sets our reality, governs it and guarantees peace and justice, in short – maintaining a symbolic order in which the West is a benevolent civilizer to end our tribal hatreds and gradually make us like themselves: American.
In the book “Empires: The Logic of World Rule – From Ancient Rome to the United States”, Herfried Münkler, a professor of political theory at Humboldt in Berlin, writes that each empire goes through two phases: expansion and consolidation, the latter being so-called “civilizational” phase. In the phase of expansion, the empire establishes military and economic supremacy, while in its “civilization” phase, it establishes its power in the political and ideological field.
Less than three decades later, Michael Mann (studied sociology at Oxford, teaches at UCLA, London School of Economics, Yele and Cambridge) conveys the following diagnosis: “It turns out that the American Empire is a giant in a military sense, a parasitic companion in the economic sense, a schizophrenic one in terms of politics, while ideologically a ghost.” Indeed: there is hardly anyone more who truly believes that America is a beacon of democracy and an authorized distributor of human rights. The American neoliberal economy is in rags, and the political spread of American values is giving way to the military. American ideology is a pierced dollar.
Therefore, according to Münkler, it’s clear that America hasn’t successfully crossed the August threshold, the transition from the phase of expansion to the phase of long duration. Octavian, who was given the name Augustus (“exalted”) by the Senate in 27 BC, when he estimated that the empire was finally firmly on its feet, reduced the number of legions from 70 to 25 and dismissed 120.000 soldiers – a large number at the time. A truly consolidated and lasting empire is guarded by its economy, politics and ideology, not a military force.
Münkler’s assessment is that America is, irreversibly, an empire in decline. Its place in the vision of the great imperial power of the West, which it inherited from Britain, is to be taken by the EU in Müller’s vision.
Therefore, the title of the last chapter of his book is entitled: “The Imperial Challenge of Europe”. He concludes with the words: “… imperial orders have mostly soft borders in which the center’s demand is gradually lost. Borders are being replaced by border spaces. Europe will have to adopt this imperial model if it does not want to burden itself and eventually collapse. In principle, it already contains such an order, given that the European Union’s external borders are different from the Schengen borders, which in turn are different from the euro area. That model should be further developed in order for the external borders of Europe to be stable and flexible. This includes an influence on the periphery that is more like imperial relations than relations among countries. The future of Europe will therefore not be possible without copying from the model of the imperial order”.
The periphery according to which imperial influence should be exercised, which Münkler is talking about – that is, of course, us.
We believed that the West, led by the US, would “unravel the Balkan war knot” and bring justice to the victims, just as we believed that the World Bank and the IMF would transform our economies from state-run to free markets, after which we would fall on green pastures of wealth in a neoliberal utopia, far away at the end of history.
We also believe that the EU will cleanse our societies of corruption and make them a free and proud part of the West. The Balkan war node is not unraveled but dissected, so it’s clear to everyone that, in the event of collapse of the EU or some other geopolitical tectonic shift, ex-Yugoslav states would enter a new tour of bloody wars. God of the free market is dead. Now we’re putting all our hopes in the EU: there’s always someone else to solve all our internal contradictions and make us better.
Our countries have the most direct possible interest in becoming part of the EU. Independent Montenegro, for example, is perceived as an independent state in the EU and NATO – otherwise, it’s difficult to sustain it in the long run, certainly not with such a neighborhood and such a population. These pragmatic reasons are actually healthy reasons: yes, we want it because it’s good for us.
What is pathological is ideological brainwash, the imposition of faith in the agents of the great Other, whether those agents are the IMF, the European Commission or the State Department. The price we have paid for naive trust in the West as our great Other is enormous: it’s absolutely unnecessary to add new interest rates to it. Faith in the West takes on the characteristics of a secular version of religious fanaticism: we act as if nothing depends on us, as if our destiny is already determined and in safe hands – “America will not allow it”, “America will replace them”, “they won’t be able to act like this once we enter Europe”, “capitalism will put that all in order”…
But there’s no one who can take care of us better than ourselves. More than that: there’s no such thing like great Other. As one Will Oldham’s song says: There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You.
