Introduction: Consensual Empires

Introduction: Consensual Empires Natasa˚ Kovac ˚evicå The special issue of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, “Consensual Empires,” provides a forum for the examination of an important area of postcolonial and globalization studies emerging after the official “end” of the Cold War: the re-constitution of empire in relation to the formerly or currently socialist countries. The “writing” of the other now turns not on the essential difference between East and West, North and South, or center and periphery, but on the logic and rhetoric of sameness. The post-socialist, or newly capitalist, others—from the Balkans to Beijing—are caught up in a halting but inexorable process of becoming-the-same as the Western countries on the other side of the Cold War divide: liberal, modern, normal. The local insistence on emulating Western practices—whether actual, imagined, or idealized—is in part aided by the ubiquitous phenomenon of self-Orientalization through the internalization of negative cultural and political stereotypes. It is also enforced externally by imperial regimes of consensus building, as theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire. They describe contemporary empire as the global production of norms and instruments of coercion in the interest of maintaining a capitalist world order. While imperial sovereignty transcends any existing nationstate, Hardt and Negri argue, its practices are nonetheless rooted in Western European and North American political and philosophical legacies. The global empire of capital, much like old colonial powers, uses brute force to further its goals (through interventionism, humanitarian or otherwise); however, it presents such force “as being in the service of right and JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 44.2 (Summer 2014): 333–343. Copyright © 2014 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory.

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peace” (15). Since countries now approach the world in terms of comparative opportunities—voluntarily asking for inclusion into and competing against one another within transnational economic networks and political organizations (Bamyeh 5)—crucial to empire’s functioning is “expanding the field of consensus” rather than pure domination (Hardt and Negri 15). Therefore, overt exclusions of difference no longer mark the current world order, but rather conditional inclusions into the global capitalist “family” based on a host of meritocratic criteria. Amy Kaplan’s discussion of the trope of homeland in US post-9/11 discourse can thus be extended to the rhetoric of global empire. The term homeland, Kaplan argues, invokes a “sense of unity, security, and stability, but more profoundly, on the other hand, work[s] to generate forms of radical insecurity by proliferating threats of the foreign lurking within and without national borders” (90). Similarly, the consensual empire of capital predicates itself upon an intimate possibility of belonging by voluntary tending to its own domain as a space of safety and implicitly excluding those who threaten it, both within and without its borders. In post-socialist transformations over the last two decades, the general consensus that the capitalist world market has no alternative has led not only to pronounced internal class differentiations, but also to the designation of (typically marginalized) groups and classes as “obstacles” to reforms and future national prosperity. In order to glean the new values, identities, and structures of global empire from the analysis of post-socialist transformations, we must think about adapting the conceptual tools of postcolonial theory for the experience of post-socialism. Postcolonial studies have traditionally neglected post-socialist areas of the world, partly because many of these countries have not been considered colonies in the strict sense of the word. However, it is telling that post-Cold War transitions to capitalism have been contemporaneous with an unprecedented flourishing of theoretical inquiries into the coercive, colonial-type mechanisms and assumptions usually accompanying the often seismic shifts from socialism. A detailed overview of such studies exceeds the scope of this introduction, but in brief, they focus on global financial networks as an indirect means of economic and political domination, humanitarian interventions as neocolonial types of conquest, as well as cultural rather than biological forms of racism and prejudice in the historical accounts of difference for societies preceding the Cold War. According to Neil Lazarus, “an adequate histori-

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cization of colonialism has been hindered by the particular and historically specific ‘third worldist’ optic” that has underwritten work in postcolonial studies since its beginnings (120). If we reframe the dynamic of inclusion into the profoundly uneven capitalist world system as a type of colonialism, Lazarus argues, we will be able to perceive how this process unfolds in the “second world” and overcome conceptually limiting geographic terms (e.g. west-east, north-south divide). I disagree with Lazarus’ claim that geographic designations end up ascribing colonialism to a civilizational rather than political dynamic—after all, they have also helped us understand the world in terms of specific, if historically shifting, locations and poles of privilege versus impoverishment. However, I believe that starting with the global spread of capitalism as a unifying factor in modern colonial endeavors is crucial to understanding not only post-socialist, but also global, class stratifications and political disenfranchisement. Post-socialist transitions likewise allow us to analyze the prominent role that obtaining popular consensus plays in narratives promoting (re)joining Europe, the European Union, or the West, as the case may be, given that aggressive neoliberalism, the disappearance of social welfare states, and the rise of comprador elites accompany the development of market economies. The apparently voluntary and eager embrace of neoliberalism despite the dire consequences makes the empire of capital seem comparatively consensual, benign and inviting unlike the conquering, centralized, and exploitative power typifying colonialism. The focus on local agency and co-operation creates the impression of a dispersed patchwork of multiple allegiances rather than a fortress of absolute sovereignty. What Alexander Kiossev calls “self-colonization,” or the need to overcome internalized Orientalist narratives that portray socialist nations as culturally “backwards,” as underdeveloped, inefficient, and even barbaric, crucially aided this consensus about abandoning socialism. Much has been written in recent years about what Ezekiel Adamovsky aptly terms Euro-Orientalism, for example, which entails both Eastern Europe’s historical image as a semi-European Orient and its persistent attempts to overcome that inferiority complex by joining the European Union. The contemporary empire of capital relies on neoliberal versions of Orientalism that “has a distinctive class component” and constitutes “a fundamental part of liberal-bourgeois ideology” (19). Analyzing how Polish bourgeoisie project Orientalist stereotypes on less privileged classes,

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Micha? Buchowski observes that “internal societal orientalization” presents impoverished workers and peasants as roadblocks to development, as the lumpenproletariat of post-socialism and easy prey for nationalist ideologies (466-67). Whereas they are seen as mere objects of transitions—their concerns about unemployment, according to Buchowski, ascribed to laziness or habitual thievery under socialism—the entrepreneurial, progressive, urban middle classes become the true subjects, the idealized agents, of “Westernization.” In the context of the current economic crisis, the stigmatized poor have become scapegoats for the Eastern European middle classes, who blame them for the recession (Bohle and Greskovits 12). Internal—and internalized—Orientalism in post-socialist countries has also been interpreted as a potential road to agency and an expression of power. Arif Dirlik argues that, from its beginnings, Chinese Orientalism developed in the contact zones between “Euro-Americans” and the Chinese, meaning that Orientalism developed alongside self-Orientalization and the Chinese were complicit in its adoption and popularization. He reads the revival of “positive” Confucianism, one of its key narratives, from the 1980s onwards as a reflection of China’s strengthening nationalism and economic confidence rather than China’s powerlessness: “an articulation of native culture (and an indigenous subjectivity) against EuroAmerican cultural hegemony” (113). Simultaneously, for Dirlik, self-Orientalization is no longer a tool of absolute distance from the “Euro-American,” but instead an articulation of difference within the global modernity that the Chinese jointly inhabit. Empire’s potential for the inclusion of safely articulated, multicultural “diversity,” so long as it is subsumed under the general reification of capitalist equivalence, is hardly new. From this perspective, however, self-Orientalization consolidates a specific hegemonic production of cultural “otherness” even as it fights Western cultural domination, while also situating itself in the context of economic success within the global empire of capital, to which it presents no alternative. In economically less powerful post-socialist countries, the appearance of a strong national culture, which both emulates foreign models and asserts resistance to external domination, may be a similarly defensive measure against the status of those countries as “crypto-colonies,” in Michael Herzfeld’s words. Nominally independent, yet profoundly dependent economically and politically, crypto-colonies “appear to resist

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domination, but do so at the cost of effective complicity—a model that more closely approaches the Gramscian definition of hegemony than do more recent and controversial notions of ‘resistance’” (903). Similarly, as Richard Howson and Kylie Smith show in their application of Gramsci’s theory to the adoption of neoliberal capitalism in the Asia-Pacific region, one cannot speak of Occidental, or specifically United States domination, but rather of hegemony, a “far more complex operation of coercion and consensus” (1). Hegemony for Gramsci is the agonistic relationship between power and powerlessness, where political and economic forces maintain power by obtaining consent from civil society through education, family structures, media, religion, etc. Although these institutions contribute to the perpetuation of “common sense,” a set of conformist beliefs and practices that feed into hegemony, they can also be at the heart of the power struggle between coercion and consensus, constraint and freedom. In bourgeois hegemony, the politics of reformism may accommodate certain aspirations for social justice, emphasizing the need for consent and approval of wide segments of the population so as to avoid coercion and, thus, resistance. For Gramsci, of course, reformism is insufficient, but what is important to note is that consensus, while seemingly more democratic and inclusive than dogmatic coercion, precludes substantial economic or political change. From Jacques Ranciere’s perspective, the egalitarian principle of disagreement changes what can be thought politically: ensuring consensus is a policing rather than a democratizing technique, and politics happens when parties and interests disagree about what “count[s],” when “society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part” (123). In post-socialist societies, the process of economic and political restructuring, as the organization of popular consent, is structured around hegemonic principles: the promotion of neoliberal models of labor and consumption, the naturalization of class divisions, the reduction of social welfare provisions, widespread privatization, etc. The essays in the issue illustrate different manifestations of these shifts in hegemonic discourse from socialism to capitalism. This process depends on the mediation and support of national governments and bourgeois elites, who aim to produce desirable identities via the disciplinary mechanisms of neoliberal models of labor and consumption. According to Étienne Balibar, “neoliberal governance develops forms of ‘real subsumption’ of individuality under capi-

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talist relations, which also have psychological dimensions, or generate ‘voluntary servitude’” (Curcio and Özselçuk 325). This special issue “Consensual Empires” is, therefore, concerned primarily with tracing cultural and social narratives that help consolidate the “common sense” of this “voluntary” transformation. The essays in this issue address a number of questions: Which narratives help us understand how globalization translates into a creation of consensual empires in postsocialist countries? How does neoliberal governance manufacture consensus, advertising the new empire as a modern, multicultural, all-inclusive club? Who are the agents of empire in post-socialist spaces and how do they appeal to public affect, intellect, and community concerns in promoting their goals? Since, from Gramsci’s perspective, hegemony unfolds as a dialectic, a perpetual struggle to either maintain or replace existing beliefs and practices, the essays also explore creative adaptations to “Westernization” and accession to neoliberal empire, counter-narratives reflective of Ranciere’s concept of dissensus. Such narratives portray uneasy encounters between neoliberal capitalist and earlier socialist discourses in shifting articulations of political subjectivities, uses of urban space, evaluations of cultural products, and attitudes to labor and class. In this context, postsocialism is not that which comes after socialism, post-socialism with a hyphen to signal the temporal divide from socialism, but that which unfolds, as Zhang Xudong notes, in the ongoing, everyday practices of socialism—with all of the problems accompanying that system—and which persists in posing the relevance of the socialist question in the face of neoliberal orthodoxy. In many post-socialist countries, the continuing relevance of socialism is a reality of life, resulting in coexisting modes of production, sociocultural norms, and symbolic orders, as well as in increasing efforts to rethink the legacy of twentieth-century socialism. The deployment of self-Orientalization as a way to distance oneself from the socialist legacy is another thematic concern of this issue: how Orientalizing narratives are employed, on the one hand, to foster the internalization of inferiority and the necessity to emulate foreign models and, on the other, to create exclusions and project inferiority onto “others” assumed to be less Westernized. Opening the issue is Kristine Kotecki’s kaleidoscopic study “Europeanizing the Balkans at the Sarajevo Film Festival,” which critiques hegemonic political and aesthetic framings delimiting the selection of

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films at this prominent festival in the aftermath of the Bosnian war. Kotecki notes that the Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF) paradoxically performs the “melancholic return to nation-at-war,” in featuring films about Bosnian war trauma, as well as the nation’s “progress” to “peaceful and productive” regional cooperation through its promotion of Southeast European cinema. The narratives of both “festivity and commemoration,” mourning and melancholy, are prioritized because they attract Western European funding, while also demonstrating that the Balkans have “matured” into Europeanization, multiculturalism, and neoliberalism. The SFF, which not only institutes stock film categories (such as “human rights” or “war” films), but includes educational events meant to train future European Union citizens, is thus read as a civilizing project for the Orientalized Balkans. To challenge this vision, Kotecki explores the awarded film Tilva Rosh as a narrative that mobilizes stereotypes of violent Balkan masculinity and “postsocialist” memories of socialism to highlight the social devastations wrought by neoliberal privatization and the pursuit of European recognition. Elaborating on the production of post-socialist Bosnians as subjects of reparative justice through “human rights” narratives, Erin Trapp furthers a sophisticated reading of the influence of Euro-American psychoanalytic models on the discourse of humanitarian intervention in the former Yugoslavia, the “non-European Europe,” in “Human Rights Poetry: On Ferida Durakovicå’s Heart of Darkness.” Trapp shows how “human rights” discourse speaks the language of global empire, facilitating Western intervention, economic destabilization, and neoliberal capitalist restructuring. Human rights poetry, Trapp argues, can offer a way out of the projective identification of this discourse by “emphasizing the insolubility of the other of Europe in the figure of the witness,” opposing the logic of reparation underpinned by “assumptions about psychological processes of identifying, witnessing, and working through.” Durakovicå’s poetry foregrounds such “aggressive disidentification[s]” between victim and witness by employing tropes of slippage, waiting, and the indeterminacy of the poetic “I,” challenging “the global reparative model of witnessing.” In “The Creation of Consensus through Spatial Appropriation: Normalization of Western Hegemony in the Built Environment,” Mary Dellenbaugh draws attention to post-socialist rewritings of urban space, focusing on the symbols and perspectives deployed in the reconstruction of East

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Berlin. According to Dellenbaugh, because the socialist heritage of Berlin was ubiquitously associated with “backwardness and inferiority,” structures amenable to commerce and conspicuous consumption replaced “bloc housing, central parade squares,” “wide boulevards,” and “monumental public art.” Analyzing the narrative tropes of the predominantly West German urban planners, sociologists, and conservative politicians, she observes that public consensus about reconstruction was manufactured “through discourses of inclusion and multiculturalism that, in fact broadly exclude the burdened histories of the socialist era.” These discourses envisioned a new ideal Stadtbürger: an educated, wealthy, flexible, and Westoriented city dweller to displace the professionally and culturally heterogeneous “Berliner mix” of the socialist period. After investigating changing attitudes to urban space, the issue “Consensual Empires” goes on to explore how shifting value systems inform and influence other practices of everyday life, such as the consumption of popular culture. In “Turbo-Folk as the Agent of Empire: On Discourses of Identity and Difference in Popular Culture,” Irena Sentevska offers a comprehensive reading of the dominant meanings associated with Serbia’s singular, yet globally replicated, musical genre turbo-folk. Locating the roots of this genre in socialist Yugoslavia, she argues that post-socialist “narratives of identity and difference” surrounding the turbo-folk phenomenon function “as ideological shorthand in the processes of social re-structuring and re-stratification in changing economic and political circumstances.” Turbo-folk, associated with bad taste and conspicuous consumption, becomes a vehicle for projecting Oriental difference onto internal “others” that pose a threat to Serbia’s Europeanization. As an officially promoted musical genre, however, it also camouflages “the harsh social reality” and legitimizes “Serbia’s war-profiteering nouveau riche.” Sentevska concludes that from the perspective of global music production, this genre idealizes Western consumer lifestyles, contributes to the imposition of neoliberal capitalism, as well as symptomizes Serbia’s “thirdworldization.” This insight offers a way out of the impasse of claiming that turbo-folk represents both authentic Serbian culture and its destruction by Oriental “otherness.” The final two contributions foreground local political narratives that legitimize post-socialist transitions. In “Neoliberal Hegemony and Narratives of ‘Losers’ and ‘Winners’ in Post-Socialist Transformations,” Elena

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Danilova highlights the complex interplay between coercion and consensus in Russian reform implementation, the result of a “long tradition of transnational networks” and “Cold War-period dialogue between American and East European economists.” Interrogating texts by leading intellectuals, liberal economists, and media pundits, Danilova shows that a neoliberal platform dominated the “common sense” which they sought to establish through tropes naturalizing “radical social inequalities,” and ascribing social failure to individual passivity, servility, and “Soviet” inefficiency. These narratives “constitut[e] an Orientalizing discourse reflecting the increasingly dependent position of Russia or Eastern Europe in relation to the Western ‘consensual empire.’” This attempt to replace the unfit “homo Sovieticus” with an entrepreneurial, progressive, independent citizen of post-Soviet Russia, as Danilova observes, promotes the competitive values of personal success, power, and wealth in the face of mass social devastation and increasing authoritarianism. Gabriel Tsang’s “Political Narratology and Consensual Development in Post-Mao China” concludes the issue by taking us through the multifarious ideological positions surrounding China’s economic-centered policy and accession to the global capitalist market. Juxtaposing a reading of the influential documentary series He Shang with the narrative strategies employed by Chinese democrat reformers and political leaders, Tsang notes that “the process of building popular consensus around Western values” is based on self-Orientalization yet “full of internal contradictions, inconsistency, and incoherence.” Mobilizing local narratives, such as the Chinese concept of democracy, Minzhu, or Confucian discourses on social harmony, enables the pragmatic and limited adaptation of values associated with the West: democracy, development, or human rights. Tsang concludes, however, that in political performances, both democrats and political leaders often use these concepts as rhetorical flourishes to win the sympathies of their audiences in lieu of exploring and explaining issues all their complexity. In bringing these conceptually and theoretically diverse essays into conversation, “Consensual Empires” hopes to trace possible intersections between postcolonial theory and globalization studies to yield a revised view of post-socialist parts of the world. Since, as Hana Cervinkova notes, “students of postsocialism look to postcolonialism for inspiration, but postcolonial scholarship does not seem to be too interested in what studies

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of postsocialism have to contribute” (159), we wish to encourage continued analyses of a range of cultural practices and narratives in post-socialist spaces where a postcolonial lens would be necessary to tie neoliberal transitions to the history of empire. Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery have proposed one avenue of nurturing the much-needed dialogue between post-socialist and postcolonial studies, namely, creating a unified analytic field, “the (post-) Cold War,” to explore the worldwide effects of Cold War ideology, and undermine the traditional divide between “third world” and “second world” studies (18). Similarly, we argue for a single analytic framework unrestricted historically to the Cold War period that recognizes the expansion of capitalism as itself a manifestation of empire.

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