“Eastern Europe”, “Balkanism” and “European-ness” in the works of Gabriel Liiceanu and Slavenka Drakulić by Anamaria Remete Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Creative Media Arts and Design Murdoch University 2019 I, Anamaria Remete confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. i Abstract The thesis proposes a critical reading of the discourse of “Europe” and “European-ness”. I argue eastern European writers have internalized the imagery reproduced by these discourses in which “Eastern Europe” is cast as an inferior Other. With a postcolonial critique in mind I propose a critical reading of the works of two contemporary east European writers and intellectuals, Romanian Gabriel Liiceanu and Croatian Slavenka Drakulić. Intellectuals in eastern Europe have had a curious mix of responses to the discourse of “Eastern Europe” from acceptance, resistance, adaptation, transformation to rejection of “Europe”, “Eastern Europe” and “Balkanism”. They have crafted distinctly-new sites of resistance and post-socialist subjectivities, modes of inhabiting and belonging to contested geographies that previous paradigms have failed to properly capture. I argue that Liiceanu and Drakulić’s writings reveal the contested and enduring relationship that east European intellectuals have had with the idea of “Europe”. Their accounts complicate the image of a neatly divided Europe, and challenge the idea of a coherent and stable East and West. Liiceanu and Drakulić participate as agents in negotiating the idea of “Europe”. These texts are spaces in which intellectuals and political elites imagine Europe and their place in the world, articulate an entirely distinct vocabulary of belonging and exclusion. Discussing their writing provides an opportunity to challenge the construction of the idea of “Europe”. ii Table of contents Declaration i Abstract ii Table of contents iii Acknowledgements vii Chapter I: Background and Problematizing “Europe” 1 1 Internalization of Otherness 8 2 “Nesting Orientalism”, historical determinism and uneasy identifications 12 3 Theoretical basis 14 4 Chapter outline 17 Chapter II Theoretical framework. Establishing a Working Relationship between the Posts: Postcolonial critique and Postcommunist Studies 22 1 Introduction to terminology 22 2 Postcolonial critique screening out Eastern Europe 27 3 The rejection of postcolonial critique in Eastern Europe 29 4 Engagements with the post-colonial paradigm in postcommunist studies 33 Chapter III The modern European imagination, “European-ness” and Geo-graphing “Eastern Europe” 53 1 “Europe” and Civilization 55 2 The myth of unity and the reality of conflict 58 3 The lack of a real tradition of a shared sense of belonging to “Europe” 62 iii 3.1 The idea of “Europe” as Respublica Christiana 62 3.2 “Europe” as the “Age of Discovery” 63 3.3 “Europe” as Modernity 64 3.4 “Europe” in the Age of Angst 65 3.5 “Europe” between the capitalist West and the socialist East 66 4 Creating the fiction of “Europe” 67 5 “Europe”, History and Tradition 68 6 The idea of “civilization”, uses of “civilization” as a conceptual tool and as discourses of power 69 7 The Modern European imagination, naturalization of knowledge, critical geopolitics, the produced nature of space 75 8 A new understanding of space. Implications for time and history 77 9 Renaissance understanding of linear perspective influenced Cartesian Perspectivalism 78 10 Beyond “Eastern Europe” and “Balkanism”: Subjectivity in eastern Europe 83 11 Mapping out and problematizing “Eastern Europe” and “the Balkans” 85 12 Uneasy self-identifications in the “real” eastern Europe 92 13 Historical determinism and fragility as modes of being in eastern Europe 95 14 Eastern Europe as “in-between-ness”. The Borderland as an east European manner of being in the world 97 Chapter IV The Cultural Field in Socialist Yugoslavia and Romania. Gabriel Liiceanu and Slavenka Drakulić's Positioning as Intellectuals 100 1 Characteristics and specificity of intellectual activity and the cultural field in 103 socialist societies iv 2 The cultural field in the Romanian and the Yugoslav society during communism 107 3 Gabriel Liiceanu and Slavenka Drakulić as intellectuals 110 Chapter V Reading Slavenka Drakulić and Gabriel Liiceanu: writing the self in eastern Europe 122 1 Subjectivities 123 1.1 Subjectivity and identification 128 1.2 Divided selves 130 2 Life writing. The making of the Self and Representation 152 3 The problem of representation in writing 158 4 Symbolic geography: Dreaming of “Europe” and escaping “Eastern Europe” 165 4.1 Home as Shame. Motherland and Fatherland 166 4.1.1 Home as Motherland – Cotroceni neighbourhood 167 4.1.2 Home as fatherland – “patria mica” 169 5 Concluding remarks 178 Chapter VI Reading Gabriel Liiceanu and Slavenka Drakulić. Writing about Memory in Eastern Europe 180 1 Divided memory – Western versus Eastern – Hot versus Cold memory 181 1.1 The need to remember after the fall of communism 187 1.2 Writing about the past. Gabriel Liiceanu and Slavenka Drakulić 188 2 Memory writing in Gabriel Liiceanu 189 2.1The memory of communism as trauma 190 2.2 The memory of communism as victimhood 193 2.3 The memory of communism as occupation 196 v 2.4 Nostalgia for the pre-regime 199 3 Memory in Slavenka Drakulić’s writing 201 3.1 The memory of the Shoah 203 3.2 The memory of communism as a walking museum 204 3.3 The memory of war 207 Chapter VII Reading Slavenka Drakulić and Gabriel Liiceanu. Resistance and Accommodation 211 1 Problematizing “dissidence” 211 2 Accommodation with power 214 3 Re-thinking the concept of resistance 219 4 Resistance through the Aesthetic or the autonomy of culture and its limits 222 5 A time for ethics 231 6 Antipolitics and “Living in truth” 232 7 Objects speak 241 Conclusion 245 Bibliography 254 vi Acknowledgements This thesis has been gestating for the past four and a half years, and during this time I have benefited from the guidance and help of many people. The biggest thanks go to my supervisors, Vijay Mishra, Kathryn Trees and Anne Surma. Professor Vijay Mishra has patiently guided me and endured my twisted and idiosyncratic English writing, generously sharing his comprehensive knowledge of Postcolonial critique and literary analysis. With great dedication he has followed my work for four and a half years. I am sure that his support and suggestions have dramatically improved the quality of this thesis. Having joined the supervision team in my final year Kathryn has had the toughest of tasks, that of understanding, harnessing and gearing my efforts to ensure the completion of this thesis. No doubt, that required great courage. Kathryn’s dedication and uncompromising quest for quality have been most inspiring. Finally, it is with great appreciation that I thank Anne Surma for her generous help and guidance during that crucial initial candidature period. I would like to thank Helena Kadmos for both mentoring, companionship and for a unique combination of wisdom and pure kindness. I thank her for being there in all the right moments. My thanks also go to Lisa Edelsward and Philip Carl Salzman for their support over the years. They both have cemented in me a sense of admiration and pure joy for the quest. I hope not to have betrayed too much the anthropologist's hat by exchanging it for that of the historian’s. This thesis has been facilitated by a generous three and a half-year MIPS scholarship awarded by Murdoch University to whom I also thank for their financial support. Last but not least, I dedicate this work to my husband Simone, my harbour in a sea of restless ideas. I am certain that without his love, support and countenance this work would not have been possible. vii Chapter I Background and Problematizing “Europe” What is meant by the name “Europe”? There are multiple answers to this question. First, Europe is a continent, a geographical place. Secondly, the name refers to the political and economic alliance that was once the “European Community” but is now the European Union. Thirdly, “Europe” invokes the mythological Greek character Europa. These, and further meanings of Europe, coalesce into a single atemporal monolithic understanding in documents such as the “Declaration on European Identity” drafted at the 1973 Copenhagen EU Summit. In this Declaration a variety of traditions and heritages are subsumed and collapsed into a single “framework of European civilization”.1 This process has resulted in an enduring and problematic legacy2 of meaning- construction and an idea of “Europe”.3 The geographical representation of countries into “West” and “East” is supposedly “objective”. Influential writers such as Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers have used “Western” and “Eastern” to differentiate between people from the “West” and the “East”. In this process the “West” became a signifier for “civilization” while the “East” became a signifier for a land discovered by the enlightened “West”. In this relationship the “East” became the object as seen in the Republic of Letters.4 Throughout history the binary “West”/”East” has taken various guises. 1 European Union, European Political Co-operation (PEC), ‘Declaration on European Identity’, Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, 1988, Paragraph 3. Fifth Edition Press and Information Office. 2 See Paul Valéry, ‘La Crise de l’Esprit,’ Variété I, Letters (Paris: 1919). I further elaborate on the intellectual engagements with the idea of “Europe” in Chapter III. 3 For a critical reading of the idea of “Europe” as a constructed concept see Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995); Anthony Pagden, The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Bo Stråth, Europe and the Other. Europe as the Other, (New York: Peter Lang, 2000).