intro = The Balkanisation of the West
By Stjepan G. Mestrovic
Routledge
Reviewed by Phil Clarke
In 1989 US state department academic Francis Fukuyama shot to fame proclaiming "the end of history" in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Fukuyama the "collapse of communism" signalled the final fall of the last great repressive ideology. The whole world was now set for the endless dominance of liberal democracy and the market harmoniously boosting living standards, peace and freedom everywhere. In his later The End of History and the Last Man he even speculates that boredom with the lack of conflict will be the main danger.
The last five years have not been kind to Fukuyama's thesis. The Gulf War and the Yugoslavian conflict have been the tip of the iceberg of a world deep in turmoil. The collapse of "communism" has failed to stabilise world capitalism and liberal democracy and affluence have hardly been the fate of the post-communist states.
Stjepan Mestrovic, a Croatian sociologist teaching in Texas, thinks he knows why. Self-consciously situating himself in the postmodernist framework, he declares that capitalism, and its derivative liberal democracy, isn't the answer to building stable and sane societies. Rather we have to look at "culture" and tradition — by which he means ideologies like nationalism and religion (what he calls "habits of the heart") which can bind together a caring society. Top of his list of candidates for this role is Islam.
Mestrovic represents an important trend in postmodernism; his work is symptomatic of the utterly reactionary direction in which postmodernist thought is travelling. He starts off with a vicious attack on the whole Enlightenment tradition — those theories and ideologies which stem from the bourgeois revolutions, especially the French revolution. For Mestrovic the problem with postmodernist writing so far, is that it fails to make a complete break with the Enlightenment world of rationality and progress; something deeper and more fundamental is needed.
What is slick in Mestrovic, is his accurate portrayal of why capitalism is not the answer to the Soviet-style state "socialism". Capitalism is an individualistic creed which naturally promotes conflict. It's a system which originated in a tiny corner of north-west Europe and, after all, isn't it a little bit imperialistic to think that it's the solution to humanity's problems?
Even here Mestrovic, because of his violent anti-communism is compelled to engage in apologetics: "it is true that capitalism has not resulted in Gulags". But of course it has resulted in the Holocaust, Hiroshima, mass slaughter in world wars, mass starvation and ecological destruction — all of which have passed Mestrovic by.
If Soviet-style communism and capitalism are not the answer, what is? Unfortunately a precise answer "lies completely outside the scope of this book". But the general pattern is clear enough. Western Enlightenment's tradition with its concern for democracy, liberalism and even communism believes in the "perfectibility" of humanity. It believes in "coerced compassion".
But a compassionate society cannot be coerced. It needs to be deeply rooted in traditions which bind people together. Which is why, of course, Mestrovic's "deep" postmodernism ends up looking backwards: "I have argued that the Western postmodernist discourse is not very different from a revival of the enlightenment project, as opposed to the more genuinely Balkan and other cultural movements of the West".
Here we have it: an ideology like Islam, which developed in the seventh century in a small corner of Arabia is ... postmodern!
Mestrovic is a perfect example of the maxim that if you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer. His complete identification of Stalinism with "communism", thus writing off any democratic socialist alternative, is par for the course. More insidious is the idea that communism. or other Enlightenment traditions, viewed humanity a "perfectible". You will search high and low in Marx or Lenin for any such notion. In any case, what can it possibly mean? How would you know when you'd got there?
Isaac Deutscher's classic little pamphlet On Socialist Man (sic) explains that humanity will never liberate itself completely from basic constraints of the species (like sex and death). Socialism couldn't possibly eliminate every form of human unhappiness (and if you were happy all the time how would you know you were ... happy?). But perhaps it might just liberate humanity from war, hunger, disease and exploitation. In fact a very modest claim. This has nothing to do with the "perfectibility" of homo sapiens.
The scenario which Mestrovic paints is one of the capitalist West cracking up, undergoing its own form of "Balkanisation". This will take the form, in the advanced capitalist west, of increasing conflict between individuals. His concerns are revealing: students attacking their lecturers for not being "politically correct", teenage drug abuse, the break-up of the family, individual crimes of violence — all those things which deeply concern middle-aged sociology lecturers in Texas!
Now all this could be dismissed as not very serious. Alas it is. Postmodernism can either end up offering nothing but incomprehension of the world and thus resignation, or it can start to put forward its own social alternative, rejecting capitalism and communism simultaneously. The fascination of post-Marxist and postmodernist theorists with Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmidt is a straw in the wind.
In the 20th century we have already seen mass urban movements which furiously attacked both communism and capitalism — movements which appealed to nationalism, religion and tradition, to eternal values like the land and folk. None of them actually succeeded in replacing capitalism in practice. But many of them did succeed in producing something pretty nasty. You can hear the jackboots marching.