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Intermarium goes viral: Twitter discourses of Central European leaders in the time of COVID19

Any longer-term consequences of the current pandemic are only a matter of speculation for now. As in many areas of life, such speculations on its political and social impact were plenty. Among the commonplaces, one heard a lot of strengthening of authoritarian-minded leaders, eager to consolidate their power in increasingly closed nation-states. This would be, [...]

5 V 2020

Any longer-term consequences of the current pandemic are only a matter of speculation for now. As in many areas of life, such speculations on its political and social impact were plenty. Among the commonplaces, one heard a lot of strengthening of authoritarian-minded leaders, eager to consolidate their power in increasingly closed nation-states. This would be, at least, a frequently repeated forecast for Eastern Europe, also known as Central Europe or, more fancifully, Intermarium. And as Central/Eastern European leaders are confronted with such great expectations, it is tempting to verify empirically to what extent they (or rather – their public personae) stand up to these hopes.

To see it, I decided to collect Twitter activity of the most prominent local politicians they produced until recently during the COVID19 outbreak. The political scene was represented by the PMs, with the exception of Serbia, where, despite his scarce constitutional prerogatives, the role of the President Aleksandar Vučić seems to be so prominent that it may be more interesting to examine his discourse instead of a pretty much figurehead PM Ana Brnabić. Consequently, the corpus consisted of the tweets of Mateusz Morawiecki (Poland, ECR), Sebastian Kurz (Austria, EPP), Aleksandar Vučić (Serbia, EPP), and Andrej Plenković (Croatia, EPP), published between 2020-02-20 and 2020-04-15. At a first glance, we can discover certain differences both in the tweeting strategies of the discussed politicians (which are of lesser importance to us now), and in the topics they covered.

Politician

Mateusz Morawiecki

Sebastian Kurz

Country

Poland

Austria

Political party

Prawo i Sprawiedliwość

(‘Law and Justice’)

Österreichische Volkspartei

(‘Austrian People’s Party’)

European affiliation

European Conservatives and Reformists

European People’s Party

Tweet count

40

168

Word count

1645

6788

Top 10 hashtags

#koronawirus 9x ‘coronavirus’

#COVID19 47x

#V4 2x ‘Visegrad 4’

#Österreich 17x ‘Austria’

#PiatkaNa100 1x ‘5 [Projects] for 100 Days of the Government’

#Coronavirus 6x

#Katowice 1x

#EU 5x

#CzystePowietrze 1x ‘Clean Air’

#London 2x

#fakenews 1x

#UK 2x

#zostańwdomu 1x ‘stay home’

#Israel 2x

#TarczaAntykryzysowa 1x ‘Anti-Crisis Shield Act’

#Austria 2x

#solidarity 1x

#Weltfrauentag 2x ‘International Women’s Day’

#WeStandTogether 1x

#WesternBalkans 2x

Politician

Aleksandar Vučić

Andrej Plenković

Country

Serbia

Croatia

Political party

Srpska napredna stranka

(‘Serbian Progressive Party’

Hrvatska demokratska zajednica

(‘Croatian Democratic Union’)

European affiliation

European People’s Party

European People’s Party

Tweet count

32

151

Word count

891

5076

Top 10 hashtags

#Srbija 6x ‘Serbia’

#OdvažnoZaHrvatsku 35x ‘With Courage for Croatia (slogan of the Plenković’s platform within the Croatian Democratic Union)’

#ostanikodkuce 5x ‘stay home’

#COVID19 26x

#koronavirus 2x ‘coronavirus’

#EU2020HR 16x ‘i.e. Croatian 2020 EU presidency’

#coronavirus 6x

#EUCO 5x ‘i.e. European Council’

#EUBudget 3x

#ZagrebSummit 3x

#fondoviEU 3x ‘EU funds’

#FAC 2x ‘Foreign Affairs Council’

#EU 2x

A twofold division becomes apparent in our corpus: Kurz and Plenković are more active on Twitter, and the accounts of Morawiecki and Vučić seem to be more neglected. Obviously, we could go along the stereotypes and explain the smaller activity of Morawiecki and Vučić with imperialist stereotypes, stressing more Western credentials of Plenković and Kurz. However, Vučić’s relative absence on Twitter is especially curious, given laborious efforts of his bots on this social network.

Keeping in mind differences in their social media aptitude, all the leaders focus on the coronavirus pandemics in the hashatgs they use. The more frequent Twitter users have to share their attention onto other topics they find significant. This is especially visible in the case of Andrej Plenković, who mentioned his own platform inside the ruling national right-wing Croatian Democratic Union (Croat./Serb. Hrvatska demokratska zajednica – HDZ) more times than the COVID19 disease. But also Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz took the occasion to congratulate on the International Women’s Day, while Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki mentioned the Visegrad Group (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary), although in the context of the pandemic.

Keyword analysis

The hashtags most frequently used by the Central European leaders are of a surprisingly little informative value. To grasp with numbers what the politicians would like to convey – and, what is way more interesting, what they would like not to convey, but they do it anyway – we have to make use of keywords. In an everyday parlance, it’s rather an ambiguous notion. In corpus linguistics, a keyword is a word selected by a  statistical algorithm (e.g. log-likelihood), which is too complicated to be discussed here in any detail. Briefly speaking, it takes another collection of texts as a reference point. With respect to this point, the algorithm checks whether potential keywords occur in our analysed text corpus more frequently than they would by pure chance. If they do, they are ascribed higher ‘keyness’ values.

As a reference for keyword selection, articles published between 2019-11-01 and 2019-12-31 (i.e. before the pandemic outbreak) in popular local dailies were used. For Poland, it was Gazeta Wyborcza, for Serbia – Politika, for Austria – Kurier, for Croatia – Večernji list.

Morawiecki

Vučić

Rank

Lexeme

Keyness

Rank

Lexeme

Keyness

3

#koronawirus

‘coronavirus’

115.68

6

hvala

‘thank’

43.88

4

dziękować

‘thank’

36.40

7

Srbija

‘Serbia’

34.00

5

‘<PL flag>’

31.83

10

ostanikodkuce

‘stay home’

24.38

6

poświęcenie

‘devotion’

31.83

11

!

24.38

7

odwaga

‘courage’

31.45

13

hteti

‘will/want’

21.90

10

GIS_gov

‘General Sanitary Inspectorate’

25.71

14

prijatelj

‘friend’

19.50

11

MZ_GOV_PL

‘Ministry of Health’

25.71

15

naš

‘our’

19.42

12

#V4

‘Visegrad 4’

25.71

16

podrška

‘support’

18.35

13

Pawlukiewicz

25.71

19

težak

‘hard’

14.63

14

BorisJohnson

25.71

20

AIPAC

‘American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee’

14.63

15

ambitny

‘ambitious’

24.05

21

prijateljstvo

‘friendship’

14.63

17

aspiracja

‘aspiration’

21.89

22

narod

‘people’

14.63

21

niech

‘let’s’

21.02

23

koronavirus

‘coronavirus’

14.63

22

dyskusja

‘discussion’

20.74

24

značajan

‘significant’

14.63

23

wszystek

‘all’

19.98

26

sav

‘all’

12.92

24

ogromny

‘huge’

19.51

27

građanin

‘citizen’

12.75

25

jedność

‘unity’

19.35

28

kineski

‘Chinese’

12.75

26

wasz

‘your’

19.32

31

pomoć

‘help’

10.49

27

sanitarny

‘sanitary’

18.99

32

nikada

‘never’

10.31

29

dziś

‘today’

18.55

33

partija

‘party’

9.75

The keywords of the Morawiecki and Vučić’s tweets are indeed somehow boring. On the other hand, there is more to them than one would expect at the first sight. Much was said that thankfulness is cheap for the ruling, so they thank the public servants a lot (for their ‘devotion’, for their ‘courage’), but less eager are they to value their labour materially, especially when it comes to non-middle class professions.

There are two points which would be interesting to investigate in more depth at Morawiecki. Firstly, ‘unity’, secondly – his ‘ambiton’ and ‘aspirations’. Well, the ‘unity’ brings us at least once explicitly to the concept of a nation as an integral, organic being, and if that were not enough, in a context of continuity with a controversial event:

10 lat od katastrofy smoleńskiej. To moment, w którym czas się zatrzymał. Tamten krzyk dzwoni wciąż głośno w uszach. Przeżywaliśmy narodową tragedię jako wspólnota. Dziś, w innych okolicznościach, też potrzebujemy jedności. Cześć pamięci ofiar Katynia i tragedii smoleńskiej.

‘10 years from the Smoleńsk catastrophe. It is a moment when the time stopped. That yell still loudly rings. We experienced a national tragedy as a community. Today, in different circumstances, we also need unity. Honour to the victims of Katyńs and the Smoleńsk tragedy.’

A problematic point in this message is the ‘yell’. It evokes an image of a 2010 Smoleńsk catastrophe as intentional killing, shared by hardcore supporters of the ruling Law and Justice party, an image surely not uniting a polarised landscape of the Polish political audience.

Now, ‘ambition’ and ‘aspiration’ turn out to be at the margin of the pandemic discourse:

Dyskusja o budżecie to dyskusja o prawdziwych aspiracjach UE. Grupa przyjaciół spójnosci to kilkanaście krajów. To Grupa Ambitnej Europy. Europy, która musi stawiać sobie ambitne cele w kontekście globalnej konkurencji i lokalnych wyzwań. Analizujemy nowe propozycje KE.

‘Discussion about the budget is a discussion about real aspirations of the EU. A group of friends of cohesion is constituted by a dozen of countries. It is a Group of Ambitious Europe. Europe that has to set itself ambitious goals in the context of global competition and local challenges. We analyse new proposals of the European Commission.’

In fact, the problems Morawiecki is talking here about are at the margins of any political discourse, regretfully. As Ambitious Europe, the Polish PM is trying to label a group of countries from the Eastern and Southern European Union – self-named Friends of Cohesion, somehow recalling factions of the good old days of the French Revolution – trying to pursue a common tactic in negotiating the capital distribution inside the Union. However limited and belated it would be, it is pleasant to see co-operation between the East and the South, especially in the context of the margins of the Kurz’s discourse.

The Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić is even less active on Twitter than Morawiecki. Nevertheless, there is more to see in his keywords than expressions of gratitude towards the medical staff. When a political leader talks of ‘friendship’, more often than not, it is a friendship between governments. It is no different here. ‘American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee’ is rather unimportant here, it is the ‘Chinese’ which play a significant role in the Vučić’s pandemic tweeting. Besides, we have seemingly innocent keywords, such as značajan ‘significant’ or pomoć ‘help’. Interestingly, a ‘significant help’ in one tweet was offered by Russia, in another by Serbia to Bosnian Serb federal entity, Republic of Srpska, led by increasingly authoritarian- and nationalist-oriented Milorad Dodik. Of course, this Vučić’s gesturing was already noticed by experts on the region and is interpreted as a possible exertion on the EU.

Kurz

Plenković

Rank

Lexeme

Keyness

Rank

Lexeme

Keyness

2

wir

‘we’

504.08

6

<HR flag>

214.12

3

#COVID19

243.25

9

HDZ_HR

‘Croatian Democratic Union’

115.56

4

Maßnahme

‘measure’

201.32

10

mjera

‘measure’

91.08

6

alle

‘all’

124.47

11

COVID19

88.37

7

Ausbreitung

‘spread’

121.62

12

OdvažnoZaHrvatsku

‘With Courage for Croatia’

74.77

8

unser

‘our’

120.40

13

županija

‘province’

58.59

11

#Österreich

‘#Austria’

97.30

14

EU2020HR

‘i.e. Croatian 2020 EU presidency’

57.78

13

ich

‘I’

88.77

15

VladaRH

‘Government of Croatia’

54.38

15

Dank

‘thank’

87.57

18

gospodarstvo

‘economy’

52.17

16

!

86.68

19

zaštita

‘protection’

50.98

20

notwendig

‘necessary’

70.42

20

<EU flag>

47.58

21

Beitrag

‘contribution’

70.29

21

zdravlje

‘health’

44.18

22

bestmöglich

‘best possible’

63.24

22

potpora

‘support’

43.90

25

Land

‘country’

53.61

23

širenje

‘spread’

37.39

26

Mensch

‘person’

52.83

24

razvoj

‘development’

37.39

27

schützen

‘protect’

50.86

25

kn

‘kuna (currency)’

37.39

28

verlangsamen

‘slow down’

48.65

26

suzbijanje

‘containment’

37.39

29

Maske

‘mask’

48.65

27

razgovarati

‘talk’

34.14

30

leisten

‘offer’

47.13

28

kriza

‘crisis’

34.14

32

Situation

‘situation’

45.43

29

radni

‘working’

33.21

Sometimes, it is the very structure of a language that reveals facts about a discourse that otherwise would be missed. It is the case with the Sebastian Kurz’s tweets. At the first place of keyword rank list (ignoring the punctuation and lemmatisation errors generated by URLs), we find a personal pronoun wir ‘we’. In many cases, it is unclear who is the ‘we’ – whether it is Kurz’s pluralis maiestatis, or if he uses an exclusive we to denote his government, or, not that rarely, whether he employs an inclusive we to speak in the name of the whole nation. If the latter fits – and it seems to be so in many cases – it explains the high position of such keywords as ‘Austria’ and ‘country’ (as well as, possibly, Vučić’s ‘Serbia’). Under a caring, biopolitical guise, we may sense some sort of retreat to völkisch idea. For caring it is, the pater patriae (ich ‘I’!) paternalistically tries to convey that it is ‘necessary’ to ‘protect’ the ‘country’ and the ‘people’ with the ‘best possible’ ‘measures’.

By the way, interesting phenomena emerge when one investigates the keyword Beitrag ‘contribution’. While a communitarian notion of everybody doing its share for the sake of the common good prevails, we find also a more material understanding of this word:

Ich erwarte harte Verhandlungen zum #EU-Budget in Brüssel. Unser Beitrag darf nicht ins Unermessliche steigen, daher habe ich die Interessen der österreichischen Steuerzahler klar im Blick.

‘I expect hard negotiations on #EUBudget in Brussels. Our contribution cannot rise immeasurably, so I will keep an close eye on the interests of the Austrian tax payers.’

It is quite instructive to see how at the margins of the pandemic-dominated discourse, one can find material conflicts between European core and periphery. As we can remember, at the discursive level Morawiecki for a few times tried to situate Poland sympathising with the European East and South. Obviously, it is reasonable to question how real this solidarity can be, but this is not the point of this text.

Anyways, the Kurz’s manner of speaking stays in some contrast to the keywords of the Plenković’s tweets. Apart from the already mentioned sphere of party politics, his messages try to be meritocratic. While both Kurz and Plenković make use of the goal-means scheme, it is the latter who rarely explicitly evokes political actors, prioritising apparently objectivised economy and a related national currency, wrapping it in a concept of ‘crisis’ management. In this context, we also find an adjective radni ‘working’, most often referring to ‘workplaces’. As a model neoliberal politician, Plenković would be justifying supportive measures directed to entrepreneurs with the interests of workers.

Part-of-speech frequency analysis

Our analysis can be complemented with one more tool, i.e. an insight into a frequency of the parts-of-speech. Keywords mainly originate in nouns, so it may be interesting to see what are the most commonly used adjectives and verbs. The latter denote actions, and for this reason they will convey what public personae of the politicians would gladly see themselves doing. Adjectives, on the other hand, very often provide a more detailed view on the evaluative meanings and values discourse actors try to persuade their audience to.

Morawiecki

Vučić

dziękować

‘thank’

7

moći

‘can’

3

chcieć

‘want’

4

željeti

‘want’

2

móc

‘can’

3

pružiti

‘offer’

2

musieć

‘must’

2

izlaziti

‘go out’

2

należeć

‘have to’

2

doći

‘come’

2

prosić

‘ask’

2

działać

‘act’

2

Kurz

Plenković

können

‘can’

35

nastavljati

‘continue’

12

geben

‘give’

26

razgovarati

‘talk’

12

müssen

‘must’

25

apelirati

‘appeal’

7

setzen

‘set’

21

ići

‘go’

7

schützen

‘protect’

16

pomoći

‘help’

6

halten

‘hold’

15

moći

‘can’

6

leisten

‘offer’

14

poduzimati

‘undertake’

5

unterstützen

‘support’

13

morati

‘must’

5

tun

‘do’

12

voditi

‘lead’

5

sollen

‘should’

10

razvijati

‘develop’

5

verlangsamen

‘slow down’

10

imati

‘have’

5

To disappoint all Polish exceptionalists, Morawiecki’s ‘to thank’ is just reflection of a fact that gratefulness in (official) Polish cannot be expressed more conveniently by a noun. Now, what we are left with, is a whole spectrum of modal verbs, quite explicitly expressing a potential of power (real or imagined, it is not a question here). This is the function of the ‘wants’, ‘cans’, ‘musts’, ‘should’, very often with the ambiguous majestic/governmental/national ‘we’. There are other subtle means to evoke a state of exception, for instance, Plenković’s ‘appeal’ to citizens or Morawiecki’s ‘asking’, both stressing that the rulers are in an exceptional situation. Last but not least, the authority’s face is not severe, it would be infelicitous to resemble an omnipotent fascist state too much, and a coalition with the Greens would be less likely, too. The lesson of a welfare state is learned, so we also come upon ‘support’ ‘offers’.

Morawiecki

Vučić

nasz

‘our’

8

sav

‘whole’

7

wszystek

‘all’

7

kineski

‘Chinese’

5

polski

‘Polish’

6

težak

‘hard’

3

kolejny

‘next’

5

srpski

‘Serbian’

3

cały

‘whole’

5

značajan

‘significant’

3

trudny

‘difficult’

4

dobar

‘good’

2

ogromny

‘huge’

4

ponosan

‘proud’

2

wasz

‘your’

4

medicinski

‘medical’

2

ambitny

‘ambitious’

3

velik

‘large’

2

nowy

‘new’

3

Kurz

Plenković

weit

‘broad’

23

sav

‘whole’

35

gut

‘good’

20

hrvatski

‘Croatian’

21

notwendig

‘necessary’

16

velik

‘large’

16

gemeinsam

‘common’

15

radni

‘working’

13

klar

‘clear’

14

europski

‘European’

12

andere

‘other’

13

nov

‘new’

12

bestmöglich

‘best possible’

13

snažan

‘strong’

12

schnell

‘fast’

12

zajednički

‘common’

10

groß

‘large’

11

parlamentaran

‘parliamentary’

9

sozial

‘social’

11

nacionalan

‘national’

8

wichtig

‘important’

9

ključan

‘crucial’

7

The adjectives are mostly confirming our previous findings. They offer, however, some new insights in the means of discursive construction of the national unity used by the Slavic-speaking politicians. An abundance of adjectives and pro-drop nature of their languages enabled them to pass unnoticed – until this moment. The relatively position of the adjective srpski ‘Serbian’ in the Vučić tweets is somehow surprising and may prove that he does not treat his Twitter seriously. On the other hand, once again we see that the supportive ‘Chinese’ – tacitly contrasted with the EU – play a significant role.

Morawiecki and Plenković use adjectives ‘Polish’ and, respectively, ‘Croatian’ way more often (as well as nasz ‘our’, in Polish POS-tagging classified as adjective – but this is a relative thing), even if the latter dilutes the ethnic content of the adjectives, from time to time referring to ‘Croatian citizens’. Plenković employs also the adjective nacionalan ‘national’ frequently and while in many cases it is because this word constitutes a part of many institution names, we come upon more explicit examples of appeal for national unity, too:

Borba protiv #COVID19 najveća je kriza od Domovinskog rata. Potrebno nam je jedinstvo, a zdravlje i životi ljudi naš su prvi prioritet. U ovom trenutku čvrsto upravljamo krizom, ali za uspješni ishod potrebna je odgovornost svakog od nas. Ovo su teški dani i ispit zrelosti za <HR flag>.

‘Struggle against #COVID19 is the largest crisis since the Fatherland War. We need unity and the people’s health and lives are our first priorities. In this moment we strongly manage the crisis, but for a succesful result responsibility of each of us is necessary. These are hard days and a test of maturity for <HR flag>.’

Military metaphors referring to diseases are so banalised that we even don’t notice them. However, talking of struggle with a chronic illness one suffers from seems to entail different consequences than a contagious disease, where organised social efforts are necessary to contain it. In the cited case the metaphor is even more concrete and refers to the armed conflict 25 years ago. The war between Croatia and Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia is quite an ambiguous reference. It evokes both a sense of banal, everyday patriotism, fond of defending own country from a nationalist aggressor, but also a violent expulsion of Serbian minority from Croatia and a rise to power of a nationalist right, with its obsession with military.

However, this kind of discourse seems to be clear enough to be immediately recognised and critiqued by the local engaged press. Critique of meritocratic parlance and seemingly mild patrnalistic measures seems to be much more difficult.

At the end, some conclusions…

  • Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki (ECR) and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić make a smaller use of Twitter, therefore, less conclusions can be drawn from their activity.

  • All the politicians in question – Morawiecki, Vučić, Croatian PM Andrej Plenković (EPP), and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (EPP) focused very much on the COVID19 pandemic in their tweets.

  • Expressions of gratitude for the medical staff were especially characteristic for Morawiecki’s and Vučić’s tweets, which obviously stays in a contrast with precarious realities e.g. nurses are faced with.

  • Appeals to national unity were noticeable in the keywords used by Morawiecki. Vučić tended to stress Russian and Chinese support for Serbia.

  • From the keywords occurring in the Kurz’s tweets, there emerge an image of a leader identifying with his own country (‚we’ the nation / pluralis maiestatis?) who takes ‚necessary measures’ to ‚protect’ the ‚people’. In fact, he seems to have the most ethno-nationalistically integrist persona of all the analysed politicians!

  • Plenković activity is generally more technocratic, paying a lot of attention to the ‚economy’. This would be in line with the victory of a neoliberal wing of the ruling right-wing Croatian Democratic Union over the more nationalistically oriented factions. Obviously, it is a question of the future where such politics will lead, given its contempt for public sector workers – derisively en bloc called uhljebi (Croat./Serb. ‚nepotists’) – and considering very possible aggravation of austerity measures.

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Tito, Hamlet, and the Plattenbauten: Eastern European Hauntology and Slavofuturism

Eastern Europe as a haunted house – die Gespenste der Zukunft gehen um alle seine Länder. And probably one of the most haunted places of this region – or am I biased because of my previous research? – is the Southeastern Europe. Southeastern European Hauntology There is a plenty of material from a broadly understood [...]

18 II 2020

Brutalist prefabricated residential skyscraper - Krakow, Al. Kijowska

Eastern Europe as a haunted house – die Gespenste der Zukunft gehen um alle seine Länder. And probably one of the most haunted places of this region – or am I biased because of my previous research? – is the Southeastern Europe.

Southeastern European Hauntology

There is a plenty of material from a broadly understood popular culture that provide evidence. Let us just investigate some random examples.

In 1993 Želimir Žilnik, a director renowned for his subversively revolutionary left critiques of state socialist and capitalist society in the spirit of 1968, shot a film Tito po drugi put među Srbima (‘Tito for the Second Time among the Serbs’). The idea behind this kind-of-mockumentary is very simple: the long-time president of real-socialist Yugoslavia and an antifascist hero returns to Belgrade in the midst of the Slobodan Milošević’s nationalist wars to get informed whether it was better to live by then or under his rule. Given the fact that Tito had died in 1980, this come-back is obviously spooky. The fact that the street public is surprisingly unsurprised and makes use of the return of the anti-fascist marshal as an opportunity to crticise the current state-of-affairs in the country, as well as to express their nostalgia does not strip the whole situation of its Unheimlichkeit. On the contrary, it is this critique of the material shortcomings of the nationalist systemand yearning for the more socially fair society of the past, which starts to share some of the aura of the immortal marshal.

It would be a smart Žilnik’s metaphor employed to mock the 1990s politics – if such representations of the supernatural real-socialism weren’t way more common. Even for cinematography the joke was too good not to be repeated. And as with all too frequently repeated jokes, the second time does not appear even as farce. Nonetheless, the 1999 Croatian film Maršal (‘Marshall’) by Vinko Brešan, also features Tito. This time the same hero starts to haunt a Dalmatian island, this fact being used both by ruthless-rural right-wing, capitalist entrepreneurs and nostalgic communist lunatics and orphans of the by-gone era. Eventually, the ghost turns out to be a mental patient from a local clinic, but both sides of the conflict go on with playing their parts. This symmetry of two evils, depicted from a perspective of an apparent neutrality, can be finally resolved by a pair consisting of a local policeman and a school teacher, united in a rather dull and predictive love story. Despite disputable artistic quality of the film, it is more than symptomatic that even this apparently neutral, liberal view needs a supernatural perspective on the real-socialist past!

At some point of the capitalist transition in the ex-Yugoslavian countries – probably very early – the idea of a spooky presence of Tito and real-socialist Yugoslavia ceased to be merely an artistic concept. It has turned into an important part of the local social imaginary. It is now 2007 and a Macedonian-Serbian pop-folk singer Tijana Dapčević succeeds to conquer the regional hit charts (at least for some time) with her song Sve je isto, samo njega nema (‘Everything is same, just he isn’t here’). The musician produces a nostalgic image, where at least during a party time everything is as it used to be under real-socialist Yuoslavia – with one exception. This significant difference is due to of His absence. The name of this entity is never named, however it is obvious that it has to be Tito. Of course, this can be also interpreted as a cult of a Great Father figure with all of its problematic aspects. However, supernaturality of such representation is undisputable.

Some more examples can be named, just to be sure that it is not some arbitrary collection of cherry-picked phenomena, that we have to do with a serious consistent trait of the Southeastern European imaginary. Therefore another convincing example can be provided by a Bosnian reggae band Dubioza Kolektiv, enormously popular in all of the Yugoslavian successor states among the young people, mostly of rather alternative left-wing and anti-capitalist convictions (which, in fact, is very often a comletely vague, ill-defined notion, both in Southeastern Europe and elsewhere). In 2007 Dubioza Kolektiv has recorded a song Brijuni, which tells a story about a summit of then-contemporary regional leaders from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia at the former Tito’s residence on the Adriatic island that gave the title to the song. At some point of the meeting a spectre of the Yugoslavian leader appears and criticises all of the modern politicians for nationalism and predatory capitalism in his usual paternal manner.

The manoeuvre was so good that the band decided to repeat it in a 2010 song Valter. It contains a rather vulgar warning directed to the regional elites against a possible come-back of a punisher. The avenger would be either the people-underdogs, or Tito – in the line with the concept presented e.g. in a cult 1972 war film Walter Defends Sarajevo (Valter brani Sarajevo) and popular propaganda slogans Tito is the people, the people are Tito.

This spooky imaginary is so indispensable that it is eagerly used even (or in some contexts – especially) by the nationalist and anti-communist far-right. On the streets of Dalmatian city Split one can sometimes find graffitis sayinAlojzije svetac, Tito vampir (‘Alojzije [Stepinac – a controversial Croatian Catholic bishop from the times of the World War II, convicted to death by the real-socialist court for collaboration with the fascists], Tito – vampire’). While they reactionarily point out an alleged necessity of Catholic exorcising of communism1, they simultaneously demonstrate a haunting nature of the real-socialist project.

Most of the aforementioned examples could be possibly subscribed under a label of nostalgia. And one can think of a rather problematic reason for this nostalgic excess, namely, relics of the former Tito personality cult. Such a cult wouldn’t have too many emancipatory traits, as it bears numerous similarities to the previous authoritarian cults of the Great Fathers, as Olivera Milosavljević demonstrated convicingly2.

There is, however, something uncanny that renders complete subsumption of these examples under a banner of the Great Father cult impossible. At play there is something different from a god-like religious worship of a patriarch and it is exactly this weird surplus element that haunts us until today.

One could possibly argue that it is just one more of the postmodern morbiditiesthis time a backlash to a primordial, archaic culture of patriarchal farmers. One can do it, but what if the opposite is true? What if it is the future that haunts? What if it is the unfulfilled promise of the communist project which geht um den Balkan – and the rest of Eastern Europe?3

But even in the sheerest nostalgia, the consciousness of the project for a good living is very tangibly present. It is not a mere yearning for old, good times, when everybody was young and knew their place. Even in the most naive memories, it is the revolutionary material aspect of the communist project that becomes prominent, although under a more mundane guise of a guaranteed job or flat. This is more of a project, a promise, and a vision – rather than a constantly evoked trauma or an unprocessed dire past.

This tangible, material dimension to it may prove that in fact it is not only a spectre of Tito that haunts the Balkans. In the memories of real-socialist Yugoslavia the word život ‘life’ reoccurs surprisingly often, to the point that it may evoke Derridian concept of learning to live – by no coincidence coined in The Spectres of Marx4. These memories of good life, which maybe even had not exactly come to be, can be, thus, perceived as a reminder about the Marxian project. Derrida states at some point that there will be “no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx”5. One can, thus, argue that in all those supernatural activities ghosts of the FUTURE are at work.

Cosmofuturism and residential utopias

These haunting futures are not exclusive for the ex-Yugoslavian area. There is a considerable deal of uncanniness in whole Eastern Europe. We shall not consider here hauntologies of the 1990s, possible alternative promises of the ill-fated capitalist transitions6. Instead, it will be argued that there is a strong supernatural component in our contemporary confrontation with other phenomena, slightly more distant in the time.

To begin with, let’s scrutinise cosmic optimism of the late 1950s and 1960s. Among the best examples there is a 1957 Soviet novel The Andromeda Nebula7. Plot lines of the book mostly concern space discovery in distant galaxies. What is the most interesting in this novel, however, it is its depiction of the social formation that enabled such a progress. “With inevitable persistence the new[, communist] way of life had spread over the entire Earth and the many races and nations were united into a single friendly and wise family.”8 Such was the future designed by the 1950s sci-fi authors. The contemporary Cold War, Fordist societies were perceived as something doomed to perish in order to make way for a better, more fair social formation, and, while their description can sound to us somehow prophetic, this cosmic era optimism may leave a supernaturally inspiring impression:

“The wars and disorganized economy of the Era of Disunity had led to the plundering of the planet. In those days forests were felled, supplies of coal and oil that had accumulated in the course of millions of years were burned up, the atmosphere was polluted by carbon monoxide and other filth that belched out of improperly constructed factories, beautiful and harmless animals were annihilated, and this went on until the world at last arrived at the communist structure of society, the only system that could ensure man’s continued existence.”9

This sort of faith was shared by broader spectra, rather than phantasms of some underground science fiction authors, it was a part of a popular social imaginary. One of the early Polish rock’n’roll hit songs was a 1963 piece Wala twist by Karin Stanel In a then-contemporary rock manner she praises a feminist endeavour of Valentina Tereshkova into the Space – Valya deserves a twist dance. On the other hand, a masculine hero, Yuriy Gagarin, is honoured in an old-fashioned, boring way – only with flowers. The fact that a expression of gratefulness proper for the youth and future is reserved for Tereshkova is in the same time a manifesto of future socialist gender-equality, a promise that never was fulfilled completely and continues to haunt us with its up-to-date message.

We may be sceptical about this kind of naive belief in progress: is it not an uncritical technicism that brought us the current miserable state-of-affairs? It will not be discussed in any more detail, a simple suggestion of distinction between progressivism and a utopian moment must suffice. And this very utopian element was epitomised in Eastern European urban planning by a Polish architect Oskar Hansen. In line with the best modernist tradition, he has redefined not only an idea of an apartment, but also of the urban. An essentially concentric and chaotic early modern, capitalist city should be, according to him, supplanted by a Linear Continuous System. This idea, conceived in the half of the 1960s, proposed cities in a form of linear belts crossing whole countries from south to north, with apartment blocks located from both sides of the rapid rail system. Workplaces should be another parallel lines, close to the residential areas, etc. This space-efficience wasn’t, however, an art for the art’s sake. Instead, it was the nature in stake, already then being under an increasing pressure from an uncontrolled urban development. Among the most successful attempt to reconcile high modernism with nature was the Warsaw apartment block estate Sady Żoliborskie, designed in 1958-1962 by Halina Skibniewska. Corbusian residential architecture was inscribed into existing greenery, respecting the long time one needs to grow a tree. While we struggle increasingly with speculative overcrowding and gentrification of urban space, with supplanting abundant greenery with scanty lawns, by then it was possible to think of the whole neighbourhoods, whole countries and whole world as a future apartment block estate sunk in nature.

But even after the space race was over, there was a plenty of 1970s utopian visions, accompanying the, eventually unsuccessful, attempts to make real-socialism more respondent to the popular consumer expectations. It was in the 1970s when the nuclear power became wide-spread in the Eastern Block countries. While quitting fossil fuels in Poland – the most coal-dependent country of the European Union after Germany – now seems hard, if not impossible, by then it seemed just a question of time. Countries at least nominally questioning capitalist ownership order were home for more than half of the human population, many of them being small, semi-peripheric economies. The latter fact didn’t prevent them from ambitions of becoming the leading powers – idea of Edward Gierek’s Poland being the 8th economy in the world can’t be dismissed as pure propaganda.

It was also in the 1970s when Corbusian mass produced machines for living in became reality. While the reality wasn’t satisfying for the aesthetes, the prefabricated buildings provided shelters for hundreds of millions inhabitants of Eastern Block. Well-planned neighbourhoods are still attractive in comparison with a speculative capitalist chaos. But the best designs are not only attractive. Take high-modernist Millenium Estate (Osiedle Tysiąclecia) in Katowice, Poland – designed by H. Buszko and A. Franta and contructed in 1961-1983 – or many of the brutalist Blokovi of Novi Beograd, Serbia – they drastically contrast with the degraded post-transitional landscape of once industrial Silesia or the ex-Yugoslavian capital. It seems as if they were by no means anachronic. Instead, they are rather to be perceived as relics, but coming from the future.

Eastern Europe is a haunted house. The question is what haunts us. Were this region a usual residuum of by-gone anachronisms, as it is often thought both in a foreign colonial and in a local self-colonialising gaze, all the named examples would be just things of the ordinary past, which one can be nostalgic about, but there would be nothing constructive to it. However, even if the whole previous discussion was close to a random enumeration, the examples mentioned may offer enough evidence to believe that we are regularly invaded by the future.

For it is the future, it is not usual, conservative nostalgia. The relics of the past come to us like a Hamlet’s father spectre, with a mission: for smart planning, housing that isn’t Debt-run, reconciliation of the technology and the nature, space optimism, and, last but not least, good living. They are, however, relics of the future past, for “the time is out of joint” here. The project of learning how to live is yet to be completed, and every ritual that brings us effectively closer to its completion should be welcome.

Slavofuturism

Travelling through the once industrial Upper Silesian agglomeration in Southern Poland is, above all, dealing with pornography. At least, in how such a journey usually proceeds, a gaze of an observer is satisfied by ruin porn: derelict tenement houses, broken shop windows, faded ads from the 1980s and 1990s, jobless people waiting for their luck, which will probably never come, in front of the red-brick apartment blocks, housing former miner families. But, at some point, a tram arrives at the border between the cities Katowice and Chorzów.

Either from smog mist or from snow, a majestic silhouettes of white, almost sterile residential skyscrapers emerges. After all the pornographic images of human and urban decay in this waste land10, covered with mist and snow, they may evoke Lovecraftian Cyclopean Cities, mysterious ruins of an ancient civilisation far more advanced than ours, prophesying a possible violent end to the world as we know it. Inhuman are they not, however. Or: non-human. Or: it is not R’lyeh11.

They are not ancient at all. They come from alternative futures, meanwhile made impossible. Futurisms of Eastern Europe, Slavofuturisms12, if you wish, come from ruins. It is, obviously, in the eye of beholder, whether it will be unromanticised nor nostalgic. Potentialities contained by these remains, thus, can be liberated only if they will be perceived through the prism of experience previously gained in critques, free from conservative nostalgia or activist illusions.

As Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi noted, the most contemporary ethnofuturisms originated in Baltic Finno-Ugric countries, although they have a longer past and can be indeed seen as heretical remakes. One of them stemmed from a student milieu of the Tartu University – as a reaction to the authoritarian spirit of the decomposing late Soviet Union and its preference for Russian over minority languages, the proponents of Estonian ethnofuturism were speaking, for instance, of “network” as a real homeland of the Ugric peoples. Such a movement would be a simultaneously oriented towards the future and towards renewing of the national identity. There were also, however, some other formulation of this notion. For instance, certain strains of Estonian alt-right would go in an even more dangerous direction, understanding ethnofuturism as a “collective term for post-segregation, (hyper-)racism, meritocratic cosmofuturism, transnational paleoconservatism and ethnopraeterism”. This all can be interpreted as a reaction toward the global political circumstances, a crisis of financial market and of a nation state, which make place not only for reactionary ethnofuturisms, but also for progressive ones. The central inspiring ethnofuturist idea would be to draw from non-Western modernity and to put in question spatial and temporal framing of the Western narratives on progress13.

Obviously, Eastern Europe used to be, due to contingent, historical reasons, a cradle of ethnonationalisms. Yes, there is a considerable load of the xenophobia in Eastern Europe, inscribed even in futurist projects. True, you probably cannot find more barbed-wire borders anywhere, but here. Yes, the Eastern Europeans witnessed (and partook in) an anti-refugee hysteria without precedents. And this could possibly constitute some sort of dystopian futurism. The notion of Slavofuturism is however, radically different and denotes roughly a constructive inspiration by the outcomes of the historically unique experiments of deep social transformation without capitalism. In this respect the main idea of Slavofuturism is somehow shared with ethnofuturisms. The differences are, however, vast – Slavofuturism is pretty indifferent ethnically14, simultaneously being (de)territorialised as world-systems can be.

Haunting Present: Socialist Modernism and Belarusian Neo-New Wave

What can be a better proof that the notion of hauntological Slavofuturism is necessary than the fact that it continues to spook us until today? The uncanny effects of socialist modernist architecture are not only a thought experiment proposed in this text. Weird fascination with monumental projects solving fundamental problems of a today’s decadent housing market has already become a serious internet phenomenon. One of its most visible expressions is an endeavour of documenting various modernist architectonic realisations throughout the Eastern Block, undertaken by a group of Romanian architects called BACU (Birou pentru Artă și Cercetare Urbană). Since at least 2015, their Instagram page SocialistModernism has attracted hundreds of thousands observers, while the albums they publish constitute a necessary part of the offer in every single European contemporary art museum.

It cannot be a coincidence that a recent hype new wave band from Minsk, Belarus Molchat Doma is strongly fascinated by socialist modernist architecture, depicting slightly dystopian brutalist buildings on their album covers. And it only contributes to the futurist flavour that their popularity is to be owed – apart from unquestionable musical qualities, evoking the era of the 1980s and the upcoming transition – to the YouTube algorithms they have been discovered by in 2018. A somehow similar atmosphere is created by another project that can be discovered thanks to the algorithmic mechanisms: a label Proletarijat that since 2016 with the use of minimal techno idiom tries to make present some sort of Yugoslavian real-socialist techno-optimism and free spirit, in the same time ambiguously questioning its repetitive Fordist component.

This futurist free spirit can be also an important part to a fascination with Yugoslavian monuments of the anti-fascist Partisan movement, well visible in the 2018 D. Niebyl project Spomenik Database. This time it is abstract art, universal, free of ethnic tensions and historical load, which comes back from the future to remind us of the undiscovered possibilities of Slavofuturism.

Its essential feature would be an abstract belief in a project of a good living, which can be constructed despite the capitalistic, territorialising impulses, reinforcing an old centre-peripheries division. As such, Slavofuturism would have something in common with a paradoxically utopian futurism in the spirit of Polish and Soviet futurists. Their crazy shimmy dance on the decaying corpse of the post-feudal society has to be repeated on the rotting corpse of the post-real-socialist/capitalist infrastructure.


1It seems that the very notion of a vampire has a conservative overtone. Myths about killing a vampire can be understood as an expression of collectivist reaction of traditional societies against aberrant individuals (Bandić D. (1990) Carstvo zemaljsko i carstvo nebesko: ogledi o narodnoj religiji. Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek.

2Milosavljević O. (2006) Otac – genije – ljubimac: Kult vladara – najtrajniji obrazac vaspitavanja dece, in: L. Perović (ed.), Žene i deca. 4. Srbija u modernizacijskim procesima XIX i XX veka. Beograd: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji. http://www.helsinki.org.rs/serbian/doc/sveske23.pdf (access: 18 Feb 2016).

3„Nostalgia as such is also utopian, alternative, and subversive against the existing order. It could give a contradictory impression, as one indeed longs for the old times, something already experienced. Nonetheless, the very simple fact that utopia anticipates a world more fair than this one and looks for it can be a mean and initiative force for emancipation. Therefore I understand nostalgia not only as a reaction, but also as an action, not only as healing the old wounds, but also as creating ruptures in the currently dominant, not only as a negation of the reality, but also as a construction of a new reality, not only as an empty wish, but also as an impulse for its realisation” (p. 165) writes Mitja Velikonja in his study on the phenomenon of nostalgia for Josip Broz Tito (2010, Titostalgija. Trans. by B. Dimitrijević. Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek).

4Derrida J. (1993/1994) The Spectres of Marx. Trans. by P. Kamuf. New York: Routledge.

5Ibid., p. 14.

6These hautological moments in Poland were carefully documented by Olga Drenda (2016, Duchologia polska. Rzeczy i ludzie w latach transformacji. Kraków: Karakter).

7This strain of thought had its predecessors in the Russian culture. Cf. the Vera Pavlovna’s 4th dream of crystal architecture and Fourierist society in the Nikolai Chernyshevskiy’s novel What is to Be Done? (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1886. pp. 385-387) or the ideas of the Russian cosmists, recently discussed by Boris Groys (2018, Russian Cosmism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

8Yefremov I. (1957/1959) Andromeda. A Space-age Tale. Trans. by G. Hanna.

9Ibid.

10Concept of a waste land as an area permanently stagnant due to capitalist transition is touchingly demonstrated in the 2018 Magdalena Okraska’s reportage Ziemia jałowa: opowieść o Zagłębiu (Warszawa: Trzecia Strona).

11Cthulhu myths were used by accelerationists (roughly) to convey the idea of uncontrolable powerful forces, set in motion by capitalism and potent enough to bring about accelerationist singularity (cf. e.g. Nick Land, 2011, Origins of the Cthulhu Club, in: idem., Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, Falmouth: Urbanomics). A reponse to it can be seen in the Donna Harraway’s notion of Chthulhucene, where monstrous forces are replaced by equally uncontrollable cthonic element – the difference is, however, in the fact that it is not necessarily hostile and it rather stands for all non-human actors humanity should make kin with (2016, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulhucene. Durham: Duke University Press).

12The Pauschalbegriff Slavofuturism obviously ignores other non-Slavic ethnicities and subsumes them somehow under an ethnic term. Nevertheless, it should be understood only as the most convenient label for the Eastern European attempt to overcome centre-peripheries division.

13Avanessian A., Moalemi M. (2018) Ethnofuturismus 1989 / 2017. Terminologische Nachbemerkungen / Die Wiedergeburt eines Non-Neologismus, in: idem, Ethnofuturismen. Trans. by R. Voullié. Merve: Leipzig, pp. 7-39.

14This ethnic indifference of Slavofuturism may be seen in a désintéressement in ineffective, utopian (in the sense used by Marx in the Manifesto of the Communist Party) critique of nation, typical to German anti-Deutsch or Polish oicophobic positions, as being negative shadows cast by ethnonationalism. Instead, one may explore a utopian (in the constructive sense) future internationalism.

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Dualizm fiskalny albo komfort życia na Dzikim Wschodzie

Już szybki rzut okiem w dane OECD na temat dochodów publicznych jego państw członkowskich mówi wiele. Wygląda to, jakby XVI-wieczna, przebiegająca na Łabie granica między beneficjentami kapitalizmu i jego peryferyjnymi poddostawcami trwała po dziś dzień. Obecnie kryterium rozgraniczenia są dochody państw i to, co za te pieniądze państwa są w stanie zaoferować. Na Zachodzie, mimo [...]

20 V 2019

Już szybki rzut okiem w dane OECD na temat dochodów publicznych jego państw członkowskich mówi wiele. Wygląda to, jakby XVI-wieczna, przebiegająca na Łabie granica między beneficjentami kapitalizmu i jego peryferyjnymi poddostawcami trwała po dziś dzień. Obecnie kryterium rozgraniczenia są dochody państw i to, co za te pieniądze państwa są w stanie zaoferować. Na Zachodzie, mimo nacisków wielkiego kapitału i cięć – wciąż sporo. Na Wschodzie – cóż, wiemy.

All budget revenues per inhabitant

[Źrodło: OECD, Ministerstwo Finansów RH, Ministerstwo Finansów RS]

Ktoś mógłby powiedzieć, nie jest to żadna sensacja – biedni są biedni, a bogaci bogaci. Jahrmarkt in Soho. Die Bettler betteln, die Diebe stehlen, die Huren huren. Tyle że w ślad za marnymi dochodami publicznymi nie idzie odciążenie mniej zarabiających, wręcz przeciwnie. W krajach o niskich dochodach publicznych zyski z VAT-u zazwyczaj przeważają nad tymi z PIT-u. Pensje potrafią się różnić znacząco, a jeśli są duże – dużą ich część się odkłada. Ci, którzy nie mają czego odkładać, mają większe wydatki bieżące, a więc obciążone VAT-em. Które państwa bardziej obciążają przeciętnych pracujących, zamiast np. dobrze zarabiających specjalistów? Państwa Wschodu i Południa.

PIT : VAT revenue proportion

Równie problematycznie ma się sprawa z zapewnieniem obywatelom opieki – służba zdrowia i emerytury mogą być postrzegane bądź jako usługa publiczna i prawo, bądź jako wypłaty z konta, na które przedtem wpłacało się jakieś kwoty. Ostatni scenariusz ma dwie wady. Po pierwsze, nie jest to logika działania ubezpieczeń, nawet prywatnych. Po drugie, każe myśleć w kategoriach osobistej korzyści (wysokości własnej renty wypłacanej z konta), nie zaś wydajności całego systemu (możliwości wypłacania godnej emerytury każdemu). Które państwa bardziej skłaniają się ku składkowemu filarowi systemu emerytalnego niż ku ich finansowaniu z budżetu? Cóż, nie są to państwa, w których starość wygląda najlepiej. To znowu Wschód i Południe.

PIT : Social security contribution proportion

Biedni nie są biedni, dlatego że są biedni. Półperyferia nie są półperyferiami z racji swojego fizycznego położenia. Państwa Wschodu i Południa mają dużo bardziej niesprawiedliwe systemy podatkowe, takie, które bardziej obciążają pracowników wykwalifikowanych i niewykwalifikowanych aniżeli specjalistów czy przedsiębiorców. Zmiana systemów opodatkowania nie przyniosłaby pracującym rewolucji, ale pozwoliłaby na znaczną poprawę standardu życia większości.

Analiza tego rodzaju danych ma jednak jedną wadę. Wiemy, jakie grupy społeczne stanowią większość w całej Europie. Pytanie, dlaczego nie przekłada się to na położenie materialne, jest oczywiście dość naiwne. I oczywiście zasługuje na nienaiwną odpowiedź, ale to materiał nie na notkę, a książkę.

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