Empire's New Clothes

Central Europe Review Empire’s New Clothes Unveiling EU Enlargement Edited by József Böröcz and Melinda Kovács József Böröcz Katalin Dancsi Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro Peter Kabachnik Melinda Kovács Anna Sher ______________________________________________________________________________________ 2001 All Rights Reserved. May Not Be Copied or Distributed Page 1 Central Europe Review (http://www.ce-review.org/) Central Europe Review Published by Central Europe Review Ltd., UK 2001 Copyright © 2001 All rights reserved This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover, electronic or print, other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. “The Fox and the Raven” by József Böröcz was reproduced here by kind permission from the Cambridge University Press, publisher of the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History. Central Europe Review Ltd., Holly Cottage, Ellerdine Heath, Telford, Shropshire TF6 6RP ISBN: 1-84287-009-2 2 Central Europe Review Table of Contents Introduction: Empire and Coloniality in the "Eastern Enlargement" of the European Union, by József Böröcz ................................................................................................................. 4 The Fox and the Raven: The European Union and Hungary renegotiate the margins of Europe, by József Böröcz ............................................................................................................... 51 The enduring national state: NATO-EU relations, EU-enlargement and the reapportionment of the Balkans, by Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro......................................................................................... 111 Shedding light on the quantitative other: The EU's discourse in the Commission Opinions of 1997, by Melinda Kovács and Peter Kabachnik....................................................................... 147 Putting down and putting off: The EU's discursive strategies in the 1998 and 1999 follow-up Reports, by Melinda Kovács ......................................................................................................... 196 A Di-vision of Europe: The European Union Enlarged, by Anna Sher................................................................................................................... 235 The Austrian Freedom Party’s Colonial Discourse in the Context of EU-Enlargement, by Katalin Dancsi........................................................................................................... 273 3 Central Europe Review Introduction: Empire and Coloniality in the "Eastern Enlargement" of the European Union1, by József Böröcz The issue, of course, is not to erase the West as though to restore to its others some ancient pre-colonial unity, as though, indeed, the West were erasable. The issue, it seems to me, is rather to establish a reflexively marked practice of dialogical exchange that might enable the postcolonial intellectual to speak to postcolonials elsewhere (subalterns, but intellectuals too) through those shared- but-different histories and shared-but-different identities. The issue [ . ] is to reconstitute the map so as to engage in a tacking between postcolonial spaces, a recursive movement of figure and ground in which that West—so much the sovereign legend of the colonial imagination—is at once interrogated and displaced, interrupted and critiqued (Scott, 1999a). If we read, as I prefer, David Scott’s above outline of the task of postcolonial scholarship as an invitation, this essay registers a modest RSVP from the right-hand half of the map of Europe. Clearly, the sender’s address on my envelope might strike some as surprising. Others will feel comfortable with the sender’s address but some might be taken aback by the destination of my missive.2 I wish to seize on, and work with, that double surprise; this Introduction, and indeed the very volume it introduces, asks what we can learn from it. 4 Central Europe Review On the one hand, what I propose in this Introduction is the most conventional operation in the social sciences: examining the relevance of two consequential and contested theoretical concepts—empire and coloniality—to an empirical phenomenon— the "eastern enlargement" of the European Union (EU). Yet I do also mean to disturb the all-too-convenient normalcy of the "normal" science of conventional scholarly analysis, especially as it applies itself to various parts of Europe. The absence of any theoretical absorption of the notions of empire and coloniality (and indeed basically any reference to those societies’ connectedness to the rest of the world or to the structural conditions or theoretical implications arising therefrom) in the mainstream historical sociology of west European state making and statehood—logically a possible source of conceptual tools for the study of the European Union today—is one aspect of this normalcy I seek to unsettle.3 With a handful of refreshing exceptions (e.g., Bornschier 1995, 1997, Schmidt 1999 and the studies in this volume), the vast majority of the literature addressing the question of what the European Union is today (an international organization with a grandiose PR? a confederacy? a federal state in the making? a set of policy realms with an imperfect geographical overlap?) also proceeds from an entirely internal perspective, hence, by default, it remains oblivious to implications of empire and coloniality. It is this disconnect that makes it possible to address the external relations of the EU—as it is done customarily—as something that is added, always as if an afterthought, to an otherwise entirely internally focused perspective, just as the comparative-historical sociology of west European statehood is so conveniently apart from any consideration of International Relations. That omission of course also occludes the ways in which the experiences of western Europe and, by 5 Central Europe Review implication, its current supranational project, the EU, have been a constitutive focus and center of dependence for important social, cultural, economic and political processes at places outside of western Europe. If we intend to maintain an interest in this traffic between the internal and the external with respect to the European Union, the current experiences of the EU’s nearest and most recently affected outside—commonly referred to as Central and Eastern Europe—should be of interest. Even the official term that denotes the process—eastern enlargement—is suggestive. Enlargement implies a process of simple augmentation, reducing a daunting amount of social, cultural, moral and administrative complexity, involving concerted, sustained action by some very powerful European states aiming to redraw the continent’s geopolitical order, to a quasi-technical operation. Given that in such idiomatic expressions as Eastern Europe, the term Eastern means either inferior or non-Europe, it is quite plausible to consider, furthermore, the possibility that the name "eastern enlargement" ends up as an orientalizing tool when applied as the marker of the current re-division of Europe.4 Of course, no previous enlargement has been called “eastern’ in spite of the fact that the last one, resulting in the inclusion of Sweden, Finland and Austria, or the preceding one, appending former East Germany to the Federal Republic, involved, technically, the EU’s expansion to the east.5 Let us take our departure from the frequent, easy reference to the historical subjectivity of the colonial perpetrator (or, alternatively, the supposed historic telos of human progress) as "Europe." Far from a nominalist preoccupation, my protest against this shorthand notes that the placement of "Europe" in the heart of this scheme blurs things inexcusably on two important counts: it is both falsely inclusive and falsely 6 Central Europe Review exclusive. At the risk of sounding pedantic, obvious, or both, I insist that the unqualified "Europe" invoked as the core protagonist of coloniality contains societies whose experiences in the realm of colonial practices have been vastly varied—indeed quite contradictory. Some have been modern colonial metropoles, some have not. Some have been centers and/or peripheries of empires of various kinds, some have not. The complexity of the cross-European experience with empire and coloniality is daunting. In addition, any quick reference to "Europe" as the colonial perpetrator also implicitly absolves large and important bodies of social experience—e.g., the US—whose history features imperial practices that are quite identical with those denoted as "European." If we imagine the continent for a moment as the landmass stretching from the northeastern littoral of the Atlantic to the Urals, and from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, one purpose of my brief Introduction is reconsidering some of the ways in which the notions of empire and coloniality are relevant to this Europe. In this sense, our project resonates deeply, and in rather farcical ways, with some aspects of "Euro-speak" (Diez 1999)—a peculiar identity discourse promoted by the European Union. When the Green Foreign Minister of the most powerful member state announces, in an interview with an established liberal weekly of his country, no less than having discovered a remedy to nearly all the world’s ills—"The Answer to Almost All

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