Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies
But the project of national cultural identities was enlivened again in the 1980s with a
“new spring of the nations” in the south-eastern region which escalated into fratricidal
wars in the 1990s. At that time cultural and political elites were commonly involved in
“jingo patriotism” 1 (Marshall, 1992) until the historic fulfilment of their nation states’
independence.
Nations were therefore constructed from above with important assistance from
cultural elites, cultural ideological apparatuses and cultural ideologies. State apparatuses
take hold of everybody, because nobody is simply born into one culture; each person has
to learn it. It is true even for such primordial cultural institutions as a national language:
literally “national language is nobody’s ‘mother tongue’ and everybody has to learn it”
(Močnik, 1998: 55). For this reason, as Rastko Močnik concludes, culture constantly
produces institutions, ideological institutions which culture may offer to nation statebuilding
projects as it did in the past. But the long term partnership now seems to be in
the process of dissolution or radical modification.
On the one hand, the recent creation of new “pocket states” in the region came at the
historical moment when nation-state sovereignties were being exposed to overall erosion
due to economic globalization. However, the limits imposed on national sovereignty are
not balanced by a new “cosmopolitan law”. “Such a deficiency”, as the Italian historian of
law Danilo Zolo of Yugoslav origin assesses, “favours the propagandistic distortion of the
doctrine of ‘human rights’ and its transformation into a kind of aggressive humanitarian
universalism – as indeed was the case of the war of Kosovo, led by Western powers
against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” (Zolo, 2007: 39). The national political elite
is, for this reason, necessarily torn between the international political elite of which it
is certainly a part, even more with the progressive dissolution of national sovereignties,
and the people it represents. Hence, the national political elite has lost its interest in
national culture as a considerably important ideological institution.
Cultural elites, on the other hand, respond to this with “culture talk” (Mamdani,
2000), such as cultural diversity, multiculturalism and minority rights, replacing one
national cultural identity with a multiplication of cultural identities. At the same
time “culture talk” has many stakes in its rhetoric: from a promise to discover hidden
and authentic cultural practices to better social justice and rights for minorities and
discriminated groups. To this overall culturalization of life practices we can offer two
brief examples which partly undermine the culturalist approach.
Firstly, national identities do not progressively dissolve, as we would expect, at least
not in all social spheres equally. The lack of a new global legal order is substituted by
lex mercatoria at the international level with an interesting contradiction. Although,
generally, “the government becomes merely the handmaiden for the global economy”
and the state is no more “the omnipotent master of its territory” (Bauman, 2005: 15),
1
That is, the patriotism of war agitators.
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