Dragan Klaic Identity You Cant Lose It Nitra2007

7/28/2019 Dragan Klaic Identity You Cant Lose It Nitra2007

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Dragan Klaic

Identity: you cant lose it!

Middentity conference, Divadelna Nitra festival, September 2007

SummaryYou can lose your mobile phone or your keys, argues DRAGAN KLAIC, but do not fear losingyour identity because that is not something palpable but fluid, elusive, inevitable self-constructedand therefore also vague. Klaic interprets obsessive search for identity definitions as an anxiousresponse to the challenges of globalization, post-communist transition and European integrationthat have all questioned some certainties and shaken the notions of the national state andweakened its traditional prerogatives. Identitary discourse is not productive, according to Klaic,since its inevitably draws demarcations between me and you, us and them, and projectsreductionist and simplistic group characteristics; neither is a historic territorial and cultural

concept such as Central Europe a productive starting point for regional cultural cooperation. Suchcooperation has to rest today of a more specific kinship of sensitivities and recognizedcommunalities of interests and has to explore junctures and dis-junctures of artistic practices thatare at the same time local, regional, European and global.

As a matter of principle I do not attend conferences, symposia and panels onidentity, any identity and especially European idenity. This is such a waste oftime: if I speak on the subject, I make some people nervous, others make meupset. That I am nevertheless standing here should be seen as a gesture ofappreciation and respect for Divadelna Nitra festival and its autonomous,consistent concept and position, for Darina and Elena Karova and their team. Iadmit that I yielded to their persistence, kindness and power of persuasion andafter some wiggling accepted to speak at the beginning of this conference.

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Last week I was in Ireland, a booming economy for the last 12 years, with morethan 10% GNP yearly growth. Once a poor country, Ireland has become rich.Traditionally, a country of mass emigration, Ireland has become a much soughtdestination of immigrants, and the Irish admit themselves that they have becomenot only dynamic and business minded, but also obsessively consumerist. Someof my Irish colleagues shared their deep sense of displacement caused by thisaccelerate change. Inevitably, there are laments about the supposed loss of theIrish identity and learned debates about the topic that I carefully avoided toattend. Irish professionals who worked abroad for years are now back becausethere are jobs for them and they admit that they cannot recognize their owncountry, now wealthy and expensive. Artists and culture professionals are onstandby to take full advantage of 1% for public art scheme from all construction

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budgets. And there are many construction projects going on so there will bemany art commissions, once criteria and procedures are worked out.

Here you have another pattern of the infamous transition, different than in thepost-communist Central and Eastern Europe. Many Gastarbeiters from Europe,

Africa, Asia and South America have come to Ireland but they are not visiblyincluded in the cultural consumption and in the cultural production. The Irishcontinue to cater to the search-of-roots market of Irish emigre descendents,mainly from the USA, with the genealogy centers, books on old Irish names andtruncated traditions, export of Irish soil and Irish air and everything else kitschyand green. A huge investment in propping up the Gaellic language (spoken byless than 10% of population) and policy of consistent bilingualism in publicsphere continues. So called 'Celtic' music has become an important exportarticle, lifted by the success and popularity of the world music. And even Irishpubs have been gentrified from rowdy watering holes to a 'concept' of thecreative industry and a topic of the leisure studies.

The Irish have been busy throughout the 20th century to invent, affirm andentrench their national identity against the historic record of the Britishcolonization and hunger driven migration, as an assertive nation in a newlyformed state (1920), but embittered by the separation from those 6 counties inthe North that remained under the British control. That self-centeredness did notusher much prosperity but kept Ireland backward, conservative and isolated.Only the EU and the European economic and political integration broughtwellness and prosperity by the deployment of the EU structural funds, took somepassions away from the North Irish conflict of the Catholic and Protestantfanatics, and made that painful Ireland/North Ireland border less relevant anddivisive. While many Irish still dwell at their identity project, they would need tolearn how to enhance intercultural competence if they want to integrate the newlyarrived migrant workers and keep their new prosperity. Identity laments andidenitity parading did not make Ireland rich and wont keep it afluent either. Thecredit goes to those Irish who made the country turn towards Europe in the mid1960 and ultimately join the EU, to the European integration mechanisms andprocesses, and to the diligence of the Irish and those newly arrived migrants.

2Besides Ireland, in many other parts of Europe and the world, even if lessprosperous, migration is tranforming cities and neighborhoods. The mobility ofthe busy and the affluent social groups contrasts with the plight of the refugeesand asylum seekers, smuggled illegals and traded women and children.Economic and cultural globalization prompts intensive and accelerated flows ofpeople, capital, ideas and images, but shatters many old certainties and safefrontiers. European integration, a slow, halting process is perceived by many as amenace, as a creeping, dangerous institutional bureaucracy, imposing

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In the Cold War times, invocations of the Central Europe, its identity and cultureand separate history had for a goal to detach some of the countries of theWarsaw Pact from the Soviet dominance and position them as somethinginherently, historically, substantially different, while leaving the cultures of othercountries further East and South at the Soviet mercy. It was nice to praise the

murmur of the cafes in Budapest, Cracow and Brno but what about cafes ofChisinau, Bitola, Plovdiv and Skodra?, I argued then. They do not belong toCentral Europe geographically nor culturally, so is their murmur automaticallyless appealing and less significant than the buzz of cafes in Budapest, Cracowand Brno? That was my polemical confrontation with the suposed CentralEuropean identity in the Cold War times. Even though my personal backgroundpulls together lines coming from Budapest, Cracow, Baja Mare/Nagybanya,Kolomea, Subotica/Szabadka, Sarajevo, Novi Sad/Ujvidek and Belgrade, I wasnot willing to write Chisinau, Bitola, Plovdiv and Skodra off.

Since then I saw the mystification of Central European identity sometimes as an

aspiration of Austrian politics to enhance its sphere of influence abroad andmake itself thus more significant in Europe, by reviving its Habsburg mythology inthe realms over which the Habsburgs once ruled. A small country's belatednostalgic imperialism,a pittiful exercise. When Slovak, Czech, Polish andHungarian intellectuals invoke Central Europe, I ask them why do they seek tolimit their horizons of curiosity? Isn't Europe a more exciting project, provided itincludes Istanbul and Moscow?

In the cultural-political and cultural-historical sense, I see Central Europeprimarily as a zone of loss, ruin and decay after the World War 2, in political-historical sense as zone of embattled nationalisms, resulting in pogroms andforced migration throughout the 20th century, thus eluding modernity and flirtingwith it at the same time. The literary stars on the Central European chunk of thesky... Krlea, Horvath, Kraus, Schnitzler or Schultz, Witkacy, Gombrowicz, Mrai,apek, Cst and Kostolnyi... are distinctive creative forces, difficult to crowd inthe same constalation and everyone of them is strongly part of the Europanliterary traditions and inspired by them, not by some regionalist mythology. Theirsuccessors, those whom I knew well, such as Ki, Ersi, Tima, now all dead,resented any regionalist straightjacket, Central European or any other.

4Yes, I know the common argument ... just walk through any Central Europeancity and you'll recognize the same typology of gymnasium, theater or operavenue, grand cafe, military barrack, hospital, town hall, even synagoge...residuaof the common Austro-Hungarian urban planning and architectural concepts,blended in a steady flow of similaritry, from Ljubljana/Leibach to Lviv/Lembergand from Klagenfurt/Celovec to Timisuara/Temisvar. But those cities are alsoravaged by the World War 2, by the communist urban planning and more

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recently by the wild capitalist 'transition' of untamed real estate wheeling anddealing and pittyful imitations of the postmodern architectural fads.

The common past means some shared gapping black holes, the painfulabsences and elesions. Of Jews, who were a connecting force across the state

boundaries, cultures, languages - now absent, uprooted, gone. Yiddish, once alingua franca of the region, is dead despite occasional festival of pumped upnostalgia. Roma another transnational population, those who survived the NaziHolocaust - found themselves neglected by communists, left poor, uneducatedand on the social margin throughout the entire period of the 'really existing' or'self-managed' socialism, only to be even more victimized by the post-1989capitalism, economically and politically, even subjected to pogroms. Are they tobenefit from the EU enlargement? Not very likely. Or perhaps well, as beggars in

Amsterdam, Milano and Frankfurt instead of Kielce, Banska Bystrica andMiskolc.

Perhaps the common features of cities in Eastern Europe could be turned in ajoint orchestrated exploration of intercultural competence that those cities oncehad and then lost, as many others in different regions of Europe. Especially ifCouncil of Europe finally initiates its project on intercultural cities, such research,cultural-historical and artistic, could make sense because it would not be lockedin the region itself. But it must not look in the past only but addresscontemporary challenges and pitfalls of those cities and delienate culturalpolicies of social cohesion, cultural advancement and economic stabilization,taking into account migration, globalization, explosive growth of culturalindustries and European integration and bring together artists, culturalprofessionals, researchers, educators and citizens.

The starting point in this case would be not some idea of identity and not somepresumed Central European common resource or historic reference frameworkbut a shared concern, common to all in Europe: how do we make our cities vital,dynamic and satisfying, culturally rich and distinctive and yet inclusive? Thus,how do we develop intercultural competence across the board, amongindividuals and organizations, as that critical commodity that we all need in orderto ensure peace and cooperative attitudes in each city and each neighborhood,and among countries and regions across Europe.

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Instead of pondering fuzzy identity constructs, Central European or any other,let us rather mark the common realm where multilateral cultural cooperation isdesirable and possible and look at the policy instruments that need to be argueand implemented in order to facilitate such a cooperative practice. In my recentlypublished book on international cultural cooperation, Mobility of Imagination, I am

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arguing that international cultural cooperation shapes a shared European publicspace as a coherent polyphonic cultural realm but that it also contributes to anemerging European citizenship. Networks remain the basis infrastructure ofinternational cultural cooperation in Europe. From them emerge cooperativeconsortia of more than two partners, united around the same project or a series

of joint projects. These projects are not only about glamor, visibility and fame butare often deeply immersed in the local communities, seking to dynamize themand help them define a sense of purpose. Yet community art projects, bringingtogether professionals and non-professionals, beyond the traditional amateurismas a mere imitation of professional artistic output, remain a rarity in this part ofEurope, despite huge upheavals and disorientating development that haveshaken so many communities, especially the disadvantaged ones, and producednew social groups in precarity, in parallel to the nouveaux riches. Theanachronistic cultural institutions, many of them structurally dysfunctional, stillappeal to most professionals and they seem to be - except perhaps in Poland reluctant to engage in local community arts project. Shakespeare festival in

Gdansk carried out such a community arts project this past summer with abunch of London students and locals in a poor inner city ghetto. BorderlandFoundation in the north-eastern coin of Poland has been doing it for years. Also

Adam Rusilowski, with children at risk in Gdansk and surroundings, and thenamong the Palestinians in Gaza as well.

Nothing strange in this. Each of us has to find own strategic manner to create aproductive dialectics of local and global, to respond to the needs, resources andimpulses from own surroundings and at the same time connect with global flows,trends and issues. To strive to be a good Central European, to develop a CentralEuropean identity, a Middentity of a sort - just wont do any longer. Being a good,engaged European is a necessity on a continent, caught in much malaise thatcannot any longer be cured by the national governments an their paternalisticand protectionist interventions. Being a citizen of the world is even more difficultbut even more urgent than ever, especially in the view of the accelerated climatechange and its worsening consequences that require a synergetic action, localand global. So, it si not really about Central Europe as a cultural-historic notionand not as a coherent contemporary cultural realm per se that we have to beconcerned. And not about identity construction but about strategies of goodneighborhood, cooperation and intercultural competence, needed in eachquarter, quartier, Bezirkand in the entire world.

Let us therefore not waste time drawing identity-inspired demarcation lines,foregrounding some supposed specificities and advantages of Central Europeand conventiely deleting others. Let us instead look how cultural policy priorities -municipal, regional, national and European could be articulated and pursuedacross Europe where many cultural-political agendas have become confluent,similar and overlapping and let us look how cultural practices require policy

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instruments that instigate cooperation, stimulate mobility and cultural diversityinstead of identity reinforcement, representation and exportation of prestige.

As Denis de Rougemont, the tireless architect of the initial infrastructure of theEuropean cultural cooperation, used to say in the midst of the Cold War in 1950s:

there is so much to be done. Indeed.

This article is based on a speech Dr Klaic gave at the opening of the conference'Midentity' at the Divadelna Nitra festival in Nitra (Slovakia) on 22 October 2007.Dragan Klaic, a theater scholar and cultural analyst, serves as a PermanentFellow of Felix Meritis (Amsterdam) and teaches arts and cultural policies at theLeiden University and at the CEU Budapest. He is the author of many articlesand several books, among which most recently Mobility of Imagination, acompanion guide to international cultural cooperation, Budapest: CAC CEU2007.E mail: [email protected]

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Dragan Klaic Identity You Cant Lose It Nitra2007