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AS EVERY PERSON on the internet, I have some thoughts.
Those thoughts, which I feel unheeded, concern the position of Eastern Europe, a body of land, peoples and cultures I know only from my own life at its westernmost edge. Those histories, which at some undefined point spill over into Central Asia, seem to me caricatured most of the time. Lumped in with the rest of Europe when useful, with no regard to the differences in history and custom, and excluded by pity and prejudice as only partially civilized when differences are to big to disregard.
Mostly then Eastern Europe, and more importantly its people, are disregarded and unknown. The lands are wast, peoples myriad, histories full of tragedy and comedy - and yet we are excpected to conform to the language and excepctation of a mere "dimple" on a sheer landmass of Asia and Africa, to its historical traumas and experiences. People in Belgium wear simple clothes, which conceal their riches, people in Romania - the poorest member of the European Union - are working in factories, driving godforsaken english lorries and thought of in terms of romantic apparition of moral fear: Count Dracula. French, British, Belgians and Germans are beset by guilt over their colonial exploits and crimes against humanity, they have cut the arms of the Congolese, tarnished the lands of India and China, divided amongst themselves The Nile and Palestine, fought wars of prestige and extermination in Middle East, Northern Africa and over the plains of the Eastern Europe (Napoelonic, Crimean, WW I and WW II, to mention only the latest). Now they struggle with those crimes and demand of the world to show them respect and grant them moral superiority once again, as they finally come to terms with their troubled past.
I often think, when confornted with those abstract demands of globlaised (yet in truth anglophone) morality, about the right to your own evils, your own ethical answers, and your own terms. I believe that every people deserve the right to be heard, and their customs and lives respected. An attempt should be made to understand. Westerners are therefore right to attempt it, but we should respond with our own narcissism, attempt to articulate ourselves, demand from ourselves our own reckonings and from them some humble understanding.
LET US CONSIDER for example the problem of colonialism and racism. It is not my point that Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa are less racist, xenophopic or revulsing in their histories of conquest. I only propose that to combat those evils we should first attempt to understand its roots, which suck their poisons from different soil.
Russians, the biggest of Slavic nations, have never enslaved Africans - but they did colonize, they still do in fact. As they spread their empire farther into Asia to their East all the way to the Chinese empire, they subjugated countless peoples, of which we know and think as little as of Native Americans. Histories of other Slavic nations are no less complex in that regard, fierce wars of subjugation were fought on plains of Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, names of peoples and countries which in the passing of history were sometimes applied to quite different entities than today. Peoples were wiped out, identities which formed are complex and burdensome, full of myth and vengance.
Still others, or - at different points in time - all of them, have experienced centuries of foreign rule themselves. Austrian Habsburgs and German states, Huns and Norse, Ottoman, the list of conquerors goes on. Whole nations rlegated to serfdom, subjected to forced assimilation, colonization, violent christianization and so on. All of that is of course now distant past of at least a century.
Nevertheless it had important influence on the formation of national myths and nationalist history. There is a form of this myth common to almost all Slavic nations, it chronicles the long and bitter path of a nation whose liberty is always somewhat hindered by foreign intervention or autocratic rule. It usually then appeals to enduring and suffering SOUL of the people, the true essence of the nation, as an alternative to corrupt and opressive political institutions. Culture, literature and language play an important role in most Slavic national myths - those are true expressions of people's soul or guiding lights towards freedom. A writer or a poet is generally more important than a general or statesman. Almost all slavic cultures have "a greatest poet" (e. g. Pushkin in Russia), who is viewed at once as originator of all literature (altough it is most often only its modernizer), founding father of the nation and the supreme pinnacle of artistic achievement.
This myth therefore asserts at once inferiority and backwardnes of the nation and its political institutions, and originality or moral superiority of the suffering but uncorrupted people, who take strenghth of their soul from faith, ancestral customs and connection with the land. There is in Slavic languages a very strong distinction between narod, ljudstvo (in English only one word for both could be used: people) and nacija, država (nation, state). Narod is an almost metaphysical entity, with a soul which strives for a formal political expression in a state (somewhat like in French political philosophy of J. J. Rousseau), but does not need a state to exist or express itself (this is somewhat similiar to German notion of Volk). Narod is therefore at once an ethnic group (shared language, history and customs), a nation (with political or cultural institutions - or at least "a soul") and people.
Ljudstvo - on the other hand - is a more general term, with less metaphysical conotations. It can denote the constituent people of a political institution or state (as in the "will of the people" of French political philosophy or "power to the people" of communist theory) or in a more widespread usage simply the "common people", the uncorrupted peasants (again similiar to German Volk). Ljudstvo as well as narod does not need the state for its existence, it is quite often understood to be actively opposed to it (especially under oppression when ljudstvo is agens of rebellion against unjust rule). As it is the "common entity" it posseses "common features", such as "common sense" or "common morality". It can be - much depends here on the time period - reactionary, wretched, stupid and mob-like, or solidary, virtous, moral, uncorrupted (narod on the other hand is morally mostly unquestionable category).
Nation or nacija is a latter addition to the vocabulary as it denotes people (ljudstvo or narod) who achieved political sovereignity in a (nation) state.
So then, the popular myths of Slavic nations posit that there exists a methaphysical entity, a soul of the people (narod), which endures in the people (ljudstvo) through subjugation, stupidity, and backwardnes towards the goal of actualized freedom and self-determination. Implication here is quite often that the nation is - by some external (foreign occupation) or internal force (general backwardness as a result of autocratic rule or stupidity) - hindered in self-actualization, but the essence is untouched and liberty awaits, when ljudstvo will act as narod, actualize the true soul hidden in the wretched condition. Then all will be well.
With this overwiev of "national mythology" we can now return to the matters of racism and xenophobia in contemporary Eastern Europe. The thing is: described terminology was used from at least the 19th century to propose differing solutions to a problem "what is wrong with our societies"? First after 1917 and then after 1945 communist revolutions and in many cases occupations put a full stop in the myth. The declaration was: the people (ljudstvo) have finally liberated themselves. This ended previous discussions with many socialist, liberal, conservative and even fascist variations of solution to the predicament of Eastern European nations. After 1989 the myth got a final revision that ended those discussions: after "democratization" of political systems and "liberalization" of economy the ultimate liberation was achieved, sovereign nation states were established (save a "few" bloody wars here and there ...) and brought in step with the West. All must be well.
Of course it was not. First of all the socialist dogma of brotherhood of peoples ("prijateljstvo narodov") was no longer keeping nationalist frevor in check. Neighbours, colonizers and colonized of the past and present, got at each others throats once more. Long forgotten vengances were exacted. It is a set of complicated stories, with many local variations and many precedents: the pogroms, the wars, the "lebensraums" of the past swirled in peoples heads, filling the vacuum left behind from decrepit myths of just commune. Second: economic liberalization thrust people in poverty and - to varying degrees - criminals to power. Institutions eroded, values changed, nothing was true, everything was permitted.
When I read about the ninties and all the destruction, poverty and death they brought to Eastern Europe I feel rising resentment toward moralists of the West, who see the bloody and vicious collapse of communism as victory of freedom and enlightenment. Those same people than despise Eastern Europeans as small minded, backwards, xenophobic barbarians.
But the root cause of undeniable xenophobic, conservative and racist feelings of easterners is this erosion of institutions and institutionalized values, which was a direct consequence of poverty and violence of the collapse. But of course it did not end there, new elites took the national myths and wrote new conclusions, they promised paradise (once again), but paradise did not materialize, the promise appears cynical. So, what now? The belief in people's active capacity to right the wrongs also eroded, but the belief in the soul of the nation stayed, it survived as a justification and consolation for the destitute. And it demands bloody sacrifice to remain untarnished, to rejuvenate and to shift the blame for the undelivered promises of much faster decrepit dreams of 21st century freedoms.
Our racism and xenophobia has then in a way much shallower roots. It is recent in two senses: firstly it is articulating old but for a long time repressed feelings of ressentment against our neighbours who look and live much like ourselves. We were for much of the twentieth century protected from it by declared socialist internationalism. This did not make antisemitism or hate of Roma for example dissappear, but it hid it under a thin veil. And nowdays people are importig language and conspiracy to articulate it again from western neo-nazis (who, as is often pointed out, would not mix themselves with Slavs whom they deem only marginally better than Jews or Roma). Second: with refugee crisies of the wars in the nineties, and economic migration to and from our countries in conjunction with the cynical rewriting of mytologies there came a change: we have discovered foreigners in our midst. Our former friends and compatriots became suddenly "dark-skined" and "slant-eyed". This redefinition of categories came into effect with new borders, it is peasant and provincial in essence as it invents difference anew on the basis that you might come from a valley some thirty kilometers away, which I don't trust.
When refugees from Middle East came in 2015 they were the first people whom the states and people in these parts of Europe met (or, as was the case with Czhech hysteria at the time, did not meet) who really came from a different cultural and geographical backgrounds. Xenophobia and racism of state and ordinary people got a kickstart from it, as they were perfect fit for the somewhat artificial previous attempts to contrive some dangerous and monstrous otherness from not-at-all foreign-looking neighbours. Even then the first reaction was not quite so violent - it was generally humanitarian. Only later after some quite ugly state enforced violence at the behest of the EU core did public sentiments definitively turn towards distrust and nationalists got their way. And so we got today a state enforced racism and xenophobia which are slowly but surely turning us from naive provincial racists who do not trust anyone from two valleys down to systematic racists who look at peoples colour first.*
* This is a generalisation. Situation differs heavily from country to country and depends heavily on regional history.
Russians made this step earlier with state-lies about Cechen terrorism analogous to WMDs in USA, which turned public
sentiments heavily against Cechen and other immigrants from muslim majority former SU republics in Central Asia.
Hungarian state nourishes myths of "imperial past", just like Serbia secretly does, and a number of Eastern European
NATO members participated voluntarily in NATOs wars and policy.
However the point I wish to make here is, that our histories are full of hate and violence against our immediate neighbours, who live by much the same myths as ourselves. This is the soil on which we now plant the crops of hate towards people who never did us no harm, and seek only refuge. Our myths are now old and rotten, but they grew from history of subjugation and repression, which we now seek to disperse on others, since that is what the "civilized" nations do or did. It is a bit like Indian and Chinese reluctance to stop using coal, before they join the developed world, just more hateful. Those myths are also blinding us to our own histories of injustice and provinciality
- we should strive to make those known to us and to release the grip of rotten myth, fashion new ones from experience of rich weaves of life on our borderlands where people always had the misfortune of mixing and living as provincial neighbours.