Pit Schultz on Fri, 10 Nov 95 22:37 MET


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ES GIBT KEINEN STAAT IN EUROPA (fwd)



http://lois.kud-fp.si/~lukap/embassy/1a/staat.html
> ES GIBT KEINEN STAAT IN EUROPA
> 
> Slavoj Zizek
> 
> For many long years in left-wing (and not only left-wing) mythology
> the State appeared as the original source of Evil, as a living dead
> sponging off the body of the community. The repressive, particularly
> ideological machinery of the State was presented as the process of
> supervising and maintaining discipline, as armour shaping the
> healthy body of the community. The utopian perspective, which
> henceforth opened up towards both the radical left-wing as well as
> the antiliberal right-wing, was the abolition of the State or its
> subordination to the community.
> 
> Today's experience, summed up in the word "Bosnia", confronts us
> with the reality of this utopia.
> 
> What we are witnessing in Bosnia is the direct consequence of the
> disintegration of State authority or its submission to the power
> play between ethnic communities - what is missing in Bosnia is a
> unified State authority elevated above ethnic disputes. A similar
> tendency can be observed in Serbia where we are again dealing with a
> state which is not based on the modern concept of nationhood, but
> has fused with the pre-state ethnic mix, and thus in Kosovo
> paradoxically in the same territory two states coexist: the Serbian
> state authority and the para-State agencies of the Republic of
> Kosovo. The old left-wing disinclination towards the rule of law and
> order has thus come face to face with its own truth, manifested in
> Bosnia and Serbia where unsupervised local warlords are plundering,
> killing and settling private scores. In contrast to expectations it
> has become clear that there is nothing liberating about the breaking
> of state authority - on the contrary: we are consigned to corruption
> and the impervious game of local interests which are no longer
> restricted by a formal legal framework.
> 
> In a certain sense "Bosnia" is merely a metaphor for Europe as a
> whole. Europe is coming closer and closer to a state of
> non-statehood where state mechanisms are losing their binding
> character. The authority of the state is being eroded from the top
> by the trans-European regulations from Brussels and the
> international economic ties and from the bottom by local and ethnic
> interests, while none of these elements are strong enough to fully
> replace state authority.
> 
> Thus, Etienne Balibar has altogether appropriately labeled the
> current situation in Europe with the syntagma "Es gibt keinen Staat
> in Europa" ("There is no State in Europe").
> 
> From all this it is thus necessary to draw what at first glance
> seems a paradoxical, yet crucial conclusion: today the concept of
> utopia has made an about-face turn - utopian energy is no longer
> directed towards a stateless community, but towards a state without
> a nation, a state which would no longer be founded on an ethnic
> community and its territory, therefore simultaneously towards a
> state without territory, towards a purely artificial structure of
> principles and authority which will have severed the umbilical
> chords of ethnic origin, indigenousness and rootedness.
> 
> As far as art, according to definition, is subversive in relation to
> the existing establishment, any art which today wants to be up to
> the level of its assignment must be a state art in the service of a
> still-non-existent country. It must abandon the celebration of
> islands of privacy, seemingly insulated from the machinery of
> authority, and must voluntarily become a small cog in this
> machinery, a servant to the new Leviathan, which it is summoning
> like the genie from the bottle.
> 
> Ljubljana, 1993