Planetary Politics. Lorenzo Marsili

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ upheaval was total. ‘A new model of life’, wrote the economist Karl Polanyi, ‘unfolds on the world with a universal aspiration without parallels from the time when Christianity began its history.’³

The mind in crisis

The carnage of the First World War destroyed the illusion of having rebuilt the universality that Greek philosophy, Roman law and Christian religion had imprinted on the collective unconscious of European elites. The words with which Stefan Zweig continues his narration of the new Babel are those of a trauma: ‘And it was precisely this generation of ours, who believed in the unity of Europe as if it were a Gospel’, he writes, ‘that was inflicted the annihilation of all hope, the experience of the greatest war among all the nations of Europe; our spiritual Rome was once again destroyed, our Tower of Babel once again abandoned by the builders.’

      A feeling of loss, of disorientation and of inexplicable anger became a key element of the literature of the time. Here is how guests woke up in a morning of 1914 in a Swiss sanatorium; a place that, with its cosmopolitan diversity, its neuroses, and its privilege, provided the perfect representation of old Europe: ‘What was this, then, that was in the air? A rising temper. Acute irritability. A nameless rancour. A universal tendency to envenomed exchange of words, to outbursts of rage – yes, even to fisticuffs. Embittered disputes, bouts of uncontrolled shrieking, by pairs and by groups, were of daily occurrence.’

Hysterica Passio is the title of the penultimate chapter of Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, The Magic Mountain. The next and necessarily last chapter is The Thunderbolt, referencing the shot that would bring all mountain guests back towards the valley, each behind his own border and with a bayonet at hand. Hannah Arendt, reflecting in 1951 on the consequences of the First World War, relied on almost identical words to Thomas Mann’s narration:

      Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs . . . It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun.⁴

      They are words that sound a strident note of familiarity in today’s Europe and indeed in today’s world. With a continent and a planet once again torn by political conflict and dominated by divisions, hatred, and the spasmodic search for a scapegoat.

The fracture of 1914 and the collapse of universal Europe were experienced as a moment of great anguish and of psychological disorientation. Trauma touched everyone’s life. Tens of millions of people found themselves without a homeland, expelled and rejected, in the first real crisis of refugees and stateless peoples of the modern era. But even those who still kept a place to call home felt the new division of the continent on their skin. Just think of Jules and Jim, the beautiful film by François Truffaut, where the playful prewar ménage à trois is divided by a hard border, by mutual distrust and by the cruel looks that French and Germans exchange on the trains. It is not surprising that for the intellectual and economic elite the collapse of the Tower of Babel was perceived as an expulsion from Eden and as a crisis of European civilisation.

The words pronounced by Paul Valéry in 1919, in the aftermath of the armistice, are telling and well known: ‘we, civilisations, now know ourselves mortal’. The feeling of a civilisational breakdown was well captured by the external gaze of Liang Qichao, one of the leading modern intellectuals of early twentieth-century China. In 1919 Liang found himself representing the new-born Republic of China at the Versailles peace conference; he travelled through a continent in rubble and noted his disillusionment with Western modernity. In his diary we find the following revealing encounter with an American journalist: ‘And once back in China’, the journalist asks Liang, ‘will you take Western civilisation with you?’ ‘Sure!’, Liang answers dutifully. ‘Oh no!’, the journalist replies, ‘but Western civilisation is bankrupt!’ Silence follows. ‘And you’, Liang finally dares to ask, ‘once back in America, what will you do?’ And the answer, which will profoundly influence the Chinese thinker, comes caustically: ‘I will lock myself in my house and wait for you to bring Chinese civilisation.’

This ‘crisis of the spirit’ provided the focus for much of the writing of the period. But this was a crisis in bad conscience, a cultural and spiritual turmoil that actually represented the flip side of the structural crisis of European domination over the world. The crisis of civilisation of the 1920s stemmed largely from the provincialisation of Europe, from the diminishing economic and political role of the Old Continent at a time when the world was surpassing its old masters and beginning its path of emancipation. It was the emergence of a world beyond Europe that put Europe itself in crisis.

The First World War took away the universal system that hinged around the undisputed dominance of the British Empire. The central empires of Austria and Germany crumbled. France and Italy came out of the conflict traumatised. And following the gigantic butchery, Europe found its already feeble legitimacy all but dissipated: the civilising mission of the white man proved itself to everyone for the barbaric pillage it had always been. It is no coincidence that the first real public debate on the colonial situation began in those years, something that would soon lead to the emergence of the concept of ‘decolonisation’. Economically, all European states emerged from the conflict heavily indebted to the United States: it was bankers in New York who now decided the destiny of the Imperial cabinet. The United States started casting its shadow over the world, strengthened by the moral legitimacy of the internationalist President Woodrow Wilson and by an economy that had surpassed that of the British Empire in influence and size. The world no longer looked to Parisian architecture but to the functionalist skyscrapers of the new American metropolises. It was perhaps Leon Trotsky who put it in the most explicit terms: Europe, he argued, found itself in the same position, vis-à-vis the United States, once occupied by the countries of South-Eastern Europe in relation to Paris and London. They had all the vestiges of sovereignty, but none of the substance.⁵

      The crisis of European civilisation was nothing but the crisis of the sovereignty of the great European powers. Indeed, as paradoxical as it may sound, it was precisely the decline of European nation states that became the source of the great nationalist uprising that would lead the continent towards totalitarianism and a Second World War. This paradox is something that Hannah Arendt already identified in her famous study on the origins of totalitarianism. Like a weakened animal, scared and hence ready to bite, nationalism became the response of a body that had lost its vigour. Nationalism, then as now, is a response to a structural crisis of the national form. And if we dig deeper into the great resentment that characterised yesterday’s as much as today’s age of anger, what we will find is this: impotence.

The first ouroboros

      Here is another paradox: the crisis of Eurocentric globalisation and of the unity of the world praised by Zweig manifested itself through the emergence of a world that became increasingly integrated and emancipated from its partial and provincial European origins. More world emerged from the crisis of the pretence that was European universalism.

      The Babel that followed the end of universal Europe was very peculiar. If, on the one hand, the period between the two world wars certainly saw the impetuous growth of nationalism and protectionism, it is equally true that the causes of the multiple military, political and economic crises that would ultimately produce the fracture of the imperial and Eurocentric order all served to highlight and deepen, through the unfolding of the crisis itself, the extraordinary interdependence reached by the world system.

With a dialectical flip, the globalisation of railways and world markets took a leap forward and acquired greater self-consciousness precisely through the extraordinary novelty of its disintegration: a war that СКАЧАТЬ