Kundera politics

What does it mean for a nation to exist? Taking as his starting point the position of Milan Kundera – who died exactly a year ago – and the movement of cultural resistance to the dissolution of Soviet totalitarianism, Danny Trom questions the difference between nationalist dreams of power and the irreducible claim to a national (and European) spirit. Is there not something at stake here for the future of Israel?

 

 

Dissidence, of which Kundera, a Czech refugee in France, became a leading figure, saw itself as a European resistance movement. In this singular historical experience of nation-states formally independent, but in practice corseted by the Russo-Soviet Empire, what can best be described as a nationalism of existential threat was developing underground. The threat was twofold, Russian and Soviet: states were subservient to Russia, dependent on it, “satellized” as it was then called, but, Dissidence added, nations were being stripped of their very substance by Sovietism, to the point where their very existence was in jeopardy. The state, be it that of the Polish, Czech, Slovak or Hungarian nation, was an empty shell, incapable of satisfying the will of the people not only to express itself, but to perpetuate itself. Criticism of political domination was coupled with a “cultural” or even “civilizational” critique of the Soviet demiurgic project to create a New Man, accused of undermining the European humanism of which the national cultures of Central Europe presented so many variations.

In the context of the Cold War, Western Europe received the message of Dissidence and celebrated the once vibrant, but unjustly suppressed, Mitteleuropa. Since the Iron Curtain fell across Europe, this part of “kidnapped Europe”, as Kundera put it, had been stifled under the Soviet dullness, almost extinguished. The editorial uproar surrounding the Central European novel under the Habsburg empire, and the great touring exhibitions on the sunken Austro-Hungarian world that attracted massive audiences, were all ways in which Western Europe celebrated the oppressed and collectively signed up the irrepressible participation of the nations of Central Europe in a great common humanist culture. In France, but elsewhere too, a generation that had broken with communism and its leftist substitutes was reviving an idea of Europe as a common heritage. They swapped the doctrinaire corpus of Marxism for classical literature. It rallied to humanism via the political critique of administered domination.

Admitting that Man is a phenomenon irreducible to any artificial transformation, that the freedom to create is “the hallmark of European humanity”, that this heritage must be preserved and cultivated – these were all ways in which Dissidence anchored resistance in a now-claimed historical continuity. The Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka, a pupil of Husserl and Heidegger, and in 1976 the first spokesman with Václav Havel for Charter 77 for civil rights and freedoms in Czechoslovakia, gave this claim a metaphysical-political underpinning: “Instead of reconnecting with the European ideal of care for the soul, scientific socialism has merely reproduced the fiction of a necessary legality of history, the end of which would lie in the achievement of real equality between men”^[1]”. Abolishing this fiction meant rejoining the course of history by reviving an authentic heritage of which every European nation was the custodian.

If the hallmark of Soviet domination is the interruption of the course of history through the confiscation of the European heritage, the cultural nation as such, in all its productions, concentrates the point of resistance to totalitarian domination: this is what Dissidence proclaims, and what establishes it as the most literary of all known resistances.

The dissidents’ struggle was thus waged on two parallel fronts: against the Soviet repressive system in its most concrete manifestations, and for the salvation of the European “soul”, the flame of which each nation carries, even if it is no more than a flicker. Under the cold domination of Soviet administrative techniques, a distinctly European experience was taking shape, despite the repression; and behind the mask of homo sovieticus, the face of European man was emerging, resilient, or restored to its cultural depth. In this precise context, the idea was born that historical continuity is a good, associated with a lasting right to possession. At first glance, this is a strange idea. Isn’t historical continuity a fact, a flow in which we’ve been immersed ever since the emergence of historical thought? That this process is affected by transformations, bifurcations, even ruptures, is only a corollary. This is precisely where Dissidence broke new ground: it made historical continuity an object of reclamation.

For nations frozen in the Soviet glacis, the threat of disappearance was based on an observation: the perpetuation of the nation does not have the State as its historical condition, since this State existed for it at best only in eclipses. Kundera would say: “Culture is the memory of the people, the collective consciousness of historical continuity, the way of thinking and living”. Nevertheless, the state is the ideal vehicle to which one ardently aspire. In the meantime, the oppressed nation, threatened with obliteration, strives to survive without a state or under a puppet state, until such time as it is truly endowed with a state of its own. Resilient, it accommodates itself to the intermittence of the state, in the expectation of its restoration. If the hallmark of Soviet domination is the interruption of the course of history through the confiscation of the European heritage, the cultural nation as such, in all its productions, concentrates the point of resistance to totalitarian domination: this is what Dissidence proclaims, and what establishes it as the most literary of all known resistances.

The lesson of Dissidence made a deep impression on a militant generation in the West, disenchanted with “really existing” communism and nourished by testimonies from the gulag, samizdats, the writings of Czesław Miłosz, Vaclav Havel, Milan Kundera or Danilo Kis. In this way, a kind of critique is formulated, addressed not to Soviet political societies finally swallowed up by the march of history, but to our own Western societies, also gripped by “the dictatorship of the present”, also traversed by a crisis of culture, compromising the historical continuity of European cultural nations^[2]. The nationalism of existential threat imperceptibly became a common topic.

Torn between the nostalgia of a past power and the hope of regaining their greatness through political Europe, the great nations are also invaded by fear.

Milan Kundera, as a European educator exiled in the West, offered his Western audience a precise definition of the collective subject of resistance: the “small nation”, whose existence can be called into question at any moment<footnote>Kundera Milan, « Un occident kidnappé » ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale », Le Débat, 1983/5 n°27, p. 3-23. </footnote>; it can disappear at any time, and is aware of it. The small nation is both fragile and persevering. What distinguishes the small nation from the great is the experience of precariousness. The certainty of continuity is the privilege of great nations, which continuously possess a robust state. However, in Western Europe, the nationalism of nations formerly embedded in a state no longer presents itself in the assertive, self-satisfied, sometimes imperial and bellicose form it once did. This version was eroded by the blows of two world wars. The building of a political Europe, founded on peace and solidarity, presupposed this drastic attenuation. Torn between the nostalgia of a past power and the hope of regaining their greatness through political Europe, the great nations were also overcome by fear.

In Western Europe, the old imperial nationalism was replaced by a threat-based nationalism specific to the “great nations”. In France, since the inaugural, painful, irretrievable event of the 1940 defeat, and since the Liberation that was supposed to overcome it, Gaullism has bequeathed France with the unhappy self-consciousness of a declassed nation. The post-war Gaullist status readjustment of France as a “middle-range power with a global vocation” was a way to cling to its status. Inexorable downgrading, combined with a determination to maintain one’s standing, became a French topicality. Well-founded or not, downgrading is a diagnosis that “big nations” have the privilege of making. The “small nations”, on the other hand, deploy a variant of the nationalism of the threat that does not involve the fear of downgrading, because they were never included in the competitive space of the European concert of yesteryear reserved for the great powers. What is claimed is not a reclassification, or even an over-classification, as they say in the airlines, but, more modestly, the right to an assured place.

So, when the Soviet Union thawed and collapsed, the European Union invited the smaller nations to join, unconditionally, in order to remove them permanently from the Empire, without paying any attention to the intensity of the nationalism of threat incubated by Dissidence. Gradually, it became clear that this idealized conservatory of our common pre-war past carried with it a national ethos that was thought to be outdated, incompatible with the spirit of the new Europe. For small nations, joining the European Union was first and foremost a way of ensuring their survival as nations, not a way of integrating into a post-national liberal Europe, as Hungary and Poland today demonstrate. Above all, it became clear that the ethos of small nations threatened with extinction and that of large nations threatened with downgrading could fit perfectly together. Both hauntings lend themselves to interpolation. An unresolved tension now runs through the European Union: will it be the post-national nationalism that is gripped by the fear of downgrading, but firmly resolved to unite to counter it, that will prevail, or will it be the nationalism of the threat specific to small nations that inexorably rubs off on all its members? This is precisely the question facing us Europeans today.

Hence the ambiguity of the status of the small Jewish nation in the minds of Europeans: on the one hand, it is the small nation par excellence, since it was almost completely exterminated in Europe, but on the other hand, it is powerful enough to endow itself with a territorial state capable of imposing itself in a hostile environment, whereas the Jews have always formed a dispersed, politically powerless nation.

Kundera raised the syntagm small-nation to the height of the concept on the basis of a borderline case: “I underline these words: small nation. Indeed, what are they, the Jews, if not the small nation par excellence? The only small nation of all time to have survived empires and the devastating march of history.”^[3] If the criterion is precariousness, Kundera is right to make the Jews the prototype of the small nation. The Jews are indeed a small surviving nation. The small Central European nation crushed under the boot of the Empire can sing, like a challenge to the mighty, that “Poland has not yet perished”, as the Polish national anthem has done since the dismemberment of the state in 1795. Yet the Jews learned to persist without a state, without even imagining it, while the small nations ardently hoped for it, a significant difference that escaped Kundera. Living dispersed in the interstices of states – Empires or nation-states, it doesn’t matter here – is by no means equivalent to intermittently possessing the state.

And yet, the advent of the State of Israel seems to confirm the accuracy of Kundera’s definition, since the Jews, too, eventually had to resort to the state to overcome the tumult of history. From the point of view of small nations, building a state is all the more of a feat when it is done against one’s own ancestral tradition, which forbids it. But from the point of view of the great declassed nation, the one that early on made Jews citizens, the State of Israel appears rather as the ultimate product of a “self-confident and domineering” people whose strength, according to de Gaule, lies in its ability to draw on an immemorial historical background. Hence the ambiguity of the status of the small Jewish nation in the minds of Europeans: on the one hand, it is the small nation par excellence, since it was almost completely exterminated in Europe, but on the other, it is powerful enough to endow itself with a territorial state capable of imposing itself in a hostile environment, whereas the Jews have always formed a dispersed, politically powerless nation.

How, then, can we qualify the Jews as a European nation if Kundera’s definition proves partial? It’s true that Israel is the state of a small nation, the smallest of them all, because the existential threat was, as far as the Jews were concerned, abruptly executed in Europe. But for this small nation, the state that has come into being is never an ideal, but rather a solution, perhaps a provisional one, on which the existence of the Jews depends conjuncturally, but not essentially. The anomaly, for her, lies precisely not in the interruption of the State, but in its unexpected emergence.

The State for the Jews is a means, adjusted to the post-war world, of soothing their anguish, while cultivating the ideal of political culture that Europe was incapable of honoring. But if this state situates historical continuity through a mythology of autochthony, it will drown in the insignificance of Middle Eastern regional quarrels, of which it will be no more than an unimportant element.

In so doing, this state solution, concocted on the basis of the political contradictions of pre-war Europe, was intended to be purged of the dross of the European national state, of which the Jews had bitter experience, as witnessed by the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel. Kundera was clearly aware of this: “If the Jews, even after having been tragically disappointed by Europe, have nevertheless remained faithful to European cosmopolitanism, Israel, their little homeland finally rediscovered, emerges in my eyes as the true heart of Europe, a strange heart placed beyond the body”.^[4] For Kundera, this was self-evident, as the State of Israel came into being as a result of a session of European Jewry and the dictates of necessity. Today, however, this small state is buffeted by contrary winds, and Kundera’s speech in Jerusalem can be reread with a heavy heart.

 

Whether the State of Israel remains faithful to this trajectory will depend on where it situates the point of continuity of the Jewish history from which it springs. That the awareness of Jewish precariousness infuses it is logical, inevitable. The state for Jews is a means, adjusted to the post-war world, of soothing their anguish, while cultivating the ideal of political culture that Europe was incapable of honoring. But – and this is the slope on which it risks sliding, on which it is already sliding – if this state situates historical continuity through a mythology of autochthony, it will drown in the insignificance of Middle Eastern regional quarrels, of which it will be no more than an unimportant element. This is the burning issue facing Jews today, whether they are citizens of their states in Europe, or citizens of the State of Israel, a state destined to protect Jews from the erring ways of a Europe that was first persecuting, then criminal, and is now plagued by doubts about its own ability to continue.

---

Danny Trom