*That's a good literary question, and with Will Self to answer it. JG Ballard would be reading this, since Self was one of his best younger pals in the writing game.
Globalization of Balkanization, lights out on the Marie Celeste, etc
(...)
What does all this feel like? What does it feel like to be living in a Marie Celeste of a Western democracy, where the lights are on but no one’s home? I suppose it probably feels a bit like being in the US during a federal government shutdown – or indeed in any society during a period of odd hiatus. The last few times I’ve seen John Gray, the conversation has slid – one way or another – towards the Balkans. Nothing to do with my DNA, just that he’s seemed to want to recall visits he took there in the early 1970s, and to relay to me a picture of deeply dysfunctional polity, never effectively integrated, that was really only waiting for the blowback from the Berlin Wall’s toppling, to disintegrate itself.
And what a disintegration. Surely the European ideal, the European dream of effective statehood – which, as I’ve had cause to remark, is really the exercise of a monopoly on violence – died there, with impotent blue and white hats standing by, while people were led away to be shot, and the barbed wire was strung between the posts. I had a dream of Europe – yeah, yeah, yeah… an’ a love like that has George Martin at the controls and the Eroica playing, and Pavarotti emoting, and the Sagrada Familia ever being built. I had a dream of an amazing polyglot Europe: the poetry of Rilke and Lorca! The plays of Shakespeare and Schiller! The music of Satie and Mendelssohn! The hills and the lakes! Flow gently Sweet Afton – or do I mean Danube…? Kafka! Proust! Joyce! Modernism! Surrealism! Marx…. Oh, hang on a minute – just about every fuckin’ spasm and ism you care to think of it was minted here: we got Enlightenment, Renaissance, scientific revolutions galore… Yeah, yeah – I know everyone bangs on about the Arab contribution, and the translation movement – but face it, these guys were only reintroducing us to ourselves, to the stuff we’d come up with centuries before.
What I’m driving at here is that every dream of Europe was, perforce, always a dream of statehood – and that European super-state, was an embryonic hegemon like no other, reeking with its own feverish manifest destiny, and stoned on its Hegelian, world-girdling fantasies… My dream of Europe – and it was strong, stronger I suspect than any other patriotism – died decades ago, and this latter European Union has just been its uncanny double: a collective hallucination of what might have been, if reality hadn’t intruded.
In his letters to Allen Ginsberg, written when he was travelling in South America, in the early 1950s, William Burroughs describes the relief he experienced on reaching Peru, after passing through a series of smaller countries, for here was a nation big enough for it to be possible for its own citizens to cordially despise it....
