At the beginning of September this year, when announcing the introduction of the National Primer into schools, minister of education Slavica Đukić Dejanović explained that children must know the national being of their own people, its culture, tradition and past, because this, among other things, is a prerequisite for understanding members of other nations, religions and cultural environments.
Poetic, but problematic! If we look at the problem of being within the framework of its meaning, and the imagined being as a statement of something real and independent, then a national being simply does not exist. It is just the name of a phantom phenomenon resulting from the political need to make citizens ethnically uniform, and to beautify the image of the state. Since the nation is a vague and figurative concept, and its beautification is an attempt to falsify historical facts in order to idealize “us” at the expense of those with whom we were in conflict, an awareness of the national being certainly can’t help us understand others better. On the contrary! It is easy to assume that the National Primer will be nothing more than a primer on nationalism, a kind of mandatory military service in schools, a tool for mental training. It would serve as an additional tool of bad education, a new textbook of arrogance and weaning from objectivity, in one word – an undisguised or poorly disguised incentive for the further spread of intolerance, or, at least, removal of the dam currently preventing such evil from taking root.
A few weeks ago, Peščanik published the transcript of Stig Saeterbakken’s 2005 lecture “My heart belongs to Europe. And that’s why it’s broken.” Speaking about the habit of the press of a country to specify how many of “our people” (in his case, Norwegians) were among the victims when reporting on some disaster, he criticized the egocentrism of national discrimination and admitted that he belongs more to Europe than to Norway because the European is the threat to the national. He also said that he is heartbroken because of the complexity of Europe, which as a figment of imagination and a literary construct is nevertheless only a Nothing. Well, if that’s the case, he chooses to be a Nobody, as well, just like Odysseus when he introduced himself to Polyphemus. A few days later, we could also read Terry Eagleton’s essay “Nationalism is built on a lie,” dedicated to national identity as a straitjacket that hinders movement and adaptation.
Their views are not new. In the 1930s, for example, Joseph Roth, in the story “The Bust of the Emperor”, through its main character, Count Morstin, said that he was doubly ashamed before the increased rudeness and baseness of this world: first of all, because it exists at all, and secondly, because he has underestimated its power. He admits that his only visible passion was to refute the “national question”, to hate nations and nation-states and to feel like a supranational man. Referring to Grillparzer’s slogan: “From humanity, via nationality, to bestiality”, he says that since the beginning of nationality in the 19th century, the precursor to the bestiality in which we live today, we have witnessed the most vulgar characters championing national issues, that there are no national virtues, that the only possible homeland, like a house with many doors and many rooms, is one for people without a homeland1
Speaking about the Russian literary emigration of the same time period when Roth was writing, Nabokov said that he regretted that, before all art and awareness of the abyss of nationalism, they were governed by a preoccupation with the saving of souls, and that some of them, seduced by wartime successes, discovered the slope of fiery nationalism down which to descend in contrition.
All this made me remember the spring of 1991, when Aleksandar Tišma and I were trying to establish a European movement for Vojvodina. We took an issue with Novi Sad’s Dnevnik because, when they reported about a criminal act which could not be connected in any way to nationality, they emphasized that the perpetrator was an Albanian. Even back then, ours was the hopeless cry of a man lost in the desert. Looking back at it now, it seems like a naive and hopeless attempt to put things in order in at least some small way. We have reached the point where, even in harmless forms of life, it has become normal when reporting about a tennis match to say that such and such, a Serbian tennis player, has defeated (destroyed or humiliated) a Croat, or even to present data from the dubious world of statistics about the average height of adult men and conclude that “Serbs outperform Croats in this category, as well”.
The calamity of ethnic egocentrism has affected all areas of life in which relations between people can be transformed into relations between nations. It is no longer an exception, but the rule. Nations are the source of expansive nonsense created with the aim that in an empty rivalry one triumphs and the other is denounced or insulted. National identity is identity of the lowest kind, because we did not choose it or contribute to it in any way, and draping ourselves in this random, forced symbol, a mechanical subjugation under a distinction that we neither achieved nor acquired, means consenting to complete depersonalization. To stand out based on national identity is pure degradation. It is indeed better to choose to be a Nobody than to remain caught in the nothingness of the nation, in the misery of state, race, and homeland. Otherwise, as Jacques Rancière says about the new forms of racism, “by fixating on radical otherness, an object of absolute, pre-political hatred”, we accept every difference as a political deficiency and make a noose for the community itself.
Judging by the announcements of the concept, but also the dire need of the current government to erase all the sins of its own past through compulsory education, the announcement of the National Primer seems ominous. This could easily do more damage than Vulin’s meetings with Putin and countless other political gaffes. Vulin’s planned excess, for example, will apparently be amortized by Vučić’s justification of his absence from BRICS due to “scramble in the penalty box”, with an equally rapid relativization of this amortization.
The consequences of the National Primer, if it becomes what we justifiably suspect, would be long-term and difficult to repair. I do not dispute the need many people seem to have to express national sentiment. But that feeling must not be imposed, especially in a biased and mythologized way. After the general setback in the accession negotiations, new examples of nepotism and corruption, and Vučić’s calculatedly conciliatory forecast that we won’t become a member of the EU for at least six years, the Primer would be just more proof that the government is cheerfully announcing a closed society that does not really want to join the European Union.
Translated by Marijana Simić
Peščanik.net, 14.09.2024.
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- The importance of Roth’s messages is not diminished by the idealization of Austria-Hungary, by the class privileges of his hero, nor by the simplified separation of the interests of ordinary people from the interests of politics. Roth himself, in the story The Silent Prophet, fantasized about the possibility of turning the Monarchy into a single homeland for all, as a model of the future big world. This served Sebald’s thesis that Roth did not suffer from illusions, that he did not yearn for restoration, that he only regretted missed historical opportunities, that Radetzky March is a purely agnostic work and that his allegorization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in no way diminishes the relentless criticism of the comatose Habsburg Empire. (One Kaddish for Austria – About Joseph Roth).
