reasonably speak of debt only with regard to natural resources (destroying the material conditions for the survival of future generations), where we are indebted to future generations which, precisely, do not yet exist and which, not without irony, will come to exist only through – and thus be indebted for their existence to – ourselves. So here also, the term ‘debt’ has no literal sense, it cannot be ‘financialised’, quantified into an amount of money. The debt we can talk about occurs when, within a global society, some group (nation or whichever) consumes more than it produces, which means that another group has to consume less than it produces – but here, relations are not as simple and clear as it may appear. Relations would be clear if, in a situation of debt, money would just have been a neutral instrument measuring how much more one group consumed with regard to what it produced, and at whose expense – but the actual situation is far from this. According to public data, around 90 per cent of money circulating around is the virtual credit money; so if ‘real’ producers find themselves indebted to financial institutions, one has good reason to doubt the status of their debt – how much of it was the result of speculations which happened in a sphere without any link to the reality of a local unit of production?
So when a country finds itself under the pressure of international financial institutions, be it IMF or private banks, one should always bear in mind that their pressure (translated into concrete demands: reduce public spending by dismantling parts of the welfare state, privatise, open up your market, deregulate your banks …) is not the expression of some neutral objective, logic or knowledge, but of a doubly partial (‘interested’) knowledge: at the formal level, it is a knowledge which embodies a series of neoliberal presuppositions, while at the level of content, it privileges the interests of certain states or institutions (banks etc.).
When the Turkish communist writer Panait Istrati visited the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, the time of the big purges and show trials, a Soviet apologist trying to convince him about the need of violence against the enemies evoked the proverb, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’, to which Istrati tersely replied, ‘All right. I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelette of yours?’ But we should say the same about the austerity measures imposed by the IMF: the Greeks would have the full right to say, ‘OK, we are breaking our eggs for all of Europe, but where’s the omelette you are promising us?’
Srećko Horvat
Danke Deutschland, meine Seele brennt!
Danke Deutschland, für das liebe Geschenk.
Danke Deutschland, vielen Dank,
wir sind jetzt nicht allein,
und die Hoffnung kommt in das zerstörte Heim.6
Croatian song, 1992
At the end of 2012, the German President Joachim Gauck visited Croatia. For some reason, I had the honour to be one of three Croatian intellectuals chosen to meet him and have a closed-room conversation about Croatia’s entry to the European Union, but mainly focused on the intellectual and cultural sphere.
When you are invited to meet a president, if you are not a complete idiot, the immediate reaction should be the famous Lacanian lesson that ‘a madman who believes he is king is no madder than a king who believes he is king.’ In other words, a king who believes he possesses an inherent ‘king gene’ is implicitly mad. And the same goes for presidents. A ‘president’ is a symbolical function, even if – or, especially if – he is from Germany (where Angela Merkel runs the game).
In the end, I was pleasantly surprised. It was really interesting to chat with Mr Gauck. He wasn’t just kindly present waiting for the official programme to end, but posed many different questions and showed interest in the Balkans. Although it was planned that culture had to be the main topic of our conversation, politics was in the air. Knowing him not only as an ‘unverbesserlicher Antikommunist’ (‘incorrigible anti-communist’, as the Stasi described Gauck in their file on him), but also as a former Lutheran pastor and someone who seriously studied theology, at one point I asked him a question about the relation between theology and debt, with a political subtext, of course. The question was based on a manuscript from the thirteenth century cited by Jacques Le Goff:
Usurers sin against nature by wanting to make money give birth to money, as a horse gives birth to a horse, or a mule to a mule. Usurers are in addition thieves, for they sell time that does not belong to them, and selling someone else’s property, despite its owner, is theft. In addition, since they sell nothing other than the expectation of money, that is to say, time, they sell days and nights.7
Le Goff offers a detailed analysis of how between the twelfth and fifteenth century a caste of tradesmen developed from a small and despised group into a powerful force not only influencing social relations or even architecture, but first and foremost – social time. What is, according to Le Goff, the hypothesis of the trading activity? Exact timing: the accumulation of supplies in anticipation of famine – buying and selling at optimum moments. In other words, what Le Goff wants to show is that – before the emergence of usurers – in the Middle Ages, time still belonged to God (or to the Church), but today it is primarily the object of capitalist expropriation/appropriation.8
Gauck’s answer about the function of debt was this: ‘It is a matter of responsibility.’ Unfortunately, at this precise moment, as much as I was tempted to do so, I was polite enough not to graze the symbolic function of the President anymore. The question I wanted to pose was, of course, the following one: ‘Is it the responsibility of the German bankers, or of the Greek citizens who depend on the credit?’
And it is not only a question about capitalist domination or financial speculation; it is a theological question par excellence. If our future is sold, then there is no future at all.
And here we come to an interesting episode from recent Croatian history. When at the end of 2012 General Ante Gotovina, considered by many in Croatia as a war hero but ten years ago the biggest obstacle to the European future of Croatia, was freed from the International Court of Justice in The Hague after seven years of imprisonment, the first thing he did when he arrived back was give a speech at the central square in the capital of Croatia, where he offered a calm and terse message to the gathered crowd of 100,000 people: ‘The war belongs to the past; let’s turn to the future!’ Among primarily emotional and some nationalist reverberations, this was the most sober message. But only at first sight.
Only a few days later, asked by a Serbian journalist about his stance towards the return of exiled Serbs to territories liberated by the operation ‘Storm’ (‘Oluja’), the General answered: ‘This is still their home, and I don’t have to invite them back, since you can’t invite someone to his own home.’ He concluded with: ‘But let’s turn to the future!’ The motive of the future as the main motto of the freed general was best summarised by his lawyer during a Croatian TV show. Asked what the General, now the single most popular person in Croatia, would do with his popularity, the lawyer answered succinctly: ‘He will use his popularity to promote the future.’ He added that the acquittal didn’t only justify the past, but also saved the future. Of course, what he forgot to add was that his future was business. Recently he invested in the gasification in his hometown Zadar, worth almost 800,000 euro. So finally, after the war and all this international justice business, we can take what we were fighting for in war – democracy and a free market!
The unavoidable irony of this hyperinflation of the future lies in the fact that never since the break-up of Yugoslavia and the end of the war was there so much public debate and discussion about the past – not about the future. Not only people on the streets, but distinguished political analysts
