past. All of a sudden we were ejected into the future. Politicians, public intellectuals, newspapers, TV shows – all were full of confronting the past, resembling the period in Germany during the 1960s: on the one hand, what did the operation ‘Storm’ really mean (now the Hague Tribunal verdict had made it clear it was legitimised as a liberation operation), and on the other hand, what crimes were still inflicted on the Serbian minority (since the generals were freed, who was now responsible for the crimes that did happen?). Instead of falling into this trap of what Hegel would call ‘die schlechte Unendlichkeit’ (once again all the endless debates were about who killed more people and whose actions and victims were more justified), the General focused himself on the future.
But what does the future really look like? As happens in rare moments, history was condensed within just a few days: at the end of 2012 the Croatian public was surprised by two other judgments that are not only giving a new meaning to the past, but also determining the future. The first verdict was against the former minister of economy, Radomir Čačić, who caused a traffic accident with two fatalities in Hungary in 2010. Although the minister was fully aware that there was a high chance he would end up in jail, he was behaving as if this didn’t concern him as the most important Croatian politician at that time. In a way, the fate of the country was held hostage by his past – because it was clear that he would be convicted, there was no future in his decisions or in his (austerity and privatisation) strategy. The second verdict was a ten-year prison sentence for the former prime minister for ‘war profiteering’. Among other things, Ivo Sanader was found guilty because between 1994 and 1995, during the war, he conferred high-interest rates on loans for Croatia, taking a commission of 5 per cent, which was around 7 million shillings. In other words, what he did during the 1990s directly affected the future of Croatia – namely today’s external debt.
As we can see, the future didn’t die during those seven years when General Gotovina was in prison. The death of the future is inscribed in the very nation-building process. Yes, Croats fought in the war, and many fought really defending their homes and families, truly believing in a better Croatia. But at the same time, the ones who convinced them to fight for Croatia worked hard to steal the future. Sanader setting high-interest rates is the best example. And the other is the once state-owned oil company INA, which is now Hungarian. And there are a number of other cases, which date back to telecommunications, another once-profitable industry that is now German, while all the doors are now open to privatisation of the railway, energy sector, healthcare system etc.
And here again we return to Gotovina and his ‘promotion of the future’. If you think that his vision of the future is an empty gesture without any content, think again. What did the General do right before the Croatians voted in the referendum on joining the EU? Although during his time in prison he hesitated to give any political messages, just a day before the EU referendum he urged all Croatian citizens to go to the referendum and vote for the European Union – and, to be sure the future would be certain, he himself voted in The Hague’s prison cell. It is precisely this perspective which can give us a clear explanation of this hyperinflation of the future, which now gets a clear outline. Just a few days after his ‘futuristic speech’ in Zagreb, he visited the coastal city of Zadar where he admitted that his vision of future was the European Union. Then, eventually, he released a dove of peace into the air.
But doesn’t the future seem a bit different? A long time ago, on one of Zagreb’s façades stood a famous graffiti: ‘We don’t have Cash, how about MasterCard?’ (Namely, the translation of ‘Gotovina’ is neither more nor less than ‘Cash’.) Today we have both, General Gotovina and MasterCard, but we don’t have any cash – we live in an economy of debt. Here the insights of the Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, known for his thesis about semio-capitalism as the new form of capitalism (financialisation as a process of sign-making), could be useful. In his book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, he claims that banking is actually about storing time. In a sense, in banks we are storing our past, but also our future. Bifo goes a step further and claims that German banks are full of our time: ‘The German banks have stored Greek time, Portuguese time, Italian time, and Irish time, and now the German banks are asking for their money back. They have stored the futures of the Greeks, the Portuguese, the Italians, and so on. Debt is actually future time – a promise about the future.’9
And if we now interpret the conversation with President Gauck, aren’t precisely German or Austrian banks, among others, storing Croatian time as well? Most of the citizens – not only in Croatia, but in the whole region of the Balkans – are now highly indebted, owing money to foreign-owned banks that have spread around the Balkans and control its whole financial sector. According to some estimation, 75.3 per cent of banks in Serbia, 90 per cent in Croatia and up to 95 per cent in Bosnia and Herzegovina actually belong to German, Italian and French banks.10 The integration of the Balkans into the EU already started twenty years ago!
So, what we should do today is to repeat the famous slogan ‘Danke Deutschland’, but of course, in a cynical manner. When Germany recognised Croatia as an independent state in December 1991, a Croatian singer performed a song under the title ‘Danke Deutschland’ on national television. Although the kitschy song actually wasn’t very popular in Croatia, it clearly shows the prevailing atmosphere: this was the time when many villages and towns in Croatia had a Genscher Street or a Genscher Square, named after the German foreign minister, and even today there are some cafés having his name. As was expected, the song ‘Danke Deutschland’ was immediately used – and played rather more often – in Serbia as a mean of counterpropaganda, which claimed this was further proof of the eternal relationship between Germany and Croatia, namely between the ‘Third Reich’ and the Ustaša regime in Croatia. TV Belgrade went even so far as to play the clip for ‘Danke Deutschland’ over filmed scenes of crowds greeting Germans in the middle of Zagreb at the beginning of the Second World War. Why is it so impossible to imagine such an enthusiasm regarding the enlargement of today’s Europe?
In an early text published during the war, in 1992, Slavoj Žižek developed the famous thesis that the Balkan ‘ethnic dance macabre’ was actually a symptom of Europe, reminding us of a story about an anthropological expedition trying to contact in New Zealand a tribe which allegedly danced a terrible war dance in grotesque death masks. When the members of the expedition reached the tribe, they asked the village to perform it for them, and next morning the performed dance did in fact match the description. The expedition was very satisfied; they returned to civilisation and published a much-praised report on the savage rites of the primitives. But here comes the surprise: shortly afterwards, another expedition arrived at this tribe and they found out that this terrible dance actually didn’t exist in itself at all. It was created by the aborigines who somehow guessed what the strangers wanted and quickly invented it for them, to satisfy their demand. In other words, the explorers received back from the aborigines their own message. And, as you can guess, Žižek’s point is that people like Hans-Dietrich Genscher were the 1990s version of the New Zealand expedition: ‘They act and react in the same way, overlooking how the spectacle of old hatreds erupting in their primordial cruelty is a dance staged for their eyes, a dance for which the West is thoroughly responsible. The fantasy which organised the perception of ex-Yugoslavia is that of the Balkans as the Other of the West: the place of savage ethnic conflicts long ago overcome by civilised Europe, the place where nothing is forgotten and nothing learned, where old traumas are being replayed again and again, where symbolic links are simultaneously devalued (dozens of cease-fires broken) and overvalued (the primitive warrior’s notions of honour and pride).’11 But far from being the Other of Europe, ex-Yugoslavia was rather Europe itself in its Otherness, the screen onto which Europe projected its own repressed reverse.
And doesn’t the same hold for the peripheral countries of Europe as well? Isn’t Greece, soon joined by Croatia, today’s mirror of Europe and all what is repressed in the centre? On the one hand, considering the Balkans still as ‘the Other of the West’, just before the entrance of Croatia to the EU, the European Commission engaged a London-based public relations agency – which usually worked for Coca-Cola, JP Morgan Chase and British Airways
