After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the abandonment of the communist project in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, it seemed that the political-economic regime of liberal democracy, specifically in its neoliberal variant as envisioned and championed especially by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, stood without a viable competing alternative. It seemed that the specific mixture of parliamentary democracy, economic liberalism, and cultural Protestantism succeeded in securing its perpetuity in the global theatre not only politically, but also, and more importantly, ideologically. It was the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, one of Reagan’s key advisors and an early supporter of American global unilateralism, who expressed this triumphant moment of capitalism in its purest form when he argued in an article from 1989 and a book from 1992 that the long history of human progress had finally reached its endpoint. It was the End of History! His main point was that, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was history that effectively demonstrated that the idea of liberal democracy could not even be significantly improved upon with time, much less replaced by a superior model of sociopolitical organisation.
Fukuyama’s victory cry of liberalism, articulated as a theoretical claim, has been heavily criticised ever since it was made on almost every point of the argument and from every possible angle. We accept the criticism of Fukuyama’s claim as fully justified. What motivates this book, however, is that there was nevertheless something that Fukuyama got right, even though not in the sense that he thought he did. In terms of the theoretical and philosophical claims, Fukuyama’s thesis gained support only from liberal thinkers, while it was always rejected or heavily criticised on the left. But in the practical sense, in the sense of lived experience, one could claim that, at least for a brief moment in time, there was a region in the world that lived the fantasy of the “end of history” as its immediate, unreflected reality. It was, of course, the very region where the dramatic historical shift took place – Eastern Europe. For the most part, the 1990s were a time of prosperity for Eastern Europe. After a series of regime changes and implementation of capitalist reforms, the region caught global attention politically, economically, and culturally; and for a while, at least for those who would seize them, there was indeed an abundance of opportunities for all kinds of grassroots initiatives. There was a price to pay, of course. The gradual but steady erosion of social rights (especially reproductive) and social welfare was documented and seriously discussed, just as was the continuous growth of the divide between the poor and the wealthy and the decline of social mobility. In the context of refurbishing national mythologies, there were several instances of suppression of ethnic or religious minorities – the treatment of Roma people and other minorities being perhaps the most universal example of “sacrifices” that were made in the process of nation-building fervour. Nevertheless, the overall image of Eastern Europe in the (early) 1990s was one of revival and reinvigoration, and as long as the majority of the population was enjoying a perceived improvement in their quality of life – mostly in the form of access to goods deemed luxurious not so long before – those “sacrifices” seemed only minor, or simply unavoidable. It is in this practical sense only that one can perhaps claim that the dream of the end of history toward which human progress flowed was, to an extent, the actual political and social reality of Eastern Europe, even if only for a very brief period.
In the early 1990s, as Eastern Europe largely experienced a peaceful transition from socialist economies to capitalist systems, there was one notable exception that stood out—a troubling anomaly that defied easy explanation: the wars in Yugoslavia. No one appeared to have a good answer as to how those wars were even possible, much less why they were fought, especially as the violence rapidly escalated into mass torture and genocide. It was especially unhelpful that Yugoslavia had been the most Westernised among the socialist states in Europe, one of the most economically developed (albeit unevenly) and politically open-minded, and one that had split with the Soviet bloc as early as 1948 and sought an independent path between the doctrines of planned and market-oriented economy – the path of self-management. Alongside political and economic reforms taking place during the 1970s and especially the 1980s, and with its history of multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic prosperity, Yugoslavia had every chance to become the “star” of the transition to neo-liberal capitalism. How could it have become practically the only former socialist country in Europe that took a completely different path? The Yugoslav wars seemed out of place, and especially out of their own historical time.
Fukuyama himself vehemently insisted on the idea that liberal democracy is the best cure against wars in general, and that war as a concept thus also belongs to the human past (Fukuyama, 1992). This notion, advocated in some sense already by Kant, even though he speaks about a federation of republics (Kant, 2006), was later shared by Steven Pinker and many others (Pinker, 2013). But for the countries emerging from the remains of Socialist Yugoslavia, the transition to capitalism was inextricably connected with war and destructive malice. One of the cultural products that captured this uncanny conjunction of war and capitalism with true effect was a series of postcards made by TRIO Sarajevo, a group of designers, called “Ironic Postcards from a City at War,” sent from a besieged city struggling in fear of murderous snipers and heavy bombardment between 1992 and 1995. Many of these postcards play with the relations between mass culture, mass production, mass consumption, and mass murder. One of the posters was a paraphrase of the global “Enjoy Coca-Cola” advertisement, except that the text says, “Enjoy Sarajevo”. The substitution of Coca-Cola with Sarajevo does not only establish a link between mass consumption and war, but it also underlines the split within Eastern Europe itself, the split between the part that got to enjoy the fantasy of the end of history, and the part that got to enjoy the very outrage of history itself.
Judging by how the Yugoslav wars were reported on and discussed especially in the West – as basically unintelligible, pre-modern ethnic violence – one would be safe to assume that they were considered a kind of strangely resilient remnant of some long-forgotten past, of something that humanity, just as Fukuyama suggested, had essentially already overcome and left behind. Wars as such seemed of questionable importance at a time when the Cold War was over and the US and the newly formed Russian Federation had agreed to continue reducing their nuclear stockpiles. The global elites in London and New York called the very status of nation-states into question, making the national wars in Yugoslavia seem utterly atavistic, even primitive. From the globalist perspective, it looked like Yugoslavia somehow had not received the memo that it was ideologically lagging behind.
But we would be equally justified to claim that the glitch in the historical time that was revealed in the Yugoslav wars was one from the future, rather than from the past. While the idea of the end of history has always been theoretically suspicious, it took many years – a decade – for the cracks in the imaginary structure of the political practice in Eastern Europe to become fully apparent and culturally acknowledged. This was perhaps most directly thematised in the 2004 film Czech Dream (Český sen, d. Vit Klusák and Filip Remunda), where the film directors, who play themselves, convince an advertising company to launch a huge media campaign for a new hypermarket called Czech Dream. The campaign is “honest” in the sense that it explicitly warns that people should “not believe it” and that they “shouldn’t come” to shop there. When 3,000 people nevertheless show up for the grand opening and start walking toward what looks like a large building in the distance, it is revealed that it was all a hoax, and the building promising the dream of pure consumer happiness is nothing but a large canvas, supported by scaffolding. The notion that the political-economic regime of late capitalism is neither a natural occurrence nor the historical fulfilment of humanity’s destiny could not simply be explained by philosophers and political scientists, it had to be experienced publicly and culturally, under what Hegel described as the process of the labour of the concept.
We can find another example of such a cultural experience in the 2003 German film Good Bye, Lenin! The film is set in East Berlin between two events, the fall of the wall in 1989 and the reunification of East Germany with West Germany in 1990. The film is a comedy with a sense of cultural nostalgia and features some truly wonderful scenic elements, such as the one where, practically overnight, a city covered with huge red flags promoting communism begins displaying huge red flags promoting Coca-Cola. This simple substitution, employed in the film for comic effect, reveals a deep truth about the functioning of ideology as such. It is not just that there is an element of radical, irreducible contingency in any ideological formation, and that in the practical sense, much like Louis Althusser argued, ideology only exists in its completely material institutions and practices, precisely in what it displays as absolutely evident (Althusser 2020). In a deeper sense, the substitution of communist red with Coca-Cola red indicates that ideology functions precisely as the minimal difference, or even as one simple signifier which becomes the central one. In other words, the vast complexity of institutional, historical, cultural, social and political differences can be ultimately reduced to one minimal difference, no bigger than the difference between two shades of red. From this point of view, the effort of ideology critique may be ultimately described as the attempt to discern the complexity of the given ideological formation as a specific shade of red. Good Bye, Lenin! succeeds in this effort, not because it alludes to how cheaply Eastern Germans sold themselves (as if saying that “they exchanged their communist project for a soda drink”), but rather in showing that what appears at first sight merely as a soda commercial in truth reveals a complex ideological structure that requires enormous social and political effort to maintain. A Coca-Cola commercial can substitute for a poster of Lenin only because it shares the poster’s structural logic, its ideological function.
The proper cultural effect of films like Czech Dream or Good Bye, Lenin! should not be described as disillusionment, because it would be too naïve to assume that they speak from some sort of ideologically neutral perspective, from a position of “naked truth.” Their effect is, nevertheless, critical, because what they manage to do is to make palpable a certain glitch in the ideological structure; they create a short circuit within the ideological current, revealing that the ostensibly “evident” or “natural” order of our reality is constructed. This glitch or short circuit can also help us understand the specific un-timeliness that can be observed when discussing Yugoslav wars within the (Eastern) European context, the fact that they appeared in their own time as strangely belonging to the past, but that we can discuss them, from the perspective of the 2020s, as a prefiguration of what was to happen much later, on a much larger scale – foreshadowing the rise of nationalism and populism, as well as the “return” of war and genocide. We can refer to this glitch as indicative of some traumatic kernel of our contemporary capitalist modernity. Enjoy Sarajevo, the poster that produced a condensation of mass consumerism and mass murder such as defined much of the space of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, functioned so well precisely because it clashed with the dominant liberal fantasy of the time, but can also be read as an eerie reminder that modernity as such is yet unfinished, that its historical trajectory has still yet to be revealed to us. But even if we understand it in a much more modest framework, as merely a visual document that perfectly captures the contradictions of its historical moment in Eastern Europe of the early 1990s, it is a perfect illustration of what this monograph seeks to engage with: the historical trauma of the Yugoslav wars as mediated in cultural and artistic practices. Our objective in analysing and discussing this mediation is double. Firstly, our volume aims to contribute to the understanding of the relationship of art to trauma in general and to examine specific cases of how art works with war and migration trauma in particular. But, secondly, this volume should also be read as a contribution to the argument that artistic mediation, especially theatre, potentially offers a privileged entry point towards understanding trauma as a social and historical phenomenon.
This excerpt is from the introduction of the monograph The Resilience of History: Yugoslav Wars Through Art, published by Maska as part of the Moj Dom project.
Blaž Kavšek is a Slovenian cultural theorist, editor, and writer known for his contributions to the intersection of art, history, and social commentary.
Gregor Moder is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist who serves as a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana.
