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3 months ago
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by Nikolai Ott
This article was originally published in German for the Zentrum Liberale Moderne.
When asked who was afraid of a nuclear war, only two students in the room raised their hands: a Swiss woman and a British man. The rest of the students, mostly South Koreans, looked at most a bit resigned, and the South Korean professor nodded in agreement as he noted the absence of hands. “You see,” the shaven-headed Korean now turned to the Swiss woman with a bright smile, “everyone here knows war, but we are still optimists.” Perhaps it was exactly that moment, this casual exchange in a university seminar on the nuclear weapons regime, that was the most symptomatic encounter of my travels in the past year.
It was probably just coincidence that all my stays abroad took me to countries once described by American political scientist Robert O. Keohane as “Lilliputians in Gulliver’s world.” To Kosovo, Poland, Taiwan, or the South Korean capital – these small nations whose existence was never guaranteed in the great-power game of world history. In a cramped bookstore in Wrocław, I discovered a newly published edition of Milan Kundera’s essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” When I first read this remarkable text, I felt caught out by his observation that an American or an Englishman is not used to talking about questions concerning the existence of their own nation. This also applied to a German – despite our history. In Poland, on the other hand, the very first line of the national anthem proclaims that “Poland has not yet perished.”
In that Poland, Kundera found a template for small nations: a nation whose existence can be called into question at any time. In Central Europe – this region between Russia and Germany – the small nation was the historical norm, forced to assert itself between the expansionist ambitions of the empires to the left and right. World history, this story of British conquerors, of the French “world spirit on horseback“, or Russian warlords, placed these nations on the wrong side – the side of the outsiders and the losers. Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz had good reason to declare the maxim that one could escape one’s own history only by resisting “history as such.” According to Kundera, the worldview of small nations is shaped by a “profound mistrust of history.”
It is probably the irony of this very history that I noticed more and more on my travels how it is precisely these small nations that, as the last holdouts, still believe in the end of history: in the superiority of liberal democracy, in the Western promise of prosperity and security, in a cautious optimism that things can get better. Let us recall that in 1989, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history in an essay of the same name. Drawing on Kojève’s reading of Hegel, he predicted that the lack of any competing ideas in the West would lead to the successive triumph of liberal democracy. Like a good Hegelian, Fukuyama also wrote his history from the perspective of the great nations. For him, the end of history represented the cultural victory of the Americans. Rock music in Czech clubs, fast fashion in Asia, or McDonald’s in the former Soviet Union – the American consumer society was conquering the planet. And even in Russia and China, Fukuyama saw patterns of the impending end of history.
While doubts about the globalized West grew in the United States, and the end of history never took hold in Russia and China, the small nations expanded rapidly. Coming in to land at Incheon Airport, one could already admire the skyline of Seoul, but it was only after my first museum visit that I realized how much had happened in the last three decades. In Germany, even a single train station project can take two decades, but in Seoul one of the world’s most impressive metropolises had been built in under three decades. The bookseller in Wrocław – an older gentleman – told me that he was amazed by all the new buildings in Warsaw and Kraków on his last visit. He excitedly reported that his son had also returned to Poland. Indeed, some experts today believe that Poland’s economy could overtake Great Britain’s by 2030. While in the major cities of Western Europe people began dreaming of degrowth and an economic system oriented toward the common good, the small nations had already deduced from their own self-image that in the great-power game, only those with sound public finances and a prosperous economy survive.
World history, Kundera said, was the “narrative (…) of a history of conquerors.” Small nations could not be conquerors. They knew how fragile the end of history was and that only active defense of this end could prevent the destructive forces of history from being unleashed again. Long before the Zeitenwende (turning point) was proclaimed in Germany, Poland had drawn the appropriate conclusions from the Crimea invasion. Two weeks ago, a South Korean friend told me via KakaoTalk that he would begin his military service in May. I remembered a lunch with him and a Finnish student who expressed surprise that we in Germany no longer have a compulsory military service. That, presumably, was exactly what Kundera meant. As a German, I did not know what it feels like to have the existence of one’s own nation constantly at risk. Now I think about it almost every day, pondering what Europe’s future in this new world should look like.
Judith Shklar’s vision of a “liberalism of permanent minorities” is now becoming an unwanted reality, not only in terms of social policy but also geopolitically. Kundera had already warned that all European nations are at risk of becoming small nations. “The fate of Central Europe anticipates the fate of Europe” – what an ever-relevant statement! If we recall Witold Gombrowicz’s words, burying one’s head in the sand in resignation is not an option. If liberalism is to survive as a phenomenon in world history, it also has to succeed as an idea. In the search for new role models, it could be precisely these small nations that become the new leading figures of Western centrists, who are at risk of shrinking to a minority in their own home countries. Today, much can be learned from these countries that, despite their ever-threatened existence, have benefited from the end of history in recent decades.
I am thinking here of the optimism of a Kosovar who opened a small vintage shop right next to our accommodation. He told us he had worked in the United States for many years but now wants to do his part for economic growth at home. I remember the innovative spirit of Estonians and Taiwanese. In Estonia today, there is no need for bureaucratic office visits anymore, and in Taiwan they produce the chips on which the entire West depends. My thoughts drift to the 3rd December in South Korea, that most unsuccessful of all coups. The next day, a student told me he had not endured freezing temperatures as a soldier at the inter-Korean border just so that a president could abolish democracy. In Poland, too, one feels what a real „turning point” could look like – one supported by the entire population. To be honest, I only feel a sense of European optimism these days when I hear Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski speak.
It would be wrong to ignore the fact that an authoritarian backlash also exists in these countries. Poland was long governed by the PiS party, and South Korea has a politically divided society. And yet liberal resilience there seems more pronounced. The end of history arrived in these states—and is now being actively defended. The states that followed a “deep mistrust of history” had taken Fukuyama more seriously than the Western great powers intoxicated by their own success—and possibly even more seriously than Fukuyama himself. In his magnum opus, he had once proclaimed the end of realism. Why would one need realism if all states follow the same logic of international relations?
These small states did not follow that hope, aware of how quickly the bitter logic of history can strike back. What was needed was a robust end of history, as Fukuyama recently rediscovered as well. Perhaps it is precisely the continuing hostilities that have prevented the “time of great boredom” from turning into a “century of authoritarianism” (Ralf Dahrendorf) in these countries. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Kundera once wrote in his book on laughter and forgetting. Not forgetting the cruelty of world history proved a survival advantage for the small nations in recent decades – and has become the raison d’être of the present for liberal democracy.
For liberals, perhaps there is a real opportunity in again becoming an ideological minority in international relations. When Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, in their search for a European identity, proposed an “avantgarde core Europe” in kantian spirit in 2003 – in the face of the Iraq War – perhaps they should have thought even smaller. After all, with lots of pathos and little realism, liberalism cannot be saved. What the liberal system is worth defending becomes clear above all in the small states today. It’s time to learn from them.
Nikolai Ott is a student assistant at the Center for International Studies (ZIS) at TU Dresden. You can reach him via mail: [email protected].
