By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
We got slapped in the face by the EU. Again.
You know what: a servile behavior towards the EU, finding new and new excuses for the lord of the manor who loves us, but can’t accept us because we are unworthy of it – as soon as we are worthy, as soon as we wash, re-stink and learn not to squirm, they’ll let us sit at the same table with them, is that right? Yes, that’s right – but it’s not part of the “European values”.
What’s happening to us is a warning why it’s particularly important for small nations to have enlightened and uncorrupted elites. The uneducated and corrupt obey every command. Montenegro does not have its own Kurti. And that’s why it’s suffering now. And it’s nothing compared to what’s going to happen in the future.
Kant is a true European value. And he, Kant, defined unenlightenment as “self-concealed infancy.” This is our condition: those who always need a guardian. And they suffer every humiliation because they are always able to convince themselves that their guardian, even when humiliating them, loves them.
To be frank – that’s the European value. What was the name of a guy who claimed that the truth liberates… Oh, yeah, Jesus Christ. Kant claimed something similar.
Benjamin Constant, in an argument with Kant, stated that “the moral principle, for example, that to tell the truth is a duty, if taken absolutely and in isolation, would make any society impossible.” He also added that, according to Kant, a man with whom his friend hid from the murderers who chased him, if the murderers broke into his house and asked him if he was hiding his friend, would have a duty to say “yes”, because a lie would mean a crime against truth as an absolute value.
Kant, who did not actually cite the example Constant ascribed to him, said in his reply that, even in that case one should tell the truth, and went on to explain that the only ethical action in which “subject pathology” has no share is his interests, affections and profits. Kant’s minimum of ethical action is practically unattainable. Because the minimum is also the maximum: there is no partially ethical act. For the whole gray zone of the partial, there is morality, which defines by agreement when and under what conditions socially acceptable unethical action. Hence, the democratic order, which defines itself as the least bad of all, as an order of consensus, transparency, control and environment, is indifferent to the ethical (who can still tell the difference between ethical and fat free: they sell both – so it’s possible to buy ethical clothing or coffee) which always tightens things up and splits the middle and pulls to extremes.
Our demands for the truth are firm and principled, until the truth threatens to harm our comfort, our friends, relatives, the nation, the state, the ideological truth … whatever we hold on to. We, the truth, somehow always expect it from others, while as a rule we have so-called higher reasons why we suspend the truth that could harm our cause. We expect others, like Aristotle, to love Plato, but to love the Truth even more. We, on the other hand, have our reasons for behaving like someone who is a friend of the truth, but an even better friend of his friends. When it comes to us, it kind of turns out to be, fuck, immoral to be ethical.
Just recall: negotiations over the formation of Dritan’s government, which is supposed to last for a year, lasted for more than 6 months.
In the end we got a government characterized by the inclusiveness of the Ku Klux Klan, the democratic legitimacy of the Bilderberg Group (or the European Commission), disgust at the corruption of Swiss banks, independence of butlers and transparency of cuttlefish ink.
The government formally runs the country, but everyone knows who ordered such a government and why. But few say it out loud, because at the same time, they will be accused of anti-Americanism and the spread of anti-Western sentiments – which is far more dangerous today than to publicly resent your distrust of Yugoslav socialism.
In the previous times, you were a dissident with such an attitude and enjoyed the respect of both the Western public and the liberal-civic intelligentsia in Yugoslavia itself. Many dissidents were happy to visit the salons. However, if you’re diagnosed “anti-Americanism”, all the doors are closed to you here today – not even a half-dead dog on the street will allow you to feed and pet it.
Numerous analysts have numerous suggestions for “how to get out of the crisis.” It seems to me that the crisis has revealed that there is no crisis. The blockade of the assembly and Zdravko’s government, which refused to leave, made it clear that we do not need an assembly or a government, nor the parasites that inhabit those parasitic institutions.
If we can survive half a year without them, then we can do it for a year. If we can do it for a year, then we can for ten years more. And if we can live without it for 10 years, let’s not have them for 100 years. OK, I know, democracy is “the least bad system.” But I can’t help the impression that in the so-called democratic process of permanent “choice of lesser evil” we choose people we don’t want in institutions we don’t need.
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published the bestseller ‘The End of History and the Last Man’. At the right moment, practically on the ruins of communism, he offered a book that proclaimed the Millennium of Liberal Democracy. The text itself is a simplification of Hegel, that is, an influential interpretation of Hegel offered by Alexandre Kojéve.
The winner, capitalism, felt so powerful that through Fukuyama, his prophet, he proclaimed himself to be the end of history. It was the third time in the unfortunate twentieth century that something great and powerful had proclaimed a secularized version of the Apocalypse.
First, communism did this – through a world revolution that would result in the end of the state and the end of history. Then – through the promise of the Millennial Reich – it was done by Nazism. That, at the end of the century, through the proclamation of the final and eternal victory of liberal democracy, capitalism would do so. Fukuyama announced an unstoppable triumphant march of globalization and neoliberal capitalism.
But 30 years later…
In an interview for the Spanish daily ‘La Vanguardia’, before the war in Ukraine, Josep Borell, the high-ranking representative of the European Union, said that we were threatened by a “crisis of biblical proportions”. What kind of crisis in the midst of the Millennial Empire of Capitalism and Democracy?
Borell overwhelmingly used dark tones as he was painting the future: “developing countries will lose all revenue as exports collapse, oil and commodity prices soar, tourism has stalled, as have remittances from economic emigrants.” The situation in Europe is going to be terrible, he says.
Okay. But, so what?
“Globalization must be re-examined,” Borell said, to resonate for a long time throughout history, through the endless emptiness of history.
And you should also re-examine both the market and its omnipotence, preached by neoliberal capitalism. Borell admitted that until now it was thought that the market “supplies the necessary goods always and everywhere. But when it comes to demise and shortages like now, you realize that 90 percent of antibiotics are produced in China, that Europe does not make a gram of paracetamol and has no stocks to deal with health crises”.
Oh, yeah. Not only should you re-examine globalization and the free market, but “we need to restore the role of a country”, the EU’s high-ranking representative said.
And not only that. In the future, Borell and Macron say, we will nationalize it. And even that is not all.
“We must not allow foreign companies to buy companies on stock exchanges whose value collapsed – the state must protect itself and one of the ways is to invest in their capital, because that is economic and political logic and reason,” Borell said, i.e. the European Union.
But wait a second… We, in the Balkans, in order to join the EU and the Millennial Empire of Liberal Democracy and its associated capitalism, have done exactly what the EU now says “should not be allowed at all”. We have done exactly the opposite of what the EU’s “economic and political logic and reason” say.
We allowed the value of the company to collapse. We allowed other countries to buy them. We did not do it only with some banks and companies, but with all of them. What we didn’t sell, we ruined and built buildings for sale there. We did all this under the careful supervision of the Troika – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
The European Union will now, therefore, do the opposite of what we have been doing for the last 30 years. They will rethink globalization, which we have embraced. They will re-examine the market, to which we have left everything. They will nationalize, and we have privatized everything. They will strengthen the state and state interventionism, we have weakened the state and declared state interventionism the remains of the past.
As it is now quite clear that everything they did was wrong, one is tempted to conclude that the Balkan economic and political model was devised by idiots. Either them or the most malicious enemies.
Imagine what our advantages would be if the masters of that model did not come up with – we had, and then destroyed, everything that the EU now states as its goals. If we had preserved socialism, we would now be ready for the EU. In fact, the EU would be ready for us. In essence, even if only symbolically, the EU would join us – not the other way around.
