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EUROPE’S

SLUMS

Gabriel Ivan

This article is a personal view of current East European evolutions. The author proposes a vision of a split Europe and depicts the historical processes tracing out new frontiers across the continent. The features of the future European slums represent the extrapolation of some characteristics of the Romanian situation and of its difficulties of reintegrating into Western civilization. To the extent that this same situation is specific to the other ex-socialist states in the Balkan peninsula, they will share the common destiny of a separate development counter to Central and Western Europe, being pushed to the periphery of European civilization. The author’s intention is to trigger the world through presenting a dystopia of a community doomed to live in the servants’ quarters of the future European house.

We are witnessing the reconstitution of European space. When politicians speak about the ex-Soviet camp, they do distinguish between Eastern and Central Europe. Beyond history or their present degree of civilization, the two entities seem to be almost irremediably separated by their possible futures. If the evolution of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary have recently outlined the perspective of their structural integration into the Western type of civilization, the Balkan states’ future seems very much like seclusion into the European slums. The fall of the Berlin wall will not transform the continent into a homogeneous space. The wall between the two sociopolitical systems will be replaced by a new frontier, that will segregate the centre from the peripheral areas. To the East of this frontier the socialist world will be replaced not by an occidental type of civilization but by a European subsidiary of the Third World. We raise here some of the present political and military developments which seem to outline the route of this breach that will expel Balkan Europeans from a democratic, efficient and prosperous Europe. The countries of the EC do not deal uniformly with the integration of ex-socialist countries into Western political, economic and military organizations. Central and Eastern Europe must go along distinct paths in their ‘run for Europe’. Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia have become members of

Gabriel Ivan is at the Institute for Educational Sciences, Str Stirbei Voda 37, 70732, Bucharest, Romania.

0016-3287/020144-06 @I 1992 Butterworth-Heinemann

Ltd

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the European Council, while Romania, Bulgaria and Albania are but special guests in this organization. This two-step integration will emphasize the distance between the two categories of states as far as democratic development and the market economy are concerned. That Western policy is spurring the breach from communism by sanctions applied to the peoples which re-elect the ex-regime representatives, is perfectly justified: but these sanctions will settle the ex-socialist states into two irremediably distinct worlds. The perspective of building a European house with two levels is transparent through the Western attitude towards making the consequences of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact void. On the basis of this pact, the Red Army occupied in 1940 the Baltic states and a part of Romania that was included in the USSR as the Republic of Moldavia. By acknowledging the independence of the Baltic states but refusing to acknowledge the independence of Moldavia, the West is showing its indifference to the territories outside the frontiers of a future EC which will include Baltic states but which will exclude Romania. The seccessionist war in Yugoslavia is a violent expression of the breach which will characterize the future European order. The war between the Croatians and the Serbs is just a military reaction of the two nations in relation to the perspective of their future positioning in this split European order. The diplomatic support granted by Western countries and Hungary for Croatia and Slovenia shapes the structure of the future alliance of the European civilizational centre. The future European settlement has begun to build its walls somewhere on the line that bounds to the West the area of influence of the Eastern church. A kind of geopolitical apartheid will convert a part of the Balkan peninsula’s inhabitants into second-class citizens of the European house. From beyond the barrier, ‘the town’ looks down at them as if they were some wretched people. Doomed to wander about the suburbs of the communitarian metropolis, they will helplessly watch one side of Europe turning into a bantustan. The rise of Western nationalist parties’ popularity will erect a barbed wire fence against the ‘white men’ in the poor European countries. Having escaped from a communist utopia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and part of Yugoslavia have been swallowed up by a dystopia of marginalization. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, the Western powers recognized Soviet political and economic rights in the countries of Eastern Europe and its predominant influence throughout most of Eastern Europe: ‘Soviet predominance thus rested on the acquiescence and agreement of the Western powers as well as on the physical presence of the Red Army’.’ ‘Interim governmental authorities’ with varying levels of communist participation (eg 50% in Yugoslavia, 75% in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, and up to 80% in Romania) were set up, though they were intended only to be temporary pending the conclusion of peace treaties and the holding of free elections. The strategic process of homogenization between East and West will include, half a century after Yalta, only the countries of Central Europethose regions which geopolitical arrangements of the second world war years included in the Soviet sphere only in a proportion of 75%. New ‘Yalta-type’ arrangements separating the ‘Central European troika’ from the

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marginalized zone will make it seem like ‘something else’ in the eyes of the civilized world, and doom any investment of capital or confidence to being a virtual failure. A civilizational gap will separate the European centre from the Balkan slums. This article aims to clear up the mechanics of marginalization. We seek to answer two questions here: which interests and geopolitical conditions will determine this schism? What are the characteristics of the slums, and how will they influence social, economic and political developments in the Balkan countries? Zonal segregation The democracy and prosperity of the East cannot be achieved by the East itself. Endogenous factors may offer more or less favourable conditions for the expansion of democracy, but without active action by the West none of these states can reach Western civilizational standards. With the end of the Cold War, Eastern Europe expects its conquerors. The hostility between the two sociopolitical systems prevented the extension of the Marshall Plan in this region of Europe after World War II. For the second time in the latter half of the 20th century, the West will not venture into the Balkan peninsula. Here, a new Iron Curtain will fall, separating prosperity from misery. The political earthquake caused by the meeting between Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev at Malta will trigger a reshaping of the European order within the framework of a centre-periphery pattern. Homogeneous from the viewpoint of the capitalist sociopolitical system, the states on the continent will nevertheless develop apart in accordance with the place they hold in this new dual structure of European civilization. How far will the ‘empire of prosperity’ spread towards the East? In our dystopia the West is neither able nor interested in extending its integrative movement beyond the Central European frontiers. The West cannot financially support radical reform both in the centre and in the east of Europe. Western taxpayers will not accept giving additional credits to Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Romania, since they Poland and Hungary. The Balkan have already helped Czechoslovakia, peoples will have to be satisfied with so-called humanitarian credits, which although they cannot support a coherent development programme, have suceeded in avoiding collapse at the edge of the empire. The European slums will be constrained to sharing this subsistence help with the countries of the Third World. Its percentage will be determined by the proportion between the amplitude of the whole North-South conflict and the extent of the social conflicts in the Balkan countries. Besides, the three great economic powers of today will turn their capital resources towards other geographical areas. The USA will substantially involve itself in the economic and social reorganization of South America. Japan will be tempted to invest in the Asiatic side of the USSR and in China, while Germany will be almost exclusively preoccupied with covering its unification costs. The West does not need a general European integration. The European house needs an outlet for its existential misery in the immediate neighbour-

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hood. The health of the future European organism implies the existence of this fetid and musty place of the Balkans where our neighbours from north-western Europe can throw away their ‘sewage’: pornography of low quality, kitsch art, outdated technologies, surplus stock, suspicious businessmen, and so on. This ex-communist Balkan land, this image of evil where nothing can be built up, stands as an extraordinarily invigorating counterexample of the West’s appetite for building. BALCANI/CALIBAN-this is an anagram which disguises a terrible predestination: Prospero-land and Caliban-land together but dramatically split within the same ‘island’ that stretches between the Atlantic Ocean and the Black Sea. This is the meaning of zonal segregation -the implacable breach between the centre and the periphery of civilization. The two zones do exist through the gap that separates them. The marginalization and isolation of the Balkan countries are obviously interesting for their ex-fellows in the Soviet camp. The stronghold-of-democracy position confers a privileged status on Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. The EC will have to confront the perturbations coming from outside the system and which threaten to jam its inner order. Thanks to their geographical position, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia will receive important Western financial or logistical support which will allow them to perform the function of a cordon sanitaire against the ‘slums’. These countries will derive advantage from most of the cost of civilizational organization (or from the resources assigned by the centre of European civilization to maintaining its stability). In most historic situations the contact area between the developed West and the large spaces of the Russian steppes represented a favourable territory for economic boom. The most powerful tendency of Western economic evolution is the development of the economic branches that greatly involve information circulation and processing, and a highly qualified labour force. In this context, the developed countries will place elsewhere those economic branches based on the circulation and processing of raw materials and on an averagely qualified labour force. Russia derives advantage from its possession of a great deal of raw materials and has at its disposal better qualified labour than the Third World. That is why it is here where an industrial boom, greatly supported by Western capital, will take place. The peripherization of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Romania will deflect the waves of civilization from and towards this ‘America’ of the future millennium, which the USSR could become. Central Europe and the lands of the Balkans contest each other with respect to the quality of relay-space. The two entities both have an interest in obtaining control over the lines of communication between the two economic regions where the complementary branches will develop-between the world of mechanics and that of microelectronics. The administration of these exchanges between Russia and the West is an opportunity not to be missed. The countries that built the ‘Central European alliance’ on 15 February 1991 (Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia), intend to monopolize the transit operations between the west and the east of Eurasia and, for a short time, to draw all the capital investments from the West. The delay of reform in the Balkan countries seems to aggravate this situation. This delay is not just a cause, but also the effect of zonal segregation.

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Stains of marginality

The general features of the slums may be identified in the current evolution of the ex-communist states in the Balkan peninsula. What are these features and how could they worsen the human state in this zone? Poverty is the first and most obvious stain of marginality. It expresses a deficit of value which is dragging down all domains of existence and human action-a multilateral developed poverty. The most traumatic aspect of poverty will be its irreparable nature. Poverty is a vicious circle: it gives birth to poverty at individual and mass level, on all levels of social life. Being its own cause, poverty cannot be removed without an influx of abundance coming from outside the Balkan slums. The slums are closed spaces. Secluded in their own underdevelopment, its inhabitants raise the aversion of those living on the other side of the barrier, and that is why they can hardly surpass their condition. Their contacts with the centre are prescribed by the rules which control the access of the slums to the heart of metropolis. After the removal of socialism from Central and Eastern Europe, the Western countries have started to implement harsher regulations for emigration. Austria’s Federal Ministry of Internal Affairs has informed Romanian immigrants, in the advertising columns of the daily Romania IiberS’: ‘YOU HAVE NO CHANCE’. Living standards in Romania make the right of free circulation futile since the goal is unattainable: an air ticket from Bucharest to Vienna costs the equivalent of 10 months’ wages for a Romanian worker. Popularizing the image of the beggar groups who tarnish its towns, sleeping in their railway stations, the West has sentenced the Balkan countries to remaining ‘outside the gates’, confined in the wretched enclosure of Balkan post-communism. Isolation contributes to the deterioration of relationships with the world. The marginals reject the values of a world which refuses them. Intolerance in and with the slums is causing a mean, counterproductive nationalism in the political arena. Backwardness. From a temporal point of view, the marginals are retarded. Monosynchronization with Western specific temporality will place them in a belated history. At present they are repeating some stages that the West excelled in: mechanical revolution, primitive accumulation of capital, the formation of national states in the USSR and Yugoslavia, or the resurgence of monarchism. Without participation in the Western future, they will perpetually synchronize with its past. Norms and values. The communist system of norms no longer exists and the panoply of new Western values has not been appropriated at the social level. The Balkan peoples will be characterized by a state of anomie. Axiologically they live in a ‘no man’s land’ which lacks norms. The consequences of this situation are a ‘market economy’ without a market, a political pluralism branded by the traces of totalitarianism, the temptation to import economic and political patterns which cannot induce an organic

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development in the direction of democracy. here not to a passage but to a blind alley.

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stage will lead

Violence. The frustration of the slums emerges through violence. Violence is an expression of helplessness and lack of communication. Incapable of changing their situation and having the feeling that they have been abandoned, the Balkan peoples will sack their capitals from time to time. After a while they will become apathetic, theorizing (as they did in the interval between the two world wars) on their seclusion from a history that refuses them. Dependency. The last marginality stain is dependency. Zonal segregation does not imply independence. On the contrary, the marginals’ survival depends on connection and exchanges of all kinds with the civilization in whose suburbs they vegetate. By themselves, the slums cannot reduce their dependency on the centre. If such a project has been initiated by the West for the East, the Balkan countries have not as yet perceived it. The ex-socialist states’ difficulties of integration into Western civilization bring about the danger of a restoration of totalitarianism. People in the Balkan states are disappointed with the immediate outcomes of reforms. If they indulge themselves in the nationalist propaganda launched by the ‘sustainers of the old regime’, they will democratically elect a new dictatorship. In their policy concerning the Balkans, Western leaders have to choose between the following alternatives: massive support being given to democratic forces, or the acceptance of an undemocratic pattern of social cohesion which may determine only relative stability in the zone. Reference 1. David Thomson,

Europe Since Napoleon

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(Harmondsworth,Penguin,NM), page830.