We take into account how enforcing a drastic peace treaty on Germany has lead to high surveillance costs that could not be sustained by the victors because of their path dependence, which ultimately led to the fact of the ‘good’ being sacrificed for the sake of the ‘comfortable’. We understand how military successes represent the test of truth for an ideology and provide the Nazi leaders with their legitimacy, inciting a group phantasm. We discern, in the relations between Germany, Soviet Russia and the French-English duo, all the elements of a triad and, implicitly, all elements of power that are generated by a game based on imposing and accepting uncertainties. All of the above bare evidence to the fact that sociological notions and concepts can produce revelations when taken into new domains, such as geopolitics and war.
1. Introduction
I
Want To Be Revised As Well– Periodicals from 1937-1940 is an anthology put together by Zoltán
Rostás attempting to recover the correspondence of Mihai Pop, dating from the
time he spent in Prague, which had been previously published in Lumea românească. What nowadays
appears in our eyes as history, as
being an inherent, logical development of events, an expression of continuity,
is in fact a simplification, because in reality we encounter elements of
discontinuity, of various possibilities for the events to have unfolded
otherwise, depending on a decision, which could have led to an entirely
different field of possibilities. Hence we have to read his writings from the
perspective of the novelty of and closeness to the events which were
taking place. We also have to observe the adherence to a certain kind of
lifestyle and the refusal of another, which was taking shape during the period.
Question: how much sociology resides in such a discourse? Beyond identifying
the sociological character of Mihai Pop’s perspective, our enquiry focuses on creating
out of this correspondence a reference
book for practical sociological works, encompassing exercises,
interpretations and sociological explanations which would have to be invented.
One of the first problems raised by Mihai
Pop is: which is the role of the intellectual? In the undeniable legacy of the
Enlightenment and of Modernity, the intellectual is that person who has the
capacity of analyzing the problems posed by the present they are living in.
What does thinking teach him? It teaches him that he is part of a system of
power of which he is both an object and an instrument and that his truth is a weapon to be used on the
battlefield of ongoing conflicts. There are no theoreticians or
practicians, there are only fighters. It is no less true that if the author is
positioned on the good side of history the relations between power, truth and
knowledge will partly be concealed.
Mihai Pop is writing under the pseudonym of
Petre Buga, a decision which has two complementary explanations. First, the
author is trying to protect himself from his writing, which is a trace. Then, freed of his actual name,
he stops considering himself as an author, in the foucauldian meaning of the
word (the author’s name has a certain task when related to discourse; “it enables classification; such a name
allows a certain number of texts to be regrouped, to be marked off, while
excluding some and opposing others”), as if hinting that any man
with common sense would have written in the same way. Consequently, his
articles are not and do not claim to be scientific studies because their author
understands that he is on a battlefield. The writing is simple, clear,
emotional, engaged, it defines the enemy and the dangers involved. The writing
is tributary to the signified and does not enter the expressive logic of the
signifier with its play of signs and prefabricates striving to impress.
What is the reason for Mihai Pop to
undertake such an endeavor? Our hypothesis is that Mihai Pop is trying to form a
circle of friends, in other words, he is recruiting soldiers for the war to
come. In Sloterdijk’s opinion “writing
not only constitutes a considerably long bridge between proven friends who are
far away from each other, but it also initiates an influence amongst those not
yet proven as friends, it makes a move of wooing new friends from afar, a move
of actio in distantis, in the language
of the antique-European magic, with the aim of exposing that potential friend
and determining him to become part of his circle of friends”.
This is the case for a group of people who are spiritually bonded by means of a
newspaper and the articles published in it. It lies in the power of the
journalist to produce these kind of relationships between people who don’t know
each other. “Only a newspaper can kindle
at the same time, the same idea in so many spirits” , says Tocqueville. Mihai Pop is aware of the power of his articles and tries to build up a
force (Deleuze would say a group phantasm),
which could withstand a military power which is counting its victories, a force
which should become a desiring-machine,
the expression of such values as democracy, tolerance, or human rights.
2. A few perspectives of
analysis
A first note to be made is regarding the
way in which Mihai Pop perceives the international political life, as being a
structure made up of a number of interacting levels. The first level is defined
by the relations between the actors, who are the states considered as political
entities and who play a geopolitical game characterized by relations of
cooperation, competition and conflict. On the second level this structure is
influenced by the internal politics of each state, its foreign policy being
configured by these internal forces. This is where discussions about each
country’s political system, social problems, political ethos etc. become part
of the larger structure. Finally, this structure is influenced by what we shall
call the third level - interdependencies generated by the movement of capital
and the human resources of the actors involved. The three levels aren’t
autonomous; the political actors themselves (the states) will transgress the
limits of these levels in order to obtain the greatest power possible in the
structure of geopolitical relations.
First, Mihai Pop portrays the relation
between states from the perspective of interdependence.
Hence the interest manifested towards all events that take place in the
European space, an interest which tries to identify the consequences of particular
events on the existing relational system. The chancellor Dolfuss is Mussolini’s
friend and on his death bed, after the Nazi’s assassination attempt , he
entrusts his family to Mussolini. When Hitler and Mussolini hug, they give
Mihai Pop the impression that they are immobilizing their arms, “because otherwise they would have to draw
their swords”. Political figures get along or they don’t, but everything is
actually a cover for cold calculus. For a historian, the correspondence draws
attention to facts which may now seem minor, but which in their respective
context had a particular significance.
What now appears to be a clear course of
events, conceals, in fact, a sort of Brownian movement. Which raises the
question: how did Germany
manage to become the main actor in the European space?
Our hypothesis, whilst reading the
correspondence of Mihai Pop, is that at the moment of 1937 the victorious
countries of the First World War no longer could, nor wished, to sustain the
costs generated by the mechanism that was holding the peace together, which had
worked for two decades. It would have been difficult to convince the public
opinion that arming would have to continue and pressure on Germany would
have to recommence. We face blockages and limitations in terms of both social
psychology and economy. The great victorious nations were psychologically and economically exhausted. There
was a clear discrepancy between the interior,
every-day life of these countries and what was going on on an international
level. A postwar era demands a different political and public agenda. This determines
these countries’ governments to stop sanctioning Germany’s breaking the rules which
they themselves had established and imposed up until then.
The eternal problem of surveillance
efficiency is now illustrated on a continental level. When we face an
exaggerated domination, its costs become, over time, difficult to bear, and the
dominating entity either gives up on its position, or identifies alternative
resources in order to sustain the surveillance costs. Based on reasons we will
analyze later, the great European powers, victorious in the First World War,
chose to lower the surveillance costs. In other words, the rise of Germany was due to the incapacity of the League of Nations to respond, and this was a consequence
of the fact, that this geopolitical reality was built on a player who didn’t
have the necessary resources to sustain it. England was faced with a path dependence
(“it has to save its colonies”) and
with its own delays (“it wasn’t yet armed”)
- facts which caused it to stop being the most powerful country in the world.
It is possible that precisely because of
the colonial issues and their will to solve them, that England and France
chose a radical solution in order for Germany not to create any further
problems and implemented an inconsiderate mechanism of imposing the postwar
order. This mechanism created a phenomenon, which sociologists call unforeseen consequences, which also lead to an increase in the surveillance costs and which we suppose
was not taken into account by the victors, as we also suppose that the
mechanism was not drafted to survive unforeseen situations, such as the
breaching of the peace treaty by the Germans. We can assert that the
surveillance costs turned out to be big, because the peace treaty had generated
oppositions derived from the victor’s violation of a fundamental war principle,
the principle of chivalry which consists in saving the honor of the vanquished.
In his correspondence Mihai Pop describes
Nazism as being the result of two phenomena, one cultural (regarding the ethno-axiological
structure of the Germans) and the other historical, relating to liberalism. The
first phenomenon is emphasized but both are included in the expression “the German is the devil’s man”. Things
are not that simple and we support our doubts by quoting a text written by
Weber in 1919: “a nation can forgive the
harming of its interests, but it cannot forgive the aggression of its honor,
especially when it is achieved with such insidious arrogance”. This lack of etiquette “leads, in fact, to a humiliation of both parties”. Moreover,
Weber demands that German politicians recognize war as emerging from the “structure of society” and that they
propose the victorious nations’ politicians to “ identify the repercussions of this situation on the objective
interests which were at stake and, especially, regarding the responsibility for
the future, a responsibility which
concerns the victors first and foremost”. In other words, Weber asserts that a
dignified attitude of the German politicians could determine the victors to
adopt an attitude, which encompasses a concern for the future in the peace
negotiations, placing everything beyond ‘feelings’,
that is, in an ‘objective’ frame.
Weber’s text concludes that the atmosphere in Germany was one of trying to
identify the persons responsible for the national disaster, an atmosphere of
strong emotive behavior which encouraged a disregarding attitude of the victors,
along with a response in the same parameters of the ‘emotional’. This would have disastrous implications in time, as we
now know.
The rupture between the discourse and the
actions of the victors was going to turn against them like a boomerang. The victors
expected the chivalrous spirit to be maintained in the sphere of international
relations, not taking into account that the terms of the peace treaty imposed
on Germany
weren’t in the least chivalrous. All of a sudden, the victors seem to be
suffering from a case of amnesia and refuse to believe that politics is war fought with other means. And so it
happens that the order established by the peace treaties following the First
World War abruptly turns into disorder, into an unpredictable and uncontrollable
world. Theory states that one of the sources of power consists in its capacity
to generate uncertainty! In fact, this will be the card played by the Germans,
that of the initiative that creates uncertainties!
Beyond aspects regarding the managing of their
own empire, Britain’s
gesture to give up on political initiative has numerous explanations. It is
obvious, that in the system of priorities the imperial problems are more important than the European ones. This phenomenon coincided with the collapse of the
old British conception where the English Channel
was a guarantee of security against any potential continental enemy. The
British took notice of the technology-imposed changes which required a new way
of tackling the issue of security. Feeling they were vulnerable, they tried to
gain time and mobilize, abandoning part of their preoccupations with the
continental affairs. Mihai Pop asserts that “things aren’t that simple. The security of the west
can’t be dissociated from that of the east”. Through this concession the
British had offered the Germans the necessary resources to become stronger and
increase pressure on their enemies.
Tocqueville maintains that the people who
live in democratic societies need freedom in order to “more easily acquire the material pleasures they continuously crave for”. The taste for pleasure ”can
deliver them to the first master on sight”. Tocqueville learns that “it is not necessary to wring such citizens
out of their rights; they themselves will let them slip through their fingers”,
their public duties being seen as “tedious
pursuits”, because while following their own interest, people “slight the main interest, which is to
remain their own masters”. In other words, the desire for
comfort has led to the sacrifice of the good, which in this case means dropping
out of defending the political freedom on the continent, endangered by the
German war-machine. Freedom and human rights were no longer considered to be
universal, generally accepted and having to be defended anymore, they were
territorialized. The disconnection from signal-events like the Spanish civil
war represented the withdrawal from the fight for democracy, which was somewhat
understandable, considering what we have observed earlier: the lack of a
military capacity to response. Unfortunately, this contributed to the rising
conception according to which democracy, human rights or tolerance do not
represent universal values, a conception which indirectly legitimates Fascism
and Nazism.
There are other aspects as well, they
belong to what we were calling the third
level of reality. Mihai Pop tackles the question of the role capital takes
up in this war-announcing configuration: “England has to save its colonies, but also the
money placed on the Berlin
market. Therefore it has an interest in maintaining things in their momentary
state, along with an interest in Germany’s economic prosperity. It
has to preserve itself as a state, but it also has to ensure the maximum of
profit for some of its leaders.”. We could assert that British
politicians’ reticence is due to the system of economic dependencies which lets
the English financial elite becomes captive in relation to Germany.
Moreover, the English upper middle class doesn’t desire peace for metaphysical
reasons, “but because it is aware that a
war, even a victorious one, would be its extinction. It doesn’t actually want
peace either, it is just trying to avoid war at any cost”. In
other words, when analyzing the Anglo-German relations, we will find that the
English middle class only believes in
non-zero-sum games and does not realize that the political scene had turned
into a zero-sum game, considering that in Germany the economic sector was subordinated
to the political one, to be exact, to the group that was controlling the state
( “party governmentality”, as
Foucault calls it), at the advantage of the latter. By comparison, in Britain, the
political dimension is subordinated to the economic mechanism, more precisely
to the group that is in charge of business. What the English considered to be a
market-deduced ‘economic truth’ the Germans saw as an ‘economic truth’ which was part of a ‘political truth’, that of a government founded on arming and
preparation for war.
England would at any time have preferred a
partnership with Germany
to one with Soviet Russia. The evaluations taken into consideration by Mihai
Pop were the following: a German-Soviet
war won by the Russians would represent a danger for England
because of Germany’s
expected conversion to communism. Otherwise, if the winners were the Germans,
they would be so drained by this war, they would need the help of England. The British
wished Germany
would attack Soviet Russia and be strong enough to defeat it. Bolshevism wasn’t
a direct threat for the British, claims Mihai Pop, it was only looming - which
explains the encouraging attitude towards Germany. England is trying to place itself
in a position of “tertius gaudens”.
What is the significance of the possible
German domination? Mihai Pop identifies what would be an unprecedented
judicial-political process in the sphere of international relations,
specifically Germany’s
introduction of a “sovereignty –
disciplinary mechanism” system in the structure of international relations.
This would lead to a normalizing order in all of the European space: once all
European countries are of German
sovereignty, the citizens of these states would be included in the German “disciplinary” machine. Through the lens
of Mihai Pop we can see Germany’s
attempts to make out of every country a subject of its action on sovereignty
and for the first time, in reporting on the crisis of the Sudeten Germans,
there are signals being raised regarding the prototype of the disciplinary
mechanism which is the concentration camp.
From the correspondence of Mihai Pop we
understand that Germany’s
power has increased with every military and political success. In comparison
with the First World War, in which Germany had attacked strong
enemies, German strategy has changed toward attacking weak countries. This fact
had a number of consequences. First of all, the German actions had more chances
to succeed. For the small states to become targets of the German power, it was
necessary for the League of Nations to collapse.
Hence the preoccupations of these states to engage in a variety of military and
political alliances, which would strengthen them in relation to the German
military colossus.
Secondly, the military success provided the
criteria of validation for the German worldview, after the rule according to
which “practice is the criteria for truth”
- a fundamental relation is established between force and truth. First and
foremost we identify a desire (“the
masses were not cheated into it, they desired fascism at one point” affirms
Deleuze, taking over an idea of Reich) and this desire tries to
materialize through military success, which generated beliefs, and these
beliefs consequently validate the values of leadership and, implicitly, the
leaders. The situation is described by Weber as being one in which “ethics can play a very sinister role from a
moral point of view”, and the cited example is from the military sphere, “when after victory in a battle, the victor
claims, with a snide air of superiority: I have won, therefore, without doubt,
justice is on my side.”. We observe how the way the peace
following the First World War, which Weber criticizes, is defined, is
paradoxically framed in a feudal definition of law, which is essentially
Germanic. Victory or failure represent tests of Truth and Justice and this
pattern will be used by the Germans after 1933. Therefore, war can produce the
truth the political class needs, military successes form the values of the
German society and generate self-fulfilling prophecies, which later sustain the
governance. That war brings death and sacrifice is irrelevant as long as it is
a creator of truth. These successes contribute to the completion of the German
state, in the sense suggested by Foucault when he affirms that “the state is at the same time something
that exists and something that doesn’t exist enough”, and they
enact a return to a premodern moment, when the state rationality subordinates
law. Simultaneously with this operation of the “fulfillment” of the state
through the state rationality, the military victories bind individuals in what
Deleuze calls “a severe act of
fabulation”, namely “the movement of
constructing a people ”. The war produces political signs for
national identification and for legitimizing the leader - the one to have
voiced the truth and developed the
technology through which it can be demonstrated, namely the military
technology.
We cannot avoid connecting this aspect with
the last phrase we find in the aforementioned correspondence, namely that the
fate of the west will be decided by “the
power of weapons and economic endurance”. We dare suggest replacing the two
notions with concepts such as efficiency and
power. In one of his analyses, Mihai
Pop affirms that, since “a war of
endurance could be fatal” for Germany, it
will want to quickly initiate the attack on the Dutch-Belgian border. In the
same economical spirit, Mihai Pop sees through the nature of the relations
existing in the triad between the French-English alliance, Germany and
Soviet Russia. Each actor of the triad tries to prevent the forming of an
alliance of the other two, since none of them has the necessary resources for a
war on two fronts. Adversely, each state wants to form an alliance with one of
the other two actors. Initially we witness the Anglo-German agreement (“not out of immediate fear of bolshevism,
but in order to destroy it”). For the same reason Germany will make an
alliance with Soviet Russia and for the same reason England will not attack the
U.S.S.R., (“on the contrary, it would
have all the reasons to win over the favor of Soviet Russia” ).
On the other hand: “the latent desire of
Soviet Russian leaders to give the age of capitalism and liberalism a mortal
blow via the destruction of the biggest political power representing it, and
not scattered ‘world revolutions’” led to their alliance with
Nazi Germany. The initiative always belonged to Germany and it will choose and
impose the way of defining the majority in the triad, its interests oscillating
between an alliance with the Occident and an alliance with the Soviets. In
fact, each German conquest is based on variously disguised calculated blows
given to democracy, while also speculating on the tension between capitalism
and bolshevism existing in relations between England
and France,
on one hand, Soviet Russia on the other. This game is also favored by the
phrase ‘national-socialism’, which permits both the orientation against the
east Slavs and against the western Imperialism. On the backdrop of this game young wolfs trying to grab a piece of
the kill emerge - Mihai Pop names Italy,
Hungary and Poland.
Alliances are formed depending on military
objectives. Mihai Pop identifies the source of Germany’s military victories,
namely the superior efficiency of the army. Since this efficiency could only be
illustrated through the attack on its western neighbors, the German propaganda
deceivingly focuses on the battle against Bolshevism, in order to set the
public opinion amiss, consequently attacking Belgium
and the Netherlands,
a fact which was registered by Mihai Pop as a shifting of the war towards the
west. Opening two fronts will also foreshadow the defeat of Germany, because it implies the
transition to a war of endurance doubled by a transition from a logic of efficiency to one of power, of available resources.
Nazism was the ideology that created a
people after the likeness of the Third Reich, imagining the development of “a severe act of fabulation” driven by a
dream of conquest. Since the military victories confirmed the truth of the
fabulation, they defined the idea of the German people at that time. Hence it
is befitting to turn to another paradigm regarding historic interpretation
which should have at its core the notion of discontinuity. In the absence of
this notion it is very difficult to associate Germany’s cultural inheritance to
the horrors of the Third Reich. There is a double movement of change and
reversal. The notion of people
belongs to the Middle Ages and we see it reinvented now, replacing the modern
notion of population with its
correlative, the human being. In order to make the change - reversal happen, the correlative of the
notion people is the new human being. The notions of population and human being relate to the reality of the present, whilst the German
notion of people relates to the past,
and the notion of new human being to
the future. It’s like saying that Nazism dissolves the present in both future
and past. The past means community, blood and the idea of conflict as the
Middle Ages have premonished it - in the words of Foucault: ”the enemies who are in front of us will
continue to threaten us and we will not be able to reach the end of the war
trough a sort of reconciliation or an agreement, unless we are the victors”. The future depends on the
relations with the neighboring communities. The past teaches that you have to
be led by a Führer, the future shows
that you will lead all of those who don’t belong to the same blood. Taking over
a scheme of Baudrillard, we will affirm that the German desire moves on two axes: hostage of the own community – the
domain of security (1) and terrorist of other peoples – the domain of freedom
(2).
Lastly, the fact that Germany is going for
safe victims, states without power,
is also favored by the British calculations which consider the costs of saving
these unimportant victims to be too great in relation to the main interests of
the country - which determined the chances of Germany’s success to increase : ”Germany wants to have a free hand on
Eastern Europe in exchange for the security it offers the West. And it seems
English financial circles have too much capital on Berlin markets and would be
ready to exert discreet pressures on the British government as to trade off the
nonobliteration of the colonies’ issue and an Oriental agreement against this
rather uninteresting Eastern Europe”. Via arming and military
success, Germany
will impose the sacrificing of world peace as a universal commodity,
transforming peace into a regional commodity and, finally, into a national one.
Mihai Pop condemns England’s
attitude, for abandoning the role of master
of the modern world and accepting German domination.
The legitimacy acquired by the government
through the military success was a check in white for the entire government
plan. Mihai Pop is daunted by the prospect of German victory, of the world
peace being a German one and every German victory seems to him to be leading to
terrible evil. Mihai Pop fervently hopes for a defeat of the Germans, which
would make the Germans and not only them abandon their “severe act of fabulation”. Mihai Pop accordingly emphasizes the
political position of Czechoslovakia
and the way in which the political class of this country relates to Germany.
Czechoslovakia is willing to oppose Germany and Mihai Pop considers that “hence, standing next to Czechoslovakia is
not just an obligation, which ensues from the structure of the Little Entente,
but also a necessity for the whole system on which the peace of contemporary
Europe stands”. The vulnerability of Czechoslovakia
lies in Germany’s capacity
to use Czechoslovakia’s
national minorities as an advantage in its own politics of expansion. Mihai
Pop’s correspondence teaches us that the Germans of the Sudentenland aren’t the
only ones putting pressure on the Czech government, but also the Hungarians and
the Polish, “not so much in order to
obtain them, as for sustaining the action of mister Henlein [the leader of
the Sudetenland Germans ]”. The choice made by these minorities
didn’t in any way target the problem of democracy and of the human rights. The
ethnic minorities of Czechoslovakia
played their role as a Trojan horse,
which determined the country to fall without a fight when it faced Germany’s
pressure.
There is a whole set of analyses carried
through by Mihai Pop regarding the role of Italy
in the power equation of interwar Europe.
These accounts portray an active Italy, important and coveted by the
great European powers. In other words, considering the conflictive relation
between England and France on one the hand and Germany on the other, Italy acquires importance because
it affords to play on two ends - it faces an open choice. This goes to show
that during the decades separating the two world wars the game was played
according to the rule of the minimal
powers, namely who is allying with whom. Once the system of alliances had
stabilized and the implications of the political game had surfaced, the
relations of force being based on the resources the belligerent camps disposed
of, the force of Italy
was reduced to the real level of its resources, which were indicating an
inferior force when compared to its position within the alliance system. The
volume’s last analysis is dated on the 10th of March 1940 and it
foreshadows Italy’s
abandoning its status as a nonbelligerent country and it is in the very least
probable that “it should adhere to the
alliance of the two”, the French-English alliance being meant. The
prediction is partially confirmed, since Mihai Pop deemed it unlikely of Italy to join
the unfolding conflict.
In the power equation of the interbellum,
elements of vulnerability are a measure of the power of a state. Mihai Pop
carefully analyzes the case of Poland,
in whose anatomy he identifies a few economic and ethnic threats caused by its
spatial context. First, almost a fifth of the population consists of a Russian
minority which has a compact position at the Soviet border covering a full
third of the country’s surface. Beyond their borders there are the Ukrainian
and Byelorussian populations, and “both
of these peoples are but in the romantic phase of the awakening of the national
conscience and of the formation of their own political structures.” Besides,
“the Ukrainians are conducting a
determined irredentist movement, sustained by a prolificacy superior to that of
their Polish neighbors, a strong national solidarity and by a systematic action
of economical organization and conquest”. Furthermore, Poland was confronted with serious
social problems, which led to a rural insurgence. The leading group, not
wanting to give up on its advantages, and using the pretext of maintaining the
order – that of the old domination system - pushes the social problem into the
sphere of the existing interethnic relations (in Galicia, against the Ukrainian
population, in Bialystok, against the Byelorussian peasants and against the
Jews) in its attempt to create national and social solidarity by pointing
towards an internal threat. The theory of conflict states that a dyadic
conflict configuration is much more dangerous for the stability of a social
system than multiple, smaller conflicts. But in the aforementioned case the
theory seems to be invalidated because through the merging of social problems
with ethnic issues, a new weakness is added to the existing social one - in a
context in which 37% of the country’s population is a minority and at a moment
when the geopolitical context is largely unfavorable. Mihai Pop makes it very
clear: Poland
will either follow the path of democracy, or it will use the methods of Tsarist
Russia. The political context is edging towards a zero-sum game: you are either
on the side of Germany,
or of Soviet Russia. This situation will not restrain the country’s leaders
from preying on a neighboring country
they had collaborated with, Czechoslovakia,
and dreaming about hegemony in the Balkans.
The absence of morality in international
politics is mirroring the lax moral standards of the societies. Mihai Pop
affirms that a big part of our middle class has a fixation with “fascism’s power to organize and civilize”.
The slaughter whose victims were the Abyssinians was
pardoned by the Romanian middle class on the reason of it being done by “our Latin sister”; the massacre of the
civil population by general Franco is based on “the love for the church, the people and for the belief of our
forefathers”; the Japanese “will by
conquering China bring order to the anarchy reigning there and will civilize
the barbaric Chinese”. What do we observe? The choice for
fascist ideas is based on a natural right, in the sense described by Walter
Benjamin: if the goal is just, the means used to get to it are
irrelevant. This idea opposes the positive right, where choosing the means
takes place in function of whether they are legal or not. Romantic vindicative
arguments don’t allow any space discussion or questioning from the perspective
of human rights.
In this context, notions like democracy,
human rights, tolerance aren’t showing up. How was it possible for the Romanian
bourgeoisie to be ‘seduced’ by the fascist argument? We can formulate an answer
if we take into account an assessment of Heidegger, namely that “susceptible of coming into being is only
what was already there”. In other words, the fact in itself is
not independent of an essence of the Romanian bourgeoisie, of the way it was
born. Hence our hypothesis, that the modernization of the Romanian society contains
a certain socio-political peculiarity: a middle class which never had to fight
for political rights and never considered it necessary to support democracy as
a political system when it asserted its position as a dominant class. Modernization is seen from the point of view of economics (and not
politics) - from the perspective of the market, based on the production of
goods and services which could be bought and sold, on the increased domestic
consumption. The perspective of the political conquest and the need of turning
the Romanian citizen into a political subject are not considered and this is ,
in Mihai Pop’s opinion, a sign of our country’s vulnerability. Besides, it was
precisely the lack of bureaucratic discipline that the Romanian firms
confronted, a fact which had to generate some expectations in this direction.
Another decisive absence from Romanian political discourse is the absence of
the democracy-generating concept of human
rights. The mass-media’s glorification of the transition from a
parliamentary system to a Carlist dictatorship shouldn’t surprise us. The
absence of human rights from the political conscience leaves the way open for
the exacerbated national discourse of the right, and the correspondence of
Mihai Pop wouldn’t have been able to bring about any significant change since
it was minoritary.
3. Conclusions
Let’s return to
to the question we posed at the beginning of the essay: why does Mihai Pop feel
the need to write articles and send them back home? Our assumption is based on
a general deleuzian idea, which is confirmed by the fact that Mihai Pop isn’t
writing with his self, with his
memory and his diseases, the absence of these references being, for that
matter, striking. In fact, “one writes in
the name of a people which has yet to appear and which doesn’t have a language
yet. Creation is not communication, it is resistance.” The correspondence
can also be read as the trace of a dream, the refusal to believe in the truth of the present. We cannot assess
the impact Mihai Pop’s articles have had. But we can ask ourselves this
question: can journalism compensate for the absence of a consideration of human
rights and the democratic practice which a society derives from this concept?
For historians,
Mihai Pop’s articles could point to the historical relevance of individual
events. We could use our imagination and construct a weberian model on historic
causality and try to understand the role of one event or another.. We can
either agree or disagree with Mihai Pop when he asserts that what we encounter
between 1937 and 1940 is neither an opposition between Nazism and communism,
nor one between capitalism and communism but an irreconcilable conflict between
Nazism and human rights. We are at a moment when “God is dead” and human
rights, if they had been born, hadn’t yet become principles of state politics
in international relations. It is Sloterdijk who maintains that “what truly determines the character of an
age pertains to its political statements because they are the ones to
reconfigure the period’s general conception of things. To declare God dead in a
culture conditioned by monotheism implies a shattering of all existing
references and heralds a new world. With ‘God’, the whole idea of the
affiliation of all humans to the unity of the created species is erased.”. If we see capitalism as the merging of two magical forces: the
market bonded with liberalism and imperialism, on the one hand, and a political
system based on human rights on the other, then the historian would be able to
say that the Nazism that evolved under these conditions was, at the moment when
Mihai Pop was writing his correspondence, an attempt to obliterate both the
notion of human rights, and that of truth (as defined by the market) and the
emergence of a new political phenomenon, the
impossible, at the time when politics was seized by the big kids (as they are envisioned by
Bismarck - “For
[him] it is those adults that never encountered situations which would make
learn the difference between politically possible and politically impossible,
that have remained children”). An entire
tradition, expressed by Weber and anticipated by him, which associated politics
with the ethics of responsibility and with a clear definition of the ethics of
convictions, is being discarded.
There is a point
where history meets sociology. History seems to be dead.
Sociology studies events. Mihai Pop’s effort concerns events, that is, it
speaks of what is becoming, the
author being a witness to the resurgence of the new. Deleuze affirms: “history
extracts from events the effects of its own practice on the state of things,
but the events in their becoming elude history. History is no experimentation -
it is the ensemble of almost negative conditions which enable the
experimentation of something that evades history. Without history,
experimentation would remain undetermined, unconditioned, but experimentation
is not historical”. By
drawing on these deleuzian ideas we try not
to consider the ‘correspondence’ a history book, because history doesn’t
record the becoming - history is a block, a limit, it places us in something
solid, in something that has remained after decantation, and events form into
actions, incidents, of somewhat Brownian nature, which allow for the creation
of historical facts. If the historian tends to view history as a collection of
events, the sociologist is interested in observing how the event unfolds, how
actors interact, what motivation their moves are determined by and what logic
their senses follow. We are fundamentally talking about the effort of placing
yourself, as Foucault suggests, in a genealogical
perspective in order to identify the logics of a situation and to understand
individual decisions from within their determined context.
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